The Sheila Variations

Liberating Mary

Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Opie, circa 1797

A wonderful essay by Bob Lamm about his crusade to get the famous portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft back on the walls at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

An important figure, certainly, in the history of feminism, education for women and equal rights (her major work is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), she also was a journalist, writing on all the major social topics of the day, and was present in Paris during the fiery heights/depths of the French Revolution. She was there when Louis XIV was guillotined. The story of her time in France is enough to make anyone's blood run cold, and she died at a very young age, she wasn't even 40, just 10 days after giving birth to her daughter (you know. Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein).

Vindication: A Novel, by Frances Sherwood, is a historical novel, based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, and I am surprised it is not more well-known. With beautiful writing, and visceral details, it gives you a real sense of the woman, her times, the wars and revolutions she witnessed, social upheaval, politics, her loves (failed and otherwise), and her sometimes irascible personality. She was a fighter. Her reputation has not been solid for centuries. She is either reviled and ignored, or praised and celebrated, depending on the moment. There is a reason her portrait was stuck in the basement, and not up on the wall with the rest of her famous family, in the National Portrait Gallery.

Her life, and the events thereof, were so scandalous at times, so off the charts interesting, that IT often has taken center stage, instead of her writing, and her philosophies. And that's a shame. Because that's what she was: one of the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, deserving her rightful place in that pantheon.

If you haven't read Vindication, by Frances Sherwood, I highly recommend it, but Mary Wollstonecraft's books should be read as well. Her history of the French Revolution has something that Thomas Carlyle's more famous book does not: immediacy. She was there. It is a good companion piece to Edmund Burke's magnificent Reflections on the Revolution in France - my thoughts on that work here (Mary Wollstonecraft had a long-standing feud with Burke, and many of her books were replies to his works).

So Bob Lamm has done all of us a great service, by pushing the powers-that-be at the National Portrait Gallery, to unearth the famous portrait from the basement, so that all can enjoy it. She has a place in history too. Let her stand on her own with the rest of them. It is what she would expect and demand.

Go read Lamm's piece. Wonderful stuff. Congratulations, Mr. Lamm, and thank you!

Rebecca West on Göring

I've got a couple of what I call "intellectual idols", people who analyze and parse the world and its events, in a way that seems singular, important, and (in some cases) life-altering (for me). I was one way before I read Ryszard Kapuscinski. After reading him, I will never look at the world in the same way again. George Orwell is another one. Robert Kaplan is another one. I suppose Alexander Hamilton is another one, although I think of him more as my boyfriend. His perspective was, in many respects, larger and more sweeping than his contemporaries - for a variety of reasons. He was an immigrant? He wasn't attached to one colony emotionally? He had grown up in a mercantile atmosphere, not agrarian at all - so he did not fear big money, and the loss of an agricultural economy. Who knows why - but he had a longer view going on than most, as far-seeing as all of "those guys" were. Robert Conquest is another intellectual idol. This is not about total agreement, by the way, which never interests me in the slightest. This is about people who seem to have some sort of perspective on events, perspective that gives them the LONG view of things, as opposed to the short. In many cases, these people (while very political) rise above politics, at least in the every-day mucky muck of them, and they see things in different contexts, because they understand history, because they can PLACE certain events in a context that makes them seem completely different. You are forever changed once you get that kind of perspective.

But the grand pooh-bah of intellectual idols is Rebecca West.

I am now reading her A Train of Powder, which I can't believe hasn't been on my radar at all. It's certainly not going to be found at your local Barnes & Noble, where you can easily find Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her masterwork.

As with many of these people I mention, they are interconnected. Robert Kaplan introduced me to Kapuscinski and also Rebecca West (his Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History follows in her footsteps through the former Yugoslavia). In my opinion, he is definitely her heir.

Train of Powder is made up of four very long essays having to do with various trials that West, as a journalist, covered, one being the Nuremberg Trials. The Nuremberg Trials are broken up into three long parts, each one called "Greenhouse with Cyclamens". One of the things that is so extraordinary about Rebecca West, and why she is so revered by anyone who wants to write thoughtfully about history and politics, is that she was able to see things before others did. (Or, not ALL others, but she certainly stands apart) She traveled through Yugoslavia in 1938, 1939. Not only could she sense the cataclysm that was to come in WWII (she is especially brutal about the German tourists she observed on the train - in them, she can see the entire Nazi Party) - but she predicts the breakup of Yugoslavia some 50 years later, and the genocidal campaigns of people like Slobodan Milosevic. Nobody who read her book would be at all shocked that Serbia would rise in such a monstrous way. Of course they did. Retrospect makes prophets of us all, and there are many who could say, "I saw it coming ..." Yes: but could you have seen it coming in 1938? There was something about Rebecca West's mind - cold and detached (yet she comes off incredibly warm in interviews) - that kept her above events, without the accompanying sense of superiority that so often comes with detached individuals.

She seems always to be on the side of the individual, which again separates her from her contemporaries - many of whom were swayed by Socialist ideas (Orwell and others) but she really never was. She considered herself a radical and a feminist, to be sure, but she always has a very healthy suspicion of any group, and such people are really rare - and almost nonexistent today, at least in political writing, where everything is about propping up your GROUP. West saw what group-identity-politics could wrought, in places like Yugoslavia, and then also in places like Germany, and she conscoiusly separated herself from the pack: "No, thanks. Not for me." Not an easy stance to take, and she is often mistaken for a reactionary which makes me chuckle - because that is so often the accusation thrown towards someone who refuses to "play well with others", who never drank the Kool-Aid in the first place.

I am devouring Train of Powder at the speed of light. The first big essay about the Nuremberg Trials has many different aspects to it: the vibe, in general, at the time, for those journalists who had been observing the trials in their entirety: the intense boredom, and the homesickness, but that's just one element. She's an incredible observer, which makes you want to read everything she writes, just to see how she interprets things. The whole "greenhouse" she encounters during her stay at a huge country house in Germany where all the press were camped out - is incredible because she takes the fact of the greenhouse (and the one legged gardener, and his devotion to cyclamens) and extrapolates out of that the meaning of the entire German people following the war. It's not a stretch. This is a woman who observed history, who knew revolutions and wars, who understood tyranny on a deep Hannah-Arendt level.

Yet she was also a humanist. This gives her writing the power and scope that it has.

She sat in the press box in the court room at Nuremberg, for months on end, and observed, taking in everything: the zaniness of much of it (due, perhaps, to the fact that a trial like this had never occurred before), the behavior of the "defendants" (what a good eye she has), and thoughts on what all of this would actually mean. What exactly is going on here? She makes insightful observations - which probably rang uneasily in the minds of her contemporaries, who were still under the sway of the glorious revolution going on in Russia, something she never fell prey to. For example, she notes that the international judges, each read different parts of what each defendant was accused of. Here she observes:

It turned out that the Russian was reading the part of the judgment that condemned the Germans for their deportations: for taking men and women away from their homes and sending them to distant camps, where they worked as slave labour in conditions of great discomfort, and were often unable to communicate with their families. There was here a certain irony, and a certain warning.

The essay was written in 1946. It is fresh news. It was unpopular, at that moment in time, to criticize Russia - for various reasons - and many just decided to stick their heads in the sand, to avoid uncomfortable truths. That was never Rebecca West's bag.

She's good on all aspects here - atmosphere, context, analysis - this is journalism of the highest order, a dying art, which is one of the reasons why I love Robert Kaplan so much. If you read his books (which are part travelogue, part journalism, part history), and his long articles in The Atlantic Monthly, you can see a similar context at work. It doesn't surprise me at all that he considers Rebecca West to be his idol as well. You can feel him trying to be as good as her, in his thoughts, analysis, and perspective. In many respects, he succeeds. My favorites of his are The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, and the aforementioned Balkan Ghosts. Recently Kaplan has become quite involved in the US military, which connects him inextricably to a group - something I view warily, because I care so much about his work. I would hate to see him lose his perspective due to his affinity for one particular group. All of that being said, the two books he has written about the US military (and he plans on writing two more, I believe) are massive accomplishments that I consider to be required reading, for anyone looking for context. Again: he is looking at things through a prism, another kind of lens than a jingoistic "my country right or wrong" lens, which may be satisfying in the short-term, but certainly won't last as a work of literature past the current generation. His two books (Imperial Grunts and Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts) are fantastic examinations of the US military, its purpose and mission, but also its place in history. He talks to people. He gives great portraits of the men and women fighting in our military. You get to know them. He has traveled the world (obviously). He is not afraid to look deeply. He has spent his career examining other cultures - traveling through Iran and Indonesia and Turkey. In An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future, he took that same journalistic observational eye he has turned on other cultures, and turned it on America. That one also is a must-read, actually. Bah. Just read all of his books, won't you? He's one of the few authors out there where I wait with baited breath for his latest.

But back to Rebecca West. (It is hard to talk about her without referencing the generations of writers she inspired ...)

I was particularly riveted by West's observations about the defendants in the Nuremberg Trials, some more monstrous than others. Here are a couple of excerpts showing her thoughts on Hermann Wilhelm Göring, which gives just a taste of her gift. There really is nobody else like her.

And though one had read surprising news of Göring for years, he still surprised. He was so very soft. Sometimes he wore a German Air Force uniform, and sometimes a light beach suit in the worst of playful taste, and both hung loosely on him, giving him an air of pregnancy. He had thick brown young hair, the coarse bright skin of an actor who has used grease paint for decades, and the preternaturally deep wrinkles of the drug addict. It added up to something like the head of a ventriloquist's dummy. He looked infinitely corrupt, and acted naively. When the other defendants' lawyers came to the door to receive instructions, he often intervened and insisted on instructing them himself, in spite of the evident fury of the defendants, which, indeed, must have been poignant, since most of them might well have felt that, had it not been for him, they never would have had to employ these lawyers at all. One of these lawyers was a tiny little man of very Jewish appearance, and when he stood in front of the dock, his head hardly reaching to the top of it, and flapped his gown in annoyance because Göring's smiling wooden mask was bearing down between him and his client, it was as if a ventriloquist had staged a quarrel between two dummies.

Göring's appearance made a strong but obscure allusion to sex. It is a matter of history that his love affairs with women played a decisive part in the development of the Nazi party at various stages, but he looked as one who would never lift a hand against a woman save in something much more peculiar than kindness. He did not look like any recognized type of homosexual, yet he was feminine. Sometimes, particularly when his humour was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel. His like are to be seen in the late morning in doorways along the steep streets of Marseille, the professional mask of geniality still hard on their faces though they stand relaxed in leisure, their fat cuts rubbing against their spread skirts. Certainly there had been a concentration on appetite, and on elaborate schemes for gratifying it; and yet there was a sense of desert thirst. No matter what aqueducts he had built to bring water to his encampment, some perversity in the architecture had let it run out and spill on the sands long before it reached him. Sometimes even now his wide lips smacked together as if he were a well-fed man who had heard no news as yet that his meals were to stop. He was the only one of all these defendants who, if he had the chance, would have walked out of the Palace of Justice and taken over Germany again, and turned it into the stage for the enactment of the private fantasy which had brought him to the dock.

As is well-known, the day before Göring was to be put to death, he killed himself in his cell. Rebecca West has some choice words about that event.

The executions were to take place on October 16. Some time during the preceding night Göring killed himself. The enormous clown, the sexual quiddity with the smile which was perhaps too wooden for mockery and perhaps not, had kicked the tray out of the hands of the servants who were bringing him the wine of humiliation, the glasses had flown into the air and splintered with a sound too much like laughter. This should not have happened. We are all hunters, but we know ourselves hunted by a mightier hunter, and our hearts are with the hunted, and we rejoice when the snared get free of the snare. In this moment visceral mournfulness changed to visceral cheerfulness; we had to applaud for the flesh that would not accept the doom that had been dealt to it but changed it to an expression of defiance. All those people who had fled from Nuremberg, British and American and French, who were scattered over the world, trying to forget the place of their immurement, would straighten up from whatever they had been bent over and burst out laughing before they could help themselves, saying, "That one! We always knew he would get the better of us yet." Surely all those Germans who walked through the rubble of their cities while their conquerors drove, they too would halt, and throw back their heads, and laugh, and say, "That one! We always knew he would get the better of them yet."

Göring should not have been permitted even this small amelioration of his doom. True, we now know some reasons for feeling that he might have been allowed to get a little of his own back. Like all the Nazis, he had been plagued by the attentions of the psychiatrists who haunted Nuremberg Jail, exercising a triple function of priest and doctor and warder hard to approve. They visited the men in the cells and offered themselves as confidants, but performed duties at the behest of the court authorities. When some of the defendants seemed to be taking an unrepentant pro-Nazi stand in their line of defence, one of the psychiatrists worked out, at the commandant's request, a plan for a new seating arrangement at the lunch table in order to break up this group and expose them to other influences. It is not easy to think of an accused person on trial before a national tribunal being subjected to such manipulation by prison officials. There was no silver lining to this cloud. One of these psychiatrists has related, without humorous intention, that when Göring asked him what a certain psychological test had revealed about his character, he replied that it had shown that he lacked the guts to face responsibility. Göring had also the benefit of spiritual care of a remarkably robust kind. He asked the Lutheran chaplain to give him Holy Communion on the night before the executions, but the chaplain refused, on the ground that he was probably shamming.

Nevertheless Göring should not have been given the chance to use his courage to weaken public horror at his crimes, to which his courage was not relevant. The Nazis were maniacs who plastered history with the cruelty which is a waste product of man's moral nature, as maniacs on a smaller scale plaster their bodies and their clothes with their excreta. Since sanity is to some extent a matter of choice, a surrender to certain stimuli and a rejection of others, the nature of mania should never be forgotten. It is unfair, not only to Germans, but to all the world, if the vileness of the Nazis be extenuated; and it was unfair that this Nazi of all Nazis should have been allowed to disguise his gross dementia. This suicide meant a long-term danger to human standards, and it might have meant a short-term danger too, had it not been for the severity of the following winter. Germany was to be ice-bound and water-logged and had no time to think of reviving the Nazi party; and if that stretch of bad weather broke Europe's heart, it also broke the continuity of popular political thinking and forced it on to a fresh phase not shadowed by resentment at conquest. But the Allies had failed idiotically in a prime matter. All to no purpose had the military policeman in the CIP gallery shaken the venerable Lord of Appeal and bidden him wake up and uncross his legs. All to no purpose had his colleague waved his club round the ears of the judge and asked him how the hell he had got in. All to no purpose had the maternal colonel shadowed our passes with his pendulous bosom. The cyanide had freely flowed.

She is magnificent. A Train of Powder is a must-read.

Today in history: September 1, 1939

Germany invaded Poland.

Hitler's speech on Sept. 1, 1939, from Berlin:

To the defense forces:

The Polish nation refused my efforts for a peaceful regulation of neighborly relations; instead it has appealed to weapons.

Germans in Poland are persecuted with a bloody terror and are driven from their homes. The series of border violations, which are unbearable to a great power, prove that the Poles no longer are willing to respect the German frontier. In order to put an end to this frantic activity no other means is left to me now than to meet force with force.

German defense forces will carry on the battle for the honor of the living rights of the re- awakened German people with firm determination.

I expect every German soldier, in view of the great tradition of eternal German soldiery, to do his duty until the end.

Remember always in all situations you are the representatives of National Socialist Greater Germany!

Long live our people and our Reich!

Hitler reviews the troops in Warsaw, early October, 1939.

Excerpt from Viktor Klemperer's stunning diary I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941:

September 3, Sunday afternoon

This torture of one's nerves ever more unbearable. On Friday morning blackout ordered until further notice. We sit in the tiny cellar, the terrible damp closeness, the constant sweating and shivering, the smell of mold, the food shortage, makes everything even more miserable. I try to save butter and meat for Eva and Muschel, to make do myself as far as possible with still unrationed bread and fish. This in itself would all be trivial, but it is all only by the way. What will happen? From hour to hour we tell ourselves, now is the moment when everything is decided, whether Hitler is all-powerful, whether his rule will last indefinitely, or whether it falls now, now.

On Friday morning, September 1, the young butcher's lad came and told us: There had been a radio announcement, we already held Danzig and the Corridor, the war with Poland was under way, England and France remained neutral. I said to Eva, then a morphine injection or something similar was the best thing for us, our life was over. But then we said to one another, that could not possibly be the way things were, the boy had often reported absurd things (he was a perfect example of the way in which people take in news reports). A little later we heard Hitler's agitated voice, then the usual roaring, but could not make anything out. We said to ourselves, if the report were even only half true they must already be putting out the flags. Then down in town the dispatch of the outbreak of war. I asked several people whether English neutrality had already been declared. Only an intelligent salesgirl in a cigar shop on Chemnitzer Platz said: No - that would really be a joke! At the baker's, at Vogel's, they all said, as good as declared, all over in a few days! A young man in front of the newspaper display: The English are cowards, they won't do anything. Ad thus with variations the general mood, vox populi (butter seller, newspaper man, bill collector of the gas company etc. etc.) In the afternoon read the Fuhrer's speech. It seemed to me pessimistic as far as the external and the interal position were considered. Also all the regulations pointed and still point to more than a mere punitive expedition against Poland. And now this is the third day like this, it feels as if it has been three years: the waiting, the despairing, hoping, weighing up, not knowing. The newspaper yesterday, Saturday, vague and in fact anticipating a general outbreak of war: England, the attacker - English mobilization, French mobilization, they will bleed to death! etc., etc. But still no declaration of war on their side. Is it coming or will they fail to resist and merely demonstrate weakness?

The military bulletin is also unclear. Talks of successes everywhere, reports no serious opposition anywhere and yet also shows that German troops have nowhere advanced far beyond the frontiers. How does it all fit together? All in all: Reports and measures taken are serious, popular opinion absolutely certain of victory, ten thousand times more arrogant than in '14. The consequence will either be an overwhelming, almost unchallenged victory, and England and France are castrated minor states, or a catastrophe ten thousand times worse than '18. And the two of us right in the middle, helpless and probably lost in either case ... And yet we force ourselves, and sometimes it even succeeds for a couple of hours, to go on with our everyday life: reading aloud, eating (as best we can), writing, garden. But as I lie down to sleep I think: Will they come for me tonight? Will I be shot, will I be put in a concentration camp?

Waiting in peaceful Dolzschen, cut off from the world, is particularly bad. One listens to every sound, watches every face, pays attention to everything. One learns nothing. One waits for the newspaper and can make nothing of it. At the moment I do tend to think that there will be war with the great powers.

At the butcher an old dear puts her hand on my shoulder and says in a voice full of tears: He has said that he will put on a soldier's coat again and be a soldier himself, and if he falls, then Goering ... A young lady brings me my ration card, looks at me with a friendly expression: Do you still remember me? I studied under you, I've married into the family here. -- An old gentleman, very friendly, brings the blackout order: Terrible, that it's war again - but yet one is so patriotic, when I saw a battery leaving yesterday, I wanted more than anything to go with them! No one is outraged by the Russian alliance, people think it is brilliant or an excellent joke - Vogel's optimism (yesterday: We've almost finished off the Poles, the others won't stir themselves!) is to our benefit in coffee, sausage, tea, soap etc. -- Is this the general mood in Germany? Is it founded on facts or on hubris?

The Jewish Community in Dresden inquires whether I want to join it, since it represents the National Association of Jews locally; the Confessing Christians inquire whether I shall remain with them. I replied to the Gruber people that I was and will remain Protestant, I would not reply to the Jewish Community at all.

Note how on September 1 the Fuhrer declared lasting friendship with Russia in two words. Is there really no one in Germany who does not feel a pang of conscience? Once more: Machiavelli was mistaken; there is a line beyond which the separation of morality and politics is unpolitical and has to be paid for. Sooner or later. But can we wait until later?

Excerpt from William Shirer's Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 (more excerpts here):

BERLIN, AUGUST 31 three thirty a.m.

Tonight the great armies, navies, and air forces are all mobilized. Each country is shut off from the other. We have not been able today to get through to Paris or London, or of course to Warsaw, though I did talk to Tess in Geneva. At that, no precipitate action is expected tonight. Berlin is quite normal in appearance this evening. There has been no evacuation of women and children, not even any sandbagging of the windows. We'll have to wait through still another night, it appears, before we know. And so to bed, almost at dawn.

BERLIN, September 1

At six a.m. Sigrid Schultz - bless her heart - phoned. She said: "it's happened." I was very sleepy - my body and mind numbed, paralysed. I mumbled: "Thanks, Sigrid," and tumbled out of bed. The war is on!

later
It's a "counter-attack"! At dawn this morning Hitler moved against Poland. It's a fragrant, inexcusable, unprovoked act of aggression. But Hitler and the High Command call it a "counter-attack". A grey morning with overhanging clouds. T he people in the street were apathetic when I drove to the Rundfunk for my first broadcast at eight fifteen a.m. Across from the Adlon the morning shift of workers was busy on the new I.G. Farben building just as if nothing had happened. None of the men brought the extras which the newsboys were shouting. Along the east-west axis the Luftwaffe were mounting five big anti-aircraft guns to protect Hitler when he addresses the Reichstag at ten a.m. Jordan and I had to remain at the radio to handle Hitler's speech for America. Throughout the speech, I thought as I listened, ran a curious strain, as though Hitler himself were dazed at the fix he had got himself into and felt a little desperate about it. Somehow he did not carry conviction and there was much less cheering in the Reichstag than on previous, less important occasions. Jordan must have reacted the same way. As we waited to translate the speech for America, he whispered: "Sounds like his swan song." It really did. He sounded discouraged when he told the Reichstag that Italy would not be coming into the war because "we are unwiling to call in outside help for this struggle. We will fulfil this task by ourselves." And yet Paragraph 3 of the Axis military alliance calls for immediate, automatic Italian support with "all its military resources on land, at sea, and in the air." What about that? He sounded desperate when, referring to Molotov's speech of yesterday at the Russian ratification of the Nazi-Soviet accord, he said: "I can only underline every word of Foreign Commisar Molotov's speech."

Tomorrow Britain and France probably will come in and you have your second World War. The British and French tonight sent an ultimatum to Hitler to withdraw his troops from Poland or their ambassadors will ask for their passports. Presumably they will get their passports.

Later. Two thirty a.m. - Almost through our first blackout. The city is completely darkened. It takes a little getting used to. You grope around in the pitch-black streets and pretty soon your eyes get used to it. You can make out the whitewashed curbstones. We had our first air-raid alarm at seven p.m. I was at the radio just beginning my script for a broadcast at eight fifteen. The lights went out, and all the German employees grabbed their gas-masks and, not a little frightened, rushed for the shelter. No one offered me a mask, but the wardens insisted that I go to the cellar. In the darkness and confusion I escaped outside and went down to the studios, where I found a small room in which a candle was burning on a table. There I scribbled out my notes. No planes came over. But with the English and French in, it may be different tomorrow. I shall then be in the by no means pleasant predicament of hoping they bomb the hell out of this town without getting me. The ugly shrill of the sirens, the rushing to a cellar with your gas-mask (if you have one), the utter darkness of the night - how will human nerves stand for that long?

One curious thing about Berlin on this first night of the war: the cafes, restaurants, and beer-halls were packed. The people just a bit apprehensive after the air-raid, I felt. Finished broadcasting at one thirty a.m., stumbled a half-mile down the Kaiserdamm in the dark, and finally found a taxi. But another pedestrian appeared out of the dark and jumped in first. We finally shared it, he very drunk and the driver drunker, and both cursing the darkness and the war.

The isolation from the outside world that you feel on a night like this is increased by a new decree issued tonight prohibiting the listening to foreign broadcasts. Who's afraid of the truth? And no wonder. Curious that not a single Polish bomber got through tonight. But will it be the same with the British and French?

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

RIP Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

NY Times obit here. Here's the obit in The Irish Times. Here is the text of the famous speech he gave at Harvard in 1978 (a choice quote: "But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening."

Let's not simplify the man, or make him less complex. He was a posterboy for no one. Infuriating, independent, beat of his own drummer, fearless. God.

Here's a lengthy article in Time.

And I've been waiting for the inevitable: Christopher Hitchens' piece, which opens with:

Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken. Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them. Examples are rather precious and relatively few, and they include Nelson Mandela refusing an offer to be released from jail (unless and until all other political detainees were also freed) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn having to be deported from his country of birth against his will, even though he had become—and had been before—a prisoner there.

More:

But it seems that Solzhenitsyn did have a worry or a dread, not that he himself would be harmed but that none of his work would ever see print. Nonetheless—and this is the point to which I call your attention—he kept on writing. The Communist Party's goons could have torn it up or confiscated or burned it—as they did sometimes—but he continued putting it down on paper and keeping a bottom drawer filled for posterity. This is a kind of fortitude for which we do not have any facile name. The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived "as if." Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on "as if" he were a free citizen, "as if" he had the right to study his own country's history, "as if" there were such a thing as human dignity.

The Vaclav Havel rule of living in a totalitarian society. Just live "as if" you were free.

I just happened to be up now - late for me - when the news came in. I have no words. A truly great man. (I've been adding links to this post since I heard the news at around 1 am this morning).

Here's an excerpt from his Gulag Archipelago, one of the most important books of the 20th century.

Shaking my head. Strange. How it feels like a personal loss.

The world was a better place, a more honorable place, a place where bravery was possible, and where truth was always louder than lies ... because he was in it.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1970, and did not attend the ceremony for fear that the Russians would retaliate by depriving him of his Russian citizenship. As much as he despised the totalitarian regime in Russia, he didn't want to be cut off to that degree. He had family in Russia, a wife, a child on the way. So he did not attend the ceremony. Instead he sent a speech that was read at the banquet. Here is the full text. He closes with:

And I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the members of the Swedish Academy for the enormous support their choice in 1970 has given my works as a writer. I venture to thank them on behalf of that vast unofficial Russia which is prohibited from expressing itself aloud, which is persecuted both for writing books and even for reading them. The Academy have heard for this decision of theirs many reproaches implying that such a prize has served political interests. But these are the shouts of raucous loudmouths who know of no other interests. We all know that an artist's work cannot be contained within the wretched dimension of politics. For this dimension cannot hold the whole of our life and we must not restrain our social consciousness within its bounds.

Photo of Solzhenitsyn in 1946 in the gulag.

Rest in peace. No more words.

Today in history: April 10, 1912

A certain ship set sail from Southampton, England.

And a certain young lady in financial stress meets a certain young gadabout artist who steals her heart (even though she is "a spoiled brat" and "no picnic") and changes her life forever.

April 10, 1912

A mere five days later:

Faces I saw at the China Out Of Tibet protest

It was a cold night, really windy. The sound of chanting - hundreds of people chanting - filled the air. Candles flickered in little glass jars, set up in geometric patterns across the pavement. There were no speeches. Flags whipped in the wind.

Full photo set here.

"Et tu, Brute! Then fall, Caesar."

Yo. It's the Ides of March, yo.

Here's the moment in the play where Caesar gets the warning from the soothsayer. And ignores it.

SCENE II. A public place

Flourish. Enter CAESAR; ANTONY, CALPURNIA, PORTIA, DECIUS BRUTUS, CICERO, BRUTUS, CASSIUS, and CASCA; a great crowd following, among them a SOOTHSAYER

CAESAR
Calpurnia!

CASCA
Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.

CAESAR
Calpurnia!

CALPURNIA
Here, my lord.

CAESAR
Stand you directly in Antonius' way,
When he doth run his course. Antonius!

ANTONY
Caesar, my lord?

CAESAR
Forget not, in your speed, Antonius,
To touch Calpurnia; for our elders say,
The barren, touched in this holy chase,
Shake off their sterile curse.

ANTONY
I shall remember:
When Caesar says 'do this,' it is perform'd.

CAESAR
Set on; and leave no ceremony out.

Flourish

SOOTHSAYER
Caesar!

CAESAR
Ha! who calls?

CASCA
Bid every noise be still: peace yet again!

CAESAR
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music,
Cry 'Caesar!' Speak; Caesar is turn'd to hear.

SOOTHSAYER
Beware the ides of March.

CAESAR
What man is that?

BRUTUS
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

CAESAR
Set him before me; let me see his face.

CASSIUS
Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.

CAESAR
What say'st thou to me now? speak once again.

SOOTHSAYER
Beware the ides of March.

CAESAR
He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.

So of course Julius Caesar was a real guy and all (I heard he really liked to "work out") ... but naturally I'm all about the play. Love that play.

The conspiracy scene, I think, is my favorite in the play. Here's a fun exercise - read it out loud and notice how often Shakespeare uses "s". Or an "s" sound. There's an "s" sound in almost every sentence. So when you hear the language - just the sound of it, never mind what it is that they're actually saying: it has a sound of "ssssss" - it gives an impression of a crowd of men whispering "psst" or - hissing - the hissing 'psst" whisper of conspiracy. Brilliant.

Here's a quiz on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Fun!! Amazing how much one remembers. It all came back to me - however, the quiz also reminds me I really MUST get back to my Shakespeare project. I mean - my reading has gone on quite well, I'm moving through each play chronologically - I've always wanted to do that. I've read all the plays, of course - but never in so-called chronological order. My original plan was: I wanted to write about each play as I read it - a la 2 Gents. I'll keep going on and get back to the series eventually)

And so, in honor of the Ides of March, here's the "moment before" - the poor ignored SOOTHSAYER comes back into the picture:

Act II, scene iv. The sense of foreboding grows. Portia can feel the wrongness in the air. This is "the moment before".

PORTIA
Come hither, fellow: which way hast thou been?

SOOTHSAYER
At mine own house, good lady.

PORTIA
What is't o'clock?

SOOTHSAYER
About the ninth hour, lady.

PORTIA
Is Caesar yet gone to the Capitol?

SOOTHSAYER
Madam, not yet: I go to take my stand,
To see him pass on to the Capitol.

PORTIA
Thou hast some suit to Caesar, hast thou not?

SOOTHSAYER
That I have, lady: if it will please Caesar
To be so good to Caesar as to hear me,
I shall beseech him to befriend himself.

PORTIA
Why, know'st thou any harm's intended towards him?

SOOTHSAYER
None that I know will be, much that I fear may chance.
Good morrow to you. Here the street is narrow:
The throng that follows Caesar at the heels,
Of senators, of praetors, common suitors,
Will crowd a feeble man almost to death:
I'll get me to a place more void, and there
Speak to great Caesar as he comes along.

Exit

PORTIA
I must go in. Ay me, how weak a thing
The heart of woman is! O Brutus,
The heavens speed thee in thine enterprise!
Sure, the boy heard me: Brutus hath a suit
That Caesar will not grant. O, I grow faint.
Run, Lucius, and commend me to my lord;
Say I am merry: come to me again,
And bring me word what he doth say to thee.

Idi Amin, continued

At some point, Barbet Schroeder's documentary will arrive in the telltale little red Netflix envelope ... I think I need to get through Triumph of the Will and Sudden Fear first. Regardless - the Idi Amin theme continues. AC took it up here. And here. And I went back to look through my main man Ryszard's book Shadow of the Sun for his chapter on Uganda. Here's a bit of it:

Excerpt from Shadow of the Sun by Ryzsard Kapuscinski:

I once considered writing a book about Amin, because he is such a glaring example of the relation between crime and low culture. I was in Uganda many times, saw Amin more than once; I have a small library of books about him, and stacks of my own notes. He is the most well known dictator in the history of contemporary Africa and one of the most famous in the twentieth century the world over.

Amin belongs to a small ethnic group called the Kakwa, whose territory encroaches on three countries: Sudan, Uganda, and Zaire. The Kakwa do not know to which country they belong, although they view this question with indifference, preoccupied as they are with something else: how to survive despite the poverty and hunger that prevail in this remote region without roads, cities, electricity, and cultivatable land. Anyone with some initiative, wits, and luck runs as far away from here as possible. But not every direction is a propitious one. Whoever goes west will only worsen his circumstances, because he will stumble upon the thickest jungles of Zaire. Those setting off northward also err, because they will arrive at the sandy, rock-strewn threshold of the Sahara. Only the southerly direction holds promise: there the Kakwa will find the fertile lands of central Ugagnda, the lush and splendid garden of Africa.

It is there, after giving birth to her son, that Amin's mother makes her way, the infant on her back. She comes to the second-largest city (or, rather, town) in Uganda after Kampala -- Jinja. Like thousands of others at that time, and millions upon millions today, she arrives in the hope of surviving, in the hope that life here will be better. She has no skills, no contacts, and no money. But one can make a living in a variety of ways: through petty trade, brewing and selling beer, or operating a portable sidewalk eatery. Amin's mother has a pot and cooks millet in it. She sells portions on banana leaves. Her daily earnings? A serving of millet for herself and her son.

This woman, who made her way with her child from a poor village in the north to a town in the wealthier south, became part of the population that today constitutes Africa's biggest problem. It is composed of tens of millions who have abandoned the countryside and migrated to the monstrously swollen cities without securing adequate housing or employment. In Uganda they are called bayaye. You will notice them at once, because it is they who form the street crowds, so different from ones in Europe. In Europe, the man on the street is usually heading toward a definite goal. The crowd has a direction and a rhythm, which is frequently characterized by haste. In an African city, only some of the people behave this way. The others are not going anywhere: they have nowhere to go, and no reason to go there. They drift this way and that, sit in the shade, stare, nap. They have nothing to do. No one is expecting them. Most often, they are hungry. The slightest street spectacle -- a quarrel, a fight, the apprehension of a theif -- will instantly draw large numbers of them. For they are everwhere around here, idle, awaiting who knows what, living who knows how -- the gapers of the world.

The principal characteristic of their stance is rootlessness. They will not return to the countryside, and there is no place for them in the city. They endure. Somehow, they exist. Somehow: that is how best to describe their situation, its fragility, its uncertainty. Somehow one lives, somehow one sleeps, somehow, from time to time, one eats. This unreality and impermanence of existence cause the bayaye to feel himself in continuous danger, and so he is increasingly tormented by fear. His fear is amplified by his condition as a stranger, an unwanted immigrant from another culture, religion, language. A foreign, extraneous competitor for the contents of the cooking pot, which is empty anyway, and for work, of which there isn't any.

Amin is a typical bayaye.

He grows up in the streets of Jinja. The town housed a battalion of the British colonial army, the King's African Rifles. The model for this army was devised toward the end of the nineteenth century by General Lugard, one of the architects of the British Empire. It called for divisions composed of mercenaries recruited from tribes hostile toward the population on whose territory they were to be garrisoned: an occupying force, holding the locals on a tight rein. Lugard's ideal soldiers were young, well-built men from the Nilotic (Sudanese) populations, which distinguished themselves by their enthusiasm for warfare, their stamina, and their cruelty. They were called Nubians, a designation that in Uganda evoked a combination of distaste and fear. The officers and non-commissioned officers of this army, however, were for many years exclusively Englishmen. One day, one of them noticed a young African with a Herculean physique hanging around the barracks. It was Amin. He was quickly enlisted. For people like him -- without a job, without possibilities -- military service was like winning the lottery. He had barely four years of elementary schooling, but because he was deemed obedient and eager to anticipate the wishes of his commanders, he began advancing rapidly through the ranks. He also gained renown as a boxer, becoming the Ugandan heavyweight champion. During colonial times, the army was dispatched on countless expeditions of oppression: against the Mau Mau insurgents, against the warriors of the Turkana tribe, or against the independent people of the Karimojong. Amin distinguished himself in these campaigns: he organized ambushes and attacks, and was merciless toward his adversaries.

It is the fifties, and the era of independence is fast approaching. Africanization has arrived, even in the military. But the British and French officers want to remain in control for as long as possible. To prove that they are irreplaceable, they promote the third-rate from among their African subordinates, those not too quick, but obedient, transforming them in a single day from corporals and sergeants into colonels and generals. Bokassa in the Central African Republic, for exmaple, Soglo in Dahomey, Amin in Uganda.

When in the fall of 1962 Uganda becomes an independent state, Amin is already, because of promotions by the British, a general, and deputy commander of the army. He takes a look around him. Although he has high rank and position, he comes from the Kakwa, a small community and one, moreover, that is not regarded as native Ugandan. Meantime, the preponderance of the army comes from the Langi tribe, to which Prime Minister Milton Obote belongs, and from the related Acholi. The Langi and the Acholi treat the Kakwa superciliously, seeing them as benighted and backward. We are navigating here in the paranoid, obsessive realm of ethnic prejudice, hatred, and antipathy -- albeit an intra-Africa one: racism and chauvinism emerge not only along the most obvious divides, e.g., white versus black, but are equally stark, stubborn and implacable, perhaps even more so, among peoples of the same skin color. Indeed, most white who have died in the world have died at the hands not of blacks, but of other whites, and likewise the majority of black lives taken in the past century were taken by other blacks, not by white. And so it follows, for example, that on account of ethnic bigotry, no one in Uganda will care whether Mr. XY is wise, kind, and friendly, or the reverse, evil and loathsome; they will care only whether he is of the tribe of Bari, Toro, Busoga, or Nandi. This is the sole criterion by which he will be classified and evaluated.

For its first eight years of independence, Uglanda is ruled by Milton Obote, an extraordinarily conceited man, boastful and sure of himself. When it is exposed in the press that Amin has misappropriated the cash, gold, and ivory given him for safekeeping by anti-Mobutu guerrillas from Zaire, Obote summons Amin, orders him to pen an explanation, and, confident that he himself is in no danger, flies off to Singapore for a conference of prime ministers of the British Commonwealth. Amin, realizing that the prime minister will arrest him as soon as he returns, decides on a preemptive strike: he stages an army coup and seizes power. Theoretically at least, Obote in fact had little to worry about: Amin did not represent an obvious threat, and his influence in the army was ultimately limited. But beginning on the night of January 25, 1971, when they took over the barracks in Kampala, Amin and his supporters employed a brutally efficient surprise tactic: they fired without warning. And at a precisely defined target: soldiers from the Langi and Achole tribes. The surprise had a paralyizing effect: no one had time to mount a resistance. On the very first day, hundreds died in the barracks. And the carnage continued. Henceforth, Amin always used this method: he would shoot first. And not just at his enemies; that was self-evident, obvious. He went further: he liquidated without hesitation those he judged might one day develop into enemies. Over time, terror in Amin's state also came to depend on universal torture. Before they died, people were routinely tormented.

All this took place in a provincial country, in a small town. The torture chambers were located in downtown buildings. The windows were open -- we are in the tropics. Whoever was walking along the street could hear cries, moans, shots. Whoever fell into the hands of the executioners vanished. A category soon emerged, then grew and grew, of those who in Latin America are called desaparecidos: those who have perished, disappeared. He left his house and never returned. "Nani?" the policeman routinely replied, if a family member demanded an explanation. "Nani?" (In Swahili the word means 'who"; the individiual is reduced to a question mark.)

Uganda started to metamorphose into a tragic, bloody stage upon which a single actor strutted -- Amin. A month after the coup Amin named himself president, then marshal, then field marshal, and finally field marshal for life. He pinned upon himself ever more orders, medals, decorations. But he also liked to walk about in ordinary battle fatigues, so that soldiers would say of him, "You see, he's one of us." He chose his cars in accordance with his outfits. Wearing a suit to a reception, he drove a dark Mercedes. Out for a spin in a sweat suit? A red Maserati. Battle fatigues? A military Range Rover. The last resembled a vehicle from a science-fiction movie. A forest of antennas protruded from it, all kinds of wires, cables, spotlights. Inside were grenades, pistols, knives. He went about this way because he constantly feared attempts on his life. He survived several. Everyone else died in them -- his aides-de-camp, his bodyguards. Amin alone would brush off the dust, straighten his uniform. To cover his tracks, he also rode in unmarked cars. People walking down a street would suddenly realize that the man sitting behind the wheel of that truck was Amin.

He trusted no one, therefore even those in his innermost circle did not know where he would be sleeping tonight, where he would be living tomorrow. He had several residences in the city; several more on the shores of Lake Victoria, still others in the countryside. Determining his whereabouts was both difficult and dangerous. He communicated with every subordinate directly, decided whom he would speak with, whom he wished to see. And for many, such a meeting would prove the last. If Amin became suspicious of someone, he would invite him over. He would be pleasant, friendly, treat his guest to a Coca-Cola. Executioners awaited the visitor as he left. Later, no one could determine what had happened to the man.

Amin usually telephoned his subordinates, but he also used the radio. Whenever he announced changes in the government or in the ranks of the military -- and he was constantly instituting changes -- he would do so over the airwaves.

Uganda had one radio station, one small newspaper (Uganda Argus), one camera, which filmed Amin, and one photojournalist, who would appear for ceremonial occasions. Everything was directed exclusively at the figure of the marshal. Moving from place to place, Amin in a sense moved the state with him; outside of him, nothing happened, nothing existed. Parliament did not exist, there no political parties, trade unions, or other organizations. And, of course, no opposition -- those suspected of dissent died painful deaths.

There appears to be a theme

running through my life these days .. an Idi Amin theme ... Suddenly he's everywhere.

First of all - Ryzsard Kapuscinski was working on a book about Idi Amin when he died - Or maybe he finished it, not sure. One of the chapters in his book about Africa was devoted to Idi Amin - awesome, it was my favorite chapter.

Second of all - Forest Whitaker's brilliant piece of acting - which just won him an Oscar. I'm so happy. That guy (Whitaker, I mean) has been around forever and ... I'm just always so happy to see him. He makes a movie better just by being in it. (Ahem. Ahem. However, even he couldn't save this monstrosity - but I consider that a point in his FAVOR, actually.) Integrity oozes off of him.

Third of all - I added Barbet Shroeder's documentary about Idi Amin on my Netflix queue (hahaha, I have to keep reminding myself of the coolness of my Netflix queue - Yeah, whatever, I have a Netflix queue, yeah, uh huh, it's not a big deal, whatever) ... but anyway. I've heard about this documentary for years - it sounds chilling, and ... well, right up my alley. Wacko dictator? Throbbing personality cult? Corruption, violence, political insanity? Count me in. So that will arrive whenever.

Fourth of all - I go to one of my favorite sites this morning - and see this.

The creepy Mitfords

I've always been a bit fascinated by the semi-creepy Mitford family (that is, if I'm guessing right, Nancy, Unity, Decca and Diana. The only one I am not sure about is the one whose head is the highest. That is either Unity or Pamela). Two more of the sisters are not in that photo - and brother Tom is out having gay sex somewhere. And then denying it, and sleeping around with 50 women to compensate. I'm surprised nobody has made a sweeping film about these 6 sisters (with Charlize Theron as Diana - she'd be PERFECT) - it's hard to believe they even existed - but they did - and there isn't an un-interesting one among them. Some of them are BARELY likeable - but damn, they are interesting, and they did indeed live in interesting times. I read The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family with fascination (but almost like I was picking up a rock to look at the fascinating bug life underneath) - there was something about the photos of all of them that I just could NOT stop looking at. They were all so gorgeous - and so breezy-looking - in their wool suits, and two-toned shoes - and marcelled hair - and light eyes - but there is something a bit blank in some of their expressions, and that - combined with their intense beauty - always seemed a bit creepy to me. Add to that the general love affair with fascism and with Hitler, specifically, that some of the Mitford sisters maintained until they died - and you just get a picture of a fascinating whirlwind of creepiness.

Oswald Mosley (who ended up marrying Diana Mitford) has been of interest to me for quite some time - just because of his time period and his obvious importance. Remains of the Day is basically about that group of fascists in England at that time and the Lord in that book is based on someone like Oswald Mosley. What a life he had - what a creep - but I've also been very interested in him because his son was (is) Nicholas Mosley - who has gone on to write one of my favorite novels of all time: Hopeful Monsters. Not to be too weird but I've felt like: If my own spirit could pick up a pen and write a book about its core beliefs - that book would be something like Hopeful Monsters. I'm dead serious. Nicholas Mosley, the son, has written a couple of memoirs - attacking his father's fascism - and his books (especially Hopeful Monsters) are one long indictment about such totalitarian structures. Quite extraordinary.

And the Mitford sisters were all caught up in these enormous upheavals of the mid- 20th century - and many of them were on the wrong side of history. They were ardent fascists and anti-Semites, Hitler-lovers (especially Unity Mitford - who appears to have been truly in lust with Hitler - like, she went out of her mind. Her fervor was so much that it burned up everything else in her personality. She ended up shooting herself in the head - and SURVIVED. Not forever - she died a couple years later - but seriously. Weird weird girls. There are pictures of Unity hanging out with "Fuhrer" - and she has this flat-eyed look of entranced exaltation on her face that seriously gives me the total creeps.)

Her sister Diana was no better. She ended up marrying Oswald Mosley (he was her second husband), connecting the fascists in England directly to the Nazis. There are pictures of her and Unity whooping it up with a bunch of SS officers. Found the photo - here it is (Unity on the left, Diana on the right):

Diana and Unity and their brother Tom all attended the 1937 Nuremberg rally - I think Diana had also gone to the first one in 1933 (but the photo above is from the 1937 rally). Tom, despite his fascist beliefs - ended up joining the British army (not joining Oswald Mosley's ranks of stormtroopers.) He died in Burma shortly before the war ended. He was brilliant, like most of the Mitfords were - HIGHLY intelligent - dauntingly so. He was probably gay. He was a major womanizer - yet he was known to have gay relationships, so the womanizing was (as it so often is) a front. Kind of a tormented guy.

Here's Diana with one of her greatest admirers:

Hitler loved Diana. Loved her looks. Called her "the perfect Aryan woman". She took this as a compliment. Diana was imprisoned during the Second World War.

Here's Diana - who was considered (by certain elements in the British secret service, who kept an eye on them) even more dangerous than Oswald Mosley:

A biography of Diana was just published, actually - I haven't read it yet, though. I do want to.

Here's Nancy Mitford, the writer:

Here's Unity Mitford, surrounded by her treasured memorabilia:

She wanted to marry Hitler. I think, too, that he might have even come close to proposing. At least that's the rumor. Her love for him was ecstatic, almsot sado-masochistic. Like Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" poem. Longing for the brute black boot to stomp on her face, etc.

The little girl sitting down is Decca (Jessica) Mitford - who eventually became an ardent Communist (imagine the rupture with her fascist family!!) - moved to the United States, became an investigative journalist and also ran a bar in Miami - Unity stands behind Decca:

Here's Deborah ("Debo") Mitford - whose main goal in life was to become a Duchess. She did. I believe Debo is still alive. Oh, excuse me. The Duchess of Devonshire!

Pamela Mitford was the second oldest - and I cannot find a picture of her. She escaped scandal, and she lived a long life.

ALL of these girls were fiercely bright and literary. Only Nancy ended up becoming a well-known novelist - but many of them wrote books:

Diana's autobiography

Here's Decca's autobiography

Here's one of Debo's books

And somehow - to me - the fact of the Mitfords stunning good looks - they're almost intimidatingly gorgeous - especially Diana - who is one of the most beautiful women I think I've ever seen - makes the whole family seem rather ... Hmm. I can't put my finger on it. All I know is that as I was reading that book about all of them, I KEPT finding myself drawn to all those pictures. They are billowy, gorgeous, seemingly breezy girls ... born to the highest ranks of society ... and all of them tossed themselves towards their own destinies with ferocity. It was like they had no barriers, nothing held them back - whoever they wanted to become. Nobody ever said NO to them. Nancy wanted to write books. She did. Some of them are still taught in college level English today. Diana was a fascist. Unity was a fascist. Unity was in love with Hitler. She spent most of her time fawning on him until finally she snapped and shot herself in the head. That is a kind of destiny. Decca was a communist. She broke with her family and threw herself into Communist Party activities - until the 50s when she became disenchanted and stopped. She then opened up a bar in Florida. Which is basically one way of saying, "Uhm, yeah. I accept capitalism." (Of all of them, Decca is the most likeable.) Deborah wanted to be a Duchess, and so she married a guy who would eventually become a Duke - and so she became a Duchess. It's a really interesting thing - despite all of the pain some of them went through (uhm, you know, shooting themselves in the head, being imprisoned, pilloried by their country - to this day, some of them, etc.) ... there is this heightened burning sense of destiny in all of them. That sense of fiery destiny could turn them into either monsters, or great artists. And the family did seem to split along those lines. FASCINATING.

The reason I am going on and on about this is because the letters of Decca (Jessica) Mitford (the Communist) have just been published and here's the review in the Times. I did not realize (or I had forgotten) that when Decca's father Lord Redesdale died - he bequest all of this stuff to his kids - and he added "except Jessica". So she was NOT forgiven. By him, anyway).

I think I need to get a copy of that book.

Here's an excerpt from the review:

Only a few letters battle directly; most report the details to friends. Her activism, though, is only one subject in a collection that deals with virtually every part of her life: her husbands, her children, her writing, her publishers and, more and more as the years pass, the Mitfords.

Each one gets her own treatment. Early on, there was a touching reconciliation with her mother, and as the years pass, this becomes warmer and more solid, though after Lady Redesdale’s death, Decca can’t resist noting to a friend one of her mother’s diary entries: “Heifer born today. Mabel [a servant] two weeks holiday. Decca married. Tea with Führer.” (The Redesdales were visiting Unity in Germany.)

If Decca has forgiven her mother her one-time Hitler sympathies, has nothing but tenderness for the deluded and disabled Unity, is cautiously affectionate with Nancy and warm though prickly with Deborah, she is unbending about Diana’s steely and unrepentant Fascist history. Visiting London with her son, Benjamin Treuhaft, who is half Jewish, she notes Diana’s offer of a meeting: “I thought better not, as I didn’t want Benj turned into a lampshade.”

Just fascinating. I don't know why I kind of can't look away from the Mitfords - but I can't. I'm strangely drawn to all of them. Not like: Ooh, I endorse their beliefs ... but in the same way that I am strangely drawn to Stalin and to Charlie Manson and those who were true believers. They never cease to fascinate.

The Legion of the Archangel Michael

Reading The Historian it is pleasing to me to discover that my own library is kind of a reference library for me. I have had that sensation before (tracked down a post I wrote about it) - but it doesn't happen often. Normally, they are just my books, background, sitting around my apartment like watching sentinels. I barely notice them. But then ... when I need something? There they are. I know where to go. I know WHAT I have, and I know in what book ... or sometimes I know only: Hmmm, I know I have read more information about this topic ... not sure in WHICH book, though. But I am my father's daughter and with a bit of searching (usually no more than a couple of minutes) - I can locate, to the exact passage, what I am looking for. I'm kind of autistic that way. All of my books on the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire, and Byzantium has made much of the subject matter in The Historian old hat to me. I'm like, "Oh yeah, Carol II, sure, yeah, that guy ...Whatever ..." "Wallachia, awesome, yup, know all about THAT ..." etc. I feel like quite an expert, however ridiculous that may be, and it's a lot of fun. The Historian is not well written, I don't think, but it's the kind of thing where you can't put it down. I cannot. put. it. down. I am tearing through it - and the damn thing is 9,001 pages long. So it's taking me a while. You just have to turn the page. You just MUST! So ... to write a page turner that is 9,001 pages long is quite a feat. So hats off, Ms. Kostova, hats off.

I often have Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts lying beside me as I read The Historian - so I can look up to see what HE said about this or that. More books as well. I love cross-referencing. It doesn't matter what the topic. Ann Marie and I, years ago, when we discovered our shared love for all things Lucy Maud, had a brief idea of creating a database for every single character that shows up in every single Lucy Maud book ... because many of them are interconnected ... many show up in different books ... Kind of a 6 degrees of separation database for the Lucy Maud world. Also, you could look up: "Okay, so in what other story does SHE show up??" Because some of the short stories contain character that show up in the novels ... etc. This kind of stuff is FUN for me. And from the insane GLEAM in Ann Marie's eyes, as we planned our database, I knew I had found, in the words of Anne Shirley, a kindred spirit.

From The Historian:

We had reached a clearing in the woods, and it was, astoundingly, full of men. They stood two rings deep around a bright bonfire, facing it and chanting. One, apparently their leader, stood near the fire, and whenever their chant rose to a crescendo each of them lifted a stiff arm in a salute, putting his other hand on the shoulder of the next man. Their faces, weirdly orange in the firelight, were stiff and unsmiling, and their eyes glittered. They wore a uniform of some sort, dark jackets over green shirts and black ties. "What is this?" I murmured to Georgescu. "What are they saying?"

"All for the Fatherland!" he hissed in my ear. "Stay very quiet or we are dead. I think this is the Legion of the Archangel Michael."

"What is that?"

Oh yes. Legion of the Archangel Michael. Oh yes, of course. THOSE guys. Hmmm, I have read about them before. Where is that passage ...

From Balkan Ghosts, by Robert Kaplan:

It was 10:30 a.m., November 30, 1940. Snow was beginning to fall in Bucharest. Inside the Church of Ilie Gorgani, built in the seventeenth century to honor a Romanian general who fought the Turks, hundreds of candles illumined the red-robed Christ in the dome. Coffins, draped in green flags with gold embroidery, lined the sides of the nave. Altar boys carried in trays of coliva (colored sugar bread) for the dead. Fourteen members of the Legion of the Archangel Michael - the fascist "Iron Guard" - including the organization's leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreaunu, were about to be buried and canonized as "national saints" by priests of the Romanian Orthodox Church, who had been chanting and swinging censers all night.

Two years earlier, in 1938, King Carol II's police had strangled the fourteen men, stripped the bodies naked, and doused them with sulfuric acid in a common ditch to hasten their decomposition. But in late 1940, Carol fled and Romania fell under an Iron Guard regime. The victims' remains, little more than heaps of earth, were dug up and placed in fourteen coffins for reburial. At the end of the funeral service, the worshipers heard a voice recording of the dead Legionnaire leader, Codreanu. "You must await the day to avenge our martyrs," he shrieked.

A few weeks later, revenge was taken. On the night of January 22, 1941, the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael - after singing Orthodox hymns, putting packets of Romanian soil around their necks, drinking each other's blood, and anointing themselves with holy water - abducted 200 men, women, and children from their homes. The Legionnaires packed the victims into trucks and drove them to the municipal slaughterhouse, a group of red brick buildings in the southern part of Bucharest near the Dimbovitsa River. They made the victims, all Jews, strip naked in the freezing dark and get down on all fours on the conveyor ramp. Whining in terror, the Jews were driven through all the automated stages of slaughter. Blood gushing from decapitated and limbless torsos, the Legionnaires thrust each on a hook and stamped it: "fit for human consumption." The trunk of a five-year-old girl they hung upside down, "smeared with blood ... like a calf," according to an eyewitness the next morning.

Good times, good times. Those Legionnaires sound like a barrel of laughs, huh?

Hmm, back to The Historian, although I am still pondering the Legion ... and I read:

"Who are they?"

He tossed his match into the fire. "Criminals," he said shortly. "They are also called the Iron Guard. They are sweeping through the villages in this part of the country, picking up young men and coverting them to hatred. They hate the Jews, in particular, and want to rid the world of them." He drew fiercely on his pipe. "We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered, too. And then a lot of other people, usually."

I described the strange figure I'd seen outside the circle.

"Oh, to be sure," Georgescu muttered. "They attract all kinds of strange admirers. It won't be long till every shepherd in the mountains is deciding to join them."

Huh. I need to know more.

I knew there was more in my book. I dug through Balkan Ghosts. Found what I was looking for.

In 1938, Carol had abolished all political parties and declared a royal dictatorship. After bankrolling the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael for years, that anti-Semitic organization turned against him on account of his liaison with the Jewish Lupescu. So Carol had the Legionnaire leaders murdered. This angered Hitler, whom Carol for a time ignored. But after the Nazi conquest of France, Carol formed his own fascist party, which passed a series of anti-Semitic laws, forcing Romania's 800,000 Jews to live virtually an underground existence. When Stalin, in the summer of 1940, demanded that Carol cede him Bessarabia, Carol appealed to Hitler for help. Hitler answered Carol by forcing him to yield the northern part of Transylvania to the pro-Nazi regime in Hungary.

The population felt these territorial losses like hammer blows. Roars of "abdica [abdicate]" rose from the crowds assembled in the square by the Athenee Palace. Carol "had been too clever," in his dealings with Hitler and Stalin, writes Manning in The Balkan Trilogy. "He had played a double game and lost."

Carol and Lupescu left Romania in the dead of night in late 1940, in a nine-car railway train filled with the country's gold and art treasures. The fascist Legion got wind of the couple's departure and tried stopping the train, but to no avail.

Again: good times, good times.

Carol II. What a guy.

But I knew there was more on the Legion itself. So I found it, with a distinct feeling of "A-ha ... here it is ..."

In 1927, the twenty-eight-year-old [Corneliu Zelea] Codreanu heard the voice of God calling him from an icon of the Archangel Michael, a fighting saint that Balkan peasants associated with the struggle against the Muslim Turks. Codreanu, an educated peasant influenced by the anti-Semitic teachings of his university professors in Jassy, heeded this voice and formed the Legion of the Archangel Michael, whose military wing would later by known as the Iron Guard. In Codreanu's view, the Legion was "a religious order" uniting all Romanians "dedicated to a heroic existence": those alive, those not yet born, and those already dead. He organized the Legion around cuibs ("nests") of thirteen members each. To join a cuib, an initiate had to suck the blood from self-imposed slashes in the arm of every other member of the nest, and then write an oath in his own blood, vowing to commit murder whenever ordered to do so. Before setting out to kill, each man had to let an ounch of his blood flow into a common goblet, out of which all would drink, thus uniting the entire nest in death. Members were also obliged to wear crosses and packets of Romanian soil around their necks. Romanian fascism, like Romanian Communism, was by no means standard-issue.

Tall and handsome, Codreanu had riveting eyes and the chiseled features of a Roman statue. His followers called him Capitanul ("the Captain"). He liked to dress completely in white and ride a white horse through the Carpathian villages. There, he was worshiped as a peasant-god - the Archangel Michael's envoy on earth. When Codreaunu married, 90,000 people formed a bridal procession.

King Carol II saw Cordreanu as a dangerous rival, especially after Hitler told Carol to his face, during a 1938 meeting in Berchtesgarten, that he preferred Codreanu to the 'dictator of Romania". Carol, perhaps because of his overweaning arrogance, was no coward. He answered the Fuhrer by having Codreanu and thirteen other Legionnaires strangled to death in November, 1938, and then spread rumors that Codreaunu had "sold out to the Jews" (exactly what Codreanu had accused Carol of doing, on account of the King's liaison with Lupescu).

But the Romanians could never believe that their "Captain" had sold out to the Jews. To the peasant masses, Codreanu was still very much alive: "a tribune who stood in the imagination of the Rumanians as both martyr and prophet," writes Countess Waldeck. Many peasants claimed that they had seen "the Captain" riding his white horse through the forests at night, in the weeks and months following his supposed execution. Later, the Romanian Orthodox Church proclaimed Codreanu a "national saint".

Ah yes. God told you to chop up 5 year old Jewish girls, "Captain"? Rot in hell.

And of course, there is MUCH more on the Legion in my books ... horrible stories, all of 'em, I mean - they're all horrible - Carol is horrible, eveyrone is horrible - but that was the bit I had been looking for. To provide a little bit more depth, a little bit of the history, the context, if you will ... and then back to the novel.

More on Codreanu and his murderous Iron Guard here.

I have been reading the entire book in this back-and-forth manner. Which is why it is taking me forever, by the way.

I could get lost

in the photo below. I have been staring at it now for, oh, 5 minutes?

It is most definitely not a "happy place" but seriously ... it is truly an awesome (in the classical sense of the word) photograph.

Giants.

The march of history.

A beast slouching towards Bethlehem. A new world being born. Horrors.

It's all in that photograph.

"Our Friend" my ass

I finally finished my Rasputin book. Which - holy CRAP - I totally recommend it. (Radzinsky wrote the Stalin book that put me into such a frenzy not so long ago) I have a bazillion thoughts about the total feckin' wackjob who was Alexandra (I literally want to smack her upside her autocratic head when I read her BOSSY letters to her husband who is - uhm - THE TSAR - telling him what "Our Friend" thinks they should do in the highest levels of government). I mean, whatevs, all autocrats must fall - and there's no love lost between me and the Tsar (I'm sure he's devastated to discover this) - but my main interest here is (as always) a psychological one. First of all - there were signs everywhere that the world was changing, and that their regime would end. Everyone sensed it. It added to the craziness of the time. She's a symbol of a world that was about to die. But still. MAN. I just HATED how she talked to her husband. Now he obviously was weak, ineffectual, and completely whipped - but I found myself secretly cheering for him when he would "disobey" her, or not respond to one of her letters.

I wanted to scream at her:

Alexandra: BACK. THE FUCK. OFF.

GIVE. YOUR HUSBAND (did I mention he was the fucking Tsar for God's sake??) SOME BREATHING SPACE. LET HIM CHOOSE HIS OWN MINISTER OF FINANCE. LET HIM MAKE HIS OWN DECISIONS.

STOP. EMASCULATING HIM. YOU BITCH.

Also, Alexandra hon? If you say the word "Our Friend" one more time I am afraid that my head will spontaneously explode. Our Friend Our Friend Our Friend Our Friend Our Friend ... that's all I ever hear.

STOP.

She's a moron. Actually, despite my annoyance - I can certainly see that she is also a hugely tragic figure. Not tragic because she tried to be great and failed. But tragic because she was born about 2 generations too late. Her world was dead, and she was the last to know.

I mean, I realize that all this is not news - and I've read a ton of books about the Romanovs - yet another wee passion of mine - but still. This book, more than ever, really highlighted her insanity. Letter after letter after letter to her husband on the front (there's even more of them included in Nicholas and Alexandra - the woman just NEVER STOPPED) ... telling him what to do, to keep "Our Friend's advice" in mind, telling him to be stronger - more autocratic - over and over and over - the same litany .... The woman was fucking RELENTLESS. No wonder Nicky seemed rather apathetic and indifferent at the very end of his life - kind of accepting of his doom. He must have been like, "Phew ... Now I can just sit in a chair and read - although I am under house arrest ... and not have to field her 20 fucking letters every day telling me what to do."

But anyway. I'll stop ranting about her.

I have sympathy for her - you know, her hemophiliac son, and the whole war-with-Germany thing - but GOD WOMAN, GET A LIFE.

AND STOP SAYING "OUR FRIEND".

It's so annoying. She literally thought he was God. I believe on some level that she was WILLFULLY ignorant. I believe that there are some people who, no matter what signs are given them, what crystal clear messages are provided - they will still choose the most self-destructive path. Either out of stubbornness, or needing to be RIGHT, being unable to admit weakness or fallibility - pride - whatever. And I think Alexandra took that to its most extreme. I think her stubborn pride actually ended up driving her mad. It must have been horrible. It must have been absolutely horrible to be inside her psyche in those last years. A frenzy. A psychological frenzy. Masked by haughty indifference to her own fate, and an iron will to keep going on her chosen path.

FASCINATING.

I loved the book, by the way.

How do you write "Holy shit" in the Cyrillic alphabet?

At this very moment a raging argument is going on on a Macedonian blog between nationalist Bulgarians and nationalist Macedonians - about these posts of mine. I have no idea what is going on but everyone is obviously VERY angry, with many ALL CAPITAL LETTER SENTENCES and many exclamation points!!!! The Macedonians appear to feel vindicated - because I kind of take their side (although I'm not blinded to their faults) - and the Bulgarians are in a rage about this. It's kind of an uncomfortable feeling to have a bunch of rage-filled Bulgarians screaming about you in the Cyrillic alphabet. I am just sitting back and watching the fur fly, cringing a little bit at the brou-haha, feeling a wee bit ashamed that my own armchair-fascination with Macedonia (I thought that nobody read those posts but CW - and I'm so glad I wrote them all - because somehow, it brought CW to my blog, and he's an awesome guy) has somehow reached the Balkans themselves, and crowds of angry Macedonians and Bulgarians are shouting at each other filled with their ancient hatreds over a couple of stupid posts I wrote in my living room in New Jersey. Good lord. At least it's all happening on a blog, and they aren't stabbing each other to death on some Ottoman battlefield. That's a hopeful sign. But still. People are obviously SCREAMING about me in another language, and my horrible assumptions about Bulgaria, and how dare I take Macedonia's side ... and I'm a little bit scared. But excited too.

The Books: "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" (Samuel P. Huntington)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is The Clash of Civilizations, by Samuel Huntington.

I felt I had to read it because every other book and every other article in the last 6 years references the damn thing. It started out as an article for Foreign Affairs - and then he expanded it into a book. It was published in 1996, and probably foreign policy wonks and scholars were the only ones who paid attention to it. It was mildly controversial - his thesis being that the nation-state's glory days are over. Conventional wars between nation-states are a thing of the past. The wave of the future is the clash of civilizations - which is pretty much what we are seeing now. It's a clash of ideologies. A clash of religions. Huntington's book became hugely important in the wake of September 11 - everyone read it. His name was everywhere. It's a prescient book. A lot of people disagree with his thesis - disagree so vehemently that they just write him off. I think we ignore him at our peril. I am not saying I think he's totally right, because who can ever say that? But I think he's onto something, and he should not be ignored entirely. Much of what he wrote in 1996 has since come true tenfold.

I've been thinking a lot about CW's post here - about misdefining problems. It's relevant to the issues Huntington brings up in his book. Huntington says that we will now start to see civilizational clashes break out across the globe - he breaks down the world into its major civilizations, and looks at the irreconcilable differences between them. The intensification of religious fanaticism in recent years (not just Muslims, but everywhere) - the downfall of the USSR - the replacing of political ideologies with religious ideologies - These are all civilizational issues (according to Huntington) and THAT is where we will see conflict in the 21st century. This is tough stuff for some people to hear - and Huntington has been written off as a nut in many circles. But - in my opinion - and going back to CW's post - he is pretty close to diagnosing the problem correctly. Now what do I know - I'm just a measly citizen, a member of Western civilization - but like I said earlier: I think Huntington is onto something. His book is far-seeing in many ways. He is not just REACTING to the issues of the day - like so many pundits and writers are, who do not know their ass from their elbow. He is trying to diagnose a problem, a world-wide problem ... and people like that are often ignored (until they have been proven right, that is.) Oh, and I agree with CW's thesis about the current mis-defining of our problem, and how once you mis-define a problem - no solution can ever be found. Yup. To me, that is EXACTLY what has happened. I've felt it from the beginning of this current conflict. Something was OFF in the diagnosis. And who the hell am I - I have no power - I'm just a citizen ... but still. To my taste, the diagnosis was OFF. And so only disaster can follow if you don't even diagnose the problem correctly.

Back to Huntington: All of this being said, I think he is a boring writer. You can still feel his outline for the book in the text. Everything is neatly organized like a college term paper. "In the next section, I will show that blah blah blah, and I will do so using the following examples." And then, whaddya know, he does it! I mean, this is good writing for a 10th grader, but one would hope that you could be a bit more graceful with your thesis statement if you're 180 years old like Huntington is.

Literally - he writes like that. I'm used to reading better writers - so it took a bit to just accept that that was how he wrote the book - and read it for the CONTENT, not the good-ness of the writing.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Clash of Civilizations, by Samuel Huntington.

While one-world expectations appear at the end of major conflicts, the tendency to think in two worlds recurs throughout human history. People are always tempted to divide people into us and them, the in-group and the other, our civilization and those barbarians. Scholars have analyzed the world in terms of the Orient and the Occident, North and South, center and periphery. Muslims have traditionally divided the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the abode of peace and the abode of war. This distinction was reflected, and in a sense reversed, at the end of the Cold War by American scholars who divided the world into "zones of peace" and "zones of turmoil". The former included the West and Japan with about 15 percent of the world's population, the latter everyone else.

Depending upon how the parts are defined, a two-part world picture may in some measure correspond with reality. The most common division, which appears under various names, is between rich (modern, developed) countries and poor (traditional, underdeveloped or developing) countries. Historically correlating with this economic division is the cultural division between West and East, where the emphasis is less on differences in economic well-being and more on differences in underlying philosophy, values, and way of life. Each of these images reflects some elements of reality yet also suffers limitations. Rich modern countries share characteristics which differentiate them from poor traditional countries, which also share charactertistics. Differences in wealth may lead to conflicts between societies, but the evidence suggests that this happens primarily when rich and more powerful societies attempt to conquer and colonize poor and more traditional societies. The West did this for four hundred years, and then some of the colonies rebelled and waged wars of liberation against the colonial powers, who may well have lost the will to empire. In the current world, decolonization has occurred and colonial wars of liberation have been replaced by conflicts among the liberated peoples.

At a more general level, conflicts between rich and poor are unlikely because, except in special circumstances, the poor countries lack the political unity, economic power, and military capability to challenge the rich countries. Economic development in Asia and Latin America is blurring the simple dichotomy of haves and have-nots. Rich states may fight tradew wars with each other; poor states may fight violent wars with each other; but an international class war between the poor South and the wealthy orth is almost as far from reality as one happy harmonious world.

The cultural bifurcation of the world division is still less useful. At some level, the West is an entity. What, however, do non-Western societies have in common other than the fact that they are non-Western? Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Muslim, and African civilizations share little in terms of religion, social structure, institutions, and prevailing values. The unity of the non-West and the East-West dichotomy are myths created by the West. These myths suffer the defects of the Orientalism which Edward Said appropriately criticized for promoting "the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, "us"), and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them")" and for assuming the inherent superiority of the former to the latter. During the Cold War the world was, however, no single cultural spectrum. The polarization of "East" and "West" culturally is in part another consequence of the universal but unfortunate practice of calling European civilization Western civilization. Instead of "East and West", it is more appropriate to speak of "the West and the rest", which at least implies the existence of many non-Wests. The world is too complex to be usefully envisioned for most purposes as simply divided economically between North and South or culturally between East and West.

The Books: "The Great Terror: A Reassessment" (Robert Conquest)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is The Great Terror: A Reassessment, by Robert Conquest

One of the most important non-fiction books of the 20th century. It was first published in 1968 - and then was re-written by Conquest, a generation later, in order to add back-up documentation, and archival information which was now available to him (crackup of the USSR, perestroika and all that). He found confirmation that he had actually UNDER-estimated the level of Stalin's terror. Conquest's work is highly regarded in some circles and completely ignored in other circles. Certain circles still cling to the utopian dream of socialism, and Robert Conquest does not play well with others, in this regard. The Great Terror is a relentless book - there is almost nothing pleasant about the reading experience - He explains the mindset so well, I think. Because that's another thing that is so frightening: the whole thing makes SENSE. It's a horrific sense, it's a looking-glass-world sense - but once you get down to brass tacks, you can see that Stalin never made a move for nothing. He always knew what he was doing, and every move he made had some logic to it.

I wrote about my response to the book here. And here too.

Essential reading. (Not my posts about the book, obviously - but the book itself). Here's an excerpt about the confessions. I always found the spectacle of the forced confessions one of the most hypnotic and awful parts about the whole thing. Like I've said time and time again, I can't help but put myself in those people's shoes ... and I try to imagine what the hell would have to happen to me, psychologically, to make me confess to something I didn't do, and to denounce my family and friends publicly. It's so incomprehensible - to me, on this side of the fence ... living as I do, never having to face those challenges ...

Conquest talks a lot about the confessions, and why they were SO important to Stalin's plan.

EXCERPT FROM The Great Terror: A Reassessment, by Robert Conquest

The question naturally arises, not only why the accused made the confessions, but also why the prosecution wanted them. In the public trials, as Radek pointed out in the dock, there was no other evidence. A case in which there was no evidence against the accused, who denied the charges, would clearly be rather a weak one by any standards.

In fact, confession is the logical thing to go for when the accused are not guilty and there is no genuine evidence. For in these circumstances, it is difficult to make people appear guilty unless they themselves admit it. And it is easier to stage-manage a trial of this sort if one can be sure that no awkward defendant is going to speak up at unpredictable intervals.

In general, moreover, in the public trials of Zinoviev and the others, the confession method can be easily accounted for. Stalin wanted not merely to kill his old opponents, but to destroy them morally and politically. It would have been difficult simply to announce the secret execution of Zinoviev. It would have been equally difficult to try him publicly, without any evidence, on charges which he could vigorously and effectively deny.

Even if confessions seem highly implausible, they may have some effect on skeptics, on the principles that there is no smoke without fire and that mud sticks. Even if the confession is disbelieved, a defendant who humbly confesses and admits that his opponents were right is to some extent discredited politically -- certainly more than if, publicly, he had put up a stout fight. Even if the confession is disbelieved, it is striking demonstration of the power of the State over its opponents. It is more in accordance with totalitarian ideologies that a defendant should confess, even under duress: it is better discipline and a good example to the ranks. (Those who would not confess properly in court were sometimes provided with posthumous confessions, to keep up the standards, as with the Bulgarian Kostov in 1949.)

These are rational considerations. But it is also clear that the principle of confession in all cases, even from ordinary victims tried in secret, was insisted on. In fact, the major effort of the whole vast police organization throughout the country went into obtaining such confessions. When we read, in cases of no particular importance, and ones never to be made public, of the use of the "conveyor" system tying down team after team of police investigators for days on end, the impression one gets is not simply of vicious cruelty, but of insane preoccupation with a pointless formality. The accused could perfectly well, it seems, have been shot or sentenced without this frightful rigamarole.

But the extraordinary, contorted legalism of the whole operation remained to the end. It would have been possible simply to have deported thousands or millions of people on suspicion. Yet perhaps 100,000 examiners and other officials spent months interrogating and guarding prisoners who did not, during that time, even provide the State with any labor. One explanation advanced in the prisons was that, apart from a hypocritical wish to preserve the facade, the absence of confessions would have made it much more difficult to find fresh inculpations.

It is also clear that the confession system, involving one single type of evidence, was easier to stereotype down the whole line of investigators than were more substantial methods of faking. When evidence of actual objects was involved, there was often trouble. In the Ukraine, a group of Socialist Revolutionaries confessed to having a secret arms cache, at the instance of an inexperienced interrogator. The first "conspirator" confessed to having put it in charge of another man. The second man, under torture, said that he had passed the weapons on to another member. They went through eleven hands until, after a discussion in his cell, the last consignee was urged to think of someone who had died whom he knew well. He could only remember his former geography master, a completely nonpolitical character who had just died, but maintained that the examiner would never believe him to have been a conspirator. He was finally persuaded that all the examiner wanted was to get rid of the arms somehow, so he made the confession as suggested, and the examiner was so delighted that he gave him a good meal and some tobacco.

We mayt also feel that with the establishment of the confession principle in the public trials, its abandonment with lesser accused might have been taken in NKVD usage as an implied criticism of the trials. The principle had become established that a confession was the best result obtainable. Those who could obtain it were to be considered successful operatives, and poor NKVD operative had a short life expectancy. Beyond all this, one forms the impression of a determination to break the idea of the truth, to impose on everyone the acceptance of official falsehood. In fact, over and above the rational motives for the extraction of confessions, one seems to sense an almost metaphysical preference for it.

As early as 1918, Dzerzhinsky had remarked, of enemies of the Soviet Government, "When confronted with evidence, criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession?" Vyshinsky was the great theorist of confession. He regarded a confession, however obtained, as "in itself grounds for a conviction," and recommended prosecutors and investigators to make a practice of getting the defendant's testimony in his own handwriting, as looking more voluntary. He added, "I personally prefer a half confession in the defendant's own handwriting to a full confession in the investigator's writing," thereby, as a recent Soviet legal commentator remarks, "creating the appearance of the 'voluntary nature' of this testimony." (One prisoner reports that after several days of bullying and beating to make him sign a confession which he had not read, with the interrogator showing especial rage at his obstinacy, he found himself unable to speak or use his hand, whereupon the interrogator put a pen in his fingers and signed it thus.)

Vyshinsky's remark is interesting, as showing some awareness on the part of Stalin's entourage of the basic incredibility likely to attach to confessions. But as to their general desirability, we can note that Vyshinsky was not a man likely to intrude his own prejudices in a matter in which Stalin was deeply concerned. We can take it that basically the idea must have been Stalin's own. It involved endless thousands of men and women in days and months of mental and physical torment.

The Books: "Road Work: Among Tyrants Heroes, Rogues and Beasts" (Mark Bowden)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is Road Work: Among Tyrants, Beasts, Heroes, and Rogues , by Mark Bowden.

A book of essays by Mark Bowden - some from his years on Philadelphia Inquirer and some from post-Black Hawk Down days. He wrote a massive piece on Saddam Hussein for Atlantic Monthly - and there were times that I felt like Bowden was flirting with a Kapuscinski-esque style of writing - which didn't quite work for me. Kapuscinski has the melancholy intellectualism of Communist Eastern Europe. That sort of writing comes naturally to him because that was his background, his life. Bowden is an American, he grew up during the Cold War, obviously - but ... I don't know. I think sometimes Bowden's experiment with this OTHER style of writing works, and sometimes it doesn't. Black Hawk Down was a straight-up narrative, with very little sentiment. He didn't DWELL on moments ... they rushed right by you without you having a chance to deal with it ... just like the guys experienced on the ground there. When I read his piece on Saddam Hussein, I thought: "Huh. This is Mark Bowden trying something new with his writing." It's a bit self-conscious, stylistically - but I can see why he chose to go in that route. It is a personality piece on Saddam Hussein, after all. He's trying to get into the psychology of the tyrant. A straight-up Black Hawk Down-esque style would not work.

These are just my wee comments, take them for what they're worth! I don't begrudge him his experiment - he was stretching himself as a writer, and I think that's a good thing, even if it's only partly successful.

Here's an excerpt from his long in-depth piece on Saddam Hussein called "Tales of the Tyrant". I remember reading it when it first came out in The Atlantic Monthly in May 2002.

EXCERPT FROM Road Work: Among Tyrants, Beasts, Heroes, and Rogues , by Mark Bowden.

In what sense does Saddam see himself as a great man? Saad al-Bazzaz, who defected in 1992, has thought a lot about this question, during his time as a newspaper editor and TV producer in Baghdad, and in the years since, as the publisher of an Arabic newspaper in London.

"I need a piece of paper and a pen," he told me recently in the lobby of Claridge's Hotel. He flattened the paper out on a coffee table and tested the pen. Then he drew a line down the center. "You must understand, the daily behavior is just the result of the mentality," he explained. "Most people would say that the main conflict in Iraqi society is sectarian, between the Sunni and the Shia Muslims. But the big gap has nothing to do with religion. It is betweent he mentality of the villages and the mentality of the cities."

"Okay. Here is a village." On the right half of the page al-Bazzaz wrote a V and underneath it he drew a collection of separate small squares. "These are houses or tents," he said. "Notice there are spaces between them. This is because in the villages each family has its own house, and each house is sometimes several miles from the next one. They are self-contained. They grow their own food and make their own clothes. Those who grow up in the villages are frightened of everything. There is no real law enforcement or civil society. Each family is frightened of each other, and all of them are frightened of outsiders. This is the tribal mind. The only loyalty they know is to their own family, or to their own village. Each of the families is ruled by a patriarch, and the village is ruled by the strongest of them. This loyalty to tribe comes before everything. There are no values beyond power. You can lie, cheat, steal, even kill, and it is okay so long as you are a loyal son of the village or the tribe. Politics for these people is a bloody game, and it is all about getting or holding power."

Al-Bazzaz wrote the word "city" atop the left half of the page. Beneath it he drew a line of adjacent squares. Below that he drew another line, and another. "In the city the old tribal ties are left behind. Everyone lives close together. The state is a big part of everyone's life. They work at jobs and buy their food and clothing at markets and in stores. There are laws, police, courts, and schools. People in the city lose their fear of outsiders, and take an interest in foreign things. Life in the city depends on cooperation, on sophisticated social networks. Mutual self-interest defines public policy. You can't get anything done without cooperating with others, so politics in the city becomes the art of compromise and partnership. The highest goal in politics becomes cooperation, community, and keeping the peace. By definition, politics in the city becomes nonviolent. The backbone of urban politics isn't blood, it's law."

In al-Bazzaz's view, Saddam embodies the tribal mentality. "He is the ultimate Iraqi patriarch, the village leader who has seized a nation," he explained. "Because he has come so far, he feels anointed by destiny. Everything he does is, by definition, the right thing to do. He has been chosen by Heaven to lead. Often in his life he has been saved by God, and each escape makes him more certain of his destiny. In recent years, in his speeches, he has begun using passages and phrases from the Koran, speaking the words as if they are his own. In the Koran, Allah says, 'If you thank me, I will give you more.' In the early nineties Saddam was on TV, presenting awards to military officers, and he said, 'If you thank me, I will give you more.' He no longer believes he is a normal person. Dialogue with him is impossible because of this. He can't understand why journalists should be allowed to criticize him. How can they criticize the father of the tribe? This is something unacceptable in his mind. To him, strength is everything. To allow criticism or difference of opinion, to negotiate or compromise, to accede to the rule of law or to due process -- these are signs of weakness."

The Books: "Black Hawk Down: A Story Of Modern War" (Mark Bowden)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

I'm finished alphabetically with all of the books on the "history" shelves - at least with the ones I've read. Next I have a shelf where I keep hard-covers, which don't fit on the smaller higher shelves.

Next book on the shelf is Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden.

Hands down, one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. From the first page to the last, I couldn't put it down. It's horrific - you are on the streets with those guys, you live their experience with them. It's not poetically written, it doesn't linger in any one place too long - and that's exactly right - because that's what those guys experienced. And yet - there's still enough time to get to know all of these people by name, just a couple of details here and there ... It's so vivid, so awful - I can't say enough good stuff about this book. I saw Mark Bowden on Book Notes, when the book first came out - and liked him so much. I loved his whole story - long-time reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer - he wasn't an international dude, he wasn't a foreign correspondent - nothing like that. But the whole debacle in Somalia happened, and he thought: "That'll make a great book. I wonder what the ins and outs of that whole thing were." Then he waited for the book to come out. Because it HAD to be a book, right? Someone HAD to be on the story, right? Obviously it wouldn't be by HIM because - he didn't have that kind of journalistic experience - but it NEEDED to be a book, and he just assumed that "someone" out there would be "on it". Years went by and no book came out. Bowden then realized: All right. No one's writing the story of what happened in Somalia - for some bizarre reason - so ... I guess I'll do it. He had no access to the military - it was a challenge for him to get "in there" - but eventually, one connection led to another led to another - until he had the full cooperation of everyone involved. It's just an amazing accomplishment.

Fantastic book. A reading experience I'll never forget.

Here's an excerpt.

From Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden.

In short order, Howe and his Delta team were in front of the force. Howe saw bullets skipping off the dirt and skimming down the walls, chipping the concrete. He was way past worrying about staying in formation. The street was a kill zone. Survival meant moving like your hair was on fire. It was time to lead by example. The goal was to punch through to the downed helicopter, and every second mattered. If they failed to link up, then there would be two weak forces instead of a single strong one. Two perimeters to defend instead of one. So they moved quickly but also smartly. As Howe moved he thought about making every one of his shots count, and keeping his back to a wall at all times. There were in a 360-degree battlefield, so keeping a wall behind him meant one angle he couldn't be shot from. At each crossroads he and his team would pause, watch, and listen. Were bullets hitting walls? Bouncing off the streets? Were the shots going left to right or right to left? Every bit of experience and practical knowledge was useful now for staying alive. Were they machine-gun bullets or AKs? An AK only has twenty-five to thirty rounds in a magazine, so if you waited for the lull, Sammy would be reloading when you ran. The most important thing was to keep moving. One of the hardest things in the world to hit is a moving target.

He and his team had spent years training with each other, had fought together in Panama and other places, and moved with confidence and authority. Howe felt that they were the perfect soldiers for this situation. They'd learned to filter out the confusion, put up a mental curtain. The only information that came fully through was the most critical at that moment. Howe could ignore the pop of a rifle or the snap of a nearby round. It was usually just somebody shooting airballs. It would take chips flying from a wall near him to make him react. As they moved down the street it was one fluid process -- scan for threats, find a safe place to go next, shoot, move, scan for t hreats ... The key was to keep moving. With the volume of fire on these streets, to stop meant to die. The greatest danger was in getting pinned down.

The Rangers followed as well as they could, leapfrogging across the intersections. Stebbins and 60-gunner Private Brian Heard kept up with them, reassured just to be close to the D-boys. These guys knkew how to stay alive. Stebbins kept telling himself, This is dangerous, but we'll make it. It's okay. At the intersections he would take a knee and shoot while the man in front of him ran. Then the man behind him would tap his shoulder and he would take off, just closing his eyes and praying and running for all he was worth,

Sergeant Goodale, who had once bragged to his mother how eager he was for combat, felt terrified. He was waiting for his turn to sprint across a street when one of the D-boys tapped him on the shoulder. Goodale recognized him: it was the short stocky one, Earl, Sergeant First Class Earl Fillmore, a good guy. Fillmore must have seen how scared Goodale looked.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I'm okay."

Fillmore winked at him and said, "It's all right. We're coming out of this thing, man."

It calmed Goodale. He believed Fillmore.

By the time they were three blocks over, Howe's team was way out front. With them were Stebbins, Heard, Goodale, Perino, Corporal Jamie Smith, and a few other Rangers. They turned left onto Marehan Road, where the alley ended. The wide dirt road sloped uphill slightly and then downhill for several blocks, so when they made the turn they were just shy of the crest of a hill. Downhill to the south they could see Sammies running every which way. Over the crest of the hill to the north, Howe saw signal smoke from what must have been the crash. They were about two hundred yards away.

There was a blizzard of fire at that intersection. Automatic rifle fire and RPGs from all directions. Howe felt the force was in peril of getting stuck and cut to ribbons. He shouted back down the street to Captain Miller, "Follow me!" and plunged straight down the left side. Stebbins and several other Rangers followed. Perino, Goodale, Smith, and some others followed Hooten's Delta team across the street and started down the right wall. Immediately behind them was Sergeant First Class John Boswell's Delta team.

An RPG exploded on the wall near Howe and his men. Howe felt the wallop of pressure in his ears and chest and dropped to one knee. One of his men had been hit on the left side with a small piece of shrapnel. Howe abruptly kicked in the door to a one-room house on his left. He and his team had learned to move like they owned the world. Every house was their house. If they needed shelter, they kicked in a door. Anyone who threatened them would be killed. It was that simple. No one was inside. They caught their breath and reloaded their weapons. Running with all that gear was exhausting. The body armor was like wearing a wet suit. They were sweating profusely and breathing heavily. Howe drew his knife and cut away the back of his buddy's shirt to check the wound. There was a small hole in the man's back with about a two-inch swollen, bruised ring around it. There was almost no blood. The swelling had closed the hole.

"You're good to go," Howe told him, and they were out the door and moving again.

The Books: "An Unexpected Light : Travels in Afghanistan" (Jason Elliot)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

I'm finished alphabetically with all of the books on the "history" shelves - at least with the ones I've read. Next I have a shelf where I keep hard-covers, which don't fit on the smaller higher shelves. These are also sort of history books.

Next book on the shelf is An Unexpected Light : Travels in Afghanistan , by Jason Elliot.

A marvelous book - part travelogue, part memoir. It's not a proper book of journalism - there are no footnotes, no bibliography. Elliot is basically writing a book-length love-letter to Afghanistan, a place he had visited, off and on, for many years. For whatever reason, it tapped into his imagination, his soul - in the same way that Yugoslavia tapped right into Rebecca West's soul - and he had to keep going back. He had to write about it as well. This was his first book. Now it came out in 1999 and of course, hardly anyone read it. Whatever. Who cares about Afghanistan, right? After September 11 happened - suddenly they re-issued the book in mass quantities (it was on display everywhere) - and now it's out in a paperback edition, and the book is now having a really long life.

I absolutely loved reading this book. I like his style.

Here's one of my favorite anecdotes from the book. I don't know why - but it's stuck with me.

From An Unexpected Light : Travels in Afghanistan , by Jason Elliot.

Across the valley the shadows were deepening in the ochreous folds of the hills and the skyline had begun to resemble the crenellated walls of a hilltop castle punctuated by ruined watchtowers and lost to time. Dusk was falling and grey plumes had begun to rise from the tiny houses below us. WEe could hear the faint shouts of boys playing football in a square behind the village and then, with a mounrful timelessness, the cry of the muezzin. Suddenly I remembered Wordsworth:

that blessed moment In which the burden of the mystery In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened.

And when I turned the others were looking at me, as if expecting some pronouncement.

We walked down again past the ruins of homes destroyed by bombs and returned to Sayeed's house where I wrote up my diary. I had learned to excuse myself expertly for this ritual and although a courteous hush spread through the room for the duration of my scrawling, the more curious men would draw in at close range, kneeling, their faces locked in perplexed delight at the odd shapes flowing from my pen.

"And he reads and writes Persian too," said Sayeed, with a touch of pride. At this I was handed a children's schoolbook and invited to read; it was the story of Joseph.

"And what about your Prophet?" asked one of the men after I had read.

"That would be Jesus," muttered another.

"Yes, Jesus - is he alive or dead?" asked a third, and the room fell unexpectedly silent at the crucial question.

It is hard to imagine unlettered European villagers enquiring of a Moslem visitor as to the significance of the Prophet Mohammed's mission. Yet here in a tiny and remote Afghan village was evidence of a sincere concern for a guest's interpretation of what to Moslem minds is a vital event.

Few non-Moslems are aware of the profound reverence throughout the Islamic world for Jesus, or of the high esteem in which Maryam Mary, is held by practicing Moslems. There is no historical equivalent, in the reverse sense, to the centuries of derogation in the West of Islam as a system of faith, or the calumny heaped upon its Prophet. And whereas Christianity has distanced itself from Islam, there remains in the Islamic world a deep consciousness of the intertwining roots of both religions, which one flourished on the same soils.

Moslem admiration for Christianity founders on two crucial objections. These are doctrinal rather than historical: both are considered inimical to the vigorous monotheism of orthodox Islam. One is the putative confusion between jesus and God, which is seen as confusion between the Messenger for its Source. The other is the symbolism of the Trinity, which smacks heavily of polytheism -- to the Moslem mind perhaps the greatest of metaphysical heresies.

Inevitably the trouble trickles down to such problematic events as the Crucifixion. As any sensible Moslem knows, Jesus did not die on the cross: someone else must have, or else He did not die. The belief that a man could die and return to life strikes Moslems as bafflingly misguided.

They have a point. If removing the cornerstone of the resurrection from the Christian edifice is troublesome for Christianity, Islam does not find itself obliged to square metaphysical circles when a simple answer suffices. There is no humanization of the Absolute in Islam. No danger, either, of having the baby of religion itself thrown out with the bathwater of anthropomorphic symbolism. Consequently it suffers from none of the insecurities that arise from the headier mysteries built into Christianity; of the terrible dichotomies between God and Man, earthly and heavenly worlds, flesh and spirit.

In Islam there is no confusion as to which is really which and who is who: no sane reason why dead men should live and three should equal one and vice versa; no conflict between spiritual and worldly endeavour; no need, therefore, for an entire class of men (and now even women) to pretend at interceding between the Divine and his servants -- confusions that smack of polytheism, mystification, of a religion gone astray; metaphysical mouthfuls indeed, to Moslems weaned on a powerfully single-flavoured religion, but which Christians are conditioned to swallow whole without thinking.

Even the most modern and sophisticated of Moslems finds the Christian version of things unnecessarily complicated and, whether he admits it or not, misguided. At the heart of Islam, conversely, lies something which, to the Christian or at least Western mind, appears disturbingly -- disappointly, almost -- straightforward: something altogether too uncompromisingly, if not oppressively, inflexible. This is the shahada, or profession of faith, the proclamation of belief so potent as to be contained within a few syllables; the adamantine nexus around which orbits the religion of a billion souls:

La illaha ill 'allah
(There is no God but God himself)

The room was silent, and the shadows from the lantern rippled over the men's faces as they leaned forward to hear my reply. But the prospect of venturing into such problematic territory, equipped only with my crippled Persian, seemed overly ambitious.

I said: "Just as a man's spirit lives on in his children, so too is Jesus alive in his followers." For a few minutes they discussed the answer among themselves and seemed content. I was off the hook.

"And where is God then?" came a voice.

It was the same man who had begun this troublesome line of enquirty.

"Here," I said, and put my hand over my heart. He looked suddenly serious, fell silent, and a moment later left the room.

The Books: "The Last Great Revolution : Turmoil and Transformation in Iran" (Robin Wright)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is The Last Great Revolution : Turmoil and Transformation in Iran , by Robin Wright. Wright, a reporter who first started covering Iran in 1973 - writes this book about where Iran is now - the revolution launched them to one place, and it is now 20, 30 years later - what's going on there now? Her main focus is cultural. (Look at the cover of the book in that link - that's the kind of duality she is exploring). She refers to it as " great revolution" not like "whoo-hoo, isn't it awesome" - but "great" as in history-making. Like the Russian Revolution. The French Revolution. The American Revolution. These are revolutions that changed the world. On multiple levels. Good or bad, it doesn't matter - they are huge events. Robin Wright writes from a bias - she loves the Iranian people, and she hates the government. But she has lived and worked there for many years. Each chapter takes on a different topic: freedom of the press (a fascinating chapter - newspapers closing because of censorship and then opening the next day - same paper, different name), birth control (huge government-run campaign to educate the populace about birth control - couples about to be married have to take the course, it's mandatory), separation of church and state, Islam and democracy (it is through this book that I was introduced to Abdul Karim Soroush - she does a whole chapter on him). He's a theologian, a philosopher - he has been called "the Iranian Martin Luther". FASCINATING man.

Anyway, it's your typical book - I would say that it's not that well-written. If you want one of these "Let's look at the entire country in 300 pages" type of books about Iran, then I would recommend Persian Mirrors. Beautifully written.

Wright's prose is a little bit boring to me. BUT - she has an entire chapter on the film industry of Iran, which is interesting and active - and that's why I really appreciate this book. She interviews the main actors, the directors ... the challenges they have with the censors - which is why so many Iranian films are about kids, and kids facing challenges, etc ... They just stay away from portraying adults altogether. Has anyone out there seen Children of Heaven?? One of my favorite films - it's on my Top 50 list - It actualyl did quite a bit of business here in the US, and was nominated for a best foreign Film Oscar - so you will be able to find it, probably, at Blockbuster, or on Netflix. It's a good film to watch with your kids, too - if they're able to read - it'll take them about 10 minutes to get used to the subtitles. I saw it in the movie theatre in New York and while there were lots of adults in the audience, a lot of parents brought their kids - 9, 10 year olds ... who just LOVED it. There's a running-race at the end of the film which is so exciting that one of the kids sitting in front of Kate and I started cheering the "hero" (a 10 year old boy like himself) on. Wonderful film. I've been very interested in the Iranian film industry ever since.

So whatever, politics shmolitics, Islam Shmislam, I'm going to post an excerpt about the film industry in Iran. Specifically about one of its biggest stars Akbar Abdi. Robin Wright lists a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini at the top of this chapter: "There is no fun in Islam." Hey, Ayatollah, thanks for the sunshine, jagoff!!

Abdi's words on Buster Keaton bring a lump to my throat. The universality of art. The universal language of actors. It just moves me so much.

The Last Great Revolution : Turmoil and Transformation in Iran , by Robin Wright.

Akbar Abdi is Iran's greatest comedic actor. A playful, pudgy man with fat cheeks and a thick walrus mustache that turns down instead of up at the sides, Abdi is best known for his breakthrough role in a breakthrough film called The Snowman.

The movie broke so much ground, in fact, that it was pretty much banned indefinitely by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in 1995. The black-comedy plotline involved an Iranian who went to Turkey in a desperate bid to get a visa to the United States. He repeatedly got scammed, leading him into ever deeper intrigues and compromising antics. But that wasn't the most controversial part of the film. What really offended censors was that Abdi played a woman.

"I was the Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire of Iran," he said with a mischievous smile when I visited him in 1998 on another movie set in Tehran.

As one of the character's ruses, Abdi did exactly what Dustin Hoffman did as Tootsie and Robin Williams did as Mrs. Doubtfire. He disguised himself as a woman to get what he couldn't as a man. The main scam in The Snowman had Abdi dressed as a woman paying money to a man he thinks is an American to marry him -- since marriage to an American is one of the few surefire ways for an Iranian to qualify for a visa.

But to conservative censors, the plot was also a surefire way to get slapped with an official ban for being "un-Islamic", even though The Snowman was supported by the official Islamic Propagation Organization and even though the character ended up falling in love with an Iranian woman and returning home.

"It was a wonderful part. A man trying to be a woman is one of three roles every actor wants to play. The other two are an addict and a crazy person," Abdi said, puffing on a Marlboro Light during a filming break. He'd just finished entertaining the cast and crew with a funny Turkish song and a little jig. They were all still chuckling in the background.

The Snowman did finally open in Iran, however. After President Khatami's 1997 election, one of the new culture minister's first acts was to lift the ban on the Abdi film. It instantly became a box-office hit. I saw the film several months after it was released; it was still playing in Tehran cinemas. For his role, Abdi told me proudly that he'd been nominated for a best actor Tandee, Iran's equivalent of the Oscar. The film also grossed more than any other movie that year -- by far.

Abdi claimed that he wasn't bitter about the delay.

"I wasn't worried, because the film probably was a little bit ahead of its time," he reflected. "Even three years later, it still had problems."

Big problems, in fact. On the day The Snowman was to premiere in Isfahan, militant Hizbollah thugs attacked the local theatre. They destroyed posters of the film. They threatened people lined up for the show, including females and children. And then they attacked anyone who didn't flee.

The cinema succumbed -- and shut down. The Snowman opened in November 1997 in twenty-two other Iranian cities, but not in Isfahan.

Just to make sure that the theatre didn't try again, militants returned for several days and held "God is Great" victory prayers on the street outside. No one even tried to stop them. Nor did police and city officials in Isfahan step in, despite the fact that Hizbollahis repeatedly broke several laws.

In a sign of the times, the showdown was defused only after the leading local ayatollah intervened -- on behalf of the movie. Ayatollah Jaleleddin Taheri used his Friday prayer sermon to scold Isfahan officials for their failure to act -- either to ensure law and order or to allow an unbanned movie to be shown.

"If the police and intelligence forces and the governor's office are unable to deal with them," the seventy-year-old cleric warned, "then let them tell me and I'll put them in their places."

Taheri's word was final. So The Snowman finally opened in Isfahan too, several weeks after its premiere elsewhere. Again, it was an instant hit.

I asked Abdi if humor was more sensitive in an Islamic theocracy -- or if there was even such a thing as Islamic humor.

"It's better not to use terms like that," he replied. "After all, what is human humor? It's the same for Christians too."

Then with a twinkle in his eye, he boomed, "Oh, I'm afraid the ceiling will collapse because I'm telling such lies!"

The film's producer and several crew members who'd gathered around to listen laughed again.

"What I mean is that a human should be a human and know God. But he shouldn't be afraid if he says this kind of thing is true. We're all humans with similar values," he added, in a more serious tone.

I asked Abdi if he was religious, and if being religious was important to an actor hoping to make it in the Islamic Republic.

"I can't say I'm very religious, but I believe in God. I believe in God very much," he said.

"At the beginning of my life, I believed because of my mother. Since I loved her very much. I wanted to follow her way. As a child, I prayed and fasted because I wanted her to love me. It's the same at the other end of life. Sometimes when people grow older they think they should get closer to God. They think if they no longer commit the sins they did when they were young, then they'll get closer to God," Abdi added. "I'm not like that. Now I really believe in God."

The thirty-eight-year old actor, however, hardly fit the outside world's image of a devout Iranian believer. He had shaken my hand when we were introduced. During the filming break, he sat across from me in a heavy military uniform for his part as a famous nineteenth-century shah. The bulky black jacket with gold trim and epaulets was wide open, fully exposing his white T-shirt underneath.

I asked Abdi whom he most admired as an actor or director.

"God," he said, pausing. Then he smiled. He clearly thought my questions were taking the religious stuff too far.

"No," he said, smiling and waving his hand sideways in the air as if to erase his words.

"It's probably Buster Keaton. For him, humanity is important. He cares about the other side of the coin. Sometimes when I've seen his films or biography I've actually broken into tears because I see a similarity between us. He was a very lonely person. And usually comedians know sadness better than others."

Before he resumed filming in the opulent Mirror Room of Golestan Palace -- golestan means "rose garden" and is so named because of the splendid flower beds alla round it -- I asked Abdi if there was any other daring role he wanted to play.

"I think playing a bisexual would be very interesting," he mused.

In light of my conversation with Mohajerani about the arts portraying homosexuality, I asked Abdi if he really thought that kind of role could ever be written into an Iranian movie script.

"Who would've thought a man could play the role of Tootsie in Iran?" he replied. "So maybe even that's possible here.

"Maybe ..." he repeated, for emphasis.

"Someday," he added. Then he turned and went back to the set, cracking jokes in Persian to amuse the crew.

A few actors do have star quality in Iran. Ihsan, the wiry little taxi driver who'd taken me to Golestan Palace, had lingered on the edge of the set during my interviews. He came up close when I talked with Abdi, almost hovering over me at the end, so I introduced him.

"It was like meeting Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson," he gushed later. "We don't get opportunities like this."

Yet making a film in Iran is not a major production, at least compared with the way most American or European movies are made. Both the cast and crew of Abdi's movie were tiny -- six actors and actresses and a staff of thirty camera, sound, light and set technicians. As in most Iranian films, the director was also the lone screenwriter. The set had no trailers for the stars or caterers for lunch. The cast and crew had all taken public transportation, or driven themselves and parked in the small lot outside the palace. Lunch was strictly brown bag.

Equipment was also sparse. The lone camera was a German-made Arriflex BL4S.

"This kind of camera probably hasn't been used anywhere in the West for fifteen years or more," Habib Allahyari, the film's tall dapper producer told me as I inspected it.

"After eight years of war and two decades of sanctions, we make quality films good enough for the whole world with this old equipment. Give us your facilities and we'll give you ours -- and then we'll compare films," he added, though with envy rather than anger.

For all the pride Iranians have in their films, the industry gets few perks. The crew had to suspend shooting for a couple of hours until repairmen quit making banging, clanging noises as they worked on the old downtown palace, built just a few years after Tehran became the capital. The shahs were coronated in the ornate first-floor ballroom before the court aristocracy and diplomatic corps. Anyone can visit now, though few besides foreign tourists bothered a generation after the last shah's departure.

Iranian movies also tend to be low-budget, to say the least. Abdi's new movie involved a sixty-day shoot and was onen of the costlier recent productions, Allahyari said. The budget was about $185,000, and it was that high only because the producer counted on a big audience. The last movie Abdi starred in grossed a billion tomans, or about $1.2 million at the exchange rate of the time.

Yet Iran's vibrant and original cinema may be the richest cultural byproduct of the revolution -- often in spite of the revolutionaries themselves.

In the 1990s, Iranian films were good enough to become standards at the world's major film festivals. And they fared well, taking major prizes at Cannes and other festivals from Switzerland to Singapore, Canada to South Korea, Italy to India to Israel, Japan to Germany, Australia to Argentina, Belgium to Brazil, Spain to China. They won for best picture, best foreign film, best director, best script, best actor, best documentary, best short film, and best jury. The Taste of Cherries, the story of a man talked out of suicide by the taste of cherries, won the Cannes Palm d'Or in 1997.

Iranian films even did well in America. The New York Film Critics Circle named The White Balloon, a poignant tale of a little girl and her brother who lose their money on the Iranian New Year and their encounters with people who try to help them retrieve it, as the best foreign film in 1996. It also won the Cannes Camera d'Or for best feature film in 1995.

Of the seven-year-old girl who plays the lead role, the Hollywood Reporter raved, "She displays a range of emotions that would stymie Meryl Streep."

Life in the Mist won the Horizon award for short films at the Aspen Filmfest in 1999. It was a powerfully simply story of a young Kurdish boy who made the family's only cash income by carrying goods on his mule along the rough Iran-Iraq border. With the death of the mule, he was forced to carry the goods himself, in turn triggering other challenges and adventures.

In 1999, Lincoln Center in New York, the American Film Institute in Washington and the Chicago Art Institute all held retrospectives honoring director Dariush Mehrjui, arguably the father of modern Iranian film, who's been ranked by both domestic and foreign critics as the most important of Iran's new generation of directors.

In Hollywood, Children of Heaven was one of the five films nominated for a foreign Oscar in 1999. The heartrending tale centers on a nine-year old boy named Ali who accidentally lost his seven-year-old sister Zahra's only shoes, a tattered pair with pink bows. To hide the loss from their poor and occasionally employed father, Ali and Zahra swapped the only pair of shoes between them, racing to meet after her school shift ended and before his began. Sharing a single pair repeatedly got both children in trouble. To solve their problems, Ali entered a long distance race -- in which, of course, shoes were a prize. The catch was that it was third prize. The subtle ending did not include Ali's winning the shoes.

The competition for best foreign film taht year was arguably the toughest in Oscar history. Iran's Children of Heaven was up against Italy's Life is Beautiful and Brazil's Central Station -- both of which were so impressive that their foreign stars were also nominated for best-actor and best-actress Oscars. Children of Heaven lost to Life is Beautiful, which also took the best-actor Oscar.

Despite the rich variety of plots, Iranian films tend to share several striking features: Characters aren't crafted from superlatives -- the prettiest, the wealthiest, most powerful, bravest or strongest, nor the most evil, ugliest, dumbest, or most cowardly. They're instead quite ordinary folk: small shopkeepers, poor families, children or housewives. The settings are not sets but real homes and back alleys, villages and schoolytards, downtown shops and public streets.

The stories also don't center on earthbound asteroids, spy escapades, sinking ocean liners or historic epics. Little is glamorous.

The common thread in many Iranian films is instead a deceptively simple story line culled from small events, encounters or challenges that subtly offer the grist for bigger themes. The heroics involve getting rhough the calamities of daily life, rarely unscathed. Many amount to modern fables that leave viewers with hauntingly deep feelings.

The Books: "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia " (Rebecca West)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf.

Next book on the shelf is the great Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia , by Rebecca West. A 1200 page masterpiece. Is it possible that every page contains interest, horror, great writing, insight? Yes, it is. Her accomplishment has never been matched. It's one of the most important books of the 20th century. I don't know how many people have even read this book - I know CW has!! It's just one of those massive TOMES that sit in Barnes and Noble, and ... people probably say, "I should read that some day ..." but LOOK at the LENGTH! That was my response to it for years. I read everything else about the Balkans I could get my hands on ... and avoided Black Lamb and Grey Falcon ... it's just so HUGE. But reading about the Balkans without reading her book is ridiculous - because every single writer references her work. (Every writer worth his or her salt, I mean.) If you don't give her the props for her accomplishment, and you think you can re-invent the wheel, then you're an idiot. Once you READ the thing, you realize just what the hell the big deal is about her book. And why people who HAVE read it talk about it in the way that they do. I am really grateful for CW's promptings to me: "Read it! You gotta read it!" I finally just picked the damn thing up, and started. And it's not a lie - once I started, I couldn't stop. It took me months to finish it - but there isn't one boring passage, there isn't one sentence of dry or boring writing. Guys, put this book on your radar. One cannot fully understand the former Yugoslavia, and that entire area, without reading this book. The book was such a project to me that I created a whole category on my blog here for it. The other thing that makes it not just a good and informative book but a great book - is how prophetic it turned out to be. Rebecca West took her journey in the late 30s, a terrible terrible time in Europe. But oh - even more terrible times were to come, especially for those in the Balkans. She predicts it all. She predicts it all.

A massive book. You can check out the category-archive above for a bunch of excerpts ... but here I'm going to excerpt one of the sections that truly blew me away. She and her husband are at a place called Sheep's Field, in Macedonia. They go out into this field where a fertility ritual is taking place - There's a specific rock where it happens - a sheep is slaughtered so that a barren woman can get pregnant. Sheeps are brought forth, their throats are cut, blood spurts out ... and Rebecca West goes OFF on this.

This is why her book is brilliant. There are more historical sections than this one - it's a history book, after all - and there's a hell of a lot of history in the Balkans - but here is where she gets UBER. Here is where she gets global, rises up above historical concerns, or timelines, and looks at humanity. The human race. She's PISSED.

Passages like this are why other writers like Robert Kaplan spend their lives trying to write a book even HALF as good as this one. (Rebecca West is Kaplan's idol).

The excerpt is long. She starts slowly, and then builds to an indictment of - well, you'll see. Pretty much everything. The world was going MAD then. And she SEES it. She sees the madness EVERYWHERE. And Rebecca West is the opposite of non-judgmental. She judges. If that makes you uncomfortable, and if you take a stance of "all cultures are equal, who am I to judge?" then this book would be difficult for you. She pulls no punches. (She LOVES Yugoslavia, though - obviously - it is a place that haunted her dreams ... this is the book she was meant to write, and she knew it.) Context is decisive here. Europe was being overrun by a savage madman. Loss of intelligent thought - mindless nationalism and zealotry ... It was coming. The apocalypse was coming. This is what she sees on the fertility rock in the field in Macedonia. And yet ... and yet ... she also writes: "It is not possible to kill goodness." A crazy time. She had a deep hatred for anything "mindless" ... because she saw what that mindlessness was doing to the great culture of Germany. She prized rationality in a time when no one was rational. Hence - her fury at all religions, at anything designed to take away man's sense of AGENCY in his own destiny. This was one of the ongoing things she kept coming back to - in her travels through the Balkans. A region where, so often, passion ruled the day, ancient gripes, ancient hatreds ... mindless, and seemingly inevitable. There are many people who probably couldn't even get through the following section without little trap doors in their brains closing left and right ... because they do not want to deal wtih the implications. People like that are part of the problem, in my opinion. I'm not even saying that Rebecca West is right here - it's her OPINION - but there are those who can't even bear to look at such opinions, because it feels like an attack on them personally. Again: people who respond to differences of opinion like that are not just part of the problem - they ARE the problem.

Rebecca West hates those who "hate reason".

Great great writing.

From Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia , by Rebecca West.

The man with the knife and his friends gathered round us and told us of the virtue of the place. Many women had got children by giving cocks and lambs to the rock. One woman who had come all the way from Prilep had had a child after she had lived in a barren marriage for fifteen years. But it was foolish to doubt the efficacy of making sacrifices to the rock, for people would not go on doing it if it were not efficacious, and they had done it for a very long time, for hundreds of years. They should, of course, have said thousands. Their proof, which should have been valid if man were a reasonable animal, was therefore stronger than they supposed. The men who told us these things were good animals, with bright eyes and long limbs and good bones. They were also intelligent. Their remarks on the stone were based on insufficient information but were logical enough, and when they went on to talk of matters less mysterious than fertility, such as their experiences in the last war, they showed considerable good sense and powers of observation. One spoke a little English, another spoke fluent French, two or three seemed to follow skilled tradees. But what they were doing at the rock was abominable.

All I had seen the night before was not discerniable to humanity. I had not found anything being done which was likely to give children to women who were barren for physiological reasons; but I had seen ritual actions that were likely to evoke the power of love, which is not irrelevant to these matters. When the Moslem women in the Tekiya put out their arms to embrace the black stone and dropped their heads to kiss it, they made a gesture of the same nature, though not so absolute, as that which men and women make when they bend down to kiss the cloth which lies instead of Christ on the holy table at Easter. Such a gesture is an imitation by the body of the gesture made by the soul in loving. It says, "I will pour myself in devotion to you, I will empty myself without hoping for return, and I can do this serenely, for I know that as I empty myself I shall be filled again." Human beings cannot remind themselves too often that they are capable of performing this miracle, the existence of which cannot be proved by logic.

The women who lay in ritual sleep on the tomb of St. George were working as fitly as the women in the Tekiya for the health of their souls. We prune our minds to fit them into the garden of ordinary life. We exclude from our consciousness all sorts of knowledge that we have acquired because it might distract us from the problems we must solve if we are to go on living, and it might even make us doubt whether it is prudent to live. But sometimes it is necessary for us to know where we are in eternity as well as in time, and we must lift this ban. Then we must let our full knowledge invade our minds, and let our memories of birth crawl like serpents from their cave and our foreknowledge of death spread its wide shadow. There is nothing shameful for women whose senses have been sharpened by the grief of barrenness to lie down on the tomb of one whose life was visible marvel and explore the invisible marvels of their own nature. Their ritual sleep was wholesome as common sleep.

But the rite of the Sheep's Field was purely shameful. It was a huge and dirty lie. There is a possibility that barrenness due to the mind could be aided by a rite that evoked love and broke down peevish desires to be separate and alone, or that animated a fatigued nature by refreshment from its hidden sources. But this could do nothing that it promised. Women do not get children by adding to the normal act of copulation the slaughter of a lamb, the breaking of a jar, the decapitation of a cock, the stretching of wool through blood and grease. If there was a woman whose womb could be unsealed by witnessing a petty and pointless act of violence, by seeing a jet of blood fall from a lamb's throat on a rock wet with stale and stinking blood, her fertility would be the reverse of motherhood, she would have children for the purpose of hating them.

The rite made its false claims not out of delusion: it was a conscious cheat. Those who had invented it and maintained it through the ages were actuated by a beastly retrogression, they wanted again to enjoy the dawn of nastiness as it had first broken over their infant minds. They wanted to put their hands on something weaker than themselves and prod its mechanism to funny tricks by the use of pain, to smash what was whole, to puddle in the warm stickiness of their own secretions. Hence the slaughter of the lambs and the cocks, the breaking of the jars, the mess of blood and grease. But the intelligence of man is sound enough to have noticed that if the fully grown try to go back to the infantile they cannot succeed, but must go on to imbecility and mania. Therefore those who wish to indulge in this make the huge pretension for it that it is a secret way of achieving what is good, and that there is a mysterious process at work in the world which has no relation to causality. This process is a penny-in-the-slot machine of idiot character. If one drops in a piece of suffering, a blessing pops out at once. If one squares death by offering him a sacrifice, one will be allowed some share in life for which one has hungered. Thus those who had a letch for violence could gratify it and at the same time gain authority over those who loved peace and life. It could be seen that the slaughterer of the lamb was very well pleased with his importance, and some of the Moslems round the rock smugly hastened to tell us that they had performed his office some time during the night. It was disgusting to think that they enjoyed any prestige, for though they were performing an action that was thousands of years old and sanctified by custom, there was about them a horrid air of whimsicality, or caprice, of instability. For all their pretensions they were doing what was not necessary. They had achieved unsurpassably what Monsieur Andre Fide licks his lips over, l'acte gratuit. This is the very converse of goodness, which must be stable, since it is a response to the fundamental needs of mankind, which themselves are stable.

I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing. Here it could be seen how the meaning of the Crucifixion had been hideen from us, though it was written clear. A supremely good man was born on earth, a man who was without cruelty, who could have taught mankind to live in perpetual happiness; and because we are infatuated with the idea of sacrifice, of shedding innocent blood to secure innocent advantages, we found nothing better to do with this passport to deliverance than destroy him. There is that in the universe, half inside and half outside our minds, which is wholly adorable; and this it was that men killed when they crucified Jesus Christ. Our shame would be absolute, were it not that the crime we intended cannot in fact be committed. It is not possible to kill goodness. There is always more of it, it does not take flight from our accursed earth, it perpetually asks us to take what we need from it.

Of that lesson we had profited hardly at all, because resourcefulness rises from the rock like the stench of its blood. The cruel spirit which informed it saved itself by a ruse, a theological ruse. So successful has this ruse been that the rock disgusted me with the added loathsomeness of familiarity, as the drunkenness of a man known to be a habitual alcoholic is more offensive than the accidental excess of a temperate man. Its rite, under various disguises, had been recommended to me since my infancy by various religious bodies, by Roman Catholocism, by Anglicanism, by Methodism, by the Salvation Army. Since its earliest days Christianity has been compelled to seem its opposite. This stone, the knife, the filth, the blood, is what many people desire beyond anything else, and they fight to obtain it. There was an enemy of love and Christ called Saul of Taurus who could not abide this demonistration by the cross that man was vile and cruelty the essence of his vileness, and for that reason persecuted Christians till his honesty could not tolerate his denial of the adorability of goodness and showed it to him under the seeming of a bright light. But the belief of his heart was in force and in pain, and his mind, which was very Jewish in its refusal to accept defeat, tinkered incessantly with the gospel till it found a way of making it appear as if cruelty was the way to salvation. He developed a theory of the Atonement which was pure nonsense yet had the power to convince, for it was spoken quickly in tones of genius to excited people who listened trustfully, knowing the innocence of Christ and assuming that everything said in his name was innocent also, and being tainted, as all human beings are, with the same love of blood as the speaker. This monstrous theory supposes that God was angry with man for his sins and that He wanted to punish him for these, not in any way that migh tlead to his reformation, but simply by inflicting pain on him; and that He allowed Christ to suffer this pain instead of man as if he had not committed these sins. This theory flouts reason at all points, for it is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.

There was a gap in the theory which could never be bridged, but those who loved cruelty tried from then on to bridge it. There were many lesser ones of this sort, and one great one, Augustine, so curiously called a saint. Genius was his, and warm blood, but his heart was polluted like the rock. He loved love with the hopeless infatuation of one who, like King Lear, cannot love. His mother and he were like dam and cub in the strength of their natural relationship, but his appetite for nastiness made him sully it. Throughout their lives they achieved from time to time an extreme sweetness, but the putrescence gained, and at her death, he felt an exaltation as mean as anything recorded in literature, because she died in Italy, far from her African home, and therefore could not be buried, as she had desired, beside her beloved husband. His relationship with God covered as wide a range. He wanted a supreme being sterilized of all that his genius recognized as foul, but he did not want him to be positively good. He hated all the milder aspects of virtue, he despised the spirit that lets all things flower according to their being, for he liked too well to draw the knife across the lamb's throat. In his desire to establish cruelty in a part of holiness he tried to find a logical basis for the abominable doctrine of St. Paul, and he adopted a theory that the Devil had acquired a rightful power over men because of his sins, an dlost it because he forfeited all rights by crucifying Christ, who was sinless. This went far to proving the universe to be as nonsensical as the devotees of the rock wished it to be. It presents us with a Devil who was apparently to a certain degree, at least respectable enough to be allowed by God to exercise his legal rights in the universe, until he killed Christ. This robs the wickedness of man of its ultimate importance. His sins were evidently not so bad, just what you might expect from the subjects of a disorderly native prince. It was perhaps that which recommended the theory to Augustine, who knew he was wicked.

It was certainly that which recommended Augustine's theory to Martin Luther, who was not even like the rock, who was the rock, with the sullied grass, the cocks' heads, the grease, the stinking blood. He was the ugliest of the great, a hog magnified and with speech. His only virtue was the virtue of the wild boar; he was courageous. But all other merits he lacked, and strove to muddy life into a sty with his ill opinion of it. He howled against man's gift of reason, and in one of his sermons he cried out to his hearers to throw shit in her face, because she was the Devil's whore, rotten with itch and leprosy, who ought to be kept in the privy. He hated reason for a cause: because it exposed the idiocy of Augustine's theory of Atonement, which was dear to him in its bloody violence, which was dear to him because it substituted joy in murder for remorse at the murder of goodness. His honesty blurted out that there was no sense whatsoever in the idea of God's acceptance of Christ's death as a sacrifice for man, but all the same he smacked his lips over it, it was good, it was gorgeous, it was eternal life. Because of him Protestantism has bleated ever since of the blood of the lamb, though not more loudly than Roman Catholicism.

So there has been daily won a victory for evil, since so many of the pious give divine honours to the cruelty which Christ came to earth to expose. If God were angry with man and wanted to punish him, and then let him go scot-free because he derived such pleasure from the sufferings of Christ, then the men who inflicted these sufferings must be the instruments of our salvation, the procurers of God's pleasures; they are at least as high as the angels. The grinning and consequential man standing on the rock with a stained knife in his grubby hand is made a personage necessary to the spiritual world; and because cruelty was built into us in our mothers' wombs we are glad of this, while at the same time everything in us that approves of kindness and can love knows that it is an obscene lie. So it has happened that all people who have not been perverted by the West into caring for nothing but machine-made articles (among which a Church designed to be primarily a social organization can fairly be classed) have found Christianity a torturing irritation, since it offers both the good and the evil in us the most supreme satisfaction imaginable and threatens them with the most final frustration.

We are continually told to range ourselves with both the crucified and the crucifiers, with innocence and guilt, with kind love and cruel hate. Our breasts echo for ever with the cries, "In murdering goodness we sinned" and "By murdering goodness we were saved." "The lamb is innocent and must not be killed", "The dead lamb brings us to salvation," so we live in chaos. This state is the less likely to be relieved because those who defend the rock are too cunning to commit their case to terms that could be grasped and disputed. Though the doctrine of the Atonement profoundly affects most public and private devotions, it has never yet been defined in any creed or by any general Council of the Churches.

Nearly all writers dip their pens in inkwells tainted with this beastliness. Shakespeare was obsessed by it. He was fully aware of the horror of this rock, but he yielded to its authority. He believed that the rite was in accord with reality, which he thought to be perverse in character. He recognized the adorability of goodness, in its simplicity and in its finer shades, as in worsted kingliness or a magician's age. But there filters into his work from the depths of his nature a nostalgia for infantile nastiness, a love of groping for trout in the peculiar rivers of the body, a letch for cruelty which hardly took pleasure in it, but longed sickly for consummation with the disgusting and destructive but just moment, as martyrs long for their doom. He who perfectly understood the nature of love, who knew that "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove," felt under an obligation to castrate it by smearing the sexual function which is the means of bringing together most lovers in the world, be they husbands and wives or parents and children. His respect for the rock forced him to write King Lear and take up all lambs of the herd one by one and draw his knife across their throats. All kinds of love are in that play presented as worthless: the love of parent for child, of child for parent, of married people and illicit lovers, all are impotent or bestial. But at the end the part of Shakespeare that was a grown man cries out that there is no health in the world save through love, that without it life is madness and death. It is not to the credit of mankind that the supreme work of art produced by Western civilization should do nothing more than embody obsession with this rock and revolt against it. Since we have travelled thus far from the speechless and thoughtless roots of our stock we should have travelled further. There must be something vile in us to make us linger, age after age, in this insanitary spot.

But some were not with us at the rock, but with the sunglight which the stench only so faintly disturbed, which shone inviolate above the mountains. That is the special value of Mozart. It is not that he was kind. When he wanted a lamb for food it had to die. But in all his music there is no phrase which consented to anything so lacking in precision at this ritual slaughter, so irrelevant to its professed purpose as this assault on infertility, nor does he ever concur in the belief that the disagreeable is somehow of magical efficacy. He believes that evil works nothing but mischief; otherwise it would not be evil. "Psst! Psst!" says Leporello, beckoning the masked strangers in the garden, and bidding them to a ball; but since wickness is the host it is not ball but an occasion for rape and bloodsheed. After Don Juan is dead the characters of the play who are good, be it in solemnity or in lightness, gather together in a nightingale burst of song, because the departure of cruelty allows their goodness to act as it must according to its own sweet process. The same precision, the same refusal to be humbugged by the hypocritical claims of cruelty, account for the value of Jane Austen's work, which is so much greater than can be accounted for by its apparent content. But suavity of style is not the secret, for William Blake is rough. His rejection of the rock took another form, he searched his mind for belief in its fraud like a terrified woman feeling her breast for a cancer, he gave himself up to prophetic fury that his mind might find its way back to the undefiled sources of its knowledge of goodness.

Here on the Sheep's Field it could be seen where the cleavage lies that can be apprehended to run through art and life: on one side are the people who are accomplices of the rock and on the other those who are its enemy. It appeared also where the cleavage lay in our human nature which makes us broken and futile. A part of us is enamored of the rock and tells us that we should not reject it, that it is solemn and mystical and only the shallow deny the value of sacrifice. Because here a perfect myth had been found for a fundamental but foul disposition of the mind, we were all on an equality with the haggard and grimy peasant, his neckerchief loose about a goitre, who now slouched to the rock, the very man to attend a nocturnal rite late the next morning, and held up a twitching lamb to the fezed executioner, who was scrambling consequentially to the squalid summit.

The Books: "In Siberia" (Colin Thubron)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is the last of the "Russian trilogy" - and it's called In Siberia, by Colin Thubron.

Thubron took the train across Siberia in the mid-1990s - following the collapse of Communism. He writes:

I was trying to find a core to Siberia, where there seemed none; or at least for a moment to witness its passage through the wreckage of Communism -- to glimpse that old, unappeasable desire to believe, as it fractured into confused channels, flowed under other names.

It's a haunting book - I highly recommend it (as I recommend all of Thubron's stuff).

Here's an excerpt of his trip to Komsomolsk.

From In Siberia, by Colin Thubron.

It was almost November, and the Baikal-Amur Railway had carried me north along the river valley to within a hundred and fifty miles of the Pacific, to Komsomolsk-na-Amur. Hooded and quilted against the cold, I tramped down streets carved out for the heavy traffic of a future which never came. Komsomolsk was Stalin's "City of the Dawn", founded by young Communist pioneers in 1932 far from the Trans-Siberian and the eyes of foreigners: a galaxy of warplane factories, submarine yards and concentration camps, cradled in xenophobia.

I had expected a place of worn ugliness. Instead, austere streets lined by facades of dull gold radiated away in a faintly forbidding classicism. The replication of their stuccoed brick lent them a muted theatre. In their stately shabbiness, they looked older than they were. The snow was falling along their avenues in wet, heavy flakes so that little infidelities of style (gauche friezes, useless colonettes), the crumbling corbels and collapsing balconies, faded down long vistas of puritan uniformity, almost beautiful.

On the banks of the Amur, swollen a mile wide, a granite boulder marked the landfall of the first Komsomol volunteers. They had arrived on two steamers, the Columbus and the Comintern, in May 1932, and began to build their city in virgin taiga, spending the first winter in tents. The Soviet press turned them into a legend of young heroism, and the local museum was still reverent with their leftover mess-tins and paraffin-lamps, while diaries and letters recorded the hardships of dwindling supplies or an early scurvy victim ("the first grave in our future city").

The town's buildings are still blazoned with old pieties: cornsheafs and banners and Lenin heads, and with the city's motif of a Komsomol cadet rising from the sea. The First Builders Avenue runs for seeming miles towards a sheaf of defunct smokestacks, and a monument raised to these pioneers portrays them climbing ashore in a windblown vanguard beside the Amur. Yet they march out of another moral world, whose paeans to metallurgical plants and blast furnaces, always on the brink of overtaking America, evoke easy cynicism. It has so quickly, cruelly, gone. When I inspected the memorial I saw -- instead of the stock musclemen of Socialist Realism -- a rather incompetent-looking and naive gang of youths. Beyond them, for hundreds of yards, the start of the First Builders Avenue had disintegrated to a track of weed-sown concrete dribbling through scrubland.

For it went through an old concentration camp. In fact the whole city was haunted by these sites. The 'First Builders' had barely formed a bridgehead before 100,000 political and criminal prisoners were herded in to build, and were soon to be followed by thousands of Japanese prisoners-of-war. Unnmarked mass graves still scatter the city, with Japanese memorials to their dead. Komsomolsk's older inhabitants say their home town was not built by Komsomols at all, but by convict labour.

And now the city was emptying, its rationale faded. Its secretive distance from any industrial center turned it illogical. Some of its arms factories were closing down, or exporting their submarines to India, or flying-boats to China, or converting to the manufacture of gliders, trawlers, and yachts. All the same, I was not sure if I was permitted here. Nothing near Komsomolsk was on my visa. But the women managing my hotel, immured in one of the blocks built by Japanese prisoners, explored my passport in fascination, and did not register me. I settled in a room with a splintered door-lock, a communal basin and some stained blankets. But the stout radiators blazed with heat, and for three nights I slept in the silence of the deepening snow outside.

During the day I wandered the city in the anonymity of falling whiteness, hoping for something to happen. A waning populace of rough-faced men and boisterous women in vinyl coats and bobble hats made muffled processions over the pavements. I was back in Brezhnev's Russia. Every cafe I tried was closed or in desultory repair. The clerks, the shop-assistants, the restaurant waitresses seemed trapped in Soviet cliche: unsmiling, gross, bawling, dyed blonde or ginger. My arrival was always a hostile intrusion. Shops existed for those who worked in them: customers chanced along afterwards, like bad luck.

On my city map the once-secret industrial suburbs were whited out. I walked down alleys whose dinosaur factories were sloughing tiles and glass. Some had been abandoned in dereliction, their overhead railcars ground to a blackened sleep, their compounds splashed with murals glorifying work or a long-past anniversary. But most still panted smoke and steam, and the air stank of lead and coal tar. I stopped in the pouring snow to re-examine my airbrushed map. In this congested power-house it showed only a furniture factory and a center for "experimental mechanics".

The Books: "The Lost Heart of Asia" (Colin Thubron)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is the second in the "Russian trilogy" - and it's called The Lost Heart of Asia , by Colin Thubron.

Uhm ... I love this book? Like ... totally? Like ... please read it? Like ... it's so awesome??

Don't even know what to say about it except that. It's my favorite of the trilogy. Thubron started his trilogy with his book about driving and camping through western Russia in 1980 - when Communism was still around, the monolith still existing - yet visibly cracking up. The second book in the trilogy is Thubron driving around through Central Asia in 1990, 1991 - after everything had fallen apart. It's just ... it's such a mysterious book, in a way - because those countries (or ... regions, really) are so impenetrable in many ways. Their histories are so long, so checkered ... In the deserts of Central Asia are ruins of civilizations that are barely remembered today. Or not remembered at all. So much there is lost history - because of how conquered or forgotten the entire region was ... for hundreds of years. Once the sea route to India was discovered and utilized, Central Asia - once the highway of the world - dropped off the map, and dropped out of history. I mean ... that entire period of history is so fascinating to me, so ... argh. I have no words. Poetic? Evocative? Tragic? What was it like? How suddenly did the Silk Road "dry up"? Did they realize what was happening as it was happening?

Thubron drives through all the 'stans - talks to people, gets local guides, sees things, he sets out to find the remaining Russians, too - the people whose grandparents had been deported there by Stalin - to see what THEIR plans are, now that Communism has ended. Where will they go? What will they do?

Great book. Love it to death.

I couldn't pick an excerpt ... there are so many great anecdotes - so I decided to go with one of the more historical sections. Even though you can get this information anywhere, there's just something about how Thubron writes that really draws you in.

From The Lost Heart of Asia , by Colin Thubron.

For two thousand years Central Asia was the womb of terror, where an implacable queue of barbarian races waited to impel one another into history. Whatever spurred their grim waves -- the deepening erosion of their pasturelands or their seasons of fleeting unity -- they bore the same stamp of phantom mobility and mercilessness.

Two and a half millenian ago the shadowy Scythians of Herodotus -- Aryan savages whose country was the horse -- simmered just beyond the reach of civilization, like a ghastly protoplasm of all that was to come. Then the Huns flooded over the shattered Roman Empire in a ravening swarm -- fetid men clothed in whatever they had slaughtered, even the sewn skins of fieldmice -- and they did not stop until they had reached Orleans, and their rude king Attila had died in unseasonable bridebed, and their kingdom flew to pieces. But the Avars followed them -- long-haired centaurs who rocked Constantinople and were eventually obliterated by Charlemagne at the dawn of the ninth century. Soon afterwards an enfeebled Byzantium let in the Magyars, and the fearsome Pechenegs rushed in after -- Turanian peoples, all of them, who evaporated at last in the gloomy European forests, or settled to become Christian on the Great Hungarian Plain.

Then, at the start of the thirteenth century, as Christian Europe ripened and Islamic Asia flourished, the dread steppeland unleashed its last holocaust in the Mongols. This was not the random flood of popular imagination, but the assault of a disciplined war-machine perfected by the genius of Genghiz Khan. Unpredictable as a dust-storm, its atrocious cavalry -- neckless warriors with dangling moustaches -- could advance at seventy miles a day, enduring any hardship. Only their stench, it was said, gave warning of their coming. In extremes, they drank from the jugulars of their horses and ate the flesh of wolves or humans. Yet they were armoured in habergeons of iron or laminiated leather scales, and they could fire their steel-tipped arrows with magic accuracy over more than two hundred yards at full gallop. Consummate tacticians and scouts, they soon carried in their wake siege-engines and flame-throwers, and around their nucleus of ethnic Mongols rode a formidable mass of Turkic auxiliaries.

By Genghiz Khan's death their empire unfurled from Poland to the China Sea. Within a few years his sons and grandsons came within sight of Vienna, laid waste Burma and Korea, and sailed, disastrously, for Japan. Meanwhile, in their Central Asian heartland, the Pax Mongolica was instilling administrative discipline, commercial recovery, and a frightened peace.

Tamerlane, the Earth-Shaker, was the last, and perhaps most awesome, of these world predators. Born in 1336 fifty miles south of Samarkand, he was the son of a petty chief in a settled Mongol clan. He acquired th ename "Timur-i-Leng" or "Timur the Lame" after arrows maimed his right leg and arm, and passed as Tamerlane into the fearful imagination of the Weset. By his early thirties, after years of fighting over the splintered heritage of Genghiz Khan, he had become lord of Mavarannah, the "land Beyond the River", with his capital at Samarkand, and had turned his cold eyes to the conquest of the world.

From the accounts that are left of him, he emerges not only as the culmination of his pitiless forerunners, but as the distant ancestor of the art-loving Moghals of India. Over the terrified servants and awed ambassadors at his court, his eyes seemed to burn without brilliance, and never winced with either humour or sadness. But a passion for practical truth fed his unlettered intelligence. He planned his campaigns in scrupulous detail, and unlike Genghiz Khan he led them in person. He clothed his every move with the sanctions of the Islamic faith, but astrology and omens, shamanism and public prayers, were all invoked to serve his needs. An angel, it was rumoured, told him men's hidden thoughts. Yet he assaulted Moslems as violently as he did Christians and Hindus. Perhaps he confused himself with God.

No flicker of compassion marred his progress. His butchery surpassed that of any before him. The towers and pyramids of skulls he left behind -- ninety thousand in the ruins of Baghdad alone -- were calculated warnings. After overrunning Persia and despoiling the Caucasus, he hacked back the remnants of the Golden Horde to Moscow, then launched a precipitate attack on India, winching his horses over the snowbound ravines of the Hindu Kush, where 20,000 Mongols froze to death. On the Ganges plain before Delhi, the Indian sultan's squadrons of mailed elephants, their tusks lashed with poisoned blades, sent a momentary tremor through the Mongol ranks; but the great beasts were routed, and the city and all its inhabitants levelled with the earth. A year later the Mongols were wending back over the mountains, leading 10,000 pack-mules sagging with gold and jewels. They left behind a land which would not recover for a century, and five million Indian dead.

Now Tamerland turned his attention west again. Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus fell. In 1402, on the field of Ankara, at the summit of his pwoer, he decimated the army of the Ottoman sultan Beyazid, and inadvertently delayed the fall of Constantinople by another half century.

Between these monotonous acts of devastation, the conqueror returned to the Samarkand he cherished. At his direction a procession of captured scholars, theologians, musicans and craftsmen arrived in the capital with their books and tools and families -- so many that they were forced to inhabit caves and orchards in the suburbs. Under their hands the mud city bloomed into faience life. Architects, painters and calligraphers from Persia; Syrian silk-weavers, armourers and glass-blowers; Indian jewellers and workers in stucco and metal; gunsmiths and artillery engineers from asia Minor: all labored to raise titanic mosques and academies, arsenals, libraries, vaulted and fountained bazaars, even an observatory and a menagerie. The captured elephants lugged into place the marble of Tabriz and the Caucausus, while rival emirs -- sometimes Tamerlane himself -- drove on the work with the parvenu impatience of shepherd-princes. The whole city, it seems, was to be an act of imperial power. Villages were built around it named Cairo, Baghdad, Shiraz or Damascus (a ghostly Paris survives) in token of their insignificance. It was the "Mirror of the World," and the premier city of Asia.

Tamerlane himself confounds simple assessment. He kept a private art collection, whose exquisitely illuminated manuscripts he loved but could not read. His speech, it seems, was puritan in its decorum. He was an ingenious and addicted chess-player, who elaborated the game by doubling its pieces -- with two giraffes, two war-engines, a vizier and others -- over a board of 110 squares. A craving for knowledge plunged him into hard, questing debates with scholars and scientists, whom he took with him even on campaign, and his quick grasp and powerful memory gave him a working knowledge of history, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.

Yet at heart he was a nomad. He moved between summer and winter pastures with his whole court and horde. Even at Samarkand he usually pavilioned in the outskirts, or in one of the sixteen gardens he spread round the city: watered parks with ringing names. Each garden was different. In one stood a porcelain Chinese palace; another glowed with the saga of his reign in lifelike frescoes, all long vanished; yet another was so vast that when a workman lost his horse there it grazed unfound for six months.

The Books: "Among the Russians: From the Baltic to the Caucasus" (Colin Thubron)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

No more Paul Theroux! Say buh-bye, Mr. Theroux! Next book on the shelf is the first of what is known as the "Russian Trilogy" - and it's called Among the Russians , by Colin Thubron. Argh, just flipping through the book made me remember how much I absolutely ATE this book up ... and made it very hard to even decide upon an excerpt. Here's the deal with the whole trilogy, and honestly, I can't recommend it highly enough: Colin Thubron's a writer. He took three separate trips to Russia - (only one when it was the USSR) - and each book is the chronicle of one particular trip. I don't know WHY these books are so good - but I know that a lot of it has to do with his extraordinary skill as a writer. Second of all, he's quite good on the whole historical side of storytelling as well - similar to Robert Kaplan is. Like ... you travel to a town, and the town has a storied history, or a checkered past ... and through the gift of the writing, you get to see the entire scope of what this one tiny particular town MEANS. Thubron is fantastic at that. But he's also amazing at giving you the FEEL of each particular trip.

Among the Russians is the first of the trilogy (actually, there's a fourth book - about China ... Thubron meant the 4 books to go together - but the China book is now not lumped in with the 3 Russian books. If you go to your History bookshelf at Barnes & Noble, you'll probably see only three books, in a row.) Anyway, Among the Russians was published in the early 80s. The first sentence of the book is: "I had been afraid of Russia ever since I could remember." He decides to confront that fear, and drives a car through Western Russia - stopping at Moscow, not going further into the country. But he travels up to Leningrad (ahem) - goes to Estonia, Latvia ... drives down to Kiev, Rostov-on-Don ... etc. The book was recently re-released in paperback, and in his little introduction (setting up the whole trilogy), Thubron writes:

Later journeys took me deeper into these lands I had been brought up to fear, and a further three books charted them: Behind the Wall on China still shadowed by the Cultural Revolution; The Lost Heart of Asia on the Islamic republics emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union; and In Siberia on Russia's eastern wilderness. Among the Russians is the first of this quartet, and perhaps the most innocent: a lone Westerner traveling into a Soviet world which still seemed impregnable.

Wonderful books. WONDERFUL. My favorite is The Lost Heart of Asia (of course - because it's a journey through all the 'stans!!) - but they're ALL good.

Among the Russians is interesting because Thubron is traveling through the country during the dying gasps of Communism. He gets a tour at some museum or something - and the guy giving the tour is still totally brainwashed by the Communist ideal ... Thubron searches, in vain, for any cynicism in the guy, he wonders: "How can he still actually believe that crap??" Thubron is also followed by the KGB throughout his trip. His notes are confiscated at the border. He is dogged by "guides" who want to travel with him ... The thought of this random British person just DRIVING HIS CAR??? THROUGH RUSSIA??? And ... camping?? Setting up his tent and camping? What? And forming his own opinion about stuff?? All of this was very threatening. Obviously, the authorities assumed this dude was up to no good. Thubron was wily, though ... cunning, and persistent. He had grown up being afraid of Russia. Once he got there, once he met people (some great scenes of him camping at campsites and the people he meets there - the vodka-soaked parties, the dancing ... but also the insights into where the country is at, how people outside of the bureaucracy feel about Communism, etc.) - anyway, once he started to meet people, and travel, he lost his fear. He refused to submit to the control. There was no reason why he couldn't drive wherever he wanted to. So off he went.

I love, too, how he meets someone - either an interpreter, or a guide, or someone like that - who starts to go on and on about his nostalgia for Stalin. The second there's a pause, Thubron states, "Stalin was a monster." And the guide stumbles a bit, and says, "We need that strength again ..."

Thubron, having grown up TERRIFIED of Russia, came to the country with his guard up. He, of course, was angry at having been terrified. He actively despises Communism, and makes no bones about how stupid he thinks the whole thing is when he talks to people. And beautifully: once he starts getting invited into people's private homes, once the vodka starts flowing at the campsites - 99% of the people, of course, have no belief in Communism - they just want to lead good lives, and have food on the table. The cynicism about it is incredible. But Thubron finds it so refreshing. After all of the bureaucratic zealotry, and talking-points, and posturing ... cynicism starts to seem like evidence of truly independent thinking. He loved it.

Marvelous book. I recommend them all.

I really waffled on this one - but I decided upon the following excerpt. Thubron reaches Rostov-on-Don.

From Among the Russians , by Colin Thubron.

So I came to Rostov-on-Don. This, too, might symbolize the march of industry over the steppes -- the triumph of the new Russia over the old Cossack anarchy. It is the gateway to the Caucasus and the eatern shores of the Black Sea. Its citizens are proud of it, and the campsite authorities alighted on me -- a rare, lone Westerner -- with a language student as a guide.

"This is Yury," they said. "He's a Cossack."

I looked into a near-featureless face, its gaze as grey and unfocused as his native wilderness. I remembered my experience at Minsk, but I had not the heart to send him away. I was his first "real Englishman," he said.

For two days he showed me round the official attractions of Rostov. He recited his facts dutifully -- good and bad -- in a throaty, smothered voice. He showed none of the hectic evangelism of Alexander Intourist. One skyscraper, he said, had already taken fifteen years to build -- he was a child when it had been started -- and nobody knew when it would be finished. It was a half-standing joke. And the huge Gorky Theatre, built in the shape of a tractor -- a last shout of Constructivism from the early thirties -- only faintly stirred him.

Yet Yury was touchy. And he understood nothing of the West at all; he could scarcely focus his imagination for a coherent question about it. Around him the Soviet Union was so vast and hermetic that it comprised all the conceivable world.

One thing I remember with peculiar clarity. This was when I told Yury that we in the West were afraid of Russia. For an instant he stared at me open-mouthed, then burst into disbelieving laughter. It was the only time I heard him laugh, so preposterous to him, so manifestly silly, was the idea of his country's dangerousness. This disbelief had already been echoed by other Russians along my route. Twice Yury asked me if I were not joking, then gazed at me for long moments, astonished at the depth of my delusion.

And I, in turn, became mesmerized by his enclosedness. Rostov to him was the measure of all things. He took me to the gates of the mammoth Rostelmash factory, the country's biggest producer of agricultural machinery, which had won the Order of Lenin, he said, and the Order of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. He chanted the orders like a liturgy. Then we went to a People's Palace of Culture. We peered into music and ballet rooms, filming and sculpture studios. They were heavy with control. Yury sensed my distaste, but he could not gauge its cause. He grew disconsolate, and redoubled his efforts. He took me to leisure compounds run by trade unions on the south bank of the Don. They were compounds of tin-roofed huts, decorated by plants set in rubber tyres. Everything was violently painted. People came here in summer to escape their apartments, Yury said; the best compound had been visited by Gagarin, and displayed a commemorative fountain, which was falling to bits. No breath of proletarian jollity fired these camps. They were almost deserted. In three different compounds I saw only one netball pitch, a split table-tennis board and a billiard table whose pockets had rotted to shreds. It was the nightmare of some Marxist Butlin.

But Yury felt none of this. He liked the trees, and the sense of the river nearby. Living in a city, he was yet a countryman. He took the steppeland into the streets with him. It lumbered in his walk and filled his inarticulate gaze and hands. He typified, perhaps, the Russian whom Westerners underestimate: decent, conscientious, enduring.

His ancestry was as remote and glamourous to him as it was to me. We spent a morning at Novocherkassk, the Cossack capital -- a town like any other now, he said. But two triumphal arches celebrated the entry of Platov's Cossacks into Napoleon's Paris, and the crypt of the forbidding cathedral was filled with the tombs of wild atamans. There were still a few old Cossack families living in the town, Yury said, but they kept to themselves and he did not know them. So we wandered around the Don Cossack museum, gazing at a booty of velvet, glass, carpets.

The Cossacks refuse any ideological mould. Refugees from serfdom or revolution, flamboyantly whiskered men and braided women, prodigal of life, roisterous, drunken, free -- this seemingly indestructible people, coalesced into unruly democracies on the frontiers of empire, pushing it forward but half independent of it, and became in turn the martyrs of peasant revolution and the brutal instruments of imperial repression. The later tsars elevated them to an elite military caste, until they formed the hardest and most reactionary regiments of the army.

All this -- royalist or revolutionary -- was splashed about the museum in a tempestuous duality. But their later history had been reconvened into ghostly, half-recognisable shapes. Their role in supporting the Whtie armies had tactfully dwindled; so had those who fought for Germany in the Second World War and who were betrayed by the Treaty of Yalta; and so had Stalin's collectivization of the kulaks, the richer farmers, which went ahead in a welter of violence and family feuds, to end in mass arrests and mass exile.

But the drift to the town was destroying Cossackdom more surely, and less painfully. "You can't be a Cossack and live in a city," Yury said, as we swallowed fish soup and beef pancakes in a self-consciously Cossack restaurant on the Don. "You have to stay in the village, the stanitsa. An urban Cossack's a contradiction."

We stared out at the river. Between its unequal banks -- the northern high and tree-crowned, the southern low and merging into steppe -- it flowed, rife with history, to the Sea of Azov. Over its surface a light, troubling ripple played all afternoon, but left its depths untouched, as if the great waters were scarcely moving. Upriver, said Yury, it no longer skirted the wattle-palisaded stanitsas of old, but emerged from a land of collectivized hamlets and forestation schemes.

"The whole society's dying," he said. "It's happening very fast. When I think of my grandfather, who rode with the Red cavalry in the Civil War!" And in a rare moment of evocation, he conjured this ancient warrior before my eyes: a lean, choleric, sickle-whiskered barbarian, whose hair exploded in hoary thickets from under his sheepskin cap and whose gorilla arms were laced with burns. He had died of drink.

"But what happened to him in the thirties?"

Yury kept his eyes on the grey river and announced without emotion: "My grandparents were considered kulak because they owned a horse, a plough, and a patch of land. They were deported to Siberia. Before they went they placed my mother -- she was a girl then -- with one of my aunts. Those were bad years: famine. My mother's still physically small. She came from deep Cossack country -- a hundred miles north of here." He gestured upriver. "But she doesn't want to go back. She says they're very bitter in those villages. They wouldn't offer a stranger so much as a glass of water. And of course they hate the memory of Stalin. Three-quarters of our people loathe Stalin."

Southward, a feeling of timelessness descends. In the west the Azov and Black Seas, where the great rivers spill, merge invisibly with the Mediterranean world. To the east stretch the cloudy steppes of the Caspian and Asia, ancient mother of half the earth's peoples, whom it has loosed in a staunchless flood since before record. Scythians, Huns, Avars, Tartars, Parthians, Magyars -- a myriad barbarians grew in this fearsome womb and flung themselves west and south and east, in spasm after spasm, towards the civilizing sea.

The Books: "The Gulag Archipelago" (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Not much I can say - it's a little bit overwhelming. Here's some background on Solzhenitsyn. Imprisoned in Stalin's gulag - the "gulag archipelago" - from 1945 to 1953. This is his book about how the "gulag" worked - but not just the camps themselves - the whole system. He explains, painstakingly, how the interrogations worked - how it was that people confessed in droves to things they did not do - why it was seen as an honor to turn in your family and friends - There are a couple of separate chapters on all of the sensational show-trials and what each one MEANT. Because, of course, the trials were not real. They were completely orchestrated, nothing unplanned about them at all - so we can look at them as symbolic of certain things. Solzhenitsyn's writing is extremely readable - very personable, almost like a diary. This book is HORRIBLE. He goes to the heart of the lunacy, and stays there. Not only does he stay there, but he explains it. He lived it. Russia denounced him for years. His international fame grew to the point that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970. Russia denounced the Nobel Prize. Of course. Typical. He never said what Russia wanted him to say. He still doesn't, come to think of it. A complicated man, someone I admire very much ... I think that The Gulag Archipelago is one of the most important books not only of the 20th century, but ever. It goes a long long way towards explaining the WHYS - and he does it in a way that really resonates with me. It's not just about political policies, or party politics, or power struggles - He talks a lot about psychology. The psychological pressure of the interrogations (which is immortalized so terrifyingly in Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon) - I always put myself in the positions of these people, I can't help myself. Maybe it's just natural curiosity, or maybe that's the part of me that's an actress, that doesn't just want to know facts - but wants to enter into the experience of others. And I can't help but try to imagine myself in those interrogation rooms, being questioned - and ... what on EARTH would have to happen in there to make me betray my friends? My boyfriend? My family? I can't IMAGINE. It's painful to think about, and yet somehow I can't help it. I try to imagine what circumstances would have to exist in order for this to occur. You get my point. That's the way my mind goes. It's horrible to contemplate, of course - it's not a pleasant daydream - but psychologically, it is one of the main things that interests me about this whole period in Russian history. The fabricated confessions. PILES of them. Glorifying that little shit who turned in his parents as kulaks. People rushing to betray their friends. Again, like I've said before - a looking-glass world. Betrayal became a virtue. It became a civic duty. How did that occur? Books like Darkness at Noon, The Great Terror by Robert Conquest, and Gulag Archipelago make great strides in answering that question.

Solzhenitsyn wrote about his own imprisonment - and what it was like - in the holding cells, and then in the forced labor camps. But he also describes the lead-up, the mass arrests, the rounds of show trials through the years, the insane year of 1937 - I'll excerpt a bit from the section on the trials.

Hard to find an excerpt. This one will do. If you haven't read this book - I can't recommend it highly enough. I went into it thinking it was going to be dry and informative ... I have no idea why I thought that. This book is the OPPOSITE of dry. You'll see in the excerpt below. He has a couple of parenthetical snarky comments - he makes fun of what's happening - you'll see how he does it. It's very very readable. All parentheticals are his. All italics are his. He even puts exclamation points in parentheses, to show how ... gobsmackingly AMAZING it all was - amazing as in 'audacious'. I love his observations on the word "Center".

From The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The Case of the "Tactical Center" -- August 16-20, 1920

In this case there were twenty-eight defendants present, plus additional defendants who were being tried in absentia because they weren't around.

At the very beginning of his impassioned speech, in a voice not yet grown hoarse and in phrases illumined by class analysis, the supreme accuser informs us that in addition to the landowners and the capitalists "there existed and there continues to exist one additional social stratum, the social characteristics of which have long since been under consideration by the representatives of revolutionary socialism. [In other words: to be or not to be?] This stratum is the so-called 'intelligentsia. In this trial, we shall be concerned with the judgment of history on the activity of the Russian intelligentsia" and with the verdict of the Revolution on it.

The narrow limits of our investigation prevent our comprehending exactly the particular manner in which the representatives of revolutionary socialism were taking under consideration the fate of the so-called intelligentsia and what specifically they were planning for it. However, we take comfort in the fact that these materials have been published, that they are accessible to everyone, and that they can be assembled in any required detail. Therefore, solely to understand the over-all atmosphere of the Republic, we shall recall the opinion of the Chairman of the Council of People's Commisars in the years when all these tribunal sessions were going on.

In a letter to Gorky on September 15, 1919 -- which we have already cited - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin replied to Gorky's attempts to intercede in the arrests of members of the intelligentsia, among them, evidently, some of the defendants in this trial, and, commenting on the bulk of the Russian intelligentsia of those years (the "close-to-the-Cadets-intelligentsia"), he wrote: "In actual fact they are not [the nation's] brains, but shit." On another occasion he said to Gorky: "If we break too many pots, it will be its [the intelligentsia's] fault." If the intelligentsia wants justice, why doesn't it come over to us? "I've gotten one bullet from the intelligentsia myself." (In other words, from Kaplan.)

On the basis of these feelings, he expressed his mistrust and hostility toward the intelligentsia: rotten-liberal; "pious"; "the slovenliness so customary among 'educated' people"; he believed the intelligentsia was always shortsighted, that it had betrayed the cause of the workers. (But when had the intelligentsia ever sworn loyalty to the cause of the workers, the dictatorship of the workers?)

This mockery of the intelligentsia, this contempt for the intelligentsia, was subsequently adopted with enthusiasm by the publicists and newspapers of the twenties and was absorbed into the current of day-to-day life. And in the end, the members of the intelligentsia accepted it too, cursing their eternal thoughtlessness, their eternal duality, their eternal spinelessness, and their hopeless lagging behind the times.

And this was just! The voice of the accusing power, echoed and re-echoed beneath the vaults of the Verkhtrib, returning us to the defendants' bench.

"This social stratum ... has, during recent years, undergone the trial of universal re-evaluation." Yes, yes, re-evaluation, as was so often said at the time. And how did that re-evaluation occur? Here's how: "The Russian intelligentsia which entered the crucible of the Revolution with slogans of power for the people [so it had something to it after all!] emerged from it an ally of the black [not even White!] generals, and a hired [!] and obedient agent of European imperialism. The intelligentsia trampled on its own banners [as in the army, yes?] and covered them with mud."

How, indeed, can we not cry out our hearts in repentance? How can we not lacerate our chests with our fingernails?

And the only reason why "there is no need to deal out the death blow to its individual representatives" is that "this social group has outlived its time."

Here, at the start of the twentieth century! What power of foresight! Oh, scientific revolutionaries! (However, the intelligentsia had to be finished off anyway. Throughout the twenties they kept finishing them off and finishing them off.)

We examine with hostility the twenty-eight individual allies of the black generals, the hirelings of European imperialism. And we are especially aroused by the stench of the word Center. Now we see a Tactical Center, now a National Center, and now a Right Center. (And in our recollection of the trials of two decades, Centers keep creeping in all the time, Centers and Centers, Engineers' Centers, Menshevik Centers, Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centers, Rightist-Bukharinite Centers, but all of them are crushed, all crushed, and that is the only reason you and I are still alive.) Wherever there is a Center, of course, the hand of imperialism can be found.

True, we feel a measure of relief when we learn that the Tactical Center on this occasion was not an organization; that it did not have (1) statutes; (2) a program; (3) membership dues. So, what did it have? Here's what: They used to meet! (Goose-pimples up and down the back!) And when they met, they undertook to familiarize themselves with one another's point of view! (Icy chills!)

The charges were extremely serious and were supported by the evidence. There were two (2) pieces of evidence to corroborate the charges against twenty-eight accused individuals. These were two letters from people who were not present in court because they were abroad: Myakotin and Fyodorov. They were absent, but until the October Revolution they had been members of the same committee as those who were present, a circumstance that gavde us the right to equate those who were absent with those who were present. And their letters dealt with their disagreements with Denikin on certain trivial questions: the peasant question (we are not told what these differences were, but they were evidently advising Denikin to give the land to the peasants); the Jewish question (they were evidently advising him not to return to the previous restrictions); the federated nationalities questoin (enough said: clear); the question of the structure of the government (democracy rather than dictatorship); and similar matters. And what conclusion did this evidence suggest? Very simple. It proved the fact of correspondence, and it also proved the agreement, the unanimity, of those present with Denikin! (Grrr! Grrrr!)

But there were also direct accusations against those present: that they had exchanged information with acquaintances who lived in outlying areas (Kiev, for example) which were not under the control of the central Soviet authorities! In other words, this used to be Russia, let's say, but then in the interests of world revolution we ceded this one piece to Germany. And people continued to exchange letters. How are you doing there, Ivan Ivanich? Here's how things are going with us. N.M. Kishkin, a member of the Central Committee of the Cadets, was so brazen as to try to justify himself right fromt he defendants' bench. "A man doesn't want to be blind. He tries to find out everything he can about what's going on everywhere."

To find out everything about what's going on everywhere? He doesn't want to be blind? Well, all one can say is that the accused correctly described their actions as treason, treason to Soviet power!

The Books: "Berlin Diary : The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941" (William L. Shirer)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is Berlin Diary : The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 by William Shirer. Last Shirer book I have - this one is, well, what the title says: his diary from those particular years. He was a newlywed, living in Germany. He traveled all over Europe, as a journalist, and broadcaster - chasing down stories. And he happened to be stationed in Berlin during the rise of Adolf Hitler. He had a front-row seat. If you're into that front-row seat stuff, this is a wonderful book. I'm glad I made it thru Rise and Fall of Third Reich - it's background, it's necessary, it's important ... but I prefer Berlin Diary, just in terms of a reading experience. It's his first-hand impressions of what he saw going on in Germany at that time.

I am going to post a rather innocuous excerpt - I just like it because I like his writing. He broadcast his stories over the radio - he was THE voice of World War II for most Americans. And here is an entry in his diary when he describes what that broadcasting process is like - in Berlin at that time. I especially found the whole censor thing really interesting.

From Berlin Diary : The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 by William Shirer.

BERLIN, March 4 [1940]

Last night, by request, I broadcast a piece about the actual routine of broadcasting from here in war-time. Had never stopped to think of it before. Some extracts, for the record: The daily broadcast at six forty-five p.m., New York time, means our talking from here at a quarter to one on the following morning. If I could get gasoline for my car I could drive to the studio in twelve minujtes. As it is, I have a ten-minute walk down the completely blacked-out Wilhelmstrasse to the subway. It is a rare night that I do not collide with a lamp-post, a fire-hydrant, or a projecitng stairway, or flop headlong into a pile of snow. Safely in the subway, I have a half hour's ride to the Rundfunk House. As half of the route is above ground, the train is plunged in darkness for fifteen minutes. My pockets are stuffed full of passes. If I cannot find the right one I must wait in the vestibule on arriving at the station and fill out a paper permitting me to enter. Finally arrived, I go to an office and write up my script. Two offices down I can hear Lord Haw-Haw attacking his typewriter with gusto or shouting in his nasal voice against "that plutocrat Chamberlain". A half-hour before my broadcast I must have my script in the hands of the censors. Follows a half-hour battle with them. If they leave enough to make it worth while to do the broadcast, as they usually do, I must then, in order to reach the studio and microphone, dash through winding corridors in the Broadcasting House, down many stairs, and out into a pitch-dark vacant lot in the middle of which are hidden steps -- the lot being terraced -- being careful not to bump into several sheds lurking in the way or to fall into a snow-drift. In the course of this journey through the lot, I must get past at least three steel-helmeted S.S. guards whom I cannot see in the darkness, but who I know are armed with sawed-off automatic rifles and have orders to shoot anyone not halting at their challenge. They must see my pass. I search for it with frozen fingers, and if I'm lucky and find it, I arrive at the studio in time and not too much out of broath, though not always in the sweetest of tempers. If the censors keep me, or the guards keep me, I arrive late, out of breath, sore and sour. I suppose listeners wonder why we pant so often through our talks.

The Books: "NIGHTMARE YEARS : 1930 - 1940" (William L. Shirer)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is NIGHTMARE YEARS : 1930 - 1940 by William Shirer. A first-person memoir of Shirer's time living in Nazi Germany, and covering not just Germany but what was going on in all of Europe at that time. It actually starts with a fascinating story of his time in wild-west Afghanistan - he's very good at this first-person perspective stuff. But the main thrust of the book is his impressions of Germany at that time - interesting, because he was a journalist, and so had some "access" to the leaders. The leaders, naturally, were liars, and you could never get a clear answer from them - but Shirer's impression of the FEELING in the streets of Berlin, the changing tides, the rising fanaticism - is chilling.

And I've gotta say that the photos he has included in this book are fantastic. Especially of the Anschluss. Terrifying photos of the crowds greeting Hitler, the weeping women, the frenzy, there are some photos where everyone is in a blur, because they are struggling to get closer to Hitler - as though they're seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show.

I'll excerpt a bit from the year 1934. Shirer goes to a massive Nazi party rally in Nuremberg.

NIGHTMARE YEARS : 1930 - 1940 by William Shirer.

In Nuremberg, on September 4 [1934], ten days after my arrival in Nazi Germany, I saw Adolf Hitler for the first time.

Like a Roman emperor he rode into the medieval town at sundown, past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Germans who packed the narrow streets that once had been the gathering place of Hans Sachs and the Meistersinger. Thousands of swastika flags blotted out the Gothic beauties of the city's architecture, the facades of the old houses, the gabled roofs. The streets, hardly wider than alleys, were a sea of brown and black uniforms.

I got my first glimpse of Hitler, as he drove by our hotel to his headquarters at the Deutscher Hof, a favorite old hotel of his, which had been newly remodeled for him. He fumbled his cap, which he held in his left hand, as he stood in his car acknowledging the delirious welcome with somewhat feeble Nazi salutes with his right arm. Probably he was pacing himself, knowing that he would be raising that right arm in salute thousands of times before the week was over. He was clad in a rather worn gabardine trench coat, very much like the weatherbeaten ones we foreign correspondents wore in those days. His face, which was rather flabby, had no particular expression -- I expected it to be much stronger -- and I wondered what there was in his almost modest bearing, in his rather common look, that unleashed such hysterical acclaim in the mob, whose men, women, and children were so wild in their joy at seeing him, their faces contorted in a way I had never seen before, ever.

The frenzy of the crowds fascinated me that evening even more than my first glimpse of the dictator. I had seen vast throngs in India moved by the sight of Gandhi and in Rome by Mussolini. But this German horde was different in a way I could not yet comprehend. Later that evening, I got caught up in a mob of these frenzied people, who jammed the moat in front of Hitler's hotel. They were swaying back and forth, like the Holy Rollers I had once seen in the back country of Arkansas and Louisiana, with the same crazed expression on their faces. They were shouting in unison: "We want our Fuhrer!" When he appeared on the balcony for a moment and waved, they went mad. Several women swooned. Some, men and women, were trampled as the crowd surged toward the hotel to get a closer look at their Messiah. For such he appeared to be to them.

By the close of the next evening, after the events of the first day of the party rally had come to an end, I had "begun to comprehend," I boasted in my diary, "some of the reasons for Hitler's astonishing success." Borrowing from the Roman Church, I noted, he was restoring pageantry to the drab lives of Germans. The morning's opening meeting in the huge Luitpold Hall on the outskirts of Nuremberg was more than a colorful show. It had something of the mysterious and religious fervor of an Easter or a Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral.

The hall was a sea of brightly colored flags. Suddenly the band stopped playing. There was a hush over the thirty thousand people packed in the immense arena. Then the band struck up the 'Badenwiler March," a rather catchy tune and played only, I learned, when the Leader made his big entrances. Hitler appeared in the back of the auditorium, dressed in a brown party uniform, and followed by his aides, Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler, all in brown uniforms except for Himmler, who wore the black garb of the S.S. He strode slowly down the wide center aisle while thirty thousand pairs of eyes were turned toward him and as many hands were raised in salute. It was a ritual, I was told, that had been followed at the opening of big party meetings for years.

As soon as the Nazi chiefs were seated on the huge platform a large symphony orchestra played Beethoven's stirring Egmont Overture. Great klieg lights played on the stage. Behind Hitler and his entourage of a hundred party officials and a scattering of army and navy officers was draped the swastika "blood flag," which had been carried through the streets of Munich by a Nazi column when the shooting began during Hitler's ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Behind this emblem, holy to the Nazis, stood some five hundred S.A. standards. When the music was over, Rudolf Hess, deputy to the Fuhrer and at that time his closest confidant, rose and slowly read the names of the Nazi "martyrs" -- Brownshirts who had been killed in the streets in the struggle for power. He read out the roll call of the dead slowly and solemnly and there was a hush over th ehall, the members of the vast audience bowing their heads in reverence.

In was in such a hushed atmosphere that Hitler sprang his Proclamation to the People, which the Nazi press office had tipped us off the evening before would be the most important pronouncement ever made by the Fuhrer. Everyone had expected him to read it himself. Instead, to save his voice for seven speeches he was scheduled to make during the week, he had it read by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner of Bavaria, who, curiously, had a voice and manner so like Hitler's that some of the correspondents who were listening on the radio back at the hotel thought it was the Fuhrer himself.

The words of that proclamation I never forgot. They kept coming back to me in the ensuring years, a reminder of the way history turns out differently than some, even the mightiest have planned.

The German form of life is definitely determined for the next thousand years! For us, the nervous nineteenth century has finally ended. There will be no revolution in Germany for the next one thousand years!

So the Third Reich was to last a thousand years! The words stunned me. But they provoked the brown mass in the great hall into a frenzy. The thirty thousand leaped to their feet and wildly cheered and clapped.

It cannot be, I protested to myself, as the crowd continued to roar, that this evil thing, demeaning to a great people, could last for a thousand years -- or even for a hundred. But I had a sinking feeling that it would last a long time. Hitler's grip on the German people was much greater than I had expected.

The throng was up on its feet, cheering again, when the Fuhrer came, as was inevitable, to his customary outburst against communism.

"Germany has done everything possible to assure world peace. If war comes to Europe it will come only because of Communist chaos."

He was back at it again when he spoke at a so-called "Kultur" meeting in the afternoon. "Only brainless dwarfs," he stormed, "cannot realize that Germany has been the breakwater against the Communist floods, which would have drowned Europe and its culture."

It was not difficult for him to convince the German people of this and, in time, many in England and France, even in America. Much later, when Hitler had embarked on his aggressive war against the rest of Europe, Charles Lindbergh would use similar words to express his belief that Germany, Hitler's Germany, "held today the intangible eastern border of European civilization."

Beyond that eastern border lay Bolshevism, in the minds of Hitler, as well as Lindbergh, and his followers the destroyers of the civilization of Europe. But it was beginning to dawn on me, caught up in the Nazi delirium of Nuremberg, that European civilization, at least in Germany, might not survive Hitler's dictatorship.

I had not yet quite realized that in order to keep the German people stirred up Hitler needed enemies to blame for all that had gone wrong before and for all that threatened the new, awakened, authoritarian Reich. Besides the Bolsheviks there were the Jews! Twice that opening day he thundered against them. The chaos from which he had rescued the country, he said, had been the work of "Jewish intellectualism".

"The alien life and form of ideas," he said, "injected into and forced on nations by Jewish intellectualism, which is racially without a basis, led to an alien, rootless state and internationally to complete chaos in cultural life."

He had saved Europe, he boasted, not only from the Bolsheviks but from the Jews, and he wanted his listeners to remember it and be grateful.

The Books: "Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich" (William L. Shirer)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William Shirer.

So deciding on an excerpt here was daunting. There's so much in this book - and - I can't even believe, in retrospect, that I finished it. It can be a total GRIND. It's a hard book - thick, fat, with a gazillion footnotes, and - at least in my copy - pretty small print. I have bad eyes. The small print is a challenge. But I'm really glad I read it.

I have two other of Shirer's books which I actually prefer - I'll excerpt those next - The Nightmare Years (his experiences as a journalist in the 20s) and his Berlin Diary - his own personal journal describing living in Berlin with his wife in the early 30s, as he saw all of this stuff begin to happen. Berlin Diary is amazing. But I'm a sucker for first-person stories, anyway.

But Rise and Fall is obviously the book he will be remembered for. It's a massive heavy accomplishment - kind of astonishing when you think of the MOUNDS of paperwork the Nazis left behind.

From Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William Shirer.

With Mussolini in the bag, Hitler turned his attention elsewhere. In August 1936 he had appointed Ribbentrop as German ambassador in London in an effort to explore the possibility of a settlement with England -- on his own terms. Incompetent and lazy, vain as a peacock, arrogant and without humor, Ribbentrop was the worst possible choice for such a post, as Goering realized. "When I criticized Ribbentrop's qualifications to handle British problems," he later declared, "the Fuehrer pointed out to me that Ribbentrop knew 'Lord So and So' and 'Minister So and So.' To which I replied, 'Yes, but the difficult is that they know Ribbentrop.'"

It is true that Ribbentrop, unattractive a figure though he was, was not without influential friends in London. Mrs. Simpson, the friend of the King, was believed in Berlin to be one of these. But Ribbentrop's initial efforts in his new post were discouraging and in November he flew back to Berlin to conclude some non-British business he had been dabbling in. On November 25 he signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, in which, he told the correspondents (of whom this writer was one) without batting an eye, Germany and Japan had joined together to defend Western civilization. On the surface this pact seemed to nothing more than a propaganda trick by which Germany and Japan could win world support by exploiting the universal dislike for Communism and the general distrust of the Comintern. But in this treaty too there was a secret protocol, specifically directed against Russia. In case of an unprovoked attack by the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan, the two nations agreed to consult on what measures to take "to safeguard their common interests" and also to "take no measures which would tend to ease the situation of the Soviet Union", It was also agreed that neither nation would make any political treaties with Russia contrary to the spirit of the agreement without mutual consent.

It would not be very long before Germany broke the agreement and accused Japan -- unjustifiably -- of not observing it. But the pact did serve a certain propaganda purpose among the world's gullible and it brought together for the first time the three have-not and aggressive nations. Italy signed it the following year.

On January 30, 1937, Hitler addressed the Reichstag proclaiming "the withdrawal of the German signature" from the Versailles Treaty, an empty but typical gesture, since the treaty was by now dead as a doornail -- and reviewing with pride the record of his four years in office. He could be pardoned for his pride, for it was an impressive record in both domestic and foreign affairs. He had, as we have seen, abolished unemployment, created a boom in business, built up a powerful Army, Navy, and Air Force, provided them with considerable armaments and the promise of more on a massive scale. He had single-handedly broken the fetters of Versailles and bluffed his way into occupying the Rhineland. Completely isolated at first, he had found a loyal ally in Mussolini and another in Franco, and he had detached Poland from France. Most important of all, perhaps, he had released the dynamic energy of the German people, reawakening their confidence in the nation and their sense of its mission as a great and expanding world power.

Everyone could see the contrast between this thriving, martial, boldly led new Germany and the decadent democracies in the West, whose confusions and vacillations seemed to increase with each new month of the calendar.

Though they were alarmed, Britian and France had not lifted a finger to prevent Hitler from violating the peace treaty by rearming Germany and reoccupying the Rhineland; they had been able to stop Mussolini in Abyssinia. And now, as the year 1937 began, they were cutting a sorry figure by their futil gestures to prevent Germany and Italy from determining the outcome of the Spanish Civil War. Everyone knew what Italy and Germany were doing in Spain to assure Franco's victory. Yet the governments of London and Paris continued for years to engage in empty diplomatic negotiations with Berlin and Rome to assure "nonintervention' in Spain. It was a sport which seems to have amused the German Dictator and which certainly increased his contempt for the stumbling political leaders of France and Britain -- "Little worms," he would shortly call them on a historic occasion when he again humbled the two Western democracies with the greatest of ease.

Neither Great Britain and France, their governments and their peoples, nor the majority of the German people seemed to realize as 1937 began that almost all that Hitler had done in his first four years was a preparation for war. This writer can testify from personal observation that right up to September 1, 1939, the German people were convinced that Hitler would get what he wanted -- and what they wanted -- without recourse to war. But among the elite who were running Germany, or serving it in the key positions, there could have been no doubt what Hitler's objective was. As the four-year "trial" period of Nazi rule, as Hitler called it, approached an end, Goering, who in September 1936 had been put in charge of the Four-Year Plan, bluntly stated what was coming in a secret speech to industrialists and high officials in Berlin.

The battle we are now approaching [he said] demands a colossal measure of production capacity. No limit on rearmament can be visualized. The only alternatives are victory or destruction ... We live in a time when the final battle is in sight. We are already on the threshold of mobilization and we are already at war. All that is lacking is the actual shooting.

Goering's warning was given on December 17, 1936. Within eleven months, as we shall shortly see, Hitler made his fateful and inalterable decision to go to war.

The Books: "Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran" (Elaine Sciolino)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino. Elaine Sciolino is a senior correspondent for The New York Times and has been covering Iran and the Middle East for years. I really like this book - with a couple of caveats. She's a wonderful writer - and makes me feel like I am THERE. If you read my blog, then you know my fascination with all things Persian, and my yearning to go there someday. A book like hers makes me feel like I am there. I think she's a bit soft on the regime - I've read that critique of her before - she was good friends with Khatami - and I think that might have colored her response to some of the more disturbing things in that country. So that kind of bugs me. But some of the images she shares in this book have stayed with me a long time - these crazy house parties in suburbs of Teheran - the women showing up in billowing black chadors - entering separate doors from the men - Then once they're inside, off come the chadors, and everyone's wearing teeny sundresses and platform sandals, all the guys in Western dress - and there's booze and dancing all night. Then, when it's time to go home - on go the full chadors, men and women leave separately - and it's as though it never happened. How do the citizens navigate such a situation? It's a strange thing when most of the citizenry is involved in just trying to FOOL their own government ... the government being a big nasty moralistic prude. And the young kids are just trying to have a bit of fun, and "fool Daddy", by sneaking out of the house, and raiding the secret liquor stash. Like - what happened to this pure Islamic Republic? People are OVER it. At least as described in Sciolino's book.

The way she describes the city of Shiraz makes me yearn to go there. Argh. I just don't know if it'll ever happen.

Like I said, I don't think Sciolino is completely reliable - but one of the things I get from her writing, is how much she loves that country, and how much she loves the people she has met there. That passion comes through in this book.

By the way, I was in an elevator with two guys. They were obviously co-workers. They were talking about something, and one guy said to the other, "So - you're obviously a born-and-bred New Yorker, huh?" The other guy said, "Actually - no ... I was born in Iran." I could feel that word just LAND in the elevator. The guy who had asked the question said, "Really! That's ... interesting!" (He really did sound interested.) I wondered what was going through the completely Americanized Iranian man ... if he knows that saying he is from THAT COUNTRY will ... somehow make people feel differently about him? If he's hesitate to share it?? I heard a bit of hesitation in the voice before he said, 'Actually, no ..." The guy who had asked the question said, "So when did you come here?" And it was not at all a surprise (of course) when the Iranian said, "My family came here in 1979."

The exodus.

I'm going to post a bit of an excerpt about Qom, the theological center south of Teheran, where Khomeini got his start. It's Mullah Central down there.

From Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino.

Qom, a gloomy, dusty thousand-year-old city on the edge of Iran's great salt desert, is only ninety miles from Tehran. It might as well be nine thousand. Its main industry is producing mullahs, much as the industry of Vatican City is training priests. And like the Vatican, Qom is a sheltered, unhurried religious refuge, where clerics can debate without attention to time and without fear of interference from the state. In the Islamic Republic, Qom has assumed another role as well: it is the idea factory for a regime that seeks to regulate daily life with all the worldly tools of a modern state even as it tries to bring its people closer to God. That is the principal reason Montazeri was allowed to continue spreading his ideas, even after he had been stripped of power and liberty.

Before the revolution, Qom was a desolate place known as a center for study and worship and a producer of fine silk carpets and of sohan, a caramel and pistachio brittle. The more the Shah consolidated his own power, the less attention he paid to Qom, a guidebook published by his Ministry of Information and Tourism devoted just three paragraphs to the city.

Ayatollah Khomeini changed all that. His appeal was exceptionally strong in Qom, where he had lived and preached for years before he was sent into exile. In January 1978, a crowd there demonstrated against the Shah in the ayatollah's name. According to some reports, clerics and Islamic militants set up street barricades, smashed buses, halted trains, and attacked banks and shops; they were not silenced even after the police opened fire. Many Iranians came to regard what became a two-and-half-hour shooting spree as the opening shots of the revolution. Afterward, the regime bused thousands of factory workers and low-level government employees to Qom for a counterdemonstration in support of the Shah. But the violent crackdowns sparked a cycle of mourning - and more demonstrations and violence - every forty days until, a year later, the Shah fled the country and Khomeini returned.

The first time I visited Qom I witnessed the slaughtering of a camel. It was a bright, cool, sunny day in February 1979, just a few days after the revolution, and the sacrifice was made to honor Khomeini's triumphant return after an absence of more than fourteen years. His followers made a path of red carnations for him, filled the walls with his portraits, and strung revolutionary posters and banners between minarets and lampposts not only in Persian, but also in Arabic, English, French, and German (for the benefit of foreign journalist, I presumed). Khomeini had ordered that no camels were to be killed in his honor, but his followers paid no heed. The giant beast was forced on its side by a handful of men. One man swiftly slit the camel's throat with a sword. Blood spurted high into the air. The crowd praised God and smeared their hands and faces with the blood. That day, Khomeini sat in the front seat of a white Chevrolet ambulance; members of the foreign media were put on a long flatbed truck. We made our way through a shrieking crowd of clerics who chanted slogans on megaphones, soldiers who had stuck carnations in their rifles, and hundreds of thousands of people who kept running to catch up. In my chador, I slipped at one point and grabbed the arm of a young bearded Iranian assigned to help us. "Don't touch me like that!" he said. "You are in Qom."

Yes, I was in Qom.

It was in Qom that Khomeini set up his government just days after the victory of the revolution. In thoseheady early days, Qom seemed like the center of the universe to its residents. No longer a religious backwater, it became very much like an eighteenth-century European court where people came and went and pleaded and waited for favors. Government officials made pilgrimages by helicopter from Tehran, often several times a week, to consult Khomeini. Courtiers and security guards shielded the ayatollah from most of the supplicants. Every day thousands of people crowded behind green metal barricades at the end of the street where Khomeini lived to get a glimpse of him, usually no more than a one-minute wave from his window. Among the throng one day was a woman who told me she had come with her blind daughter all the way from Isfahan to get Khomeini's blessing, and a widow with seven children who said she had come from Mashad to ask for an increase in her pension.

After the revolution, the city emerged as an even more important Shiite pilgrimage site and the country's most authoritative center of learning. "Islam has no borders," Khomeini said, so the seminaries attracted religious scholars and students from around the world as the exportation of Iran's revolution became one of the pillars of the new Islamic system. The religious teachers of Qom were assigned the task of indoctrinating foreign students with tales about the Islamic revolution and how to duplicate it back home. During the war with Iraq, the ranks of the seminaries swelled, in part because clerical students were exempt from military service. By the turn of the century, tens of thousands of students were enrolled in the Qom theological seminaries alone.

Over the years, I have made the drive from Tehran to Qom more times than I can count: with a group of American tourists, with officials from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, with a nephew of Ayatollah Khomeini, with Nazila. The trip has gone faster since a six-lane highway was built. But I still don't feel as if I fully understand the place. Even for many Iranians, Qom seems alien. Religion dominates the culture and the clerics don't like outsiders. I have worked for a long time with secular Iranian women who hate to go there because of the way the clerics look at them. A foreigner can be spotted from miles away. I keep going back to Qom because I hope that each visit will reveal more. And indeed, it is different every time.

The distinction between what is public and what is private is drawn more starkly in Qom than in the rest of Iran; the curtain of privacy is far more tightly drawn around the clergy, making it especially difficult for an outsider to get inside. Hotels generally don't welcome women traveling on their own, and restaurants are hard to find. Qom has only one main avenue; everything important is within walking distance - the central shrine, the seminaries, even a new Islamic computer center where Koranic teachings and interpretations are on the Internet. Even so, an outsider cannot navigate without a guide. To get anything accomplished, you have to be invited; someone who belongs has to lead you down the narrow streets and do the introductions. It is especially difficult to make appointments in advance. The trick is to start out from Tehran at about 6:00 a.m., arrive at eight, and work until noon. That's when most clerics pray, eat, and nap. Most of the city shuts down until about 5:00 p.m., when work begins again.

The centerpiece of Qom is the grand, gold-domed shrine that houses the tomb of Massoumeh, the sister of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam, who died in the ninth century. Thousands of pilgrims come every day to say prayers, beg for favors, and leave wads of bills as donations. They solemnly finger the silver cage that houses Massoumeh's tomb and then touch their faces, as if her aura will somehow rub off on them.

There is an air of informality in the shrine, as in mosques, that doesn't exist in most churches and synogogues. The religious complex, like others throughout Iran, is more than simply a place of prayer; it is also a place of political mobilization. During the war with Iraq, the clerics set up enlistment centers for teenage volunteers and donation centers here where people could contribute their gold jewelry and coins to the war effort. The shrine is also a place for socializing, for getting out of the house. Women sit on the carpets and eat picnic lunches with their children. And the courtyard is known as a meeting place where the Shiite Muslim practice of sigheh, or temporary marriage, can be arranged by a lonely pilgrim and a woman who needs money.

Qom is a very different place than it was at the beginning of the revolution. It boasts recreational parks and movie theatres. Most of the bookstores sell only religious books, but I have also found English-language volumes: King Lear, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and a wide assortment of Persian-English dictionaries. Clerics drive motorbikes and some women even dare to go out on the streets in scarves and long coats, rather than black chadors.

The Books: "10 Days That Shook the World" (John Reed)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is 10 Days That Shook the World by John Reed.

Before I get to this rollicking effective fabulously-written piece of propaganda, I have to get something out of the way:

You know how some bloggers are always arguing with an imaginary confrontational audience? In the posts? Their writing goes like this:

"Now I realize that most of you will find this offensive ..." "I am willing to bet that 90% of you will be angry at what I'm about to say ..." Everything must be prefaced, or couched, or framed ... They are overly aware of the readers' response. Or they even flat-out get INTO it with the imaginary audience: "Don't tell me that there isn't a such and such for the so and so ... I am fully aware of all of the implications, thank you very much." Like - they start up an argument, and then keep arguing - even though no one's there. This is not along the lines of someone taking a point and defending it, or expressing why they are angry about this or that - this is being overly conscious of the readership. I honestly try not to do that. It's bad writing. I mean, you learn that in high school English. Pick a point and argue it. Imagine putting all of that stuff into a high school term paper. "I know that you, my teacher, may find my argument immature, but you just need to sit back and listen to where I'm coming from when I say that the green light across Gatsby's bay symbolizes the lost hopes of the Jazz Age. I know it's controversial, and I know you probably don't agree, but just hear me out." Uhm - horrible. You'd get an F. In my view - argue about that stuff in the COMMENTS - but I try to keep it out of the post itself. Because this is about me expressing myself - and all of that apologetic stuff or defensive stuff weakens the writing. It's hard not to succumb to it - but sometimes I cave - because I just KNOW that someone's gonna say THIS, and I need to address that BEFORE they say it - etc. Beth once pointed it out to me - in a very very nice private email - saying she thought it was a shame when I did that, I should just write what I want to write, and not preface everything with some argument with an imaginary reader. I really appreciated her email, I really did. Now if I find myself going that way, I edit it out. As much as I can. Because she's right. I find bloggers who do that habitually kinda unreadable ... I like the bloggers who just flat out say what they want to say, and just share their opinions wihtout hemming and hawing to their "readers".

Anyway, all of this DOES have a point!!

And in another post about the Russian Revolution - where John Reed's book came up - I argued with imaginary readers - and it makes my point, so what the hell, I'll quote myself:

I've read John Reed's 10 Days that shook the world, and it's a brilliant piece of propaganda - one of the best. It is, of course, propaganda - and you can argue that it's a dangerous piece of work, whatever - that argument bores me, frankly. I want to read anything I can get my hands on - and that is a first-hand account of the October Revolution. He was the one who "sold" the Revolution to the outside world. Whatever you think of his beliefs (and again - I find myself rolling my eyes when I read it - the enthusiasm! The belief that the whole world would rise up in a red wave! Etc.) - the dude can write. Don't bitch about me about what I should or should not read. That's another form of totalitarianism. I recognize Reed's work as propaganda for the cause. I read it anyway. So don't foam at the mouth, mkay? I love first-person accounts of any historical event - biased or no. I like to feel like I am THERE.

That "don't bitch to me" and "so don't foam at the mouth, mkay?" is what I'm talking about. It's a struggle to not put comments like that in - but like I said - Beth was right. My point is well made in the above paragraph without the "don't foam at the mouth". I mean, I know that I have readers who WOULD foam at the mouth - but - er - why is that my problem? There are going to be people who just think I'm an idiot - and who read me in order to CORRECT me. I despise those people, but again: why is that my problem? I am not going to address my posts TO those people. hahahaha It's so weird, when I step back from it. This has only occurred in the last year or so when I've gotten so many more readers than I had before. So - it's been a balancing act, and kind of a fun challenge.

I didn't set down to write all this this morning, but I do know that when I saw the next book on the shelf, I felt a bit apprehensive - like: Oh God. As though people would be mad at me for even having it on my shelf. How was I going to FRAME this?

Good Lord. Who cares?? I ain't gonna frame SHIT.

So. John Reed. Who, strangely enough, did NOT look like Warren Beatty (hahaha) was a journalist. Here's some good information about him. A fascinating life. The value of his book is, for me, the first-person account of the events of those "10 days" - his writing is phenomenal. He was swept away by the enthusiasm of what was happening, so obviously he was duped - as many were duped - but his writing!! The descriptions!! You get the smells, the sights, the brief personality portraits, the "foul blue cigarette smoke" in the air, the smell of unwashed people, the frigid wind ... Fabulous.

Here is an excerpt from his description of November 7, 1917. The bulletin that Kameniev hands to John Reed is stunning, I think. Good Lord. They stated their intentions up front and ... God. You just know that MILLIONS died carrying the plan out. "transform into a state monopoly" ... wow, guys!! Great idea!! Good luck with that! (It's funny that this book came up a day after I wrote this.)

Oh, and one thing: John Reed uses ellipses a lot. I've not taken anything out in the excerpt below - the ellipses are already in the text.

From 10 Days That Shook the World by John Reed.

The massive facade of Smolny blazed with lights as we drove up, and from every street converged upon it streams of hurrying shapes dim in the gloom. Automobiiles and motorcycles came and went; an enormous elephant-coloured armored automobile, with two red flags flying from the turret, lumbered out with screaming siren. It was cold, and at the outer gate the Red Guards had built themselves a bonfire. At the inner gate, too, there was a blaze, by the light of which the sentries slowly spelled out our passes and looked us up and down. The canvas covers had been taken off the four rapid-fire guns on each side of the doorway, and the ammunition-belts hung snakelike from their breeches. A dun herd of armoured cars stood under the trees in the court-yard, engines going. The long, bare, dimly-illuminated halls roared with the thunder of feet, calling, shouting ... There was an atmosphere of recklessness. A crowd came pouring down the staircase, workers in black blouses and round black fur hats, many of them with guns slung over their shoulders, soldiers in rough dirt-coloured coats and grey fur shapki pinched flat, a leader or so -- Lunatcharsky, Kameniev -- hurrying along in the centre of a group all talking at once, with harassed anxious faces, and bulging portfolios under their arms. The extraordinary meeting of the Petrograd Soviet was over. I stopped Kameniev -- a quick-moving little man, with a wide, vivacious face set close to his shoulders. Without preface he read in rapid French a copy of the resolution just passed:

The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldier's Deputies, saluting the victorious Revolution of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison, particularly emphasises the unity, organisation, discipline, and complete cooperation shown by the masses in this rising; rarely has less blood been spilled, and rarely has an insurrection succeeded so well.

The Soviet expresses its firm conviction that the Workers' and Peasants' Government which, as the government of the Soviets, will be created by the Revolution, and which will assure the industrial proletariat of the support of the entire mass of poor peasants, will march firmly toward Socialism, the only means by which the country can be spared the miseries and unheard-of horrors of war.

The new Workers' and Peasants' Government will propose immediately a just and democratic peace to all the belligerent countries.

It will suppress immediately the great landed property, and transfer the land to the peasants. It will establish workmen's control over production and distribution of manufactured products, and will set up a general control over the banks, which it will transform into a state monopoly.

The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldier's Deputies calls upon the workers and the peasants of Russia to support with all their energy and all their devotion the Proletarian Revolution. The Soviet expresses its conviction that the city workers, allies of the poor peasants, will assure complete revolutionary order, indispensable to the victory of Socialism. The Soviet is convinced that the proletariat of the countries of Western Europe will aid us in conducting the cause of Socialism to a real and lasting victory.

"You consider it won then?"

He lifted his shoulders. "There is much to do. Horribly much. It is just beginning ..."

On the landing I met Riazanov, vice-president of the Trade Unions, looking black and biting his grey beard. "It's insane! Insane!" he shouted. "The European working-class won't move! All Russia --" He waved his hand distractedly and ran off. Riazanov and Kameniev had both opposed the insurrection, and felt the lash of Lenin's terrible tongue ...

It had been a momentous session. In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee Trotsky had declared that the Provisional Government no longer existed.

"The characteristic of bourgeois government," he said, "is to deceive the people. We, the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies, are going to try an experiment unique in history; we are going to found a power which will have no other aim but to satisfy the needs of the soldiers, workers, and peasants."

Lenin had appeared, welcomed with a mighty ovation, prophesying world-wide Social Revolution ... And Zinoviev crying, "This day we have paid our debt to the international proletariat, and struck a terrible blow at the war, a terrible body-blow at all the imperialists and particularly at Wilhelm the Executioner ..."

Then Trotsky, that telegrams had been sent to the front announcing the victorious insurrection, but no reply had come. Troops were said to be marching against Petrograd -- a delegation must be sent to tell them the truth.

Cries, "You are anticipating the will of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets!"

Trotsky, colly, "The will of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets has been anticipated by the rising of the Petrograd workers and soldiers!"

So we came into the great meeting-hall, pushing through the clamourous mob at the door. In the rows of seats, under the white chandeliers, packed immovably in the aisles and on the sides, perched on every window-sill, and even the edge of the platform, the representatives of the workesr and soldiers of all Russia waited in anxious silence or wild exultation the ringing of the chairman's bell. There was no heat in the hall but the stifling heat of unwashed human bodies. A foul blue cloud of cigarette smoke rose from the mass and hung in the thick air. Occasionally some one in authority mounted the tribune and asked the comrades not to smoke; then everybody, smokers and all, took up the cry "Don't smoke, comrades!" and went on smoking. Petrovsky, Anarchist delegate from the Obukhov factory, made a seat for me beside him. Unshaven and filthy, he was reeling from three nights' sleepless work on the Military Revolutionary Committee.

On the platform sat the leaders of the old Tsay-ee-kah -- for the last time dominating the turbulent Soviets, which they had ruled from the first days, and which were now risen against them. It was the end of the first period of the Russian revolution, which these men had attempted to guide in careful ways ... The three greatest of them were not there: Kerensky, flying to the front through country towns all doubtfully heaving up; Teheidze, the old eagle, who had contemptuously retired to his own Georgian mountains, there to sicken with consumption; and the high-souled Tseretelli, also mortally stricken, who, nevertheless, would return and pour out his beautiful eloquence for a lost cause. Gotz sat there, Dan, Lieber, Bogdanov, Broido, Fillipovsky, -- white-faced, hollow-eyed and indignant. Below them the second siezd of the All-Russian Soviets boiled and swirled, and over their heads the Military Revolutionary Committee functioned white-hot, holding in its hands the threads of insurrection and striking with a long arm ... It was 10:40 P.M.

Dan, a mild-faced, baldish figure in a shapeless military surgeon's uniform, was ringing the bell. Silence fell sharply, intense, broken by the scuffling and disputing of the people at the door ...

"We have the power in our hands," he began sadly, stopped for a moment, and then went on in a low voice. "Comrades! The Congress of Soviets is meeting in such unusual circumstances and in such an extraordinary moment that you will understand why the Tsay-ee-kah considers it unnecessary to address you with a political speech. This will become much clearer to you if you will recollect that I am a memeber of the Tsay-ee-kah, and that at this very moment our party comrades are in the Winter Palace under bombardment, sacrificing themselves to execute the duty put on them by the Tsay-ee-kah." (Confused uproar.)

"I declare the first session of the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies open!"

The election of the presidium took place amid stir and moving about. Avanessov announced that by agreement of the Bolskeviki, Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Menshiviki Internationalists, it was decided to base the presidium upon proportionality. Several Mensheviki leaped to their feet protesting. A bearded solider shouted at them, "Remember what you did to us Bolsheviki when we were the minority!" Result -- 14 Bolsheviki, 7 Socialist Revolutionaries, 3 Mensheviki and 1 Internationalist (Gorky's group). Hendelmann, for the right and centre Socialist Revolutionaries siad that they refused to take part in the presidium; the same from Kintchuk, for the Mensheviki; and from the Mensheviki Internationalists, that until the verification of certain circumstances, they too could not enter the presidium. Scattering applause and hoots. One voice, "Renegades, you call yourselves Socialists!" A representative of the Ukrainian delegates demanded, and received, a place. Then the old Tsay-ee-kah stepped down, and in their places appeared Trotsky, Kameniev, Lunatcharsky, Madame Kollentai, Nogin ... The hall rose, thundering. How far they had soared, these Bolsheviki, from a despised and hunted sect leses than four months ago, to this supreme place, the helm of great Russia in full tide of insurrection!

The order of the day, said Kameniev, was first, Organization of Power; second, War and Peace; and third, the Constituent Assembly. Lozovsky, rising, announced that upon agreement of the bureaus of all factions, it was proposed to hear and discuss the report of the Petrograd Soviet, then to give the floor to members of the Tsay-ee-kah and the different parties, and finally to pass to the order of the day.

But suddenly a new sound made itself heard, deeper than the tumult of the crowd, persistent, disquieting -- the dull shock of guns. People looked anxiously toward the clouded windows, and a sort of fever came over them. Martov, demanding the floor, croaked hoarsely, "The civil war is beginning, comrades! The first question must be a peaceful settlement of the crisis. On principle and from a political standpoint we must urgently discuss a means of averting civil war. Our brothers are being shot down in the streets! At this moment, when before the opening of the Congress of Soviets the question of Power is being settled by means of a military plot organized by one of the revolutionary parties--" for a moment he could not make himself heard above the noise, "All of the revolutionary parties must face the fact! The first vopros (question) before the Congress is the question of Power, and this question is already being settled by force of arms in the streets! ... We must create a power which will be recognized by the whole democracy. If the Congress wishes to be the voice of the revolutionary democracy it must not sit with folded hands before the developing civil war, the result of which may be a dangerous outburst of counter-revolution ... The possibility of a peaceful outcome lies in the formation of a united democratic authority ... We must elect a delegation to negotiate with the other Socialist parties and organizations ..."

Always the methodical muffled boom of cannon through the windows, and the delegates, screaming at each other ... So, with the crash of artillery, in the dark, with hatred, and fear, and reckless daring, new Russia was being born.

The Books: "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia " (Ahmed Rashid)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid. This book came out in 2000 and did not make a splash at all - I guess because most Americans didn't care about what was going on in Afghanistan until it affected them. After September 11, you could not find this book on the shelves. It was perpetually out of stock. It was re-released in a massive paperback edition after September 11 - and now you see it everywhere. Rashid is a journalist from Pakistan - and he writes in his introduction that this book was "21 years in the making". All of his experience and work life had been leading up to this moment. He's a go-to guy. He shows up in books as an expert in many other books about the area - Robert Kaplan interviews him all the time, Christopher Hitchens - all of those guys who have been determined to explain that whole area and its history to us use him as their main guide. His name comes up all the time. I bought this book after reading Kaplan's book At the Ends of the Earth - where he shows up in the chapters on Pakistan. Ahmed Rashid is a wonderful journalist - he truly does honor to his profession.

Here's a section from chapter 2 - which kind of explains the culture of the Taliban.

From Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid

In March 1995, on the northern edge of the Dashte-e-Mango -- the Desert of Death -- plumes of fine white dust rose in the air above the narrow ribbon of the battered highway that connects Kandahar with Herat, 350 miles away. The highway, built by the Russians in the 1950s skirted through the brush and sands of one of the hottest and most waterless deserts in the world. After years of war, the highway was now rutted with tank tracks, bomb craters and broken bridges, slowing down the traffic to just 20 miles an hour.

The Taliban war wagons -- Japanese two-door pick-ups with a stripped-down trunk at the back open to the elements - were streaming towards Herat laden with heavily armed young men in their bid to capture the city. In the opposite direction a steady flow of vehicles was bringing back wounded Taliban lying on string beds and strapped into the trunk as well as prisoners captured from the forces of Ismael Khan who held Herat.

In the first three months after capturing Kandahar, the Taliban had broken the staleate in the Afghan civil war by capturing 12 of Afghanistan's 31 provinces and had arrived at the outskirts of Kabul to the north and Herat in the west. Taliban soldiers were reluctant to talk under the gaze of their commanders in Kandahar so the only way to learn something about them was to hitch lifts along the road and back again. In the confines of the pick-ups where a dozen warriors were jam-packed with crates of ammunition, rockets, grenade launchers and sacks of wheat, they were more than eager to share their life stories.

They said that since the capture of Kandahar some 20,000 Afghans and hundreds of Pakistani madrassa students had streamed across the border from refugee camps in Pakistan to join Mullah Omar. Thousands more Afghan Pashtuns had joined them in their march northwards. The majority were incredibly young - between 14 and 24 years old - and many had never fought before although, like all Pashtuns, they knew how to handle a weapon.

Many had spent their lives in refugee camps in Baluchistan and the NWFP provinces of Pakistan, interspersed with stints at imbibing a Koranic education in the dozens of madrassas that had sprung up along the border run by Afghan mullahs or Pakistan's Islamic fundamentalist parties. Here they studied the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, and the basics of Islamic law as interpreted by their barely literate teachers. Neither teachers nor students had any formal grounding in maths, science, history, or geography. Many of these young warriors did not even know the history of their own country or the story of the jihad against the Soviets.

These boys were a world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I had got to know during the 1980s -- men who could recount their tribal and clan lineages, remembered their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia, and recounted legends and stories from Afghan history. These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace -- an Afghanistan not at war with invaders and itself. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbors nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that often made up their villages and their homeland. These boys were what the war had thrown up like the sea's surrender on the beach of history.

They had no memories of the past, no plans for the future while the present was everything. They were literally the orphans of the war, the rootless and the restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with little self-knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning. Untrained for anything, even the traditional occupations of their forefathers such as farming, herding or the making of handicrafts, they were what Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan's lumpen proletariat.

Moreoever, they had willingly gathered under the all-male brotherhood that the Taliban leaders were set on creating, because they knew of nothing else. Many in fact were orphans whoh had grown up without women - mothers, sisters or cousins. Others were madrassa students or had lived in the strict confines of segregated refugee camp life, where the normal comings and goings of female relatives were curtailed. Even by the norms of conservative Pashtun tribal society, where villages or nomadic camps were close-knit communities and men still mixed with women to whom they were related, these boys had lived rough, tough lives. They had simply never known the company of women.

The mullahs who had taught them stressed that women were a temptation, an unnecessary distraction from being of service to Allah. So when the Taliban entered Kandahar and confined women to their homes by barring them from working, going to school and even from shopping, the majority of these madrassa boys saw nothing unusual in such measures. They felt threatened by that half of the human race which they had never known and it was much easier to lock that half away, especially if it was ordained by the mullahs who invoked primitive Islamic injunctions, which had no basis in Islamic law. The subjugation of women became the mission of the true believer and a fundamental marker that differentiated the Taliban from the former Mujaheddin.

This male brotherhood offered these youngsters not just a religious cause to fight for, but a whole way of life to fully embrace and make their existence meaningful. Ironically, the Taliban were a direct throwback to the military religious order that arose in Christendom during the Crusades to fight Islam -- disciplined, motivated and ruthless in attaining their aims. In the first few months the sweeping victories of the Taliban created an entire mythology of invincibility that only God's own soldiers could attain. In those heady early days, every victory only reinforced the perceived truth of their mission, that God was on their side and that their interpretation of islam was the only interpretation.

Reinforced by their new recruits, the Taliban moved north into Urozgan and Zabul provinces which they captured without a shot being fired. The marauding Pashtun commanders, unwilling to test their own supporters' uncertain loyalty, surrendered by hoisting white flags and handing over their weapons in a mark of submission.

The Books: "On Another Man's Wound" (Ernie O'Malley)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is On Another Man's Wound by Ernie O'Malley. Like my dad said when he told me to read this book: "Most memoirs of IRA members are not well written. It's all 'Then we blew up the lorry and hid in the bushes.' But O'Malley can actually write." He sure can. This is literature, a beautifully written book. Luscious language, filled with Irish songs and poems, personal portraits of people he met, a real sense of the time. Ernie O'Malley was a medical student in Dublin when the Easter Uprising happened in 1916. He was kind of indifferent to the whole thing at first - but as the fighting continued - his perspective changed. So much so that he joined the IRA. He traveled around Ireland (in the South, not the North) and organized battalions, training farmers and regular people in the ways of war.

This is his story, written in his own words. But again, what sets this book apart from other revolutionary memoirs is his talent for writing. It's almost like he is determined to get down as complete a picture of Ireland at that very moment in time as he possibly can. It's like Synge's book on the Aran Islands. Everything is going to change ... and people will change ... so let's get it all down NOW before they do.

On Another Man's Wound is filled with lots of Irish legends, told around peat fires in the West - the songs they would sing, the poems they would recite ...

It's hypnotic. A lovely and elegaic book. It's a love letter to Ireland. It reminds me a lot of Synge's stuff.

Here's an excerpt.

From On Another Man's Wound by Ernie O'Malley.

The brigade Vice-Commandant, Maurteen Devitt, and the Quartermaster, Peadar O'Loughlin, were on the run in their part of Mid Clare. They had more time for Volunteer work and knew the by-roads and the general direction of police patrols. Maurteen was thin in body, pale faced and energetic with a sharp turn of tongue in speech and wit; satiric.

Maurteen Devitt's father was an old man, an Irish speaker, his favourite curse being, "the curse of the crows upon you," but he sympathised with us and did not regard us as half wits, as many others did. Once I arrived early in the morning, tired out, as I had walked a long distance, I knew the songs were out at a dance and that the father was alone. He came to the window and when I told him I wanted to get in, he said: "Be off with you, Patsey Mitchell, you playboy." I mentioned my name, but he did not seemingly know it, as it had not been spoken of in the house, although I had been staying there some weeks. He cursed me fluently, ending up with the curse of the crows; I knocked again, but as he became more exasperated i gave it up, buttoned up my coat and went to sleep on thte ground. One of the sons found me in the morning sleeping, white with hoar frost. The old man always bore this in mind and never ceased to blame himself when he met me.

In the night time I often sat opposite to him in the fireplace listening to his talk. He always wore an old hard hat, light green with sun, brown mottled in spots with a torn brim and a dint on the top. He had a hoar stubble of a beard. He slurred his words in English through gaps in his stained teeth, but Irish seemed to flow swiftly enough. He had a great friend who came often; then they spoke Irish all the evening; sometimes the old man would translate or begin a story in English with many pauses. He would hold a match in his broken clay pipe or a piece of glowing sod, then puff, hold the pipe in one hand, talk, draw on the pipe to find it had gone out. Time and again the pipe went out; intent on the story he used it to emphasize words. Refilling the pipe was a ceremony. The 'baccy was pared from a hard black piece of plug or twist, ground slowly between the palms and rammed down into the bowl; some of the last pipe's ashes on top, then a tin cover with a hole in the top. The pipe was cleaned by sticking the bowl in the red turf glow.

Sometimes they'd laugh together and shake their heads with delight when speaking of Pedlar McGrath or Se�n O'Twomey. Some poems he would not translate; they seemed to enjoy them all the more. "The ould fellow is worked up," Maurteen would say, when he began on Rafferty or Donnchadh Ruadh MacNamara. Then I regretted I had not studied Irish thoroughly. I knew next to nothing of these poets save in translation. But here the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lived again, for these two men could tell story after story of the poets' pranks, drinkings and songs, and describe them as if they had lived in the same parish. They recited verses of men whose names I did not know. I think the only thing that left me with a shred of reputation was that I had a battered copy of the Love Songs of Connacht.

Old Devitt and his friends were like the others I had met in this stretch of Clare and in the Rosses. Their sense of literature was on the lips and in their faultless memory. In craggy Carren an old man recited the whole of The Midnight Court for me. They were not literary nor had they any pretence to learning. The extension of their knowledge made them simple; they were not conscious of it, but they knew more of poetry as a living feeling than had anybody else I had met save poets themselves. They could curse hard and long mostly for emphasis and the sound of words, but also in anger.

What I liked most about him and others was their independence, their air of being true to themselves. In the towns people conformed their suppressed selves to an outward convention; here they created their own environment in and through themselves. They had no feeling of equality or inequality, but a definite reality, and it would be a long time, I knew, before I could ever hope to have anything as real in myself as they had.

They had a sense of life that made them fresh and interesting to listen to and the flavour of a life of the open air was in their words and thought. They were starkly real like chunks of their own earth when they spoke of the land, its irritable uncertainty and its aching sweat, but a feeling for words and phrasing would lift a talk about manure.

Old women screwed with rheumatism, their faces like ploughed fileds, took snuff or a draw of the pipe in the corner while they fingered their beads. These were the obvious signs of outward realism and the harsh background of their lives; but there was a deep content, an ease in life and a depth in themselves that could well up nourishment. They were able to entertain and amuse themselves easily. Song was a definite expression as natural as talk, and they all sang. They sang at the end of the a hard day's work and were refreshed or musicioners used fiddle or melodeon in a manner peculiar to themselves. In spite of aching land work they had the leisure of the wealthy and they made use of it simplyl and fully. Gentleness and fierceness, lack of sentimentality and a definite concreteness merged with poetry and sharp realism in speech; kind towards suffering and callous towards cattle and dogs and their burden-bearer the skinny ass.

The Books: "Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples" (V.S. Naipaul)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples by V.S. Naipaul. This is the sequel to the last book I excerpted Among the Believers. Naipaul returns to the 4 "converted" countries he visited in the first book: Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan. In 1995, he took a 5 month trip through these four places. He had last been to many of them in 1979 - so the changes are startling. Mainly economic changes, especially when it came to Indonesia.

Here's an excerpt from his section on Iran. He meets a man named Ali - who is in his 60s. Ali made a fortune during the Shah's time as a real estate developer. He was a supporter of the revolution - because he wanted his country to be free, his people to be liberated. But as we all know - the revolution took a bit of a turn, shall we say, with the Khomeini return. Ali suffered greatly in the early years of the revolution - because of his success. He was kidnapped three times, arrested, thrown in jail ... But he survived that rough time - learned how to live with the new rules of the new regime.

Anyway, here is part of Naipaul's long interview with Ali. I love these two books. I highly recommend them both.

From Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples by V.S. Naipaul.

Some people Ali knew, supporters of the revolution, turned against it after the first month. Ali thought he should give it a little more time. But then, about two months after the revolution, when the executions began, he had serious doubts. People who had done nothing were arrested and taken to jail. Many of them disappeared. "Then they started charging into people's houses, confiscating their properties. We had no security for our property or our children or our wife." I felt that the word in Ali's word was the word Mehrdad had introduced me to: namoos.

A revolutionary court, the Court of Islamic Justice, had been set up about a month after the revolution. One of Ali's best friends was second in command in that court, and Ali used to go every day to see what he could do to save people he knew.

"That court was going almost twenty-four horus a day. Khalkhalli was the master of that court." Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini's famous hanging judge. "He used this court as the instrument of his executions. It was in Shariati Street. Before the revolution it was a military court. The Shah had set up this court to try his opponents. Almost the same people who had set up this court were now tried in it, in the same building. My friends were in the court for about two years."

But long before that time Ali had given up on the revolution, and he was deep in his own torments.

"We expected something heavenly to happen -- something emotional. When we were kids of twelve and thirteen we used to read accounts of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Glorious Revolution in England. And the Russian Revolution. But we were always fascinated with the French Revolution. It was something done by God, you know. In the last generation most of the Iranians who had studied abroad had French culture. We were hypnotized by their stories of the French Revolution. We all thought revolution was something beautiful, done by God, something like music, like a concert. It was as though we were in a theatre, watching a concert, and we were happy that we were part of the theatre. We were the actors now. For years we had been reading about Danton and Robespierre. But now we were the actors. We never thought that those killings would start afterwards."

It took a year for the communists and the Islamics to move away from one another. But the Tudeh, the communist party, had infiltrated every branch of the new government. They even went to the Friday prayers in the mosques. They showed themselves as people of God. The communist party in those early days put itself entirely at the service of Khomeini. They said, according to Ali, that they didn't want executive power; they were content to be counselors. And they were behind the nationalization of banks, insurance companies, factories. They gave the Soviet-style aspect to government and official demeanor which the visitor could still notice.

After six months of the revolution Ali was insecure and bitter. Life wasn't easy. It was impossible to work. The new officials were hostile; they looked upon Ali as part of the old regime. Some people in Ali's company began to agitate against him. Two or three of them would come to Ali's office to "question" him. He had to buy them off. And at the end of the first year he was kidnapped.

"This was in Kerman. I was on my land. We were building houses. They came in a car, three or four of them. They asked me to help them in a building project they had. I got in the car, and they drove me away. They kept me fifteen kilometers away in a desert area and questioned me as in a court. It was in a little shanty house, a shepherd's shelter. They were young boys. They had seen a lot of cinema. Now they had guns in their hands and they felt really big."

The guns were from the armories of the Shah's army. When the army collapsed, and it collapsed suddenly, many people ran to the armories to get guns. For four months after the revolution the guns were piled up in the university and were being given away to anyone who asked for one and could show an ID card. Many people offered Ali guns, but he soon realized that guns were no use to him, because he couldn't kill anyone, even to protect himself. And perhaps if he had had a gun and had tried to use it at the time of his kidnapping, he might have been harmed by his boy kidnappers.

He thought now to move carefully with these boys, in order to find out just how many more were behind them. Perhaps there was no one else. Perhaps there were four thousand, and they were planning to hold him for a ransom. They talked for ten hours in the shepherd's hut in the desert. At last they said they were going to release him, but he had to pay them. He didn't want to pay them too much; he didn't want to encourage others. He promised very small sums. The boys were enraged. They threatened to kill him. They threatened to destroy his building company. But he didn't promise more.

He said, "I was very strict."

And in the end he was released. But this kidnapping added to his insecurity. There were four million people in Tehran; and it seemed that any four of the five million could come with guns to demand money. And all the time now there was trouble with local officals. They began to occupy his land and housing developments. They said they were government property and had to be given to the people.

"The local government man actually confiscated many properties in Kerman, mine and other people's."

"What was he like? Did you get to know him?"

"He was connected to the mujahidin group. Very leftist, one hundred percent against capitalists."

"What was he like physically?"

"He was about thirty-four, short, fat. Full of resentment. An educated man, an engineer. I am sure he was beaten by SAVAK. And he was full of resentment. He caused me a lot of damage. Millions. Many millions. I met him a few years ago. He came to my office. He was poor. He had been kicked out of office. The government had put him in prison. He came to me and asked for a job. He came and kissed me and asked for pardon. He was then about forty-five. He had an old jacket. I told him that every kid had toys, but there is one toy that is the special toy. 'I too have toys. I have been used to living well, to enjoy myself, and every night, all through my life, I have had lavish food. I am still doing that. And that is my favorite toy. If because of what you have done I didn't have my lavish living for one night, I would never forgive you. I would never pardon you. But what you did was like a little fly walking on my skin. It couldn't hurt me.'"

A lawyer friend of Ali's had come into the room where we were and was sitting with us -- it was a Friday morning, the Muslim sabbath -- and I felt that the presence of this third person was encouraging Ali's unusual passion.

I asked, "Did you give the man the job?"

"I didn't give him the job. Because people of this kind can never be enlightened. If they had the chance again, they would hurt me again. So they should be kept away."

And now, a year into the revolution, Ali was being pushed from every side, by government people, by communists within the government, and by simple agitators. He was kidnapped three or four more times.

"I wasn't much afraid to go with them, because I knew that my reasoning was stronger than theirs. The first time you think it's a wild animal, it's going to tear you apart. But once you tame this animal, you can order them around."

There was now, too, a constant harassment from the Revolutionary Guards, jumping into the garden and looking through the windows to see whether anyone was looking at television or videos, or breaking into the house to search for alcohol or ham or women's dresses or men's neckties, all now forbidden things.

"And if you were cleanly dressed, they didn't like it. They would attack you. It was like Pol Pot, but n ot so extreme. Ten percent. It was a full revolution."

"A full revolution?"

"The reins of government went altogether out of the hands of government, out of control. It was anarchy and terror. The reason was Khomeini himself. About three months after the revolution I was taken by my ayatollah friend to meet Mr. Khomeini. The ayatollah friend had explained to Khomeini that I was a developer and a technical man and could help with housing problems. I and the ayatollah friend and Khomeini were sitting together on the ground in Khomeini's house. The door opened. Some mullahs came in. Khomeini started talking with them. Later some more mullahs came in. And it went on and on until the room was full of mullahs, two hundred of them. And they all wanted money to take to their students and religious organizations in their own towns. Khomeini said he didn't have money to give to all of them. Then he said, 'Go to your own towns. Fine the first man who is rich or the first man who has a factor or a huge farm. And force him to pay you.'"

This language from the head of the government shocked Ali. And this was when he realized that Khomeini was leading his people to chaos.

The lawyer sitting with us said, "His mental discipline was different from other people's. He was a man of the people. He understood the majority of the people. The majority were not educated. They wanted to get money and things. They didn't want revolution. They wanted money, and Khomeini knew that."

Ali said, "The majority wanted to loot."

The lawyer said, "So he made disorder in the country and let them loot. He did what they wanted."

Ali said, "When he said 'Follow the law', it wasn't the law of the country. It was his law, the law in his own mind. Before the revolution he said it was un-Islamic to pay taxes to the government. After, he said it was Islamic to pay taxes to the government. He wanted complete chaos. That day in his house I realized this man is not a man of government. He was still a revolutionary. He couldn't control himself. Until the very last day he was making disorder."

I wondered whether this disorder, this constant "revolution" (a word with misleading assocations), wasn't an aspect of Shia protest. But when I made the point neither Ali nor the lawyer took it up. They were disillusioned men; they spoke out of a great torment; but they were so deep in Shiism, it was so much part of their emotional life, that they couldn't take this step back, as it were, and consider it from the outside.

They began to talk instead of the Islamic law of necessity, in whose name Khomeini, always acting religiously, had said and unsaid things.

Ali said, of this law of necessity, "To protect yourself, you can sometimes do something wrong. The ayatollahs can mediate between the first level of laws, which come from Allah, and the second level. When the need arises, the ayatollahs can for a short time issue secondary orders." The example he gave was close to him. "In Islam the protection of people's property belongs to the first level of laws. But during Khomeini's regime, while he was alive, there was a shortage of land for housing. So Khomeini said, 'Using my privilege of ordering the second order of laws, I am going to grab plots of land that belong to anybody in the town, without paying any compensation, and I am going to subdivide it and give it to the people who need it. Because there is necessity.'"

And now, to prove that this action of Khomeini's was excessive, the lawyer began, as I felt, to take me down the lanes and ancient alleyways and tunnels of Islamic jurisprudence such as was taught in the theological schools of Mashhad and Qom.

The lawyer -- delicately eating small green figs whole, and, in between, peeling and eating other fruit -- said, "About a hundred years after the birth of Islam one of the caliphs in Mecca wanted to take land around the holy place. People were living in houses around this holy place, the Kaaba. But the law didn't allow the taking of the land. Protecting people's property was a duty of the caliph. So the caliph invited the big muftis to his house, to find some way. The best opinion was that of a direct descendant of Prophet Mohammed, the fifth Shia Imam, Bagher. He said, 'You can take those houses around the Kaaba because the Kaaba came first. Value the houses, and pay the owners, and send them away.'"

Ali said, "Khomeini has set a bad example. Every ayatollah now can claim necessity, as Khomeini often did, and break the law." And Iran was still living with his Islamic constitution, which gave him supreme power, and established the principle of leadership and obedience. The constitution provided for an elected assembly, but there was also a council, which could override the assembly.

Ali said, "He had an instinctive brain. He was instinctively intelligent. An instinctive, animal intelligence. Because of this he could command the people. He did not have an educated intelligence. He didn't become emotion. He was very cool."

The Books: "Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey" (V.S. Naipaul)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V.S. Naipaul. VS Naipaul went on a 7-month journey in the early 80s through 4 "countries of the converts" - non-Arab countries, countries of converts to Islam. He has no sympathy for religious fervor whatsoever, and he makes no bones about it. He distrusts fundamentalism of every kind. He and Christopher Hitchens are brothers in this respect. He is right in his assessment that converts are usually more fanatical than those born into a faith. I've known a few recent born-agains in my day, and I can say that he speaks the truth. Uhm - wow. Total personality change. Total erasure of sense of humor. Where did the personality go? A lot of people can't stand Naipaul because of this hostility towards religion, but in my opinion - this personal bias makes him a clear-eyed critic of certain aspects of faith-based societies. Same with Krakauer who wrote that blisteringly hostile book about Mormons - Krakauer came right out and stated his bias in the beginning, so you, as a reader, know what you're dealing with. I don't share Naipaul's distrust for people who have faith - not at all - but I do share his abhorrence of fundamentalists, of any stripe, and I make no bones about it either. Naipaul has no patience whatsoever with those who do not use their MINDS. But anyway, back to this book, which is quite quite wonderful: He travels to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. He talks to people. A lot of the book is conversation. He speaks to students in madrassahs, he speaks to mullahs, he speaks to regular everyday people on the street.

There's a sequel to the book which I'll excerpt tomorrow - he returns to the same 4 countries a decade later - and looks up all the same people he met the first trip. The two books together are fascinating and rather prophetic looks at Islamic countries, and the radicalization of the Muslim faith. Especially his chapters on Indonesia, which I'll excerpt here.

I love Naipaul. He's such a crank. And a damn fine writer as well.

The excerpt gives you a real feel for the book. It's all about PEOPLE. Naipaul tells the history of certain events, certain areas, etc., through one person's personal history. Very very interesting. The following excerpt is a bit long, but it's worth it. It's about an Indonesian man named Suryadi.

From Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V.S. Naipaul.

It is dizzying to read of recent Indonesian history. And to look at it in the life of one man is to wonder how, with so little to hold on to in the way of law or country, anyone could withstand so many assaults on his personality.

Suryadi was in his mid fifties. He was small, dark-brown, frail-looking. He was born in East Java and he described himself as one of the "statistical Muslims" of Indonesia. He had received no religious training; such religion as he had was what was in the air around him. He wasn't sure whether he believed in the afterlife; and he didn't know that that belief was fundamental to the Muslim faith.

He belonged to the nobility, but in Java that meant only that he was not of the peasantry. The Dutch ruiled Java through the old feudal courts of the country. But Java was only an agricultural colony, and the skills required of the nobility in the Dutch time were hnot high. Suryadi's grandfather, as a noble, had had a modest white-collar job; Suryadi's father was a bookkeeper in a bank.

It was possible for Suryadi, as a noble, to go to a Dutch school. The fees were low; and Suryadi, in facat, didn't have to pay. The education was good. Just how good it was was shown by the excellent English Suryadi spoke. And recently, wishing to take up German again and enrolling in the German cultural centre in Jakarta, the Goethe Institute, Suryadi found that, with his Dutch-taught German of forty years before, he was put in the middle class, and he was later able without trouble to get a certificate in an examination marked in Germany.

Early in 1942 the Japanese occupied Java. The message from Radio Tokyo was that the Japanese would give Indonesia its independence, and there were many people willing to welcome the Japanese as liberators. Suryadi was in the final year of his school. The Dutch teachers were replaced by Indonesians, and the headmaster or supervisor was Japanese. For six months classes continued as they would have done under the Dutch. Then -- and it is amazing how things go on, even during an upheaval -- Suryadi went to the university. The lecturers and professors there were now Japanese. But the Japanese simply couldn't manage foreign languages. They recognized this themselves, and after a time they appointed Indonesians, who worked under Japanese supervisors.

The Indonesians used the classes to preach nationalism. Already much of the good will towards the Japanese had gone. It was clear to Suryadi that the whole economy was being subverted to assist the Japanese war effort. Thousands of Indonesians were sent to work on the Burma Railway (and there is still a community of Indonesians in Thailand, from the enforced migration of that time). Radios were sealed; the radios that had once brought the good news from Radio Tokyo could no longer be listened to,

Two incidents occurred at this time which made Suryadi declare his opposition to the Japanese. The university authorities decreed that all students were to shave their heads. It was the discipline of the Zen monastery. And Suryadi felt it as he was meant to feel it: an assault on his personality. And then one day on the parade ground -- students were given military training -- a student was slapped by a Japanese officer. All the Indonesians felt humiliated, and Suryadi and his friends held a protest demonstration in the university. Thirty of them, teachers as well as students, were arrested by the Japanese secret police and taken to jail.

In the jail they heard people being tortured for anti-Japanese offences and even for listening to the radio. But Suryadi's group were treated like political prisoners; and they continued to be disciplined in the way of the Zen monastery. They were beaten with bamboo staves, but it was only a ritual humiliation. The bamboo staves were split at the end; they didn't hurt, they only made a loud cracking noise. After a month of this Suryadi and his friends were released. But they were expelled from the university. So Suryadi never completed his education.

They had got off lightly because the Indonesian nationalism leaders were still cooperating with the Japanese. Sukarno never believed that Japan was going to lose the war, Suryadi said. Sukarno didn't even believe that the atom bomb had been dropped on Japan. It was only after the Japanese surrender that Sukarno and the nationalists proclaimed the independence of Indonesia. And four years of fighting against the Dutch followed.

What events to have lived through, in one's first twenty-six years! But Suryadi was without rancour. The events had been too big; there was no one to blame. He had no ill-feeling towards either Dutch or Japanese. He did business now with both; and he respected both as people who honoured a bargain. The Japanese had the reputation in Southeast Asia of being hard bargainers (there had been anti-Japanese riots in Jakarta because of the Japanese domination of the Indonesian market); but Suryadi had found the Japanese more generous, if anything, than the Dutch.

Suryadi was without rancour, and it could be said that he had won through. But there was an Indonesian sadness in him, and it was the sadness of a man who felt he had been left alone, and was now -- after the Dutch time, the Japanese time, the four years of the war against the Dutch, the twenty years of Sukarno -- without a cause. More than once the world had seemed about to open out for him as an Indonesian, but then had closed up again.

He had lain low during the later Sukarno years. Army rule after that had appeared to revive the country. But now something else was happening. A kind of Javanese culture was being asserted. Suryadi was Javanese; the Javanese dance and the Javanese epics and puppet plays were part of his being. But he felt that Javanese culture was being misused; it was encouraging a revival of feudal attitudes, with the army taking the place of the old courts. Suryadi had the Javanese eye for feudal courtesies. He saw that nowadays the soldier's salute to an officer was more than an army salute; it also contained a feudal bow. It was a twisted kind of retrogression. It wasn't what Suryadi had wanted for his country.

And he had lost his daughter. She had become a convert to the new Muslim cause -- the Malaysian disease, some people called it here. At school and then at the university she had been a lively girl. She had done Javanese dancing; she was a diver; she liked to go camping. But then, at the university, she had met a new Muslim, a born-again Muslim, and she had begun to change. She went out with her hair covered; she wore drab long gowns; and her mind began correspondingly to dull.

Suryadi and his wife had done the unforgivable one day. They had gone among the girl's papers, and they had come upon a pledge she had signed. She had pledged to be ruled in everything by a particular Muslim teacher; he was to be her guide to paradise. She, who would have been a statistical Muslim like Suryadi and his wife, was now being instructed in the pure faith.

Suryadi didn't take it well. He thought now he should have been calmer in the beginning; by making his dismay too apparent he had probably pushed the girl further away from him. He said to her one day, "Suppose someone asks you to go out camping now, will you say, 'I can't go, because I have no assurance there will be water for my ablutions before my prayers'?" He had spoken with irritation and irony. But later she came back to him and said, "I have checked. In the Koran there is nothing that says it is obligatory if you are travelling." And Suryadi understood that she had become impervious to irony; that she had become removed from the allusive family way of talking. The intellectual loss was what grieved him the most. He said, "But don't you have a mind any longer? Do you have to go to that book every time? Can't you think for yourself now?" She said, "The Koran is the source of all wisdom and virtue in the world."

She had married the born-again Muslim who had led her to the faith. She had a degree; he was still only a student at the university; but, like a good Muslim wife, she subordinated herself to him. That was the new sadness that Suryadi was learning to live with: a once-lively daughter who had gone strange.

Still, recently he had found a little cause for hope. He was driving her back one day to her in-laws' house, where she lived with her husband. He said, "I have bought that little house for you. Why don't you go and live there? Why does your husband want to keep on living with his parents? It isn't right. Why doesn't he make up his mind to act on his own?" She had said then, "He's got an inferiority complex, Father."

And this little sign, the first for some time, that his daughter still had a mind, was still capable of judging, was a great comfort to Suryadi. She had seen what was clear to Suryadi: that the boy was a poor student, didn't have the background, couldn't cope with university life. He was still some way from taking his degree and wasn't giving enough time to his work. During the month of Ramadan, the fasting month, he had given up his work altogether, fasting all day and going to the mosque in the evening to pray. This was easier than being with the difficult books; and his religious correctness was admired by his Islamic group at the university.

Suryadi's daughter had seen this on her own. That was some weeks ago. And it was now what Suryadi was waiting for: that in time she might see a little more.

At the end, just before we separated, Suryadi said, "But I've been lucky. I haven't been like so many others in Indonesia, switching to another wavelength under pressure."

"Another wavelength?"

"You know how people are like here. But perhaps you don't. They turn mystical. Logical, rational people. They start burning incense or sitting up at night in graveyards if they want to achieve something. If they feel they are frustrated, not advancing in their work or career."

"Do you call that mystical?"

"I don't know what else you call ilt."

The Books: "A Secret History of the IRA" (Ed Moloney)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney. If I recall correctly, Emily got so angry reading this book that she threw it across the room! Good times!! Ed Moloney has been Northern editor of The Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune - and has written this book with unprecedented access to - well - the "secret history" of the IRA. It's the story of the IRA but more than that it's the story of the rise of Gerry Adams. The pretty much Machiavellian rise of Gerry Adams. Having stayed in Ballymurphy when I was in Belfast, and having - uhm - seen Gerry Adams' car outside the Sinn Fein head office - I really feel like an insider. There is nothing like seeing Gerry Adams' car parked at the curb to really make you feel close to the HEART of something important. heh heh This book is DENSE, man - I found it tough-going at times to keep on reading it.

When my family went to Ireland when we were all kids - we went to visit my "Auntie Bridgie" in Killarney. An 83 year old woman who lived in a 2-room dark house with cows right outside the door. Her husband had been dead for ... 30 years? 40 years? Anyway, on the dark stained wall over the stove were three things: A picture of JFK. A picture of Pope John Paul II. And a pin in a small dusty glass case - the pin had a red ribboned thing hanging off it. I am unable to describe it, because I am a loser. It wasn't a medallion - but a ribboned thing, almost like an epaulet - Anyway, that was her husband's IRA pin. Of course this would have been the IRA back in the 20s and 30s, a very different organization from the one we see now. But those three items were the only wall decorations. Kinda says it all, don't it??

I'll post an excerpt about the Provisional IRA.

From A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney.

The first Provisional leaders were sure of the rightness of their cause and the reasons for breaking with the Officials. The initial statement from O Bradaigh's breakaway Sinn Fein in January 1970 listed five reasons for splitting with Goulding: his recognition of the Irish and British parliaments; the move to embrace extreme socialism; illegal internal disciplinary methods; the failure to defend Belfast; and the policy of defending the Northern parliament at Stormont. The list demonstrated that the Provisionals were essentially a coalition of differing grievances; for some Marxism was the major problem with Goulding, and for others the military rundown of the IRA. One characteristic of the new IRA above all others that united the coalition - the glue that held it together - was a distrust of politics, parliamentary politics in particular, and an unshakable belief in the correctness of armed struggle.

The early Provisional leaders were determined that they would not stray down the path of parliamentary reformism trod by other nationalist and republican leaders. Each previous generation of freedom fighters had been betrayed, they believed, by leaders seduced by the siren call of parliamentary politics. They would be the exception. For this reason they defined the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA in simple and traditional terms. The military wing, the IRA, was in charge, and Sinn Fein would obey and be subservient to the Army Council. That was the case in the South and also in the North, where, according to one veteran party activist, Sinn Fein was secondary to the IRA from the outset: "Sinn Fein was the poor relation. It wasn't worth bothering about. Sinn Fein in the 1970s was an organization without clout; it supported the 'campaign' and held lofty ideas of a united Ireland but nothing else. The IRA was boss."

As the war intensified and more and more Northerners joined up, the antipolitical nature of the Provisionals intensified, as one of the Provisionals' founding members recalled:

When the resistance began, Northerners came in droves, and they were reacting to events for a number of years. The Northern guys were quite slow to be politicized. They looked down on Sinn Fein and dismissed it, saying, 'We're Army men.' I shared a cell with them in Mountjoy, and that was their view. They were quite happy sitting in their cells reading the Sun or the Mirror boasting about operations. They were purely militaristic - hit, hit, keep on hitting.

Whereas the first IRA commanders were Southerners, the foot soldiers in the war, the Volunteers, came overwhelmingly from the North and at first mostly from Belfast, where the attempted loyalist pogroms of August 1969 had taken place. Many IRA units elsewhere in North, in republican heartlands like Tyrone, Armagh, and Derry, were slower to take sides in the republican split; in some cases months went by before they decided whether to follow Goulding or MacStiofain. The Provisionals were born in Belfast and sustained by the city's bitter sectarian politics.

Some of those outside Belfast were repelled by the Provisionals' simplistic politics. Typical of this category was the Derry republican Mitchel McLaughlin, who stayed with the Officials for several months before joining the Provisionals, later rising to become a key Adams aide and advocate of his peace strategy. "At the time of the split," he once told an interviewere, "I actually stayed with the Official Republican Movement. Mainly because of their politics which undoubtedly were more progressive than the more, kind of nationalistic rhetoric that I was hearing [from the early Provisional leaders]." Gerry Adams and the Ballymurphy unit were not the only IRA members to hesitate before taking sides in the split. Not surprisingly, many were waiting to see who came out on top, and so what happened in Belfast was crucial. When Belfast republicanism went over to the Provos, as it did during the crucial year of 1970, many of the rural units followed, and soon if angry young Northern Catholics wanted to hit back at either the loyalists or the British army, they knew they would find a warm welcome in the Provisionals.

The IRA before August 1969 was an organization kept going by family tradition. Membership was passed from father to son, mother to daughter, but the recruits who flocked to the ranks of the Provisionals were a new breed, motivated by an atavistic fear of loyalist violence and an overwhelming need to strike back. Known as Sixty-niners, they joined the IRA literally to defend their own streets, were resolved that the near-pogroms of August 1969 would never again be repeated, and were ready, if the opportunity arose, to retaliate. They joined the Provos because the Officials had failed to defend their communities in the way that was expected, and they automatically associated the Officals' obsession with politics with military weakness and betrayal. From the outset abhorrence of politics and the requirement for defense and armed struggle were just different sides of the same coin.

Typical of the new Provisional IRA Volunteer was Bernard Fox, an apprentice coach builder from the Falls Road who joined the IRA in 1969, when he was just eighteen years old. He is now a senior figure in the leadership and was named in 2001 in the British media as a senior figure in the Provisional IRA's GHQ staff. He spent nineteen years in prison, either jailed or interned, for IRA activitiy. His motive for signing up was straightforward, as he once explained in a newspaper interview after the peace process reforms had secured his release fromk prison: "I was almost shot in a gun attack at Norfolk Street. I came away wanting a gun. It was survival. You wanted to protect your own people ... my family and myself. When the barricades went up I wanted a gun so I approached this fella who was in the IRA and asked for gun and he said: could I shoot a British soldier? At that time I hadn't the idea that it was the British government's fault ..."

Brendan Hughes from the Lower Falls Road district, a figure who later became an IRA legend, was similarly affected by the violence of August 1969. "At that time it was simply 'Here we are being attacked by Loyalists, by B Specials, by the RUC, by the British army,' and there was a need to hit back," recalled the former Belfast commander. "I mean I was in Bombay Street the morning after it was burned out, helping people out, and I went to the bottom of the Falls Road and seen all the burnt-out homes. I had relatives in Bombay Street who were burnt out, and I felt the desire to get back at these people who were doing it." Micky McMullen, a former long-term IRA prisoner, came under similar pressure but managed to resist it: "Up to 1969 there was nothing, but August 1969 was the turning point. I became involved in community defence you know and stuff like that, helping families to move after they had been burned out. At that time a lot of my friends would have been trying to join the IRA and the rationale would be just to get stuck into the 'Orangies' you know. It was a defence thing but something stopped me from getting into that."

Fox, Hughes, and McMullen and the many hundreds who followed them into the Provisional IRA in the first years of its existence were part of a Northern Catholic tradition that went back nearly two hundred years, when another armed uprising had very nearly ended British rule in Ireland. The United Irishmen's rebellion of 1798 is celebrated as the moment when modern, secular Irish republicanism was born, but it but it also coincided with the birth of sectarian politics in Ireland and left a scar that marked Northern socidety for centuries to come.

The Books: "Chechnya: To the heart of a conflict" (Andrew Meier)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is Chechnya: To the heart of a conflict by Andrew Meier. I didn't really like this book. Interesteing topic - but Meier was too pleased with himself for all the things HE went through in Chechnya. It's a travelogue/political history of the place and the conflict - a la Robert Kaplan and others ... but somehow, the tone of this book made me think it should be called: Look, Ma! I'm in Chechnya! Also, here's another thing: The book is literally 106 pages long. It's tiny. Uhm - can you get "to the heart" of that conflict in 106 pages?? You dare to say you've gotten "to the heart" of it in a book no bigger than a pamphlet? Seems a little un-ambitious to me. I'm thinkin' there's quite a lot going on in Chechnya and to get "to the heart" of it, you have to write about more than your terrifying experience at some chaotic checkpoint.

Here's an excerpt about North Ossetia.

From Chechnya: To the heart of a conflict by Andrew Meier.

Vladikavkaz, christened as a garrison town in 1818, means "To rule the Caucasus." The North Ossetians have yet to live up to the bravado, but they have long served as the proxies of tsars and general secretaries in helping tame the unruly tribes of the south. In August 1942 Hitler's troops planted a Nazi flag atop Elbrus. Hitler wanted the Grozny oil fields and dreamed of taking Baku, with its vast reserves of Caspian oil. Not surprisingly, in some Caucasian circles, the Germans found support. How many sided with the Nazis is a matter of historical debate. No one will ever know. To some, the Germans doubtless offered a chance to oppose Soviet power. The Ossetians, however, stood loyal. The Nazi forces got no further than Vladikavkaz, then called Ordzhonikidze after a Georgian aide-de-camp to Stalin.

In recent years North Ossetia had distinguished itself as a singular outpost of fidelity. Things, however, could have gone very differently. In the last years of the old empire, as minor satraps across the south raised the sword of religion and the shield of sovereignty to revive "ancient hatreds" remembered by few, North Ossetia was the first Soviet tinderbox to explode. In the late 1980s, tensions boiled between the North Ossetians and the Ingush, the ethnic minority in the east -- and the Chechens' next of kin. Both sides claimed the pastoral land east of Vladikavkaz known as Prigorodny, just on the North Ossetian side of the border with Ingushetia.

The roots of the trouble, like much of the present turmoil, began with Stalin, who in 1944 ordered the Ingush and the Chechens deported en masse to Central Asia. On February 23, 1944, Red Army Day, and the twenty-sixth anniversary of the founding of the workers' and peasants' army, Stalin tricked the Ingush and the Chechens into coming out to their town squares. They were rounded up and packed off in lend-lease Studebaker trucks. For the next thirteen years, until the liberalizing thaw that followed Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956, when they started to return to the lands, the Chechens and the Ingush disappeared from the pages of officialdom. The Soviet Union had established a tradition, as Robert Conquest notes in his seminal book on the deportations, The Nation Killers, of erasing the existence of intellectuals who had earned the wrath of the state. "Unpersons," George Orwell had famously called the writers and poets who were erased from Soviet society, if not killed. But as Conquest points out in regard to Stalin's rounding up of the Chechens and Ingush, among other minorities, "the 'unnation' was a new phenomenon."

Before the deportation Prigorodny was Ingush. In the last years of the USSR the Ingush began to exhibit their intention of reclaiming it. In 1992, their Soviet bonds loosened, the Ingush and the North Ossetians went to war over the scrap of land. The fighting cost hundreds of lives on both sides, but the North Ossetians, backed by Moscow, kept their hold on the dry pastures of Prigorodny.

There had been another small war, across the mountains in Georgia, beyond the famed Darial Pass, among the Ossetians trapped in another contrivance of Soviet mapmaking called South Ossetia. In 1989 the South Ossetians, with a population of some ninety thousand, had risen up, seeking to break free of Georgia and reunite with their brethren to the north. No nation on earth, however, recognized their sovereignty. The North Ossetians meanwhile remained loyal to Moscow. Fealty had its rewards. The tiny republic of fewer than a half million now led the Russian Federation in vodka production. "Ours is a special relationship," President Dzasokhov said of the coziness with the Russians. "We have a history of understanding."

The Books: "Nicholas and Alexandra" (Nicholas Massie)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. The story of the final Tsar and his wife. Great book. I've read a couple other books about the Romanovs but none so detailed, none so well-written. It's kind of horrible to read it at times, because you already know the ending. And it just - I hate the thought of those children in that basement, with their jewels sewn into their corsets, trapped, being shot to death, the smoke filling the room. ANYHOO. It's also kind of creepy to read it because you just get the sense that history is marching towards these people - and it is about to march right on by them ... WE know that, because we know the end, but Nicholas and Alexandra don't. They behave in ways that seem almost willfully ignorant ... like they are covering their eyes and shouting LALALALALA at reality. The whole Rasputin thing ...

I'm going to excerpt a bit from one of the chapters on Rasputin. I have a hard time believing that the dude actually EXISTED. What a strange man. What a ... he's kind of an Elron Hubman type. I have no idea - there's so much mystery about him. Alexandra got it into her head that Rasputin had, by sending a telegram at the perfect moment, put a mystical stop to her son's hemophiliac attack. And for her? That was it. Rasputin was IN. He was a holy man, a healer, and he was somehow able to keep Alexis' disease at bay. Alexandra didn't CARE about the rumors, she didn't care that many people thought Rasputin was a fraud, and a user. He was IN.

From Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie.

Gregory Rasputin was one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic men to appear on earth. He was an overwhelming personality and a superbly convincing actor. He had prodigious physical strength and caroused night and day at a pace that would kill a normal man. His physical presence projected enormous magnetism: prime ministers, princes, bishops, and grand dukes as well as society women and peasant girls had felt his powerful attraction and, when the relationship soured, had been as powerfully repelled.

Now, all of the terrible power of this remarkable personality was concentrated on a single objective: convincing the Empress that he was as she saw him, the pure, devoted Man of God, sprung from its soil of peasant Russia. Because of his painstaking care, Alexandra never saw him as anything else. His superb performance was strongly enhanced by the miracles she had seen take place at the bedsides of Alexis and Anna. Whenever he felt himself threatened, Rasputin skillfully played on the Empress' fears and her religious nature. "Remember that I need neither the Emperor or yourself," he would say. "If you abandon me to my enemies, it will not worry me. I am quite able to cope with them. But neither the Emperor nor you can do without me. If I am not there to protect you, you will lose your son and your crown within six months." Alexandra -- having been through Spala and the nosebleed on the train -- was not willing to take risks. Rasputin must be what he said he was and he must stay with her or her world would collapse.

Shrewdly, Rasputin secured his position and enhanced his hold by meeting the Empress's more prosaic need for constant reassurance and encouragement. His conversation and telegrams were an artful blend of religion and prophecy, often sounding like the gloriously meaningless forecasts which fall from penny machines at county fairs: "Be crowned with earthly happiness, the heavenly wreaths will follow ... Do not fear our present embarrassments, the protection of the Holy Mother is over you -- go to the hospitals though the enemies are menacing -- have faith ... Don't fear, it will not be worse than it was, faith and the banner will favor us." Blurred though these messages were, the Empress, weary and harassed, found them comforting.

Politically, Rasputin's advice was usually confined to carefully endorsing policies which the Empress already believed in, making certain that the idea was rephrased in his own language so that it would seem freshly inspired. Where his ideas were in fact original and specific, they accurately and realistically represented peasant Russia. Throughout the war, he warned of the bloodletting. "It is getting empty in the villages," he told the Tsar. Yet, when challenged by Paleologue that he had been urging the Tsar to end the war, Rasputin retorted, "Those who told you that are just idiots. I am always telling the Tsar that he must fight until complete victory is won. But I am also telling him that the war has brought unbearable suffering to the Russian people. I know of villages where there is no one left but the blind and the wounded, the widows and the orphans."

The Books: "The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein" (Sandra Mackey)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein by Sandra Mackey. Another book by Mackey. Again, like her book on Saudi Arabia, there's probably nothing here that is new to any of us - especially now, when we are getting to know Iraq as well as our own country!! But still: it's worth a read. I like the sections about the ancient world - Mesopotamia, and the Assyrians - and the Middle Ages, and all that. But the book, as a whole, gives really good background to the conflicts we see there now.

I'm going to post a bit about the first modern king of Iraq - King Faisal. The monarchy only lasted four decades. I did a lot of research about King Faisal a couple of years back because I was in a play where I played Gertrude Bell, a really interesting woman - often called "the female Lawrence of Arabia" - who was really one of the ones responsible for setting up Iraq as we know it now. A "sand-mad Brit" - an unconventional woman (obviously!!) - who was buried in Baghdad, so revered was she by the people at that time. She was considered one of them. Anyway - she was a big supporter of Faisal - really one of his greatest champions - so playing her was one of the reasons I did a boat-load of research about that guy.

So here's an excerpt about Faisal.

From The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein by Sandra Mackey.

Born of impeccable stock, Faisal, third son of the Sharif of Mecca, claimed a place in the thirty-seventh generation directly descended from the prophet Muhammed. Sickly as a boy, he spent much of his childhood among the Bedouin of the Hejaz to be hardened by the demands of the merciless desert. He learned to shoot, to manage the cranky bellowing camel, and to ride the fine Arabian stallion. In the tents of the sheikhs, he listened to the cadence of classical Arabic poetry and learned the skills of tribal leadership. Strengthened and tuned, he went to Constantinople as a deputy to the Ottoman Parliament and fought for the Turks in Yemen. In 1917, he took his experiences and skills into the Arab Revolt. In the last days of World War I, he established in Damascus the Arab government obliquely promised by Britain in the Hussein-McMahon letters of 1915-16. Fine boned, with a long face set with large liquid eyes, Faisal looked every inch a great Arab sheikh.

During his two years in Damascus, Faisal filled his house with a throng of black Abyssinian eunuch slaves imported from Mecca and a select group of khaki-clad officers who had deserted the Ottoman army to join the revolt. Brimming with the passion of Arab nationalism, they had fought across the deserts from Mecca to Damascus. Now the group that would become known as the Sharifians gathered around Faisal to fulfill the dream of an Arab state. When Faisal lost his Arab government, they followed him to London and then to Baghdad, where they formed the core of the court and acted as the custodians of Sunni political influence.

When Faisal and the Sharifians arrived in Baghdad in 1921, Iraq bore the scars of Ottoman neglect. Mosul, across the Tigris from the ruins of ancient Nineveh, languished within decaying stone walls where Arabs and Kurds engaged in desultory trade. In once glorious Baghdad, the richly colored tiles decorating the mosques barely clung to structures seemingly untouched since the days of the Islamic Empire. Water still came to homes in leather skins filled from the Tigris and delivererd on the backs of donkeys. The city on the east side of the river was tied to the city on the west side by swaying pontoon bridges that floated on the round reed boats that Herodotus had described two thousand years earlier. There were only three of these bridges, for superstition held that when Baghdad possessed five, as in the days of the caliphs, the city would fall.

Since Baghdad had not been a true capital for nearly seven centuries, no palaces or buildings possessed even a modicum of grandeur. So after his coronation, Faisal went to the Citadel by the North Gate, driven in a car provided by the British. It traveled by the only real street in the city, a rutted unpaved road named for General Maude that cut a straight line through a maze of covered bazaars seemingly untouched by time. The sparse and antiquated infrastructure of Baghdad was symbolic of the new state of Iraq. It literally sagged under the accumulated weight of poverty, ignorance, and isolation that had reduced the land between the rivers to little more than an outpost of civilization.

The day Faisal picked up the reins of government, a simple street scene drew a complex sociological picture of his realm. Sunni bureaucrats and merchants proudly garbed in the newly popular Western clothes gathered around small tables outside the coffee shops strung along the Tigris. From there, they watched Jews hurry twoard their banks; Christians move their crafts to the souks, followed by Persian merchants toting fine carpets; Kurds in their baggy sharwals unload a barge of produce from the highlands; and Shia sheikhs in flowing robes pass by on their way back to their villages in the south. In real terms, the social structure mirrored Ottoman times. The monarchy, with British contrivance, soono superimposed on it the Sharifians, who from the court took all the key military and governmental positions. Products of Ottoman education, many were related by blood or marriage. Claiming neither a local following nor a power base within Iraq, they depended on the government for their position, and the government depended on them to be the loyal cadre of Hashemite rule. Below the Sharifians, grouped in an imprecise and often fluid order, were the old Sunni elite, the Christian elite of Mosul, the Sunni and Shia tribal notables, and at the bottom, the peasants, most of whom were Shia. Finally, there were the Kurdish clan chiefs, added in 1925 by the incorporation of Mosul province into Iraq. But before Faisal could even approach this internal tangle, he first had to secure his borders against his neighbords -- Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Persia, all of them geographically larger than Iraq.

The British, protecting their own interests in the oil resources of the Mosul region, took care of Ataturk's threat from Turkey. But in the south, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud and his Wahhabi zealots posed a serious challenge to Faisal's claim to the tribes of southern Iraq.¹ Beginning in March 1922, the Ikhwan, the fanatical Muslim brotherhood within the Wahhabi sect that often defied the authority of Abdul Aziz, periodically rode into Iraq to raid for faith and booty. In 1927 when Ikhwan raiders mutilated tribesmen in southern Iraq, it was Britain as the mandatory power the went into action. In a spate of low-tech warfare, single-enginge Royal Air Force planes swooped low to drop pint-sized bombs on the marauding tribes while Model T Fordsd mounted with machine guns chased the Ikhwan back into Arabia. By 1929, the immediate threat from the south was over.²

The threat from the east, from Persia, defied simple military tactics. The Persian government, claiming Najaf and Karbala as "holy places of Persia", refused to recognize the infant state of Iraq. But Persia, like Turkey and Abdul Aziz, was in no position to threaten the British mandate of Iraq. Not only did Britain control Iran's oil resources, but the Qajar dynasty sat in the dying embers of its own regime. In 1925 when Reza Shah Pahlavi ascended the Peacock Throne, Iran and Iraq, prodded by Britain, negotiated a boundary agreement that held until the 1980 Iran-Iraq War.³ Thus, with the borders calm on the east, south, and north and the British military umbrella spread over Iraq, Faisal turned his full attention to the challenges of consolidating his state.

¹In the West, the legendary Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the father of modern Saudi Arabia, is most often known as Ibn Saud, 'the son of Saud". In the Arab world, he is more correctly known as Abdul Aziz.
²The border disputes between Iraq and Saudi Arabia have never really ceased, playing a role in the 1991 Gulf War.
³It was Reza Shah Pahlavi who would change the name of Persia to iran in 1935.

The Books: "The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom" (Sandra Mackey)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book on the shelf is The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom by Sandra Mackey. Sandra Mackey, a journalist, lived in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s, early 80s - her husband was there in Riyadh, a doctor on staff at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital. Because of the restrictions on her because of her sex, only allowed to be there because she was a dependent of her husband, Mackey was undercover. She wrote under multiple male pseudonyms, and had to hide her true identity. It's a really interesting story: how she was able to even GET stories - when she wasn't supposed to be a journalist in the first place. But she was there at a certain point of transition in Saudi Arabia (transition? How about total and utter UPHEAVAL) because of the oil boom - that she was able to see this culture wrenching itself into the 20th century, awkwardly, badly at times. We all are aware of the surface realities of Saudi Arabia. This book didn't really tell me anything I didn't know, but it did add perspective and historical context to some of those realities. If you want to get a start on understanding how things work, and WHY - this is a very good place to start. Mackey, at times, takes on a perspective similar to that of Elias Canetti's - she, as a total outsider (and Saudi Arabian social life is pretty much nonexistent - it was nearly impossible for her, as a Westerner, to get close to any of the Saudis she knew on an every day basis - it's not like there were weekly Happy Hours in Riyadh where Mackey could mingle, and get an idea of what was REALLY going on, and people's RESPONSES to the oil boom, and the upheaval, and yadda yadda - it is a closed society, so she had quite a struggle) - But anyway, in the same way that Elias Canetti, after all his research into crowds and how crowds behaved throughout history - felt comfortable enough to generalize about certain cultures - based on his observations - so does Mackey. This is not about stereotyping. It is about the expression of a reality we all can point to, and say exists. Canetti looks at German culture (his own culture) and asks questions like: What is important to a German? What does being in a crowd provide a German that is different than, say, a Bushman in the Kalahari Desert? We are NOT all the same ... a German sees the world differently than an African Bushman ... and WHY?? Mackey not only writes about the history of Saudi Arabia - and all of that is very interesting - but she goes to great lengths to talk about the actual psychology of the kingdom itself, and its residents. How do their minds WORK - it's not just nature that forms us, it's nurture - so what is the psychology like there? How is the family structured? And how do they deal with pride, or guilt, or humor, or insecurity? Of course there are things that all human beings have in common, regardless of the culture they were born into - we experience fear, pain, bodily functions, we laugh ... But the psychology of a Saudi citizen is going to be different than the psychology of a Chinese person, or a person from Russia. Mackey talks a lot about this.

I'm going to excerpt a bit from her chapter on the Bedouin. Again, probably nothing new here to anyone - still, it's interesting.

From The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom by Sandra Mackey.

The legendarily tough and fiercely independent nomads of the Arabian Peninsula are called Bedouins, a French derivative of an Arabic word meaning "an inhabitant of the desert." For centuries the Bedouins alone dominated the vast, empty wasteland of the Arabian Peninsula. Through civilization after civilization, it was the Bedouin with his superhuman ability to survive who not only controlled but characterized the desert.

Nowhere in the world was there such a continuity as in the Arabian desert. Here Semitic nomads ... must have herded their flocks before the Pyramids were built or the Flood wiped out all traces of man in the Euphrates valley. Successive civilizations rose and fell around the desert's edge ... Egypt of the Pharaohs; Sumeria; Babylonia; Assyria; the Hebrews; the Phoenicians; Greeks and Romans; the Persians; the Muslim Empire of the Arabs, and finally the Turks. They lasted a few hundred or thousand years and vanished; new races were evolved and later disappeared; religions rose and fell; men changed, adapting themselves to a changin world; but in the desert the nomad tribes lived on, the pattern of their lives but little changed over this enormous span of time.*

The Bedouin lived on almost nothing. What meager cash he did scrape together came from transporting goods across the desert or selling camels to those who did. Camels were the mainstay of the Bedouin. They were transport, commerce, and, when they died, food. Uniquely suited to the desert, a camel could go without water for five days in summer and twenty-five in winter. For its owners, it provided milk for food, dung for fuel, and urine for hair tonic or a bath to keep the flies away from the baby. The Bedouins survived the ravages of nature in tents woven by the women from the odorous hair of family goats. Meat from their sheep was the staple of their diet. To increase their life-sustaining herds, tribe raided tribe under sacred rules that spoke of medieval forms of fidelity and warfare.** They had nothing except a great sneering pride in who they were.

And then it all changed within a few short years. The Bedouins became victims of mechanization. After the First World War, the products of technology -- cars, airplanes, and radio -- undermined the Bedouins' advantage in the desert. No longer could a Bedouin tribe stage a raid against those who sought to control it and then disappear unpursued into the desert. No longer were the Bedouin tribes able to blackmail governments for their good behavior, levy tolls on travelers, or extract tributes from villages. But above all, mechanical transport destroyed the Bedouin economy. No longer was there any demand for their only cash crop, camels. Yet the Bedouins still survive. Continuing to live in tightly knit grouips of family and tribe, they drift in and out of Saudi Arabia's towns and cities, an object of public scorn.

For centuries in hundreds of towns such as al-Hotghat, the mud-walled settlement in Wadi Hanifa, the town Arabs were traders whose only contact with the Bedouins was in pursuit of commerce. In the coffee houses, there was endless ridicule of the Bedouin for everything he did, including the way he prayed. Yet the emotional intensity of the desert nomad irrefutably imposed its ideals on the towns. Urbanized Saudis look back on the Bedouin and endow him with almost superhuman traits that transform him into an idealized giant. But at the same time, Saudis of the city, especially the young and educated, delight in poking fun at the Bedouin, especially in the presence of a Westerner, and calim that they themselves never step foot outside the limits of the city. In the age of petroleum, the Bedouin is both the archetypal hero and comic buffoon of Saudi society. This conflicting set of attitudes, the Bedouin as hero and the Bedouin as fool, is another of the many conflicts within the Saudi psyche. Psychologically, the Bedouin represents to the present-day Saudi what the Western cowboy folk hero represents to an American. And like Americans, the Saudis have created from the Bedouin, idealized as a desert warrior, a powerful prototype that influences their value system and their patterns of behavior. No matter how much the various geographic regions of Saudi Arabia may differ or how far a Saudi is removed from the desert, the Bedouin ethos is the bedrock of the culture.

Just how many Bedouins are left in Saudi Arabia is an open question. A study done in the early 1980s suggested that perhaps 5 percent of the Saudi population remains wholly nomadic. But this figure is grossly misleading. A Bedouin can no longer be defined by a nomadic lifestyle. The demarcation line between the sedentary and the nomadic population is fluid, for the Bedouins themselves can be nomadic, seminomadic, or settled. It is the strength of the Bedouin mentality that is important for the classification of a Saudi as Bedouin or a town Arab rather than the way he lives. Under this critierion, the Bedouin constitute a significant part of the Saudi population.

How well have the Bedouins adjusted to the age of development in Saudi Arabia? There are Bedouins working in the oil fields, in business, and in the bureaucracy, and there are Bedouins still herding camels. There are Bedouins living in the heart of Riyadh and there are Bedouins still living in tents. Most Western academicians claim that the Bedouins have not adapted well to modernization, are trapped between their traditional past and the unknown future, and survive economically on government handouts. On one level all this is true. The Bedouins have been deeply affected by modernization. There is an ongoing struggle to merge the material benefits of modernization with the Bedouins' traditional lifestyle. Although they travel by plane now, the Bedouins still have a nomadic attitude about the amount and kinds of luggage they carry. When a Bedouin gets on an airplane, he checks battered suitcases, cardboard boxes, and his bedroll. As compartment luggage, he carries a cloth sack filled with food and his portable cooking stove.

For those Bedouins who still choose to live in tents, the clutter of development has moved into their camps. Before the oil boom, a nomadic family's spartan belongings consisted of coffee pots, cooking utensils, some rugs on which to sleep, and a few articles of extra clothing. The Bedouin family now has sewing machines, radios, insulated coolers, aluminum cots, and garishly painted tin trunks imported from Yemen. Abandoned campsites are no longer marked by the blackened stones of the campfire but are littered with punctured tires, empty oil drums, plastic bags, and rusting tin cans.

But on another level, the Bedouin psyche is less torn by development than that of the town Arabs. The Bedouins are so secure in their perception of themselves that they have an amazing ability to accept the things they choose from development and reject the rest. Every day I saw Bedouins manipulate their environment to suit their desires. A graphic example of this occurred along one of the valleys west of Riyadh. As we crested a rise on the roadless desert, Dan was forced to swerve our NIssan Patrol sharply left to avoid a dump truck creeping up the other side. Below, an army of trucks and heavy earth-moving equipment was loudly chewing at the desert floor between massive steel towers that would carry high power lines to villages throughout the valley. In the midst of all this construction activity, a lone figure stood serenely. It was a Bedouin, his leathery feet stuck in traditional sandals, his ragged gutra dropping down the back of his loose, soiled thobe, his staff clutched in his horny hand. Oblivious to the noise around him, he stood watch over his flock of Nejdi sheep, pulling at the spotty vegetation that had survived the onslaught of progress.

Of all the Saudis, the Bedouins are the least willing to interact with Westerners. There was seldom any banter between Bedouins and Westerners in the souqs, and Bedouin camps in the desert were armed fortresses closed to outsiders. Yet even if the Bedouins refused to accept foreigners, they did accept the most advanced medical treatment as a matter of course. One of the most interest aspects of being associated with the tertiary care center for Saudi Arabia was seeing the cross-section of people who came through the hospital. Every day I could observe the Bedouins interacting with modernization on the most personal level. I often saw veiled women, their hands patterned and painted with henna, abaayas covering their loudly striped polyester dresses, squatting outside the door of the x-ray department, waiting for a CT scan. But it was the time I spent in an isolated Bedouin camp to celebrate a tribal member's recovery from a kidney transplant that confirmed in my mind that the Bedouins have emotionally survived the oil boom better than is generally acknowledged.

It was seven o'clock in the morning when those of us invited to the camp excitedly gathered at the gate of the hospital. All of us realized that this was special, for few Westerners ever had the opportunity to enter a Bedouin camp. Mohammed, our guide, arrived in a new Chevrolet Caprice, which he probably had purchased with a government grant to dig a well or with a bonus from the National Guard, where he served as a part-time soldier. With him in the lead, our little caravan proceeded north out of Riyadh, through Darma, northwest into the province of Gasim, on through obscure towns and settlements, and out into the high northern desert. After four hours, the Chevrolet abruptly turned off the road, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and bounced across the rough terrain. As we crested a sandy incline, the camp spread out before us. A long, black goat-hair tent open in the front, through which goats were wandering in and out, stood at the center. In front a campfire burned, warming the traditional coffee pot. Scattered across the camp area was a collection of Toyota and Datsun pickups and a square canvas tent. As we pulled to a stop, old and young men, some with ammunition belts strapped across their chests, veiled women, and a multitude of children tumbled out of the tents to greet us. The men of our party were escorted toward the big tent while we women were separated out and taken to the smaller tent. There we were entertained by the camp women and all the children. In the ritual of hospitality, a small handleless cup of pale green coffee spiced with cardamon was thrust in my hand as soon as I was seated on a machine-made Oriental rug imported from Bulgaria. A boy of about four, thick yellow mucous running from his nose, shly reacahed into an aluminum tin buzzing with flies and pulled out a sticky date, which he thrust at me in his dirty hand. I gingerly took the date, passed its sand-coated skin across my lips, and chewed its sweet meat. I was intensely curious about life in the camp. From where I sat I was able to look out through a slit where the sides of the tent joined. Directly in my life of vision was the men's tent. Through its open front, I saw the men sitting in a circle while a young man in his late teens moved from one to the other poruing coffee from an obviously new brass pot of the kind the Saudis imported in great quantities from Pakistan. Leaping out of this montage was a roll of paper towels imported directly from the West, which dangled from the side of the tent on a strand of rope.

By midafternoon, the lamb roasting in an oven made from an oil drum buried in the sand was done. The men lifted the meat up on heavy metal skewers and laid it on a metal tray that was at least two feet in diameter. Dining was reserved for the guests. When we were joined by the Western men, the Bedouin women disappeared. With great ceremony, our hosts set down before us a great steaming tray of lamb and rice. Only the choicest pieces of meat were presented. There were tender neck joints and large chunks of the leg, and lying on top of the wrinkled stomach with its fuzzlike villi was the skull with the brain encased. Loaves of flat Arabic bread were handed around, which we used to scoop up the rice and lamb from the communal plate. It was one of the best meals I have ever eaten. When we finished, the tray was removed and taken to the Bedouin men in the main tent. When they finished, their scraps went to the women.

The Bedouin women reentered the guest tent carrying piles of quilts and mattresses made from cotton wadding, which they rolled out on the ground so we could rest. With the goats temporarily shooed away, I reclined on a square bolster pillow and talked to the women hidden behind their veils. I asked the wife of the transplant patient how her husband happened to know about the availability of transplant surgery. obviously puzzled about my lack of knowledge of basic facts, she said, "From his brother. He had a transplant at the Military Hospital last year." Sitting in that tent, looking out on the patient, his brother who had donated the kidney, and the young, brihgt, highly trained Western surgeon who was comfortably talking with them, I thought that out of the boom decade the Bedouins may have survived the best. Perhaps it is because in the tumultuous days of Saudi Arabia's awakening to the outside world, the Bedouins never doubted their superiority. When the Westerners came with their machines and their different way of life, the Bedouin was able to gather in a share of the new consumer goods purchased with government money. He could choose to send his sons to school and on into the modern economy, or he could choose, without shame, to remain what he had always been - a Bedouin,

Clustered in family or tribe, the Bedouins refuse to surrender to outside authority. Their support can be bought but their loyalty is achored in the family. In the past, each desert family was alone, separated from the rest of society by the sparseness of the vegetation needed to support the animals on which their very lives depended. From this isolation in family units there developed over many centuries an intense feeling that an individual had no protection beyond that of the family. Of the various values the Bedouins have bestowed on modern Saudi Arabia, the primacy of the family is among the most important.

Saudis live in large extended families. It is one of their significant differences from Western culture that, for the Saudis, the concept of individuality is absent. A Saudi seems himself in the context of his family and, to a lesser degree, the tribe. His duty is never to himself but to the group. Within the family, there is a strong sense of patrilineal descent, for a man is considered to be a descendant only of his father and his paternal grandfather but never his mother or maternal grandfather. He belongs only to his father's group, which claims his entire, undivided loyalty. This is why the most sought-after marriages are first cousin marriages between children of brothers. By sharing the same grandfather, the all-important group solidarity is ensured.

*Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands
** The system of chivalry is believed by some to have been carried to Europe from the Arabs during the Crusades.

The Books: "The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror" (Bernard Lewis)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Next book on the shelf is The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis. I think this began as a lengthy article in The Atlantic or something like that - I remember reading part of it as an article, and he expanded it into a book. Actually, my favorite of all of Lewis' book is a book called Middle East Mosaic - and I'm not including an excerpt from it because - he didn't really WRITE it. It's more that he COMPILED it. A huge book - filled with quotes throughout history about different aspects of the Muslim world. Travelers from the Middle Ages, emissaries from Muslim lands describing things in letters, first impressions, but also: poetry, snippets from recipe books, songs, legends ... It's a GREAT compilation - not the sort of thing to read cover to cover, but still: really fun, and thought-provoking. I love that first-hand stuff. It's a Middle Eastern Commonplace Book. Love it.

But anyway, on to excerpt from Crisis of Islam.

From The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis.

The victories of Saladin and his capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 have long been and are today a source of inspiration to Arab leaders. Saddam Hussein refers frequently to two previous rulers of Iraq whom he claims as predecessors in his mission -- Saladin, who ended the Western menace of his day by defeating and evicting the Crusaders, and Nebuchadnezzar, who dealt expeditiously and conclusively with the Zionist problem. On October 8, 2002, the prime minster of France, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in a speech to the French National Assembly, told how Saladin was able "to defeat the Crusaders in Galilee and liberate Jerusalem." This interesting use of the word liberate by a French prime minister to describe Saladin's capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders may be a reflection of present-day realignments or, alternatively, a case of extreme political correctness. In some other countries this formulation might be ascribed to ignorance of history, but surely not in France.

Even in Christian Europe, Saladin was justly celebrated and admired for his chivalrous and generous treatment of his defeated enemies. This treatment, however, did not extend to Reynald of Chatillon. The great Arab historian Ibn al-Athir explains the circumstances. "Twice, [said Saladin,] I had made a vow to kill him if I had him in my hands, once when he tried to march on Mecca and Medina, and again when he treacherously captured the caravan [bound for the Hijaz]." After Saladin's great victory, when many of the Crusader princes and chieftains were taken captive and later released, he separated Reynald of Chatillon from the rest, and killed and beheaded him with his own hands.

After the success of the jihad and the recapture of Jerusalem, Saldin and his successors seem to have lost interest in the city, and in 1229 one of them even ceded Jerusalem to the emperor Frederick II as part of a general compromise agreement between the Muslim ruler and the Crusaders. It was retaken in 1244, after the Crusaders tried to make it a purely Christian city. After a long period of relative obscurity, interest in the city was reawakened in the nineteenth century, first by the quarrels of the European powers over the custody of the Christian holy places, and then by the new Jewish immigration.

The same period saw a first awakening of interest among Muslims in the Crusades, which had aroused remarkably little concern at the time they occurred. The vast and rich Arabic historiography of the period duly records the Crusaders' arrival, their battles, and the states that they established but shows little or no awareness of the nature and purposes of their venture. The word Crusade and Crusader do not even occur in the Arabic historiography of the time, in which the Crusaders are referred to as the infidels, the Christians, or more frequently, the Franks, a general term for Catholic -- and later also Protestant -- European Christians, to distinguish them from their Orthodox and Eastern coreligionists. Awareness of the Crusades as a distinct historical phenomenon dates from the nineteenth century, and the translation of European books on history. Since then, there is a new perception of the Crusades as an early prototype of the expansion of European imperialism into the Islamic world. A more accurate description would present them as a long-delayed, very limited, and finally ineffectual response to the jihad. The Crusades ended in failure and defeat, and were soon forgotten in the lands of Islam, but later European efforst to resist and reverse the Mulsim advance into Christendom were more successful, and initiated what became a series of painful defeats on the frontiers of the Islamic world.

Under the medieval Arab caliphate, and again under the Persian and Turkish dynasties, the empire of Islam was the richest, most powerful, most creative, most enlightened region in the world, and for most of the Middle Ages, Christendom was on the defensive. In the fifteenth century, the Christian counterattack expanded. The Tatars were expelled from Russia, and the Moors from Spain. But in southeastern Europe, where the Ottoman sultan confronted first the Byzantine and then the Holy Roman emperor, Muslim power prevailed, and these other setbacks were seen as minor and peripheral. As late as the seventeenth century, Turkish pashas still ruled in Budapest and Belgrade, Turkish armies were besieging Vienna, and Barbary corsairs were raiding both shipping and seashores as far away as England, Ireland, and, on occasion, even Madeira and Iceland. The corsairs were greatly helped in their work by Europeans who, for one reason or another, settled in North Africa and showed them how to build, man, and operate oceangoing vessels in the North Sea and even in the Atlantic. This phase did not last very long.

Then came the great change. The second Turkish siege of Vienna, in 1683, ended in total failure followed by headlong retreat -- an entirely new experience for the Ottoman armies. This defeat, suffered by what was then the major military power of the Muslim world, gave rise to a new debate, which in a sense has been going on ever since. The argument began among the Ottoman military, political, and later intellectual elite as a discussion of two questions. Why had the once ever-victorious Ottoman armies been vanquished by the despised Christian enemy? And how could they restore their previous dominance? In time the debate spread from the elites to wider circles, from Turkey to many other countries, and dealt with an ever-widening range of issues.

There was good reason for concern. Defeat followed defeat, and Christian European forces, having liberated their own lands, pursued their former invaders whence they had come in Asia and Africa. Even small European powers such as Holland and Portugal were able to build vast empires in the East and to establish a dominant role in trade. In 1593 an Ottoman official who also served as a chronicler of current events, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English ambassador. He does not appear to have been much interested in the ambassador, but he was much struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled: "A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul," he wrote. "It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried eighty-three guns besides other weapons ... It was a wonder of the age, the like of which has not been seen or recorded." Another source of wonderment was the sovereign who sent the ambassador. "The ruler of the island of England is a woman who governs her inherited realm ... with complete power."

The Books: "What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East" (Bernard Lewis)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf.

Next book on the shelf is What Went Wrong? : The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis. Oh boy. The thought police are gonna be all over me for this one!! hahaha

Anyway, Bernard Lewis has been out there, writing books on Islam and the Muslim world for many years - and he, of course, catapulted to national prominence (on a wider more populist level) following September 11, when his expertise was sorely needed. The whole "Why are these people so mad???" question is addressed, over and over and over again, in this book. It's a quick read, not too in-depth - it is meant to address a wide populace- not a select group of scholars. Muslim History 101. A very good quick reference book for the shelves. It's also good because Lewis has great affection for his topic - which gives his tone and his points a certain weight. He is truly sad it has come to this. But he's not surprised. Because of the history involved.

I highly recommend this book.

From What Went Wrong? : The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis.

At the peak of Islamic power, there was only one civilization that was comparable in the level, quality, and variety of achievement; that was of course China. But Chinese civilization remained essentially local, limited to one region, East Asia, and to one racial group. It was exported to some degree, but only to neighboring and kindred peoples. Islam in contrast created a world civilization, polyethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental.

For centuries the world view and self-view of Muslims seemed well grounded. Islam represented the greatest military power on earth -- its armies, at the very same time, were invading Europe and Africa, India and China. It was the foremost economic power in the world, trading in a wide range of commodities through a far-flung network of commerce and communications in Asia, Europe, and Africa; importing slaves and gold from Africa, slaves and wool from Europe, and exchanging a variety of foodstuffs, materials, and manufactures with the civilized countries of Asia. It had achieved the highest level so far in human history in the arts and sciences of civilization. Inheriting the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece and of Persia, it added to them several important innovations from outside, such as the use and manufacture of paper from China and decimal positional numbering from India. It is difficult to imagine modern literature or science without the one or the other. It was in the Islamic Middle East that Indian numbers were for the first time incorporated in the inherited body of mathematical learning. From the Middle East they were transmitted to the West, where they are still known as Arabic numerals, honoring not those who invented them but those who first brought them to Europe. To this rich inheritance scholars and scientists in the Islamic world added an immensely important contribution through their own observations, experiments, and ideas. In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world, relying on Arabic versions even for many otherwise unknown Greek works.

And then, suddenly, the relationship changed. Even before the Renaissance, Europeans were beginning to make significant progress in the civilized arts. With the advent of the New Learning, they advanced by leaps and bounds, leaving the scientific and technological and eventually the cultural heritage of the Islamic world far behind them.

The Muslims for a long time remained unaware of this. The great translation movement that centuries earlier had brought many Greek, Persian, and Syriac works wihtin the purview of Muslim and other Arabic readers had come to an end, and the new scientific literature of Europe was almost totally unknown to them. Until the late eighteenth century, only one medical book was translated into a Middle Eastern language -- a sixteenth century treatise on syphilis, presented to Sultan Mehmed IV in Turkish 1655. Both the choice and the date are significant. This disease, reputedly of American origin, had come to the Islamic world, from Europe and is indeed still known in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and other languages as "the Frankish disease". Obviously, it seemed both appropriate and legitimate to adopt a Frankish remedy for a Frankish disease. Apart from that, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the technological revolution passed virtually unnoticed in the lands of Islam, where they were still inclined to dismiss the denizens of the lands beyond the Western frontier as benighted barbarians, much inferior even to the more sophisticated Asian infidels to the east. These had useful skills and devices to impart; the Europeans had neither. It was a judgment that had for long been reasonably accurate. It was becoming dangerously out of date.

The Books: "China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power " (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf.

Oh, and a quick note: I get emails sometimes, angry emails, about the books I have on my shelf. My latest email was from an angry Muslim woman who wrote to tell me that The Hidden Lives of Muslim Women is a bad book, hated by Muslim women, and Geraldine Brooks is hated by Muslims. I am aware of this already - and in posting excerpts from my books, it is not an implicit endorsement of the ideas therein. The Muslim woman was extremely polite, and respectful - it was actually a nice email - but it made me do a double-take. I didn't write the books. I own Mein Kampf, for example. If you want to understand the rise of Nazism, and I do, then you kinda need to have that book. So don't bitch at me about the books I have on my shelves. I am glad for any discussion - but I own tons of books that would probably offend SOMEONE and ... I don't care. They're my bookshelves. This daily-excerpt thing is a fun exercise for me - and lots of readers seem to get a lot out of it. I do it in a ROTE way, because that makes it funner for me and less editorial. By that I mean, I'm not looking at my shelf and thinking: "Hmmm, what book is the best one here? What book do I like best?" No. For this daily-excerpt thing I just go book to book to book - and they're mainly in alphabetical order. I skip the books I haven't read yet. Again, any discussions of these books is awesome - that's the whole point - I have an incredible group of readers, who are all well-read, with different historical perspectives, who come from this or that walk of life - they all bring cool stuff to the table. I got an angry email from some frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic (funny how the people who email me like this rarely comment on the site - never heard of this dude before in my life) about my love of Clifford Odets, and how could I post excerpts from his plays WITHOUT denouncing his Communist views. This guy wanted me to say: "Clifford Odets, while I love his plays, had views I consider abhorrent". It offended him that I focused only on Odets' language, and plays. He was ITCHING to add text to my own post - he was TWITCHING through the keyboard with his own agitation - I could feel him thinking: "Why didn't she mention that he was a Communist?? Why is she misleading people?" Uhm - well. Many thoughts. Get your own blog is the first thought. Second of all: if, by reading the Odets-ian excerpts, people get interested in him - then they can go look him up and see what he was all about. I'm not trying to be encyclopedic here. Third of all: this is an exercise for me. For me, the appeal of Odets is his language (nobody better - literally) - his dialogue - and his place in American theatrical history. I am not trying to be all-inclusive here. I certainly don't like the thought that I might offend someone, but - I don't care, essentially. Especially with something like THIS - a daily book excerpt - which is just an interesting and invigorating personal exercise for me.

The comments these book excerpts have gotten have been WONDERFUL. I love the discussions that come up. But just a reminder: I did not write these books. I do not endorse many of the views in my books. But - DUH - I like history. I like to learn what people say about it, from all sides. And there you have it!!

Next book on the shelf is China Wakes : The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power , by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn. Married, both New York Times reporters - they won Pulitzers for their reporting during the Tiananman Square situation - I remember their articles from that time. Every day - you just had to open the paper (uhm - no cable news, of course!!) - and see if there were any new developments. It was gripping, and awful - to watch it all unfold. All of their articles are included in this book.

Anyway - they have now written, as a team, a couple of books on China - and this is one of them. It's what you would call a "sweeping" book - each chapter takes on a different aspect - Communism, capitalism, the peasants, the intellectual life, yadda yadda. It's good. I actually would like to read a nice big book solely about the Cultural Revolution in China - if anyone has any suggestions, please leave them in the comments. That would be great!

Sheryl Wudunn, a Chinese-American, only one generation removed from China - had quite an experience going back. She went back to her family's village - actually, she had never been there before - it was a pilgrimage for her, almost - she had heard about it, and then she traveled to see it. To meet her relatives still there, etc. I'm going to post an excerpt from that chapter.

From China Wakes : The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power , by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.

As I stood beside my second cousin in Shun Shui, I felt an abyss between us that cut deeper than our bloodline. As I watched him and his wife and his sons, I rested a hand on my smooth black leather bag, which all of a sudden seemed to boast of opulence. I had gone to private schools on the East Coast and taken jazz dance and French lessons. My cousin had dropped out of school before he learned to write. I had grown up shopping in Bloomingdale's and eating bagels. He had never even been to the provincial capital of Guangzhou. And now I carried $150 -- or four months' worth of his salary -- in my wallet. When I departed, I left half of my money with Ng Lap-ting, the village chief: "Use it toward buying a television for the village," I urged. And I left the other half with my relatives, stuffing it hurriedly into my second cousin's hand.

I wasn't the only one leaving piles of cash behind in China. Like my grandfather, millions of Chinese had forsaken their homeland from the seventeenth century on, fleeing poverty and seeking a better life. This diaspora embraces more than 50 million ethnic Chinese, now living in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia -- and, of course, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. While Chinese in China remained mired in poverty, those abroad became successful traders and often did better than the local people. That's why -- at least until the Deng era -- Chinese always seemed far more dynamic when you encountered them in Jakarta or Singapore than when you visited Shanghai. Chinese ethnic minorities play a hugely disproportionate role in the business communities of Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Chinese dominate such dynamos as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapoer.

It has always struck me as odd that many nationalities should thrive abroad while seeming listless at home. India is a laggard, yet Indians dominate the Fijian economy. Tamils are far more impressive abroad in Sri Lanka than at home in Tamil Nadu. Perhaps it has to do in part with the immigrant mentality lighting a fire under people in their new homes. Perhaps they are bound at home by the burdens of caste and culture, finding themselves free only when they are far away. And perhaps it is self-selection: The risk takers are those who flee their homelands to work on plantations in Fiji, to work in construction in Sri Lanka -- or to open a Mandarin Restaurant in Manhattan.

In any case, the overseas Chinese have been a godsend to China. Beginning in the 1970s, they shuffled in through the door when other foreigners demurred; they traveled by rickety car and rackety bus through the rice paddies to see their laojia and invest in local factories; they brought in radios and camera and, over banquets of stir-fried pig stomach and sea urchin, told about life in the world beyond; they offered investment, expertise, modern manufacturing techniques, and a great desire to do business with their homeland. Today, they run all over China, their arms overflowing with gifts and hong bao -- red envelopes containing money -- for their relatives. They have become role models for the Chinese.

The Chinese diaspora is one reason China has been a great deal more successful than the European alumni of the Communist Bloc. How many overseas Bulgarian businessmen are there abroad to set up factories in their hometowns? No other country has had remotely as much support from compatriots as China. Some three-fourths of foreign investment in China has come from ethnic Chinese abroad, mostly in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The biggest single foreign investor in China is a Thai Chinese who runs an agribusiness empire. As labor costs soared in Southeast Asia, many overseas Chinese businessmen moved their entire assembly lines or their back offices into their ancestral hometowns in China.

The overseas Chinese brought other baggage with them as well. They lugged their Scandinavian furniture, their Persian carpets, their long-haired cats, their love of Western books and newspapers, and a large basket of Western values. They even brought their American husbands! Maybe it wasn't such a pity after all that the poor or the persecuted fled China, for they always seemed to return -- often as foreign citizens -- to the motherland, whether to tour, to live, to invest, or to die. And how intoxicating it was for many local Chinese to see this, and how puzzling! Were these overseas Chinese really Chinese? Or some weird hybrid? But the Chinese liked what they saw. For a time the top pop singer in China was Fei Xiang, the blue-eyed, six-foot-tall son of a Taiwan woman and an American father. Anything foreign had cachet. Companies began changing their names to sound foreign, as if they were translated from English, even if they weren't. Chinese began spelling their names in the Taiwan and Hong Kong way, like Chang instead of Zhang and Chow instead of Zhao. People gave themselves English names (sometimes with disastrous results, as when Miss Chow named herself Kitt). And these newly styled Chinese began asking their government for more. As the economy soared and the confidence of economists and intellectuals rose in the late 1980s, there was a strange sense, a wistful hope, that China was transforming into a new country, one more like the overseas Chinese communities abroad.

But it was going to be a battle, a tug-of-war for the soul of the new China. The revolutionary generation was not amenable to sweeping change, and to them this new orientation was tantamount to abandoning the nation's pride. The growing dependence on the West was too much for many of the old cadres, whose fathers and forefathers had spent their lives fighting off the foreigners. China's emperors, from Qianlong to Mao, had struggled to keep China an economic island unto itself, shunning Western help and advice.

"Our Celestial Emperor possesses all things in prolific abundance," Emperor Qianlong declared to Lord Macartney in 1793, explaining China's refusal to trade with the West. Ever since, Chinese have agonized over the merits of contact with the West. Some of them, like Mao, boasted of self-reliance, and those who took up his mantle wanted to believe that China could advance on its own, with limited foreign assistance. They were embarrassed, humiliated, by their country's mood. They disparagingly called it chongyang meiwai -- worshiping the West and fawning on foreigners.

I wasn't the only one with an identity crisis: China was in the midst of one, too. Would it be traditional or Western? Would it maintain strict controls on society or be bold enough to liberalize? Would it allow people to speak out more openly, perhaps even to criticize the emperor and his retinue? These questions bubbled in the atmosphere during the months before the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. The government's unequivocal answer came soon enough.

The Books: "The Spirit of Prague" (Ivan Klima)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on the shelf is a collection of essays by Czech writer Ivan Klima - it's called The Spirit of Prague . Klima has seen it all - he was in Terezin concentration camp as a child, he went though the Stalinist totalitarianism afterwards in his home country - he's a novelist - (his book Judge on Trial is what turned me on to him) and lived through YEARS of repression of even being able to work. Because you know who are most frightening to totalitarian despots? The writers. Nothing more dangerous than the printed word. Nothing more dangerous than a well-timed book, or painting, or film that cuts straight through all the bullshit propaganda. No, no, no, we can't have THAT! Klima was the editor of Czechoslovakia's most prominent literary magazine - his experience of the "Prague Spring" was, like most of his countrymen, shattering. Devastating. Most of these essays were written in the 1989-1991 period - during and following "the Velvet Revolution" (I love that they called it that) - it was a time of great hope, but also - great sadness and uncertainty. Vaclav Havel's "moral contamination" speech in early 1990 captures that vibe perfectly. Yes, whoo-hoo, they were now "free" - but they had to deal with all they had lost, through the repression, and also how they the citizens were partly responsible for all of it. (Havel's speech, to me, is one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century. Never heard anything like it before in MY life!! Amazing.)

I'm going to post a bit from Klima's essay called "Culture vs. Totalitarianism". In it, he describes the cultural opposition to the regime in Czechoslovakia. This is one of the reasons why I am so, shall we say, 'touchy' towards those who wish that artists would just shut up about things outside of their realm, don't try to be important, or relevant ... just juggle over in the corner and entertain me. I'm touchy about it not just for my own personal reasons and my own life-choices, but because in my mind I'm thinking: Careful what you wish for. Careful what you wish for.

I love Czech writers - and Havel is one of my idols - so it was an easy leap over to Klima. I checked out his novel first and then moved on to his non-fiction. He's fantastic - if you haven't read him, I hope you give him a try.

From The Spirit of Prague .

Totalitarianism correctly understood the threat this cultural resistance posed, but the nature of that power ruled out any accommodation or compromise. It continued to battle against literature. It raided private flats and detained people who had gathered there to listen to lectures or the reading of a play or something as innocent as lyric poetry. It confiscated manuscripts from poets, prose writers and philosophers, both local and translated works, just as it did documents from Charter 77. From time to time it held trials in which judgement was passed on those who copied texts or organized other kinds of cultural activitiy. Because these people were clearly innocent, even according to the laws in force, the outcome of these trials were the opposite of what the authorities intended. They were meant to intimidate, but they succeeded only in unmasking power, in revealing it for the unprincipled, prejudiced and philistine force it was. This merely stiffened people's resistance. Early samizdat publications came out in tiny editions of tens of copies; by the eighties, books were being reproduced in many workshops, the technology of reproduction was modernized, and the number of titles mushroomed. (The literary samizdat enterprise Padlock Editions published three hundred titles.) In the seventies, there were practically no samizdat cultural journals; by the eighties, there were more than a hundred unofficial magazines. (At the same time, there were only five official magazines dealing with culture.)

Sasmizdat literature was only one of the ways in which the repressed culture expressed itself. There were seminars in philosophy, and lecture series were held on different areas of the humanities. Young people frequently tried to distance themselves entirely from the pseudo-culture offered to them by the authorities. They founded small theatres, and from the seventies on, the most authentic expression of their relationship to the ruling system was the protest song. Singers who were closest to them in age and attitude became their idols. The authorities reacted predictably, and one generation of protest singers was essentially driven into exile, but as usual, the results were the opposite of what was intended.

By the late eighties, the international situation was undoubtedly influential. Those who represented power and those who represented culture were clearly squared off against each other. Several events also sharpened the conflict between the authorities and those who were trying to extricate themselves from their toils. The authorities frequently used police brutality to break up memorial assemblies to commemorate the country's national holiday or the memory of Jan Palach, a student who had set fire to himself, and died, in protest against the Soviet invasion. Those who came to pay their respects to a person who symbolized the possibility of individual protest taken to its furthest extreme became the object of a violent attack by special units who used truncheons, water-cannons, and tear-gas. People, mostly the young, decided not to give way to violence. For five consecutive days the peaceful assemblies were repeated, and on four occasions the police used violence to break them up. Several people were arrested, Vaclav Havel among them. During these events, which aroused the emotions of the whole country, the cruel truth about power was publicly revealed for the first time. At this critical juncture, the government could not find a single person with sufficient authority to address the nation. No one was willing to give public support to the regime, but many could be found to protest against police brutality, against imprisoning the innocent. Among the protestors were actors, filmmakers, and writers who, until then, the regime had believed to be "on its side".

In this critical situation, the authorities -- and it is hard to say whether this was out of stupidity or desperation or arrogance, or the awareness that they were indeed indelibly tarnished -- refused all invitations by the cultural opposition to take part in a dialogue. The deep chasm between totalitarian power and all the "shaken", to use Patocka's term, became unbridgeable. It was clear that any further error, any further act of arrogance, might be fatal.

What happened in November 1989 is well known. As an eyewitness and a participant, I wish to emphasize that this revolution, which really was the outcome of a clash between culture and pwoer, was the most non-violent revolution imaginable. In the mass meetings attended by up to three-quarters of a million people, no one was hurt, not a window was broken, not a car damaged. Many of the tens of thousands of pamphlets that flooded Prague and other cities and towns urged people to peaceful, tolerant action; not one called for violence. For those who still believe in the power of culture, the power of words, of good and of love, and their dominance over violence, who believe that neither the poet nor Archimedes, in their struggle against the man in uniform, are beaten before they begin, the Prague revolution must have been an inspiration.

The Books: "Imperium" (Ryszard Kapuscinski)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is the last Ryszard Kapuscinski book I have - actually, I think that's it for Ryzsard - at least in English translation - To anyone who is interested in Communism (the rise and fall of), totalitarian regimes and how they work, the Caucasus, Central Asia - (meaning all the things I'm interested in!!) then I can't recommend this book highly enough. I absolutely LOVE it. It's called Imperium - I'm sure I've posted excerpts from it before. The structure of the book is really interesting. Kapuscinski starts with a description of the Russians rolling into his Polish town in 1939 and what that was like - he was 8 or something like that. This was his first encounter with "the Imperium". In 1958, as a journalist, he takes the Trans-Siberian Express - and that's the second section of the book - his confrontation with the true vastness of the Imperium. In 1967 he traveled down through the Caucasus (called "the South") and that's the third section of the book. The last section is the longest one in the book - and it is reporting from the years 1989 to 1991. Kapuscinski tried to be literally everywhere at once - because events were happening so quickly, revolutions breaking out, things falling apart - it was hard to tell where the center was.

Anyway - it's a wonderful book and might be my favorite of Kapuscinski's. I know I've FORCED a couple of people to read it - hahahaha - but I knew they'd like it!

I knew immediately what excerpt I wanted to put here. The one about Armenia.

From Imperium

In Matenadaran one can see the ancient books of the Armenians. To me they are doubly inaccessible: they lie in cabinets behind glass, and I do not know how to read them. I ask Vanik if he understands them. Yes and no, for he can read the letters but cannot discern the meaning. The alphabet has remained the same for fifteen centuries, but the language has changed. The Armenian walks into Matenadaran like a Muslim into Mecca. It is the end of his pilgrimage; he is moved, overwhelmed. In Armenian history, the book was the national relic. The comrade who is our guide (so beautiful!) says in a hushed voice that many of the manuscripts that we see were saved at the cost of human life. There are pages stained with blood here. There are books that for years lay hidden in the ground, in the crevices of rocks. Armenians buried them in the same way defeated armies bury their banners. They were recovered without difficulty: information about their hiding places had been handed down from generation to generation.

A nation that does not have a state seeks salvation in symbols. The protection of the symbol is as important to it as the protection of borders is to other states. The cult of the symbol is an act of patriotism. Not that the Armenians never had a state. They had one, but it was destroyed in antiquity. It was then reborn in the ninth century, and after 160 years it perished -- in that earlier form -- forever. It is not just a question of statehood. For at least two thousand years Armenians were in danger of complete extermination. They were sitll threatened with it as recently as this century, right up until 1920.

The history of Armenians is measured in millennia. We are in that part of the world that is customarily called the cradle of civilization. We are moving among the oldest traces of man's existence. In the valley of the Razdan River, near Yerevan, stone tools from half a million years ago have been unearthed. The first mention of Armenia is four thousand years old, but by then, as the stone inscription proclaims, there had already existed on Armenian territory "sixty empires" and "hundreds of cities". Armenia therefore is the contemporary of the world's oldest civilizations. Babylon and Assyria were its neighbors. The biblical rivers Tigris and Euphrates have their sources within its borders.

Armenians have a measure of time different from ours. They experienced their first partition 1,500 years ago. Their renaissance occurred in the fourth century of our era. They accepted Christianity seven centuries earlier than we. Ten centuries before us they started to write in their own language. But Armenia shared with ancient Egypt, Sumer, and Byzantium a drama typical of this part of the world -- its essence was a lack of historical continuity, that sudden appearance of empty chapters in the history book of one's own state.

A magnificent ascent, and then a dispiriting fall.

Gradually, the nations living in this cradle of mankind, having created great, monumental civilizations, as if exhausted by the superhuman effort, or perhaps even crushed by the immensity of what they had brought forth and no longer capable of further developing it, handed over the reins to younger peoples, bursting with energy and eager to live. Europe will come on the scene and, later, America.

The source of all of Armenia's misfortune was its disastrous geographic location. One has to look at the map, not from our vantage point, from the center of Europe, but from an entirely different place, from the south of Asia, the way those who sealed Armenia's fate looked at it. Historically, Armenia occupied the Armenian Highland. Periodically (and these periods lasted centuries) Armenia reached farther, was a state of three seas -- the Mediterranean, the Black, and the Caspian. But let us remain within the borders of the Highland. It is this area upon which the Armenians' historical memory draws. After the eleventh century, the Armenians never succeeded in rebuilding Armenia within those borders.

The map, looked at from the south of Asia, explains the tragedy of the Armenians. Fate could not have placed their country in a more unfortunate spot. In the south of the Highland it borders upon two of the past's most formidable powers -- Persia and Turkey. Let's add to that the Arabian caliphate. And even Byzantium. Four political colossi, ambitious, extremely expansionist, fanatical, voracious. And now -- what does the ruler of each of these four powers see when he looks at the map? He sees that if he takes Armenia, then his empire will be enclosed by an ideal natural border in the north. Because from the north the Armenian Highland is magnificently protected, guarded by two seas (the Black Sea and the Caspian) and by the gigantic barrier of the Caucasus. And the north is dangerous for Persia and for Turkey, for the Arabs and Byzantium. Because in those days from the north an unsubdued Mongolian fury loomed.

And so Armenia gives all the pashas and emperors sleepless nights. Each one of them would like his realm to have a nicely rounded border. So that in his realm, as in King Philip's, the sun should never set. A border that does not dissipate itself amid flatland, but which leans against a proper mountain, against the edge of the sea. The consequence of these ambitions is continued invasions of Armenia; someone is always conquering and destroying it, always subjugating it.

The Books: "The Shadow of the Sun" (Ryszard Kapuscinski)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is the latest Ryszard Kapuscinski book - it came out in 2001 - and it's called The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Kapuscinski described this book as the story of "a forty-year marriage" between himself and Africa. He arrived in Ghana in 1957 - this was the beginning of the end of colonial rule across the continent - and he traveled - reporting on the hopeful beginning of independence - independence! How exciting!! And of course we all know how most of that "independence" has worked out - and Kapuscinski has stayed in Africa, living there off and on for 40 years - reporting on the upheavals, the revolutions, the reversals ... This is his book of his 40 damn years in Africa. It's huge. Again, like most of his books - it is not a scholarly book. There is no bibliography. There are no footnotes. He writes his experiences, first-hand. There is also obviously a lot of on-the-ground reporting that gets done - he's a journalist, not a travelogue writer - but his style is not your regular journalist-in-the-field style. He has an entire chapter on when he got malaria and what malaria feels like. You read it and it's so vivid you think: "Uhm. Wow. Hope I never get THAT." But he also goes country to country ... honing in on one aspect to write about ... It's a sweeping accomplishment. Africa's feckin' huge, after all. It was really hard to pick an excerpt, I loved all of it ... but I've decided to excerpt from his amazing chapter on Idi Amin. It's a bit long but ... oh well. Read on if you like.

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

I once considered writing a book about Amin, because he is such a glaring example of the relation between crime and low culture. I was in Uganda many times, saw Amin more than once; I have a small library of books about him, and stacks of my own notes. He is the most well known dictator in the history of contemporary Africa and one of the most famous in the twentieth century the world over.

Amin belongs to a small ethnic group called the Kakwa, whose territory encroaches on three countries: Sudan, Uganda, and Zaire. The Kakwa do not know to which country they belong, although they view this question with indifference, preoccupied as they are with something else: how to survive despite the poverty and hunger that prevail in this remote region without roads, cities, electricity, and cultivatable land. Anyone with some initiative, wits, and luck runs as far away from here as possible. But not every direction is a propitious one. Whoever goes west will only worsen his circumstances, because he will stumble upon the thickest jungles of Zaire. Those setting off northward also err, because they will arrive at the sandy, rock-strewn threshold of the Sahara. Only the southerly direction holds promise: there the Kakwa will find the fertile lands of central Ugagnda, the lush and splendid garden of Africa.

It is there, after giving birth to her son, that Amin's mother makes her way, the infant on her back. She comes to the second-largest city (or, rather, town) in Uganda after Kampala -- Jinja. Like thousands of others at that time, and millions upon millions today, she arrives in the hope of surviving, in the hope that life here will be better. She has no skills, no contacts, and no money. But one can make a living in a variety of ways: through petty trade, brewing and selling beer, or operating a portable sidewalk eatery. Amin's mother has a pot and cooks millet in it. She sells portions on banana leaves. Her daily earnings? A serving of millet for herself and her son.

This woman, who made her way with her child from a poor village in the north to a town in the wealthier south, became part of the population that today constitutes Africa's biggest problem. It is composed of tens of millions who have abandoned the countryside and migrated to the monstrously swollen cities without securing adequate housing or employment. In Uganda they are called bayaye. You will notice them at once, because it is they who form the street crowds, so different from ones in Europe. In Europe, the man on the street is usually heading toward a definite goal. The crowd has a direction and a rhythm, which is frequently characterized by haste. In an African city, only some of the people behave this way. The others are not going anywhere: they have nowhere to go, and no reason to go there. They drift this way and that, sit in the shade, stare, nap. They have nothing to do. No one is expecting them. Most often, they are hungry. The slightest street spectacle -- a quarrel, a fight, the apprehension of a theif -- will instantly draw large numbers of them. For they are everwhere around here, idle, awaiting who knows what, living who knows how -- the gapers of the world.

The principal characteristic of their stance is rootlessness. They will not return to the countryside, and there is no place for them in the city. They endure. Somehow, they exist. Somehow: that is how best to describe their situation, its fragility, its uncertainty. Somehow one lives, somehow one sleeps, somehow, from time to time, one eats. This unreality and impermanence of existence cause the bayaye to feel himself in continuous danger, and so he is increasingly tormented by fear. His fear is amplified by his condition as a stranger, an unwanted immigrant from another culture, religion, language. A foreign, extraneous competitor for the contents of the cooking pot, which is empty anyway, and for work, of which there isn't any.

Amin is a typical bayaye.

He grows up in the streets of Jinja. The town housed a battalion of the British colonial army, the King's African Rifles. The model for this army was devised toward the end of the nineteenth century by General Lugard, one of the architects of the British Empire. It called for divisions composed of mercenaries recruited from tribes hostile toward the population on whose territory they were to be garrisoned: an occupying force, holding the locals on a tight rein. Lugard's ideal soldiers were young, well-built men from the Nilotic (Sudanese) populations, which distinguished themselves by their enthusiasm for warfare, their stamina, and their cruelty. They were called Nubians, a designation that in Uganda evoked a combination of distaste and fear. The officers and non-commissioned officers of this army, however, were for many years exclusively Englishmen. One day, one of them noticed a young African with a Herculean physique hanging around the barracks. It was Amin. He was quickly enlisted. For people like him -- without a job, without possibilities -- military service was like winning the lottery. He had barely four years of elementary schooling, but because he was deemed obedient and eager to anticipate the wishes of his commanders, he began advancing rapidly through the ranks. He also gained renown as a boxer, becoming the Ugandan heavyweight champion. During colonial times, the army was dispatched on countless expeditions of oppression: against the Mau Mau insurgents, against the warriors of the Turkana tribe, or against the independent people of the Karimojong. Amin distinguished himself in these campaigns: he organized ambushes and attacks, and was merciless toward his adversaries.

It is the fifties, and the era of independence is fast approaching. Africanization has arrived, even in the military. But the British and French officers want to remain in control for as long as possible. To prove that they are irreplaceable, they promote the third-rate from among their African subordinates, those not too quick, but obedient, transforming them in a single day from corporals and sergeants into colonels and generals. Bokassa in the Central African Republic, for exmaple, Soglo in Dahomey, Amin in Uganda.

When in the fall of 1962 Uganda becomes an independent state, Amin is already, because of promotions by the British, a general, and deputy commander of the army. He takes a look around him. Although he has high rank and position, he comes from the Kakwa, a small community and one, moreover, that is not regarded as native Ugandan. Meantime, the preponderance of the army comes from the Langi tribe, to which Prime Minister Milton Obote belongs, and from the related Acholi. The Langi and the Acholi treat the Kakwa superciliously, seeing them as benighted and backward. We are navigating here in the paranoid, obsessive realm of ethnic prejudice, hatred, and antipathy -- albeit an intra-Africa one: racism and chauvinism emerge not only along the most obvious divides, e.g., white versus black, but are equally stark, stubborn and implacable, perhaps even more so, among peoples of the same skin color. Indeed, most white who have died in the world have died at the hands not of blacks, but of other whites, and likewise the majority of black lives taken in the past century were taken by other blacks, not by white. And so it follows, for example, that on account of ethnic bigotry, no one in Uganda will care whether Mr. XY is wise, kind, and friendly, or the reverse, evil and loathsome; they will care only whether he is of the tribe of Bari, Toro, Busoga, or Nandi. This is the sole criterion by which he will be classified and evaluated.

For its first eight years of independence, Uglanda is ruled by Milton Obote, an extraordinarily conceited man, boastful and sure of himself. When it is exposed in the press that Amin has misappropriated the cash, gold, and ivory given him for safekeeping by anti-Mobutu guerrillas from Zaire, Obote summons Amin, orders him to pen an explanation, and, confident that he himself is in no danger, flies off to Singapore for a conference of prime ministers of the British Commonwealth. Amin, realizing that the prime minister will arrest him as soon as he returns, decides on a preemptive strike: he stages an army coup and seizes power. Theoretically at least, Obote in fact had little to worry about: Amin did not represent an obvious threat, and his influence in the army was ultimately limited. But beginning on the night of January 25, 1971, when they took over the barracks in Kampala, Amin and his supporters employed a brutally efficient surprise tactic: they fired without warning. And at a precisely defined target: soldiers from the Langi and Achole tribes. The surprise had a paralyizing effect: no one had time to mount a resistance. On the very first day, hundreds died in the barracks. And the carnage continued. Henceforth, Amin always used this method: he would shoot first. And not just at his enemies; that was self-evident, obvious. He went further: he liquidated without hesitation those he judged might one day develop into enemies. Over time, terror in Amin's state also came to depend on universal torture. Before they died, people were routinely tormented.

All this took place in a provincial country, in a small town. The torture chambers were located in downtown buildings. The windows were open -- we are in the tropics. Whoever was walking along the street could hear cries, moans, shots. Whoever fell into the hands of the executioners vanished. A category soon emerged, then grew and grew, of those who in Latin America are called desaparecidos: those who have perished, disappeared. He left his house and never returned. "Nani?" the policeman routinely replied, if a family member demanded an explanation. "Nani?" (In Swahili the word means 'who"; the individiual is reduced to a question mark.)

Uganda started to metamorphose into a tragic, bloody stage upon which a single actor strutted -- Amin. A month after the coup Amin named himself president, then marshal, then field marshal, and finally field marshal for life. He pinned upon himself ever more orders, medals, decorations. But he also liked to walk about in ordinary battle fatigues, so that soldiers would say of him, "You see, he's one of us." He chose his cars in accordance with his outfits. Wearing a suit to a reception, he drove a dark Mercedes. Out for a spin in a sweat suit? A red Maserati. Battle fatigues? A military Range Rover. The last resembled a vehicle from a science-fiction movie. A forest of antennas protruded from it, all kinds of wires, cables, spotlights. Inside were grenades, pistols, knives. He went about this way because he constantly feared attempts on his life. He survived several. Everyone else died in them -- his aides-de-camp, his bodyguards. Amin alone would brush off the dust, straighten his uniform. To cover his tracks, he also rode in unmarked cars. People walking down a street would suddenly realize that the man sitting behind the wheel of that truck was Amin.

He trusted no one, therefore even those in his innermost circle did not know where he would be sleeping tonight, where he would be living tomorrow. He had several residences in the city; several more on the shores of Lake Victoria, still others in the countryside. Determining his whereabouts was both difficult and dangerous. He communicated with every subordinate directly, decided whom he would speak with, whom he wished to see. And for many, such a meeting would prove the last. If Amin became suspicious of someone, he would invite him over. He would be pleasant, friendly, treat his guest to a Coca-Cola. Executioners awaited the visitor as he left. Later, no one could determine what had happened to the man.

Amin usually telephoned his subordinates, but he also used the radio. Whenever he announced changes in the government or in the ranks of the military -- and he was constantly instituting changes -- he would do so over the airwaves.

Uganda had one radio station, one small newspaper (Uganda Argus), one camera, which filmed Amin, and one photojournalist, who would appear for ceremonial occasions. Everything was directed exclusively at the figure of the marshal. Moving from place to place, Amin in a sense moved the state with him; outside of him, nothing happened, nothing existed. Parliament did not exist, there no political parties, trade unions, or other organizations. And, of course, no opposition -- those suspected of dissent died painful deaths.

The Books: "Shah of Shahs" (Ryszard Kapuscinski)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

This is about the fall of the last Shah of Iran and the rise of Khomeini. Kapuscinski was there. He appeared to be here, there, and everywhere, through the 60s and 70s. He was in Teheran when the hostages were taken - he lived in Iran and reported on the events. Again - what I find so fascinating about this book (and his book about Ethiopia) is that he ... in a subtle way ... uses these books to criticize Communism and the leadership back in his homeland of Poland. He could not openly criticize. That was not allowed. But he could write a blistering book about the Shah of Iran, making all the points he wanted to make about the Soviet Union ... Totalitarianism pretty much takes on the same guise from country to country. The people back in Poland would have gotten the point. They would have understood the subtext of Kapuscinski's book.

Listen to this section of Shah of Shahs where he describes SAVAK, the secret police of the Shah. Doesn't really take a rocket scientist to figure out that this could also apply to the KGB.

From Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Savak had a good ear for all allusions. One scorching afternoon an old man with a bad heart turned up at the bus stop and gasped, "It's so oppressive you can't catch your breath." "So it is," the Savak agent replied immeditaely, edging closer to the winded stranger. "it's getting more and more oppressive and people are fighting for air." "Too true," replied the naive old man, clapping his hand over his heart, "such heavy air, so oppressive." Immediately the Savak agent barked, "Now you'll have a chance to regain your strength," and marched him off.

The other people at the bus stop had been listening in dread, for they had sensed from the beginning that the feeble elderly man was committing an unpardonable error by saying "oppressive" to a stranger.

Experience had taught them to avoid uttering such terms as oppressiveness, darkness, burden, abyss, collapse, quagmire, putrefaction, cage, bars, chain, gag, truncheon, boot, claptrap, screw, pocket, paw, madness, and expressions like lie down, lie flat, spreadeagle, fall on your face, wither away, gotten flabby, go blind, go deaf, wallow in it, something's out of kilter, something's wrong, all screwed up, something's got to give -- because all of them, these nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns, could hide allusions to the Shah's regime, and thus formed a connotative minefield where you could get blown to bits with one slip of the tongue.

For a moment, for just an instant, a new doubt flashed through the heads of the people standing at the bus stop: What if the sick old man was a Savak agent too? Because he had criticized the regime (by using "oppressive" in conversation), he must have been free to criticize. If he hadn't been, wouldn't he have kept his mouth shut or spoken about such agreeable topics as the fact that the sun was shining and the bus was sure to come along any minute? And who had the right to criticize? Only Savak agents, whose job it was to provoke reckless babblers, then cart them off to jail.

The ubiquitous terror drove people crazy, made them so paranoid they couldn't credit anyone with being honest, pure, or courageous...

Fear so debased people's thinking, they saw deceit in bravery, collaboration in courage. This time, however, seeing how roughly the Savak agent led his victim away, the people at the bus stop had to admit that the ailing old man could not have been connected with the police. In any case, the captor and his prey were soon out of sight, and the sole remaining question was: Where did they go?

Nobody actually knew where Savak was located. The organization had no headquarters. Dispersed all over the city (and all over the country), it was everywhere and nowhere. It occupied houses, villas, and apartments no one ever paid attention to...Only those who were in on the secret knew its telephone numbers...Whoever fell into the grip of that organization disappeared without a trace, sometimes forever. People would vanish suddenly and nobody would know what had happened to them, where to go, whom to ask, whom to appeal to. They might be locked up in a prison, but which one? There were six thousand. An invisible, adamant wall would rise up, before which you stood helpless, unable to take a step forward.

Iran belonged to Savak.

It was Savak that banned the plays of Shakespeare and Moliere because they criticized monarchical and aristocratic vices. Savak ruled in the universities, offices, and factories. A monstrously overgrown cephalopod, it entangled everything, crept into every crack and corner, glued its suckers everywhere, ferreted and sniffed in all directions, scratched and bored through every level of existence...

The people waiting at the bus stop knew all this and therefore remained silent once the Savak agent and the old man had gone. They watched each other out of the corners of their eyes, for all they knew the one standing next to them might have to inform...Without wanting to (even though some of them try to hide it so as not to provoke any aggressive outbursts), the people at the bus stop look at each other with loathing. They are inclined to neurotic, disproportionate reactions. Something gets on their nerves, something smells bad, and they move away from each other, waiting to see who goes after whom, who attacks someone first. This reciprocal distrust in the work of Savak...This one, this one, and that one. That one too? Sure, of course.

Everybody.

The Books: "The Emperor" (Ryszard Kapuscinski)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski. This is the story of the the fall of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. Kapuscinski went to Ethiopia, while the fighting for power was still going on, and tracked down Haile Selassie's old servants and secretaries and butlers, etc. The "true believers". And their interviews make up the bulk of the book. Most of the book is in their voices - with no editorial comment from Kapuscinski. We hear their delusions, prejudices, small-mindedness, or foresight - unimpeded. Intermittently, Kapuscinski will come in and write a couple of pages - pushing the events along.

I did a post about Haile Selassie - on the date he was deposed by the military. I used a lot of quotes from Kapuscinski's book - interviews about his final days. That post - sitting in my archives - is one of those Google-friendly posts. It still gets a lot of traffic. Stuff like that always interests me. Who knew??

Here's an excerpt from Kapuscinski. Kapuscinski describes a banquet he went to in Addis Ababa in 1963. The Emperor was hosting all of the presidents of independent Africa - and so he wanted to put on a show, and display that Ethiopia was a modern nation. Buildings were erected quickly, streets were cleared of peasants and camels, all of the poverty was basically hidden from view. Mud huts were destroyed - people left homeless - etc. Kapuscinski saw all this.

Then the reception itself.

From The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

The Emperor threw an imposing reception for the meeting of the presidents. Wine and caviar were flowin in from Europe specially for the occasion. At a cost of twenty-five thousand dollars, Miram Makeba was brought from Hollywood to serenade the leaders with Zulu songs after the feast. All told, more than three thousand people, divided hierarchically into upper and lower categories, were invited. Each category received invitations of a different color and chose from a different menu.

The reception took place in the Emperor's Old Palace. The guests passed long ranks of soldiers from the Imperial Guard, armed with sabers and halberds. From atop towers, spotlit trumpeters played the Emperor's fanfare. In the galleries, theatrical troupes performed scenes from the lives of past Emperors. From the balconies, girls in folk costumes showered the guests with flowers. The sky exploded in plumes of fireworks.

When the guests had been seated at tables in the great hall, fanfares rang out and the Emperor walked in with President Nasser of Egypt at his right hand. They formed an extraordinary pair. Nasser, a tall, stocky, imperious man, his head thrust forward with his wide jaws set into a smile, and next to him the diminutive silhouette - frail, one could almost say - of Haile Selassie, worn by the years, with his thin, expressive face, his glistening, penetrating eyes. Behind them the remaining leaders entered in pairs. The audience rose; everyone was applauding. Ovations sounded for unity and the Emperor. Then the feast began. There was one dark-skinned wiater for every four guests. Out of excitement and nervousness, things were falling from the waiters' hands. The table setting was silver, in the old Harar style. Several tons of priceless antique silver lay on those tables. Some people slipped pieces of silverware into their pockets. One sneaked a fork, the next one a spoon.

Mountains of meat, fruit, fish, and cheese rose on the tables. Many-layered cakes dripped with sweet, colored icing. Distinguished wines spread reflected colors and invigorating aromas. The music played on, and costumed clowns did somersaults to the delight of the carefree revelers. Time passed in conversation, laughter, consumption.

It was a splendid affair.

During these proceedings, I needed to find a quiet place, but I didn't know where to look. I left the Great Chamber by a side door that led outside. It was a dark night, with a fine rain falling. A May rain, but a chilly one. A gentle slop led down from the door, and some distance below stood a poorly lit building without walls. A row of waiters stood in a line from the door to this building, passing dishes with leftovers from the banquet table. On those dishes a stream of bones, nibbled scraps, mashed vegetables, fish heads, and cut-away bits of meat flowed. I walked toward the building without walls, slipping on the mud and scattered bits of food.

I noticed that something on the other side was moving, shifting, murmuring, squishing, sighing, and smacking its lips. I turned the corner to have a closer look.

In the thick night, a crowd of barefoot beggars stood huddled together. The dishwashers working in the building threw leftovers to them. I watched the crowd devour the scraps, bones, and fish heads with laborious concentration. In the meticulous absorption of this eating there was an almost violent biological abandon -- the satisfaction of hunger in anxiety and ecstasy.

From time to time the waiters would get held up, and the flow of dishes would stop. Then the crowd of beggars would relax as though someone had given them the order to stand at ease. People wiped their lips and straightened their muddy and food-stained rags. But soon the stream of dishes would start flowing again -- because up there the great hogging, with smacking of lips and slurping, was going on, too -- and the crowd would fall again to its blessed and eager labor of feeding.

I was getting soaked, so I returned to the Great Chamber to the Imperial party. I looked at the silver and gold on the scarlet velvet, at President Kasavuba, at my neighbor, a certain Aye Mamlaye. I breathed in the scent of roses and incense, I listened to the suggestive Zulu song that Miriam Makeba was singing, I bowed to the Emperor (an absolute requirement of protocol), and I went home.

The Books: "The Soccer War" (Ryszard Kapuscinski)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Often referred to as a classic of this type of journalism, The Soccer War is a compilation of many of Kapuscinski's essays, all of them having to do with the revolutions and civil wars that happened from 1958 - 1976.

It starts in Africa. Kapuscinski lived in Africa, off and on, for about 20 years and his most recent book, The Shadow of the Sun is entirely about that continent. In The Soccer War, he writes about Lumamba, Kwame Nkrumah, Ben Bella. He drives through burning roadblocks in Nigeria, he gets malaria, he drives right into the middle of civil wars. Algeria, Nigeria, etc.

In the second half of the book we leave Africa and go to Latin America. More revolutions. That's what Kapuscinski is interested in. And here, in this section, is the title essay of the book "The Soccer War". I'll post an excerpt from it.

It's a famous essay to journalists. People look to it as inspiration, as "how" to tell a story. He's a master at his craft. You can tell when people try to imitate Kapuscinski - Mark Bowden tried in his big long piece in The Atlantic about Saddam Hussein (which was very good, but he had drastically changed his style from Black Hawk Down, and I think it's because he re-read Kapuscinski's stuff and decided to 'try' it. It's not entirely successful - he's not as big a thinker, but Bowden is right on one point: that style IS more appropriate to his topic at hand. It has a more meandering feel to it, it is completely unafraid to go off into psychological tangents. Kapuscinski is not obsessed with driving a narrative forward. He is much more sensoral. He is contemplative. He will be writing about one thing ... and then stop and contemplate the meaning of life. Literally. Bowden is too much of a working journalist, a career journalist, to let himself go that far ... but he gives it a good try in the Saddam piece. But it's not quiiiiite a good fit. Bowden is too practical.)

There's one essay in Soccer War where Kapuscinski is recalled from the field as a foreign correspondent and has to go back to Poland and work behind a desk. Kapuscinski writes a 4 page essay about what it is that bothers him about desks: desks create barriers between men, desks create a hierarchy that Kapuscinski finds disgusting, desks diminish one person and raises another person up. The long story short is that Kapuscinski is saying, "A desk job is NOT for me" but like Elias Canetti, and Robert Kaplan, and Herodotus, and other great big-picture thinkers, he tries to describe WHY. Bowden could never go there to that degree. It would be too embarrassing for that practical-minded man.

A great example of that kind of Kapuscinski writing (the philosophical contemplations) is here. When the huge train crash happened in North Korea, I wrote a post about the lack of information we were receiving about it and it made me think of one of Kapuscinski's essays. Now THAT is good writing. It sticks with you. It contextualizes the world. You reference it.

Here's the start of The Soccer War.

The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Luis Suarez said there was going to be a war, and I believed whatever Luis said. We were staying together in Mexico. Luis was giving me a lesson in Latin America: what it is and how to understand it. He could foresee many events. In his time he had predicted the fall of Goulart in Brazil, the fall of Bosch in the Dominican Republic and of Jiminez in Venezuela. Long before the return of Peron he believed that the old caudillo would again become president of Argentina; he foretold the sudden death of the Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier at a time when everybody said Papa Doc had many years left. Luis knew how to pick his way through Latin politics, in which amateurs like me got bogged down and blundered helplessly with each step.

This time Luis announced his belief that there would be a war after putting down the newspaper in which he had read a report on the soccer match between the Honduran and Salvadoran national teams. The two countries were playing for the right to take part in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.

The first match was held on Sunday 8 June 1969, in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa.

Nobody in the world paid any attention.

The Salvadoran team arrived in Tegucigalpa on Saturday and spent a sleepless night in their hotel. The team could not sleep because it was the target of psychological warfare waged by the Honduran fans. A swarm of people encircled the hotel. The crowd threw stones at the windows and beat sheets of tin and empty barrels with sticks. They set off one string of firecrackers after another. They leaned on the horns of cars parked in front of the hotel. The fans whistled, screamed and sent up hostile chants. This went on all night. The idea was that a sleepy, edgy, exhausted team would be bound to lose. In Latin America these are common practices.

The next day Honduras defeated the sleepless El Salvador squad one-nil.

Eighteen-year-old Amelia Bolanios was sitting in front of the television in El Salvador when the Hondruan striker Roberto Cardona scored the winning goal in the final minute. She got up and ran to the desk which contained her father's pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart. "The young girl could not bear to see her fatherland brought to its knees," wrote the Salvadoran newspaper El Nacional the next day. The whole capital took part in the televised funeral of Amelia Bolanios. An army honour guard marched with a flag at the head of the procession. The president of the republic and his ministers walked behind the flag-draped coffin. behind the government came the Salvadoran soccer eleven who, booed, laughed at, and spat on at the Tegucigalpa airport, had returned to El Salvador on a special flight that morning.

But the return match of the series took place in San Salvador, the beautifully named Flor Blanca stadium, a week later. This time it was the Honduran team that spent a sleepless night. The screaming crowd of fans broke all the windows in the hotel and threw rotten eggs, dead rats, and stinking rags inside. The players were taken to the match in armored cars of the First Salvadoran Mechanized Division -- which saved them from revenge and bloodshed at the hands of the mob that lined the route, holding up portraits of the national heroine Amelia Bolanios.

The army surrounded the ground. On the pitch stood a cordon of soldiers from a crack regiment of the Guardian Nacional, armed with sub-machine-guns. During the playing of the Honduran national anthem the crowd roared and whistled. Next, instead of the Honduran flag -- which had been burnt before the eyes of the spectators, driving them mad with joy -- the hosts ran a dirty, tattered dishrag up the flag-pole. Under such conditions the players from Tegucigalpa did not, understandably, have their minds on the game. They had their minds on getting out alive. "We're awfully lucky that we lost," said the visiting coach, Mario Griffin, with relief.

El Salvador prevailed, three-nil.

The same armored cars carried the Honduran team straight from the playing field to the airport. A worse fate awaited the visiting fans. Kicked and beaten, they fled towards the border. Two of them died. Scores landed in hospital. One hundred and fifty of the visitors' cars were burned. The border between the two states was closed a few hours later.

Luis read about all of this in the newspaper and said that there was going to be a war. He had been a reporter for a long time and he knew his beat.

In Latin America, he said, the border between soccer and politics is vague. There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team. Players on the losing team are denounced in the press as traitors. When Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico, an exiled Brazilian colleague of mine was heartbroken: "The military right wing," he said, "can be assured of at least five more years of peaceful rule." On the way to the title, Brazil beat England. In an article with the headline 'Jesus Defends Brazil', the Rio de Janeiro paper Jornal dos Sportes explained the victory thus: "Whenever the ball flew towards our goal and a score seemed inevitable, Jesus reached his foot out of the clouds and cleared the ball." Drawings accompanied the article, illustrating the supernatural intervention.

Anyone at the stadium can lose his life. Take the match that Mexico lost to Peru, two-one. An embittered Mexican fan shouted in an ironic tone, "Viva Mexico!" A moment later he was dead, massacred by the crowd. But sometimes the heightened emotions find an outlet in other ways. After Mexico beat Belgium one-nil, Augusto Mariaga, the warden of a maximum-security prison in Chilpancingo (Guerrero State, Mexico) became delirious with joy and ran around firing a pistol into the air and shouting, "Viva Mexico!" He opened all the cells, releasing 142 dangerous hardened criminals. A court acquitted him later, as, according to the verdict, he had "acted in patriotic exaltation."

"Do you think it's worth going to Honduras?" I asked Luis, who was then editing the serious and influential weekly Siempre.

"I think it's worth it," he answered. "Something's bound to happen."

I was in Tegucigalpa the next morning.

The Books: "Another Day of Life" (Ryszard Kapuscinski)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Kapuscinski. He's one of my all-time favorite writers. And I'm reading him in translation - so I have no idea how good he must be in his native Polish. But the translations I have are pretty damn good. My only complaint about him is that he doesn't publish ENOUGH. hahahaha And I also eagerly await an official biography of this guy. I know a little bit about him - but I mainly know him through his books. Here's the deal: He's Polish. He's a journalist. He grew up under Communism - and remembers when the Communists arrived in his town, at age 8. He lived under that oppressive regime. He felt the oppression. He became a reporter - and eventually, he was sent out as the only foreign correspondent that Poland had. I think ... the details are blurry - this is why I need a biography. Anyway, of course the Communists were not wacky about letting people travel - but because Kapuscinski had the job he did, he went everywhere. This also happened to be in the 60s and 70s, when revolutions and civil wars were breaking out all over the world. He went everywhere. The really subtle thing about his books (at least the ones written before the 1980s) is that - he uses his writing as a way to criticize totalitarian regimes, and totalitarian mentalities - without ever criticizing the Communist powers-that-be. It was a kind of subterfuge. His book about Haile Selassie's fall was, yes, about Ethiopia - but if you read it in the context of what was going on in Poland, what they suffered back there - you can see that it was a sneaky way to critique the leaders in his own country, without ever naming them.

I love his books.

I mean ... I LOVE his books.

So. Another Day of Life which ... I think is his first book. In 1975, the fascist dictatorship in Portugal fell apart - and as a consequence, Angola - one of their long-held "colonies" was cut loose. Pandemonium ensued. The Portugese population fled for thier lives, civil war broke out between rivaling factions, trying to fill up the power vacuum - Who among the "natives" would now get to rule the country - now that the Portugese were gone? - Kapuscinski bribed an airline pilot to take him to Luanda from Lisbon. The pilot did not want to take him - too dangerous - all planes were LEAVING the country, no more planes going in ... but Kapuscinski arrived in 1975, as everything was breaking apart. This civil war was brutal and lasted almost 30 years - over 1.5 million people were killed, millions and millions of people were displaced ... Hell on earth.

Another Day of Life describes the last days before the real war breaks out - when the Portugese, who had lived in Angola for generations, realized what was coming ... and then had to get themselves together and get the hell OUT. I'll excerpt a bit from that section.

You know how sometimes, even if you really thought a book was good, only one or two images from the book will really STICK in your mind? Like ... if the title is said to you, then one of those images will immediately come up in your head? You don't keep the WHOLE book in your head. But one or two images stay behind, forever. What Kapuscinski describes in the following excerpt is the image that has been left behind forever in my brain, for whatever reason. It's kind of haunting.

From Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Various things happened before that, before the city was closed and sentenced to death. As a sick person suddenly revives and recovers his strength for a moment in the midst of his agony, so, at the end of September, life in Luanda took on a certain vigor and tempo. The sidewalks were crowded and traffic jams clogged the streets. People ran around nervously, in a hurry, wrapping up thousands of matters. Clear out as quickly as possible, escape in time, before the first wave of deadly air intrudes upon the city.

They didn't want Angola. They had had enough of the country, which was supposed to be the promised land but had brought them disenchantment and abasement. They said farewell to their African homes with mixed despair and rage, sorrow and impotence, with the feeling of leaving forever. All they wanted was to get out with their lives and to take their possessions with them.

Everybody was busy building crates. Mountains of boards and plywood were brought in. The price of hammers and nails soared. Crates were the main topic of conversation -- how to build them, what was the best thing to reinforce them with. Self-proclaimed experts, crate specialists, homegrown architects of cratery, masters of crate styles, crate schools, and crate fashions appeared. Inside the Luanda of concrete and bricks a new wooden city began to rise. The streets I walked through resembled a great building site. I stumbled over discarded planks; nails sticking out of beams ripped my shirt. Some crates were as big as vacation cottages, because a hierarchy of crate status had suddenly come into being. The richer the people, the bigger the crates they erected. Crates belonging to millionaires were impressive: beamed and lined with sailcloth, they had solid, elegant walls made of the most expensive grade of tropical wood, with the rings and knots cut and polished like antiques. Into these crates went whole salons and bedrooms, sofas, tables, wardrobes, kitchens and refrigerators, commodes and armchairs, pictures, carpets, chandeliers, porcelain, bedclothes and linene, clothing, tapestries and vases, even artificial flowers (I saw them with my own eyes), all the monstrous and inexhaustible junk that clutters every middle-class home. Into them went figurines, seashells, glass balls, flower bowls, stuffed lizards, a metal miniature of the cathedral of Milan brought back from Italy, letters! -- letters and photographs, wedding pictures in gilt frames (Why don't we leave that? the husband asks, and the enraged wife cries, You ought to be ashamed!) -- all the pictures of the children, and here's the first time he sat up, and here's the first time he said Give, Give, and here he is with a lollipop, and here with his grandma -- everything, and I mean everything, because this case of wine, this supply of macaroni that I laid in as soon as the shooting started, and then the fishing rod, the crochet needles -- my yarn! -- my rifle, Tutu's colored blocks, birds, peanuts, the vacuum and the nutcracker have to be squeezed in, too, that's all there is to it, they have to be, and they are, so that all we leave behind are the bare floors, the naked walls, en deshabille. The house's striptease goes all the way, right down to the curtain rods -- and all that remains is to lock the door and stop along the boulevard en route to the airport and throw the key in the ocean.

The crates of the poor are inferior on several counts. They are smaller, often downright diminutive, and unsightly.l They can't compete in quality; their workmanship leaves a great deal to be desired. While the wealthy can employ master cabinetmakers, the poor have to knock their crates together with their own hands. For materials they use odds and ends from the lumber yard, mill ends, warped beams, cracked plywood, all the leftovers you can pick up thirdhand. Many are made of hammered tin, taken from olive-oil cans, old signs, and rusty billboards; they look like the tumbledown slums of the African quarters. It's not worth looking inside -- not worth it, and not really the sort of thing one does.

The crates of the wealthy stand in the main downtown streets or in the shadowy byways of exclusive neighborhoods. You can look at them and admire. The crates of the poor, on the other hand, languish in entranceways, in backyards, in sheds. They are hidden for the time being, but in the end they will have to be transported the length of the city to the port, and the thought of that pitiful display is unappetizing.

Thanks to the abundance of wood that has collected here in Luanda, this dusty desert city nearly devoid of trees now smells like a flourishing forest. It's as if the forest had suddenly taken root in the streets, the squares, and the plazas. In the evenings I throw the window open to take a deep breath of it, and the war fades. I no longer hear the moans of Dona Esmerelda, I no longer see the ruined playboy with his two pistols, and I feel just as if I were sleeping it off in a forester's cottage in Bory Tucholski.

The building of the wooden city, the city of crates, goes on day after day, from dawn to twlight. Everyone works, soaked with rain, burned by the sun; even the millionaires, if they are physically fit, turn to the task. The enthusiasm of the adults infects the children. They too build crates, for their dolls and toys. Packing takes place under cover of night. It's better that way, when no one's sticking his nose into other people's business, nobody's keeping track of who puts in how much and what (and everyone knows there are a lot of that sort around, the ones who serve the MPLA and can't wait to inform).

So by night, in the thickest darkness, we transfer the contents of the stone city to the inside of the wooden city. It takes a lot of effort and sweat, lifting and struggling, shoulders sore from stowing it all, knees sore from squeezing it all in because it all has to fit and, after all, the stone city was big and the wooden city is small.

Gradually, from night to night, the stone city lost its value in favor of the wooden city. Gradually, too, it changed people's estimation. People stopped thinking in terms of houses and apartments and discussed only crates. Instead of saying, "I've got to go see what's at home," they said, "I've got to go check my crate." By now that was the only thing that interested them, the only thing they cared about. The Luanda they were leaving had become a stiff and alien stage set, empty, for the show was over.

Nowhere else in the world had I seen such a city, and I may never see anything like it again. It existed for months, and then it suddenly began disappearing. Or rather, quarter after quarter, it was taken on trucks to the port. Now it was spread out at the very edge of the sea, illuminated at night by harbor lanterns and the glare of lights on anchored ships. By day, people wound through its chaotic streets, painting their names and addresses on little plates, just as anyone does anywhere in the world when he builds himself a house. You could convince yourself, therefore, that this is a normal wooden town, except that it's been closed up by its residents who, for unknown reasons, have had to leave it in haste.

But afterward, when things had already turned very bad in the stone city and we, its handful of inhabitants, were waiting like desperadoes for the day of its destruction, the wooden city sailed away on the ocean. It was carried off by a great flotilla with which, after several hours, it disappeared below the horizon. This happened suddenly, as if a pirate fleet had sailed into the port, seized a priceless treasure, and escaped to sea with it.

Even so, I managed to see how the city sailed away. At dawn it was still rocking off the coast, piled up confusedly, uninhabited, lifeless, as if magically transformed into a museum exhibit of an ancient Eastern city and the last tour group had left. At that hour it was foggy and cold. I stood on the shore with some Angolan soldiers and a little crowd of ragtag freezing black children. "They've taken everything from us," one of the soldiers said without malice, and turned to cut a pineapple because that fruit, so overripe that,w hen it was cut, the juice ran out like water from a cup, was then our only food. "They've tatken everything from us," he repeated and buried his face in the golden bowl of the fruit. The homeless harbor children gazed at him with greedy, fascinated eyes. The soldier lifted his juice-smeared face, smiled, and added, "But anyway, we've got a home now. They left us what's ours." He stood and, rejoicing in the thought that Angola was his, shot off a whole round from his automatic rifle into the air. Sirens sounded, seagulls darted and wheeled over the water, and the city stirred and began to sail away.

I don't know if there had ever been an instance of a whole city sailing across the ocean, but that is exactly what happened. The city sailed out into the world, in search of its inhabitants. These were the former residents of Angola, the Portugese, who had scattered throughout Europe and America. A part of them reached South Africa. All fled Angola in haste, escaping before the conflagration of war, convinced that in this country there would be no more life and only the cemeteries would remain. But before they left they had still managed to build the wooden city in Luanda, into which they packed everything that had been in the stone city. On the streets now there were only thousands of cars, rusting and covered with dust. The walls also remained, the roofs, the asphalt on the roads, and the iron benches along the boulevards.

And now the wooden city was sailing on an Atlantic swept by violent, gale-driven waves. Somewhere on the ocean the partition of the city occurred and one section, the largest, sailed to Lisbon, the second to Rio de Janeiro, and the third to Cape Town. Each of these sections reached its haven safely. I know this from various sources. Maria wrote to tell me that her crate ended up in Brazil -- crates that had been part of the wooden city. Many newspapers wrote about the fact that one section made it to Cape Town. And here's what I saw with my own eyes. After leaving Luanda, I stopped in Lisbon. A friend drove me along a wide street at the mouth of the Tagus, near the port. And there I saw fantastic heaps of crates stacked to perilous heights, unmoved, abandoned, as if they belonged to no one. This was the largest section of the wooden Luanda, which had sailed to the coast of Europe.

The Books: "Warrior Politics" (Robert Kaplan)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert Kaplan.

The main set-up of this book, while not original, is a really good read in Kaplan's hands. Kaplan's first book published after September 11 (but very soon after - so the bulk of it was probably written pre-Sept. 11) - Warrior Politics looks to ancient and not-so-ancient philosophers, thinkers, and leaders for ways to look at the challenges facing the world today. So we've got a chapter on Sun-Tzu, a chapter on Kant, a chapter on Machiavellie, Hobbes, Malthus - all those big guys.

I'll post a bit from the Machiavelli chapter. Mainly cause I dig Machiavelli. Also cause I just finished His Excellency (Ellis' superb biography of George Washington) - and there's quite a Machiavellian strain in Washington. Not because he sat around and studied Machiavelli, but because he LIVED it - in the early years of his life, fighting the French and Indian War, and with other aspects of his life (changing crops, land acquisition, becoming commander-in-chief, fighting the Revolutionary War). It was not just VIRTUE that got him through all this stuff, and he thought, actually, that "patriotism" was not a reason to do anything. Or it was all well and good, but it wouldn't SUSTAIN anything. Quote from George himself:

Men may speculate as they will, they may talk of patriotism; they may draw a few examples from current story � but whoever builds upon it as a sufficient basis for conducting a long and bloody war will find themselves deceived in the end � For a long time it may of itself push men to action, to bear much, to encounter difficulties, but it will not endure unassisted by Interest.

Over and over and over in his life, he faced this. He believed in INTEREST, that was the only way to establish relationships between human beings, and also between nations. He didn't believe in "trust" - at least not in any pure ideal way. He was suspicious of it. He knew that everyone acted through their own Interests - and if they didn't, or if they said they didn't, they were probably lying. Which is a very Machiavellian concept.

So - here's the excerpt.

From Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert Kaplan.

The Prince, as well as Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, are full of bracing insight. Machiavelli writes that foreign invaders will support local minorities over the majority in order "to weaken those who are powerful within the country itself" -- which is how European governments behaved in the Middle East in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when they armed ethnic minorities against the Ottoman rulers. He writes about the difficulty in toppling existing regimes because rulers, no matter how cruel, are surrounded by loyalists, who will suffer if the ruler is deposed; in this, he anticipated the difficulty of replacing dictators such as Saddam Hussein. "All armed prophets succeed whereas unarmed ones fail," he writes, anticipating the danger of a bin Laden. Savonarola was an unarmed prophet who failed, while the medieval popes, along with Moses and Mohammed, were armed prophets who triumphed. Hitler was an armed prophet, and it required an extraordinary effort to vanquish him. Only when Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that he would not defend Communist regimes in Eastern Europe with force was it possible for the unarmed prophet Vaclav Havel to succeed.

Nevertheless, Machiavelli may go too far. Wasn't he himself an unarmed prophet who succeeded in influencing statesmen for centuries with only a book? Wasn't Jesus an unarmed prophet whose followers helped bring down the Roman empire? One must always keep in mind that ideas do matter, for better and worse, and to reduce the world merely to power struggles is to make cynical use of Machiavelli. But some academics and intellectuals go too far in the other direction: they try to reduce the world only to ideas, and to neglect power.

Values -- good or bad -- Machiavelli says, are useless without arms to back them up: even a civil society requires police and a credible judiciary to enforce its laws. Therefore, for policymakers, projecting power comes first; values come second. "The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy," writes the political scientist Thomas Schelling. Abraham Lincoln, the ultimate prince, understood this when he said that American geography was suited for one nation, not two, and that his side would prevail, provided it was willing to pay the cost in blood. Machiavelli's prince, Cesare Borgia, failed to unite Italy against Pope Julius, but Lincoln was sufficiently ruthless to target the farms, homes, and factories of Southern civilization in the latter phase of the Civil War. Thus Lincoln reunited the temperate zone of North America, preventing it from falling prey to European powers and creating a mass society under uniform laws.

Virtue is more complex than it seems. Because human rights are a self-evident good, we believe that by promoting them we are being virtuous. But that is not always the case. If the United States had pressed too hard for human rights in Jordan, King Hussein might have been weakened during his struggles for survivial in the 1970s and 1980s. The same is true in Egype, where a US policy dominated completely by human rights concerns would weaken President Hosni Mubarak, whose successor would likely have even less regard for human rights. The same is true for Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan, the Republic of Georgia, and many other countries. Though regimes such as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and China are oppressive, the power vacuum that would likely replace them would cause even more suffering.

For Machiavelli, virtue is the opposite of righteousness. With their incessant harping on values, today's Republicans and Democrats alike often sound less like Renaissance pragmatists than like medieval churchmen, dividing the world sanctimoniously between good and evil.

Isaiah Berlin's observation that Machiavelli's values are moral but not Christian raises the possibility of several just but incompatible value systems existing side by side. For example, had Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore subscribed to America's doctrine of individiual liberties, the meritocracy, public honesty, and economic success fostered by his mild authoritarianism might have been impossible. While Singapore ranks near the top of key indexes on economic freedom -- freedom from property confiscation, from capricious tax codes, from burdensome regulations, and so on -- the West African state of Benin, a parliamentary democracy, stands in the bottom quarter of such indexes.

Machiavelli's ideal is the "well-governed patria," not individual freedom. The "well-governed patria" may at times be incompatible with an aggressive media, whose search for the "truth" can yield little more than embarrassing facts untempered by context, so the risk of exposure may convince leaders to devise new methods of secrecy. The more the barons of punditry demand "morality" in complex situations overseas, where all the options are either bad or involve great risk, the more virtu our leaders may need in order to deceive them. Just as the priests of ancient Egypt, the rhetoricians of Greece and Rome, and the theologians of medieval Europe undermined political authority, so too do the media. While suspicion of power has been central to the American Creed, presidents and military commanders will have to regain breathing space from media assaults to deal with the challenges of split-second decision making in future warfare.

Machiavelli's ideals influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States. The Founders certainly had more faith in ordinary people than Machiavelli did. Nevertheless, their recollection of the debacle of Oliver Cromwell's parliamentary rule in mid-seventeenth-century England made them healthily suspicious of the masses. "Men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious," writes Alexander Hamilton, echoing Machiavelli's (and, unwittingly, the ancient Chinese). That is why James Madison preferred a "republic" (in which the whims of the masses are filtered through "their representatives and agents") over direct "democracy", in which the people "exercise the government in person ..."

The core of Machiavelli's wisdom is that primitive necessity and self-interest drive politics, and that this can be good in itself, because competing self-interests are the basis for compromise, while stiff moral arguments lead to war and civil conflict, rarely the better options.

Machiavelli exphasizes that "all the things of men are in motion and cannot remain fixed." Thus, primitive necessity is irresistible, because, as Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield explains, "A man or a country may be able to afford generosity today but what of tomorrow?" The United States may have the power to intervene in East Timor today, but then can we afford to fight in the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula tomorrow? The answer may well be yes. If we have the means to stop a large-scale human rights tragedy, it is a good in and of itself to do so -- provided that we confront our capabilities not only for this day, but for the next. In an age of constant crises, "anxious foresight" must be the centerpiece of any prudent policy.

The Books: "Eastward to Tartary : Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus" (Robert Kaplan)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Eastward to Tartary : Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus by Robert Kaplan.

This book was published in 2000 - and in it, Kaplan goes back to the Balkans - to see what has happened in the 10 years since he went there and wrote Balkan Ghosts. He then travels down into Turkey and then further down into the Caucasus - and then goes through Syria, Lebanon, Israel ...

Another good one. And it's another kind of scary book where you read about some of these places, and you think: "Now ... how the hell will THIS sort itself out??" Kaplan, again, is not an optimist. He's not a bleak nihilistic pessimist either - he obviously has a lot of faith in human ingenuity (his chapters on the slums and shantytowns in Turkey are great examples of that) - but the future, according to Kaplan, is going to get worse - before it gets better.

I'll post from the section where he travels through Georgia, Stalin's homeland.

Eastward to Tartary : Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus by Robert Kaplan.

According to one noted writer, the difference between Aleksandr Kerensky, the enlightened social democrat who took power after Russia's 1917 revoltuion, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Joseph Stalin was the difference between the West, the semi-West, and the East. Kerensky and the Menshevik social reformers were extreme westernizers; Lenin, a Great-Russian from the Middle Volga, was a "blend of Westernizer and Slavophile"; while Stalin was a Georgian from the Caucasus Mountains, where Russia ends and the Near East begins. In April 1941, when Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Japan, freeing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka raised his glass to the treaty's success, and, with the institution of hara-kiri in mind, declared that if the treaty were not kept, "I must give my life, for, you see, we are Asiatics."

"We are both Asiatics," Stalin replied.

Of course, Stalin's despotism had many roots and cannot be reduced simply to the culture and geography of his birthplace. (Upon the death of his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, Stalin told a friend at the funeral, "She is dead and with her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings.") But to say that the Oriental influence was merely incidental to his character is to ignore its essentials. The monumental use of terror, the very grandeur of his personality cult, and the use of prison labor for gigantic public works projects echo the ancient Assyrian and Mesopotamian tyrannies. The liturgical nature of Stalin's diatribes, which became the standard for official Communist discourse, bore the influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church, in one of whose Georgian seminaries Stalin studied as a youth.

Someone as evil as Stalin could have come from anywhere, but many of the methods he employed, such as playing one nationality against the other until all were devastated, bore the influence of his early life in the Caucasus. What ultimately differentiated Stalin from the others among Lenin's inner circle (Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev), and what allowed him to destroy them all, was that they -- all Jewish except for Bukharin; all from European Russia and the Ukraine -- were cosmopolitan idealists and westernizers, however savage and cynical their methods, whereas Stalin saw the world anthropologically: For him, a Jew was a Jew, a Turk, a Turk, a Chechen, a Chechen; and so on. Such thinking was far more common to the Near East than to the West, for in the Caucasus the tribe and clan -- not formal institutions -- have always been the key to politics. That was, in part, an expression of Stalin's early life in the Caucasus: a Toynbean laboratory of history and ethnic identity that makes the Balkans look transparent by comparison. Trotsky writes:

The frequent bloody raids into the Caucasus of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane left their traces upon the national epos of Georgia. If one can believe the unfortuante Bukharin, they left their traces likewise on the character of Stalin.

The Books: "The Coming Anarchy : Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War " (Robert Kaplan)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called The Coming Anarchy : Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert Kaplan.

This is Kaplan at his most pessimistic. It's kind of a terrifying book. I mean, you read it and think: "You know what? Let's just blow ourselves up now. This is HOPELESS."

It came out in 2000, so the title is eerie.

Here's an excerpt from a section called "The Lies of Mapmakers".

From The Coming Anarchy : Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert Kaplan.

Whereas West Africa represents the least stable part of political reality outside Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, Turkey, an organic outgrowth of two Turkish empires that ruled Anatolia for 850 years, has been among the most stable. Turkey's borders were established not by colonial powers but in a war of independence in the early 1920s. Kemal Ataturk provided Turkey with a secular nation-building myth that most Arab and African states, burdened by artificially drawn borders, lack. That lack will leave many Arab states defenseless against a wave of Islam that will eat away at their legitimacy and frontiers in coming years. Yet even as regards Turkey, maps deceive.

It is not only African shantytowns that don't appear on urban maps. Many shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere are also missing -- as are the considerable territories controlled by guerrilla armies and urban mafias. Traveling with Eritrean guerrillas in what, according to the map, was northern Ethiopia, traveling in "northern Iraq" with Kurdish guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus controlled by al ocal mafia -- to say nothing of my experiences in West Africa -- led me to develop a healthy skepticism toward maps, which, I began to realize, create a conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending the political crack-up just beginning to occur worldwide.

Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries, each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map, with which all of us have grown up, is generally an invention of modernism, specifically of European colonialism. Modernism, in the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nation-states in Europe and was confirmed by the death of feudalism, at the end of the Thirty Years' War -- an event that was interposed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which together gave birth to modern science. People were suddenly flush with an enthusiasm to categorize, to define. The map, based on scientific techniques of measurement, offered a way to classify n ew national organisms, making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them. "Frontier" is itself a modern concept that didn't exist in the feudal mind. And as European nations carved out far-flung domains at the same time that print technology was making the reproduction of maps cheapter, cartography came into its own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world.

In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University, demonstrates that the map enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a "totalizing classifcatory grid ... It was bounded, determinate, and therefore -- in principle -- countable." To the colonialist, country maps were the equivalent of an accountant's ledger books. Maps, Anderson explains, "shaped the grammar" that would make possible such questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. The state, recall, is a purely Western notion, one that until the twentieth century applied to countries covering only 3 percent of the earth's land area. Nor is the evidence compelling that the state, as a governing ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside the industrialized world. Even the United States of America, in the words of one of our best living poets, Gary Snyder, consists of "arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here."

Yet this inflexible, artificial reality staggers on, not only in the United Nations but in various geographic and travel publications (themselves by-products of an age of elite touring which colonialims made possible) that still report on and photograph the world according to 'country'. Newspapers, this magazine,a dn this writer are not innocent of the tendency.

According to the map, the great hydropower complex emblemized by the Ataturk Dam is situated in Turkey. Forget the map. This southeastern region of Turkey is populated almost completely by Kurds. About half of the world's twenty million Kurds live in "Turkey". The Kurds are predominant in an ellipse of territory that overlaps not only with Turkey but also with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former Soviet Union. The Western-enforced Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, a consequence of the 1991 Gulf War, has already exposed the fictitious nature of that supposed nation-state.

On a recent visit to the Turkish-Iranian border, it occurred to me what a risky idea the nation-state is. Here I was on the legal fault line between two clashing civilizations, Turkic and Iranian. Yet the reality was more subtle: as in West Africa, the border was porous and smuggling abounded, but here the people doing the smuggling, on both sides of the border, were Kurds. In such a moonscape, over which peoples have migrated and settled in patterns that obliterate borders, the end of the Cold War will bring on a cruel process of natural selection among existing states. No longer will these states be so firmly propped up by the West of the Soviet Union. Because the Kurds overlap with nearly everybody in the Middle East, on account of their being cheated out of a state in the post-First World War peace treaties, they are emerging, in effect, as the natural selector --the ultimate reality check. They have destabilized Iraq and may continue to disrupt states that do not offer them adequate breathing sapce, while strengthening states that do.

Because the Turks, owing to their water resources, their growing economy, and the social cohesion evinced by the most crime-free slums I have encountered, are on the verge of big-power status, and because the ten million Kurds within Turkey threaten taht status, the outcome of the Turkish-Kurdish dispute will be more critical to the future of the Middle East than the eventual outcome of the recent Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

The Books: "The Ends of the Earth : From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy " (Robert Kaplan)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called The Ends of the Earth : From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy by Robert Kaplan. This might be my favorite of his. Hard to say. It's certainly the one I have read more than once. There's so much in it it gets a bit overwhelming. You also feel like: "Well, at least HE goes to West Africa, so I don't have to." He travels through these regions, talking to people, taking busses (he insists that's the best way to get to know a country, to see how things are working), introducing us to people - Despite the - I wouldn't call it pessimism - I would call it world-weary realism of his outlook, I don't find it to be a totally depressing book (although the section in Africa is unremittingly bleak). Kaplan definitely,like I said before, sees things in a certain way. He wears his Kaplan goggles at all times. Of course. It's his perspective.

I'm going to excerpt a part from the book when he travels through Central Asia, with an Uzbek guide named Ulug Beg. (Obviously, he was very proud of being named after this man.) Look at me - linking to myself as though I'm some expert. I'm really not. hahahaha But I did write about Ulug Beg, so there you go.

Kaplan brings up Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations - the influential - ahem, controversial - and alarming book - in this excerpt.

From The Ends of the Earth : From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy by Robert Kaplan.

Ulug Beg's hostility, however atypical, toward Tajiks reminded me of the cracked Greek tombstone in the Tashkent cemetery, of the Iranians' fear of Turks, of the tensions between Turks and Arabs over the damming of the Euphrates, of the Moslem violence against Copts in Upper Egypt, and other ethno-cultural tensions I had observed in the course of my travels. Was this evidence of what Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard called "The Clash of Civilizations"?

The world, Huntington argues, has been moving in our century from nation-state conflict to ideological conflict and, finally, to culture conflict. I would add that as refugee flows increase and as peasants continue migrating to cities around the world -- turning them into vast villages -- national borders will mean less, while political power falls increasingly into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups. In the eyes of these uneducated but newly empowered millions, the real borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture and tribe. Huntington writes, "First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic," involving, among other things, history, language, and religion. "Second ... the interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness."

Huntington points to interlocking conflicts among Hindu, Moslem, Slavic Orthodox, Western, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American, and possibly African civilizations.

Because Huntington's brush is broad, his specifics are vulnerable to attack. In a rebuttal to Huntington's argument, John Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese-born Shi'ite who certainly knows the world beyond the ivory-tower America universities, writes in the September-October 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs:

The world of Islam divides and subdivides. The battle lines in the Caucasus ... are not coextensive with civilizational fault lines. The lines follow the interest of states. Where Huntington sees a civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has cast religious zeal ... to the wind ... in that battle the Iranians have tilted toward Christian Armenia.

True, Huntington's hypothesized war between Islam and Orthodox Christianity is not borne out by the alliance network in the Caucasus. But that is only because he has misidentified which civilizational war is occurring there. Azeri Turks, perhaps the world's most secular Shi'ite Moslems, see their cultural identity not in terms of religion but in terms of the Turkic race. The Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris not because the latter are Moslems, but because they are Turks, related to the same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915. Turkic culture (secular and based on languages adopting a Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously militant as defined by the Teheran clergy, and wed to an Arabic script across Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow Indo-Europeans, the Iranians.

Huntington may be correct to say that the Caucasus is a flash point of cultural and racial wars. But, as Ajami observes, Huntington's terms are too simple. While Turks are growing deeply distrustful and coming to hate Moslem Iran, they are also, especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dominate Turkish political life, identifying themselves increasingly as Moslems, betrayed by a West that for several years did little to help besieged Moslems in Bosnia and which attacks Turkish Moslems in the streets of Germany.

To go a step further, the Balkans, where nation-state wars flared at the beginning of the twentieth century, have been on the verge of culture conflict between Orthodox Christianity (represented by the Serbs and a classic Byzantine configuration of somewhat-sympathetic Greeks, Russians, and Romanians) and the worldwide House of Islam. Yet in the Caucasus, Islam is subdividing into a class between Turks and Iranians. Ajami rightly asserts that this very subdividing, not to mention th emany divisions within the Arab world, indicate that the West, including the United States, is not threatened by Huntington's scenario. As the Gulf War demonstrated, the West can still play one part of the House of Islam against another.

"The Clash of Civilizations" is a romantic term, conjuring up massive armies divided by race, language, and religion, advancing across battlefields thousands of miles long, wielding banners of the cross and of the crescent. The reality is different. The desecration of Greek and Russian Orthodox tombstones by a Moslem Uzbek mob in Tashkent was an isolated incident ignited by specific, local factors -- like other isolated events, such as a war between Moslems and Orthodox Christians in Bosnia; a decades-long war of words, wiht occasional bloodshed, between a Greek Orthodox government in Athens and a Turksih Moslem government in Ankara; the forced exodus, earlier in the twentieth century, of Greek Orthodox communities from Istanbul, Smyrna, and the Turkish-Moslem-controlled Black Sea coast; and the tensions between various Russian Orthodox and Turkic Moslem communities in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. But these events, taken as a whole, have more to do with historically based religious and ethnic differences than with modern state loyalties. So for such events, Huntington's civilization clash is an appropriate term -- as a crude organizing principle.

But the reality is uglier, more complex, and pathetic. Forget about medieval horsemen giving battle; expect instead a fistfight with smashed vodka bottles in a plywood bar. For the moment, a civilizations competition may exist between the Turkic and Iranian peoples for future trade routes in Central Asia -- routes, that for the most part haven't yet been built, with the battle so far being fought with charts and anemic statements within bureaucrats' offices. It is a competition that the Russians are joining: The Russians want to upstage both Turkey's plan to transport Central Asian oil across Anatolia to the Mediterranean and Iran's plan to tranport the oil to the Persian Gulf with their own plan to ship oil through the Black Sea and the Bosphorus straits. As some states have become increasingly identified with old caravan routes, this might lead to conflict. Meanwhile, what I saw on the ground is a Turkic Uzbek youth, Ulug Beg, pale with anger after being teased by a Persian Tajik woman.

Schuyler's description of the negative stereotypes harbored by Uzbeks and Tajiks for each other may still apply because of the economic and social disorder arising from seventy-four years of communist rule, and the weaking of other constraints. From Schuyler's day through 1991, Uzbeks and Tajiks were all subjects of a single authority: the czar, and then the commissar. There was no territory for them to fight over, just as there was none in the Balkans in the days of the Ottoman empire. But now, with very fragile states with little tradition behind them and little logic to their borders, the tensions a visitor notices in Central Asia are less between states than between groups both within and overlapping such states, or between inhabitants of one traditional city-state region and another. The chance that these states will shatter as a result of intensified Turkic-Iranian competition (leading to strife between Uzbeks and Tajiks), or because of economic competition within the Uzbek or Tajik communities, is probably greater than the threat of a traditional war between, say, Uzbekistan and Tajikstan -- neither of whose governments can claim the loyalty of their ethnic minorities in such a circumstance, and neither of whose military frontiers coincide with ethnic ones.

All I had learned so far was that states in West Africa, the Near East, and Central Asia were weakening, and that ethnic-religious identities appeared stronger by contrast. Beyond that, I had little proof of anything.

The Books: "Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History" (Robert Kaplan)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan.

This was the book that launched Robert Kaplan's career- although he had been writing books and articles for Atlantic Monthly for years - this was the book that "hit". I didn't read it when it first came out in 1993 - I came to it later. I read it in 2000. Why do I know this? Because I always put my name and the date I bought the dern book on the first page. I have no idea what prompted me to pick it up ... Here is a theory: I discovered the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski (I love that guy so much that I list him over on the right hand side under my Stark Raving Mad Obsessions) in 1999. I blew through all of his existing books in a matter of 3 months. This was my moment of discovery. I hadn't really been a history buff - or the foreign-correspondent-in-my-own-head - before Kapuscinski. I was a fiction reader, primarily. I mean, I KNOW about history - because I had a pretty good education, and I also watch the news, and am aware of the different "issues" facing different regions - it's not like I'm totally isolated - but to dig deep into certain areas? To say to myself: "Okay. I need to learn about Armenia now. Let's go buy some books" was not how I spent my time. I am so so thankful that one day, in the bookstore, browsing - I picked up Imperium by Kapuscinski. It blew me AWAY. A whole world opened up to me - a world I only vaguely knew about - the world of countries with names like Uzbekistan ... Kazakhstan ... the old silk road ... Kapuscinski was the perfect guide. He is one of my favorite writers of all time. I would KILL to meet that guy some day. So Imperium was the beginning. I suddenly realized, in a little A-ha moment - Okay. I need to learn more about the world. And, frankly, my interest lay in central Asia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. Not sure why. Maybe because of how he writes about those areas in Imperium - but it was like I suddenly was an addict. I needed more, more, MORE. This is STILL the case with me, in terms of those areas, and I will not be satisfied until I actually GO there. But for now? Books!!! I read all of those books in 1999 - and ... my theory is that I discovered Kaplan mainly because of his proximity to Kapuscinski on any bookshelf in Barnes and Noble. They are always in the same section - and their books are always side by side. I think I picked up Balkan Ghosts randomly - because Kapuscinski's stuff had turned me on so much, that now I was trolling the shelves, hungry, searching for more.

Balkan Ghosts was a revelation to me. He and Kapuscinski are very similar. Kaplan references Kapuscinski in his work all the time. Kapuscinski and Dame Rebecca West are his two idols. And rightly so. None of us create the wheel. We only build on the accomplishments of those who came before us. In Balkan Ghosts, Kaplan travels through the former Yugoslavia in 1991 - directly following the crack-up of the Soviet Imperium. "Dame Rebecca" traveled through Yugoslavia in 1938, I believe - as WWII approached - She wanted to see "what was going on" there. Her book (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon) is one of the most prescient books of all time. It predicts everything. Kaplan literally travels through all of these countries, carrying a copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in his bag. He follows through her footsteps. He pulls out the book randomly, to read what she wrote about this or that monastery, this cathedral, this little village - because it's all in there. And she is STILL a better guide to that entire area than any contemporary writer could ever be. Kaplan uses her book not just as a launching-off point, but as an ongoing theme throughout the book.

Balkan Ghosts, wiht all of the information, with all of the historical context it provides - is also wonderfully written - and I can't forget some of the people I meet in its pages. Kaplan talks to people. He records the conversations. He goes to discos - talks to dancing kids - he tracks down professors - etc. Some of these people have insights into what is going on with their country (or - in this case, more usually - their ethnic group) - and the insights are stuff that someone like a prime minister or a President can only dream of. Kaplan now has access like that - he can get in to talk to Presidents and Princes and Prime Ministers - but sometimes you get better stuff if you talk to a taxi driver.

It was SO hard to pick an excerpt. There's so much good stuff in the book. I decided to excerpt a bit from his section on Macedonia and on the formation of IMRO.

From Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan.

The first Macedonian guerrilla rising, as it is known, collapsed under Turkish whips and rifle butts in the suffocation cells of Bitolj prison in 1881. But while the Turks were still strong enough to crush an open insurgency, they could not prevent new insurgents and propagandists from filtering into the area.

That same year, Serbia grudgingly recognized Austria-Hungary's occupation of Bosnia, sanctioned by the Treaty of Berlin three years earlier. In return, Serbia received the blessing of the Habsburg court to pour men and equipment into Macedonia, as a wedge against both the Ottoman Turks and the pro-Russian Bulgarians. In 1885, continued Russian pressure on Turkey resulted in the union of the southern half of Bulgaria with the already independent northern half. Fearful that the Bulgarians might yet achieve their aim of a Greater Bulgaria, the Turks discovered that they could benefit by helping the Serbs against the Bulgarians in Macedonia.

In 1897, this situation broke all bounds of complexity. An uprising on the island of Crete sparked a war between Greece and the Ottoman Turks. To prevent Bulgaria from joining forces with Greece, the Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid suddenly reversed his policy in Macedonia. Rather than continuing to help the Serbs in order to contain the Bulgarians there, the Sultan now gave Bulgaria's King Ferdinand carte blanche to help the Serbs contain the Greeks.

Meanwhile, in the town of Shtip, southeast of Skopje, six conspirators, including Gotse Delchev, a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher, had founded "the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization" on the ruins of the original cheti guerrilla revolt. To distinguish this indigenous movement from another Macedonian underground group set up in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization soon became the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, or IMRO. IMRO spread rapidly in the 1890s, raising its money through bank robberies and kidnappings for ransom.

By the turn of the century, Macedonia was a power vacuum of sectarian violence. The absence of a viable central government or a defining concept of nationhood permitted various outside powers -- all soon to disappear as a result of what Macedonia would unleash -- to play out their rivalries against the backdrop of a magnificent, mountainous landscape. In Macedonia, Christian militias fought Muslim militias, and fought each other as well; bearded and bandoliered terrorists like Gotse Delchev planted bombs at cafes, open-air theatres, and railway stations; splinter groups murdered members of rival groups, conducted secret tribunals, executed civilians accused of collaboration with the "enemy", and took hostages, such as the American Protestant missionary Ellen Stone. "Two hundred and forty-five bands were in the mountains. Serbian and Bulgarian comitadjis, Greek andartes, Albanians and Vlachs ... all waging a terrorist war," writes Leon Sciaky in Farewell to Salonica: Portrait of an Era. Macedonia, on the day the twentieth century began, was a place of atrocities and refugee camps that people in the West were already bored by and cynical ab out; it represented a situation that would never be solved and to which the newspaper correspondents were paying far too much attention.

But by 1990, except as memorialized in a handful of old black-and-white photographs buckling inside dusty frames in the local museums of Skopje and other towns, all this was long past and forgotten -- in the West, that is.

Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for "mixed salad" (macedoine), defines the principal illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that its borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion. Because Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, had established a great kingdom in Macedonia in the fourth century BC, the Greeks believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because the Bulgarians at the end of the tenth century under King Samuel and again in the thirteenth century under King Ivan Assen II had extended the frontiers of Bulgaria all the way west to the Adriatic Sea, the Bulgarians believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because King Stefan Dushan had overrun Macedonia in the fourteenth century and had made Skpje, in Dame Rebecca's words, "a great city, and there he had been crowned one Easter Sunday Emperor and Autocrat of the Serbs and Byzantines, the Bulgars and the Albanians," the Serbs believed Macedonia to be theirs. In the Balkans, history is not viewed as tracing a chronological progression as it is in the West. Instead, history jumps arounld and moves in circles; and where history is perceived in such a way, myths take root. Evangelos Kofos, Greece's preeminent scholar on Macedonia, has observed that these "historical legacies ... sustained nations in their uphill drive toward state-building, national unification, and, possibly, the reincarnation of lost extinct empires."

The Books: "Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan" (Robert Kaplan)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert Kaplan.

This book was originally published in 1990 - which, I believe again, was prior to Balkan Ghosts. It was re-published after September 11 - because of the whole Afghanistan theme. Kaplan was one of those hardy journalists who traveled around the mujhadeen - and met all the warlord leaders - Massoud, in particular - but all of them. This is the book of his journeys in Afghanistan during the ongoing war with the Soviets. As always with Kaplan, you not only get a feel for the history of the region (the long long LONG history) - but you also meet the people he meets, you see the scenery, you taste the food, you learn about the culture ... A rich travelogue, as well as journalism. The whole Kaplan THING.

I couldn't decide originally what to excerpt - there's a whole long section about the famous Ahmed Shah Massoud - which is very good - but I decided instead to excerpt the section when he talks about the legendary Khyber Pass.

From Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert Kaplan.

The bus rambled straight ahead on a flat table of increasingly dry earth that bred nothing, it seemed, except a rash of cinder block and mud brick shanties inhabited by refugees. The throngs of people and roadside stalls gradually thinned as the wall of mountains came closer. At the edge of the plain, just past the stone gate with the inscription from Kipling's "Arithmetic on the Frontier", stood the tan battlements of Jamrud Fort, built by the Sikh governor of Peshawar, Hari Singh, in 1836 to defend the entrance to the Pass. It was like a stage set for Gunga Din.

Then, quickly, the earth heaved upward, and what had minutes before seemed like a solitary sandstone wall disintegrated into a labyrinth of scooped-out riverbeds and folds reflecting the dull soldierly hues of gunmetal gray and plankton green. I had the sensation of being trapped ina tunnel. Topping each rise was a slash of red or ocher as the sun caught a higher steeper slope at a different angle. Lifts of cooler air penetrated the bus, momentarily drying my sweat -- my first frresh taste of the mountains after the gauzy heat film of Peshawar. The machine-gun rhythm of Pakistani popular music filled my ears as the winding bed of a Kabul River tributary led to a series of long, slowly rising switchbacks that constituted the heart of the twenty-five-mile-long Khyber Pass.

Disguised as a Pathan in this metal crate hurtling upward toward Afghanistan, I thought it was hard not to be a little impressed with myself. But I had just showered and eaten a hearty breakfast. I doubted that I would feel the same after two weeks of bad food and little sleep.

By themselves, the dimensions of the Khyber Pass are not impressive. The highest peak in the area is under seven thousand feet, and the rise is never steep. What makes the Pass spectacular is sheer scenery, historical association, and a present-day reality every bit as gripping and dangerous as in former epochs. Perhaps nowhere else on the planet are the cultural, climatic, and topographic changes quite so swift and theatrical. In a world of arbitrary boundaries, here is one border region that lives up to the definition.

In the space of forty minutes you are transported through a confined, volcanic nether world of crags and winding canyons, from the lush, tropical floor of India to the cool, tonsured wastes of middle Asia; from a world of black soil, bold fabrics, and rich spicy cuisine to one of sand, coarse wool, and goat meet. And some would add: from a land of subtle, slippery justifications to one of hard, upright decision.

Alexander the Great, accompanied by his teenage Bactrian bride, Roxanne, must have experienced this very sensation as he came down into India (Hindustan) near the Malakand Pass, sixty miles north of here, in the early winter of 327 BC. Some of Alexander's troops, under the command of his most trusted general, Hephaestion, trekked through these same Khyber defiles. So did Babur, the sixteenth-century Mongol king and descendant of Tamurlane, who had lost his father's central Asian kingdom as a young man, but before his death had conquered Kabul and Delhi and founded the great Moghul dynasty. Babur was a poet, whose fantastically detailed memoirs, the Babur-nama, exude a sensitive, lyric intensity that captures the awe and pain of travel in this part of the world. (On finding a cave in the middle of a blizzard in the first days of January 1507, he wrote: "People brought out their rations, cold meat, parched grain, whatever they had. From such cold and tumult to a place so warm, cozy, and quiet!")

Though he conquered India, Babur preferred Afghanistan; his conquest of Kabul in 1504 had marked the turning point in his fortunes. And it was to Kabul, his favorite city, that his body was taken. He lies now under a garden of mulberry trees on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, in a marble monument built in the following century by Shah Jahan, the Moghul emperor responsible for the Taj Mahal. For the handful of journalists and relief workers in Peshawar enamored of such stuff, Babur's marble tomb loomed as the longed-for summit of their Frontier odysseys, where, under the shade of that mulberry arbor, they would one day rest their dirty, fatigued bodies and read Babur's poetry after having witnessed -- they hoped -- the mujahidin conquest of Kabul. "O Babur! dream of your luck when your Feast is the meeting, your New-year the face; For better than that could not be with a hundred New-years and Bairams." Like Babur, some of us measured happiness by how close we were to going up Khyber for the last time.

The British first marched up the Khyber Pass in 1839, on their way to the first Afghan war, which was to end in disaster three years later with the massacre of every solider save one, a Dr. William Brydon, who lived to tell the story. The British came back up the Pass in 1878 and again were forced by the Afghans to withdraw. The graves of British soldiers killed in the second Afghan war lie near the Masjid Mosque by the top of the Pass. Each time, the British lost hundreds of men just fighting their way through the Khyber territory, controlled by the Afridis, a tribal branch of the Pathans who since antiquity have served the function of "guardians of the Pass".

In 1897, the British had to dispatch forty thousand troops to this area just to quell an Afridi uprising and regain control of the Pass. Alexander and Babur also fought pitched battles with the Afridis. It is these tribesmen, numbering over 300,000 in their mud brick redoubts that dot the hills of the Khyber Tribal Agency, who have given the Khyber Pass its allure of danger and epic drama throughout history -- and never more so than in the 1980s.

In The Pathans by Sir Olaf Caroe, the definitive work on the subject, the author provides evidence that the Aparutai, mentioned by the fifth century BC Greek historian Herodotus, are the ancestors of the Afridis of today. (As Caroe writes, the names sound similar when one recognizes that the Afridis, like other Pathans, "habitually change f into p.") The Afridis are also generally thought to have more ancient Greek blood than other Pathans who intermixed with Alexander's soldiers, evinced by their sharp features and fairer complexions. They dress differently too: you can always spot an Afridi by his turban, wrapped tightly with an ostentatious bow around a bulbous red hat, called a kullah.

But these are all minutiae.

What really sets the Afridis apart from other Pathans is their deliciously devious, amoral character -- a legacy of the physical landscape of the Northwest Frontier and the Khyber Pass in particular. Unlike other regions of the Frontier and eastern Afghanistan, the Khyber area has no arable land. Through these poor, barren defiles, conquerors from time immemorial have come to steal the wealth of the subcontinent. So the Afridis learned to play the only card they had: their power to murder, ambush, and in general make life hell for any invading army. What they have essentially said to everyone was: Rather than kill you, all we ask is that you share a certain portion of your wealth with us. And to their fellow Pathans in the Afghan resistance the Afridis' attitude was: You fight the Russians, so they go after you but kill us too. So you must give us something in return. There had been frequent, violent clashes between the mujahidin and the Afridis. The Afridis were bristling with arms. They controlled the weapons trade at Darra, and in addition were supplied with guns by KhAD as a reward for fighting the guerrillas. So it had become more dangerous than ever to trek through Afridi territory on the way into Afghanistan, as I planned to do.

Smuggling, as well as bribes and thievery, was a source of income for the Afridis. A quarter of a century ago the Afridis in the Khyber Agency were among the poorest tribes in Pakistan. They had little to eat and were forced to weave shoes from grass. Their situation improved when they got involved in running Russian consumer appliances from Soviet-occupied Afghanistan into Pakistan. (A smuggled Russian air conditioner cost $300 in Peshawar; an Italian or Japanese one was four to five times the price.) But real fortunes were made with heroin, which, following the Islamic revolution in Iran, became the Khyber Agency's main business. The Afridis set up laborartories in hillside caves, where they organized smuggling caravans to bring the heroin to Pakistani ports. They often bribed police at the various Khyber Pass checkpoints. Unlike other Pathans, the Afridis have managed to keep their fundamentalist beliefs and their livelihood in two separate, airtight mental compartments. A Pakistani government official explained: "To them, nothing is immoral when you are making money." Often an Afridi will interrupt a drug sale if it is prayer time. Afridi merchants always close drug deals with the words: "May God be with you."

The long, buff walls of the British-built Shagai Fort, now manned by the Khyber Rifles, came into view as our bus mounted the first of a series of plateaus. I was not impressed. These Pakistani troops, despite their drums, sashes, and breast-beating tradition earned during the time of the Raj, were not able to hold more than twenty yards on either side of the highway. Beyond that, permission was needed from the heavily armed Afridi tribesmen in order to pass. The real power here lay within the even higher, longer walls of the fortresses that appeared farther up the road: the homes of the wealthiest Afridi khans (large landowners), not a few of whom where implicated in the international drug trade.

Every few miles I saw a military checkpoint, where a Pakistani soldier would mount the bus, cast a quick glance at anyone or anything that looked suspicious, and then wave the bus on. I instinctively looked down and away: Never ever establish eye contact with a border guard. It was one of a reporter's more mundane nightmares out here that he would be pulled off a bus before even entering Afghanistan and be humiliated in the eyes of his colleagues and editors. This happened periodically to journalists in the course of the war, because the attitude of the Pakistani authorities was much more ambivalent than President Zia's open support of the mujahidin suggested. Many in the lower reaches of the Pakistani security services did not share Zia's enthusiasm for the resistance. Even Zia, though he was willing to help the mujahidin, did not want to be seen in the eyes of the Soviets as allowing Western journalists to cross an international border illegally in order to cover the war from the guerrilla side.

The Books: "Surrender or Starve : Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea" (Robert Kaplan)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Surrender or Starve : Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea by Robert Kaplan.

Yet another one of Kaplan's earlier books which was re-released after his massive success with Balkan Ghosts. Here, unlike The Arabists, I can start to feel the Robert Kaplan STYLE emerging. He's finding his milieu. It's part travelogue - Robert Kaplan is not just a journalist - he is always IN these books as a character. His idol is Rebecca West, whose stupendous book about Yugoslavia in 1939 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is still a high-water mark in the genre. He is quite open about his regard for her - and that he models his books after her accomplishments. He's also humble enough to say: "I can only ATTEMPT to do what she did ..." Rebecca West is a character in the book she wrote about Yugoslavia - we hear about the breakfasts they had, the people they met on the train ... her own thoughts and perceptions at Kosovo Polje, etc. etc. We learn a ton about the region - we get the history, etc., but it's also almost like a travel diary. Robert Kaplan is damn good at this kind of writing - and in Surrender or Starve he's moving into that territory.

The book is about famine - the causes thereof (which is, of course, never lack of food) - and power. Who's in power? Who controls the food supply? What's the government like? Where do things break down? He travels to the most desolate areas imaginable - horrific refugee camps in the Sudan, Ethiopia ... He looks at the inherent sickness in the whole emergency aid culture ... It's a good book. I recommend it. But then again: I recommend ALL of Kaplan's books.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book. Things covered: the famine in the early 70s in Ethiopia - the fall of the Emperor - and the rise of Mengistu. (This stuff is also told in a BRILLIANT book by a writer I hold above all others - Ryszard Kapuscinski - he wrote a brilliant book about the last emperor of Ethiopia called The Emperor ... but we'll get to that!! Kaplan quotes Kapuscinski all the time, as you will see)

From Surrender or Starve : Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea by Robert Kaplan.

The story began with the 1973-74 famine in Tigre and Wollo. Except for its severity -- an estimated 200,000 peasants starved to death -- there was little that was unusual about this famine. Like the five previous ones that had devastated Ethiopia since Haile Selassie assumed power in 1916, this famine took place in the north; an area that the Amhara emperor had a strategic interest in keeping underdeveloped, on account of Amhara historical conflicts with the Eritreans and Tigreans. A feudal landowning system, an absence of investment, crippling taxation, and drought were the causes of the famine. As far as the palace was concerned, there was nothing to be alarmed about. According to Kapuscinski,

Death from hunger had existed in our Empire for hundreds of years, an everyday natural thing, and it never occurred to anyone to make any noise about it. Drought would come and the earth would dry up, the cattle would drop dead, the peasants would starve. Ordinary, in accordance with the laws of nature and the eternal order of th ings ... none of the dignitaries would dare to bother His Most Exalted Highness with the news that in such and such a province a given person had died of hunger.

In late 1973 there was one difference, however. Between the 1960s famine and the one in the 1970s, television coverage of overseas events finally had come into its own -- encouraged no doubt by the intervening Vietnam War. British reporter Jonathan Dimbleby's film of the famine, The Unknown Famine, of course was not broadcast in Ethiopia, but information about the film filtered back to radicals in Addis Ababa, thereby fostering a strong empathy on their part for the starving peasants up north. A similar bond had eluded Russian revolutionaries until the beginning of this century. In Poland, the convergence of workers and intellectuals into one movement was crucial to Solidarity's initial success. But in Africa, where radicals tend to come from an urban elite that knows, cares, and thinks little about the countryside and the peasants in it, such a development is unusual.

As news of the famine, conveyed by other journalists who followed Dimbleby's trail, reached the streets and campus in Addis Ababa, it had the same effect as the 1905 shooting of marching workers in front of the Winter Palace had on Czar Nicholas II -- the news broke the emperor's spell. The edifice of legitimacy, created by history and tradition, was smashed. What followed was a series of events as drawn out, bloody, and intellectually insane as the Russian and French revolutions, but even more complex. Scholar Bertram D. Wolfe's depiction of revolutionaries in Russia in Three Who Made a Revolution could easily apply to Ethiopia: "With fiercer passion than ever, they fell to engaging in controversies of a minuteness, stubbornness, sweep, and fury unheard of in all the history of politics."

The first phase of the uprising in Ethiopia was known as the "creeping coup". At the beginning of 1974, taxi drivers in Addis Ababa, protesting a rise in gasoline prices, went out on strike. A general strike of all workers followed in March. At the same time, an army mutiny, sparked by a government defeat in Eritrea, was taking place. In Negelle, in the far south of Ethiopia, junior officers arrested their superiors, forcing the generals to eat the same miserable food and dirty water as did the enlisted men. Out of this and other barracks' rebellions came the Dergue (Amharic for committee), a coordinating body of educated junior officers, with representatives from units throughout the country. The uprising began as a class struggle. But, as pointed out by marina and David Ottaway in Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution, the ethnic animosities basic to an empire of great diversity quickly became dominant. Almost as soon as it was formed, the Dergue began to fissure along ethnic lines. Because his ancestry was not wholly Amhara, Mengistu's rise to power was aided by his ability to be seen as a unifying figure.

It was a gradual process. The portrait of one ruler, as so often happens in the Third World, was not abruptly taken down one day from the wall and replaced with that of another. It was as if the picture imperceptibly changed, day by day, a line at a time, during a period of months, until the face of Emperor Haile Selassie was completely wiped out and the face of Mengistu Haile Mariam had emerged from out of the dim background, anonymous and impenetrable; the face of the masses at their most brutal. In the void opened by the absence of democratic institutions and the chaos of revolution, the worst national traits came to the surface.

Mengistu's origin is obscure. By one account, he is the son of a night watchman and a palace servant; by another, the illegitimate descendant of a nobleman and his mistress. Mengistu's complexion is extremely dark, and he is assumed to be part Oromo. During the first years of his rule, his official portrait was touched up to lighten his complexion, so he would appear like an Amhara.

In 1974, Mengistu was a thirty-two-year-old army captain, a graduate of the Holeta Military Academy, which was an institution of no prestige designed for prospective officers whose family backgrounds were neither wealthy nor aristocratic. Like Haile Selassie, Mengistu was short: five feet, five inches. But his reputation was always that of a roughneck; he was constantly getting into fist fights. For eight long years, until the outbreak of the "creeping coup", Mengistu sat behind a desk in a cramped, dusty office in Harar, while serving as an ordnance officer for the Third Army Division -- a typical dead-end job. From this vantage point, noted Rene Lefort in Ethiopia: Revolution Heretique, Mengistu learned how to master the system at its most vicious, petty, and bureaucratic level. Favors, payoffs, and other dirty business regularly crossed his desk. The future author of resettlement and villagization followed Stalin's dictum well: "Paper will put up with anything that is written on it."

The barracks disturbances in early 1974 were perfect opportunities for Mengistu's cunning and thuggishness. Only a true "desperado" could challenge an absolute monarch in a society as violent and secretive as Ethiopia's. At the Dergue's founding meeting in late June 1974, Mengistu was chosen immediately as one of its leaders.

The emperor tried to meet the mutineers' challenge by appointing a new prime minister, who was given a mandate for reform. Meanwhile, Mengistu and the other members of the Dergue worked behind the scenes to unite the faction-ridden armed forces. Haile Selassie was deposed on September 12, 1974; he was driven away from the palace in the back seat of a green Volkswagen and taken to the basement of the Fourth Division headquarters. Two months later, in November, a dispute about the conduct of the war in Eritrea led Mengistu to eliminate his chief rival, General Aman Michael Andom, who was gunned down in his home.

In December, students were dispatched to the countryside, ostensibly to revolutionize th emasses. But the relocation of the students, many of whom were members of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary party (EPRP), allowed the Dergue to consolidate its power in the cities by forming its own left-wing party, the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement, known by its Amharic acronym, MEISON. The Dergue then set MEISON agaginst the EPRP.

On August 28, 1975, the English-language Ethiopian Herald announced that Haile Selassie had died the day before of circulatory failure. However, Mengistu is said to have suffocated the eighty-three-year-old deposed emperor with a pillow.

A few weeks later, the Dergue shot contingents of EPRP marchers down in the street. This, as Mengistu no doubt expected, only whetted MEISON's appetite. By early 1976, MEISON cadres were conducting house-to-house searches, killing anyone suspected of belonging to the EPRP.

Within the Dergue, Mengistu continued apace to eliminate rivals. In July 1976, the members of a faction that supported a peaceful solution to the war in Eritrea all were executed. Undeterred, another group, led by General Teferi Banti -- this time calling for democratic reforms -- demanded that Mengistu's power be circumscribed. Mengistu, uncharacteristically, submitted. A few months went by. Then, on February 2, 1977, General Banti and his colleagues were murdered by Mengistu inside the palace. By now, having destroyed the EPRP with the help of MEISON, the Dergue was turning against MEISON itself.

The Russian were very impressed with Mengistu's performance thus far, and a group of East German security police were dispatched to Addis Ababa to advise the emergent Ethiopian leadaer on what to do next. What followed was the Red Terror, which began in May 1977. On May Day eve, soldiers that had been brought into town by convoy machine-gunned to death hundreds of demonstrating students, including many children. During the coming months, dozens of new bodies would turn up on the street every morning; most of them were teenagers who were vaguely connected with revolutionary politics at a time when there was no right side to be on. The victims' families had to pay a fee to the government in order to get the bodies back for burial.

The revolution ground to a halt the next year. The death toll was estimated to be thirty thousand, not including tens of thousands of battlefield deaths. (In Tigre, an insurgency had broken out against the new military rulers, and in Eritrea, Mengistu's uncompromising stance toward the guerrillas resulted in intensified fighting.) Of the 120 members of the original Dergue, only a small fraction were still alive. Compared to the hundreds of political prisoners in jail in Haile Selassie's day, tens of thousands were being held in 1978. Torture reportedly was widespread.

The Darwinian process of revolution had proved efficient and had elevated Mengistu in a very short time from the very bottom to the very top, where he both orchestrated and survived four years of the most violent internecine struggles imaginable. Constantly underestimated by his rivals, he never once miscalculated. The standard of treachery he was judged by, given the paranoia engendered by the revolution, was much higer than that ever applied to Haile Selassie. A Marxist revolution once again had brought an outdated despotism up to a modern standard, with a programmed killer installed in the emperor's palace.

Mengistu belonged to the most lethal class of dictator: the kind not distracted by greed. As with Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, Mengistu was not personally corrupt, and corruption never has been a key element in his style of rule. Apologists for the Ethiopian regime -- and in Europe, especially, there are many - point out that it is more honest and efficient than the previous one. This is certainly true. Mengistu has none of the all-too-human foibles of other Third World rulers, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, for example, whose evil was of a lesser variety, one to which the US public could relate. (Is there a more tangible symbol of conspicuous, nouveau riche, middle-class consumption than Mrs. Marcos's fetish for shoes?) This is one reason why even during the height of the famine, the media never bothered much with Mengistu. As a personality he was too austere and his evil too remote for mass audience appeal.

The Books: "The Arabists" (Robert Kaplan)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Arabists : The Romance of an American Elite by Robert Kaplan.

Ah, Robert Kaplan. He's a guy who pretty much launched a thousand ships in my life. He and Ryzsard Kapuscinski were the ones who started it all. I read Balkan Ghosts and Kapscinski's marvelous Imperium in tandem and ... fuggedaboutit. I was HOOKED. Not only do I find Kaplan's world-weary pragmatism and sometimes rampant pessimism kind of invigorating (how can pessimism be invigorating? I have no idea. But read his books, if you haven't already to see what I mean) - but I also think he's one of the best writers out there, in terms of not only journalism, but human interest stories, travelogue pieces, book reviews. I just eat his stuff UP. He can't be pinned down, either - or, no, that's not accurate. You know where he stands on certain issues, but it sure as hell doesn't line up with any bullshit political party talking-points. He's an environmentalist. He thinks military action is often the only way to bring about peace of any kind. He's worried about overpopulation. He despises communism and totalitarianism. I am now making my way through his Imperial Grunts - his huge book about the American military - and I'm telling you, I wouldn't have any other person as a guide. In my mind, he's the best guide there is. He's got his own way of looking at the world - the Kaplan filter - and you can take it or leave it, but you might as well know what the guy is saying, because he's made correct predictions before. He's scarily prescient. His book The Coming Anarchy should be required reading ... I don't know WHO should be required to read it but I feel like everyone should read it. That book scared the shit out of me. Kaplan's books often scare the shit out of me. I've read them all, and he is one of the few authors where I literally wait with baited breath for his next book. He's pretty much been a one-book-a-year kind of guy since the late 90s, so it's been cool for me - I can get my Kaplan fix on a yearly basis. I like looking at the world through the Kaplan filter. I think my favorite of all of his books is The Ends of the Earth - a spectacular book about his journeys through West Africa, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Southeast Asia - places of "anarchy". Kaplan is one of those guys, one of those few few guys, who takes the long long view. This is one of the reasons why I find him invigorating. If you're a historian, if you study ancient empires rising and falling - as Kaplan does ... then you're going to look at the current struggle a little bit differently. Empires always end. His book Empire Wilderness is his fascinating book about America itself - he travels through America and treats it as though it is a foreign country - He's trying to figure out what is happening in America ... It's kind of a scary book - because - well - change scares me - but I feel comforted knowing that people like him are out there, thinking about this stuff, projecting into the future (good or bad) ...

Anyway, I could go on and on and on about Robert Kaplan. And believe me, I will.

His first book (I think) is Arabists - He became famous with Balkan Ghosts but there were a couple of books before that one. I think Arabists had gone out of print and when Balkan Ghosts hit it so huge, they re-released it. Anyway, it's the story of basically the American diplomat class in the Middle East - how it began with these Protestant missionary types - who wanted to save the heathens ... and then others came ... and more and more ... setting up universities, diplomatic missions from the US State Department blah blah blah ... How were the US "Arabists" different from the "sand-mad Britons"? Kaplan looks at the differences. It's an interesting book, a lot of the history I did not know - but having read every single one of Kaplan's books, and feeling, at times, completely turned ON by his prose - I can feel that he's new at this whole book-writing thing in this one. It feels like a first book. Or maybe a dissertation paper. VERY interesting, though.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from the book - it's about Loy Henderson, Mr. still-controversial Cold War Foreign Service Man.

From Arabists : The Romance of an American Elite by Robert Kaplan.

Unlike the missionaries, Henderson was no idealist. Nor did he, or anyone he was close to, have a vested interest -- as the missionaries certainly did -- in maintaining a personal relationship with the Arabs. Henderson was, however, both a gifted analyst and a quick study, one who was able immediately to place facts about a region previously unknown to him into a conceptual framework that interlocked with situations elsewhere in the world. And it didn't take him long to figure out that after the war with Germany and Japan was over, the Middle East was bent on a cataclysm. He was absolutely certain by 1943 that the intercommunal situation in Palestine was explosive and nearly impossible to solve, and that its shock effects would fissure throughout the Middle East, distorting the region's politics as it already was doing in Iraq. Because he was also certain that after Hitler was defeated, the Soviet Union would become America's worldwide enemy, he thought that the United States had to look at the Palestine problem through the filter of a global struggle against Communism. This necessitated that the US support the side in Palestine that would better strengthen its hand in dealing with the Soviets. For Henderson there was no contest: the Arabs had oil, strategic locations, and numbers. And how many oil wells do the Jews have? Henderson seemed to ask himself. In 1943 this was sheer clairvoyance (even if, as some might assume, Henderson was also motivated by a lack of sympathy for Jews.) By 1947 Henderson would realize that recognition of the State of Israel would buy the United States decades of constant trouble and expense, as well as lead to "the rise of fanatic Mohammedanism" of a kind "not experienced for hundres of years." Could anyone today argue with that?

Henderson would turn out to be wrong about one thing, however: the US could indeed have it both ways, friendship with the Arabs and with the Jews. But not for three decades, as a consequence of Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy and reestablishment of relations with Egypt and Syria in the 1970s, would this become absolutely clear.

In the end, one's attitude towards Henderson is driven by one's perception of how cold-blooded American police needed to be back then. Because Henderson had personally experienced Stalinism to a degree that few of his countrymen had, he had no illusions about the enemy they faced and what he thought it would take to eventually defeat that enemy. Henderson was about as different from the missionaries as one could get. He had no special interest in the Arabs, their language, their culture, or their educational and national aspirations. But he did have strong opinions about where the US national interest in the Middle East lay, and these opinions happened to dovetail perfectly with those of the missionaries. This alignment of goals provided the template for the hybrid Arabist culture that would emerge in the 1950s.

Henderson's analytical skills, his determination and energy, and his willingness -- with the support of his wife, Elise -- to sacrifice much of his personal life on the altar of work and duty resulted in his promotion in 1945. He became the director of the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs office. Henderson's force was felt immediately. When the French government, now controlled by the Free French leader, Charles De Gaulle, began bombing Damascus and other Arab population centers in Syria as a means of retaining control over the Syrian mandate, Henderson went directly to Truman, advising him to force the French to withdraw. Not only, Henderson thought, did French actions mock the spirit of the new United Nations charter, but they threatened to derail the West's relations with Arabs and other Moslems. As Henderson explained to his superiors, Arab hatred of the French would eventually be directed at the entire West and would one day permit the Soviet Union to fill the Great Power void in Syria. This, of course, is exactly what happened.

In early 1946 Soviet troops advanced south to the outskirts of Tabriz in northwestern Iran and were poised to take the city. It was the first crisis in what was to be called the Cold War, and Loy Henderson was ready. It was Henderson who marched into the offices of Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of State James Byrnes, armed with maps to explain how the Soviet troop deployment threatened Turkey, Iraq, and the Iranian oil fields, and prevailed upon the Truman administration to issue a stiff warning to Stalin. Stalin soon pulled back his troops. It was Henderson who, responding to political chaos in Greece later that same year, agitated for a strong US response to prevent a Communist victory there. "The Truman doctrine, which more than any other document served as the blueprint of America's anticommunist empire, took shape in Henderson's office and under his careful direction" as a response to the Greek civil war.

It was in such an atmosphere, with Stalin banging down Greece's door and threatening the northern extremities of Iran, that Henderson confronted the Palestine issue in 1947 and 1948. Henderson, who by now ran NEA in autocratic style and was utterly consumed by the Soviet threat, did everything he could to thwart partition and afterward to thwart US recognition of the part of Palestine awarded to the Jews. Though Marshall and others outside the State Department supported Henderson in this policy, American Jews concentrated their wrath on Henderson alone. "Perhaps Palestine is a new subject for Mr. Marshall. Perhaps he is being briefed by Loy Henderson, the Arabphile [and] striped-trousered underling saboteur," declared Emanuel Celler, a Democratic congressman from a heavily Jewish area of New York City. By the middle of 1948, with Truman fighting for election, Henderson was a political liability that the Democratic presidential candidate could no longer afford. And so for the crime of challenging the conventional wisdom, Henderson was once again exiled, this time to India as US ambassador.

Henderson regretted nothing. He was willing to be publicly branded an anti-Semite if that was the price he had to pay for fulfilling his responsibilities as a Foreign Service officer. Without missing a beat, he immersed himself in India matters. As he had in the Middle East, Henderson arrived in New Delhi soon after India became a major issue. Again Henderson disrupted both conventional wisdom and political correctness by daring to criticize the new nation of India's celebrated leader, Jawaharlal Nehru. Henderson found Nehru "vain, sensitive, emotional and complicated," as well as ungrateful for America's friendship. Even worse, according to Henderson, Nehru's dislike of America had little to do with policy differences but was driven by his British schoolboy-like snobbery regarding America's commercialism and middle-class culture. Henderson also found Indian neutralism dangerous and intellectually dishonest. Such realizations later became commonplace, but Henderson was the first to point them out.

In 1951 Henderson left India to become Ambassador to Iran just as Mohammed Mosadeq was named prime minister, promising to kick the British and their oil interstes out of the country. For almost the next three years Henderson put on a stellar one-man performance in directing US policy toward greater engagement in Iranian affairs and eventually toward overthrowing Mosadeq when his flirtations with the Soviet Union became overt. The Shah's reassertions of power with a strong US presence was thus assured for the next quarter-century, thanks to Henderson, though he took no pleasure in the outcome. He predicted that one day the Iranian people would come to hate America as they did Britain.

The overthrow of Mosadeq led to the creation of the Baghdad Pact, an anticommunist alliance of Near Eastern states to which Henderson was named ambassador in 1955. Henderson was also involved in the Suez, Congo, and other crises. Henderson's last important task in the State Department, as deputy undersecretary of state, was to oversee the reorganization of the Foreign Service in the 1950s, a reorganization that made the service at once more professional and less elite, while laying the groundwork for the true middle-class democratization of the State Department that would occur in the 1980s.

By the end of his career, writes Brands, "peers judged" Henderson "the consummate career officer, a man who did not allow political considerations to color his advice, whose steady advancement owed to solid work and devotion to duty. Subordinates looked up to him as a model of what they might become," particularly because, as Henderson had no children, he adopted a fatherly attitude toward many young Foreign Service officers, seeing them as his heirs.

Loy Henderson, in a sense, invented the political culture of the Foreign Service in the first decades of the postwar era. He was affectionately called Mr. Foreign Service, a title that many of his former colleagues still use when talking about him. While the diplomatic reception rooms on the top floor of the State Department take the names of the Founding Fathers, a large public hall on the ground floor is named after Henderson. Dedicating the hall in 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger lauded Henderon as "the quintessence of what makes our Foreign Service a great and dedicated instrument of national policy."

There could be no greater proof of the immeasurable distance between the State Department and the Jewish state than the fact that the very man who fought hardest to prevent its recognition was thought by his peers to represent the highest standards of their profession. While to Israelis and American Jews Henderson was a "bastard," to Foreign Service officers he was a martyr to public ignorance. Henderson was the classic elitist and insider, who knew popular domestic opinion deserved no place in computing the national interest because the public lacked the facts, the analytical skills, and the living experience overseas that he and his colleagues had in abundance. Wasn't he right -- and all those Jewish intellectuals wrong -- about the true nature of communism?

The Books: "Baghdad without a Map" (Tony Horwitz)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. I'm on my history bookshelf.

Next book on this shelf is called Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz.

Tony Horwitz is kind of the Dave Barry of "travelogues". He's married to Geraldine Brooks, serious foreign correspondent (I already excerpted her book about Iran) - and for some reason I just love the thought of them together. His books are laugh out loud funny, even if he's writing about a serious topic - and, like Dave Barry does, he often makes himself the unwitting star of his own books. Like: "look at what a goofball I am." If you haven't read his stuff, I highly highly recommend him. He doesn't publish ENOUGH as far as I'm concerned. So Baghdad without a map is the story of him basically tagging along through the Middle East and Africa behind his hot-shot wife - and the adventures and "misadventures" he has. He doesn't have the same access she does - she talks to Prime Ministers - he talks to car salesmen. But he's one of those people - like Dave Barry, or David Sedaris - whose antennae are always tuned in towards "the funny". He sees the absurdity of life. Some of the observations he makes in Baghdad without a map seem so spot ON - but he never sacrifices the humor. Like he describes being on a flight to Iran from London or something. Everyone gets on the plane, everyone is "Western". The pilot announces that they will soon begin the descent to Tehran. And all at once, as one, every woman on the plane starts to drape herself in her burkha. It's not a funny image all on its own, per se ... it's indicative of some of the issues in the Middle East - but it's specific, it's human, and it tells the story way better than some treatise on what Mohammed said about veiling women, or the history of the burkha. Tony Horwitz makes you see it. Women in hip track suits, or chic designer clothes, stiletto heels - suddenly draping themselves, and becoming indistinguishable from one another. The book is full of anecdotes like that. Oh, and he said that after a couple of weeks being in Arab countries, or any Muslim country - where his wife had to put on a veil - the sight of his wife's hair started to arouse him in the worst way. They would come home after a long day to the hotel, she would take off her veil, he would contemplate her hair, and then just attack her.

In the book, he goes to Yemen, Beirut, Cairo, Baghdad, Israel, Libya (now that's a hoot - Libya, in and of itself, is, of course, not funny at all - but read his chapter on Libya - hahahaha), Tehran (he is there during Khomeini's funeral) - and he takes a boat ride in the Persian Gulf.

It was so hard to choose because each chapter is so good - so just promise me you'll give the whole book a shot - I chose a great excerpt from his visit to the Sudan. He goes to Khartoum, piggy-backing with a group of aid workers. And then they all travel, as a group, to southern Sudan. Tony Horwitz is fascinated by the toweringly tall Dinka - Anyway, while in southern Sudan working at a refugee camp - there's an impromptu soccer game - It's one of my favorite incidents in the book.

From Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz.

We made it back to Muglad in time for a sunset soccer game at a field adjoining the refugee camp. Normally, Kevin and one other aid worker played in the weekly contest, but they had work to do and asked Bart and me to go as substitutes. I was weary from the long day in Babanoosa and wearier still at the sight of the field: a two-hundred-yard expanse of thorn and scrub, with crooked sticks forming a goal at either end. The field was almost as wide as it was long and edged with sand and brambles. An underfed goat grazed at the hundred-yard line.

The teams, twenty to a side, were as irregular as the field. One squad was mostly Dinka, the other included members of a clan called Nuer. Tribal markings were the only way to tell the two groups apart. Dinka men have their six bottom teeth yanked out at the age of eight, and four lines cut across their foreheads at adolescence. The Nuers' faces are marked with six lines and small raised dots. This distinction would no doubt be obvious to an anthropologist. But in fading sunlight, on a playing ground the size of an Iowa cornfield, the players were indistinguishable to me.

When I suggested with pantomime that one team identify itself by disrobing from the waist up, in the American tradition of "shirts and skins", half of the players politely obliged and half didn't, irrespective of which squad they were on. Then a self-appointed referee, who had evidently never played soccer before, tossed a lumpy brown ball in the air and announced that the match had begun.

Tents emptied out and the refugees crowded along the sidelines, shouting and banging on sticks. Adults gathered behind one goal and children behind the other, though neighter group seemed to be rooting for a particular team. The game, after all, was a complete novelty to most of them, as were Bart and I. No sooner had we lined up, on opposing sides, than a deafening roar begagn:

"Khawajja! Khawajja! Khawajja!"

Posted at left wing, the only player I could identify was a Dinka with red sneakers who appeared to be on my side. This was hard to confirm, as everyone crowded around the ball rather than playing in position. The referee stood passively by as the players delivered groin kicks and tackled each other in the thorns.

What the players lacked in finesse they made up for in stamina. After two or three springs down the endless field, I was clutching my stomach and gasping for breath. My teammates, many of whom had recently limped into Muglad with swollen feet and bellies, raced up and down as effortlessly as gazelles across the savannah.

Given the size and condition of the field, scoring should have been impossible. Perhaps to compensate for this, both teams passed over their seven-footers and chosen as goalies two youths who were, by Dinka standards, virtual dwarfs, no taller than I. As the goals were thirty yards wide and the posts lacked crossbeams, even wild kicks sailed past the goalies' arms or over their heads. After twenty minutes of play the score was 10 to 7.

The crowd showed no interest in the scoring, apparently unaware that this was the point of the game. Instead, they were riveted to the miscues, laughing loudly whenever players kicked and missed or let balls roll between their legs. After days spent waiting for rations of sorghum, the soccer game wasn't sport, it was comic relief. And it quickly became clear that Bart and I were the champion clowns, midget men with straight blond hair and pale skin, loping in slow motion behind the fleet, tall Dinka. Each time either of us touched the ball, the cry went up from the sidelines: "Khawajja! Khawajja! Khawajja!"

Deafened by the noise, I dribbled through the thorns until my wind gave out, then looked for the red-sneakered youth -- yelling, pointlessly, "Yo! Dinka in the red!" -- and kicked the ball as hard as I could.

"KHAWAJJA! KHAWAJJA! KHAWAJJA!"

After an hour, the sun sank into the scrub in a blaze of purple and orange, with the score tied at 21. The referee called the game. The other side didn't hear, or didn't care, and rushed down the field, kicking the ball through the posts after our goalie had fled. The referee threw up his hands. The Nuer had won, 22 to 21. And the refugees wandered off through the dark to pick up firewood and cook their sorghum porridge as another band of refugees wandered in.

The Books: "Dispatches" (Michael Herr)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. I'm on my history bookshelf.

Next book on this shelf is called Dipatches by Michael Herr. Michael Herr also wrote Apocalypse Now - or, he was one of the writers. Dispatches is his book about being a foreign correspondent over in Vietnam. But it's not your typical book, written in a typical journalistic style. It's raw-er. It's poetic. It has a kind of of stream-of-consciousness to it that - is very freaky. The sentences are long, they just keep going and going ... some of it sounds hallucinatory. Hunter Thompson went on record saying that the book blew him away, and that the book "put all the rest of us in the shade".

There's historical stuff in the book, background information, a sense of who, what, where, why, when - but the excerpt I've chosen doesn't have any of that. It's just plain creepy.

Here it is.

From Dipatches by Michael Herr.

There were times during the night when all the jungle sounds would stop at once. There was no dwindling down or fading away, it was all gone in a single instant as though some signal had been transmitted out to the life: bats, birds, snakes, monkeys, insects, picking up on a frequency that a thousand years in the jungle might condition you to receive, but leaving you as it was to wonder what you weren't hearing now, straining for any sound, one piece of information. I had heard it before in other jungles, the Amazon and the Philippines, but those jungles were "secure," there wasn't much chance that hundreds of Viet Cong were coming and going, moving and waiting, living out there just to do you harm. The thought of that one could turn any sudden silence into a space that you'd fill with everything you thought was quiet in you, it could even put you on the approach to clairaudience. You thought you heard impossible things: damp roots breathing, fruit sweating, fervid bug action, the heartbeat of tiny animals.

You could sustain that sensitivity for a long time, either until the babbling and chittering and shrieking of the jungle had started up again, or until something familiar brought you out of it, a helicopter flying around above your canopy or the strangely reassuring sound next to you of one going into the chamber. Once we heard a really frightening thing blaring down from a Psyops soundship broadcasting the sound of a baby crying. You wouldn't have wanted to hear that during daylight, let alone at night when the volume and distortion came down through two or three layers of cover and froze us all in place for a moment. And there wasn't much release in the pitched hysteria of the message that followed, hyper-Vietnamese like an icepick in the ear, something like, "Friendly Baby, GVN Baby, Don't Let This Happen To Your Baby, Resist the Viet Cong Today!"

Sometimes you'd get so tired that you'd forget where you were and sleep the way you hadn't slept since you were a child. I know that a lot of people there never got up from that kind of sleep; some called them lucky (Never knew what hit him), some called them fucked (If he'd been on the stick ...), but that was worse than academic, everyone's death got talked about, it was a way of constantly touching and turning the odds, and real sleep was at a premium. (I met a ranger-recondo who could go to sleep just like that, say, "Guess I'll get some," close his eyes and be there, day or night, sitting or lying down, sleeping through some things but not others; a loud radio or a 105 firing outside the tent wouldn't wake him, but a rustle in the bushes fifty feet away would, or a stopped generator.) Mostly what you had was on the agitated side of half-sleep, you thought you were sleeping but you were really just waiting. Night sweats, harsh functionings of consciousness, drifting in and out of your head, pinned to a canvas cot somewhere, looking up at a strange ceiling or out through a tent flap at the glimmering night sky of a combat zone. Or dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn't 99 percent moisture, one clean brath to dry-sluice your anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body. But all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and made your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet. There were spots in the jungle where you had to have a cigarette going all the time, whether you smoked or not, just to keep the mosquitos from swarming into your mouth. War under water, swamp fever, and instant involuntary weight control, malarias that could burn you out and cave you in, put you into twenty-three hours of sleep a day without giving you a minute of rest, leaving you there to listen to the trance music that they said came in with terminal brain funk. ("Take your pills, baby," a medic in Can Tho told me. "Big orange ones every week, little white ones every day, and don't miss a day whatever you do. They got strains over here that could waste a heavy-set fella like you in a week.") Sometimes you couldn't live with the terms any longer and headed for air-conditioners in Danang and Saigon. And sometimes the only reason you didn't panic was that you didn't have the energy.

Every day people were dying because of some small detail that they couldn't be bothered to observe. Imagine being too tired to snap a flak jacket closed, too tired to clean your rifle, too tired to guard a light, too tired to deal with the half-inch margins of safety that moving through the war often demanded, just too tired to give a fuck and then dying behind that exhaustion. There were times when the whole war itself seemed tapped of its vitality: epic enervation, the machine running half-assed and depressed, fueled on the watery residue of last year's war-making energy. Entire divisions would function in a bad dream state, acting out a weird set of moves without any connection to their source. Once I talked for maybe five minutes with a sergeant who had just brought his squad in from a long patrol before I realized that the dopey-dummy film over his eyes and the fly abstraction of his words were coming from deep sleep. He was standing there at the bar of the NCO club with his eyes open and a beer in his hand, responding to some dream conversation far inside his head. It really gave me the creeps -- this was the second day of the Tet Offensive, our installation was more or less surrounded, the only secure road out of there was littered with dead Vietnamese, information was scarce and I was pretty touchy and tired myself -- and for a second I imagined that I was talking to a dead man. When I told him about it later he just laughted and said, "Shit, that's nothing. I do that all the time."

The Books: "Carnage and Culture" (Victor Davis Hanson)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. I'm on my history bookshelf.

Next book on this shelf is called Carnage and Culture : Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson.

I've been a fan of Hanson for quite some time, and am very excited he has his own site now, where all his articles are listed, because I won't read his regular stuff on you-know-what. Bummer. Hey, we all have principles, and I have mine - it's a meaningless little boycott, but if we don't act according to our principles then who are we??? Hanson is a good writer, and an even better thinker. He's an incredibly boring public speaker, however - I saw him on Book Notes once and was nearly put into a hypnotic state by the mellifluous MONOTONE of his voice - but his written prose doesn't come across as boring at ALL. He's a lively thinker, a lively writer - and he has the ability to make me understand what was going on, in these intricate battles - from the year 732 or whatever - and not just understand, but hear the crashing of the waves at Salamis, or hear the thundering horse hooves ... I'm not a military historian by any stretch of the imagination, so I, personally, NEED the writer to make me feel like I was there. So I can "get it". Hanson has that in spades.

If you like Victor Davis Hanson and if you like his columns - then I highly suggest you check out Carnage and Culture. The blurb on the back of the book says: "Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or advanced technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values -- the tradition of dissent, the importance placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship -- which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers." And by "superior", Hanson means soldiers capable of the most "carnage". Hanson feels ambivalently about this, as he expresses many times throughout the book - but I think he makes a very compelling case. His book was very controversial when it came out. He makes some very uncomfortable points - along the lines that Bernard Lewis does in his fantastic and important book What Went Wrong?. Actually - the word "uncomfortable" in that last sentence should probably be qualified. It doesn't make ME uncomfortable. I'm just saying that it made SOME people uncomfortable, and there was a lot of weeping and wailing about it . It's only "uncomfortable" if you are unwilling to examine certain historical facts, if you think that politically correct attitudes should not only dominate the present, but also dominate the past, if the whole concept of "victory" makes you feel a little bit ikky and ambivalent ... then this book will make you very uncomfortable. This book also has a bit in common with the massively successful Guns, Germs, and Steel and it makes people "uncomfortable" in the same ways. Different cultures in different regions develop in different ways. DUH. Because of these differences - some cultures have been far more dominant in battle than others. DUH. Hanson theorizes that the West's dominance is not just about superior technology, and geography - but about the actual culture itself. This makes a lot of people nervous - they don't know what he's reeeaaaallly trying to say. Is he trying to say that we shouldn't respect other cultures?? Is he trying to say that it's ALL RIGHT that we massacred such and such and so and so? I don't hear him say ANY of that. But these folks are suspicious of his motives. I see it in a much simpler way. He's a classical historian, and a military historian - not to mention a farmer in California. He looks at 9 battles throughout human history (Salamis, Gaugamela, Cannae, Poitiers, Tenochtitlan, Lepanto, Rorke's Drift, Midway, Tet) and analyzes them. He has come to the conclusion that many Western traditions (like the ones listed above - ones that were not present in, say, ancient Persia) has helped Western armies to be the effective war machines they are today (and always have been). That's it.

I'm going to excerpt a bit from the first chapter where he breaks down the battle at Salamis, - September 28, 480 BC - Greeks against the Persians. 40,000 men drowned that day. It's really hard to contemplate that.

Anyway, here's the section on Persian society and culture at that time. It's long. I found this excerpt online.

From Carnage and Culture : Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson.

The Persian Empire at the time of the battle of Salamis was huge -- 1 million square miles of territory, with nearly 70 million inhabitants -- at that point the largest single hegemony in the history of the civilized world. In contrast, Greek-speakers on the mainland numbered less than 2 million and occupied about 50,000 square miles. Persia was also a relatively young sovereignty, less than a hundred years old, robust in its period of greatest power -- and largely the product of the genius of its legendary king Cyrus the Great. In a period of not more than thirty years (cs. 560-530 BC), Cyrus had transformed the rather small and isolated Persian monarchy (Parsua in what is now Iran and Kurdistan) into a world government. He finally presided over the conquered peoples of most Asia -- ranging from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River, and covering most of the territory between the Persian Gulf and Red Sea in the south and the Caspian and Aral Seas to the north.

After the subsequent loss of the Ionian Greek states on the shores of the Aegean, the mainland Greeks grew familiar with this huge and sophisticated new empire now expanding near its eastern borders. What the Greeks learned of Persia -- as would be the later European experience with the Ottomans -- both fascinated and frightened them. Later an entire series of gifted politicians and renegade intriguers such as Demaratus, Themistocles, and Alcibiades would aid the Persians against their own Greek kin, and yet at the same time loathe their hosts for appealing nakedly to their personal greed. In a similar manner Italian admirals, ship designers, and tacticians would later seek lucrative employment with the Ottomans. Greek moralists, in relating culture and ethics, had long equated Hellenic poverty with liberty and excellence, Eastern alliance with slavery and decadence. So the poet Phocylides wrote, "The law-biding polis, though small and set on a high rock, outranks senseless Nineveh."

By the time of the reign of Darius I (521 - 486 BC) Persia was a relatively stable empire, governed by the so-called Achaemenid monarchy that oversaw a sophisticated provincial administration of some twenty satrapies. Persian governors collected taxes, provided musters for national campaigns, built and maintained national roads and an efficient royal postal service, and in general left local conquered peoples the freedom to worship their own gods and devise their own means for meeting targeted levels of imperial taxation. To the Greeks, who could never unify properly their own vastly smaller mainland, the Achaemenids' confederation of an entire continent raised the specter of a force of men and resources beyond their comprehension.

What mystified Westerners most -- we can pass over their prejudicial view of Easterners as soft, weak, and effeminate -- was the Persian Empire's almost total cultural antithesis to everything Hellenic, from politics and military practice to economic and social life. Only a few miles of sea separated Asia Minor from the Grreek islands in the Aegean, but despite a similar climate and centuries of interaction, the two cultures were a world apart. This foreign system had resulted not in weakness and decadence, as the Greeks sometimes proclaimed, but ostensibly in relatively efficient imperial administration and vast wealth: Xerxes was on the Athenian acropolis, the Greeks (not yet) in Persepolis. An awe-inspiring impression of Persian power was what Greeks gleaned from itinerant traders, their own imported Eastern chattel slaves, communication from their Ionian brethren, the thousands of Greek-speakers who found employment in the Persian bureaucracy, and random tales from returning mercenaries. The success of the Achaemenid dynasty suggested that there were peoples in the world -- and in increasing proximity to Greece -- who did things far differently, and in the process became far more wealthy and prosperous than the Greeks.

The absolute rule of millions was in the hands of a very few. The king and his small court of relatives and advisers (their Persian titles variously translate as "bow carrier," "spear bearer," "king's friends," "the king's benefactor", "the eyes and ears of the king," etc.) oversaw the bureaucracy and priesthood, which thrived from the collection of provincial taxes and ownership of vast estates, while a cadre of Persian elites and Achaemenid kin ran the huge multicultural army. There was apparently no abstract or legal concept of freedom in Achaemenid Persia. Even satraps were referred to as slaves in imperial correspondence: "The King of Kings, Darius son of Hystapes, says these things to his slave Gadatas: 'I learn that you are not obeying my commands in all respects ...'" (R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, eds., Greek Historical Inscriptions, #12, 1-5). The Achaemenid monarch was absolute and, though not divine himself, the regent of the god Ahura Mazda on earth. The practice of proskynesis -- kneeling before the Great King -- was required of all subjects and foreigners. Aristotle later saw this custom of worshiping men as gods as proof of the wide difference between Eastern and Hellenic notions of individualism, politics, and religion. Whereas the victorious Greek generals of the Persian Wars -- the regent Pausanias in Sparta, Miltiades and Themistocles at Athens -- were severely criticized for identifying their persons with the Greek triumph, Xerxes, when attempting to cross a choppy Hellespont, had the sea "whipped and branded" for "disobeying" his orders.

Legal codes exist in every civilization. Under the Persians, local judiciaries were left in place at Lydia, Egypt, Babylonia, and Ionia -- with the proviso that Achaemenid law superseded all statues, and was established and amended as the Great King himself saw fit. Every man bobbing in the water on September 28 had no legal entity other than as a bandaka, or "slave" of Xerxes -- a concept taken from the earlier Babylonian idea that the individual was an ardu, a "chattel" of the monarch.

Contrarily, in Greece by the fifth century almost all political leaders in the city-states were selected by lot, elected, or subject to annual review by an elected council. No archon claimed divine status; execution by fiat was tantamount to murder; and the greatest vigilance was devoted to preventing the resurgence of tyrants, who had plagued a number of the most prosperous and commercial Greek states in the immediate past. Even personal slaves and servants in Greek city-states were often protected from arbitrary torture and murder. These were not alternative approaches to state rule, but fundamental differences in the idea of personal freedom that would help determine who lived and died at Salamis.

The Persian imperial army was huge and commanded at the top by relatives and elites under oath to the king. At its core were professional Persian infantrymen -- the so-called Immortals were the most famous -- and various contingents of subsidiary heavy and light infantry, supported by vast forces of cavalry, charioteers, and missile troops. In battle the army depended on its speed and numbers. In place of a heavily armed shock force of pikemen that could shatter horsemen and ground troops, Persian infantrymen were often conscripted from hundreds of different regions, spoke dozens of languages, and were armed with swords, daggers, short spears, picks, war axes, and javelins, and protected by wicker shields, leather jerkins, and occasionally chain-mail shirts. Drill, strict adherence to rank and file, and coordinated group advance and retreat were largely unknown. The Greeks' dismissive view about the quality of Persian heavy infantry was largely accurate. Some years later, in the early fourth century, Antiochos, a Greek ambassador from Arcadia, said there was not a man fit in Persia for battle against Greeks. There was no need during the creation of the Persian Empire on the steppes of Asia to field phalanxes of citizen hoplites outfitted in seventy-pound panoplies.

The Achaemenid king was not always perched on a throne overlooking the killing ground -- like Xerxes at Thermopylae and Salamis -- but more regularly fought in a great chariot, surrounded by bodyguards, in the middle of the Persian battle line: both the safest and most logical position whence to issue orders. Greek historians made much of the obvious dissimilarity: Persian monarchs fled ahead of their armies in defeat, while there is not a single major Greek battle -- Thermopylae , Delium, Mantinea, Leuctra -- in which Hellenic generals survived the rout of their troops. Military catastrophe brought no reproach upon the Achaemenid king himself; subordinates like the Phoenicians at Salamis were scapegoated and executed. In contrast, there was also not one great Greek general in the entire history of the city-state -- Themistocles, Militiades, Pericles, Alcibiades, Vrasidas, Lysander, Pelopidas, Epaminondas -- who was not at some time either fined, exiled, or demoted, or killed alongside his troops. Some of the most successful and gifted commanders after their greatest victories -- the Athenian admirals who won at Arginusae (406 BC) or Epaminondas on his return from liberating the Messenian helots (369 BC) -- stood trial for their lives, not so much on charges of cowardice or incompetence as for inattention to the welfare of their men or the lack of communication with their civilian overseers.

In such a vast domain as Persia, there were in theory thousands of individual landholders and private businessmen, but the economic and cultural contrast with fifth-century Greece was again telling. In classical Athens we do not know of a single farm larger than one hundred acres, whereas in Asia -- both under the Achaemenids and later during the Hellenistic dynasties -- estates exceeded thousands of acres in size. One of Xerxes' relatives might own more property than every rower in the Persian fleet combined. Most of the best land in the empire was under direct control of priests, who sharecropped their domains to serfs, and absentee Persian lords, who often owned entire villages. The Persian king himself, in theory, had title to all the land in the empire and could either exercise rights of confiscation of any estate he wished or execute its owner by fiat.

Greece itself had plenty of its own hierarchies concerning property owning, but the difference lay in the posture of a consensual government toward the entire question of land tenure. Public or religiously held estates were of limited size and relatively rare -- comprising not more than 5 percent of the aggregate land surrounding a polis. Property was rather equitably held. Public auctions of repossessed farmland were standard, and prices at public sales low and uniform. Lands in new colonies were surveyed and distributed by lot or public sale, never handed over to a few elites. The so-called hoplite infantry class typically owned farms of about ten acres. In most city-states they made up about a third to half of the citizen population and controlled about two-thirds of all the existing arable land -- a pattern of landholding far more egalitarian than, say, in present-day California, where 5 percent of the landowners own 95 percent of all agricultural property.

No Greek citizen could be arbitrarily executed without a trial. His property was not liable to confiscation except by vote of a council, whether that be a landed boule in broadly based oligarchies or a popular ekklesia under democracy. In the Greek mind the ability to hold property freely -- have legal title to it, improve it, and pass it on -- was the foundation of freedom. While such classical agrarian traditions would erode during the later Roman Empire and the early Dark Ages, with the creation of vast absentee estates and ecclesiastical fiefdoms, the ideal would not be abandoned, but rather still provided the basis for revolution and rural reform in the West from the Renaissance to the present day.

While there were vast state mints in Persia, our sources for Achaemenid imperial administration -- borne out by the later arrival of the looters and plunderers in Alexander the Great's army -- suggest that tons of stored bullion remained uncoined and that there was a chronic stagnation in the Persian economy. With metals on deposit in imperial treasuries, provincial taxes were more often paid in kind as "gifts" -- food, livestock, metals, slaves, property -- rather than in specie, illustrative of high taxes and an undeveloped moneyed economy. One of the reasons for the initial rampant expansion and inflation of the later Hellenistic world (323-31 BC) was the sudden conversion of precious metals stored in the Achaemenid vaults into readily coined money by the Macedonian Successor kings, who, in transforming a command economy to a more capitalist one, hired out thousands of builders, shippers, and mercenaries.

Persian literature -- a corpus of drama, philosophy, or poetry apart from religious or political structure -- did not exist. True, Zoroastrianism was a fascinating metaphysical inquiry, but its reason to be was religious, and thus the parameters of its thought were one with all holy treatises, embedded as it was with a zeal that precluded unlimited speculation and true free expression. History -- the Greeks' idea of free inquiry, in which the records and sources of the past are continually subject to questioning and evaluation as part of an effort to provide a timeless narrative of explication -- was also unknown among the Persians, at least in any widely disseminated form. The nearest approximation was the public inscriptions of the Achaemenids themselves, in which a Darius I or Xerxes published his own res gestae:

A great god is Ahura Mazda, who created this earth, who created man, who created peace for man, who made Xerxes king, one king of many, one lord of many. I am Xerxes, the great king, king of kings, king of lands containing many men, king in this great earth far and wide, son of Darius the king, an Achaemenid, a Persian, so of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan seed. (A. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, 231)

The emperor Augustus issued similar proclamations in imperial Rome, but there were still a Suetonius, Plutarch and Tacitus eventually to set the record straight. Just as the Ottomans would later bar printing presses throughout their empire in fear of free expression, the idea of public criticism of the Achaemenids through written documents was literally unknown.

All Persian texts -- whether public inscriptions, palace inventories, or sacred tracts -- concern the king, his priests, and bureaucrats at large, and confine themselves to government and religion. Even if other avenues of public expression had existed, the Persian victory at Thermopylae could not have been portrayed onstage or remembered in poetry without the approval of Xerxes -- and not without Xerxes as chief protagonist in the triumph. The commemoration of the Persian victory in Bactria proves that well enough: "Says Xerxes the king: When I became king, there was within these lands which are written above one which was restless. Afterward Ahura Mazda brought me help. By the favor of Ahura Mazda I smote that land and put it in its place." (A. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, 231)

Persian religion was not as absolutist as that in Egypt, inasmuch as the Achaemenids were agents of Ahura Mazda, not divinities per se. Nevertheless, royal power was predicated on divine right, imperial edict was considered a holy act. So the constant refrain of all the Achaemenid kings: "Of me is Ahura Mazda, of Ahura Mazda am I." When Alexander the Great learned to say the same thing, even his most loyal Macedonian lords began to plot either an assassination, a coup, or a return to Greece. Conquered peoples of the Persian Empire like the Babylonians and Jews, however, at the local level were left to worship their own gods. Because no culture in the conquered East had any tradition of religion apart from politics, or even embraced the ideal of religious divinity, most Persian subjects considered the Achaemenid religious-political relationship not any different from their own -- and if anything more tolerant.

That being said, there were numerous castes of holy men who not only enjoyed political power as agents of the king but also sought vast acreages to support their work. The official white-robed magi were employed by the monarchy as religious auditors in public ceremony and to ensure the piety of the imperial subjects. Mathematics and astronomy were advanced, but ultimately they were subject to religious scrutiny and used to promote in a religious context the arts of divination and prophesy. A humanist such as Protagoras ("Man is the measure of all things") or an atheist rationalist like Anaxagoras ("Whatever has life, both the greater and smaller, Mind [nous] controls them all ... whatsoever things are now and will be, Mind arranged them all") could not have prospered under the Achaemenids. Such freethinking in Persia might arise only through imperial laxity; and if discovered, was subject to immediate imperial censure. The classical Greeks were as pious as the Persians, but when conservative citizens rallied to rid their cities of atheistic provocateurs, they first sought a majority decree of the people or at least the semblance of an open jury trial.

If in the past Western historians have relied on Greek authors such as Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Euripides, Isocrates, and Plato to form stereotypes of the Persians as decadent, effete, corrupt, and under the spell of eunuchs and harems, the careful examination of imperial archives and inscriptions of the Achaemenids should warn us of going too far in the other direction. The Persian army at Salamis was not decadent or effeminate, but it did constitute a complete alternate universe to almost everything Greek. All things considered, there was no polis to the East. Achaemenid Persia -- like Ottoman Turkey or Montezuma's Aztecs -- was a vast two-tiered society in which millions were ruled by autocrats, audited by theocrats, and coerced by generals.

The Books: "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families" (Philip Gourevitch)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. I'm on my history bookshelf.

Next book on this shelf is called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch.

What a book. What an unbelievable book. If you haven't read it - all I can say is: please. Do yourself a favor: Go out and buy it NOW.

Gourevitch stood in line at the Holocaust Museum in DC in 1994, all the signs of "Never Again" all over the place. As he waited in line for his ticket, he read the New York Times. On the front page (and I'm sure we all remember this image) was a photo of a river clogged with dead bodies. He read, with growing horror, about what was going on. He could not believe his eyes. And in the setting he was in - with "Never Again" shouting at him from all sides - it took on even greater meeting. Oh, never again, huh?? He was a young young guy - 25 years old - but he had already had some stuff published in The New Yorker (he's a HELL of a writer) - so he basically had The New Yorker send him over to Rwanda. This book is the result. It is THE book of the Rwandan genocide. There are stories in here that you will never EVER forget. Hotel Rwanda is based on one of the many stories included in this book. Gourevitch opened the way for others. Now there are many books you can read in your local Barnes & Noble about the genocide - but his was the first.

A haunting book. An infuriating book. A tragic book. It is so good - can't say enough about it.

I'll post an excerpt that always struck me as ... particularly intense. And deep. It also shows you Gourevitch's style here, which isn't like other reporter's styles. He doesn't just report the facts. He goes deeper. You'll see what I mean. He interviews a doctor named Odettet Nyiramilimo - a Tutsi woman, born in 1956. She'd seen a lot of shit, and had somehow survived the 1994 slaughter. But of course - there had been many "dress rehearsals" for genocide - pogrom after pogrom through the years - she grew up with this shit.

But look at what Gourevitch does here.

He's a reporter who is not just about his STORY. He is after ... something else. I don't know why I know that - but it just seems that he notices EVERYthing. He doesn't only pay attention to that which will enhance the STORY he is after. The moment I am speaking of in the following excerpt is really startling - it cracks open the story - It's NOT just a story. It is a human LIFE. Which can never be narrowed down into just a plot-line. Gourevitch is after that something else ... maybe he's after meaning - not just facts - but MEANING - When we are faced with genocide, so often we just want to know WHY?? Or HOW could you do that?? These questions never really can be answered - it's at the heart of the mystery of man's inhumanity to man ... but that's what Gourevitch is after. His book is about Rwanda, yes, but it's also about, in a larger sense, the essential mystery of genocide - and his writing shows that. I love him.

From We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch.

In 1973, after her brother-in-law rejected her, she kept walking, home to Kinunu. She found her father's house empty and one of his side houses burned. The family was hiding in the bush, camping among their banana trees, and Odette lived with them there for several months. Then, in July, the man in charge of the pogroms, Major General Habyarimana, ousted Kayibanda, declared himself president of the Second Republic, and called a moratorium on attacks against Tutsis. Rwandans, he said, should live in peace and work together for development. The message was clear: the violence had served its purpose, and Habyarimana was the fulfillment of the revoltuion.

"We really danced in the streets when Habyarimana took power," Odette told me. "At last, a President who said not to kill Tutsis. And after 'seventy-five, at least, we did live in security. But the exclusions were still there." In fact, Rwanda was more tightly regulated under Habyarimana than ever before. "Development" was his favorite political word and it also happened to be a favorite word of the European and American aid donors whom he milked with great skill. By law, every citizen became a member for life of the President's party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), which served as the all-pervasive instrument of his will. People were literally kept in their place by rules that forbade changing residence without government approval, and for Tutsis, of course, the old nine-percent quota rules remained. Members of the armed forces were forbidden to marry Tutsis, and it went without saying that they were not supposed to be Tutsis themselves. Two Tutsis were eventually given seats in Habyarimana's rubber-stamp parliament, and a token Tutsi was given a ministerial post. If Tutsis thought they deserved better, they hardly complained; Habyarimana and his MRND promised to let them live unmolested, and that was more than they had been able to count on in the past.

The Belgian director of Odette's old school in Cyangugu would not readmit her, but she found a place in a school that specialized in sciences, and began preparing for a career in medicine. Once again, the headmistress was a Belgian, but this Belgian took Odettet under her wing, keeping her name out of the enrollment books, and hiding her when government inspectors came looking for Tutsis. "It was all trickery," Odette said, "and the other girls resented it. One night, they came to my dormitory and beat me with sticks." Odette didn't dwell on the discomfort. "Those were the good years," she said. "The headmistress looked after me, I had become a good student -- first in my class -- and then I was admitted, with some more trickery, to the national medical school in Butare."

The only thing Odette said about her life as a medical student was: "In Butare once, a professor of internal medicine came up to me and said, 'What a pretty girl,' and he started patting my bottom and tried to set up a date even though he was married."

The memory just popped out of her like that, with no apparent connection to the thought that preceded it or the thought that followed. Then Odette sped along, skipping over the years to her graduation and her marriage. Yet, for a moment, the image of her as a young student in an awkward moment of sexual surprise and discomfort hung between us. It seemed to amuse Odette, and it reminded me of all that she wasn't telling me as she recited her life story. She was keeping everything that was not about Hutu and Tutsi to herself. Later, I met Odette several times at parties; she and her husband were gregarious and understandably popular. Together they run a private maternity and pediatrics practice called The Good Samaritan Clinic. They were known as excellent doctors and fun people -- warm, vivacious, good-humored. They had a charmingly affectionate ease with each other, and one saw right away that they were in the midst of full and engaging lives. But when we met in the garden of the Cercle Sportif, Odette spoke as a genocide survivor to a foreign correspondent. Her theme was the threat of annihilation, and the moments of reprieve in her story -- the fond memories, funny anecdotes, sparks of wit -- came, if at all, in quick beats, like punctuation marks.

This made sense to me. We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us, and, looking back, there are these discrete tracks of memory: the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others' ideas of us, and the more private timse when we are free to imagine ourselves. My own parents and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. They came with stories similar to Odette's, of being hunted from here to there because they were born a this and not a that, or because they had chosen to resist the hunters in the service of an opposing political idea. Near the end of their lives, both my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandmother wrote their memoirs, and although their stories and their sensibilities were markedly different, both ended their accounts of their lives right in the middle of those lives, with a full stop at the moment they arrived in America. I don't know why they stopped there. Perhaps nothing that came afterward ever made them feel so vividly, or terribly, aware and alive. But listening to Odette, it occurred to me that if others have so often made your life their business -- made your life into a question, really, and made that question their business -- then perhaps you will want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and inviolably your own.

It was the same with nearly all the Tutsi survivors I met in Rwanda. When I pressed for stories of how they had lived during the long periods between bouts of violence -- household stories, village stories, funny stories, or stories of annoyance, stories of school, work, church, a wedding, a funeral, a trip, a party, or a feud -- the answer was always opaque: in normal times we lived normally. After a while I stopped asking, because the question seemed pointless and cruel. On the other hand, I found that Hutus often volunteered their memories of life's engrossing daily drama before the genocide, and these stories were, just as the Tutsi survivors had said, normal: variations, in a Rwandan vein, of stories you might hear anywhere.

So remembering had its economy, like experience itself, and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom, and grinned, I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered into her memories, and I felt that we were both glad of it. A professor had imagined her susceptible and she had imagined that as a married man and her teacher he should know greater restraint. They had each other wrong. But people have the strangest notions as they navigate each other in this life -- and in the "good years", the "normal times," this isn't the end of the world.

The Books: "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (Edward Gibbon)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library. I'm on my history bookshelf.

Next book on this shelf is called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.

It's one of those things where you say ... uh ... SOME DAY I'll get to that. I really SHOULD read that some day. I mean, it's this multi-volume dense famous book about the Roman Empire written in the 18th century. Yeah. I'll get to that some day.

I look at the front page where I always put my name and the date I bought the book - It says "Nov. 2001." I bought it in Nov. 2001 and promptly read the whole thing. It was hard going, and I read other things at the same time, but ... well. It makes total sense. It was Nov. 2001. It makes sense that I would suddenly decide, at that point in time, "Okay. Read this book. GO." Think about it.

I know I can't convince anyone who hasn't read it to read it - it's a huge undertaking and it takes a long long time to finish it. By the way - that Amazon link I provided is actually to an abridged edition - I didn't read an abridged edition. I bought the book at the great second-hand store right down the street from my parents house - a huge dusty hardcover book, with thin crinkly pages, and teeny print. I've gotta be nuts to read a book like that, right? I guess so.

But DAMN. WHAT A READ.

I read it like a bat out of hell. I was in a bad bad way that fall, because of September 11th, of course ... and have never read so many books in such a short time. I should go back and calculate the number of books I tore through in a matter of months. All about empires and Islam and totalitarian regimes and the Crusades ... I remember I had one moment when I went to the Strand to pick up some books on the history of the Muslim world. Because I'm a history buff, I had already read most of Bernard Lewis' stuff, long prior to September 11th, but you know ... there were some holes in my collection that I needed to rectify. So I went to the Strand and I went to the History section. I found the section on the "Middle East". And the shelves were empty. This was in October. The shelves were literally empty. Maybe there was one Koran, and one travelogue from some sand-mad Brit in the early 20th century. But other than that, they were cleaned OUT. I felt a burst of pride for my ... countrymen, my fellow Americans. To those jagoffs out there who think we're stupid, soft, uncurious, and indifferent: I present to you the 12 EMPTY SHELVES in the Strand. Yeah, so maybe a lot of people didn't know the history behind the attacks and what the hell was going on with those terrorists. But what did everyone in New York do? They went to the Strand and bought all the books in sight on the topic. I felt so PROUD of us. All right, so this attack took some of us by surprise. So let's go catch up then. Let's go figure it out. Let's accept the steep learning curve and CATCH UP.

But that's a sidenote.

I was so upset and so ... well, kind of constantly having a panic attack for about 2 months ... that Decline and Fall was a perfect antidote to that. A book about antiquity. A book written in rigorous formal 18th century language. A book still relevant to the events of today. But a HARD book. A CHALLENGING book. Not an "Islam for Dummies" book. It took up so much of my concentration that I found it very very calming to read. Even though it's basically page after page of atrocities.

LM Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables and many many others, loved this book and I think read it all the way through 4 or 5 times. She found it very comforting - especially in really bad times. She lived through two world wars, after all.

Here's one of my favorite quotes from her journal about Gibbon and his masterwork:

"I finished 'Decline and Fall' this evening. It is the third time I have read it...It is a monumental piece of work. I know of no historian so coldly impersonal as Gibbon. He seems more like a machine recording history ... This makes for the proper impartiality; but it is also largely accountable for what, after all, must be called the monotony of his style. Almost the only portions of his history in which we get a glimpse of Gibbon himself -- the intellect behind the machine -- are in his famous chapters on Christianity and his sprinkling of sly spicy smutty stories. Naturally these -- the chapters, I mean -- are therefore the most interesting part of the work ... Gibbon doesn't overdo but his smirk rather gives the effect of a Satyr leering suddenly around the columns of Karnak."

The book is stupendous and has the ability to make you feel small and insignificant - your problems amounting to "a hill of beans".

The chapter on Christianity is rightly famous - but I'm going to post an excerpt about the emperor Diocletian. Note: all the footnotes are written by Gibbon (except for one notable exception - you'll see it.) The footnotes are written in the same mildly snarky and very very formal tone of the rest of Gibbon's prose. For some reason, I really enjoy the prose. It flows, it sweeps me along with it (like LM Montgomery said) - and even though it's formal language, I can just sit back and let it take me.

Onward! Diocletian!!

From The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.

From the time of Augustus to that of Diocletian, the Roman princes, conversing in a familiar manner among their fellow-citizens, were saluted only with the same respect that was usually paid to senators and magistrates. Their principal distinction was the Imperial or military robe of purple; whilst the senatorial garment was marked by a broad, and the equestrian by a narrow band or stripe of the same honorable color. The pride, or rather the policy of Diocletian, engaged that artful prince to introduce the stately magnificence of the court of Persia. He ventured to assume the diadem, an ornament detested by the Romans as the odious ensign of royalty, and the use of which had been considered as the most desperate act of the madness of Caligula. It was no more than a broad white fillet set with pearls, which encircled the emperor's head. The sumptuous robes of Diocletian and his successors were of silkl and gold; and it is remarked with indignation that even their shoes were studded with the most precious gems. The access to their sacred person was every day rendered more difficult by the institution of new forms and ceremonies. The avenues of the palace were strictly guarded by the various schools, as they began to be called, of domestic officers. The interior apartments were intrusted to the jealous vigilance of the eunuchs; the increase of whose numbers and influence was the most infallible symptom of the progress of despotism. When a subject was at length admitted to the Imperial presence, he was obliged, whatever might be his rank, to fall prostrate on the ground, and to adore, according to the eastern fashion, the divinity of his lord and master.¹⁰² Diocletian was a man of sense, who, in the course of private as well as public life, had formed a just estimate both of himself and of mankind: nor is it easy to conceive that in substituting the manners of Persia to those of Rome he was seriously actuated by so mean a principle as that of vanity. He flattered himself that an ostentation of splendour and luxury would subdue the imagination of the multitude; that the monarch would be less exposed to the rude licence of the people and the soldiers, as his person was secluded from the public view; and that habits of submission would insensibly be productive of sentiments of veneration. Like the modesty affected by Augustus, the state maintained by Diocletian was a theatrical representation; but it must be confessed that, of the two comedies, the former was of a much more liberal and manly character than the latter. It was the aim of the one to disguise, and the object of the other to display, the unbounded power which the emperors possessed over the Roman world.

Ostentation was the first principle of the new system instituted by Diocletian. The second was division. He divided the empire, the provinces, and every branch of the civil as well as military administration. He multiplied the wheels of the machine of government, and rendered its operations less rapid but more secure. Whatever advantages and whatever defects might attend these innovations, they must be ascribed in a very great degree to the first inventor; but as the new frame of policy was gradually improved and completed by succeeding princes, it will be more satisfactory to delay the consideration of it till the season of its full maturity and perfection.¹⁰³ Reserving, therefore, for the reign of Constantine a more exact picture of the new empire, we shall content ourselves with describing the principal and decisive outline, as it was traced by the hand of Diocletian. He had associated three colleagues in the exercise of the supreme power; and as he was convinced that the abilities of a single man were inadequate to the public defence, he considered the joint administration of four princes not as a temporary expedient, but as a fundamental law of the constitution. It was his intention that the two elder princes should be distinguished by the use of the diadem and the title of Augusti; that, as affection or esteem might direct their choice, they should regularly call to their assistance two subordinate colleagues; and that the Caesars, rising in their turn to the first rank, should supply an uninterrupted succession of emperors. The empire was divided into four parts. The East and Italy were the most honourable, the Danube and the Rhine the most laborious stations. The former claimed the presence of the Augusti, the latter were intrusted to the administration of the Caesars. The strength of the legions was in the hands of the four partners of sovereignty, and the despair of successively vanquishing four formidable rivals might intimidate the ambition of an aspiring general. In their civil government the emperors were supposed to exercise the undivided power of the monarch, and their edicts, inscribed with their joint names, were received in all the provinces as promulgated by their mutual councils and authority. Notwithstanding these precautions, the political union of the Roman world was gradually dissolved, and a principle of division was introduced, which, in the course of a few years, occasioned the perpetual separation of the eastern and western empires.

The system of Diocletian was accdompanied with another very material disadvantage, which cannot even at present be totally overlooked: a more expensive establishment, and consequently an increase of taxes, and the oppression of the people. Instead of a modest family of slaves and freedmen, such as had contented the simple greatness of Augustan and Trajan, three or four magnificent courts were established in the various parts of the empire, and as many Roman kings contended with each other and with the Persian monarch for the vain superiority of pomp and luxury. The number of ministers, of magistrates, of officers, and of servants, who filled the different departments of the state, was multipled beyond the example of former times; and (if we may borrow the warm expression of a contemporary), "when the proportion of those who received exceeded the proportion of those who contributed, the provinces were oppressed by the weight of tributes."¹⁰⁴ From this period to the extinction of the empire, it would be easy to deduce an uninterrupted series of clamors and complaints. According to his religion and situation, each writer chooses either Diocletian, or Constantine, or Valens, or Theodosius, for the object of his invectives; but they unanimously agree in representing the burden of the public impositions, and particularly the land-tax and capitation, as the intolerable and increasing grievance of their own times. From such a concurrence, an impartial historian, who is obliged to extract truth from satire, as well as from panegyric, will be inclined to divide the blame among the princes whom they accuse, and to ascribe their exactions much less to their personal vices than to the uniform system of their administration. The emperor Diocletian was indeed the author of that system; but during his reign the growing evil was confined within the bounds of modesty and discretion, and he deserves the reproach of establishing pernicious precedents, rather than of exercising actual oppression.¹⁰⁵ It may be added, that his revenues were managed with prudent economy; and that, after all the current expenses were discharged, there still remained in the Imperial treasury an ample proision either for judicious liberality or for any emergency of the state.

It was in the twenty-first year of his reign that Diocletian exercised his memorable resolution of abdicating the empire; an action more naturally to have been expected from the elder or the younger Antoninus than from a prince who had never practiced the lessons of philosophy either in the attainment or in the use of supreme power. Diocletian acquired the glory of giving to the world the first example of a resignation¹⁰⁶ which has not been very frequently imitated by succeeding monarchs. The parallel of Charles the Fifth, however, will naturally offer itself to our mind, not only since the eloquence of a modern historian has rendered that name so familiar to an English reader, but from the very striking resemblance between the characters of the two emperors, whose political abilities were superior to their military genius, and whose specious virtues were much less the effect of nature than of art. The abdication of Charles appears to have been hastened by the vicissitude of fortune; and the disappointment of his favorite schemes urged him to relinquish a power which he found inadequate to his ambition. But the reign of Diocletian had flowed with a tide of uninterrupted success; nor was it till after he had vanquished all his enemies, and accomplished all his designs, that he seems to have entertained any serious thoughts of resigning the empire. Neither Charles nor Diocletian were arrived at a very advanced period of life; since the one was only fifty-five, and the other was no more than fifty-nine years of age; but the active life of those princes, their wars and journeys, the cares of royalty, and their application to business, had already impaired their constitution, and brought on the infirmities of a premature old age.¹⁰⁷

Notwithstanding the severity of a very cold and rainy winter, Diocletian left Italy soon after the ceremony of his triumph, and began his progress towards the East round the circuit of the Illyrian provinces. From the inclemency of the weather and the fatigue of the journey, he soon contracted a slow illness; and though he made easy marches, and was generally carried in a close litter, his disorder, before he arrived at Nicomedia, about the end of the summer, was become very serious and alarming. During the whole winter he was confined to his palace; his danger inspired a general and unaffected concern; but the people could only judge of the various alterations of his health from the joy or consternation which they discovered in the countenances and behavior of his attendants. The rumor of his death was for some time universally believed, and it was supposed to be concealed with a view to prevent the troubles that might have happened during the absence of the Caesar Galerius. At length, however, on the first of March, Diocletian once more appeared in public, but so pale and emaciated that he could scarcely have been recognized by those to whom his person was the most familiar. It was time to put an end to the painful struggle, which he had sustained during more than a year, between the care of his health and that of his dignity. The former required indulgence and relaxation, the latter compelled him to direct, from the bed of sickness, the administration of a great empire. He resolved to pass the remainder of his days in honorable repose, to place his glory beyond the reach of fortune, and to relinquish the theatre of the world to his younger and more active associates.¹⁰⁸

The ceremony of his abdication was performed in a spacious plain, about three miles from Nicomedia. The emperor ascended a lofty throne, and, in a speech full of reason and dignity, declared his intention, both to the people and to the soldiers who were assembled on this extraordinary occasion. As soon as he had divested himself of the purple, he withdrew from the gazing multitude, and, traversing the city in a covered chariot, proceeded without delay to the favorite reitrement which he had chosen in his native country of Dalmatia. On the same day, which was the first of May,¹⁰⁹ Maximian, as it had been previously concerted, made his resignation of the Imperial dignity at Milan. Even in the splendour of the Roman triumph, Diocletian had meditated his design of abdicating the government. As he wished to secure the obedience of Maximian, he exacted from him either a general assurance that he would submit his actions to the authority of his benefactor, or a particular promise that he would descend from the throne whenever he should receive the advice and the example. This engagement, though it was confirmed by the solemnity of an oath before the altar of the Capitoline Jupiter,¹¹⁰ would have proved a feeble restraint on the fierce temper of Maximian, whose passion was the love of power, and who neither desired present tranquility nor future reputation. But he yielded, however reluctantly, to the ascendant which his wiser colleague had acquired over him, and retired immediately after his abdication to a villa in Lucania, where it was almost impossible that such an impatient spirit could find any lasting tranquility.

¹⁰²Aurelius Victor. Eutropius, ix. 26. It appears by the Panegyrists that the Romans were soon reconciled to the name and ceremony of adoration.

¹⁰³The innovations introduced by Diocletian are chiefly deduced, 1st, from some very strong passages in Lactantius; and, secondly, from the new and various offices which, in the Theodosian code, appear already established in the beginning of the reign of Constantine.

¹⁰⁴ Lactant, de M. P. c. 7.

¹⁰⁵Indicta lex nova quae sane illorum temporum modestia tolerabilis, in perniciem processit. Aurel. Victor [de Caesar, c. 39]; who has treated the character of Diocletian with good sense, though in bad Latin.
[The most curious document which has come to light since the publication of Gibbon's History is the edict of Diocletian published from an incription found at Eskihissar (Stratoniceia), by Col. Leake. This edict, according to Milman, was issued in the name of the four Caesars, Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius, and Galerius. It fixed a maximum of prices throughout the empire for all the necessaries and commodities of life. The preamble insists with great vehemence on the extortion and inhumanity of the merchants and vendors. Among the articles of which the maximum value is assessed are oil, salt, honey, butcher's meat, poultry, game, fish, vegetables, fruit, the wages of laborers and artisans, schoolmasters and orators, clothes, skins, boots and shoes, harness, timber, corn, wine, and beer (zythus). The depreciation in the value of money or the rise in the price of commodities had been so great during the last century that butcher's meat, which in the second century was two denarii the pound, was now fixed at a maximum of eight. An excellent edition of the edict has been published with a commentary by Mommsen, who shows that it was issued in AD 301. Cf Finlay's Hist. of Greece, vol 1. Appendix I. - O.S.]

¹⁰⁶Solus omnium, post conditum Romanum Imperium, qui ex tanto fastigio sponte ad privatae vitae statum civilitatemque remearet. Eutrop. ix. 28.

¹⁰⁷The particulars of the journey and illness are taken from Lactantius (c. 17), who may sometimes be admitted as an evidence of public facts, though very seldom of private anecdotes.

¹⁰⁸Aurelius Victor [de Caesar, c. 39] ascribes the abdication, which had been so variously accounted for, to two causes: first, Diocletian's contempt of ambition; and secondly, His apprehension of impending troubles. One of the panegyrists (vi. 9) mentions the age and infirmities of Diocletian as a very natural reason for his retirement.

¹⁰⁹The difficulties as well as mistakes attending the dates both of the year and of the day of Diocletian's abdication are perfectly cleared up by Tillemont, Hist. des Empereurs, tom. iv. p. 525, note 19, and by Pagi ad annum.

¹¹⁰See Panegyr. Veter. vi. 9. The oration was pronounced after Maximian had reassumed the purple.

The Books: "From Beirut to Jerusalem" (Thomas Friedman)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman. This was an important book for me. I remember where and when I was in my life when I read it. I was never into non-fiction. (Can you believe it?? Now I have to FORCE myself to read novels ... for the most part, I am a non-fiction girl). But for whatever reason, I decided to pick up that book and read it. I was in grad school - for acting, of course - and I lived, breathed, ate, dreamt, acting - 24/7. Grad school is a cloister, sort of. So to be reading that in the middle of the cloister was incredible. I had assimilated a lot of the information in the book, of course, because - I remember the civil war in Beirut, just from the news, I know a lot of the events because - you know - they were on the damn news. But this book was the first - it led me to other books, it made me dig deeper, read as much as I could - it led me into other areas - because everything is interconnected when you really start to learn about it - it was the spark that lit the flame, the beginning of my non-fiction journey. I can tell how blown away by it I was because of all the writing in the margins, and all of the underlining. First off - I love his writing. The book is full of memorable anecdotes of a personal nature: the whole "check-point" thing - one of the funniest sections in the book, the golf course outside Beirut, the hostess of the dinner party in Beirut saying to her guests - as explosions rocked the apartment: "So should we wait until after the battle ends to have dessert?"

I'll post a bit from the Beirut section - where Friedman describes the whole Commodore Hotel phenomenon in Beirut. Now I was in grade school and junior high way back then - but even I remembered the name "Commodore Hotel". It had somehow filtered down into the consciousness of even a young girl.

From From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman.

The home of all good Beirut fixers -- not to mention all good Beirut reporters and crooked taxi drivers -- was the Commodore Hotel. Every war has its hotel, and the Lebanese wars had the Commodore. The Commodore was an island of insanity in a sea of madness. It wasn't just the parrot in the bar, which did a perfect imitation of the whistle of an incoming shell, that made the place so weird; it wasn't just the front desk clerk, who would ask registering guests whether they wanted a room on the "shelling side" of the hotel, which faced East Beirut, or the peaceful side of the hotel, which faced the sea; it wasn't the way they "laundered" your hotel bills by putting all your bar charges down as "dry cleaning"; it wasn't even the sign in the lobby during the summer of 82 which read: "In case of shooting around the hotel, the management insists that neither television cameramen nor photographers attemp to take pictures. This endangers not only their lives but those of the guests and the staff. Those who are not prepared to cooperate may check out of this hotel." It was the whole insane atmosphere, an atmosphere that was neatly captured by the cartoonist Garry Trudeau in a series of Doonesbury strips he did about the Commodore during the summer of 82. My favorite shows his character, television newsman Roland Burton Hedley, Jr., calling down to the front desk from his Commodore room.

"Any messages for me?" Hedley asks the desk clerk.

"Let's see ..." says the clerk. "Yes, a couple more death threats. Shall I put them in your box?"

"Yeah, look," says Hedley, "if they call again, tell them I only work for cable."

You did not stay in the Commodore for the quality of its room. The only thing that came with your room at the Commodore was a 16 percent service charge, and whatever you found in the blue-and-gold shag rugs. The lobby consisted of overstuffed couches, a bar, a would-be disco with a tin-sounding organ, and enough bimbos to stock a whorehouse. There was also a Chinese restaurant and an old dining room, where the service was always bad and the food even worse. When the Shiites took over West Beirut in 1984 and imposed a more fundamental regime, the Commodore management was forced to close the bar in the lobby and to open up what became known as the Ramadan Room on the seventh floor. (Ramadan is the Muslim holy month of fasting.) Hotel guests would knock on the Ramadan Room door with all the caution of entering a speakeasy during Prohibition. Yunis, the bartender, would peek out to make sure it wasn't some mullah come to break his bottles, and then let you in. Inside, guests would be sitting in the dark, sipping drinks on the couch, while Fuad, the hotel manager, would be shuffling back and forth uttering his favorite expression: "No problem, no problem."

If you got tired of visiting the battlefront, all you had to do was sit in the Commodore lobby and wait for the front to visit you. One quiet Saturday night in 1984, a large number of journalists were gathered around the bar, getting loose after a day in the field. Yunis was keeping the booze flowing, when suddenly shots rang out from the lobby. The journalists all ducked behind the bar while a band of Druse gunmen poured into the hotel from the front door and kitchen, chasing after a certain gentleman who was apparently cutting in on their drug business. They found him in the lobby and tried to drag him out, but he, knowing what was in store for him, wrapped his arms around the leg of a couch. In order to encourage him to let go, the Druse pistol-whipped him and then pumped some lead into his thigh. Just as this scene was unfolding, my friend David Zucchino happened to come out of the elevator.

"All you saw in the lobby was this poor guy holding on to the couch for dear life, while the gunmen were trying to drag him away; and over at the bar all these little eyes of journalists were peering out from behind the stools," Zucchino recalled. "At the front desk, two gunmen were beating the clerk, who was trying to call Amal for help. But what I remember most was that CBS correspondent Larry Pintak's Dalmatian, which he used to keep tied up to the AP machine in the lobby, got so excited by all the shooting that he broke his leash and started lapping up this guy's blood on the lobby floor. It was disgusting! The gunment finally left and this guy let go of the couch, got up, and sat on a bar stool in shock. Fuad immediately showed up and pronounced, 'No problem, no problem.'"

Why did any sane journalist stay at the Commodore? To begin with, most deluxe hotels in West Beirut had been destroyed during the early years of the Lebanese civil war. But more important, the Commodore's owner, a Palestinian Christian by the name of Yousef Nazzal, who bought this fleabag in 1970 from a pair of Lebanese brothers who needed some fast cash to pay off their gambling debts before their arms were broken, was a genius of catering to journalists. He understood that there is only one thing journalists appreciate more than luxury and that is functioning communications equipment with which to file their stories or television spots. By paying enormous bribes, Yousef managed to maintain live international telex and telephone lines into his hotel, no matter how bad the combat became. In the summer of 82, he once paid someone to slip into the central post office, unplug Prime Minister Shafik al-Wazzan's telex, and plug the Commodore's in its place. Yousef never took politics or life too seriously. He loved to sit on the stiff blue couch in the lobby right around deadline time and listen to the hum of all the telexes going at once -- at a rate of about $25 a minute. He would sneak up behind me and say, "Tom, my boy, some people make a living, other people make a killing."

The other important attribute of the Commodore was that it filled the void left by the defunct Lebanese Ministry of Information. For a "small consideration," also known as baksheesh, also known as a bribe, the Commodore would get you a visa at the airport, a work permit, a residence permit, a press card, a quickie divorce, or a marriage certificate. Hell, they would get you a bar mitzvah, if you wanted it. As long as you had money, you could buy anything at the Commodore. No money, see you later.

Pro-Israeli press critics used to complain that the Commodore was a "PLO hotel". There is no denying that many a Palestinian spokesman hung out there, but when the Israeli army invaded West Beirut, more than a few Israeli officers dined in the Commodore's restaurant and sued it to contact reporters -- the exact way the PLO had. The Commodore lived by the motto: The king is dead, long live the king. I would not be surprised if today a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini is hanging over the reception desk.

The Books: "Modern Ireland : 1600-1972" (R. F. Foster)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Modern Ireland : 1600-1972 by R. F. Foster.

A massive book with a sweeping scope - it's kind of essential reading for anyone interested in Ireland. My dad told me to read it years ago - and there's so much in it, so much information that it's actually hard to absorb in one sitting. It's a very good book. I agonized over the excerpt to choose. I mean, not AGONIZED ... but you know ... it took some time. Should I go with the famine? Or Parnell? Or Cromwell? Or with Patrick Pearse et al?

I decided to go with the events in Ireland in the late 1700s - a time of great upheaval - well, there was great upheaval everywhere. There was the American revolution, the French revolution - these events reverberated throughout the world. Kind of like the time of revolutions in the 1960s, when every African country seemed to shrug off their colonial masters in the same decade ... a wave of revolutions that could not be stopped. The Irish were very much affected by the events in France - and the revolution-mania brought their own issues, shall we say, their own discontent to the surface. The Catholics must be completely emancipated - and there needed to be a strong government in Ireland - Parliament needed to be reformed - and out of all of this brou-haha a society was formed called the United Irishmen. They were a group of men who were well organized - and also dedicated and strong enough to try to bring about the necessary changes in Irish society. Foster writes: "their history reflects the inspiration, radicalization and disillusionment that the events of the 1790s brought to Irish society at much wider levels." The secretary of the United Irishmen was Theobald Wolfe Tone - his name is probably familiar to you. The United Irishmen wanted equality for Catholics (oh, and most of these guys were Protestants - so there goes the assumption that this whole thing is about religion - it's not - it's about land and power) - but they wanted to work within the existing system (at least originally) - a fact that made Edmund Burke (Mr. Don't Tear Stuff Down!!) approve of their ideas - which was very important. Getting Burke's stamp of approval was a big deal - and, hahahaha, I guess it still is, even though the dude is dead. People still wonder: "Will Edmund Burke approve???" In terms of the United Irishmen wanting reform and emancipation, Foster writes - Burke gave "the intelligent conservative rationate for such a step." I am so skimming the surface of this tumultuous time - but that's the gist of it.

I'm going to post an excerpt involving the United Irishmen and the extraordinary Theobald Wolfe Tone.

I highly recommend this book!!

From Modern Ireland : 1600-1972 by R. F. Foster.

This movement, the vital germ of Irish radicalism, cannot be separated from the general Irish reaction to the French Revolution. Fashionable Irish people had always tended to Francophilia; there was accordingly a wide circulation of literature to do with the early Revolution, and much favorable comment in the newspapers. Trinity College took its characteristic adversarial role, conferring an honorary degree on Burke a few weeks after the publication of his Reflections. As the Revolution gathered momentum, so did celbration of its great occasions. And so did political argument: vehement pamphlets came from the conservative side, to counter republican salvoes. The level of informed opinion was remarkably high on both sides: this discourse indicates a politically literate society, exasperated by the incompetence of a landlord government. Here we can discern some of the impetus behind the early United Irishmen Clubs.

The origin of the Belfast Club may lie in the 1791 celebrations of Bastille Day; the Club was formed the following October. Belfast was notably "French", Dublin less so. But there, too, was an educated middle-class element, and an initial desire to see the men of small property represented in politics -- which could, with the radicalization of events in France and the rise to influence of men like Thomas Addis Emmet,¹ move on to ideas of universal male suffrage and complete Catholic emancipation, as well as the secret ballot, payment of MPs and a general range of radical nostrums.

But how and when did the United Irishmen movve from being parliamentary reformers to constitutional revolutionaries? Eventually, their oaths and catechisms would posit a linear historical development. "What have you got in your hand? A green bough. Where did it first grow? In America. Where did it bud? In France. Where are you going to plant it? In the crown of Great Britain." But what should be borne in mind is not only the percussion of events in Ireland from the early 1790s, but also the Presbyterian tradition of libertarian republicanism that long antedated 1775 or 1789. Dissenting ideology is there from the beginning: far more apparent, and far more galvanic, than the vague and shadowy Gaelic nationalism that was taken on board in the late 1790s. The traditions of Enlightenment debate were diffused through Belfast "society" (notably via education in Glasgow); this encouraged the fashion for Paine (seven Irish editions of the Rights of Man between 1791 and 1792) and the full newspaper reports of Convention debates. But deism was never popular, even among the most advanced Belfast United Irishmen. And northern radicals retained a basic dislike of Catholicism, not only because of its counter-revolutionary implications. Despite the belief that the age of religion was over, ancient identifications ran through radical Irish discourse; "the Catholics" were always referred to as a distinct group, if only a political one. Even when they were allies, they tended to be seen as irritatingly obsessive. Consciousness of Catholics qua Catholics remained evident in the discussions even of advanced United Irishmen like Drennan, Russell², McCracken³ and Neilson⁴.

Neilson's paper, the Northern Star, appeared from January 1792 and reflects some of the attitudes of Belfast United Irishmen. It could always be relied upon to explain and rationalize the reverses and convulsions of events in Paris through the early nineties -- supporting th execution of the King, as did Tone and Drennan. On domestic issues it trod a more careful path, beginning by advancing political reform and criticizing the violent methods of "those infatuated people called Defenders". It was, inevitably, prosecuted all the same; but its ability to reappear made it a focus of radical energy until it went down for the last time in 1797.

The Star and Tone's enthusiastic views have colored the reputation of Ulster radicalism. But the old siege mentality was still much in evidence in most of the province. Antrim and Down, with very few Catholics and a strong New Light Presbyterian tradition, were radical, the rest of Ulster was not. And though 1792-3 saw a great revival of Volunteering in Ulster, and the summoning of reform conventions supported by many gentry, this should not be simplistically interpreted. Francis Hutcheson's ideas of armed militias to protect civil rights may have been returned to Ulster with interest. But many within the movement specifically declared against republicanism, and aired deeply held worries about Catholic emancipation. Pro-Catholic United Irishmen might argue that Catholics had been "educated to liberty" by association with Protestants, but this was not entirely convincing. Even Drennan, one of the most generously minded, was fatalistic rather than enthusiastic about the process of Catholic rapprochement. "It is churlish soil, but it is the soil of Ireland, and must be cultivated, or we must emigrate."

Belfast radicalism also tended to be cynical about the sister movement in Dublin, which got under way slightly later. By the end of 1792 a renewed and radicalized Volunteer movement seemed about to take off, using tactics and iconography borrowed from the French Revolution; but it was short-circuited after some near-confrontations with the government. Northern Volunteers tended to sneer at the outspoken radical paper sponsored by Emmet and Arthur O'Connor, the Press ("vulgar for the vulgar", according to Drennan). However, in Ulster also Volunteers backed off from confrontation over reform; the revival collapsed slowly from early 1793. Again, the vital development of war with France was instrumental. But even without such an issue, it is doubtful whether infiltration by United Irishmen could ever have succeeded in radicalizing gentry Volunteers to the point of open defiance. Subsequent developments would be accelerated by counter-revolutionary measures brought in by Pitt's wartime administration; frome arly 1794, no longer restrained by their Volunteer allies, clear-sighted United Irishmen saw that conspiracy and elitist organization were the only weapons open to them.

This was as true in Dublin as in Belfast. The Dublin United Irishmen, formed a month after the Belfast Society, began by capitalizing on the current of political feeling that worked to bring Catholics and radicals into a reforming coalition; their rapid polarization is well documented, an advantage to the government of the day as well as to historians of the future. From early on their membership included ex-Volunteers like the irrepressible Napper Tandy and Hamilton Rowan⁵, as well as members of the politically marginalized professional and business classes, including many textile manufacturers, who stressed the advantages of campaigning for protectionist measures. The working classes were conspicuously absent from the rolls of the Dublin United Irishmen. The aristocratic mavericks came later, though the movement as a whole is inevitably identified with their reputations.

After the United Irishmen's reconstruction in 1794 and the arrest of many of its members, the liberal Francophile middle class were much less prominent in the Society. Their place was taken by glamorous figures like Lord Edward Fitzgerald⁶, the epitome of radical chic, and Arthur O'Connor⁷, who translated the ideas of Swift and Molyneux into the rhetoric of the 1790s. Such men had links, personal as well as political, with English radical Whiggery -- Fox, and those to the left of him. They were also closely connected to the provincial network of United Irishmen in Ireland itself: as early as 1793 there were at least nine Clubs in towns like Armagh, Lisburn, Clonmel and Limerick. The influence of men like Fitzgerald stressed the French connection (he had romantically married a supposed daughter of Philippe Egalite) and "breaking the connection" with England -- though it was tacitly admitted that geographical and, by now, cultural propinquity would always necessitate some kind of association. Notions of federalism were being floated even in the late 1790s. Contradictions of this kind within the movement are best expressed by its most famous member, Wolfe Tone.

Tone was brilliantly articulate, and his cleverness, humor and personality have been passed down to posterity through his extraordinarily immediate and entertaining journals. The secret language, self-mockery and in-jokes apparently convey a jocular and lightweight character: "a flimsy man", remarked one contemporary. Certainly his inconsistency and self-advancement have been much stressed, as well as his inability to recognize the sectarian underpinning of all political activity in Ireland, outside the small Francophile intelligentsia. Even in his days as spokesman of the Catholic Committee, he held to the fundamental Irish-Protestant belief that Catholicism was a dying superstition -- though this did not prevent his Argument on Behalf of the Catholics (September 1791) from being a brilliant pamphlet that persuaded many Dissenters that it would be dangerous not to join the emancipation cause.

But Tone's really important quality was his ability to become a dedicated and ruthless revolutionary. From his early days at the Irish Bar, satirically nicknamed "Marat" and mocking his own radical pretensions, he actually came to live out the reality of international conspiracy. Like Irish radical politics as a whole, Tone must be seen as undergoing a fundamental change in 1793-4. The United Irishmen were suppressed in May 1794. While Tone had been quite capable in the early 1790s of casting a line towards the government, praising Grattan and cultivating Irish Whigs, by April 1794 he could produce memoranda for French agents that were radical in a reductionist way.

In Ireland, a conquered and oppressed and insulted country, the name of England and her power is universally odious, save with those who have no interest in maintaining it, such as the Government and its connexions, the Church and its dependents, the great landed property, etc.; but the power of these people, being founded on property, the first convulsion would level it with the dust. On the contrary, the great bulk of the people would probably throw off the yoke, if they saw any force in the country sufficiently strong to resort to for defence. It seems idle to suppose that the prejudices of England against France spring merely from the republicanism of the French; they proceed rather from a spirit of rivalship, encouraged by continued wars. In Ireland the Dissenters are enemies to the English power from reason and reflection; the Catholics, from hatred to the English name. In a word, the prejudices of the one country are directly favorable, and those of the other directly adverse, to an invasion. The Government of Ireland is to be looked upon as a Government of force; the moment a superior force appears it would tumble at once as being neither founded in the interests nor in the affections of the people.

This was the kind of activity that sent him into exile in June 1795, after the government had incriminated a number of United Irishmen in treasonable activity. By then, there was no turning back. Most importantly, in Ireland radical identifications had begun to fuse with nationalism, in the sense that the establishment was defined as English. All ills, in Tone's view, could be traced to the English connection. The idea of native oppressors was not much entertained; they were written off as an oligarchy of collaborators.

"Nationalism" as such had not been part of the original United Irish package. They were internationalist liberals, anti-government rather than anti-English. Even when anti-Englishness took over, they had little time for "ethnic" considerations; recent fashions for traditional music and poetry, and archaeological divinations of the "Celtic" past, seemed to middle-class radicals at best silly and at worst savage. The United Irishmen were modernizers: they appealed, as they themselves put it, to posterity, not ancestors. (Given the way that the ancestors of Belfast radaicals had treated the Gaelic Irish, this was just as well.) They looked to Hutcheson, to Locke, to America, and most of all to France.

¹Thomas Addis Emmet (1764-1827): born in Cork; educated at Trinity College, Dublin, Edinburgh and the Continent; called to the Irish bar, 1790; leading counsel for the United Irishmen; took their oath in open court to prove its legality; Secretary to the Society's Supreme Council, 1795; arrested, 1798; attempted to interest Napoleon in an invasion of Ireland, 1802, but came to regret the connection of Irish and French politics; sailed for the USA, 1804; joined the New York Bar; built up a large practice, specializing in pleading for the liberty of escaped slaves. Characterized by Drennan as "possessing more eloquence than energy, more caution than action".

²Thomas Russell (1767 - 1803): born in County Cork; joined the British army, 1782; an original member of the United Irishmen, 1791; contributed to the Northern Star; imprisoned, 1796 - 1802; met Robert Emmet in Paris and given the task of raising Ulster, 1803; arrested in Dublin; tried and hanged at Downpatrick for high treason.

³Henry Joy McCracken (1767-98): born in Belfast of Huguenont descent and into a leading family in the linen trade; an early but not original member of the United Irishmen, 1791; arrested, 1796; took a leading part in planning the 1798 rebellion in the north, while on bail; commanded the County Antrim insurgents; captured on the eve of a projected escape to America, after some weeks in hiding; tried and hanged.

⁴Samuel Nelson (1761-1803): born in County Down, son of a Presbyterian minister; had made his fortune as a draper by 1790; abandoned business for politics; editor of the Northern Star, 1792; arrested, 1796; released on bail and played a part in preparing the 1798 rising; rearrested and gave "honorable information"; imprisoned and exiled, 1799; favored Union; died in the USA.

⁵Archibald Hamilton Rowan (1751-1834): born in London; settled in County Kildare, 1784; a founding member of the Northern Whig Club, 1790; joined the United Irishmen, 1791; tried and sentenced for sedition, 1794; escaped to France; the memory of atrocities witnessed during the Reign of Terror made it impossible for him to join any Irish revolutionary enterprise; pardoned, 1803; settled in County Down.

⁶Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763-98): born in Carton House, County Kildare; son of the first Duke of Lenster and Emily, daughter of the Duke of Richmond; joined the Sussex militia and served in America, 1779; MP for Athy, 1781; rejoined the army in Canada, 1788; MP for County Kildare, 1790; attracted by revolutionary thought; visited Paris, staying with Tom Paine, 1792; cashiered from the army for toasting the abolition of all hereditary titles; associated with the United Irishmen from their early days but did not formally join the Society until 1796; led a military committtee of the United Irishmen, 1798; captured and mortally wounded in a skirmish in a house in Thomas Street, Dublin.

⁷Arthur O'Connor (1763-1852): born in Michelstown; educated at Trinity College, Dublin; called to the Irish Bar, 1788; MP for Philipstown, 1792; did not oppose government until 1795; determined to abandon Irish politics and seek an English parliamentary seat, 1796; persuaded to act otherwise by Lord Edward Fitzgerald; joined the United Irishmen; edited the Press; arrested in England, 1798; released, 1803; went to France; appointed a general by Napoleon and married the daughter of Condorcet; grew fiercely anti-clerical, to the extent of deriding the O'Connellite movement for Catholic relief as priest-ridden. Eccentric, churlish, megalomaniac.

The Books: "The Arab World: Forty Years of Change" (Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Robert A. Fernea)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called The Arab World: Forty Years of Change by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea & Robert A. Fernea.

Catchy title, huh? hahahaha Also the two of them have to have the most complicated names in the history of mankind. I can just HEAR the arguments in the publisher's office. Like - she MUST have her ... is it a maiden name? Is Warnock her maiden name? And knowing what I know of Robert A. Fernea, he probably gave her shit about putting her maiden name on there. hahahahaha (Read on, you'll see what I mean)

So Elizabeth Warlock Fernea .... Warlock? and then he goes for it too - he has to put a middle initial in there, which mucks up the waters - and they have the same last name ... but she is also a Warlock ... I can't keep it straight.

I like this book, sort of - there's a lot of good stuff in it, if you can meander your way around the emotional malarkey. It's huge - it's kind of annoying - there's a sort of mix of history and then personal - The two of them are married, and he's an anthropologist and she's a documentary filmmaker and ... not sure what else ... and they have lived in the Middle East, off and on, for forty years. Or - they spend protracted amounts of time there, and then come back to the States, and teach, or what have you. They describe their various times in the Middle East - using their own personal experiences to show how much things have changed (or not changed, as the case may be). The biggest change has to be Beirut - they lived there in 1956, and then they returned in 1981. A greater change could not even be imagined.

There's a weird dynamic in the book. They share the writing - he does the "serious" stuff, and she does the travelogue stuff ... and she reveals stuff about their relationship that - it's kind of like it belongs in another book. Like, half the time I feel like bitch-slapping Robert A. Fernea for being so condescending to his wife - SHE wrote those sections too. Like, their arguments - and how he will correct her, in public - he sounds like kind of a know-it-all. But ... do I want to be assaulted with an inside look at their RELATIONSHIP or do I want to learn about the goldurn Arab world? The parts where we get an insider's view at their relationship are strangely disturbing and seem like they should be part of another book. Just my opinion!! The two of them are very emotional, and they have a lot of dear friends through the Middle East - my favorite parts of the book are, actually, when we get descriptions of certain areas - Elizabeth Warlock Fernea (hahaha I can't help it) is a LOVELY writer, when she is not describing pissy little fights with her condescending husband ... and she makes me SEE and SMELL and HEAR what she does. She has a gift.

Make no mistake: it's a weird book. It's HUGE too. LIke - the book never ends.

Robert Fernea condescends to his wife across the Middle East. He condescends to her in Marrakesh, he condescends to her on the West Bank ... Nothing she does is ever good enough for him! They sit in a group conversation and she starts to talk, and he cuts her off rudely, telling her what she is missing ... He tells her impatiently to hurry up whenever they go on an outing ... And SHE is writing all of this. Is she proud of the fact that her husband treats her like this? Or is this unconscious? Or is she trying to get back at him? Because I did NOT like him, reading this book. I thought: Oh you pompous ass - and treat your wife better, moron!

Not exactly the look they were going for, I don't think.

Uhm ... oh yeah ... this book is about The Arab World, not the inner workings of the Fernea marriage psychodrama.

I have a whole theory about the two of them (again - a silly distraction from what I think is the real point of their book): They were married in the 50s. I think she was enlightened by the women's movement in the 70s. And so she suddenly wanted to be equal to her husband ... but he was already so condescending and so old-school in his thoughts about her that he couldn't change ... and she, instead, insisted on stuff like her maiden name ... which weakens her case.

Again: did I read this book to analyze the Fernea dynamic? (Sounds like a scientific term) No, I did not. But I find I cannot help myself. They invited me into their little world, and that is what I see!

I'll post a bit from the whole chapter on Beirut. I think Robert A. Fernea taught at the university there ...condescending to his students throughout the 50s. Anyway - they lived there in 1956, and then returned periodically throughout the 60s.

This is Elizabeth Warlock Fernea's voice. I picked it not because it's the most fascinating part of the book - (I would say that the whole section on building the dam on the Nile, and the whole Nubian situation is the most interesting part of the book) - but because I wanted to find an excerpt that showed off what I liked about the book the most: Elizabeth Warlock Fernea's descriptions of nature, and life, and her surroundings. Amazingly, Robert A. Fernea does NOT treat his wife like she is an intellectual moron in this excerpt!

From The Arab World: Forty Years of Change by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea & Robert A. Fernea.

BEIRUT, 1956
Bob Adams arrived, our visas were duly stamped, and before we set off in the University of Chicago Jeep across the desert to Baghdad, we were invited to dine at the summer home of M. Henri Seyrig, the director of the institute. "A simple dinner of native dishes," he said. His messenger offered to drive us to the mountain retreat about Aley.

Dusk was coming down over the sea as we climbed, the setting sun staining the rock ridges pink as we wound around them in the Jeep, shading the oleanders, pink and white, muting the red tiled roofs of the stone houses in the mountain villages. We braked and paused for bleating sheep, for a few cows being chased by a boy in a skullcap and an embroidered shirt, for a procession of women in red dresses, with diaphanous colored veils that spread out behind them in the evening breeze, like halos.

M. Seyrig greeted us on the terrace of his summer house, a man in late middle age, small and compact, dark, and with a gracious manner, an inquisitive eye. After aperitifs, dinner was served by a woman servant in bloomers and embroidered blouse, her hair tied up in one of those evanescent veils, this one purple. A simple meal of native foods, yes -- delicious shawarma, rice, salad.

We sat with M. Seyrig, looking out over the dark valley dotted with rows of tiny flickering lights marking the houses along the terraces we had just climbed. The sea, studded with flecks of foam glimmering white on the black water, seemed scarcely distinguishable from the land. Behind us hung modern canvases by an unfamiliar Parisian painter, great strokes of orange, green, black, and crimson in unexpected combinations, on the walls of the whitewashed summer house. To our right a Maronite cathedral loomed in the dusk, reflecting dim light among shrubs and trees.

The woman in the purple head scarf served dessert: fried bananas in rum. We had thick, strong coffee.

"Yes," murmured M. Seyrig. "This region is ageless in its beauty."

"It is very beautiful." I replied.

What else was there to be said? We were young and impressionable, full of ourselves and our new adventure, our new marriage, our new lives. The vista of hills stretched below us, darkly clotted with fig trees; some aromatic bush vied for sweetness with the fumes of rum from our dessert. The sea washed and foamed far below. The evening posed the possibilities of sensual delights that were almost overwhelming. M. Seyrig seemed part of this setting, so relaxed, so knowledgeable. Perhaps it was the conjunction of ancient splendor, natural beauty, and the modern wall-high swaths of bravura color in the paintings behind us that left us speechless. We were from America, a new world, and all this mixing of old and new seemed unreal, strange, something to experience but hard to feel part of. Yet wonderful. The hills. The fig trees. The cathedral and the modern paintings. The dark-haired woman and the bananas with rum.

BEIRUT 1960, 1964
During the years to come, when we had lived in Iraq and Egypt, Beirut continued to be the closest thing to a visit home. In some ways, we felt a bit ashamed of the fact that we should enjoy American pleasures in Beirut when we were supposed to be involved in the patterns of Arab culture. We admitted to each other that Uncle Sam's hamburger restaurant and its American-style ice cream seemed awfully good -- the first time around on each visit, at least.

But it was more than familiar sights and sounds. Beirut seemed to us a hopeful place, a sign of the future, where the church bells could ring on Sunday, the synagogues fill up on Saturdays, and the calls to prayer from the mosques sound throughout the week. Whenever doubt flickered like a shadow across our lantern-slide images of the great peaceful future of the Middle East, we thought about Lebaonj and Beirut, Switzerland of the Middle East, ancient Phoenician port, where all races and religions mixed, talked, enjoyed a free press and a constitutional government, and made a great deal of money from banking and trade. We saw some hope in all of this. East and West seemed to combine here without perceptible strain.

We said to ourselves that Lebanon felt like America because it shared many of our much vaunted freedoms. Was that true? There was freedom of speech, it seemed. College texts described the Lebanese constitution as a model of religious and ethnic accord. Political asylum was taken for granted. If we felt a sense of relief from just being in Beirut, so did hundreds of others with much better reasons, political exiles from throughout the region.

Beirut provided free trade and the appropriate political atmosphere for high-rolling international capitalism. The two were not unrelated, of course. Business was booming without hindrance; taxes and duties were low. Everyone seemed to carry on his or her affairs without bothering others. The focus was on living well and accumulating the means to do so. As the major trade center of the Middle East, home of international banking and of most foreign concerns who wanted a Middle East location free of government interference, Beirut was needed by all parties, friendly or otherwise.

And so life in this sea-blown oasis seemed assured through long sunny summers and long sunny winters. Foreign experts, exiles, businessmen, and educators came and went, and the future looked bright and full of promise, at least in downtown Beirut.

And ....

All together now!!

From Chai-rista

The Books: "Down with Big Brother : The Fall of the Soviet Empire" (Michael Dobbs)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Down with Big Brother : The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Michael Dobbs. This is a great book - even if you already know half of the stories in it. I love the set-up of the book, and I love his writing. He uses the totalitarian language from 1984 as the structure of his book - It has four parts: Revolt of the Proles, Revolt of the Machines, Revolt of the Nations, and Revolt of the Party. This is 1984 language. In this book, I discovered one of my favorite anecdotes - that I use all the time - the one about Boris Yeltsin walking into a supermarket in Houston, or something - I think it was somewhere in Texas - this was in 1989 or 90, I believe - and what he saw there - the convenience, the abundance, the cake-makers, the choices - not only blew his mind, but gave him an epiphany. A horrible soul-shaking epiphany. He had been taught that capitalism was evil. But he knew what supermarkets were like in the Soviet Union. And this? Being able to pick and choose, being able to have choices to feed your family? I guess on the plane ride home, he was totally silent, staring out the window. One of the people with him, an assistant or something, asked him if he was all right. He said, with tears on his face, "They had to fool the people ... They couldn't let people travel. They were afraid that people's eyes would open." He realized he had been fooled. That generations of people had been fooled by communist propaganda. Yeltsin never looked back from that Houston supermarket - it was the end of the road for him. He left the Party shortly thereafter. He was disillusioned. He had been lied to. No more Party loyalty. He would throw his hat into the ring and join the struggle for who would be the next leader of Russia.

There are idiots who still believe that communism was a good idea, in theory, only badly executed by evil leaders. People still cling to the idea that socialism is some happy lollipop land where poverty will be eradicated, and the world will all hold hands as one. People who believe in socialism do not understand human nature, pure and simple. It's not that the people running the show were bad - it's that the system ITSELF IS BAD.

Dear idiots: maybe you just prefer to live in a world where Utopia is possible, and the streams will run with bubbly champagne, and a unicorn will graze in your backyard, and there will be food and hope and sunshine and rainbows! Okay - fine - I get fantasies. Believe me, I understand fantasies. Sometimes I fantasize that Cary Grant has come back to life and takes me dancing at Coconut Grove. But just GET that you are choosing to live in a FANTASY WORLD and not the REAL world and do not be surprised when I, and many many others like me, refuse to take you seriously.

Obviously I feel strongly about this. Millions and millions died under the Soviet system - and certain people STILL hold onto the fact that socialism was a good idea, in theory. It makes my blood boil.

Even if you're a history buff and you know the story of the events of the late 1980s, early 1990s - pick this book up.

I'm going to excerpt a bit of the section on Chernobyl. Chernobyl is, of course, the biggest and most horrible example of a Revolt of the Machines in Soviet Union history. The cracks it revealed in the monolithic edifice of the Communist Party ... unprecedented. The damage control attempted by the Party made things worse. Something's rotten in the state of Denmark and now everybody knew.

Here's the excerpt.

From Down with Big Brother : The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Michael Dobbs

Nuclear accidents can occur anywhere, but Chernobyl was a uniquely Soviet catastrophe. It was the almost inevitable consequence of the rapacious attitude toward nature that was an inherent part of the Soviet system of economic development. In the revolutionary mind-set, nature was subordinate to man. "We cannot wait for favors from nature," Soviet propagandists liked to proclaim. "Our task is to take them from her." In the end nature was bound to take its revenge, one way or another.

"The Russian soil was able to support the Communists for fifty years. It can't put up with them much longer," said Adam Michnik, one of the intellectual forces behind the Polish Solidarity movement, referring to Chernobyl and a host of other man-made disasters. "In Poland, in August 1980, it was human beings who went on strike. In the Soviet Union we are witnessing a strike of inanimate objects."

In the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, the government blamed the disaster on Bryukhanov, Dyatlov, and their subordinates. It was true that they had ignored safety rules and made serious errors of judgment. The investigation showed that the operators had switched off the emergency cooling system to Reactor No. 4 so that it would not interfere with the turbine experiment. They had failed to observe proper shutdown procedures. At a secret trial in July 1987 both Dyatlov and Bryukhanov were sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for "violations of discipline." Four other operators received prison sentences ranging from two to ten years. The prosecution described the defendants as "nuclear hooligans".

By producing a few scapegoats, the court neatly absolved everybody else of responsibility. The verdict deflected attention away from a series of major design flaws in the Chernobyl type of reactor, such as the lack of a containment structure to prevent leaks of radioactivitiy. It turned out that such reactors were chronically unstable at low levels of power, but no one had bothered to inform the operators about this defect. The operators were also unaware that under certain circumstances, the emergency shutdown mechanism could trigger a fatal surge of power. This is precisely what happened at Chernobyl. To have admitted all this at the time would have rarised questions about the whole future of the nuclear power industry. It was much easier to blame "operator error".

The real villain of Chernobyl was not the operators or even the designers of the flawed reactor, but the Soviet system itself. It was a system that valued conformity over individual responsibility, concerned with today rather than tomorrow, a system that treated both man and nautre as "factors of produciton" that could be mercilessly exploited. Eventually something had to break.

The violation of safety procedures was the norm, rather than the exception, in Soviet factories. So too was the obsession with secrecy that deprived the operators of the Chernobyl plant of basic information about the design of the reactor and previous nuclear accidents. But perhaps the gravest shortcoming of the system was the way it suppressed the notion of individual responsibility. The physical bravery displayed by many of the sic hundred thousand "liquidators" who took part in the Chernobyl cleanup efforts - beginning with the operators themselves and the firemen who fought the blaze on the roof of the turbine hall -- was remarkable. Equally remarkable was the moral cowardice that caused otherwise decent individuals to go along with senseless and reprehensible decisions, including a fatal delay in the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from heavily contaminated areas. When the Ukrainian Communist Party chief insisted that May Day parades go ahead in Kiev despite the fact that radioactive winds were blowing in the direction of the capital, hardly anyone stood up to protest.

The moral failing was eventually recognized by one of the leaders of the Soviet nuclear industry, academician Valery Legasov, who committed suicide on the second anniversary of the disaster. Shortly before his death he gave an interview in which he complained that technology had been permitted to outpace morality. He explained that the previous generation of Soviet scientists -- men like Sakharov, Kurchatov, and Kapitsa -- had stood "on the shoulders of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky". They had been educated in the spirit of beautiful literature, great art, and a "correct moral sense". But somewhere along the line the connection with Russia's prerevolutionary traditions had been broken. "Soviet man" was technically developed but morally stunted.

"We will not cope with anything if we do not renew our moral attitude to work," Legasov concluded.

The Soviet system made a catastrophe like Chernobyl unavoidable. It then compounded the tragedy by an insistence on secrecy so absurd that it was ultimately self-defeating. The attempted cover-up was all the more grotesque because it came when the rest of the world was in the throes of an information revolution that rapidly revealed the magnitude of the disaster.

The Books: "The Rape of Nanking" (Iris Chang)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. An absolutely tormenting book - unforgettable - but truly AWFUL. I had a very very hard time getting through this book, but I really think it's so important for people to read it. Iris Chang, a young author (who sadly committed suicide last year), was determined to get this story, in all its fullness and awfulness, out. Her horror at what she learned, at the stories she heard, breathes through every word on the page.

Chang obviously suffered from clinical depression as well - but I wonder if that was exacerbated by the stories of human monstrosity that she uncovered in her research. I wonder if steeping herself in such evil, in such a blatant example of "man's inhumanity to man" - made her depression run even deeper? Made the sun go out forever, no chance of returning? The Rape of Nanking is so depressing that the so-called HERO of the book is a low-level Nazi, stationed in Nanking, who - with little to no bureaucratic support - walked through the war-torn streets, with a bullhorn, shouting at people to stop the rapes - he personally would break up gang-rapes - walking into the group and throwing people off the girl - He used his position to set up a "safety zone", etc. ...But at the same time he was a true Nazi believer. Like I said - it's a rough book. Humanity at its ugliest. I think it's important that people read this book, obviously.

From The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.

To prepare for the inevitable war with China, Japan had spent decades training its men for combat. The molding of young men to serve in the Japanese military began early in life, and in the 1930s the martial influence seeped into every aspect of Japanese boyhood. Toy shops becamse virtual shrines to war, selling arsenals of toy soldiers, tanks, helmets, uniforms, rifles, antiaircraft guns, bugles, and howitzers. Memoirs from that time describe preadolescent boys waging mock battles in the streets, using bamboo poles as imaginary rifles. Some even tied logs of wood on their backs and fantasized about dying as "human bomb", heroes in suicide missions.

Japanese schools operated like miniature military units. Indeed, some of the teachers were military officers, who lectured students on their duty to help Japan fulfill its divine destiny of conquering Asia and being able to stand up to the world's nations as a people second to none. They taught young boys how to handle wooden models of guns, and older boys how to handle real ones. Textbooks became vehicles for military propaganda; one geography book even used the shape of Japan as justification for expansion: "We appear to be standing in the vanguard of Asia, advancing bravely into the Pacific. At the same time we appear ready to defend the Asian continent from outside attack." Teachers also instilled in boys hatred and contempt for the Chinese people, preparing them psychologically for a future invasion of the Chinese mainland. One historian tells the story of a squeamish Japanese schoolboy in the 1930s who burst into tears when told to dissece a frog. His teachder slammed his knuckles against the boy's head and yelled, "Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up you'll have to kill one hundred, two hundred chinks!"

(And yet with all this psychological programming the story is much more complicated. "There was a deep ambivalence in Japanese society about China," Oxford historian Rana Mitter observes. "It was not all racist contempt, as it was for the Koreans: on the one hand, they recognized China as a source of culture that they had drawn on heavily; on the other, they were exasperated by the mess that China was in by the early twentieth century. Ishiwara Kanji, architect of the Manchurian Incident of 1931, was a big fan of the 1911 Revolution. Many Chinese, including Sun Yatsen and Yuan Shikai, drew on Japanese help and training in the years before and after the 1911 Revolution. The Japanese also sponsored Boxer Indemnity Scholarships and Dojinkai hospitals for the Chinese, and scholars like Tokio Hashimoto genuinely appreciated Chinese culture. Japan's Foreign Office and army experts on China were often very well trained and knowledgeable about the country." This knowledge and tempering, however, would rarely pass down to the ordinary soldier.)

The historical roots of militarism in Japanese schools stretched back to the Meiji Restoration. In the late nineteenth century the Japanese minister of education declared that schools were run not for the benefit of the students but for the good of the country. Elementary school teachers were trained like military recruits, with student-teachers housed in barracks and subjected to harsh discipline and indoctrination. In 1890 the Imperial Rescript on Education emerged; it laid down a code of ethics to govern not only students and teachers but every Japanese citizen. The Rescript was the civilian equivalent of Japanese military codes, which valued above all obedience to authority and unconditional loyalty to the emperor. In every Japanese school a copy of the Rescript was enshrined with a portrait of the emperor and taken out each morning to be read. It was reputed that more than one teacher who accidentally stumbled over the words committed suicide to atone for the insult to the sacred document.

By the 1930s the Japanese educational system had become regimented and robotic. A visitor to one of its elementary schools expressed pleasant surprise at seeing thousands of children waving flags and marching in unison in perfect lines; quite clearly the visitor had seen the discipline and order but not the abuse required to establish and maintain it. It was commonplace for teachers to behave like sadistic drill sergeants, slapping children across the cheeks, hitting them with their fists, or bludgeoning them with bamboo or wooden swords. Students were forced to hold heavy objects, sit on their knees, stand barefoot in the snow, or run around the playground until they collapsed from exhaustion. There were certainly few visits to the schools by indignant or even concerned parents.

The pressure to conform to authority intensified if the schoolboy decided to become a soldier. Vicious hazing and a relentless pecking order usually squelched any residual spirit of individualism in him. Obedience was touted as a supreme virtue, and a sense of the individual self-worth was replaced by a sense of value as a small cog in the larger scheme of things. To establish this sublimation of individuality to the common good, superior officers or older soldiers slapped recruits for almost no reason at all or beat them severely with heavy wooden rods. According to the author Iritani Toshio, officers often justified unauthorized punishment by saying, "I do not beat you because I hate you. I beat you because I care for you. Do you think I perform these acts with hands swollen and bloody in a state of madness?" Some youths died under such brutal physical conditions; others committed suicide; the majority became tempered vessels into which the military could pour a new set of life goals.

Training was no less grueling a process for aspiring officers. In the 1920s all army cadets had to pass through the Military Academy at Ichigaya. With its overcrowded barracks, unheated study rooms, and inadequate food, the place bore a greater resemblance to a prison than a school. The intensity of the training in Japan surpassed that of most Western military academies: in England an officer was commissioned after some 1,372 hours of classwork and 245 hours of private study, but in Japan the standards were 3,382 hours of classwork and 2,765 hours of private study. The cadets endured a punishing darily regimen of physical exercise and classes in history, geography, foreign languages, mathematics, science, logic, drawing, and penmanship. Everything in the curriculum was bent toward the goal of perfection and triumph. Above all the Japanese cadets were to adopt "a will which knows no defeat." So terrified were the cadets of any hint of failure that examination results were kept secret, to minimize the risk of suicide.

The academy was like an island to itself, sealed off from the rest of the world. The Japanese cadet enjoyed neither privacy nor any opportunity to exercise individual leadership skills. His reading material was carefully censored, and leisure time was nonexistent. History and science were distorted to project an image of the Japanese as a superrace. "During these impressionable years they have been walled off from all outside pleasures, interestes or influences," one Western writer observed of the Japanese officers. "The atmosphere of the narrow groove along which they have moved has been saturated with a special national and a special military propaganda. Already from a race psychologically far removed from us, they have been removed still further."

In the summer of 1937 Japan finally succeeded in provoking a full-scale war with China. In July a Japanese regiment, garrisoned by treaty in the Chinese city of Tientsin, had been conducting night maneuvers near the ancient Marco Polo Bridge. During a break several shots were fired at the Japanese in the darkness, and a Japanese soldier failed to appear during roll call. Using this incident as an excuse to exercise its power in the region, Japanese troops advanced upon the Chinese fort of Wanping near the bridge and demanded that its gates be opened so that they could search for the soldier. When the Chinese commander refused, the Japanese shelled the fort.

By the end of July, Japan had tightened its grasp on the entire Tientsin-Peking region, and by August the Japanese had invaded Shanghai. The second Sino-Japanese War was no longer reversible.

But conquering China proved to be a more difficult task than the Japanese anticipated. In Shanghai alone Chinese forces outnumbered the Japanese marines ten to one, and Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government, had reserved his best troops for the battle. That August, while attempting to land thirty-five thousand fresh troops on the docks of Shanghai, the Japanese encountered their first setback. A hidden Chinese artillery emplacement opened fire and killed several hundred men, including a cousin of the Empress Nagako. For months the Chinese defended the metropolis with extraordinary valor. To the chagrin of the Japanese, the battle of Shanghai proceeded slowly, street by street, barricade by barricade.

In the 1930s, Japanese military leaders had boasted -- and seriously believed -- that Japan could conquer all of mainland China within three months. But when a battle in a single Chinese city alone dragged from summer to fall, and then from fall to winter, it shattered Japanese fantasies of an easy victory. Here, this primitive people, illiterate in military science and poorly trained, had managed to fight the superior Japanese to a standstill. When Shanghai finally fell in November, the mood of the imperial troops had turned ugly, and many, it was said, lusted for revenge as they marched toward Nanking.

The Books: "Crowds and Power" (Elias Canetti)

And here is my next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

My political philosophy bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. I first encountered Canetti when I read Robert Kaplan's book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History - Kaplan references Canetti's theories and ideas about crowds and power on almost every other page. I thought - I've got to track this book down. I finally did. It's an extraordinary book - very hard to describe or explain - it's really a book of philosophy, although there is a ton of historical information in it, anthropological, sociological ... Canetti studied crowds - in all different cultures and times - how they behaved, how they actually operated ... He took nothing for granted. He took nothing in stride. He asked questions about everything, obviously. He found there to be different types of crowds: feast crowds, flight crowds, prohibition crowds - and each type of crowd behaved in its own specific way. Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize in 1981.

I've posted excerpts of this book before - it holds a deep and lasting fascination to me (thanks, Robert Kaplan!!). It's dense, it's at times difficult, but it is one of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read.

I am going to post the first section of the book - it is called "The Fear of Being Touched".

From Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti.

The Fear of Being Touched
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim.

All the distances which men create round themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which noone may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

The repugnance to being touched remains wiht us when we go out among people; the way we move in a busy street, in restaurants, trains or buses, is governed by it. Even when we are standing next to them and are able to watch and examine them closely, we avoid actual contact if we can. If we do not avoid it, it is because we feel attracted to someone; and then it is we who make the approach.

The promptness wiht which apology is offered for an unintentional contact, the tension with which it is awaited, our violent and sometimes even physical reaction when it is not forthcoming, the antipathy and hatred we feel for the offender, even when we cannot be certain who it is - the whole knot of shifting and intensely sensitive reactions to an alien touch - proves that we are dealing here with a human propensity as deep-seated as it is alert and insidious; something which never leaves a man when he has once established the boundaries of his personality. Even in sleep, when he is far more unguarded, he can all too easily be disturbed by a touch.

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose physical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. The reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest.

The Books: "Nine Parts of Desire : The Hidden World of Islamic Women" (Geraldine Brooks)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Nine Parts of Desire : The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks, a foreign correspondent for the WSJ (she's also married to Tony Horwitz - a guy whose books about travel literally make me laugh OUT LOUD ... He wrote a book called Baghdad without a map - which is a complete joy, and which I'll get to later). Nine Parts of Desire is just one of a TON of books I have in this line. A mix of history, political analysis, and anecdotal information - describing the lives in various Islamic regimes. This one focuses on female lives. Each chapter explores a different topic: marriage, war, divorce, sex, career ... Geraldine Brooks, having lived in many of these countries as a correspondent, befriended many women - who let her into their inner sanctum - something that is VERY difficult. It's easier for a female journalist to get behind the veil than a male journalist, obviously. Brooks was invited to private parties, where women took off their veils to reveal slinky designer clothes - where they would drink bootlegged liquor, and sit around and talk about sex. It's a fascinating book.

The title comes from a quote from Ali - the founder of the Shiite sect whose death (I think he died in the 4th century) is still commemorated to this day (you know those pictures we see on occasion of bloody Shiites, marching through streets with blood pouring down their faces? That's the commemoration march for Ali - their founder). Anyhoo - he apparently said something about God creating sexual desire in ten parts - women got nine of those parts and men got one. Which gives you some idea of the FEAR of women inherent in this culture. It's sort of the opposite of the idea that we have (at least, judging from movies in the 1950s - movies like Splendor in the Grass etc - anything to do with teenagers falling in love) - The attitude here is, apparently, that men's sexuality is out of control and it is up to the GIRLS to put a rein on it, and be responsible. Do not expect that the boys will be able to STOP when you say STOP. Because their sexuality is BIGGER than ours (the girls) and it is up to US to control the event. It is the opposite in the Islamic world. Women are seen as so much more sexual than men (they got NINE parts, men only got one!) that women need to be completely controlled, and men need to protect themselves from the wildly out of control lascivious sexual desire of the female - it will threaten to drown him if he does not rein it in.

I will excerpt a section from the chapter entitled: "Politics, With and Without a Vote". It describes a protest organized by 47 Saudi women against the rule that they are not allowed to drive. The last quote in this excerpt never fails to bring a huge lump (of sadness and outrage) to my throat.

From Nine Parts of Desire : The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks

Across the border in Saudi Arabia, even the notion of a debate is anathema. Saudi Arabia has virtually no political culture. "We don't need democracy, we have our own 'desert democracy," explained Nabila al-Bassam, a Saudi woman who ran her own clothing and gift store in Dhahran. What she was referring to was an ancient desert tradition known as the majlis, weekly gatherings hosted by members of the ruling family, where any of their subjects were free to present petitions or air grievances. In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a fefw seconds' opportunity to whisper in their prince's ear.

Nabila told me of a friend who had recently petitioned King Fahd's wife to allow the legal import of hair-salon equipment. Technically, hairdressing salons were banned in Saudi Arabia, where the religious establishment frowned on anything that drew women from their houses. In fact, thriving salons owned by prominent Saudis and staffed by Filipina or Syrian beauticians did a roaring trade. "My friend is tired of having to run her business in secret," Nabila said. But so far she had received no response to her petition. "Petitions do work," said Nabila. "But in this society you have to do things on a friendly basis, like a family. You can ask for things, but you can't just reach out and take things as if it's your right." A rejected petitioner had no choice but to accept the al-Sauds' decision. With no free press and no way to mobilize public opinion, the al-Sauds ruled as they liked.

If there was one thing that Saudi women were prepared to criticize about their lot, it was the ban that prevented them from driving. During the Gulf War the sight of pony-tailed American servicewomen driving trucks and Humvees on Saudi Arabian roads invigorated a long-simmering debate on the issue. The Americans weren't the only women drivers the war had brought. Many Kuwaiti women, fleeing the Iraqi invasion, had arrived in Saudi Arabia unveiled, at the wheel of the family Mercedes.

By October 1990, articles about Saudi women seeking the right to drive had begun appearing in the heavily censored press. Women quoted in these articles said they'd been alarmed to realize that they wouldn't have been able to transport their children to safety as the Kuwaiti women had done. Some raised economic issues, calculating that twenty percent of average Saudi family income was spent on drivers, who had to be fed and housed as well as paid a salary. Saudi had 300,000 full-time private chauffeurs -- a staggering number, but still far short of providing a driver for every Saudi woman who needed mobility. Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some proponents of allowing women to drive played the Islamic card, pointing out how undesirable it was for a woman to be forced to have a strange man as part of her household, and to drive around alone with him.

On a Tuesday afternoon in early November, forty-seven women, driven by their chauffeurs, converged on the parking lot of the Al Tamimi supermarket in downtown Riyadh. There, they dismissed their drivers. About a quarter then slid into the drivers' seats of their cars, the rest taking their places as passengers. They drove off in convoy down the busy thoroughfare. A few blocks later, the cane-wielding mutawain of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice stopped the cars at intersections, ordering the women out of the drivers' seats. Soon, regular police arrived, and the women asked them to see that they weren't taken off to the mutawain headquarters. There was a scuffle between the mutawain, who yelled that the women had committed a religious crime, and the traffic police, who said the matter was their affair. In the end, the police drove the women's cars to police headquarters with a mutawa in the passenger seat and the women in the back.

The women who had taken part in the demonstration were all from what Saudis call 'good families' -- wealthy, prominent clans with close ties to the ruling al-Saud dynasty. All the women who actually drove were mature professionals who had international drivers' licenses they'd acquired overseas. Many of them were from the faculty of the women's branch of Riyadh university, such as Fatim al-Zamil, a professor of medicine. Others were women of achievement such as Aisha al-Mana, who had a doctorote in sociology from the University of Colorado and headed a consortium of women-owned businesses from fashion to computer-training centers. Even though some of these women didn't normally veil their faces, for the demonstration all wore the covering that leaves only eyes exposed.

Before the demonstration, the women had sent a petition to the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, who was thought to be a fairly progressive member of the ruling family. The petition begged King Fahd to open his "paternal heart" to what they termed their "humane demand" to drive. They argued that women of the prophet's era had ridden camels, the main mode of transportation of their day. The evidence, they wrote in their petition, was there in Islam, "such is the greatness of the teacher of humanity and the master of men in leaving lessons that are as clear as the sunlight to dispel the darkness of ignorance."

While the women were held at the police station, Prince Salman summoned a group of prominent religious and legal experts to discuss what they had done. The legal scholars concluded that no civil violations had occurred, since the women all had international drivers' licenses recognized by Saudi law. The religious representatives found that no moral issues were at stake, since the women were veiled and the Koran says nothing that could be construed as forbidding an act such as driving. The women were released.

In Jeddah and Dhahran, women gathered to plan parallel demonstrations, encouraged by the what they saw as tacit support from the ruling family. But then came the backlash.

Word of the demonstration spread quickly, despite a total blackout of coverage in the Saudi media. When the women who had taken part arrived for work the next day at the university, they expected to be greeted as heroines by their all-women students. Instead, some found their office doors daubed with graffiti, criticizing them as un-Islamic. Others found their classes boycotted by large numbers of conservative students. Soon denunciations spewed from the mosques. Leaflets flooded the streets. Under a heading "Names of the Promoters of Vice and Lasciviousness," the demonstration participants were listed, along with their phone numbers, and a designation of either 'American secularist" or 'communist' after each name. "These are the Roots of Calamity", the leaflets shrieked. "Uproot them! Uproot them! Uproot them! Purify the Land of Monotheism." Predictably, the women's phones began ringing off the hook with abusive calls. If their husbands answered, they were told to divorce their whorish wives, or berated for being unable to control them.

The royal family immediately caved in to the extremists' pressures. Prince Salman's committee's findings were quickly buried. Instead, the government suspended the women from their jobs and confiscated their passports. The security police also arrested a prominent, well-connected Saudi man accused of leaking word of the protest to a British film crew. He was given a grueling interrogation, including a beating, and thrown in jail for several weeks.

The ruling family could have stood by the women on Islamic grounds. What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman's reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.

But a week after the demonstration Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the interior minister, joined the slanderers. At a meeting in Mecca he denounced the demonstrations as "a stupid act", and said some of the women involved were raised outside Saudi Arabia and "not brought up in an Islamic home." He then read out a new fatwa, or ruling with the force of law, from Saudi Arabia's leading sheik, Abdul Aziz bin Baz, stating that women driving contradicted "Islamic traditions followed by Saudi citizens." If driving hadn't been illegal before, it was now. Naif's remarks got front-page coverage, the first mention of the driving demonstration that had appeared in the Saudi press.

Although I had been in touch with some of the women drivers before the demonstration, none of them would take my calls afterward. They all had been warned that any contact with foreign media would lead to rearrest. All were sure that their phones were tapped and their homes watched. I did get a sad letter, signed simply, "A proud Saudi woman" detailing the "witch hunt" under way. "Fanatics," she wrote "are forcing students to sign petitions denouncing the women." They were "using this incident to demonstrate their strength and foment antiliberal antigovernment and anti-American feelings." Another woman sent me a simple message: "I did it because I want my granddaughters to be able to say I was there."

The Books: "When the War Was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution" (Elizabeth Becker)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called When the War Was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution by Elizabeth Becker. This is a massive book. It took me forever to finish it. But it's very good and gives you a HUGE history of that entire region and what happened in Cambodia, and how it came about. The countries in that region are so intertwined - you really get a good overview of the entire history of southeast Asia.

There is so much information in this book it was hard to find one excerpt - but I chose the part where Norodom Sihanouk, the Prince of Cambodia - returned from a world tour, getting support, and found that he was to be pushed aside. This was in 1976.

From When the War Was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution by Elizabeth Becker.

The revolution did not wait for Sihanouk. Before he finally returned, the united front government he allegedly headed met in Phnom Penh for the last time and on December 14, 1975, adopted a new constitution that acknowledged what had in fact become the law of the land since April 17. It was the front's third (and last) national congress. Its new constitution for the land abolished the monarchy and "reactionary" religion. Sihanouk was now a commoner, and his faith, the faith of his ancestors and his nation, was forbidden. The prince was to play no role in the new government.

All property became "collectively owned"; farms, factories, homes, offices, small fishing craft, tools, and cars were the property of the state. Citizens were divided into three categories: workers, peasants, and soldiers. No others existed. According to the constitution, all they were to do was to work and to defend the country. The system of justice was given cursory treatment; there were to be "peoples courts," which were not defined, and there was a blunt warning that anyone "threatening the popular state" could look forward to the "severest form of punishment".

The government was described as a collective. A state presidium, headed by a chairman and including a first and second vice-chairman, matched the three-member leadership system used by cooperatives. The composition of the Cambodian revolutionary army merited an article of its own. Equality of the sexes was upheld in the constituion, polygamy and polyandry was banned. But above all else, this constitution spoke about work and production. The new national coat of arms was composed of irrigation terraces and factories. Culture was defined as "serving the tasks of defending and building Cambodia into a great and prosperous country." Every worker "has his subsistence fully secure", the constitution said, and unemployment was outlawed in the country renamed Democratic Kampuchea. (Kampuchea is the Khmer name for Cambodia).

There was also no mention of freedom. "The worker, laborer and peasant are the master of the factories, the hands and means of production," but their only right was the right to work.

The country's foreign policy was described as independent, peaceful, nonaligned and neutral. The constitution warned that Democratic Kampuchea was opposed "to all forms of subversion and aggression from outside, whether military, political, cultural, social, diplomatic, or so-called humanitarian" but stated that it was 'full of goodwill" and "firmly determined to maintain close and friendly relations with all countries having common borders with her and with all countries throughout the world, near and far, on the strict basis of mutual respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity."

The constitution did not describe the government as socialist, much less communist. It was extremely simple and, in that sense and most others, it was true to the system the Khmer Rouge adopted. The national anthem, entitled "Glorious April 17" came closer to describing the spirit of the new regime:

Bright red Blood which covers towns and plains
Of Kampuchea, our Motherland,
Sublime Blood of workers and peasants,
Sublime Blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!
The Blood changing into unrelenting hatred
And resolute struggle,
On April 17th, under the Flag of the Revolution,
Flees from Slavery!

Long live, long live Glorious April 17th!
Glorious Victory with greater signification
Than the times of Angkor!

We are uniting to edify
Splendid and democratic new Kampuchea and new society
With equality and justice,
Firmly applying the line of independence,
sovereignty and self-reliance.
Let us resolutely defend
Our Motherland, our sacred Soil
And our Glorious Revolution!

Long live, long live, long live,
Democratic and prosperous new Kampuchea!
Let us resolutely raise high
The Red Flag of the Revolution!
Let us edify our Motherland!
Let us make her advance with great leaps,
So that She will be more glorious and more marvelous than ever!

Sihanouk finally returned at the end of December and on January 3, 1976, promulgated the constitution. It called for an elected "people's assembly," and on March 20, an 'election' was duly held across the country for members of the assembly, who then met for several hours in April. The assembly members were photographed raising their hands to accept unanimously the resignation of the old front government and the request of Prince Sihanouk to retire. A new government was immediately formed. At its head was Pol Pot. Unknown to the outside world, this nomme de guerre was used to conceal the identity of Saloth Sar.

Sihanouk, no longer of use to the regime, was put away, under house arrest at the royal palace.

The days of the united front were over. There was no longer any pretense at including people from all strata of the old society in the new revolutionary regime. Angka no longer courted the monks, intellectuals, or members of the royal family whose names had added prestige and respect to their cause and whose labor had been so instrumental at crucial stages of their revolution. Diplomats from other communist countries, particularly in the Soviet bloc, were more shocked by Sihanouk's "retirement" and the end of the united front strategy than were non-communist nations. They knew how unorthodox and dangerous it was to spurn so early and with such extreme finality those people who had held the respect and admiration of the population. But the diplomats made no public criticisms.

The Khmer Rouge planned to make their mark by surpassing communist orthodoxy as well as more established political behavior. No other communist country had dared attempt such a complete confiscation of property, much less within a year after victory. In theory, socialist revolutions were planned in discrete phases, to prepare the population for gradually giving up their old way of life for a new communist order. The Khmer Rouge began their revolution at a stage most communist countries would consider extreme as a goal, much less a starting point.

The Khmer Rouge adapted the most radical economic examples from communist history -- the overnight industrial revolutions of Stalin and Mao -- as the normal pace for their revolution. And they directed these upheavals through the mysterious Angka. They were still hiding their communist party behind a wall of secrecy. Too impatient to try to win popular support and too cynical, they became tyrants and ruled through terror. Each new directive they issued was accompanied by a new wave of executions and purges to ensure obedience.

Ieng Thirith said the Center never felt it truly controlled the country and that the party felt threatened by scores of enemies trying to rob it of power. First the party blamed the elite of the old society and killed many of them. Then the party launched its version of the socialist revolution, and when the revolution went out of control, the Center began to suspect the men it had appointed as ministers in the government of March 1976. They were arrested and killed. In 1978 the Center went after the powerful zone secretaries and killed many of them. Feeling beseiged, the party initiated "class warfare" in a desperate search for "enemies" and purged peasants and party members alike for not coming from an extremely poor, hence proper, class background, or for associating with an ill-defined enemy class bent on sabotaging the revolution. The Center suspected that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam had agents within the Cambodian communist party. Purge followed purge, but the "enemy" grew ever more elusive, and ever more pervasive in the party's mind.

The Khmer Rouge were living proof that power does not grow out of a gun. The rifles of the Khmer Rouge destroyed the old power, but those same guns could not in the end create a new power base. That requires a degree of popular support and understanding of the new order that the Khmer Rouge never cultivated or won. They ruled, instead, through violence and terror.

Hannah Arendt, student of revolutions, made this observation years before the Khmer Rouge attempted their ultimate revolution: "To substitute violence for pwoer can bring victory, but the price is very high ... the end will be the destruction of all power."

She described how a complete rule by terror would operate and why it would bring about its own cataclysmic failure. The terrorist regime must first destroy all organized opposition. The people must become "atomized, an outrageously pale, academic word for the horror it implies." They must be separated from each other and forbidden normal ties and relationships, something the Khmer Rouge achieved with the evacuations and cooperative system. Then, she wrote, the people would have to be policed by spies, ubiquitous informers. The Khmer Rouge established a spy system through their national security police service and within the cooperatives. Children were made to inform on parents, comrades on comrades, neighbor on neighbor, to save themselves.

The result, Arendt said, would be a regime where no one could be trusted, a regime of sabotage and subterfuge. In such an environment, economic progress is doomed because terror produces paralysis in society. Waste, of human lives and human production, is the natural product of terror. Eventually the regime is consumed by the increasingly inward quest for the mysterious enemies robbing it of progress and power. It must finally turn on itself.

Arendt concluded: " ... terror turns not only against its enemies but against its friends and supporters as well, being afraid of all power, even the power of its friends. The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victims."

Arendt was writing in philosophical terms, summing up the experience of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union years before the Khmer Rouge captured Cambodia. She foresaw the consequences of a regime that took revolution by terror to its ultimate extreme -- economic upheaval, purges, failure, and death. And Arendt pinpointed how such a regime would have to enforce its terror -- through atomization.

The effect of the revolution on the people of Cambodia can best be seen through the prism of atomization. That process of breaking down and then isolating society both describes and defines the disease that had infected the Cambodian revolution long before the communist army won in 1975. In their years of obscurity, the Khmer Rouge developed a preoccupation with betrayal that came to be as intense as their appreciation of Cambodia's lost honor. Avenging both became nearly a divine mission. This shaped their choice of an extreme communist ideology and an obsessively secret form for their revolution.

Since they built their party and revolution without the active support or legitimacy of the communist world, much less the Cambodian population, they learned to trust no one. Everything was a secret. Isolation became an asset. It contained a sense of mystery and supported an overblown idea of their own power. Secrecy, distrust, and isolation became the modi operandi of the Khmer Rouge, and spawned their theories of battle and of the ideal society to follow. They believed the "enemy" was everywhere, and extreme measures were their only answers to thwarting and defeating that enemy. Hence their wartime cooperatives were prison fortresses and their soldiers were ordered to fight like kamikazes.

And with victory their vigilance was heightened, not relaxed. They followed Stalin's maxim that class struggle would intensify after victory. Despite their rhetoric, they never trusted "the people" so often extolled in their speeches. When faced with individuals the Khmer Rouge saw only enemies. They saw Cambodia's former society, the ancien regime, as a nest of enemies, and sought to destroy it. All human relationships were suspect. The notion of a personal life, of the rights and feelings of the individual, was denied. Individuals were not loyal to the revolution, only classes were: the peasantry, the soldiers, and the workers.

Family life had to be eliminated. The state had to usurp the authority of the family if it was to survive. The family was the most potent, hence the most feared, of all relationships of the former society. In the countryside the peasant families had had power over the basic decisions the revolution now wanted to make: what kind and how much food would be planted; when and how crops would be marketed; who would work in the fields; who would work at home.

The larger identities of the people were also suspect. The cultural and religious minorities had to abandon their distinctive ways and assimilate. They had to become new Cambodian worker-peasants, or face death. Everyone had to be the same; everyone had to be loyal to the state and to the state alone. Even the Khmer peasantry had to give up its traditions, to become like the proletariat. That meant giving up the peculiarities of village or province, and living the cooperative way of life which had to be uniform throughout the land. All relationships outside that of the individual to the state were discouraged if not outlawed -- from the personal, to the family, to the minotiry, to the traditional provincial life of the minority.

This attack on society was done in the name of purification of a worker-peasant revolution, to protect the communist cadre from the impure elements of the old society and its enemy classes. But the definition of enemy shifted constantly as the party failed to win power and failed to achieve the desired economic miracles. A swing in party politics or a change in revolutionary theory created new categories of enemies. Fear of enemy classes was replaced by fear of enemy elements who had infiltrated the party. Ultimately, no one could be protected, for the party found no one to trust. Angka was on a path of complete self-destruction, complete atomization of society.

The Books: "Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past" (Peter Balakian)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is a memoir called Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past by Peter Balakian. FanTAStic book if you haven't read it. He came out with a new book last year - not a memoir - but still a history of the genocide of the Armenians in 1915 - but this was his first big book. Peter Balakian is a poet, actually. He grew up in the 50s and 60s in Tenafly, New Jersey, and his book is completely eloquent about America at that time - about the struggle to live up to his immigrant parents expectations of him - but also the unbelievable pull of the Beat Generation, and poetry readings, and folk music. But really the book is about the fact that Peter's family came to America, fleeing the Turks - and never spoke about their Armenian past again. (Until he started asking questions as an adult). He grew up knowing that they came from somewhere else, and that their family was a bit different than other families on the block (different because of the food they ate, that his mother didn't work - and rarely left the house, etc.) - but he never had even heard of Armenia - and nobody told him about the genoicide. There is a family tree in the front of the book, and it's a chilling display of what each family went through. 90% of the family members have a death date of 1915. It's just ... it blows your mind. Anyway, this is a book about Balakian's personal discovery of his past, and ... Well. It makes me want to cry. He's a poet. He believes, obviously, in the power of language. In sharing language. He thought, all along, that this was part of his American heritage - Walt Whitman, etc. - and it WAS - but literature and the written language is a huge part of Armenian culture, too - so this is a journey of self-discovery for him. This was his way of honoring his family members - dead and alive - and also his way of speaking the truth - of getting the story OUT.

It's also incredible that when he went to research the genocide - when he first learned about it - there was almost nothing out there about it. He had to send away for books, etc. NOW you can learn about the genocide - there is much more of a universal awareness that this HAPPENED - (there was Hitler's famous remark, when he was planning his own mass murder: "Who remembers the Armenians now?") Well, we remember now.

It's a marvelous book. I highly recommend this one to you. (There's also a wonderful story he tells about taking his Armenian mother to one of Allen Ginsberg's readings in the 50s. Genius.)

Here's an excerpt where Balakian first really discovers what had happened in 1915.

From Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past by Peter Balakian.

A few days before I was to leave for my first year of graduate school at Brown, I decided to return to my old job to earn a few extra bucks. Over the weekend, I picked off the bookshelf in my parents' den a book whose spine I had stared at for years. Ambassador Morganthau's Story, published by Doubleday & Page, 1919. It seemed like a book that would get me through the workweek. On Monday, as I stood under the big, arching copper beeches on Knickerbocker Road waiting for the bus to take me to work, I stared at the photograph of Morgenthau used for the frontispiece. A look from the era of Woodrow Wilson: the bifocals, the high forehead, serious eyes, the stylish mustache and goatee. The dignified face of a German Jew who came to America at the age of nine in 1865; who graduated from Columbia Law School at twenty-three and started his own law firm; a Democrat with an old mugwump's idealism. In his youth, Morgenthau worked for the Jewish settlement houses and cofounded the Free Synogogue. Instrumental in the International Red Cross, a passionate supporter of the League of Nations, in 1912 he campaigned for Wilson and later for FDR. By 1913, when Wilson appointed him Ambassador for Turkey, he was a seasoned statesman. An ambassador to a strategic zone of international politics on the eve of the Great War.

It was an amazing fate that landed me in this great headquarters of intrigue at the very moment when the plans of the Kaiser for controlling Turkey, which he had carefully usurped for a quarter of a century, were about to achieve their final success.

By the time the bus came rattling over the potholes of Knickerbocker Road, I was lost in my father's birthplace. Ships moored along the Bosphorus. The water, green, tepid, caique-flecked, the glitter of silver. Terraced clumps of fig and olive trees. The dome of Hagia Sophia, golden, with minarets jutting up. Men in fezzes. Smells of shaslik and sewage in the streets.

The man first sent by the Kaiser to achieve the subjugation of Turkey to Germany was Baron Von Wangenheim, a Prussian autocrat whose ambition typified the new German Empire: "Pan-Germany filled all his waking hours and directed his every action. The deification of his emperor was the only religious instinct which impelled him." He believed Germany was destined to rule the world. Turkey was a strategic place to the European powers; influence in Turkey meant access to the Dardanelles and new commercial markets in the Middle East and central Asia. In the imperialist struggles for domination, a controlling alliance with Turkey also meant being able to check Russian access to the Mediterranean. Germany's Berlin to Baghdad Railway was one symbol of Germany's hope for hegemony in the Near East.

Morgenthau used the phrase of my eighth-grade social studies text -- "the sick man of Europe" -- to describe Turkey, a country that "was in a state of decrepitude that had left it an easy prey to German diplomacy". Abdul Hamid II, who was to be Turkey's last functional ruling sultan, was an unbenevolent despot. He watched his empire begin to crumble as Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria became autonomous or independent and the empire sank into further financial ruin. Gladstone called Abdul Hamid II the "bloody assassin", because during the last decade of the nineteenth century, the sultan took out his frustration over the diminishment of his empire on his Christian minorities, especially the Armenians.

Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which the Russians won, the peace drawn up at San Stefano gave the Russians control of the Armenian provinces of northeast Anatolia and hence the ability to protect the Armenians there from Turkish misrule. But at the behest of Disraeli the lines were redrawn, and the 1878 Treaty of Berlin gave the European powers only a theoretical obligation to protect the Armenians. The very sultan who had been abusing the Armenians again had direct responsibility for protecting them. The setback of the Treaty of Berlin left Armenians frustrated and demoralized but determined to improve their deplorable condition as "infidels" in Turkish society. As the sultan's policy toward Armenians became even harsher in the 1880s and early 1890s, Armenians organized reform movements, most importantly the Hunchak and the Dashnak parties. These groups sought cultural freedom; equality before the law; freedom of speech, press, and assembly; freedom from the unjust tax system imposed on Christians; and the right to bear arms. In the wake of these demands, the sultan became further enraged.

After Armenians were massacred at Sassoun in 1894 for protesting the unequal tax laws for Christians, and more massacres of Armenains occurred throughout the empire, a small group of Armenians seized the Ottoman Bank in Constantinope in August 1896, staging a protest and demanding civil rights. No money was taken or bank property damaged, and after a thirteen-hour bloodless drama, the Armenians exiled themselves on a ship bound for Marseilles. The protest not only failed but resulted in Abdul Hamid accelerating his program of massacring Armenians with secret military forces; by the end of 1896, more than 200,000 Armenians had been killed.

The intensified culture of massacre initiated by the sultan in the '90s went unchecked by the European powers and served as a prologue to what would happen to the Armenians in 1915. By 1908, Abdul Hamid's crumbling reign was brought to an end by a trio of upstarts, Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemel Pasha, who called themselves Ittihad ve Terakki (the Committee of Union and Progress) and were known as the Young Turks. The Young Turks overthrew the old theocracy and promised a new secular nationalism and reform for the empire and its Christian minorities. In 1908, Armenians, anticipating an era of liberty and justice, were celebrating the new regime.

Morgenthau's descriptions of Talaat, Enver, Djemel -- the men who engineered the Armenian Genocide -- fascinated me the way descriptions of Hitler did when I first read about the Holocaust. The leader of the triumvirate, Talaat Pasha, like Hitler, Napoleon, and Stalin, was an ethnic outsider -- a Bulgarian gypsy whose peasant upbringing had not included the "use of a knife and fork". A former telegraph clerk in Edirne, he was forty-one when he came to power.

[He] liked to sit at his desk, with his shoulders drawn up, his head thrown back, and his wrists, twice the size of an ordinary man's, planted firmly on the table ... his fierceness, his determination, his remorselessness -- the whole life and nature of the man [took] form in those wrists.

As Minister of the Interior he was head of the secret police and he also administered the six Armenian provinces in the eastern part of the country.

Jemal Pasha, once a colonel in the Turkish Third Army, at forty-one became Minister of the Marine. In a photo from the Illustrated London News of 1913, he is pictured in his decorated uniform looking bemused.

Enver Pasha, age thirty-two, had been a major in the Turkish Third Army, "a Europeanized dandy," with delusions of Napoleonic grandeur. He had "a clean-cut face, a slightly curled up mustache, a small but sturdy figure, with pleasing manners." He hung pictures of Napoleon and Frederick the Great in his parlor, and "his friends commonly referred to him as 'Napoleonik'." Enver spoke German fluently, worshipped Prussian militarism, and believed he was divinely chosen to reestablish the glory of Turkey. Having spent years as a military attache in Berlin, Enver was the bridge between Turkey and Germany and a tool for Baron Von Wangenheim and the Kaiser, who cultuivated him as a possible instrument for their plans in the Orient.

For more than a decade, Morgenthau noted, the Kaiser and Von Wangenheim had advocated the evacuation of all the Greeks of Smyrna and the surrounding region; the Turks referred to the city as giaour Ismir, or infidel Smyurna. Morgenthau wrote that Pan-Germanism of this period advocated the virtues of deportation, "the shifting of whole peoples as though they were so many herds of cattle." The Germans would practice this in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia during the Great War, but its "most hideous manifestation" would be inspired by Germany and practiced by Turkey on its Armenian population. How prophetic that Morgenthau, a Jew who emigrated from Germany to America in the middle of the nineteenth century, wrote this less than two decades before the next German empire would subject his own people to a 'deportation" that would claim more lives than any other in history.

In 1913, Talaat ordered boycotts against all Greek merchants, and demanded that all foreign establishments dismiss their Greek employees. Morgenthau wrote:

I did not have the slightest suspicions at that time that the Germans had instigated these deportations, but I looked upon them merely as an outburst of Turkish chauvinism ... By this time I knew Talaat well; I saw him nearly every day, and he used to discuss practically every phase of international relations with me. I objected vigorously to his treatment of the Greeks; I told him that it would make the worst possible impression abroad and that it would affect American interests ... Talaat explained his national policy ... if what was left of Turkey to survive, he must get rid of these alien peoples. "Turkey for the Turks" was now Talaat's controlling idea.

My hands were sweating on the faded brown cloth binding. I ran out of the empty bus, down the escalator, down two more flights of stairs, through the turnstile and onto the platform to see an A train sitting with its doors open and aisles packed with strap-hanging commuters. I read standing as the train cut through Manhattan.

The common term applied by the Turk to the Christian is "dog" and in his [the Turk's] estimation this is no mere rhetorical figure; he actually looks upon his European neighbors as far less worthy of consideration than his own domestic animals ... "My son," an old Turk once said, "do you see that herd of swine? Some are white, some are black, some are large, some are small -- they differ from each other in some respects, but they are all swine. So it is with Christians."

In Turkey,

[T]he mechanism of business and industry had always rested in the hands of the subject peoples, Greeks, Jews, Armenians and Arabs. The Turks have learned little of European art or science, they have established very few educational institutions, and illiteracy is the prevailing rule.

I sat sucking the air off the bottom of a Tropicana carton and thinking that the parallels in history are frightening; it was the same with the Third Reich and the Jews. The paradox of dependency and power that existed between the Armenians and Turks was a tinderbox.

Under Islamic Ottoman rule, the"infidel" Christians were excluded from military and civil service and government. They had no civil or legal rights; the Koran was the basis of justice. The Turks

erected the several peopls, such as the Greeks and the Armenians into separate "millets", or provinces. And, they did this not to promote their independence and welfare, but because they regarded them as vermin, and thus not fit for membership in the Ottoman state.

In such a culture, a Christian was forever vulnerable to the arbitrary violence of any Turk: "And for centuries the Turks simply lived like parasites upon these overburdened and industrious people. They taxed them to economic extinction, stole their most beautiful daughters and forced them into their harems."

In Armenia, Greece, and Albania, as well as the areas now comprising Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslav province of Macedonia, Turkish officials came each year and took to Constantinople the brightest and strongest male children between the ages of eleven and thirteen, where in the cruelest of ironies they taught them to beat down the cross and die for the crescent as Janissaries of the sultan's personal army.

After my morning pickups at Peralta, Cunard, MOSK, and Norton-Lily, I took a coffee break. I bought a carton of Tropicana orange juice from the woman who wheeled the coffee cart around the eleventh floor at 10:30 and I went to the storage room, a dimly lit bowling alley of a place in which I often wrote poems. It was lined with brown boxes of Xerox paper, manila envelopes, stationery, Scotch tape, mimeograph paper, binders, and all the other things that made offices run in those days before computers. In the narrow space between the stacks of boxes, the silence settled on me.

And then Armenian church came back to me -- not what I learned from the lessons of the Gospels and the Nicene Creed -- but the theatre of it all. The haunting minor keys of the hymns I could still sing in Armenian. The echoes of the deacons and altar boys chanting. The ashy, resinous smell of incense spreading in clouds as the deacon walked into the aisle swinging the silver censer with its chains and bells, and the sound of acolytes shaking gold scepters ringed with tiny bells as the altar curtain opened and closed and we sat and kneeled and stood. When the priest in the high-collared, gold-and-red embroidered robe raised his jewel-studded cross to the congregation we crossed ourselves, and then he disappeared behind the curtain.

What I had learned in Sunday School was this. Armenia emerged from Urartian civilization sometime around the sixth century BC. For a short time Armenia held the status of a world power. (Our Sunday School teachers made sure we knew this.) Under King Dikran II, known as Dikran the Great, who ruled from 95 to 55 BC, Armenia reached the height of its empire, extending north to Transcaucausia, east to the Caspian Sea, west to central Anatolia, and south to Cilicia on the Mediterranean Sea. The Romans under Pompey feared Armenia's power, and Pompey sent the general Lucullus to conquer King Dikran and subjugate Armenia. We were told that the final battle between the Romans and the Armenians was a close one, decided by something like a blocked field goal. Dikran's son, Artavazd II, who wrote plays in Greek and founded a Greek theatre in his court, was kidnapped by the soldiers of Mark Antony, who put Artavazd and his family to death.

At the turn of the fourth century, about AD 301, the Armenian nation officially adopted Christianity, thus making Armenia the first nation to become Christian. Armenian Christianity developed independently from that of Rome and Byzantium. To consummate its cultural identity, in the early part of the fifth century, King Vramshapuh commissioned a monk, Mesrob Mashtots (later sainted) to invent an alphabet, enabling Armenians to read scripture in Armenian which, until then, had been a spoken language. The Armenians thus were freed from their dependence on Greek and Persian for written language.

When Persian King Yesdegrid tried to force Armenia to adopt Zoroastrianism in the fifth century, promising them gifts and honors in return, the Armenian leaders replied: "From this fatih none can shake us, neither angels, nor men, neither sword, fire, water, nor any bitter torturers." So the Persians invaded Armenia with an army of close to a quarter of a million men and teams of elephants, attacking an Armenian army of about 60,000 men, led by Vartan Mamikonian. Saint Vartan -- who I pictured then like Vince Lombardi but with a beard and a sword and a shield -- was killed, but after a long, exhausting war, the Persians, seeing that the beleaguered Armenians refused to give up, finally withdrew. This was 451, and Armenia remained Christian. Armenia's neighbors on the ancient map -- the Cappodocians, Chaldeans, Sumerians, Babyloninans, Scythians, Parthians, Hittites -- were gone, but the Armenians had survived, their religion and their alphabet keeping them unassimilated by their neighbors.

I pictured those wind-bitten stone churches built out of the Armenian highlands of Anatolia, with their wooden belfries prescribed by Ottoman law so that no bell could be heard. I could hear those wooden clappers making a thump like a muffled throat. Then I thought of St. Thomas' Armenian Church in Tenafly, where women in coifed hair and mink coats sat in mahogany pews, their perfume mingling with the incense, as the morning light came through the pale colors of the flat, modern images of Jesus, the Virgin, and the Apostles in the stained-glass windows. The store-bought carpet glowed with the colored light, and the large windows in the Sunday School rooms looked out to the split-level and ranch houses with swimming pools and tennis courts on Tenafly's east hill.

The Books: "Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey" (Fouad Ajami)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is a fabulous and heartbreaking book called Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey by Fouad Ajami. I can't really describe it ... I'll post what's on the back of the book to give you an idea of the topic. One of the things I loved about the book was how it introduced me to an entire world of Arabic poetry and literature that I never even knew existed.

Here's the blurb on the back of the book - there is such a SADNESS in this book - I mean, the sadness is in the title as well, if you think about it - but anyway, here's the blurb:

... a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glittering metropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between a modernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser's pan-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy Pax Americana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War to the continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.

Ajami was raised in Beirut. It was damn hard to find an excerpt - but I'll post a bit of his writings on Egypt. I highly recommend this book, sad as it is. The picture of the young "Gulfie" desperate to find a certain book while he is in Cairo - because he knows that when he goes back to his home country - there will be NO chance he coul find the book anywhere - is heartwrenching, and - one of those small human moments that is, at its heart, an indictment of the way things are.

From Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey by Fouad Ajami.

A small political-literary storm that broke out in early 1993 and a Syrian-born poet's "open letter" to the Egyptian General Assocation of the Book come close to capturing that unique Egyptian role in Arab cultural life. At the center of this controversy was the celebrated poet Nizar Qabbani. A furor broke out over a poem he had written, "When Will They Declare the Death of the Arabs?" and a campaign was launched to rescind an invitation that the General Association of the Book had issued him to visit Cairo. The literary and political elite stood their ground: The great poet was free to write what he wished, and Egypt's doors would always be open to him. As it turned out, Qabanni had not been able to come. He sent instead an "open letter" from his new home in London, an unabashed letter of gratitude and devotion to the country. It was published in a new, vibrant magazine, al-Qahira, sponsored by the assocation:

My dear friends in the land of Egypt:

I can't write of Egypt with neutrality or love her with neutrality. Egypt is my mother: from her I was fed, I drank from her wellsprings, from her I learned how to walk, how to utter my first words. When I arrived in Cairo in the mid-1940s I was but a boy looking for a mother, for a cultural womb. I want to acknowledge that Egypt nursed me, sang over my bed, until I learned how to compose my verse, until I was able in 1948 to publish my first daring poetic collection ... I want to say that Egypt never made a distinction between me and its native sons. Often she took my side and the side of my poems paying no heed to my Damascan ancestry and my Syrian dialect. Egypt had embraced my ancestor, my grandfather, Abu Khalil Qabbani, welcomed him as a pioneer in theatre in the final years of the nineteenth century. And here it is embracing my poetry in the final years of this century. This is but a confirmation of its heritage as a defender of freedom, creativeity, and the creative spirit.

The invitation I received from the General Egyptian Assocation of the Book is not just an ordinary invitation. It is an invitation that carries the scent of Egypt, and the tenderness of Egypt and her eternal devotion to her progteny: I am one of Egypt's children who was not abandoned in the midst of a storm, left to face wind, rain, and the cold of exile. In the midst of the flood stirred up by my recent poem Egypt extended her hand to me from under the water ... Such is the destiny of Egypt since it has been Egypt. It has not been Egypt's way, at any time in its history, to be with the killer against his victim, with the oppressor against the oppressed, with the jailer against the prisoner, with the illiterate against the letters of the alphabet. My dear friends this annual celebration of the book held in Cairo is a victory for those who read over those who kill, for those who know over those who don't, for those who compose beautiful poems over those who make coffins.

The genius of Egypt lies in her artistic and cultural sensibility: the skill of its men and women of letters with narrative, a way with cultural creation in film, soap operas, theatre, political and philosophical argument, and the song. On a recent visit there, in the famed Cairo bookshop Madbuli, where a publishing firm displays and sells its recent titles, in Talaat Harb Square, I saw that indispensable Egyptian role in Arab and Muslim life. A young man from the Gulf was pleading for a book he wanted that was temporarily (so the publisher said) out of stock. It was the young man's last day in Cairo; he was desperate for the book; he had been told that new copies would be available on that day, but the books had not arrived. He offered endless deals for Madbuli's manager. He would pay to have it delivered to his hotel, he would pay in advance, and he would throw in a generous tip, if one of the boys at Madbuli would meet him at the airport with the book. The young Gulfie was from a place of wealth, but he was leaving a city where the gift of the writing and the culture of books had not yet died. (On that very day, there had been a run on every title that the embattled academic and philosopher Nasr Abu Zeid had written.)

There was a cultural seige (of sorts) in Egypt, but the life of letters has deep roots here. It was in Cairo, in the mid-1870s, that two brothers, Salim and Bishara Taqla, Christian emigres from Lebanon, established the daily paper al-Ahram. And it was Egypt that gave two great figures of Arab modernity, Faris Nimr and Yaqub Sarruf, a second chance in the 1880s, after the American missionaries at the Syrian Protestant College (the AUB) dismissed them for their enthusiasm for Darwin and the theory of evolution. The first of these two men rose to become one of the great, wealthy personages of Egypt, the powerful editor of a paper of his own. Faris Nimr lived a long, full, and productive life; he worked at the intersection of politics and journalism until his death in 1951, on the eve of the Free Officers revolt, at the age of ninety-five. He never bothered to hide his devotion to the ways of the West, and the virtues and disclipine of Anglo-Saxon culture, which he wanted to graft onto 'the east'. It was the Egyptian theatre, and the social rhythm that sustained the theatre, that gave the Syrian, Ahmad Abu Khalil Qabbani, the chance to pursue his craft and art in the latter years of the nineteenth century. When a remarkable pair, Farid al-Atrash and his sister Amal, children of the ruling princely family in Jabal Druze in Syria, yearned for a world beyond their confining ancestral land and for careers in music, film, and song, they left their home for Cairo in the 1930s. Farid al-Atrash became one of the most successful crooners and film stars. His sister Amal, using the single stage name of Asmahan and whose career was cut short by a premature death, was one of the great beauties of the age. Her talent with the song fused Arabic and European asthetics, and her films were huge hits. The public could never get enough of her or of the gossip about the men in her life, who included the head of the king's administrative council, a noted film director, and the ex-husband of her closest friend.

The (Western) novel came to Egypt in 1911; the first Egyptian film was made in 1926, and it was made by a woman filmmaker and actress, Aziza al-Amir, who had been raised fatherless and poor. Women's magazines made their appearance in the 1900s. By 1914, there were more than twenty women's periodicals. To come to a possession of a cultural sensibility in the Arab world was to assimilate the artifacts and products of Egyptian creativity. Arabs have not always known what to make of Egypt. The very same men and women from other Arab lands who have been known to be crushed and surprised by Egypt's poverty and squalor on their first encounter with a land that had come to them in film and fiction touched by glamour and magic have been known to recover their poise as they went out againt o savor the graces of that surprising place.

The Books: "The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Speeches"

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf. Onward.

The second book on this shelf is another favorite of mine called The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Speeches . An AWESOME resource. It's not the "greatest" speeches - in that, there is not editorial control saying: "We approve of THIS person's views, and therefore we include it in the collection, we don't approve of THAT person's views and therefore we do not include his speech ..." For example, there are speeches of Stalin and Hitler included. Chilling. Absolultely chilling. It's good to have the "greatest" speeches as well - for inspiration and for all that feel-good shite - but in terms of learning the truth of history, it's GREAT to have an archive like this one. You can actually, if you read the book straight through, start to feel the march of historic events. Amazing. We've got Patrick Pearse, and Teddy Roosevelt's muckraker speech and Lenin and Lloyd George and Emmeline Pankhurst and Sacco and Vanzetti - Oswald Mosley, Oppenheimer, Kwame Nkrumah, Castro, Bertrand Russell, Neville Chamberlain, FDR, Patton ... etc. etc. Salman Rushdie, JFK, Krushchev, Martin Luther King, Alexander Solzhenitsyn ... You get the idea. It's a terrific book. Here is where you can see the full text of Vaclav Havel's INCREDIBLE speech that he made on January 1, 1990 - which I read to myself, on occasion, if I need an uplifting experience.

I highly recommend this book, obviously.

I will post William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. It's a doozy. An amazing triumphant statement of the role of the artist in the world. It makes me want to cry. I will also print out the excerpt preceding the speech, so you can get the context.

From The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Speeches .

WILLIAM FAULKNER
Stockholm, 10 December 1950
"The agony and the sweat"

When William Faulkner (1897 - 1962), the creator of Yoknapatawpha County and author of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, won the Nobel Prize, he bought his first dress suit for the occasion and decided to go to Stockholm for the prize-giving.

At the state banquet, the quiet farmer from Oxford, Mississippi, appeared before a microphone and television camera for the first time and said that he declined to accept the end of man.

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labours under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope, and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grive on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simplyl because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endue: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars, to help him endure and prevail.

The Books: "The Collapse of Communism" (NY Times)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

I have now finished with the first bookshelf - in my kitchen - and have decided to now do excerpts from the books in my History/Biography bookshelf. I'm scared! But I will press on.

The first 3 shelves of this particular bookcase is my "history" section. As will become apparent - it is mainly the history of totalitarian regimes around the globe.

First book on this shelf is a favorite of mine called The Collapse of Communism - and it's a compilation of every article on the events in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Russia and China (well - all over, actually) - from The New York Times - from winter 1988 to Summer 1991. We leap around - and because we read the actual articles, and not just a retrospective report on it - we feel like we are once again right in the middle of events. Things were happening almost too quickly for anyone to grasp.

It's a great resource, this book. I reference it all the time. They include, of course, enormous pieces of reportage - front-page articles - but then the editors also include the smaller human interest stories - which really give you a sense of the individuals involved.

It's hard to even choose an excerpt - the book is huge with so much in it ... reportage from all over the world - But I just flipped through and picked out one excerpt - it gives you a real sense of the immediacy of the whole book. It's from an article written on August 23, 1991. It's by Henry Kamm, and he writes from Tallinn, Estonia.

From The Collapse of Communism, by New York Times correspondents round the world - edited by Bernard Gwertzman

The Icons Topple

Tallinn, Estonia, Aug. 23 - From late afternoon well into the evening, the people of this capital city did something they said they had never done -- they flocked to Communist Party headquarters; then they stood there and laughed.

They stood in a large arc that constantly renewed itself as men, women and children came and went and stared and pointed at an empty marble pedestal. Until early today, a larger-than-life bronze statue of Lenin had stood there in the familiar rhetorical pose, opposite the entrance to the modern headquarters building.

A crew came this morning and carried out a Government decision to remove the statue in the aftermath of the failure of the coup by doctrinaire Communists against the Government of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

"It was done with respect," said Aino Siiak, a retired economist, her voice full of sarcasm. "A crane came; they put a chain around his neck and took the great philosopher away."

While in Lithuania and Latvia, the two other Baltic republics, the Communist Party was virtually outlawed today, Estonians expressed their sentiments through a symbolic act.

"Estonians do things slowly," Mrs. Siiak said. "We have no temperament." The way in which she and many others at the scene gave vent to long-suppressed emotion suggested otherwise. Voices trembled and faces quivered as Estonians recalled their sentiments through the tumultuous days that began with the ouster of Mr. Gorbachev on Monday.

The Books: "Mary of Scotland" (Maxwell Anderson)

Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:

I am still on my script shelf

Next play in my little unalphabetized pile of Samuel French plays is Mary of Scotland, by Maxwell Anderson

Awesome play. First produced by the Theatrical Guild in 1930 with Helen Hayes playing Mary of Scotland. It's in verse. It's kick-ass. I've worked on the last scene before in acting class - it's between Elizabeth and Mary - Mary's imprisoned, Elizabeth comes to visit her. Historically inaccurate but HUGELY theatrical, and devastating to both characters - it's a vicious scene, absolutely fantastic - two women circling one another, trying to win. You think Elizabeth has the upper hand, and then Mary seizes it ... you think Mary is winning, and then Elizabeth seizes the reins back ... it's great great stuff for actors. Of course, because of the title of the play - Mary ends up being the emotional victor in the play - even though Elizabeth wins in the eyes of the real world.

I'll excerpt from that scene - it's the very end of the play.

EXCERPT FROM Mary of Scotland, by Maxwell Anderson

MARY. I have seen but a poor likeness, and yet I believe
This is Elizabeth.

ELIZABETH.
I am Elizabeth.
May we be alone together?

[At a sign from Mary the maids go out. Elizabeth enters and the doors swing to behind her]

MARY.
I had hoped to see you.
When last you wrote you were not sure.

ELIZABETH.
If I've come
So doubtfully and tardigrade, my dear,
And break thus in upon you, it's not for lack
Of thinking of you. Rather because I've thought
Too long, perhaps, and carefully. Then at last
It seemed if I saw you near, and we talked as sisters
Over these poor realms of ours, some light might break
That we'd never see apart.

MARY.
Have I been so much
A problem?

ELIZABETH.
Have you not? When the winds blow down
The houses, and there's a running and arming of men,
And a great cry of praise and blame, and the center
Of all this storm's a queen, she beautiful --
As I see you are --

MARY. Nay --

ELIZABETH.
Aye, with the Stuart mouth.
And the high forehead and French ways and thoughts --
Well, we must look to it. -- Not since that Helen
We read of in dead Troy, has a woman's face
Stirred such a confluence of air and waters
To beat against the bastions. I'd thought you taller,
But truly, since that Helen, I think there's been
No queen so fair to look on.

MARY. You flatter me.

ELIZABETH.
It's more like envy. You see this line
Drawn down between my brows? No wash or ointments
Nor wearing of straight plasters in the night
Will take that line away. Yet I'm not much older
Than you, and had looks, too, once.

MARY.
I had wished myself
For a more regal beauty such as yours,
More fitting for a queen.

ELIZABETH.
Were there not two verses
In a play I remember!
"Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair" --?
They must die young if they'd die fair, my cousin.
Brightness falls from them but not from you yet,
believe me,
It's envy, not flattery.

MARY.
Can it be -- as I've hoped --
Can it be that you come to me as a friend --
Wishing me well?

ELIZABETH. Would you have me an enemy?

MARY. Oh! if that were so, if that were so.

ELIZABETH. Aye?

MARY.
I have great power to love! Let them buzz forever
Between us, these men with messages and lies,
You'll find me still there, and smiling, and open-hearted,
Unchanging while the cusped hills wear down!

ELIZABETH.
Nay, pledge
Not too much, my dear, for in these uncertain times
It's slippery going for all of us. I, who seem now
So firm in my footing, well I know one mis-step
Could make me a most unchancy friend. If you'd keep
Your place on this rolling ball, let the mountains slide
And slip to the valleys. Put no hand to them
Or they'll pull you after.

MARY.
But does this mean you can lend
No hand to me, or I'll pull you down?

ELIZABETH.
I say it
Recalling how I came to my throne as you did,
Some five or six years before, beset as you were
With angry factions -- and came there young, loving truth,
As you did. This was many centuries since,
Or seems so to me, I'm so old by now
In shuffling tricks and the huckstering of souls
For lands and pensions. I learned to play it young,
Must learn it or die. -- It's thgus if you would rule;
Give up good faith, the word that goes with the heart,
The heart that clings where it loves. Give these up, and love
Where your interest lies, and should your interest change
Let your love follow it quickly. This is queen's porridge
And however little stomach she has for it
A queen must eat it.

MARY.
I, too, Elizabeth,
Have read my Machiavelli. His is a text-book
Much studied in the French court. Are you serious
To read me this lesson?

ELIZABETH.
You have too loving a heart,
I fear, and too bright a face to be a queen.

MARY.
That's not what's charged againt me.
I've been traduced as a murderess and adultress
And nothing I could have said, and nothing done
Would have warded the blow. What I seek now is only
My freedom, so that I may return and prove
In open court, and before my witnesses,
That I am guiltless. You are the Queen of England,
And I am held prisoner in England. Why am I held,
And who is it holds me?

ELIZABETH.
It was to my interest, child,
To protect you, lest violence be offered to a princess
And set a precedent. Is there anyone in England
Who could hold you against my will?

MARY.
Then I ask you as a sovereign,
Speaking to you as an equal, that I be allowed
To go and fight my own battles.

ELIZABETH. It would be madness.

MARY. May I not be judge of that?

ELIZABETH. See, here is our love!

MARY.
If you wish my love and good-will you shall have it freely
When I am free.

ELIZABETH.
You will never govern, Mary. If I let you go
There will be long broils again in Scotland, dangers,
And ripe ones, to mym peace at home. To be fair
To my own people, this must not be.

MARY.
Now speak once
What your will is, and what behind it! You wish me here,
You wish me in prison -- have we come to that?

ELIZABETH. It's safer.

MARY. Who do you wish to rule in Scotland,
If not my Stuart line?

ELIZABETH.
Have I said, my dear,
That I'd bar the Stuarts from Scotland, or bar your reign
If you were there, and reigned there? I say only
You went the left way about it, that since it's so
And has fallen out so, it were better for both our kingdoms
If you remained my guest.

MARY. For how long?

ELIZABETH.
Until
The world is quieter.

MARY. And who will rule in my place?

ELIZABETH. Why, who rules now? Your brother.

MARY. He rules by stealth!

ELIZABETH.
But all this could be arranged,
Or so I'm told, if your son were to be crowned king,
And Moray made regent.

MARY.
My son in Moray's hands --
Moray in power --

ELIZABETH. Is there any other way?

[A pause]

MARY.
Elizabeth -- I have been here a long time
Already -- it seems so. If it's your policy
To keep me -- shut me up -- I can argue no more --
No -- I beg now. There's one I love in the north,
You know that -- and my life's there, my throne's
there, my name
To be defended -- and I must lie here darkened
From news and from the sun -- lie here impaled
On a brain's agony -- wondering even sometimes
If I were what they said me -- a carrion thing
In my desires -- can you understand this? -- I speak it
Too brokenly to be understood, but I beg of you
As you are a woman and I am -- and our brightness falls
Soon enough at best -- let me go, let me have my life
Once more -- and my dear health of mind again --
For I rot away here in my mind -- in what
I think of myself -- some death-tinge falls over one
In prisons --

ELIZABETH.
It will grow worse, not better. I've known
Strong men shut up alone for years -- it's not
Their hair turns white only; they sicken within
And scourge themselves. If you would think like a queen
This is no place for you. The brain taints here
Till all desires are alike. Be advised and sign
The abdication.

MARY.
Stay now a moment. I begin to glimpse
Behind this basilisk mask of yours. It was this
You've wanted from the first.

ELIZABETH. This what I wanted?

MARY.
It was you sent Lord Throgmorton long ago
When first I'd have married Bothwell. All this while
Some evil's touched my life at every turn.
To cripple what I'd do. And now -- why, now --
Looking on you -- I see it incarnate before me --
It was your hand that touched me. Reaching out
In little ways -- here, a word, there an action -- this
Was what you wanted. I thought perhaps a star --
Wildly I thought it -- perhaps a star might ride
Astray -- or a crone that burned an image down
In wax -- filling the air with curses on me
And slander; the murder of Rizzio, Moray in that
And you behind Moray -- the murder of Darnley,
Throgmorton
Behind that too, you with them -- and that winged scandal
You threw at us when we were married. Proof I have none
But I've felt it -- would know it anywhere -- in your eyes --
There -- before me.

ELIZABETH.
What may become a queen
Is to rule her kingdom. Had you ruled yours I'd say
She has her ways, I mine. Live and let live
And a merry world for those who have it. But now
I must think this over -- sadness has touched your brain.
I'm no witch to charm you, make no incantations:
You came here by your own road.

MARY.
I see how I came.
Back, back, each step the wrong way, and each sign followed
As you'd have me go, till the skein picks up and we stand
Face to face here. It was you forced Bothwell from me --
You there, and always. Oh, I'm to blame in this, too!
I should have seen your hand.

ELIZABETH.
It has not been my use
To speak mcuh or spend my time --

MARY.
How could I have been
Mistaken in you for an instant?

ELIZABETH.
You were not mistaken.
I am all women I must be. One's a young girl,
Young and harrowed as you are -- one who could weep
To see you here -- and one's a bitterness
At what I have lost and can never have, and one's
The basilisk you saw. This last stands guard
And I obey it. Lady, you came to Scotland
A fixed and subtle enemy, more dangerous
To me than you've ever known. This could not be borne,
And I set myself to cull you out and down,
And down you are.

MARY. When was I your enemy?

ELIZABETH.
Your life was a threat to mine, your throne to my throne,
Your policy a threat.

MARY. How? Why?

ELIZABETH.
It was you or I.
Do you know that?
The one of us must win
And I must always win.
The Lords have brought a parchment
For you to sign. Sign it and live.

MARY.
If I sign it
Do I live where I please? Go free?

ELIZABETH.
Nay, I would you might,
But you'd go to Bothwell, and between you two
You might be too much for Moray. You'll live with me
In London. There are other loves, my dear.
You'll find amusement there in the court. I assure you
It's better than a cell.

MARY.
And if I will not sign
This abdication?

ELIZABETH.
You've tasted prison. Try
A diet of it.

MARY.
And so I will. I wait for Bothwell --
And wait for him here.

ELIZABETH.
Where you will wait, bear in mind,
Is for me to say. Give up Bothwell,
Give up your throne if you'd have
A life worth living.

MARY.
I will not.
This trespass
Against God's right will be known. The nations will know it,
Mine and yours. They will see you as I see you
And pull you down.

ELIZABETH.
Child, child, I've studied this gambit
Before I play it. I will send each year
This paper to you. Not signing, you will step
From one cell to another, step lower always,
Till you reach the last, forgotten, forgotten of men,
Forgotten among causes, a wraith that cries
To fallen gods in another generation
That's lost your name. Wait then for Bothwell's rescue.
It will never come.

MARY. I may never see him?

ELIZABETH.
Never.
It would not be wise.

MARY.
Oh! Oh! --
And suppose indeed you won
Within our lifetime, still looking down from the heavens
And up from men around us, God's spies that watch
The fall of the great and little, they will find you out --
I will wait for that, wait longer than a life,
Till men and the times unscroll you, study the tricks
You play, and laugh, as I shall laugh, being known
Your better, haunted by your demon, driven
To death or exile by you, unjustly. Why,
When all's done, it's my name I care for, my name and heart,
To keep them clean.
Win now, take your triumph now,
For I'll win men's hearts in the end -- though the sifting takes
This hundred years -- or a thousand.

ELIZABETH.
And you are gulled
By what men write in histories, this or that,
And never true? I am careful of my name
As you are, for this day and longer. It's not what happens
That matters, no, not even what happens that's true,
But what men believe to have happened.
What will be said about us in after years
By men to come, I control that, being who I am.
It will be said of me that I governed well,
And wisely, but of you, cousin, that your life,
Shot through with ill-loves, battened on lechery, made you
An ensign of evil, that men tore down and trampled.
Shall I call for the Lords' parchment?

MARY.
And still I win.
This crooked track
You've drawn me on, cover it, let it not be believed
That a woman was a fiend. Yes, cover it deep,
And heap my infamy over it, lest men peer
And catch sight of you as you were and are. In myself
I know you to be an eater of dust. Leave me here
And set me lower this year by year, as you promise,
Till the last an oubliette, and my name inscribed
On the four winds. Still, still I win! I have been
A woman, and I have loved as a woman loves,
Lost as a woman loses. I have borne a son,
And he will rule Scotland -- and England. You have
no heir!
A devil has no children.

ELIZABETH.
You shall suffer
For this.

MARY.
And that I can do. A woman
Can do that. Come turn the key. I have a hell
For you in my mind, where you will burn and feel it,
Live where you like, and softly.

ELIZABETH.
Once more I ask you,
And patiently. Give up your throne.

MARY.
No, devil.
My pride is stronger than yours, and my heart beats blood
Such as yours has never known. And in this dungeon, I win here, alone.

ELIZABETH. [turning]
Good night, then.

MARY. Aye, good night.
[Elizabeth goes to the door]
Beaton!

ELIZABETH.
You will not see your maids again,
I think. It's said they bring you news from the north.

MARY.
I thank you for all kindness.

[Elizabeth goes out. Mary stands for a moment in thought, then, going to the window, she sits again in her old place and looks out into the darkness]

CURTAIN

Taking care

The baby was a little bit fussy. He squirmed about in his mother's lap, across the aisle of the bus from me, and it seemed that he was nearing the inconsolable stage. He was probably 3 or 4 months old (but then again: I'm pretty bad at guessing baby's ages), and he had tan skin, and big brown eyes. He wore a navy blue onesie, and his white diaper bulged out the sides. His legs were more like yummy drumsticks than human appendages. His mother, a plump Hispanic woman with thick black hair, soothed him or tried to, stroking his fat little face, and murmuring something to him in Spanish. To no avail. He writhed about. At one point, we made eye contact across the aisle, he and I. His eyes, huge and deeply set, struck me with their humanness. He was having a hard time right then, he was dealing with a bodily function of some kind, who knows which one, and he was letting his mother know he needed help. I gave him an encouraging smile. This seemed to strike him still, he got that I was communicating with him, and he went very silent and calm, staring at me. His eyes were serious. Who is this person smiling at me ... does it mean something? Can she help me? When it became apparent that my smile had nothing to do with HELPING HIM, he went back to writhing about, his small tan feet curling and uncurling themselves in mortal baby agony. The mother, still cradling him in her lap, reached down for her bag, which was placed on the floor of the bus, awkwardly out of her reach. She strained, reaching further, digging her hand deeper. The baby's mood was reaching critical mass. He was about to start screaming. I could see the threat of it in his eyes. Then she finally brought out a bottle of what looked like apple juice, and got him into feeding position. Already the bottle was 5 minutes too late, so in the one second it took to get him into position, he began to weep as though he were from a Greek tragedy. Why, mamma, why is it taking ... so ... long ... ... And just before the tragedy could reach its peak, the bottle went in his mouth. Then came the transformation. You could feel it not just in his body language but in his entire essence. He relaxed. He lay back in his mother's lap, and sucked away. Blissfully. He had his drumsticks up in the air, and I could see that he was still flexing his feet, but now it was a languid gesture, the gesture of a happy pasha, of contentment. Ahhhh, yum yum, I've got me some juice, and I love to flex my toes ...

I watched this entire thing from across the bus, sometimes peripherally, and sometimes blatantly - and when he relaxed, suddenly I felt from out of nowhere a huge lump clog up my throat. I thought of the mothers outside the Superdome, clutching their limp hot babies, babies wearing filthy diapers that the mothers have scraped clean so that they can use them again, dehydrated babies, babies who need water, juice, anything ... and the mothers, being mothers, know this ... and yet there is no water, there is no juice. The stench of the air is atrocious, there is a corpse lying 2 feet away, and no amount of soothing or clucking or stroking will turn the baby into a contented pasha, flexing his toes just because he can and because it feels good.

The simple gesture: of a mother reaching down into her bag to get a bottle ... the simple gesture: of a mother being able to take care of her baby's needs when he says to her, in body language: "Mamma, I have a need..." ...

suddenly seemed like a miracle, a freakin' miracle, and it pierced my heart in two.

Beslan

It's one year today that the horror began.

Marking the anniversary in Beslan.

But ... but ...

... Mr. Niayzov, sometimes I like to dance around my room and lip synch to Kelly Clarkson. Is that ... illegal now? Say it ain't so!!

I know it's not really funny, because ... well, Niyazov has power, etc., and the people who live in Turkmenistan have to deal with him being their leader ... but still. His rules that come down from on high are ... they're just funny. And his commentary ... Like: oh my God, dude, you are NUTS.

"Don't kill talents by using lip synching... Create our new culture."

Sir. Excuse me for saying this, but you are insane, and I think your country might have bigger problems than the ubiquity of LIP SYNCHING. I mean ... what???

Will there now be a lip synching underground? Boot-leg music videos smuggled into the country? Secret code-words to get into secret clubs, where people can let off steam, and lip synch to their heart's content? "50 people were arrested last night, en masse, for holding a lip synching contest out in the woods. We will show no mercy towards such rebels."

I wrote a long thing about Niyazov a while back. Every now and then, you hear word from Turkmenistan - and it's always some nutso ruling like Niyazov's latest.

Lip synchers: unite!! We will not allow ourselves to be discriminated against! We will stand up for what is right! We will not succumb!

Again, I know it's not really funny, because a lunatic is in charge of an entire country ... but I couldn't help but laugh, in amazement, when I read this latest one. Lip synching has "a negative effect on the development of singing and musical art", according to Niyazov. Lemme ask you something, dude: you outlawed opera last year. You also outlawed ballet. That also might have "a negative effect on the development of singing and musical art," don't you think?

But then again, maybe he has a point.

If you were to ask me, flat out, "What is wrong with America?" - I know that the very first thing that would come to my mind would be: "Too much damn lip synching."

The Books: "Tamburlaine" (Christopher Marlowe)

Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next play on the script shelf is Tamburlaine by the marvelous Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe fascinates, intrigues. There's a new biography of him out, and I want to read it.

Here's an excerpt from Act IV, scene 2 of his magnificent work Tamburlaine. I just love that last speech of Tamburlaine's. The imagery! The language!

... wrapped in the bowels of a freezing cloud ...

...when the sky shall wax as red as blood,
It shall be said I made it red myself...

Amazing.

EXCERPT FROM Tamburlaine, by Christopher Marlowe.

Enter Tamburlaine, Techelles, Theridamas, Usumcasane, Zenocrate, Anippe, two Moores drawing Bajazeth in a cage, and Zabina following him.

TAMBURLAINE
Bring out my footstool.

[They take BAJAZETH out of the cage.]

BAJAZETH
Ye holy priests of heavenly Mahomet,
That, sacrificing, slice and cut your flesh,
Staining his altars with your purple blood,
Make heaven to frown, and every fixed star
To suck up poison from the moorish fens,
And pour it in this glorious tyrant's throat!

TAMBURLAINE
The chiefest god, first mover of that sphere
Enchas'd with thousands ever-shining lamps,
Will sooner burn the glorious frame of heaven
Than it should so conspire my overthrow.
But, villain, thou that wishest this to me,
Fall prostrate on the low disdainful earth,
And be the footstool of great Tamburlaine,
That I may rise into my royal throne.

BAJAZETH
First shalt thou rip my bowels with thy sword,
And sacrifice my heart to death and hell,
Before I yield to such a slavery.

TAMBURLAINE
Base villain, vassal, slave to Tamburlaine,
Unworthy to embrace or touch the ground
That bears the honour of my royal weight;
Stoop, villain, stoop! stoop; for so he bids
That may command thee piecemeal to be torn,
Or scatter'd like the lofty cedar-trees
Struck with the voice of thundering Jupiter.

BAJAZETH
Then, as I look down to the damned fiends,
Fiends, look on me! and thou, dread god of hell,
With ebon sceptre strike this hateful earth,
And make it swallow both of us at once!

[TAMBURLAINE gets up on him into his chair.]

TAMBURLAINE
Now clear the triple region of the air,
And let the Majesty of Heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
Smile, stars that reign'd at my nativity,
And dim the brightness of your neighbour lamps;
Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia!
For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,
First rising in the east with mild aspect,
But fixed now in the meridian line,
Will send up fire to your turning spheres,
And cause the sun to borrow light of you.
My sword struck fire from his coat of steel,
Even in Bithynia, when I took this Turk;
As when a fiery exhalation,
Wrapt in the bowels of a freezing cloud,
Fighting for passage, make[s] the welkin crack,
And casts a flash of lightning to the earth:
But, ere I march to wealthy Persia,
Or leave Damascus and th' Egyptian fields,
As was the fame of Clymene's brain-sick son
That almost brent the axle-tree of heaven,
So shall our swords, our lances, and our shot
Fill all the air with fiery meteors;
Then, when the sky shall wax as red as blood,
It shall be said I made it red myself,
To make me think of naught but blood and war.

Dear terrorists:

So apparently some group of you claimed responsibility for the attacks in London today on some jihad website. We take everything you say with a grain of salt, because we know you LOVE to claim responsibility for EVERYthing, it makes you feel good about yourself or something (when the relationship with the great love of my life broke up I think you even took responsibility for THAT), but one thing struck me about the message, and it's something that's been on my mind.

You seem to believe that the people of England would run cowering away from this coordinated series of attacks. You seem to think that they are a soft and cowardly people who would flee at the first sign of confrontation.

I think it's time for a history lesson. I realize that you are uninterested in infidel history. This has been the case even during the glory days of Islam, during the West's dark ages, when you were far ahead of us in terms of education, infrastructure, science, astronomy, everything. You flourished. Europe floundered. European countries would send diplomats and scientists and envoys to your countries, so that they could study in your universities, use your astronomical observatories, and write home about the customs of your land. You all never returned the favor. Because we were infidels. What could you learn from infidels?

Perhaps that was true in the Dark Ages, but it is no longer true, and you are ignorant now of reality.

Well, I am here to tell you that you are WAY off in your estimation of the British character. Are you aware of even the FRACTION of stuff these people have endured on their own soil?

Now I have only picked out a couple of the most blatant examples (see the posts below this one), and I am sure some of my Anglophile readers can add more.

But if you think for one second that the Brits are a people who crumble easily, I have got to say: You are out of your goddamned mind.

There's this thing? It's called History? Maybe you should check it out.

Let's start in 1665, shall we?

The plague. The Black Death.

The first outbreak of the Black Death was in 1348. It killed nearly a third of the population.

The plague would appear, and disappear, appear and disappear, in spurts - but nothing could prepare anybody for the outbreak in 1665, in which 100,000 people died.

Look at all the skeletons in that scene. A macabre and grisly event. The panic of mass death.

And then - a year later:

The London Fire.

The destruction of medieval London began at about one o'clock in the morning on September 2nd 1666, when sparks from the fire in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane (he was baker to Charles II) leapt out of the oven and ignited a nearby pile of firewood. Sparks from the burning baker's shop landed on some hay in the yard of the Star Inn at Fish Street Hill. Because medieval London was mostly thatched houses, covered in pitch, the fire spread quickly, disastrously. The fire spread from the Star Inn to St. Margaret's Church which was soon completely ablaze, and from there the fire raced towards Thames Street. Thames Street, at that time, was all warehouses packed with what happened to be highly flammable materials. Coal, oil, tallow. The rudimentary hand-operated dousing devices could no longer combat what was going on. By 8 am the next morning, the fire had not only reached London Bridge but consumed half of it. The city was on fire. The fire burned for the entire day of September 2, spreading, morphing into something even more monstrous. Fleet Street reduced to ashes. Old Bailey reduced to ashes. Ludgate. Ashes. There was a strong wind from the east which propelled the fire onward. There were reports that stones in St. Paul's Cathedral were exploding from the heat. There was no organized fire department at that time. Most of the equipment was rotting, of no use. As the fire showed no signs of abating, the city decided to try to cut its losses - and started demolishing houses to create fire breaks.

The fire raged for three days. Just picture that if you can. Three. Days.

Personally, when a spark from my burning incense floats onto my rug and smoulders there for a second, it feels like an eternity until I can squash it out. Human beings (and animals) panic when confronted by fire. It is one of our most rational and universal responses. (Which is why firemen are such rock stars. They act against one of our most shared fight-or-flight impulses, in order to fight this primal beast.)

My point is: I cannot imagine being in the presence of a giant raging out of control fire for THREE. DAYS.

It looked like the fire was going to die out at one point. But then it re-emerged, stronger than ever, and kept creeping on towards Whitehall. More houses were ordered exploded, and that finally did the trick. The fire was stopped.

The damage done? 4/5s of the city had been destroyed. Let me just say that again, because I am having a hard time comprehending it. 4/5s of the city had been destroyed.

The fire actually didn't kill all that many people, surprisingly enough. The main devastation was to property. And it killed most of the rats in the city, the rats which had been responsible for the plague. After the fire, the number of plague deaths pretty much dropped off the charts.

But 250,000 people were left homeless. They lived in tents on the outskirts of the charred city, in abject poverty. Many of these newly homeless people turned to crime, in order to survive, which meant that the prisons soon became severely overcrowded.

The debris still was smouldering in March, 1667.

It was a massive disaster, and it took London generations to recover from it.

Jumping over many centures now to:

World War I.

Unbelievable.

And then:

The blitz of World War II. You think after a city has experienced something like THIS that they will crumple in "panic and fear" because of your attack? You think you can break such a people so easily? These people have seen their city decimated from the air. These people survived THAT. And they rebuilt. They have more ingenuity and courage than you will ever know.

Visual aids below: I look at these, and first of all - my mind goes blank at the scope of the destruction, which appears to be total. And now, today, looking at these pictures, I feel ANGER at how the terrorists underestimate our friends, the British. How dare they? How. dare. they.

The mind goes blank.

But here is a photo that I think completely encapsulates the spirit of the British people - this is St. Paul's Cathedral, as the city burns around it, on Sunday December 29th. London, 1940.

You honestly believe that THESE people who saw THIS are going to run cowering away from you?

And then:

This is just one of many, although perhaps one of the most famous. The Mulberry Bush pub and the nearby Tavern in the Town, were both destroyed by IRA bombs within minutes of each other on 21 November, 1974:

Random carnage. People having drinks at a PUB, for God's sake.

And then:

Canary wharf, February 1996.

On 9 February 1996, a truck parked near South Quay station exploded - another IRA attack - devastating a large area of London's Docklands.

So the moral of the story is: London's tale, dear terrorists, since the beginning of time has been one of challenges, ingenuity, unthinkable loss, and magnificent rebuilding.

You think after its long storied history you will make them - THEM - quake in their boots? Are you out of your mind?

England is one of the most resilient resourceful countries on the face of this earth. England will bury its dead, England will mourn - and we mourn with them. What has happened is an outrage, and an insult to all of us who believe in free societies. But England will survive. England will flourish.

Read a book. About something other than Allah. Maybe you'll learn something.

Or better yet: please read this post in its entirety, including EVERY. SINGLE. COMMENT.

Fuck yeah!

Waking up ...

... to the news that multiple simultaneous explosions have gone off in the London Tube, and also in a packed double decker bus. Watching the footage right now, waiting for Tony Blair to speak, which should happen shortly. Obvious questions: the G8 meeting in Scotland, London being given the 2012 Olympics ... and now ... this. This is an almost identical attack as the one in Madrid on March 11, 2004. They're now reporting that some Islamic jihad group is claiming responsibility - but this came after the explosions, not before. The tube is now being closed, the entire transportation network shutting down.

Jesus Christ.

Eyewitness accounts here, with a timeline. From peteb at Slugger.

Blair's speech. He looked quite shaken up, visibly rocked. But he stayed clear, calm:

"It is important that those who engage in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction and impose extremism on the world. They will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear."

He said the timing of the attacks are "barbaric".

Three double-decker buses loaded up injured people and drove them to local hospitals.

Depraved. These people are depraved.

Just a small personal observation: There are multiple helicopters hovering over my neighborhood. I know security has been amped way up in the public transit system, and I wonder if the helicopters have something to do with that. They are LOW, too. They feel right overhead.

Message to Karl Marx : Dude, you were so WRONG!

A must-read book review by Roger Kimball about what seems to me to be a must-read book: Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown, by Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski.

Kimball describes it as:

In its nimble mastery of intellectual history and generous humanity, the book has no equal. Kolakowski�s survey of Marxist thought is breathtaking in its sweep�from the Bible and the Greeks through the web of nineteenth-century socialist thought and the florid dissemination of Marxist and quasi-Marxist ideas in the �new-age� redoubts of the twentieth century, Kolakowski has provided the definitive account of a spiritual-political itinerary gone terribly wrong.

A massive 3-volume book, originally published in 1978 - it has now been reissued, except all 3 volumes are now one volume. So the book must be massive. I MUST have it. (Read that article to see its publication history in France. Faaaaaaascinating.)

Kimball writes:

As far as I can tell, the text is unchanged except for the addition of a brief preface. Although only a few pages long, the preface is valuable for three things. It reminds us straightaway�this emerges as a theme of the book�that Marxist doctrine, by calling for the abolition of private property and the more or less total subordination of the market to state control, provided �a good blueprint for converting human society into a giant concentration camp.� (�[T]he abolition of the market,� Kolakowski comments elsewhere, �means a gulag society.�) Kolakowski also makes the important point that, notwithstanding the collapse of the Soviet Union, Marxism is still eminently worth studying, not least because its aspirations continue to percolate in the dreams of various utopian planners. (You needn�t go to China or even Cuba: just look at the increasingly pink and authoritarian complexion of the European Union.) Moreover, as Kolakowski puts it in his introduction to My Correct Views on Everything,

Communism was not the crazy fantasy of a few fanatics, nor the result of human stupidity and baseness; it was a real, very real part of the history of the twentieth century, and we cannot understand this history of ours without understanding communism. We cannot get rid of this specter by saying it was just �human stupidity,� or �human corruptibility.� The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life.

... The philosopher David Stove once observed, �As an item on the intellectual agenda, Marxism is scarcely even a joke� . Marxism is a fearful social�and police�problem, but so is the drug trade. It is a fearsome political problem, but so is Islamic fundamentalism. But an intellectual problem Marxism is not, any more than the drug trade or Islamic fundamentalism.� Kolakowski has devoted the 1500 pages of Main Currents of Marxism as well as a dozen or more essays to Marxism, its genesis, its permutations, its horrifying record of mass murder.

Sounds like my kind of philosopher. I've always had a gut feeling that the actual POINT of Communism was for a couple of dudes to become ruthless brutal mass murderers with a ton of power. All the "life will be wonderful, and rivers will flow with milk, and the proletariat will join hands" crap seemed like a smokescreen. A brilliant smokescreen. There's the section in the "secret book" in 1984 which basically admits this smokescreen. I should excerpt that - it makes my blood run cold. The calculating indifference to human suffering, the ruthless grabbing of power, the stomping boot on millions and millions of people - ... none of that was a byproduct of a mis-guided philosophy, or the result of a couple of over-zealous believers ... No. It was the actual POINT of the endeavor.

Kimball writes of Kolakowski:

He does not give Marxism the benefit of the doubt, exactly, but he does give it the benefit of patient scrutiny and the highest level of historical intelligence.

The results of that scrutiny are devastating. Notwithstanding its pretensions to �science� (perhaps the most grotesque aspect of Marxism�s intellectual pretension�remember, for example, Engels� insistence that social laws were no less objective than geological deposits), Marxism has proven to be completely barren as an instrument of social understanding or prediction. This does not mean, as Kolakowski points out, that Marx�s theories have not been useful. It�s just that their usefulness has been confined entirely to providing �a set of slogans that were supposed to justify and glorify communism and the slavery that inevitably goes with it.�

All of Marx�s major predictions have turned out to be wrong. He said that societies based on a market economy would suffer spiraling class polarization and the disappearance of the middle class. Every society lucky enough to enjoy the fruits of a market economy shows that Marx was wrong about that. He predicted the growing immiseration and impoverishment of the working class in capitalist societies. (Actually, he didn�t merely predict that it would happen, he predicted that it would happen necessarily and inevitably�thanks, Hegel!) The opposite has happened. Indeed, as Kolakowski notes, �in the second edition of Capital Marx updated various statistics and figures, but not those relating to workers� wages; those figures, if updated, would have contradicted his theory.�

Marx further predicted the inevitable revolution of the proletariat. This is the very motor of Marxism. Take away the proletarian revolution and you neuter the theory. But there have been no proletarian revolutions. The Bolshevik revolution, as Kolakowski points out, �had nothing to do with Marxian prophesies. Its driving force was not a conflict between the industrial working class and capital, but rather was carried out under slogans that had no socialist, let alone Marxist, content: Peace and Land for Peasants.� Marx said that in a capitalist economy, untrammeled competition would inevitably squeeze profit margins: eventually�and soon!�the economy would grind to a halt and capitalism would collapse. Take a look at capitalist economies in the hundred and fifty years since Marx wrote: have profit margins evaporated? Marx thought that capitalist economies would hamper technical progress: the opposite is true.

Anyway. MUST read this book. I kind of want to go out and buy it right now.

It's definitely worth it to read Kimball's review in its entirety.

Top 10 historical moments I would have liked to have seen

I got this idea from a conversation going on in my E-verse newsletter, so here goes: If I did this tomorrow, I might come up with 10 different ones, but today? Here is what I think:

1. The gathering of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787
2. Genghis Khan and his hordes galloping across the desert on their way to pillage some Central Asian city (of course, they would have slaughtered me ... but still. It's a sight I would like to have seen.)
3. The landing of Lindbergh's cross-Atlantic flight in France
4. The building of one of the Pyramids
5. I would have like to have sat in on the trial of Gallileo Galilei
6. The Boston tea party
7. Times Square, when the end of World War I was announced
8. I would like to be a witness to how the hell Stone Henge was built
9. Jesus' crucifixion
10. Washington's inauguration

(There are a ton of other things I would have liked to have seen ... mainly theatrical events ... but I thought those should go in a separate list.)

Profile of Hirsi Ali

An in-depth fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine about the extraordinary Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I've been aware of her for some time, even more so since the murder of Theo van Gogh, but there was much in this article I didn't know. I highly recommend it. It describes this woman's entire journey, from Somali fundamentalist girl, eager to be a martyr (I found it especially chilling how she "suddenly hated Israel", even though she had never heard of Israel, didn't even know what it is), and then her move to "unbeliever" now and member of Dutch parliament, living under armed guard, dealing with daily death threats from outraged Muslims worldwide.

The present Dutch crisis looks very different if you believe a tribal principle is at work. It can look apocalyptic, in fact. In late February, sitting in an empty conference room in The Hague, clutching her black woolen wrap, Hirsi Ali speculated on one consequence. ''The Netherlands is an art country,'' she said. ''If the citizens of Amsterdam, 60 percent of whom will soon be of non-Western origin, are not made part of that, all of this will decay and be destroyed. When the municipality has to vote on whether funds go to preserve art or build a mosque, they may ask, 'Why should I pay for this stupid painting?' They may do a host of other things that are undemocratic, illiberal and unfriendly toward women and homosexuals and unbelievers.'' Hirsi Ali fears that inaction will be grist for the mill of an extreme right that is on the rise. ''If we don't take effective measures, now,'' she said, ''the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights'': an Islamic one and a non-Islamic one.

It's a problem. "Inaction will be grist for the mill". Uhm ... it already has been "grist for the mill". The enemy isn't at the gates, the enemy is inside the gates. I applaud those like Theo van Gogh and Hirsi Ali, these lone voices of protest against this tide of inaction. Speak the truth. Speak the truth about what is happening in Europe.

After stabbing van Gogh, the killer left impaled on the corpse a five-page letter addressed to Hirsi Ali. As the Netherlands suffered an explosion of mosque-burnings and attacks on churches, Hirsi Ali was moved under heavy guard from secret location to secret location, sometimes more than once a day. After six days of that, she had had enough. She was told that the only safe alternative was for her to leave the country for a spell. Hirsi Ali insisted on going to either Israel or the United States. ''Those are the only places,'' she recalls thinking, ''where people will understand what happened Nov. 2.''

Yup. Pretty much.

A quote from Hirsi Ali's book Cage of Virginis:

When a 'Life of Brian' comes out with Muhammad in the lead role, directed by an Arab equivalent of Theo van Gogh, it will be a huge step forward.

2 years

How it looks from Iraq. Written by a 26-year-old Iraqi.

He writes:

Our cities are smoking, our graveyards full, and terrorists in our midst. But we are not defeated. We are not down, we are not regretful. We are not going to surrender. For all that the two years have brought, the greatest thign they have given us is a future, and a view of the finish line.

Iraqis see the finish line, the finish line of freedom and democracy and a functioning nation. We can smell it, taste it, and like a sprinter, one who has broken his legs, but who has a heart full of passion, we will crawl there no matter what the cost. No matter what we must endure, we have realized what we can become, and that is the biggest result of the last two years.

Go read it all.

Elias Canetti - on Germany and Versailles

More Canetti below. I'm too lazy to link to all of them.

In the following section, Canetti (a German, born in 1905) writes more about Germany, and the Germans - in terms of their being a "crowd". It's a familiar story, told by William Shirer, by anyone who witnessed the rise of Nazism - but Canetti is coming at it from a different angle. He is interested in crowd-dynamics, the structures of crowds, and how they might work. He fills his books with many many examples from all throughout history. Here, he looks at the Treaty of Versailles, and how it transformed Germany from a "closed crowd" to an "open crowd". This was discussed earlier in the book, with much detail. Closed crowds (monasteries, disciplined armies, etc.) are a picnic compared to the destruction that can be wrought by an "open crowd". This is Canetti's theory.

Again - this should not be read as an aplogia for Germany. That is incorrect. There are many of you out there who are uninterested in the WHYs of things. To even ask "why" in terms of certain horrors - (terrorism, genocide, whatever) - it seems that one is seeking to excuse it. Well, sorry folks. If you think that, then you totally are missing the boat. My boat and the boat I choose to be on. There is no excuse for strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing up in a bus. But there had BETTER be those people out there (like Victor Davis Hanson, like Bernard Lewis) who give a shit about WHY. And frankly, I'd rather hang with those people. They're far more interesting.

So. This is not an apologia for Germany. Germany morphed and transformed and rose like a horrific angel of destruction following World War I. Why?

Back to the Treaty of Versailles ... and how Canetti sees that Germany morphed from a closed crowd into a much more dangerous open crowd.

Germany and Versailles

In order to clarify as much as possible some of the concepts I have formulated, I propose to add here a few words about the crowd-structure of Germany, the Germany which, in the first third of this century, astonished the world with formations and tendencies of an entirely unprecedented kind, whose deadly seriousness went completely unrealized at the time and which are only now beginning slowly to be understood.

The crowd symbol of the united German nation which formed after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was, and remained, the army. Every German was proud of the army and it was only a few isolated individuals who were able to remain outside the influence of this symbol...

Apart from its influence as a symbol, the army did also exist in a concrete form; and this fact was of decisive importance. A symbol lives in the minds and feelings of men, as did that curious entity, the forest-army. The actual army, on the other hand, in which every German served, functioned as a closed crowd. [Note: Canetti discusses the differences between closed and open crowds in a former chapter. Closed crowds are things like: monasteries, armies, etc.] The belief in universal military service, the conviction of its profound significance and the veneration accorded it, had a wider reach than the traditional religions, for it embraced Catholics and Protestants alike. Anyone who excluded himself was no German. I said earlier that it was only in a very limited sense that armies could be called crowds. This, however, was not so with a German; the army was by far the most important closed crowd he experienced. It was closed because those belonging to it were either young men of certain age groups only, who served for a limited period, or professional soldiers. But every young man passed through it at some time and remained inwardly linked to it for the rest of his life...

On the outbreak of the First World War the whole German people became one open crowd. The enthusiasm of those days has often been described. Many people in other countries had been counting on the internationalism of the Social Democrats and were astounded at their failure to act. They forgot that the Social Democrats, too, bore within them this forest-army symbol of their nation; that they themselves had belonged to the closed crowd of the army and that, whilst in it, they had been under the command and influence of a highly disciplined and immensely effective crowd crystal, the Junker and officer caste. Their membership of a political party carried very little weight in comparison with this.

But those first August days of 1914 were also the days in which National Socialism was begotten. Hitler himself is our authority for this. He later described how, at the outbreak of war, he fell on his knees and thanked God. It was his decisive experience, the one moment at which he himself honestly became part of a crowd. He never forgot it and his whole subsequent career was devoted to the re-creation of this moment, but from outside. Germany was to be again as it was then, conscious of its military striking power and exulting and uniting in it.

But Hitler would never have achieved his purpose had not the Treaty of Versailles disbanded the Germany army. The prohibition on universal military service robbed the Germans of their most essential closed crowd. The activities they were denied, the exercises, the receiving and passing on of orders, became something which they had to procure for themselves again at all costs. The prohibition on universal military service was the birth of National Socialism. Every closed crowd which is dissolved by force transforms itself into an open crowd to which to which it imparts all its own characteristics. The party came to the rescue of the army, and the party had no limits set to its recruitment from within the nation. Every single German -- man, woman, or child, soldier or civilian - could become a National Socialist. He was probably even more anxious to become one if he had not been a soldier before, because, by doing so, he achieved participation in activities hitherto denied him.

Hitler used the slogan The Diktat of Versailles with unparalleled and unwearying monotony; and many have marvelled at its effectiveness. Repetition never weakened it; on the contrary, it grew stronger with the years. What was the actual content of this slogan? What was it that Hitler passed on to his audiences by it? To a German the word "Versailles" did not so much mean the defeat, which he never really acknowledged, as the prohibition of the army; the prohibition of specific and sacrosanct practices without which he could not really imagine life. The prohibition of the army was like the prohibition of a religion. The faith of his fathers had been proscribed, and it was every many's sacred duty to re-establish it. Every time it was used, the word "Versailles" probed this wound and kept it bleeding, so that it never closed. As long as the word "Versailles" was uttered with sufficient force at mass meetings it was impossible for healing to begin...

Anyone who heard or read the words "Diktat of Versailles" felt in his depths what had been taken away from him, which was the goal; once it was there again, everything would be as it had been before. The army's importance as a national crowd symbol had never been shaken; the forest, which was the older and deeper-rooted part of this symbol, still stood untouched...

It was at Versailles that Bismarck had founded the Second German Empire. The unity of Germany had been proclaimed there in the moment of elation and irresitible strength following a great victory... Thus the proclaimation of the German Empire at Versailles was a belated victory over both Louis XIV and Napoleon together; and it had been won alone, without the help of an ally. There is plenty of confirmation of the effect which the word "Versailles" had on Germans at this time, and it was inevitable that it should, for the name of Versailles was bound up with the greatest triumph of modern German history.

Every time Hitler spoke of the notorious Diktat, the memory of that triumph echoed in the word and was transmitted to his audience as a promise.

[Note from Sheila: It occurs to me that Milosevic's speech on the edge of the Field of Blackbirds is the same sort of thing. At the very spot of Serbia's greatest defeat - in 1389, if I recall correctly - Milosevic gathered his followers and made a speech, which basically said: "You will never feel powerless again." Now - in terms of Serbia's neighbors, this was a THREAT. But in terms of the Serbian people, it was a drug that they could not resist. Like Canetti said - it was a "promise".]

If the former enemies of Germany had had ears to hear, they would have known it for a threat of war and defeat. With the exception of those directed against the Jews, it can be maintained without exaggeration that all the important slogans of National Socialism -- "The Third Reich", the "Sieg-Heil", etc. -- derive directly from the words "The Diktat of Versailles". The whole content of the movement is concentrated in them: the defeat to be turned into victory; the prohibited army to be re-created for this purpose.

Perhaps one should also give a thought to the symbol of th emovement, the Swastika. Its effect is a twofold one; that of the sign and that of the word. And both have something cruel about them. The sign resembles two twisted gallows; it threatens the spectator insidiously, as though it said "You wait. You will be surprised at what will hang here." In as far as the swastika has a revolving movement, this too contains menace; it recalls the limbs of the criminals who used to be broken on the wheel.

The word has absorbed the cruel and bloodthirsty elements of the Christian cross, as though it were good to crucify. Haken, the first part of the German word, recalls hakenstellen, an expression commonly used by boys for "tripping up". Thus it forebodes the fall of many. For some it conjures up military visions of heels clicking; the German for "heels" being hacken. Thus, with the threat of cruel punishment, it combines an insidious viciousness and a hidden reminder of military discipline.

Ahem. Sorry for that rant up above. I get fed up with being treated like a silly little child who just hasn't thought things thru, I get fed up with the emails telling me how I should think, what I should say, the "right" way to look at things. I try not to let it get to me. But it's moments like these - when the emails haven't come yet, but I know that they will - that I get annoyed. I don't mind if people get angry at what I write, but I DO mind being condescended to. That I mind very very much.

Now I'm laughing at myself. I'm screaming at nobody! It hasn't happened yet!! Heh heh

Back to Canetti. I think that's a fascinating analysis of Germany's national crowd-structure.

Elias Canetti - Germany's "crowd symbol"

More Canetti excerpts below. I don't feel like linking to all of them. Scroll through if you are so inclined.

This is the explanation of what a "national crowd symbol" is.

In the book, Canetti discusses what he sees to be the "national crowd symbols" of 8 countries. Here is what he has to say about his own country, Germany. Now remember - this book was written through the 1950s, published in 1960. He knew the horror his country was capable of. In this book, though, he does not seek to condemn. Not exactly. He seeks to figure out WHY.

He looks at Spain, Italy, the Swiss, the Dutch, the English ... and a couple of other nations ... deciding on what their "crowd symbol" might be, how the Dutch use THIS symbol, subconsciously, to cohere into a crowd, etc.

Here is Canetti's discussion on Germany.

The Germans

The crowd symbol of the Germans was the army. But the army was more than just the army; it was the marching forest. In no other modern country has the forest-feeling remained as alive as it has in Germany. The parallel rigidity of the upright trees and their density and number fill the heart of the German with a deep and mysterious delight. To this day he lvoes to go deep into the forest where his forefathers lived; he feels at one with the trees.

Their orderly separation and the stress on the vertical distinguish this forest from the tropical kind where creepers grow in all directions. In tropical forests the eye loses itself in the foreground; there is a chaotic and unarticulated mass of growth, full of colour and life, which effectively precludes any sensation of order, or even of repetition. The forests of the temperate zone, on the other hand, have a conspicuous rhythm. The eye moves along lines of clearly visible trees into a uniform distance. Each individual tree is always taller than a man and goes on growing until it becomes a giant. Its steadfastness has much in common with the same virtue in a warrior. In a single tree the bark resembles a coat of mail; in a whole forest, where there are many trees of the same kind growing together, it suggests rather the uniforms of an army. For the German, without his being clearly aware of it, army and forest transfused each other in every possible way. What to others might seem the army's dreariness and barrenness kept for the German the life and glow of the forest. He was never afraid in it; he felt protected, one amongst many others. He took the rigidity and straightness of trees for his own law.

The boy who escaped into the forest from the confinement of home, thinking to be alone there and able to dream, actually anticipated his entry into the army. In the forest he found the others waiting for him, true, faithful, and upright as he himself wanted to be; each like every other, for each grows straight, and yet quite different in height and strength. The effect of this early forest romanticism on the German must never be underrated. He absorbed it from countless poems and songs and the forest which appears in these is often called "German".

The Englishman likes to imagine himself at sea, the German in a forest. It is impossible to express the difference of their national feeling more concisely.

Elias Canetti - on National Crowd Symbols

Now - for me - here is where Canetti's book gets really juicy. Up until this point in the book, he had been studying so-called primitive societies - to see if there were connections in crowd behavior between the Aborigines or the Bushmen and our modern-day crowd behavior. (Of course, the behaviors are identical.) But in Part IV, he brings up what he calls "national crowd symbols" - and discusses modern-day events, events of the 20th century - and yet he discusses it in the context of this whole crowd-behavior dynamic. I can't explain it. I know this sounds inarticulate. I'll just cut to the excerpt now, where Canetti describes his theory of "national crowd symbols":

Most attempts to find out what nations really are have suffered from an intrinsic defect: they have been attempts to define the general concept of nationality. People have said that a nation is this or that, apparently believing that all that mattered was to find the right definition; once found, this would be applicable to all nations equally. They have addressed language or territory, written literature, history, form of government or so-called national feeling; and in every case the exceptions have proved more important than the rule. It has been like clutching at some adventitious garment, in the belief that the living creature within could be thus grasped.

Apart from this seemingly objective approach, there is another, more naive one, which consists in being interested in one nation only -- one's own -- and indifferent to all the rest. Its components are an unshakeable belief in the superiority of this one nation; prophetic visions of unique greatness, and a peculiar mixture of moral and feral pretensions. But it must not be assumed that all these national ideologies have the same content...

For it is idle to speak of nations as though there were not real differences between them. They wage long wars against one another and a considerable proportion of each nation takes an active part in these wars. What they are fighting for is proclaimed often enough, but what they fight as is unknown. It is true they have a name for it; they say they fight as Frenchmen or as Germans, English or Japanese. But what meaning is attached to any of these words by the person using it of himself? In what does he believe himself to be different when, as a Frenchman, or a German, a Japanese or an Englishman, he goes to war? The factual differences do not matter so much. An investigation of customes, traditions, politics and literature, could be thorough and still not touch the distinctive character of a nation, that which, when it goes to war, becomes its faith...

The history of his nation means even less to the man in the street. He does not know its true course, nor the fullness of its continuity. He does not know how his nation used to live, and only a few of the names of those who lived before him. The figures and moments of which he is aware are remote from anything the proper historian understands as history.

The larger unit to which he feels himself related is always a crowd or a crowd symbol. It always has some of the characteristics of crowds or their symbols: density, growth, and infinite openness; surprising or very striking cohesion; a common rhythm or a sudden discharge. Many of these symbols have already been treated at length, for example, sea, forest, and corn...They will recur in the discussion of the conceptions and feelings nations have about themselves.

Perhaps you have to have read the entire book to find the next idea thrilling, startling, unexpected - but Canetti writes:

A nation's consciousness of itself changes when, and only when, its symbol changes. It is less immutable than one supposes, a face which offers some hope for the continued existence of mankind.

Next up? Germany's Crowd Symbol.

Canetti: Fire as a "crowd symbol"

Elias Canetti wrote:

Crowd symbols is the name I give to collective units which do not consist of men, but which are still felt to be crowds.

Robert Kaplan, in his book Balkan Ghosts, comes back to Canetti's idea of "crowd symbols" over and over again.

Canetti lists 11 such "crowd symbols": Corn, rivers, forest, rain, wind, sand, fire, the sea, the heap, stone heaps, treasure. Each one has its own section in the book.

Canetti writes:

It may seem, at first sight, that they are not important enough to warrant detailed examination. But it will be seen that, through them, the crowd itself can be approached in a new and profitable way. They shed a natural light on it, which it would be foolish to exclude.

To give a brief example of what Canetti is up to here, here is a bit of what he has to say about Fire, in terms of how it is a "crowd symbol". To Canetti, studying fire is the BEST ways to study crowd behavior, because of the parallels.

FIRE The first thing to be said about fire is that it is always the same. Whether it is large or small, wherever it starts, and however long or short the time it lasts, there is in our imagination always a sameness about it, which is independent of the particular occasion. The image of fire is like a scar, strongly marked, irremovable and precise.

Fire spreads. It is contagious and insatiable. The violence with which it seizes whole forests and steppes and cities is one of the most impressive things about it. Until its onset tree stood by tree, and house by house, each distinct and separate from the next. But fire joins what was separate, and in the shortest possible time. Isolated and diverse objects all go up in the same flames. They become so much the same that they disappear completely.

Canetti postulates that that is one of the main desires of a crowd: The crowd, more than anything else, wants to grow, wants to become larger. In such a large crowd, the point is to lose your individuality - and to not feel so alone.

More on Fire:

Man has learned to dominate fire. Not only can he always ally himself with water in the fight against it, but he has also succeeded in dividing it and in storing it thus. He keeps it captive in hearths and ovens, and feeds it as he feeds an animal; he can starve it, or he can choke it. This brings us to the last important characteristic of fire: it is treated as though it were alive.

And lastly - so that you can see how Canetti connects the image of Fire with the image of a Crowd:

If we consider the several attributes of fire together we get a surprising picture. Fire is the same wherever it breaks out; it spreads rapidly; it is contagious and insatiable; it can break out anywhere and with great suddenness; it is multiple; it is destructive; it has an enemy; it dies; it acts as though it were alive, and is so treated. All this is true of the crowd. Indeed it would be difficult to list its attributes more accurately. Let us go through them in turn. The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same among men of the most diverse origin, education and language. Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence. Few can resist its contagion; it always wants to go on growing and there are no inherent limits to its growth. It can arise wherever people are together, and its spontaneity and suddenness are uncanny. It is multiple but cohesive. It is composed of large numbers of people, but one never knows exactly how many. It can be destructive; and it can be damped and tamed. It seeks an enemy. It dies away as quickly as it has arisen, and often as inexplicably; and it has, as goes without saying, its own restless and violent life. These likenesses between fire and the crowd have led to the close assimilation of their images; they enter into each other and can stand for each other. Fire is one of the most important and malleable of the crowd symbols which have always played a part in the history of mankind.

Now. This is all very interesting. Canetti goes on and on and on like this - for Fire, for the Sea, for Corn, for Forest ... all the different symbols. If you find this sort of writing tedious, then you would hate this book. I found it deep, challenging, and actually quite thrilling in a way. It is rare that you read a book that helps you to see things in a new way, in a deeper way.

All of these universal "crowd symbols" (listed above somewhere) have, as their distant more modern cousin, the "national crowd symbols". These are FASCINATING to me. Very thought-provoking.

For example, Canetti briefly posits that we can fully understand the nation of Great Britain if we fully understand that their "crowd symbol" is the "sea". It is a certain kind of nation that would have the "sea" as its symbol, an island nation perhaps, an adventuring nation. Canetti goes deeper into the collective metaphors for all of these concrete objects, metaphors which are common to all humanity.

Canetti talks about such "symbols" as indicative of the different stages of crowd behavior.

For example: Rivers are like crowds as the crowd is converging, from many streams into one current. Rivers are relatively static, they rarely jump their banks and flood over, the way is clear, everyone is one, and the crowd is moving together as one. They move in one direction. They lose their individuality and become one.

For those of you who are interested, here is a brief excerpt, where Canetti describes the attributes of every crowd.

The Attributes of the Crowd

Before I try to undertake a classification of crowds it may be useful to summarize briefly their main attributes. The following four traits are important.

1. The crowd always wants to grow. There are no natural boundaries to its growth. Where such boundaries have been artificially created - e.g. in all institutions which are used for the preservation of closed crowds - an eruption of the crowd is always possible and will, in fact, happen from time to time. There are no institutions which can be absolutely relied on to prevent the growth of the crowd once and for all.

2. Within the crowd there is equality. This is absolute and indisputable and never questioned by the crowd itself. It is of fundamental importance and one might even define a crowd as a state of absolute equality. A head is a head, an arm is an arm, and differences between individual heads and arms are irrelevant. It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it. All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.

3. The crowd loves density. It can never feel too dense. Nothing must stand between its parts or divide them; everything must be the crowd itself. The feeling of density is strongest in the moment of discharge [Ed: This is the moment when, in Canetti's theory, a crowd actually coheres into a crowd. Once there was nothing, now there is a crowd. "Discharge" is the moment when that happens.] One day it may be possible to determine this density more accurately and even to measure it.

4. The crowd needs a direction. It is in movement and it moves towards a goal. The direction, which is common to all its members, strengthens the feeling of equality. A goal outside the individual members and common to all of them drives underground all the private differing goals which are fatal to the crowd as such. Direction is essential for the continuing existence of the crowd. It's constant fear of disintegration means that it will accept any goal. A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal.

There is, however, another tendency hidden in the crowd, which appears to lead to new and superior kinds of formation. The nature of these is often not predictable.

More from Elias Canetti

... whose book Crowds and Power (even though I finished it last week) continues to stay with me. It's a mysterious book, in many ways it's a frightening book. Published in 1960, I think, Canetti - a German - born in 1905 - had seen Europe destroyed. Twice. He had seen his own country rise up in horrible militarism - twice. He had seen the carnage. And by 1960 - World War II long over - there was another terror: the Cold War, and the bomb. Canetti comes back to that over and over. We can count on crowds to behave in certain ways. Throughout human history, the patterns have been the same. But now ... now that we, as the human race, have the potential to destroy ourselves - the question: Why do crowds behave the way they do? takes on an urgency. The question MUST be examined. The future of the human race depends upon it.

A couple excerpts about Germany coming up.

Congratulations ...

... to the people of Iraq, for turning out to the polls in droves, despite the violence, despite the threats. I am finding the pictures of the voting extremely moving.

And here is one of the lines for the polls:

Emily has posted some wonderful quotes from Iraqis, about their experiences voting. Go read their words (and follow her link to read more).

And Patrick has posted what is, perhaps, the most emotional photo out there I've seen. Beautiful.

The Jersey City murders

I'm sure many of you have heard about the brutal murder of an entire family in Jersey City this past weekend. I woke up to the headlines, and the rage of the locals talking about it at my corner deli. The murder occurred down the road from where I live. The next town over. So it was on everyone's lips.

"What the hell?" "An entire family stabbed?" "What is this world coming to?" "It's AWFUL."

The NY Post link above (dated Jan. 16) has more information, chilling information:

The father of the family was an outspoken Coptic Christian, an Egyptian, and he got into some flame-wars on Muslim message boards. A Muslim threatened him (online). And this past Friday, the entire family (Husband, wife, 2 daughters - aged 15 and 8) was butchered. Stabbed.

I can't find anything else online about this right now. The NY Daily News says that, "Newly revealed evidence suggests the family slaughtered in their Jersey City home were victims of a robbery". The original article I read in the paper said that nothing was stolen from the house, the jewelry was all there, but now it appears that all the money in the house was gone. But the savagery of the murders suggests (to my untrained eyes anyway) that something much more personal was going on here.

The funerals occurred yesterday, and fights broke out outside the church, between Muslims and Christians. I saw that on the front page of my little local newspaper - but can't find anything else about it online.

More Information:

Here's the 1010 Wins story on the funerals. Scary stuff. Protests, marches, people standing up and screaming during the service and then being dragged out of the church by police officers, violence ... etc.

Oh, and one other thing: This is from ABC ... Apparently, a cousin of the slaughtered family was working for the prosecution (as a translator) in the trial of Lynne Stewart.

I'm not naive about dictators

and how nuts and paranoid and out of touch they are, and how crazy it must be living in a closed system. I am not naive about what happens in totalitarian dictatorships while a regime struggles to survive, to crush its enemies, to generate enormous personality cults around its wack-job leader who usually wears Ray-Banz, to justify its existence to a judgmental watching world. I know that such situations have an extremely high (read: 100%) tendency to descend into LOONY TUNES-ville.

And so I am definitely not naive about Zimbabwe's "leader" Robert Mugabe.

But this piece even gave ME pause. I had to read it a couple of times over to make sure I was understanding correctly.

It is delusional and so out of touch that ... it has the quality of light hitting the earth from a star that has been dead for millennia. It's THAT out of touch. It is one of the insanest things I have ever heard.

I picked this up from Mean Mr. Mustard ... who pretty much sums up my response, too:

The one redeeming quality that seems to reliably cut across the entire class of incompetent, genocidal, megalomaniacal African dictators is that, every once in a while, they are almost amusingly insane.

More upheaval in Holland

-- in the wake of the murder of Theo Van Gogh.

Things are spiralling out of control. Violence, attacks, counterattacks - Holland, famously the most tolerant and open of European countries, now (according to a recent poll) hope that Muslims "no longer feel at home" in Holland. Holland is saying this. Radical Muslims, massing in Holland, have no interest in partaking of that open tolerant society - except to use its very openness to punish and kill the infidels who DARE to criticize them.

This is exactly what Theo Van Gogh was warning against (in his 11-minute film Submission.)

Being murdered so brutally in broad daylight proves his own point.

If these Islamic fundamentalists refuse to assimilate, if they want to impose sharia on Holland, for God's sake, if they are so freakin' sensitive that they can't possibly bear an 11-minute criticism about their violent treatment of women from an infidel, and need to MURDER the man who made the film - then it's time to deport them.

Holland is in big trouble right now. Or - the trouble has been growing, silently, exponentially, over the last couple of years ... and now it's in the open. Now they're realizing: Shit, we have let this go too far ... These people are killing us ... killing our free and open society ... killing an ARTIST (very important in Holland - they cherish free speech) ...

And now it's here. The cat's out of the bag, the monster's out of the closet.

Mr. Theo Van Gogh

As I'm sure most of you know, Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch film-maker, was murdered last week for making a film (called "Submission") that criticized Islam. The Netherlands has become a hot-spot of the crash of civilizations - they have a big problem on their hands - as the murders of Pim Fortyn and now Van Gogh prove. What the hell is to be done? It's a scary situation.

Here's a very interesting column about Van Gogh by someone who knew him.

Here's another very good column on Van Gogh, written by Irshad Manji, a self-described Muslim dissident.

My God. My God.

The funeral of 2 sisters, Irina and Alina Tetova (ages 13 and 12), murdered in Beslan.

There is nothing to say here. These people's wounds will never be healed. Their children are dead. Forever. That's it. Over.

This is a terrible terrible day.

Let's put 300-plus checks on the "evil" side of the balance sheet.

Field of the Blackbirds

In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon they have now reached the Kosovo Polye (or Polje), aka "Field of the Blackbirds" - the scene of the defeat of the Serbs against the Turks in 1389. Losing at Kosovo Polye meant centuries under Turkish rule for the Serbs. It wasn't just a defeat - it was the cessation of their civilization. It's no mistake that Slobodan Milosevic would choose Kosovo Polye as the place to launch his deadly plan for his country. He stood on the edge of the plain, surrounded by crowds, and said, "We as Serbs will never be defeated like that again." The memory of 1389 fresh and raw, still. And - of course - we all know what happened next. The revival of national pride under Milosevic became a genocide.

I've read a lot about Kosovo Polye, and I thought I'd share some of Rebecca West's thoughts about the place, and the history of it - as she stands on the edge of it, looking out, trying to picture all that had occurred there.

It is flattery of nature to say that it is indifferent to man. It grossly disfavors him in quantity and quality, providing more pain than pleasure, and making that more potent. The simplest and most dramatic example is found in our food: a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live forever though a bad one can make him dead forever.

The agony of Kossovo could not be balanced by the joy that was to be derived from it. The transports of the women who built the church must dull themselves in continuance, and even if they generated the steady delight of founding a new nation that itself was dulled by the resistance offered to the will by material objects, and by the conflict between different wills working to the same end, which is often not less envenomed than the conflict between wills working to different ends. But the agony of Kossovy must have been purely itself, pain upon pain, newly born in acuteness for each generation, throughout five centuries. The night of evil had been supreme, it still was supreme on a quantitative basis.

Above the plain were the soft white castles of the clouds and a blank blue wall behind them.

Into this world I had been born, and I must resign myself to it; I could not move myself to a fortunate planet, where any rare tear was instantly dried by a benediction. This is my glass, I must drink out of it. In my anxiety to know what was in the glass, I wondered, "The world is tragic, but just how tragic? I wonder if it is finally so, if we can ever counter the catastrophes to which we are liable and give ourselves a workshop of serenity in which we can experiment with that other way of life which is not tragedy, but which is not comedy. Certainly not comedy, for that is merely life before tragedy has fallen upon it, ridiculous as a clown on the films who grins and capers without seeing that there is a policeman behind him just about to bring down a club on his head. That other way of life must transcend not only comedy but tragedy, must refuse to be impressed by its grandiose quality and frustrate it at every point."

But I found my mind wandering from the subject, which was surely the nature of tragedy and the points at which it attacked man, to indulge in some of that optimism which serves us in the West instead of fortitude. Life, I said to myself, was surely not as tragic as all that, and perhaps the defeat of Kossovo had not been a disaster of supreme magnitude. Perhaps the armies that had stood up before the Turks had been a huddle of barbarians, impressive only after the fashion of a pack of wolves, that in its dying presented the world with only the uninteresting difference between a live pack of wolves and a dead pack of wolves. That is a view held by some historians, notably the person so unfortunately selected by the editors of the Cambridge Medieval Hitory to write the chapter on the Serbian Empire; and it seems to receive some support when one drives, as we did after we left the church, along the fringes of the plain. The population of Old Serbia is sunk far deeper in misery than the Macedonians, and at a superficial glance they justify the poor opinion of the Christian rayahs held by 19th century travellers. Their houses turn a dilapidated blankness on the village street; their clothes are often dirty and unornamented by a single stitch of embroidery; and they gape at the stranger with eyes empty of anything but a lethargic fear which is quite unapposite to the present, which is the residue of a deposit left by a past age, never yet drained off by the intelligence.

A quiet crowd

My 2 friends and I walked through the West Village last night, talking, laughing, enjoying the night breeze. Stepping over the buckled sidewalks, on our way to the Path station.

On one block, we came upon a blitzkrieg of activity - news trucks, spotlights, people running around with microphones. At first I thought it was just a movie being filmed - you can't walk a block in Greenwich Village without tripping over 12 movie crews - but then I noticed that all of the vehicles had News Channel logos on the side. Everyone was staring up at one apartment. It was eerie. What was going on in there? I wondered if a celeb had just moved in (after all, it's the West Village) ... or ... had there been a murder?

Turns out it was the apartment of journalist Micah Garen, now in the hands of Islamic terrorists who are threatening to behead him in 48 hours. His fiance, who had just heard the news, was inside.

The block was strangely quiet. Nobody rushing about, no pushing or shoving - It was a crowd, yes, but it was a quiet crowd. Garen's fiance was nowhere to be seen. I am sure she was holed up in her apartment, avoiding the chaos outside, sitting by the telephone, watching TV, trying to get through the horror, minute by minute.

Odd. Eerie. The press was in stake-out mode, waiting to nab her the second she walked out to get a carton of milk or whatever. Poor woman.

The three of us all stared up at the lit windows of the brownstone - and I know I was thinking about her. Thinking about her, and what she must be going through. Strange - I didn't think of Micah Garen at all in that moment. He seemed very very far away. But her silent presence filled the dark street.

Wow. Just wow.

Iraqi and American athletes together, yesterday at the Opening Ceremony.

I didn't watch the ceremony myself, but Michele has some great commentary.

Thank you, again, to Hitchens

He certainly can cut to the heart of an issue and I couldn't agree with him more, for the most part.

Finally - the sound of common fucking sense in the middle of all the hyped-up paranoia and politicized jargon.

I'm fatigued. I'm fatigued by my own need to stay informed. I'm fatigued by the emptiness of the rhetoric. I'm fatigued by listening to those who are out of touch with reality - and they obviously exist on both sides.

Christopher Hitchens' cranky commonsensical prose is like a breath of fresh air.

A momentous moment

I feel like I've forgotten how to be hopeful. There's been a lot of white noise in my head over the past couple weeks. Fear, anxiety, despair ... it seems the world is falling apart.

But let's just take a moment and wish this newly sovereign nation all the best.

May they find their way through this dark tunnel. May they find a way to resolve differences through laws, and not war.

Again, I've forgotten how to be hopeful.

But I do wish this for them.

Sarajevo

This morning I finished the chapter in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (other posts about that book here) about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in the streets of Sarajevo in June, 1914.

Now, the book is amazing, in pretty much every way (content, writing-style, human interest, information) - but this chapter in particular is a masterpiece.

I know the story, but in a kind of bare-bones historical way. Princip, and what happened afterwards ... the importance of the assassination in a grand historical sense.

But Rebecca West doesn't write about history in a bare-bones way. She gets inside of it. She leaves things unanswered that cannot be answered (damn, if every historian and biographer on earth would take a hint from her!!) - and yet she asks all the questions. She ponders things, she digs in the dirt, she imagines motivations and imagines what people must be thinking: but she does not assume that she is right. It's such a rare quality in a writer of history or historical events or biography that ... it took me a second to realize: Wow. NOBODY writes like this. Only she does.

The chapter (entitled "Sarajevo V") is a masterpiece.

Elegy for the Aral Sea

This is news?

Anyone who knows anything about environmental disasters knows about the drying up of Aral Sea and has known for a long time.

Quote from the article:

"You may say that the Aral Sea has already disappeared," said Bo Libert, a regional adviser for the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe and an author of a report on water use in central Asia.

Yes. The sea is not drying up, it is gone already.

Just caught this bit of nonsense in the article I posted:

Drought and excessive use of its main feeder rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, are mostly to blame.

Uhm - no. That's not right. That makes it sound like it was semi-natural, and had nothing to do with the ridiculous environmental policies of Communism - which is exactly why the Aral Sea has been destroyed.

What you SHOULD have said is that the Sea has dried up because of the ravages of Communism and because of the USSR's boneheaded plots to try to make cotton bloom across the deserts of Uzbekistan.

This is a man-made disaster. The Aral Sea has died because of human stupidity and the careless and rapacious way Communist regimes treated nature.

The UN is just picking up on this disaster now?

It's done. Let it go. Let the Aral Sea go. It's a disaster, nothing can stop the disappearance now, let it fade into a memory. Let those ships which now sit in the middle of the desert (photo below) stay there. As warnings and reminders.

Not of the dangers of drought but of the dangers of stupid people in power who end up engineering droughts through ridiculous use of state power.

Erudite commentary from the redhead

Putin says Russia warned the US about Saddam, Iraq, etc.

Well, for 75 years we warned your asses about how Communism wouldn't work and that it would eventually crumble around your ears. But did you listen to us???

Noooooooooooooo

Rebecca West

An excerpt about Croatian history - and its legacy:

Well, what did all this story mean to the people in Croatia, the people I was looking at, the people who had been selling me things? I had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past has made the present, and I wanted to see how the process works. Let me start now. It is plain that it means an amount of human pain, arranged in an unbroken continuity appalling to any person cradled in the security of the English or American past. Were I to go down into the market place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' -- wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, -- I should never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning back for a thousand years, if by my magic I raised four thousand from the dead. I should always hear, 'No, there was fear; there were our enemies without, our rulers within; there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.'

And they had no compensation in their history, for that never once formed a historic legend of any splendid magnitude. It was a record of individual heroism that no nation could surpass, but it never shaped itself into an indestructible image of triumph that could be turned to as an escape from present failure. The Croats have always been superb soldiers; but their greatest achievements have been merged in the general triumphs of the armies of the Hapsburgs, who were at pains that they should never be extricated and distinguished, and their courage and endurance were shown most prodigious in engagements with the Turks which were too numerous and too indecisive to be named in history or even preserved with any vividness in local tradition. The only outstanding military victory to their credit was the rout of the Hungarians commemorated by Jellachich's statue, and this might as well have been a defeat.

Again we must go for an analogy to the sexual affairs of individuals. As we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their beginnings, we realize that to the people who take part in them it is almost of greater importance that they should be stories, that they should form a recognizable pattern, than that they should be happy or tragic. The men and women who are withered by their fates, who go down to death reluctantly but without noticeable regrets for life, are not those who have lost their mates prematurely or by perfidy, or who have lost battles or fallen from early promise in circumstances of public shame, but those who have been jilted or the victims of impotent lovers, who have never been summoned to command or been given an opportunity for success or failure. Art is not a plaything, but a necessity; and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one's own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book. We can all of us judge the truth of this, for hardly any of us manage to avoid some periods when the main theme of our lives is obscured by details, when we involve ourselves with persons who are insufficiently characterized; and it is possibly true not only of individuals, but of nations.

What would England be like if it had not its immense Valhalla of kings and heroes, if it had not its Elizabethan and Victorian ages, its thousands of incidents which come up in the mind, simple as icons and as miraculous in their suggestion that what England has been it can be again, now and forever? What would the United States be like if it had not those reservoirs of triumphant will power, the historical facts of the War of Independence, of the giant American statesmen, and of the pioneering progress into the West, which every American citizen has at his mental command and into which he can plunge for revivification at any minute? To have a difficult history makes, perhaps, a people who are bound to be difficult in any conditions. 'But perhaps,' said my husband, 'it does not matter very much.'

Rebecca West: on the Germans in the train

Rebecca West and her husband travel by train to Zagreb. It is 1937. Europe teeters, teeters. The train is full of primarily Germans, on their way to vacation on the Adriatic coast. This is what I mean when I say this is not just a book about politics. She observes human behavior, she watches closely, she picks up on every signal - and then makes huge assumptions based on her observations. Like many of us do, only she happens to be a brilliant writer, and also - pretty much all of her predictions made ended up coming true, the woman was amazingly prescient. It was during this traveling-with-the-Germans-on-the-train section that the book really kicked in for me.

I got up and went out into the corridor. It was disconcerting to be rushing through the night with this carriageful of unhappy muddlers, who were so nice and so incomprehensible, and apparently doomed to disaster of a kind so special that it was impossible for anybody not of their blood to imagine how it could be averted. Their helplessness was the greater because they had plainly a special talent for obedience. In the routine level of commerce and industry they must have known a success which must have made their failure in all other phases of their being embittering and strange. Now that capitalism was passing into a decadent phase, and many of the grooves along which they had rolled so happily were worn down to nothing, they were broken and beaten, and their ability to choose the broad outlines of their daily lives, to make political decisions, was now less than it had been originally. It was inevitable that the children of such muddlers, who would themselves be muddlers, would support any system which offered them new opportunities for profitable obedience, which would pattern society with new grooves in place of the old, and would never be warned by any instinct of competence and self-preservation if that system was leading to universal disaster. I tried to tell myself that these people in the carriage were not of importance, and were not typical, but I knew that I lied. These were exactly like all Aryan Germans I had ever known; and there were sixty millions of them in the middle of Europe.

To be in the midst of an oncoming disaster - and to be able to SEE it ... now that is a rare gift.

Rebecca West: "But now Luckeni is Mussolini"

More on the killing of the King of Yugoslavia:

I knew, of course, how and why the murder [of the King of Yugoslavia] had happened. Lucheni [the Italian assassin who killed Express Elizabeth of Austria] has got on well in the world. When he killed Elizabeth over forty years ago, he had to do his own work in the world; he had to travel humbly about Switzerland in search of his victims; he had but one little two-edged dagger as tool for his crime, and he had to pay the penalty.

But now Lucheni is Mussolini, and the improvement in his circumstances can be measured by the increase in the magnitude of his crime. In Elizabeth the insecure and traditionless town dweller struck down the symbol of power, but the modern representative has struck down power itself and degraded its essence. His offense is not that he has virtually deposed his king, for kings and presidents who cannot hold their office lose thereby the title to their kingdoms and republics. His offense is that he made himself dictator without binding himself by any of the contractual obligations which civilized man has imposed on his rulers in all creditable phases of history and which give power a soul to be saved. This cancellation of process in government leaves it an empty violence that must perpetually and at any cost outdo itself, for it has no alternative idea and hence no alternative activity. This aggressiveness leads obviously to the establishment of immense armed forces, and furtively to incessant experimentation with methods of injuring the outer world other than the traditional procedure of warfare.

Rebecca West on the assassination of the King of Yugoslavia

Another long excerpt from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - The assassination of the King of Yugoslavia in Marseille, which Rebecca West hears about from her sick-bed in the hospital, is what triggers her second visit to the Balkans. She knows she MUST go back. Before it is too late. She requests to watch the existing film of the assassination. Here is what I mean when I say she sees EVERYTHING. There's a reason why other journalists bow down before this woman. She's got the context, it's all about context.

A few days later my husband told me that he had seen a news film which had shown with extraordinary detail the actual death of the King of Yugoslavia, and as soon as I could leave the nursing home I went and saw it. I had to go to a private projection room, for by that time it had been withdrawn from the ordinary cinemas, and I took the opportunity to have it run over several times, while I peered at it like an old woman reading the tea leaves in her cup. First there was the Yugoslavian warship sliding into the harbor of Marseille, which I know very well. Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little unable to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might, from a poetical point of view, be correct. I know enough to be aware that this bridge cannot have been spun by a vast steel spider out of its entrails, but no other explanation seems to me as plausible, and I have not the faintest notion of its use. But the man who comes down the gangway of the ship and travels on the tender to the quay, him I can understand, for he is something that is not new. Always the people have had the idea of the leader, and sometimes a man is born who embodies this idea.

His face is sucked too close to the bone by sickness to be tranquil or even handsome, and it would at any time have suggested a dry pedantry, unnatural in a man not far advanced in the forties. But he looks like a great man, which is not to say that he is a good man or a wise man, but that he has that historic quality which comes from intense concentration on an important subject. What he is thinking of is noble, to judge from the homage he pays it with his eyes, and it governs him entirely. He does not relapse into it when the other world fails to interest him; rather does he relapse into noticing what is about him when for a moment his interior communion fails him. But he is not abstracted; he is paying due respect to the meeting between France and Yugoslavia. Indeed he is bringing to the official occasion a naive earnestness. When Monsieur Barthou, the French Foreign Minister, comes and greets him, it is as if a jolly priest, fully at ease in his orders, stood before the altar beside a tortured mystical layman. Sometimes, too, he shows by a turn of the head, by a dilation of the pinched nostrils, that some delightful aspect of the scene has pleased him.

About all his reactions there is that jerky quickness which comes of long vigilance. It was natural. He had been a soldier from boyhood, and since the Great War he had perpetually been threatened with death from within, by tuberculosis, and with death from without, by assassination at the hand of Croats or Macedonians who wanted independence instead of union with Serbia. But it is not fear that is his preoccupation. That, certainly, is Yugoslavia.

Now King Alexander is driving down the familiar streets, curiously unguarded, in a curiously antique car. It can be seen from his attempt to make his stiff hand supple, from a careless flash of his careful black eyes, that he is taking the cheers of the crowd with a childish seriousness; it is touching, like a girl's putting full faith in the compliments that are paid to her at a ball. Then his preoccupation veils his brows. He is thinking of Yugoslavia again. Then the camera leaves him. It recedes. The sound track records a change, a swelling astonishment, in the voice of the crowd. We see a man jumping on the footboard of the car, a gendarme swinging a sword, a revolver in the hand of another, a straw hat lying on the ground, a crowd that jumps up and down, up and down, smashing something flat with its arms, kicking something flat with its feet, till there is seen on the pavement a pulp covered with garments. A lad in a sweater dodges before his captors, his defiant face unmarked by fear, although his body expresses the very last extreme of fear by a creeping, writhing motion. A view of the whole street shows people dashed about as by a tangible wind of death.

The camera returns to the car and we see the King. He is lying almost flat on his back on the seat, and he is as I was after the anaesthetic. He does not know that anything has happened; he is still half-rooted in the pleasure of his own nostalgia. He might be asking, 'Et en quelle saison Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison, Qui m'est une province et beaucoup d'avantage?' It is certain that he is dying, because he is the centre of a miraculous manifestation which would not happen unless the living had been shocked out of their reserve by the presence of death. Innumerable hands are caressing him. Hands are coming from everywhere, over the back of the car, over the sides, through the windows, to caress the dying King, and they are supremely kind. They are far kinder than faces can be, for faces are Marthas burdened with many cares because of their close connection with the mind, but these hands express the mindless sympathy of living flesh for flesh that is about to die, the pure physical basis for pity. They are men's hands, but they move tenderly as the hands of women fondling their babies; they stroke his cheek as if they were washing it with kindness. Suddenly his nostalgia goes from him. His pedantry relaxes. He is at peace; he need not guard against death any more.

Rebecca West I

"If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed a good idea at the time.' "

-- Rebecca West

In this day and age...

certain words ALWAYS go together.

"Fiery"
"one-eyed"
"hook-handed"
"radical"
"Muslim cleric".

Always. No exceptions. Word to the wise.

Speaking of "fiery one-eyed hook-handed radical Muslim clerics" - Tim Blair wrote up a personal ad for hook-handed Abu Hamza.

The first item reads thus:

I am a: One-eyed hook-handed hate preacher

Still laughing over here.

UFOs?

Independence Day? Contact? Signs? What do we think about this?

So. Rasputin.

Rasputin is on my mind because I am deeply engrossed at the moment in Nicholas and Alexandra - sent to me off my Wish List from MikeR - Yeah! It's a story I am highly familiar with, because of my other reading: toppling of autocratic regimes by OTHER autocratic regimes ... the history of Russia, in general, etc etc. I read some other book years ago, just focusing on Alexandra - but it wasn't very good, as I recall. Really the one to read is Nicholas and Alexandra.

Now I can see why.

The author, Robert Massie, began writing a book, originally, about hemophilia, and the history of hemophilia. He has a son who is a hemophiliac (an hemophiliac?) and so, naturally, he was drawn to the history of various royal families, since they all seem to have major problems with hemophiliacs popping up in every other generation. It's called "the royal disease" for that reason.

But slowly, as his research unfolded, and as he came to know these people a bit more, he realized a couple of things:

Their story had not been fully told yet, as amazing as that is.

Apparently, when he and his publishers were deciding what to call the book, and his suggestion was the plain-and-simple "Nicholas and Alexandra", the publishers rejected it because they didn't think anyone would know what the names meant or referred to. Of course, historians knew - but general public? No. It was a different time. Because of Massie's book, primarily, which has continued to sell and sell and sell, over the years, "Nicholas and Alexandra" entered the langauge.)

And he also realized the multiple layers of the Russian revolution - the what came before and how essential that was.

His contention is that the hemophilia of the Tsar's son and heir, combined with the mystical hold Rasputin had over the Empress Alexandra - were the primary reasons that the "empire" fell apart. One could not have happened without the other. And Lenin just took advantage of a disintegrating process that was already occurring.

Alexandra seems ... how to say this ... a little bit nuts, quite frankly.

Massie quotes extensively from her letters. He makes it clear that she wrote so many letters, and in such a florid overblown style, that they are very difficult to get through, it is hard to know where to start, and her overblown emotionalism make them almost unbearably boring and repetitive. Researchers get lost in her prose, and it is very hard to analyze. Or even make sense of it.

But what Massie pulls out of the pile of letters (found in a suitcase in the Siberian basement where the family was massacred) is quote after quote after quote having to do with Rasputin.

Government positions were filled based on the sole factor of whether or not this person got along with "Our Friend".

"Is he not Our Friend's enemy?"

She clearly had an enormous hold over her husband's will, and Rasputin insinuated himself in between the two.

What an absolutely disgusting (and yet riveting) character Rasputin is. He seems almost mythical - like he can't have been really real. And the role he played in the crashing of the empire was so perfectly planned - it almost seems like he was created solely for historical purposes.

What amazes me is how duped she was by him. Massie goes on and on about Rasputin's hypocrisy, his nastiness, his double-sided character (pious with the Tsar and Tsarina, and then a raving drunken maniac with everyone else) - Everyone else seems to have caught on except for Alexandra. Rasputin had arrived at key moments during her son's hemorrhages, and appeared to stop the bleeding, merely by speaking softly to her son. And so she had this intense (I would say, fervent and fanatical) belief in his powers. He was a Man of God. If he approved of so-and-so as Ministry of Interior, then that so-and-so was blessed by God. Even if the so-and-so had never held a government position in his life.

Alexandra ignored the signs. Willfully. When confronted with evidence of Rasputin's true character, the rapes, the binges, and also the nasty things he said in public about her and his hold over her, she refused to believe it.

Scott Peck, in his chilling book People of the Lie defines evil as (and sorry, I'm paraphrasing): people who refuse to look inward, people who refuse to change. It takes an act of will to stay the same. Peck calls this "evil".

There seems to be a lot of People of the Lie stuff going on with Alexandra. She believed totally in autocracy, pretty much because she wanted to make sure her son's legacy was fulfilled. Without autocracy, her son would be nothing, nada. She was filled with these vague and mystical "feelings" about things, which she would then pass onto her husband, who more often than not based his policies, his policies of food distribution and even his military tactics during World War I, on Alexandra's gut "feelings" about something. She even wrote to him once telling him that he should stop the Russian offensive because "Our Friend" [Rasputin] had a dream foretelling doom.

It is astonishing. Truly. The level of impact he had.

It baffles me. I guess I would like to meet him (well, that is, if he hadn't been shot multiple times, bashed over the head, and then drowned - yes, none of the rest of that stuff killed him, it was the drowning that got him), just to see for myself what the big deal was. Even people who hated him attested to his great magnetism. People who were repulsed by his power still acknowledged this "thing" that he had. One of the members of the Duma describes vividly having to actively resist being hypnotized by Rasputin, during a conversation.

Fascinatingly vile character.

Great book.

Hanging on for dear life

A lot of people are linking to the article in Reason entitled "Fools for Communism". One of my loyal readers sent it to me - thank you! If you haven't read it yet, you really should.

Glenn Garvin looks at the phenomenon of those who still hang on to the "belief" in Communism (and yes, by this point it is a religion, not a philosophy, or an economic theory) - despite all the evidence, and who refuse to adjust their views, despite the spectacular crack-up of the entire Soviet Union. I liked, too, how the article focused on the meaning of apologies, and the lack of apologies. What is that about?

Great quote:

Sometimes the refusal to confront errors is simple hubris. But often it masks a queasy reluctance to start down a path of self-examination, for fear of where it will lead.

Man, I KNOW people like that. Who never examine themselves, because they don't see the need because their views are so clearly right, who never allow change (God forbid), who are uncomfortable with ambiguity, and who NEVER take a look at their dearly held views and examine them. These people are not in process. They are done.

There's nothing more boring than talking to a person who has never changed his or her mind about anything.

But, on a deeper level, this fantastic article looks at that issue I pondered over, in utter confusion, in this post. There are people out there, still, who refuse to believe their own eyes. Why? Who are these people?

Definitely read the Reason article. Very good.

"When someone persuades me that I'm wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?" -- John Maynard Keynes

Iraqi prisoners

Some people have a sense of decency towards their fellow man, and some people do not.

I am ashamed, disgusted, and upset. Look at the grinning face of that US servicewoman. (Scroll down) It is chilling. It reminds me of those horrible photos of laughing crowds at lynchings.

She has no sense of decency.

Americans do not hold the moral high ground just because we are Americans. To me, that seems like a self-evident statement - but you would be surprised, the resistance I come up against when I say shit like that. People are overly sentimental about what it means to live in this great nation - yes, OVERLY sentimental - and forget that we also produce evil people, we also do horrible things - we are capable of horrors. Of COURSE we are, because Americans are, after all, members of the human race, and if there's anything I have learned during my sojourn on this planet, it is that human beings, in general, are capable of horrible things.

Here's one of the comments to the post I link to, which is evidence of this blinkered moral-high-ground thinking:

Sorry, but I'll wait until the investigation is done and the military is done dispensing justice before I'll get worked up about this. We can re-pave the "Arab Street" if it rises up. The prisoners were allegedly humiliated, that's all. Deplorable, if true, but not summarily executed and dumped into a mass grave. When they and their bloodline are running airliners into our skyscrapers killing thousands of innocents, being made to stand on a box with playing electric ghost is something I can't get fired up about.

I appreciate the probability that some will be offended and may cause trouble, but this is a scant % of the prisoners we hold.

This is a frightening line of thinking. I was glad to see another commenter reply to that:

The fact is that we MUST be better than this, or we are lying to ourselves about what we stand for. I would have no problem whatsoever with a "forceful" field interrogation of prisoners to obtain tactical information, etc. But once we are out of tactical danger, we MUST treat prisoners the way we would have OUR military treated, were they captured by the other side. I know that the other side, particularly the Islamofascists, do NOT treat our prisoners better than this, but that is their sin; it should NEVER be ours.

If we aren't better than our enemies, we don't stand for shit. I am proud of my country, and I am proud of the men and women who serve in my country's military, but I recognize there are bad apples in EVERY barrel - the trick is to find them and dispose of them, post haste. The "soldiers" who perpetrated this shameful episode should and must be punished to the full extent of the law.

And John is right; more men and women in our uniform will die because of what these subhuman assholes did.

If you think 9/11 justifies our acting like savages, you are sadly mistaken, and a sick individual.

Now that is something I can get behind. We must not sit on some high horse, thinking we can behave in this disgusting manner.

If this is true - and it seems to be - then these servicemen and women have done us, and our cause, and the ideals of America grave grave harm. They should be ashamed of themselves, and I hope they are punished within the full extent of the law.

I guess I have been living in denial

because I can't comprehend the fact that there are still people out there, with all of the information we have at our disposal, with everything we know now, who would make such statements as:

"Communism isnt bad... the people who use communism are bad."

And that is just one of the idiotic statements made. Others have to do with Saddam having created a "free republic" and a "market economy".

Boggles the mind.

(via Val)

Et cetera?

Tsar Nicholas II had this for a complete title:

Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, of Siberia, of Tauric Chersonese, of Georgia, Lord of Pskov, Grand Duke of Smolensk, of Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Libonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogotia, Bialostock, Karelia, Tver, Yougouria, Perm, Viatka, Bulgaria, and other countries; Lord and Grand Duke of Lower Novgorod, of Tchernigov, Riazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslav, Belozero, Oudoria, Obdoria, Condia, Vitebsk, Mstislav and all the region of the North, Lord and Sovereign of the countries of Iveria, Cartalinia, Kabardinia and the provinces of Armenia, Sovereign of the Circassian Princes and the Mountain Princes, Lord of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig Hosstein, of Storman, of the Ditmars, and of Oldenbourg, etc.

It's that "etc." at the end that really kills me.

Trivia question

Now this is a bit up-for-debate. However - we're talking about expert consensus here:

What do military historians agree is the longest conventional war in the 20th century?

Conventional, conventional - 2 huge armies facing one another. No guerrilla stuff.

I can't help but notice the difference

between the train-crash in North Korea and the train-explosions in Madrid. Every report I read of the North Korean crash has contradictory information, contradictory numbers. Now thousands have been killed, now it's only 150. They want our help. There are no pictures available. There is no sense of what is really happening. You don't get the sense that anything actually IS happening. On Yahoo, there is merely a satellite photo of what the railway looks like from above (but the photo dates a year ago). It's now a day later, and still - all we get is one of those "this just in" maps, telling us where it has happened.

Normally, "this just in" maps signify: More to come, more details to come, hang on, hang on. We've had the same "This Just In" map up now for 24 hours.

Now, apparently, North Korea is asking for help. I'm no investigative journalist, I'm just a girl reading the headlines - but if they're asking for help, then I would imagine that the reality is 10 times worse than what is being reported.

And yet the people of North Korea - what of them?

When the bombs went off in Madrid, we saw the faces of the people in the city, we could share in their emotions, we could relate to them - because we could see them - Who cannot relate to someone who has just lost their son and husband? Who can't relate to the horror of cell phones going off in body bags? And what that actually means? On a human level?

North Korea is an invisible nation. They are under lock and key. Nothing gets in, and almost nothing gets out.

I guess what I am really aware of right now is an overwhelmingly LOUD silence.

And I remember the chatter-chatter-chatter not too long ago about the catastrophe in Madrid. People putting out information, embassies, consulates, we heard from Spanish bloggers, yap yap yap yap. The country was not closed - we could be with them in their moment of sorrow. There was a sense that we could communicate with the people of Madrid, we were all part of the same world.

Not so now.

Ryzsard Kapucinski has a great essay about the importance of listening to the "silence" in history. I'll let Kapucinski speak for himself:

People who write history devote too much attention to so-called events heard round the world, while neglecting the periods of silence. This neglect reveals the absence of that infallible intuition that every mother has when her child falls suddenly silent in its room. A mother knows that this silence signifies something bad. That the silence is hiding something. She runs to intervene because she can feel evil hanging in the air. Silence fulfills the same role in history and in politics. Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet. Look at how colonialism has always fostered silence: at how discreetly the Holy Inquisition functioned; at the way Leonidas Trujillo avoided publicity.

What silence emanates from countries wiht overflowing prisons! In Somoza's Nicaragua -- silence; in Duvalier's Haiti -- silence. Each dictator makes a calculated effort to maintain the ideal state of silence, even though somebody is continually trying to violate it! How many victims of silence there are, and at what cost! Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence demands that concentration camps be built in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous police apparatus with an army of informers. Silence demands that its enemies disappear suddenly and without a trace. Silence prefers that no voice -- of complaint or protest or indignation -- disturb its calm. And where such a voice is heard, silence strikes with all its might to restore the status quo ante -- the state of silence...

Today one hears about noise pollution, but silence pollution is worse. Noise pollution affects the nerves; silence pollution is a matter of human lives. No one defends the maker of a loud noise, whereas those who establish silence in their own states are protected by an apparatus of repression. That is why the battle against silence is so difficult.

It would be interesting to research the media systems of the world to see how many service information and how many service silence and quiet. Is there more of what is said or of what is not said? One could calculate the number of people working in the publicity industry. What if you could calculate the number of people working in the silence industry? Which number would be greater?

Horrible

The explosion in North Korea.

Yeah, so you have a massive explosion, where thousands are killed - and what is one of the first things done by the so-called government? Cut the international phone lines.

You know what? Some people are just evil mo-fos, and that's all there is to it.

Evil.

It's the final image in the article which I cannot get out of my mind:

"Reuters reported that residents of Pyongyang reached by telephone had said that there was nothing unusual in the capital. North Korean television was broadcasting military songs and music — standard evening fare."

Those poor people, living trapped in that country.

I'll be there Eire Long

It's official. Going to Ireland in November. I'll be there for my birthday.

I was there for my birthday once before. Holy shite, I'm old. My sisters and I were all there together - Siobhan was in school at UCD, and Jean and I traveled to visit.

The hilarity that ensued that week is difficult to describe. Pretty much the entire vacation has a "Had to be there" clause attached to it.

And the laughter? The laughter was intense.

We spent my birthday traveling to look at the pre-Stone Henge spirals of New Grange, on a grey rainy day.

Here is my imitation of what it is like to take a tour at New Grange:

You follow the tour-guide up the narrow inclining-passageway in the tomb. The rocks around you are literally covered in carved spirals.

Random person: So what do the spirals signify?
Tour guide: (Irish brogue) Well, we don't really know.

You get into the tomb area, where on the Solstice - if it is sunny - the light crawls up the narrow passage, and floods the inner tomb with light. In the tomb, on the sides, there are these large rounded-out stones - like platforms, or tables, or ... who the hell knows what.

Random person: What are these large stones for?
Tour guide: Nobody really knows.
Another random person: Do they think that it was a burial site? Or ...
Tour guide: Your guess is as good as mine.

It is HILARIOUS. If you ever go to New Grange, I highly suggest you take the tour, because basically the message is: "Nobody knows anything about this place, but isn't it just feckin' amazing???"

And it is.

The night of my birthday, my sisters and I went out and saw a play, and then huddled together in a Dublin nightclub, drinking beers, and screaming at each other over the music. Jean had bought a bodhran earlier the day, and we didn't have time to go back to the dorm and drop it off, so she was forced to bring the bodhran into the club. This mortified her.

"I look like such a tourist. I can't believe I'm bringing an Irish drum into a nightclub in Dublin. I hope no one asks about it."

The entire week was one long laugh-fest. And it all ended, gloriously, with "the night the lights went out in Dublin". One of the funnest and funniest nights I have ever had in my life.

I was there for the millennium as well - and now I'm going back. This November.

Unbelievable

Ann Louise Bardach interviews Oliver Stone in regards to his HBO documentary on Fidel Castro. Actually, it's more like interrogates. She basically skewers Stone on a spear.

A couple of incredibly stupid comments from Stone, who truly appears blinded by the "glamour" of Fidel Castro:

OS: I must say, you're really picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn't feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America.

ALB: Did you go to the prisons in Cuba?

OS: No, I didn't.

My favorite part of that is Oliver Stone's protest: "I must say, you're really picturing a Stalinist state."

Uh ... YEAH. EXACTLY.

And then this:

Castro has become a spiritual leader. He will always be a Mao to those people.

There's so much that is wrong with this. If you only talk to Castro, and if you only talk to Cubans WHILE CASTRO IS STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU, then of course you are going to get a lot of bull shit answers. "Yes, we love him. We love him. He is our spiritual leader".

Is Oliver Stone aware that even Mao is no longer Mao to the people of China? Trips to Mao's birthplace used to be compulsory. Like pilgrimages to Mecca. Now it sits, gathering dust. Communism has basically been tossed out, in everything but name, and China now is consumed with performing economic miracles. Embracing capitalism wholeheartedly. Mr. "I wear a peasant suit every day of my life" Mao would have been horrified.

So Stone says, "He will always be a Mao to these people."

This is such a blatant misunderstanding, first of all of who Mao was, and also - of the nature of tyrants and societies in general.

There are too many quotes to even list about the temporary nature of all tyrants. Going back to Herodutus, and Shakespeare, and any writer who observes history and politics. The king always falls. Tyrants never die of old age asleep in their old beds. The Shah must go.

Mao's legacy of being a "spiritual leader" barely lasted one generation.

What the hell is Stone talking about?

He's in love with Communist leaders, that's apparent, and the long-debunked ideals of Communism - He remains completely blind to inconsistencies. He doesn't investigate things which do not agree with his world view. He also seems unaware that there are actually such things as "show-trials", and tyrants trotting out "happy peasants" just for show - to fool the useful idiots such as himself. These tactics have been used by despotic leaders for AGES. It seems beyond his comprehension to realize he has been duped. He has been fooled by the glamour of this leader.

Anyway. I've rambled enough - and Ann Louise Bardach does a much better job than I could of remaining logical, cool, and bombarding Oliver Stone with the uncomfortable realities of Cuba, as opposed to the Castro-loving propaganda he has swallowed, hook, line and sinker.

Trivia

What is the largest single religious building in the world?

Must Read

Mario Vargas Llosa on Madrid.

Don't miss it. I was especially moved by his description at the end of feeling enraged that he wasn't actually IN Madrid, on that day in March. Friends of mine who happened to be out of town on September 11 described to me the same sense of helpless rage at not being in the city on that day. This was not a ghoulish desire, a desire to be close to the action - They were devastated to not be there but because it is their HOME - and it didn't seem right to my friends that they were not there in its time of need.

Excerpt:

It has been this free spirit and this unblinkered mentality of an open city, hospitable and democratic, the emblem city of a remarkable transformation of Spain in the last quarter-century, that the fanatics sought to destroy, on the morning of March 11, when they placed in Atocha the bombs that have left more than 200 dead and 1,500 wounded - 12 nationalities, typically enough, being represented among the victims - in the most ferocious terrorist massacre suffered in Western Europe in modern history.

The killers were not mistaken in their target: today's Madrid represents precisely the negation of the radical inhumanity of the obtuse, exclusive tribal spirit of fundamentalism, religious or political, which hates mixture, diversity and tolerance and, above all, liberty. This is the first European battle in a savage war that began exactly two years ago with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and whose inroads will probably fill with blood and horror a good part of this new century. It is a war to the death, of course, and owing to the present fantastic development of the technology of destruction and the fanatic, suicidal zeal that inspires the international movement of terror, it is perhaps a trial even more difficult than those represented by fascism and communism for the culture of liberty.

Compared to September 11 in the United States, the March 11 attack in Madrid has an added factor in terrorist strategy: apart from causing the largest possible number of deaths, the intention to influence the political life of the victim country. It achieved this: thanks to the savage massacre, a considerable number of Spanish voters, hurt and infuriated, voted for the opposition and overthrew the governing party, for which the surveys had assured an easy victory.

Trivia

There is a place on earth, an actual building, where, for 3 short decades, Jews and Muslims prayed side by side. In the same building.

Where is this place?

Do not miss this extraordinary photo-journal

I feel like I got lost in another world.

Lena, a motorcycle-chick from Kiev, rides through the ghost-town of Chernobyl, and takes pictures every step of the way.

Really - I cannot recommend it enough. I was blown away.

She goes into abandoned houses, abandoned schools - she sees the objects people left behind - obviously fleeing in a panic. Family photos, children's dolls ...

There are wild horses living in the deserted town now. Lena gets an amazing photo of the herd of them galloping by.

Since Chernobyl occurred in 1985, before the fall of Communism, she notes all of the old Communist propaganda on the walls - a room filled with flags, in preparation for the Labor Day in May ... a true ghost-town, relics of a past now disappeared.

One thing that blew me away:

On the approach to Chernobyl, to let you know you are close - there is a huge sculpture of an egg. In the middle of the road. Apparently, someone from Germany sent it to the town, or maybe placed it there on their own.

The egg - to symbolize the possibility of new life, new beginnings - in this polluted terrifying environment.

Her photos are phenomenal. Go. Go now and click through.

(via LoboWalk)

And Israel, too

11 dead.

Police said the bombers may have been trying to blow themselves up near chemicals, causing far greater loss of life.

It's evil. That's all there is to it. Choosing a location in order to ensure far greater loss of life.

Forces of chaos and darkness gaining power.

Oh Jeez

It's always a bit alarming when you wake up and find yourself being hit with an Insta-bombardment.

Unfortunately, the title of my post below "Shared Grief" is obviously revealed as a fallacy, since many, apparently, do not "share the grief" with the Spaniards. (Read the comments.)

Well, bully to them for being so close-minded and cold.

My heart is with Spain today. If there were people who supported terrorists in that country, perhaps their hearts will change, now that the war has been brought to their doorstep. After all, this happened for many of us in America.

I will speak for myself: my complacence, my intellectual curiosity about world events (as opposed to a gut-level understanding), my feeling that it was always "over there" was given an enormous shock on a blindingly-blue-skied day 4 years ago.

Many of us in America had to have a very steep learning curve.

Let us give Spain that room as well, people.

Or you know what? Perhaps being attacked like this WON'T change the hearts of many people - but I can't control that - and I don't even GIVE a shit about that right now. All I can think of is that line of body bags, with cell phones ringing off the hook. I cannot hear about such a thing and not just ACHE for those trying to call their loved ones. At a time like this, that is all that matters.

Or - whatever. Do whatever the hell you want to do, but I intend to give Spain that room. That learning curve. I stand by them.

You can't understand certain things until they happen to you. Like childbirth, or the death of a parent, or a violent terrorist attack right on your soil. And I'm a New Yorker. I experienced it first-hand.

Yes, I remember the photo of the gleeful ignorant Spanish girls, at an anti-war protest in Madrid, wearing suicide belts and bikinis. I was horrified at the image. Horrified.

But ... er ... because of that ... because there were anti-war protests in the country ... I'm not going to feel terrible because 200 innocent people were just slaughtered?

Fuck off. That's not who I am. That's not how I live my life in this world. Fuck off.

There are ignorant people in every country.

This week, my heart is with the innocent people who were cruelly murdered, on their way to work, and on their way to school. My heart is with the men and women who are now widows, the children who are now orphans.

/begin bitter sarcastic tone
And you know what?? Oh my GOD, maybe some of those people on those trains were anti-war!! Maybe some of the people on those trains hated the US!! Maybe some of the people on those trains DIDN'T AGREE WITH EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY OPINIONS! How DARE they?? Don't they know that I am ALWAYS RIGHT???
/end bitter sarcastic tone

There is nothing that I have more contempt for, in this moment, than people who hold that blinkered political-filter view.

My heart is with Spain. Just like my heart was with the people of Iran when they had the massive earthquake. They're human beings. Jesus Christ.

We're talking about precious human life here.

I share grief with Spain. I say it proudly.

Shared grief

Comment

I saw a picture at one of the demonstrations in Spain today. A kid holding up a sign which said, in Spanish, "We were all on that train."

I feel that way today with the people of Spain. I felt that way when the massacre happened in Bali.

We do not know yet who committed this atrocity in Spain. It is not for me to speculate.

But in terms of the larger picture - I am with Samuel Huntington, in some respects - and I agree with his theory that what we are seeing now is a "clash of civilizations". World wars will never be the same, where one clear-cut country wages war against another clear-cut country. This is an entire civilization attacking another civilization. Because of its IDEAS. It is much more amorphous, harder to pin down. The "root causes" float about, sticking together, coming apart, like mercury. Nobody can even agree on what the hell is going on.

I talked with my friend David about this the other night.

Change, adapt, or die out. A civilization that cannot adapt will not survive.

Western civilization has had its ups and downs. It has not been an ever-increasing road uphill, to greater and greater heights of glory and perfection. There is no such thing as a Utopia. The journey has been a mess. Chaotic. Only with the long perspective of centuries can you look back on it and figure out what happened, how certain things came to be, how certain movements or certain pamphlets or certain philosophers helped shape our world. The Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason transformed our civilization. Separation of church and state, rendering Caesar's stuff to Caesar and God's stuff to God - This is a new concept. It is RADICAL. Revolutionary.

It took us a long time to get there, and we still (obviously), (in this country and in others), struggle with what exactly that means. Separation of church and state. Separation of powers. Power-sharing. Bloodless transfers of power. This shit continues to blow my mind, when I look at the bloody chaos of so much of the rest of the world.

It has taken centuries of philosphers, theologians, writers, poets to formulate these ideas, to fight things out, hash things out, to argue, debate, find the checks, find the balances, learn the value of giving UP some of your individual power for the good of the GROUP ...

This shit is hard stuff. It requires vigilance, restraint, and debate.

I don't care who you are in the world, or what nation you belong to. If you also feel that you were on that train in Spain - if you also feel that the values of this civilization (liberty, equality, freedom of religion, separate the Caesar from God) - then you are my kin.

We are the same. We were all on that train.

From Instapundit

The address of the Spanish embassy:

2375 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. - Washington, D.C. 20037
202.452.0100

(thanks Glenn, for the info)

Remember how the world stood still for us in the aftermath of September 11. (Thanks Michele - Even today, years after 2001, looking through these photos, I am overwhelmed by love and humility.) How people from across the world visited our embassies, lit candles, left cards and notes. Had moments of silence ... from Moscow to Denmark to Berlin.

The Spanish deserve just as much.

From Miss Jones: A list of all the Spanish consulates.

One last thing, from one of Michele's commenters: "1800flowers.com demands a first and last name. Inocencio Aris is the ambassador to the UN, and should suffice. I stuck "(or any official)" on the same line as his last name, just in case."

Spain

It's so terrible. Jesus.

The Command Post is covering it.

My thoughts, prayers, love, sympathy are with the people of Spain today. Horrible.

God be with them.

In regards to ETA, Al-Qaeda, and terrorist plots - go and visit Jane Galt. She has asked some questions of her readers - questions that I have asked myself, from time to time. Looks like it is going to be a very good discussion.

Update: Letter from Al Qaeda, apparently claiming responsibility. No link on Fox News yet. But here's what Reuters in Dubai says:

A letter purporting to come from Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network claimed responsibility for the train bombings in Spain on Thursday, calling them strikes against "crusaders," a London-based Arabic newspaper said.

"We have succeeded in infiltrating the heart of crusader Europe and struck one of the bases of the crusader alliance," said the letter which called the attacks "Operation Death Trains." There was no way of authenticating the letter, a copy of which was faxed to Reuters' office in Dubai by the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper.

The letter bore the signature "Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades." The newspaper received similar letters from the same brigade claiming responsibility on behalf of al Qaeda for a November bombing of two synagogues in Turkey and the August bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.

Update:
Allison at An Unsealed Room responds. Don't miss it.

A Must-Read

Betrayed by Europe: An Expatriate’s Lament, by Nidra Poller.

An elegy for France.

For me, the monuments are crumbling. The glistening golden dome of Les Invalides. The châteaux and the triumphal arches, the obelisks, the bux om fountains, the wrought-iron balconies, the slightly tipsy 18th-century apartment buildings, the rivers winding through those darling towns and cities. How can so much beauty cover such deep cowardice? I lash myself to the mast and close my senses to the sirens, while my heart rings with pride for "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

We are not free in France. I know the difference. I come from a free country. A rough and ready, clumsy, slapped together, tacky country where people say wow and gosh and shop at Costco. A country so vast I haven’t the faintest idea where I would put myself. A homeland I would have liked to keep at a distance, visit with pleasure, and leave with relief. A native land I walked out on with belated adolescent insouciance. A foreign land where I was born because Europe vomited up my grandparents as it is now coughing up me and mine.

Reading it has made me extremely melancholy.

A couple of excerpts, and that's all - You must go read it yourself. It's one of the saddest things I have read in a long time:

I never thought of myself as an expatriate; I’d let my American identity slip away while retaining the free-floating grace of being a foreigner. Instead, I’d been a "European," picking up after a brief interruption not exactly where my family had left off—not Budapest, not Przemysl, those were places we would not go back to—but Europe and all it could boast of. Beautiful cities that are really lived in, monuments at every street corner, savoir faire, craftsmanship, savoir vivre, boutiques, refinement, manners, health care, free education, history, French windows and parquet floors.

And . . . the Shoah? I came back to be European and, irony of ironies, Europe is showing me why my grandparents left. For a novelist and student of history, this is a fantastic experience. For a grandmother, it is agony. How can I explain to French grandchildren whose very existence is the consequence of my once flighty decision that I cannot entrust them to their native land? But how can I lead them to safety if I myself do not know how to go home?

And then this admission:

I will have to change my way of looking at things. To some extent, I already have changed my way of looking at things. The post-Thanksgiving stampedes at the shopping mall? How I would have slathered them with leftist contempt decades ago. Today I see them as expressions of the common man’s patriotism. No, the malls are not for me, I cannot live in a suburb; but it is incomparably better for people to shop their nation to prosperity than to be marching in the streets of Paris for jihad against the Jews or demonstrating for higher wages, shorter hours, and "justice" in Palestine.

The question is, how would I fit into the picture? Walking down a street in Brookline, Massachusetts, I can recognize myself, barely. But months of snow? I couldn’t take it. Washington? Too square. New York? Perfect in theory, but in practice too frantic, and too expensive. Wouldn’t it be great to reconnect with family, coast-to-coast cousins and nephews and nieces with their children, all so bright and energetic? Yes, but with grandchildren off to college so far away it might as well be Siberia or South Africa, I’d see them once a year if I was lucky.

Where, then?

Poller describes her background:

I am, or was, the first American-born generation in a family that fled Europe before World War I: a lesson in the wisdom of leaving before it is too late. Now I am the first stage in the story of a three-generation "French" family. Why don’t people just pick up and go while they still can? It’s always the same. There is an ailing grandmother, a son in medical school, a daughter who just got married, a business too good to throw away and not good enough to sell. There are in-laws and obligations and unfinished business and . . . hope. Hope that it will all blow over. That people will come to their senses, reason win out, normal life resume. And so, blinded by hope, people minimize danger and cling to an imagined stability.

This woman can write. I will be sure to buy her book, when it is published.

Go read the whole thing. It makes me sad.

(via Andrea Harris)

Quote

"You mean to tell me they can find Saddam Hussein in a fucking hole, but you can’t tell me who shot Tupac?"

-- Chris Rock

Thanks for the fruit and money, pal

I don't know how much of you have been following this - but the missing Russian politician has been found.

Rybkin said he was just taking a break. In the Ukraine. Without telling anyone where he was going. Nobody. He vanished.

Rybkin had this to say for himself:

"I didn't disappear anywhere. I bought a newspaper today and was stunned."

Uh ... what?

Even the people working on his campaign had no idea where he went. It was a very suspicious situation. He was a harsh critic of Putin. And then - poof - he disappears. Another member of the Liberal Russia party, of which he was a member, was assassinated last year. So obviously, the situation did not look good. Had Rybkin been wiped out? Had someone killed him?

Where the hell was he?

Well, he was hanging out with his friends in Kiev, cell phone turned off.

Clearly, he is not cut out to be the leader of a massive country like Russia if he can't understand what the big deal is about his disappearance. He "decided to have a rest from the fuss which has surrounded me", and took off without a word. Uh - sorry. If you're the president of Russia you can't do that.

He didn't even tell his wife where he was going. Here's a quote I love:

"I left fruit and money for my wife."

If I were his wife, I would take that fruit and I would throw it at his head. Repeatedly. (As though they were pretzels.)

Fight like hell at Point A

I have to point to a couple of posts - in regards to the Carlie Bruscia murder. A murder of a child is hard to get my head around - my brain refuses to deal with it, or contemplate it in any serious way - and the security camera footage Bruscia being led away is - I just have no words. It is horrible. Horrible. She is going to her death. She looks so docile. That's what strikes me at the core about that footage. She looks so freakin' DOCILE.

This reminds me of one of the first lessons of self-defense - taught to me by cops who came and did a seminar for us in grade-school about stranger-danger:

"People don't want to hurt you at Point A. They want to hurt you at Point B."

Meaning: put up a hell of a fight at Point A. Fight like hell to avoid being moved to a Point B situation. If you're gonna fight for your life, do not wait. Fight immediately. Do not let the perpetrator move you. Die at Point A, if you have to.

Years later, when I took a self-defense course as an adult, the very same lesson was taught - only it was put in blunter terms than when I was a kid - since this was a class taught by tough Chicago cops, and the people in the class were all adult women.

"Girls don't get raped and die at Point A. Girls get raped and die at Point B."

There is only so much you can control - but if you can have the presence of mind to fight like a tiger at Point A - it might save your life.

Carlie Bruscia did put up a fight, apparently, bless her. May she rest in peace. But that fight did not happen at Point A.

The footage is so chilling to me, for that reason. DAMMIT.

Michele has a kick-ass essay up right now, about parenting, driving her kids to school, the dangers facing kids today, and being accused of being an "over-protective" parent, who coddles her kids. Etc. She pulls no punches, and it is a great post.

And Key Monroe also weighs in. (Something's up with her permanent links - scroll down to the post entitled "Infuriating".) Don't miss this post.

The Missing 727

Carlos W (or CW) has written a very interesting essay about the plane that went missing last year from Angola- a plane that has not yet turned up. Definitely go read it - it's excellent.

He has a very good blog over there, by the way. Beautiful photographs, and extensive essays on myriad topics. His essays on Belize made me feel like I was right there with him, seeing it all.

Name that country

Carlos has issued a challenge on his blog. He has posted 3 photos from an unidentified country, and asks us to guess the location.

My guess, Cambodia, was blazingly wrong. It didn't FEEL right to me, either ... I have never been to Cambodia but my idea of it is that the foliage is a bit more messy, more jungly.

Anyway, go check out the photos - see if you can guess. He will continue to post photos, until someone guesses correctly.

The Czech Republic - Essays

Introductory words

Part I - History

Part II - The 20th Century

Part III - Vaclav Havel's speech, January 1, 1990

Part IV - Ivan Klima - The Spirit of Prague

The Czech Republic - Part IV - The Spirit of Prague

Here are some excerpts from Ivan Klima's wonderful collection of essays "The Spirit of Prague". Klima's a great novelist, too. I highly recommend his work. Here he talks about Prague itself, he talks about Havel, about Kafka, about the "velvet revolution". Don't miss these excerpts, and check out that book if you ever get the chance.

The Czech Republic - Part IV - The Spirit of Prague

Klima on Prague:

The Prague of past eras is gone. No one can bring the murdered back to life, and most of those who were driven out will probably never return to the city. Nevertheless Prague has survived and has, finally, tasted freedom again. Its spirit is intact as well. This manifested itself vividly during the revolution that opened the way to freedom in 1989. Revolutions are usually marked by high-sounding slogans and flags; blood flows, or at least glass is shattered and stones fly.

The November revolution, which earned the epithet "velvet", differed from other revolutions not only in its peacefulness, but also in the main weapon used in the struggle. It was ridicule. Almost every available space in Prague -- the walls of the buildings, the subway stations, the windows of buses and streetcars, shop windows, lampposts, even statues and monuments -- were covered, in the space of a few days, with an unbelievable number of signs and posters. Although the slogans had a single object -- to overthrow the dictatorship -- their tone was light, ironic. The citizens of Prague delivered the coup de grace to their despised rulers not with a sword, but with a joke. Yet at the heart of this original, unemotional style of struggle there dwelt a stunning passion. It was the most recent and perhaps the most remarkable paradox to date in the life of this remarkable city.

Klima on Kafka

What you call the dream world was, for Kafka, the real world -- the world in which order reigned, in which people were able to grow fond of each other, make love, raise families, be orderly in all their duties -- but for him, with his obsessive truthfulness, this world was unattainable. His heroes suffered not because they could not realize their dreams, but because they were not strong enough properly to enter the real world, to fulfill their duty.

The reason Kafka was banned under communist regimes is explained in a single sentence by the hero of my novel Love and Garbage: "What matters most about Kafka's personality is his honesty." A regime that is built on deception, that asks people to pretend, that demands external agreement without caring about the inner conviction of those to whom it turns for consent, a regime afraid of anyone who asks about the sense of his actions, cannot allow anyone whose veracity attained such fascinating or even terrifying completeness to speak to the people.

If you ask what Kafka meant to me, we get back to the question we somehow keep circling. On the whole Kafka was an unpolitical writer. I like to quote the entry in his diary for 2 August 1914. "Germany has declared war on Russia. -- Swimming in the afternoon." Here the historic, world-shaking plane and the personal one are exactly level ...

Kafka's metaphors were so powerful that they far exceeded his original intentions. I know that The Trial as well as "In the Penal Colony" have been explained as ingenious prophecies of the terrible fate that befell the Jewish nation during the war, which broke out fifteen years after Kafka's death. But it was no prophecy of genius; these works merely prove that a creator who knows how to reflect his most personal experiences deeply and truthfully also touches the suprapersonal or social spheres. Again I am answering the question about political content in literature. Literature doesn't have to scratch around for political realities, or even worry about systems that come and go; it can transcend them and still answer questions that the system evokes in people.

This is the most important lesson that I extracted for myself from Kafka.

Klima on Havel

Havel's candidacy for president and his later election were, in the first place, an expression of the precipitate, truly revolutionary course of events in this country. When I was returning from a meeting of one of the committees of Civic Forum [the organization Havel formed in November, 1989, to investigate police brutality] one day towards the end of November, my friends and I were saying to each other that the time was near when we should nominate our candidate for the office of president. We agreed then that the only candidate to consider, for he enjoyed the relatively wide support of the public, was Alexander Dubcek. But it became clear a few days later that the revolution had gone beyond the point where any candidate who was connected, if only by his past, with the Communist Party, was acceptable to the younger generation of Czechs.

At that moment the only suitable candidate emerged -- Vaclav Havel.

To a certain sector of the Czech public, Havel was, indeed, more or less unknown, or known as the son of a rich capitalist, even as a convict, but the revolutionary ethos that seized the nation brought about a change of attitude. In a certain atmosphere, in the midst of a crowd, however civil and restrained, an individual suddenly identifies himself with the prevailing mood and state of mind, and captures the crowd's enthusiasm. It's true that the majority of the country shared in the doings of the former system, but it's also true that the majority hated it just because it had made them complicit in its awfulness, and hardly anyone still identified himself with that regime which had so often humiliated, deceived and cheated them.

Within a few days, Havel became the symbol of revolutionary change, the man who would lead society out of its crisis.

Klima on fear and power

If power becomes so total that it can commit any arbitrary act, can falsely accuse anyone, arrest, try and sentence him for imaginary crimes, confiscate his property, his job, his freedom and, on top of it all, publicly dishonor him with insults, then fear can also become so total that almost none of those things need actually be done to maintain it. The powers that be need only occasionally demonstrate that they are willing and able to behave arbitrarily. We live in a world in which the powerful govern by means unlike anything humanity has ever known. They can control and exterminate individuals and entire peoples. As long as these means exist, our world will remain a world of fear.

The fear that sleeps in the beds of the powerless gives a strong impetus to their dreams and their actions. The powerless person longing to escape his anxiety usually sees only two ways out: to flee beyond the reach of the hostile powers, or to become powerful himself. Fear engenders dreams of power.

...Power is soulless and it is derived from soullessness. It builds on it and draws its strength from it. Soullessness keeps company with fear. People who have given up their souls have only a body, and it is the body they are terrified for ... People who have not given up their souls can overcome fear because they know that in the end, fear comes from within and not from without. The person who has let anxiety from the external world replace his soul can never drive out his fear. Anyone who has defended his soul, his inner integrity, and is prepared to surrender everything, to risk even his freedom of movement and, in extreme need, even his life, cannot be broken by fear and is thus beyond the reach of power. He becomes free, he becomes a partner of power, not as a competitor in the struggle for control of the country, people and things, but as a living reminder of the mendacity and the transcience of everything power defends and represents ...

A person who, out of inner need, consistently stands up to the powerful, risking everything, has a single small hope: that by his actions, he will remind those in power where that power came from, what its origins are and what their responsibility is, and perhaps he will make them a little more human.

Klima on the 1968 invasion

The invasion of my country in August 1968 was a singular act in modern history: it was the only time a foreign country had intervened militarily in the peaceful affairs of a neighbor to which it was allegedly tied with bonds of friendship. The invasion was, of course, traumatic for most citizens ... But the shameful nature of the invasion indelibly tarnished all those whose intention it was to renew the old-style totalitarian power.

As I have said, the appearance of being cultured and civilized is particularly important in Czech lands, where centuries of national and cultural repression have made culture, and especially literature, popular and highly respected. The powers-that-be needed poets to cloak their intentions and actions in verse ... But they needed them pliant, or even broken ... The powers-that-be were usually able to win over a part of the intellectual elite through promises, bribery, concessions and sometimes even by force.

But how could a power that was indelibly tarnished win them over? It could not. It sensed its own isolation and therefore decided to use compulsion. The early 70s were a turning-point for both the powers-that-be and for Czech culture. The regime decided to break those who, in their eyes, represented that culture, even at the cost of destroying the culture altogether. For their part, the members of the intellectual elite decided that they would rather be destroyed than have anything to do with this indelibly tarnished power.

Klima on the 1989 velvet revolution

The authorities frequently used police brutality to break up memorial assemblies to commemorate the country's national holiday or the memory of Jan Palach ... Those who came to pay their respects to a person who symbolized the possibility of individual protest taken to its furthest extreme became the object of a violent attack by special units who used truncheons, water-cannons and tear-gas. People, mostly the young, decided not to give way to violence.

For 5 consecutive days the peaceful assemblies were repeated, and on four occasions the police used violence to break them up. Several people were arrested, Vaclav Havel among them.

During these events, which aroused the emotions of the whole country, the cruel truth about power was publicly revealed for the first time. At this critical juncture, the government could not find a single person with sufficient authority to address the nation. No one was willing to give public support to the regime, but many could be found to protest against police brutality, against imprisoning the innocent. Among the protestors were actors, filmmakers, and writers who, until then, the regime had believed to be on "its side".

In this critical situation, the authorities -- and it is hard to say whether this was out of stupidity or desperation or arrogance, or the awareness that they were indeed indelibly tarnished -- refused all invitations by the cultural opposition to take part in a dialogue. The deep chasm between totalitarian power and all the "shaken", to use Patocka's term, became unbridgeable. It was clear that any further error, any further act of arrogance, might be fatal.

What happened in November 1989 is well known. As an eyewitness and a participant, I wish to emphasize that this revoltuion, which really was the outcome of a clash between culture and power, was the most non-violent revolution imaginable. In the mass meetings attended by up to three-quarters of a million people, no one was hurt, not a window was broken, not a car damaged. Many of the tens of thousands of pamphlets that flooded Prague and other cities and towns urged people to peaceful, tolerant action; not one called for ciolence. For those who still believe in the power of culture, the power of words, of good and of love, and their dominance over violence, who believe that neither the poet nor Archimedes, in their struggle against the man in uniform, are beaten before they begin, the Prague revolution must have been an inspiration.

Amen!

The Czech Republic - Part III - Vaclav Havel's speech in 1990

Vaclav Havel made a speech on January 1, 1990, immediately following all of the extraordinary changes which had occurred in his country. This speech along with many many others made it into the book I have of "Speeches of the 20th Century".

The first time I read it, I was sitting on a crowded subway. By the end, tears were rolling down my face. In retrospect, I think that is hysterical. If anyone noticed I was crying, I am sure they would never have guessed the reason - and would have thought I was insane if they had asked:

"Ma'am, are you all right? Why are you crying? Did your boyfriend break up with you?"

"Oh ... uh ... no. I'm crying because of Vaclav Havel's speech to the Czech people in 1990."

".....Oh..."

Havel's speech, broadcast on the radio, set the tone for all that was to follow. It is referred to as "the contaminated moral environment" speech. After decades of double-speak, decades of being lied to by their own government, decades of muffling their true sentiments, Vaclav Havel stood up and told the truth. He had been preparing for this moment since the 1960s.

And that's another thing. We, as human beings, can recognize truth when we hear it. We know when we're being lied to, deceived. Truth is unmistakable, and Havel knew that. And Havel did not let the Czech people off the hook - another reason why the "velvet revolution" was so amazing. It was not about pointing fingers, screaming, "YOU DID THIS TO US". Havel encouraged the Czech people to take responsibility in their destinies, to take responsibility for having endured the tyranny for so long. The "contaminated moral environment" is not only addressing the Communist regime. He addressed that comment to every Czech person who had tolerated living under tyranny. No passing the buck, no blame. Take responsibility.

Imagine. How many leaders ever speak to their people in such a way? This speech is one of the myriad reasons that Vaclav Havel is one of my political heroes.

Quotes from his extraordinary speech - (the last line makes me want to cheer):

The Czech Republic - Havel's speech, Jan. 1990

But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous ...

The previous regime -- armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology -- reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production ... It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone ...

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere ... I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all -- though naturally to differing extremes -- responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators ...

We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly ... Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts ...

In the effort to rectify matters ... we have something to lean on. The recent period -- and in particular, the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution -- has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential and civil culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical, and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake from their shoulders in several weeks and in a decent and peaceful way the totalitarian yoke...

There are free elections and an election campaign ahead of us. Let us not allow this struggle to dirty the so far clean face of our gentle revoltuion ... It is not really important now which party, club, or group will prevail in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moral, civil, political and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations ...

In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will ... always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.

You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social, or political.

People, your government has returned to you!

The Czech Republic - Part II - The 20th Century

This is mercilessly long. Just a little heads-up. It's the story of Czechoslovakia throughout the tumultuous 20th century.

The Czech Republic - Part II - The 20th Century

World War II
But all of that became meaningless with the outbreak of World War II. Czechoslovakia's location was disastrous for them. I mean, in actuality, their location was strategically fantastic for them in other times. They sat right on one of those most significant land routes in Europe, which was all very good for shipping goods in and out, for their military to move in and out, for trade to travel. But with all of Europe gone to hell, Czechoslovakia was caught right in the middle.

Look at a map of Czechoslovakia, and take a look at the countries surrounding them (at the time, Slovakia was part of the nation though, of course). It is obvious how trapped they were. It is like they are trapped in a vise: Germany chomping on them to the West like a big Pacman, Austria yawning beneath them like quicksand.

Czechoslovakia had millions of German-speakers, who got caught up in the nationalistic fever happening in the Pacman-country to the West. They wanted to join their country-men. They NEEDED to join their German countrymen. Hitler agreed. This is the whole "Sudetenland German" problem. The first terrible moment of appeasement.

The Munich Agreement, the betrayal of the Allies
And this is where Czechoslovakia was sold down the river in the Munich Agreement in 1938. Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland be returned to him. And then (famous last words): "That will be my last demand! All I want is the Sudetenland!" It was given to him. Czechoslovakia was handed to Germany by the countries of Europe.

There was a Czech underground, there were protests, there was some preparation for going head-to-head with Hitler all on their own, since the big leaders of Europe seemed willing to let them be chewed up and spit out. Europe basically said to Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement, "Buh-bye. We are feeding you to the lions. Sorry. We just can't fight this guy." Most of the Czech intelligentsia were killed (and this is very important to remember: resistance in Czechoslovakia has always been at the hands of the intellectuals). So the Germans, of course, knew this, and all of the intelligentsia were shipped off to concentration camps or just killed outright.

Ivan Klima, a Czechoslovakian writer was sent to a concentration camp as a small boy. There is a wonderful collection of his essays called The Spirit of Prague which I'm going to quote from later. He's awesome. He can describe the experience of living under a totalitarian fascistic regime, using no theory, no abstractions.

But anyway. Onward.

The Germans leave, the Soviets arrive
In 1945, the Czechs were rising up against the German forces, war breaking out, mini-battles, fighting for their lives. With no help from the Allies, who had abandoned them in the Munich Agreement. Meanwhile, the Soviets were closing in on them from the east.

On May 5, 1945, the Czech resistance in Prague rose up so fiercely against the Germans, that the German troops retreated out of the country. By that point, the German army was a rag-tag bunch of terrified starving soldiers, trying to do their best for the Fuhrer, but losing, losing, losing. They had already lost. This was a big victory for the Czechs, but then, on May 8, 1945, three days later, the Soviets rolled into town.

Under the Soviet umbrella
Czechoslovakia was established as an independent state in the Soviet sphere. There were large-scale deportations of German and Hungarian populations. The Germans who were deported following World War II, are still, to this day, demanding the return of their property. The country was permitted the freest multiparty democracy in Eastern Europe. This was mostly because there was genuine sympathy for Communism already existing in Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia you didn't see the kind of harsh enforced Communism the way you saw in Poland or Lithuania or many other places.

An interesting factoid that I pulled off the CIA website (and take these statistics - like all statistics - with a grain of salt): the religious breakdown in the Czech Republic goes like this:

39% atheist
39% Roman Catholic
4% Protestant

That really stood out for me - I haven't encountered any other country in the Factbook with religious statistics like that, and so it got my attention. Atheists are tied as the largest religious group in the country. If this number is true, then it would make sense that the Communists didn't have as tough a time. In other countries, seriously Catholic countries like Poland, atheism had to forced down the people's throats, and the Poles fought back HARD against this. Catholicism was an essential part of their identity - it was the receptacle of their collective spirit. This intensified with Pope John Paul II - a Pole. They looked to HIM for guidance, not to the Politburo. The Communists, to punish the Poles, would turn their cathedrals into "Museums of Atheism". This would not have outraged the Czechs as much as it did other more religiously faithful countries.

They had elections in 1946 and the Communist candidates won the majority of the popular vote. This was one of the only instances where a country occupied by the Soviet Union willingly chose Communists to run their country. But by 1948, with the economy still suffering, the country going bankrupt, support for Communism was definitely waning.

The Communists could feel that they might be losing their grasp, so in 1948 they organized a coup d'etat, and seized absolute power, through the unions and the police. And Czechoslovakia fell. And fell. And fell.

After 1948
It soon became one of the most repressive regimes in Eastern Europe. People imprisoned, executed, sent off into exile, sent off to prison camps, the gulag ... All dissent was squashed, through fear and terror. Only the intellectuals kept the identity of Czechoslovakia alive. Only the intellectuals tried to keep the Czech language alive. Only the intellectuals tried to maintain the memory of the country. Everybody else was cowed. Beaten.

Then along comes:

The 1960s
Czechoslovakia started waking up. I suppose it must have been the tenor of the times, but there were other factors as well. The 1960s was a fever, spreading all over the world. The Czechs experienced a cultural awakening, they started remembering who they were.

But along with the Zeitgeist of the time, a lot of this awakening had to do with who was in charge of the country: Alexander Dubcek. He was a Communist, he was one of the founders of the Czech Communist Party actually. But he had different ideas from Moscow. He began making moves to liberalize the country. He wanted to end censorship. He wanted to open up dialogues again. His motto was: "We will show the world Socialism with a Human Face." Socialism with a Human Face. He wanted to prove to the world that Communism need not be synonymous with Dictatorship. He dismantled any vestige of a personality cult around himself (a necessity for all other Communist leaders). He promised the Czechs "rule of law".

It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for the people of Czechoslovakia at that heady time. I can only try. I can only read what they write, the memoirs of that time - Kundera, Klima, Havel, and others. Hope rising up, happiness, freedom, being able to SPEAK, being able to feel like they are joining the rest of the world again, after decades of repression, hope, hope, all of this hope coming from their LEADER. Who seemed to hear what they were saying, expressing their own desires.

All of this was going on without the blessing of Moscow. Dubcek, a die-hard Communist, assumed that the Soviets would not care. He trusted the leaders in Moscow. He underestimated them.

He, maybe even more than the Czech people themselves, was devastated by what happened next.

1968: The Prague Spring
The Prague Spring refers to the cultural awakening coming to a real head through the early months of 1968. There was a sense of possiblity, of hope.

Moscow was alarmed by what was going on in Czechoslovakia. They had no interest in promoting Socialism with a Human Face. Freedom of the press means that people can criticize the regime, can criticize Communism, and if people can criticize then the cracks in the entire facade will widen. Moscow felt that they must have an unbroken Red Wall of Unity to present to the rest of the world. Nobody can deviate from the party line.

Moscow demanded that all of the Warsaw Pact allies participate in an invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush Socialism with a Human Face, to crush what was also called "the Czech Experiment". (An interesting sidenote: Nicolae Ceausescu, dictator of Romania, refused to join in the invasion, and because of that, the West LOVED him, and ignored the fact that the man was a villain, a despot, a crackpot. He was wined and dined all over the West for not stepping in line with the rest of the Warsaw Pact, and hailed as a maverick leader. Yeah, he was a maverick all right! So maverick that he starved his own citizens in order to built dams, he turned off heat and electricity in the middle of the winter so he could pay back the country's debt ahead of schedule, he criminalized birth control ... you remember those horror images of starving Romanian orphans strapped to their beds in the late 1980s? That's his doing.)

In early August of 1968, the entire leadership of Czechoslovakia was flown to Moscow, to be scolded by Brezhnev. Actually, no, it wasn't a scolding. He was warning them. "Cut this shit OUT." Dubcek (a real hero) refused to cut the shit out. Dubcek refused to turn his back on his ideas that Socialism did not have to mean cruelty and tyranny. He would not denounce the Prague Spring. But Dubcek still did not believe that Moscow would invade. He did not believe that Moscow would turn on him. And so - in a way - he was brainwashed by the Politburo as well.

On the night of August 20-21, 1968, the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and took the city back by force. By the next day, 58 people had been killed.

Wenceslas Square, in Prague, was the focal point of the resistance to the Soviet invasion. (See the movie "Unbearable Lightness of Being" for an incredible look at what it must have been like.) Chaos. Horror. Grief. And utter betrayal. The "Czech experiment" was over.

The world was horrified. But nobody did anything. Nobody stopped it. The Czechs, once again, were thrown to the wolves.

Dark dark days ahead.

The Crackdown
After the invasion, Gustav Husak was responsible for whipping the country back into shape. He himself had been a victim of Stalinist repression and had spent 8 years in prison. That, to me, is one of the most insidious things about such tyranny: the persecuted become the persecutor. Nobody escapes.

Husak whirled through the country like a tornado. He did a major purge of the Czech Communist Party, getting rid of anybody who might have sympathized with the idea of Socialism with a Human Face. Anybody who might even be on the FENCE about it was gone. And major Stalinist hard-liners were brought in to replace them.

And once again, nothing changed in Czechoslovakia until 1989 when everything fell apart in two weeks time.

The country was completely closed off from the rest of the world. Prague became a Communist backwater, as opposed to one of Europe's premier cities. Nobody could travel, nobody could leave. Censorship was imposed. All liberalization programs introduced by Dubcek were cut off.

Oh, and what happened to Dubcek?? The father of Czechoslovakian Communism was forced to resign, obviously, in 1969, and then he was kept under house arrest from 1968 until 1987. And he wasn't allowed to communicate, or write, or let the Czech people know he was alive, and still around. The Communists, in the words of the Mafia, "disappeared" Dubcek. I am so glad they didn't "disappear" him forever, because once the Soviet Union started collapsing, suddenly Dubcek emerged again, and the Czech nation was able to express, openly, to him just how much he meant to them. Just how much they appreciated his sacrifices. How much, basically, that they loved him. Nobody had heard from him in decades. They thought he was dead. And then ... like a ghost ... he came out from house arrest, accompanied by Vaclav Havel, and the people of Czechoslovakia, waking up once again, could not believe their eyes. Dubcek! The man who tried to set them free! His emergence made them remember who they were. And then they fought back like hell, and toppled the house of cards. At last.

1968 - 1989
But up until 1989, the Czechs suffered under a hardline Stalinist regime. Who knows what was going on in the privacy of Czechoslovakian homes, but on the outside: they became a drab backwards silent Communist country. The borders closed, the trade unions shut down, everything got very reactionary, and extremely rigid.

GLASNOST
Gorbachev's idea of glasnost was a huge threat to Gustav Husak. Husak LIVED in the shadow of the 1968 invasion. He did not want the humiliation of Dubcek, being rejected by his former Communist friends. Husak refused to take on glasnost as a concept, even though Gorbachev was encouraging all of his "clients" to do so. Husak held on, and held on tight, to the old way.

And again, it was as though the Czech people were under a cloud. Glasnost did not infect the Czech nation. The 1968 invasion had been so devastating, so painful.

The only people protesting, and demanding that Husak start adopting glasnost, were the intellectuals. The writers. Vaclav Havel, most of all. Vaclav Havel had been there the whole time, stirring up shit, creating human rights organizations, writing plays, getting arrested, getting in trouble ... but it was never enough to make the population, as a whole, rise up. It was more like a "cafe" revolution. Tortured intellectuals talking about a better world over cups of coffee, while outside, all the normal people slogged off to work, unaware, uncaring.

As the astonishing changes started sweeping through Eastern Europe, during 1988 and 1989, the Husak regime became more and more alarmed. Their response was to crack down harder and harder, isolate their country even more. Idiots. You can't keep out life!

Oh, and I forgot to tell about one important thing:

Jan Palach ... and what he meant
The year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1969, Jan Palach, a young student in Prague, burned himself to death in the middle of Wenceslas Square to protest the invasion of his country. He killed himself on January 16, 1969.

In the years after, the decades after, nobody was ever allowed to memorialize Palach. People would secretly gather together on the day of his death to remember him, but any public sentiment of mourning for Palach was punishable with prison time. This was one of Havel's raison d'etres: every single year he would stage some sort of public memorial service for Palach, and every year he would get arrested. But this never stopped him, this never shut him up. Palach WOULD be remembered.

Today, the spot of his death is marked with a cross and a plaque. People every year gather around to remember this martyr for the cause of a free Czechoslovakia.

So back to glasnost.

Glasnost 1988, 1989
Suddenly, unbelievably, during 1988 and 1989, without Moscow's "permission", without Husak's "permission", Czech people started flaunting forbidden things: the Czech flag, photos of Dubcek, photos of Palach. They were, in the words of Havel, "behaving AS IF they were free in an unfree nation". It was a quiet rebellion, though. No demands for change were made, and Husak had created an environment that barely let the Czech people breathe on their own.

On November 17, 1989, the Communist youth movement in Prague organized a demonstration, a peaceful demonstration, to memorialize 9 students killed by the Nazis in 1939. A peaceful crowd of 50,000 people gathered. Mostly students and intellectuals. The workers of the country remained slumbering. Rip Van Winkle. The Husak regime brutally crushed this peaceful demonstration. 500 people were beaten by the police. 100 people were arrested.

And this, suddenly, was the spark. The straw. The galvanizing moment when the entire Czech nation woke up. When the entire Czech nation suddenly HEARD what Havel had been saying for so many years, and stepped in line beside him.

Instead of crushing the rebellion, the regime, through its own actions, exploded it into an inferno.

The Velvet Revolution
Let me try to describe it to you from an uber-perspective, so you can get just how fast this all happened. It stuns me.

In 1988: Czechoslovakia remained a place of repressive calm. The only loudmouth was Vaclav Havel. And nobody was listening, except for people in the West. His own country ignored him.

In 1989: a movement began, a student movement. The students began calling for a change in government, they began calling for change.

Oct. 1989: 10,000 students demonstrated, calling for change. There was a massive show of force from the government. Heavily armed police put down the demonstrations, and the tyrants stayed in power. (Here's something else: by December, 2 months later, the entire Communist Party in Czechoslovakia had resigned. I mean, this is stunning. But I get ahead of myself.)

Nov. 17, 1989: The memorial demonstration for those killed by the Nazis, people arrested, people beaten ... This was the spark I have spoken of.

The days following Nov. 17: Instead of backing down, the students kept demonstrating. Every single day. Every single day the crowds got larger, and larger, and larger. The students, the intellectuals, kept begging the workers to join them. They needed their support. It was a difficult fight, it took a lot of persuading over the days following Nov. 17, but the workers, so long asleep, finally left their jobs, went on strike, and joined the students. Constant demonstrations. Husak had no more authority.

More in November, 1989, it was a big month: Vaclav Havel, at the forefront, created an organization called the Civic Forum, to investigate charges of police brutality on November 17. He was relentless. And every day, the crowds got bigger. And louder. Vaclav Havel not only was calling for investigations, he was also calling for the entire Communist Party to resign.

And...

on November 24, 1989 They did. The entire Politburo resigned, in one shot.

From November 17 to November 24 is just 7 days. Unbelievable.

AND: (it gets better, it gets even more breathtaking)

On December 29, 1989, Vaclav Havel is elected president of the new free Czechoslovakia. And Dubcek emerged from hiding, at Havel's side, and was elected speaker of the national assembly.

A peaceful transition of power. A so-called "velvet revolution". The Communists basically gave up, and walked away.

There was not one casualty in Czechoslovakia, following the Nov. 17 demonstration. Compared to other countries in Eastern Europe, this is phenomenal. A tribute to the Czech people, I would say.

In 1993, the nation experienced what they called "a velvet divorce" from the Slovaks. They split into two national components: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Havel was president of Czechoslovakia for 10 years. He stepped down in February of 2003, and Vaclav Klaus is now the President. The Czech Republic is now a member of NATO, and were invited to join the EU in 2002. It is expected that they will be ready to join in 2004. Their economic policies have been working for them, and they have made an amazing economic recovery, after decades of Soviet mismanagement. Tourism is booming. The industrial base (completely decrepit and outdated through the years of Communism) has been updated, and is functioning at a very high level. There are goods to buy, the cities are blossoming, Prague is back. They've still got problems, of course. Every country does. They suffer from severe pollution, much of the land was destroyed during the decades of Communism, there's a lot of crime ... but these are the basic problems for every city. The Czech Republic has joined the world again.

It's one of my favorite stories of the 20th century. The story of their "velvet revolution".

The Czech Republic - Part I - History

Per my dad's request, here are my "Czech Republic" pieces, hijacked over from my old blog.

To all the historian readers I have - please feel free to interject at any time - and let me know if my interpretation is faulty, or if I'm missing certain elements. I am not an expert. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Also - I have a love for Czechoslovakia, primarily through its art - a deep love - and so I am completely biased, and this may color how I talk about things.

Let me know if this is the case!

This first piece is on the long history of what is now called The Czech Republic.

The Czech Republic - Part I - History

This first essay takes us up to World War I.

Back in the day
Czechoslovakia has never stayed in the same form for too long.

In the 5th and 6th centuries, the Slavs arrived in this region. The various tribes adopted Christianity soon after and eventually cohered into an empire. An empire that didn't last very long. It was called the Great Moravian Empire, and had its glory days from 830 to 906. It was a large empire, encompassing areas in Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Silesia and Bohemia. Silesia and Bohemia are now regions in the Czech Republic.

At the end of the 9th century, the Czechs seceded from this empire to form the country of Bohemia. (A country named Bohemia clearly would eventually elect Vaclav Havel as president.) But the Czechs still were factioned off into little tribes, squabbling tribes, without any unification. So it was very easy for King Otto I (King of Germany) to stroll into Bohemia in 950 and conquer them. Bohemia was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire, but still: King Otto gave the Bohemian prince (Otakar I) at the time the right to some degree of autonomy (again: this is a theme which also comes up again and again in Czech history) and self-rule. The son of the Bohemian prince (Otakar II) was more ambitious than was expected of him: he tried to claim for himself the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and he also tried to proclaim himself King of the Czechs. This all happened during the middle ages, the 1200s.

Otakar II was doomed for disappointment. The imperial crown instead went to Rudolph Hapsburg, which ushers in a whole new phase in Czech history.

The Hapsburgs were strong rulers. Tyrannical to some, benign to others. It was an empire, after all. The Czech people were subjects in this empire, subjects with a long memory, a memory of a grand past, when they had princes and kings. This past is symbolized (to this day) by Prague Castle, an undeniable reminder of the greatness of this nation once upon a time. During the long drab years under Soviet rule, their borders were closed off, and they were completely cut off from the rest of the world. But there ... in Prague ... was their castle. The memory of the country contained in its borders; the Soviets could not erase that memory, even though they tried.

Under the Hapsburgs, Bohemia flourished. They had strong protection from the empire, and so were able to blossom, and experience a Golden Age, since they didn't have worries about self-defense or keeping enemies at bay. Prague became one of the most important cities in Europe.

Moving along in history...
I know a lot of huge stuff went down in the 14th and 15th centuries, but it gets confusing, and I am not too sure of my facts, so I will not be vague, and pretend I understand it all.

I know there were revolutions, I know there was some sort of mass religious reform movement which alarmed the Catholics, and caused a lot of problems. The status quo of Catholicism in Europe was threatened by the reform. And then along came the Hapsburgs again. The Hapsburgs were, of course, a Catholic empire.

The Czech nation came under the Hapsburg sphere again in the 1500s. The Hapsburgs made promises to the Czechs, and did not follow through. (This is yet another theme in the story of Czechoslovakia.) They said that they would have religious tolerance for minorities, they promised freedom, and they also promised the Bohemian royal families that they would maintain their royal privileges. None of this occurred. The Bohemian Royal Estates revolted against this, violently. Two Hapsburg officials were pushed out of a window, and plummeted to their deaths. This event sparked the Thirty Years War. Well, no. That is an exaggeration. There was a hell of a lot of religious turmoil swirling all across Europe at that time. And THAT was what sparked the Thirty Years War ... but the Bohemians were so rebellious, and so angry, and actually killed some of the Hapsburgs, so the Hapsburgs felt they had no choice but to crack-down, and crack down HARD, on the pesky little Czechs.

But the real issue in Bohemia, is that the Hapsburgs wanted to stomp out Protestantism, squash it like a bug.

Like I said: I am tearing through this story. I am missing a lot.

The Thirty Years War
This war was crushing to the Czechs.

Here's a quote about what happened (one of those interminable quotes I collect - sometimes I remember to write down where it came from, sometimes I do not - This one, unfortunately, is un-attributed):

The Austrian Habsburgs had failed in their efforts to increase their authority in the Empire and to eradicate Protestantism, but they emerged from the war stronger than before. In Bohemia, they had stamped out Protestantism, broken the power of the old nobility, and declared the crown hereditary in the male line of their family. With Bohemia now firmly in their grasp and with their large group of adjoining territories, they were ready to expand to the east in the Balkans, to the south in Italy, or to interfere once more in the Empire.

So in the end, the Czechs lost everything. They lost all of their rights. They lost all of their hard-won freedom. They lost their property. They also then were put through forced Catholicization and forced Germanization. The Hapsburgs (again: sometimes benign, sometimes tyrannical) wanted to wipe out the concept of Czech national identity. They wanted to erase the individuality of the Czech people off the map forever. This was devastating. And they nearly succeeded.

What is so incredible, and hopeful, is that it did NOT succeed. You cannot do that to people. You cannot. They will, no matter what the hell you do to them, remember who they are, and where they came from. Sometimes, the worse the tyranny, the stronger the cultural memory. Milan Kundera writes about that so well.

But here's what's even more incredible:

After the Thirty Years War, the Hapsburgs kept Bohemia under such a strong thumb that nothing changed in that country for THREE CENTURIES. I mean, of course, people grew up, got married, died, had fun, cried, built buildings, tore buildings down. But I'm talking about evolution as a nation. That completely stopped. They were beaten. Defeated.

The Hapsburgs won.

Until ...

The mid-1800s
Tracy Chapman may think that revolution "sounds like a whisper", but the year of 1848 was a year of shriekingly loud revolutions, which caught on like a brushfire, leaping across borders, igniting in first this country, then that one. Not a hell of a lot of whispering going on. Empires, monarchies - all going up in flames.

Bohemia got caught up in it, too, despite the lead cloak of the Hapsburgs. They began to buck against the authority (the Czechs seem to have a talent for that). They may LOOK like they are being compliant, but underneath it all: they are ready to explode.

I read a great quote from Vaclav Havel about his many years living under Soviet oppression. And of course, he was a big loud-mouth trouble-maker, writing inflammatory plays (none of which were allowed to be performed in his own country), creating human rights organizations, ignoring the ban on public meetings of more than 10 people. Vaclav Havel, at one point, decided to "behave AS IF he were free, in an unfree nation". He was arrested countless times, he was constantly followed, spied upon ... but he behaved AS IF he were free. This seems to me to be a talent of the Czech people.

Anyway. Back to the story.

Slowly, slowly ... the Czech people began to contemplate being a free and independent state. This desire percolated for many years, as the Hapsburg Empire slowly deteriorated.

All of that ended when Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian student, stepped out of the crowd one day in Sarajevo and assassinated the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Of course, this was the shot heard round the world. The shot that began World War I.

History was about to speed up again for the Czechs. Only to come to a shrieking halt once more.

I have a psychic twin

and his name is Dennis Miller. Although I would never think to say something like, "To me Dennis Kucinich's politics are more scrambled than Rod Steiger's dream journal". Rod Steiger's dream journal. That is funny to me on such a deep level that I don't even know how to talk about it.

Great piece on Miller in the New York Times, discussing his conservative transformation after September 11, which appears to be identical to my own.

I agree with all that he says - and better yet, I love what he says, because it is done with wit. I relate. I like how he speaks. Although - again - I also would never ever ever think to call John Madden "the Pliny the Elder of football announcers". WHAT?? So freakin' FUNNY.

The man is insanely brilliant - and right-on-the-money.

People say I've slid to the right. Well, can you blame me? One of the biggest malfeasances of the left right now is the mislabeling of Hitler. Quit saying this guy is Hitler. Hitler is Hitler. That's the quintessential evil in the history of the universe, and we're throwing it around on MoveOn.org to win a contest. That's grotesque to me."

Also:

I think abortion's wrong, but it's none of my business to tell somebody what's wrong. So I'm pro-choice. I want to keep my nose out of other people's personal business. I guess I fall into conservative when it comes to protecting the United States in a world where a lot of people hate the United States."

And:

Everybody should be in the protection business now. I can't imagine anybody not saying that. Well, I guess on the farthest end of the left they'd say, `That's our fault.' And on the middle end they'd say, `Well, there's another way to deal with it other than flat-out protecting ourselves.' I just don't believe that. People say we're the ones who make them hate us because of what we do. That's garbage to me. I think they're nuts. And you've got to protect yourself from nuts."

Yeah - like NUTS. You don't need to understand why NUTS hate you because they are not rational and they are NUTS.

Dennis Miller is my psychic twin and that's all I'm saying.

But still - Rod Steiger's dream journal??

(via Vodka Pundit)

Hungary Essays

Here are all my blitherings about Hungary, compiled:

Part I - Geography as Destiny

Part II - Culture

Part III - 1989

Part IV - Budapest

Part V - 1956

Hungary - Part V - 1956

This post is a simple version of the Hungarian revolt against Soviet Russia in 1956, the revolt which had such long-lasting implications, in terms of its effect on the psyche of Hungarians.

HUNGARY - PART V - 1956

This is why, as the edifice cracked in the late 1980s, demonstrations commemorating fallen heroes were such a massive deal in all of the countries of the Soviet bloc. Heroes whose names had been erased from the public record, heroes the Communist Party wanted to wipe out of people's memory banks ...

The 1956 revolt in Hungary cost an estimated 30,000 lives.

The Soviet Army tried to control the protests, the demonstrations. They cracked down on the journalists, the academics, the students ... all to no avail. The revolt kept escalating, gathering speed and momentum.

The year was 1956. The Cold War was in full bloom. The Communists were not going to give an inch. So the Soviet Army feigned a withdrawal from all the hotspots in Hungary. People noticed the troops were gone, they noticed that they were no longer being watched and persecuted. So they relaxed. The dissidents and loud-mouthed intellectuals and journalists came out of hiding.

And on November 4, 1956, the Soviet Army launched a surprise attack and crushed the uprising, decimating the opposition. The tanks rolled through Hungary, terrorizing the population. There were Stalinist show trials, tons of people were hanged and tossed in unmarked graves. People were forced to rat each other out, people were tortured, murdered, executed. The spirit of Hungary was crushed (temporarily), along with the revolution. It's like the country went into a deep depression after that, a clinical depression which lingered, and lingered, and lingered.

Moscow then secretly put Janos Kadar in full charge of the country. He had actually been freed from prison by Mr. Nagy. Kadar dominated Hungary from 1956 until 1988, when he was deposed. It sounds to me like he was a Soviet puppet.

The long-delayed funeral service for Nagy in 1989 was one of the sparks which lit the match which ignited the entire world of Eastern Europe to throw off the Communist dominators. You cannot obliterate a people's memory. You cannot tell them who to care about. You cannot say, "No no no no, Nagy really wasn't for YOU ... he was a pawn of the Communists ... Love KADAR...LOVE KADAR." People are NOT that stupid.

I am thinking of Iran. The Shah (the last Shah, anyway) could not make the Iranian people love him and get behind his plans for their country. No matter how hard he tried, he had not captured the hearts and minds of his people. You cannot fake the kind of devotion and mania the Iranians had when Khomeini returned to Iran. This sort of devotion can be dysfunctional, and terrifying, like all of the Aryan youths marching around screaming "Heil, Hitler!", or it can take on a more benign form.

Imre Nagy, the prime minister of Hungary, a Communist himself!, did not want the country to be crushed and dominated by Communism. He did not want the citizens of Hungary to be dogged by secret police wherever they went. He stood up for them, he spoke up for them. He paid for this with his life. The Hungarians love him. He is their hero. Their voice.

The outpouring of love over 30 years later at Nagy's funeral was baffling to the Communist Party, which continued to try to control things in Hungary. But they were increasingly losing it. They refused to rehabilitate Nagy's memory.

But here is the New York Times article (or an excerpt from it), describing what happened at this memorial service in June, 1989.

Thirty-one years after he was hanged and his body thrown into a prison grave, Imre Nagy, who led the 1956 uprising against Soviet domination, was given a solemn funeral today ... The ceremonies were organized by the opposition, which worships the former Prime Minister as a national hero, but four leading members of the ruling Communist Party came to pay tribute ... The four top party officials ...left before a succession of eulogies to Imre Nagy that were unsparing in their condemnation of the Communist Party and its ally, the Soviet Union.

Many in the crowd looked up in shock and seemed to be holding their breath to hear at so public a ceremony, in so sumptuous a setting, words of such astonishing candor ...

Victor Orban, a spokesman for the Federation of Young Democrats, paid tribute to Mr. Nagy as a man who, although a Communist, "identified himself with the wishes of the Hungarian nation to put an end to the Communist taboos, blind obedience to the Russian empire and the dictatorship of a single party." ...

Sandor Racz, who led the Budapest Workers' Council during the uprising and spent seven years in prison, condemned the Soviet Army and the Communist Party as "obstacles for Hungarian society". ... He said the party was "clinging fearfully to power," although it was clear that "what it failed to achieve in the last 44 years cannot be remedied now." He continued, "They are responsible for the past. They are responsible for the damaged lives of Hungarians."

Budapest experienced a day full of anomalies and contradictions. No state funeral could have been more solemnly and publicly marked or held in a more prestigious settling, but for the Hungarian Governemtn and the ruling party, Mr. Nagy and the four companions who were sentenced to death and now reburied with him remain traitors and counterrrevolutionaries...As recently as earlier this year, Mr. Grosz still ruled out Mr. Nagy's rehabilitation. On the 30th anniversary of the hangings last year, the police broke up with considerable violence a small tribute organized by dissidents on a Budapest square.

It was an anomaly also that the Soviet Union and Hungary's other Communist friends sent diplomats, but not their ambassadors, to attend the ceremony, although it had no official character that would have obliged them to be there. But other Communist countries -- China, North Korea, Romania, and Albania -- stayed away.

The Heroes Square ceremony was staged, in one more irony, by the son of another executed Communist, Laszlo Rajk, who was Interior and Foreign Minister. Mr. Rajk, a loyal Communist, was hanged after a show trial in 1949 at the height of the Stalinist period. The younger Laszlo Rajk, an architect and movie set deisgner, draped the neoclassical facade of the art museum and a tall column in the center of the square's vast expanse fully in black and white, traditional mourning colors among the Hungarians of Transylvania, annexed by Romania. He devised strikingly modern wood and metal structures as a setting on which to display the five coffins, as well as a sixth, empty one commemorating the more than 300 victims of judicial retributions after the uprising. Tall, flaming torches stood between the coffins, and a permanent rotation of honorary pallbearers -- including widows, children, and other relatives of the five victims being buried -- flanked them ...

Today, after the wreath-laying and eulogies, a procession of hearses, followed by cars and buses, set out for the huge public ceremony next to the prison where the hangings took place ... Beyond them, in an adjoining field full of mainly unmarked graves, a tomb had been dug for Mr. Nagy. His daughter had requested that he be laid to rest amid the bulk of those who paid with their lives for following his lead.

Two actors read in alphabetical order the names of the 260 victims, who were executed from 1956 to 1961, their occupations and their ages. At each name, a torchbearer stepped forward, held high the flame and replied, "He has lived in us; he has not gone."

When the name of one of the five was called, surname first, in the Hungarian fashion, like "Nagy Imre, Prime Minister, 62 years," his coffin was carried to the grave and a friend delivered a eulogy. Then, supporting one another, his nearest relatives stepped to the grave to put down flowers and stand, with bowed heads, allowed for the first time to mourn in public, together with those who share their grief.

Unbelievable.

After that funeral service, the power of the Communist Party continued to erode throughout the summer. The party leadership elected a four-man presidency, and then it stripped one of the four (who had succeeded Kadar as party leader) of all authority. The party liberals were rising, and suddenly: other parties outside the political system started sprouting up. Parties of dissidents, cultural activists, ecologists, cultural nationalists. These parties all started calling for pluralistic free elctions. They demanded that they occur in 1990. No more "some day", no more "we're working on it." It was 1989. They wanted the elections in 1990.

And indeed, elections were scheduled by 1990, and secretly the Communist Party members in Hungary began talking amongst themselves about how to liquidate the party's assets, and change its name (so they could participate in the free elections as well).

Hungary - Part IV - Budapest

This post is made up of excerpts from Robert Kaplan's man-on-the-street reporting from the streets of Budapest. It is a mix of historical information, personal impressions, and quotes from a man he meets - Rudolf Fischer. Kaplan's books are never straight history, which is why I enjoy them, although they may be displeasing to history buffs because it focuses on the personal, and on somewhat anecdotal information.

I like the anecdotes. I like meeting the people of the country through Kaplan's eyes.

HUNGARY - PART IV - BUDAPEST

These excerpts are snapshots from that chapter.

Fischer unfurled his set of late-nineteenth-century Austrian army staff maps and a somewhat earlier German one. "These are the maps you must use at the start of your journey," he told me. "They are better than Cold War era maps. The maps before 1989 are, of course, useless. The Iron Curtain is still a social and cultural border. Do you know the real service provided by McDonald's in Hungary and the other formerly socialist countries? They are the only place where people -- women, especially -- can find a clean public lavatory."

Kaplan on the still reverberating echo of the Roman empire:

Very simply put, the split running through the Balkans between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires to which Fischer referred reflects a much earlier division. In the fourth century A.D., the Roman empire divided into western and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire, while Constantinople became the capital of the eastern one. Rome's western empire eventually gave way to Charlemagne's kingdom and to the Vatican: Western Europe, in other words. The eastern empire -- Byzantium -- was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and later by Moslems, when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. The border between the eastern and western empires ran through the middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia. When that state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially it echoed the division of Rome sixteen centuries earlier: The Slovenes and Croats were Roman Catholics, heirs to a tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary to Rome in the West; the Serbs, however, were Eastern Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East.

Kaplan on the Carpathian Mountains:

The Carpathians, which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium and, later, between the Habsburg emperors in Vienna and the Turkish sultans in Constantinople. Rudolf Fischer told me that the Carpathians, which were not easily traversed, halted the eastward spread of European culture, marked by Romanesque and Gothic architecture and by the Renaissance and Reformation.

A quote from Rudolf Fischer on the Carpathian Mountains and the divide between West and East:

"Romania -- because of the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation in the northwest of the country -- had been more developed than Greece before World War II! It was only the Truman Doctrine -- $10 billion in American aid, in 1940s dollars no less -- that created today's westernized Greece. Let me go on in the same vein. The differences between the Hungarian Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi and the Romanian Stalinist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and even more so between their successors, Janos Kadar and Nicolae Ceausescu, were the differences -- don't you see! -- between Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. Rakosi and Kadar may have been perverse Central Europeans, but as Hungarians, they were Central Europeans nonetheless. But Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu were Oriental despots, from a part of Europe influenced more by Ottoman Turkey than by Habsburg Austria. That's why communism did less damage to Hungary than to Romania."

Fischer on the difficulty Hungary faces in escaping its communist past:

"Our whores in Budapest are Russian and Ukrainian; our money -- though it floats freely -- is still worthless in the West; our oil and gas are from Russia; and we have mafia murders and corruption just like in the countries to the south and east. Mafia shootings and the drug trade put pressure on the Hungarian government to make [entrance] visas compulsory for Romanians, Serbs, and Ukrainians, who are thought to be the culprits, but that will never happen, because it will separate us from the ethnic Hungarians just over the [Romanian] border. We are tied to the ex-Communist East, whether we like it or not."

Kaplan on the lingering effects of Communism in the Hungarian urban landscape:

...the hallway in his building was dark and untidy, like many that I had seen throughout the former Communist world, where decades of state ownership had given people no incentive to maintain property, an attitude that was changing slowly. There was, too, the building itself, and all the others in Fischer's neighborhood, whose unfinished look and poor construction -- plate glass and mustard-colored cinder blocks -- were more typical of buildings in formerly Communist Central Asia than those in Austria, just a two-hour ride away by train. The Berlin Wall may have fallen in November 1989, but for a traveler almost a decade later, its ghost was still present.

A conversation between Kaplan and Fischer about Hungary, NATO, and the EU:

Kaplan: "What about NATO? Will its new eastern frontier -- following the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary-- mark the border of the Near East?" Fischer: "NATO doesn't matter. Only the EU is real. The EU is about currency, border controls, passports, trade, interest rates, environmental and dietary regulations -- the details of daily life -- which will change Hungary. For decades Austria was not part of NATO, but did you ever think of Austria as part of Eastern Europe or the Near East? Of course not."

Kaplan expanding on the new Near East:

Therefore, it appeared likely -- at least if the EU expanded into Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland but took a decade to grant full membership to Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, and Russia -- that the Western alliance would be an eerie variation of the Holy Roman Empire at its zenith in the 11th century, and the split between Western and Eastern Christianity would be institutionalized once more, as it had been during the divisions between Rome and Byzantium and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The Near East would then begin on the border of Hungary and Romania. Completing the reemergence of this older map, Russia was now returning to the dimensions of 16th century Muscovy: a vibrant city-state within a chaotic hinterland.

A conversation between Fischer and Kaplan about the borders of Hungary:

Fischer: "Hungarians want to spiritualize the frontiers -- that is the word that they use here."
Kaplan: "You mean they want the borders to be filters: to protect, but not to divide."
Fischer: "Perhaps. What the Hungarians really want is to let ethnic Hungarians from the east into Hungary, but nobody else."

Fischer on modern-day Europe:

Fischer then railed against the "modern age" in Europe, in which democratic stirrings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries strengthened ethnic nationalism, while industrialization strengthened the power of states. The result was the collapse of multiethnic empires like Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey and the rise of uniethnic powers like Germany and of nasty tribal principalities in the post-World War I Balkans, though they were in some cases called parliamentary democracies. Even the 1848 democratic revolutions in Central Europe, it seemed, were not so pure; they were based on ethnicity as much as on liberal ideals, and in Hungarian (Magyar) areas, at least, were opposed by the minority Croats, Serbs, and Romanians. For Fischer, with his background, the modern age had meant "Magyarization campaigns" and other forms of "ethnic cleansing", crucial to the establishment of petty states tyrannized by ethnic majorities.

A personal story from Fischer's past which illuminates the problems with Hungarian nationalism. It is the story of what happened to him on his 21st birthday, September 17, 1944:

"Because my father and I had fled Romania when World War II broke out and managed to get visas to Australia, I was in the Australian army on my 21st birthday. My commanding officer had given me a short leave. Thus, I spent my birthday alone, walking in the Australian countryside and thinking about who among my family and friends back in Transylvania were alive or dead. What had happened to them? Soon after the war, I learned that on that very day, Hungarian soldiers shot the entire Jewish population of Sarmas, a village east of Kolozsvar, in Transylvania. Those poor people. They had thought of themselves as Hungarian. They spoke Hungarian. They had managed to survive five years of fascism without being deported to concentration camps. It was as if they had been miraculously forgotten while every kind of horror reigned around them. Then their own Hungarian soldiers appears in Sarmas, and what did they do? They herded all the Jews into pigsties for several days and then took them to a hill and massacred them. Within the Holocaust, there were many little pogroms. This is why I remember so vividly walking alone in Australia on my 21st birthday. Because the memory of it was preserved by what I later found out had occurred on that same day in Sarmasu. You see, Robert, Hungarian nationalism, Romanian nationalism -- they're all bad. The boundary formed by the Carpathians was benign compared to these modern nationalistic boundaries, because the Carpathians divided empires within which peoples and religions mixed. I am a cosmopolitan. That is what every civilized person must now try to be!"

Fischer says to Kaplan: "We are going for a walk. I have something to show you which you must see before you start on your journey.":

Near Orczy Square, in the far-off southeast corner of Budapest, we came to an immense hodgepodge of metal-framed stalls and greasy canteens set up in abandoned Russian railway cars. I saw Chinese-manufactured high-top running shoes on sale for the equivalent of ten dollars, sweaters for four dollars, socks, clocks, jackets, cell phones, shampoo, toys, and just about any other necessity -- all cheap and made in either Asia or formerly Communist Europe. Many of the goods were Russian. The food at the canteens was Turkish. The merchants were Chinese, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian nationalities, but mostly Chinese. i noticed bus stops for destinations in Romania and other points east, but never west. Hungarian policemen were ubiquitous, for there had been several murders here recently. Nobody was well dressed.

"People in Budapest call this place the Chinese market," Fischer told me. "It grew in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and China loosened travel restrictions on its own citizens. It is a real caravansary." Chinese families dominated a vast underground trading network that provided cheap goods for the overwhelming majority of people in Eastern Europe, who could not afford the new Western-style shops. Here, any language worked. Commerce was the great equalizer. "Yes, it is a bit violent, with gangland killings," Fischer said. "But is it any different from the backstreets of Odessa one or two hundred years ago, where my Jewish ancestors and yours were carrying on much as these people do now?"

"This is all I have to show you, Robert," Fischer concluded. "Remember that the Iron Curtain still forms a community. Just look at this market. Over four decades of the most comprehensive repression cannot be wished away in a few years." Fischer guided me onto a tram and rode with me for a few stops. "It is good that you will be passing through Transylvania. Ah, so much to see there," he said, his voice full of longing. Then he stepped off the tram and waved good-bye by lifting his walking stick.

Hungary - Part III - 1989

This post is about the world-wrenching events of 1989, and Hungary's role in all of that.

HUNGARY - PART III - 1989

The Berlin Wall came down in November. But that mind-blowing development was created by a crisis in Hungary. A crisis for the Communist Party and for the Soviet Union in general.

Basically, the edifice of the Communist Party had been crumbling for awhile, and suddenly, in a matter of a year, there was no mask left. Nobody cared, nobody listened to them anymore. There was no belief in the power of the Communist Party. It was a paper dragon. The slaughter in Beijing, under the eyes of the visiting Gorbachev, had something to do with it, but it also was a fever which spread across the world, in all places at once. Lech Walesa and Solidarity, the massacre of demonstrators in Tbilisi ... every single country began to explode, and the Communist Party was completely ineffective in dealing with all of these crises. There would be no Prague Spring this time. No one listened to the mouthpieces anymore. No one feared the Paper Dragon.

And here is what the Hungarians did: Let me make sure I get this straight:

For decades, Hungary was a popular vacation spot for people from behind the Iron Curtain. It was a summer "resort" spot, with lakes and cabins (as opposed to a wintry Alp-type atmosphere.) Knowing the holiday season in Hungary is important because it was when everyone started returning home for their vacations in late August, early September 1989, that everything started changing, cracking, accelerating.

East Germans and West Germans would use Hungary (a relatively open and relaxed Communist country ... as opposed to the more Stalinist Romania, or the wacky militant Bulgars) as a meeting spot in the summer months. Families would be reunited, would have vacations together on a yearly basis, and then return to their respective homes, on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.

For forty years, the Hungarian border guards were fierce about making sure that the East Germans returned to East Germany. The border with Austria was one of the toughest and most harassing in the world, because it was the place where you could escape. Austria represented Europe, and the West. Hungary was Communist, so the poor East Germans didn't have a chance to escape because everybody had their eye on them. First of all, they were hated because they were Germans, part of the country that started two World Wars. Second of all, they were from a divided country. They still had enormous family connections on the other side of the wall. Of course they wanted the wall to be taken down, so that they could be with their relatives again, see their families again. This was just the sort of tight family bond that the Communist Party frowned upon. And the situation in Germany was extremely volatile because of this. The Berlin Wall did not make things easier for the Communists. It made things worse.

So anyway. Back to Hungary.

Hungary had a treaty agreement with East Germany, signed in 1968, saying that they would not permit East German citizens to travel to the West via Hungary.

And then suddenly, in the early autumn of 1989, the foreign minister of Hungary (Gyula Horn) decided to ignore his treaty obligations. He did so without any permission from Moscow, without any discussion with the politburo. This is just incredible.

But here's what led up to that autonomous decision which changed everything. What is so incredible is how quickly the massive Communist structure toppled. The rot within was so extensive. The East Germany refugee crisis was in September1989, the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, and it all was over by summer of 1991.

Phenomenal.

Hungary decided to let some of the East German refugees pass through to the West with their families and the border guards turned a blind eye. At first. So this is in itself incredible, and goes to show you how much things had relaxed, how the power had been crumbling bit by bit - until in one fell swoop, it no longer existed. But what began as a small trickle of people exploded, and quickly, into a massive refugee crisis. Once people heard that you could get to the West easily through Hungary, they all basically packed their bags, left East Germany, and poured into Hungary. This was an incredibly embarrassing situation for the Communists in Moscow, and for the politburo in Hungary. What should they do? There were thousands and thousands of people suddenly crushing up against the border with Austria. Tens of thousands of refugees. And this was not a refugee crisis of the kind we are accustomed to - poor bedraggled people, huddled in tents on a windy plain. These people were young, educated, and supposedly the future of the Communist Party.

Here's a quote from Michael Dobbs' great book Down with Big Brother:

Unbeknownst to either man, the foreign minister of Hungary made a decision, in the privacy of his Budapest home, that led inexorably to the fall of the Berlin Wall less than three months later. Gyula Horn was grappling with the kind of excruciating moral and political dilemma familiar to many Communist reformers that summer. Over the past few months Hungary had been transformed into a holding pen for tens of thousands of East German refugees. Very few were political dissidents. For the most part they were young people, fed up with the austerity of life under communism and the never-ending snooping of the secret police. They had given up on their dogmatic Communist leaders, who seemed allergic to the very idea of reform, and were voting with their feet. From Hungary they wanted nothing more than safe passage to the bright lights of capitalism in West Germany. "There is no future for us in the East" was a common refrain. The foreign minister had to decide whether to let them go or keep them penned up in the Communist East.

Now this is amazing: Yes, Hungary had this treaty with East Germany. Hungary did fear that the hard-liners in Berlin, in Moscow, would come down on them fiercely if they broke this treaty and let the refugees go through. Czechloslovakia's "Prague Spring" in 1968 had been a warning to all Communist countries everywhere of what could happen if you started ignoring Moscow.

HOWEVER: a few months before Hungary filled up with East German refugees it had also signed an international agreement pledging freedom of travel, and also "humane treatment" of refugees.

So this was Horn's dilemma. He knew the whole world was watching his country's behavior because Hungary had signed this international agreement, stating its commitment to human rights. Hungary was a Communist state. Was it possible for a Communist country to protect the human rights of its citizens, as well as people "visiting" their country? Beijing was an obvious debacle in this regard. The world was still shocked, stunned, and devastated (one more descriptive term, Sheila??) by the massacre in Tienamen Square. There had been hope that the Chinese government was changing: allowing the students to speak out, allowing forums on democracy, etc. But once they were confronted by an actual revolution, they crushed it like a bug.

Would Hungary go the same way? Would Hungary reveal itself to be as hypocritical and as afraid as China? Would it honor its agreement with Moscow? Or would it honor its agreement with the world?

Horn (a hero in my book) decided, on his own, without getting permission from the powers-that-be in Moscow, to stand by the international human-rights agreement, and NOT the agreement with East Germany.

Another quote from Dobbs:

After a sleepless night, pacing up and down his sitting room, the 57 year old foreign minister made up his mind. He decided to abrogate the treaty with East Berlin and let the refugees go. Hungarian leaders had earlier taken the precaution of informally testing the waters with Moscow. The Soviets appeared to have no objection.

"There was no other way," Horn recalled later. "We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise. It was quite obvious to me that this would be the first step in a landslide-like series of events."

And he was certainly correct. East Germans fled their own country in droves. They piled into Hungary, poured out through Austria, and then poured into West Germany to be reunited joyously with their families. This directly led to the Berlin Wall coming down a couple of months later.

"We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise" said Horn. God bless him. He may have acted out of a sense of his own political survival, and not out of any lofty goal. But still - in an uber sense, he did the right thing.

Hungary - Part II - Culture

Unfortunately, my notes about Hungary start in the 800 ADs, and then skip to World War I. My apologies for that. One of the many cool things about doing this whole "Country of the Week" thing is that I get to see what I don't know, and the obvious gaps. I have no idea what Hungary was like in between the 10th century and the 20th century, and that's a pretty huge freakin' gap.

Here are a couple of general points about Hungary:

HUNGARY - PART II - CULTURE

Hungary had always been way more influenced by Habsburg Austria than by Ottoman Turkey.

Hungary has a large Calvinist population, mostly in the eastern part of the country. Hungary also has a large Catholic population. Robert Kaplan describes the interesting (and potentially volatile) relationship between these two faiths, and also how these faiths have manifested themselves in Hungary in areas like economic development:

"In the mid-sixteenth century Debrecen [a city in eastern Hungary] was a hotbed of the Reformation, and Catholics were forbidden to settle. Here, a Calvinist college was established and local Calvinists made a pact with the ruling Moslem Turks to provide for the town's security. But the so-called Prussian work ethic did not invigorate the Calvinists of Debrecen. 'In eastern Hungary, Calvinism has been mere conservatism and fatalism, yet another element of ethnicity surrounded by religious walls, proscribing innovation,' Laszlo Csaba, a Hungarian economist and social critic, had told me in Budapest. It has always been the Catholic areas of Hungary that displayed economic dynamism. (Csaba had added that the 'Prussian work ethic,' based partly on Protestantism, was also misunderstood. 'The Prussian work ethic was not entrepreneurial, but fitted to bureaucracy and mass industrialization. It functioned only if somebody else supplied the jobs and told people what to do. In a postindustrial entrepreneurial age,' he continued, 'don't expect the formerly Prussian parts of Germany to be economically impressive. Budapest and the rest of Hungary are closer to Catholic Munich than to Prussian-Protestant Berlin, and in a new Europe of region-states, the region oriented toward Munich may be stronger.')"

Now, this is just me personally, but a paragraph like that completely turns me on. I can read it 10 times in a row, and I have, and still feel like I have only scratched the surface of what is going on. I have my eye jammed up against a tiny hole in the wall, trying to see the whole world beyond. And I have only that paragraph to go on. It is just one man's interpretation of events - but it provides me with avenues of inquiry, it tells me some of the right questions to ask.

In the next post, I'll talk about Hungary's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before the Berlin Wall ever came down, Hungarians were already dismantling the empire in their own country. In a very sneaky and entrepreneurial way. Very cool.

Hungary - Part I - Geography as Destiny

More essays from the "Country of the Week" thing I did on my old blog. Here are the other essays, for those of you new to me, or for anyone who is interested.

I had done a bunch of them, focusing on Turkmenistan, Macedonia - and I got a random email from someone: "Could you do Hungary?"

Uh ... Could I "do" Hungary? In what way, might I ask?

But anyway, I took on the challenge.

All errors of facts or interpretation are my fault, if any come up.

HUNGARY - PART I - GEOGRAPHY AS DESTINY

This is a long way of saying geography is destiny.

It makes a lot of sense if you check it out on a map. I actually just spent 15 minutes searching the Web for a good topographical map of the area, and came up lacking. Frustrating. If you have access to a globe, just look at Hungary, and look at the inverted "C" of the Carpathians, cutting a swath through Romania. See how those mountains block Romania off from surrounding areas, and also see how the Great Plain on the eastern side of Hungary runs right up to the Carpathians, spreading upwards into the foothills of the mountain range, leaving the plain open to the north.

Such a simple thing, but crucial to the development of nations. A huge open plain, surrounded by a curving mountain range, with foothills to the north, provided easy access to the nomadic tribes and wandering people in the Middle Ages and before. This is how Hungary was born.

In 896 A.D. (how in the world do people come up with such specific dates??) seven "Magyar tribes" entered what is now modern-day Hungary, through the Great Plain, after being on the move for more than a thousand years. The Magyars are the ancestors of Hungarians. Who were they? To be honest, I'm not sure. Please feel free to illuminate me. Here is all I know, and this is basically regurgitated from one of my books: In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Magyars, along with the Finns, were the first Ural-Altaic peoples in Europe. (Those are two regions in Siberia, by the way.) They were horsemen of the Asian steppe, distantly related to the fantastic Uighur Turks. I have an endless fascination with these ancient little-known equestrian tribes.

The Magyars spent a thousand years migrating from the western edge of Siberia. Who knows why. They passed through the Caucasus, where they encountered Bulgars and Turks before coming in to Hungary.

Here is one of the things I have picked up about the Magyars. They had a genius for assimilation. Their culture was enormously flexible and expansive. Well, perhaps "culture" is not the correct word for a tribe who basically lived on their horses, with no country to call their own, without even the concept of "country" or "nation-state" in their collective consciousness. But this assimilative talent is very important to keep in mind, if you want to understand Hungary and present-day Hungarians. It seems that the open intelligence of the Magyars, their willingness to transform, their willingness to add words to their language taken from the Bulgars and the Turks, is one of the keys to the character of Hungary today.

I love that. The thought that an ancient tribe's personality can course through the culture of the generations to follow, 600 years later. It seems to me that this view may not be a very politically correct one, but it also seems to me to be true. Why else would my heart rise up out of my chest when I hear the beat of a bodhran or the sound of Uilleann Pipes? Why else would the stamp of riverdancing feet make me feel like I am remembering something? I personally did not grow up in Ireland, I was not part of a Celtic tribe, I cannot speak Gaelic ... but there is something familiar about the entire thing. I go to Ireland and there is something about it that feels like home. Is this just a trick of the mind? As in: I know that my ancestors are Irish and so I relate to the Irish experience? Maybe. But I think that that is just part of what is going on. Perhaps it's a Jungian view of the world. That there is such a thing as a collective unconscious. In my case, I tap into the collective Irish unconscious in a way which does not feel intellectual, or analytical, or understood in any normal way. It is like a memory. Only these memories are not my own, personally. They are of "my people".

Tangent over.

Anyway, what is known of the Magyars is that they had a genius for evolution and assimilation. They came to Europe from Siberia, they were primitive people who lived on their horses, who were buried with their horses, and within a century, a CENTURY, had completely adopted European manners, and a European mindset. This is extraordinary. A century is a blip on the radar screen of history. But the Magyars accomplished this. They must have been an amazing people.

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, with many words of Turkish. A bizarre mix, and it is one of the legacies of the nomadic Magyars.

The Great Plain of Hungary had been important long before the arrival of the Magyars. Way earlier, it had been the northeasternmost frontier region of Rome, and like all frontier regions, it was filled with chaos and conflict. The order provided by the Roman empire dissolved a bit the further away you got from the center, and the Great Plain was filled with tribes, fighting for supremacy.

The Magyars were not the first tribes to pass through this area. For centuries, nomadic tribes with fascinating ancient names (Scythians, Huns, Avars, Tartars, Kumyks) migrated here. But they did not have the staying power of the Magyars, who arrived, settled in, and prospered. These other Central Asian tribes came, left a genetic imprint of one kind or another, and then disappeared off the face of the earth.

I love the idea that ancient history is a better guide to current events than the major newspapers of our day. Apparently, in Hungary now, Inner Asian studies has become enormously popular, because the country (after decades of crushing communism) is now interested in understanding its ethnic roots.

The other thing I have mentioned here which continues to be important in Hungary today, is the topography of the country. It is a small and very flat country. Budapest is in the center. Because there are no physical barriers (like the Carpathian mountains in Romania) it makes it very easy for ideas, movements, influences to move out from Budapest into the rest of the country. Things like Western investment (now a big big deal in Budapest) is fanning outwards, and the entire country is benefiting.

Take a look at Romania - again, on a globe if you have one. You can't get topographical maps online, obviously. Romania is filled with enormous mountain ranges, cutting one side of the country off from the other, and the rest of it is thick forests. It must be incredibly beautiful, but perhaps it makes it difficult for Romania to cohere. Eastern and Western Romania may as well be two different countries.

Hungary remains open, assimilative, flexible, expansive. Maybe partly due to the ancient Magyar culture coursing in the collective unconscious of the country to this day.

That's just a guess, though.

Ukrainian Essays

Part I - The Famine

Part II - The Events of 1991

Part III - The People

The Ukraine - Part III - The People

I will close with a couple of quotes from Colin Thubron's book Among the Russians. (It's part of his awesome Russian trilogy. Other titles in this trilogy: In Siberia and The Lost Heart of Asia.)

Among the Russians was published in 1983, and it was based on Thubron's travels through Russia (western Russia), Georgia, Armenia, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. The Soviet Union was still a behemoth at the time, albeit a rotting one. But all of these countries were still under the thumb of Moscow.

Thubron drove around these countries in his car, camping in camp sites, and talking with people. It's kind of a depressing book, actually. There is next to no intimation of the cataclysmic changes which would rock the world a mere six years later.

And more than anything - you can feel the lingering shadow of Stalin.

The entire Soviet system is just maintaining. Like that joke about all of Russia on a broken train, and the Soviet leaders pull the shades down and demand that everybody on the train pretend that they are still moving.

THE UKRAINE - PART III - THE PEOPLE

The first describes Thubron's vodka-soaked experience at one camp ground in Zaporozhye, in the Ukraine. He ends up hanging out with a group of 20 year old students. Music is playing, and he dances with one girl:

She was a 19 year old student from the local polytechnic ... She looked embarrassed and lost. "You're English?" She jigged in my arms with her head turned away, blushing. "You're not really English?" She answered my questions in rushed, flat monosyllables. The polytechnic was quite nice. Dancing was all right. Zaporozhye was quite nice. But I wasn't really English?

I settled with the students round our table, talking about poetry; one was eloquent on Blok, another passionate about Yesenin. Albert got fed up. He tried to join in, but he was irreversibly of the Jack London generation. In a moment, I thought, he would quote Burns. "They're just students," he said. "They don't know anything. They've no experience of life." And they seemed indeed to be of a different race. Alternately my gaze focused on them and on Albert through the deepening pool of my inebriation. I was not sure if I were looking at a generation gap or at some other, deeper human division. "You're my guest," Albert mumbled, "not theirs ..."

They were gentle with him, as with a child. They refused to take offense. His petty vanities and ritualized hospitality seemed to be as foreign to them as to me. When his talk turned crassly to politics, they deflected him. "No, no, no," they said. Politics threatened differences; they were less important than the flesh and blood of my presence. When Albert tried to force drinks on me, they tactfully dissuaded him.

I was dimly aware that I was witnessing two Russias. I hoped that one was the future and the other the past, although even in my drunkenness I realized that nothing was as simple as that. Yet Albert was typical of his deprived generation. He was practical, tough, and narrow. To him these others were too pampered and easy. They were, I sensed, apolitical. He resented them; and they, in turn, looked on him not only with the old Russian respect for seniority but with a feeling that he was somehow irrelevant, and belonged to a world of absolutes which was forever past.

"They're too young," he said.

I'll take a couple of more quotes from his book, on the major cities of the Ukraine (it's very interesting, especially for an armchair traveler like myself).

On Odessa:

I imagined the gossipy pre-Revolutionary port which I had read about somewhere: the Grrek, Jewish, and Italianite cosmopolis with its polyglot interchange of wares and ideas, its tang of French architecture. But morning disclosed a city quieter, tamer, more uniform. Its trade, once the highest in the Soviet Union, has been deflected to the satellite port of Ilyichovsk ... leaving Odessa becalmed among its 19th century streets and plane trees. It rises above the sea in terraced avenues fringed with old business houses ... The Odessans show an old humor and entrepreneurial cunning. One in every three families is employed by the sea, and a desultory life still revolves around the cafes.

On Yalta:

Once these shores were the evening playground of the tsarist aristocracy. Their lush slopes gleam and bristle with the architectural fancies of western Europe and the Orient. But now the palaces have been turned into sanatoria for the people (as inscriptions on the base of every Lenin statue remind you). Confections in the Moorish or Ottoman taste, overblown Swiss chalets and Renaissance palazzi, sprout and ramble among parklands or botanical gardens fat with oak and arbutus ... Yalta itself has doubled its size in twenty years; but its alleys still twine through a 19th century heart of parks and verandahed mansions, and its quay tinkles with a children's funfair; while higher inland, in a stone house and a garden jungly with lilies, Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.

On The Crimea:

The Crimea, like the Caucasus, is darkened by a displaced people. On a thin suspicion of collaboration with Germany, its two hundred thousand Tartars were deported en masse to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944, and their role in the partisan fight against Nazism was systematically distorted or suppressed. In 1967 the charges against them were withdrawn; but thousands had already died in the hardship of exile, and their efforts to filter back into the Crimea have been harassed ever since.

On Kiev:

Kiev, "the mother of Russian cities," still keeps the unrest, the size and a trace of the refinement of a great capital. From the 9th to the 12th centuries it was the heart of a Russia which flowered in the sunlight of Byzantium, standing where the Dnieper headwaters gathered the Viking traffic before flooding south united to the Black Sea. Now, on one bank, the apartments sprawl in a colder-than-usual rhetoric -- within 15 years the population has doubled to two and a half million -- while opposite, where the Church of St. Andrew rises like a trumpet-blast from the old city, the boulevards are plump with spaced gardens and parklands ...

Kiev is still the capital of the Ukraine, and was a strategic lodestar for the Germans in 1941. War memorials reach a deafening crescendo: mounds of immortality, obelisks of glory, parks of eternity. I noticed more than ten which had been built as late as the 1960s and 70s. Russians and Germans between them destroyed much of the central city, and in the rambling complex called the Monastery of the Cross, once Russia's holiest shrine, the 11th century cathedral was reduced to a shattered body upholding a single dome. Far down the monastery's gardened slopes, a covered way plunges to a little square and a church. The place has been disused for two decades. Nothing gives you to expect what is coming. But within the church the plaster-smooth walls suddenly close around the monks' catacombs. For hundreds of yards, past dimly gleaming chapels and down water-dripping steps, the corridor beetles and bifurcates through a ghastly mausoleum. Robed in white silk, their faces covered by purple velet or black embroidery and their feet slippered in silk, the abbots lie in their glass-topped coffins, with a single claw-like hand exposed on the breast. The cell-shrines are stacked with bones. Blackened skulls gape in their powder or leer from glass jars. Eight centuries of skeletons and mummified cadavers lie in their niches, hung with anti-religious plaques -- the intolerance of Marxism hounding them even in their dust -- until the defiled labyrinth washes you up again before the church's tarnished icon-screen...

You would not know, from its exterior, that Kiev's cathedral of Haghia Sophia contained a pure 11th century core, built at the zenith of Russia's early power...Inside, the Byzantine glory breaks like an ocean in wave upon wave of fresco and mosaic, embracing for ever the divine and earthly order of things, engulfing arches, pillars and galleries in its petrified and self-existent splendour. In the dome hovers the soft mosaic presence of Christ the Ruler... He looks unfit to rule...

The tourist groups were attending doggedly to their guides, and were being dealt a Marxist interpretation of theocratic art ... Once this Byzantine world had exercised so profound an appeal to the Russian spirit that despite all persecution its decline would be inexplicable had not its power so clearly been deflected into a new redemption on earth. Sometimes in the past months I had almost envied this entirety of vision. Now, wandering in the forest of pillars, I felt old and alienated ... And as I walked through these aisles of faded certainty, it seemed that after even the most tragic failings had been counted, despite the public tyranny and private dissimulation, the travestied history and the sallow men on the edge of crowds, there yet remained a bruised grandeur about this race who could still dream, however faintly, of a perfectible community on earth.

But all around me the frescoed ancestors of this foolishness were thinning away. The blemished saints and Church fathers no longer held the heart and gaze. They were draining back into the paster, into their unimaginable centuries.

"It was just superstition," a guide said. "Primitive daydreams..."

Thubron was tailed by the KGB his entire time in Kiev. He was afraid to visit the friends he had there, because it would have gotten them into trouble. His room was searched, his diaries gone through. He writes:

It seems foolish, in retrospect, that Kiev should be so contaminated for me. I thought it a handsome city, but it remains discolored in my mind. I remember staring into foodshops whose stock was wretchedly little and expensive: in one only a heap of decapitated chickens, in another some crates of aubergines. And this was the capital of the Ukraine, of the Black Earth!

Thubron meets up with Julian in the Crimea. Julian lives in the Ukraine. He is Russian. They travel together for a couple of days. This final anecdote brings tears to my eyes.

It was our last evening. He had bought a bottle of Caucasion dessert wine -- we never normally drank much together -- and we celebrated a somber farewell. From time to time his gaze wandered uneasily to the restaurant television. "You've heard the news?"

It came non-committally from the television announcer: the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq.

We stared at one another, wondering where the Soviet and Western governments would stand, what we would be told to feel. "It looks like Moscow and Washington are hanging back," Julian said. "It's not time for us to report for duty." He tried to laugh. But we touched glasses unhappily, as if already clothed in invisible battledress. The news had momentarily reduced us.

"Sometimes I think of my father," Julian said, "and of that whole war generation, and I think: 'Let the dead bury their dead.' " He grimaced. "Is that in the Bible or Longfellow?" Then out of his schoolboy memory, he began to quote Burns. I suppressed a moan as My Heart's in the Highlands came up. But the words rolled out of him with a kind of ponderous wonder, restoring the poem to itself ...

Dusk had turned to night, and the wine glasses empty. Above us, as we wandered back to our huts, the one crag stood out in moon-streaked solitude from the consensus of the rest. "In the Kruschev years, the golden years," Julian said, "I managed to buy a copy of Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero -- the book of a pacifist. Have you read it? It had a deep influence on me." We stopped in front of our hut doors. The noise of a radio sounded in the trees: Iraqi advance, Iranian casualties, American silence. We listened. "I don't know how to talk about our meeting like this" -- he was suddenly fumbling for phrases. "It's important, you and I ... like two people meeting in outer space ... " He ran his fingers over his face, as if to order its expression, his thoughts. Outer space. His country immaterial.

As we said goodbye, he clasped my hand and said, "If in some future time I see you in the sights of my rifle -- I'll miss."

"And I won't fire at all."

We laughed, but with deep emotion. I've never felt so brief a friendship more.

The Ukraine - Part II - The Events of 1991

Another essay on The Ukraine, this one about the extraordinary events of 1991.

THE UKRAINE - PART II - THE EVENTS OF 1991

For example:
In January, 1990, thousands joined hands to celebrate that first independence in 1918. This would have been unheard-of, even two or three years before. But the tone of the world at that time was one of upheaval, change, hope. Countries breaking free of their chains. Pope John Paul ratified the structure of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Once we hit 1990, history starts speeding up again. After decades of silence.

In March of 1990, elections are held throughout the republic. The democratic opposition comes to power.

On June 16, 1990, there is a Declaration of Parliament stating that the Ukraine will be neutral and nonatomic.

In autumn of 1990, there were student strikes, and miners' strikes. The students were demanding the resignations of all the Soviet leaders (many who had been incorporated in this new government.) The country was sliding into chaos.

In August, 1991, there was the infamous coup d'etat attempt in Moscow. Which is interesting on 5,000 different levels, but basically what the coup d'etat did was reveal (once and for all) the indecisive incompetence of the leaders in Moscow.

The Ukraine decided immediately to choose its own destiny, and the Supreme Council proclaims the Ukraine's independence on August 24, 1991.

Since then, the Ukraine's executive branch has basically been taken over by gangsters. Many of the former countries of the USSR have nearly identical experiences following the collapse.

The governement is like a mafia. It embezzles cash. It manipulates elections, appropriates businesses, destroys the media, blackmails people it doesn't like. It's a netherworld of vaguely criminal activity.

More and more Ukrainians are emigrating.

I have to admit I don't know the steps in between 1990 and now, which would lead to this development (except for the fact that it's the same old story in all the former republics -- they have no experience with representative democracy, the Soviets crushed the infrastructure of the government, there is a power vacuum and so these gangster mafia types have a very easy time filling up the gap).

There is also the little matter of ethnicity and ethnic cleansing, which is such a common theme in these former republics. In the 1980s and the 1990s a virtual war was fought in the Ukraine over language. 350 years of Russification had obliterated Ukrainian. There was a ban on printing books in Ukrainian. Etc. Well, the Ukrainians started rebelling. There was a desire to get rid of all Russian. To go back to their roots.

A lovely theory, no? The only problem is is that there are millions and millions of Russians who live in the Ukraine, and who have lived there for generations, and who consider themselves Ukrainian. They speak Russian, but they think of themselves as belonging to the Ukraine, as well. The Ukrainians beg to differ. This is the same old "we belong here, you don't" bullshit which causes so much trouble all over the world.

It is like the colonists who ended up fleeing Angola when the revolution occurred. These were Portugese people, yes. They were the "colonizers". Whatever. These people had lived in Angola for generations. Angola was their home. But the natives disagreed and rode them out of the country on a rail. As it turns out, of course, the Portugese were the only people in the country who knew how to do the things which would keep a country running. But the natives weren't thinking logically. They were thinking ethnically.

So now, the Ukraine has been described as two countries: Eastern and Western. These two sides have almost completely different characters. None of this has been resolved yet, by the way. The nation has not cohered, or worked it all out. The current president, Kuchma, was re-elected in 1999 by intimidation and fraud. The Ukraine is losing it, quite frankly.

The Western side of the Ukraine belonged to Poland before the war. It is definitely more Ukrainian than the eastern side of the country. They speak Ukrainian here. The soul of the country and the people survived here, through the Soviet tyranny.

The Eastern side of the Ukraine is a different story, resting, as it does, right up against the Soviet Union. 13 million native Russians live here. The "Russification" campaign was brutal on the eastern side of the Ukraine. The entire Ukrainian intelligentsia was murdered by Stalin, in the 1930s, and, of course, the country has not yet recovered from that loss. It will take generations more.

Ukraine - Part I - The Famine

Somehow, it's all been about Communism today. Along those lines - here are three short pieces I wrote about the Ukraine, on my old blog. Actually, the third piece is a compilation of excerpts from Colin Thubron's wonderful book Among the Russians.

The first piece is on the horrific famine in the Ukraine, engineered by the Soviets in the 1930s. My piece barely scratches the surface at all. Robert Conquest's book The Harvest of Sorrow is the most thorough explanation of exactly how this man-made famine occurred.

But for now:

THE UKRAINE - PART 1 - THE FAMINE

Until 1917, the Ukraine was one of the world's tapestries of culture, religion, and language. Peoples overlapped here. Then the Bolsheviks conquered the nation. The Ukraine was one of the countries most severely damaged by Communism, the people were some of the most trapped and terrorized: mainly because the Ukraine was the most valuable commodity the Soviets had. The Ukraine fed the entire empire. There was no way on earth that the Ukraine would ever break free of the Soviet Imperium. They had no independence, no freedom of movement, no slack was ever given (like was given to some of the other more remote republics). The Ukraine was crushed like a bug under the thumb of the Imperium.

They declared independence in 1918, directly following being conquered. This was very short-lived, of course. And then the relentless crushing began.

The Great Famine was caused by the collectivization of the farms, a "program" (or a pogrom) implemented across the Soviet Union. Tens and tens of millions (this is not an exaggeration) died as a result of collectivization. And the world did nothing. Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Charles Lindbergh traveled to Russia in the middle of this great hidden famine. I have her journals from that time, and she writes in glorious positive terms about the "busy" Russians. She loved seeing everybody so "busy", so productive. She had never been in a country which had such industry, such commitment to public works. It's disgusting to read her journals now (at least her journals during World War II), because of 20/20 hindsight. They were willfully lied to. The happy productive Russians were trotted out for their benefit. And 200 miles away, the fields of the Ukraine were piled high with corpses.

In brief: collectivization began in 1929. Lenin was long gone. Trotsky was long gone. Stalin was now king. All of the USSR had to be moved off of their own little farms into kholkozes (collectivized farms). People were herded into barracks, there were armed guards around the peripheries, there were gates outside the collective farms with lovely slogans like: Work is Beautiful. Or whatever. Communist bullshit. The peasants resisted this move. They did not want to go. They hunkered down.

Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of people into the gulag, the massive prison camp structure he erected throughout Siberia, and none of these people were ever heard of again.

The rest of them he decided to starve out. This was a conscious decision. Public policy.

The famine began in 1930 and lasted seven years.

Moscow determined the quotas that each village had to deliver to the state. These quotas were purposefully greater than whatever the land could yield. Authorities confiscated everything that was edible. Schools were closed. Three year olds had to work in the fields, to try to squeeze the quotas out of the land. No one was allowed to leave the villages. People who tried were shot.

The main element of Ukrainian identity is the peasantry. The Ukrainian spirit resides in the peasantry. So Stalin had to destroy that peasantry.

In 1932, a terrifying edict came down called The Law of the Blade of Grain. It's a heartless law. One could be shot or sent to prison for life if one stole one blade of grain.

Meanwhile, the famine is reaching massive proportions. There were villages which resorted to cannibalism. There were not enough graves to contain all the dead. People lay in the streets, in the fields, in their own beds. Entire families dead from starvation in their own homes. Howling filling the streets, people crazed from hunger.

The Law of the Blade of Grain was Stalin's final screw. Outside each village were enormous grain fields. Every single blade of grain, due to the unrealistic quotas, was "earmarked" for Moscow. Within the village, people were starving. They had to work these fields, they had to harvest this grain which could conceivably save their lives and the lives of their families, but the punishment was not just severe, it was basically the end of your life. Nobody came out of the gulag. Soldiers and secret police were posted on watchtowers around the fields, to make sure nobody stole even ONE BLADE of grain.

Desperate mothers would send their toddlers into the field, to see if they could steal a couple of blades, in the hopes that their size would keep them better-hidden than an adult. Of course, many toddlers were shot dead because of this.

It is estimated that 30 million people starved as a result of collectivization and the Law of the Blade of Grain. This estimate may even be low.

Today, in the Ukraine, the collectivized farms still exist, but they are now abandoned. Derelict barracks, gates swinging on the hinges, peeling murals of sickles and clasped hands ... The ghost of the famine still exists in the Ukrainian psychology, in the same way it does in the Irish psychology, but it also exists because of these falling-down buildings haunting the countryside. Relics from that brutal time.

"They had to fool the people..."

To go along with the "crimes of Communism" theme today - here is an excerpt from a book I really dig: Michael Dobbs' Down With Big Brothjer: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. It's my favorite excerpt.

Despite a willingness to redefine the word "socialism", so that it lost much of its meaning, Gorbachev was unwilling to abandon Communist ideology altogether. He prattled on about the irrevocable "socialist choice" that Russia had allegedly made in November 1917. Lenin remained an unassailable authority for him. Yeltsin, on the other hand, was undergoing an ideological conversation that was both painful and public. Spurred on by his conflict with the Communist Party establishment, he had reexamined his most basic political beliefs, and he had come to the conclusion that he was no longer a Communist.

A turning point in Yeltsin's intellectual development occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989, more specifically his first visit to an American supermarket, in Houston, Texas. The sight of aisle after aisle of shelves neatly stacked with every conceivable type of foodstuff and household item, each in a dozen varieties, both amazed and depressed him. For Yeltsin, like many other first-time Russian visitors to America, this was infinitely more impressive than tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. It was impressive precisely because of its ordinariness. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was within the reach of ordinary citizens without standing in line for hours. And it was all so attractively displayed. For someone brought up in the drab conditions of communism, even a member of the relatively privileged elite, a visit to a Western supermarket involved a full-scale assault on the senses.

"What we saw in that supermarket was no less amazing than America itself," recalled Lev Sukhanov, who accompanied Yeltsin on his trip to the United States and shared his sense of shock and dismay at the gap in living standards between the two superpowers. "I think it is quite likely that the last prop of Yeltsin's Bolshevik consciousness finally collapsed after Houston. His decision to leave theparty and join the struggle for supreme power in Russia may have ripened irrevocably at that moment of mental confusion."

On the plane, traveling from Houston to Miami, Yeltsin seemed lost in his thoughts for a long time. He clutched his head in his hands. Eventually he broke his silence. "They had to fool the people," he told Sukhanov. "It is now clear why they made it so difficult for the average Soviet citizen to go abroad. They were afraid that people's eyes would open."

The former party apparatchik understood the yearning of the narod -- the long-suffering Russian people -- for a normal life, its anger at being deceived and humiliated. He, too, had been humiliated. He, too, had been deceived. He would help the narod secure its revenge against the party establishment. The narod's revenge would also be his.

Orwell's genius was recognizing the trick, recognizing how "they" had to fool "the people" - recognizing the utter lie of Communism or Socialism - decades before anyone else did. I'm gonna go home and pull out that excerpt from 1984 where Winston reads the forbidden book which outlines the tenets of Newspeak and totalitarianism - and Orwell (duh) finds a much deeper level to all of it than I could see originally.

"They had to fool the people". People are still being fooled.

The Holocaust of Communism

There is an interesting conversation going on in the comments for this post about communism and its evils. There were no Nuremberg trials after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The discussion reminded me of the quiz I found this morning over on Dean Esmay's blog.

The quiz is called:

The Holocausts of Communism

Test your knowledge on the evils of Communism and get back to me on it.

I was disappointed to find out that I only got an "Advanced" score - but in my defense, I found some of the questions confusing - not to mention the terrible flashback-inducing format of multiple choice, with such answers as: "A, C, and D, but not B". It appears, however, that my score is above the median curve - Most who have taken the quiz score as "Novice" or "Intermediate". Cold comfort indeed.

However, that's neither here nor there. It's a terrific quiz - and once you get your score - all answers are discussed. You can see which is correct, and why.

Oh, and I realized the "blanks" in my knowledge, of which there are many.

I know about the Great Leap Forward, but I'm not so sure about the later days. I'm not as clear on Vietnam - but I got almost all of the questions right about the Russian Revolution. Cambodia I'm clear on ... but the inner workings of Chinese politics are not in my realm.

YET.

Quote

But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them up into a "swan dive," nor keep them on sleepless "stand-up" for a week, nor kick them with jackboots, nor beat them with rubber truncheons, nor squeeze their skulls with iron rings, nor push them into a cell so that they lie atop one another like pieces of baggage - we will not do any of the things they did! But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly: "Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer."

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Uzbekistan Essays

A compilation of all of the essays posted below on Uzbekistan.

I. The People

II. Samarqand and Tamerlane

III. Bukhara

IV. Tashkent

V. The Aral Sea

VI. Uzbekistan Today

Uzbekistan - Part VI - Uzbekistan Today

This will be my last piece on Uzbekistan. I just wanted to give a brief picture of what is going on there now, since I have spent so much time back in the dark ages with Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.

UZBEKISTAN TODAY

Islam Karimov is the president of Uzbekistan, and has been so since 1990, when he was elected by the still-in-power Supreme Soviet. It says a lot about who the people of Uzbekistan are that Karimov, emblematic of the old regime, a symbol of the Communist state which wrecked their country, continues to be elected as their leader. Other countries, Eastern European countries, (the Czech Republic is a perfect example) had purges of their entire government. Anyone connected with Communism at all had to GO.

Uzbekistan is not really a country yet, not really a nation. They don't know what it really feels like to be free citizens, to participate in the government of their country ... there is a disconnect between the leadership and the citizenry, which, of course, existed during Communism, but it continues today.

The regime in Uzbekistan is run by former Soviet-Brezhnev-style bosses, and Karimov heads up a sterile dictatorship which, so far, has kept the country from fracturing. Democracy would be useless here, at the moment, since there is no infrastructure, nothing set up to support and uphold democratic institutions.

Karimov is a very isolated leader. He came up through the ranks of the bureacracy, very much insulated within the Communist hierarchy. He is a Communist, for God's sake. What that means, in a practical sense, is that he doesn't understand economics AT ALL. He has been unable to help the country modernize, or integrate into world markets. He doesn't get it.

On the flipside, however, he is not averse to allowing businessmen come from all over the world to set up businesses here, to get things going. Some of the other "stans" take a "we can do it on our own" attitude (Turkmenistan), and because of that, their people are starving and ignorant. Uzbekistan at least has interaction with other cultures in this way. Karimov is also very authoritarian, very uncompromising. He doesn't really behave like a Western leader. His regime is very tribal. He looks out for his tribe. He sees the Uzbeks as his tribe, he is responsible for them. They need a strong hand.

Uzbekistan also has the worst human rights record of any of the former Soviet republics.

The police are completely corrupt. The mafia is everywhere. It is a completely unsafe place for Westerners to travel. Westerners have to shack up in the local fleabag hotel, and must carry all their money on them at all times, and never leave anything of value in the room, because it will not be there when they return. A Westerner coming to town is still a relatively rare thing, and word is out on the street in a matter of moments. The Westerner is prey, here. The criminal element is highly visible. Everyone is broke, poor, with no prospects, and many people are raging alcoholics. This is a powder-keg.

In the early 1990s, as I mentioned in another post, there was a mass exodus of Russians from Uzbekistan. The Uzbeks had harassed them into leaving. However, this had a result which could have been foreseen if the Uzbeks had thought about it at all: the Russians leaving decimated the ranks of professionals in the republic, and institutions and businesses were left empty, with nobody there who could train the Uzbeks, nobody knew how to do anything.

From their history, the people of Uzbekistan assume that the government is not there to serve them. They have no experience with representative government. They were not ready for nationhood.

Karimov's dictatorship became less severe throughout the 1990s ... but at all times it is a modern-day version of Genghis Khan's and Stalin's regimes of absolute power.

Some of the issues for present-day Uzbekistan:

Chaos is breaking out all around them. In Afghanistan, in Tajikstan. There is a worry in regards to Tajikstan, which has a massive Uzbek population. (Tajikstan is an ally of Iran, due to ethnic similarities, and Iran is a mortal enemy of Uzbekistan from way back when, when the Persian empire conquered them. People have very long memories here) The fear is that Tajikstan could become a base for Iranian influence in Central Asia. And Uzbeks fear that Iran is trying to promote a "Greater Tajikstan", which would include the millions of Tajiks in southeast Uzbekistan and 4 million in Afghanistan.

I've said this before and I will say it again: anytime any leader talks about wanting to create a "greater" anything, know that what that basically means is war and ethnic cleansing.

Uzbekistan is a bit of an expansionist threat itself. There are millions and millions of Uzbeks who live outside the borders. Uzbekistan covets territory in Tajikstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan.

Karimov, a secular man, uses the "Islamist threat" from Afghanistan as his rationale for authoritarianism. He refuses to countenance any organized Muslim piety, and persecutes Muslims. Which could end up being a big ol' boomerang, eventually, dressed up like a suicide bomber. In 1998, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was formed, and they stated as their aim the overthrow of the Karimov government. So far this has not occurred, but it is a potentially very dangerous situation. Karimov becomes more authoritarian, the Islamic Movement becomes more vocal, there are more despotic crackdowns ... it is very bad and could easily get much much worse.

The whole place is chaotic, enigmatic, contradictory. The Communist rulers persist in power here, only they are under another name, the regime pays lip service to Islam and yet cracks down on militants, the economy has continued to loosen up, which is good, but there is absolutely no promise of democracy here. At least not yet.

I'll close with an anecdote from Colin Thubron's book The Lost Heart of Asia. Thubron visits the tomb of Tamerlane (the terrifying warrior of long ago who conquered the entire area, and made his capital in Samarqand). He has an encounter with a caretaker.

...from the emperor's skull the Soviet scientist Gerasimov painstakingly reconstructed a bronze portrait-head, before sealing Tamerlane back in the tomb. Under the sculptor's hands there emerged a face of hardened power, compassionless, bitter and suble. Perhaps some Slavic prejudice heightened the epicanthic cruelty of the eyes; perhaps not ...

"He was a hero," said a voice behind me. I jumped. The caretaker had entered noiselessly and was looking down at the tumult of calligraphy on the slab. "What a history!"

"Perhaps he should have done less," I said.

"Less? No. Timur [Tamerlane] turned us into one country." He seemed light-hearted, but a reticent evangelism tinged him. "Yes, he was cruel, I know. People come to this grave from Iran and Afghanistan and they hate him. They say, 'He destroyed our land, he enslaved us!' And of course it's true. He smashed Isfahan and Baghdad." He smiled charmingly. "He was ruthless."

I said, "Ulug Beg might be a better hero for your nation."..

The caretaker laughed ... "He was only a teacher ... But Timur was world-class! If I was an Iranian, I'd hate him too!" He was laughing at himself a little ... "But Timur was not a savage. He knew about Alexander of Macedon, and the slave leader Spartacus and ... "

"Spartacus?" This was a Soviet cult leftover. "Did he?"

"...and he'd read the great Persian poet Firdausi, who claimed that the Iranians were natural rulers and the Turks were natural slaves ... Our two worlds have always been at war. And when Timur overran Persia and came to Firdausi's tomb he shouted: 'Stand up! Look at me! A Turk in the heart of your empire! You said we were slaves, but look now!'" ...

He glowed with vicarious triumph. Tamerlane for him was the unifier and recreator of his national fatherland, of the Pan-Turkic dream. He said, "The Persians were here once, you see. You've been to Afrasiab? You've seen those Sogdian paintings, Persian things? They were our conquerors."

"Those paintings are extraordinary..."

"So Timur avenged us. He created a Turkish empire ... He's our hero."

I said: "But he was a Mongol."

"No, Timur was not a Mongol, he was a Turk."

I stayed silent. Everyone was claiming Tamerlane now. Uzbeks and even Tajiks whom I met would debonairly enroll him in their nations. In fact Tamerlane had been a pure Mongol of the Barlas clan, infected by Turkic customs. But this pedantry could not staunch the caretaker's sense of ownership or belonging.

"I may be an Uzbek," he said, "but above all I am a Turk. Most people have forgotten their tribes now, but I know my father was a Kungrat, my mother a Mangit -- these are Turkic tribes."

"They're Uzbek tribes too."

"But you can't feel Uzbek." He was losing the infant Uzbek nation in a Turkic sea. "Look at our ancesors! We have Navoi, we have Mirkhwand, we have ... " His list spilt into the unknown for me. In fact his people were ethnically too complex to shelter under any name. Even his Turkic umbrella was full of Persian holes.

The hero of Uzbek literature, the 15th century Timurid poet Navoi, had written of Uzbeks only to disparage them. Yet his name and image were ... ubiquitous in Uzbekistan ... Young in their state, Uzbeks and Tajiks were suddenly annexing poets or scientists out of the past, steeping their nation in the magic of great men. The Tajiks were even appropriating Saadi and Omar Khayyam, any Persian at all. To challenge such claims was to wander an ethnic labyrinth until the concept of a country became meaninigless.

The caretaker got to his feet, still reeling off names ... "And we have Timur!"

He switched off the sad bulb and locked the narrow door behind us. In the sanity of daylight he relented a little. "Well," he said, "occasionally somebody does feel quite strongly 'I'm an Uzbek' " -- he feebly thumped his chest -- "but you don't hear it much."

We walked around the mausoleum in the sun. Some ease and lightness had returned to us. Uzbek independence had freed him into pride, he said, instead of condemning him to some Slavic sub-species. "Of course I'm pleased by it. Everyone I know is pleased. You've found some not? Well, those are the uneducated ... Some people don't know what to feel. They can't see beyond their faces. They just know that things are bad now. But I'm thinking of my children, and the world they'll grow into. I want it to be their own."

...I was gazing into the crypt. it was a vent for whispered prayers. I straightened and moved away, shaking off the notion that some dreadful authority lingered in those shreds of gristle and calcium under the stone.

The man went on eagerly. "How can anyone regret the Soviet Union falling to bits? They bled us. In the old days they gave us five kopeks for a kilo of cotton. Just five kopeks. One factory in Russia used to make two shirts out of a kilo and sell them for forty roubles each. Moscow said we were partners, but what kind of partnership is that?" He clasped my hand in illustration. "Partnership should mean friendship, shouldn't it?"

We had circled the building now,and the handclasp turned into farewell. As I walked back across the courtyard, his shouted optimisms followed me to the gate. "Enjoy our country! Everything will get better!"

Above him the great dome made a lonely tumor above the ogre-king.

Uzbekistan - Part V - The Aral Sea

There are a couple of other things I want to talk about.

I want to talk about what the Soviet Imperium did (ecologically) to the region. And I also want to talk about the Uzbek people now ... how they are trying to adjust to independence, how they feel about their government (a secular regime ... basically old Communists are in the government, just under another name), and who they align themselves with (Turkey? Iran? Russia?)

So I will start with the story of the Aral Sea, in the northwest corner of Uzbekistan.

UZBEKISTAN - THE ARAL SEA

Ryszard Kapucinski describes the contrast thus, in his book Imperium:

Central Asia is deserts and more deserts, fields of brown weathered stones, the heat from the sun above, sandstorms.

But the world of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya is different. Arable fields stretch along both rivers, abundant orchards; everywhere profusions of nut trees, apple trees, fig trees, palms, pomegranates...

The waters of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, as well as of their tributaries, allowed famous cities to arise and to flourish --Bukhara and Khiva, Kokand and Samarqand. This way, too, passed the loaded-down caravans of the Silk Road, thanks to which the markets of Venice and Florence, Nice and Seville, acquired their importance and color.

Heads up: Kapuscinski has written an incredible essay, included in his book Imperium called: "Central Asia -- The Destruction of the Sea". I will quote from it extensively, because he says it all. It is a horrible story. And completely irrevocable. Nothing can be done to reverse the destructive process. It's over.

Blame Brezhnev.

He decided to turn all of Uzbekistan into one large cotton plantation. Brezhnev wanted Uzbekistan to be a showpiece of Bolshevik ingenuity.

One of the worst and most unintelligent things about Communism is that it treats nature and the natural world as just another element of production, to be controlled, dominated, manipulated. So that is what Brezhnev set out to do in Uzbekistan: no longer would the people along the two rivers grow fruit, and figs and apples (things they could actually survive on). All of their orchards and green fields were appropriated by the Soviet state, and planted with cotton. The repercussions of this ill-thought-out move were apocalyptically disastrous. You cannot treat nature that way. It will rebel. It will punish you, harshly, for thinking that you can control things.

But Brezhnev was obsessed with the idea of Uzbekistan being turned into the Land of Cotton ... a place where the Soviet system of Communism could work miracles, could transform desert nomads and oasis merchants into cotton-growers, could make the desert bloom with cotton plants. Nobody ever said, "Y'know what, Brezhnev? Let's look at the long term ... I don't think this is such a good idea." Nobody ever said "No" to these despots. So Brezhnev was free to move forward on this crackpot illogical scheme ... (Can you tell I'm angry? He ruined the ecology in Uzbekistan, perhaps forever.)

So anyway: Uzbekistan is not a natural for cotton plantations. It's a DESERT, for God's sake. The people along the two great rivers lived in careful equilibrium with nature, growing things to support their communities, carefully handling the water supply, carefully monitoring how many people lived in each oasis ... because oases are not meant to overflow with people. One too many camels, and suddenly your water supply dries up. Brezhnev and his Communist goons had no understanding of this, didn't want to have any understanding of this, so blind was their faith in the Communist utopia, that they bulldozed through Uzbekistan, upending all of the orchards, all of the fields, and forced everybody to plant cotton.

Kapuscinski describes this process:

First, bulldozers were brought in from all over the Imperium. The hot metal cockroaches crawled over the sandy plains. Starting from the banks of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, the steel rams began to carve deep ditches and fissures in the sand, into which the water from the rivers was then channeled. They had to dig an endless number of these ditches (and they are still digging them now), considering that the combined length of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya is 3,662 kilometers! Then along those canals, the kolkhoz workers had to plant cotton. [Kolkhoz is the name for collective farms.] At first they planted upon desert barrens, but because there was still not enough of the white fibers, the authorities ordered that arable fields, gardens, and orchards be given over to cotton. It is easy to imagine the despair and terror of peasants from whom one takes the only thing they have -- the currant bush, the apricot tree, the scrap of shade. In villages, cotton was now planted right up against the cottage windows, in former flower beds, in courtyards, near fences. It was planted instead of tomatoes and onions, instead of olives and watermelons. Over these villages drowning in cotton, planes and helicopters flew, dumping on them avalanches of artificial fertilizers, clouds of poisonous pesticides. People choked, they had nothing to breathe, went blind.

The rivers Amu and Syr Darya had been doing their thing for millennia. By diverting the waters of the rivers, by imposing an artificial restriction on them, the delicate balance of the desert land changed ... and it changed rapidly.

Kapuscinski:

The fields of rice and wheat, the green meadows, the stands of kale and paprika, the plantations of peaches and lemons, all vanished. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, cotton grew. Its fields, its white drowsy sea, stretched for tens, hundreds of kilometers ...

Grigory Reznichenko wrote a book in 1989 called The Aral Catastrophe, which is such upsetting reading that I was barely able to get through it. He elaborates:

Around 20 million people live in the countryside in Central Asia. Two-thirds work with cotton and really with nothing else besides. Farmers, gardeners, orchard keepers have all had to change profession -- they are now employed as laborers on cotton plantations. Coercion and fear compel them to work with cotton. Coercion and fear, for it surely isn't money. One earns pennies harvesting cotton. And the work is tiring and monotonous. To fulfill his daily quota, a man mustbend down ten to twelve thousand times. An atrocious, forty-degree heat [Celsius], air that stinks of virulent chemicals, aridity, and constant thirst destroy the human being, especially women and children ... people pay with their health and their life for the personal well-being and power of a handful of demoralized careerists.

The "careerists" in Moscow would agree upon, beforehand, the amount of the coming cotton harvest. It was always a number which was completely unattainable. Then when the smaller harvest came in, Brezhnev and his goons would inflate the numbers and spread positive propaganda about the miracle they had worked in Uzbekistan. It is now called "the cotton mafia". The mafia got rich off of the completely imaginary massive cotton harvests. And the people working the cotton starved, because no longer could they feed themselves with their own orchards.

But all of this is pretty much just the normal tragedy (with different details) of all of the republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Communists raped the land, enslaved the citizens, and closed the borders. This is all par for the course.

What makes the tragedy in Uzbekistan stand out is the Aral Sea, the once-beautiful and vital Aral Sea, a sea which, in a matter of 25 years, has dried up off the face of the earth, creating global ecological issues.

The Soviets never thought long-term about the environment. You want to build a highway? Hack down the forest. You want to create a city out of nothing? Bulldoze down the peasants' wheat fields and cover them up with concrete.

So the Soviets over-taxed the Amu and Syr Darya rivers, they cut tributaries into the desert, to divert the water where they wanted it to go. And almost immediately (the balance of nature is so delicate in any desert), both ancient and great rivers began to dry up, and shrink to nothing. Amu and Syr are what feed the Aral Sea. So the drying up of the two rivers had massive consequences for the Aral Sea, which began to shrink. It shrank so rapidly that if you look at satellite photographs of the sea, from 1967 to 1997, you see it almost completely disappear. It makes me sick to my stomach.

Kapuscinski again, describing the crux of the issue:

The waters of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, instead of flowing into the Aral Sea, were, according to man's will, sqandered along the way, spilled over fields, over unending deserts, along an immense distance of more than 3000 kilometers. For this reason, the calm and broad currents of both powerful rivers -- the only source of life in this part of the world -- instead of swelling and intensifying in the course of their journey (as is customary in nature), began to decline, to shrink, to get narrower and shallower, until, short of reaching the sea, they were transformed into salty, poisoned, and muddy pools, into spongy and foul-smelling ditches, into treacherous puddles of duckweed, finally sinking below ground and disappearing from view.

So the rivers shrink. Because the river shrinks, the sea disappears. And then there's the issue with salt. Here's some info about what the Aral Sea once was (I got this from the Aral Sea homepage):

The salt deposits rising to the surface because of the shrinking of the rivers destroyed the land, and because of all the windstorms and duststorms common to deserts, these salt deposits also ruined the atmosphere. This was exacerbated by all of the pesticides which had soaked into the land over the decades, so the pesticides are stirred up by the windstorms, and spread, ruining the air for miles and miles around.

Kapuscinski on the salt problem:

It is a known fact that a dozen or so meters below the surface of every desert lie large deposits of concentrated salt. If water is conducted to it, the salt, together with the moisture, will rise to the surface. And that is exactly what happened now in Uzbekistan. The concealed, crushed, deeply secreted salt started to move upward, to regain its liberty. The golden land of Uzbekistan, which was first cloaked in the white of cotton, was now glazed over with a lustrous crust of white salt.

But one doesn't have to study the ground. When the wind blows, one can taste the salt on one's lips, on one's tongue. It stings the eyes.

More:

The Aral Sea and its tributaries provided sustenance for 3 million people. But the fate of this sea and its two rivers also impinges on the situaion of all the inhabitants of this region, of whom there are 32 million..

The Soviet authorities have long worried about how to reverse the disaster -- the destruction of the Aral Sea, the ruination of half of Central Asia. It is after all well known that the unprecedented increase in cotton cultivation has led to a tragic shortage of water, a shortage that is destroying a large part of the world (a fact which to this day continues to be concealed.

Then, of course, the USSR collapsed. Although the USSR was an ungainly bohemoth, an "evil empire", and although this whole frigging mess was their fault in the first place, they still were the only ones aware enough of the problem to try to find solutions. Granted their "solutions" were insane: bombing glaciers in the Tienshan and Pamir mountains, so that the run-off would flood the land again (what?? I'm no environmental engineer but even I know that this would not work), or redirecting the rivers of Siberia (thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away) to come down into Uzbekistan, so that Brezhnev's crazy dream of a Land of Cotton could be realized. This, if they had followed through with it, of course would have meant the ruination of Siberia.

But they had screwed up, and the Soviets were desperate for a solution. As crackpot as the schemes were, at least they were schemes! Once the USSR collapsed, Uzbekistan was completely abandoned. All of the Russians who knew how to do anything fled the country, leaving it in the hands of a down-trodden uneducated populace, who know nothing about anything. And so the Aral Sea has died.

Environmental groups all over the world have stepped in, to try to save the situation. But certainly it's not the Uzbeks spearheading anything. The Soviets had enslaved them, had given them no sense of agency in their destinies, they just harvested the cotton and tried to live their lives, while the environmental disaster in their own country intensified almost on a minute to minute basis. People die much earlier there. People get weird unclassifiable diseases. People are poisoned.

It's a lost cause.

So the Aral Sea is shrinking, and a process of "desertification" is taking place. The sands growing more and more insistent, taking over more and more acreage ... the entire region drying up, and cracking shut.

Here's a final (and terrible) image to leave you with. Kapuscinski, on his travels, visits Muynak, which was, only a couple of years ago, a fishing port on the Aral Sea. I can't get these images out of my head:

[Muynak] now stands in the middle of the desert; the sea is 60 to 80 kilometers from here. Near the settlement, where the port once was, rusting carcasses of trawlers, cutters, barges, and other boats lie in the sand. Despite the fact that the paint is peeling and falling off, one can still make out some of the names: Estonia, Dagestan, Nahodka. The place is deserted; there is no one around ...

It is a sad settlement -- Muynak. It once lay in the spot where the beautiful life-giving Amu Darya flowed into the Aral Sea, an extraordinary sea in the heart of a great desert. Today, there is neither river nor sea. In the town the vegetation has withered; the dogs have died. Half the residents have left, and those who stayed have nowhere else to go. They do not work, for they are fishermen, and there are no fish. Of the Aral Sea's 178 species of fish and frutti di mare, only 38 remain. Besides, the sea is far away; how is one to get there across the desert? If there is no strong wind, people sit on little benches, leaning against the shabby and crumbling walls of their decrepit houses. It is impossible to ascertain how they make a living; it is difficult to communicate with them about anything. They are Karakalpaks -- they barely speak any Russian, and the children no longer speak Russian at all. If one smiles at the people sitting against the walls, they become even more gloomy, and the women veil their faces. Indeed, a smile does look false here, and laughter would sound like the screech of a rusty nail against glass.

Children play in the sand with a plastic bucket that's missing a handle. Ragged, skinny, sad. I did not visit the nearest hospital, which is on the other side of the sea, but in Tashkent I was shown a film made in that hospital. For every 1000 children born, 100 die immediately. And those that survive? The doctor picks up in his hands little white skeletons, still alive, although it is difficult to tell.

Here are some pictures of Muynak ... and there is the terrible sight of a fishing boat sitting in the middle of the desert.

The whole thing makes me feel hopeless and mad.

Uzbekistan - Part IV - Tashkent

Uzbekistan, rather than being a modern nation-state, as we understand it, is still a collection of "oasis cities", made famous and prosperous by the Silk Road - cities with names famous round the world: Samarqand, Bukhara.

The following post is about Tashkent:

UZBEKISTAN - TASHKENT

In the 1st century A.D. it was an oasis settlement.

Throughout the following millennium, Tashkent was conquered and released and re-conquered over and over again. Persians, Mongol hordes, Turkic khans swept through, owned it, and passed it back and forth between them over the years.

And then, on June 15, 1865, the Russians arrived. And basically they never left. They are still there. In 1990, the population of Tashkent was 40% Russian. After the Soviet collapse, the Russians were a lost and sad community, abandoned by the motherland, adrift in a society wracked with upheaval and a Muslim revival. They were the old oppressors, trying to live with the conquered people, who were now trying to take back their country. So Tashkent has a Russian overlay, unlike Bukhara, which is a Muslim center. It is a very religious town, filled with fundamentalists. Tashkent is also a Russian outpost.

Tashkent, in the years after 1865, became Russia's base of operations for further conquests in Turkestan. The Russians built a colonial city here which swallowed up the medieval Turkic city.

Thubron says, "The Russians had captured Tashkent in 1865, not on orders from St. Petersburg but by the adventurism of local generals. Wiithin a few years it became the capital of Russian Turkestan, and there grew up beside the native town a pleasant, nondescript cantonment, where water channels trickled and great trees bloomed. Its first governor-general, the vain and chilly Kaufmann, ruled like a petty emperor. His army and administrations were filled with exiled bankrupts and adventurers. Far from home, local society became inward-looking and licentious, while beside it the Uzbek community continued almost unstudied, as if it would one day fade away."

Finally, with the advent of the Bolsheviks and their terrible aesthetic sense, the old Tashkent disappeared forever. Stalinist architecture (massive homely buildings, dauntingly wide concrete boulevards) stamped out the medieval nature of the desert town ... there isn't much left to be seen of the old Tashkent.

And then in 1966 there was a tremendous earthquake which gutted half of the city. Soviet builders rushed in to fill the vacuum and rebuild the city according to their own disgusting sensibilities.

Tashkent, judging from the pictures, is one of the ugliest places on earth. Everything is grandiose, inflated, with massive gaunt spaces meant to make the citizens feel tiny and insignificant. The avenues are 6 lanes wide, the squares are massive vistas watched over by mammoth statues. It looks oppressive. Like someone is always watching, or like the city is always waiting for something terrible to happen.

Stalin's legacy persists here, not just in the architecture, but in the population of Tashkent. Tashkent is filled with Russians and Armenians. Taskent still has very strong ties with Moscow ... much stronger than other areas in Uzbekistan. This adds to the regional divides in the country; it is very difficult for the nation to join together, unify, and agree on who they are as a people, as a place. Nobody agrees. Everybody battles for power.

The Russians, while they were the leaders of Tashkent, erected a state playhouse, a ballet, a circus. So Tchaikovsky was introduced to Uzbekistan, to a disgruntled Muslim populace (who, quite frankly, have no curiosity about other cultures in general. They could not GIVE a shit about what Western culture might have to offer. Meanwhile, we translate all of their top novels and poets into English or French or German or Italian, we watch their films, we give them Oscars ... but the exchange is almost completely one-sided. Well - except for the proliferation of Leonardo deCaprio T-shirts in Tehran).

And Tashkent today? Over a million people live in the city. There is much crime; it is not safe for anybody. It is very polluted. There is no work. And the youth population has exploded, so the city is crowded with drunken young men, filled with vague senses of grievance, who have nothing to do. The suburbs continue to spread. Everything looks the same. There is no traditional Uzbek community here. Everyone yearns to be part of the West, and yet they live in a poverty-struck and dangerous society, where they basically have to leave in order to live productive lives. The mafia is ever-present, their influence in everything.

It's a bad situation, a powder keg. Islamic fundamentalism on the rise, reacting to the youthful population who want nothing more than to have access to Western music and Western movies.

These people have had their histories, their indigenous culture, amputated. There is no memory, no sense of who they are. The Russians who still live here live in fear, hiding out in their houses, dreaming about the good old days of Stalin.

Kind of a sick scenario, no?

Uzbekistan - Part III - Bukhara

This post is about Bukhara, another of the famous cities of Uzbekistan.

UZBEKISTAN - BUKHARA

There are bazaars in Bukhara which have been operating, nonstop, for a thousand years. There are madrassahs in Bukhara, built in the 1500s, which still have students today.

Bukhara was once seen as one of the centers of the world. There was a Sufi religious center here, built in the 1300s ... a major mecca for Sufi scholars and pilgrims. Everyone passed through Bukhara, and the Silk Road helped establish Bukhara's position as one of the premier city-states in the known world.

I don't know much about the Samanids, but they were a dynasty in the 10th century, and under their reign, Bukhara blossomed. They built a great library here that had 45,000 manuscripts in it. The Samanids were eventually destroyed by the Mongols, everything destroyed, nothing survived of that brief great era.

An interesting fact: The Samanids had built a wall around their oasis. But during the time of prosperity, the Samanids let down their guard ... they relaxed ... they let the wall fall to bits, they did not maintain their wall ... so when the Turkic invaders came along in 999 A.D., they easily captured the town.

First off, a quote, from Colin Thubron's great book The Lost Heart of Asia:

Across this region, for some two thousand years, the Silk Road has nourished caravan-towns -- Samarqand, Bukhara, Margilan -- whose populace had spoken an Iranian tongue. The Uzbeks were latecomers, migrating south at the end of the 15th century. They took their name froma khan of the Golden Horde, for their origins were Turkic, but already their blood was mixed with Iranians', and they added only the last layer to a palimpsest of peoples identifying themselves less by nation than by clan. On my map Uzbekistan made a multi-colored confusion. It was shaped like a dog barking at China. A country of 20 million -- more than 70% of them Uzbeks -- it butted against the Tienshan and the Pamir mountains in green-tinted lowlands and a sudden spaghetti of roads. But it remained an enigma: a land whose Communist rulers had persisted in power under another name, offering only lipservice to Islam, and loosening the economy without promise of democracy.

Thubron rhapsodizes about what the word "Bukhara" has always meant to him:

Bukhara! For centuries it had glimmered remote in the Western consciousness: the most secretive and fanatical of the great caravan-cities, shored up in its desert fastness against time and change. To either side of it the Silk Road had withered away, so that by the 19th century the town had folded its battlements around its people in self-immolated barbarism, and receded into fable.

So the Mongols sacked the joint in 1220, and trashed the entire town. But then along came Tamerlane the Terrible, and in the 16th century the mosques and madrassahs were rebuilt. They still stand today, but nothing older than that survives.

Once the sea route to India and to China was discovered, Central Asia was done. In a matter of 100 years, the place closed shut like a trap, forgotten by the rest of the world. Bukhara (and Samarqand, and others) fell into wretched decay. Nobody passed through. For hundreds of years, Uzbeks never saw someone from the West. The cultural exchange stopped. Technological advances stopped passing through the area. They were forgotten by history.

In 2001, when Uzbekistan let us operate from their bases (Russian-built), during our attacks on Afghanistan, that was the first time that Western soldiers had operated in this area since Alexander the Great passed through in 329 B.C. Incredible, no?

Colin Thubron, who traveled through the region during the first summer and spring of independence from Moscow, describes Bukhara's own journey (because, like I said, Uzbekistan is not a real country yet. At least not like we would define. People in Uzbekistan, for millennia, have identified themselves as citizens of Bukhara, Samarqand, etc. Now, they are starting to identify themselves ethnically ... "We are Uzbeks. Everything good comes from Uzbek culture!" So far, they do not have an identity as a coherent nation yet.) So Bukhara's own story definitely can stand in for the whole, to some degree.

It was the failure of water, as well as conservative ferocity, which hurried on the isolation of Bukhara. The Zerafshan river, flowing 500 miles out of the Pamirs, expends its last breath on the oasis, and is withering away. To north and west the sands have buried a multitude of towns and villages which the exhausted irrigation could not save.

Even in the 19th century, the accounts of travellers were filled with ambiguity. To Moslems Bukhara was "the Noble, the Sublime". It was wrapped round by eight miles of walls and fortified gates, and its mosques and medresehs were beyond counting. The Bukhariots, it was said, were the most polished and civilized inhabitants of Central Asia, and their manners and dress became a yardstick of oriental fashion ...

Even in decline, the bazaars were rumoured magnificent, and teemed with Hindus, Persians, Jews, and Tartars.

Yet this splendour barely concealed an inner wretchedness. Men who walked abroad like kings returned at night to hovels. The city gates and walls were a gimcrack theatre-set, and the famed medresehs in decay ... Ordinary people seemed inured to cruelty and subterfuge. Scarcely a Westerner dared enter before the 1870s.

The decline had begun in earnest during the end of the 18th century. And in the 19th century, there were two vicious and degenerate emirs who were brutal, and terrifying. Their behavior alienated them from their own people. The discontent and anger of the citizens of Bukhara made it relatively easy for the Russians to sweep in in the mid-1800s, and reduce Bukhara to a client state. This was part of the famous "Great Game", played by Russia and England in the middle of Central Asia.

Here's a passage about the czarist triumph:

In all their Central Asian wars, between 1847-73, the Russians claimed to have lost only 400 dead, while the Moslem casualties mounted to tens of thousands.

The ensuing years brought the ambiguous peace of subservience. The czarist Russians, like the Bolsheviks after them, were contemptuous of the world which they had conquered. They stilled the Turcoman raids and abolished slavery, at least in name, but they entertained few visions of betterment for their subjects. As for the Moslems, who could stoically endure their own despots, the tyranny of the Great White Czar insulted them by its alien unbelief. "Better your own land's weeds," they murmured, "than other men's wheat."

Yet there would come a time when they would look back on the czarist indifference as a golden age.

In 1918, Mahomet Alim, the last emir of Bukhara, repulsed the (now) Red Invaders, booting out the Bolsheviks. This wasn't altogether a great thing for the people of Bukhara because the last emir was a tyrannical lunatic, with a massive harem, who sent tax collectors out to basically terrorize the populace. He wasn't a great guy. But he did defeat the Russians. However, 2 years later, in 1920, as General Frunze, in the Red Army, advanced again on the oasis, the last emir flipped out, and fled with his harem, leaving the populace to fend for themselves.

And then followed six decades of communism. Stalin closed down all the mosques. He criminalized private property, and entrepreneurship ... Uzbekistan was crushed beyond repair. They have still not recovered.

The story of what has happened to the Aral Sea is one of the most disturbing and devastating legacies left by the Russians. It has been described as "the world's greatest environmental disaster". It makes me sick to my stomach.

Thubron again, on strolling through the ancient bazaars in the early 1990s:

A hesitant free enterprise was surfacing, but the inflation raging through the old Soviet empire had turned everyone poor. Sad traders peered from their kiosks like glove-puppets, or threaded the bazaars with a predatory vigilance. But they had almost nothing to sell. Once the name 'Bukhara' had been synonymous with lustrous dyed silks and the crimson rugs of the Turcomans who traded here, and carpets of Persian design were woven on domestic looms all over the city. But under Stalin, home industries became criminal. Mass production laid a dead hand on all the old crafts. I trudged through the market quarter until dark, but found no trace of handmade silk or rug.

Nobody alive today can know what the ancient Bukhara was like. It's lost. Lost for good.

Here are some pictures of modern-day Bukhara. I can see why everyone refers to the oasis as "monochromatic". Everything is the color of chalk.

If you take a look at the lower left picture, you will see the old city gate, which still stands. Part of the remaining wall that has always surrounded the oasis. And the top left, the emir's summer palace, is the residence of the last emir who flew the coop when he was threatened by Frunze. He and all his many many many lovely ladies. Additionally, in the last post I talked about the Kalyan minaret, erected in 1127, the only surviving structure from Genghis Khan's attack in 1220. It is 148 feet high, and actually kind of homely, in my opinion, but there was a time on this planet, when that minaret (pictured in the right hand column, second photo down) was as famous a sight as the Eiffel Tower. I have never seen the Eiffel Tower but I know exactly what it looks like. The camel caravans on the Silk Road kept their eyes open for that minaret, knowing exactly what it would look like, counting on it to be there.

Oh, and also notice the bottom right hand picture: the Ulugh Beg madrassah. He was the grandson of Tamerlane, who took over the empire after his grandfather's death. But Ulugh Beg was a scientist, an astronomer ... and actually, quite brilliant. He built observatories and sponsored scientists visiting Bukhara. He wanted the place to be a cultural center, not just a hotbed of fanaticism, and a place to rest in between military ventures and wars. The madrassah you see in the picture was completed in 1420. It was one of the places shut down by Stalin, but now it is open again, and filled with students.

I am a little afraid of what they may be learning in there these days ("And today's lesson ... Americans are Satan." "Don't forget to do your homework ... write an essay on why you think the Zionists are taking over the world."), but still: the Ulugh Beg madrassah is an amazing structure, and actually was built by quite an enlightened and educated man. A curious man.

So perhaps that legacy will rub off. I can only hope.

I found some descriptive quotes of Bukhara in Thubron's book that I wanted to share. It makes me feel as though I can see this famous city with my own eyes. Which is, after all, why I read all of these historical travelogues. I want to see the world. And not just Paris or Rome, although I'd love to go there, too. The places I really want to see are the so-called backwaters of Central Asia and the Middle East. Samarqand, Bukhara, Shiraz (in Iran), the Fergana Valley (in Kyrgyzstan), Herat (in Afghanstan)... all of Alexander the Great's old hangouts.

Thubron strolls through Bukhara:

...I entered a dust-filled wasteland fringed by a pale host of mosques and medresehs. The din and pall of restoration shook the air. The earth dazzled. The buildings glared in a blank, shadowless uniformity. Dressed in cement-colored brick, they had not the rich plenitude of the tiled mosques of Iran, but were patterned only sparsely with a glaze of indigo or green. For the rest, they were the color of the earth beneath them: a dead platinum. It was as if the dust had hardened into walls and turrets and latticed windows. Everything-- even the clay-colored sky -- shone with the same bleached stare.

But above, in radiant atonement, hovered a tumult of turquoise domes. Beyond the high gateways and iwans -- the great vaulted porches-- they swam up from their drums like unearthly fruit, and flooded the sky with the heaven-sent blue of Persia. From a distance they seemed to shine in unified aquamarine, but in fact the tiles which coated them were subtly different from one another, so that they spread a vibrant, changing patina over every cupola: eggshell, kingfisher, deep sapphire.

These mosques and medresehs were mostly raised by the successors of Tamerlane or by the 16th century Sheibanids, the first and most glorious Uzbek dynasty that succeeded them. Little that is older survives...

The blanched aridity all around oppressed me inexplicably, as though the city were dying instead of being restored. Even the dust seemed to have been leached by some ghostly peroxide. But in fact Bukhara was being resurrected indiscriminately: walls rebuilt shoddily en masse, tilework reproduced wholesale. Work had started in the Soviet period, but events had overtaken it, and the mosques which had been reconstituted cold in the service of art or tourism were stirring again with a half-life of their own.

The following descriptive passage is also very interesting because it captures what appears to be the inherent contradictions not only in Bukhara but in all of Uzbekistan. They don't really fit in with the rest of Central Asia ... they are not homogenous, they practice Islam but with elements of shamanism and Sufism, they don't subscribe to fundamentalism (at least not yet) ... They try to resist being sucked into the issues plaguing Afghanistan, the civil war next door in Tajikstan, the tyrannical dictatorship in Turkmenistan next door ... They are a milder people. But this struggle is difficult. Very difficult. Because, of course, there are many radical elements in the populations. There are millions of Uzbeks who do not live in Uzbekistan proper, who live in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, China, Tajikstan ... and these people bring home radicalism, fanaticism.

Thubron discusses the glorious Renaissance that Bukhara experienced in the10th century, a great era of art and literature, and although it was back in the Middle Ages, the tensions he describes in the society still exist, and still simmer beneath the surface.

He visits "The Tomb of the Samanids", a 10th century mausoleum that stands on the outskirts of the city.

The tomb is all that survives of the precocious Samanid dynasty, the last Persians to rule in Central Asia, whose empire pushed south of the Caspian and deep into Afghanistan. The tomb escaped the Mongol sack because it lay buried under windblownsands, its builders half forgotten, and it perhaps finds its architectural origins in the palaces and fire-temples of pre-Islamic times. But its sophistication -- the lavish, almost playful deployment of its brick -- betrays an age more daring, more intellectual, than any which succeeded it.

For over a hundred years, until the end of the 10th century, a creative frenzy gripped the capital. Alongside the moral austerity of Islam, there bloomed an aesthetic Persian spirit which looked back to the magnificence and philosophic liberalism of the Sassanian age, extinguished by the Arabs more than two centuries before. As the Silk Road spilt into and out of Bukhara -- furs, amber and honey travelling east; silks, jewellry and jade going west -- the Samanids sent horses and glass to China, and received spices and ceramics in exchange.

An era of peace brought men of letters and science crowding to the court, and the Persian language flowered again in a galaxy of native poets. It was an ebullient age. Iranian music, painting and wine flourished heretically alongside Koranic learning, and the great library of Bukhara, stacked with 45,000 manuscripts,became the haunt of doctors, mathematicians, astronomers, and geographers.

The short era produced men of striking genius: the polymathic al-Biruni, who computed the earth's radius; the lyric poet Rudaki; and the great Ibn Sina, Avicenna, who wrote 242 scientific books of stupefying variety, and whose 'Canons of Medicine' became a vital textbook in the hospitals even of Christian Europe for 500 years.

Uzbekistan - Part II - Samarqand and Tamerlane

The following post is about the storied city of Samarqand and the horrors of Timur.

UZBEKISTAN - SAMARQAND AND TIMUR

But, for me, the really gripping history in the area goes way way back, to medieval times, when this section of the planet was one of the centers of the world, if not the center. An amazing thing, to have that in your cultural memory.

Uzbekistan was part of the old Persian empire, and things did not change much here from the 6th century BC to the 19th century. In the 4th century B.C., Alexander the Great passed through (that boy certainly got around), and married the daughter of a local chieftain near Samarqand. This connected the region to the outside world. The Silk Road propelled the region to the center of the world. The Silk Road was a peaceful connector, a trade-driven connector. Regions did not have to be conquered by outsiders anymore in order to learn about innovations in other cultures. Camel caravans brought news and technology and inventions to these remote areas, and the world got a bit smaller.

In the 6th century AD, Western Turks galloped into the region from the vast steppes and brought Islam with them. They also brought a written alphabet. This changed everything.

Uzbekistan is one of the crossroads of the world. Everybody passed through here in those days, avoiding the Himalayas, avoiding the deserts, following the great rivers. Oases and towns sprung up, people became rich, civilization flourished. The Turks moved on, and the Persians took over again.

City-states were passed from leader to leader over the centuries. For example: Tashkent: in the 1st century AD, it was your basic oasis settlement. And then Persian armies, Mongol hordes, and Turkic khans swapped it back and forth through the medieval centuries. One despot would subside, leaving room for another. By the middle ages, Tashkent, Samarqand and Bukhara were not just desert oases. They were centers of learning and culture. They were the Pragues of the 12th century.

Genghis Khan comes along in the 13th century and sacks the entire region. Every oasis was destroyed. I'm not sure what exactly his point was ... Genghis didn't seem to be a typical conqueror as in: I will come in, kick you all out or enslave you, and take over all your buildings. He was more like: I will come in, kill everybody, and burn all of your cities to the ground. Then I will decapitate the intelligentsia and I will put their heads on stakes outside of your libraries, and I will smash all of your mirrors. And then he would ride on to the next oasis. Not sure what that accomplished. But that was his deal. Ha ha ... such an oversimplification! I don't even really know what I'm talking about, but all I DO know is that the history books describing the 13th century in this area are peppered with the following sentences: "And they flourished until Genghis Khan." "And then Genghis Khan sacked the city." "All was well until the terror of Genghis Khan came from the north." Who knows. He was a destroyer, not a builder. The same is true, and more so, for Tamerlane.

An explanatory quote about Mr. Khan (unfortunately, I have no idea where this quote came from - it's on one of my "Uzbekistan"index cards ... sorry.)

The Mongols were illiterate, religiously shamanistic and sparsely populated, perhaps no more than around 700,000 in number, living in good-sized felt tents. They were herdsmen around an area called Karakorum. They had been moving across great distances on the grassy plains -- steppe lands -- north and east of China, frequently fighting wars over turf. Before 1200 they had been fragmented ... In the late 1100s and early 1200s a Mongol military leader named Temüjin was creating a confederation of tribes, Mongol and non-Mongol but which would be called Mongol. He was a good manager, collecting under him people of talent. And, when necessary, he warred ... In 1206, at the age of 42, Temüjin took the title Universal Ruler, which translates to Genghis Khan.

Like others, Genghis Khan's subjects saw themselves at the center of the universe and the greatest of people -- favored, of course, by the gods. And they justified Genghis Khan's conquests in previous years by claiming that he was the rightful master not only over the "peoples of the felt tent" but the entire world.

More on Genghis Khan right here. It's mind-boggling, how much territory he conquered, on horseback. Genghis Khan described himself as "the punishment of God".

And then there was Tamerlane (or Timur). Tamerlane was a Muslim and has routinely been chosen as one of the most ruthless warriors of the millennium. (At least, Time Magazine voted him so in 2000.)

Tamerlane was a brutal warrior, the terror of the land, but he also loved and appreciated art and architecture ... So when he would capture a town, he would enslave the best artists in that town, capture them, spare them from execution, and drag them to Samarqand (the oasis he chose as his capital). He then made these prisoners of war build him the perfect city. A very contradictory mix, that Tamerlane. Samarqand became one of the most famous Islamic cities in the world while Tamerlane was around.

Ulugh Beg (1394-1449) was Tamerlane's grandson, and he took over when his grandfather died. He wasn't a ruthless murderer like his grandfather. Ulugh Beg was an astronomer, and also a great patron of scientists and astronomers. He built observatories. Another unattributable quote about the fascinating Ulugh Beg:

He was certainly the most important observational astronomer of the 15th century. He was one of the first to advocate and build permanently mounted astronomical instruments. His catalogue of 1018 stars (some sources count 1022) was the only such undertaking carried out between the times of Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 170 A.D.) and Tycho Brahe (ca. 1600).

Blows the mind. Ulugh Beg only ruled for two years, because he was assassinated, but in that time, he was able to supervise the building of astronomical observatories, the ruins of which still stand. Fascinating man. There are madrassahs in Uzbekistan named after him today. He is one of their cultural heroes.

The history of the oases of Uzbekistan tells the story of the whole area. This post is about Samarqand. I'll do Bukhara tomorrow.

Samarqand is one of those cities which has never NOT been inhabited, since its inception, two thousand years ago.

In the 6th century B.C., ancient Samarqand was called Maraconda. It was the capital of the Sogdians (who were, basically, Iranians ... the forefathers of Iranians, anyway.)

In the 4th century (329 B.C.), Samarqand was captured by Alexander the Great, during his push east. The Sogdians outlasted Alexander's rule, however. (Those resourceful Iranians ... they cannot be completely conquered!)

In the 2nd century B.C., Samarqand was made into an essential junction point of the Silk Road by China. Chinese merchants chose it because of its location, and its nearness to a river, a perfect combination. Samarqand flourished. Became a very wealthy and cosmopolitan medieval city throughout the centuries that followed.

In 712 A.D., Samarqand (Maraconda) was conquered by the Arabs.

In the 13th century A.D., Samarqand was, you guessed it, sacked by Genghis Khan. The entire city was wrecked. And then built back up.

In the 14th century A.D., Samarqand was chosen as Tamerlane's capital, which made it famous. Samarqand became Tamerlane's showpiece, his pride and joy. It was a mud city, but underneath the guidance of Tamerlane, the place bloomed. Artists and architects from Persia were captured and brought there to build it up, silk weavers from Syria, jewellers from India. It once was a mud city, but under Tamerlane the place exploded: tiled mosques, minarets, towers.

From 1407 - 1449, Samarqand was ruled by Ulugh Beg (Tamerlane's grandson).

In the 14th century, the Mongol tribes who called themselves "Uzbek" began moving south, and they eventually conquered all of Tamerlane's empire. By 1510, they controlled everything in the area (and the descendents still control that very same area today, the area known as modern-day Uzbekistan).

I'll close today with Ryzsard Kapuscinski's discussion of Samarqand, Bukhara, and Tamerlane:

Bukhara is brownish; it is the color of clay baked in the sun. Samarqand is intensely blue; it is the color of sky and water.

Bukhara is commercial, noisy, concrete, and material: it is a city of merchandise and marketplaces; it is an enormous warehouse, a desert port, Asia's belly. Samarqand is inspired, abstract, lofty, and beautiful; it is a city of concentration and reflection; it is a musical note and a painting; it is turned toward the stars. Erkin told me that one must look at Samarqand on a moonlit night, during a full moon. The ground remains dark; the walls and the towers catch all the light; the city starts to shimmer, then it floats upward, like a lantern.

H. Papworth, in his book The Legend of Timur, questions whether the miracle that is Samarqand is in fact the work of Timur, also known as Tamerlane. There is something incomprehensible -- he writes -- in the notion that this city, which with all its beauty and composition directs man's thoughts toward mysticism and contemplation, was created by such a cruel demon, marauder, and despot as was Timur,

But there is no denying the fact that the basis of Samarqand's fame was born at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries and hence during Timur's reign. Timur is an astonishing historical phenomenon. His name aroused terror for decades. He was a great ruler who kept Asia under his heel, but his might did not stop him from concerning himself with details. His armies were famed for their cruelty. Wherever Timur appeared, writes the Arab historian Zaid Vosifi, "blood poured from people as from vessels," and "the sky was the color of a field of tulips". Timur himself would stand at the head of each and every expedition, overseeing everything himself. Those whom he conquered he ordered beheaded. He ordered towers built from their skulls, and walls and roads. He supervised the progress of the work himself. He ordered the stomachs of merchants ripped open and searched for gold. He himself supervised the process to ensure they were being searched diligently. He ordered his adversaries and opponents poisoned. He prepared the potions himself.

He carried the standard of death, and this mission absorbed him for half the day.

During the second half of the day, art absorbed him. Timur devoted himself to the dissemination of art with the same zeal he sustained for the spread of death. In Timur's consciousness, an extremely narrow line separated art and death, and it is precisely this fact that Papworth cannot comprehend. It is true that Timur killed. But it is also true that he did not kill all. He spared people with creative qualifications. In Timur's Imperium, the best sanctuary was talent.

Timur drew talent to Samarqand; he courted every artist. He did not allow anyone who carried within him the divine spark to be touched. Artists bloomed and Samarqand bloomed. The city was his pride. On one of its gates Timur ordered inscribed the sentence: IF YOU DOUBT OUR MIGHT -- LOOK AT OUR BUILDINGS! and that sentence has outlived Timur by many centuries. Today Samarqand still stuns us with its peerless beauty, its excellence of form, its artistic genius. Timur supervised each construction himself. That which was unsuccessful he ordered removed, and his taste was excellent. He deliberated about the various alternatives in ornamentation; he judged the delicacy of design, the purity of line. And then he threw himself again into the whirl of a new military expedition, into carnage, into blood, into flames, into cries.

Papworth does not understand that Timur was playing a game that few people have the means to play. Timur was sounding the limits of man's possibilities. Timur demonstrated that which Dostoyevsky later described -- that man is capable of everything. One can define Timur's creation through a sentence of Saint-Exupery's: "That which I have done no animal would ever do." Both the good and the bad. Timur's scissors had two blades -- the blade of creation and the blade of destruction. These two blades define the limits of every man's activity. Ordinarily, though, the scissors are barely open. Sometimes they are open a little more. In Timur's case they were open as far as they could go.

Erkin showed me Timur's grave in Samarqand, made of green nephrite. Before the entrance to the mausoleum there is an inscription, whose author is Timur: HAPPY IS HE WHO RENOUNCED THE WORLD BEFORE THE WORLD RENOUNCED HIM.

He died at the age of 69, in 1405, during an expedition to China.

I must go and see Samarqand one day. I really must.

Uzbekistan - Part I - The People

Here is an archive of the past countries I chose to focus on ... writing a brief essay a day, providing book excerpts, etc.

Now - before I head back to Manhattan - I am going to post the essays I wrote about Uzbekistan, a country which holds much fascination for me. I feel that I must go there some day.

The first essay I wrote is about the Uzbeks themselves.

As always, readers, please chime in, to add to this discussion, or to help me out on stuff I may be missing.

All of this stuff comes from my reading of other people, having never been there myself.

UZBEKISTAN - THE PEOPLE

Uzbekistan is the heartland of Central Asia. It has borders with all of the other "stans", as well as a small border with Afghanistan.

There are two ancient rivers flowing through Uzbekistan: the Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya. Because of these two great rivers, oases were able to spring up left and right throughout the desert country, where people flourished and survived, in the middle of nothingness. Another example of geography as destiny. Bukhara and Samarqand would never have been so important without those two rivers.

Who are the Uzbek people? How the hell should I know ... I've never met an Uzbek. But here is what I can glean: They are of Turkic origin, but they also have genetic connections with Iranians. This makes for a very interesting mix, because Iranians are, historically, looked down upon throughout this area, because they are of Indo-European stock, not Turkic, and they are also Shiites, not Sunni. So the Uzbek people bridge that gap, uneasily at times. The Uzbeks were latecomers to the area, having migrated south at the end of the 15th century.

Uzbeks trace their lineage back to Uzbek Khan (1312-1340), from whom they take their name. Uzbek Khan was the great-grandson of the feared and infamous Genghis Khan. Uzbek Khan's forebears were part of Genghis' original Turko-Mongolian horde.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to get that because of all this, Uzbek society is based on clan traditions. The notion of a nation-state is still very weak here. These people are desert nomads, they traveled throughout the centuries from oasis to oasis ... and the oasis was the center, the oasis was the basis of your identity. You did not say, "Yes, I am an Uzbek." You said, "I am from Samarqand." I think to some degree that this is still true. Stalin's repressive programs in this region certainly did not help! Russians poured into Uzbekistan, as colonizers. There are a ton of them still there.

But I'll get to that later.

Uzbeks are, traditionally, Sunni Muslim, but they have some interesting twists in it. There are elements of shamanism in their practice (anathema to traditional Sunnis ... you can be killed for this stuff in Saudi Arabia). They have a deep undercurrent of Persian philosophy in their faith, of Sufism (the whirling dervishes, you will recall). Uzbeks are a very proud and independent people, as desert nomads always are. They don't accept central authority. But they have handled being dominated in an interesting way: it's like they take on the attributes of their oppressor, as protective coloring, while underneath they remain committed to their own traditions, their own ways.

I have an awesome passage which illustrates this. Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of my favorite authors, traveled all through the "Soviet Imperium" throughout his life as a Polish foreign correspondent. Kapuscinski lived under Soviet domination. He suffered. So he wrote books about the tyranny of the last Shah in Iran, of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, of revolutions in Central America, as a way to criticize the terrible regime Poles lived under at home. But he could not have gotten away with writing about his own country. He went at it another way. Finally, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kapuscinski wrote Imperium, a panoramic view of the USSR over the years. From 1939, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Kapuscinski's home town when he was a small boy, to the incredible years of 1989-1991. I can't recommend this book highly enough!

But back to Uzbekistan, and the trait of the Uzbek people I was talking about: their ability to take on the protective coloring of the dominant power:

Kapuscinski travels through all the "stans" in 1967. The Soviet Union has these republics on a short leash. But the leash is never short enough, as it turns out. And here is Kapuscinski's description of a town square in Bukhara, during the Soviet years:

It is noon. I go out of the fortress onto a large, dusty square. On the opposite side is a chaykhana. At this time of day the chaykhanas are full of Uzbeks. They squat, colorful skullcaps on their heads, drinking green tea. They drink like this for hours, often all day. It's a pleasant life, spent in the shadow of a tree, on a little carpet, among close friends. I sat down on the grass and ordered a pot of tea. On one side I had a view of the fortress, as big as Krakow's Vavel Castle, only made of clay. But on the other side I had an even better view.

On the other side stood a glorious mosque.

The mosque caught my attention because it was made of wood, which is extremely rare in Muslim architecture, whose materials are typically stone and clay. Furthermore, in the hot, numb silence of the desert at noon, one could hear a knocking inside the mosque. I put aside my teapot and went to investigate the matter.

It was billard balls knocking.

The mosque is called Bolo-Khauz. It is a unique example of 18th century Central Asian architecture, virtually the only structure from that period to have survived. The portal and exterior walls of Bolo-Khauz are decorated with a wooden ornamentation whose beauty and precision have no equal. One cannot help but be enraptured.

I looked inside. There were six green tables, and at each one young boys with tousled blond hair were playing billiards. A crowd of onlookers rooted for the various competitors. It cost eighty kopecks to rent a table for an hour, so it was cheap, and there were so many willing customers that there was a line in front of the entrance. I didn't feel like standing in it and so couldn't get a good look at the interior. I returned to the chaykhana.

Blinding sun fell on the square. Dogs wandered about. Tour groups were coming out of the fortress ... Between the fortress-turned-museum and the mosque-turned-billiards hall sat Uzbeks drinking tea. They sat in silence, facing the mosque, in accordance with the ways of the fathers. There was a kind of dignity in the silent presence of these people, and despite their worn gray smocks, they looked distinguished. I had the urge to walk up to them and shake their hands. I wanted to express my respect in some way, but I didn't know how. In these men, in their bearing, in their wise calm, was something that aroused my spontaneous and genuine admiration. They have sat for generations in this chaykhana, which is old, perhaps older than the fortress and the mosque. Many things are different now -- many, but not all. One can say that the world is changing, but it is not changing completely; in any case it is not changing to the degree that an Uzbek cannot sit in a chaykhana and drink tea even during working hours.

Russians moved into their country, and turned Uzbek mosques into billiard halls. Hard to comprehend. Terrible. Stalin closed down 26,000 mosques and only allowed 22 people to study in the madrassahs, when before they overflowed with people. Islam dove way underground.

The other thing Stalin attacked (which he did everywhere else as well) was the Uzbek language. Their language is Turkic, and was was born during the 16th century, and has survived through all of the chaos that has followed. Stalin prohibited the language to be used starting in 1937. This was an assault on the identity of the Uzbeks. History was cut off. Young Uzbeks today, kids who are 20 years old or whatever, have absolutely no sense of the ancient history of their culture. They are now trying to re-invent the past, mythologizing themselves, making up heroes out of nothing. Creating a glorious past that never really existed, because no accurate information has survived and people are ignorant and illiterate.

The Uzbeks, traditionally, like their great-great-great-granddaddy Genghis, were warriors. Nomadic warriors. They disdained trade. They were not sedentary. They were always on the move. They have a lot of ethnic pride, a ton of it, but that pride has not coalesced or transformed into a nationalistic thing.

Macedonia Essays

I have compiled the five short essays I wrote about Macedonia, and "the Macedonian problem" - so they are all in one place. Macedonia is one of my overriding passions - but there's always still so much to learn.

Part I - Introduction

Part II - IMRO

Part III - Competing territorial claims

Part IV - The Young Turks

Part V - 20th century wars

Quote

The utopian premise of the Genocide Convention had been that a moral imperative to prevent efforts to exterminate whole peoples should be the overriding interest animating the action of an international community of autonomous states. This is a radical notion, fundamentally at odds, as so much of the internationalist experiment has proven to be, with the principle of sovereignty. States have never acted for purely disinterested humanitarian reasons; the novel idea was that the protection of humanity was in every state's interest, and it was well understood in the aftermath of World War II that action against genocide would require a willingness to use force and to risk the lives of one's own. The belief was that the price to the world of such a risk would not be as great as the price of inaction. But whose world were the drafters of the Genocide Convention -- and the refugee conventions, which soon followed -- thinking of?

--Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Familes: Stories from Rwanda

Macedonia - Part IV - The Young Turks

The fascination Macedonia holds for me so far does not equal a ton of knowledge (as opposed to, say, my fascination with Uzbekistan, which has led to me owning an entire small bookshelf of material on the republic). But that's all right, I suppose. Now I know that I need to learn more about Macedonia. I can feel the gaps in my mind, questions arising, wanting to flesh out the scenario a bit more for myself.

The post below is about the Turkey-Macedonian connection.

MACEDONIA - THE YOUNG TURKS

Again, from what I have read, things that happen in Macedonia send out shock waves with global consequences. This has been true since Alexander the Great launched his ships of conquest from Salonika. Macedonia was the place from which world events sprung. So here's how I understand the connection between Ataturk (who basically equalled Turkey) and Macedonia:

In 1903, IMRO began a violent uprising against the Turks and the entire Ottoman Empire. IMRO took over some villages at the top of a mountain in Macedonia and proclaimed it an independent republic called the "Krushovo Republic". This republic lasted 10 days, and then 2000 Turkish troops marched in and completely massacred everybody. One of the stories told is that forty of the guerrillas, instead of surrendering, kissed one another goodbye, and shot themselves in the mouth. Another story is that the Turks, as they took back the area, raped 150 women and small girls. There are other horror stories. Of the Turks complete inhumanity and cruelty.

There was a worldwide protest against the Turkish Sultanate for this behavior, led by Great Britain and the West. The British prime minister, the Russian czar and the Habsburg Emperor (Franz Joseph) all put tremendous pressure on the Ottomans to call off the dogs, so to speak, and to calm the hell down about Macedonia. Just CALM DOWN.

The pressure became so great, the outrage so pronounced, that an international peacekeeping force marched into Macedonia in 1904, to keep an eye on the situation. (Of course, history has proven how useless peacekeeping forces are, in places as volatile and violent as Macedonia. I read a wonderful interview with Philip Gourevitch, the author of the amazing book about the genocide in Rwanda, and he said in the interview, "One of the things I have learned is that if you find yourself living in a UN 'safe zone', just know that your life is in danger. It is the most dangerous place on the planet to be....in a UN Safe Zone. Run for your life.")

And now for Turkey/Ataturk:

Mustapha Kemal Ataturk was born in Macedonia. (Of COURSE.) Additionally, the "Young Turk Revolution", which ended up toppling the Ottoman Empire (which had lasted for 400 years or something like that) originated in Macedonia.

The Young Turk revolution originally demanded "liberty, equality, fraternity, justice". They wanted to force the Sultan to draw up (or accept from them) a liberal constitution. They wanted to preserve the empire, but they wanted to loosen up the iron-fist a bit. (A precursor to Gorbachev....) However (as with so many revolutions), the Young Turks didn't really have a plan. They didn't know how to go about creating a government, or re-creating Turkey into your basic normal country, which also happens to be a massive empire. They also were coming from a place of ethnicity, nationalism, and racial hatred. A terrible mix. CLEARLY.

The problem, as always in the Balkans, was the confusing ethnic mix of peoples. Orthodox Christians were enraged at the thought of a Muslim-run confederation, where perhaps they had constitutional safeguards as protected minorities. Remember that Turkey had been a dreaded and brutal nation for 400 years. Nobody trusted them, nobody believed them when they said "No, we promise to take care of you." Everyone in the Balkans knew, firsthand, what horrors the Turks were capable of.

The Young Turk Revolution, just like Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost, accelerated the shattering of the Ottoman Empire. That was not their intent at all. They wanted the empire to open up to change, to stop resisting transformation. But by introducing minor changes, by discussing modern-day ideas like constitutions, and protections of minorities, etc., all hell broke loose. The door was cracked open a teeny bit by the Young Turks, then the entire population of the Balkans, sick to death of the Ottoman tyranny, pushed open the door the rest of the way. Violently.

1908 was a big year in which Turkey clearly began losing control):

--Bulgaria declared its complete independence from Turkey.

--The island of Crete (which was part of Turkey at the time) voted for union with Greece.

--The Habsburgs annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina (which they had been administering since The Treaty of Berlin)

That last bit there, with the Habsburgs, is the cause of World War I. Puts a chill up your spine, no?

Came across the following passage about all of this mess in (where else) Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, which breaks it all down:

Put another way, Bulgarian-financed guerrillas in Macedonia had triggered a revolution among young Turkish officers stationed there, which then fanned throughout the Ottoman Empire; this development, in turn, encouraged Astria-Hungary to annex Bosnia, inflicting on its Serbian population a tyranny so great that a Bosnian Serb would later assassinate the Habsburg Archduke and ignite World War I.

But before all of this: Turkish Muslims were enraged by the Ottoman Empire's disintegration. Everyone in Turkey began revolting: army units, theological students, clerics. They began demonstrating for "sharia" (Islamic law, of course, which the Taliban perfected). As always, with Muslim fanatics, they wanted to go backwards. They wanted the Ottomans to crack down on all these uppity minorities, crack down HARD, and go back to the perfect time when the Turks ruled the world.

The Young Turks crushed this counterrevolution. They forced the Sultan into exile in, where else, Macedonia. That would be like forcing Hitler into exile in a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. The Sultan had to hide, terrified for his life, in this land of people who hated him and wanted him to pay for what his empire had done.

Then, the Young Turks fell off the deep end. They perpetrated the century's first genocide against the Armenians in 1915. It was a mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians, orchestrated by the government. The Armenians threatened the Turks demographically and religiously. They were Christians, there were large numbers of them, and they were right in the middle of the Turkish homeland. In order for Turkey to be great and unified again, then the Armenians had to disappear.

This genocide occurred on the world stage. Nobody protested. Nobody did anything. There is a story about Hitler, planning Germany's genocide thirty years later, and answering the feeble protests ("What will people say? Won't they notice and try to stop it?") of the sycophants around him. Hitler's response to their concerns was: "Who remembers Armenia?"

Okay, so this is now becoming way too long, and I have strayed far from Macedonia....However, it is all connected.

The Young Turks becoming so terrifying and so brutal forced the Balkans to do something which had never happened before, and which has never happened since: they united. They buried the hatchet in the face of such a clear enemy, and formed an alliance. After all, none of the Great Powers out there were intervening in any of this. They realized that no great warrior from the West was going to lead a cavalry charge and save them, so Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria joined up together, and fought for themselves. Incredible. These historic enemies...people who literally are still in a rage about what happened in 612 AD, or whatever.

In 1912, this alliance declared war on the Ottoman Empire. (A very very ballsy thing to do.) Their principal goal was to liberate poor forgotten important Macedonia.

Next: 20th century wars

Macedonia - Part III - Competing territorial claims

This essay (or, rather, excerpts from others' brilliant works) has to do with why Macedonia is such a flash-point- why people are obsessed with Macedonia. I could never describe this situation in my own words because, as I said in the Intro - I get a bit bogged down trying to get the complexity of Macedonia.

MACEDONIA - COMPETING CLAIMS

Here is quote #1. This describes perfectly the essence of the Balkan chaos:

Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for 'mixed salad' (macedoine), defines the principal illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that its borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion. Because Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, had established a great kingdom in Macedonia in the fourth century BC, the Greeks believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because the Bulgarians at the end of the tenth century under King Samuel and again in the thirteenth century under King Ivan Assen II had extended the frontiers of Bulgaria all the way west to the Adriatic Sea, the Bulgarians believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because King Stefan Duhan had overrun Macedonia in the fourteenth century and had made Skopje, in Dame Rebecca [West's] words, 'a great city, and there he had been crowned one Easter Sunday Emperor and Autocrat of the Serbs and Byzantines, the Bulgars and the Albanians,' the Serbs believed Macedonia to be theirs.

In the Balkans, history is not viewed as tracing a chronological progression as it is in the West. Instead, history jumps around and moves in circles; and where history is perceived in such a way, myths take root. Evangelos Kofos, Greece's preeminent scholar on Macedonia, has observed that these 'historical legacies ... sustained nations in their uphill drive toward state-building, national unification and, possibly, the reincarnation of long extinct empires.'

And here is quote #2. This reiterates what I described in the post about IMRO, only going into a bit more detail about what went down between the two World Wars.

After starting and losing two wars over Macedonia, Bulgaria's King Ferdinant abdicated in 1919. For the next twenty years, until the outbreak of World War II, his son, King Boris III, presided over a political system in Sofia that was riven by coup attempts and other violent conspiracies connected to the loss of what Bulgarians considered their historic homeland. IMRO, radicalized by the defeats of 1913 and 1918, became a terrorist state within a state, and, helped by its skull-and-crossbones insignia, became synonymous in the outside world with hate and violent nihilism. Opium profits financed the purchase of IMRO's weaponry. The standard fee for an IMRO assassination was twenty dollars, so Bulgarian politicians walked around with trains of bodyguards...

The terrorists, aided by Orthodox clergy, came from the Macedonian refugee population of Sofia's slums. By the 1930s, Macedonian terrorists were hiring themselves to radical groups throughout Europe -- in particular, to the Croatian Ustashe, whose chief paymaster was the fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini. A Bulgarian Macedonian nicknamed 'Vlado the Chauffeur' assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia -- the crime that initiated Dame Rebecca's passion for that country.

World War II provided another sickening reply of World War I and the Second Balkan War. Again, as in World War I, Bulgaria joined a German-led alliance against a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in order to regain Macedonia. Again, while forces of a German-speaking power occupied Serbia from the north, Bulgarian troops invaded and occupied Macedonia from the east. And again, Serb and Greek resistance forces, aided by the British, drove the Bulgarians back to the hated borders established in August 1913 at the conclusion of the Second Balkan War. At that point, Communist totalitarianism stopped history until the century's final decade. Nothing of all this has yet been resolved.

Next: The Young Turks

Macedonia - Part II - IMRO

The second essay about Macedonia is about the formation of the terrorist group known as IMRO. My understanding of the history of this group is a wee bit shallow - As always, chime in if you know more.

MACEDONIA - IMRO

The country is poor, ethnically divided, filled with hatred, and with historically weak government institutions. The ground was fertile for terrorism.

IMRO disappeared once Macedonia was sucked into the Yugoslav Federation post World War II. A lot of things (ethnic warfare, guerrilla tactics, raging hatred) disappeared from view under Tito, but these things did not vanish or dissolve or resolve themselves. They merely subsided into silence, underneath the water, waiting for the time when it would be right to emerge again. And "emerge" they did. More like explode. Once Yugoslavia fell apart, all of these undercurrents exploded to the surface again, as though the 40 years of silence meant nothing.

IMRO surfaced again after the collapse of Yugoslavia, only this time it took on the character of a fairly moderate political party. The extremists have been pushed to the side. Most moved to Bulgaria, where everybody is nationalistic, extremist, intense (at least when it comes to the Macedonian Problem).

There is, I am sure, more to learn about IMRO.

Next: Competing territorial claims

Macedonia - Part I - Introduction

I am riveted by Macedonia.

These essays are more from my old Country of the Week feature on my old blog - slowly I am migrating them all over here. They're interesting, if I do say so myself (although I cannot take any credit for the information therein - It's all from the great authors I have read.)

Other countries discussed here.

MACEDONIA - INTRODUCTION

I have read multiple books about the Balkans. Macedonia is really the key to the whole area. Always has been, always will be. But could I explain to you WHY? Occasionally I will have a bright-white "A-ha!!" moment, in terms of getting what is going on with Macedonia, but then the cloud cover comes down again. Sometimes I get the sense, too, that Macedonia is like one of those sub-sub-sub atomic particles in the world of quantum physics, where the only way you can tell that they exist, is by the effect these teeny particles have on OTHER particles. This is not to say that Macedonia does not exist. (Although, I suppose if you spoke with a nationalistic Bulgarian that is exactly what they would say: "Macedonia?? There IS no Macedonia! It is ALL BULGARIA!") It is just that you can really only "get" Macedonia in relation to all the other countries in the Balkans.

Any context or clarifiations to the rambling discussion below would be greatly appreciated. My readers are, categorically, well-read, well-spoken, and damn smart.

Let's begin with this:

TWO TREATIES HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

1. The Treaty of San Stefano

Macedonia is the Balkans in miniature. It is an old country, with memories of glory centuries ago. Alexander the Great, after all, was a Macedonian, and set out from Macedonia to conquer the world. Macedonia is filled with a mix of races and languages and religions and cultures, and nobody mixes with each other. They never have mixed and they don't mix now.

But before I talk about generalities, let me try to describe what is known as "the Macedonian problem", because it is the key. This problem has not disappeared and will definitely appear again one day to the forefront of world events.

Historic Macedonia overlaps Bulgaria and also Greece. Claims on this soil are legion. It's like Armenia. There is a centuries-old question surrounding the issue: Is Macedonia a real country? What are its borders? It has been cut up and carved up and divided so many times that nobody seems to know, although everybody has a fierce opinion about it. And, at this point, everything is so mixed up and ethnically divided that no matter how you divided Macedonia, each state would be left with unruly pissed-off minorities.

So here's a bit of history. The whole Balkan area was part of the Ottoman Empire. In the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire began to show the first signs of a crack-up. Greeks, Serbs, and Montenegrins won a struggle for self-rule. In 1877, Russian troops arrived to liberate Bulgaria from Turkey. The Turks were defeated, and the Russians moved into the Bulgarian capital as an occupying force.

In March, 1878, the Russians dictated the Treaty of San Stefano to the Turks. The Treaty of San Stefano has been called "the first fuse of the Balkan powder keg". It is one of those devilish things from the past which cannot be undone. It seemed like a good idea at the time to the Russians who dictated it, but here we are, over a century later, and people are still bemoaning the Treaty of San Stefano, and how it fucked them over, etc.

The Treaty awarded Macedonia to Bulgaria. The purpose of the Treaty was to recreate Bulgaria, along the lines of the medieval Bulgarian kingdom's borders. So the treaty enlarged Bulgaria, creating a "Greater Bulgaria" which encompassed present-day Bulgaria, all of Macedonia, parts of Albania, and a huge chunk of Greek land surrounding the northern city of Salonika.

So what the Russians basically did with this treaty, was create a powerful pro-Russian state in the Balkans. It swept away the needs or desires of Macedonia and Greece. All that mattered was Bulgaria, and the population of Bulgars. The other big powers at the time (Britain, Germany, the Habsburg Empire) could not accept the Treaty, as written, and demanded that it be amended. Germany and England made it clear to Russia that creating a "Greater Bulgaria" would mean war with Great Britain.

So here we are seeing the roots of World War I. Russia capitulated.

2. The Treaty of Berlin

So basically, Greater Bulgaria was dismembered before it even had a chance to exist. A second treaty was drawn up. The Treaty of Berlin. The northern half of Greater Bulgaria became free (Bulgaria), and the southern half became a Turkish province in the Ottoman Empire (Macedonia). Macedonia was completely abandoned to the brutal Turks, as though the Treaty of San Stefano had never existed. It's like what the Allies let happen to Czechloslovakia in WWII. They tossed the country to the dogs. No hope for them, nobody would invade and save them. They were on their own.

The Treaty of Berlin basically passed around Balkan chunks of land as though nobody actually lived there, it was merely territory. But it created such confusion and such anger that we are still living in the aftermath of that treaty today. Here's the puzzle pieces of the treaty:

--Bismarck gave Russia lands in Bessarabia and Northeast Anatolia, to compensate them for the loss of Macedonia

--Serbs were given full independence

--Bismarck transferred Bosnia from Ottoman rule to Habsburg rule (this is the immediate cause of WWI). Bismarck did this to compensate the Habsburgs for the loss of Macedonia.

--Great Britain received Cyprus from the Turks.

Can you see how misguided all of this is? How crazy? How it solves nothing, and just plants the seeds of insanity for generations to come?

Also: see how Macedonia is the key?

This Treaty sparked an orgy of violence in Macedonia. The Turks brutally suppressed the uprisings.

Macedonia is, historically, an Eastern Orthodox nation. So refugees (ethnic Turks, Muslim Bosnians) flooded into Macedonia to terrorize the Christian population. In 1878 there was a guerrilla uprising against the Turks. That uprising led to a century-long guerilla war. Macedonia is the birthplace of modern-day terrorism. They invented many of the tactics which we see so often now. Their rage at being tossed to the Turks and losing everything continues to this day.

The 1890s brought spreading terrorism and violence, no central government, no concept of nationhood. And the outside powers just used this country to play out their rivalries. The mountains were filled with gangs of mercenaries and murderers, waging 15 different terrorist wars.

Then (I'm skipping way ahead here), Macedonia was incorporated into the Yugoslav Federation which, although awful to some degree, also helped tamp down a lot of the ethnic hatred and violence. But the question continues: Who, actually, does Macedonia belong to? Bulgaria is convinced that there IS no Macedonia. That Macedonia is, and always has been, part of Bulgaria. Greece feels the same way about southern Macedonia, which used to be part of Greece. Greece has never ever given up their claims on that area.

In the books I have read, people lose their minds when they start to talk about Macedonia. Screaming, tearing their hair out, everybody convinced they are right. It's a mess. It's one of the most intense "flashpoints" on this planet. There are certain areas which seem destined, somehow, to make people go nuts. Jerusalem, Armenia, Poland (how many times can Poland be invaded??), the land bridge into Turkey where Istanbul/Constantinople stands ... These are places which, geographically, nobody can be neutral about. If you even just look at their placements on a map, it is obvious why.

The Macedonian Problem will rise again. I'm sure of it.

I hope I explained that okay. It's all very confusing. But interesting, no?

Next: IMRO

For Iraq: There's no going back

Great piece by Christopher Hitchens in The Mirror:

"He was in our minds at all times - and that was power, of a kind." These words, from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, convey a faint sense of the symbolic and practical importance of the fact that, today, we enter the post-Saddam epoch.

Try to imagine seeing his face on your front page every day for three decades, and hearing that voice and seeing that face every time you turned on the radio or TV.

Try to imagine being unable to escape from it when you went to the opera, the cinema, the theatre, or the football. For millions of Iraqis under 35, this indoctrination started at infant school, where lesson one was that Big Daddy was supreme, and could do what he liked to your or your family.

Kanan Makiya's brilliant profile of Ba'ath Party rule, The Republic of Fear, had a title that was, if anything, understated. In Baghdad in the old days, I knew people who said you could smell the fear. Others said no, you could taste it. The one who came closest said you could actually eat it.

(via Michael Totten)

Turkmenistan - Part V - Cultural Identity

And for the last small piece on Turkmenistan (see the other posts below) - here's something on the cultural identity of the people there.

This comes from books I read - I've never been there myself. So I'm not an expert - just someone curious about that region of the world.

Turkmenistan - Cultural Identity

Alexander the Great (HIM AGAIN) marched across the Kara Kum desert in 329 B.C. and left behind him traces of Macedonia and Greece. The ancient ruins of Turkmenistan reveal a culture filled with a fusion of different influences. Islamic, Persian, Hellenistic, Parthian ... all sometimes showing up in the same damn building.

Now think about this mish-mash and the beautiful cultural past, something actually to be proud of and embrace, and imagine Mr. Turkmanbashi insisting that, ACTUALLY, in the past, it was all about "Turkmenness", and there was a homogenous Turkomen society back then when you could be proud of being a Turkomen, and Oh, if we could only go back to the good old days when it was JUST US TURKOMENS here...All fabrications.

There is no homogenous Turkomen identity. It doesn't exist. In actuality, it's something much more interesting, but it is too dangerous for Turkmanbashi to allow people to embrace it. He counts on people to keep the flares of ethnic suspicion and hatred alive.

I will close with an anecdote, which kind of describes what I'm talking about here.

Turkmenistan is NOT what you would think. It is a hot dry oil-filled Islamic country, but it is NOT Saudi Arabia.

This anecdote is from Colin Thubron's awesome book The Lost Heart of Asia. This encounter takes place in the ancient Turkomen city of Merv:

I saw an old man touching an elfin hammer to a little anvil. In front of him lay a miniature lathe and a box of gouging and chipping tools -- all as intricate and fragile-looking as he -- and with these he was creating miniature jewellry and the unearthly, silvery music whenever his hammer struck.

He lived here, I discovered ... As I came in, he asked me to sit by him. Tentatively I enquired after the saints buried here, and wondered if he was their guardian.

His voice came thin and musical: "They were soldiers, martyrs. When? I don't know, but in the century of the great sultans. Their history is written in Arabic and Persian. You can't find it in Russian." He added in faint reproof: "People should learn the holy languages. You can learn one in a few months if your will is strong enough, and if your heart is right." He massaged his heart with a tiny fist. "Look." He rummaged among his tools and from a carefully beribboned cloth picked out a Koran in Arabic. "People should read this!"

Yet his own eyes twinkled over it unseeing; he could no more read it than I could. It was a talisman only. In the Stalin years a whole generation of educated Turcomens, the Arabic speakers, had been despatched into oblivion.

I took it from him and turned the sacred pages. "Where did you get it?"

"From Iran. Sometimes they come here, those people, and from Afghanistan."

"You favor that system, that ..." -- the word whispered like a secret -- "fundamentalism?"

For a moment he went on chipping at the ivory in his hands. Suddenly I realized how I hung on his reply. Here, if anywhere, among the poor and pious, must be the breeding-ground for an Islamic resurgence.

But he answered simply, finally: "No. We don't need that here." He jerked his chin to the south. "That's for people over there."

It was strange, I thought. Superficially the soil for fundamentalism was perfect here: the deepening poverty and sense of historical wrong, the damaged pride. But in fact the old man's response was typical of his people. The idea of religion as a doctrinaire moulder of society seemed shallow-rooted among them, and their faith to thrive somewhere different, somewhere more sensory and pagan.

"All those laws and customs ..." The old man resettled his grimy skull-cap. "They don't matter. What matters is underneath this!" -- he plucked at his jacket -- "What matters is the heart!" ... He said, "Our country's had enough of other people's interference."

Turkmenistan - Part IV - Desert Nomads

I must give hats off to Colin Thubron - who wrote one of my favorite travelogue books: "The Lost Heart of Asia" - in which he travels through all of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia directly following the collapse of the USSR. He tries to take the pulse of the entire area, which, obviously, is very difficult.

But man, can he write. Beautiful book.

Ryzsard Kapucinski also wrote a wonderful book called Imperium - which sparked my interest originally in Central Asia.

This is a short post on the nomads of Turkestan.

Turkmenistan - Desert Nomads

The whole nomad existence is something I would like to know more about. I mean, I've never met an actual nomad. If I did, I would be able to ask him questions about his life, what it's like, what goes on in his mind, how his experience may differ from mine.

In one of the many books I've read on the topic, I came across a description which I loved. I would cite the source, but unfortunately, I have no idea where it came from. It's coming directly off my "Turkestan" index card, (I'm autistic, I guess - and maintain 2 fat boxes of index cards with information/quotes/etc. I have compiled on most of the countries in the world - If I ever get recruited to be a spy, or a Gertrude Bell type, I will be all set) Anyway, the quote is: "Nomads mastered the art of conquering space." I love that.

Nomads created the first global system of mass communication long before anyone even knew what exactly was "out there", and what the "globe" may have looked like.

Centuries ago, it was the nomads who helped cities like Bukhara and Tashkent rise up and become famous and prosperous and cosmopolitan. They helped spread information and technology around the world. Incredible.

I read one essay about "The Death of the Uzboj", which was a river in the Kara Kum Desert. The Uzboj dried up and disappeared over 400 years ago, and the writer of the essay surmised that this was the beginning of the end for the Turkomens. Fascinating. Here is the theory. And it sort of fits in with the whole "what the hell is a nomad and what is his life like?" thing I was talking about a moment ago.

The Kara Kum Desert is huge. It is 800 miles long. The temperatures regularly reach levels like 172 degrees Farenheit.

The Turkmens lived here in scattered huts. The desert is endless. A complete wasteland.

The Kara Kum is the largest desert not just in Turkmenistan but in all of Central Asia, which is, obviously, a region of deserts.

Turkestan was receptive to Islam, when it arrived. Islam seems to be the religion of desert people, of people who live in hot unforgiving climates. I wonder about that sometimes and if some theologian could explain why that might be, or even if I'm way off the mark here. The descriptions in the Koran of paradise are all about: running water, green fields, moist lush lands (not to mention 72 virgins...or was that 72 raisins? Well, either way...72 yummy somethings-or-other). Paradise filled with things in direct contrast to the harsh bleakness of the desert landscapes.

The Uzboj was a river which flowed through the Kara Kum monotony. Needless to say, oases sprang up along its banks. This is how civilization grows.

400 years ago, the Uzboj dried up and disappeared. And the dying river took the equilibrium of the Turkmens with it.

Tribes were sent into exile, whole oases had to find other places to live, so people were suddenly on the move.

An oasis is a very fragile entity. It can only hold so many people before things get out of whack. So this is what happened to the Turkomens. Wandering desperate people tried to squeeze their way in to other oases, and were turned away. Sometimes violently.

And this is how the wars of the Turkomens began. Over water.

They never knew unity, as a people. Their first contact with one another, with the Turkomens outside their own oasis, was violent. This is life and death stuff: fighting over water in a deadly desert. This is not a silly reason or a trivial reason to go to war. LET ME IN to this oasis...I have a wife (or maybe 2 or 3), and 15 children, and we are DYING. There is NO WATER. We live in a DESERT, remember?? Let me IN.

When the Russians arrived two and a half centuries later, it was a piece of cake to subdue the Turkomens. It is easy to conquer a divided people. (Now, I know you all know that I did not make that concept up myself!) Well, the Russians didn't even need to worry about the first part of the theory. They came across this desert, and found an already divided scattered people. No big deal to completely conquer them.

For those of you with the time, who want to read on, here's a passage from Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Imperium.

I'm going to quote specifically from his passage on The Death of the Uzboj. Anyone who has been reading this blog will probably think that I only read one book. And that is Kapuscinski's Imperium. I understand how I might give that impression. To me, that book holds it all. It was also the beginning of it all, for me. I read that book, on a whim, years ago, because I was fascinated by the COVER of all embarrassing things. But the book opened up my world, my mind...I had no idea what the hell the man was talking about but I knew I wanted to know more. Now I look at my book shelves and I have more books on Central Asia than I do poetry, or fiction. A strange transformation.

Anyway, here is a bit more on the Death of the Uzboj:

Everyone tried to live as close to the Uzboj as possible. The river carried water; it carried life. Along its banks ran the trails of caravans. In the currents of the Uzboj the army of Genghis Khan watered its horses. To its shores journeyed the merchants of Samarkand and the Yomud -- slave traders.

The river's agony, said Rashyd, began four hundred years ago. Having appeared suddenly on the desert, the river now just as suddenly began to vanish.

The Uzboj had created a civilization in the very heart of the desert, had sustained three tribes, linked the west with the east; on the banks of the Uzboj stood dozens of cities and settlements, which Yusupov would excavate. Now the sands were swallowing up the river. Its energy began to weaken, its current to wane.

It is not known who first noticed this.

The Ali-Ali, Chyzr, and Tivedzij gathered on the banks to watch the river, the source of life, departing; they sat and they watched, because people like to observe their own misfortune. The water level fell from one day to the next; an abyss was yawning before them ... People ran to the mullahs, ran to the ishans ... Nothing helped. The fields were drying up and the trees withering. For a skin of water one would buy a Karakul sheep. Caravans, which before stopped here and there, now passed by in a hurry, as if an epidemic had befallen this land. The bazaars grew deserted; merchants closed their shops.

Yusupov, who excavated the former oases of the Uzboj, claims that there is a great disorder among the objects found there. People just abandoned everything they had. Children abandoned their toys; women abandoned their pots. They must have been seized with panic, hysteria, fear. No doubt the most fantastic rumors circulated. Perhaps prophets and fortune-tellers appeared. People felt the band of the desert tightening around them; the sand was whistling at their door.

Turkmenistan - Part III - Niyazov

This post is about Niyazov, the "president" of Turkmenistan. Actually, he has renamed himself Turkmanbashi, which means "Chief of the Turkmens".

The guy is nuts.

Turkmenistan - Niyazov

Turkmenistan, throughout the millennia, was not a unified place. It still is not. 55 nationalities alone live in the capital city. It is a place of nomads, and wanderers. Desert people.

But Niyazov wanted to inflame in the Turkomens a sense of ethnicity and unification. He set out to re-invent the past.

The truth of the matter, the FACTS of the past, did not suit his purposes, so he made stuff up, to make the Turkomens feel better about themselves.

The local scholars, the intelligent people left in the country, know the truth: that the Turkomens are not the source of everything wonderful and innovative on the planet, the Turkomens did not discover America, etc...but they must parrot the regime's version of the truth.

Niyazov's father was killed in World War I, and his mother died in the 1948 earthquake in Ashgabat which basically swallowed up the entire city. 110,000 people died. The entire medieval city disappeared off the face of the earth.

Niyazov was then raised in an orphanage. Some scholars surmise that being abandoned (twice) like this in his childhood is the primary source of his personality cult. He has turned himself into the golden child of the country. He has put himself on all the currency. He has named months after himself.

Ashgabad is clogged with golden statues of himself. Also, Times-Square-size billboards of his face fill the entire country. I read one travelogue where the writer describes riding through the devastatingly bleak Kara Kum Desert which makes up most of Turkmenistan, and seeing Niyazov billboards looming up out of the empty distance. Even in the middle of nowhere, Niyazov wants to make sure his presence is omniscent.

Niyazov was a member of the Communist Party since 1962. He rose through the ranks to the highest level. In 1990 (just before all hell broke loose across the Soviet Union...or, actually, during the hellfire) he became Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the top dog. Then the Soviet Union shattered, ethnic warfare broke out, the economy collapsed - It was a time of utter confusion, especially in these nomadic Central Asian Islamic republics...republics with no prior history of centralized government or democracy.

In 1991, Turkmenistan declared itself independent. A new constitution was drawn up, a democratic constitution, which set in motion a presidential election. The first in Turkmenistan's history.

And hey, whaddya know, Niyazov was elected president.

There is a ludicrous aspect to his regime, which actually is rather dangerous. I say that because it seems rather easy for us to make fun of it all, how stupid it is, how ridiculous he obviously is. Niyazov has come out with a line of cologne, for example. Turkomen cologne. He has published his own poetry which is always #1 on Turkmenistan's best-seller list. He also, a la Qaddafi, has published books of his own philosophical musings. Musings on "Turkmenness", and ethnicity, and how to create a government, etc. etc.

The reason I say "dangerous" is that I have read articles which treat this regime humorously. The tone of the articles is: Ho ho, look at this crazy man!! Ha ha, isn't it funny...blah blah blah. When, actually, what he has created is a society with no freedom of speech. A completely un-free society in every way. Not only is there no freedom of speech, but there is no freedom of thought. Niyazov hijacked the entire country. The people are trapped by their own leader.

Every building built is built to glorify Niyazov and humble the population. This was Stalin's tactic as well. Stalin's architecture was inhumanly sized massive buildings, and impossibly wide streets. The urban landscape was built specifically to make people feel miniscule and helpless. Dwarfed. Niyazov does the same. He is a complete and utter megalomaniac who never ever ever hears someone say "No", or "You know what, Saparmurat? I don't think that is such a good idea." Or "Well, we have a lot of problems in this country...unemployment, anger, poverty...maybe focusing on a line of cologne is not the best use of your energy??"

Nomads, historically, are very suspicious people. Suspicious of outsiders. It is not hard to imagine why.

Typically, an outsider who shows up in the nomad world, is a thief, a Genghis Khan-type, a raider, a pillager. Your life, and your trust, is placed with your CLAN. The outside world is not to be trusted. Only the clan matters. Two generations ago, Turkmenistan was a nation of nomads. This suspicion of outsiders, in their nomadic blood, has now been transferred into their government.

Niyazov's regime is xenophobic. Suspicious. Defensive. The populace finds tremendous obstacles in their way if they want to travel. A vast bureaucracy has been created to make Visa applications nearly impossible. Niyazov wants no outside influence, he doesn't want the citizenry to get any funny ideas.

However he has NO problem with "hiring out". Turkmenistan is a land with vast oil wealth and they have no idea how to capitalize on this wealth. They don't know the technology, they don't have any experts in the country. So Niyazov hires armies of experts from other countries (many of them Israelis) to come and build the infrastructure of the country FOR him.

Niyazov has a massive secret police force. Which he learned how to utilize during his days in the Communist Party.

Journalists who come to the country to find out what is going on will often be followed, trailed, watched like a hawk. They will be assigned a "guide" who is really a government spy. All typical despotic tyrannical stuff.

Who knows how it all will end. It cannot go on like this indefinitely. This nation of people have had no chance to figure out their own way. They are crushed under an iron fist, once again. From Communism to Niyazov-ism.

But then again: perhaps - coming from a xenophobic nomadic clan-based culture themselves - they see nothing wrong with the government.

Niyazov is definitely one of those evil leaders out there.

The regime is "stable", but only because no dissent is allowed. Political parties are outlawed. Nobody can make a move. The entire country is paralyzed. Something's gotta give, and Niyazov will not give up easily. He's a psychological case study, which is kind of terrifying to have in a tyrant. Someone who is working out his childhood abandonment issues ON the country he is leading. A terrible mix.

Turkemenistan - Part II - Ancient History

In the following post - I talk about the ancient history of Turkmenistan. History is an odd concept for the lands of Central Asia - The land has been inhabited forever, crossed over by marauders on horseback, by nomads, by the Silk Road ... but "history" as in - written-down-history of a nation doesn't exist here.

Turkmenistan - Ancient History

All of these "stans" were not known as nations during their heyday in the Middle Ages.

People were identified with the oasis they lived in: Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, whatever. The area was inhabited by Turkic people (which comprises many many sub-divisions: Turkomans, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Uighurs), and Persian people, and Caucasian tribes and Tibetans and mongoloid races, and other forgotten subgroupings. We are talking about a mecca of multiculturalism. They were always at war with one another, as well.

Turkestan was a very complicated collision zone of identities and races.

The famous medieval "Silk Road" traveled through Turkestan, making the cities along the way internationally known, in an age before mass media.

As a matter of fact, for centuries, Turkestan was essential. Over this vast steppe and desert-land, the caravans would come, bringing goods, and information, and technology from China.

If Turkestan had been made up of Himalayan-tall mountain ranges, the Silk Road could not have evolved. It is impossible to over-estimate the impact the Silk Road had on the human race and Turkestan's string of city-states was one of the reasons why this occurred.

If I had a time machine, one of the places/times I would KILL to visit would be an oasis along the Silk Road. Samarkand, Tashkent. They were Islamic cities, when Islam was at its height. Islam, at that time as opposed to now, was an incredibly assimilative religion. The Islamic warriors would conquer a land, and immediately begin to assimilate all the best from that conquered culture: literature, scientific discoveries, inventions, philosophies. People came from all over Turkestan and beyond to study in the theological centers set up in the cities. Turkic and Persian cultures fused together, which still is reflected in the architecture in these cities today. (Wherever the Russians didn't destroy the buildings.)

Then came 1498.

And an incredible discovery was made. Wonderful for the human race in a "macro" sense, but a disaster for Turkestan. The sea route to India was discovered. And basically, with that discovery, Turkestan slipped out of history and disappeared completely. The Silk Road withered up and died, and the famous city-states fell into decay. Turkestan lost its reason for being.

Four centuries later, the Russians "discovered" Turkestan.

The Turkomans, who had been completely left in history's dustbin suddenly, once again, were sitting on the most valuable piece of land on earth.

Russia and Great Britain began their "Great Game": the struggle for control of Central Asia. The two superpowers of the 19th century battled it out with one another on the deserts and steppes.

I am just so curious what that must have been like for them. For the Turkomans who, for centuries, had lived in their desert oases, ignored by the rest of the world, ignoring the rest of the world, completely self-contained, silent, absolutely unknown.

And then ... boom. Here come two massive superpowers wielding weaponry such as they have never seen, fighting wars over the land on which they lived. Who were these people?

The Turkomans are ancient people of pretty much unknown origins anyway - Through their oral history and epics, they knew that long long long ago, their land was talked about in books, was revered, mythologized, dreamt of. And they knew that they, once upon a time, were the greatest warriors on the planet. But they were not cut out to be a modern people. Their glory days occurred seven centuries ago.

I am very curious about people with such long memories. What could they tell us? Who knows, maybe I'm romanticizing. I probably am.

Turkmenistan - Part I - Introduction

I will now move onward with my "Countries" feature - and post my old essays about Turkmenistan. For those of you are interested in this kind of thing.

You can see the other Countries featured here.

Turkmenistan holds me in thrall. I don't know why. It just does.

Turkmenistan - Intro

Turkmenistan is 90% desert with vast quantities of oil beneath.

In the 10th and 11th centuries, the Turkmens (or Turcomans...it's spelled differently in every book I read) started to migrate here from Mongolia. Nobody is sure why. Not even the Turkmens of today know why. These ancient people were nomadic raider types of the Genghis Khan variety. Very good raiders. Not so good nation-builders. Also, the landscape of Turkmenistan does not at all lend itself to any kind of centralized government. It's just one big huge desert, with most of the population living in 5 oases, spread out, and disconnected.

In the mid 1700s, the Persians subdued the Turkmens (who had been continuously raiding Persia for centuries).

In the early 1800s, the Russians arrived. A portentous event. They started erecting forts throughout the desert. The Russians wanted to break Persia's hold on Central Asia, and they did just that. The Russians began warring with the Turkmens who, understandably, wanted them to pack up their damn forts and trot on back to Moscow.

In 1916 a Turkmen leader came along, the first one to unite this land, which was little more than a massive desert, scattered with tribes and clans who had nothing to do with each other. But along comes Mohammed Qurban Junaid Khan, who instilled in the Turkmens a sense of nationhood, a sense of pride...and they ejected the czarist forces and began a war with the Red Army. Quite a ballsy move, and doomed to failure.

The Turkmens were nomadic farmers and wanderers. They were no match for the Russians.

The Soviets won, naturally. They immediately changed the Turkmen alphabet from Arabic to Cyrillic. They sealed the borders with Iran and Afghanistan. Stalin came along, and there were tons of purges and executions. The Russians began to "resettle" in Turkmenistan. The Soviet leadership needed there to be more Russians in these wild backwards Central Asian places, so tons of Russians were sent to Turkmenistan to settle in. The few educated Turkmen that existed were completely annihilated.

Turkmenistan became independent in 1991. But this basically happened against their will. They were forced to become a nation. Turkmenistan was the LEAST prepared of all the Central Asian republics to become a state. Statehood has always been an indistinct and abstract concept in this area. So the Turkmen people inherited a complete void. Which is a perfect situation for a power-crazed dictator to rush in and take over. This is exactly what has happened. A madman is now in charge of Turkmenistan, but that's a story for another post.

Betsy...

I post this photo, in honor of your "Little House on the Prairie" observations.

Was it actually Saddam they captured? Or ... was it Mr. Edwards?

Demons, Angels

I know many people who make it a point not to watch the news.

They state, almost proudly, "I don't watch the news." "I can't watch the news." "It's too upsetting. I can't watch the news." It freaks them out. They cannot stand it. They cannot separate themselves from what they see. Which is understandable. I don't sit and stare at the famine in Malawi and feel unmoved. Far from it! But I can't not watch. I can't not at least TRY to know what is going on. It's not just a need I have, or a desire. It feels like a responsibility. I have a responsibility to participate. To watch.

What I really want to say is, yes. The news can be horrific. Tragic. Stressful.

It seems like all the stories are bad - horrible - violent.

However, it seems important to remember that:

If you block out the bad, you inevitably block out the good as well. There's a famous quote (from Kafka, I think) - which I paraphrase here: Be careful about driving out ALL of your demons. Because in doing so, you may drive out some angels as well.

This is so true.

People who do not watch the news, to avoid the horror and the violence, miss out, then, on participating in the glorious joy of news like:

- the 9 rescued miners

- the return of Elizabeth Smart

- April 9, 2003

- the capture of Saddam Hussein this past weekend

(just a couple of examples)

Regardless of all the anxiety one experiences when one watches the parade of misery which is usually the nightly news, occasionally something will come along where the entire world can rejoice. I feel sorry for the people I know who refuse to watch any news at all, ever, because they miss out. They miss out on the overwhelming joy of certain events coming along, which touch humanity, as a whole. They deny themselves that.

In shutting out the stress of the news, they also shut out the enlightenment.

And with enlightenment comes something which is so damn important: context. Without context, events cannot be understood.

I am not talking about moral relativism, or equivalence.

I am not talking about making excuses for horrible acts due to some root cause or anything like that.

I am talking about knowing that France and Germany are behaving in such and such a way, because of this event in the past, or that event in the past, and that means THIS, and so that means that then we will do THIS ... so that the news you see makes SENSE.

I am talking about being semi-up to date with what is going on, so that when something catastrophic (the Bali nightclub bombing, etc.) or something wonderful (April 9, or the capture of Saddam) occurs, we know where to put it. We understand the context of the event. We can handle it.

I field phone calls from friends after big world events. For the most part the calls consist of: "Okay, so what does this mean?" But you know what they are really asking? They are really asking: "How should I feel about this? What is your take on how I should feel about this?"

I'm just another jackass like everybody else - but I watch the news and I read multiple newspapers every day - and I consciously commit to trying to figure stuff out. I have made a conscious commitment to stay in the game, to remain in the conversation.

Knowledge is power.

I have never felt that in such a strong way than in the past couple of years, since September 11. The people I know who have not gone out in search of context ... are baffled, upset, freaked-out, and pretty much uninformed. So they make up their minds about things based on emotion and impulse, EVERYTHING is subjective, they are blown about by every influence, every comment ... They literally don't know what to think. And so they feel victimized by the news. Victimized by what they do not know.

I know intimately what it feels like to be intimidated by what I do not know. To feel ... out of touch with the real sources of power and information. Often, I feel weak, powerless to DO anything ...

There are those who become intimidated by their lack of context, and respond by shutting the whole thing out. After all, who LIKES to be intimidated or to feel that one is in over one's head? So these people continue to live their lives narrowly, focused on only their personal experiences, the day to day, as though a major world cataclysm was not taking place. That's fine. That's their right. I don't understand it - but it is their right to tune everything out. (And then call me, when something big goes down.)

I am merely saying that the people who tune stuff out because it is all BAD, miss out on a whole lot of GOOD. That's all.

By driving out the demons, they have driven out the angels as well.

And that's a damn shame.

They miss the chance to jump up and down for joy, because of the good fortune of people they DO NOT KNOW, people they have NEVER MET. What an incredible and life-affirming thing. Whatever your political beliefs, it doesn't matter. Humanity is humanity.

I remember when those 9 miners were saved. I prayed for them. I wept when they came out of the earth alive. Total strangers in New York City exchanged smiles in the elevator, because those 9 miners had been rescued, men we would never meet. It was a beautiful thing to participate in.

Life is good. Life is something to be cherished. We are more than the sum of our little lives. I certainly care about my own existence, my plans, my family, my friends, my acting class - but there is a larger perspective, and for that I am INTENSELY grateful.

Elizabeth Smart returns home, and people everywhere felt relief, happiness ... joy. We all were in the shoes of the Smart parents, trying to imagine their happiness. Saddam Hussein is captured - and the laughing whooping-it-up pictures of Iraqi people touch us - we get to participate in their joy. We have high hopes for them. We LOVE them, dammit.

Empathy grows in an experience like that, compassion. This is good for the human race.

If you keep your eyes to the ground, refusing to get involved, you miss out on that opportunity for growth, and that blessed opportunity for communion with others - communion with people you do not know, and will never meet.

You've shut out the angels.

More happy images

Yes, there is much work ahead. There must be a trial. I am glad that Saddam Hussein is not dead - no chance for him to be sainted, martyred, whatever. He must face the music.

Time enough for all of that tomorrow.

But for now - at least just for today - I want to look at the happy faces.

Triumph

Look at this picture and don't forget the mantra: The Iraqis hate us, the Iraqis want us to leave, the Iraqis hate America ... Looks like they hated Saddam more, huh...

What an amazing day.

(via Tim Blair - who links to more celebratory photos)

Azerbaijan - Part VI - Azeri Culture

And lastly (after the Intro, after war with Armenia, after oil, after government, after ethnic hatred) ... a post on the hodge-podge culture of this country.

The Culture of Azerbaijan

A couple of quotes on this issue:

"In the past Azerbaijan was more of a geographic and cultural concept than a political one. There never really was a centralized state of Azerbaijan, and in this its history differs from that of Georgia and Armenia. It differs in other respects as well. By way of the Black Sea and Anatolia, Georgia and Armenia maintained contact with ancient Europe, and later with Byzantium. They received Christianity from there, which created within their territories a resistance to the spread of Islam. In Azerbaijan the influence of Europe was weak from the onset, at best secondary. Between Europe and Azerbaijan rise the barriers of the Caucasus and the Armenian Highland, whereas in the east Azerbaijan turns into lowlands, is easily accessible open. Azerbaijan is the threshold of Central Asia." -- Ryzsard Kapuscinsky, Imperium

"This culture was deepening, even if nationhood was indistinct. Outwardly, it was becoming as if the Russians had never been here ... Turkish kebab stands were appearing ... Ramiz, Reza's friend, declared a fourth vodka toast to Azerbaijan, the hearthplace of Turkish literature ... But Azeri culture wasn't simply Turkish. Ramiz's very manner, the tender, cloistered expression in his searching eyes, and the fetid dining room full of vodka, rotting cheeses, old photos, and perspiring, very lightly drunken men and women -- as if they were in one evening-long communal hug -- proclaimed an atmosphere similar to what I had experienced in Eastern Europe during communist rule -- places where political life had been so sterile that the vacuum, perforce, had been filled by a personal life, making the latter far richer than people in Western Europe and North America could imagine...There was also much Persian influence." -- Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth

And one last thing to cap it all off:

"Azerbaijan was not merely an eastern extension of Turkey, but a grey, shaded area where the Turkish, Russian, and Iranian worlds overlapped. Because of seven decades of totalitarianism, which buried this rich legacy, this cultural eclecticism had become a confusing void." -- Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth

Azerbaijan is one of the first countries I ever became curious about in that region. Azerbaijan ushered me into a new world - my curiosity about Azerbaijan led me to Turkmenistan, to Georgia, to Armenia, to Kurdistan ....

So I have a soft spot in my heart for Azerbaijan.

Not that anybody cares, but I thought I would share that.

Azerbaijan - Part V - Hatred and Suspicion

This post focuses on the ethnic hatred between Azeris and Armenians.

Hatred and Suspicion

With a couple of choice observations, Kapuscinski shows how hopeless such situations can be, especially when the enemies live in such close cramped quarters. Right on top of each other, basically. Sound familiar??

Imperium, by the way, was published in 1994. In the Azerbaijan chapters, he describes not only his trip through the Caucasus in the 1950s, but he also tells of his visit to Azerbaijan and Armenia during the years of 1989 through 1991. So this is just as the situation was exploding between the two peoples, simultaneous with the collapse of the entire edifice of Communism, which had, to some degree, muted the ethnic violence in all of the republics. Once that edifice no longer existed, all bets were off. People were free to hate each other all on their own, and on their own terms. My point, too, is that the following excerpt is from before the ceasefire in 1994:

Azerbaijanis, like Armenians, divide mankind into two opposing camps.

For Armenians, an ally is one who believes that Nagorno-Karabakh is a problem. The rest are enemies.

For Azerbaijanis, an ally is one who believes that Nagorno-Karabakh is not a problem. The rest are enemies.

The extremity and finality of these positions is remarkable. It isn't merely that among Armenians one cannot say, "I believe that the Azerbaijanis are right," or that among Azerbaijanis one cannot maintain, "I believe that the Armenians are right." No such stance even enters the realm of possibility -- either group would instantly hate you and then kill you! In the wrong place or among the wrong people even to say, "There is a problem," (or, "There is no problem") is enough to put oneself at risk of being strangled, hanged, stoned, burned.

It is also unimaginable to make the following speech in either Baku or Yerevan: Listen. Decades ago (who living among us can even remember those times?), some Turkish pasha and the savage Stalin threw our Caucasian nest this terrible cuckoo's egg, and from that time on, for the entire century, we have been tormenting and killing one another, while they, in their musty graves, are cackling so loudly one can hear them. And we are living in so much poverty, after all, there is so much backwardness and dirt all around, that we should really reconcile our differences and finally set about doing some work!

This person would never make it to the end of his speech, for the moment either side realized what he was driving at, the unfortunate moralist and negotiator would be deprived of his life.

Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world.

The first is the plague of nationalism.

The second is the plague of racism.

The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.

All three share one trait, a common denominator -- an aggressive, all-powerful, total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits only its sacrificial victims. Every attempt at calm conversation will fail. He doesn't want a conversation, but a declaration that you agree with him, admit that he is right, join the cause. Otherwise you have no significance in his eyes, you do not exist, for you count only if you are a tool, an instrument, a weapon. There are no people -- there is only the cause.

A mind touched by such a contagion is a closed mind, one-dimensional, monothematic, spinning round one subject only -- its enemy. Thinking about our enemy sustains us, allows us to exist. That is why the enemy is always present, is always with us. When near Yerevan a local guide shows me one of the old Armenian basilicas, he finishes his commentary with a contemptuous rhetorical question: "Could those Azerbaijanis build such a basilica?" When later, in Baku, a local guide draws my attention to a row of ornamental, art nouveau houses, he concludes his explanations with this scornful remark: "Could Armenians construct such apartment buildings?"

Azerbaijan - Part IV - Government

This post talks about the Azeri government.

Government

It very quickly became clear that the only people in the country who knew how to do anything (and by that I mean, anything having to do with creating or maintaining a government) were the old Communists. People so long subjected to overbearing rule like the Azeris can't just bounce back into a multiparty democracy in a year's time, although this was basically the expectation all across the former Soviet Union.

Actually, "bounce back" is completely the wrong term since Azerbaijan wasn't exactly known for being a flourishing democracy before Communism. This is even more of a struggle, since the Azeri's memory did not encompass any memory of democracy. They had no idea what to do.

The Azeris attempted to create a democratic government (and in light of the events of the early 21st century, I say "GOOD FOR THEM"), but the new state did not work at all. Criminals and gangsters had the run of the country. The democratically elected president was Ebulfez Elcibey. Poor man, he didn't stand a chance. He eventually fled Baku when militia leaders marched on the capital, demanding change.

Elcibey disappearing left a power vacuum which needed to be filled immediately. And, amazingly, after seven decades of crushing communist rule, the Azeris welcomed back to power the former Soviet party chief Geidar Aliyev. Aliyev was also an ex-KGB man. This all occurred in 1993.

It's an incredible story (and it didn't just happen in Azerbaijan). In many of the countries freed so suddenly from the yoke of the Soviet Union, the first tentative attempts at democracy were disasters. People weren't ready yet. Militias and gangsters and criminals easily ignored the rules, and ran these countries like their own personal fiefdoms. So eventually, people cried out for the return of the Communist leaders. To come and at least help them keep things orderly. They did not want a return of Communism, but they wanted a strong leader. They needed a strong leader. So these ex-Communist guys, ex-Communist Party chiefs, returned to the countries where they had ruled during Communism, and became "democratically" elected Presidents.

Aliyev returned to power in Azerbaijan. He very quickly started ACTING. He was able to get a ton of things done. He arranged a cease fire with Armenia. He dismantled all of the unofficial roadblocks which were terrorizing the populace, and also adding to the criminal atmosphere of the country. He established (of course) a nice personality cult around himself. You kind of cannot stop a diehard communist leader from creating a personality cult. They cannot help themselves.

So he basically snapped everybody into shape, but he didn't create any institutions. He didn't focus on the micro-management level of government. He didn't try to figure out ways to get people back to work, to heat up the economy, to fix all the damn potholes. I suppose he had other more pressing concerns immediately: like all of the homeless wandering war refugees, and the warlords and militia leaders trying to run the country themselves.

Aliyev is still the President of Azerbaijan today.

Azerbaijan - Part III - Oil

This post talks about the unresolved issue of oil in Azerbaijan.

Oil

Alexander the Great, as he waltzed his way through the region way back in those B.C. years, noticed methane gas, as well as Zoroastrian temples. Zoroastrians were fire worshippers from Persia, mostly.

In the 10th century, Arab writers were referring to Baku as the place where oil comes from. Oil would be shipped from this area out to the rest of the known world, using the Silk Route across Asia.

In the 17th century, Turks describe the area around Baku as having "burning ground". One of my favorite images is from a Turkish writer who says the ground is so hot from the burning fuel beneath it, that you could put a cauldron of water down directly onto the ground, and it would start to boil within minutes.

In the 1860s, the first oil derricks go up. In 1873, the derricks strike oil big time. Azerbaijan quickly became a Kuwait or a Saudi Arabia of this earlier time. Baku grew into a cosmopolitan city, as opposed to a Turkic backwater, perched on the edge of the Caspian Sea, tipping off into Central Asia. People made massive fortunes in Azerbaijan. In the 1870s and 1880s Baku was one of the world's richest and most populous cities.

In 1920, the city of Baku was overrun by Bolshevik soldiers and history pretty much stopped. They endured seven decades of collectivisation and poverty under Communist rule. Additionally, during this time, Azerbaijan has been completely destroyed by pollution from the careless oil drilling. Oil lies pooled up in the streets. The beach on the Caspian Sea apparently looks like a post-apocalyptic disaster zone.

In 1997, Azerbaijan had another oil boom. There was talk, as well, of building an oil pipeline below the Caspian Sea, in order to transport all the oil from all the "stans" (Kazakhstan, especially) to Baku, and then to be shipped out from Azerbaijan. If this plan was completed, Baku could potentially become one of the most important places on the planet. Azeris were exhilarated, thrilled. (And so begins the devastation of societies brought about by big oil.) Foreign businessmen started coming to their country. They had to install credit card machines in the run down Stalinist hotels in Baku. Nightclubs were built. Baku was trying to modernize itself and clean itself up in a year, where other cities go through such transformations over generations.

The oil boom went bust in 1998, with a drop in oil prices. The hopes for the massive oil fields in the Caspian Sea (the estimates of what people hoped to find were mind-boggling) were dashed. Russia collapsed financially, an event which had worldwide implications.

And by 1999, Azerbaijan was back to a Caucausus backwater, with no hopes for the future. Oil would not "save" them from having to develop a working society. This is the insidiousness of oil societies. The populations make a deal with the Devil. Okay, okay, the regime can do whatever it wants, as long as that oil keeps flowing, and keeps the money coming in, and we don't have to look at what needs to be fixed, what isn't working.

Azerbaijan had hoped (of course, subconsciously) to skip the necessary stages of nation-building: forming a government, setting up a banking system, helping a middle class to flourish...all that stuff...by having oil spurting out of the Caspian and into their pockets. So far, this has not happened.

Azerbaijan - Part II - War with Armenia

The first post is your basic introduction to Azerbaijan.

This next one is an overview of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The whole Nagorno-Karabakh thing is a continuing story - everything has changed - but this post talks about the events of the early to mid 1990s.

War with Armenia, 1991

This war between the two countries is over a place called Nagorno-Karabakh. It is officially part of Azerbaijan, yet it is basically an ethnic Armenian enclave. Completely cut off from any access to Armenia proper. The ethnic dispute over this small bit of land hastened the breakup of the Soviet Union.

In the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks conquered the Caucasus, and made Nagorno-Karabakh an autonomous region within Turkic Azerbaijan. The population was something like 95% Armenian, so these kinds of "autonomous region" solutions never make any sense, but this is what the Bolsheviks did. Stalin knew damn well that Nagorno was ALWAYS going to be an issue between Turks and Armenians. He wanted to insure that chaos and hatred and darkness would not just exist in the present, but would stretch out into the future. So he did not unite Nagorno with Armenia (which would have made sense ethnically), but left it in the middle of Azerbaijan, under Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan) control.

So Nagorno became this teeny island of frightened Christianity surrounded by Turks. Don't forget, either, that just in 1915, the 20th century welcomed its first ethnic genocide. The Turks slaughtered over a million Armenians to "cleanse" the area so Armenians had good reason to fear the Turks. This entire area of Nagorno was surrounded by Azeri militia and Red Army troops, with no way in or out. This situation existed for seven decades. A complete DISASTER created by Stalin.

Then along comes Gorbachev, and glasnost and perestroika. By this time, the Armenian population in Nagorno had shrunk a bit and they were afraid that one day they would be minorities in this enclave. In 1988, Armenians started demonstrating in Yerevan for unification, at the very same time that Azeri authorities began a crackdown on Armenians. Armenians are always being "cracked down" upon. So the Soviet troops are sent to crack down on everybody, but ethnic violence kept breaking out...Azerbaijan blockaded all the Armenian communities in Nagorno, and Armenia is shouting about how Nagorno is and always has been a part of Armenia.

1991 comes. The Soviet Union collapses. Full scale war erupts between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In 1994 the war ends, with Armenia the clear victor. They drove out all the Azeri forces and annexed other areas, so that Armenia and Karabakh could be joined by a thin corridor. The outside world "recognized" none of this. And by that I mean, if you looked on a map, you would see no evidence of "Nagorno Karabakh" as being anything other than part of Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan - Part I - Introduction

Last week, I imported all my "Georgia" essays from my old blog ... It's kind of a good archive, although it is (as I fully admit) mostly regurgitated information from actual experts.

I'm pressed for time today, in terms of writing, so I am going to import the various posts I did on Azerbaijan, at my old blog.

It was Ryzsard Kapucsinski's astonishing book Imperium which opened me to the world of the Caucasus for the first time. It's a great book - one of my favorites of his. He evokes these ancient mountainous countries in such a way that you feel you are there yourself.

So ... here we go ... 6 short essays on Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan - Introduction

The Azeris are Shi'ite Muslims. For those of you who do not know, there are 2 main sects of Islam: Sunni Muslim (think Saudi Arabia), and Shi'ite Muslim (think Iran). This is an incredible oversimplification, but suffice it to say that there is an enormous painful split between these two "brands" of Muslims.

However, the Azeris are a mish-mash. They are Turkic (which is, traditionally, Sunni), and yet their religion is Shiite. They also are relatively secular (which is a no-no in both sects). Liquor overflows in Azerbaijan, as does pornography and prostitution.

One other fact, which I find completely fascinating: They have changed their alphabet three times in the 20th century. (This is evidence of the confusion in the country, as they try to congeal into some sort of cohesive nation.) Alphabets and languages have been imposed on these people for centuries. This country has been conquered and reconquered and conquered again countless times.

In the 1920s, Azerbaijan changed its alphabet from Arabic to Latin. In the 1930s they changed from Latin to Cyrillic. And in the 1990s they changed back to Latin from Cyrillic. I read a great article about what massive confusion this has caused. Street signs, newspapers, schoolbooks…all in different languages.

So you can imagine how confused the populace is, with all this shifting about. This is one of the reasons why Armenia was so able to kick their butt in the war over Nagorno Karabakh, in the 1990s, because Armenia has a strong (iron-strong) sense of national identity, and national personality, and the Azeris are still searching for theirs.

Quote

"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."

- Sigmund Freud on the Irish

I find this quote strangely vindicating.

Georgia - Part V - Georgia's Breakaway Regions

I am posting these in chronological order, which, unfortunately, means that you all will see them backwards. I credit the authors who have written about Georgia and from whom I got this information.

1. So the first thing I posted was in regards to Georgia's long long history.

2. My second post was about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

3. The third post is about Shevardnadze - the return of Shevardnadze to save the former Soviet republic from civil war. (The reason I have unearthed these posts is because of the recent chaos in Georgia ... I had gone back to read through them myself and thought I would bring them over from my old blog to share.)

4. This post is about the Georgians themselves.

And my last post on Georgia (printed below) is about all of the "breakaway regions" in the country. A lot of this information may be a bit out of date - things change so fast over there - but again: it is great context.

GEORGIA'S BREAKAWAY REGIONS

There are those stories (which have nothing to do with Georgia, but bear with me) about ancient ruins in Afghanistan which, due to the almost constant state of war in that country for the last thirty years, have never been fully excavated, but amazing initial discoveries were made. For example: ancient Hellenistic coins and artifacts were found in ancient ruins all over Afghanistan, which meant that Alexander the Great actually had moved farther east than anyone had ever realized. There are also, in the ancient ruins, buildings with Hellenistic features, columns and porticoes, etc. The ancient war leaving its mark.

Georgia is filled with such conqueror's legacies. Evidence of that history in the architecture, the street names, the ancient churches. Georgia has a long and complicated history with Turkey, with Persia. Both countries have left indelible marks on what Georgia looks like. "Georgia for Georgians" is all well and good, but one cannot deny that the history here is extremely multicultural. And always has been.

One of the most complicated things about Georgia is all of the "breakaway regions" and "autonomous regions" it has. There are people basically who live in one specific TOWN who say, "We do not like Georgia. Our ancestors were originally from blankity-blank so we now call our town BlankityBlank."

Shevardnadze certainly has his work cut out for him. (Note: I wrote these when he was still there.)

There's the region called Abkhazia, in Northwestern Georgia, which has declared itself autonomous from Georgia. Again, it really doesn't matter if Abkhazia announces to the whole world: "Hi, there. We are our OWN THING now." If this autonomy is not recognized by the world at large, then nothing will change, and maps will stay the same. There are many countries out there right now who have declared themselves to the world, and the world turns away. "Nope. You are not legitimate. We won't give you the time of day." Afghanistan under the Taliban was one example. Burma (or is it Myanmar??) is another.

So Abkhazia. Abkhazia is supposedly very beautiful and the people who live there have dreams of turning the place into a resort. It is on the Black Sea so the place has a very Mediterranean feel, with a lovely climate. But as long as they are attached to Georgia, and are somehow beholden to a government (a government which has not yet completely gained control of the country), they will be stuck. Trapped. Their dream is to liberate themselves from Georgia and go on and become the "Riviera of the Caucasus".

Georgia of course recognizes the potential tourist gold mine that is Abkhazia. It could be a cash cow for the country if they ever got their act together. Right now, it is still too dangerous and chaotic, but once the problems are resolved, then Georgia can build up Abkhazia, and let the tourist dollars start rolling in.

But Abkhazia wants none of this. They want to do their OWN THING.

In 1990, 100,000 Abkhazians declared their intention to separate from Georgia and form their own state. Georgia basically said, in the midst of the civil war, "In your DREAMS. You ain't goin' NOWHERE." Russia got involved, on the side of the separatists, which made things worse. Russia backed the rebellion, supplying arms and support. Full-out war ensued, leading to 10,000 deaths.

Additionally, the Abkhazians set out to "cleanse" their region of ethnic Georgians. I hate that word in this context. Cleanse. 200,000 Georgians were killed or displaced. The country was suddenly filled with internal refugees wandering around. Gamsakhurdia was president at the time. The refugees were kept from leaving Abkhazia by the main road due to Gamsakhurdia's road blocks. He had cordoned off "Abkhazia". The thousands of people, fleeing for their lives, had to detour through the Caucasus mountains, which are not gentle rolling hills. It is a daunting mountain range. Thousands of Georgians died in this attempt.

The ethnicity of the Abkhazians is Caucasian, but their tribe is older and stronger than most. They were the last people to be conquered by the Russians. There had actually been plans before Stalin's death to exile the entire Abkhazian population to Siberia because they were such troublemakers, so hard to govern and subdue.

Then there's another small breakaway region which is known by two different names, but the official one is Ajaria. The population here is mainly Muslim, but they speak a Georgian dialect. They feel very connected to Turkey, right over the border. Lenin created Ajaria in 1921, using the whole different religion thing as the perfect opportunity to divide and conquer. The people who live here, as Muslims, do not want to be part of Orthodox Christian Georgia. They want autonomy. Turkey, right next door, with a long hostile relationship with Georgia, supports Ajaria, and undermines Georgia's conciliatory attempts.

Ajaria consists of one town and the area surrounding the town: Batumi.

Batumi has an interesting history. It sits at the point where the Anatolian (Turkish) plateau meets the Caucasus mountains. Amazing how geography determines history. In ancient times, Batumi was a port on the Black Sea. It was either a Roman, a Byzantine, or a Persian port, depending on the year. Batumi was a jewel to be captured. Whoever controlled Batumi controlled the traffic on the Black Sea. So it kept changing hands throughout history, until it fell under the Ottoman Empire, which was like night falling. A perpetual night. Batumi then goes through centuries of Ottoman rule. In 1877 the Russians captured Batumi. In 1918, the Turks retook Batumi. After the armistice, 15,000 British troops replaced the Turks. Within two years, the Bolsheviks grabbed control again, and the British left.

Batumi's border was snapped shut for decades. Incomprehensible. This once cosmopolitan seaport, host to every culture, open to the Black Sea, in the land of the Golden Fleece, closed down. Like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory: nobody every goes in, and nobody ever comes out. Batumi, a small city, was trapped between two massive regional superpowers: NATO-member Turkey on one side, and Communist Soviet Union on the other.

But in recent years, Ajaria is no longer called Ajaria, it is now called Aslanistan. Here's why (it's kind of like The Sopranos, Georgia-style). The region is now run by a warlord (a kind of cuddly benign warlord, but a warlord nonetheless) named Aslan Abashidze. Hence, "Aslanistan". This would be like Rudy Guiliani saying, "Manhattan is no longer Manhattan. It is now GuilianiLand. " Or "New York City, from this day forth, will be called RudyStan." Abashidze is a criminal. An extortionist, a bully. He has set up "customs" offices all along the border with Turkey, which bribes everybody coming in or going out. It is an openly criminal enterprise and it's how Abashidze subsidizes his power over the region.

Also, and here's where it gets dangerous and ominous: Aslan is a Muslim. He has packed his bureaucracy with Muslim officials. Batumi has a mosque on every corner, the construction of which was financed by Aslan, who wants to institutionalize the difference between Ajaria and Georgia. Georgia is a country of infidels. Aslan wants nothing to do with them.

Robert Kaplan, in his book, Eastward to Tartary says the following about Abashidze's obsession with having more mosques than churches:

In the ex-Soviet Caucasus, where religion was less a factor in ethnic identity than in the Balkans, this was a clear case of a modern politician inventing hatreds retrospectively.

Abashidze was a small man with a large ego and a noble surname: his grandfather Mehmet had played a key role in brokering the agreement between Lenin and Ataturk that settled the border here. Aslan, as he was called, liked to receive visiting dignitaries in the new tennis courts he had built, which were the pride of his warlord fiefdom ... His offices were generic Communist style: massive white-marble hallways and dark red carpets that dwarfed a metal detector and a small cheap table. Around the latter stood a group of tough-looking young Georgians, who carried cell phones and sidearms and rubbed their unshaven cheeks as they inspected my Atlantic Monthly business card. Outside the office was a militiaman, also unshaven. His shoes were worn down to the soles, his uniform was missing buttons, and he was wearing one of those grandiose visored caps favored by the Soviet military. His breath stank, and he asked me for a cigarette.

The official face of government here was uncivil, untamed.

And last but not least we have Ossetia. Ossetia is a region of north-central Georgia. Ossetes are both Muslims and Orthodox Christians. They speak a language akin to Persian. Their religious diversity helped keep them neutral in czarist Russia's campaigns and pogroms against purely Muslim people: the Chechens, the Ingush, the Dagestanis.

Ossetia is also in a very important strategic position. It straddles the north and south slopes of the High Caucasus, halfway in between the Black and the Caspian seas.

Muslim/Christian Ossetia emerged as an ally (it's amazing how these things work) to the atheistic Soviet Union.

Both Lenin and Stalin adopted the Ossetes as favored people, not to be messed with or deported or slaughtered. Good of them, huh? So kind, so generous. They were given an autonomous republic on the northern slopes of the mountains, and also an autonomous region within Georgia.

The Ingush, on the other hand, were deported, en masse, in 1944. The entire population of Ingush was killed, imprisoned, shot, etc. In 1950, the Ingush who had survived all of that came back to Ossetia, their former home, to find all of the land taken up by the Ossetes. This (as I am sure you can imagine) ended up causing enormous problems. It causes problems to this day.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed. Civil war promptly broke out in Ossetia. In North Ossetia, ethnic war exploded between Ossetes and Ingush, now bitter enemies. In 1992, the Northern Ossetes expelled thousands of Ingush, adding to the number of war refugees staggering through the country. In 1993, South Ossetia declared its intention to leave Georgia and join North Ossetia in a new "Greater Ossetia."

Any time any country wants to call itself "Greater" anything, you can be sure that ethnic cleansing will follow.

Which is just what happened. War broke out. 30,000 ethnic Georgians were expelled forcibly from Ossetia. None of this has been resolved or cleaned up, but Ossetia does declare itself independent from Georgia and to get in and out you have to pay a fee. (Which is a complete racket. Picture drunken homeless soldiers, hailing cars to stop, and then forcing the people in the cars to hand over their wallets.)

There is no economy. There is no government, there is no infrastructure.

A highly volatile situation. To be watched closely.

Georgia Part IV - The Georgians

In one of the posts below I describe my old "Country of the Week" thing I used to do on my old blog. Go read it for an introduction to what I am doing here right now. Then scroll up - I am posting these in chronological order, which, unfortunately, means that you all will see them backwards. I also credit the authors who have written about Georgia and from whom I got this information. (I have never been to Georgia - so after all, what the hell do I know?)

1. So the first thing I posted was in regards to Georgia's long long history.

2. My second post was about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

3. The third post is about Shevardnadze - the return of Shevardnadze to rescue the former Soviet republic from civil war. (The reason I have unearthed these posts is because of the recent chaos in Georgia ... I had gone back to read through them myself and thought I would bring them over from my old blog to share.)

4. And the following post is a compilation of quotes, basically, from various books, about the Georgians themselves.

GEORGIANS

From The Making of the Georgian Nation by Ronald Grigor Suny:

"Georgian society has its own networks and codes. It is a society dominated by men."

From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan:

"Corruption here was less a moral shortcoming than a survival mechanism by a people living in poverty and dominated for centuries by outsiders."

Quote from Lawrence Sheets, Reuters bureau chief who lived in Tbilisi throughout the civil war:

"Every night downtown, macho men with grenade launchers fired into the air at nothing in particular. The road between Batumi and Tbilisi was blocked for months at a time by battles that had no military or political purpose. Mini-rebellions broke out based on nothing really except male testosterone."

From Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? Scholarly Debate and the Realities of Eastern Europe in "The National Interest", Fall 1997, by Anatol Leven:

"The Georgians, with strong cultural traditions of individualism, machismo, and the cult of weapons, differ a great deal from the peaceable, gloomy, and obedient inhabitants of the cities of eastern and southern Ukraine. National character is not a concept much liked by contemporary political scientists, but it is necessary to explain why, all other things being equal, an ethnic dispute in Azerbaijan or Georgia would be much more likely to turn extreme and violent than would be one in Estonia or Ukraine."

From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan: Kaplan interviews Professor Alexidze, a former adviser to the nationalist wacko Gamsakhurdia.

" 'Georgians were passionate against the Soviets and passionate against each other,' said Professor Alexidze. 'Gamsakhurdia destroyed the Soviet spirit more than anyone, but in Georgia, a civil war was necessary because of the kind of people we are. The real cause of the war is our medievalness: our knights of the round table simply quarreled and fought each other.' "

From Among the Russians by Colin Thubron:

"I was in Georgia. The name defines a land whose inhabitants are ancient to it, a people of the black-eyed Armenoid kind, the self-styled offspring of biblical giants. For at least three thousand years they have held their mountain kingdom through disunion, invasion and prodigious bursts of independence, becoming Christian early in the fourth century and surviving conquest with a native glitter and resource ..."

From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan:

"Another Georgian intellectual described the Russians to me 'as Scythians, still unformed, unsettled, who in the 20th century rediscovered the art of laying waste whole tracts of territory.' Along with the hatred of communism that often spilled over into hatred of Russians went a dislike of Armenians, 'usurers who ruined Georgian families, who are now allied with Russia against Georgia and Azerbaijan.' 'The Armenians are always claiming that they are the best, that they are fighting with nothing, even while Russia supports them.' 'I don't like Armenians. The Azeris are nicer people.' 'The only good-looking Armenian is Cher.' Listening to Georgians talk about Armenians gave me the chilling sensation of what Old World anti-Semitism must have been like."

Again from Among the Russians by Colin Thubron:

"The high places of its pagan idols -- moon-god and fertility goddess -- were exorcised by Christian churches on the encircling hills and the foundation of its great cathedral is suffused with fables. Clenched in battlement walls, the building is typically Georgian ... It is strong, handsome. It belongs to a tradition grown from the far marches of the ancient Christian world, like the churches of Armenia. Its people show a peasant attachment to it and circumambulate its walls piously in the drenching sun, fondling its blond masonry and leaving flowers at its doors. For the Georgians the Church is the expression of the nation ... Everybody seems at home with God.

From Imperium, by my main man: Ryszard Kapuscinski:

"The splendour and excellence of Georgia's ancient art are overwhelming ... The most glorious period of this work spans the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. The faces of the saints, dark, but radiant in the light, dwell immobile in extremely rich gold frames studded with precious stones. There are icons that open, like the altar of Vit Stoss. Their dimensions are immense, almost monumental. There is an icon here on which several generations of masters worked for three centuries ... Then there are the frescoes in the Georgian churches. Such marvels, and yet so little is known about them outside of Georgia. Virtually nothing. The best frescoes, unfortunately, were destroyed. They covered the interior of the largest church in Georgia -- Sven Tschoveli, built in 1010 in Georgia's former capital, Meht ... They were a marvel of the Middle Ages on a par with the stained glass at Chartres. They were painted over on the order of the czar's governor, who wanted the church whitewashed 'like our peasant women whitewash stones.' No restoration efforts can return these frescoes to the world. Their brilliance is extinguished forever."

Again, from Robert Kaplan's interview with the Professor:

"Professor Alexidze told me: 'Our society is rotten, the mafiosi are strong, and while the West worships laws, we worship power. We leapt from the darkness in the late 1980s. We did not have the kind of social and economic development as in Central Europe. So our dissidents were never enlightened.' "

Robert Kaplan interviews a group of intellectuals in Tbilisi (this is in the late 1990s). Here are some of the quotes:

Kikodze: "The Russians built up Tbilisi in the nineteenth century as the capital of Transcaucasia. On this street, where I have lived since 1958, there used to be Kurds, Armenians, Jews, Russians, and others. It was a golden age. We thought nationalism did not exist. Then it destroyed us. The Jews left for Israel; the Armenians, for Armenia; the Russians for Russia; and so on. And now we are losing the Russian language which is a disaster for us. English is still only for a rarefied elite, while the loss of Russian cuts the average Georgian off from the outside world. All our books of learning, our encyclopedias on art, literature, history, science, are in Russian. Young Georgians can no longer communicate with Armenians and Ossetians. There is a new illiteracy promoting ethnic separation."

Rondeli: "Georgians are a very old tribal entity, but we have no identity as a modern state. We are a quasi-state. All nations get what they deserve, so to see what kind of government Georgia will have in the future, it is merely a matter of dissecting our national character. We are nominally Christian, but really we are superstitious atheists. We know how to survive but not how to improve. Our church is pagan, politicized, part of the national resistance, and thus unable to move forward."

Again from Rondeli: "Remember, we had seventy-four years of political-cultural-economic emasculation under the Soviet Union; three generations of Georgians were destroyed. The West concentrates on the crimes of Hitler, but the Nazis ruled for only twelve years."

Saakashvili: "Sometimes very little is needed to survive. We don't need thirty thousand NATO troops or weeks of bombing -- just small, highly specialized security forces from the West to protect our president from assassination, to monitor our borders, to protect the new oil pipeline. If Washington pays attention and gives us advance warning and technical help, we may manage. Unemployment and other statistics are meaningless, because a huge black market helps Georgia survive ... because Georgians have always been corrupt and cynical, with mafias an old tradition, there is not a strong Communist opposition in parliament as in Russia."

From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan:

"NATO's air war against the Serbs in Kosovo coincided with my journey through the Caucasus. People here seemed to have two related reactions to it. They were much too impressed with the bold, naked display of Western power to be concerned over the Clinton administration's clumsy diplomacy and planning for the operation. But they also felt that the ten weeks of NATO bombing would never be replicated in the Caucasus, no matter what atrocities the Russians or anyone else perpetrated here."

Robert Kaplan approaches Zaal Kikodze, an archaeologist, living in Tbilisi, to see if he can get some answers about Georgia. Here is how the exchange went:

Kaplan: I was wondering if you could tell me what Georgian history says about Georgia's future.

Kikodze: Such questions are best discussed over cheese and wine.

Kind of says it all, don't it?

Georgia: Part III - Shevardnadze

In one of the posts below I describe my old "Country of the Week" thing I used to do on my old blog. Go read it for an introduction to what I am doing here right now. Then scroll up - I am posting these in chronological order, which, unfortunately, means that you all will see them backwards. I also credit the authors who have written about Georgia and from whom I got this information. (I have never been to Georgia - so after all, what the hell do I know?)

So the first thing I posted was in regards to Georgia's long long history.

My second post was about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And the following post is about Shevardnadze - the return of Shevardnadze to rescue the former Soviet republic from civil war.

SHEVARDNADZE

A military council ousted Gamsakhurdia in early 1992. He fled to Chechnya. The civil war continued. Gamsakhurdia still had troops of crazed supporters, more like followers of some personality cult than an actual army, and these troops were still battling it out with the new military council, and all of the rival mafias which had suddenly exploded throughout the country.

Eduard Shevardnadze was the Communist Party boss in Georgia, as well as the ex-secret police chief. He was also Gorbachev's foreign minister. The two of them would talk about Communism, and Leninism, and how to make it work, and what else could be done to bring about the glorious Communist society. They were both committed Communists.

However, in 1979, right before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Shevardnadze, in a moment of truth, blurted out to Gorbachev: "This entire country is rotten. We have got to see if we can salvage something out of this entire mess." Gorbachev continued to believe, almost until the very end, that Communism could still work, and that the Soviet Union could manage to stay together. Even with a new economy, and more freedom. Of course, he was proved tremendously wrong, but that was the level of belief he had in the right-ness of Communism.

Shevardnadze headed up the Communist apparatus in Georgia for many years. He represented the strong-hand of Moscow. As Mr. Secret Police Chief, he also was in charge of one of the most feared and despised institutions in all of Communist Russia.

But...amazingly, once Gamsakhurdia, the dissident, the idealist, took the country by the hand and led them into civil war, Shevardnadze (one of the truly great unsung heroes of the break-down of the "evil empire") was called back from Moscow to clean up the mess.

It is truly an extraordinary story, one which I can't really describe in too much detail.

But here is this man, this person who was once at the TOP of the Communist Party. He had all the perks of his position. And then, in a matter of 2 years, the entire edifice through which he has created his entire life, his entire philosophy, disappears off the face of the planet. Unbelievable. Many apparatchiks in the Communist Party could not handle the transition, and committed suicide. Others were completely lost when faced with the prospect of actually having to COMPETE in an open society for jobs, for raises, etc. Others leapt almost immediately into entrepreneurial pursuits, and others veered off into more criminal pursuits.

Shevardnadze kept his head. He let it go. He let the dream go, and immediately set about doing what needed to be done in Georgia.

So many of these ex-CP guys were called back to help run the countries who were now independent and floundering, and so many of them did so because they enjoyed the power so much. The ex-CP guys kept all of the facets of the Communist Party intact (one-party systems, personality cults surrounding the leader, no free press, secret police), and just called it by another name.

But Shevardnadze let go of Communism. Truly. And came back to Georgia, with the aim to rebuild the country, restore the economy, and get Georgia ready to join the modern world. He brought reformers into the government. He also kept many of the gangster-mafia types in high-level positions, so that they wouldn't be able to form a strong opposition. He included them in the process. He was very canny, very smart. He also survived countless assassination attempts during all of this.

Shevardnadze worked a mini-miracle in Georgia. It is quite a success story, albeit one in progress.

There is still a huge mafia problem in the country. There is still a huge criminal element. But throughout the 1990s, the economy has been growing by double digits. One of the best signs of how well things are going is the ubiquitousness of traffic jams in every major city. This may sound incredibly annoying, but add this to the picture: In 1991, there were NO drive-able roads in the entire country. Cars couldn't get anywhere. You could not leave your village, you could not get from here to there. Shevardnadze has created an infrastructure in the country which has raised the quality of life tremendously. Traffic jams!! How wonderful!

Shevardnadze is still the leader of Georgia today (I wrote this piece in November of 2002). Still battling off assassination attempts, still trying to rebuild the country, still putting down separatist movements all over the place, still trying to help foster a middle-class. A Communist man!! Committed to nurturing the bourgeoisie. I admire him very much.

Robert Kaplan, as always, has some very insightful things to say about Shevardnadze, in his book Eastward to Tartary. Check it out:

Shevardnadze, 71, was a burly man with white curly hair and, normally, a ruddy complexion. But now he was haggard and exhausted, and it was clear that helping to run the world as Soviet foreign minister had been a lot easier for him than running Grgia. His voice was deep and gruff, but he was patient, as though he were conducting a fireside chat with us -- 20 local reporters and myself ... One reporter asked the President why he was blaming the Russians [for the most recent assassination attempt] when the CIA was known to have ordered assassination attempts on Castro. This former Politburo member, used to limousines with the curtains drawn, symbolizing the power he had wielded in a vast tyrannical state, did not lose his temper at this. He smiled and enjoyed the exchange. In his own way, Shevardnadze had become a democrat ... Shevardnadze had a simple strategy: personal physical survival. If he survived a few more years without dying or being killed -- enough time, perhaps, for more political stabilization, more reforms, more institution-building -- then his personal survival, or that of his successor, might no longer be synonymous with the survival of the state itself.

If you have spent any time at all learning about Communism, and how the whole thing went down once it ended, you will know how unbelievable this is. To let the power go, and know that in order for Georgia to survive, it had to survive whether he was the leader of the country or not. All we have to do is look at Iraq, or Libya, or Syria to to see the sickness of societies completely bound to the personality of one specific leader. The entire country (like Turkmenistan) becomes an expression of the leader's ego. It's sick. Shevardnadze could easily go that way, like many of his colleagues did. He did not. He is a man of character.

One more quote (note: I am not sure where this quote came from ... forgive ...), and then I'll finish up:

Eduard Amvrosiyevich Shevardnadze was one of three famous Georgians in 20th century world history. The other two were Stalin and Stalin's feared secret police chief, Laventi Beria, a bespectacled man who combined the roles of Himmler and Eichmann in Stalin's death machine. There are many similarities between Shevardnadze and these two great criminals. They too were manipulators, able to take advantage of any situation; they both betrayed their best friends as they rose to power. None of the three was truly educated, but all were talented: Each man had the strong intuition of a good hunting dog, who could sniff the essence of every idea and situation and adapt it to his needs ...

For example, after one assassination attempt, everyone expected Shevardnadze to fire his interior minister. But he didn't. What couldbe more useful than an interior minister who has been politically discredited, so that he cannot plot against you, because he is now dependent on your goodwill! Shevardnadze now runs the police directly through this man.

Morality is a funny thing. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it seemed that Gamsakhurdia -- the intellectual who had translated Shakespeare -- had been a moral man while Shevardnadze, the Communist hack, was an immoral one. But Shevardnadze, the Machiavellian hunting dog, had sniffed out the rot in the system he was a part of, and, along with his allies Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Yakovlev, tried to reform it for the sake of their own survivial. They failed and the Soviet Union collapsed. The peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union, perhaps the single most significant event of the 20th century, owes almost as much to Shevardnadze as to Gorbachev.

Meanwhile, Shevardnadze's survival game continued in Georgia, where the lessons of The Prince were the surest path to democratization.

It's certainly not a warm and fuzzy world and Shevardnadze is not a warm and fuzzy Jimmy Carter kind of guy.

Georgia: Part II - The collapse of the USSR

In the post below I describe my old "Country of the Week" thing I used to do on my old blog. Go read it for an introduction to what I am doing here right now.

So the first thing I posted on Georgia was in regards to its long long history.

This is my second post about Georgia, and it is on the collapse of the Soviet Union.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR

Now the Soviets are gone (sort of), but the Georgians remain fixated on Russia.

They have a longing for the order the Soviets once provided, and yet they resent having been so dominated. As I said yesterday, their national character is intractable. They are intelligent, they are rebellious, they are schemers and wheeler-dealers (Georgians have taken the concept of a black market to a whole different level), they are deeply religious, and they also refuse to give up who they are. They speak their own language, etc.

However, once the Russians retreated, taking the Russian language with them, the Georgians were left hugely isolated in their mountainous country. They have no experience with needing to speak to the rest of the world. Someone else was always speaking for them. Now they have no way to communicate, no way to participate. They have never had the opportunity to join world events, the world economy, and they are completely unprepared. Russian was the only language that connected them to the world, so the collapse of the Soviet Union, although positive in some respects, left a massive void in Georgia which has yet to be filled.

In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union (of course) began to crack up and began to grant all of the various republics more autonomy. They were allowed to choose their own destinies, make their own way, tear down the Berlin Wall if they wanted to. Georgia, like all the other breakaway republics, immediately set about to become a modern democracy. Change was fast, furious, chaotic. Even reporters at the The New York Times seemed unable to keep up with everything that was happening.

Georgia raced to have elections. Of course, elections are just a symbol. We know that NOW, looking in. Elections mean diddly-squat if the country itself does not have the institutions to support democracy. America hashed stuff out, concepts, desires, ideals...creating the system of checks and balances which was necessary to the development of a democratic society. Georgia had none of this. So their first experiment with democracy was (just like it was elsewhere, all over the former Soviet Union) a complete and utter disaster.

The first democratically elected president in Georgia was Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He was the leading dissident during the Communist-era period. A very idealistic man. (I hate to say it, but being "very idealistic" is a terrible quality to have if you are going to be a President of anything. You need to have your feet on the ground and know how to get shit DONE.) Anyway, I know it's so easy to judge standing on the outside. Georgia needed to make its mistakes, and learn, and grow, in order to transform itself. This process is still going on.

But regardless: Gamsakhurdia completely friggin' destroyed Georgia. He walked Georgia right into civil war.

There are, actually, a lot of similarities between Gamsakhurdia and Slobodan Milosevic. Gamsakhurdia came along and fanned the flames of ethnic hatred, racism, xenophobia, and historical grievance. His entire "platform" had to do with needing revenge against what the Communists had done.

However: Georgia is a country overflowing with minority groups: Armenians, Ossetians, Abhazians, and many many others. Gamsakhurdia saw them as second-class citizens, and began a program of oppression and discrimination against them. His motto was "Georgia for Georgians". All this did was fill people with hate. You can't run a government efficiently on hate.

Here's a quote about Gamsakhurdia from Michael Dobbs' great book Down with Big Brother:

"Georgia is a unitary independent state, and therefore there can be no concessions to the separatists in Abhazia or southern Ossetia," [Gamsakhurdia] told the meeting outside the parliament building. "The representatives of all other nations are merely guests on Georgian land, who can be shown the door at any time by their hosts."

In many ways, Gamsakhurdia's brand of xenophobic nationalism was as authoritarian and myopic as the Communist ideology it sought to replace. He convinced his followers that independence would lead automatically to prosperity, as the Kremlin would no longer have the opportunity to "exploit" Georgia economically. In his patriotic zeal he ignored the fact that Georgia relied on other Soviet republics for practically all its oil and gas, 94 percent of its grain, 93 percent of its steel, and 82 percent of its timber. His assumption that ethnic minorities would meekly accept the will of the Georgian majority turned out to be another fatal miscalculation, which laid the basis for a prolonged civil war.

In the emotional aftermath of the Tblisi massacre (in April 1989, when Soviet soldiers gunned down a peaceful protest in Tbilisi's main square, a la Tienamen) reason and common sense were in short supply. Revolted by the shedding of innocent blood, Georgians rallied around the leaders who denounced the Soviet "imperialists" the loudest. At this point the Communist authorities made a series of blunders that played right into the hands of the nationalists. They arrested Gamsakhurdia and other opposition leaders, endowing them with the halos of martyrs. Then, for almost two weeks, the army denied using toxic gas against the demonstrators. Panic swept the city as hundreds of people were admitted to local hospitals with symptoms of poisoning. Anti-Soviet sentiment reached a fever pitch. By the time Gamsakhurdia was released from prison several weeks later, the role of one of his father's heroes seemed ready-made for him. A year and a half after "Bloody Sunday", he was to win the first free election in Georgia's history, by a two-to-one margin.

Ah, what a mess, what a mess. It's obvious that all of this is going to go badly, but what happens next is quite surprising. Gamsakhurdia is, of course, ousted. Run out of Georgia on a rail.

And somebody appears to save the day from a most unexpected place.

Georgia's on my mind

On my old blog I used to have this "feature" that I called "Country of the Week".

I took countries I knew a bit about, or at least had 5,000 reference books on, and wrote an entry a day about each country.

Ah, I had a lot of energy those days in my blog-infancy. A long essay a DAY??

I have done so much reading and kept so many notes that I figured: Let's put this vague form of autism to use.

During the life of my old blog, the Countries of the Week were: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Macedonia, Hungary, The Ukraine, Croatia, The Czech Republic, Uzbekistan, and Georgia. A lot of the entries were made up of book excerpts - and a lot of it I just rambled out myself.

"Okay, so here is what happened with the first Balkan War, as far as I understand..."

That kind of thing.

Anyway. Because of recent upheavals in Georgia, and Shevardnadze stepping down, I went back and looked at my 5 entries for Georgia. And I'm gonna post them here, for whoever is interested.

The tone of these posts rather amuses me, because I do sound like I think I am an expert. Please ignore how obnoxious that is - I am NOT an expert. But I do have a passion for the history of the Caucasus - (as well as the countries in Central Asia) - so while I am not an expert, and could not teach a class on the History of Georgia - there is definitely some good regurgitated information in these posts.

I must give a nod to Robert Kaplan, Colin Thubron, and Ryzsard Kapucinski - all of whom have covered Georgia in great depth, with tremendously beautiful writing. I quote from their books extensively.

So here we go.

The first post is entitled "HISTORY".

HISTORY OF GEORGIA

Georgia is an ancient country, with a largely Orthodox Christian population. The country also has a tremendous mix of ethnicities which has led to a very complex and bloody history. I'll start with the ancient history, and then move on to recent events. It's always good to put a country into context.

Georgia is a beautiful and fertile place, nestled in the Caucasus mountains, and also stretching along the east coast of the Black Sea. Russia fought very hard to keep Georgia under its control, and it is easy to see why. Georgia is a rich breadbasket of a country. The mountain range has allowed Georgia, over the millennia, to remain linguistically homogenous and intact. Which is phenomenal in an area of the world where the minimum amount of ethnicities/languages in any given city is 50. Georgians have been described as "a pocket people preserved in a dusty museum case."

4th century
In 330 A.D., Christianity was brought to Georgia by Assyrian monks. Georgian Christianity is its OWN THING; it has the passion of Orthodox rituals mixed in with flavoring from ancient pagan rites. Georgian Christianity is among the world's oldest form of the religion (along with Armenia, right next door). It mixes in rituals from the Greek pantheon, Zoroastrianism, Anatolian cults. The church holds the country together.

5th century
In the 5th century, A.D., the Georgians created one of the world's 14 alphabets. Incredible.

Georgia's positioning, on the Black Sea, has made it a prize to be captured over the millennia. It is another country (like Armenia, like Poland) which has a long history of being coveted. Empires marched over this land, retreated over it, marched back again, chopping it up, devouring it, ruling it, occupying it. From what I have read, though, there is something in the Georgian character which cannot be subdued. (I'm Irish, so this sounds a bit familiar to me!) Perhaps it is their passionate community-building brand of Christianity. But there is something intractable in Georgians which does not allow them to be psychologically conquered, even when their country is being ruled by an occupying force. They do not take their occupiers very seriously. The land has been ravaged by Arab, Byzantine, Turk, Mongol and Persian armies, and still: these people are Georgian.

Georgia was an ancient monarchy. As long as there was no threat from the outside, all went well. The population was so diverse, and so individualistic that it made things difficult. Diversity is a lovely ideal, but it can be extremely unwieldy when trying to fight off a foe. How do you come to agreement? How do you decide on goals? How do you identify yourself?

10th century
In the 10th century, A.D., that foe arrived in the form of the Byzantine army. The Georgian monarch was unable to unite all the different principalities and populations and ethnicities hiding in the mountains of his country, so the Byzantines easily took over.

11th/12th centuries
Then came the heyday of Georgian history which peaked in the 11th and 12th centuries. The Georgians easily adapted to Byzantine rule, and flourished. The culture thrived, the empire spread from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, and also down into Persia. Georgia was a cosmopolitan mix of Byzantium, Seljuk Turkey, and Persia. The leader of Georgia at the time was David the Builder, who is one of Georgia's many folk-heroes. Georgians love heroes (which is a very important thing to remember....it is one of the keys to this country...their addiction to hero-worship). David the Builder spearheaded the expansion of Georgia. The Turks had conquered and occupied Tbilisi for 400 years, and David basically marched in and took it back.

13th century
The 13th century brought the Mongol invasions. Which were savage and divisive. The Georgian monarchy fell apart. The Mongols supported and promoted the provincial noblemen, in order to shut out the King's influence.

14th century
The 14th century brought the Black Death, which decimated Georgia. This was also the century when the feared Tamerlane conquered Georgia.

Meanwhile, during all of this, the Georgian people are hiding out in the mountains, resisting the outside influence of their conquerors. Yes, they assimilated some of the Persian or Turkic influences, but their alphabet stayed strong, their language stayed strong, their personalities stayed strong. Georgians can thank the barriers of the Caucasus mountains for that.

Georgia eventually was divided up, brutally, between the Turks and the Persians. It was a classic East-West division. (Which, basically, exists in this country until this day). Although Georgia yearns to join the West, yearns to be modern, looks to the West for its inspiration ... the East dictates the tenor of the politics here. It continues to be an internally divided nation. So the Ottoman Turks conquered Georgia from the West, and the Safavid Iranian empire conquered Georgia from the East. The oppression was extreme, from both sides of the coin.

17th century
In the 17th century, we have to add Russia's expansion into this mix. Russia began to creep its way south, keeping its eye firmly set on the jewel of Georgia.

18th century
By the time the 18th century rolled around, Russia and Persia were basically at war over Georgia. This small mountainous chunk of land on the shores of the Black Sea. But again, if you look at a map, you can see how crucial Georgia is to any empire looking to expand in that area. You must have Georgia if you want to have an outlet on the Black Sea. The Black Sea is what connects East to West. It is essential.

19th century
In 1801, Czar Alexander I forcibly incorporated Georgia into the Russian empire. Throughout the 19th century, the Russians hastened the pace in Georgia, forcing them to modernize, to catch up with the rest of the world. This was a jarring transition for the people of Georgia.

However, the Georgian Church continued to bond the people together, in a secret and passionate way. One of the goals of the Russians was to subordinate the Georgian Church to Russian institutions. They were never able to succeed with this. Apparently, some of the most gorgeous painted religious icons came from Georgia. The oppression of the Church catapulted religous art into greatness. I've seen some of those icons, and they bring tears to my eyes. It is faith, burning with a strong and steady flame. It is faith which digs its heels in, sets its jaw squarely. It is faith which does not need a BUILDING to contain it. It is faith which exists whether it is given permission to or not. It is faith which never has to scream about itself, or justify itself, or explain itself. Quite extraordinary. It is indestructible.

20th century
Then along comes the 20th century and slowly, Marxism starts to become very attractive to Georgians. Marxism, in its pure sense, in its naive beginning, was opposed to czarism, opposed to the "officialdom" of Russian society, opposed to the bourgeoisie. All of these elements were extremely appealing to the beleaguered poverty-struck Georgians. Georgia is the real historical birthplace of mass-movement socialism.

It is not surprising at all that such a country would be the birthplace of Josef Stalin. A country filled with peasants, a country bound together by faith (Stalin had studied to be a priest), a country obsessed with heroes, a country obsessed with its own past. This is the ground from which one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century sprung.

Rome wasn't built in a day

So Miss Afghanistan won a special award in the Miss Earth contest, huh? And it's a big ol' victory, right? Seeing her on the catwalk in her bikini, right? A triumph for the new Afghanistan?

New Afghanistan, my ASS.

Fazel Ahmad Manawi, deputy head of Afghanistan's Supreme Court, takes the tone of one chiding a CHILD: "I hope that this lady regrets her actions."

Jackass. She's an adult. And you know what? That's how the civilized world treats women - as ADULTS. Capable of making their OWN choices.

He added that Afghan prosecutors may open an investigation, but refused to say what charges or penalties Samadzai could face.

She "could face prosecution if she returns to her native country."

I've had it with these freaks.

(via Instapundit)

Speaking of Ernie O'Malley...

At long last, after owning it for years, I am reading Ernie O'Malley's classic of the 1916 Easter Rising, On Another Man's Wound. I'm only on Chapter 2 at the moment, but I can already tell that his writing style is far above and beyond the other "Irish Nationalist" memoirs I have tried to read. As my dad said, when he recommended I read this book, "Most of the other books read like: 'And then we hid in the bushes and blew up some lorries'". Ernie O'Malley can certainly write.

So far, here is my favorite paragraph:

On market days we could sense the roughness of country people. Awkward men drinking pints of frothy porter, using wiry ash plants on each other in daylight or being dragged and sometimes carried to the barracks by police. Bullocks beaten through the streets, the shrill complaining of pigs, a steady waft of speech and smells of cow dung and fresh horse droppings. Shawled barefooted women selling eggs and yellow, strong salty butter in plaited osier baskets, salty dilisk in trays, or minding bonnovs with a sugan. A ballad singer with an old song or one of a recent happening, stressing his syllables, rushing a long line into a short singing spacve whilst the people gathered in a circle, following the words eagerly. They bought his broadsheets and hummed the notes as they walked around. Old women with pleated frills to their white caps, the more wealthy with black bonnets shaking from a spangle of flat beads; boys in corduroy trousers and bare feet; rosy girls in tight-laced boots, which some had put on at the entrance to the town. Through all, talk, laughter, hot-blooded sudden blows, a sense of the bare breath of Mayo, backed by rounded mountains and sea, frayed lake-edges and the straight reach of Nephin mountain.

"The bare breath of Mayo" ... I like that. The O'Malleys are from Mayo, I have family there ... and Ernie O'Malleys words capture the feeling of it perfectly.

Let Us Now Praise Firemen

A post from Michele, honoring firemen everywhere.

Her father was a fireman. She eloquently describes her "moment of realization" as a child:

[My father] was, at that time, a volunteer firefighter on Long Island, in addtion to his paid position in the city. One evening, a huge grocery store went up in flames. My mother and the rest of the firemen's wives had the duty of bringing coffee and other drinks to the firemen. Hey, it was the 70's. Women did that sort of thing without question.

So mom packed us up into the car and we went to watch the Big Apple grocery store burn down. I thought it would be fun and exciting. Instead, it was terrifying. I watched the roof collapse. I watched the building crumble underneath the flames. I watched as firemen kept going in, towards the flames instead of away from them. What kind of idiot goes into a burning building? A brave one, I suppose.

Shortly after that, a volunteer fireman from my father's company died in the line of duty. My father's chosen profession suddenly took on a different tone for me. I never thought about the death part. I never even considered the fact that one day he might not come home from work. I went to bed that night angry. How could my father be so selfish that he would risk his life to save strangers and their property when he had kids and a wife at home who needed him? A small voice in my head replied: That's not selfish. It's selfless.

I saw the picture on the front page of the New York Times today, and my jaw dropped at the sight. It is a terrifying photograph. Terrifying.

I thought of those men, those human beings, who appear almost as specks in the photograph. Those brave men - dwarfed by this catastrophe almost beyond their control - and yet there they are, lined up along a fire hose, facing the inferno.

Again, as I have said time and time again, my brain goes blank almost when faced with such men.

I don't know what to say, how to thank them ... how to carve out enough space in my heart for my humility, my gratitude.

Go read all of Michele's post. She finds the words.

At last...

...An editorial by Cathy Young in a major newspaper discussing the rights of the defendant in rape cases.

It's about TIME.

Attitudes toward sexual assault victims have changed greatly in the past 30 years -- and thank goodness for that. In the early 1970s, juries in many states were still commonly instructed to consider evidence of "unchaste character" (such as going to bars alone or using birth control) as detracting from a woman's credibility or suggesting that she was likely to have consented. Rape shield laws forbidding the use of the complainant's sexual past as evidence are rightly seen as an important accomplishment of the women's movement.

And yet many people, including feminists such as Columbia University law professor Vivian Berger, have cautioned against going too far in protecting the accuser at the expense of the accused. In some cases, the woman's past -- including her sexual past -- can indeed be relevant to the man's guilt, particularly in he said/she said cases without much physical evidence.

What if the woman has a record of making false accusations of rape or other crimes? What if she is so mentally unstable that she has trouble distinguishing between imagination and reality? What if she has engaged in sexual acts that could provide an alternate explanation for the physical evidence which the prosecution is using to prove sexual assault?

Damn - even just ASKING these questions is inflammatory. I can see the smoke shooting out of Susan Faludi's ears from miles away.

Cathy Young, the author of this piece, acknowledges fully that rape is not, and can never be, a black and white issue - due to the he said/she said nature of the crime - and also because it is true that you can be raped by your husband, it is true that prostitutes can be raped, none of that stuff can be ignored. All kinds of information has to be taken into account, and we cannot hold women on such a pedestal that the mere mention of a woman having sex somehow besmirches her in our eyes.

"So she's had a bunch of one-night stands? She's a slut - she was asking for it."

Yawn.

Women have to be responsible for their own safety, and not put themselves in compromising positions, yes. But you know what? At some point, that caution doesn't matter. Women get attacked for no reason, meaningless things happen, things you cannot avoid. I am no fight for a big strong man, and I am a SPITFIRE. If a man decided to drag me into the shadows, he may have to fight with me a bit - but not all that much. Short of locking ourselves in our rooms, and only going out with chaperones, women have to risk a bit if we want to live free lives. You have to weigh the risks.

As in: "Okay. I am not going to travel at 3 am all the way up to Washington Heights, by myself, to meet someone for a drink". If I chose to do such a thing, then - well, I still will not say "asking for it" - but I will say that I was then being WILDLY irresponsible with my own safety and should not be shocked if I were harassed, mugged, what-have-you.

Young says, with stunning simplicity (so simple that it made me realize how we do not hear people outside the blog-world making this point all that much):

Some victim advocates worry that even if the woman in such a case has not been raped, she may be brutally abused by the legal process. They seem to forget that being falsely accused of rape is a terrible form of abuse as well.

Young also writes:

Rape is a despicable crime, and an accusation of rape should be taken very seriously -- but the rights of the accused should be rigorously protected. After the 1997 trial of sportscaster Marv Albert, defending the judge's decision to admit compromising information about Albert's sexual past but not about his accuser's, feminist attorney Gloria Allred decried "the notion that there's some sort of moral equivalency between the defendant and the victim." Yet as long as the defendant hasn't been convicted, he and the victim are indeed moral equals in the eyes of the law.

Gloria Allred's blinkered position scares me. He's the 'DEFENDANT' during the trial, not the 'RAPIST'. That is the whole point of our justice system, that is the whole point of Western freakin' civilization, woman.

He hasn't been convicted yet, remember?

An ominous date

Not only is today the one-year marker of the Moscow theatre siege (Man - it really does not feel like it happened a year ago to me ... more like a couple of months) - but it is also the "anniversary" of the suicide bomber driving into the Marine barracks in Beirut.

What, is Oct. 23 "Let's all act like raging Islamic lunatics" day?

Original article by Tom Friedman.

Terrible. Terrible events.

Lt. Smash - or, I should say, Citizen Smash, has some places where you can go to pay your respects to the Marines who lost their lives.

Jesus.

This is alarming.

Plastic bags of box cutters found aboard two planes from Southwest Airlines. In the next 24 hours, all commercial aircraft will be searched.

A note in both packages indicated the items were intended to challenge the TSA checkpoint security procedures, Southwest said.

Mission accomplished, eh?

I'm sure they have a list of suspects:

Nordic-looking grandmothers
5-year-old Amish boys
Frail old Jewish men
Breastfeeding mothers

Care to add any?

Vatican says condoms don't stop AIDS

The latest idiocy from the Vatican: Condoms don't stop Aids

To me, this statement (that condoms should not be used "because they have tiny holes in them through which the HIV virus can pass") is not just idiotic - harmful - foolish - but evil. Yes. It's evil.

Africa is ravaged by this disease. Ravaged. It is an epidemic. Condom use is not widely practiced in Africa, anyway. To warn people against using condoms, with this misinformation, is infuriating. Evil.

How DARE you?

Full disclosure: I'm a Catholic. Obviously. But this shit makes me NUTS.

Toys to Baghdad

As I am sure many of you are aware of, Chief Wiggles has set up a toy drive for Iraqi kids.

Please, everyone! It wouldn't take that much time ... and think of the joy a simple jump-rope or some hopscotch-chalk would bring!

Here are the toys you should NOT send:
Any guns of any kind
No violent action hereos
No violent toys
No barbie dolls or dolls skantily dressed
No toys that shoot something, no projectiles
No water guns
Let's just keep it simple, simple toys, just the basics, these kids have nothing.

Some suggested toys that would be good to send:
Construction paper, markers (probably not crayons, because of the heat)
stuffed animals
bubbles
jump ropes
sidewalk chalk
matchbox cars
yo yos
frisbees

If you follow the link above, and read down through the Comments, a lot of people have great suggestions of culturally sensitive cool toys that would be good to send.

A couple of must-reads

1.
The piece by Philip Gourevitch in the latest New Yorker, about North Korea. I can't recommend it highly enough, for myriad reasons.

First off: Gourevitch is one of my favorite writers. I also like to think of him, privately (and pathetically), as "my future husband". Well, obviously now that I've posted it here, not so privately anymore.

But all that aside: it is an enormous piece of research, compelling, frightening, very very well-done.

It's an indictment of the regime.

And the photograph to go along with the piece is haunting. It's a satellite picture of Korea entire, North and South, at night. South Korea is filled with big splotches of bright lights, denoting (or should I use "connoting"? Always get those two confused) civilization, obviously. North Korea is literally DARK. Not one cluster of humanity, not one bright splotch. All is darkness.

Really: it's a must-read.

2. The following piece by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, which I found via Andrew Sullivan.

I read it with mounting interest, I haven't read something so clear-sighted in a long long time.

It focuses on, on one level, the failure of writers and poets (our mouthpieces, so to speak) to respond to September 11 in any meaningful way. To not realize that there are some things which cannot be spoken, some experiences which go beyond words. But really, you have to read the piece to get the gist of his points.

Here's an excerpt:

Any event as shocking as this was difficult to respond to perceptively or even sensibly. "Perhaps one of the most upsetting aspects of post-bombing America is the fatuousness of our response," Thomas Laqueur wrote in the London Review of Books, little knowing how much truer his words would be made by his fellow contributors. Maybe there was nothing useful to say, but then writers and performers seldom follow the advice that if you can't think of anything sensible to say, keep quiet. Silence would have surely been better than the cloud of exotic prose which rose like fumes from the wreckage, as sundry scribblers did their best to justify Karl Kraus's saying that a journalist is someone who has nothing to say but who knows how to say it. A comparatively harmless case was Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker recording that "On the morning of the day they did it, the city was as beautiful as it had ever been. Central park had never seemed so gleaming and luxuriant" and so on until the unlikely insight that what he found some way from ground zero was "almost like the smell of smoked mozzarella." Even as good a newspaperman and historian as Neal Ascherson felt he had to flex his literary muscles: "Manhattan that morning was a diagram, a blue bar chart with columns which were tall or not so tall. A silver cursor passed across the screen and clicked silently on the tallest column, which turned red and black and presently vanished. This is how we delete you."

But it was writers-with-a-W who really excelled, doing their best to confute Shelley's grandiose proposition that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. That idea always looked dubious-in practice writers are all too often sillier and nastier in their politics than anyone else-and one or two writers were wise enough to recognise this in September 2001. Bret Easton Ellis said that he was too depressed to make phrases, and Philip Roth refused public comment. If only there had been more like them.

Wheatcroft has written a literary critique, as well as a political and social critique. He's angry. He's very angry. He expresses it well.

At its most extreme, "they had it coming" was used to blame the Americans in general, and even those in the World Trade Centre, for electing the wrong kind of president. "American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants," the New Statesman said in a memorable leader. "Well, yes and no- Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privileges of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the US often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader."

Actually, the 3,000 dead in New York must have included people who did vote for Nader, and more who voted for Gore. That was recognised, in a peculiarly foolish way, by the egregious Michael Moore (a stupid white man if ever there was): "Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes- destination of California-these were places that voted against Bush!" Presumably the terrorist murders were wrong in liberal Manhattan, but would have been all right if al Qaeda had attacked Phoenix or Atlanta. Or perhaps terrorists should find means of attack which distinguish between good and bad, killing the Republicans but sparing anyone who voted for an environmentally-correct candidate.

And that is enough excerpting, for you must go read it yourself.

Great White fined

So Great White has been fined "$7,000 for failing to ensure that its employees were properly protected from fire hazards, especially from the pyrotechnics that sparked the inferno."

This particular sentence made me RAGE:

"The Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Wednesday imposed an $85,200 levy against the owners, brothers Jeffrey and Michael Derderian, for what it called a "willful" violation by installing an exit door that swung the wrong way. "

I had not heard about the exit doors which swung in, as opposed to out.

Maybe I have too much imagination. But I can't stop myself from imagining those poor people. Those trapped people. Running to the exit door, en masse, and pushing against it, expecting it, of course, to swing open, as exit doors SHOULD. But instead, it remained shut, and the crowd, the panicked terrorized crowd, piled up against the door, meaning that, obviously, nobody would ever move back towards the inferno, in order to leave room for the exit door to open, swinging in.

This is just ... it's horrific. I wince, I wince. I can't stop my mind from picturing being there. Being in that nightmare. Jesus Christ. I cannot stop myself from picturing the panic of those poor people.

Seems like $85,200 is a pretty small sum for such an enormous offense.

No words

This is beyond infuriating. It's an outrage.

Came across the bunch of newspapers and magazines I had saved in the wake of 9/11 during my packing frenzy this weekend. It was odd. Time-travelers. And in one of the magazines there were statements of support, listed, from every leader of the world. Circa late September, 2001.

How soon they forget.

"We stand in solidarity with the people of the US" says Chirac. Says Schroeder.

No no NO YOU DO NOT STAND WITH US. YOU DO NOT. You just stood by us when we were DOWN. The second we got up again, angry, and roaring, the awakened giant, you condemned us. You turned on us. You are not with us. You are not.

But this ... this is despicable.

Moral ROT.

And not only that, but the writing sucks.

I'm too upset to be more articulate.

Re-visiting the Dream Palaces

This is not exactly a timely piece, but it's something worth re-visiting, and worth mentioning.

At the end of April, the phenomenal David Brooks had a piece in The Weekly Standard, called "The Collapse of the Dream Palaces". He used the phrase "dream palaces", echoing the title of Fouad Ajami's wonderful book called Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey.

Brooks, writing in the direct aftermath of April 9, was reacting to the immediate and knee-jerk Bush-hatred flowing about the airwaves, the defeatism, the pessismism, but he also tackled the psychological "dream-palaces", erected not just by the Arabs, but by all of the ideologists screaming around at the time. Well, obviously, that war of ideology is still going on right now, which is why I wanted to bring up Brooks' incredible article again. Read it, if you didn't do so the first time around.

But more on the dream-palace concept.

Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese journalist, wrote in his book about the Arab nationalist movement of the 20th century ... the hopes of the Arab intellectuals and poets, the true thinkers of these societies, fighting for Islam to grow up, to expand, to let in social change. Arab nationalism, of course, was hijacked by Islamism. I found Ajami's book to be very sad. The intellectuals are still out there. They are still trying to initiate change. Most of them are in jail, or persecuted. Or, they write from the safety of Western countries.

The thesis of Brooks' piece in The Weekly Standard is:

Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are.

He identifies a couple of different "dream palaces":

The dream palace of the Arabs, the dream palace of the Europeans, and the dream palace of the "American Bush haters".

People refuse to deal with reality. They see the world through a filter. Different filters, all. I mean, this is a very human thing. I do not set myself apart from that statement. If we did not have filters for reality, we all would be vacant hollow shells tooling around, with no opinions. I look at the world through my own Sheila-Irish-American-Catholic-artist filter. This is how I process information.

But!

When the filter turns into a dream palace, a rigid construct of an ideology which brooks no self-criticism, no growth ... you are done for. You have stepped OUT of the dialogue, you have removed yourself from the conversation, and you have removed yourself from the possibility of being a part of any kind of workable solution.

You are unable to even contemplate that the "other side" may have anything to say, that "the other side" may ALSO be coming from a place of integrity, of true belief.

Eventually, what happens is: you have put your hands over your ears, to block out these unsettling voices, voices which you cannot recognize, voices which you cannot even allow yourself to hear ... because if you DO, then the house of cards will come crashing down.

Most people have beliefs, opinions, standards they try to live by. This is good.

I myself, while definitely a hot-head, and definitely opinionated, try to take a live and let live approach. I do not want to live in a dream palace. I read a ton of books, on all different topics, I have vehement opinions which I will express, I believe in things. I believe in things firmly. But I never ever want to be closed to growth, to development, to being able to LISTEN. Being able to actually hear the validity of what someone else might be saying to me. I also have no desire to live in a fantasy world. A world of pure ideology, of untouched conviction. No. That is spiritual death.

Brooks describes the "dream palace of the Arabists":

In this dream palace, it is always the twelfth century, and every Western incursion into the Middle East is a Crusade. The Americans are always invaders and occupiers. In this dream palace, any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor, so Osama bin Laden becomes an Arab Joe Louis, and Saddam Hussein, who probably killed more Muslims than any other person in the history of the world, becomes the champion of the Muslim cause.

In this dream palace, the problems of the Arab world are never the Arabs' fault. It is always the Jews, the Zionists, the Americans, and the imperialists who are to blame. This palace reeks of conspiracies--of Israelis who blew up the World Trade Center, of Jews who put the blood of Muslim children in their pastries, of Americans who fake images of Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad in order to fool the world. In this palace, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi information minister, was taken seriously because he told the Arabists what they wanted to hear.

Then Brooks tackles the Europeans:

In this palace, America is a bigger threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein. America is the land of rotting cities, the electric chair, serial killers, gun-crazed hunters, shallow materialists, religious nuts, savage capitalists, the all-powerful Jewish lobby, the oil lobby, the military-industrial complex, and bloodthirsty cowboy-presidents...

In the European dream palace, Americans are terminally naive, filled with crazy notions like the belief that Arabs are capable of democracy. In this vision of reality, Americans are at once childish, selfish, and trigger-happy, but Arabs live just this side of savagery. Any action that might rile them will cause the Arab street to explode, and will lead to a thousand more bin Ladens.

And the last dream palace? Reserved for the Bush/America haters:

In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

Brooks goes into much more depth, but that, pretty much, is the basis of it.

Brooks then talks about the many many many people who do not live in dream palaces, who do not have fiery beliefs or convictions, and who also may not read 10 newspapers a day, who are not addicted to being completely informed, but who definitely want to participate, who want to know what our leaders are up to, what is really going on:

BUT THERE IS ANOTHER, larger group of people whose worldviews will be permanently altered by the war in Iraq. Members of this group were not firm opponents of the war. Indeed, they were mild supporters, or they were ambivalent. They were members of the vast, nervous American majority that swung behind the president as the fighting commenced.

These people do not have foreign policy categories deeply entrenched in their brains. They don't see themselves as hawks or doves, realists or Wilsonians. They don't see each looming conflict either through the prism of Vietnam, as many peaceniks do, or through the prism of the 1930s and the Cold War, as many conservatives do. They don't attract any press coverage or much attention, because they seldom take a bold stand either way. Their foreign policy instincts are unformed. But they are the quiet people who swing elections.

(emphasis mine)

Brooks talks about the hatred of Bush. He sees it as pathology.

The conservatives who hated Clinton also seemed pathological to me, at the time. As more comes out about Clinton's behavior in the White House, the more I am horrified by him, and horrified that I voted for the guy. But the vehemence, the gut-level HATRED people had for him ... seemed very unbalanced to me at the time. It seemed insane. Personal. It was like they did not care how much their persecution of their own President made him look bad and weak in the eyes of the world. If our President looks bad and weak, then we look bad and weak. We always must hold our public officials to account, it is our duty as citizens to keep our top guys in line. Our system is set up that way. But the hatred for Clinton, and now the hatred for Bush, felt (and feels) PERSONAL. It's nasty.

Please don't write to me and tell me that politics is a dirty game. That is not what I am talking about here. I am not saying: "Why can't we all just get along? Why can't everyone just be NICE?" I am talking about insane and pathological hatred. Hatred which blurs the sight, and makes people behave like Cookie-Monster on crack.

Those people live in dream-palaces. Dream-palaces constructed of absolute rights and absolute wrongs. They literally cannot HEAR anymore.

Brooks makes some very good points:

The Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

That last sentence about claiming they "always accepted certain realities" we saw come to pass, post the EASY initial roll-into Baghdad. Vocifeous Bush-hating op-ed columnists, who had been be-moaning the upcoming quagmire, and the rising up of the Arab street, and the destruction of Israel, blah blah blah, (the same ones who were warning all of us trepidatiously about that "brutal Afghan winter") suddenly started saying, "We always knew we would win this war. But the problem now is _______" (insert some random complaint).

Not even admitting that their dire predictions were a bit off. True, there were a couple of courageous columnists who owned up to their error, and I applaud them. They aren't holed up in a dream-palace (a palace which is actually made of paper-thin glass, ready to shatter at the least evidence that perhaps their entire belief structure may be built on sand.)

I am very very concerned about all of this.

I am very concerned about ideology trumping critical thinking and rationality.

Democracy, federalism, representative government: none of this stuff has anything to do with creating a dream palace. None of this has to do with purity, or perfectability. The founding fathers knew that man was "irredeemable". Nobody is perfect.

The rules of impeachment were already in place when George Washington was inaugurated.

I love that fact, because, if you really think about it, it's so cynical. But it is also highly logical. Man (and society) must be protected against his man's own irredeemability.

There is a truism about human nature, and I heard it once described somewhere in the analogy of building a new town:

You go out into the wilderness and you start to plan out the town that you will build. It's going to be a great town, filled with happy people, happy people who have jobs, and who enjoy living there. This town will be a blazing success. But you immediately and instinctively allocate space for a cemetary and space for a prison. No questions asked. No conversation of: "Well, in THIS town, we won't NEED a prison."

That's not a dream palace. That's reality.

I highly recommend Fouad Ajami's book, for those of you inclined. It describes a tragedy. The tragedy of Arab intellectuals. The ones trying to live in the real world, trying to build a real society. Instead, they are now trapped in a rigid (and because it's rigid, it can shatter at the least provocation) dream palace.

Remember....

"What if [Saddam] fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction? ... Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal."

-- President Bill Clinton, 1998.

The Universal Plots

Justice does not come easy. Sometimes you have to fight for justice. Sometimes peace has to be defended, guarded, fought for. You don't get peace by, in the words of Sheryl Crow, "not having enemies". That's an incredibly stupid way to look at the complexity of human conflict. Of human beings, in general. Without the Allies bombarding Germany, the Jews would not have been freed. That is a fact. War set those people free. Violence set those people free. Five years too frigging late, in my opinion. Everybody appeased the Nazi regime for years, while Jews died by the millions.

I prefer to take a more common sense view to human affairs and people. I know that man is capable of the worst horrors. Man has the hugest capacity to SUCK.

I am afraid of utopias. I am suspicious of people who believe in utopias. Any ideology is utopian, and does not take into consideration human nature, which is messy, troubled, power-hungry, corruptible.

The Founding Fathers were brilliant, in this regard. Yes, they had an ideal for their new country. They wanted to be a "city on a hill". But it wasn't just an idea. They put into the constitution all of the myriad checks and balances which keep us in line today. No, it is not perfect. Nothing is perfect. Anyone who dreams of a perfect society is a tyrant in the making. Someone saying, "Follow me ... I know the way to perfection" is the cue for you to run for the hills. Run screaming for your life.

John Adams wanted the new country to be a "rule of laws", not a "rule of men". He said that over and over and over and over again. Men are fallible. Power can corrupt. (Power does not ALWAYS corrupt, like many people shriek, latching onto the cliche as though it is a lifeboat, as though the second you have power you are corrupt ... this is not necessarily true). Power CAN corrupt. The Founding Fathers understood that man is corruptible, by his very nature, so let the LAWS be the rule of the land, not men. There is no such thing as a "president for life" in this country. The Founding Fathers were terrified of even the possibility that that could occur.

You learn in high school English (at least I did ... thank you Mr. Crothers...) the universal plots in literature.

Man Against Himself. Hmm, let's see. Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. Although that would probably also be under Man Against Society...

Man Against Society. I would put Portrait of a Lady here. Also The Scarlet Letter. Obviously.

Man Against Nature. Pretty much anything by Jack London. To Build a Fire is probably the greatest example of this type of plot, in my opinion.

Man Against Fate. Sometimes this is categorized as a sub-set of Man Against Nature. Man struggling with something he cannot control. Moby Dick? Captain Ahab, struggling with the loss of his leg, the loss of his control, battling with the fate the universe has in store for him. His date with the whale. Written in the stars. This book, all the great books actually, have elements of all of the plots.

and then, of course:

Man Against Man. This is such a universal plot that it doesn't even need to be described.

There is no room for a utopian view of the world the second you have TWO people in the picture. Fine, you have a vision of a perfect universe ... great for you. Go sit on a mountaintop by yourself and create it, because the moment you have another person beside you, you will have conflict:

"I think we should only eat berries and make our own clothes and play the autoharp every day from 10 to 11 am."

"Well ... actually ... I definitely need to have a cup of coffee and I'd like to bring my platform shoes along, because I love them so."

"NO. Platform shoes? And autoharps? Those two things DO NOT GO TOGETHER."

You get the idea.

Sheryl Crow, preaching to us not to have enemies, doesn't get it. She doesn't get that man against man is one of the most universal things about being human.

This is a struggle. I am not talking about accepting horrible things as inevitable, so why fight them. Not at all. This is not like Anne Morrow Lindbergh's book The Wave of the Future, where her basic message was: "The Nazis are an inevitable part of history. They are the wave of the future. We should succumb, and let them take over ... because eventually they will burn up and burn out ... but we must accept that they are the wave of the future." The woman was rightly criticized for her defeatist views, based on nothing but her "feelings" about it all, her "feelings" of fear about war and violence. (Not to mention her husband's clear anti-Semitism.) Anne Lindbergh did not have the comfort of hindsight, of course, and she paid dearly for that book, but her basic view of Nazism and totalitarianism is that we just have to wait it out, because war, in general, is wrong and violence is NOT GOOD. EVER.

Well, violence wiped out the Nazi scum, and opened up the gates of Auschwitz. The Nazis were not the wave of the future. They were a plague on this planet that needed to be eradicated. By force. No way would they give up and say, "You know what? You guys are right. What the hell have we been doing all these years? We love the Jews! We embrace the Jews! Let them BE FREE."

Anyway, all of this rambling on was spurred for me by the reading I have done recently, in re: the Kurds of Northern Iraq. This issue, to me, is what we are talking about when we talk about justice, and peace. Knowing that, actually, there are some things worth fighting for.

For me, "justice" in this situation, means that we, the West, are willing to fight for these people to have peace, and live lives of dignity. The Kurds are not concerned about "collateral damage", innocent civilians dying because of the West invading ... For them, the collateral damage caused by an invasion of Iraq is PEANUTS compared to the thousands and thousands of people who have perished at the hand of Saddam Hussein. Yes, people will die. Civilians will die. But they were dying ANYWAY, being gassed and murdered and tortured by their own leader.

Peace doesn't come easy. Man is corruptible. What is worth fighting for? Turn away from utopias, reject utopias, and ask: Okay. What do I believe in? And when you can answer that question, you must then ask the next question: What can I DO? What the hell can I do? Because there is ALWAYS something to do.

An "Ugly Incident"

From Nov. 25, 2002

I'm sorry, I know it's trite, but the whole damn world is losing its mind.

Nigerian Information Minister, Jerry Gana, says: "I salute the courage of the [Miss World] contestants. They came all the way here despite the conspiracy of the international press... particularly the British press ... There's an international conspiracy just to show that an African country like Nigeria cannot host this thing. I think Nigerians should be really angry with the international press."

Way to pass the buck, dude. "CONSPIRACY?" Listen, man, I know the white-hot light of the spotlights have been on Nigeria lately, because you were going to stone a woman for having a child out of wedlock. That must have sucked for you. But that is the job of the "international press". To call stuff out. And now it's Nigeria's turn. Because stoning a woman is medieval. And if you want people to come to Nigeria, and be curious about Nigeria, then you can't go around being all medieval. So the "international press" has a "conspiracy" to show that "an African country" can't host something like a beauty pageant, huh? NO. Stop the pity party. It's nobody's fault but your own.

Secondly: "I salute the courage of the contestants." Well, that is lovely but I, personally, salute the courage of all the Nigerian women who have to live in your tyrannical country.

And thirdly: Unfortunately, the riots and mayhem DO prove that Nigeria is NOT up to the task of hosting a beauty pageant. (Okay, that is a ridiculous sentence. As though hosting a beauty pageant is a highly specialized activity, requiring years of experience and expertise.)

Michele, at Small Victory, tears the whole thing up. She even goes to the Miss World website to see if there is ANY acknowledgement AT ALL of the trail of bodies this pageant has left in its wake, and there is nothing. Just one small message on a buried page: "The pageant will go on, as planned, in London."

I guess I find every single person in this entire story to be despicable. The vapid contestants, the hairdresser who described (as though he thought it was endearing and funny) how all the girls wanted to crowd into the bathroom on the flight from Nigeria to London so that they could make sure they looked "their best" (as Nigeria was in FLAMES beneath them), the rioters and murderers who basically have no sense of reality and are too "sensitive" to live on this planet, the newspaper editor who caved in to pressure and resigned (after writing kiss-ass apology letters for all the PAIN she has caused), the organizers of the pageant who referred to over 200 deaths as an "ugly incident", the point-the-finger-at-others Nigerian officials ...

The only person who is walking out of this with any sense of dignity and humanity is Miss Canada (Lynsey Bennett), who came home rather than move on to London with the rest of the contestants.

Bennett said, "As soon as I found out that 105 people had already died due to the triggers of the Miss World, I said, 'You know what? This is not why I'm here. This isn't right. I'm going home.'"

Phew! Now there's something I can actually relate to in all this mess.

Iran

As I'm sure everybody knows by now, the students in Iran canceled today's planned protests, for fear of a Tienamen-like response.

OxBlog has a great post up about demonstrations today (maybe in your area) - to show your support to the people of Iran.

All I can think of to say is: I remember seeing this photograph everywhere, during the demonstrations in 1999, and then hearing later that this boy was eventually found and jailed as a result of this photograph - and I remember how helpless I felt. Frustrated. Look at his face. The humanity there, the strength. The loss. The anger.

Again, I say: I truly believe that none of this, even today's thwarted strike, will be in vain.

The mullahs won this round. They won by utilizing the normal tactics of tyrants. They arrested people. They confiscated satellite dishes. They jammed the phone lines. They closed the university. They restricted access to the student organization's website. They cracked down, and cracked down hard. So whatever. They won. Today.

But yesterday's column Pooya Dayanim in the National Review, entitled "Judgment Day: July 9 and Beyond", strikes a ringing tone of triumph, strength and certainty:

Judgment Day is approaching for those who have shed the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Iranians. Judgment Day is approaching for those who have ordered the stoning of women. Judgment Day is approaching for those who ordered the bombing of the Jewish community center in Argentina. Judgment Day is approaching for those who ordered the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon and the Khobar Towers in Riyadh. Judgment Day is approaching for those who started the chant: "Death to America" and everything America stands for. Judgment Day is approaching for the Islamic Republic of Iran. It may not be tomorrow, but soon this evil regime will join the other evil regimes in the dustbin of history. Judgment Day will come.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is July 9.

July 9.

Read the Iranian Girl's post today. She ends her post saying:

Tomorrow is July 9...the day that Iranians will show what they really want, & will prove that they're not a kind of people who leave alone the students & the young guys who are spending they life in prisons, just because they wanted freedom for all Iranians. I really hope that they do it well & I myself will try my best to do whatever I can as a young girl, we must also encourage each other; that's very important…

Anyway, I know that all people in the world support us spiritually, & pray for all fighters of freedom. I wish that they also show their support by whatever they can do; I'm sure that bloggers & writers from other countries will not forget us.
Oh, I feel that I'm making a will!!! You know, I can not ignore this feeling of anxiety...Ok, let's see what is waiting for Iranians in their destiny.

My heart is with this girl. This high school girl, writing a 'will' on her blog, hoping that someone will hear her. My heart is not just with this girl, but with all the people of Iran who want a better life. Who want some freedom. My heart is with the students, the courageous students, who, as we speak, are planning commemorative protests for tomorrow, knowing that they may be arrested, beaten, killed.

They make me proud to be a member of the human race.

Nothing that happens tomorrow will be in vain. I say that as a blinded optimist, I realize. But the impulse, the impulse to strive for a better life, for dignity, humanity, for some choice in how you live your life, how you worship, how you go about living, is what separates us from the beasts. Such a struggle, even if it is thwarted, can only add light to the world. People of Iran: we here in America watch with baited breath. We are, in every sense of the word, on your side in this struggle.

Know that you are not alone. We, who watch, cannot MAKE that regime fall. Obviously. But their days are numbered, regardless of when it happens. This will not stand. You know it. And they know it too.

You are a strong proud people, with a long and ancient tradition. The mullahs have hijacked your country, and you stand now on the threshold ... demanding that they give it back.

I, too, Iranian Girl, have a feeling of anxiety when I think about tomorrow. I remember all too well the euphoria in 1989, thinking: "Holy crap, those Chinese students in Tienaman Square just might pull this off!" iit was devastating, obviously, to watch them be crushed so brutally. There is much to fear. Leaders are ruthless. Leaders are most ruthless when they are afraid. And your leaders are terrified. As well they should be.

Despots never die of old age. Despots never die in their beds surrounded by loved ones. Despots are dragged, screaming, off their self-appointed thrones. Despots are murdered, assassinated.

It is time for the mullahs to listen to the people of Iran. After all, the rest of the world already is.

Take a moment to read Iranian Girl's post. Send her a note of support. Think about the people of Iran tomorrow. Send some good energy their way (to me, that means praying, but whatever works for you...) The power of the entire world watching cannot be over-estimated.

Okay, Iranian Girl, that's enough for now. God bless you, God bless your country, and I'll be looking to hear from you on July 10.