Books we're reading this month
The Devil and the disappearing sea: A true story about the Aral Sea catastrophe by Rob Ferguson (Raincoast Books, 2003).
The author worked with NGOs bouncing around the Asian steppes in white Toyota Landcruisers. He was working there on contract to develop public relations plans to change the locals' attitudes to water use in order to save the rapidly drying-up Aral Sea. The story is a fascinating account of the dynamics of power among many local barons left behind when the Soviet Union collapsed.
But the unintentional subtext is truly entertaining: our narrator is continually stalled, frustrated and tricked until forced to leave by a trumped up murder charge, and though the story is his to tell, one can't help but sympathize, and side, with the former commie bosses trying to hold their societies together against waves of such well-meaning American NGO types who know nothing.
There is also some information about the Aral Sea in here, although the author himself, sent to save it, never travels out far enough to see it.
- Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org> |
America Alone: The neo-conservatives and the global order , by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke (Cambridge 2004).
The right side is cracking. This book, which more than most on the subject flays the neo-cons alive, is written by two bona fide card-carrying conservative Republicans.
Because they were on the inside of the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush I administrations, they know more than most where the neo-con fashion came from and who midwifed its birth.
Their contention is that the neo-cons are dangerous but are surprisingly few in number. The authors believe the neo-con group were ready before anyone else to catch the ear of a traditional conservative non-interventionist president bewildered and vulnerable to them by the events on the morning of September 11.
My feeling is that the more far-sighted of the Republicans, like these two, can sniff war crimes trials and convictions possibly on the horizon, and are backfilling now to cover tracks leading to themselves. I'm not convinced the neo-cons form an identifiable group that can be isolated out from the Republican party generally, or from American leadership itself. I say that because of my reading of the next book below.
- Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org> |
Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the great American communist hunt , by Michael J Ybarra, Steerforth Press, 2004.
McCarthy had little to do with the origins or the power behind McCarthyism. But Pat McCarran did, more than just about anyone else, according to Ybarra. Most observers of US politics, however, have never heard of the long-serving Democratic Nevada senator.
In this convincing and engrossing tale, McCarthyism was in fact originally a purge of Roosevelt's New Deal bureaucrats, and the communist threat was trumped up to pull off political power capers that would normally be constitutionally barred. The method was justified by McCarran because in the early 1930s, he was convinced that Roosevelt's New Deal provisions were wholly unconstitutional, and that Roosevelt was himself maliciously establishing a dictatorship.
There are many quotes that use the word “communism” in this book taken from politicians in the 1930s through the 1950s; if “terrorism” were substituted, they would sound exactly the same as what we hear today.
The hunt back then was carried out by both Democrats and Republicans intent on rooting out anyone who thought it good to restrict what companies could do to the environment, workers and the stability of the economy. The communist scare was invented by them only as an expedient. It is the same today, and the neo-com movement is only the latest McCarthy-like thrust against New Deal types.
- Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org> |
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