Cav > Books: communism‎ (115)

"...They’re coming from scholars, policy research institutes, journalists, and commentators, and they stem from two convictions: One is that the present world order, led by the United States and the West, has by and large been a good thing, preventing major wars and allowing for international trade, economic growth, and a remarkably stable and prosperous international system. Two is that the rise of the non-Western nations and the emergence of an alternative to the familiar American-led world order will be frightening, unpredictable, and almost surely a change for the worse. For the West at least, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a stark warning about the dangers of the breakdown of the American-led world order and its replacement with a kind of Putinesque law of the jungle, a breakdown aided and abetted by an ever more powerful China."

"Would the end of US and Western dominance really be so bad?
In this book, I argue, contrary to much elite opinion, that it need not be, especially over the long run. This is not because the West’s fears about the rise of non-Western powers, including China and Russia, are always exaggerated, although sometimes they are, due to the loss of power and prestige. But it is because Western supremacy has itself contributed to plenty of instability, injustice, and disorder that might be eased by its decline. More importantly, centuries of dominance have led the West to a kind of arrogance and ignorance about the rest of the world, overlooking the ideas and contributions of other civilizations to stability and progress throughout history. We have forgotten that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—existed long before the rise of the West, and that many of the ideas we assume are Western inventions actually originated in other civilizations. Mechanisms and values that are central to world order—such as diplomacy, economic interdependence, freedom of seas, principles for the protection of people in war and peace, preservation of the environment, and cooperation among major powers, to name a few—emerged over millennia across the globe."

"...For more than a year, Soviet leaders rejected pleas from the Afghan communist government to send troops to help put down rebellion by the rural population protesting the regime’s merciless modernization programs. After Moscow did invade, it found itself locked in conflict—essentially, a civil war—it could barely comprehend. While it cannot be said that Afghanistan triggered the Soviet collapse, it did project an image of a failing empire unable to deal with a handful of bedraggled partisans in a remote part of its southern frontier."

"The Brezhnev regime’s great gamble brought devastating consequences on an epic scale. While the official figure of Soviet war deaths is around 15,000, the real number is believed to be far higher, perhaps even as high as the 75,000 cited by many veterans. Conservative estimates put Afghan deaths at 1.25 million, or 9 percent of the population, with another three-quarters of a million wounded..."
"...Some 620,000 Soviets served in Afghanistan. Officially, 13,833 died—although that number is still the subject of debate between various Russian government agencies—plus some 650 from affiliated units. Another 469,685 were sick or wounded; 10,751 of them became invalids. But many who fought in Afghanistan believe the real number of those killed was closer to 75,000. Among the equipment lost were 118 jets, 333 helicopters, 147 tanks, 1,314 APCs, 433 artillery pieces and mortars, 1,138 communications vehicles, 510 engineering vehicles, and 11,369 trucks. Even the unofficial figures are tiny compared to the Afghan deaths the conflict caused, along with a society left in utter ruin by the decade of bloody warfare.
Few in Moscow truly believed Najibullah would be able to hang on without Soviet military support. It would be an irony of history, or another lesson about the unintended consequences of using force, that his regime would outlive the Soviet Union that was convinced it had a duty to teach the world how to think and live."

"...Instead of escorting captured mujahideen to military bases for interrogation and imprisonment, they often threw terrified captives out of the aircraft to their deaths. When he was flying a peasant loyal to the government to a mujahideen base in his northern village that he’d agreed to identify, the man admiringly pointed at his own house as the helicopter approached. Before the interpreter had a chance to translate, the chopper’s gunner destroyed the little structure with rocket fire. The Russian soldiers were amused as the Afghan clutched his head, then saved themselves the trouble of an explanation back at their base by shoving him out.
The mujahideen were no less cruel to their captives. One of their favorite tortures was skinning Soviet soldiers alive by slitting them around the waist, pulling their skin above their heads, and tying it there, leaving the doomed to suffer excruciating deaths."

"This book’s chapters focus on the six presidencies (with a discussion of an “acting president” in 2014) since Ukraine’s independence.
There is one chapter for each president, with two devoted to Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency—the first under hybrid, low-intensity Russian attack; the second during Russia’s full-scale war. An eighth chapter looks at the future of Ukraine. This organizing principle is well justified as Ukraine’s presidents have exerted deep influence over the state and often represented the social trends of their time.
Ukraine’s presidents have wielded significant influence through substantial constitutional powers and frequent success in shaping ruling majorities. In office, they have been a powerful—if not always dominant—force shaping domestic and foreign policy."

"...On my last visit to court, there was a big argument about the age of one of the Crocodile Gang members. My mother explained to me that if he was under eighteen then they couldn’t hang him, but if he was over eighteen, they could. Like most Africans he didn’t know his exact age, and he didn’t have a birth certificate..."

"Older Africans, whose parents couldn’t speak English, tended to have an arbitrary English word as a name. They believed that having a name in the white man’s language would attract the white man’s power. So they were called by any English word their parents had chanced across: words like Tickie, or Sixpence, Cigarette or Matches were commonly used as names. The next generation of Africans, who were the target of Christian missionaries, tended to have Old Testament names; Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Isaiah and Zephaniah. Baby girls were often called after the emotion felt by the mother at birth – Joy, Happiness, Delight. But, as far as I know, there were no girls called Disappointment, Pain or Exhaustion. Finally Africans began taking ordinary names popular with European settlers. Usually they would retain an African name as well, which only they knew, but after the civil war, the new chimurenga, it became fashionable to revert to their African names..."

"...One of these iconic wars was the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Students of history have at least some basic knowledge of the conflict, which raged for three years and drew in other nations.
Spain’s civil war has come to be seen as a foretelling of the horrors of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the story of the conflict that set Spain on fire is still relevant. This book traces the conflict from its origins to its bloody aftermath in chronological order and clearly narrates the main events. Some analysis is provided to give the reader a better understanding of the main issues and the big questions raised by the conflict that are still hotly debated today, such as if war can be averted and what the role of the international community in such conflicts should be."

"All too often, the Spanish Civil War has been portrayed as a simple case of a conflict between Left and Right. In reality, it was much more complex. There was so much propaganda during and after the conflict that many people still hold misconceptions about the war. This work is based on the most up-to-date research and offers the readers an insight into the war without the distortions of ideologues and propaganda, allowing them to learn the facts.
Few civil wars have excited the interest of the international community like the Spanish Civil War. The international actors that participated in the civil war are discussed, as well as their culpability in the tragedy."

"More than any other system of government known to man, Communist rule required the strong hand of the military and heavily armed security services, all under strict party control.
Once the regime’s sword was lifted, Communist parties crumbled quickly; if the sword remained, the party did too.
Nor, for that matter, was the emergence of Communist governments in the twentieth century in the first place preordained by some Hegelian- Marxist law of history, however much Karl Marx and his acolytes would have wished it so. As we will see in the pages ahead, the emergence of Communism in Russia, China, and their satellites required a series of world wars that rent the social fabric and put lethal arms in the hands of millions of angry and impressionable young men. Despite the party’s claim to speak for the proletarian masses of humanity, and several much ballyhooed near misses, Communists nowhere came to power through the ballot box."

"To promote Beijing’s entry into the WTO at the turn of the millennium, Washington politicians promised Americans that opening China for trade would moderate Communism. As Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, put it, “By entering the WTO, China committed to free itself from the ‘House that Mao Built,’ including state-run enterprises [and] central planning institutes,” leading to “more institutions and associations free from Communist party control.” Nothing of the kind has happened. Instead of Communist China converging on Western liberal norms, Western technology has allowed the Chinese government to ratchet up surveillance of its citizens. It uses data mining made possible by US internet search engines, tracking features on smartphones, and the like to keep tabs on people’s movements and activities in the most invasive “social credit system” in the world. Dissidents are denied access to jobs, travel, and credit cards. With “Zero COVID” contact tracing and forcible house quarantining, the CCP under China’s increasingly authoritarian president, Xi Jinping, carried out population controls the KGB could only have dreamed of..."

"...It sets their stories against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s past as a battleground for outside powers, including the legacy of Britain’s 19thcentury colonial invasions, the Soviet occupation during the Cold War and America’s role in backing the anti-Soviet mujahideen. And it interweaves their journeys with my own, as an outsider who spent two decades working and living in Afghanistan. In my work as a reporter, I was focused on the war. But in my day-to-day life, I was witness to a country changing and growing in spite of it. So this is also my perspective on that other side to Afghanistan’s story."

"Calling Afghanistan the graveyard of empires overlooks the fact that it was itself the foundation of empires, including that of its own 18th-century Durrani dynasty. The term is also inaccurate. While both Britain and the USSR were badly mauled in Afghanistan, that wasn’t the reason their two empires came to an end. Most important of all, the term ignores the reality that it is Afghanistan rather than its invaders that has always paid the heaviest price, becoming a graveyard for its own people. And that pattern continued after the Soviet withdrawal in February 1989."

"...History does not repeat, but it rhymes. For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill. This is the way of things in all things. There is light and there is dark. Always has been. Always will be. Civilization is the superstructure built on law and order that keeps the petty, the resentful, and the cruel away from the rest of us. Some societies have been better at this than others. Those who fail at repelling the repulsive fall to unhumanity—to a state of affairs in which human thriving is impossible and surviving improbable."

"The authors argue that it is humanity itself currently under threat. They unwrap the history of Communism, a dehumanizing philosophy of oppression, of denial of human rights and nihilism.
The reader is guided around the world, revealing the stories and histories the mainstream press won’t touch … from Cambodia, Nicaragua, Chile, Afghanistan and the Soviets, to Apartheid in South Africa. They bring us right up to President Donald Trump and January 6th, a day they correctly call “America’s Inverse Bastille.”

"While academic and reference titles explore the motives and agenda of household-name leaders during each left-wing upheaval, this book will give you on-the-ground descriptions of what it’s really like to witness (and fight) communist forces of change. We have recast the story of communism as individuals against individuals, as real people, to reveal how and why neighbors turn against neighbors. Why even yours might, against you. Along the way, we will reintroduce you to the household names of history, but in a way you’ve never seen before—we will tell their true stories.
And unlike some popular conservative commentators—who are nakedly reactionary and hyperbolically defeatist in their retellings of left-wing political history—this book will offer a measured tone. We will take this subject as seriously as deserved. And in the process, this book will inoculate you and by extension those you love from ever falling for revolutionary ideas that accelerate the end of everything."

"Before the Second World War, military conflicts were fought under orthodox conditions, usually termed “conventional warfare,” but several innovations had significantly changed combat, leading inextricably to the race for a nuclear weapon in the 1930s and 1940s. Conflicts had been fought by armies on horseback with guns of varying sophistication since the 16th century, but mechanized warfare and machine guns changed this calculus and set the stage for future combat by the end of World War I. Other sinister changes entered the fray during this conflict, such as chemical weapons like chlorine and mustard gas. The total warfare brought about by World War I and ensuing wars like the Spanish Civil War made the quest for the most powerful weapons somewhat necessary."

"This book, therefore, seeks to provide a comprehensive account of that relationship over the last eight decades. The story begins in 1943, when the Cairo Declaration first held forth the idea that Taiwan would be part of a Chinese state; it ends with the elections in a democratic, practically independent Taiwan in 2024. I could not have attempted such a survey without the excellent work that others have done on various aspects of those relations, though I have also benefited from primary sources from all three sides.7 There are, to be sure, inevitable gaps in the record. But there is enough material around to guide us along the paths that brought the three countries to their present moment—and thereby, perhaps, to show where they might go in the future..."

"Charles Robert Jenkins is, quite simply, a figure of lasting historical importance. He has lived a life that’s unique in twentiethcentury history. No other Westerner has survived so long in the world’s least known, least visited, and least understood country on the planet and been able to return to tell the tale. And what he has to say is vitally important: Is there any country in the world harder to get a handle on than North Korea? And while there are certainly rivals when it comes to the intensity of American diplomatic bungling, has any country been a U.S. foreign relations debacle so consistently for so many years? While native North Korean defectors and escapees from its gulags have made some horrors of that nation known to the world, Jenkins is the first Westerner able to provide a long-term, detailed view of this secretive and brutal society from the perspective of an outsider who became intimately familiar with its inner workings. I do not profess to know much about North Korea, but I’m confident Charles Robert Jenkins knows more about it than just about any foreigner on the planet."

"The curtain Robert draws back on the mundane, relentless, dehumanizing operation of the North Korean state—its wastes of money and labor on domestic spying rather than economic output, its language-debasing doublespeak, its interference in the most intimate details of its residents’ lives—helps demonstrate how insidious and debilitating, bizarre and oppressive the country is. The story of Robert’s life was more difficult to tell since it did not reach either extreme of the sensationalism spectrum. He is neither a villain nor a hero, just a man trying to cope with the guilt of a horrible mistake while eking out an existence in a country unimaginably strange and hostile. But I hope that this attention to the quotidian, this focus on the struggle of everyday life, has produced a more nuanced and valuable contribution to our understanding of North Korea."

"From nearby Seoul to faraway Washington, DC, many government officials and analysts boldly predicted—sometime in whispers, sometimes in shouts—widespread instability, a mass exodus into China, a military coup, imminent collapse. Behind all the doom mongering was one shared thought: surely this regime couldn’t survive the transition to a third totalitarian leader called Kim, much less to a twentysomething who’d been educated at fancy European schools and had an obsession about the Chicago Bulls—a young man with no known military or government background..."

"Death was all around us. We’d enter the market in the mornings to find women wailing and rocking in their arms children who had died during the night. As we plunged deep into the merchants’ stalls, we found the corpses of old men and women, mouths still agape as if, in their final moments, they wanted to say something, their eyes staring out, pleading with us to hear them. I always thought the place after death was peaceful. It was how my eomeoni had described it. But what I saw on the faces of the dead was anything but. It was as if they had got stuck looking at and feeling all their grief and pain..."

"...It struggled through five years of bloody civil conflict with the destructive intervention of bellicose foreign powers, four years of a genocidal revolutionary regime, then liberation through invasion and a decade of military occupation by Vietnam, a hated and feared big neighbor, and throughout these years unceasing internecine warfare on its soil, continuing to this day."

"What follows is an attempt to retrace the events of nearly three decades as seen by a reporter who was granted the privilege of being taken into the confidence of many Cambodians, men and women whom I admired and whose hopes for their country I shared, as well as others. I recall with infinite sadness those among them who paid with their lives for staying when they could have fled, before total darkness enveloped Cambodia for four years that have known no equal in history."

"...As with so many things military, there was a secondary reason. The name “Skunk Works” had no direct or sensible translation into Russian. The workers at the Skunk Works were convinced that Russian trawlers off the California coast housed KGB spies who monitored the Skunk Works, more formerly known as Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects."

"...This is the reality of the world in which we all live. The nuclear war scenario proposed in this book could happen tomorrow. Or later today.
“The world could end in the next couple of hours,” warns General Robert Kehler, the former commander of the United States Strategic Command."

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
"Since the early 1950s, the United States government has spent trillions of dollars preparing to fight a nuclear war, while also refining protocols meant to keep the U.S. government functioning after hundreds of millions of Americans become casualties of an apocalyptic-scale nuclear holocaust.
This scenario—of what the moments after an inbound nuclear missile launch could look like—is based on facts sourced from exclusive interviews with presidential advisors, cabinet members, nuclear weapons engineers, scientists, soldiers, airmen, special operators, Secret Service, emergency management experts, intelligence analysts, civil servants, and others who have worked on these macabre scenarios over decades. Because the plans for General Nuclear War are among the most classified secrets held by the U.S. government, this book, and the scenario it postulates, takes the reader up to the razor’s edge of what can legally be known. Declassified documents—obfuscated for decades—fill in the details with terrifying clarity.
Because the Pentagon is a top target for a strike by America’s nucleararmed enemies, in the scenario that follows, Washington, D.C., gets hit first —with a 1-megaton thermonuclear bomb. “A Bolt out of the Blue attack against D.C. is what everyone in D.C. fears most,” says former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs Andrew Weber. “Bolt out of the Blue” is how U.S. Nuclear Command and Control refers to an “unwarned large [nuclear] attack.”
This strike on D.C. initiates the beginning of an Armageddon-like General Nuclear War that will almost certainly follow. “There is no such thing as a small nuclear war” is an oft repeated phrase in Washington..."

"The race to build even more atomic bombs now accelerated dramatically. By 1950, the U.S. added 129 atomic weapons to its stockpile, bringing the total from 170 to 299. At the time, the Soviet Union had five.
The following year, in 1951, the number climbed again—this time to an astonishing 438 atomic weapons in the U.S. arsenal. More than twice the number the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been told could “depopulate vast areas of the Earth’s surface leaving only vestigial remnants of man’s material works...”
...The next year, there was a near-doubling of the near-doubling yet again. By 1952, there were 841 atomic weapons in the U.S. stockpile. By 1954, there were 1,703 nuclear weapons in the stockpile. The U.S. military-industrial complex was now churning out (on average) 1.5 nuclear weapons per day.
1955: 2,422. Almost two bombs per day, and with ten new systems introduced including three new styles of thermonuclear bombs.
1956: 3,692 bombs. The numbers continued to escalate to the point of dizziness. With production levels soaring, these mass-destruction weapons were now coming off literal assembly lines at an average pace of 3.5 nuclear bombs per day.
By 1957, there were 5,543 bombs in the U.S. stockpile. That is, 1,851 new nuclear weapons in a single year. More than five per day. And the numbers kept growing.
1958: 7,345.
1959: 12,298. By 1960, when the U.S. war planners met in the underground bunker in Nebraska, the U.S. stockpile contained 18,638 nuclear bombs. By 1967, it reached an all-time high of 31,255 nuclear bombs."

"...And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesmen responsible for the death of the West?"

"Thus the question this book addresses is not whether the British were heroic. That is settled for all time. But were their statesmen wise? For if they were wise, how did Britain pass in one generation from being mistress of the most awesome of empires into a nation whose only hope for avoiding defeat and ruin was an America that bore no love for the empire? By 1942, Britain relied on the United States for all the necessities of national survival: the munitions to keep fighting, the ships to bring her supplies, the troops to rescue a continent from which Britain had been expelled in three weeks by the Panzers of Rommel and Guderian. Who blundered? Who failed Britain? Who lost the empire? Was it only the appeasers, the Guilty Men?"

"Had Britain never given the war guarantee, the Soviet Union would almost surely have borne the brunt of the blow that fell on France. The Red Army, ravaged by Stalin’s purge of senior officers, might have collapsed. Bolshevism might have been crushed. Communism might have perished in 1940, instead of living on for fifty years and murdering tens of millions more in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. A Hitler-Stalin war might have been the only war in Europe in the 1940s. Tens of millions might never have died terrible deaths in the greatest war in all history."

"...Its passion and parables, and its characters, are nowadays better known than those of the Bible. Instead of the triumphal ride into Jerusalem, the Last Supper and the betrayal at Gethsemane, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Supper at Emmaus and the coming of the Holy Ghost in tongues of fire, we have a modern substitute: Winston the outcast prophet in the wilderness, living on cigars and champagne rather than locusts and wild honey, but slighted, exiled and prophetic all the same. We have the betrayal at Munich, the miraculous survival of virtue amid defeat at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain, and the resurrection of freedom and democracy on D-Day."

"...One day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us all simply because we have a government too vain and inexperienced to restrain itself. That is why it is so important to dispel it."

"There is little doubt that much of the bombing of Germany was done to please and appease Josef Stalin. Stalin jeered at Churchill for his failure to open a Second Front and to fight Hitler’s armies in Europe, and ceaselessly pressed him to open such a front – something Churchill was politically and militarily reluctant to do. Bombing Germany, though it did not satisfy Stalin’s demands for an invasion, at least reassured him that we were doing something, and so lessened his pressure on us to open a second front.
Pleasing Stalin – or at least avoiding his disfavour – would be one of Winston Churchill’s preoccupations in the years that followed...
...the killing of German civilians, and the disruption of German rule in central Europe, was an effective and practicable way of soothing the Soviet monster’s rages...
...Soon after his first ill-tempered encounter with Stalin, Churchill was pressed by Harris for a commitment to a bombing offensive. Churchill responded that he was committed to bombing, partly because it would look bad to stop such a major part of Britain’s war effort, but he did not expect it to have decisive results in 1943 or bring the war to an end. But it was, Churchill said, ‘better than doing nothing’."

"March 1945. Tokyo hit by Operation Meetinghouse, the single most destructive bombing raid of this or any war. 16 square miles of central Tokyo annihilated, over 1 million made homeless, with an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths. (To put these figures into context, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima some months later killed 70,000, and the one dropped on Nagasaki killed 35,000.)"

"It is true that nobody could have known at the time that the National Socialist persecution of Jews would end in the extermination camps. Even Hitler had not yet conceived of them. Yet when undoubted evidence of these camps later reached the USA and Britain, these countries took no direct action to prevent the murder, to destroy railway tracks leading to the murder camps or to rescue those who remained trapped in Europe. The Bermuda Conference of April 1943 likewise rejected any plans to relax immigration quotas, either in the USA or in Palestine, or to take special measures to allow Europe’s remaining Jews to escape Hitler. Yet by then many credible reports strongly suggesting large-scale murder had reached the outside world."

"And what can we say about World War II’s final settlement, at Yalta? Viewed coldly, this cynical action, a sort of large-scale protection racket in which Stalin played the racketeer and the Western Allies his cowed victims, was a far more disgraceful episode of appeasement than anything even contemplated at Munich in 1938. This unheroic pact meant the handing over of millions of innocent and defenceless people to a cruel foreign conqueror. Some of them – such as the Cossacks – were disgracefully sent in locked railway cars into the custody of Stalin’s NKVD execution squads. They had good reason to fear for their lives, but their frantic pleas to remain in the West were ignored. No doubt the penetration of our establishment by sympathisers of the Communist empire prevented us for many years from admitting the revolting nature of the Soviet state. But perhaps our embarrassment about having had such people as valued allies also played its part in that reticence."

"I am not saying that Britain should have remained neutral throughout the European War that began in 1939. I am saying that we might have done better to follow the wise example of the USA, and wait until we and our allies were militarily and diplomatically ready before entering that conflict. I am suggesting that our diplomacy, especially after March 1939, allowed others to dictate and hasten the timing of that war in ways that did not suit us or our main ally, France.
Above all, I am not saying that the war against Hitler was unnecessary. At some point, for the good of Germany, Europe and the world, Hitler’s career had to be ended, probably by force, from within or without. Even if you do not believe that the internal affairs of other countries are the business of other countries, you may hope that repulsive regimes may be brought to an end. And sometimes the most effective way of doing so is inflicting foreign policy defeats on them, robbing them of prestige at home.
The startling thing is that, as matters turned out, Britain ended up playing a surprisingly small part in the overthrow of Hitler. It was not British troops who stormed Hitler’s bunker or planted their flag on the ruins of the Reichstag. It is still difficult to mention this, or to criticise aspects of our war effort. But it is so."