It is fortunate that VIETNAM/ THE NECESSARY WAR/ A REINTERPRETATION OF AMERICA'S MOST DISASTROUS MILITARY CONFLICT by Michael Lind was published in 1999, long before the attack on the world's greatest buildings, including the American Pentagon, for sure, on September 11, 2001, when it became perfectly clear that the United States of America has hardly any real allies in the world, and Americans could begin to think about the rest of the world as the underlings. The last Vietnamese that Americans really worried about was Ngo Dinh Diem, a leader who had such a mind of his own that Lind can easily compare him with a situation that was begging for the 9/11 attacks. "If South Vietnam's dictators were no worse than South Korea's, they were not as bad as some of the despots in the Middle East whom the United States has aided in the service of its global grand strategy. Many of the Muslim mujahideen . . . are now taking part in a murderous jihad or holy war against America and the West." (p. 234). These people are turning out to be the people that America should have been protecting the world against, "But that is the wrong standard of comparison. Compared to America's other allies in East Asia, the Saigon elite does not appear to have been uniquely bad. And in retrospect they appear relatively enlightened, compared to most of America's allies in the Middle East." (p. 233).

Since September 11, 2001, it seems like America has only one ally in the Middle East, and the rest of the area is festering at the prospect that America will treat their governments as underlings in the kind of virtue and morality that are most important to America until their governments can be undermined and replaced by some form of control which is more to our liking, though Iraq seems to be failing in the manner that Vietnam failed to be an ideal place to which to send American troops. People who still remember enough Vietnamese poetry to dream their poems might be inspired by the few poems in this book, and a report on the aftermath of the war. "Doan Van Toai, a South Vietnamese dissident who was imprisoned after the communist conquest of the South in 1975, recalled an incident in jail: `As we chime in with `At night I dream I see Uncle Ho,' I realize that several voices in the choir are changing `I see' to `I kill.' No doubt the new version corresponds more closely to the reality of their dreams." (p. 244). This reminds me of current internet polls asking whether it would be more important to capture Osama bin Laden, the radical rich guy who was really waging war on America, or Saddam Hussein, the former government official in Iraq whose people might not be sure whose underlings they are until he is disposed of. When we have to pick from choices like this, I doubt that we have any real allies in the Middle East, and even the underlings don't seem to like the waiting involved while we resolve which parts they are going to be asked to play.

The Preface tried to make a parallel that depended entirely on air superiority. "Reluctantly the president ordered the bombing of the communist-nationalist dictator's homeland, hoping that air power alone would compel the dictator to abandon his campaign of aggression. . . . To escalate the war by introducing ground troops would be to risk a bloody debacle and a political backlash. Every choice presented the possibility of disaster." (p. x). Slobodan Milosevic ended up as a defendant in war crimes proceedings for activities which took place as a result of his dream of a Greater Serbia, but it is still not clear if Osama or Saddam would be equally guilty of the charges brought against him. "Milosevic armed, supplied, and directed Serb paramilitary units engaged in mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Kosovo, and other parts of the former Yugoslavia; Ho armed, supplied, and directed Viet Cong guerillas in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia who waged war . . ." (p. xi) and the American army supported my presence in 2 of those 5 areas, but I didn't want to stay in the army long enough to get shipped to Iraq.

VIETNAM/ THE NECESSARY WAR is all about how to have proxy wars, in which the great powers crush the underlings without ever getting into each other's way, except indirectly. As long as the jihad was being waged by the opponents of Soviet expansion, in was in America's interest to support it, and this book maintains the kind of geopolitical slice and dice approach to who is fighting who that is the only way of viewing things that is going to make sense. Trying to picture the world as America's underlings, or the Middle East as Israel's underlings, or Libya and the Middle East as oil's overlords, and seizing the assets of anyone who tries to challenge the economic picture by wiping out tourists, museums, rice paddies, villages, foliage, marshes, exploding oil pipelines, newspapers, TV stations, and most people who start shooting rifles in the air in Iraq whenever they are mad about something, threatens to become an awful picture. This book has a good index, which even has an entry for Operation Flaming Dart, against Dong Hoi, North Vietnam, early in 1965. You might want to think about that one, for a minute, before you look that up.

If you want to read a book by Wittgenstein, just so you can say you have read him, or because you feel the need for some direct intellectual contact with a leading philosopher of the twentieth century, ON CERTAINTY is certain to be the one which you will understand the best, because it even tells you how you eventually understand something by finally stopping yourself from asking any more questions about it. As Wittgenstein's last book, close to being his dying words, it is something like a final opportunity for readers to surrender to Wittgenstein's power as a philosopher to keep thinking `I doubt it.'

After World War One, Wittgenstein attempted teaching at an elementary level in a few small Austrian farm villages. Wittgenstein came from a large family which employed an enormous number of tutors to provide its children with individual instruction. You could read Ray Monk's biography if you are interested in disputes about how many grand pianos were in Wittgenstein's house when he was growing up, and how many he said he had without implying that he could play them all at the same time, later on among Englishmen, who were capable of being impressed by numbers between one and ten, all of which might have been true at one point, if the Wittgensteins brought in a few extra grand pianos for some special occasion. ON CERTAINTY seems to be driven by the kind of attempt to produce intellectual slaves that was most recently attacked by the decision of the United States Supreme Court striking down the affirmative action program, which granted 20 points out of 150 possible points scored for undergraduate admission to the University of Michigan.

Even in free countries, law is expected to dominate in the intellectual slavery of free peoples, and judges, the majority of whom are white people dominated by the kind of logic that appeals to their interests, ultimately control the kind of decisions which can be made when the equality of the systems of the United States is directly challenged. Michigan is a state which is highly developed industrially and intellectually, with a large portion of black descendants of the kind of slaves who made the white masters of the south so financially successful in the years before the American Civil War. The affirmative action program at the University of Michigan was an attempt to make a large number of the black leaders in Michigan intellectual slaves of a tradition that is so inclusive that the normal political understanding of the politically astute slaves of mediocrity will not allow this kind of uppity boosting to take place. 20 points is outrageous, as a number to be used against the average white applicant, because it suggests a level of intellectual and social attainment that an average politically mediocre individual could never hope to attain.

ON CERTAINTY should be a perfect guide for understanding how the 20 point system works, because each individual's score was determined with the kind of mathematical precision that anyone with a brain like Wittgenstein's could only applaud, and any U.S. Supreme Court opinion to the contrary, hoping for some kind of individual evaluation which refuses to stick numbers on particular kinds of distinctions, while trying to achieve the same results, only more indistinctly, raises the possibility that for those who rule, everything is seemingly hidden from the ruled, in the kind of intellectual slavery that could be most aptly described as a secret circus stunt method of swaying vast multitudes, and which damns the state which would try to teach people to think any differently.

This book, LUTHER AND ERASMUS: FREE WILL AND SALVATION, contains some great summaries of the arguments involved. Originally, Erasmus, author of IN PRAISE OF FOLLY (1509) and a great scholar who edited a Greek New Testament in 1516, pictures his philosophical self as the perfect opponent of tyrannical godliness in DIATRIBE ON FREE WILL (1524). Luther was offended, not so much that he was named by Erasmus as a particular kind of fool for God, but that Luther's interpretation of the Bible on this question, ON THE BONDAGE OF THE WILL (1525), based on absolute interpretations which depend on the kind of faith proclaimed by Paul, because "the power or endeavor of free choice is something different from faith in Jesus Christ. But Paul denies that anything outside this faith is righteous in the sight of God; and if it is not righteous in the sight of God, it must necessarily be sin. . . . With men, of course, it is certainly a fact that there are middle and neutral cases, where men neither owe one another anything nor do anything for one another. But an ungodly man sins against God whether he eats or drinks or whatever he does, because he perpetually misuses God's creatures in his impiety and ingratitude, and never for a moment gives glory to God from his heart." (p. 308).

In the history of religion, Martin Luther might be remembered mainly for his opposition to the established church of his time and place. Having been subject to many vows as a monk, he openly rejected certain restrictions that the religious organizations of his day had imposed on those who wished to lead worship or serve communion, and his marriage was a scandal that was altogether typical of the kind of disagreements in that time which survive in some form in the present day. One question of faith that I still find meaningful, in FREE WILL AND SALVATION, is the Bible's comparison of life with military service, as assumed in the first verse of chapter 7 of the book of Job, which Luther uses to explain a similar passage in Isaiah. " `The life of man is a warfare upon earth,' that is there is a set time for it. I prefer to take it simply, in the ordinary grammatical sense of `warfare,' so that Isaiah is understood to be speaking of the toilsome course of the people under the law, as if they were engaged in military service." (p. 267).

As old Europe attempts to secularize itself into an economic empire with minuscule military forces, it seems oddly historical that a few fundamentally religious political movements are being tied to such warfare as exists in our times, a modern age in which terrorism excites the forces of civilization so much that no government or political spokesman that harbors such killers is safe. LUTHER AND ERASMUS: FREE WILL AND SALVATION does not attempt to solve this problem. If anything, this book is just a book that shows how knowledge in the form of books can trap scholars by allowing them to do what the best scholars have always been best at, exhibiting the meaning of states of mind that others usually flee, far beyond the realm of what Job 7:1 in THE JERUSALEM BIBLE asks, "Is not man's life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his time no better than hired drudgery?"

Happenstance, at the end of World War II, picked on Hiroshima, for the purpose of a ten-minute speech, to be a military base, instead of a city, for the announcement of the use of an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. Most people's lives, the way they live, are more like the city, now, but there is a geopolitical interpretation of world power that allows anyplace to be the Hiroshima of the moment, if the rest of the world wants to see it that way. Luther blames the devil, in FREE WILL AND SALVATION, whenever a man thinks he is choosing to do something on his own, and considering Hiroshima a military base instead of a city in 1945 is the kind of thinking that ought to be considered worthy of the devil, even if Harry Truman was willing to adopt it for ten minutes so he would not seem too far out of step with his military advisers. But the outcry, after dropping a couple atomic bombs within a week back then, started to make it obvious that not everybody was inclined to accept the incineration of cities so lightly. I might even be leaving out something terrible about the nature of the judgment of God, which is the primary topic of this book, because Luther seems so much closer to the nature of Hiroshima than we are, survivors though some of us might be. What makes LUTHER AND ERASMUS: FREE WILL AND SALVATION such heavy reading now is because it makes no attempt to lighten up to match the spiritually and economically commercial nature of our society, which usually considers itself thoroughly artistic or comical, especially in the manner in which people all get along by going along. Half of this book doubts that the world could ever be considered so normal. After a general index (which includes some latin phrases, though the tough latin phrases, like *praeter casam,* are explained in an "Appendix: On the Adagia of Erasmus") of several pages, the Biblical References take most of four pages. Anyone who wondered why Luther thought Christians should be reading the Bible, instead of being spoon fed lessons by officials, should get a load of this. Praeter casam to you, too.

I doubt if I will ever read another book about Robert Maxwell. This book has more information than a lot of people, presuming the innocence of just about everything, would want to cope with. Among the people listed as interviewees in the front of this book are Efraim ---, six other former members of Mossad, William Casey, and William Colby. The death of William Casey was famously reported in VEIL by Bob Woodward, published in 1987, after Casey had a craniotomy and had been taken to Mayknoll to die. "He contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized on Long Island. There, the morning of May 6, the day after Congress began its public hearings on the Iran-contra affair, Casey died." Woodward interpreted Casey's death as a kind of silence which fell in line with the question: What hurts, sir? "What you don't know," he said. (Veil, pp. 506-507). This book, ROBERT MAXWELL, ISRAEL'S SUPERSPY/ THE LIFE AND MURDER OF A MEDIA MOGUL, (2002), was written in the spirit of William Casey's final interview. If the factual basis for some of its assertions seem a bit ghostly, you might blame all the Bills, or other outrageous bills, or the authors, Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, or anyone who seems to know more than any trap-door possessing Prosecutor's Management Information Systems software salesman with investments in newspapers, scientific journals, and an account in the Bank of Bulgaria could keep track of, at the age of sixty-eight, or after November, 1991, when Robert Maxwell, also, was dead.

A society which employs Certified Public Accountants presupposes that people will be able to keep track of certain things, certainly money, for sure, and who people are, though this book finds a certain glory in how easy it is to fool official guardians of the identity assumptions with simple tricks. Obviously, this works best at places like Numec, a company specializing in reprocessing nuclear waste, in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Anybody ought to be able to figure out how likely it is that the following events, prior to December 1982, but reported as background information, might have actually occurred:

His two companions were described on their cards as scientists from `The Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel'.
There was no such department.
The men were LAKAM security officers whose task would be to see the best way of stealing fissionable waste from Numec. All three spent four days in Apollo, passing many hours touring the Numec plant, sitting for more hours in Shapiro's office. What they spoke about would remain a secret. On the fifth day Eitan and his companions left Apollo as unobstrusively as they had arrived.
A month later the first of nine shipments of containers of nuclear waste left Numec. Each container would bear the words: `Property of the State of Israel: Ministry of Agriculture'. The containers would carry a stencil stating they had full diplomatic clearance and so were exempt from customs checks before they were stowed on board El Al cargo freighters to Tel Aviv.
The containers were destined for Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility in the Negev Desert. (pp. 55-56)

One way to be a Mogul, buying companies close to bankruptcy and investing enough to turn them into successes, is described in this book as just the starting point for how "Robert Maxwell was the Barnum and Bailey of the financial world, the great stock market ringmaster able to introduce with consummate speed and a crack of his whip some new and even more startling financial act. But increasingly his high-wire actions had become more dangerous - and long ago he had abandoned any idea of a safety net." (p. 34). Maxwell's arrangements with Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the Soviet KGB, who had been involved in the August plot to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office, made certain bankers insecure enough to want Maxwell to pay some of their loans. Maxwell thought 400 million pounds might be enough "to stave off his more pressing creditors. He asked Mossad to use its influence with Israel's banker's to arrange a loan. He was told to try to do what his fellow tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, had done when he had faced a similar situation. Murdoch had confessed his plight to his bankers and then renegotiated his debts, which were almost twice what Maxwell owed." (pp. 13-14). Actually, Maxwell must have owed far more than he told the Mossad. A Daily Mirror headline in the photographs section, after the "Maxwell Dies at Sea" picture, reported, "Maxwell: 536m pounds is missing from his firms/ The increasingly desperate actions of a desperate man."

Assuming that much, the rest of the book is written around questions raised by Efraim.

`If the truth about Robert Maxwell surfaces and he is destroyed in the process, who else will be compromised? How great will the damage be to Israel?' (p. 15).

Americans might be interested in this book for judging the current chances for success of American policies that seem to parallel the desperation of Robert Maxwell, but might cause Bill Casey even greater pain, if he were still in charge.

Quite a biography, NIETZSCHE, "THE LAST ANTIPOLITICAL GERMAN" by Peter Bergmann, published in 1987, is a historian's attempt to place Nietzsche's writings in the political setting that provides a context for whatever goal Nietzsche might have been driving at in each stage of his development. In the history of philosophy before Nietzsche, Hegel is usually considered an official university philosopher who wished to preserve the significance of theology without clinging to the godlike articles of faith that define God in the hearts of believers. Bergmann asserts that Nietzsche never studied any of Hegel's books, but formed opinions based upon a political context in which the philosophy of Hegel represented an intellectual point of view that only needed to be aped by official philosophers.

I picked this book off my shelf again, after all these years, to look for the modern parallels which, like "The new anarchism of the eighties, heralded by Prince Kropotkin, a scholarly, pacific type, became inarticulate in its love affair with dynamite." (p. 147). Writing about a situation which preceded our times by a hundred years, Bergmann examined Nietzsche's reactions to steps that the United States has recently used against Osama bin Laden.

"Bismarck put increasing pressure on Switzerland. In August 1881 Swiss authorities expelled Kropotkin after his return from a much-publicized international anarchist congress in London. Six months before, the newly elected President of the Swiss Confederacy had committed suicide, stung, it was said, by charges of his former radical friends that he was bargaining away the historic rights of Swiss asylum." (p. 147).

Chapter One, "The Anti-Motif" is short. Much interpretation of Nietzsche has already established that "Nietzsche's works have appropriately been read as a lifelong effort to fashion an `anti-self,' one that would free him from the claims of the initial self. Existentialists, concentrating on the struggles of the self, embraced what they perceived as Nietzsche's flight from the political." (p. 5). In Chapter Two, "The Clerical Son," maintains that "Nietzsche kept the dilemma of the clerical son before him throughout his life." (p. 29).

In our more modern age, dominated by the information provided through a secularized mass media, it might be difficult to picture the authority that Pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813-1849) exercised in the Evangelical church within the provincial world of a small town. Modern presidents who picture their position as a minor miracle granted by God might appreciate such "Pietist theologians and country parsons" who "became the vigilant censors of thought and behavior. Ludwig enthusiastically greeted Friedrich Wilhelm IV's accession and his proclamation of the Christian state. . . . Among Prussia's six thousand Protestant clergymen, Ludwig would be one of the king's most ardent supporters, always believing in the bond between religion and politics." (p. 10). Nietzsche's mother was only seventeen when she married Ludwig, hardly educated, but "They fully shared each other's pietistic enthusiasm. Franziska's strict, simple piety would remain undisturbed throughout her life, with her letters of the 1890s still breathing the emotive and by then anachronistic Pietist language of mid-century." (p. 10).

Those in the 1840s who were expecting that "religion is once again and will in the immediate future be even more the axis around which the world will revolve" (p. 11) were surprised that "The revolution of 1848 would bring this era of religious politics to an abrupt end. Nietzsche's earliest recorded memories were of peasants near his village celebrating the outbreak of the revolution with red flags." (p. 11). "The protestant churches, it seemed, had lost their institutional hold over the populace, and in its stead the army had to secure monarchic authority." (p. 12).

Chapter Three, "The Generation of 1866," tracks "a mood of calamity" (p. 31) in which "the entire issue of Friedrich Wilhelm IV's madness and death was problematic," and the celebration of the coronation of Wilhelm I was described by Nietzsche as "terribly boring, the fireworks on the hill and the bonfire only a little less so, and then the whole evening. It was ghastly." (p. 31). Some people in Iraq seem to be overreacting to their liberation in 2003 from Saddam Hussein with a similar lack of enthusiasm for the American troops who can pull down statues, but then what? Those German young people who expected more opportunities to prosper in the growing federation of German states after the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866, also experienced the Danish war which "concluded in a squalid struggle between Prussia and Austria over the spoils." (p. 37). In 1866, "Nietzsche found himself in the anomalous situation of being a Prussian in occupied Leipzig." (p. 47). After some involvement in politics, "Nietzsche left Leipzig to escape the cholera epidemic invading the city." (p. 48).

Chapter Four, "The Spectacle of Greatness," following some previous mention of Schopenhauer, examines the tension between the illegitimacy of the Bismarckian state and the Wagnerian movement toward the Bayreuth festival of 1876. As a young professor, Nietzsche was attempting to bring antiquity to life, and Johann Jacob Bachofen gets credit for "arcane studies of the mythological prehistory of the ancient world that included the novel thesis of an earlier matriarchal age." (p. 90). This should no longer be a surprise. According to Will Durant, THE LIFE OF GREECE, (1939) before Cecrops, who founded Athens, children did not know their own father. "The descendants of Cecrops ruled Athens as kings. The fourth in line was Erechtheus, . . . His grandson, Theseus, about 1250, merged the twelve demes or villages of Attica into one political unity, whose citizens, wherever they lived, were to be called Athenians." Our civilization is only 3400 years younger than that matriarchy, and with all the crazy things that men do, it is not too surprising that Nietzsche started life in a home ruled by his grandmother, who moved the family and let him stay in a back room after his father died.

Wittgenstein is the kind of philosopher who keeps thinking up new approaches, publishing little during his life, but widely admired by those who could consider him a teacher. Having been raised in a cultured family in Vienna, he had been formally trained in the arts, such as music, so well that "When he played, he was not expressing himself, his own primordial life, but the thoughts, the life, of others." (p. 240). Ray Monk has tracked down a lot of information to produce this book. People who have more interest in philosophy itself might learn more about what was considered important during his life by reading the portions of THE SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHIES, A GLOBAL THEORY OF INTELLECTUAL CHANGE by Randall Collins. Philosophers don't naturally find "The Duty of Genius," the subtitle of Ray Monk's biography, LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, as much as they compete for attention in the creative spheres of their own time.

Due to the unique shift in the lives of many Viennese university professors to England and America at a troubled time in the twentieth century, many readers around the world are in a position to appreciate Wittgenstein's ideas. In Chapter 13 of THE SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHIES, subtitled, "Boundaries as Philosophical Puzzles," sections have the titles, "The Social Invention of Higher Mathematics" (pp. 697-709), "The Logicism of Russell and Wittgenstein" (pp. 709-717), "The Vienna Circle as a Nexus of Struggles" (pp. 717-730), "The Ordinary Language Reaction against Logical Formalism" (pp. 731-734), and "Wittgenstein's Tortured Path" (pp. 734-737). Wittgenstein was able to matter to many of the thinkers who found a place in that chapter, and Randall Collins explains the places in the philosophical world.

Ray Monk's biography, LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, might seem much more disappointing because the author never seems to have figured out any ultimate questions. Familiar names appear in this book, but the immediacy of life is often lacking. A meeting between Wittgenstein and Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, is described as not actually occurring until "Gretl succeeded where Schlick himself had, on more than one occasion over a number of years, failed." (p. 241). People with lives that are constantly changing might appreciate how Schlick read TRACTATUS in 1922, wrote to Wittgenstein at Puchberg in 1924, received a reply from Wittgenstein from Otterthal, made a trip to Otterthal in April, 1926 with a few students, but "On arriving in Otterthal the pilgrims were deeply disappointed to be told that Wittgenstein had resigned his post and had left teaching." (p. 242). Finally in February 1927, Gretl invited Schlick to dinner to meet Wittgenstein, after which, "The next day Wittgenstein told Engelmann: `Each of us thought the other must be mad.' Soon after this, Wittgenstein and Schlick began to meet regularly for discussions." (p. 242).

By the summer of 1927 Wittgenstein was drawn into meetings on Monday evenings which included Rudolf Carnap, who reported, "His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer." (p. 244). Later in the book, Wittgenstein is identified with opposition to science in a form which had invaded philosophy. "You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful - almost too ridiculous for words." (p. 405). He told audiences that he was disgusted with "the worship of science, and he therefore spent some time in these lectures execrating what he considered to be powerful and damaging forms of evangelism for this worship." (p. 404). If that makes more sense to you than anything you previously knew about philosophy, this book might be a good way to learn about philosophy. "Wittgenstein quotes two kinds of explanation from the work of Freud, which illustrate, respectively, the kind of reductive account that he thought should be avoided at all costs, and the other `style of thinking' that he was trying to promote." (p. 405). Wittgenstein is given credit for appreciating Freud's JOKES AND THEIR RELATIONS TO THE UNCONSCIOUS, in which "One of Heine's characters, a humble lottery-agent, in boasting about his relations with Baron Rothschild, remarks: `He treated me quite as his equal - quite familionairely'. The reason this makes us laugh, Freud claims, . . . there is actually something rather unpleasant about being treated with a rich man's condescension." (pp. 406-407). Wittgenstein's aesthetic analysis of such explanations leads into a way of appreciating art. "But the important thing was that I read the poems entirely differently, more intensely, and said to others: `Look! This is how they should be read.' " (p. 407).

In the picture section, numbers 44 & 45 show a post card, with a picture of "The Pilgrim of Peace/ Bravo ! Mr. Chamberlain" that he didn't send to anyone. There is no address or postage stamp, but he wrote the message, "In case you want an Emetic, there it is." Signed LudW, it might be considered typical of what was considered humor on college campuses, but most of this book is on a higher level.

Intellectuals have problems fitting in with the big buddies in the world. This might be more true in Russia during the last few centuries than elsewhere, but PUSHKIN'S CHILDREN by Tatyana Tolstaya does not have an index, in which to look up Lenin, for his opinion on the intelligentsia, to illustrate the point. The intellectual freedoms which literary people in Russia had been seeking since the time of Herzen were finally granted by Gorbachev. But then the Partocracy, "accustomed to doing nothing concrete, to producing a lot of empty talk, they were shaken from their usual rut by the very mystery of what was happening. They were so baffled that it was easy to sweep them from their posts. When someone has fainted, you can quickly throw them out the door." (p. 44). People who live in democracies should recognize the ability of voters to do this to rulers on a regular basis, if the voters have enough reason and are given the opportunity.

In the case of Gorbachev, the larger question of how he managed to preside over the collapse of an empire and an economic system is of unusual interest for people in democracies whose outlooks for wealth are not stable. Tolstaya pictures the intelligentsia as being too moral to grasp the downside of what would happen when "Gorbachev made his first, and perhaps his most serious, mistake. He forbade the people to drink.
"The intelligentsia forgave him for this (they were `moved by their own perdition'). The Partocracy was happy. Here was a concrete task, and a familiar one: to fight, to root out, to fire people from their jobs. They set to tearing out grape vines, paving over rare vinyards in the Crimea, uprooting muscat so fine and expensive that `the people' couldn't get near it. They only counted the monstrous losses when the campaign was over. During the campaign, however, people cursed Gorbachev, bought up all the sugar, perfected their knowledge of moonshine manufacture, and most important of all, grasped that they could do everything their own way and not get caught or punished. An epidemic of hoarding began. Sugar, soap, matches, and lightbulbs disappeared, and then sheets and pillows, and then clothes, shoes, eggs, and finally bread." (p. 45).

Most of the people in the world live in countries where they do not need to depend on their government to supply them with such items, and even the United States, rich as it is in so many ways, might expect to be able to conquer anyplace it chooses without having to furnish such items to everybody. Even the current road map might appear to create a state for the Palestinians in an area in which Jewish settlements are the hoarders of anything they might really want. Long before, this book, PUSHKIN'S CHILDREN, starts with a book review of SOVIET WOMEN: WALKING THE TIGHTROPE, by Francine du Plessix Gray, in which reality conforms to the old maxim, "Women can do everything, and men do all the rest." (p. 3). War and prison camps kept men away from homes and jobs in the first half of the twentieth century. "An honest person tried his or her best not to participate in this `official' life. Those who did get involved in the hellish machine were broken: either it destroyed all traces of individuality and compromised them morally and ethically, or--if a person rebelled--it threw him out of society, sometimes sending him as far as Siberia." (p. 11).

Things change as the essays in this book were written. "In January 1994, no one talks about politics and no one explains anything, no matter how much I ask. No one understands anything. No one believes in anyone or anything." (pp. 127-128). With incredibly high prices, "But there are happy surprises, too: a medicine that I bought in America for $50 turned out to be so cheap in Russia that I bought fifteen jars and paid only five cents for it. (I should have bought thirty jars.)" (p. 128).

Another explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union was in the personality conflict between its primary leaders. "In February 1991, Yeltsin was dying to speak on television and Gorbachev wouldn't let him. . . . Many people understood that the conflict between these two strong personalities did in fact threaten the country with collapse--and with unforeseen consequences." (p. 147). Then, "Having rushed to `seize' Russia, he didn't know what to do with it." (p. 151). Yeltsin is pictured as dreaming that things would be better for him if he were in America. "(I wonder whether, somewhere in the depths of Yeltsin's subconscious, he is remembering the last house of the last Russian tsar, given to Nikolai II by the Bolsheviks, which Yeltsin himself had blown up on orders from Moscow.) In any event, I rather think that if an American president willfully decided to get rid of California, Nevada, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, the two Virginias, both Carolinas, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, the grateful American people wouldn't build him anything more than a hut in Alaska, at best, and wouldn't give him any sled dogs either." (pp. 151-152).

This book is really too good. Even if you know a lot of what this book covers, the point of view is unusual and witty enough to make it entertaining. But in our times, even PUSHKIN'S CHILDREN has to admit, "Recently Americans have not shown much interest in what is going on in Russia." (pp. 185-186). The final paragraph, dated 2000, includes the kind of things that feed current fears. "Russians began to remove everything they possibly could from institutes and factories, and to sell everything they stole, including state secrets--actual, not imagined ones. They stole poisons, mercury, uranium, cesium, and vaccines. Even, in one instance, smallpox virus." (p. 242). Take it from an author who "used to buy meat patties at some tank factory. No one ever stopped me." (p. 242).

Roger Scruton, who has written more than twenty books, including: LAND HELD HOSTAGE: LEBANON AND THE WEST (1987), has summarized the philosophical background of political thought supporting western forms of government and enterprises, on the one hand, and the most menacing forms of opposition threatening their existence, on the other. The index is quite useful for locating significant figures, where they appear in the text most pertinently. Nietzsche only appears once, on the way to explaining "the appeal of those recent thinkers--Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty--who owe their intellectual eminence not to their arguments but to their role in giving authority to the rejection of authority, and to their absolute commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments." (p. 75). Former opponents of the Western world as we know it in this book include Karl Marx, "Shortly after the family had been iconized by Hegel, it was satirized by Marx and Engels in THE HOLY FAMILY. But the real intellectual war against the family is a product of the late twentieth century, and part of a great cultural shift from the affirmation to the repudiation of inherited values." (p. 70). "Like Marxism, feminism purports to show us the world without ideological masks or camouflage." (p. 72). Marx is later criticized more philosophically for starting this ball rolling. "All distinctions are `cultural,' therefore `constructed,' therefore `ideological,' in the sense defined by Marx--manufactured by the ruling classes in order to serve their interests and bolster their power. Western civilization is simply the record of that oppressive process, and the principal purpose of studying it is to deconstruct its claim to our membership. This is the core belief that a great many students in the humanities are required to ingest, " (p. 79) at least until men stop signing up for liberal arts classes because they find them so offensive.

On the other hand, revolt in Western societies seems to play right into the hands of what the poet, Robert Bly, calls a sibling society. Instead of a society dominated by adults able "to induct young people into the national culture, when loyalties no longer stretch across generations or define themselves in territorial terms, then inevitably the society of strangers, held together by citizenship, is under threat." (p. 82). The vast media domination, assuming the primary influence of entertainment values in areas that used to be under the sway of intellectual thought, produces a society which is easily seen by the rest of the world as dominated by "a dissipation that is both cause and effect of the sex-and-drugs lifestyle of the modern teenager." (p. 82).

The fundamental point in Chapter 3, "Holy Law," is perhaps stated most forcefully later, in Chapter 4, "Globalization," considering how the common financial situation determining the future of the demographic explosion has not escaped ancient attitudes. "There is no such entity as Iraq, only a legal fiction erected by the United Nations for the purpose of dealing with whichever individual, clique, or faction is for the moment holding the people of that country hostage." (p. 135). Any authority which previously existed in that area takes "no responsibility, and can be neither praised nor blamed, but exist merely as shields and weapons in the hands of those whose advantages they secure. This was made explicit under the Leninist system of Communist government, which was . . . shadowed by an office of the `vanguard party,' which exercised all the power but was wholly unaccountable for doing so.
"This too casts some light on September 11. The attacks were designed to wound the United States in its decision-making part." (pp. 135-136). September 11, 2001, was a near miss for the political parties who send people to the U.S. Congress. Only those who lack political clout in the ruling party would want to point out that the financial structures and Pentagon civilians harmed in that attack were among those least likely to throw lives away in the kind of fights which previously seemed unlikely for a government which normally, "When it fights on their behalf it does not drag them into conflicts that are none of their business but involves them in conflicts of their own." (p. 138). So when I look at the news, I'm still checking to see if the oil wells are safe, and who wouldn't? This book explains things that were in the news much longer than most people have worried about them, and some of the truth in this book hurts.

I like this so much, I think American music, in comparison, suffers from a cult of professionalism which stifles anything that might be a breath of fresh air. I don't speak the language that these songs are sung in, but there was a translation in the CD liner. Selection 4, "The Man in the Black Coat," with the final line, "He demands all my money even when I hide it," as translated in the liner, actually has the word, "money" in English in the song, so the demand is perfectly clear, and the idea that "money" is being demanded in English might be one of the things which makes that song chilling. Another one of the songs struck me as being a perfect topic. The selection by Moses Mchunu is in the middle of the CD, after an instrumental track. When the introduction of the song "Qhwayilahle/Leave Him Alone" or "Ohwahilale" starts, I'm always thinking, Are they going to start singing the funny one yet? The voices sound serious as they do the first line, but an instrumental riff peps things up and the song takes off. The translation is "Just imagine you are the only one of your age group who is not married and your peers are jealous of your girlfriends." There are enough voices involved in the performance to picture what is going on as the group hashes this one out. You shouldn't have to understand what each word means to hear the humor of that song. All the music on this CD was recorded in 1981-84, and I started listening to it when it really was new, but it is so different from the rest of my music collection that hearing it is still a novelty. Some of it seems a bit rough, but it is not an intentional punk type effort to trash their listeners because their listeners think they have heard it all before. These people sing like they have found an audience who can enjoy it, and everybody is digging it so much they are beyond teasing.

I was expecting something like one of my favorite comic dramas, "The Great Escape." If prisoners of war in a German camp in World War II could dramatically tunnel out, as they had in that film in my childhood, I was sure that World War I would last long enough for the new prisoners in their first camp to dig their way out. Perhaps I thought the prisoners were joking every time the end of the war was mentioned, as rumors about having the boys home in time for Christmas were rampant unsubstantiated speculation that usually turned out to be untrue for a longer conflict later in the 20th century. The plot of this movie is so much more complicated than "The Great Escape" that it isn't surprising the WWII setting became the TV-sitcom with comic ridicule of the prison command structure, while Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion" is still just a black and white movie from 1938. But it is a great movie, and transfer to DVD was made in 1999.

There is no American point of view in "Grand Illusion." There are Russian prisoners, upset when a big shipment from the czarina turned out to be books instead of vodka. In the opening scene, a German aristocrat is a pilot who shot down a French aristocrat, the first prisoner to appear in the movie. At the prison camp, a rich banker is the source of whatever bounty the prisoners are able to receive, and even the guards respect the right of those with money to have what they are unable to obtain. The tragic element of the movie is the decline of whatever superiority the aristocracy had before World War One, in either France or Germany. The values which were shared between the aristocrats in the film had become piffle, of no value whatever by 1937, when this movie was made, and the discussions between the characters in this movie trace the loss of such distinctions in the greater cataclysm of war on such a large scale. This is a fine film.