Hegemony or Survival continues Noam Chomsky's critique of post-WW II American foreign policy, and puts recent developments squarely in the context of the evidence for American policymakers' willingness to risk the human race's survival in their quest for global hegemony. In the book Chomsky judiciously writes little about these policymakers' motives. Instead, he continues to document what is no longer merely evidentiary - the indisputable facts of the enormous risks American foreign policymakers have taken (and are still taking) to achieve their goals, the incalculable costs they've imposed (and are still imposing), and their longstanding, appalling disregard for law and the concerns of other nations where the use of international force is concerned. Chomsky also continues to document the main reason for the American public's persistent refusal to accept those facts as indisputable, a phenomenon I think he'd say is fairly described as "public befuddlement."

Chomsky's methodology in documenting instances of the befuddlement phenomenon explains how it comes about, and a concise description of the methodology was recently provided by a participant on a forum at the website of the American Empire Project, with which Professor Chomsky is associated:

"Chomsky collects undisputed facts about the government that are given very little emphasis (if any at all ) in the media. He then identifies patterns from these facts. He shows that the rationale (when) given by politicians and pundits in the media describing foreign policy usually conflict with these patterns."

My one, literal, difficulty with Hegemony was that there's a ("linguist's"?) sentence here and there whose grammar eluded me.

I very much welcomed Chomsky's use of America's operations against communist Cuba as examples of many of the book's broader themes. America's perpetual, covert war against Castro from 1959 exemplified this country's (characteristic) use of international terrorism against a country known to constitute no threat to us. Covert became overt with U.S- trained, financed, and supported surrogate forces (characteristically) in the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and then brought the world to the brink in October, 1962. (Only in the year 2000 did it become generally known that nuclear war had been averted because a Soviet submarine commander ignored an order to launch his missiles.) Then after the Missile Crisis subsided....American covert and surrogate violations of Cuba's sovereignty resumed!! The Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis could not have been more publicized, of course, but even the operations preceding and succeeding the highly public flash points were secret only to varying degrees. They were given "very little emphasis (if any at all) in the media", and where they surfaced were provided "rationales" by "politicians and pundits in the media" reaffirming American cold-war assumptions (see above quotation).

Perversely in part I suppose, I also very much appreciated the author's sarcasms, which I don't recall having read in his writings before. For example, on page 175 of the Metropolitan Books First Edition:

"More than half of Qalquila's agricultural lands were reported to have been confiscated, to be annexed to Israel, with the munificent offer of onetime compensation equal to the market price of one year's harvest."

My supposition is that his sarcasm reflects Chomsky's growing frustration with the relative ineffectiveness of mere rationality to curtail "politicians and pundits in the media describing foreign policy" from relegating "undisputed facts" (see above quotation) to "historical black holes," to be "disappeared from history" or "erased from history" (in Chomsky's words). I don't refer to those words of Chomsky's as his sarcasms, but those words also reflect their author's frustration, since ultimately what empowers American policymakers to pursue their goal of world military dominance is that undisputed facts are being erased daily from the present (not from history) - not only by the befuddling of the American public but by the multitudinous forms of secrecy riddling Democracy As We Know It and by the Great American Money-Babble. Neither of the first two, virtually indefensible empowerments is new, nor is the GAM-B, of course, but all three are much worse and more dangerous now, with the stakes being so much higher.

Hegemony or Survival reprises, deepens, broadens, and raises to the highest level Chomsky's critique; it is stunningly organized; and it illustrates more growth by the most politically astute academic-polemicist in the world. The book looks the most globally terrifying aspects of our bad times dead in the face.

It is a brilliant book.

An admirable trait of our challenged species is that we suffer in silence a lot. And it's sad when a person once devoted to ameliorating this suffering concludes not that they've done their best and the job was too big, but that all along they were wrong. Possibly, it was Ronald Radosh's being brought up in bourgeois "red diapers" by loving parents that instilled a softer commitment to communist ideals than others' fiercer commitments, instilled differently.

If such a thing can be, Radosh's book "Commies" is kind of a (Whittaker Chambers') "Witness" lite. And thank god for that, because books of ex-communists' expiations run to the superficial, egomaniacal and infantile stinky. The lite-er the better, I say. American flag-wavers will love this book. Many if not most others will find it superficial, egomaniacal and infantile stinky, as I did. But I give it one star for the lite.

Consider. Radosh writes on p151 of the "Commies" paperback edition I read, that since "he was a historian" when the government released the FBI's Rosenberg files, he figured he was "the perfect person to undertake a serious effort to examine them and write a book." But just two pages later he demonstrates an inattention to his own factual narrative that would embarrass an undergraduate history major. In the second paragraph on p153, Radosh writes that what "stunned" him reading the FBI files was that the bureau's prison informant (who presumably had talked only to Julius Rosenberg) confirmed a story previously told to Radosh by Jim Weinstein about how he (Weinstein) "had (driven) Julius...from Ithaca to New York." Further on in that very paragraph, however, Radosh elaborates on what the informant told the FBI and comments on it, "(the informant)...told the FBI (that a communist party recruit, Max Finestone) had borrowed (Jim Weinstein's car) to drive Julius to Ithaca.....This of course is precisely what Jim Weinstein had related to me." No, not even close to "precisely," Ronald Radosh. The drivers and the destinations differed in the two versions of the story.

The explanation for these inconsistencies is probably trivial especially if one believes the Rosenberg case itself was fairly trivial, beyond the personal tragedies involved. But in his book, Radosh makes a lot out of his Rosenberg case research as disenchanting him with the left in general. And his failure to even notice two glaring inconsistencies in one short paragraph in "Commies" - about what he says had stunned him in his Rosenberg case research -- reduces his claim to be "a historian" to plain silliness.

On the next-to-last page of the book, Radosh muses: "Our history should have been a cautionary tale, but as the causes of yesteryear collapsed, my old friends found it hard to reevaluate their experiences or acknowledge that they were wrong." Not true again, Ronald Radosh. And especially not true of the cause you say finally convinced you that left politics were wrong - the New Left's opposition to Ronald Reagan's Nicaraguan war of unprecedented murderousness and devastation, ultimately funded in secret with Iranian arms money - the New Left's opposition to this war, you write, convinced you lefties were wrong because they condemned what Ronald Reagan wrought in Nicaragua but were silent about Daniel Ortega's insensitivity to personal freedoms there. How grotesque.

No, your old lefty friends were not wrong, Ronald Radosh. On the contrary, although as prone to overzealousness and impatience as to long and debilitating periods of quiescence, lefties have never been wrong. We've just always had trouble with the timing.

Rewriting the Soul is a fascinating book, treating with eminent erudition, logic, and brevity its subtopics, multiple personality disorder and child abuse, and its main topic, how from the late 19th century the psychological sciences of memory came to be surrogates for the spiritual and spiritualistic concepts of the soul.

The author is a philosopher with a special interest in the history of psychiatry.

I recommend this book highly, especially to all the psychology undergraduate majors from the 1960's who did not continue and get their Phd's, and who have so often seen rendered pop-simple or inaccessible the subjects they enjoyed in college. And I hope to add detail to this review in the future.

Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire is a title of the American Empire Project, whose authors in addition to Johnson include Noam Chomsky and Michael Klare. The Project's website homepage asks simply, "How did we get to this point? And what lies down the road?" Dating the American Empire's birth as 1898, Johnson provides highly discomforting answers to those questions, from the viewpoint of a leftist military-analyst academic. I would date the birth as December, 1942, but Johnson's views are eminently justified, and Sorrows is an excellent and much-needed book. It is written in clear and lively declarative sentences, which will make it a fast read even for non-intellectual readers. In sum, Johnson's outlook and information may literally change minds about the subjects he discusses. So I give his book five stars. Nonetheless, I see no basis for Johnson's optimism when he writes that Congress could still turn the country around. It's already too late. The American Empire, aka Democracy As We Know It, will be stuffed down the planet's throat like it or not until the Empire goes bankrupt, which could be quite a while.

Sorrows is a gold mine of interesting historical and sociological information, and readers with open minds will find their own most absorbing sections. Chapter 8 - Iraq Wars -- recalled for me that the "no-fly zones" over Iraq were creations of the U.S. government and never sanctioned by the United Nations. Oh, well. What's a United Nations? Chapter 8 also occasioned a connection in my mind which the book's author did not make. Many have wondered why Bush-1 did not push on to Baghdad and capture Saddam Hussein or have him murdered in 1991. Well sure, for more than one reason, Bush-1 wanted to set up all those American bases in the Persian Gulf outside Saudi Arabia. Having a live and still "threatening" Saddam Hussein made accomplishing that objective much easier.

Johnson says the American Empire is notable for being based on military bases instead of the occupation of territory. And he identifies five sorrows of empire, the first being "racism" on p28. Rightly, the author says racism is inherent in the attitudes required to dominate other cultures militarily. The other four sorrows Johnson lists almost 260 pages later. They are a state of perpetual war, the loss of domestic democracy, destruction of public truthfulness, and finally financial bankruptcy. ....'tis true 'tis pity; And pity 'tis 'tis true....So expect now endlessly continuing and unabashed military-expenditure-based crony (for family and friends) capitalism and whatever mutant forms of domestic governance are required to sustain it. Chickens a-la-Marcos coming home to roost, as it were. Evidently, apart from successfully deluding themselves into believing our military is a relatively invulnerable twenty-first century electronically-controlled exercise, the Empire's leaders' greatest feat to date is their amazing impersonations of the caudillo crooks they propped up around the globe - with arms and clandestine state-terrorism programs for repressing communists and their sympathizers - throughout the cold war. Regrettably for the rest of the world and regrettably for America, Democracy As We Know It is unlikely to fade away in our lifetimes like the Soviets' control of much of the Asian land mass did.

I've read a lot of history over the last twenty years, but despite having lived in northern California the entire time and despite being more than sympathetic to both Mexican and Native American perspectives on California history, I've read very little pre-1848 history of the state. General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans is a short, impressionistic biography of Commandant General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, who was born in 1807 in the town of Monterey in the Mexican province of California and was a major participant in the following sixty most tumultuous years of California history. He died peacefully in 1890 at his home in the town of Sonoma in the American state of California.

The book has been my reason and place to start reading pre-1848 California history. And it's been fun.

Oh, yes. General Vallejo's wife's given name was Francisca Benicia Carrillo. I worked in Vallejo, California, for the last three years before I retired, and I'll be returning to my home in Benicia, California, next summer.

'But blurbs, publication dates, and personal knowledge may suffice. Cambridge University Press' blurb for this book begins, "Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980s and continued to climb until 1991 after which something unprecedented occurred. For the next seven years it declined to a level not seen since the 1960s." The blurb continues, "As the authors point out, the trends that have contributed to the decline in violent crime...(include) gun control efforts (at both the local and federal levels), changes in drug markets (the decline of crack cocaine), and economic shifts (high employment in the flourishing economy of the late 1990s)..."

'In August of 1999, John Donohue of Stanford Law School and Steven Levitt of the National Bureau of Economic Research put up on the internet site of the Social Science Research Network Electronic Library ... a paper titled "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime." The SSRN site was far from user-friendly and required a late version of Adobe Acrobat to download its several thousand freely downloadable papers, but papers' abstracts didn't require Adobe, and Donohue and Levitt's abstract began, "Crime has fallen dramatically in the 1990s. While many explanations for this decline have been offered, these other explanations have difficulty explaining the timing, large magnitude, persistence, and widespread nature of the drop." The abstract continued, "The empirical evidence we present is consistent with abortion playing an important role. First, the timing of the crime drop corresponds to the period in which the first cohorts affected by abortion are reaching the peak ages of criminal activity. Second, states that legalized abortion before the rest of the nation were the first to experience decreasing crime. Third, states with high abortion rates have seen a greater fall in crime since 1985, even after controlling for other factors that would be expected to influence crimes. Fourth, the declines in crime in high-abortion states are disproportionately concentrated among those under the ages of 25..."

'This remarkable paper was the most downloaded paper of all time at the SSRN site in 2000, but it was apparently widely ignored by the media in this country. Donohue and Leavitt point out that their paper simply illustrates that wanted babies are less likely to become young criminals than unwanted babies.

'Hopefully a revised edition of The Crime Drop in America by Blumstein, Wallman and Farrington will include a discussion of the Donohue and Levitt paper and the reaction to it.'

The preceding is a rewritten version of a my "review" of The Crime Drop in America which Amazon.com published on February 4, 2001. Evidently, Cambridge University Press has not issued a revised edition of the book since then, and my comments on its subject matter remain timely.

My first review of this book is the Customer Review dated June 6, 2000. Without retracting anything I wrote in that review or my rating of the book, I would like to supplement my first review by suggesting three "entry-points" into the book for serious-minded readers:

(1) Robert Fogel writes on page 180 - '....the reform agenda spelled out by the religious Right......more fully addresses the new issues of egalitarianism than does the Agenda of the Third Great Awakening.' (The T.G.A. being the widespread reforms in America beginning at the end of the nineteenth century which led to the rise of the welfare state and policies to promote diversity.)

Imagine what Mr. Fogel means by the word 'egalitarianism.'

(2) Mr. Fogel writes on page 177 - 'The new equity issues in the United States do not arise from the shocks of rapid urbanization, the destruction of small businesses by competition from industrial giants, the massive destitution created by the prolonged unemployment of up to one-quarter of prime-aged workers, the disappearance of the frontier as a safety valve for urban unemployment and poverty, or the undernutrition and premature death of the great majority of urban workers and their family members. Quite the contrary, the new issues are to a large extent the product of the solutions to these problems achieved by a combination of economic growth and the success of the reforms advocated by the Social Gospelers, their allies, and their successors.'

Imagine what he means by the word 'solutions.'

(3) Mr. Fogel writes on page 10 - 'Technological advances in distilling reduced the costs of spirits and made it possible for the urban poor to afford immoderate amounts of alcohol. Reductions in the cost of ocean transportation brought huge waves of immigrants into American labor markets, lowering wages and promoting urban unemployment.'

Consider the perspective of a 'historian' who acknowledges the massive destitution of last century's immigrant workers and their families in America, but who finds remarkable causally their alcohol consumption and the cheap ocean transportation rates they paid to get here. Consider, that is, whether Mr. Fogel even approaches the status of a historian in writing this book or is simply another social scientist concerned with making astonishingly shallow but verifiable factual observations.

'Villa and Zapata' deserves reading twice, the book is so rich in detail and the Mexican Revolution was so fascinating and timeless. But it's likely only dedicated students and historians will give the book much attention.

Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa were the most prominent and remembered among the constellations of men at war and movements in Mexico from 1910 to 1920, but the book's attention to so many facets of that decade of Mexican history - and how these melded into Woodrow Wilson's America and the First World War in Europe -- was its most remarkable feature to me.

Permit me as a compliment to 'Villa and Zapata' to paraphrase at some length from two of its parts describing the deaths of those two prominent and remembered but very different warriors, and then briefly from the book's Conclusion.

First died Emiliano Zapata -

'On April 10, 1919, Zapata and his escorts rode down the hills towards a hacienda - in familiar territory, as he had taken it in early 1911. There were shops outside the hacienda, and Zapata stopped and conferred there with his escorts. Jesus Guajardo, who was to accept Zapata's surrender at the hacienda, came outside and joined Zapata and his escorts. Only one zapatista had entered the hacienda - Zapata's principal aid Miguel Palacios was discussing the handover of 12,000 rounds of ammunition. Outside Guajardo suggested to Zapata that they ride inside the hacienda walls for dinner. Zapata was wary but tired and hungry, and so he acceded, taking a bodyguard of just ten men. He mounted his horse and rode into the hacienda's plaza, as Guajardo's guard of honor stood at attention - paying their visitor a great compliment. A bugle sounded and the guard presented arms. The last note sounded and Zapata had reached the threshold of the building when the guards opened fire at point-blank range. Zapata died immediately, and Palacios and two of the escort also perished. The rest of the zapatistas fled for their lives.'

Pancho Villa lasted four long years more -

'On July 20, 1923, Villa drove to Canutillo in a large Dodge saloon with six men. In the town, at the intersection of Benito Juarez and Claro Hurtado streets, there was an old man selling candy and he cried out Viva Villa! It was a prearranged signal, and as Villa turned the corner he ran into a fusillade of bullets. He was killed instantly. The Dodge went out of control and hit a tree. One of Villa's companions managed to crawl under the car and play dead while a gunman ran up and pumped more bullets into Villa's head. Another companion managed to kill one of the assailants before making good his escape. Claro Hurtado was less fortunate. Trying to get away down a river bank, his way was blocked and he was gunned down when he turned back.'

The book's Conclusion begins -

'The Mexican Revolution was a ten-year Iliad, in which Villa, Zapata, Obregon and Carranza played the roles in fact which were played in myth by Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, and Aeneas. Historians estimate that the death toll was between 350,000 and 1,000,000, excluding the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic, which added another 300,000 to the list of fatalities. Civilization's thin veneer was never thinner than in the Mexican Revolution, and the moral is surely that even in advanced societies we skate all the time on the thinnest of ice. And a seemingly trivial political crisis can open up the ravening maw of an underworld of chaos.'

I love this movie, and not just because I was born in central Texas in 1941 and my older, cowgirl sister looked like Ella Raines.

Sure, some folks consider it a Gabby Hayes movie, but not me. Gabby was 56 at the time and looked about John's age, and he had more lines, but what the hey? You all can believe me, Big John was the star.

Heck, I'd never reveal the ending, so you're going to have to just go out and buy it, the perfect old/new western -- a thinker but without those songs from nowhere. Or catch it at a movie house in the nearest town to you with less than 75 inhabitants.

That's All Folks!!!

Lots of information is conveyed with excellent editing making this book a very fast read. But AT&T's 6-year opposition to distributed processing is as appropriately treated -- without comment -- as the telegram sent by Senator Edward Kennedy's office to Boston-based BBN Corportation when the latter landed ARPA's contract for the Interface Message Processor: "Congratulations on your contract to build the Interfaith Message Processor."

This book's a beauty.