AE

One of the most groundbreaking anti-colonial history books of the entire genre.
An absolute requirement for all who want to know about the intentionally obfuscated history of colonial capitalism and their brutal murderous regimes.

Here's what I learned:
__The Scramble for AfricaThe scramble for Africa began in the late 1800's. Why was this scramble happening? Why the unquenchable thirst of capitalism, of course! “Underlying much of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials—slaves—for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe's earlier dealings with Africa.”Britain, in particular claimed they wanted to bring “civilization” to the peoples of Africa. This is a lie. They wanted to drain the wealth of the nation to feed their economies. They claimed they were “combatting the slave trade” when in reality...“Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire. But Britons quickly forgot all this, just as they forgot that slavery's demise had been hastened by large slave revolts in the British West Indies, brutally and with increasing difficulty suppressed by British troops.” If we look at history through the leans of dialectical materialism, slavery abolition became a strong cultural phenomenon both in the US and Europe not because of the “virtues” of the Yankees or Brits, but because of the industrial revolution. Slavery was becoming less economically viable with the rise of machinery. British imperial interests strove to end chattel slavery everywhere to replace it with wage slavery and colonialism (with British elites at the top, of course). “During the nineteenth-century European drive for possessions in Africa and Asia, people justified colonialism in various ways, claiming that it Christianized the heathen or civilized the savage races or brought everyone the miraculous benefits of free trade.”Leopold has entered the chatBut let's get to our book's namesake. Leopold, king of the country of Belgium (about the size of the state of Maryland) NEEDED a piece of the pie: “Leopold's letters and memos, forever badgering someone about acquiring a colony, seem to be in the voice of a person starved for love as a child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute, the way someone becomes embroiled in an endless dispute with a brother or sister over an inheritance, or with a neighbor over a property boundary. The urge for more can become insatiable, and its apparent fulfillment seems only to exacerbate that early sense of deprivation and to stimulate the need to acquire still more.”King Leopold didn't pretend he wanted to “civilize the savages”. He wanted to extract as much wealth as he possibly could as quickly as he possibly could: “‘Belgium doesn't exploit the world,' he complained to one of his advisers. ‘It's a taste we have got to make her learn.'”The coastal nations were all taken by other European colonies, so Leopold sent his colonizers deeper into the mainland, trying to find where the Congo River came from. They pretended their new colony was to create a “confederation of free negro republics.” This was an obvious smokescreen. “As one of Leopold's subordinates bluntly wrote to Stanley: ‘There is no question of granting the slightest political power to negroes. That would be absurd. The white men, heads of the stations, retain all the powers.'”The colonizers did what all colonizers (like our forefathers) did to garner more wealth and power: lie, cheat, and steal. They wrote up treaties and lied to the people who could not read said treaties what they specifically entailed: “The texts varied, but many of the treaties gave the king a complete trading monopoly, even as he placated European and American questioners by insisting that he was opening up Africa to free trade. More important, chiefs signed over their land to Leopold, and they did so for almost nothing. At Isangila, near the big rapids, Stanley recorded, he was able to buy land for a station by paying some chiefs with ‘an ample supply of fine clothes, flunkey coats, and tinsel-braided uniforms, with a rich assortment of divers marketable wares ... not omitting a couple of bottles of gin.'”“The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their X's to documents in a foreign language and in legalese.” This isn't ‘negotiations between two independent parties,' this is criminally scamming entire tribes, villages, and territories. They used phony treaties to justify incalculable theft and horrible atrocities. Truly ghoulish. Florida Man?But here's a crazy twist in the story: Henry Shelton Sanford, some failson who managed to only invest in enterprises that end up going under, was good homies with the King. To my fellow Floridians, that last name might sound familiar to you because it's the same Sanford of which the town north of Orlando got its name. This guy became head propagandist in the US to try and legitimize the king's exploits through US recognition of Belgium's claim over the region. The USA loved the idea of Europeans colonizing another country (obviously). And Sanford didn't have to go far in Washington to find some friends: “Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, a former Confederate brigadier general, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Like most white Southern politicians of the era, he was frightened by the specter of millions of freed slaves and their descendants harboring threatening dreams of equality. [...] Morgan fretted for years over the ‘problem' of this growing black population. His solution, endorsed by many, was simple: send them back to Africa!” Since they couldn't own black people anymore, the only logical solution was to send them back to the continent their ancestors came from hundreds of years ago. (Fun fact: The whole “send em back to Africa” idea came into popularity in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. This is not a coincidence.) The USA was the first country to internationally legitimize the King's crimes, because of course it was. Never miss a chance to be an embarrassment, USA. In a redemptive arc, the first person to effectively blow the whistle on the atrocities happening there came from an American by the name of George Washington Williams, who went there to see the viability about getting black Americans to emigrate there. What he saw shook him to his core. He penned “An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, by Colonel the Honorable Geo. W. Williams, of the United States of America.” It's a great read and a damming exposé of the horrors. Much shorter than the book. Strong recommend. Unspeakable BrutalityYou might be asking: how did the native people of the Congo fair under subjugation by Belgium? Well...not great. The Danish were nothing less than brutal savages. And yet they had the audacity to call the victims of their reign of terror “savages.” Their rule came alongside the invention of the machine gun, which was used liberally to murder as many civilians as possible as quickly as possible when they deemed it necessary. They worked people to death. They raped, pillaged, burned, mutilated, killed, kidnapped, terrorized, forced conscription, enslaved, stole land, created child soldiers, tortured, and committed every other possible atrocity one person could do to another at the time. Why? To suck the wealth out of the country, as quickly and effectively as possible, of course. They established children's colonies with the help of Catholic priests to create armies of child soldiers, many of their parents having been killed by the occupying military or simply worked to death. These were the only “schools” Belgium constructed. “Among the traumatized and malnourished children packed into both the state and Catholic colonies, disease was rife and the death rate high, often over 50 percent. Thousands more children perished during the long journeys to get there.”The Europeans who went to Africa to serve as colonial rulers were not particularly evil (prior to doing all the atrocities). They were young white men looking for adventure and to make a little more money. “For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose whatever punishments you liked. If you got carried away, the penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist.“ It didn't matter as long as the wealth kept flowing. Why get stuck in some factory or clerk job in Europe when you could run your own little fiefdom in Africa? And the more brutal you were, the more money you made! A guy wrote a fictional book about these atrocities called “Heart of Darkness.” Pretty much everything he wrote in there was just what he really saw happening. This book was the basis for the movie “Apocalypse Now,” which takes place during the US-Vietnam war. I'll let you put two and two together there. RUBBER!For a while, Belgium was only extracting ivory. Then some asshole named “Goodyear” supposedly spilled some sulfur onto rubber on his stove, inadvertently inventing vulcanization, and in the 1890's, rubber became all the rage. The atrocities kicked into high gear when the King realized that he was sitting on a proverbial gold mine of wild rubber trees. He knew that eventually these trees would be grown in plantations, which would take a few years to get going. So he had a head start and limited window to extract and export as much rubber as he possibly could. “'An example of what is done was told me up the Ubangi [River],' the British vice consul reported in 1899. ‘This officer['s]...method ... was to arrive in canoes at a village, the inhabitants of which invariably bolted on their arrival; the soldiers were then landed, and commenced looting, taking all the chickens, grain, etc., out of the houses; after this they attacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were kept as hostages until the Chief of the district brought in the required number of kilogrammes of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected.'”When I say they were “draining the wealth” of the Congo, I mean this as literally as I possibly can. Not only does the harvesting of rubber literally entail cutting it from the bottom of the dangling vines and draining it, but...“We now know that the value of the rubber, ivory, and other riches coming to Europe each year [...] was roughly five times that of goods being shipped to the Congo that were destined for Africans. In return for the rubber and ivory, Morel knew, it was not possible that the Congo's Africans were being paid in money—which he knew they were not allowed to use—or in goods that came from elsewhere, for Elder Dempster had the cargo monopoly. Clearly, they were not being paid at all.”The world was slowly coming round to recognize how particularly brutal Leopold's regime was. So did he work toward creating more humane working conditions for the Congolese? Of course not! Like all capitalists, he used propaganda to downplay the atrocities he oversaw, buying good press and slandering those spreading bad press. And who was spearheading opposition in Belgium's parliament? Unsurprisingly, the Socialists. Europe continually pointed the finger at Belgium while ignoring the atrocities being committed in each other their own countries (sounds familiar). They weren't anti-colonialist, they were just anti-being really super mega evil. We have that now with the “ethical capitalists” who think a system designed to be exploitative can somehow be reigned in despite that never working. Leopold often pointed to the double-standard he was facing, with Britain's countless crimes against humanity all across the globe. The cold, hard numbersSo where does this land on the scoreboard of historical atrocities? Well, the King had most of the records burned up to prevent that ever coming to light. but what we do know is astounding. “King Leopold II's personal État Indépendant du Congo officially existed for twenty-three years, beginning in 1885, but many Congolese were already dying unnatural deaths by the start of that period, and important elements of the king's system of exploitation endured for many years after its official end. The rubber boom, cause of the worst bloodletting in the Congo, began under Leopold's rule in the mid-1890s, but it continued several years after the end of his one-man regime.”All in all, with the genocides and plummeting birth rate, a conservative estimate is that 10,000,000 human beings died under this brutal regime. “An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold's state, the population of the territory had ‘been reduced by half.'” Half of what, exactly? “In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.” Half the population killed. Ten million people.And how much wealth did Leopold successfully drain? The true number may not ever be known, but scholars “estimate, not including some smaller or hard-to-trace sources of money, of 220 million francs of the time, or $1.1 billion in [1999] dollars,” which is about $2 billion dollars in 2022. But why isn't this horrible event covered in schools? Because the colonizers want you to forget their atrocities, and the colonizers write the history books. The colonizers locked up the files, too. A Commission of Inquiry created by the King (a kangaroo court if there ever was one) still managed to collect a vast trove of testimony about the atrocities committed from the victims themselves. “However, no one read them. Despite the report's critical conclusions, the statements by African witnesses were never directly quoted. The commission's report was expressed in generalities. The stories were not published separately, nor was anyone allowed to see them. They ended up in the closed section of a state archive in Brussels. Not until the 1980s were people at last permitted to read and copy them freely.” Whitewashing of history. Par for the course. The King's Reign Ends, but the Terror merely evolvesUltimately, the brutal regime didn't stop their crimes against humanity because of the international outcry or because the King died, but because of evolving material conditions. Plantations and taxation replaced brutality and murder in Belgium-ruled Congo. And they found even more resources to suck up! “More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. The Allies also wanted ever more rubber for the tires of hundreds of thousands of military trucks, Jeeps, and warplanes.“ Forced labor practices continued for decades into the 20th century. __
Not an anomaly

The Congo was a concentrated area of colonial brutality. Other colonial powers were just as brutal, but they weren't as concentrated. “If you draw boundaries differently—to surround, say, all African equatorial rain forest land rich in wild rubber—then what happened in the Congo is, unfortunately, no worse than what happened in neighboring colonies: Leopold simply had far more of the rubber territory than anyone else.” France, Portugal, and Germany used the Leopold model for their own brutal colonial exploits. Same forced labor. Same unfathomable wealth extracted.

“The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, at roughly 50 percent. [...] between 1904 and 1907, the month-by-month rise and fall in rubber production correlated almost exactly to the rise and fall in the number of bullets used up by company ‘sentries'—nearly four hundred in a busy month.”

This is what Marx called “primitive accumulation of capital”. The brutal, murderous colonial regimes gobbling up as much wealth as possible. This is why Europe is rich and Africa is poor. This terror campaign never stopped, it merely evolved.

A major reason why Belgium's been left of the hook is because they were major victims of the Nazis in WW2. But remember: Fascism is when Imperialism comes home. The Nazis didn't invent anything they did to Europe. It was all the same stuff Europeans were doing to Africa for centuries.

Anyway, this book is really sad but really good and you should read it if you're into this sort of stuff.

They FINALLY released a Parenti book as an audiobook. This guy is the much better Noam Chomsky and if I had gotten ahold of this book 2 years ago, I think it would have accelerated my ideological development much faster, saving me a lot of time. I recomend this book to ANYONE interested in expanding their political horizons, reinterpreting their preconceived understanding of modern history, or if you think the Soviet Union was bad.

The author has a strong criticism of Soviet Russia, rightfully so. But he does not see things in black and white like what we in The West have been led to believe. He asserts, and backs up with hard evidence, that the collapse of the Soviet Union has resulted in an overall decrease in the material wellbeing of the people within Soviet countries. Capitalism didn't make their lives better; It made them worse.

Here ares some of my favorite quotes:
~~
Fascism & Capitalism:

Speaking about Germany in 1932, “True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” This holds true to this day. SocDems are not allies to the left because they will inevitably support fascism if it means maintaining capitalism.

“In both Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s, old industrial evils, thought to have passed permanently into history, re-emerged as the conditions of labor deteriorated precipitously. In the name of saving society from the Red Menace, unions and strikes were outlawed. Union property and farm cooperatives were confiscated and handed over to rich private owners. Minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, and factory safety regulations were abolished. Speedups became commonplace. Dismissals or imprisonment awaited those workers who complained about unsafe or inhumane work conditions. Workers toiled longer hours for less pay. The already modest wages were severely cut, in Germany by 25 to 40 percent, in Italy by 50 percent. In Italy, child labor was reintroduced.” This is excellent evidence to show how similar modern conservatism is to fascism. They support the same economic policies.

“Italian fascism and German Nazism had their admirers within the U.S. business community and the corporate-owned press. Bankers, publishers, and industrialists, including the likes of Henry Ford, traveled to Rome and Berlin to pay homage, receive medals, and strike profitable deals. Many did their utmost to advance the Nazi war effort, sharing military-industrial secrets and engaging in secret transactions with the Nazi government, even after the United States entered the war. During the 1920s and early 1930s, major publications like Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor hailed Mussolini as the man who rescued Italy from anarchy and radicalism.“
As I've said in previous book reviews, the fact that the USA backed the Allies in WW2 instead of the Axis powers is a historical fluke. The predominant ideology of US elites at the time were far closer to the fascists. This is shown by how much the US media and oligarchs fawned over the fascists, even helping them after the US started fighting them. Corps love fascists. The US took in as many fascists as they could as the war was ending. Fascists learned from the US in order to do fascism better. The West did a far worse job De-Nazifying countries than the Soviets. And all of this is because Capitalism and Fascism are 2 heads of the same monster. Fascism is Capitalism in decay.

“Under the protection of U.S. occupation authorities, the police, courts, military, security agencies, and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former fascist regimes or by their ideological recruits—as is true to this day. [...] “In comparison, when the Communists took over in East Germany, they removed some 80 percent of the judges, teachers, and officials for their Nazi collaboration; they imprisoned thousands, and they executed six hundred Nazi party leaders for war crimes.” Woulda killed more Nazi's but the rest fled to the open arms of The West.

“Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings.” Imagine that for a moment. A company collaborated with the Nazis and then got money from the US government because they bombed the company's factory. Insane.

The fascists were never removed from Italy because the US prefers fascism over socialism “The Italian neofascists were learning from the U.S. reactionaries how to achieve fascism's class goals within the confines of quasidemocratic forms: use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; replace the jackbooted militarists with media-hyped crowd pleasers; convince people that government is the enemy—especially its social service sector—while strengthening the repressive capacities of the state; instigate racist hostility and antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants; preach the mythical virtues of the free market; and pursue tax and spending measures that redistribute income upward.” This is literally what Faux News and Republicans do every day.
~~~
US Terrorism (Post WW2)

“In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq; over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.”
The Black Book of Capitalism is thicker than anyone would like to admit. But when the US does terrorism, that's good, right? We've never been known for invading countries for unjust reason, right?


This is my favorite quote: “There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.”

Both negative freedoms and positive freedoms must come together for the betterment of all people. Arguing just for negative freedoms is absurd.

This quote was in the context of revolutionary governments, and how many of them throughout the last ~100 years were not sufficiently democratic. This gave the US empire justification to overthrow the countries.

“U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.”

These revolutions improved the material conditions of the people within the country. Did they become Western-style democracies? No. But that wasn't the goal. The goal was making people's lives better. Those don't necessarily coincide. The US does not have a perfect system and forcing it upon other countries that do not want it is evil. The West's goal isn't really to improve the wellbeing of the countries with their invasions, coups, and terror campaigns. It's to “open up the economy” and infect the countries with US-based corporate interests.

The West doesn't care about the freedom of the people to live a healthy, fulfilling life. It cares about the “freedom” of corporations to exploit the people. US-backed propagandists poison the minds of those in the West to claim these countries aren't “free”.

“So a conservative think tank like the Heritage Foundation rated Cuba along with Laos, Iraq, and North Korea as countries with the lowest level of ‘economic freedom.' Countries with a high level of economic freedom were those that imposed little or no taxes or regulations on business, and did without wage protections, price controls, environmental safeguards, and benefits for the poor. Economic freedom is the real concern of conservatives and plutocrats; the freedom to utilize vast sums of money to accumulate still vaster sums, regardless of the human and environmental costs.”

We cannot look at a country's “freedom” based on the metrics of our own country. We must look at it on the metrics of its own history. Not “more or less free than us” just “more or less free than before”: “But what of the democratic rights that these peoples were denied? In fact, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, these countries had known little political democracy in the days before communism. Russia was a czarist autocracy, Poland a rightist dictatorship with concentration camps of its own, Albania an Italian fascist protectorate as early as 1927, Cuba a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship. Lithuania, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes allied with Nazi Germany in World War II.”

State socialism “transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention.” That'd be nice.

~~~
Left Anticommunism

This was the most interesting aspect of the book, the arguments against self-described anti-capitalists who denigrate the Soviet Union as “not real socialism”. I've dabbled in this myself and I was impressed by how well the author provided a thorough, nuanced retort against such a belief.

Was the Soviet Union perfect? No. But “In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish—while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world.”

What matters is the material conditions of the people. Were they better or worse in Socialist countries pre-1990 vs Capitalist countries then? Depends on the metric. It certainly didn't help that the West strove to topple them at every turn: “As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands—the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib.” Hard to improve the material conditions of the people when you've got Coca Cola death squads and the US Marines trying to kill you.

Many people in socialist countries took for granted their lack of consumer debt, their universal healthcare, their guaranteed employment, universal housing, their met basic material needs, and focused instead on the lack of consumer goods: “People took for granted what they had in the way of human services and entitlements while hungering for the consumer goods dangling in their imaginations. [...] “Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have.” The people of the second-world weren't “yearning for freedom”. They were yearning for stuff.

This failure to meet the wants of the people was not inevitable under the economic system. It was because the socialist countries were too busy fighting off an endless barrage of attacks on all fronts from the capitalist countries: “One reason siege socialism could not make the transition to consumer socialism is that the state of siege was never lifted. As noted in the previous chapter, the very real internal deficiencies within communist systems were exacerbated by unrelenting external attacks and threats from the Western powers. Born into a powerfully hostile capitalist world, communist nations suffered through wars, invasions, and an arms race that exhausted their productive capacities and retarded their development.” Bombs, not blue jeans.

The entire history of the USSR from its very inception was being constantly under siege. “One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government.” When your enemy has literally committed a nuclear holocaust against civilians, and has also invaded you once already, it makes sense why you might want to stock up on nukes. It's a shame that this arms race took place, because if the US (AKA the aggressor) chose to seek a true genuine peace, we might be living in a more peaceful world today, with a less massive military industrial complex.

~~~
Capitalist “freedom”

Meanwhile in the first-world capitalist countries, we don't get universal healthcare, universal housing, job guarantees, free higher education, unions, pensions. Not then, before the wall fell, and after it did fall, there was no reason for Capital to capitulate to Labor's demands because Labor had no standard bearer to hold up and say “the Soviets have this, why don't we?” So the social safety net was gutted in the West.

What is very clear is that countries that were once part of the Soviet Bloc and then became capitalist are objectively worse for the majority of people. This is an undeniable fact. Their social safety nets and state-owned factories were sold off for pennies on the dollar to private firms, creating vast inequalities and absolutely destroying the wellbeing of the people.

“Without making compensation, West German capitalists grabbed almost all the socialized property in [East Germany], including factories, mills, farms, apartments and other real estate, and the medical care system—assets worth about $2 trillion—in what has amounted to the largest expropriation of public wealth by private capital in European history.
The end result of all this free-market privatization in East Germany is that rents, once 5 percent of one's income, have climbed to as much as two-thirds; likewise the costs of transportation, child care, health care, and higher education have soared beyond the reach of many.” Don't you feel so free??

“The overthrow of communism brought a rising infant mortality and soaring death rates in Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Moldavia, Rumania, Ukraine, Mongolia, and East Germany. One-third of Russian men never live to sixty years of age. In 1992, Russia's birth rate fell below its death rate for the first time since World War II. In 1992 and 1993, East Germans buried two people for every baby born. The death rate rose nearly 20 percent for East German women in their late thirties, and nearly 30 percent for men of the same age.” Things have not gotten much better. How is it possible for capitalism to be the pinnacle of an economic system of the people within newly capitalist countries are objectively worse off than they were before? Why do 2/3rds of Russian people think things were better under the USSR? Because it was better.

“The overthrow of communism has brought a sharp increase in gender inequality. The new constitution adopted in Russia eliminates provisions that guaranteed women the right to paid maternity leave, job security during pregnancy, prenatal care, and affordable day-care centers.” Crazy how they had that decades ago and “the richest, freest country on earth” still hasn't figured it out.

Here's my 2nd favorite quote from the book:

“According to Noam Chomsky, communism ‘was a monstrosity,' and ‘the collapse of tyranny' in Eastern Europe and Russia is ‘an occasion for rejoicing for anyone who values freedom and human dignity.' I treasure freedom and human dignity yet find no occasion for rejoicing. The postcommunist societies do not represent a net gain for such values. If anything, the breakup of the communist states has brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and imperialism, with its correlative increase in human misery, and a historic setback for revolutionary liberation struggles everywhere.”
~~~
Marxism

Then the book ends with a basic overview of Marxism which was good too. It's as pertinent today as it was in 1867. Good stuff.

Short book. And a little bit closer to what I want: a book arguing that intellectual property laws hinder art more than they help. The author's biography proves that he walks the walk. And while he does not call for the complete abolition of all IP laws, he does call for a sensible middle ground that prioritizes the interests of artists and the security of the people over the interests of the mega-corporations. This is a middle-ground I can get behind.

I am still looking for a book elaborating on what a society with zero IP laws might look like, and how it would be a net benefit to society. My next book on this journey will be: “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin & David Levine. Though I worry that it will be more libertarian theorizing....

This book focuses on how copyright laws as they exist today are not well equipped to function in the internet age, and that the calls for more stringent enforcement mechanis are resulting in, and will continue to result in a less secure, more surveillance-riddled internet that benefits no one except for the already rich & powerful, as well as authoritarian governments.

The current enforcement of copyright laws have resulted in intentionally insecure products that are designed to deliberately disobey their owner in order to primarily protect mega-corporations. The laws criminalize individuals from simply being able to access their own legally purchased content in the privacy of their own homes in ways that outside eyes do not appreciate. Want to rip your Blu-Rays? That's a crime. Want to jailbreak your device? Well now it's intentionally bricked.

Digital locks like DRM do not benefit the artist, only the distributor. We do not own our content if purchased with DRM. It can be locked away at any time for any reason by the corporate middleman. This has happened before. Books we buy getting deleted because of some rights issue, entire digital libraries getting destroyed because the service shuts down. And they call pirates “criminals.” Piracy is the only rational action in this insanely irrational landscape.

“We can't stop copying on the Internet, because the Internet is a copying machine. Literally. There is no way to communicate on the Internet without sending copies. You might think you're ‘loading' a web page, but what's really happening is that a copy is being placed on your computer, which then displays it in your browser.”

Stronger laws or more stringent enforcement cannot stop violations without fundamentally destroying the Internet. Though destruction of the fundamental principles of the internet are ultimately the goal of the corporate middlemen that benefit from trademark laws and the corrupt, out of touch, authoritarian members of government.

“Viacom told the court that its industry couldn't peacefully coexist with an option to keep your personal data private.” If that is the case, then I choose privacy over the existence of Viacom and the capitalist system that perpetuates them.

“Though SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, the TPP, the WCT, and their ilk differ in their specifics, they share certain broad themes that represent the legislative agenda for the entertainment lobby. And if you wanted to sum up that agenda in a single sentence, it would be this: More intermediary liability, with fewer checks and balances.”

“Adding censorship to the Internet means adding surveillance to the Internet. Creating Great Firewalls means creating secret, unaccountable lists of censored material that result in mass abuse, even in the most liberal of democracies. It doesn't matter if you're censoring for copyright infringement or for human-rights reports. The result is the same: a surveillance state.”

“If you weaken the world's computer security—the security of our planes and nuclear reactors, our artificial hearts and our thermostats, and, yes, our phones and our laptops, devices that are privy to our every secret—then no amount of gains in the War on Terror will balance out the costs we'll all pay in vulnerability to crooks, creeps, spooks, thugs, perverts, voyeurs, and anyone else who independently discovers these deliberate flaws and turns them against targets of opportunity.
So where does all this tie in with the copyfight? The laws behind digital locks make it illegal to determine what your computer is doing. They make it illegal to stop your computer from doing things you don't like. And they make it illegal to tell other people about what's going on inside your computer.
As you read this, digital locks are proliferating in new and deadly ways.”

His reasonable middle-ground is thus: Blanket licenses. “Here's how blanket licenses work: first, we collectively decide that the ‘moral right' of creators to decide who uses their work and how is less important than the ‘economic right' to get paid when their works are used Then we find entities who would like to distribute or perform copyrighted works, and negotiate a fee structure. The money goes into a ‘collective licensing society.'
Next we use some combination of statistical sampling methods (Nielsen families, network statistics, etc.) to compile usage statistics for the entity's pool of copyrighted works, and divide and remit the collective-licensing money based on the stats.”

This is how radio DJ's are able to play almost any song. It's a noble solution that would “enables the largest diversity of creators making the largest diversity of works to please the largest diversity of audiences.” Though I still think full abolition would be better.

I think this book really needs a new edition, as a lot of its references and statistics appear dated. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in knowing more about copyright in the digital age.

I find reading libertarian theory fascinating. I'm not a libertarian at all, never have been and never will be, but reading what they have to say has always struck my interest. I think their one of the most intellectually consistent and self-reflective political ideologies on the spectrum. They're not riddled with hypocrisies like standard issue conservatives or intellectually bankrupt like liberals. They know what they believe and they want to push it to its absolute extremes because they think it will lead to a more free and fair society. I find that noble.

On a related note, I also sincerely believe that the world would be a better place for the vast majority of people if all intellectual property laws were completely abolished. I wanted to read a book that took this belief seriously and elaborated on it with more evidence than I could bring myself to providing.

Before reading this book, I didn't realize it was going to be right-libertarian philosophical thought experiments. My next book on the subject will be “Information Doesn't Want to Be Free” by Cory Doctorow, which should come to a similar conclusion as this book, but from a more anti-capitalist angle.

“Natural-rights,” “Utilitarian analysis,” “first-occupier homesteading rule,” “privity,” “usufruct,” These are all words & phrases that I apparently was supposed to know the meaning of before reading this book, but did not.

I'm not really on board with private property rights, and I see IP as an extension of private property (like the factory) instead of personal property (like the toothbrush) and therefore am not a big fan.

The main points the author makes are:

• There is no evidence that copyright and patent laws are needed to spurn the production of creative works and innovations.
• There is no evidence that IP laws show net gains in wealth.
• The IP laws' lengths are arbitrary (20 years for trademarks, death of author+70 years for copyright, etc (of course the author didn't even bother mentioning the fact that Disney is the only reason why US copyright laws keep getting longer))
• “Both the inventor and the theoretical scientist engage in creative mental effort to produce useful, new ideas. Yet one is rewarded, and the other is not. ...it is arbitrary and unfair to reward more practical inventors and entertainment providers, such as the engineer and songwriter, and to leave more theoretical science and math researchers and philosophers unrewarded. The distinction is inherently vague, arbitrary, and unjust.”
• “The function of property rights is to prevent interpersonal conflict over scarce resources, by allocating exclusive ownership of resources to specified individuals (owners). [...] Property rights are not applicable to things of infinite abundance, because there cannot be conflict over such things. [...] “Since use of another's idea does not deprive him of its use, no conflict over its use is possible; ideas, therefore, are not candidates for property rights.” AKA: you can't exhaust an idea, as it is infinite. Therefore, it cannot be deemed your property.
• “There is, in fact, no reason why merely innovating gives the innovator partial ownership of property that others already own.” If you own a copyright or trademark, it means you can control what everyone does with their own property. Which they say is a violation of some homestead whatnot, idk I can only comprehend so much libertarian theory before my eyes glaze over.

At least the book was short.

I do not recommend this book to anyone.

A fantastic book about the history of the Third World countries during and after the Cold War. As they navigate a post-colonial world, they're pressured to choose a side between the “First World” capitalist countries and the “Second World” socialist countries.

This book is really fantastic and I highly recomended it to anyone interested in learning about 20th century history that you probably didn't know much about. Or if you're a fellow traveler wanting to learn more about international solidarity, the need for an international jubilee, and the modern history of neo-colonialism.

This book lays bare the hypocrisy of the liberal nations' call for liberty and equality as they subjugated and brutalized the underdeveloped world for centuries, finding new ways to do so as 20th-century de-colonialization made way for neoliberalism's neocolonialist aims. Europe prides itself on the Enlightenment's “Rights of Man” while treating the people of the underdeveloped countries like beasts of burden. The US's Declaration of Independence is a beacon for those who wish to live a life free of authoritarianism, meanwhile the has spent ~150 years overthrowing countries and installing authoritarian dictators.

THIS BOOK REPORT IS TOO LONG. I AM SORRY. READ THIS BOOK. IT IS GOOD. Here are some of the quotes I found interesting...

~
The Failures of the Second World in effectively allying with the Third World

The Third World was a bastion of anti-imperial, anti-colonial fervor, which coincides with anti-capitalist fervor as these are the 3 heads of the same hydra. But this book explains how the Second World failed to leverage this energy, resulting in the First World coming in to dominate again. This is a shame and a betrayal of the call for solidarity with the workers of the world: “Certainly, Communism as an idea and the USSR as an inspiration held an important place in the imagination of the anticolonial movements from Indonesia to Cuba. Yet the Second World had an attitude toward the former colonies that in some ways mimicked that of the First World. For the founding conference of the Cominform held in Poland in 1947, the Soviets did not invite even one Communist Party from the former colonized world, and certainly not the Chinese Party.” The Second World failed to show the respect the Third World deserved.

“On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the heirs of [Stalin] saw promise in the movements of the Third World, and even while they offered assistance to them, they did so with every attempt to steer the ship of history, rather than to share the rudder. Direction was anathema to the darker nations, which had been told what to do for far too long.”
This is a shame, and further shows the lack of solidarity between these two anti-capitalist camps.

~
King Leopold's Ghost

This book talks briefly about King Leopoldo the 2nd from Belgium, who oversaw the genocide of the Congolese: “To supply the emergent tire industry, Leopold II's Free State, therefore, sucked the life out of the rubber vines and murdered half the Congo's population in the process (between 1885 and 1908, the population declined from twenty million to ten million).” I plan on reading “King Leopold's Ghost” this year. It's on the short list.

Even the other European empires saw the atrocities brought forth by Belgium, their concerns were not taken seriously due to the overt hypocrisy: “The Foreign Office in London wrote a tepid note critical of the Belgians, and Leopold II's reply rightly accused the British of hypocrisy: much of the policies followed by the Belgians in the Congo had been standard for the English elsewhere. Indeed, Casement found that British companies in the Putamayo region between Colombia and Peru followed the same kinds of barbarism, the U.S.-based United Fruit Company in Central America pillaged the dignity of the natives there, and in Portuguese Angola as well as French and German Cameroon, the companies used much the same kind of rubber plantation regime.” The whitewashing of history is ever present. Genocides are rebranded as “civilizing the savages.” Talk about projection. We're not the good guys, folks.
Like imagine if a country who's known for invading and overthrowing the governments of weaker nations for seemingly nonsensical reasons started criticizing another country doing the same thing.........

“...the U.S. and British governments, and most of the actors who participated in the condemnation of the Belgians remained silent on the brutality elsewhere. In fact, their criticism of the Congo enabled them to obscure their own role in the barbarity. [...] The imperial powers made Leopold II the issue, at the same time as they buried the broader problem in which they had a hand: imperialism. In 1908, Leopold turned over the management of the [Congo] to the Belgian government, and the barbarism continued until the Belgians completed their rail system in 1914 that rationalized the removal of the Congo's minerals all the way to 1961 and beyond.” Remember this when you talk about “Social Democracies” in Europe. While universal basic services should be strived for, they should not be built on the backs of the exploited Third World. And that's how most of these countries pay for everything.

~
Post-Colonial Nationalism

While I lambasted the notion of “nations” and “nationalism” during a previous book review, this book has revitalized my post-colonial nationalist support: “The formerly colonized people have at least one thing in common: they are colonized. [...] For them, the nation had to be constructed out of two elements: the history of their struggles against colonialism, and their program for the creation of justice. [...] they had an internationalist ethos, one that looked outward to other anticolonial nations as their fellows.” Post-colonial nationalism is an international effort to stand in solidarity with the people of all former colonialized states.

This book talks a lot about different organizations and conferences in the underdeveloped nations that strove to fight imperialism and bring solidarity with colonized countries:
• Pan-African Conference of 1900, and later The Pan-African Congress
• The African Association
• The first Conference of African States, and later The All-African People's Conference.
And others I forgot to list.
These organizations stood against colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism to fight for an economic democracy, “We welcome economic democracy as the only real democracy.” This is part of the ideology know n as Pan-Africanism.

There were similar efforts in Asia, fighting for Pan-Asianism and against the US Empire's growing neo-colonial efforts, rebranded as “dollar imperialism”.
• Asian Relations Conference of 1947
• Asian Conference of 1949

As well as in the Americas, where they were trying to get the US to stop invading them, overthrowing their governments, and draining their countries of wealth for the benefit of multi-national corporations.
• the First Inter-American Conference of 1889
• The Pan-American Union
• The Havana Conference of 1928
Though the Americas' anti-imperialists didn't cross paths with the Afro-Asian anti-imperialists because “Their target was not Old Europe, but the New Yankee.” But they finally came together, culminating into the “Non-Aligned Movement” (or NAM states), the Tricontinental, and the “League Against Imperialism”, which included a young patent clerk named Al Einstein you may have heard of. Weird that's never talked about...

“The colonial powers quickly tainted the [League Against Imperialism's] work by intimating that it was nothing but a Communist front. Certainly, the Communists played a major role in the league, but they did not exhaust its range and the claim made on it by peoples who had little experience with Communism.” ...oh. That's why.

What these conferences and organizations (many of which I did not list) show is that the fight for post-colonial nationalism must be an international movement; the formerly colonized peoples of the world must have solidarity to rid themselves of their oppressors. And, the fact that none of these organizations or conferences were ever mentioned in a high school history class, shows how imperialist propaganda is still rampant in the imperial core.

“[The Bandung Conference of 1927] allowed these leaders to meet together, celebrate the demise of formal colonialism, and pledge themselves to some measure of joint struggle against the forces of imperialism.”

Colonialism and imperialism has never ended, but it has been greatly reigned in from its peek in the early 1900s. This wasn't accomplished thanks to the human decency of the colonizers. That has never happened. It was accomplished by the sword-wielding colonized people, coming together in national awakenings to fight their oppressors.

The call for post-colonial internationalism is still alive and well within the G-77 and the United Nations. Of course the good ole US of A doesn't really give a damn about the UN because the idea of not having absolute autonomy on a global scale is simply heretical. We are the nation's police force, and we don't really do a good job at holding our own police accountable.

~
Tariffs, the IMF, the World Bank, and Usury

One of the most influential books I read was “Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism“ (2007) by Ha-Joon Chang. In it, the author opened my eyes to the exploitative nature of modern neoliberal capitalism to the historically underdeveloped nations. “The Darker Nations” stands alongside and reinforces the assertions made in “Bad Samaritans” as well as in “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” and “Open Veins of Latin America.”

Namely: The First World used tariffs to help grow their economies and now force the Third World to abolish tariffs and open up their unprocessed commodities to the global market. The Third World gets paid pittance for the raw material, which goes to industrialized nations for processing and is sold back for 100x the cost.

This is what we should do:
“Since Europe and the United States benefited from colonial rule, they must bear responsibility for it. To be responsible should mean that the First World needed to provide outright grants to the Third World (what would later be called ‘reparations'). To ask the people of the Third World to sacrifice more toward development would be morally inappropriate.“

Instead we do this:

“[T]he G-7 objected strongly when the [Non-Aligned Movement] states created tariff barriers to protect their economies, but by UNCTAD's count, the G-7 states themselves had over seven hundred nontariff barriers (such as government subsidies, quantitative restrictions, and other technical standards to block the import of certain goods into their protected markets).” Do as I say, not as I do.

And we do this:

“In the 1970s, the IMF shifted its three-decades-old mission from the provision of short-term credit to countries with current account deficits (lender of the last resort) to the use of its crucial finances as a weapon to demand structural economic changes mainly in the bruised nations. In other words, the new IMF eroded the institutions of state sovereignty fought for by the global institutions of the Third World.”

The IMF is an evil, evil organization that is directly responsible for the continued underdevelopment of the Third World. They do not make things better. They make things worse. They drain the wealth of the Third World to enrich the First World. “The IMF, for the United States particularly, would be one more instrument to maintain a tariff-free capitalist system.”

You may think the rich nations subsidize the poor nations. This is false. The following is (in my opinion) the most important quote in this book:

“By 1983, capital flows reversed, as more money came from the indebted states to the G-7 than went out as loans and aid. In other words, the indebted countries subsidized and funded the wealthy nations. In the late 1980s, the indebted states sent an average of $40 billion more to the G-7 than the G-7 sent out as loans and aid; this became the annual tribute from the darker nations. By 1997, the total debt owed by the formerly colonized world amounted to about $2.17 trillion, with a daily debt-service payment of $717 million. The nations of sub-Saharan Africa spent four times more on debt service, on interest payments, than on health care. For most of the indebted states, between one-third and one-fifth of their gross national product was squandered in this debt-service tribute. The debt crisis had winners: the financial interests in the G-7.”

The IMF is colonialism by another name. This is what I mean when I say neoliberalism is synonymous with neocolonialism: “[W]hereas almost a hundred Third World states accounted for less than 37 percent of the IMF's voting power, the five leading industrial powers controlled more than 40 percent, while the United States alone held 20 percent of the votes in the IMF. The fund was controlled by the United States and other advanced industrial states.“

The US controls the IMF and the World Bank. The IMF and The World Bank control the Third World. The third world sells their resources to the US corporations, which feeds the US empire, completing the cycle of global exploitation.

~~~
US Imperialism
“The United States had a poor track record with national liberation and anti-imperialist movements in Central America and the Caribbean. The armies and allies of the United States had been prone to oppose these movements, assassinate their leaders, and deliver arms to their monarchist or oligarchic opponents. Between 1900 and 1933, the U.S. military intervened to scuttle the national hopes of the people of Cuba (four times), the Dominican Republic (four times, including an eight-year occupation), Guatemala (once), Haiti (twice, including a nineteen-year occupation), Honduras (seven times), Nicaragua (twice), and Panama (six times).”

“[As of 1964,] The United States had intervened in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Latin America. [...] Imperialist powers had an inherent tendency to fight wars of conquest and subjugation, and as they did so, they would confront people's tenacious desire for liberty and independence.”

“The lack of a central authority in Bolivia, or else the effective devolution of power to the people's organizations, led the U.S. State Department to note in 1957 that ‘the whole complex of lawlessness, combined with the government's apparent unwillingness or inability to control it, added up to a considerable degree of anarchy in the country.' The ‘anarchy' for the United States was popular democracy for the Bolivians.”

The US Government doesn't like democracy. It likes authoritarians because they prioritize the interest of corporations over the interest of the people. These corporations drain the wealth of the exploited countries and fill US government and US corporate coffers.

“The U.S.-engineered coup in Iran (1953) is an early example of this planetary role for Washington, DC. Whereas the evidence of U.S. involvement is unclear in most of the coups in the Third World, the footprint of the CIA and the U.S. military intelligence has been clearly documented in the coups in the Dominican Republic (1963), Ecuador (1963), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Congo (1965), Greece (1967), Cambodia (1970), Bolivia again (1971), and most famously Chile (1973).”

The US subsidizes the Military Industrial Complex by donating conditional funds to Third World nations that immediately go toward purchasing military hardware from US corporations. This has the added benefit of creating professional militaries that speak for the authoritarian ruler (and thus the interests of capitol) rather than an armed proletariat militia.

“By 1982, the United Nations offered the stark choice that either the world can ‘pursue the arms race,' or else it can ‘move consciously and with deliberate speed toward a more stable and balanced social and economic development.' But, the United Nations cautioned, ‘it cannot do both.'” Guess what we chose. “Every attempt to stem the arms trade or cut back on the vast increase in the global military budget was met with disdain or incomprehension—security and defense had come to be reality, whereas social development became idealistic.”

What kind of world would we live in if we prioritized helping people over designing and stockpiling more sophisticated ways of killing them?

~
Cartels - Oil, Private, & Public

The “Seven Sisters: Seven Sisters: Exxon (or Esso), Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and So-cal (or Chevron)” controlled the vast majority of crude oil production and
“acted together as a cartel of private companies to ensure that they not only got the best prices for crude oil but also controlled the entire oil market.
The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage—to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite—the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia—and to oil the military machine.”
Because that's what the corporations wanted. Corporations have no interest in their profits going toward benefiting society. They will only share profits with those who help secure their interests. Authoritarian oligarchs are the best thing for a corporation.

There aren't just cartels for oil, but every raw material: “Whether the crop is cocoa, sugar, rubber, or oil, the structure of the commodity cartel did not differ much.” Some governments tried to create their own international governmental cartel to challenge corporate cartels. Rather than corporate cartels draining the wealth of the exploited nations, these public commodity cartels would “achieve a stabilization of prices to benefit the raw materials' producers.” Imagine that: the wealth of a nation being controlled by its government for the benefit of the nation itself, rather than it being controlled by multinational corporations who aim to drain it for the benefit of the imperial core. Wild.

The underdeveloped countries were single-commodity producers, booming or busting at the whims of the market, and if they got too upity, the oligarchy would cut them out and go to a neighboring country, devastating the economy. It's not a “market,” it's an global extortion racket. “By 1980, of the 115 ‘developing countries,' according to UNCTAD, at least half remained dependent on one commodity for over 50 percent of their export revenues.” Mostly oil, but also sugar, cocoa, coffee, fish, copper, and alumina.

This is where OPEC comes in. “The five charter members nominally controlled or at least produced 82 percent of the world's crude oil exports. [...] the idea that the darker nations could produce a cartel for their precious commodities to ensure a decent price, impacted the Third World. Various Third World political forums now tried to move a similar agenda as OPEC, to create various public cartels for the otherwise-cheap raw materials bought in a market created by the private transnational cartels mostly located in the First World.”

Tragically, the OPEC countries didn't help with the creation of similar price stabilization efforts for other raw materials. “Despite its political origins, OPEC became an economic cartel as it fought to defend oil prices and do little else.” This is a tragedy for the Third World.

There was a big long paragraph in here about Petro-Dollars and Nixon delinking the US dollar to the Gold Standard and the 1973 embargo. I didn't really understand much, but I'll say it all sucks.

The pinnacle of anti-colonial text. A key book on the shelf of the revolutionary.

While this book has a lot of key messages that are useful in fighting the class war, I think it's far more valuable to people in the underdeveloped world. And as a 5th-generation colonizer on land that required a lot of genocides to steal and slave labor to develop, it really feels like this book isn't FOR me. It's for people far more oppressed than me. While a lot of the content is timeless, he occasionally makes references to timely events with little to no contextualization, usually because he's trying to build a bigger point so the contextualization necessary for those out of the know would have derailed the point.

Regardless I still got some good stuff out of it. Here are some of the quotes I highlighted:

“...it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers.” As relevant as ever. Deteriorating material conditions will inevitably spark revolution. Whether the state crackdown that follows extinguishes the revolution, that is circumstantial.

“Imperialism and capitalism are convinced that the fight against racism and national liberation movements are purely and simply controlled and masterminded from ‘the outside.'” We see this any time the corporate media repeat the propaganda of “outside agitators” trying to fight for human rights, like during the 2020 BLM protests.

“Europe's well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians. This we are determined never to forget. When a colonialist country, embarrassed by a colony's demand for independence, proclaims with the nationalist leaders in mind: ‘If you want independence, take it and return to the Dark Ages,' the newly independent people nod their approval and take up the challenge. And what we actually see is the colonizer withdrawing his capital and technicians and encircling the young nation with an apparatus of economic pressure.” This is how the world works. Get dominated by a stronger country, and either accept it or fight for your independence and get economically crushed. Hello Cuba.

“Colonialism and imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn their flag and their police force from our territories. For centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world. Deportation, massacres, forced labor, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power.” Indeed.

“In order to invest in the independent countries, private companies demand terms which from experience prove unacceptable or unfeasible. True to their principle of immediate returns as soon as they invest “overseas,” capitalists are reluctant to invest in the long term. They are recalcitrant and often openly hostile to the so-called economic planning programs of the young regimes. At the most they are willing to lend capital to the young nations on condition it is used to buy manufactured goods and machinery, and therefore keep the factories in the metropolis running.” This was talked about a lot more in “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” by Walter Rodney (1972). Europe bought the raw material form underdeveloped countries for cheap, then sold the processed goods back for far more. They had no interest in helping other countries develop. They just wanted to exploit them. They still exploit underdeveloped countries. Exploitation is inevitable under Capitalism.

“The more the people understand, the more vigilant they become, the more they realize in fact that everything depends on them and that their salvation lies in their solidarity, in recognizing their interests and identifying their enemies. The people understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the spoils from an organized protection racket. The rich no longer seem respectable men but flesh-eating beasts, jackals and ravens who wallow in the blood of the people.” I love this one. I have nothing of value to add to this. I just really liked it.

Read this book if you're interested in anti-colonialism/post-colonial nationalism.
See also:
• “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” by Walter Rodney (1972)
• “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” by Eduardo Galeano, (1971)
• “Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism” by John Henrik Clarke (1992)

This book encompasses a 100+ year history of the Arabic people within the Middle East, touching briefly in Muslims within Central Asia. It is the longest book I've ever gotten through. And it may be a controversial opinion, but I'm gonna say it: the Middle East region is complicated. Yeah. I said it.

Regarding the book itself: I found it highly informative, straightforward, and balanced. I wish it drew more through-lines of ‘how this event happening now connects to that event from 50 years ago'. The author did that a bit, but not enough IMO. Also not nearly enough about the US-Saudi Arabia relationship. I'mma need to read another book about that.

But my overall thoughts on the historical events are this:
US and European meddling has done more harm than good in the Greater Middle East region and to the Arabic people. The best thing to be done is for the West to remain as neutral and un-involved as possible. Everything we touch turns to shit. Leave these people alone.

The majority of this book was about Israel and its shenanigans over the last 100 years. Skip to the final section to see my thoughts on that kerfuffle.

Good place to start
“Western policymakers and intellectuals need to pay far more attention to history if they hope to remedy the ills that afflict the Arab world today. All too often in the West, we discount the current value of history. [...] This could spare them not from repeating history so much as from repeating historic mistakes.”

—
Culture Clash
• In the late 1700's, The French brought post-Revolution classical liberalism to Egypt, and argued that their ideals were “universal”. There is truly no better tool for a zealot or conqueror than to claim that their firmly held beliefs are the pinnacle and all others are “barbaric”.
• I do hold many of the liberal, materialist beliefs espoused by the European invaders of the time, including “the exercise of human reason over revealed religion”, it's clear their intentions were not to improve the material conditions of the people they sought out, but to conquer their lands and stick it to their centuries-long enemy, Britain.

Ironically, before WW1, Europe helped the Ottoman Empire stay afloat to keep Russia from annexing Ottoman land and to keep the peace in the Mediterranean.
“In a secret appendix to the London Convention of 1840, the governments of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia gave a formal commitment to ‘seek no augmentation of territory, no exclusive influence, [and] no commercial advantage for their subjects, which those of every other nation may not equally obtain.' This self-denying protocol provided the Ottoman Empire with nearly four decades of protection against European designs on its territory” But...well...time ticks on.

—
Pre-WW1 Imperialism, Colonialism, and Neo-Colonialism

• Tunisia, a small African country just south of Italy would be a victim of Europe's newest plot of conquest: Not gunboat diplomacy, but something more insidious.
• After Tunisia's 1861 constitution, a guy named Khayr al-Din was appointed president of the Grand Council, but didn't like how things were run, “and so in 1863 he tendered his resignation. The issue that provoked his resignation was the government's decision to contract its first foreign loan, which Khayr al-Din predicted would drag his adoptive country ‘to its ruin.' [...] “The result was the surrender of Tunisia's sovereignty to an international financial commission.” And there it is. That's how they get you.
• I always thought that the Neo-Colonial “dollar diplomacy” of Europe and the US started after regular old colonialism fell out of fashion in the mid-1900's. Turns out they were both happening in lock-step for over 150 years.
• Long-story short: Europe offers usurious loans to developing countries, the country can't pay the loan back, thus the European empire takes over whatever is making the country money, and drains the wealth as quickly as possible, while diverting any funding that benefits the people of that country. It's a story as old as time. It's still going on today, and it's never stopped happening in over 150 years. Though now it's mostly done by “The World Bank” and the “International Monetary Fund”, which are puppets to the interest of US & EU corporate interests. That's how the world works. This is neo-colonialism, AKA neo-liberalism.
• “The single greatest threat to the independence of the Middle East was not the armies of Europe but its banks. Ottoman reformers were terrified by the risks involved in accepting loans from Europe. In 1852, when Sultan Abdulmecid sought funds from France, one of his advisors took him aside and counseled strongly against the loan: ‘Your father [Mahmud II] had two wars with the Russians and lived through many campaigns. He had many pressures on him, yet he did not borrow money from abroad. [...] If this state borrows five piasters it will sink. For if once a loan is taken, there will be no end to it. [The state] will sink overwhelmed in debt.'”
• Thus these countries and the Ottoman Empire itself sank deeper and deeper into the claws to the European empire without even firing a shot.
• “[Europe] gained tremendous power over the finances of the Ottoman Empire as a whole, which the European powers used not just to control the actions of the sultan's government but to open the Ottoman economy to European companies for railways, mining, and public works.”
• “Open up the economy” is one of those euphemism capitalists have been using for centuries to describe “let the oligarchs suck the country dry”. That's what that phrase has always meant. Remember that the next time CNN or the NYT suggests it for some poor under-developed nation.
• “Between 1862 and 1873, Egypt contracted eight foreign loans, totaling £68.5 million ($376.75 million), which, after discounts, left only £47 million ($258.5 million), of which some £36 million ($198 million) were spent in payments on the principal and interest on the foreign loans. Thus, out of a debt of £68.5 million ($376.75 million), the government of Egypt gained only about £11 million ($60.5 million) to invest in its economy.”
So 23% of the loan was actually usable by the country and the rest was stolen back by Europe. If that's not the textbook definition of usury I don't know what is.
• Then these countries exploited by Europe began selling their assets. And who was there to buy for pennies on the dollar? Why the exploiters, of course!
• “As this desperate measure failed to staunch the hemorrhage, the viceroy sold the government's shares in the Suez Canal Company to the British government in 1875 for £4 million ($22 million)—recouping only one-quarter of the £16 million ($88 million) the canal is estimated to have cost the government of Egypt.” Truly truly evil.
• The vultures of Europe picked clean the carcass they themselves killed. But their “financial advisers” had no interest in returning these countries to fiscal solvency. “With each plan, the foreign economic advisors managed to insinuate themselves deeper into the financial administration of Egypt.” That was their goal, of course.
• The insatiable European powered couldn't stop there. “Over time, informal imperial control hardened into direct colonial rule, as the whole of North Africa was partitioned and distributed among the growing empires of Europe.”
• Ultimately, England stole Egypt, France stole Algeria & Tunisia, Italy stole Libya, France & Spain stole Morocco. And again this is BEFORE WW1.
• The imperial nations stole these countries' autonomy and wealth. The countries' people fought back, and ultimately the imperial nations had to occupy the under-developed nations to put down any further notion of independence fro European domination. This is a very common pattern we see in history.

—
Nationalism
• “By the end of 1912 the entire coast of North Africa, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, was under European colonial domination. Two of the states—Algeria and Libya—were under direct colonial rule. Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco were protectorates ruled by France and Britain through their own local dynasties.”
• Before the Europeans came the Arabs didn't really care much about nationalism. “Before the age of nationalism, identity was linked to either one's tribe or town of origin. If Arabs thought in terms of a broader identity, it was more likely to be based on religion than ethnicity.”
• I genuinely believe that the European notion of the “Nation-State” is what doomed not only the Middle East but the planet as a whole. Forcing this concept onto the people of the world that did not want it has resulted in endless suffering and strife. For this reason, I have become vehemently anti-nation: Anti-nationalist. No more nations. City-states I can get behind. nation-states, nah.

—
Arab Nationalism and the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt
• Despite my aforementioned support of “anti-nationalism”, what I hate more than nations is imperialism. The rise of Arab Nationalism, and the merging of Arab nations into a united singular nation seemed like viable opponent to European imperialism.
• Resistance to European & US imperialism after WW2 resulted as anyone might expect with some Arab countries asking for help from the big bad USSR.
• Egypt even had the audacity of extending diplomatic relations to the People's Republic of China in 1956. How dare these countries do what's in their own best interest instead of falling in line with US, British, & French hegemony‽
• So Egypt wanted to build a dam, and the Brits and US saw that as a perfect opportunity to do more Neo-Colonialism.
• “[T]he United States and Britain never intended to give the full amount Egypt needed, pledging only one-third the sum requested—not enough to guarantee the dam but rather just enough to exercise influence over Egypt during the years it would take to build it.”
• Remember this whenever you hear people talk about “why are we giving money to these other countries”? It's so we can control them. That's always the goal. Never altruism, or the betterment of humanity, but to advance the interests of the USA, usually meaning the interests of the multinational corporations that control the USA.
• But so Egypt had a plan: pay for the dam by nationalizing the Suez Canal, which was at the time owned by a corporation listed in France with the British government as the largest shareholder.
• Britain didn't want that because that would weaken their control over their former colony. I mean...the idea of a country believing that the wealth generated by that country belongs to its people and not international corporations and foreign empires? how could anyone believe such a thing‽ (Fun fact: Any time a weaker nation under the thumb of Europe or the US ever “nationalizes” anything or does “land reform,” you best believe that country is about to get invaded)
• This became known as “The Suez Crisis,” AKA “The Tripartite Aggression” because after Egypt nationalized it, Britain, France, and Israel went to war with Egypt. This obvious act of imperial aggression destroyed the credibility of both France and Britain among the Arab countries, helping to ferment Arab nationalism and ended their influence in the region (except for in Israel, of course)
• The US was appalled by this needless aggression, simultaneously “the Central Intelligence Agency had itself been plotting a coup against the Syrian government, to be executed on the very day the Israelis began their attack.” Why don't these countries like us again? Silver lining: the crisis derailed the US's regime change efforts in Syria. We're not the good guys, folks.
• Credit where credit is due: “Eisenhower administration resorted to outright threats against Britain and France to secure compliance with their demands for an immediate cease-fire. Both countries were threatened with expulsion from NATO, and the U.S. Treasury warned it would sell part of its Sterling bond holdings to force a devaluation of the British currency.” Sometimes wielding a big stick can actually be anti-imperialist.

• Arab nationalism when so far as to merge Egypt and Syria into a singular country for a few years. That was pretty crazy.
• Since before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, The West has been terrified of Arab unity. That's one of the reasons why they were so obsessed with meddling in Arab affairs. A united Arab people challenged European & US hegemony. So who can truly blame them for turning to the USSR? What's that? ‘The reactionaries in charge at the time?' Oh....

—
Mesopotamia [Iraq]
• Conquered by Britain in 1918, the region's 3 ethnic groups (Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiites) had different ideas on how the new country's relationship with the British Empire would work. The capitalist class wanted the power of the state to maintain stability, and thus economic growth. The people wanted independence from foreign occupation.
• Guess who won out. And wouldn't you know it? Occupying Iraq was really difficult for Britain. Britain kept saying they would strive to let Iraq be self-governing, but actually strove to achieve direct colonial rule, just like in India. The Iraqis rose up in 1920, resulting in an authoritarian crackdown, hardening the resolve of the freedom fighters. Why does this story sound familiar?
• Britain sent Indian soldiers (colonized peoples to subjugate colonized peoples) to retake the country. “The British were relentless in pursuing the insurgents and refused all negotiations.” Hmmmm.... “The Uprising of 1920, referred to in Iraq as the “Revolution of 1920,” has a special place in the nationalist mythology of the modern Iraqi state comparable to the American Revolution of 1776 in the United States.”
• Britain, having not learned its lesson after 100+ years, kept on fighting. They tried to legitimize their rule by propping up a banana republic with unpopular elections and a treaty for the electors to ratify.

___
Arabia, Ibn Saud, Wahhabism, bin Laden, US Terrorism
• A book covering this massive swath of information is bound to have a few things missing, but I was very disappointed in seeing no mention of FDR's meeting with Ibn Saud after WW2. I found a new book that I might read that is just about the US-Saudi Arabia relationship. Hopefully it's not as long as this one.
• Ibn Saud conquered Arabia with the radical Muslim sect, known as “Wahhabism”. He took over the country and slapped his name on it. And now we call it “Saudi Arabia.” What an absolute flex.
• “The fact that Bin Ladin and fifteen of the suicide hijackers in the September 11 attacks were citizens of Saudi Arabia, and that private Saudi funds had bankrolled al-Qaida, only worsened relations between the Saudis and the Americans.” Hmmmmmm.........
• The Arab states found themselves under irreconcilable pressures after 9/11. If they opposed America's war on terror, they risked sanctions that might range from economic isolation to outright calls for regime change by the world's sole superpower.” (Makes sense. The US does that all the time).
—
Post-WW1 and King-Crane
• Read my review of “A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East” by David Fromkin (1989), which is about the Middle East during and after WW1. It's because that book was so limited in scope that I decided to read this one.
• But basically: Britain lied, cheated, and stole to secure pretty much everything they wanted after WW1, blindly carving up the region with no sense of understanding its history, peoples, or sectarian concerns. This has resulted in the issues the region has faced ever since.

—
Occupied Palestine - ‘One cannot fill a cup that is already full.'

• The colonization of Palestine by Imperial-backed zionists is one of the most contentious issues of the modern era.
• This is the 3rd or 4th book I've read that covers this topic. Something like half of this book ended up being about the creation of Israel, its internal strife, and the decades of external conflicts with its neighbors.
• After reading these books, watching documentaries, and following the news about what's going on most recently, I can emphatically say that I cannot in good conscious support this country's “right to exist” as it keeps demanding from anyone and everyone. Fun fact: If a country needs a propaganda arm to force people from other countries to pledge their support for the country's “right to exist” then it might be...trying to compensate for something... at the very least.

—
Occupied Palestine - Yes, the Nazis are incomparably bad

• Britain's 1939 White Paper set strict standards on how many colonizers could enter the region, and set up the plan for creating an independent PALESTINIAN state by 1949.
• Then this big asshole with a stupid mustache started committing horrible atrocities in Europe.
• The more radical zionists temporarily put aside their dissatisfaction with the Brits' insufficient support for colonization to deal with the bigger issue: Fascism, Nazism, etc.
• Once that was all wrapped up, the Brits realized that the Palestinian question had gone full FUBAR, and turned to the newly created Inited Nations: “The United Nations assembled an eleven-nation Special Committee on Palestine, known by the acronym UNSCOP. Aside from Iran, none of the UNSCOP members had any particular interest in Middle Eastern affairs: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, and Yugoslavia.” What a bizarre assortment of countries.
• While the UN was trying to figure out what to do, waves of illegal Jewish immigrants, including many holocaust survivors, flooded into Palestine. This is understandable given the circumstances.
• The Brits tried to stop this immigration because they were trying to adhere to their 1939 White Paper.
• Britain's unpopular handling of Jewish refugees resulted in violence between the Jewish community and Britain, eventually resulting in the hanging of 2 British sergeants.
• The hangings so angered the British people that “Only two years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, swastikas and slogans such as ‘Hang All Jews' and ‘Hitler Was Right' stained British cities.” This is unconscionable.
• The book “Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook” by Mark Bray (2017) talked about this and other post-WW2 fascist rumblings throughout Europe and the US. Good book.

This book report is getting too long. Goodreads needs to increase its review character limit. I had to cut out 1/3rd of this review and I didn't even cover everything in the book. I can't reasonably fit all I want to say about the stuff this book talks about into one concise essay.

Here is my final favorite quote:
“The inconvenient truth about democracy in the Arab world is that, in any free and fair election, those parties most hostile to the United States are most likely to win. This is not because of any animosity toward Americans per se, but because Arab voters are increasingly convinced that the U.S. government is hostile to their interests. The war on terror has only confirmed Arab voters in this view. American hostilities against Muslim and Arab states, combined with unconditional American support for Israel, led many Arab citizens to conclude that the U.S. was exploiting the war on terror to extend its domination over their region.”

The smartest move in this game is not to play. Leave these people alone. Close the bases. End the sanctions. Normalize relations. Stop trying to control them because it always makes things worse.

For continued reading on the subject, see these other books I recommend:
• “Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East” (2020) by Philip Gordon
• “Imperial Ambitions: Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World” (2005) by Noam Chomsky

This book covers the buildup before WW1, to its end and some post-WW1 scuffles and ends around 1923, focusing entirely on the Middle East.

This is also the longest audiobook I've ever gotten through, so this review is gonna be a doozie. I made lots of highlights in my ebook copy so I wouldn't forget my thoughts. I have attempted to compile the most interesting factoids along with my thoughts in a mildly cohesive narrative. Half of this review is quotes from the book because it's so insane that I don't think anyone would believe me otherwise.

In order to understand the modern Middle East, you must understand how Europe (mostly Britain) carved up the Ottoman Empire after winning WW1. To put it simply, the people who had control of the collapsed Ottoman Empire (France and Britain) had little to no understanding of the regions they had been tasked with carving up. The people who actually lived there did not have input on the decisions made. Their hubris has sent a century-long shockwave through the region that has no sign of getting resolved for the next century or more.

Miscellaneous
• Even before WW1 started, Europe was already conducting corporate colonialism over Ottoman means of production. An empire being colonized. Who would a thunk it? “Europeans also shared in the control of what is at the heart of a political entity: its finances. Because the Porte had defaulted on a public debt of more than a thousand million dollars in 1875, the Sultan was obliged to issue a decree in 1881 that placed administration of the Ottoman public debt in European hands.”
• The German Empire probably could have won WW1 if they hadn't goaded the US Empire into war against them.
• In both WW1 and WW2, the British, French, and Americans were on the same side as Russia. This is really funny since they always hated the Russians and it was just circumstantial “enemy of my enemy” sort of allies. The more things change, etc.
• Any time they mentioned Ibn Saud or Wahhabism, my ears perked up. Watch the documentary “Bitter Lake” (2015) by Adam Curtis to learn why. The Brit's recognized his fanatical faction back then. They supported him, he garnered too much power, they sent their puppets against him and lost. Who knows how different the world might be if European empires stopped the Saudis & Wahhabism from ruling Arabia? More buildings in NYC maybe?
• TE Lawerence, AKA: “Lawrence of Arabia” was apparently a bit of an over-exaggerator. That and British bigotry resulted in the legend of Lawrence expanding well-beyond reality: “Lawrence possessed many virtues but honesty was not among them; he passed off his fantasies as the truth. [...] Lawrence's arrival with the news from Aqaba completed his nine months' transformation into a military hero. Auda abu Tayi, sheikh of the eastern Howeitat, who had in fact won the victory, did not have a name that tripped easily off the tongues of British officers. Instead they said, as historians did later, that ‘Lawrence took Aqaba.'”

White & Christian Supremacy
• The European empires were simply white supremacists & Christian supremacists who believed their form of rule is the only acceptable form and believe they had a divine right to control the Arabic-speaking peoples because “they were incapable of genuine independence” and “the Arabs can't govern themselves”. It's just “the white man's burden - European edition”.
• The European empires didn't care about self-determination. And the Arabs “did not want to be ruled by Christians or Europeans”. Who can blame them?
• Europe's white supremacy blinded them so much that they couldn't even fathom the idea of simply asking the Arabic people what they want. This was recommended by Woodrow Wilson and resulted in the DOA King-Crane Commission. A valiant effort but the European Empires would never let their subjects decide their own fates.

Anti-Semitism
• The most bizarre fact I learned was that pretty much every single person in charge in Europe at the time was extremely anti-Semitic and genuinely believed in a covert global Jewish cabal, so much so that many tried to get said cabal on their side to help win the war. The anti-Zionists were anti-Semitic. The pro-Zionists were anti-Semitic. Everyone in every country.
• This anti-Semitic conspiratorial mindset even resulted in Europeans believing that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was actually “secret agents called into existence by Germans doing the work of Jews who were devoted to the vengeful destruction of Russia.” Insane.
• The Catholics thought that Zionism and Bolshevism were a part of the same Jewish world conspiracy “seeking the destruction of the Christian world”.
• The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about “Jewish domination” stemmed from a piece of propaganda called “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” which was first published in 1903 but didn't garner popularity in Europe until 1920. It “purported to be a record of meetings held by Jews and Freemasons at the end of the nineteenth century in which they plotted to overthrow capitalism and Christianity and to establish a world state under their joint rule.” Powerful people in Britain and France genuinely believed this propaganda was true.
• However, the protocols were a forgery concocted by the Czarist Russia's secret police, who plagiarized them from a satire on Napoleon III. So that's fun. Now I know more about the phony globalist Jewish conspiracy theory than I ever did before.

Zionism, Palestine, & Britain
• Zionism became popular amongst Christians in part because of “a powerful evangelical movement within the Church of England that aimed at bringing the Jews back to Palestine, converting them to Christianity, and hastening the Second Coming.” This is especially funny since one of the most powerful pro-Zionist movements in the US today are the conservative evangelicals who believe the same thing.
• The British Empire spearheaded the Zionist movement under the guise of wanting a homeland for a historically oppressed people. They claimed it was “Biblical prophecy to restore the Jews to Zion.” This was a smokescreen.
• The real reason was because of the strategic importance of Palestine to the British Empire. It was a key link on the land route to India. Keeping control of lands between the Mediterranean and India was their primary drive during and after WW1.
• “Palestine gave Britain the land road from Egypt to India and brought together the empires of Africa and Asia. [...] With the addition of Palestine and Mesopotamia [Iraq], the Cape Town to Suez stretch could be linked up with the stretch of territory that ran through British-controlled Persia [Iran] and the Indian Empire to Burma, Malaya, and the two great Dominions in the Pacific—Australia and New Zealand. As of 1917, Palestine was the key missing link that could join together the parts of the British Empire so that they would form a continuous chain from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific.”
• The zionists knew their plans to colonize Palestine would result in a geopolitical nightmare even back in 1918. But empires are gonna empire and colonizers are gonna colonize. And here we are over 100 years later with the matter no closer to being solved. Britain is the reason why Israel exists. Britain, and to a far lesser extent France, are the causes of the century-long strife in the entire region.
• “[Aaron Aaronsohn's] work tended to show that, without displacing any of the 600,000 or so inhabitants of western Palestine, millions more could be settled on land made rich and fertile by scientific agriculture.” Jim's at camera [Narrator: that's not what happened]

Jordan & Palestine
• Apparently Palestine also included the country of Jordan, and because the Brits were selling off the Middle East, Churchill inadvertently cleaved the country apart and created a wholly new nation. Insane.
• “The recurring suggestion that Palestine be partitioned between Arabs and Jews ran up against the problem that 75 percent of the country had already been given to an Arab dynasty that was not Palestinian. The newly created province of Transjordan, later to become the independent state of Jordan, gradually drifted into existence as an entity separate from the rest of Palestine; indeed, today it is often forgotten that Jordan was ever part of Palestine.”
• This has been deemed illegal by many folks in the region and overall deemed a dick move by Churchill.

The US Empire
• The US Empire's involvement in WW1 is the most interesting. Woodrow Wilson is undeniably a white supremacist. But he was publicly an anti-imperialist. His fourteen points, while noble, weren't followed through because of Wilson's mediocre negotiating skills and having a stroke. The Allied empires did whatever they could to scoop up more colonies without sparking the US's ire. Or even better, they sicked the US after a former ally for being too colonialist.
• “Lloyd George's Middle Eastern strategy was to direct the Americans' anti-imperialist ire against the claims presented by Italy and France, distracting the President from areas in which he might make difficulties for Britain. Maurice Hankey, British Secretary to the Peace Conference, recorded in his diary even before the conference convened that Lloyd George ‘means to try and get President Wilson into German East Africa in order to ride him off Palestine.'”
• I wish this book had thrown in a sentence or two about how the “staunchly anti-imperialist” Woodrow Wilson refused to meet with Ho Chi Mihn, who was at the Versailles peace talks to lobby for the liberation of Vietnam from French Colonizers. We all know what happened after that....
• The US Empire's failure to back up Wilson's Fourteen Points resulted in Britain and France having complete control over the Middle East's fate.
• After Wilson left office, we got a good modern colonialist in W.G. Harding who didn't give a damn about self-governance and used the power of the state to protect corporate oil interests. Where have I heard that before?

No Honor Among Thieves
• The Brits really won WW1. They won it flat out. They won and did everything they could to secure that imperial land route, including stabbing the French in the back. They were all trying to stab each-other in the back and gobble up the plunder for themselves:
• “The French did not believe that the British were sponsoring Jewish and Arab aspirations in good faith, while the British discussed how, rather than whether, to break their agreements with France. Neither Britain nor France planned to honor wartime commitments to Italy. Neither Britain nor France was disposed to carry out the idealistic program of Woodrow Wilson with which, when Washington was listening, they pretended to be in sympathy.”
• The back-stabbing allies really heated up after the Angora Accord, where the French made a separate peace with Turkey, resulting in a proxy war between British-backed Greeks & French-backed Turks in 1921. Wild
• With the dust settled, their empires garnered these states: “Palestine and Mesopotamia [Iraq] to be kept by Britain; Arabia was to remain independent under British-influenced monarchs, Egypt and the Gulf coast already having been taken by Britain; and Syria, including Lebanon, was to go to France.”
• Britain & France screwing over Italy in the spoils of war inspired an Italian political agitator named Benito Mussolini. Boy I sure hope that doesn't result in anything bad.......

Social Democracy
This was my favorite quote:
“In 1920 and 1921 the British economy collapsed. Prices collapsed, exports slumped, companies went out of business, and the country was gripped by mass unemployment on a scale never known before. [...] it had always been Lloyd George's view that ‘the way to prevent the spread of the revolutionary spirit was to embark at once on large schemes of social progress.' In his view, to give up such schemes was to leave the door open for agitation and violence.”
Bingo. This is exactly what FDR, the “man who saved capitalism,” did with the New Deal. That was the point. Force capitalists to give a little to prevent them from losing it all. Workers win in the short term and lose in the long term. This is one reason why anti-capitalists don't trust Social Democrats.

Backfire
• The reason why European imperialism failed so miserably in the Middle East was because of their fundamental misunderstanding in the millennia-old culture and identity of the peoples. Europe imposed a secular nation-state structure to a people who did not want that.
• “Beneath such apparently insoluble, but specific, issues as the political future of the Kurds or the political destiny of the Palestinian Arabs, lies the more general question of whether the transplanted modern system of politics invented in Europe—characterized, among other things, by the division of the earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship—will survive in the foreign soil of the Middle East.”
• “In the rest of the world European political assumptions are so taken for granted that nobody thinks about them anymore; but at least one of these assumptions, the modern belief in secular civil government, is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants, for more than a thousand years, have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all of life, including government and politics.”
• It took Europe 1500 years to resolve the collapse of the Roman Empire and form into the modern nation-state system that exists today. It's been 100 years since the end of WW1. I doubt this'll be resolved within the next 100 years.
• “In a leading article on 7 August 1920, The Times demanded to know ‘how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?'”
• Europe didn't care about the minutia around the various religious sects and their millennia-old divisions. Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds, none of that mattered to the imperialists. Europe's most prestigious libraries didn't even have to-date information about the region. Britain's leaders made reference to geographic areas from The Bible.
• “An Italian diplomat wrote that “A common sight at the Peace Conference in Paris was one or other of the world's statesmen, standing before a map and muttering to himself: ‘Where is that damn'd...?' while he sought with extended forefinger for some town or river that he had never heard of before.” Lloyd George, who kept demanding that Britain should rule Palestine from (in the Biblical phrase) Dan to Beersheba, did not know where Dan was. He searched for it in a nineteenth-century Biblical atlas, but it was not until nearly a year after the armistice that General Allenby was able to report to him that Dan had been located and, as it was not where the Prime Minister wanted it to be, Britain asked for a boundary further north”. These were the idiots in charge of carving up the Middle East.
• And unsurprisingly, immediately after the war ended and the lines got drawn, the people began uprising against their colonialist oppressors. The British people didn't want to spend the money on maintaining the empire. The government didn't want to commit the troops they needed to maintain their stranglehold.
• Then we come with the greatest quote ever: “Bonar Law argued that if the United States and the Allies were not prepared to share the burden of responsibility, Britain should put it down. ‘We cannot alone act as the policeman of the world. The financial and social conditions of this country make that impossible.'“ Hilarious. Only took another ~3 decades for the US empire to pick up that mantle as world police.

Iraq
• Britain created the country of Iraq. It is the reason why that nation exists. It bankrolled Iraq's first monarch and orchestrated an astroturf campaign to get him into power.
• “In the east, Kurdish, Sunni, Shi'ite, and Jewish populations had been combined into a new Mesopotamian country named Iraq, under the rule of an Arabian prince; it looked like an independent country, but Britain regarded it as a British protectorate.”
• The US Empire's oil oligarchs supported British Hegemony in their puppet state: “Allen Dulles, chief of the Near Eastern Affairs Division of the Department of State, was one of the many officials who expressed dismay at the thought that Britain and France might relinquish control of their Middle Eastern conquests, and who expressed fear for the fate of American interests should they do so.” Fun fact: Allen Dulles went on to run the CIA and orchestrated the assassination of JFK, as well as the coverup. See: “The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government” (2015) by David Talbot


The book stops at 1923, but I really wanted it to keep going and cover the rest of the 1900s. I'll have to find a THIRD book covering that. Not sure what that'll be.

This book is incredible and fascinating and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in history.

And with this book, I've now completed my globetrotting journey of European & US Imperialism of the last ~200 years. We conclude with the Middle East.

I was disappointed in this book because it was what it was: a biography. I wanted something more akin to my last book, “Gangsters of Capitalism” that talked more broadly about the historical contexts outside of the sphere of the subject matter (British & French colonialism and the dissolving Ottoman Empire during and after WW1).

The book ends at Sykes' untimely death February 1919 from the pandemic of the time (then referred to as the Spanish Flu). Its brief epilogue then covers what the Allied Empires did to carve up the Ottoman Empire into the nation states we know today:

“A further cause for friction was the arbitrary and autocratic manner in which borders were delineated, with little regard for division along linguistic or religious lines, but entirely to suit the Allies' political, strategic and commercial interests, the latter more and more influenced by the increasing demand for oil. The example of Iraq was typical, with Kurds to the north, Sunni Muslims in the centre and Shiite Muslims to the south.”

This was the real meat I wanted to get into. The author only covered this briefly at the end and did not explain how exactly the Sykes-Picot Agreement reflected the final post-war impositions onto the region. Though the author did talk a lot about Sykes' interest in Zionism, foreshadowing the colonial apartheid state in occupied Palestine & Syria we all know and love today.

The author (the grandson of the subject) also claimed his grandfather ended up hating imperialism years after helping write one of the most important imperialist treaties in world history. He speculates that Sykes would have helped foster a more free and fair society had he not died beforehand. I am skeptical of this, and think he was trying to paint the man in a more endearing light.

I don't know enough about this time in history, and I wish I had read a better book that covers it. I am open to recommendations. I do not recommend this book.

All I wanna know is: How influential were the ‘Sykes–Picot Agreement' and the ‘Balfour Declaration' to the ‘Supreme Council of the Peace Conference' that met in San Remo in April 1920? How were they similar/different from each other? I don't know. And the fact that I've learned enough from this book to be able to ask that question, but not answer it, shows why I'm frustrated.

“The one who deals the blow forgets.
The one who carries the scar remembers.”
—Haitian proverb

This is my new favorite book. It will undoubtedly reach my top 5 of the year and is my #1 recommendation about the history of US Imperialism.

This book ties together 3 stories:
• A biography of Major General Smedley Butler and his adventures in US Imperialism from the Spanish-American War to campaigning against war before WW2.
• The author traveling the world to see the real places associated with Smedley's adventures
• An expanded history of US Imperialism beyond what Smedley Butler was involved in.

His story IS the story of US Imperialism. He fought the Spanish after the original false flag explosion of the USS Maine, resulting in the US colonizing Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the creation of the infamous military installation in Guantanamo Bay. He was in China during the Boxer Rebellion, the first time the United States invaded China, along with other Imperial nations. Then he defended corporate oil interests the SECOND time the US sent soldiers into China. He personally overthrew the democracy of Haiti and implemented slave labor. This is why Haitians see him as a devil, but Americans don't have any idea about any of this.

He did a lot of terrible things at the behest of the US government. He also helped stop a fascist coup to overthrow FDR. One that has eerie similarities to the January 6th putsch.

But it wasn't until he left the military that he was fully able to articulate what he truly was: A racketeer for capitalism.

There's a reason why the US empire grew in power right alongside US companies becoming international mega-corporations. These two things went hand in hand. Smedley Butler saw it. Hell, he DID it!

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank [now PNC] boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers [now BBH] in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil [now Chevron, ExxonMobil, Amoco, and Marathon] went its way unmolested”

He committed atrocities against oppressed people for the interests of corporations that still exist to this day. He blazed the trail for what the US Government and corporations continue to do to this day: oppress peoples across the world to extract wealth from weaker nations. We are rich because they are poor. Imperialism is truly the highest form of Capitalism. Two heads of the same hydra.

But there's another head of that hydra. The specter of fascism hovers over this nation. Capitalists stood with the fascists then, they plotted to overthrew the government in 1933 to stop the modest Social Democrat reforms from FDR, the self-proclaimed “savior of capitalism”. They stood with Mussolini and Hitler before the US joined and actively got rich off of those fascist countries. And they'll do it again if given the chance. Because they would rather give up Democracy itself than an iota of profits. Fascism is Capitalism in decay.

Read this book. It's incredible and important.

This book truly is the sister of “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” Reading one is a requirement after reading the other, as they susinctly match and compliment the themes and overarching tales of exploitation from, sometimes, the same corporations in both continents.

Slaves stolen from both Africa and Latin America worked on planting and harvesting mono-cultured cash crops on both continents to feed Europe and the US. The most powerful countries on earth will do anything to maintain their stranglehold on the world's resources. Invasion, genocide, crippling economic sanctions, whatever it takes.

“Like sugarcane, cacao means monoculture, the burning of forests, the dictatorship of international prices, and perpetual penury for the workers. The plantation owners, who live on the Rio de Janeiro beaches and are more businessmen than farmers, do not permit a single inch of land to be devoted to other crops. Their managers normally pay wages in kind—jerked beef, flour, beans; when paid in cash, the peasant receives the equivalent of a liter of beer for a whole day's work, and must work a day and a half to buy a can of powdered milk.”

When your country's entire economy is based on the export of a handful of crops or mined minerals, a national economic collapse is merely a matter of when, not if. The international corporations deliberately play these under-developed countries off eachother to drive down the prices of the raw materials. And when a bust comes, the rich move on and the poor get shafted. Just like everywhere else.

Anything they call “international aid” is simply more tools of controlling these underdeveloped nations. They don't give money to help. They give it because they've sucked up too much wealth and need to help balance things out so the exploited countries don't collapse. Because if that happens, the resources run dry.

This is a fantastic book that I encourage anyone interested in understanding South America, the history of global capitalism, and the history of US Imperialism. Also read “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” immediately before or after reading this book.

A powerful work that reveals the truth behind why Africa has fallen so far behind developmentally compared to Europe and the US.

The reason is simple: first Europe stole millions of human beings from Africa, committing systematic genocides for over a century. This left Africa without the labor needed to develop itself and left Europe and the US with a slave workforce used to develop their own economies, creating massive wealth.

Much of the wealth and power garnered by this slave labor was then leveraged to further exploit Africa, draining it of its natural wealth shortly after draining it of its labor. Colonization's sole purpose is to drain the wealth of weaker nations for the benefit of stronger nations and international corporations. Many of the corporations who benefited from colonial exploitation of Africa still exist today:
Cadbury, Firestone, Unilever, De beers, and more.

The colonies weren't developed to process their natural wealth into high-value products. Of course not. Then the workers would rise up like they did in Europe. If Africans just do the high-labor, low-skill work, then the laborers can be replaced without issue. And they can become further indebted by selling back the high-value commodities they helped make. Export cheap cocoa, import expensive chocolate. Export cheap rubber trees, import expensive tires. Export cheap bauxite, import expensive aluminum products. It wasn't mysterious “market forces”. It was, and is, deliberate & intentional exploitation by powerful countries against weaker countries.

What's worse was the colonial education system, designed not to teach them about their own country's history, culture, peoples, indigenous flora and fauna, etc. but strove to teach them about such things of the colonizing country, all with the direct assertion that their own subjugation is justifiable. Such propaganda was heavily internalized.

I think he spiritual sequel to this book is “Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism” by Ha-Joon Chang (2007) which picks up where this book left off: Neoliberalism (AKA Neocolonialism), where countries are pressured into gutting any policies that help their people in order to prioritize exploiting the natural wealth for the benefit of the international corporations.

All of this is still going on today. One long unbroken chain of exploitation stretching back from the time of Columbus. This is why they say “there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism.” Because everything we buy is in some small way associated with this global system of exploitation. This will always be the case until the system, as it exists today, is destroyed.

I thought this was going to be another book about the Us's globe-spanning, century-long escapade of war crimes and their consequences. It was actually just about East Asian countries (Japan, Korea, China, etc) and mostly about economic dominance and the evil IMF.

Okinawa
If the majority of the citizens of a sovereign nation want an occupying military to leave their nation, then the right thing to do is to leave. Right? If, say, the hundreds of thousands of US troops and personnel in Okinawa Japan are incredibly unpopular, due to the high cases of drunkenness, violence, car accidents, and rape all caused by US military folk, then the US should respect the wishes of these occupied people and leave. That's what moral, ethical countries do. We're not at war with Japan anymore. We're simply maintaining our forward operating base within a satellite of the empire.

Reading 20-year old books about international politics is a mixed bag. In some aspects, it's interesting to see how little things change and how predictions can be so spot on.

For example: “An excessive reliance on a militarized foreign policy and an indifference to the distinction between national interests and national values in deciding where the United States should intervene abroad have actually made the country less secure in ways that will become only more apparent in the years to come”

THAT was written in 1999, in the first edition. Holy moly. He could not be more right.

Not only that, the guy pretty much exactly predicts China's Belt & Road initiative to rival the IMF and US Hegemony: “It is only a matter of time until the small nations of East Asia get tired of this American bullying and find a suitable leader to create an anti-American coalition.” Virtually every southeast Asian country has signed up for it, along with most of the rest of the world. I really want to read a book about it.

On the other hand, there is also a lot of stuff that is now simply out of date and wrong in this book. Mostly about China. Including “Hong Kong is indeed no longer at issue”. Whoops. Can't always get it right.

Then there was the issue I found most intriguing, the “Asian concept of human rights”. I have been a big supporter of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I still am. But I'm now coming around to the fact that they are a concept created by Western Liberal empires, and come with the hyper-individualistic, anti-community bias that such empires push for.

“The selective way the U.S. government has wielded the human rights issue has had an unintended consequence. It has stimulated Asians of many different persuasions to develop an “Asian concept of human rights” and to attack the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights as not “universal” at all but only another manifestation of Western cultural imperialism. [...][Quoting Lee Kuan Yew] ‘Americans believe their ideas are universal—the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not. Never were [...] The ideas of individual supremacy and the right to free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working.'”

This is an interesting point of view that I want to learn more about.

• Good. This is another book that I finished before discovering there is a new version (2018), but it's a “young reader's edition” so it doesn't count. It really does need a new version because it has several chapters that are out of date.
  
  This book is a collection of short stories related to the discovery/creation of various elements on the periodic table. Most of these stories consist of “scientist screws around, discovers something weird, inadvertently poisons self or loved one, dies.”
  
  Really disappointed this book COMPLETELY ignore the Radium Girls. How is that possible? Not even a single solitary sentence. I was shocked. Google them if you wanna know how cool and good unregulated capitalism is.
  
  The author also had a really weird sentence when trying to describe pathological science: “It's not pseudoscience, like Freudianism and Marxism, fields that poach on the imprimatur of science yet shun the rigors of the scientific method.” Seems like a really bold assertion to casually throw out there without any follow-up in this fun little book about chemistry. But alright.
  
  Great dad book. Your dad would love this book.
  
  

It's interesting to read this book and think about the media trying to scare us about China's “oppressive social credit score” system.
Meanwhile we have a patchwork of far less transparent black box systems that control...
• if you get into college
• if you get offered a job
• If you get a mortgage
• If you get targeted by scam universities or scam credit systems
• if you get approve to rent a home
• if you get fired or promoted
• if you get stopped by the police
• if you get bail
• if you get a longer criminal sentence
• if you get probation
And more. Existing systemic bias is coded into these algorithms, resulting in a venire of “science” and “objectivity” used to justify further systemic oppression.
Racist cops find more crime in poor non-white neighborhoods → algorithms designed to find “where crime might happen” takes this garbage data and outputs garbage results → Cops further oppress these neighborhoods, locking up more poor people → An algorithm looks at the material conditions of a defendant and determines that since he's poor, his friends and family are and have had run-ins with the law, and he has few professional prospects, he is likely to reoffend and gets a more stringent sentence.
This feedback loop reinforces our racist, classist criminal justice system while claiming to use “scientific, non-biased” tools. This is just one of the many examples of “big data” run amuck outlined in ths book.

Many more include leveraging big data to suck as much money out of poor people as they can possibly get away with. Because when we have a global economic system primarily driven by profit instead of helping people, the newest technological revolutionary tools will be used not to push humanity forward, but to suck up all our personal information to serve us targeted ads, many of which include ads to scam us.

Great book. highly recommended.

I read the 2nd edition

Holy moly. I was literally putting on the finishing touches of this review when I heard the news about the author passing. What a strange and sad coincidence. Please read her books. She was a wonderful person and I hope she rests in power.
One of my favorite YouTubers, “F.D. Signifier” recommended this author, and I already had one of her books on my reading list, so I figured I'd bump up this more recent book to the top of the list.
To me, this short book seems to be the spiritual predecessor of “Feminism for the 99%” by Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser, and Tithi Bhattacharya (2019). Both of which look at the intersectionality of feminism with racial justice, and class consciousness. This is summarized by my favorite quote: “Intersectionality without class consciousness is just Identity politics. Class consciousness without intersectionality is class reductionism. We need both. We have the same enemy.” Coined by someone on Twitter.
As the author says, feminism IS for everybody. It's not about fighting specific people, it's about fighting specific ideas and to strive for a more fair, safe, & equitable society.
The first edition was published in 2000. Which you can really tell when the author doesn't mention the internet at all, and how the author kept describing lesbianism as a “choice” and a “lifestyle choice”. Bit of a yikes. The only obvious change in this version was a new Forward. But there might have been more changes that I didn't notice.
What was interesting to me was how she mentioned after her first book (“Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism”) was published, she angered the lesbian community for not including them in the book. And in this book, she doesn't mention trans people at all. Very curious.
I really liked how she went over the history of 20th century feminism, the infighting, infiltration of bourgeois white feminism, and sects of thought that were more alienating to the general public than others. Such as the sect that believes sadomasochism is anti-feminist, (which we'd now call kink-shaming) and the sect that believed all form of penetrative sex, no matter what, is rape (which we'd now call crazy talk). I didn't know much about those two and several other branches of feminist theory. That was interesting.
Pretty much everything she brings up is still relevant 21 years later:
• “Men's Rights” organizations being a cesspool of misogyny.
• Colonial ‘feminists' leveraging US imperialism to tell countries “how to treat your women”. This has become more relevant this year with the final end of the war in Afghanistan. We've seen conservatives & supposed ‘bleeding heart' liberals claiming to care about the women of Afghanistan, and how that's why we need to continue the endless war that's killed thousands of female civilians. Next year I'll hopefully be reading “A Decolonial Feminism” by Françoise Vergès, which will cover that more.
• “Power Feminists,” more colloquially be referred to now as “lean-in feminism,” which is a faux-feminist sect that encourages the domination of women by other women in the corporate setting. This was really well dismantled in “Feminism for the 99%”. It's incredibly popular in the white liberal sphere.
• How physically abusing children is...uh...bad, no matter what. I still get in Facebook fights with friends and randoms about whether or not you should spank your children, despite the insurmountable evidence against the practice.
• The ever shaky ground of reproductive rights. More relevant than ever these days.
I liked the book. It strove to explain feminist theory in a simple, easy to understand manner that doesn't make you feel bad about yourself, and it succeeded. I recommend it to anyone interested in wanting to understand intersectional feminist theory. Though if you want an even more concise book on intersectional feminism, I'd highly recommend “Feminism for the 99%.” That was one of my favorite books of 2019.

Dr. Carl Hart is living in the year 2100. His bold proclamation is elegant in its simplicity: criminalization of ANY recreational drug causes more inherent harm to society than good. For that reason, EVERY drug should be decriminalized, legalized, regulated, and taxed.

Just like ending prohibition in the 1920's. Just like ending marijuana criminalization today. Just like some states are even pushing for legalization of some psychedelics. This fight will not end until all drug prohibition ends and the words of the Declaration of Independence finally ring true: the right to the pursuit of happiness.

Everything we were taught in school and told by the Mainstream Media about recreational drugs is either completely wrong or incredibly sensationalized.
Police over the last century have demonized & lied about a specific drug and use those lies as post-hoc justifications for the unjust murders they committed, to further brutalize the poor and marginalized communities, and to justify future murders.

Any time you hear “[New scary drug] makes people aggressive, gives them immense strength, and makes them impervious to bullets,” or anything like that, it's lies made up by cops. Every time.

Remember that guy who “became a cannibal after taking bath salts?” Well turns out he didn't have any bath salts (MDPV, methylone, mephedrone, etc) in his system at all at the time of the assault. But that didn't stop the cops from lying and the media from buying & repeating their lies. And now that class of drug, which had NOTHING TO DO with that assault, is outlawed. For no good reason.
The major cause of drug-related deaths is user's poor understanding of how to administer the drug safely, and the fact that because these drugs exist on a black market, they are unregulated and no one really knows what they're buying. This can be remedied through legalization, regulation, and education.

Brutalizing drug users will never eliminate the use of these drugs. Ever. These laws are always enforced in a manner that primarily harms the poor and marginalized people, despite the fact that drugs ARE expensive, and frequently used by the well to do. But if you're rich and white, the cops aren't gonna bust down your door for wanting to have a good time in the privacy of your own home.
Crack and cocaine are the same exact drug chemically and pharmacologically, yet the sentences for possession are 18x greater for crack. Why? Because historically black people used crack and white people used cocaine. That's literally the only reason. (Luckily it's down from what it used to be before 2010, which was 100:1. Thanks Obama, I guess)

Drugs won the “war on drugs.” It's time to end it. It's time to stop the prison industrial complex from continuing to enslave people who dare to want to alter their minds. It's time to legalize.

I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. This is a fight that anyone who supports individual freedom and/or dismantling the racist, oppressive criminal justice system should support.

Bad. This book sucked. I hate biographies, especially about jerks like Edison, written by an uncritical fanboy author.

I wish I had read this in like May when I was reading the other books in this category, instead of November, when I found the audiobook. But what can you do? It was pretty good

The internet is a series of tubes. Quite literally. Everything you do online requires data to travel through thousands of miles of tubes. This is a tale about finding these tubes, the physical locations our digital data travel through.

The author lavishly regales his journey to the internet backbone buildings across the world, the obscure conferences, and various historically relevant locations involved in the creation and maintenance of the modern Internet.

This is a pop-science book, which I am now realizing has similar issues to the pop-psychology books I've previously read.
The author formats the book in a first-person narrative, from the perspective of a layman, adding in all sorts of irrelevant information to keep the reader engaged and the “narrative flowing”. But I don't really care about what the author thinks or feels, I just want to learn. I want a “How It's Made”, technically-focused, detailed book. But that's not what this is, which is disappointing.

Ive been googling up a storm trying to understand PON/AON, QAM, Multiplexing, FTTx, and other aspects about how the internet works that were COMPLETELY ABSENT in this book.

But it's written by a layman for laymen, so if you want to learn about data centers and intercontinental fiberoptic cables, network centers, and...some other random irrelevant crap formulated as a whimsical journey, this book is for you. But I was disappointed.

Funnily enough, I just noticed the cover has a quote from the author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)” by Tom Vanderbilt, which is another pop science/pop psychology book written by a layman about a complicated subject: automobile traffic. That's funny because that book was WAY better than this one. Go read Traffic.

This is by far one of the best books I've read all year. I strongly recommend this book to everyone.

I've never been the spiritual type. I'm a methaphysical naturalist. But this book is the first book ever that has me questioning such an ideology. The ones who cleave the spirit from the natural world are also those who seek to dominate it at all costs.

If societally accepted fictions like corporations can garner personhood despite not tangibly existing, then we must expand our definition of personhood & individual rights to things and beings that do exist, like rivers and forests and animals. As these aren't “natural resources” to plunder. They're vital threads in the web of life.

Environmental sustainability is fundamentally incomparable with Capitalism. You cannot support both. Capitalism requires endless growth for the sake of growth. This is impossible on a finite planet, and unethical in a world filled with unjust suffering, poverty, and death caused by capitalism's unquenchable thirst.
GDP does not measure the health or wellbeing of the people or the environment, but the health and wellbeing of capital. Countries with lower GDP's have higher levels of happiness, wellbeing, lower carbon footprints, longer lifespans, etc.. In this country, we work ourselves to death not for ourselves, but to make the rich richer.

We must ignore GDP and shift our global economic system from an exchange-value system (underlined by unending growth and capital accumulation) to a use-value system (underlined by improving the health and wellbeing of the people, and becoming a more environmentally sustainable society.

This can be accomplished by de-comodifying healthcare via M4A, creating universal basic services, strengthening labor rights (reducing the work week without reducing pay, among other things)

Reading theory is hard. though modern theory is more tolerable, especially with the author making reference to modern media and how it relates to the theory. I should have read this BEFORE “Four Futures” as this book asks the question “what comes after Capitalism?” Where “Four Futures” answers the question.

One day, Capitalism will end.
Read that sentence again, slowly.
One day, the global economic system we colloquially understand as “Capitalism” will be replaced by a different system. No one can say with certainty what will replace it, but it is utterly absurd to assert that it will NEVER end.
This begs the question: what will replace it?
The author postulates 4 possibilities along a 2X2 matrix: Equality vs Hierarchy and Abundance vs Scarcity.
It's interesting to see how the powers that be are pushing society toward one of these futures through the lenses of these 4 possibilities. My (least) favorite possibility was Rentism, which is pushed by ghouls like Bill Gates, trying to lock as much of the world's resources behind the “benevolence” of corporations and NGO's, so the commons own nothing and everything must be rented. Quite ominous.
The book is thought-provoking and short. I highly recomend

I want to start reading books about how scientific discoveries affected the wider world. Initially I was looking for a book about the discovery of dinosaurs and its impacts, but haven't nailed down which one to get. If you have a recommendation that covers dinosaurs or anything else, let me know!

This book is about how Darwin's “On the Origin of Species” affected the lives of people in mid-1800's America, pre-civil war, post-John Brown's death. It follows the lives of various notable people and how the release of this book affected then and their surroundings.

This was before Science and Scientists existed as we understand them today. Western societies of the time asserted that “science was nothing less than the study of God's creation.” Darwin helped cleave science from religion & transcendentalism by dismantling the biblical idea of creation, helping push society toward a more materialist, agnostic, and rational science. One more capable of questioning religious dogma.

You can see even then the 3 categories of responses from people back then:
• Outright denial and demonization of such blasphemy
• Acceptance/intrigue and leaning toward agnosticism
• And my favorite retort: God of the Gaps. Accepting the theory and filling in the things it doesn't sufficiently cover (the origin of life itself, the complexities of the human eye, the evolution of consciousness, etc.) with “God did it” or that “natural selection is a mechanism employed by God”. We see this today too, and those gaps get smaller and smaller as science advances.

The book was also released in one of the most turbulent times of US History: 1860. John Brown had just been murdered by the state for fighting to end slavery, and the Civil War was incoming. Here comes a book that shatters the “race science”/“scientific racism”/polygeny (white supremacy masquerading as science) by (indirectly) saying all human beings are human beings and that other races aren't some ‘inferior species'. It was a powerful notion ~160 years ago. And the notion still hasn't won out against individual or societal racism completely. (Read “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter, 2010 for more about this topic)

Darwin wasn't right about everything. He was a product of his time, holding racist, colonialist views like believing primitive peoples represented a missing link between primates and humans. His theory evolved with the help of other scientists. After the civil war, the theory was bastardized to assert that black people were inferior and white folk were better adapted to survive. This was justification to pass “anti-miscegenation” laws, outlawing interracial marriage.
I wish this book focused more on the society as a whole and less on the collection of mini-biographies of the individuals affected by Darwin. Other than that, it was pretty good.

Wow. This book goes HARD. I first got a better understanding about the true evils of Christopher Columbus after reading “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond (1997), “A People's History of the United States” (2004 edition) by Howard Zinn, “An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014), and “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong “ by James W. Loewen (2008). All fantastic books I would highly recommend.
So I already knew he was a bad dude. But because it's Indigenous Peoples Day weekend, I figured I'd read a short book just about him. But this book...this book cranks it to 11 at the jump. It does not hold its punches against Columbus, the church, colonialists, capitalists, anyone. It's awesome. Reading through the author's Wikipedia page and watching some videos of interviews with him, it's no wonder he'd write something this unabashedly provocative. He was an amazing professor and historian that tried to right the wrongs of the US's Eurocentric historical understanding.
Christopher Columbus was a bad guy. He personally participated in the genocides of countless people on two different continents. Don't take my word for it. You can read his own journal to see how ruthlessly evil he was. He didn't discover shit. You cannot discover places where people already exist. Furthermore, he didn't know he “discovered” a new place, AND he wasn't the first European to show up. He destroyed more cultures than he helped create.
What he did do was spearhead (and personally participate in) the genocides of the natives of North America and the genocides of native Africans. He was ruthless and cruel. He set into motion the beginnings of capitalism, commodifying human beings and slaughtering those who disobey.
I'll be checking out some more stuff by this author and some books he recommended in his interviews and in this book. His call for Pan-Africanism is really interesting and a subject I know disappointingly little about.
Highly recommended to anyone who wants to actually understand this history of the founding of the USA and not the whitewashed bullshit they teach in school.