Wow.
It is deeply researched, coherently presented, cogently argued. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll wonder how you ever could have believed that things are what they seem or are how the powers that be present them.
Wow.
I think the primary reason Trump provokes such strong revulsion in some quarters is that he represents the id of the America empire—the hideous, capering truth that so much of our culture is designed to obscure.
“Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute which morality pays to immorality, or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised. One can never be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external observer or whether, as may be usually the case, it deceives the self. Naturally this defect in individuals becomes more apparent in the less moral life of nations. Yet it might be supposed that nations, of whom so much less is expected, would not be under the necessity of making moral pretensions for their actions. There was probably a time when they were under no such necessity. Their hypocrisy is both a tribute to the growing rationality of man and a proof of the ease with which rational demands may be circumvented.”
UPDATE: A friend at Amazon saw this post, looked into it, and informed me that the whole thing was a mistake: my second review did indeed post; I shouldn’t have received the first email, requiring revisions; I certainly shouldn’t have received the second email, mistakenly informing me that even my revised review wouldn’t do. They’re reviewing what went wrong and will try to fix it.
I figured this was a glitch (as I’ve said in comments, there are 200+ other reviews of the book and of course the book is itself for sale, so suppressing my review would be a pretty shaky means of suppression).
Anyway kudos to Amazon for trying to figure out what went wrong and for trying to fix it.
And again: The Putin Interviews is extremely illuminating and highly recommended.
************
I’ve now tried twice to post an Amazon customer review of Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews.
One or more of your posts were found to be outside our guidelines. In order to help our customers make informed choices, we encourage them to review the product and contribute information about it. However, Community content that violate our guidelines or Conditions of Use will be removed.
Please consider this a first warning.
Before submitting your next post, please refer to our Customer Guidelines:
http://business.amazon.com/abredir/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_508088_bid_1594471?nodeId=508088
Failure to comply with our policies may result in your account being banned from taking part in Community features.
Thanks for your understanding in this matter.
You may post reviews, comments, photos, videos, and other content; send e-cards and other communications; and submit suggestions, ideas, comments, questions, or other information, so long as the content is not illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights (including publicity rights), or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable, and does not consist of or contain software viruses, political campaigning, commercial solicitation, chain letters, mass mailings, or any form of "spam" or unsolicited commercial electronic messages. You may not use a false e-mail address, impersonate any person or entity, or otherwise mislead as to the origin of a card or other content.
If you’re not familiar with Noam Chomsky’s insights into the real causes and consequences of US foreign policy, The Myth of American Idealism is an excellent introduction. If you are familiar, it’s a great refresher. IMO, the biggest, high-level takeaways:
To put it another way, my approach to creating characters in my novels is based on the recognition that humans are more alike than dissimilar, that our commonalities are more consequential than our differences. If that’s true, than a good start to understanding the behavior of others is to understand ourselves. America is run by humans, which means it’s run by the same kinds of people—subject to the same laws of human nature—as those who run China, Iran, Russia, etc. Of course culture matters, but culture is only a finite expression of human nature, which itself is unvarying.
See, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society:
“Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute which morality pays to immorality, or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised. One can never be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external observer or whether, as may be usually the case, it deceives the self. Naturally this defect in individuals becomes more apparent in the less moral life of nations. Yet it might be supposed that nations, of whom so much less is expected, would not be under the necessity of making moral pretensions for their actions. There was probably a time when they were under no such necessity. Their hypocrisy is both a tribute to the growing rationality of man and a proof of the ease with which rational demands may be circumvented.”
There is no way to read Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario and conclude other than that nuclear abolition should be a top priority for all world leaders. Nothing could be worth the risk to humanity of a highly emotional species, given to miscalculations, mistakes, and misunderstandings, possessing tens of thousands of the instruments of its own destruction.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
Of course I can’t prove or disprove the workings of Putin’s heart, and I don’t have access to the minutes of meetings of the Russian government. So at some point, arguments about motivations become declarations of faith. But I would argue that in addition to reasons to be suspicious regarding NNH and related explanations for the war, there is abundant evidence, much of it memory-holed or otherwise suppressed in western establishment discourse, that the real and obvious reason Russia invaded Ukraine has been NATO metastasis.
Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era…Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma’s ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.
Or if only 46 foreign policy experts—former senators, admirals, CIA directors, secretaries of defense—could also as far back as 1997 have foreseen that:
The current U.S.-led effort to expand NATO is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability for the following reasons: (i) In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the START II and III treaties; (ii) In Europe, NATO expansion will draw a new line of division between the “ins” and the “outs,” foster instability, and ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included…Or if only then-US ambassador to Russia and current director of the CIA William Burns could have warned in 2008 in a Wikileaks-uncovered secret cable called “Nyet Means Nyet” to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that:
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face…Or if only America’s last ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, could have warned in 1997 in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that:
I consider the [Clinton] administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.Then there’s historian podcaster Darryl Cooper. This episode, comparing the west’s treatment of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union with the Treaty of Versailles the allies forced on Germany following WWI, is from spring 2022, not long after Russia invaded.
Just posted my Amazon customer review of Scott Horton’s outstanding Provoked, the definitive guide to what really caused and continues to prolong the war in Ukraine: