Bharat Rakshak

Empires of the Silk Road is a major scholarly achievement. This is the first book to provide a comprehensive account of the history of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present. But it is much more than a simple narrative of events in what is arguably the most important region for the development of civilization during the past four or five millennia. It is an intellectually ambitious undertaking that attempts to account for essential transformations in the cultural, economic, and political life of societies situated both within the Central Eurasian heartland and on its periphery. Beckwith achieves the radical feat of demonstrating how Central Eurasia is actually key for understanding the dynamics of human history and progress throughout antiquity, the medieval period, and the recent past. Above all, and for the first time, he convincingly shows that Central Eurasia was not a sump of poverty-stricken, unremittingly vicious subhumans, but a wellspring of vibrant, energetic, resourceful, enterprising peoples who facilitated communication and change in all directions. In other words, Beckwith turns conventional wisdom on its head and makes Central Eurasia the core of human history, rather than the embarrassing backwater which it is usually portrayed as. Perhaps his greatest contribution is in the powerful, sustained epilogue, where he shatters a whole galaxy of misconceptions about the dreaded 'barbarians.'

An original, useful, and very timely book, China between Empires is arguably the first single-volume comprehensive treatment for general readers of Chinese history between AD 220 and 589. Lewis writes clearly and with conviction and marshals an impressive array of evidence--historical, religious, technological, literary, and archaeological. It is a remarkable achievement, especially considering the extreme complexity of the period.
--Lothar von Falkenhausen, University of California, Los Angeles

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After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions.

The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of the country. Literature moved beyond the court and capital to depict local culture, and newly emerging social spaces included the garden, temple, salon, and country villa. The growth of self-defined genteel families expanded the notion of the elite, moving it away from the traditional great Han families identified mostly by material wealth. Trailing the rebel movements that toppled the Han, the new faiths of Daoism and Buddhism altered every aspect of life, including the state, kinship structures, and the economy.

By the time China was reunited by the Sui dynasty in 589 ce, the elite had been drawn into the state order, and imperial power had assumed a more transcendent nature. The Chinese were incorporated into a new world system in which they exchanged goods and ideas with states that shared a common Buddhist religion. The centuries between the Han and the Tang thus had a profound and permanent impact on the Chinese world.

"To Keep the British Isles Afloat" is a page-turner that illuminates a critical moment in WWII history and Anglo-American diplomacy. Parrish provides telling anecdotes about FDR, Churchill, Averell Harriman, and Harry Hopkins. I hadn't known before that the latter two were so charismatic. And hadn't realized that FDR had the perfect temperment for presidency. Parrish's writing style is witty and perceptive. History and biography buffs will especially appreciate his ability to make known history suspenseful.

In a resolutely popular treatment, Parrish recounts the missions of emissaries whom President Roosevelt dispatched to Britain in early 1941 to assess Winston Churchill’s bibulous habits and Britain’s will and means to resist Nazi Germany. Emphasizing personalities and period detail, such as the experience of transatlantic flight in wartime, Parrish previews central characters Harry Hopkins and W. Averill Harriman via their biographies, Hopkins’ that of gregarious social worker and New Deal executive; Harriman’s of a humorless, hardworking railroad heir yearning to get into politics. FDR’s commission was Harriman’s biggest chance yet, but Hopkins reconnoitered first, in January 1941. Parrish evocatively renders the atmosphere of Hopkins’ inspection, encompassing dinners with Churchill, nights under the Blitz, and railroad journeys to naval bases, and continuing with similar descriptions of Hopkins’ report back to the White House, where he lived at FDR’s invitation. Following up with Harriman’s task of totting up Britain’s military needs and his extramarital affair with Pamela Churchill, Parrish ably dramatizes FDR’s characteristically personalized diplomacy, which eventuated in the Lend-Lease program. --Gilbert Taylor

Blank Spots on the Map is an expose of an empire that continues to grow every year—and which, officially, it isn’t even there. It is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer’s road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and C.I.A. “black ops” sites. This is a shadow nation of state secrets: clandestine military bases, ultra-secret black sites, classified factories, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies making up what defense and intelligence insiders themselves call the “black world.” Run by an amorphous group of government agencies and private companies, this empire’s ever expanding budget dwarfs that of many good sized countries, yet it denies its own existence.

Author Trevor Paglen is a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur. His research into areas that officially don’t exist leads him on a globe-trotting investigation into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled black empire—the unmarked blank areas whether you are looking at Google Earth or a U.S. Geological Survey map. Paglen knocks on the doors of CIA prisons, stakes out the Groom Lake covert air base in Nevada from a mountaintop 30 miles away, observes classified spacecraft in the night sky with amateur astronomers, and dissects the Defense Department’s multibillion dollar black budget. Traveling to the Middle East, Central America, and even around our nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs, he interviews the people who live on the edges of these blank spots.

Paglen visits the widow of Walter Kazra, who, while working construction at Groom Lake, was poisoned by the toxic garbage pits there. The U. S. Air Force defense to his estate’s suit? The base does not exist. The U. S. Supreme Court declined to review the case. Whether Paglen reports from a hotel room in Vegas, Washington D. C. suburbs, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Honduras, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, he is impassioned, rigorous, relentless—and eye-opening. This is a human, vivid, and telling portrait of a ballooning national mistake.

The U.S. National Security Act of 1947 established a national security structure which was felt to be necessary to protect the U.S. from what was perceived as serious threats from foreign and domestic enemies. Almost immediately a parallel structure, invisible to public, was created as a compliment to the public national security establishment. This parallel structure is what this absolutely fascinating book refers to as the "black world."

According to Trevor Paglen, a geographer by trade, this black world can bounded by adroit compilation of blank areas on official maps, deleted passages from official documents, and acute observations of restricted areas and activities. Well he has certainly done a very thorough job of it. He begins with the secret and unacknowledged government test sites scattered throughout the country, but especially in the South Western U.S. that actually employ an astonishingly large number military and civilian workers yet still are literarily off the map. He subsequently tackles such arcane topics as black operations, black funding, and a host of other unacknowledged, often denied, U.S. activities including questionable and even illegal programs and operations. Perhaps the most discouraging information he provides is how easily it is for officials of the black world to hoodwink congress and the media, both nominal guards against government excesses. Certainly the most astonishing thing he reveals is that the black world in total may employ as many as 4 million military and civilians who carry secret or higher clearances. The fact that this many people can be involved and yet so many black activities remain completely off the gird is pretty scary in itself.

This reviewer has tremendous respect for the academic discipline of geography. It combines some of the best features of social and physical science and perhaps is the most effective system for understanding the phenomenon of Globalization. Some 60 years ago one branch of geography that was called "cultural geography" sought to describe the relationship between societies and the environment in which they lived. The term may no longer be used, but Paglen is a cultural geographer in the best sense of the term.


An interesting historical review of the "Black" world of American intelligence operations. The title is a little misleading but considering the subject matter that seems rather appropriate. Mr. Paglen does an adequate job of historical documentation on all aspects of the secret and above secret "Black" world of alphabet soup intelligence agencies. At times he is rather pedantic in certain aspects of the intelligence world, like super secret intelligence satellites, while quickly glossing over more interesting operations like Iran-Contra and Groom Lake. His chapter on Federal Law and the evolution of today's massive intelligence gathering machine is very interesting and worthy of more examination. One of the most interesting little nuggets that Mr. Paglen highlighted was, "At this moment approximately four million (his italics) people in the United States hold security clearances to work on classified projects. By way of contrast, the federal government employs approximately 1.8 million civilians in the white world." Amazing. Since its very beginning as the "Black Chamber" in 1919, covert/clandestine/"Black" Operations has grown to such a monumental size that few in our government knows just how large the "organization" really is.

The Measure of America is the first-ever human development report for a wealthy, developed nation. It introduces the American Human Development Index, which provides a single measure of well-being for all Americans, disaggregated by state and congressional district, as well as by gender, race, and ethnicity. The Index rankings of the 50 states and 436 congressional districts reveal huge disparities in the health, education, and living standards of different groups. Clear, precise, objective, and authoritative, this report will become the basis for all serious discussions concerning the realization of a fair, just, and globally competitive American society.


The American Human Development Project is far more than just a report of data and conclusions. On the contrary, it not only provides interesting insight on the state of our nation, but it gives its readers a completely fresh perspective on how to examine our collective and individual well-bring. For example, instead of emphasizing how the economy is doing (GDP, etc) we should be asking how our citizens are faring within the economy.

The report is unique and the first of its kind in that it exclusively examines the United States all the way down to its 436 congressional districts. Likewise, even more specific lenses are provided when ethnicity, age, income, etc are all included. From all this, index scores are computed and given to each locality and state, allowing readers to rank and compare just how well-off we all are. This is truly an innovative report that is well worth a long look.

This is a stunning, detailed, thoughtful, and remarkably informative collection of information. The statistics and summaries illustrate trends that clearly show what our policy priorities should be and why. The website and interactive support materials found there are fun, sleek, and colorful, and bring the numbers alive, with some surprising facts revealed, positive and negative. I am using this for college level psychology course instruction, for human development and stress/health topics. What a lens this information provides, and in such an engaging, user friendly format-manifesting the ideal that human tools, knowledge and culture can and should enhance human experience and development. A must read not only for policy makers, educators, health care workers, economic advisors or investors, but for anyone living on planet earth!

In 1683, an Ottoman army that stretched from horizon to horizon set out to seize the “Golden Apple,” as Turks referred to Vienna. The ensuing siege pitted battle-hardened Janissaries wielding seventeenth-century grenades against Habsburg armies, widely feared for their savagery. The walls of Vienna bristled with guns as the besieging Ottoman host launched bombs, fired cannons, and showered the populace with arrows during the battle for Christianity’s bulwark. Each side was sustained by the hatred of its age-old enemy, certain that victory would be won by the grace of God.

The Great Siege of Vienna is the centerpiece for historian Andrew Wheatcroft’s richly drawn portrait of the centuries-long rivalry between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires for control of the European continent. A gripping work by a master historian, The Enemy at the Gate offers a timely examination of an epic clash of civilizations.


Andrew Wheatcroft's "The Enemy at the Gate" to be a good primer about the empires, their epic clash in 1683, and 17th century European history generally. Although the narrative lacks focus, its heart - a study of the massive Ottoman campaign against the capital of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire - is solid.

The conquest of Vienna would have been the crown achievement of the Ottoman Empire, a victory to rival the conquest of Constantinople. Vienna had withstood a siege by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1521, and topping his achievement would have immortalized his distant successor, Mehmet IV. It was a battle for the glory of the empire and that of Islam - "to be hailed as the Conqueror of Vienna was an irresistible Prospect" (p. 82).

Irresistible, but far fetched. From the get go, the Ottomans were disadvantaged - their troops, although superior to the Habsburg forces individually, were far less disciplined, and were unable to maneuver as ably. The Ottomans were facing an invasion of a well defended country in an era in which military maneuvering were moving away from pitch battles into sieges. By the late seventeenth Century, the Ottoman Habsburg border was littered with formidable castles. Vienna itself sported impressive defenses, admittedly poorly maintained. Mehmet's task was considerably more onerous than the one attempted by his legendary ancestor.

Not that the Sultan was there to command the campaign - in fact, neither sovereign participated directly in the campaign. Mehmet IV, after accompanying his soldiers part of the way as a de jure commander, gave formal authority to his Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa in Belgrade. On the Habsburg side, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I abandoned Vienna as soon as it appeared the Ottomans were approaching.

The Ottoman army caught the Holy Roman Empire unaware; Its leaders did not foresee a march on Vienna, and the city was left mostly undefended, with its main forces scattered. Arriving in Vienna in middle of July, the Turks surrounded the city, and the war started in earnest.

The Ottoman Siege of Vienna was a pitched battle, a daily carnage as the Ottomans inched forward, mining and destroying the Viennese defenses piece by piece, all the time under heavy fire. "Nothing until the battle of Stalingrad in 1942 equaled the relentless struggle in the ditch before Vienna... men fought over the mountains of debris, shattered buildings and a landscape of utter desolation" (p. 150).

By the end of august, a month and a half after the siege has commenced, the Ottomans have cracked through most of the main defenses. Battles now raged around improvised, yet effective, barriers. But as the City's defenses endured, help was on the way. A coalition of Habsburg, Polish, and several Germanic states' forces made its way towards Vienna. Battle was matched on September the 12th, 1683.

Wheatcroft's description of the battle is confusing. With only one map, deciphering the various tactical moves is difficult. Yet the bottom line is clear: after 12 hours of heavy fighting, the result was an utter rout for the Ottoman forces. Vienna, and Christendom, saved.

Unfortunately, Wheatcroft's account does not stop after the siege was lifted, or even after the successful Habsburg counter attack, which led to the re-conquest of Hungary by the early 18th century. Instead, Wheatcroft spends several rambling chapters tracking Turkish-Western relations to the present, in a transparent and cheap attempt at political relevance.

He would have been wise to avoid it. Until the final chapters, "The Enemy at the Gate" is a workmanlike history of the Battle of Vienna and its aftermath. It is mostly well written, albeit somewhat confusing: The narrative jumps around places and times in a manner that makes it difficult for the reader to keep track. In chronicling decades of Ottoman-Habsburg clashes, it is sometimes difficult to decide where and when events occurred. Nevertheless, if we overlook its pretensions and expositional faults, "The Enemy at the Gate" is a worthwhile piece for anyone interested in the mighty clash between two competing empires, and two great faiths.

From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool's Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown.

Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia," as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team's bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control.

The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the "shadow banking" world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk.

But when the Morgan team's derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and was perverted -- through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed -- by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch -- even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling -- catastrophe followed. Tett's access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank's escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown.

A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, Fool's Gold is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.

About the Author
Gillian Tett oversees global coverage of the financial markets for the Financial Times, the world's leading newspaper covering finance and business. In 2007 she was awarded the Wincott prize, the premier British award for financial journalism, for her capital-markets coverage. In 2008, she was named British Business Journalist of the Year. She previously served as the newspaper's deputy head of the Lex column (an agenda-setting column on business and financial topics), Tokyo bureau chief, economic correspondent, and foreign correspondent. She speaks regularly at conferences around the world on finance and global markets. She has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University. In 2003, she published a book on Japan's banking crisis, Saving the Sun: How Wall Street Mavericks Shook Up Japan's Financial World and Made Billions.


The book starts with a fly-on-the-wall description of big, offsite meeting in Boca Raton for J.P. Morgan employees. There they made plans to ensure that J.P. Morgan led the industry in credit derivatives. This story of the bravado of young party animals becomes the backdrop for how we got into this mess. These recently minted and overconfident traders and analysts risk takers, lead a headlong charge into a poorly understood market innovation. After that, Tett describes in detail the array of models, players and events that lead to the financial crisis and weaves them all together to explain the events like no other author yet has done.

Although the description of events are detailed, Tett leaves out explanations of how basic psychology and particular modeling errors contributed to the problem - such as the researched described in Hubbard's The Failure of Risk Management: Why It's Broken and How to Fix It (although Hubbard is talking about risk management in a broader sense than financial risks alone, I still recommend both books for this topic). But Tett is also more pragmatic and specific than Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and makes more logically supported conclusions than Posner's A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression.

Tett seems to cover just about every aspect of the recent crisis that an author can cover without getting into specific mathematical modeling errors (Hubbard argues this is a critical contributor but it would be hard to elaborate without alienating much of the audience). He covers AIG, Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae, the credit rating agencies and the Basel II accords. He mentions Gaussian copula model, Goldman Sachs and the actions of Alan Greenspan. The details of Structured Investment Vehicles (SIV) and Value at Risk are included along with recent events like the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

I do not believe there is another single book that has this breadth of coverage combined with a logical picture of how they formed an avalanche of connected events. As of now, this is the single most important book on the topic, period.

Thoroughly researched and focefully presented, Secret Wars gives fascinating insights into the shadowy world behind the scenes where events that shape the world and the people who shape the events are portrayed. World history has many aspects. The one Gordon Thomas describes in this book is certainly one of the most interesting. It shows what normally is not shown and gives chilling accounts of what we would fear if we knew about it.

Two famous British institutions will celebrate their centenaries in 2009: the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI5 and MI6. They maintain an aura of secrecy, a touch of sophistication and a hint of melodrama even in this age of populist candor. Thomas (Descent into Danger), who enjoys justified respect as an authority on the intelligence world, has a broad spectrum of contacts and confidants in both services. He taps their memories and insights in this reconstruction of Britain's intelligence operations from the Age of Empire through the cold war and into today's constantly metamorphosing Islamic challenge. The emphasis on personal evidence at the expense of archival sources gives the work an anecdotal tone and a contemporary focus that makes the subtitle misleading. Both are compensated for by the immediacy of the material and the vividness of the narration, presenting a fascinating cast of moles and double agents, whistle-blowers and politicians. For the ambience of the closed world that inspired James Bond and George Smiley, this book is a winner.

A veteran writer offers this centennial history of the two almost legendary British intelligence agencies, MI5 (foreign) and MI6 (domestic). Founded during the run-up to World War I, they have served the British Crown with varying degrees of skill and success in all the political conundrums and crises since. They have also been gold mines for thriller writers. As an author of intelligence-related fiction and nonfiction (e.g., Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, 3d ed., 2007), Thomas bring to the agencies’ histories a high level of expertise, a fluent style accessible to lay reader and expert alike, and a combination of frankness and balance about some of his subjects’ less glorious chapters. Those involve such things as the Soviet mole during the post–World War II era, the ongoing tension with the CIA, and the problem of deciding whether operations against the IRA and more recent terrorist groups are foreign or domestic. A good basic book on its subjects.

Ansary has written an informative and thoroughly engaging look at the past, present, and future of Islam. With his seamless and charming prose, he challenges conventional wisdom and appeals for a fuller understanding of how Islam and the world at large have shaped each other. And that makes this book, in this uneasy, contentious post-9/11 world, a must read. --Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns
Ansary is a great storyteller and a wise soul. It's not like reading academic history. It's like sitting down with a sage and listening to him tell you a terrific story. It's fascinating that the Islamic world has a totally different (yet legitimate) view of history that emphasizes different events. Europe's dark ages were their Renaissance. Western domination after WWII was their humiliation. Yet both sides steal each others' ideas. I don't think I really understood the world until I read this. Interesting fact: we would know nothing about Aristotle if it wasn't for Persians preserving his work.

He has the right background to speak about, and to, both cultures: Born in Afghanistan to an Afghan father and an American mother, Ansary emigrated to the U.S. in his teens and went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He has lived in the U.S. ever since, with trips back to Afghanistan and the Middle East.

I was fascinated by the book's discussion of Islam's early years in the 7th century, the discussion of Islamic reform movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the compassionate overview of the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East.

For that long-running disaster Ansary assigns blame and plenty to everyone involved, and I mean everyone -- including the British, the Americans, the Russians, and the Saudis. And that's just for starters.

His evaluation of the Six Day War in 1967 is eye-opening; he argues that it was a military triumph in the short term but did more harm than good to Israel in the long term.

I was hungry for a longer discussion of the meaning and impact of 9/11 from an Islamic perspective, and I hope the author will do that in some other publication. That aside, this is the perfect book for readers wanting a readable, friendly, big-picture story of how Islam came to be and the religious and cultural frameworks that shape its view of world history.

Between his first book No God but God and this one, Reza Aslan has a lot to say. He is well versed with the discrepancies within the Islamic world, and portrays them very eloquently in both his books.
Additionally, this book is a broad narrative on the rifts between the muslim world and the Judeo-Christian world, and gives the reader a deep insight into the reasons that created global Jihad.
For anyone who wants to peel the layers and understand these rifts and their reasons, this book should be added to their list.
Its an objective account of history and a peaceful proposition to end religious wars.


A cosmic war is a religious war. It is a battle not between armies or nations, but between the forces of good and evil. The ultimate goal of a cosmic war is to vanquish evil itself, which ensures that a cosmic war remains an absolute, eternal, and ultimately unwinnable conflict. Cosmic wars are fought not over land or politics but over identity. There can be no compromise, no negotiation, no settlement, and no surrender in a cosmic war. The Jihadists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 were fighting a cosmic war. According to Reza Aslan, by adopting the same religiously polarizing rhetoric and cosmic worldview in the so-called War on Terror, the U.S. is also fighting a cosmic war... a war that can't be won.

HOW TO WIN A COSMIC WAR provides both an in-depth study of the ideology behind al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, and like-minded militants throughout the Muslim world, and an exploration of the tradition of religious violence found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Surveying the global scene from Israel to Iraq and from New York to the Netherlands, Aslan argues that religion is a stronger force today than it has been in a century. At a time when religion and politics are increasingly sharing the same vocabulary and functioning in the same sphere, Aslan writes that we must strip this ideological conflict of its religious connotations and address the actual grievances that fuel the Jihadist movement.

How do you win a cosmic war? By refusing to fight in one.


Dr. Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is a columnist at the Daily Beast (thedailybeast.com). Reza Aslan has degrees in Religions from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He serves on the board of directors for both the Ploughshares Fund, which gives grants for peace and security issues, Abraham's Vision, an interfaith peace organization, and PEN USA. AslanÕs first book is the New York Times Bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which has been translated into thirteen languages, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award in the UK, and nominated for a PEN USA award for research Non-Fiction. His most recent book is How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, followed by an edited anthology, Words Without Borders: Writings from the Middle East, which we will be published by Norton in 2010. Aslan is Cofounder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, a hub for creative content from and about the Middle East, as well as Editorial Executive of Mecca.com. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles where he is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Reza Aslan is a brilliant young scholar of Islam and also of comparative religion in general, just the sort that we so dearly need today when there is so much confusion surrounding one of the world's great historical religions and its theological beliefs and political intentions. Born in Iran a few years prior to the overthrow of the Shah and the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, the young boy was whisked out of the country and settled in the United States. Later, he studied religions at Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. At the University of Iowa he received a master's degree in fine arts and served as a visiting assistant professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. In my opinion, one of the advantages he has when speaking and writing about Islam for the American audience is that he is not only knowledgeable about his own heritage, but appears to be thoroughly acquainted with the Western religious tradition and the American culture. This places him in an extremely enviable position for a discussion about the impact of Islam on contemporary geopolitics.

There is little doubt in my own mind, after listening to many Christian leaders and thinkers expound their views about Islam in the popular press (particularly after the 9/11 tragedy), that an unfamiliarity with the history, tradition, and beliefs of Islam abounds in the United States and, probably, in most of the West as well. (This, by the way, has always struck me as strange since I have always considered Islam to be a "western" religion, along with Judaism and Christianity, as contrasted with the "eastern" religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and so forth.) Anyway, some of the more recent and scurrilous attacks on Islam and its founder -- "Muhammad is a pedophile," for instance -- by some "leaders" of Christian churches, show an abysmal ignorance of Islam and its founder, not to mention a frightening lack of perspective in this age of scandals involving Christian televangelists consorting with prostitutes and perpetrating financial fraud and Catholic priests going to prison for the sexual abuse of minors. I won't discuss the Muhammad-pedophilia issue here as Aslan provides the explanation in his book, but the charge made against the founder of Islam, while groundless and misunderstood, is also very stupid.

Most of "No god but God" is devoted to a history of Islam. But it must be understood that this is not a singular nor simple chronological presentation. I suspect there's a presumption among most Westerners, and particularly non-Muslim Americans, that Islam is a rather uncomplicated fanatical faith that is deliberately trying to destroy Western civilization and replace it with some sort of theocratic tyranny. Well, Aslan will straighten you about that. Islam is a very complex faith and his history of it is intertwined with accounts of internecine disputes over doctrinal and moral theology, over leadership and hegemony, over traditions as opposed to meeting contemporary necessities, and all sorts of other problems which any movement -- be it political, social, or religious -- is bound to face. These internal conflicts within Islam should not be a surprise to anyone knowledgeable about the history of Christianity. In fact, one of the things that intrigued me most about his account of the "philosophical" history of Islam is how it parallels in many respects the "philosophical" history of Christianity. After all, Christianity is hardly a "unified" movement and hasn't been for over a thousand years (think Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, just to mention three).

Islam, contrary to the common view of most Americans, is not a unified religious force with a totalitarian script written by theocrats who want to dominate the entire world. There are various factions -- "sects," if you will -- within Islam opposed to each other. This appears to have been the case almost from the beginning. While some factions within Islam have striven to create theocratic states, others have supported the building of democratic, pluralistic societies. Think about the current situation in Iraq with the disputes between the Shi'ites and the Sunni, both religious factions of Islam. Then think about Wahhabism, another faction which arose in Saudi Arabia and is much more "fundamentalistic." Think "Taliban," probably the most extremist of the Islamic factions. Islam is hardly a unified movement, anymore than modern Christianity is. Aslan goes to great lengths in his book to explain all this and does a superb job doing it. And he shows, I think, that Islam can live and thrive in a modern democratic and pluralistic world, without being the "threat" that many have envisioned.

I highly recommend this book. If there's one thing we need desperately today it is an understanding of other religions and philosophies. Islam is a mysterious faith to many Americans. Fear is most often founded upon ignorance. And there can no longer be a justification for ignorance about a major religion which is so impacting the world's stage today. The world is getting smaller every hour. Isolationism and parochialism are no longer viable options. We either learn to live together or we destroy each other. Read, contemplate, discuss, and understand. Aslan's book is a contribution to that protocol.


Though it is the fastest growing religion in the world, Islam remains shrouded by ignorance and fear. What is the essence of this ancient faith? Is it a religion of peace or war? How does Allah differ from the God of Jews and Christians? Can an Islamic State be founded on democratic values such as pluralism and human rights?

A writer and scholar of comparative religions, Reza Aslan has garnered international acclaim for the passion and clarity he has brought to these questions. In No god but God, Aslan challenges the "clash of civilizations" mentality that has distorted our view of Islam and explains this critical faith in all its complexity, beauty, and compassion.

Contrary to popular perception, Islam is a religion firmly rooted in the prophetic traditions of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Aslan begins with a vivid account of the social and religious milieu from which the Prophet Muhammad arose. The revelations that Muhammad received in Mecca and Medina, and which were recorded in the Quran, became the foundation of a radically egalitarian community, the likes of which had never been seen before.

Soon after the his death, the Prophet's successors set about the overwhelming task of defining and interpreting Muhammad's message for future generations. Their efforts led to the development of a comprehensive code of conduct expected to regulate every aspect of the believer's life. But this attempt only widened the chasm between orthodox Islam and its two major sects, Shiism and Sufism, both of which Aslan presents in rich detail.

Finally, No god but God examines how, in the shadow of European colonialism, Muslims developed conflicting strategies to reconcile traditional Islamic values with the social and political realities of the modern world. With the emergence of the Islamic State in the 20th century, this contest over the future of Islam has become a passionate, sometimes violent battle between those who seek to enforce a rigid and archaic legal code on society and those who struggle to harmonize the teachings of the Prophet with contemporary ideals of democracy and human rights. According to Reza Aslan, we are now living in the era of "the Islamic Reformation."

No god but God is a persuasive and elegantly written account of the origins, evolution, and future of Islam.

HISTORY WITHOUT AN END


Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History 1890-1950 By Shabnum Tejani, Permanent Black, Rs 695

This is a serious book on a very important subject which does not quite live up to the promise of its subtitle. Despite this, what it does achieve is significant.

Secularism in the Indian context has become a contentious and an ambiguous subject. The author does not attempt to support any of the existing definitions or to arrive at a new one of her own. She argues that secularism in India can be understood in particular historical contexts. She defines her own project thus: “This book reconstructs such a history [of secularism] as a series of acts, focusing on six historical moments from 1890 to 1950. I argue that each moment represents both possibility and closure, marking a point when the meaning of a certain political concept crystallized. These concepts include Hindu community, patriotism, communal, communalism, the democratic majority, and secular citizenship.’’

Of the six moments she chooses, three are popular movements located in Maharashtra and Sind: cow protection, Swadeshi and Khilafat; the other three are related to the constitutional debates in 1909, 1932 and 1950. In western India, in the period 1893-1911, movements that were self-consciously political claimed the mantle of “nationalism’’. Shabnum Tejani argues that “the cultural and political idioms of this period became integral to formulations of Indian nationalism in later years.’’ The term, ‘communalism’, acquired its Indian connotation between 1906 and 1909, and the distinction between nationalism and communalism sharpened during the Khilafat movement and its aftermath. The beginnings of democracy in India in the 1930s witnessed the separation between majority and minority communities and their appropriation by different political formations. This process defined minorities not just in terms of religion but also in terms of castes.

Apart from its thematic importance, there is another aspect of this monograph that should be noted. Each chapter and the sections to which they belong follow a chronological framework. The chapters are also written as narratives. But the book as a whole does not follow an obvious narrative line. It also does not chase an overarching question or hypothesis that it seeks to answer. On the contrary, the author, in a series of nuanced and open-ended arguments, tries to show how words and concepts changed and shifted their meanings and definitions in particular political contexts. These shifts in meaning — and the author acknowledges her debt to the work of Quentin Skinner in this regard — do not suggest that critical concepts like nationalism, communalism and secularism always moved in one clearly defined direction. She is emphatic that her concerns are anti-teleological for “the end of the story was neither obvious nor inevitable.’’ Her stated project is to reconstruct the genealogies of secularism and of communalism. Those genealogies are still incomplete and open. In a very vital sense, we still live within the history of Indian secularism.

The book is theoretically informed but the theory never dominates the histories that the author tries to set out. It is good to have a history book that revels in the open-endedness of its argument and its mode of writing. The author deserves to be congratulated for having the courage to choose for her first book an extremely complex subject and for having written about it with exemplary courage.

RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

A premature newswire report announces the end of World War I, spurring wild celebrations in American streets days before the actual treaty was signed. A St. Louis newspaper prints reviews of theatrical performances that never took place—they had been canceled due to bad weather. New York newspaper reporters plant evidence in the apartment of the man accused of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby and then call him a liar in the courtroom once the trial begins.

These are just a few of the many wrongs that have been reported as right over two centuries of American history. All the News Unfit to Print puts the media under the microscope to expose the many types of mistakes, hoaxes, omissions, and lies that have skewed our understanding of the past, and reveals the range of reasons and motivations—from boredom and haste to politics and greed-behind them. Reviewing a host of journalistic slip-ups involving Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst, Theodore H. White, and many others, this book covers the stories behind the stories to refine incorrect "first drafts" of history from the Revolutionary War era to more recent times.

"All the News Unfit to Print is a rollicking joyride that careens through the ridiculous, the odd, and the serious malfeasances in American journalistic history and reminds us of the difference between news and facts."
—Neal Gabler, author of Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

What if Sam Adams had reported the facts instead of using his pen and imagination to stoke the flames of anti-British rebellion? What if William Randolph Hearst had not relentlessly commanded Americans to "remember the Maine"? What if New York Times reporter Walter Duranty had not let Communist sympathies keep him from accurately reporting the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and the brutality of Stalin's Five-Year Plan?

The history of American journalism is rife with errors, omissions, pranks, and downright lies. Some of these have actively influenced events and shaped history, while others have prompted little more than raised eyebrows and wry amusement. In All the News Unfit to Print, veteran journalist and media analyst Eric Burns surveys two centuries of American history to reveal how the media have gotten history wrong and how their mistakes distorted our view and under-standing of the past.

Burns offers fascinating examples from the entire spectrum of journalistic wrongdoing, from unintentional errors to deliberate deceptions motivated by greed, bias, arrogance, or self-promotion. Ben Franklin created the false "Trial of Miss Polly Baker" story in an attempt to improve women's lives. A bored Samuel Clemens exercised his mastery of the hoax in a piece on the discovery of a hundred-year-old "Petrified Man," a tale made up of whole cloth, not mummified remains. H. L. Mencken accelerated the news in his "synthetic war dispatch," reporting details of a major Russo-Japanese War battle nearly two weeks before actual battlefield reports became available. Years later, circulation-boosting journalists around the country shamelessly invented incriminating facts-and one even tampered with evidence—in condemning the German carpenter accused in the infamous Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping case.

Through these and many other stories, Burns traces the remarkable evolution of American journalism from its undisciplined beginnings as a profession from which little was expected in the way of truth or accountability to the gradual evolution of standards of objectivity (or at least transparent bias) and veracity which, while not always met, are accepted as the norm today.

Written with insight and flair, All the News Unfit to Print is essential reading for anyone interested in American history and in controversies about the accuracy and bias of the nation's media coverage.

When a concerned citizen reviews the publications of official government investigations of the major assassinations of the 1960s, they are faced with a maze of truths, half-truths, and conclusions, both reasonable and indefensible. The single consistent theme that emerges is that when Power Lies, it does so with Authority. It also does so with the full cooperation of the Media, whose livelihood depends on ready access to power.

Probe Magazine was the publication of CTKA (Citizens for Truth in the Kennedy Assassinations). The group was formed in the wake of the release of Oliver Stone's movie, by a group of men and women, mostly critics from years before, but some new to the issue. I was fortunate enough to be there for some of the early meetings of this group of motivated individuals, but was little more than a fellow consumer when it came to their publication.

But what a publication it was. Accomplished professionals, and individuals with highly developed and specialized knowledge of the case came together to produce articles of breathtaking depth and analysis on a bimonthly basis. Not only did they delve deeper into the JFK case, they also expanded their focus to include the other assassinations of the 1960s and events peripheral to them - the understanding of which helps to put these cases in their proper historical perspective. From one issue to the next, the material just continued to improve. Then, when Lisa Pease joined the effort, her intellectual strength, and energy of commitment helped to spark the project into heights likely not imagined during the organization's humble beginnings. Then, perhaps most amazing to me, they just sustained that greatness until they could go no longer, and stopped publication.
If you want to read the most current knowledge about the truth of the political assassinations of the 1960's this is the book to read. The Assassinations is a collection of the best articles to appear in a little know publication called Probe magazine from 1994 to 2000. These articles were written by serious citizen researchers who invested the time and money doing the work our major news media failed to do--that is to sift through the many new declassified documents about the assassinations that have become available during the past decade. With an introduction by Judge Joe Brown of TV fame the book is filled with in depth articles that you won't read anywhere else.
Examples of offerings include Professor Donald Gibson discussing how de-classified telephone transcripts from the early Johnson Presidency in the days after Nov. 22, 1963 show us how the Warren Commission was created, and for what purpose. John Armstrong has spent years of his life devoted to the study of Lee Harvey Oswald. Here Armstrong shows us that there was much more to the Oswald story than we were ever told.
Radiologist David Mantik has spent many more hours studying the JFK autopsy x-rays than did any offical government investigating body. Mantik has submitted the x-rays to sophisitcated tests unavailable during the 1960's and 70's and has proven that the x-rays now in the National Archives are forgeries.
Lisa Pese fleshes out the details of the RFK murder that have never been published before. James Douglass explains how a 1999 civil trial in Memphis proved beyond any doubt that our very government executed a man whose birthday it honors with a national holiday. And much, much more.
Perhaps the most enlightening and disturbing part of the book is the section titled, "The Failure of the Fourth Estate." Here the reader will learn why the news media never informed you about any of this information. You will learn of the all too cozy relationship that exists between our mainstream news media and the U.S. government intelligence agencies. You will learn specific names of well known journalists who got their stories cleared with intelligence agencies before writing, and who acted as government informants and "propaganda assets."
The book closes with a thoughtful afterword by one of the editors, James DiEugenio, who places the assassinations in their political context and explains how they impacted our lives and changed the course of our collective history.
This book is not for those who practice the superficial, shallow, "my country right or wrong", flag-waving type of patriotism so in vogue these days. This book is for true patriots who care about their country and aren't afraid to look straight into it's ugly, evil side. This book is for those who want to learn from the past and want to understand when and how the United States began to go from being a much loved beacon of democracy to becoming a loathed and feared nation. This book is for patriots who want to help ensure that we once again return to having a government " of the people, by the people and for the people."

Acharya wrote:How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (Hardcover)
by Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (Paperback)
by Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan (Author) [/b]

AGENDA | Sunday, July 5, 2009 | Email | Print |


Shedding colonial baggage

BB Kumar’s book is a rich collection of materials and painstaking analysis, writes Satya Mitra Dubey

India: Caste, Culture and Traditions
Author: BB Kumar
Publisher: Yash Publications
Price: Rs 2,100

Author BB Kumar, being a teacher, an academic administrator in the field of higher education, an active researcher with training in anthropology, with his natural inclination for a textual and empirical understanding of Indian society mixed with first hand familiarity with the linguistic, socio-cultural and political problems of the tribes of the Northeast, can easily depend on his experience and study to write a book on Indian castes, culture and traditions.

According to him, “The confusion of the average Indian about our social structure, culture and tradition is enormous. The root cause is our culture and tradition illiteracy that is quite high in society, especially among our university degree holders. One reason for this is the continuance of the old colonial education in our country even after Independence.”

Kumar is of the view that social science disciplines such as anthropology, history and Indology, apart from the mindset of a large section of educated Indians, are coloured by colonial misinterpretations. This is primarily the motivating factor for writing this book. “Efforts should be made to get our social sciences and education rid of the all pervasive colonial hangover without any delay. The book, written with this perspective in mind, tries to inform about Indian social structures — varna and caste — and the various other aspects of our culture and tradition in the succeeding chapters,” Kumar says.

Al Beruni mentions only four castes and eight outcastes in Hindu society and the fact that all the four castes, as observed by him, had no hesitation in eating together, Kumar says, indicates that the caste system in its present form is a post-Turk phenomenon. The constant invasions, wars, defeats and reprisals in the medieval period generated insularity among Hindus, leading to the hardening of commensality and extreme forms of the notions of purity and pollution.

The early administrators of East India Company were primarily interested in profit through loot, expansion and consolidation of the British Empire. The well-integrated Indian society and stable village communities were portrayed in their reports, monographs and surveys as consisting of isolated, mutually-exclusive castes, tribes, communities, linguistic groups, sects, religions and mass of people geographically scattered and racially distinct.

Some of the early Western translators of Sanskrit texts into English deliberately misinterpreted the philosophical and religious concepts. By this the main purpose was to strengthen colonial rule, propagate Christianity and convert Indians. To achieve these objectives, Indian customs and traditions were degraded.

Going through these bold assertions, a natural question may arise: Has Kumar offered sustainable evidence to prove his line of argument? Yes.

The author recognises the valuable contributions made by William Jones and a host of other scholars and administrators. But at the same time, he points to the negative, distorted and motivated pictures of Indian society as presented by Abbe JA Dubois, Max Mueller, James Mill, ET Dalton, HH Risley, among others.

James Mill’s History of British India was recommended as a basic text for candidates of the Indian Civil Service. Even a pro-colonial scholar like Max Mueller calls this book “most mischievous”. According to a well-known Sanskrit scholar, Prof Wilson: “Mill, in his estimate of Hindu character, is guided by Dubois … Orme and Buchanan, Tenant and Ward, all of them neither very competent nor very unprejudiced judges. Mill, however, picks out all that is most unfavourable from their works and omits the qualifications which these writers felt bound to give to their wholesale condemnation of the Hindus.”

Brahmins, being the intellectual class in India, were especially targeted. Dubois considered them the greatest hurdle in winning “India for Christ”. The Boden Professorship of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford was established to translate Sanskrit books into English so as to enable the British to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian religion. Macaulay, who had a design of “proselytisation through education”, proposed to pay £10,000 to Max Mueller for translating the Rig Veda in such a manner that it would destroy the belief of Hindus in the Vedic religion.

In Kumar’s assessment, in the early phases, the process of differentiation and stratification based on the varna system was positive. The varna system played significant roles in division of labour in Indian society and helped in organising occupational structure. Its contributions were pivotal in the socio-cultural integration of Indian society. The present degraded form of rigid and untouchabilty-based caste system is the product of the latter phases. In the first decades of the 20th century, such views were strongly upheld by scholars like Bhagwan Das and Anand K Coomaswami. Even Mahatma Gandhi had highlighted the positive roles of varna and caste.

The author has tried to discuss different aspects of caste in different chapters with special emphasis on its relationship with varna, professions and mobility, clan and marriage, food taboos and commensality, caste clusters, socio-religious practices, panchayats and castes and the caste-tribe continuum. There are chapters on deities and priests, the jajmani relationship and Scheduled Castes.

In the evaluation of any work, there are bound to be different opinions. This book, too, is not an exception. For its rich collection of materials and painstaking analysis, this book deserves admiration. At the same time, in this era of ideological controversies and political motivations, some others may find it tradition-oriented.

Both these stands will make this book more readable and valuable.

The writer is a senior sociologist and political analyst

AGENDA | Sunday, July 5, 2009 | Email | Print |


Politics of religion

This book posits, through facts and arguments, a historical trajectory of different stages of Indian society particularly with a focus on colonial and post-colonial developments, writes Ajay Kumar

This is a pioneering work and a must read book for undergraduate and post-graduate students by Himanshu Roy who teaches political science in the University of Delhi. It is equally a work of importance for those who are interested in research and debates on communalism and secularism in India as it posits, through facts and arguments, a historical trajectory of different stages of Indian society particularly with a focus on colonial and post-colonial developments. More, it analyses the transformation of dharma and relegere under colonialism/ capitalism with a comparison of Western Europe.

Roy’s main thesis which he rightly points out, is that “Indian states in history, unlike Europe, have rarely been theocratic. Neither were they ideologically premised on the religious majority-minority divide.” The vast number of independent small peasantry existing on a natural subsistence economy enjoying a large degree of freedom which itself is required for agricultural decision-making, acted as a bulwark against theocracy or against such kind of rule. “In Europe, the more the states became theocratic in nature more the ruling classes restricted/ denied landholdings to the peasants ...” Here, Roy seems to present, to use Sudipta Kaviraj’s phrase, a “flattering picture of the pre-colonial past”.

In his second thesis he argues that it was the colonial state that “introduced the religious divisive paradigm in 1909 in connivance with the Muslim elite which was stiffly opposed by the Moderate Congress.” Later on, in 1916, the extremist Congress compromised with this divisive paradigm. This communal compromise of religious segregation was internalised as Indian secularism. Fortunately, many elements of this compromise were debunked by the Constituent Assembly after Partition. “The leftover, which could not be debunked, were perpetuated as secular features of polity.” Here, Roy brings in another interesting argument. He states that a segment of traditional Muslim elite has always been hostile to the Congress.” But “opposite of it, a substantive percentage of Muslim masses under the jajmani system have been an integral part of her support base till the 1980s. Once the jajmani system withered away, the Muslim masses, too, drifted away from the Congress.”

Roy looks at the relationship between religion and political processes in India through the form of classical Marxian paradigm of which one of the main arguments is that Indian communalism is largely (rightly so) the result of colonial modernity. But it is hard to accept the argument that it was also largely due to the dialectical trends of capitalist development to integrate the world with ‘universal attributes’ of ‘modern citizenship’. Here, Roy discusses ambiguously the relationship between capitalism and social identities in India, where he always finds capitalism’s positive role in determining modern identities, notwithstanding the fact that capitalism has had its retrogressive role too in determining caste and communal identities in modern India. Roy criticises vaguely how scholars are fancied by metaphors and jargons and how particularly the ‘Left’ (of the CPM variety) “pits the community/ collective (the Left conveniently deletes the traditionality of the community) against the ‘bourgeois’ citizenship without transcending the traditionality/ religiosity of the community”(all original quotes).

Roy sees the religious intervention by the colonial state and the enumeration in terms of ‘majority-minority’ often giving rise to fundamentalism. The term is used interchangeably with communalism in Indian political debates and Roy sees this as a retreat from bourgeois modernity into a more comprehensible doctrine of “traditionality”. However, this argument does fit well for communal politics in India, which is essentially and clearly a strategy to seek more secure gains within the arrangements of modern electoral politics. Modern communal politics in India has its basis in the existence of parliamentary electoral arrangements. It is mainly based on the numerical biases of the modern state. Western or capitalist secularism, which Roy takes as the reference point, is based on the simplistic, dualistic picture of the historical processes of depletion of religious beliefs often implying that rationalisation led the growth of the secular, atheistic world view. Such an interpretation actually does not fit even for Western secularisation as it denies the complexities and interruptions of the rationalisation process.

Finally, he concludes that secularism is inbuilt in capitalism despite the existence of oppositional elements in it. And in combination with judicial pronouncements and democratic processes, it has played, overall, a positive role in the secularisation of society. As the market economy breaks down, the primordialities of society there emerges, and after decades of communal jigsaw, a better trend that reflects recognition to secularism and inclusive developments. Unfortunately, this aspect is not recognised by the Left academics who argue that minority ethnic rights are a part of secularism. As a result, they failed to transcend the Indian bourgeois paradigm premised on the communal compromise of 1916.

It is refreshing to read Roy’s book at this juncture when Marx and Marxism are generally forgotten. He brings in lots of insights on the subject from a Marxian perspective.

The reviewer teaches in JNU

This is an excellent book with a considerable set of observations concerning the shifts occurring in the global power equation. It is both complementary of and critical of Western Civilization. It gives credit where credit is due: Western Civilization established a set of cultural principles which are generally applicable to all of humankind: democracy, the rule of law, the intellectual gift of the Enlightenment.

Westerna Civilization is, however, in the process of weakening itself. It errs significantly when it deviates from those principals. The United States is particularly prone to embrace ideology (be it political or moralistic) when operating on the world stage. This approach was doomed to failure in the past and is doomed to failure in the present. One does not force democracy down the throats of people at the barrel of a gun. One does not torture people in hidden prisons. One does not make friends and influence people in a global village by playing the bully.

Essentially the world is filled with highly intelligent and hardworking people. They may not want to be fully Westernized but they certainly want to be "Modernized." How much they adopt the principles of democracy should be up to them. Not all societies are developed to a level where they can easily embrace Western views of democracy. They will, however, become more progressive.

The are some weaknesses in the book. The author is extremely concerned about the rise of protectionism particularly in America. This makes sense since the US provides the rest of the world with 100s of billions of dollars a year of its wealth. This is ultimately hurtful to the American form of Western Civilization. Diminishing the wealth base of the United States cannot continue to be the sole source of growth for Asian economies. The author does not present any recommendations as to how to deal with this form of unsustainable economics.

One of Asia's leading intellectuals illuminates what will be on the agenda as Western domination ends and the Asian renaissance impacts world politics, markets, and history.

For centuries, the Asians (Chinese, Indians, Muslims, and others) have been bystanders in world history. Now they are ready to become co-drivers.

Asians have finally understood, absorbed, and implemented Western best practices in many areas: from free-market economics to modern science and technology, from meritocracy to rule of law. They have also become innovative in their own way, creating new patterns of cooperation not seen in the West.

Will the West resist the rise of Asia? The good news is that Asia wants to replicate, not dominate, the West. For a happy outcome to emerge, the West must gracefully give up its domination of global institutions, from the IMF to the World Bank, from the G7 to the UN Security Council.

History teaches that tensions and conflicts are more likely when new powers emerge. This, too, may happen. But they can be avoided if the world accepts the key principles for a new global partnership spelled out in Tehran to Tokyo.


Consequently I had to pick up the book and read it. KM expects to provoke 'us' Westerners, but he asks some pundits to write blurbs, which Summers and Zbig and others did.
KM's thesis is this: Asia rises, and that is good for the world. The Western leaders have trouble in adjusting their mental maps, which are trapped in the past. Asia has benefitted from the world system as established after WW2 and has no interest in endangering it. The current wave of optimism will enter West Asia as well and Pakistan, Iran and others will want to have the same progress as China and India etc...
The March to Modernity is good for all, and it is not just material, rather the escape from poverty has far reaching immaterial value for the masses of Asia.
In short, KM is a 'hopeless' optimist, and I do hope that his victorious scenario wins. My biggest doubts are over the Islamic world's ability to join the trend. Maybe KM knows better. I do hope so.
One surprise for me was that KM steps away from the old litany of Lee Kuan Yew and others, i.e. that Asian economic success is due to traditonal Confucian values. In the contrary, KM argues that China, India, and the others, are following Japan in adopting the '7 pillars' that were the basis of the West's surge forward some centuries ago. These 7 pillars are: 1. free economy (expect Adam Smith in the Asian pantheon of the future!), 2.science (enormous push forward; quote Rajiv Gandhi: better brain drain than brain in the drain); 3. meritocracy/equal opportunity, a trend which requires overcoming huge traditional obstacles, but which is clearly on the way; 4.pragmatism: possibly a euphemism for copying; 5.a culture of peace (maybe hard to believe for many in the West); 6. the rule of law: far from being an attained target so far; 7.education.
If KM is right, the adoption of Western values is going far beyond copying Gucci bags and Lacoste shirts. In that sense I would'nt be surprised if he got as much headwind in Asia as in the West.
The headwind in the West comes from his criticism of the exportation of democracy into nations that are not ready for it. And of course from his criticism of the way the West dominates the international institutions and applies double standards.
Why are we not happy with the Asians following our example? Because it means loss of power, plain and simple.
Can't say that I don't see his point. Equally I think he is right in blaming the current Western leadership for gross incompetence in critical issues such as Middle East policy (the Iraq invasion as the single worst case of bad judgment and terrible implementation), free trade, nuclear non-proliferation, global warming...
Incidentally, KM points out, at the time when Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy in Rome, the Muslim emperor Akbar the Great pronounced principles of a secular government in India. So much for Western conceipt.

This book is an essential point of reference for understanding the analogies and other devices that decision makers use to evaluate information.

The bottom line is both straight-forward and scary: policymakers see everything in terms of their own (usually limited and largely domestic) historical experiences, and they interpret what they are given by intelligence professionals in the context of their own personal perspectives.

This has several implications, and I regard this book as one of perhaps five that are long-term essential building blocks for the new craft of analytic tradecraft being devised by the CIA's Kent Center and Jack Davis:

1) Intelligence is remedial education for policymakers. There is no getting around this. While the authors are much more diplomatic than I could ever be, the raw fact is that most policy makers are very loosely-educated and generally do not have a high-quality international affairs education or substantive experience dealing with foreign affairs or even national affairs. They are local lawyers, businessmen, "friends of the President," etcetera.

2) Objective, internationalist intelligence will always be in conflict with subjective, domestic politics unless--and this is the other new theme just now emerging, years after the author's published their work--there is a public intelligence community and the citizen-voters are receiving sufficiently compelling intelligence they can use to demand and vote for early and thoughtful action instead of in extremis reaction.

3) The book breaks new ground in establishing the importance of history, not only for drawing intelligence conclusions (understanding ethnic conflict, for example, is best done in the context of 200+ years of prior history), but for translating, converting, interpreting foreign events, threats, and opportunities in domestic historical terms that can be more easily absorbed by very busy policymakers.

I do not mean to suggest that the authors are condescending. Far from it. They take a very difficult and complex matter, that of speaking truth to power about foreign issues, and offer it up in a very sensible and understandable form.

The best of the students using this book for coursework will understand that it is a "keeper," of lasting value as a future reference, worth returning to from year to year for a refresher on the value of history in both understanding and communicating.

It's astonishing how many people have reviewed this book thinking that's it's a defense of religion, when Eagleton himself is atheist, or agnostic at best. It indicates that not all of us are reading this book as closely as perhaps we should be. Clearly, quite a few of us are predisposed to take offense on behalf of Dawkins and Hitchens, every time Eagleton flourishes his dry British wit. But this is how the British debate: witheringly and dramatically.

I'm glad someone is pointing out that Dawkins leaps gleefully into a chasm of hypocrisy by attacking religion's crimes (which are many) while obtusely dismissing how science has enabled us to wreak havoc on one another. Eagleton romps from one end of the book to the other, slaughtering sacred cows, and is clearly enjoying himself.

Again, I don't claim to be an expert on textual analysis, but I'm seeing a lot of misfires in the reviews section here. It's a very nuanced style, and sometimes you have to slow down quite a bit to grasp what he's saying. For example, there is not, in fact, any indication that Eagleton thinks Hitchens is a closet Marxist. If anything, Eagleton repeatedly confirms the man's strident and misbegotten *fascism*. Which dovetails into his argument about how Enlightenment values can end up producing the opposite of the intended effect.

Then there's the matter of taking seriously such cast-off, joking comments such as the one he makes about the phases of the moon. For some reason, people are latching on to this as a confirmation of some character flaw. They are elevating it beyond the confines of the statement; erasing the ambiguous humor from the page because a certain interpretation allows them to dismiss more serious statements elsewhere. That's intellectually dissonant.

Basically, the message of the book is this: Dawkins and Hitchens see the debate on religion and secularism in overly broad terms, and their underlying worldview has an inherently *mystical* bias (such as blind faith in the Path of Progress).

Literary critic Terry Eagleton, who is, insofar as I can tell, an atheist himself, nevertheless engages in a nuanced take-down of some of the pretenses associated with contemporary atheism. And he focuses in particular on the two most articulate writers within the neo-atheist movement---Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. For purposes of convenience (since Dawkins and Hitchens, in numerous instances, offer similar arguments) Eagleton amusingly conflates their names into a singular entity that he calls "Ditchkins."

Eagleton sees the neo-atheist movement as a reaction to the resurgence of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism after 9-11, and he sees that reaction as largely obtuse, both intellectually and psychologically. Eagleton, for example, sees real value in the Bible, and in the story of Jesus in particular, and what it can teach us about life and social change. Eagleton's readings of the Ten Commandments and the story of Jesus were especially dazzling, and illustrated his point that one needn't throw the religious/mythic babies out with the fundamentalist bathwater.

Eagleton is also an unreconstructed Marxist, which I think is a rather dubious intellectual position itself. Nevertheless, it gives him a vantage for making sharp and astute critiques of Ditchkins's complacency with regard to the role that capitalism and Modernism have played in creating a world of religious fundamentalist reactionaries. Eagleton sees fundamentalism as the West's psychological shadow---and points us to Euripides's Bakkhai as a play we would do well to study. In that play, King Pentheus treats Dionysus, who inhabits the borders of his realm, with enormous arrogance and without self-critical awareness, and the result is his own destruction. In this part of the book, Eagleton is rehashing material that he dealt with in more detail in a previous book ("Holy Terror").

Eagleton's book is strongest in its first half. The first chapter was especially thought provoking, for in it Eagleton offered a brilliant aesthetic defense of God's existence that could (almost) make me a believer. Eagleton's argument is a reversal of Liebnitz-like utility, in which God must do everything perfectly---and this must be "the best of all possible worlds." To the contrary, Eagleton suggests that God may have made the universe for a very different purpose. The universe may be (if we are to attribute it to God) a contingent art project, utterly inefficient and without utility---an act of freedom, not necessity. This, of course, has its own problems, but Eagleton has offered a clever retort to traditional theodicy.

Why did Eagleton write this book? If I may engage in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis, I think it is because Eagleton perceives the universal acid of reductionist rationalism heading his way. It's coming after religion now, but it's coming after poetry, literature, and Marxism later. In other words, Eagleton's book is, at one level at least, a battle against an obtuse utilitarianism which sees the price of everything and the value of nothing. I saw Eagleton's (perhaps unconscious) motive leaping from page 34 of his book, in which he wrote: "That a great deal of [religion] is indeed repulsive . . . is not a bone of contention between us. But I speak here partly in defense of my own forebears, against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void."

In some sense, this book is Eagleton (as a Marxist critic) fighting for his own life---defending the importance of nuance and measured judgment against the crassest forms of reductionist cynicism---and making a case for the value of some form of hope for POETIC JUSTICE in the future.

It's astonishing how many people have reviewed this book thinking that's it's a defense of religion, when Eagleton himself is atheist, or agnostic at best. It indicates that not all of us are reading this book as closely as perhaps we should be. Clearly, quite a few of us are predisposed to take offense on behalf of Dawkins and Hitchens, every time Eagleton flourishes his dry British wit. But this is how the British debate: witheringly and dramatically.

I'm glad someone is pointing out that Dawkins leaps gleefully into a chasm of hypocrisy by attacking religion's crimes (which are many) while obtusely dismissing how science has enabled us to wreak havoc on one another. Eagleton romps from one end of the book to the other, slaughtering sacred cows, and is clearly enjoying himself.

Again, I don't claim to be an expert on textual analysis, but I'm seeing a lot of misfires in the reviews section here. It's a very nuanced style, and sometimes you have to slow down quite a bit to grasp what he's saying. For example, there is not, in fact, any indication that Eagleton thinks Hitchens is a closet Marxist. If anything, Eagleton repeatedly confirms the man's strident and misbegotten *fascism*. Which dovetails into his argument about how Enlightenment values can end up producing the opposite of the intended effect.

Then there's the matter of taking seriously such cast-off, joking comments such as the one he makes about the phases of the moon. For some reason, people are latching on to this as a confirmation of some character flaw. They are elevating it beyond the confines of the statement; erasing the ambiguous humor from the page because a certain interpretation allows them to dismiss more serious statements elsewhere. That's intellectually dissonant.

Basically, the message of the book is this: Dawkins and Hitchens see the debate on religion and secularism in overly broad terms, and their underlying worldview has an inherently *mystical* bias (such as blind faith in the Path of Progress).

Since 2001, RAND Corporation political scientist Jones (The Rise of European Security Cooperation) has been observing the reinvigorated insurgency in Afghanistan and weighing the potency of its threat to the country's future and American interests in the region. Jones finds the roots of the re-emergence in the expected areas: the deterioration of security after the ousting of the Taliban regime in 2002, the U.S.'s focus on Iraq as its foreign policy priority and Pakistan's role as a haven for insurgents. He revisits Afghan history, specifically the invasions by the British in the mid- and late-19th century and the Russians in the late-20th to rue how little the U.S. has learned from these two previous wars. He sheds light on why Pakistan—a consistent supporter of the Taliban—continues to be a key player in the region's future. Jones makes important arguments for the inclusion of local leaders, particularly in rural regions, but his diligent panorama of the situation fails to consider whether the war in Afghanistan is already lost. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
A deeply researched, clearly written, and well-analyzed account of the failures of American policies in Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires lays out a plan to avoid a potential quagmire. This timely book will be mandatory reading for policymakers from Washington to Kabul but it will also help to inform Americans who want to understand what is likely to be the greatest foreign policy challenge of the Obama administration. (Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know )

A great story, a convincing explanation, and a persuasive prescription for dealing with Afghanistan's ongoing civil war.... Jones' book will be the essential guide for anyone interested in understanding this still escalating conflict. (James Dobbins, the Bush Administration's first special envoy for Afghanistan )

No one understands the successes and failures of American policy in Afghanistan better than Seth Jones....If you read just one book about the Taliban, terrorism, and the United States, this is the place to start. (Jeremi Suri, Professor of history, University of Wisconsin )

[D]estined to become the standard text on America's involvement in Afghanistan. It is a timely and important work, without peer in terms of both its scholarship and the author's intimate knowledge of the country, the insurgency threatening it, and the challenges in defeating it. (Professor Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University and author of Inside Terrorism


The failure of the Bush Administration to support post Taliban governmental and infrastructure initiatives was lost due to the Iraq War. Having worked the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) initiative in the early days, it was so obvious in March of 2003 that the Bush people really cared "less" about Afghanistan than the alleged and false facts relating to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

That said, the result of this tragic strategic error in both military and political leadership is today's Afghanistan. We simply lost an opportunity!

The US KIA and those of ISAF/coalition partners are a direct result of the absolutely failed "Bush-Cheney" leadership..and those who could of..but did not speak up.

The book correctly outlines the strategic mistakes, the lack of leadership and the current state in Afghanistan. In short, we lost the initiative and are now paying a heavy price.

On 14 July 2009, the New York Times previewed this book noting Steve Cole's book, "Ghost Wars" and several others as standard reading for those who want to understand the historical context of today's Afghanistan. I can add one more..."Decent Into Chaos", by Ahmed Rashid which correctly addresses the post Tora Bora/Operation Anaconda time frame with emphasis on infrastructure development and governance.

The issues in Afghanistan will be with us for a very long time!

"This detailed study... chronicles the rise of what Giustozzi labels 'the neo-Taliban'. Separate chapters treat how and why the neo-Taliban were recruited, their organization, their tactics and strategy, and the counterinsurgency efforts of the Afghan government and its outside supporters. With copious cross-referencing, he works in such subjects as
the continued involvement of Pakistan, the drug trade, neo-Taliban relations with Al Qaeda, and the rural-versus-urban dimension of this struggle. There are also several perceptive comparisons with insurgencies elsewhere in the world. [Giustozzi] concludes that reining in the neo-Taliban by arms or diplomacy will be more difficult now than reining in the original was five years ago. He also sees the group's strategy as having shifted in its new form from national resistance to global jihad.'" -- Foreign Affairs

"This book fills the gap in the current scholarship on the neo-Taliban. It benefits from the author's entertainment of deep thinking and cross-analyses of facts and figures. While ambitious, by strictly confining himself to developments occurring between 2002 and 2007, Antonio Giustiozzi has succeeded in providing a valid framework for exploration of the nature of the political in Afghanistan in general and the resurgent Taliban in particular." -- Amalendu Misra, author of Afghanistan: The Labyrinth of Violence

TO UNRAVEL A COMPLICATED QUESTION


TO LIVE OR TO PERISH FOREVER: TWO TUMULTUOUS YEARS IN PAKISTAN By Nicholas Schmidle, Random House, Rs 299

“But what’s the problem with that place?” The question was put to Nicholas Schmidle on telephone by his grandfather, who, like so many of his fellow Americans, must have become aware of Pakistan ’s existence post-9/11. Schmidle was in Pakistan then on an Institute of Current World Affairs fellowship that required him to report and write on what he saw, and could have taken the question head-on. But he must have hung up soon. A long-distance telephone conversation wouldn’t give him enough time to explain Pakistan’s complex realities. In fact, even after having written 261 pages in small print, Schmidle cannot be entirely sure if he has provided “any answers” to what is wrong with Pakistan .

The best way to go about this book, however, is to stop looking for answers and take in Schmidle as he comes — without any compulsion to provide a linear narrative and without the sombreness that usually marks all discussions on Pakistan and its killing fields. Schmidle even manages to give a face to each extremist in that swarm of bearded men in shalwar-kameez. The infamous Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who led the Red Mosque insurrection in 2007, is said to have looked like Jerry Garcia, and Maulana Fazlullah of Swat, who has never been photographed, is a short man with large gaps between his teeth and a “goofy smile”.

The reason why most of the chapters in this book — many of them self-sufficient articles — work so well is because Schmidle layers his narrative. The unexpected breaks — to recount meetings with tribal and political leaders, his experience of street clashes or tribal rituals, to recollect student politics or rehash history — give no chance for monotony to set in. The dramatic two years — 2006-08 — which included a regime change, in any case, wouldn’t let that happen.

Liberal Pakistan versus the Taliban is only one of the many conflicts that the nation has survived. Pakistan’s current preoccupation, however, also overshadows other irreparable sectarian and ethnic divides that make it almost impossible for Pakistan to hold together as a nation — the Shia-Sunni conflict, the Pashtun-Mohajir or the Punjabi-Sindhi divide, or the recalcitrance of Baluchistan to cohere with the nation. Schmidle goes deep into each of these fissures to show how conflicting identities and histories have complicated Pakistan’s political journey since its birth. The more Pakistan’s State-building efforts have tried to smother identities, the more intractable each problem has become.

Take Baluchistan, which seems to be currently worrying India more than Pakistan. Its incorporation into Pakistan happened more by accident than by design. Over the decades, the Pakistan government has intensified the feeling of alienation by its neglect of the region, its ill-devised financial system and its ham-handed policy of dealing with insurgency. The same myopia has deepened other divides. In a society as polarized as Pakistan’s, Schmidle says that any political problem gets transformed into an ethnic one.

Schmidle also shows that these problems are never simple. For example, the Pashtun Awami National Party may have given up on its dream of an independent Pashtunistan, but its politics is grounded in the belief that “Talibanization” is a “neocolonial” attempt of the Punjabi elite (read the Pakistan army) to rule the Pashtun lands through religious proxy. And, yet, it did agree to a “deal” with the pro-Taliban Sufi Mohammad. Has the ANP given in to the Punjabi design then? In 2009, Schmidle himself might be groping for an answer to that question.

Schmidle invests a lot of time, energy and patience in unravelling the mystery behind the inexorable Talibanization of Pakistan. This takes him repeatedly to the smooth-talking Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the Red Mosque, deep into Waziristan, to the mountain abode of the Taliban in the North West Frontier Province, to witness their summary justice. To begin to do all this, Schmidle had to do a lot of homework. He started off by reading about the country, learning Urdu, and then donning the shalwar-kameez and travelling by public transport to far-off places or riding on local journalists’ bikes and hatchbacks to slums, madrasas and Taliban territory. Schmidle never forgets the dangers of being an American, although his hosts, sometimes the feared Taliban, often do. As Maulana Fazlullah’s military commander, Sirajuddin, put it nonchalantly, “You are our guest.”

In his wanderings deep into Pakistan, Schmidle finds a tribal society in flux — centuries-old tradition of governance was being replaced by the violent “sharia-rule” of the Taliban, which, nevertheless, answered the people’s need for prompt justice and order. The brash, impatient, new entrants into the game of religious and political one-upmanship were pushing out the previous generation of conservative leaders like Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam. There was no time left for the democratic games that Rehman once played under the umbrella of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal.

One man in a real hurry to seize the moment was Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the imam of the Red Mosque and Schmidle’s friend, who gave him the key to enter the radical heartland. Schmidle suspects that Ghazi became a victim of the cult he had himself created but he cannot help blaming the Pakistan government/army for forcing Ghazi’s hand. Schmidle’s grief for Ghazi is genuine, and in grieving the “death of a friend”, he manages to give a human face to extremists like Ghazi and to his own tribe — the mediapersons scavenging on Pakistan ’s disorder to make a name and career.

Despite Schmidle’s interest in the Taliban, he does not explore Pakistan’s intelligence agencies’ links with them, although he constantly hints at them. After Daniel Pearl, that is probably now too dangerous a subject. Schmidle’s discretion, however, does not prevent him from being hounded by the intelligence agencies. He is forced to leave the country end of 2007, and again, more dramatically, after a hot chase in August 2008. Schmidle’s nail-biting account of the chase in 2008, broken only briefly by his visit to the annual urs for Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, helps the book transcend political commentary and become almost a thriller. But even without this ‘epilogue’, the book would have remained an enjoyable read.

CHIROSREE BASU

Arthur Laffer -- the father of supply-side economics and a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board -- joins economist Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal editorial board and investment advisor Peter J. Tanous to send Americans an urgent message: We risk losing the exceptional standard of living that has made us the envy of the rest of the world if the pro-growth policies of the last twenty-five years are reversed by a new president.

Since the early 1980s, the United States has experienced a wave of prosperity almost unprecedented in history in terms of wealth creation, new jobs, and improved living standards for all. Under the leadership of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Americans changed the incentive structure on taxes, inflation, and regulation, and as a result the economy roared back to life after the anti-growth, high-inflation 1970s.

Now the rest of the world is following the American economic growth model of lower tax rates, more economic freedom, and sound money. Paradoxically, one country is moving away from these growth policies and putting its prosperity at risk -- America.

On the eve of a critical presidential election, Laffer, Moore, and Tanous provide the factual information every American needs in order to understand exactly how we achieved the prosperity many people have come to take for granted, and explain how the policies of Democrats Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi can cause America to lose its status as the world's growth and job creation machine.

The End of Prosperity is essential reading for all Americans who value our nation's free enterprise system and high standard of living, and want to know how to protect their own investments in the coming storm.

-"The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World" is one of the best political reads I've enjoyed in decades. Being basically optimistic I do believe that civilization can be healed and pulled out of the doldrums we are currently facing in this global economic crisis. The crisis has caused fortunes of the wealthy to be lost, decline in retirement savings of the average worker and of course the poor simply are the ones that suffer the most.

What I grew up with and was taught as a child was hope. That no matter what things are now, or how bad your situation may be, that you can and should pull yourself out of it. That hope really was a human necessity. Take the U.S. for instance. We were founded as a slave owning nation that joined the world economy with cotton, agriculture products and by the turn of the 20th century, we were leaders in this sector of the world's economy. Many of our grain products to this day are exported overseas more so than they stay at home. We also became a leader in the industrial age and by the 1990s we were ahead of everyone else in the world on the cutting edge of the information age industry. Computers, social networking and other services have become tools that people use on a daily basis that had their start in the U.S. and the Western world.

However, after 9/11 the West seems to have forgotten all of the ills our civilization endured for centuries and yet during those harsh times we remained hopeful. America the nation that embodies freedom and equality was once a very unequal nation. It depended on the color of your skin, your gender and economic status, whether you had basic human rights or not. However, we've now turned a corner. We now live in fear of everything it seems. From the economy to terrorism Americans and Europeans are frightened. We can't seem to handle the tough times anymore. Having had amazing grandparents who taught me what they endured and still believed in the possibilities of their nation and they accomplished amazing things by hoping for better days.

Now the West is not leading in hope. That is fast becoming an Asian cultural belief. Despite China's crackdown on its own people and the North Koreans shooting missiles throughout their continent, Asians still live in hope for their future. At least this book paints a very clear picture of a hopeful people who believe that their futures will be brighter than they are for them today.

Moisi describe Muslims on the other hand as feeling desperation and humiliation. They're leaders in the author's opinion; many are brutal dictators who cling on to power by stealing from the masses and instilling disgrace upon them with terrorism while blaming America and the West for their troubles.

Author Dominique Moisi captures the story of three great civilizations on the crossroads of change. While I personally hope and believe that America and the West soon reaches out their hand and grasp to hope and pride again in the future, it seems that we have forever been changed by the decade we've just ended. In addition, Moisi says, "add to that fear of not being the economic superpowers anymore, you have a recipe for great nations declining by doubt and pessimism."

Moisi's book doesn't seem to offer a solution, which of course is not the author's intent or responsibility. But it's a great way to look inward, which Americans have hated to do from the dawn of our beginning. Most people don't like to look in the mirror and figure out a solution. We like to point fingers and blame others for what ills us today. But this book captures a spirit of three major divisions in the world and what is causing them.

Doubleday Publishing has edited this book with precision. There are no parts of it uninteresting or used as filler. It's chocked full of many details of some well known factors in our world today, but it also goes beneath the surface level of politics of the three major civilizations in detail. There doesn't seem to be great hope on the horizon for Muslims who seem entrenched in their belief that they are the victim of the West and not of the terrorists amongst them. But there does seem to be an intellectual group amongst Muslims who do see the problems and put the blame squarely where it belongs, on Muslim leadership.

The publisher states, "An astonishingly creative response to Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, this groundbreaking analysis examines political trends through the prism of emotion, arguing that fear, humiliation and hope might be as influential as the cultural, social and economic factors that breed political conflict. Shedding keen light on the limitations of the geographic and cultural determinism that currently dominates international relations discourse, Moïsi uses these definitions to remap the world's political regions."

This book also explains in great detail how great Western nations are fighting in the world and domestically in order to maintain relevancy in a world that is shifting because of issues that not only deal with economic issues, religion and natural resources. He also maintains that global disasters and desire for natural resources are also making cultures change as well.

Being so patriotic, I believe every American should read this book and then decide if we want to continue in the direction of "fear" or if we want to embrace hope again and hard work. The book is easily read in a few days and one that you will not want to put down.

Dominique Moïsi (Co-Chair) is senior adviser to the French Institute of International Affairs.

The work of a study group of distinguished scholars, this book is a systematic investigation of the origins and nature of the international society today. The first section of the book describes the flood tide of European expansion that began in the 16th century and united the world for the first time in a single economic strategic, and political unit. The second section analyzes the process whereby the non-European states came to take their place as members of the same society, while the third section examines the repudiation of European, Russian, and American domination by states and peoples of the Third World, and the subsequent transition from a system based on European hegemony to one that is not. The book concludes with a discussion of the international order that has emerged from the ebb tide of European dominance.

"Alexander Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics is one of the most important books of international relations (IR) theory to be published in the past few decades...Wendt's contribution is impressive and deserves consideration by all students of IR, as well as those who seek to understand the role of ideas, norms and culture in political life...Wendt's book systematically tackles a host of devilishly difficult and professionally contested issues with a clear-eyed, eloquent, and original approach...with this extraordinarily thoughtful book, Wendt has made the best analytical case so far for taking seriously the social nature of international politics." Journl of Politics

Drawing on philosophy and social theory, Social Theory of International Politics develops a cultural theory of international politics that contrasts with the realist mainstream. Wendt argues that states can view each other as enemies, rivals, or friends. He characterizes these roles as "cultures of anarchy," which are shared ideas that help shape states' interests and capabilities. These cultures can change over time as ideas change. Wendt thus argues that the nature of international politics is not fixed, and that the international system is not condemned to conflict and war.

Alexander Wendt makes an extremely well written attempt to find common ground amongst various approaches to international relations. The first four chapters alone are worth the price of the book. While at first glance the book may seem to be of interest only to academics, his methods do bear quite interesting consequences for the way we can all view global politics. By encouraging us to think more clearly about causal and constitutive questions, readers of this book will find it of continuing relevance in understanding the way politicians, CEO's and NGO's contest and negotiate in various institutional forums over issues of critical importance. The only drawback of the book is that it does reinforce the bias, common in IR circles, of remaining silent about the extreme malleability between "politics" and "the economy". This is where constructivism comes into it's own against the stronger strands of positivist realism. That Wendt discusses corporate agency without discussing actual corporations, or more importantly, the constitutive features and problems of capitalism as a form of institutionalized power that constantly challenges the current contours of "the state" and at the same time shapes the ideational realm he scrutinizes, is, perhaps, the only drawback of this otherwise fine book.

Stunning shifts in the worldviews of states mark the modern history of international affairs: how do societies think about—and rethink—international order and security? Japan’s "opening," German conquest, American internationalism, Maoist independence, and Gorbachev’s "new thinking" molded international conflict and cooperation in their eras. How do we explain such momentous changes—and in many cases their equally surprising absence?

The nature of strategic ideas, Jeffrey W. Legro argues, played a critical and overlooked role in these transformations. Big changes in foreign policies are rare because it is difficult for individuals to overcome the inertia of entrenched national mentalities. Doing so depends on a particular nexus of policy expectations, national experience, and ready replacement ideas. In a sweeping comparative history, Legro explores the sources of strategy in the United States and Germany before and after the world wars, in Tokugawa Japan, and in the Soviet Union. He charts the likely future of American primacy and a rising China in the coming century.

Rethinking the World tells us when and why we can expect changes in the way states think about the world, why some ideas win out over others, and why some leaders succeed while others fail in redirecting grand strategy.

From the Back Cover
"Jeffrey W. Legro delivers a thoughtful and very clearly written account of the conditions under which major powers change or don't change their visions of their status and role in international society. The book is yet another nail in the coffin of realist theory as it shows that power relationships, unfiltered by prior, collectively held ideas about cause and effect in international relations, tell us little about major power behavior. The book guides us in looking for and theorizing about important instances of `new thinking' in world politics, and thus helps problematize the persistence of `old thinking.'"--Alastair Iain Johnston, Harvard University "What explains fundamental reorientation of the grand strategy of great powers? Jeffrey Legro moves beyond conventional accounts stressing immutable adaptation to the balance of power, random response to external shocks, or normative persuasion by inherently attractive ideas. He argues instead that big changes in how states view the world reflect domestic struggles to redefine the national interest, which are in turn shaped by contingent yet explicable interactions between ideas and events. This subtle theoretical synthesis marks an important advance in our understanding of the role ideas play in international relations, from which Legro draws important implications for the contemporary foreign policy of the United States and China."--Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University

"The rapid pace of change in the fundamental features of international politics demands that scholars develop better theories of change. In recent years, many scholars and activists have argued that the force of new, persuasive, principled ideas can lead to fundamental change in the world. Jeffrey W. Legro's Rethinking the World looks at dramatic new departures in the thinking of great powers--America's and Japan's emergence from isolationism; Gorbachev's "new thinking" that ended the Cold War; Germany's break with its Nazi past--and shows how external shocks combined with domestic politics and the pre-existing stock of ideas about the world to determine whether change would happen and whether the change would stick. This book's fruitful, balanced approach will be a welcome addition to my syllabus on international relations."--Jack L. Snyder, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations, Columbia University

Starobin, staff correspondent for the National Journal, delivers a meticulously researched and up-to-the-minute analysis of the United States' role in global politics, culture and society. Arguing that the U.S. has reached the end of its tenure as a unipolar superpower, Starobin analyzes the weaknesses in America's political and economic institutions that have led to a widening gap in prosperity (both within its own borders and vis-à-vis other developed nations) and hindered its ability to set the pace of progress. He demonstrates how theories of widespread chaos in a post-American era are constructed, using as an example the fall of Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, America's key ally against the Taliban in Afghanistan—but he shies away from this model, suggesting how the new world order might be one in which power is assumed by another nation (possibly China) or shared among several (India, Brazil and the E.U.). He also questions the validity of classically defined nation-states in favor of the possibility that economic and social interactions between cross-national regions, powerful city-states or global movements might supersede the relevance of individual nations. The result is a narrative of extraordinary range and contemporary relevance.

America-in-decline is the premise for National Journal reporter Starobin’s predictions of the future of the international order. He structures his prognostications around several possibilities, such as the notion that China will supplant the U.S. as preeminent world power, and packages opinions about long-term trends with interviews of actors in the emerging conditions—in the Chinese example, with China’s ambassador to Chile, for whose copper China has a great appetite. Starobin’s position throughout is that Americans and American political and economic institutions must prepare to adjust to such scenarios. In case China’s ascendance doesn’t pan out, Starobin proffers multipolarity, global governance, globally oriented city-states, and a “happy” chaos of Internet-empowered individualism as other successor situations to the American Century (an idea that, for readers unfamiliar with it, Starobin recaps, including its outgrowth from American exceptionalism). Crystallizing his vision of America’s future by means of a précis of California’s cosmopolitan present, Starobin argues with clarity and conviction that will resonate with the current-affairs readership.


The premise of the book is that we are experiencing the decline of the US as the supreme global power. There are a number of specific examples on how we got to this condition (basically we have no one to blame but ourselves). This decline was inevitable as other nations progress and prosper; however, disastarous US foreign policy (read the invasion of Iraq) and our short-term, greed is good culture have only accelerated this trend.

Probably the best discussion centers on a world in which the US is not "number 1." Who will claim the title? Russia? China? The European Union? India? What is clear is that regional powers will grow in strength. What is not clear will be the structure and dominance of the multipolar world order. Will chaos reign or will a true world government emerge? All is speculation but very good food for thought.

One very clear message from this and other books well worth reading (e.g., Chalmers Johnson's triology on US foreign policy - Blowback, Sorrows of Empire & Nemesis): Cultural decline is rarely forced upon a dominant culture; rather it rots from within. We chose as a Nation to outsource manufacturing excellence and we wasted our soft power. We elected the officials with short-term vision (grab for all the rich bits as quickly as possible) and spurned the more long-term thinkers (e.g., Jimmy Carter & Al Gore).

The corollary to this is simple: for the US to slow its decline and to remain relevant in the world we must control our appetites and stop the short-term greed oriented decision making. The best protector of democracy is wealth and opportunity which are wisely distributed. The opposite which has held sway for around 30 years has made us less wealthy, less secure, more indebted and with fewer options.

MacMillan, author of the acclaimed Paris 1919, reminds readers that history matters: It is particularly unfortunate that just as history is becoming more important in our public discussions, professional historians have largely been abandoning the field to amateurs. According to MacMillan, this is a grave mistake. Governments and leaders use history to invent tradition and subvert the past. In a world hungry for heroes, badly researched historical biographies fly off bookstore shelves. In this highly readable and polished book, readers learn of the dangers of not properly tending to the past, of distorting it and ignoring inconvenient facts. If done correctly, history helps unlock the past in useful ways. The author explores the ways history has present meaning—not always constructively: in providing a sense of identity for groups, as a basis of nationalism or national pride, as a tool for redress of past wrongs and as an ideological tool. In this important work, we learn that history is more than presenting facts, it is about framing the past. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the importance of correctly understanding the past.

MacMillan, a professor of history at Oxford University and the University of Toronto, views the study and utilization of history as a double-edged sword. History, of course, can show us where we have been; it can also provide a sense of shared culture that binds otherwise diverse populations and forms the basis of the nation-state. For many, the study of history is plain fun, filled with colorful characters and real-life drama. But the abuse of history often provokes tragic consequences. Tyrants, including Stalin and Hitler, wrapped themselves in the mantle of national icons to enhance their personal power. Karl Marx saw history as a process leading inexorably to a classless society, which allowed his adherents to justify mass murder. The refusal to let go of some aspects of the past has prolonged a sense of grievance, hatred, and entitlement among numerous groups across the globe. For both historians and lay readers, this thoughtful and provocative work will be enlightening and useful

In this slim but important volume, historian Margaret MacMillan sets out to challenge those who use or misuse history for their own purposes. Few escape her glance, from the Chinese who cultivate a sense of victimization even now that they have risen to the status of economic superpower (and whose leaders cite a sign that never existed in Shanghai, denying entrance to a park to Chinese and dogs) to both Palestinians and Israelis, quarreling over the question of "who was here first" with reference to the lands now under Israeli authority.

MacMillan's two most recent works (one about the Versailles Treaty of 1919; the other about Nixon and Mao) have given her tremendous insight into the way history is used and abused in geopolitical and political conflicts around the world. Bad history, she writes, tells only parts of complex stories, is selective, misleading and can lead to the creation of national 'myths' that hold their own dangers. She uses examples to bolster every point, such as the Serbian myths surrounding the defeat of Prince Lazar, their national hero, by Ottoman Turks at the battle of Kosovo in 1389. In fact, MacMillan points out, Lazar was simply one Serb prince (not a national leader); while he was killed, the battle was widely viewed as a draw and even claimed by Serbs at the time as a victory; and far from marking the end of Serb independence, an independent Serbia remained for decades. The Orthodox church used Lazar's death to bolster the myth of a resistance to Turkish rule for centuries; in the 19th century, when that myth collided with the emergence of nationalism across Europe, the result was not only the bloody conflicts in the former Yugoslavia but also one of the triggering events of the still-bloodier World War I.

MacMillan's command of her facts, from the well known to the most obscure, make this a convincing and lively read. Still, she's treading on perilous ground by challenging such cherished myths and pointing out how historical facts have been distorted to support them. It doesn't matter that she's an equal-opportunity critic (Both Palestinians and Israelis get their share of criticism for manipulating the facts in the ongoing "who was here first" argument.) Her argument is straightforward and yet provocative: only by recognizing that the stories we may like to tell ourselves aren't always the true or complete ones do we have a chance to take advantage of what history has to teach us: that others have myths that they, too, cherish; that we can and should question our values and convictions from time to time, and that the result will be a better understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

"It can be dangerous to question the stories people tell about themselves because so much of our identity is both shaped by and bound up with our history," MacMillan writes. (Indeed, just take a look at Sacred Geography: A Tale of Murder and Archeology in the Holy Land for evidence.) That doesn't stop MacMillan from tackling a wide array of battles waged in the 'history wars' that have been just as hotly contested as those in the better-known 'culture war'.

The result is a valuable book for anyone who is interested in reading history and going beyond the 'what', 'who' and 'why' of the events that happened to broader questions. What history is written, by whom and for what purpose? What assumptions do historians make when they write? How are their works received by their audiences? Anyone intrigued by these questions will find much to mull over in this book. If your world view is black and white, rather than shades of grey, you may find less to admire.

Throughout time, violent battles and bloody clashes have changed the course of history and shaped nations or empires. Battles of annihilation are rare, but ever since antiquity a stunning victory on the battlefield, even if it has failed to win the war, has captured the imagination of many. The battle of Cannae in 216BC, where Hannibal destroyed an entire Roman army, has become legend, inspiring generations of military thinkers to discuss and imitate this feat. Usually written off as incidents of luck, some argue that it is not possible to completely destroy the enemy, although historic engagements have proved that annihilating the opponent can be achieved, at least on a tactical level. In this book Mir Bahmanyar examines battles of annihilation throughout history, some well known, others less so, but all equally extraordinary, to discover what sets these engagements apart, whether they achieve a decisive strategic advantage in war, and why there are fewer battles of annihilation in modern times.

Mir Bahmanyar received his BA in History from the University of California at Berkeley. Subsequently, he joined the US Army, serving with the 2d Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment as a machine-gunner and training non-commissioned officer. Mir also created http://www.suasponte.com, a website chronicling the history of the American Ranger. He is a feature film producer and screenwriter, recently completing the film Soldier of God (http://www.soldierofgod.net). He lives in Los Angeles. The author lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Edwin Black's Banking on Baghdad underlines Iraq's long history of exploitation by Western powers and powerful corporations struggling for advantage and domination. His impressive analysis, which included looking at more than 50,000 original documents and hundreds of scholarly books and articles, provides a comprehensive history of Iraq that explains why the West's record in the region so complicates nation-building there today. Black writes that popular sentiment in Iraq in the post-World War II era is most aptly characterized by "resentment over foreign interference, anti-Zionism, and churning nationalism . . . fused into a rage against the West." Clearly, the West's imperial legacy in Iraq has placed the United States at a major disadvantage in the war of ideas in the Middle East. America's poor understanding of Iraq's history only makes matters worse. "Most Americans had never heard of Najaf," the great center of Shiite pilgrimage, Black points out, "and barely knew the difference between Shiites and Sunnis." In one foreboding anecdote, he describes the British effort after World War I to bring Iraq under British colonial control, with limited sovereignty, using "40 handpicked representatives," all of whom were expected to support the British agenda. After Iraqi protests went unheard, the British soon had a protracted, nationwide insurgency on their hands.
Black recounts numerous incidents of exploitation in intricate detail; his analysis of how Iraq's oil has greased the treads of war throughout modern history is particularly noteworthy. He writes that Iraqi crude fueled the tanks, warships, submarines and airplanes that helped fight for ultimate control of Iraqi territory during World War II. Well into the Cold War, Iraq remained a strategic outpost, even as its people remained "largely destitute, significantly unemployed, and detached en masse from the nation's oil wealth." Black's book is thoughtful and meticulous, though many readers may find the breadth of analysis too ambitious and, at just fewer than 500 pages, a bit tedious at points. His analysis, nevertheless, highlights the deficit of legitimacy the United States faces in Iraq and the wider Middle East.
Since so few Arabs will seriously listen to arguments about democracy from the U.S. government, the war of ideas will have to be fought by nongovernmental organizations, governments other than the U.S. administration, and friendly leaders in the Is...

In War Against the Weak, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black connects the crimes of the Nazis to a pseudoscientific American movement of the early twentieth century called eugenics. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island but ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Ultimately, over 60,000 unfit Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg declared such practices crimes agains humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst--which holds important lessons for the impending genetic age.

This book is a fascinating account of the eugenics movement that flourished in the United States during the first third of the twentieth century. With the help of an international team of researchers the author details the movement's history: creation of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island; the leadership of poultry researcher Charles Davenport; extensive Harriman, Rockefeller, and Carnegie funding; state laws legalizing compulsory sterilization; widespread acceptance by college presidents, clergymen, mental health workers, school principals, and leading progressive thinkers such as Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and Woodrow Wilson; its validation by the United States Supreme Court in 1927 when it voted 8 to 1 to uphold the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenic sterilization law; and much, much more.

The book's most dramatic and controversial conclusion is that the American eugenics movement fueled the triumph of Nazism in Germany and thereby helped bring on the Holocaust. As Black writes in his Introduction, "the scientific rationales that drove killer doctors at Auschwitz were first concocted on Long Island at the Carnegie Institution's eugenic enterprise at Cold Spring Harbor." To his credit he provides a great deal of evidence to make his contention plausible, if not totally convincing.

The extremes to which the Nazis took their eugenics--euthansia killings of "unfit" Germans and the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and others--gave eugenics a bad name from which it never recovered. This important book sheds much needed light on one of the darkest and most bizarre chapters of American history.

Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

an important book: the history of the American eugenics movement and its influence on the perpetrators of the Nazi version leading to the Holocaust. Sanitized or amnesiac history has forgotten the details here, and they are grisly, the more so being American data of record, deep in the many archives the author and his team researched. The details include the involvement of many of the foundations, Carnegie, Rockerfeller, et. al. The eugenics era is routinely denounced, but the facts are diffused from discussion and this book is eminently worth reading carefully to see how it actually happened. The account has eye-popping details on every second page,viz. the actual episodes of tracking down hill billies for enforced sterilization. That's right, in the US of A.
The cheerleading of the Eugenics movement for the Nazis continued right up through the beginning of World War II in certain scientific journals. After that eugenics became genetics, and the author explores at the end the implications of all this as we enter the age of the genome under the banner of genetic fundamentalism.
I would get this book under your belt asap, and it is also an indirect contribution to the legacy of historical Mendelism/Darwinism/Social Darwinism as these generated the milieu for this phase of Americana Goes Haywire. It can happen here. So watch it.

"Access to oil is the key, the precipitating factor for understanding the roots of twenty-first century war, revolution and the societal marginalization and economic deprivations that persists in the live of people of African descent. Whether in the United States, Latin America or Africa, the starting point for interpreting the black experience today, then, requires a basic knowledge of competing oil producing nations and their markets. This remarkable study is the starting point." - Juliet E. K. Walker Center for Black Business History, Entrepreneuership, Technology University of Texas at Austin


This book is an excellent start in gaining a grasp on the topic. The authors use straightforward language, and touch on many different aspects of the industry, including case studies of several oil-rich nations.

At the very least, it will give the reader an understanding that there is much we lay people don't understand. The oil industry (and its peripherals) is so colossal in scope, that developing a serious working knowledge of it would take years of study. Anyone wishing to tackle such an endeavor should read this book, but don't expect to stop here.

This is JKG holding forth on that most perennially fascinating of topics. The subtitle ("Whence it Came, Where it Went") may bear a relation to the question on everybody's mind during the early and mid-seventies: why is our money behaving so badly?

"In the twenty years before the founding of the [Federal Reserve] System there were 1748 bank suspensions; in the twenty years after it ended the anarchy of unstable private banking, there were 15,502."(p144)

"...the Democrats...could authorize it [the central bank] without being suspected of evil."(p239)

"...the [German] inflation of 1923, with its euthanasia of the "rentier" class...had almost certainly a far greater [than the 1945 inflation] effect on relative wealth. ...The loss of assets makes a deep impression on an impressionable class of people. The loss of jobs is accepted more philosophically."(p303/304)

"... the higher oil price [in 1973] was considered highly inflationary ... in fact, it was deflationary ... the revenues... accumulated in unspent balances. Thus they represented a withdrawal from current purchasing power..."(p363) (The rest of the paragraph is relevant. The basic point is that the oil producers took money out of circulation, since they made it far faster than they could spend it.)"

And the piece de resistence: "To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time."(p368)


That same tone, in a couple of particulars, is what makes "Money" such a tremendous book. First there's the persistently arched eyebrow, aimed at other economists. Then there's the urge to make the world clearer. The whole book is quite admirable in this way.

Money's pace is a little funny: perhaps 80 pages get us from the start of world history up to the Bank of England, then another 100 pages from the 19th century to World War I. The remaining 150 pages covering the practical collapse of the gold standard through the Depression and its aftermath. It's like Zeno's Monetary History.

Galbraith's central observation about banking is that, beyond its most primitive forms, all banks suffer from one single, ineradicable problem: they have more money on the books than they actually have on hand. And every now and again, panic spreads from bank to bank, justly or unjustly: a nearby bank fails, so all my depositors rush to empty out their accounts. They are all shocked to discover that I don't have a special bag of gold coins labeled "Doris's savings account." My bank fails, as do all the other banks. My bank wasn't necessarily any worse just before the failure than it was a week earlier, but expectations combined to make it collapse. If I'm not mistaken, observations of this form are distinctly Keynesian.

Indeed, Galbraith is an old-school Keynesian, responsible in some fashion for price controls during World War II. Some of the most interesting parts of "Money", to me, were Galbraith's defenses of this centralization. It all worked quite well, says Galbraith, and people seemed generally satisfied with it. When the price controls were lifted, inflation did not go through the roof; there was no pent-up demand waiting to explode, but for the evil central planners. This, and much of the rest of the book, is a more or less direct response to Milton Friedman, maybe especially Friedman and Stigler's "Roofs or Ceilings?"

Part of "Money" is in fact a direct attack on Friedman's monetarism. The standard Keynesian attack seems to go like this: there comes a point in an economic crisis when the interest rate just cannot be productively lowered any more -- we are at the "zero lower bound". Banks are afraid to lend out any more money, so they hoard it. Lower interest rates near the ZLB just lead to more hoarding. The distinctive Keynesian response is to emphasize fiscal policy here over monetary policy: the government should actively spend money to put it in consumers' pockets to get people spending, get them borrowing (clear out those hoards), etc. When read today, Keynes sounds somewhat naïve about the prospects for apolitical control of the economy by a technocratic élite; so does Galbraith.

Some of Galbraith's naïveté comes from a belief that the world is moving to greater centralization: fewer corporations controlling production, and unions representing workers in bulk. It sounds like commerce really was more concentrated during World War II, and consequently that the central planner had a much easier task than he would now. Galbraith doesn't seem to have updated this picture of the world since 1945.

General Electric Funds Hitler
General Electric in Weimar, Germany
General Electric & the Financing of Hitler
Technical Cooperation with Krupp
A.E.G. Avoids the Bombs in World War II

The Economic Power of I. G. Farben

Qualified observers have argued that Germany could not have gone to war in 1939 without I. G. Farben. Between 1927 and the beginning of World War II, I.G. Farben doubled in size, an expansion made possible in great part by American technical assistance and by American bond issues, such as the one for $30 million offered by National City Bank. By 1939 I. G. acquired a participation and managerial influence in some 380 other German firms and over 500 foreign firms. The Farben empire owned its own coal mines, its own electric power plants, iron and steel units, banks, research units, and numerous commercial enterprises. There were over 2,000 cartel agreements between I. G. and foreign firms — including Standard Oil of New Jersey, DuPont, Alcoa, Dow Chemical, and others in the United States, The full story of I,G, Farben and its world-wide ae-tivities before World War II can never be known, as key German records were destroyed in 1945 in anticipation of Allied victory. However, one post-war investigation by the U.S, War Department concluded that:

Without I. G.'s immense productive facilities, its intense re. search, and vast international affiliations, Germany's prosecution of the war would have been unthinkable and impossible; Farben not only directed its energies toward arming Germany, but concentrated on weakening her intended victims, and this double-barreled attempt to expand the German industrial potential for war and to restrict that of the rest of the world was not conceived and executed "in the normal course of business." The proof is overwhelming that I. G. Farben officials had full prior knowledge of Germany's plan for world conquest and of each specific aggressive act later undertaken ....3

Directors of Farben firms (i.e., the "I. G. Farben officials" referred to in the investigation) included not only Germans but also prominent American financiers. This 1945 U.S. War Department report concluded that I.G.'s assignment from Hitler in the prewar period was to make Germany self-sufficient in rubber, gasoline, lubricating oils, magnesium, fibers, tanning agents, fats, and explosives. To fulfill this critical assignment, vast sums were spent by I.G. on processes to extract these war materials from indigenous German raw materials - in particular the plentiful German coal resources. Where these processes could not be developed in Germany ,they were acquired from abroad under cartel arrangements. For example, the process for iso-octane, essential for aviation fuels, was obtained from the United States,

... in fact entirely [from] the Americans and has become known to us in detail in its separate stages through our agreements with them [Standard Oil of New Jersey] and is being used very extensively by us.4

The process for manufacturing tetra-ethyl lead? essential for aviation gasoline, was obtained by I. G. Farben from the United States, and in 1939 I.G. was sold $20 million of high-grade aviation gasoline by Standard Oil of New Jersey. Even before Germany manufactured tetra-ethyl lead by the American process it was able to "borrow" 500 tons from the Ethyl Corporation. This loan of vital tetra-ethyl lead was not repaid and I.G. forfeited the $1 million security. Further, I.G. purchased large stocks of magnesium from Dow Chemical for incendiary bombs and stockpiled explosives, stabilizers, phosphorus, and cyanides from the outside world.

Ron Chernow's "The House of Morgan" is both an engaging history of the Morgan banks and a brilliant account of the growth of global finance from Victorian times through the late 1980's. It's every bit as enjoyable as Chernow's "The Warburgs," but provides a better analysis than the Warburg book of key business and political developments of the 20th century.

No one should be intimidated by this book's length or the complexity of its subject. Its pages are rich with lively portraits of the sometimes quirky men who ran the Morgan banks, the high and mighty of the world with whom they did business, and the world's many critics of such concentrated economic might. Pierpont and Jack Morgan and their successors at the top get the most detailed treatment, but figures as diverse as Brandeis, Mussolini, Lindbergh (the son-in-law of a top Morgan partner), Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Thatcher all play a part in the story, not to mention interesting but lesser-known figures like Ferdinand Pecora, Judge Harold Medina and central bankers from Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan.

As a backdrop to the Morgan saga, this book includes accounts of the main events of 20th-century financial history, such as the Panic of 1907, the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the Crash of 1929 and the depression and bank failures that followed it, the New Dealers' attack on banks led by Pecora that resulted in the Glass-Steagall Act and the separation of commercial banking from investment banking, and the rise of hostile takeovers, Eurodollars, petrodollars, Latin American lending, junk bonds and the securitization of debt, all refreshingly written for laymen rather than experts.

"The House of Morgan" has perhaps two overriding themes. The first is that as the years have passed, and the Morgan banks have faced increasing competition, the Morgan bankers' need to maintain their global preeminence has led them to take bigger and bigger risks. Some of these risks have resulted in large financial loss, but more often they have resulted in a loss of both public and customers' confidence, which has eroded the very preeminence that the banks seek to maintain. The second theme is that the top Morgan bankers have consistently underestimated the power of government to control what they do, and even make their lives miserable. From Pierpont on down, they have ignored government at their peril. It's almost a certainty that with the next big economic downturn, the Morgan banks will be attacked again, and I hope that Chernow will be on the scene to provide an account of it.



At 700 plus pages this is an incredibly long book. Unfortunately it is an uneven read. I became progressively less interested in the book as I went along; however, it was worth the effort to complete.

The first section, which he calls the Baronial Era in banking, is fascinating, and for me it was a page-turner. The Morgan banking house actually began as the George Peabody bank in England, and Junius Morgan was brought over from the US to be his successor. Junius Morgan took the bank to a level far beyond where Peabody had, and then his son JP Morgan Sr. took over. JP Morgan Sr (Pierpont) is the name most associated with Morgan banking, and he was an enormously powerful and colorful character. This was the infamous age of the "Robber Barons" the rise of American railroads, big steel, and the oil industry. Pierpont was at the center of it, commanding industry while collecting art, building yachts and cavorting with women. It makes a great story.

Pierpont was succeeded by his son JP Morgan Jr(Jack) who headed the bank during what Chernow called the "Diplomatic Era". The book became less interesting. Jack was nowhere near as colorful as his father, and his reign over the bank nowhere near as autocratic. Several other bankers, among them Dwight Morrow (father of Anne Morrow Lindbergh) were major players at the bank. The bank played a huge role on the international stage in this era, and while it had strong ties to England (and its sister bank Morgan Grenfall) it also helped finance the rise of the Nazis, Mussolini and the nationalists in Japan. This was also the period of the roaring twenties and the depression. The story told in the book is not quite as gripping because it doesn't hinge on a single character, but the events impacted and the role played by the bank were enough to keep me reading with interest and occassionally complete absorption.

The third era covered was the "Casino Era". As a result of the Glass Steagle Act, the bank split into Morgan Guarantee and Morgan Stanley. This section of the book also tells about the demise of Morgan Grenfall in England. This is essentially the modern era of banking where the investment bankers at Morgan Stanley and Morgan Grenfall became involved in takeover battles and modern securities. Morgan Guarantee became a fairly staid, and boring, commercial bank. This section of the book had the least interesting characters. I found it to be pretty dry. I have read several books about the various takeover battles, so this account, which was more of a survey, lacked the blood and drama of other accounts I have read.

Finally, from the perspective of 2005, the last section of the book, covering the most recent time period, feels a bit dated. I know more about what happened to both Morgan Guarantee and Morgan Stanley than Chernow knew when he wrote the book, so the very last few chapters felt out of date.

Overall it was also interesting to see the interaction between the history of the bank, and social history. The bank originally was very "white shoe", male and protestant. It hired its first Jewish banker in 1963. Pierpont and Jack were quite anti-Semitic. Yet, within its confines, the bank was also a meritocracy and afforded many of its employees entree into the upper classes.

Although, it can be a bit of a slog at times, if you are interested in the world of banking and finance, or the history of the 19th and 20th century, this is an excellent book.

AGENDA | Sunday, August 9, 2009 | Email | Print |


A Losing Crusade?

Although Islam is today described as Europe’s second religion, it is likely in the foreseeable future to become the first. This book, write KR Phanda and Prafull Goradia, is an objective, masterly exposition of a rather worrying demographic revolution taking place in the continent

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be The Same With Different People In It?
Author: Christopher Caldwell
Publisher: Allen Lane
Price: £14.99

Christopher Caldwell is an American journalist who writes in leading newspapers like the Financial Times. In the course of 12 chapters stretching 365 pages in the book under review, he portrays the anxiety and agony which afflicts native Europeans today. The anxiety is that Europe could well cease to be culturally as well as racially what it has been; the agony results from their helplessness in responding to the revolution set off by fast-multiplying immigrants from Africa and Asia. As the author states, native Germans have a fertility rate of 1.36 children per woman, whereas the Turkish immigrants appear to multiply at the rate of 2.4 children per woman. Eighty per cent of young Turks are married whereas in the same state of Westphalia, only 32 per cent of German natives tie the knot. Caldwell sums up the situation: “The closer one gets to European culture, the farther one goes from family and its raison d’etre, children.”

A remarkable feature of the continent in its centuries of growth was nationalism and a competition between nation states. The horrors of World War II discredited nationalism as leading to racialism, militarism, chauvinism or patriotism. The institution of marriage appears to have suffered a collapse, replaced by live-in couples who produce very few children. Homosexuality has not only spread, even marriages between gays and lesbians has been legitimatised. To add to these woes came the challenge of migrants.

To make sure that the immigrants’ identity is not diluted and the tradition of large families is maintained, a majority of immigrant young men marry women born in their home country. For example, over 60 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis marry girls born in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Such marriages are evidence of a choice against assimilation into the European mainstream.

The contention of the immigrant young men generally is that girls who grow up in Europe become distant from their own culture or become degenerate. The general impression in Denmark is that immigrants migrate just because they want a better life; they do not necessarily want a European life.

Native Europeans see the veil as a banner of solidarity with a violent international political movement which resorts to terrorism, whereas the Islamists consider such a garment as protecting modesty, chastity and even the virginity of their womenfolk. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali made a case for the liberty of women from Amsterdam, the retort was that Amsterdam is known as a place where young women are allowed to sit naked in windows waiting for men to pay them for sex. Islamists are also aware that Christians, and Roman Catholics in particular, were equally emphatic about chastity as well as pre-marital virginity. They therefore feel that the native European reaction to Islam is motivated by wanting liberation from religion per se; it does not matter whether it is Christianity or Islam.

Another aspect of this problem is that immigrant boys are generally not serious about studies and often end up doing jobs like driving taxis. Whereas Europe-born migrant girls are serious and a number of them get well paid white-collar jobs. Hence also the reluctance of boys to marry locally brought-up girls. Be that as it may, it only accelerates the demographic revolution whereby the number of immigrants rise in the background of the native European population falling.

Going back to history, Christianity provided the basis of a political ideology until the Reformation which began in the 16th century. Then the excesses of the Roman Catholic priesthood were exposed and the political classes started throwing off the yoke of the Church on the state. The two were separated to give birth to secularism which in turn obtained ideological support from the Enlightenment. This celebration of reason led to the blossoming of modern European civilisation. As reason flourished, faith diminished and the proportion of worshipping Christians declined.

Europeans became more intellectual and less religious. Even the faithful appeared to lose some of their collective pride in Christianity. The author quotes Islamologist Hans Jansen as talking of the end of religion. Among current European natives, religion shows signs of being a thing of the past. A poll by the influential paper La Figaro found that 45 per cent of self-described Catholics in France were unable to say what Easter commemorates. In 2003, a Lutheran pastor of Copenhagen had to be suspended for declaring that he did not believe in God the Creator! Compared to this is Islam, brimming with vigour and faith in Allah being the only God. Most Muslims are Muslims first, Muslims second and everything else later.

Pope Benedict XVI gave Islam a grudging compliment: “Islam’s strength comes mainly from people’s conviction that Islam can provide a valid spiritual foundation to their lives.” This is the Pope who provoked a Muslim uproar by stating that in Islam God is absolutely transcendent, not bound even to rationality. Little wonder then that in France, it was found that 85 per cent Muslim students stressed that religious beliefs were very important. Only 35 per cent non-Muslims felt so ardently. In Germany, 81 per cent Turks were religious as against only 23 per cent native Christians.

The European dice is thus loaded against the natives. Although Islam is today described as Europe’s second religion, it is likely in the foreseeable future to become the first. Hence Christopher Caldwell, on the cover of his book, asks, “Can Europe be the same with different people in it?” This is the crux of the demographic revolution taking place with fully aware native Europeans watching helplessly.

Every society or civilisation changes with time and circumstance. Perhaps, most native Europeans would be reconciled to the changing demographic profile of their continent provided most or all the immigrants were congenial to the ethos of Europe. Unfortunately Islamists have been found to be determined to stick to their orthodox ways. In fairness to them, it must be said that Muslims are unchanging even when by themselves whether in Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh or India. They are reminded regularly by their imams that Allah is the only God and that Prophet Mohammed was the last prophet who delivered the final message of Allah. The implication is that a final message cannot be altered. Between the Quran, the Hadith and the Sunnah, every answer is given.

What native Europeans find the most abhorrent about Muslims is their attitude towards women. They are not looked upon as equal human beings. Among other things, honour killings appear barbaric to the natives of Europe. They are practised especially by the Kurdish and Pakistani communities. Brothers murder their sisters or fathers their daughters for some trespass against sexual propriety — usually either wearing Western clothing or dating Western men. There were 45 such murders in Germany alone in the first half of the decade according to a 2005 study by the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency. In Berlin, Hatun Surucu “dishonoured” her family by dating a German and raising a child on her own. Her spectacular killing by several of her brothers in broad daylight in early 2005 was one of half-a-dozen honour killings that year in Berlin alone.

In Chapter 4, called ‘Fear Masquerading as Tolerance’, the thrust of the message is that the native European response to the immigrants is a mixture of liberalism and their fear of Islam. Which is more is difficult to tell, but neither is an effective answer to the immigrant challenge. Incidentally, the problem is substantially confined to Muslims. There is no mention of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and others who have also migrated to Europe.

The Enlightenment as well as the recent horror of war led to an intolerance of intolerance — a mindset that has been praised as anti-racism and anti-fascism, and described as political correctness. Another factor that complicated the situation was the fear of Communism throughout the 20th century. One answer to the Red menace was a declared commitment to individualism, democracy, freedom and human rights — all of which justify the liberal attitude.

An interesting illustration of the fear prevailing in post-war Europe was given by Enoch Powell in his well-known 1968 speech Rivers of Blood, on the subject of immigration. He received thousands of letters of appreciation, but most left out their address presumably because it was dangerous and they would risk either penalties or reprisals if it were found out. As the author puts it, more and more native Europeans are becoming politically correct when they talk about immigration and ethnicity. The question is: Has the European public assented or submitted, is it being convinced or coerced, is it acquiring manners or losing liberties?

This book is a masterly exposition on the low but chronic horror that afflicts Europeans. This volume should be read not only by those interested in the future of Europe but also those concerned with what lies in store for India. Our country also faces a similar dilemma, although it does not feel as much pain due to the immunity developed over eight centuries.

When published in the 1960s, this book had a revolutionary effect on our understanding of the American Revolution. Its impact is undiminished by the passage of the last 40 years. Bailyn's scholarship and exposition remains as exciting as it must have been at the time of initial publication. Bailyn attempted to take a fresh look at the thinking of the individuals who made the Revolution. His work was based on an extensive survey and analysis of the large number of political pamphlets published in the years leading up to the revolution. His work benefited as well greatly from a number of other significant works of scholarship, such as Caroline Robbins' book on the Commonwealth tradition in 18th century thought. More than anything else, Bailyn succeeded in determining what key terms like 'power', 'liberty', and republicanism meant to the Revolutionary generations. In doing so, he was able to strip away anachronistic accretions from these terms and ideas and recover the actual thinking of the Revolutionaries and their opponents.

Bailyn's achievement is manifold. He was able to show that dominant intellectual influence on the Revolutionaries was a compound of classical models, Common Law legal tradition, Enlightenment ideology, covenant theology, and a strong tradition of British intellectual and political dissent that had its roots in the Commonwealth period of the 17th century. The latter tradition was especially important and acted as the binding matrix for other traditions and interpretative lens through which other received ideas were focused. Bailyn shows how these ideas were articulated in the specifically American context and how they led inevitably to confrontation with the expanding imperial authority of Britain. This conflict led to new expansions of the basic ideology, some of which would represent completely novel ideas. The traditional ideas of representation and consent, constitutional basis of society, and sovereignty were overthrown and replaced to a very large extent by the concepts we still uphold.

The development of these new ideas and the necessity to give them practical scope would lead to what Bailyn artfully termed "The Contagion of Liberty"; the expansion of concepts of rights and freedom well beyond the original categories of thought received by the Revolutionary generations. These would include attacks on slavery, the questioning of establishment of religion, speculation about democracy as a legitimate and potentially stable form of government, and an increasing emphasis on social equality generated from the realization of political equality. As Bailyn remarks, the thinking and writing on these topics provides the bridge between the world of the 18th century intellectuals and what would become the world of Madison and de Toqueville.

Bailyn's analysis and scholarship are superb. The organization and quality of writing in this book are outstanding. Just as important, Bailyn is very good at supporting his analysis with well chosen excerpts from contemporary political pamphlets. His judicious choice of quotations not only serves to support his conclusions but gives a fine idea of the words and thoughts of the Revolutionaries and their opponents.

This is a fundamental book for understanding the American past.


This work is a classic. Bailyn brilliantly traces the ideological background of the revolutionaries. He shows how they were steeped in the radical libertarian and republican opposition literature of 17th and 18th century England. He overturms traditional interpretations that stress Locke as the primary influence by demonstrating the vital importance of such men as Algernon Sidney, John Milton, John Trenchard & Thomas Gordon, Lord Bolingbroke, and a host of others. Despite this, Bailyn does not deny the centrality of Locken natural rights philosophy, as many more recent scholars have. He sees the basic philosophy behind the revolution as one which views power as the eternal enemy of liberty. Power must be watched and restrained tightly, otherwise it will exceed its bounds and bring about the end of liberty and the initiation of slavery. He also delves into various issues relating to this philosophy that surrounded the break from Great Britain as well, including the unsettling consequences of their revolutionary agenda(e.g. new views of slavery). In the revised edition of the work, Bailyn extends his analysis to the new U.S. Constitution. Contrary to many other scholars, Bailyn maintains that the new Constitution did not represent a repudiation of the Revolution, but rather, its fulfillment. I myself am still a bit skeptical concerning this point, but his scholarship is sound, and his reasoning is suggestive and challenging. Above all, I would have to say that this work is an absolute *must* for any individual who is interested in early-American history or political philosophy. Moreover, it is also very instructive for liberty loving Americans, as it reveals the nature of the truly radical libertarian foundations of our nation.

Yet, in early 2006, India quietly gifted five Mi-17 helicopters to the Sri Lankan air force. The only Indian condition was: These helicopters would fly under Sri Lankan air force colours. New Delhi clearly did not want to annoy UPA's Tamil Nadu allies like the DMK unnecessarily.

The Mi-17s were in addition to a Sukanya Class offshore patrol vessel gifted by the Indian Coast Guard to the Sri Lankan navy in 2002.

These warehouses or ships of varying sizes were used by the LTTE to store arms, ammunition and even armoured personnel carriers. These ships, which had no names or identification numbers, used to remain on high seas for months on end. They were brought near Sri Lankan shores whenever the LTTE needed the arms. Smaller ships and craft were used to transport these arms to the Sea Tiger bases on the east and the west coast.

Indian and Sri Lankan navy sources revealed that well-coordinated operations by the two navies between 2006 and 2009 actually broke the backbone of the Sea Tigers.

The Indian Navy, the Sri Lankans said, helped in various ways.

For instance, the Indian Navy's Dorniers based at Ramnad in Tamil Nadu flew regular reconnaissance missions over the seas around Sri Lanka. These Dornier aircraft, fitted with high-powered radar, scoured the area for ships with suspicious movement and cargo.

Whenever such a ship was detected, the Indian Navy passed on the information to the Sri Lankans. The real time intelligence helped the Sri Lankan navy track and then destroy LTTE arms consignments.

Once the rogue ships were located, Sri Lankan navy's Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPV) would go after these floating warehouses and destroy them. The Sri Lankan navy destroyed the first warehouse ship on September 17, 2006, about 120 nautical miles east of the island. Three more such ships were sunk in early 2007.

Moreover, under an agreement between the two countries, the Indian Navy and the Coast Guard frequently sent out ships to patrol the Palk Strait and the Gulf of Mannar. The presence of warships and Indian Coast Guards's OPVs acted as a firm deterrence against the Sea Tigers.

We went near Australian waters and whacked the last four vessels,' Vice-Admiral Karannagoda told Jane's Navy International in March 2009. 'Yet we are not a big navy; we had to improvise and use innovation and ingenuity to get our job done. The Sri Lankan navy does not possess any frigate-sized ships, so we used offshore patrol vessels and old tankers, merchant vessels and fishing trawlers as support vessels.'