Bob Savage

Extremely Informative

Revisado: 02-27-25

Unlike history books by other Leftists historians like Howard Zinn, this book if filled with insightful facts rarely discussed anywhere else. I hope Daniel Immerwahr will write more. Since after WW II, at least prior to Trump’s second term, didn’t want to think of ourselves as owing and/or controlling lands outside of the 50 states by this book makes clear that we were fooling ourselves. Now Trump’s talk of taking Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal may indicate we may no longer would be ashamed of our colonialism.

This book is in the league with books written by great historians such as Eric Foner.

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Great To Read the Unfiltered Works of the World’s Monsters

Revisado: 10-30-24

The narration was great! I love reading the unfiltered works of the word’s monsters to try to get insight in how to prevent similar movements from successfully emerging again. In What Is To Be Done, Lenin argues for need of the professional revolutionary because the masses are not competent to lead a revolution. This results in the “successful” revolution being dominated by professional revolutionaries. When they succeed, as in the USSR and China, these professional revolutionaries go on to run their countries’ with their prime motivation being retain power at all costs. They denominate, terrorize, and even kill the masses to keep them under control. The professional revolutionaries, including Lenin, are not heroes. The Europeans who brought social democracy through the parliamentary process, which Lenin in later works claimed would fail, were much more successful in improving their societies for the masses than were the revolutionary mobsters such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

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Finally Don’t Make Excuses For Anti-Democracy Rural Voters

Revisado: 05-05-24

This was a a refreshing read. It correctly demonstrates that the majority of rural voters are irrationally unreachable to politicians who actually are willing to help them. By electing hard right Republicans they let big business destroy their communities and then blame the liberal Democratic politicians who most oppose the dominance of big business in their communities . If they keep electing these types of Republicans it will continue to get worse.

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Half of a Good Book

Revisado: 04-23-24

This is a book that was written to an audience that already believes what Jim Wallis is preaching. He explained how Trump's MAGA movement has overtaken both the Republican Party and the white evangelical movement. He persuasively argues that the these white evangelicals are not really following the word of Jesus Christ contained in the bible. He calls them to account ("to the alter") for their blasphemy. However, if he wants to win converts to his cause, he lost the opportunity to do so by not pointing out the outrageous beliefs and behavior of undemocratic movements on the Left that look to the past for inspiration from Black Liberation Army's killer, Assata Shakur, (BLM': "Assata thought us") and Angela Davis (two time Vice Presidential candidate of the Communists Party USA). These groups talk about revolution and express no faith in existing American institution even after sixty years since the Civil Rights movement has brought significant legislative and institutional change. The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, is that the Republican outrageously allowed the right-wing anti-democratic movements, especially MAGA, to take over their party while the Democrats have not allowed anti-democratic to have any significant power in their party. If Wallis want converts to his democratic cause, he needs to acknowledge that anti-democratic movements of the Left can be potentially dangerous to democracy and demonstrate what an effective job the Democrats have done to prevent them from being a force in their party, while the Republicans have become a threat to the very existence of American democracy. Lets try to connivence Christians and people of other faiths that following MAGA goes against their beliefs by demonstrating not just the evils of MAGA but show how Democrats have kept their faith in American democracy by preventing the undemocratic left for controlling their party.

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False Equivalency

Revisado: 03-23-24

Right-wing radicals control the Republican Party leadership but left-wing radicals are outsiders in the Democratic Party. We don’t get that distinction from this book. Tired of books that simply don’t acknowledge that by Trump getting close to majority support it demonstrates a sickness in American society; it’s not the Democratic Party’s fault. Don’t appease Trump supporters. Hope their fever breaks and enough return to loving their country again. In the meantime, Democrats will continue to make sure anti-democratic radicals are kept from any real power.

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Great To Have Access to Classic Literature

Revisado: 07-17-23

After see The Republic cited since elementary school, it was great to be given the opportunity to listen to it in its entirety. What Plato apparently thought he creating in his imaginary state was utopia, it was authoritarian dystopia promoting eugenics, extreme censorship, slavery, and extreme elitism, especially knowing and accepting your place in society mostly determined by birth. What a monstrous place this would be!

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Cold War Background History Flawed

Revisado: 02-28-23

Ms. Gage’s description of the post-WW II Cold War is flawed. She focused on anti-communism of conservatives and the right. They were already engaged in militant anti-communism before, during, and after WWII. What made anti-communism so powerful after WWII was that liberals and the anti-communist left joined the fight and there was no significant return of 1930’s/1940s anti-anti-communist movement until the 1960s. These anti-communist liberals and radicals saw Stalin in particular and Leninism in general as a danger to democracy at home and abroad. They were disgusted by communist appeasing journalism in publications such as The Nation and policies promoted by politicians such as Henry Wallace. Liberals such Schlesinger and Niebuhr stopped submitting articles for and openly criticized The Nation’s magazines defense of Stalin and the USSR. Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas pushed to purge his party and the ACLU of communists and communist fellow travelers. Anti-communist social democrats, such as Walter Reuther, purged communist from the the unions that they led. The anti-communists liberals created the ADA to oppose “dough faced” popular front liberals (Schlesinger words in The Viral Center) such as Henry Wallace. Ms. Gage description of the ADA as anti-anti-communist at its creation in 1948 is ridiculous. Niebuhr’s 1952 book the Irony of American History argued that American needed to stand up to international communism but do so with awareness that it will make grave errors in doing so but that shouldn’t make them unwilling to engage in the fight. What made Cold War Liberals and radicals different from conservatives and the right was that, unlike Chambers, McCarthy, Kirk, and Buckley, they didn’t oppose radical solutions to society’s problem as long as they were enacted through the democratic process as opposed to being forced if the population through a totalitarian system such a communism. In the early 1960s the SDS started as student branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, which was led by Socialist Michael Harrington. When they refused Harrington’s demand that it include an anti-communist commitment in its founding documents, they broke off from the LID and renamed the organization the Students for Democratic Society “SDS”’and the return of 1930s and 1940s popular front anti-anti-communism was given its first significant start. This background would have helped us understand why Cold War Liberals and anti-communists radicals didn’t oppose Hoover anti-communist actions from the end of WWII until the early 1960s as long as it was focused on actual communists rather than Cold War liberals and anti-communists radicals. If Hoover’s support only came conservatives and liberals, he would been reigned in. Cold War liberals and anti-communists radicals gave him room to maneuver as long as they believed he was going after mutual enemies: communists and their fellow travelers. If she included this context it would have been a much better book.

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Great Book Except For Except Epilogue

Revisado: 07-21-22

Five stars for the entire book up until the epilogue. Epilogue deserves -0- stars. The book is interesting and thorough history of passage, application, and Supreme Court interpretation of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and acts of Congress that attempted to enforce them through the first decade of the 20th Century.

However, the epilogue was extremely misleading. Foner claims that the Court through the present has required state action to enforce acts passed in the reconstruction era under the authority of the 14th Amendment. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was initially passed under the authority of the 13th Amendment and then re-enacted under the authority of the 14th Amendment, has been interpreted by the Supreme Court since the 1970s to authorize individuals to sue other individuals, businesses, and other entities for employment discrimination, 42 USC Sec. 1981 and housing discrimination, 42 USC Sec. 1982, even though no state action was involved. These statutes were based on the Reconstruction Amendments not the Commerce Clause. Forner should have consulted a lawyer before completing his epilogue. See, Johnson v Railway Express Agency, 421 U.S. 424 (1975), Tilman v. Wheaton-Haven Recreation Assn., 410 U. S. 431 (1973), and Runyon v McCrary, 427 U.S. 160 (1976), Paterson v. McKean Union, 491 U.S. 164 (1989) upheld Runyon holding the Sec. 1981 applied to private employment but that it didn’t apply to harassment in employment claims because it wasn’t part of contract formation. Congress responded in 1991 by amending Sec. 1981 to specificity apply to private employment harassment claims. Foner should have discussed the Supreme Court’s reversals of its prior decisions that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (42 U.S. Sections 1981 and 1982) didn’t apply to individual actions.

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Too Much of An Apologist For Revolutionary Violence

Revisado: 07-05-21

I just listened to this for a second time. The first time around, before I knew much about the French Revolution, I was appreciative of what I learned from the course. Now I realized that she was stretching and ignoring facts to make the French Revolution appear as positive as possible. There was nothing positive about The Terror or Robespierre but she tried to pull Jacobin’s desire for equity as a positive attribute, when it really only resulted in the killings of thousands of co-revolutionaries and innocent people. When she went over the legacy of the French Revolution she didn’t mention that it showed the difference between using violence against people whose families they will have to live with after revolution, which caused continuous resentment, hatred, and unending instability, to the American Revolution that used violence to push another nation out (Great Britain). Pushing out the British resulted in patriotism and unity in the United States that allowed it to form a stable republic for decades until it could no longer be sustained in the face of the hypocrisy of leaving out African Americans from the promise of American liberty, which caused the Civil War over 80 years later.

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Revolutionary Marxists and Anarchist Aren’t Heroes

Revisado: 04-12-21

There is an assumption in this book that Antifa, who the author admits are significantly composed of Revolutionary Marxists and Anarchists, are the good guys. How many more millions of people need to die at the hands of revolutionary Marxists before the Left realizes that they will never be a force to improve living conditions for anyone; they bring misery to bulk of any country’s population that they have controlled. When this book went through the history of anti-Fascism, it skipped the shameful history of revolutionary Marxists collaboration with Nazis during the existence of German- Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The Anti-anti-communism of the Left since the late 1960s has been a disaster for the Left. The anti-communist Social Democrats in Europe sine the end of WW II (and to a more limited extent the liberal Democrats in the US since the Great Depression) did more to improve the lives of their citizens than any totalitarian communist party or group. We are in serious trouble if we look to Antifa supporters as our protectors from fascism. Left-liberals, Democratic Socialists, and Social Democrats need to distance themselves from these would be totalitarians; they are enemies of peaceful representative democracy. Don’t fall for the old belief that the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

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