Asarchus

A True Soldier's View of the Army at Peace and War

Revisado: 06-17-24

This is a highly detailed, warts and all autobiography of a man who rose from US Army buck private to full colonel during the period just after World War II to the last years of the Vietnam War. This is not the 30,000-foot view of an architect of war, but a foxhole-to-trench saga with many surprises, reverses, successes, and lucky breaks during hand-to-hand combat. Hackworth, who died in 2005, saw both Korea and Vietnam close up, learning much about what works and what fails in modern warfare. He's a brutal critic of the Army's system of identifying and promoting its middle-management officers, many of whom became "ticket punchers" with little frontline combat experience, and for whom advanced service schools like Army War College were as important assignments as command of an Army brigade. Hackworth also tears into the Army's replacement policy in both wars, where individuals rather than units were rotated in and out of combat assignments. This resulted in many field commands being sapped of morale as "new guys" struggled to gain respect from the veterans. But worst of all Army policies was the measurement of the Vietnam war's success by "body count", in which the number of claimed Vietcong and North Vietnamese dead became the marker by which officers were promoted and campaigns listed as victories. The "body count" became a lasting testament to the futility of the Vietnam war. Hackworth has little good to say about South Vietnamese military leadership and prowess. In his view, the South Vietnamese military leaders were never serious about beating the Vietcong, preferring to act as warlords and petty embezzlers instead, with "private" jeeps and helicopters and movie-star appointed headquarters.

This is a thick, densely written book which brings the smallest details of the story to life, putting the reader in a soggy trench with enemy fire all around, or in a crippled helicopter making a hard landing in a jungle clearing. It's intense, often humorous, sometimes tragic, and essential reading for all who want to see what war feels like close up.

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Space for Trump Needed

Revisado: 04-06-24

This is a comprehensive global look at nations that have traded democracy for despotism, progress for stagnation, and enlightened leadership for one-person rule. From Orban in Hungary to Mugabe in Tanzania, the authors take us on a wild ride in which those who seek absolute power fall victim to absolute corruption. When a nation's top official somehow ends up winning the top prize in a national lottery, you know the nation is bound for hell. The authors give our own would-be strongman his due, but recent events ("I will only be a dictator for just one day") show Donald J. Trump to be in the mold of many leaders who have ruined their countries through nepotism and incompetent leadership. This book is both fascinating history and a warning to the future. Let us hope we can heed that warning.

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History or Prequel?

Revisado: 01-22-24

Is this story of how visitors from the great democracies were seduced by the Nazis a forecast of what may happen if the MAGA movement has a second chance to rule the USA? Read and decide.

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In its Death Throes, a Regime Consumes Itself

Revisado: 12-23-23

Hitler's Germany died a well-deserved death while claiming millions of victims among its own citizens in its last months. After the failure of the 20 July 1944 bomb plot, The Nazi leaders and the Party apparatus tightened its grip on soldiers, civilians, slave laborers, and victims in the concentration camps. Many Germans were convinced that Hitler's escaping death from Stauffenberg's bomb was truly the proof that he was ordained to lead his people to victory...or doom. After the bomb plot was unsuccessful, no one dared stand firm against the Fuehrer, Thousands of prisoners died in meaningless forced marches during icy winter weather. Old men and teenage boys were assembled in Volkssturm batallians and sent against Allied tanks. Their lack of military training resulted in horrific casualties. In the final two months of the war, hundreds of ordinary Germans were hanged by the Nazi SS for showing "defeatism" or deserting their units after realizing the situation was hopeless.

This book gives a riveting picture of what life is like when all but the most fanatical believers know the end is near. Self-preservation becomes paramount, both among the general population and the leadership. Nazi mayors exhort their subjects to fight to the last bullet, then slip away in civilian clothes, hoping to escape the bloodbath. Top Nazis like Heinrich Himmler try to remake themselves as mediators with the Allies, offering Jewish captives as pawns in an effort to save themselves from execution as war criminals. Ordinary Germans, particularly women, desperately try to avoid being raped or murdered by vengeance-seeking Russian soldiers. This is essential history, both as a close-up view of Nazi Germany's collapse and as a warning to those who place faith in leaders who so clearly show the banality--and incompetence--of evil.

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MAGA Changelings and Sellouts Explained

Revisado: 12-07-23

Naomi Klein helps us understand why and how once honest and rational public figures become shills for the MAGA crowd. By focusing on her "Doppelgänger", Naomi Wolf, with whom she is often confused, Klein shows how being accepted as a mainstream author, actor, or artist can lead a person to sell out to the Right for greater fame or cold cash. Roseanne Barr, Lara Logan, Kanye West, and Matt Taibi are just a few of the once respected authors and artists who now populate FOX News, Breitbart, and other unsettled sites hawking conspiracy theories. To a person, they portray themselves as truth tellers who are "victims" of fictional cabals led by Socialists, Communists, Jews, gays, and any other despised outgroup targeted by the extreme Right.

Klein is a brilliant author and narrator. This book is a must read for anyone who wonders, "what happened to?" when confronted with reports from formerly sensible journalists who now regard the likes of Trump as worthy statespeople.

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Relevant to the current situation in Israel.

Revisado: 11-25-23

Just what is needed to sort through the propaganda and whataboutism of the Israeli government’s position on the West Bank and Gaza.

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Everyday Life in a Meat Grinder

Revisado: 08-08-23

This history was constructed from many contemporary diaries and letters written by ordinary Germans. Some of the material lay undiscovered for over 50 years, and thus avoided second-guessing by scholars as to the motives involved in its creation. By detailing the six years of war from the losing side while avoiding lengthy excursions into well-known events like D-Day and the Battle of Britain, Nicholas Stargardt presents a fascinating picture of ordinary lives adapting first to amazing success in battle, then to troubling setbacks, and finally to a long, bloody, and ultimately pointless avalanche of defeat. The narrators are soldiers, students, nurses, farmers, and factory workers. They continue to hope for victory even as allied bombing raids devastate their towns and more and more relatives go "missing in action" in Russia. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ordinary German citizen trusts the official press less as each year goes by and the war goes on, drawing closer each month to the homeland. People head for the cinema to see comedies and musicals, and on some occasions become disorderly when the theaters play a newsreel rather than start the feature.

While there are few graphic accounts of the countless atrocities committed by German troops (and not a few German civilians) against Poles, French, Jews, Russians, Czechs, and many other nationalities, the spare accounts in German letters home reveal some horrifying details: on one Greek Island, the entire Jewish population (around 75 men, women, and children) was rounded up, sent to the mainland, and exterminated. In what had been Poland, a German woman came upon six Jewish children who had apparently escaped from a death camp transport, The woman fed the children, then took them to the woods near her estate and shot them one by one with her husband's pistol. In her letter, she notes that the children did not run or resist, only whimpered until the bullet entered their brain.

Although rank and file Germans were increasingly skeptical of their country's ultimately winning the war, many nevertheless repeated the stale arguments which Dr. Goebbels fed them from 1933 to April 1945. They were convinced that the Allied coalition would fall apart and Britain and the United States would join Germany in beating back the Soviet Union. Some continued to justify the death and destruction by blaming it all on Jewish influences, even continuing this excuse after the war ended. Perhaps most distressing, the top Nazi leaders convinced many of their countrymen that destroying the German nation was preferable to repeating the "cowardly stab in the back" of November 1918, when Germany had agreed to an armistice before Allied armies invaded her territory. This lunacy prevailed to the point where 14 year olds attacked tanks with single-shot Panzerfausts in the ruins of Berlin.

This book tells a gripping story in a careful and studious way. The author provides actual tonnage figures for bombs dropped on Hamburg and Dresden, then compares these to the German bombs dropped on London in the 1940-41 Blitz. Had the German people known how the Allied bombing of Germany dwarfed the German efforts earlier in the war, perhaps their letters would not have radiated such hope that Germany could somehow win against them.

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A Noble Idea Laid Waste by Human Frailty

Revisado: 05-25-23

Revolution in France began with the highest ideals. Absolute monarchy would be replaced with democracy. The people of France would control their own government, and thereby their destiny as a nation. Social classes would become equal in the law. Human rights would advance, even beyond those proclaimed 14 years before by the American Colonists, The French Monarch would abide by a new French Constitution. Liberty, equality, fraternity, and above all reason would reside in the new revolutionary state.

All this idealism and seeming enlightenment came a cropper. As the French Revolution moved along from the exhilaration of 1789, when the Bastille fell and a new Estates General/parliament began debating the adoption of a Constitution based mostly on the American document, things began falling apart. The French King was reluctant to surrender his powers, until forced to become a prisoner, then branded a traitor, and finally sent to the guillotine. A series of charismatic revolutionary firebrands commanded political power, then fell afoul of plotters within the Assembly, and met with the executioner as had the King. Meanwhile. France's revolutionary ardor was met with armed hostility by the rest of Europe. Wars of varying intensity erupted between France and its neighbors throughout the 1790's. This left the political rulers of France little time to tamp down the firebrands and the plotters, while boosting the leadership of ambitious military men, among these a little-known Napoleon Bonaparte.

A New World Begins is an excellent one-volume history of the Revolutionary period in France, beginning in the 1780's when the country's economy was wrecked by peasant uprisings, crop failures. and war debts (the French had spent dearly while helping the Americans defeat their British rulers). The Revolutionary years from 1789 to 1804 are extensively covered, although Napoleon's rise from minor officer in the new French army to crowning himself emperor of the French is dealt with almost as an afterthought in the final section of the book.

What I believe this book does is shout a warning from history: that with the noblest ideas of creating a peaceful, prosperous society where all citizens are equal before the law, a state can descend into anarchy. In this state, the politically strong send the weak to be executed, no one is beyond the executioner's reach, and ultimately a strongman (or woman) rises to end the madness and impose his or her will.

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esto le resultó útil a 10 personas

Lives up to its Title, Unfortunately

Revisado: 04-18-23

I've become quite a devotee of Gutfeld! since I stumbled on this late-night rumble fest. Not because Greg is good at his craft. He's crass, abrasive, self-congratulatory, often genuinely mean. Many times he dredges up some discredited Liberal from decades past (Howard Dean? Rachel Dolezahl?) for a cheap laugh--if the audience gets the reference. All without a scintilla of humor--even his studio audience barely snickers at most of his one-liners. Yet Gutfeld! gets high viewership. Sienkewicz and Marx start with FOX News's latest effort to craft a cable show that competes from the Right against Colbert, Fallon, Myers, and other comedians who serve as laugh inducers on the day's political and social events. The authors make an attempt to quantify Greg Gutfeld versus the other late night hosts. However, they fail to draw comparisons between Gutfeld's attempts at joking and the "genuine" laugh lines offered by "left-leaning" hosts. Having analyzed Gutfeld's style, I believe a contrast between how he and Colbert (or any other late-night network or cable host) handle the same current events would help the reader understand the difference between landing a solid laugh and coughing up a hairball.

From Gutfeld!, the authors journey down the cellar stairs that lead past sexist, anti-science, white supremacist, racist, and even Nazi-worshiping shows (mostly only available as podcasts). Shows hosted by would-be comedians such as Joe Rogan are examined, often by pointing out their marginal guest lists. We explore horrific examples such as "The Daily Shoah", which tries to lighten up subjects like genocide and the Holocaust. The authors wisely exclude original material from such sources. Unfortunately, despite the frightening aspects of these extreme Right "humorous" websites, discussion of their perverse nature is often dull and dry in the authors' hands.

While this story as told is worth the read, I feel some genuine comedy writing is necessary for us to understand why Right-wing attempts at humor often resemble the bully's classic "joke" of kicking away an amputee's crutch, or worse, throwing a puppy in a wood chipper just for grins.

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In Defeat, Shame, Sacrifice, and Subversion

Revisado: 03-14-23

The story of how a great nation with a superlative life in art, writing, theater, cinema, and salons succumbed to collaboration with a ruthless occupier. You will find many world-famous names here, from Picasso to Sartre, Camus to Gide, Piaf to Chevalier. All in some fashion gave aid and comfort to the enemy, and in the worst cases openly called for France to fall in line with the Germans, who looted the art museums and heavily censored entertainments even while keeping cultural life alive, albeit in semi-consciousness. While the four years and two months of Nazi control over Paris spawned a resistance movement that played a major role in the liberation of the City in August 1944, the French cultural elites still had much to answer for. So many played along with German persecution of Jews and Communists that many French men and women were left to face harsh justice when the Allies drove the Germans out.

This is an explanation of the toxic undercurrents that swept away the Third Republic and installed "Petainism", or collaboration in its place. Under Marshall Petain, many French artists and writers tried to recast the country as a loyal supplicant to the harsh, vicious overlords who occupied Paris and two-thirds of Metropolitan France. The gambit failed. Millions of French soldiers remained prisoners of war in Germany. A million French citizens perished in Nazi death camps. French men and women with Jewish ancestry were hunted down and rounded up, sent to the camps or slaughtered by the Nazi SS and Fascist Milice, a wholly French terror organization.

A half century ago. Marcel Ophuls' documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity, portrayed the real story of France under Nazi occupation. This book is like an expanded footnote to that epic work.

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