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 The Ugly Rhymes of History?
Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies; National Styles and Strategic Cultures By Thomas McDermott, Strategy Bridge: “Some would say that the journey from Akkad to Fallujah proves that the ugly history of insurgency rhymes through the ages. But is this really true? Are there really continuities in a meaningful and instrumental sense? Perhaps more importantly, do the strictures born of society, geography and environment dictate who wins and loses?”
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany 1St Edition by Richard Lucas.
A “fascinating, well-researched account” of Mildred Gillars, the failed actress who turned on her country and became a Nazi propagandist during WWII (Publishers Weekly). One of the most notorious Americans of the twentieth century was a failed Broadway actress turned radio announcer named Mildred Gillars (1900–1988), better known to American GIs as “Axis Sally.” Despite the richness of her life story, there has never been a full-length biography of the ambitious, star-struck Ohio girl who evolved into a reviled disseminator of Nazi propaganda. At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Gillars had been living in Germany for five years. Hoping to marry, she chose to remain in the Nazi-run state even as the last Americans departed for home. In 1940, she was hired by the German overseas radio, where she evolved from a simple disc jockey and announcer to a master propagandist. Under the tutelage of her married lover, Max Otto Koischwitz, Gillars became the personification of Nazi propaganda to the American GI. Spicing her broadcasts with music, Gillars’s used her soothing voice to taunt Allied troops about the supposed infidelities of their wives and girlfriends back home, as well as the horrible deaths they were likely to meet on the battlefield. Supported by German military intelligence, she was able to convey personal greetings to individual US units, creating an eerie foreboding among troops who realized the Germans knew who and where they were. After broadcasting for Berlin up to the very end of the war, Gillars tried but failed to pose as a refugee, and was captured by US authorities. Her 1949 trial for treason captured the attention and raw emotion of a nation fresh from the horrors of the Second World War. Gillars’s twelve-year imprisonment and life on parole, including a stay in a convent, is a remarkable story of a woman who attempts to rebuild her life in the country she betrayed. https://www.amazon.com/Axis-Sally-American-Voice-Germany-ebook/dp/B00CE34UVG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503710100&sr=8-1&keywords=lucas+axis+sally  Russian transport infrastructure: Moscow has approved US$2.5 billion to expand and modernize the Trans-Siberian and Baikal-Amur railways as part of a larger rail project to boost economic growth and exports from the country’s Far East region that borders the Pacific Ocean, Asia Times staff report. It will pay for 580 kilometers of additional main lines, signaling upgrades on 680 km of railway and 43 crossings, and the renovation of 90 railway stations. Russian Railways said in a statement on its website: “The project will contribute to the development of industrial enterprises in the region, create new jobs, and the necessary economic conditions for effective and sustainable development of Siberia and the Far East.” READ THE STORY HERE
 
VOLUME II: WRESTLING WITH HIS ANGEL, THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, A SELF MADE MAN PART 1 OF 68/24/2017
Planetary civil wars. Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs.
Yes, there is a civil war looming in the United States. But it will look little like the orderly pattern of descent which spiraled into the conflict of 1861-65. It will appear more like the Yugoslavia break-up, or the Russian and Chinese civil wars of the 20th Century. It will appear as an evolving chaos. And the next US civil war, though it yet may be arrested to a degree by the formal hand of centralized government, will destabilize many other nation-states, including the Peo-ple’s Republic of China (PRC). It may, in other words, be short-lived simply because the uprising will probably not be based upon the decisions of constituent states (which, in the US Civil War, created a break-away confederacy), acting within their own perception of a legal process. It is more probable that the 21st Century event would contage as a gradual breakdown of law and order. The outcome, to a degree dependent on how rapidly order is restored, would likely be the end, or constraint, of the present view of democracy in the US. It would see a mas-sive dislocation of the economy and currency. It would, then, become a global-level is-sue. Humans mock what they see as an impulse toward species suicide among the beautiful lemming clan of Lemmus lemmus.1 In fact, these tiny creatures have a societal survival pattern which seems more consistent than that of their human detractors. The pattern of human history shows that civilizations usually end through internal illness rather than at the hand of external powers. It is significant that the gathering crisis in the United States was not precipitated by the November 7, 2016, election of Pres. Donald Trump, and neither was the growing polari-zation of the United Kingdom’s society caused by the Brexit vote of 2016. In both instances, the election of Mr Trump and the decision by UK voters for Britain to exit the European Union were late reactions — perhaps too late — by the regional populations of both countries to what they perceived as the destruction of their nation-states by “urban super-oligarchies”. ...
Tales of the New Cold War: Lost Alternatives of Mikhail Gorbachev. Stephen F. Cohen @nyu @princeton. PART 2 of 2
"...His father was a combine harvester operator and World War II veteran, named Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev. His mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva (née Gopkalo), was a kolkhoz worker.[8] He was brought up mainly by his Ukrainian maternal grandparents. In his teens, he operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. In 1967 he qualified as an agricultural economist via a correspondence master's degree at the Stavropol Institute of Agriculture. While at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and soon became very active within the party. Gorbachev met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko, daughter of a Ukrainian railway engineer, at Moscow State University. They married in September 1953 and moved to Stavropol upon graduation. She gave birth to their only child, daughter Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya (Ири́на Миха́йловна Вирга́нская), in 1957. Raisa Gorbacheva died of leukemia in 1999.[9] Gorbachev has two granddaughters (Ksenia and Anastasia) and one great granddaughter (Aleksandra)...." SINCE INDEPENDENCE, NEW DELHI EMPLOYS MUSLIM DIPLOMATS THROUGHOUT ASIA, THE BACKLASH BEGINNING8/21/2017  Gold, Dollars, and Power
By Rob Ludington, Strategy Bridge: “Recurring Cold War debates about U.S. military posture in Europe had to include the financial costs, and the associated impacts to the balance of payments system, while at the same time addressing security commitments, domestic politics, and international relations with both allies and adversaries."
Hitler's Forgotten Children: A True Story of the Lebensborn Program and One Woman's Search for Her Real Identity by Ingrid von Oelhafen and Tim Tate. PART 1 of 2.
Created by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program abducted as many as half a million children from across Europe. Through a process called Germanization, they were to become the next generation of the Aryan master race in the second phase of the Final Solution. In the summer of 1942, parents across Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia were required to submit their children to medical checks designed to assess racial purity. One such child, Erika Matko, was nine months old when Nazi doctors declared her fit to be a “Child of Hitler.” Taken to Germany and placed with politically vetted foster parents, Erika was renamed Ingrid von Oelhafen. Many years later, Ingrid began to uncover the truth of her identity. Though the Nazis destroyed many Lebensborn records, Ingrid unearthed rare documents, including Nuremberg trial testimony about her own abduction. Following the evidence back to her place of birth, Ingrid discovered an even more shocking secret: a woman named Erika Matko, who as an infant had been given to Ingrid’s mother as a replacement child. Hitler’s Forgotten Children is both a harrowing personal memoir and a devastating investigation into the awful crimes and monstrous scope of the Lebensborn program. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0141ZP2Y8?_encoding=UTF8&isInIframe=1&n=133140011&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=digital-text&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper
Hitler's Forgotten Children: A True Story of the Lebensborn Program and One Woman's Search for Her Real Identity by Ingrid von Oelhafen and Tim Tate. PART 2 of 2.
Created by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program abducted as many as half a million children from across Europe. Through a process called Germanization, they were to become the next generation of the Aryan master race in the second phase of the Final Solution. In the summer of 1942, parents across Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia were required to submit their children to medical checks designed to assess racial purity. One such child, Erika Matko, was nine months old when Nazi doctors declared her fit to be a “Child of Hitler.” Taken to Germany and placed with politically vetted foster parents, Erika was renamed Ingrid von Oelhafen. Many years later, Ingrid began to uncover the truth of her identity. Though the Nazis destroyed many Lebensborn records, Ingrid unearthed rare documents, including Nuremberg trial testimony about her own abduction. Following the evidence back to her place of birth, Ingrid discovered an even more shocking secret: a woman named Erika Matko, who as an infant had been given to Ingrid’s mother as a replacement child. Hitler’s Forgotten Children is both a harrowing personal memoir and a devastating investigation into the awful crimes and monstrous scope of the Lebensborn program. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0141ZP2Y8?_encoding=UTF8&isInIframe=1&n=133140011&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=digital-text&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper
"More than seven decades after the end of the Second World War, the era of the Nazi Hunters is drawing to a close. Their saga is finally told in this “deep and sweeping account of a relentless search for justice that began in 1945 and is only now coming to an end” (The Washington Post).
After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. “Absorbing” (Kirkus Reviews) and “fascinating” (Library Journal), The Nazi Hunters focuses on the men and women who refused to allow their crimes to be forgotten. The Nazi Hunters reveals the experiences of the young American prosecutors in the Nuremberg and Dachau trials, Benjamin Ferencz and William Denson; the Polish investigating judge Jan Sehn, who handled the case of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss; the Mossad agent Rafi Eitan, who was in charge of the Israeli team that nabbed Eichmann; and Eli Rosenbaum, who sought to expel war criminals who were living in the United States. But some of the Nazi hunters’ most controversial actions involved the more ambiguous cases, such as former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s attempt to cover up his wartime history. Or the fate of concentration camp guards who have lived into their nineties, long past the time when reliable eyewitnesses could be found to pinpoint their exact roles. The story of the Nazi hunters is coming to a natural end. It was unprecedented in so many ways, especially the degree to which the initial impulse of revenge was transformed into a struggle for justice. The Nazi hunters have transformed our fundamental notions of right and wrong, and Andrew Nagorski’s “vivid, reader-friendly account of how justice was done…is comprehensively informative and a highly involving read” (The Wall Street Journal)." https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Hunters-Andrew-Nagorski-ebook/dp/B010MHAA14/ref=la_B001H6TZOS_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1495898314&sr=1-1  Vietnam’s energy dilemma: State planners say more than 50% of national power will be coal-fired by 2030, a big boost in the fossil fuel’s use that will worsen the country’s already severe air pollution and undercut its climate change goals, Dan Southerland writes. As a rapidly industrializing nation, it needs more electricity for both industries and homes, requiring it to not only build more coal-fired power plants but also import more of the fuel. Chinese companies appear ready to supply Vietnam with both coal and equipment, even as China closes some of its own coal-fired plants at home. READ THE STORY HERE U.S., VIETNAM: U.S. Aircraft Carriers Are Headed to Vietnam
By Zachary Keck, The National Interest: “In a move that is sure to upset China, a U.S. aircraft carrier will be visiting Vietnam in 2018, the first time an American carrier will be in the country since the end of the Vietnam War." |
Introduction to Eric Hoffer's Classic "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements".
FEMINISM: HOW WOMEN BETRAYED WOMEN
RESOLVING WORLD DISORDER
POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR MIDDLE EAST
HOW ISRAEL WINS
THE TREASON OF INTELLECTUALS: JULIEN BENDA
HAYEK & THE INTELLECTUALS
US STRATEGY FOR WINNING WORLD WAR IV
POLICY PAPERS FOR US GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT
COMPOSITION FOR THE LONG WAR
PROSPECT MAGAZINE
CategoriesArchives
October 2020
EXAMPLE OF SUCCESS IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY ACE VENTURA
PAUL RAHE: REALISM IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS, SPARTA
CONSCIENCE & TEMPORAL AUTHORITY
SHAKESPEARE
POSITIVE LAW vs. CONSCIENCE
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