AE

This book is a good foundational, introductory text for those interested in learning more about the ideology. A lot of people (like me) think Social Democracy (like seen in Scandinavian countries) is far too reformist to qualify as Socialism, and actual Marxists would concur. This book is all-inclusive, which I wasn't a fan of. It's an ok place to start but I've got some videos that might be better to help you differentiate the ideologies.

When I was in high school, I saw a quote attributed to Morgan Freeman claiming he said that he “didn't see race”, wanted to eliminate the idea of race from our thinking, and to treat everyone equally. In my immature liberal high schooler brain, that resonated with me and I wanted to adhere to that ideology as well. It didn't take long to see how incredibly illogical the idea of ignoring race is in this highly racialized world.

You can't ignore race because when those in power don't also ignore race, race continues to be a material reality. If I look at data about how many people get pulled over by police, but I've ignored their perceived race, I am blinding myself to reality. If I ignore race and see injustice, I may fail to identify it.

And yet a large portion of white folk in this country, especially self-described “progressives” and “liberals” adhere to this foolish idea, helping to reinforce unjust systems of power that coincidentally benefit those same people.

This book does an excellent job showcasing those who hold these beliefs and how to counteract them. The basis of its thesis is based on conversations with college kids and adults in like 1999. I wish they would redo the interviews with more people. Also I love any author or book who criticizes Obama from the left. That was a great chapter.

There was a great theory about what the future racial order might look like in the USA as we get closer to becoming a majority minority country. Instead of having a biracial order, it will be more like South & Central Americas' tri-racial order. The way he described it made my skin crawl because, ya know, the idea of racial hierarchies is gross and wrong. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I'll post a link to his theory in the comments.

I also found out there's a 6th edition coming out in October, which is lame. But it'll probably just be more appended chapters like this edition.

I would recommend this book to every white person and/or anyone interested in expanding their understanding about race and racism in the USA and/or anyone who thinks that they couldn't be racist because they...like...don't say the N word or voted for Obama or something.

Great book

I was never interested in history while in school. I didn't take a single history class in college. But over the last 3 years, I've learned the vast importance of understanding human history and how it shapes our present. (Thank you DJT for making me hate listening to NPR and switch to audiobooks instead). This book explains more than a dozen specific topics & themes high school history books intentionally leave out and the indoctrinating philosophies injected into them (spoiler alert: it's white ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, sexism, class erasure, and nationalism). It also explains why the corporations who “write” these books have a vested interest in making them terrible for students. I STRONGLY implore every teacher read this book. I also very much recommend every current or former student who found history boring to read this book to understand why, and learn what you missed.

Highly Recommend

I find reading libertarian theory fascinating. I'm not a libertarian at all, never have been and never will be, but reading what they have to say has always struck my interest. I think their one of the most intellectually consistent and self-reflective political ideologies on the spectrum. They're not riddled with hypocrisies like standard issue conservatives or intellectually bankrupt like liberals. They know what they believe and they want to push it to its absolute extremes because they think it will lead to a more free and fair society. I find that noble.

On a related note, I also sincerely believe that the world would be a better place for the vast majority of people if all intellectual property laws were completely abolished. I wanted to read a book that took this belief seriously and elaborated on it with more evidence than I could bring myself to providing.

Before reading this book, I didn't realize it was going to be right-libertarian philosophical thought experiments. My next book on the subject will be “Information Doesn't Want to Be Free” by Cory Doctorow, which should come to a similar conclusion as this book, but from a more anti-capitalist angle.

“Natural-rights,” “Utilitarian analysis,” “first-occupier homesteading rule,” “privity,” “usufruct,” These are all words & phrases that I apparently was supposed to know the meaning of before reading this book, but did not.

I'm not really on board with private property rights, and I see IP as an extension of private property (like the factory) instead of personal property (like the toothbrush) and therefore am not a big fan.

The main points the author makes are:

• There is no evidence that copyright and patent laws are needed to spurn the production of creative works and innovations.
• There is no evidence that IP laws show net gains in wealth.
• The IP laws' lengths are arbitrary (20 years for trademarks, death of author+70 years for copyright, etc (of course the author didn't even bother mentioning the fact that Disney is the only reason why US copyright laws keep getting longer))
• “Both the inventor and the theoretical scientist engage in creative mental effort to produce useful, new ideas. Yet one is rewarded, and the other is not. ...it is arbitrary and unfair to reward more practical inventors and entertainment providers, such as the engineer and songwriter, and to leave more theoretical science and math researchers and philosophers unrewarded. The distinction is inherently vague, arbitrary, and unjust.”
• “The function of property rights is to prevent interpersonal conflict over scarce resources, by allocating exclusive ownership of resources to specified individuals (owners). [...] Property rights are not applicable to things of infinite abundance, because there cannot be conflict over such things. [...] “Since use of another's idea does not deprive him of its use, no conflict over its use is possible; ideas, therefore, are not candidates for property rights.” AKA: you can't exhaust an idea, as it is infinite. Therefore, it cannot be deemed your property.
• “There is, in fact, no reason why merely innovating gives the innovator partial ownership of property that others already own.” If you own a copyright or trademark, it means you can control what everyone does with their own property. Which they say is a violation of some homestead whatnot, idk I can only comprehend so much libertarian theory before my eyes glaze over.

At least the book was short.

I do not recommend this book to anyone.

This book encompasses a 100+ year history of the Arabic people within the Middle East, touching briefly in Muslims within Central Asia. It is the longest book I've ever gotten through. And it may be a controversial opinion, but I'm gonna say it: the Middle East region is complicated. Yeah. I said it.

Regarding the book itself: I found it highly informative, straightforward, and balanced. I wish it drew more through-lines of ‘how this event happening now connects to that event from 50 years ago'. The author did that a bit, but not enough IMO. Also not nearly enough about the US-Saudi Arabia relationship. I'mma need to read another book about that.

But my overall thoughts on the historical events are this:
US and European meddling has done more harm than good in the Greater Middle East region and to the Arabic people. The best thing to be done is for the West to remain as neutral and un-involved as possible. Everything we touch turns to shit. Leave these people alone.

The majority of this book was about Israel and its shenanigans over the last 100 years. Skip to the final section to see my thoughts on that kerfuffle.

Good place to start
“Western policymakers and intellectuals need to pay far more attention to history if they hope to remedy the ills that afflict the Arab world today. All too often in the West, we discount the current value of history. [...] This could spare them not from repeating history so much as from repeating historic mistakes.”

—
Culture Clash
• In the late 1700's, The French brought post-Revolution classical liberalism to Egypt, and argued that their ideals were “universal”. There is truly no better tool for a zealot or conqueror than to claim that their firmly held beliefs are the pinnacle and all others are “barbaric”.
• I do hold many of the liberal, materialist beliefs espoused by the European invaders of the time, including “the exercise of human reason over revealed religion”, it's clear their intentions were not to improve the material conditions of the people they sought out, but to conquer their lands and stick it to their centuries-long enemy, Britain.

Ironically, before WW1, Europe helped the Ottoman Empire stay afloat to keep Russia from annexing Ottoman land and to keep the peace in the Mediterranean.
“In a secret appendix to the London Convention of 1840, the governments of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia gave a formal commitment to ‘seek no augmentation of territory, no exclusive influence, [and] no commercial advantage for their subjects, which those of every other nation may not equally obtain.' This self-denying protocol provided the Ottoman Empire with nearly four decades of protection against European designs on its territory” But...well...time ticks on.

—
Pre-WW1 Imperialism, Colonialism, and Neo-Colonialism

• Tunisia, a small African country just south of Italy would be a victim of Europe's newest plot of conquest: Not gunboat diplomacy, but something more insidious.
• After Tunisia's 1861 constitution, a guy named Khayr al-Din was appointed president of the Grand Council, but didn't like how things were run, “and so in 1863 he tendered his resignation. The issue that provoked his resignation was the government's decision to contract its first foreign loan, which Khayr al-Din predicted would drag his adoptive country ‘to its ruin.' [...] “The result was the surrender of Tunisia's sovereignty to an international financial commission.” And there it is. That's how they get you.
• I always thought that the Neo-Colonial “dollar diplomacy” of Europe and the US started after regular old colonialism fell out of fashion in the mid-1900's. Turns out they were both happening in lock-step for over 150 years.
• Long-story short: Europe offers usurious loans to developing countries, the country can't pay the loan back, thus the European empire takes over whatever is making the country money, and drains the wealth as quickly as possible, while diverting any funding that benefits the people of that country. It's a story as old as time. It's still going on today, and it's never stopped happening in over 150 years. Though now it's mostly done by “The World Bank” and the “International Monetary Fund”, which are puppets to the interest of US & EU corporate interests. That's how the world works. This is neo-colonialism, AKA neo-liberalism.
• “The single greatest threat to the independence of the Middle East was not the armies of Europe but its banks. Ottoman reformers were terrified by the risks involved in accepting loans from Europe. In 1852, when Sultan Abdulmecid sought funds from France, one of his advisors took him aside and counseled strongly against the loan: ‘Your father [Mahmud II] had two wars with the Russians and lived through many campaigns. He had many pressures on him, yet he did not borrow money from abroad. [...] If this state borrows five piasters it will sink. For if once a loan is taken, there will be no end to it. [The state] will sink overwhelmed in debt.'”
• Thus these countries and the Ottoman Empire itself sank deeper and deeper into the claws to the European empire without even firing a shot.
• “[Europe] gained tremendous power over the finances of the Ottoman Empire as a whole, which the European powers used not just to control the actions of the sultan's government but to open the Ottoman economy to European companies for railways, mining, and public works.”
• “Open up the economy” is one of those euphemism capitalists have been using for centuries to describe “let the oligarchs suck the country dry”. That's what that phrase has always meant. Remember that the next time CNN or the NYT suggests it for some poor under-developed nation.
• “Between 1862 and 1873, Egypt contracted eight foreign loans, totaling £68.5 million ($376.75 million), which, after discounts, left only £47 million ($258.5 million), of which some £36 million ($198 million) were spent in payments on the principal and interest on the foreign loans. Thus, out of a debt of £68.5 million ($376.75 million), the government of Egypt gained only about £11 million ($60.5 million) to invest in its economy.”
So 23% of the loan was actually usable by the country and the rest was stolen back by Europe. If that's not the textbook definition of usury I don't know what is.
• Then these countries exploited by Europe began selling their assets. And who was there to buy for pennies on the dollar? Why the exploiters, of course!
• “As this desperate measure failed to staunch the hemorrhage, the viceroy sold the government's shares in the Suez Canal Company to the British government in 1875 for £4 million ($22 million)—recouping only one-quarter of the £16 million ($88 million) the canal is estimated to have cost the government of Egypt.” Truly truly evil.
• The vultures of Europe picked clean the carcass they themselves killed. But their “financial advisers” had no interest in returning these countries to fiscal solvency. “With each plan, the foreign economic advisors managed to insinuate themselves deeper into the financial administration of Egypt.” That was their goal, of course.
• The insatiable European powered couldn't stop there. “Over time, informal imperial control hardened into direct colonial rule, as the whole of North Africa was partitioned and distributed among the growing empires of Europe.”
• Ultimately, England stole Egypt, France stole Algeria & Tunisia, Italy stole Libya, France & Spain stole Morocco. And again this is BEFORE WW1.
• The imperial nations stole these countries' autonomy and wealth. The countries' people fought back, and ultimately the imperial nations had to occupy the under-developed nations to put down any further notion of independence fro European domination. This is a very common pattern we see in history.

—
Nationalism
• “By the end of 1912 the entire coast of North Africa, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, was under European colonial domination. Two of the states—Algeria and Libya—were under direct colonial rule. Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco were protectorates ruled by France and Britain through their own local dynasties.”
• Before the Europeans came the Arabs didn't really care much about nationalism. “Before the age of nationalism, identity was linked to either one's tribe or town of origin. If Arabs thought in terms of a broader identity, it was more likely to be based on religion than ethnicity.”
• I genuinely believe that the European notion of the “Nation-State” is what doomed not only the Middle East but the planet as a whole. Forcing this concept onto the people of the world that did not want it has resulted in endless suffering and strife. For this reason, I have become vehemently anti-nation: Anti-nationalist. No more nations. City-states I can get behind. nation-states, nah.

—
Arab Nationalism and the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt
• Despite my aforementioned support of “anti-nationalism”, what I hate more than nations is imperialism. The rise of Arab Nationalism, and the merging of Arab nations into a united singular nation seemed like viable opponent to European imperialism.
• Resistance to European & US imperialism after WW2 resulted as anyone might expect with some Arab countries asking for help from the big bad USSR.
• Egypt even had the audacity of extending diplomatic relations to the People's Republic of China in 1956. How dare these countries do what's in their own best interest instead of falling in line with US, British, & French hegemony‽
• So Egypt wanted to build a dam, and the Brits and US saw that as a perfect opportunity to do more Neo-Colonialism.
• “[T]he United States and Britain never intended to give the full amount Egypt needed, pledging only one-third the sum requested—not enough to guarantee the dam but rather just enough to exercise influence over Egypt during the years it would take to build it.”
• Remember this whenever you hear people talk about “why are we giving money to these other countries”? It's so we can control them. That's always the goal. Never altruism, or the betterment of humanity, but to advance the interests of the USA, usually meaning the interests of the multinational corporations that control the USA.
• But so Egypt had a plan: pay for the dam by nationalizing the Suez Canal, which was at the time owned by a corporation listed in France with the British government as the largest shareholder.
• Britain didn't want that because that would weaken their control over their former colony. I mean...the idea of a country believing that the wealth generated by that country belongs to its people and not international corporations and foreign empires? how could anyone believe such a thing‽ (Fun fact: Any time a weaker nation under the thumb of Europe or the US ever “nationalizes” anything or does “land reform,” you best believe that country is about to get invaded)
• This became known as “The Suez Crisis,” AKA “The Tripartite Aggression” because after Egypt nationalized it, Britain, France, and Israel went to war with Egypt. This obvious act of imperial aggression destroyed the credibility of both France and Britain among the Arab countries, helping to ferment Arab nationalism and ended their influence in the region (except for in Israel, of course)
• The US was appalled by this needless aggression, simultaneously “the Central Intelligence Agency had itself been plotting a coup against the Syrian government, to be executed on the very day the Israelis began their attack.” Why don't these countries like us again? Silver lining: the crisis derailed the US's regime change efforts in Syria. We're not the good guys, folks.
• Credit where credit is due: “Eisenhower administration resorted to outright threats against Britain and France to secure compliance with their demands for an immediate cease-fire. Both countries were threatened with expulsion from NATO, and the U.S. Treasury warned it would sell part of its Sterling bond holdings to force a devaluation of the British currency.” Sometimes wielding a big stick can actually be anti-imperialist.

• Arab nationalism when so far as to merge Egypt and Syria into a singular country for a few years. That was pretty crazy.
• Since before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, The West has been terrified of Arab unity. That's one of the reasons why they were so obsessed with meddling in Arab affairs. A united Arab people challenged European & US hegemony. So who can truly blame them for turning to the USSR? What's that? ‘The reactionaries in charge at the time?' Oh....

—
Mesopotamia [Iraq]
• Conquered by Britain in 1918, the region's 3 ethnic groups (Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiites) had different ideas on how the new country's relationship with the British Empire would work. The capitalist class wanted the power of the state to maintain stability, and thus economic growth. The people wanted independence from foreign occupation.
• Guess who won out. And wouldn't you know it? Occupying Iraq was really difficult for Britain. Britain kept saying they would strive to let Iraq be self-governing, but actually strove to achieve direct colonial rule, just like in India. The Iraqis rose up in 1920, resulting in an authoritarian crackdown, hardening the resolve of the freedom fighters. Why does this story sound familiar?
• Britain sent Indian soldiers (colonized peoples to subjugate colonized peoples) to retake the country. “The British were relentless in pursuing the insurgents and refused all negotiations.” Hmmmm.... “The Uprising of 1920, referred to in Iraq as the “Revolution of 1920,” has a special place in the nationalist mythology of the modern Iraqi state comparable to the American Revolution of 1776 in the United States.”
• Britain, having not learned its lesson after 100+ years, kept on fighting. They tried to legitimize their rule by propping up a banana republic with unpopular elections and a treaty for the electors to ratify.

___
Arabia, Ibn Saud, Wahhabism, bin Laden, US Terrorism
• A book covering this massive swath of information is bound to have a few things missing, but I was very disappointed in seeing no mention of FDR's meeting with Ibn Saud after WW2. I found a new book that I might read that is just about the US-Saudi Arabia relationship. Hopefully it's not as long as this one.
• Ibn Saud conquered Arabia with the radical Muslim sect, known as “Wahhabism”. He took over the country and slapped his name on it. And now we call it “Saudi Arabia.” What an absolute flex.
• “The fact that Bin Ladin and fifteen of the suicide hijackers in the September 11 attacks were citizens of Saudi Arabia, and that private Saudi funds had bankrolled al-Qaida, only worsened relations between the Saudis and the Americans.” Hmmmmmm.........
• The Arab states found themselves under irreconcilable pressures after 9/11. If they opposed America's war on terror, they risked sanctions that might range from economic isolation to outright calls for regime change by the world's sole superpower.” (Makes sense. The US does that all the time).
—
Post-WW1 and King-Crane
• Read my review of “A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East” by David Fromkin (1989), which is about the Middle East during and after WW1. It's because that book was so limited in scope that I decided to read this one.
• But basically: Britain lied, cheated, and stole to secure pretty much everything they wanted after WW1, blindly carving up the region with no sense of understanding its history, peoples, or sectarian concerns. This has resulted in the issues the region has faced ever since.

—
Occupied Palestine - ‘One cannot fill a cup that is already full.'

• The colonization of Palestine by Imperial-backed zionists is one of the most contentious issues of the modern era.
• This is the 3rd or 4th book I've read that covers this topic. Something like half of this book ended up being about the creation of Israel, its internal strife, and the decades of external conflicts with its neighbors.
• After reading these books, watching documentaries, and following the news about what's going on most recently, I can emphatically say that I cannot in good conscious support this country's “right to exist” as it keeps demanding from anyone and everyone. Fun fact: If a country needs a propaganda arm to force people from other countries to pledge their support for the country's “right to exist” then it might be...trying to compensate for something... at the very least.

—
Occupied Palestine - Yes, the Nazis are incomparably bad

• Britain's 1939 White Paper set strict standards on how many colonizers could enter the region, and set up the plan for creating an independent PALESTINIAN state by 1949.
• Then this big asshole with a stupid mustache started committing horrible atrocities in Europe.
• The more radical zionists temporarily put aside their dissatisfaction with the Brits' insufficient support for colonization to deal with the bigger issue: Fascism, Nazism, etc.
• Once that was all wrapped up, the Brits realized that the Palestinian question had gone full FUBAR, and turned to the newly created Inited Nations: “The United Nations assembled an eleven-nation Special Committee on Palestine, known by the acronym UNSCOP. Aside from Iran, none of the UNSCOP members had any particular interest in Middle Eastern affairs: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, and Yugoslavia.” What a bizarre assortment of countries.
• While the UN was trying to figure out what to do, waves of illegal Jewish immigrants, including many holocaust survivors, flooded into Palestine. This is understandable given the circumstances.
• The Brits tried to stop this immigration because they were trying to adhere to their 1939 White Paper.
• Britain's unpopular handling of Jewish refugees resulted in violence between the Jewish community and Britain, eventually resulting in the hanging of 2 British sergeants.
• The hangings so angered the British people that “Only two years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, swastikas and slogans such as ‘Hang All Jews' and ‘Hitler Was Right' stained British cities.” This is unconscionable.
• The book “Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook” by Mark Bray (2017) talked about this and other post-WW2 fascist rumblings throughout Europe and the US. Good book.

This book report is getting too long. Goodreads needs to increase its review character limit. I had to cut out 1/3rd of this review and I didn't even cover everything in the book. I can't reasonably fit all I want to say about the stuff this book talks about into one concise essay.

Here is my final favorite quote:
“The inconvenient truth about democracy in the Arab world is that, in any free and fair election, those parties most hostile to the United States are most likely to win. This is not because of any animosity toward Americans per se, but because Arab voters are increasingly convinced that the U.S. government is hostile to their interests. The war on terror has only confirmed Arab voters in this view. American hostilities against Muslim and Arab states, combined with unconditional American support for Israel, led many Arab citizens to conclude that the U.S. was exploiting the war on terror to extend its domination over their region.”

The smartest move in this game is not to play. Leave these people alone. Close the bases. End the sanctions. Normalize relations. Stop trying to control them because it always makes things worse.

For continued reading on the subject, see these other books I recommend:
• “Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East” (2020) by Philip Gordon
• “Imperial Ambitions: Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World” (2005) by Noam Chomsky

One of the most groundbreaking anti-colonial history books of the entire genre.
An absolute requirement for all who want to know about the intentionally obfuscated history of colonial capitalism and their brutal murderous regimes.

Here's what I learned:
__The Scramble for AfricaThe scramble for Africa began in the late 1800's. Why was this scramble happening? Why the unquenchable thirst of capitalism, of course! “Underlying much of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials—slaves—for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe's earlier dealings with Africa.”Britain, in particular claimed they wanted to bring “civilization” to the peoples of Africa. This is a lie. They wanted to drain the wealth of the nation to feed their economies. They claimed they were “combatting the slave trade” when in reality...“Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire. But Britons quickly forgot all this, just as they forgot that slavery's demise had been hastened by large slave revolts in the British West Indies, brutally and with increasing difficulty suppressed by British troops.” If we look at history through the leans of dialectical materialism, slavery abolition became a strong cultural phenomenon both in the US and Europe not because of the “virtues” of the Yankees or Brits, but because of the industrial revolution. Slavery was becoming less economically viable with the rise of machinery. British imperial interests strove to end chattel slavery everywhere to replace it with wage slavery and colonialism (with British elites at the top, of course). “During the nineteenth-century European drive for possessions in Africa and Asia, people justified colonialism in various ways, claiming that it Christianized the heathen or civilized the savage races or brought everyone the miraculous benefits of free trade.”Leopold has entered the chatBut let's get to our book's namesake. Leopold, king of the country of Belgium (about the size of the state of Maryland) NEEDED a piece of the pie: “Leopold's letters and memos, forever badgering someone about acquiring a colony, seem to be in the voice of a person starved for love as a child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute, the way someone becomes embroiled in an endless dispute with a brother or sister over an inheritance, or with a neighbor over a property boundary. The urge for more can become insatiable, and its apparent fulfillment seems only to exacerbate that early sense of deprivation and to stimulate the need to acquire still more.”King Leopold didn't pretend he wanted to “civilize the savages”. He wanted to extract as much wealth as he possibly could as quickly as he possibly could: “‘Belgium doesn't exploit the world,' he complained to one of his advisers. ‘It's a taste we have got to make her learn.'”The coastal nations were all taken by other European colonies, so Leopold sent his colonizers deeper into the mainland, trying to find where the Congo River came from. They pretended their new colony was to create a “confederation of free negro republics.” This was an obvious smokescreen. “As one of Leopold's subordinates bluntly wrote to Stanley: ‘There is no question of granting the slightest political power to negroes. That would be absurd. The white men, heads of the stations, retain all the powers.'”The colonizers did what all colonizers (like our forefathers) did to garner more wealth and power: lie, cheat, and steal. They wrote up treaties and lied to the people who could not read said treaties what they specifically entailed: “The texts varied, but many of the treaties gave the king a complete trading monopoly, even as he placated European and American questioners by insisting that he was opening up Africa to free trade. More important, chiefs signed over their land to Leopold, and they did so for almost nothing. At Isangila, near the big rapids, Stanley recorded, he was able to buy land for a station by paying some chiefs with ‘an ample supply of fine clothes, flunkey coats, and tinsel-braided uniforms, with a rich assortment of divers marketable wares ... not omitting a couple of bottles of gin.'”“The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their X's to documents in a foreign language and in legalese.” This isn't ‘negotiations between two independent parties,' this is criminally scamming entire tribes, villages, and territories. They used phony treaties to justify incalculable theft and horrible atrocities. Truly ghoulish. Florida Man?But here's a crazy twist in the story: Henry Shelton Sanford, some failson who managed to only invest in enterprises that end up going under, was good homies with the King. To my fellow Floridians, that last name might sound familiar to you because it's the same Sanford of which the town north of Orlando got its name. This guy became head propagandist in the US to try and legitimize the king's exploits through US recognition of Belgium's claim over the region. The USA loved the idea of Europeans colonizing another country (obviously). And Sanford didn't have to go far in Washington to find some friends: “Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, a former Confederate brigadier general, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Like most white Southern politicians of the era, he was frightened by the specter of millions of freed slaves and their descendants harboring threatening dreams of equality. [...] Morgan fretted for years over the ‘problem' of this growing black population. His solution, endorsed by many, was simple: send them back to Africa!” Since they couldn't own black people anymore, the only logical solution was to send them back to the continent their ancestors came from hundreds of years ago. (Fun fact: The whole “send em back to Africa” idea came into popularity in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. This is not a coincidence.) The USA was the first country to internationally legitimize the King's crimes, because of course it was. Never miss a chance to be an embarrassment, USA. In a redemptive arc, the first person to effectively blow the whistle on the atrocities happening there came from an American by the name of George Washington Williams, who went there to see the viability about getting black Americans to emigrate there. What he saw shook him to his core. He penned “An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, by Colonel the Honorable Geo. W. Williams, of the United States of America.” It's a great read and a damming exposé of the horrors. Much shorter than the book. Strong recommend. Unspeakable BrutalityYou might be asking: how did the native people of the Congo fair under subjugation by Belgium? Well...not great. The Danish were nothing less than brutal savages. And yet they had the audacity to call the victims of their reign of terror “savages.” Their rule came alongside the invention of the machine gun, which was used liberally to murder as many civilians as possible as quickly as possible when they deemed it necessary. They worked people to death. They raped, pillaged, burned, mutilated, killed, kidnapped, terrorized, forced conscription, enslaved, stole land, created child soldiers, tortured, and committed every other possible atrocity one person could do to another at the time. Why? To suck the wealth out of the country, as quickly and effectively as possible, of course. They established children's colonies with the help of Catholic priests to create armies of child soldiers, many of their parents having been killed by the occupying military or simply worked to death. These were the only “schools” Belgium constructed. “Among the traumatized and malnourished children packed into both the state and Catholic colonies, disease was rife and the death rate high, often over 50 percent. Thousands more children perished during the long journeys to get there.”The Europeans who went to Africa to serve as colonial rulers were not particularly evil (prior to doing all the atrocities). They were young white men looking for adventure and to make a little more money. “For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose whatever punishments you liked. If you got carried away, the penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist.“ It didn't matter as long as the wealth kept flowing. Why get stuck in some factory or clerk job in Europe when you could run your own little fiefdom in Africa? And the more brutal you were, the more money you made! A guy wrote a fictional book about these atrocities called “Heart of Darkness.” Pretty much everything he wrote in there was just what he really saw happening. This book was the basis for the movie “Apocalypse Now,” which takes place during the US-Vietnam war. I'll let you put two and two together there. RUBBER!For a while, Belgium was only extracting ivory. Then some asshole named “Goodyear” supposedly spilled some sulfur onto rubber on his stove, inadvertently inventing vulcanization, and in the 1890's, rubber became all the rage. The atrocities kicked into high gear when the King realized that he was sitting on a proverbial gold mine of wild rubber trees. He knew that eventually these trees would be grown in plantations, which would take a few years to get going. So he had a head start and limited window to extract and export as much rubber as he possibly could. “'An example of what is done was told me up the Ubangi [River],' the British vice consul reported in 1899. ‘This officer['s]...method ... was to arrive in canoes at a village, the inhabitants of which invariably bolted on their arrival; the soldiers were then landed, and commenced looting, taking all the chickens, grain, etc., out of the houses; after this they attacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were kept as hostages until the Chief of the district brought in the required number of kilogrammes of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected.'”When I say they were “draining the wealth” of the Congo, I mean this as literally as I possibly can. Not only does the harvesting of rubber literally entail cutting it from the bottom of the dangling vines and draining it, but...“We now know that the value of the rubber, ivory, and other riches coming to Europe each year [...] was roughly five times that of goods being shipped to the Congo that were destined for Africans. In return for the rubber and ivory, Morel knew, it was not possible that the Congo's Africans were being paid in money—which he knew they were not allowed to use—or in goods that came from elsewhere, for Elder Dempster had the cargo monopoly. Clearly, they were not being paid at all.”The world was slowly coming round to recognize how particularly brutal Leopold's regime was. So did he work toward creating more humane working conditions for the Congolese? Of course not! Like all capitalists, he used propaganda to downplay the atrocities he oversaw, buying good press and slandering those spreading bad press. And who was spearheading opposition in Belgium's parliament? Unsurprisingly, the Socialists. Europe continually pointed the finger at Belgium while ignoring the atrocities being committed in each other their own countries (sounds familiar). They weren't anti-colonialist, they were just anti-being really super mega evil. We have that now with the “ethical capitalists” who think a system designed to be exploitative can somehow be reigned in despite that never working. Leopold often pointed to the double-standard he was facing, with Britain's countless crimes against humanity all across the globe. The cold, hard numbersSo where does this land on the scoreboard of historical atrocities? Well, the King had most of the records burned up to prevent that ever coming to light. but what we do know is astounding. “King Leopold II's personal État Indépendant du Congo officially existed for twenty-three years, beginning in 1885, but many Congolese were already dying unnatural deaths by the start of that period, and important elements of the king's system of exploitation endured for many years after its official end. The rubber boom, cause of the worst bloodletting in the Congo, began under Leopold's rule in the mid-1890s, but it continued several years after the end of his one-man regime.”All in all, with the genocides and plummeting birth rate, a conservative estimate is that 10,000,000 human beings died under this brutal regime. “An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold's state, the population of the territory had ‘been reduced by half.'” Half of what, exactly? “In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.” Half the population killed. Ten million people.And how much wealth did Leopold successfully drain? The true number may not ever be known, but scholars “estimate, not including some smaller or hard-to-trace sources of money, of 220 million francs of the time, or $1.1 billion in [1999] dollars,” which is about $2 billion dollars in 2022. But why isn't this horrible event covered in schools? Because the colonizers want you to forget their atrocities, and the colonizers write the history books. The colonizers locked up the files, too. A Commission of Inquiry created by the King (a kangaroo court if there ever was one) still managed to collect a vast trove of testimony about the atrocities committed from the victims themselves. “However, no one read them. Despite the report's critical conclusions, the statements by African witnesses were never directly quoted. The commission's report was expressed in generalities. The stories were not published separately, nor was anyone allowed to see them. They ended up in the closed section of a state archive in Brussels. Not until the 1980s were people at last permitted to read and copy them freely.” Whitewashing of history. Par for the course. The King's Reign Ends, but the Terror merely evolvesUltimately, the brutal regime didn't stop their crimes against humanity because of the international outcry or because the King died, but because of evolving material conditions. Plantations and taxation replaced brutality and murder in Belgium-ruled Congo. And they found even more resources to suck up! “More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. The Allies also wanted ever more rubber for the tires of hundreds of thousands of military trucks, Jeeps, and warplanes.“ Forced labor practices continued for decades into the 20th century. __
Not an anomaly

The Congo was a concentrated area of colonial brutality. Other colonial powers were just as brutal, but they weren't as concentrated. “If you draw boundaries differently—to surround, say, all African equatorial rain forest land rich in wild rubber—then what happened in the Congo is, unfortunately, no worse than what happened in neighboring colonies: Leopold simply had far more of the rubber territory than anyone else.” France, Portugal, and Germany used the Leopold model for their own brutal colonial exploits. Same forced labor. Same unfathomable wealth extracted.

“The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, at roughly 50 percent. [...] between 1904 and 1907, the month-by-month rise and fall in rubber production correlated almost exactly to the rise and fall in the number of bullets used up by company ‘sentries'—nearly four hundred in a busy month.”

This is what Marx called “primitive accumulation of capital”. The brutal, murderous colonial regimes gobbling up as much wealth as possible. This is why Europe is rich and Africa is poor. This terror campaign never stopped, it merely evolved.

A major reason why Belgium's been left of the hook is because they were major victims of the Nazis in WW2. But remember: Fascism is when Imperialism comes home. The Nazis didn't invent anything they did to Europe. It was all the same stuff Europeans were doing to Africa for centuries.

Anyway, this book is really sad but really good and you should read it if you're into this sort of stuff.

The author is a reformed Silicon Valley investor who realized that Facebook and the rest of the internet juggernauts are fundamentally opposed to making the world a better place. They're actually making things worse.

This is a good book to introduce the concepts of Social Democracy, and how the science & evidence strongly supports the efficacy of such proposals: UBI, reducing the work week, less hindered international migration, striving toward an actual meritocracy instead of focusing on bullshit jobs and the stupid GDP.

Pretty much everything this guy talks about is stuff I already know and support. Though he claims to be the guy who brought the concept of UBI into the zeitgeist in the 21st century. (His original version was published in 2014).

I've got my own gripes about SocDem, which I've complained about before, but I'll be taking his suggestion:
“The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.”

I'll be the radical making his ideas seem sensible.

If you're to the right of SocDem, read this. If you're SocDem, read it to learn more.

If you're on the left, you probably already know about all this and can skip it.

I thought this was going to be another book about the Us's globe-spanning, century-long escapade of war crimes and their consequences. It was actually just about East Asian countries (Japan, Korea, China, etc) and mostly about economic dominance and the evil IMF.

Okinawa
If the majority of the citizens of a sovereign nation want an occupying military to leave their nation, then the right thing to do is to leave. Right? If, say, the hundreds of thousands of US troops and personnel in Okinawa Japan are incredibly unpopular, due to the high cases of drunkenness, violence, car accidents, and rape all caused by US military folk, then the US should respect the wishes of these occupied people and leave. That's what moral, ethical countries do. We're not at war with Japan anymore. We're simply maintaining our forward operating base within a satellite of the empire.

Reading 20-year old books about international politics is a mixed bag. In some aspects, it's interesting to see how little things change and how predictions can be so spot on.

For example: “An excessive reliance on a militarized foreign policy and an indifference to the distinction between national interests and national values in deciding where the United States should intervene abroad have actually made the country less secure in ways that will become only more apparent in the years to come”

THAT was written in 1999, in the first edition. Holy moly. He could not be more right.

Not only that, the guy pretty much exactly predicts China's Belt & Road initiative to rival the IMF and US Hegemony: “It is only a matter of time until the small nations of East Asia get tired of this American bullying and find a suitable leader to create an anti-American coalition.” Virtually every southeast Asian country has signed up for it, along with most of the rest of the world. I really want to read a book about it.

On the other hand, there is also a lot of stuff that is now simply out of date and wrong in this book. Mostly about China. Including “Hong Kong is indeed no longer at issue”. Whoops. Can't always get it right.

Then there was the issue I found most intriguing, the “Asian concept of human rights”. I have been a big supporter of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I still am. But I'm now coming around to the fact that they are a concept created by Western Liberal empires, and come with the hyper-individualistic, anti-community bias that such empires push for.

“The selective way the U.S. government has wielded the human rights issue has had an unintended consequence. It has stimulated Asians of many different persuasions to develop an “Asian concept of human rights” and to attack the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights as not “universal” at all but only another manifestation of Western cultural imperialism. [...][Quoting Lee Kuan Yew] ‘Americans believe their ideas are universal—the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not. Never were [...] The ideas of individual supremacy and the right to free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working.'”

This is an interesting point of view that I want to learn more about.

Not very interesting. More of a podcast than a book.

They FINALLY released a Parenti book as an audiobook. This guy is the much better Noam Chomsky and if I had gotten ahold of this book 2 years ago, I think it would have accelerated my ideological development much faster, saving me a lot of time. I recomend this book to ANYONE interested in expanding their political horizons, reinterpreting their preconceived understanding of modern history, or if you think the Soviet Union was bad.

The author has a strong criticism of Soviet Russia, rightfully so. But he does not see things in black and white like what we in The West have been led to believe. He asserts, and backs up with hard evidence, that the collapse of the Soviet Union has resulted in an overall decrease in the material wellbeing of the people within Soviet countries. Capitalism didn't make their lives better; It made them worse.

Here ares some of my favorite quotes:
~~
Fascism & Capitalism:

Speaking about Germany in 1932, “True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” This holds true to this day. SocDems are not allies to the left because they will inevitably support fascism if it means maintaining capitalism.

“In both Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s, old industrial evils, thought to have passed permanently into history, re-emerged as the conditions of labor deteriorated precipitously. In the name of saving society from the Red Menace, unions and strikes were outlawed. Union property and farm cooperatives were confiscated and handed over to rich private owners. Minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, and factory safety regulations were abolished. Speedups became commonplace. Dismissals or imprisonment awaited those workers who complained about unsafe or inhumane work conditions. Workers toiled longer hours for less pay. The already modest wages were severely cut, in Germany by 25 to 40 percent, in Italy by 50 percent. In Italy, child labor was reintroduced.” This is excellent evidence to show how similar modern conservatism is to fascism. They support the same economic policies.

“Italian fascism and German Nazism had their admirers within the U.S. business community and the corporate-owned press. Bankers, publishers, and industrialists, including the likes of Henry Ford, traveled to Rome and Berlin to pay homage, receive medals, and strike profitable deals. Many did their utmost to advance the Nazi war effort, sharing military-industrial secrets and engaging in secret transactions with the Nazi government, even after the United States entered the war. During the 1920s and early 1930s, major publications like Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor hailed Mussolini as the man who rescued Italy from anarchy and radicalism.“
As I've said in previous book reviews, the fact that the USA backed the Allies in WW2 instead of the Axis powers is a historical fluke. The predominant ideology of US elites at the time were far closer to the fascists. This is shown by how much the US media and oligarchs fawned over the fascists, even helping them after the US started fighting them. Corps love fascists. The US took in as many fascists as they could as the war was ending. Fascists learned from the US in order to do fascism better. The West did a far worse job De-Nazifying countries than the Soviets. And all of this is because Capitalism and Fascism are 2 heads of the same monster. Fascism is Capitalism in decay.

“Under the protection of U.S. occupation authorities, the police, courts, military, security agencies, and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former fascist regimes or by their ideological recruits—as is true to this day. [...] “In comparison, when the Communists took over in East Germany, they removed some 80 percent of the judges, teachers, and officials for their Nazi collaboration; they imprisoned thousands, and they executed six hundred Nazi party leaders for war crimes.” Woulda killed more Nazi's but the rest fled to the open arms of The West.

“Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings.” Imagine that for a moment. A company collaborated with the Nazis and then got money from the US government because they bombed the company's factory. Insane.

The fascists were never removed from Italy because the US prefers fascism over socialism “The Italian neofascists were learning from the U.S. reactionaries how to achieve fascism's class goals within the confines of quasidemocratic forms: use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; replace the jackbooted militarists with media-hyped crowd pleasers; convince people that government is the enemy—especially its social service sector—while strengthening the repressive capacities of the state; instigate racist hostility and antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants; preach the mythical virtues of the free market; and pursue tax and spending measures that redistribute income upward.” This is literally what Faux News and Republicans do every day.
~~~
US Terrorism (Post WW2)

“In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq; over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.”
The Black Book of Capitalism is thicker than anyone would like to admit. But when the US does terrorism, that's good, right? We've never been known for invading countries for unjust reason, right?


This is my favorite quote: “There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.”

Both negative freedoms and positive freedoms must come together for the betterment of all people. Arguing just for negative freedoms is absurd.

This quote was in the context of revolutionary governments, and how many of them throughout the last ~100 years were not sufficiently democratic. This gave the US empire justification to overthrow the countries.

“U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.”

These revolutions improved the material conditions of the people within the country. Did they become Western-style democracies? No. But that wasn't the goal. The goal was making people's lives better. Those don't necessarily coincide. The US does not have a perfect system and forcing it upon other countries that do not want it is evil. The West's goal isn't really to improve the wellbeing of the countries with their invasions, coups, and terror campaigns. It's to “open up the economy” and infect the countries with US-based corporate interests.

The West doesn't care about the freedom of the people to live a healthy, fulfilling life. It cares about the “freedom” of corporations to exploit the people. US-backed propagandists poison the minds of those in the West to claim these countries aren't “free”.

“So a conservative think tank like the Heritage Foundation rated Cuba along with Laos, Iraq, and North Korea as countries with the lowest level of ‘economic freedom.' Countries with a high level of economic freedom were those that imposed little or no taxes or regulations on business, and did without wage protections, price controls, environmental safeguards, and benefits for the poor. Economic freedom is the real concern of conservatives and plutocrats; the freedom to utilize vast sums of money to accumulate still vaster sums, regardless of the human and environmental costs.”

We cannot look at a country's “freedom” based on the metrics of our own country. We must look at it on the metrics of its own history. Not “more or less free than us” just “more or less free than before”: “But what of the democratic rights that these peoples were denied? In fact, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, these countries had known little political democracy in the days before communism. Russia was a czarist autocracy, Poland a rightist dictatorship with concentration camps of its own, Albania an Italian fascist protectorate as early as 1927, Cuba a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship. Lithuania, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes allied with Nazi Germany in World War II.”

State socialism “transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention.” That'd be nice.

~~~
Left Anticommunism

This was the most interesting aspect of the book, the arguments against self-described anti-capitalists who denigrate the Soviet Union as “not real socialism”. I've dabbled in this myself and I was impressed by how well the author provided a thorough, nuanced retort against such a belief.

Was the Soviet Union perfect? No. But “In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish—while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world.”

What matters is the material conditions of the people. Were they better or worse in Socialist countries pre-1990 vs Capitalist countries then? Depends on the metric. It certainly didn't help that the West strove to topple them at every turn: “As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands—the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib.” Hard to improve the material conditions of the people when you've got Coca Cola death squads and the US Marines trying to kill you.

Many people in socialist countries took for granted their lack of consumer debt, their universal healthcare, their guaranteed employment, universal housing, their met basic material needs, and focused instead on the lack of consumer goods: “People took for granted what they had in the way of human services and entitlements while hungering for the consumer goods dangling in their imaginations. [...] “Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have.” The people of the second-world weren't “yearning for freedom”. They were yearning for stuff.

This failure to meet the wants of the people was not inevitable under the economic system. It was because the socialist countries were too busy fighting off an endless barrage of attacks on all fronts from the capitalist countries: “One reason siege socialism could not make the transition to consumer socialism is that the state of siege was never lifted. As noted in the previous chapter, the very real internal deficiencies within communist systems were exacerbated by unrelenting external attacks and threats from the Western powers. Born into a powerfully hostile capitalist world, communist nations suffered through wars, invasions, and an arms race that exhausted their productive capacities and retarded their development.” Bombs, not blue jeans.

The entire history of the USSR from its very inception was being constantly under siege. “One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government.” When your enemy has literally committed a nuclear holocaust against civilians, and has also invaded you once already, it makes sense why you might want to stock up on nukes. It's a shame that this arms race took place, because if the US (AKA the aggressor) chose to seek a true genuine peace, we might be living in a more peaceful world today, with a less massive military industrial complex.

~~~
Capitalist “freedom”

Meanwhile in the first-world capitalist countries, we don't get universal healthcare, universal housing, job guarantees, free higher education, unions, pensions. Not then, before the wall fell, and after it did fall, there was no reason for Capital to capitulate to Labor's demands because Labor had no standard bearer to hold up and say “the Soviets have this, why don't we?” So the social safety net was gutted in the West.

What is very clear is that countries that were once part of the Soviet Bloc and then became capitalist are objectively worse for the majority of people. This is an undeniable fact. Their social safety nets and state-owned factories were sold off for pennies on the dollar to private firms, creating vast inequalities and absolutely destroying the wellbeing of the people.

“Without making compensation, West German capitalists grabbed almost all the socialized property in [East Germany], including factories, mills, farms, apartments and other real estate, and the medical care system—assets worth about $2 trillion—in what has amounted to the largest expropriation of public wealth by private capital in European history.
The end result of all this free-market privatization in East Germany is that rents, once 5 percent of one's income, have climbed to as much as two-thirds; likewise the costs of transportation, child care, health care, and higher education have soared beyond the reach of many.” Don't you feel so free??

“The overthrow of communism brought a rising infant mortality and soaring death rates in Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Moldavia, Rumania, Ukraine, Mongolia, and East Germany. One-third of Russian men never live to sixty years of age. In 1992, Russia's birth rate fell below its death rate for the first time since World War II. In 1992 and 1993, East Germans buried two people for every baby born. The death rate rose nearly 20 percent for East German women in their late thirties, and nearly 30 percent for men of the same age.” Things have not gotten much better. How is it possible for capitalism to be the pinnacle of an economic system of the people within newly capitalist countries are objectively worse off than they were before? Why do 2/3rds of Russian people think things were better under the USSR? Because it was better.

“The overthrow of communism has brought a sharp increase in gender inequality. The new constitution adopted in Russia eliminates provisions that guaranteed women the right to paid maternity leave, job security during pregnancy, prenatal care, and affordable day-care centers.” Crazy how they had that decades ago and “the richest, freest country on earth” still hasn't figured it out.

Here's my 2nd favorite quote from the book:

“According to Noam Chomsky, communism ‘was a monstrosity,' and ‘the collapse of tyranny' in Eastern Europe and Russia is ‘an occasion for rejoicing for anyone who values freedom and human dignity.' I treasure freedom and human dignity yet find no occasion for rejoicing. The postcommunist societies do not represent a net gain for such values. If anything, the breakup of the communist states has brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and imperialism, with its correlative increase in human misery, and a historic setback for revolutionary liberation struggles everywhere.”
~~~
Marxism

Then the book ends with a basic overview of Marxism which was good too. It's as pertinent today as it was in 1867. Good stuff.

It's nice and short, but manages to talk about the intersectionality of feminism and other socioeconomic issues. It's the mortal enemy of the “Lean-in Feminism” being pedaled by the 1%.

A powerful work that reveals the truth behind why Africa has fallen so far behind developmentally compared to Europe and the US.

The reason is simple: first Europe stole millions of human beings from Africa, committing systematic genocides for over a century. This left Africa without the labor needed to develop itself and left Europe and the US with a slave workforce used to develop their own economies, creating massive wealth.

Much of the wealth and power garnered by this slave labor was then leveraged to further exploit Africa, draining it of its natural wealth shortly after draining it of its labor. Colonization's sole purpose is to drain the wealth of weaker nations for the benefit of stronger nations and international corporations. Many of the corporations who benefited from colonial exploitation of Africa still exist today:
Cadbury, Firestone, Unilever, De beers, and more.

The colonies weren't developed to process their natural wealth into high-value products. Of course not. Then the workers would rise up like they did in Europe. If Africans just do the high-labor, low-skill work, then the laborers can be replaced without issue. And they can become further indebted by selling back the high-value commodities they helped make. Export cheap cocoa, import expensive chocolate. Export cheap rubber trees, import expensive tires. Export cheap bauxite, import expensive aluminum products. It wasn't mysterious “market forces”. It was, and is, deliberate & intentional exploitation by powerful countries against weaker countries.

What's worse was the colonial education system, designed not to teach them about their own country's history, culture, peoples, indigenous flora and fauna, etc. but strove to teach them about such things of the colonizing country, all with the direct assertion that their own subjugation is justifiable. Such propaganda was heavily internalized.

I think he spiritual sequel to this book is “Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism” by Ha-Joon Chang (2007) which picks up where this book left off: Neoliberalism (AKA Neocolonialism), where countries are pressured into gutting any policies that help their people in order to prioritize exploiting the natural wealth for the benefit of the international corporations.

All of this is still going on today. One long unbroken chain of exploitation stretching back from the time of Columbus. This is why they say “there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism.” Because everything we buy is in some small way associated with this global system of exploitation. This will always be the case until the system, as it exists today, is destroyed.

If you want to have an understanding of racism, power, and intersectionality in the US, don't read that trash “White Fragility,” read this.

Highly recommended.

This guy is great. He's got a great podcast. He really gets it. This book makes you realize that we aren't designing things based on what's best for us as a species or as individuals.

One of my favorite books of the year. This is the stuff that history teachers should be teaching but aren't. The sun doesn't set on the US empire.

After reading the MLK assassination book, it felt only right to read about the RFK assassination.

When discussing the political assassinations of the 1960's, it's often said that the RFK one was “an open and shut case.” However, if you were to review the recordings and transcripts of witness interviews, autopsy report, chain of custody for evidence, and the criminal case information for the indicted shooter, Sirhan Sirhan, then you would realize that it is extremely far from “open and shut.” The evidence for conspiracy is astounding. You don't need to go far afield to find it.

I said in my MLK book review that the evidence of conspiracy and cover up in that case dwarfed that of the JFK assassination and that no logical person could look at all the evidence and conclude that the official story from the police and FBI could possibly be credible. What I didn't mention is that most of the evidence pointing to that was from eyewitness testimony, and that there was few (yet still quite compelling) bits of physical evidence.

Comparably, the RFK assassination has exceptionally more physical evidence pointing to the fact that the accused shooter did not fire the lethal shots to Kennedy, if he actually fired any bullets at all. Marrying that to an equal, or possibly even larger, trove of eyewitness testimony, and the mountain of evidence pointing to conspiracy actually DWARFS the MLK assassination! This author meticulously lays out every bit of evidence publicly available, cross-referencing it with new testimony of witnesses, providing her own interviews with witnesses, and other key facts in the development of the story. All laid out, it is clear to anyone with an open enough mind to admit that maybe the government might lie to its people sometimes, that there were more than 1 gunmen that night, and more than 1 guns firing at Kennedy.

Here's a brief summary of how the official narrative does not make sense:
* The Gun Sirhan used held 8 rounds. Eight rounds. Therefore the “official narrative” is that 8 shots were fired.
* Multiple witnesses heard more than 8 shots.
* Multiple witnesses saw more than 1 gunman.
* An audio recording of the entire incident heard more than 8 shots.
* A witness got powder burns on his face in a way that does not make sense with Sirhan being the lone shooter.
* None of the bullet wound trajectories in Kennedy make sense based on the “official narrative”.
* Multiple bullet holes were identified around the scene in the door frame and ceiling. All of the physical evidence was inexplicably destroyed
* Police altered reports from eyewitnesses who said they heard more than 8 shots.
* Witnesses heard, saw, and felt shots coming from other places than where Sirhan was openly firing from.
* Multiple witnesses saw a gunman shooting from atop a table, a location impossible for Sirhan to have been on given what happened during his apprehension.
* Multiple witnesses saw multiple gunmen running from the scene with unconcealed or poorly concealed guns
* “Based on the totality of the evidence, it appears two bullets, not one, entered Kennedy's brain from the same near-contact entry point. Bang-bang.” It is not physically possible for those shots to have been fired by Sirhan.

A dozen or more witnesses provided very specific testimony of certain individuals walking with and talking with Sirhan. They all describe the same 1-3 people. Several witnesses saw one of these people, a woman in a white dress with black polka dots run out shortly after the shooting saying “we shot him! Senator Kennedy!” These witnesses were psychologically tortured by the FBI into recanting their statements because they didn't coincide with “the official narrative.” The audio transcripts of their interrogations are deeply disturbing and show that the police have no interest in the truth, merely to maintain the official facade. All it takes is a reading of, or listening to, these transcripts and it won't take an ounce of logical leaping to believe that the police have something to hide with this case.

Many of the witness interviews were intentionally not transcribed in order to obfuscate the evidence from the public. Every single one of the interviews not transcribed (written on the envelope with the tapes “do not type”) contain a witness giving a statement that lends credence to a conspiracy.

There has been zero physical evidence tying the rounds exhumed from the victims and the scene to the gun taken from the possession of Sirhan. Rounds fired from a gun leave what's called “rifling”, like a finger print that is slightly different for each gun and always on fired bullets. None match Sirhan's gun. None matched from the rifling range Sirhan was seen shooting at in the weeks prior.

The chain of evidence for the bullets were so incredibly lousy that there is clearly evidence of tampering from LA police and/or the FBI. The bullets from the Kennedy Autopsy were marked by the surgeon. The bullets currently in evidence do not match what the surgeon extracted.

There is substantial evidence that more bullets were fired than what Sirhan's gun was capable of holding. Bullets were dug out of door frames and likely thrown into Sirhan's car. Bullet holes were in the ceiling.

“We've been over the kitchen area twice, and we're going at least one more time. It's unbelievable how many damn holes there are in that kitchen ceiling.” The door frames and kitchen tiles were removed for evidence. They have since been destroyed. There is indisputable physical evidence, photographs, interviews, official statements, pointing to the fact that more than 8 shots were fired. Defenders of the official narrative come up with all sorts of cockamamie explanations as to “which of these 3+ locations could the 8th bullet have gone? There's so much compelling evidence for each of them!” It is more fantastical, more supernatural, more irrational to assert that only 8 bullets were shot than to say there were more than 8.

The killing shot(s) to Kennedy were fired at the back of his head from less than an inch away from him. We know this because the gunpowder fired at that close a range gets embedded into the skin, resulting in tattooing. This was seen on Kennedy. Not one single witness claims Sirhan was ever less than 1 foot away from Kennedy. It is not physically possible for the markings found on Kennedy to have been shot by Sirhan. It is simply physically impossible for the “official story” to be true. It's really that simple.

Sirhan was holding a .22 caliber revolver. .22 rounds, as the name implies, have a diameter of 0.22 inches. Here is an exact quote from the X-Ray autopsy: “The largest metallic fragment is situated in the petrous ridge and at about the arcuate eminence. This measures 12 mm in transverse dimension, 7 mm in vertical dimension, and approximately 12 mm in anteroposterior dimension.” 12mm x 7mm x 12mm = 0.47”x0.28”x0.47”. The bullet inside Kennedy is the wrong caliber to fit Sirhan's gun.

“High school student Scott Enyart had been standing on a table in the pantry, waiting for Kennedy so he could take his picture, when the shooting began. He took pictures ‘while the shots were being fired' or ‘maybe a little afterward,' he wasn't sure. He jumped up on one of the steam tables so he had a good view of the room. Enyart mentioned his friend Brent Gold was there with him, taking pictures as well. [...] Forty years later, Enyart would win a lawsuit against the LAPD over this film...”

“These photos were purportedly stolen from a courier's car at a gas stop on the way between the California State Archives in Sacramento to the courthouse where Enyart's case was in session in Los Angeles. Given that nothing else from the car was stolen, we have to ask who wanted to keep Enyart from receiving these photos, and what the photos may have shown that was worth pilfering in an elaborate operation.
It wouldn't be the first time evidence was sabotaged. Less than two months after the assassination, the LAPD took the extraordinary step of burning some 2,400 photos from the case in Los Angeles County General's medical-waste incinerator. Why destroy thousands of photos in an incinerator if there was nothing to hide? The LAPD kept hundreds of innocuous crowd scene photos that showed no girl in a polka dot dress and no suspicious activities or individuals. Why were those photos preserved? Perhaps because those photos had nothing in them that warranted their destruction?” HUH. THAT'S WEIRD. DON'T YOU THINK THAT'S WEIRD? WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT? SURELY THERE'S NOTHING SUSPICIOUS HERE. DON'T WORRY FOLKS WE GOT THE GUY. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

One of the officers pivotal to the prosecution of Sirhan was LAPD criminalist and member of the LAPD crime lab, Officer DeWayne Wolfer. He spearheaded the investigation for LAPD, his team gathered evidence, he fired test bullets in order to determine if the rifling from Sirhan's gun matched the bullets being presented to the jury as those recovered from the scene. He was the key to the whole investigation. Surely he's a straight shooter, right? No. The LAPD has been corrupt for decades. He and the LAPD were SO corrupt that the California Court of Appeals “railed against Wolfer's actions and testimony in [a separate shooting case with similar ballistic evidence], stating he had ‘negligently presented false demonstrative evidence in support of his ballistics testimony,' that ‘Wolfer's acoustical testimony was false,' and that ‘his testimony on qualifications as an expert on anatomy was also false and borders on the perjurious.' In other words, the Court of Appeals stopped just short of calling Wolfer a liar.” Key ballistics expert for the RFK assassination is a known liar who manufactured false evidence and gave false testimony. HUH. WEIRD. SURELY JUST THE ONE TIME, RIGHT?

6 separate suspects were wanted for questioning that night. Several were even brought into custody.
Everyone who mentioned a separate suspect mysteriously had their police radio communications go silent shortly afterward and the story changed.
Michael Wayne was arrested for running away from the shooting. His story didn't hold up compared to witnesses' testimony. Many people pin him with a gun as he was running from the shooting. He was taken into custody by a security guard because people were shooting “stop that man”. He lied to the FBI about what happened, a federal crime, but no consequences for that for some strange reason. WEIRD.

There is so much more to this book that I have failed to cover. I didn't even talk about the farce of a trial, Sirhan's defense attorneys were very clearly not interested in providing a legitimate defense and conspired with the prosecutor and judge.

Large swaths of testimony and reporting is still classified. Because in this fake country, we the peons cannot know what the government doesn't want us to know. There was no “Warren Commission” for RFK. There's been no significant effort to release classified documents related to his assassination.

The people who helped cover up the conspiracy got promoted. The people who asked questions or threatened to “official narrative” got harassed, blacklisted, or disappeared. Hell, the person who denied Sirhan's parole a few years ago became the present sitting Vice President of the US.

No rational person can review the evidence and assert in good faith that the official narrative is credible. I implore anyone who has an iota of skepticism for the federal government to read this book and research the matter yourself.

I recommend this book to everyone.

This book was really different in a surprising way. I came across the author because of a Washington Post article she wrote in 2016 titled “The U.S. tried to change other countries' governments 72 times during the Cold War”. I figured any book written by her about regime change is gonna be awesome. What I didn't expect was how the book is designed...

This book is written as a long-form scientific research paper trying to determine the reasons behind the US's regime change efforts, their efficacy, etc. via the scientific method. It sort of throws into question my main theory of the reason behind regime change (draining wealth from weaker countries into stronger ones). But it strengthens my other prevailing theory as to the reasons behind US regime change: centralizing power.

If a nation dares goes against US hegemony, it is swiftly brought into line via covert (and sometimes overt) intervention. We've overthrown democracies, dictatorships, capitalist countries, and communist ones. Sometimes for the benefit of corporations, but usually not.

It is clear from this very thorough, cold, dry analysis that regime change is ultimately counter-productive and indefensible. If you want the cold, hard, apolitical, scientific facts of US-led regime change, read this book and you will see the truth: Don't do it.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding US foreign policy in the past, present, and future.

This was a really interesting book that discusses how much planning and cooperation goes into the operations of mega-corporations like Walmart & Amazon. It shows that “ruthless market competition” is far less relevant in our current corporate capitalist system than we've been led to believe. It discusses the dichotomy of planned economies vs anarchic markets and the viability of leveraging modern computing for planning.

It takes a critical, rational look at the Soviet Union's system and gleans valuable insight from what they accomplished and where they erred.

It also discusses something I didn't know anything about before: Chile's “Project Cybersyn”, a precursor to the internet tasked with economic planning. “...management cybernetics could serve Allende's vision of an anti-bureaucratic democratic socialism in which workers participated in management and that would defend individual civil liberties.” That was a great success until the US-backed fascist coup in 1973, which resulted in the dismantling of “Project Cybersyn”. I've now renamed my router to “Cybersyn” in solidarity.

This book says what I've been saying for years now: Capitalism cannot fix the climate crisis. Caputalism caused the climate crisis. The profit motive and endless growth caused climate change. No amount of regressive Pigovian flat taxes on carbon will solve this crisis. “The market's profit motive—not growth or industrial civilization, as some environmentalists have argued—caused our climate calamity and the larger bio-crisis. The market is amoral, not immoral. It is directionless, with its own internal logic that is independent of human command.”
Massive economic planning already exists in various siloed systems, but with tyrannical capitalists as the decision makers. The goal is to democratize the process and prioritize humanity instead of the profit motive.

It pairs well with “The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths “ by Mariana mazzucato (2013), which shows that innovation is far more prevalent in state-backed research, not profit-based enterprises. I highly recommend that book. The concept of anarchist markets is covered deeper in “Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty” Edited by Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson (2011) , I mildly recommend this book.

Great book. Highly recommended

Not as good as his previous two books, both of which I heartily recommend. This one is pretty forgettable. Give it a shot if you like the author, otherwise Do Not Recommend.

This one was a real slog. Interesting concept, but rather dull. The best part was talking about extracting trillions of dollars worth of rare earth metals from mining asteroids to eliminate resource scarcity. That was neat. The rest was dull.

This is the book that started me down the path. We do not live in a meritocracy. We live in an oligarchy.

In 2018ish, I remember telling a self-described progressive Bernie voter friend of mine in casual conversation that my view of sex work is: “decriminalize, legalize, unionize.” He looked at me like I had grown a 2nd head. My stance hasn't changed much since then, but this is the first time I've read something that challenged it. I learned my terminology was oxymoronic, but the spirit of my original stance has been honed by this book.

This book is not salacious. It tells no sexy stories. It is as dry and analytical as any typical book talking about an overly exploited sub-sect of the working class.

It does thoroughly repeat the points over and over again to make them as strong as possible. If you're already on the author's side, it can come off as overly repetitive.

When people talk about “sex work,” they get so hung up on the first word that they often forget about the 2nd. The call for decriminalization isn't about wanting to further exploit women and marginalized minority groups. Quite the opposite. This is about empowering workers with labor protections instead of further criminalizing their work, thus further alienating the worker, and preventing them from moving beyond said work. Criminalization does not make sex workers safer any more than drug criminalization makes people with drug addiction safer.

Like the book I just previously read “quick fixes”, sex work, like drugs, isn't really about sex work, it's about control. It's about those with power thinking they're doing the right thing but are ultimately making things worse.

Sex trafficking is a serious problem across the world. This book repeatedly emphasizes that there is not enough funding to actually help the victims of sex trafficking and that many of the laws are fundamentally counter-productive. The biggest being the high cost to cross borders. I'm not doing justice to the authors' arguments but I assure you they're quite thorough and compelling. Here's 4 quotes about that:

“Immigration status is the most important single factor engendering migrant workers' vulnerability to exploitation in the UK sex industry.” (This quote is from a UK research study the book quotes)

“People are not, en masse, being snatched off the street. A report from the UK's anti-slavery commission notes that cases of kidnap are very unusual, essentially because it would make little sense to ‘give' someone the services of taking them across a border for free, when people are willing to pay up to thirty thousand pounds to be taken across that same border.”

“People smuggling tends to happen to less vulnerable migrants: those who have the cash to pay a smuggler upfront or have a family or community already settled in the destination country. People trafficking tends to happen to more vulnerable migrants: those who must take on a debt to the smuggler to travel and who have no community connections in their destination country. Both want to travel, however, and this is what anti-trafficking conversations largely obscure with their talk about kidnap and chains.”

“Our position is that no human being is ‘illegal'. People should have the right to travel and to cross borders, and to live and work where they wish. As we wrote in the introduction, border controls are a relatively new invention – they emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century as part of colonial logics of racial domination and exclusion.”

There are 4 general camps regarding the legality of sex work:

1. Criminalization and Incarceration

“Feminism that welcomes police power is called carceral feminism. The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, one of the first to use this phrase, uses it to describe a feminist approach that prioritises a ‘law-and-order agenda'; a shift ‘from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals'. Carceral feminism focuses on policing and criminalisation as the key ways to deliver justice to women.”

Some carceral feminists think this is actually helping sex workers, which is absurd. The criminal justice system is designed to ruin the lives of people thrown into it. This is a feature of the system. Infinitely more lives are ruined by it than “saved.”

It's hypocritical for supposed “feminists” to think that empowering the police and border enforcement, inherently patriarchal institutions designed to uphold existing patriarchal structures, are somehow whitewashed when doing so against sex workers. If you actually listen to what sex workers say, you'll know that borders and police are as big of enemies as violent managers or clients.

In my humble opinion as a white guy, I don't think carceral feminism is real feminism and should be denigrated the same as TERF's.

“Carceral feminism has gained popularity even though the police – and the wider criminal justice system – are key perpetrators of violence against women. In the United States, police officers are disproportionately likely to be violent or abusive to their partners or children. At work, they commit vast numbers of assaults, rapes, or harassment. Sexual assault is the second-most commonly reported form of police violence in the United States (after excessive use of force), and on-duty police commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general US population. Those are just the assaults that make it into the statistics: many will never dare to make a report to an abuser's colleague.”

The police are not your friend.

2. The “Nordic Model” AKA: “Don't criminalize the selling of sex, criminalize the buying of sex.”

This is seen as the “gold standard” of “progressive and forward thinking” Nordic countries.

This law is fundamentally counter-productive and does not make the lives of sex workers safer or better in any way. On the contrary. When it's criminalized for just the buyer, it's more likely that buyers will be violent and the worker would have to stay out later to make ends meet.

“(Pro–Nordic Model politician Rhoda Grant even described this dynamic while advocating for its introduction in Scotland, saying, ‘While those who currently break the law [i.e., violent abusers] will not see the criminalisation of the purchase of sex as a deterrent, many others will.') Thinking of sex work as always, intrinsically violent, of course, hides the difference between a respectful client and an abusive one.”

“A 2004 report by the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security found that ‘the Swedish street prostitutes experience a tougher time. They are more frequently exposed to dangerous clients, while the [legitimate] clients are afraid of being arrested ... They have less time to assess the client as the deal takes place very hurriedly due to fear on the part of the client.'”

It doesn't solve the underlying problem and does not make anyone safer.

Not only that, sex workers may not get prosecuted for sex work, but they can (and do) get evicted, arrested, and even deported.

“[A] sex worker working under the Nordic Model still has a lot to fear. If she's a migrant – even one with a visa – she can be arrested and taken to a deportation centre today. If her name is on the tenancy of a flat she shares, she can be prosecuted. Would you call the police if doing so would make you homeless today, or open you up to prosecution?”

3. The Nevada Model, AKA: “Legalize and regulate”

This overly bureaucratic solution does not give power to the worker, but to the managers. Those who don't adhere to the managerial structure are still criminalize. It's not about protecting people, it's about control.

One thing I'm not quite sure I can agree with from the author was their belief that “mandatory testing is a violation of human rights. Everybody deserves medical privacy and medical autonomy, and mandatory testing violates those core human rights.” I'm sort of more on the idea that workers' rights also need to counterbalance with consumer rights. Maybe that's a bad take.

“To regulate and control sex workers – with the threat of punishment if they don't comply – is to abandon the poorest and most vulnerable to the shadows. To these workers, legalisation is criminalisation, since the ability to work within the law is in practice beyond them. [...] “Penalties mean taking power from workers and giving it to the police, employers, or clients.”

4. The “New Zealand Model,” AKA: “Decriminalize & Unionize”, AKA: The best solution.

“Full Decriminalisation: A legal model that decriminalises the sex worker, the client, and third parties such as managers, drivers, and landlords and regulates the sex industry through labour law.”

Yeah. That. That's what I support. This is why my original stance of “Decriminalize, Legalize, Unionize”. Because Legalization actually means regulation...

“Under legalisation, some sex work, in some contexts, is legal. This legal sex work is heavily regulated by the state – generally not in a way that prioritises the welfare of workers. [...] Often, to legalise means to implement new laws related specifically to sex work, including new criminal penalties, rather than repealing the existing ones.”

Right. Don't want that.

New Zealand has gone the farthest, but that's seen as a starting point, and more progress should be made. A lot of additional progress is additional improvements to the material conditions of the working class to eliminate systematic desperation, depriving those who seek to exploit vulnerable and marginalized people of that vulnerability (and hopefully the marginalization as well).

“Decriminalisation cannot wash away class conflict between the interests of management and employees; instead, it aims to mitigate the intense workplace exploitation that is propped up and fuelled by criminalisation.”

Decriminalization means: Workers' Rights, Defunding Police of their ability to abuse and further exploit sex workers (as is often the case), & harm reduction.

“Through the lens of economic need, people's reasons for engaging in sex work reappear not as aberrant or abject, but as a rational survival strategy in an often shitty world.” People do it for money. The best way to eliminate sex work is not criminalization, it's improving the material conditions of the poor and working class. It's really that simple.

Great book. Very enlightening.

And as always, I'd like to end with some of my favorite quotes and my thoughts about them:

“The bravery and resilience of sex workers has played a part in many liberation struggles. In the 1950s, prostitutes were part of the Mau Mau uprising that led to Kenya's liberation from British colonial rule. In the 1960s and 1970s they were part of the riots at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco and the Stonewall Inn in New York that kickstarted the LGBTQ liberation movement in the United States. In times of rapid social change, working class sex workers are often at the heart of the action. As sex worker activist Margo St. James has put it, ‘it takes about two minutes to politicise a hooker'.”

I wonder if those in power deliberately try to quash and criminalize specific sects of the populous to prevent grassroots radical movements.

“Along with racism, anxieties about commercial sex are embedded in the histories of immigration controls. These are legislative spaces where race and gender co-produce racist categories of exclusion: men of colour as traffickers; women of colour as helpless, seductive, infectious; both as threats to the body politic of the nation. These histories help us see that police and border violence are not anomalous or the work of ‘bad apples'; they are intrinsic to these institutions.
“The feminist movement should thus be sceptical of approaches to gender justice that rely on or further empower the police or immigration controls. Black feminists such as Angela Davis have long criticised feminist reliance on the police, and note that the police appear as the most benevolent protectors in the minds of those who encounter them the least. For sex workers and other marginalised and criminalised groups, the police are not a symbol of protection but a real manifestation of punishment and control.”

ACAB includes CBP

“For feminists, this preoccupation with feminine ‘innocence' should be a red flag, not least because it speaks to a prurient interest in young women. Conversely, LGBTQ people, Black people, and deliberate prostitutes are often left out of the category of innocence, and as a result harm against people in these groups becomes less legible as harm. For example, a young Black man may face arrest rather than support; indeed, resources for runaway and homeless youth (whose realities are rather more complex than chains and ropes) were not included in the US Congress's 2015 reauthorisation of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act.17 Anti-trafficking statutes often exclude deliberate prostitutes from the category of people able to seek redress, as to be a ‘legitimate' trafficking victim requires innocence, and a deliberate prostitute, however harmed, cannot fulfil that requirement.”

Example of insufficient/counter-productive legislation.

More quotes regarding borders:

“The clash between people's need to migrate and intensifying border fortifications has predictable outcomes. Migration scholars Nassim Majidi and Saagarika Dadu-Brown write that intensifying border restrictions creates ‘new migrant-smuggler relationships', adding that ‘smugglers will take advantage of a border closure or restriction to increase prices'.”

“Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), an NGO that tackles the exploitation of migrant workers in Europe, notes that ‘fear of immigration authorities is a major barrier to reporting for undocumented workers ... The threat of reporting to police or immigration authorities is routinely used by unscrupulous employers to hold workers in abusive situations.”

“Both the US and UK typically tie domestic workers' visas to a specific employer. As a result, a staggering 80 per cent of migrant domestic workers entering the US find that they have been deceived about their contract, and 78% have had employers threaten them with deportation if they complain.”

“[F]or carceral feminists, the problem is commercial sex, which produces trafficking; for us, the problem is borders, which produces people who have few to no rights as they travel and work. The solutions we propose are equally divergent. Carceral feminists want to tackle commercial sex through criminal law, giving more power to the police. For sex workers, the solution includes dismantling immigration enforcement and the militarised border regimes that push undocumented people into the shadows and shut off their access to safety or justice – in other words, taking power away from the police and giving it to migrants and to workers.”

Border are unjust and can cause more problems than they solve. They exist to serve the interest of the power elite and not the interests of the people.

When this book was first published, I came across the author's AMA and thought was interesting. I was trying to get all my ebooks & audiobooks from the library at the time, so I recommended they add it to their collection. In 2020, they emailed me saying it's been added to their collection so I gave it a read. I had this big block of text written out for it's own separate review after finishing it a few months ago but never got around to posting it. I intend on doing more in-depth reviews of books as I finish them next year, unless I don't. Who knows?

Popular psychology books like this one are written for laymen. There's this small area between “edgy freshman psych student who thinks their references and jokes are funnier than they really are” and “just a phd thesis in book form” where I find pop-psy enjoyable to read. This book falls wayy off the cliff on the former side. The bad jokes, dumbed-down language, and prolific use of ‘I' & ‘my' delegitimized the research by emphasizing the author and his opinions. This was probably done because of the subject matter. But I did not enjoy that very much.

This book will help you understand that you're really not that weird for having fantasies or desires outside of what we were raised to believe is “normal”. The only thing I really got out of this book was: brief psychological explanations of why people have certain kinks & fantasies, and the percent of people surveyed who have certain kinks & fantasies. The rest was all stuff I already knew or bad jokes. It could have been boiled down into a research paper and I'd have liked it more. That's my kink: dry, humorless science articles about interesting topics.

I would recommend this book if you or your partner is interested, yet somewhat apprehensive, in expanding your romantic horizons, or if you just want to get a better understanding of the human condition with regards to sexuality, gender, and romantic fantasies.

You are not immune to propaganda. I am not immune to propaganda. No one is immune to propaganda. In a country that opposes censorship, indoctrination, and propaganda, that country's government would be required by law to make their files on media cooperation open to the public and require studios to explicitly declare any cooperation in the opening credits of their films, television shows, and videogames. After reading this and the “Lies” book, it's clear that the US citizenry is one of the most indoctrinated populations on earth. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn what media has been directly influenced by state propagandists, the methodology used by said propagandists, and the history of US Propaganda. [Highly Recommended]