5 Star – Page 102 – Public Intelligence Blog

2009/07/032009/12/04

Review: The Attack on the Liberty–The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship

Summary Review Intended to Inspire Wrath of US Voters,June 20, 2009

James Scott

I have reviewed earlier books on the Liberty, and stood with the Liberty survivors and their kin in believing that the U.S. Government then led by Lyndon Johnson betrayed the public trust in this instance. A handful of books support the general betrayal of the public trust that began with Lyndon Johnson and continues to this day:
An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, New and Updated Edition
Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars

That is the context within which the USS Liberty was attacked with impunity, and the deliberate attack covered up by the US Government, i.e. the White House and Cy Vance the Secretary of Defense. The US Navy protested but was silenced.

Perhaps the most important contribution this book makes is to record the current (2007) views of participants on both sides to the effect that this was a deliberate premeditated attack ordered by a person high enough in Israel to order the combined “joint” attack by both air force attack jets and naval torpedo boats.

The book confirms what has been claimed before, that the vessel was known to be US, and that the American flag was clearly seen by the attackers. DCI Richard Helms, interviewed in 2008, specifically confirmed the atrocity.

QUOTE from page 47: “The fighters destroyed the Liberty's machine guns, knocked out the antennas, and targeted the bridge to kill the officers and spark chaos among the crew.”

I am especially angry at the manner in which the Israeli's have bought the US Congress along with Wall Street and the banking world. See for instance:
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Israel also spies with impunity on the US, both with formal and technical spy networks such as depicted in Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul, where every American Jew is considered a “sayonim,” a person who will support Israel spy operations that are treason against the US, and with non-official spying such as Congresswoman Jane “this conversation never happened” Harman supports.

The book is both a labor of love and extremely well-executed investigative journalism.

Israel murdered 34 US naval personnel and wounded 171. This was an international war crime.

This is a RIGHTEOUS BOOK (I actually write this just before putting the book down). Here are some of my notes:

+ Immediate impact of the cover-up was the failure to learn anything, such that the USS Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans (at the request for the Soviets, completing their needs for use of the crypto cards they acquired earlier).

+ Middle of the book is sad sickening detail not here-to-fore presented in such an organized and detailed manner, along with 22 compelling shameful photographs of battle damage. Points to remember:

–Smell of rotting bodies

–Oil-soaked environment

–Partial bodies were a recovery & identification challenge

+ Communications breakdowns combined with a quick Israeli apology kept reinforcements from reaching the Liberty for 17 hours.

+ The Skipper ramped readiness up, wanted to move, but would have lost line of sight needed for NSA intercepts. Similarly, Navy advisor to Adm McCain (the father) wanted to pull the Liberty back at same time that a submarine was pulled back, but Admiral McCain did not want to tangle with NSA and claimed he did not have the authority when he actually did. (Later he redeems himself somewhat by insisting on Purple Hearts and combat pay.]

+ The context (Viet-Nam in particular) made the Liberty a “problem” for LBJ. Quote from page 93: “The Liberty–now riddled with cannon blasts, its decks soaked in blood, and its starboard side ripped open by a torpedo–evolved in a matter of hours from a top-secret intelligence asset to a domestic political liability.”

+ We learn that LBJ's upbringing taught him to favor Jews, and that “Johnson has too heavy a roster of Jewish and pro-Israeli advisors” (page 139.

+ We learn that Pentagon loyalists toed the party line on covering the whole thing up.

+ We learn that the US inquiry did not answer the question “How and why did this happen,” that Admiral McCain forbade travel to Israel, and that the Israeli's were not forthcoming with logs from any of the attacking units.

+ We learn that the original Israeli “investigation” was done by one officer alone, and after very angry exchanges on all sides, redone with an outcome of 7 counts of negligence recommended and not accepted. The final report from Israel is riddled with lies that are pointed out by the Israeli Ambassador himself in furious messages home. I am reminded of Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed its Own POWs in Vietnam and Is Anybody Listening?: A True Story About POW/MIAs In The Vietnam War.

+ We learn the Israeli's ordered napalm to be used against the USS Liberty as it would be “more efficient,” and we learn that the US politicians in the White House considered sinking the USS Liberty at sea to get rid of the evidence–one can only recoil in horror knowing that they considered the crew “expendable” and did not care if it was sunk with or without crew.

+ We learn that the US was willing to accept $3.3 million for the families, and the Israeli'[s refused, offering $1.25 million. Ultimately the Israeli bill came to $17 million of which $9 million was interest, and they finally settled for $6 million in three payments of $2 million each. What the author does NOT tell us is that the US taxpayer pays 20% of the entire Israeli government budget every year at the same time that the USA turns a blind eye to Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and Israeli theft of water from the Arab aquifers (see Chuck Spinney's brief on this at oss.net).

The book ends on a graceful note. I am impressed by the author's balance throughout. He finally visits Israel and meets one of the pilots, now Brigadier General Yiftah Spector. Accompanied by his father, who served on the USS Liberty, the author witnesses the Israeli officer saying “I'm sorry,” and his father saying “Thank you.”

2009/07/032009/12/04

Review: Conscious Capitalism–Principles for Prosperity

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Straight from the Author: Systems are Value-Neutral, June 25, 2009

David A. Schwerin Ph.D.

Am in a UN design seminar and have been listening to the author, whose next book is Conscious Globalism: What's Wrong with the World and How to Fix It, and am enthralled. We are on a break. Here are the highlights:

+ Economic crisis we are experiencing is a blessing. We NEEDED this kind of large systemic failure to wake us up.

+ Systems, such as capitalism, are value-neutral. It is the individuals whose personal and social and cultural values determine the direction and nature of the system.

+ Values are a means of teaching what works for the long run. Individuals that cheat others know deeply that they are less worthy and soiled, but they get away with it, and the community does not protest, provided there is a certain level of global stabilization. When everything goes bad, then values re-assert themselves as “timeless.”

+ Politicians follow rather than lead. In the absence of public engagement, they follow the money.

+ “There is an influx of consciousness coming into the planet.” The new generation of young people have a different consciousness and appear to be ready to adopt longer views, less selfish views.

I really like the above point, and am reminded of Will and Ariel Durant, and their Lessons of History, that specifically isolated morality as a strategic value that is priceless.

The author is a phenomenal speaker and the message in this book is not out of date at all, but I do want to alert Amazon customers to the imminent availability of his new book, “Conscious Globalization.”

From my own reading, I am listing below 5 books for each of two groups:

Predatory Immoral Capitalism:
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
The Working Poor: Invisible in America

Conscious Moral Capitalism Creating Infinite Wealth
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
In addition to the author's two books, see also
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

This book has been translated into Chinese and is in its second mass printing in China. From my own listening to this author in person, I draw out the lesson that capitalism is a system for innovation and individual entrepreneurship, and that no system is sustainable that seeks–as the USA does–to consume 25% of the earth's resources for the benefit of 5% of the global population.

2009/07/032009/12/04

Review: Fighting Identity–Sacred War and World Change (The Changing Face of War)

5 Star, War & Face of Battle

Our Bunker Hill-a STAKE in the Heart of “The Borg”, June 27, 2009

Michael Vlahos

I consider this book one of the most important books of our time, for it takes on “the Borg” at an intellectual level in a cultural context, and in so doing, speaks truth to power: our Emperors (“the Borg”) are naked and ignorant.

Early on he points out that ours is not the first globalization, and that previous globalizations have demonstrated that new identities rise within globalization and *cannot be put down* (his emphasis). New ideas, counter-establishment ideas, cannot be suppressed, and ultimately triumph in new consciousness at multiple levels. States struggle vainly, equating everything “new” with being a “threat,” and ultimately collapse under the weight of their own ignorance and inability to adapt.

The first few chapters suggest that our reaction to 9-11 opened a Pandora's box, that AF-IQ are our Waterloo, and that “non-state actors” is a generic term for all that is outside the state.

He specifies six “identity” migration paths: networks of conversion and subversion (e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood and the Pentecostals); autonomous urban subcultures (e.g. gangs); emerging nations; fighter fraternities; militarized Bucellani (vandal elites, e.g. the Taliban, a state within a state); and our own cross to bear, intercessor security sub-cultures (e.g. our military-industrial complex to which I would add, a Congress lacking in integrity).

TWO MAJOR POINTS:

1. The US Military is no longer Of, By, and For We the People, no longer a collective citizenry that is armed–in brief, the militarization of national policy has made us arrogant, ignorant, and repugnant.

2. By resisting change we are promoting change. I cannot help myself, I think of the anti-Borg from outer space that grows when we nuke it, shrinks when we show love.

The author points out that every US military intervention into a Muslim society has failed; that our failures lead to new formulas (reformations) rather than new directions (transformations); and that in being drawn in and maintaining the chaos space, we are feeding the metamorphosis of non-state cocoons into butterflies very hard to hit with an artillery shell or even an aimed bullet.

The middle of the book expands on the theme of war as “creative destruction” (a mantra in the commercial intelligence world), while pointing out that in ignoring morality, the Napoleonic and Clauswitzian essential (“the moral is to the physical as three is to one”–today I would make it 10:1) the US is giving up the very power that matters, and failing to understand that identity is stronger than materiel. He points out that the “others” have commitment, sacrifice, collective effectiveness, breeding in battle, are fighting on their home ground, and achieve transcendence in resisting the US. Meanwhile, in the US, 1% do the fighting and the other 99% are asked to go shopping.

P26: “America's problem comes with the discovery that it is merely the midwife rather than the godfather. We fight so as to get nothing from those we legitimize.”

I have a note culture is identity is being is sacred and together form consciousness.

The author is critical of Al Qaeda and its many mistakes, but credits them with drawing the US out into creating the chaos space within which other indigenous forces are rising.

His section on method discusses the utility of history and anthropology, both foreign “denied areas” to the USG IMHO.

The author points out the obvious that is not so obvious to those sacrificing America's blood, treasure, and spirit in our name, i.e. two thirds of humanity is “the other” living the Hobbsian life that is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.,” For these people, war is an entry point to negotiations, and the new players acquire legitimacy by out-lasting (not necessarily out-fighting) US forces.

As we move toward the conclusion the author speculates that we may be headed for a new Middle Ages with a global pandemic, climate change, and an energy crunch (to which I would add water crunch).

AF-IQ went wrong in five ways:

1. Liberation fizzled (I add, because neither Rumsfeld nor Gates are serious about waging peace)

2. Al Qaeda showed up in Iraq (the author neglects Iran's glee and strategic leverage)

3. No miraculous reconstruction (according to Paul Wolfowitz , “at their expense”)

4. No democratic transformation (to have expected one was idiocy or mendacity)

5. World did not, will not, accept the “Long War”

Chapter 8 on “fit” credits Martin van Creveld with the term, and elegantly discusses how our leaders went to war, ordered others to war, without the slightest understanding of “the other.” The “American way of battle” that Tony Echeverria has pointed out is not a way of war at all, has been, in the author's words, “the helpmate to enemy realization.”

On page 176 the author itemizes our “transformation” rules set and concludes it is flat out wrong.

1. Situational awareness (based on remote technologies)
2. Precision killing (ineffective for individuals)
3. Rapid dominance (not so fast)
4. Kill enough of the enemy and their leaders, and resistance will fold (simply not so).

PP191-192 are a stake in the heart of COIN–it is not wrong, it is simply ignorant and oblivious of the strategic Whole of Government and Whole Earth ramifications of spending all of our money on a lemon. COIN is (my words) “Borg triumphant.” COIN is “bento-box consciousness” and RAND–normally a supplicant cheer-leader– has outlined its demise in detail.

P202: “The events of 9/11 drove us back to Great War, but this time without *the people.* This Great War was *and remains* a war of the leadership and its tribal confederacy. It is a state-military enterprise, but far more significantly, *it is also now a state-military liturgy.* (Emphasis in original.]

The author notes that the “other” has a faster learning curve than we do, and on page 182: “Today's non-state actors know us better than we wish to know them.” This is an indictment of the USG.

See the images loaded under the book cover, and below books consistent with author's intent:
The Lessons of History
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Uncomfortable Wars Revisited (International and Security Affairs Series)
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
The Tunnels of Cu Chi: A Harrowing Account of America's “Tunnel Rats” in the Underground Battlefields of Vietnam
Radical Man

2009/07/032009/12/04

Review: Responsible History

5 Star, History

Nobel Prize Material–Elegant, Exudes Integrity, a Joy to Read, June 27, 2009

Antoon De Baets

This is, in my opinion, a Nobel-level contribution to all scholarship as well as to humanity. The author is at the intersection of history and human rights, but I also see him as having provided a definitive typology of responsible scholarship that exudes INTEGRITY, the one word that captured the essence of Buckminster Fuller and his ideal to create a world that works for all with disadvantage to none.

Two other books that provide context for this one, but are focused on the substance of history rather than the ethics of history where the author is clearly the vanguard, are:
The Lessons of History
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

See the image I have posted for a number of other book covers and the core “data pathology” concepts that undermine our ability to create a prosperous world at peace.

The author is also responsible for Censorship of Historical Thought: A World Guide, 1945-2000, a book that is grotesquely over-priced by the publisher, so with sadness I must limit my foundation for praising this author on the basis of this single properly-priced volume.

As with most books I consider special I began by reading the notes (40 pages) and the bibliography (18 pages), and from these extracted the following terms I place in alphabetical order:

Abuse-of-history
Academic-freedom
Access-to-information
Censorship
Civil-and-political-rights
Defamation
Denunciation
Duties-to-the-dead
Ethics
Fakes-and-forgeries
Frauds-and-myths
Freedom-of-information
Hard-truth-vs-good-faith
Harming-the-dead
Holocaust-denial
Humanitarian-law
Human-rights
Incitement-of-hatred
Inquisition
Posthumous-rights
Propaganda
Protection-of-literary-and-artistic-works
Repression
Rights-vs-reputations
Right-to-history
Right-to-memory
Smear-campaigns
Social-reconstruction
Social-role-of-the-historian
Truth-and-reconciliation
Uncertain-knowledge
Voices

The book does not contain a biography of the author, searching for <dr. A.H.M. (Antoon) de Baets> yields his contact information, I have copied and loaded his photo from another site.

I learn that 2005 was the first time in history that “abuse of history” is formally defined as a meaningful concept, by the International Committee of Historical Sciences. The author is a founding leader of the Network of Concerned Historians, generally in support of human rights investigations.

Table 1.1 on page 13 is so valuable I am loading an image to honor the author. I am not doing this for the many other more complex tables that represent deep nuanced thinking and a philosophy of history that is GOOD. Buy the book.

On page 14 he gives us two definitions:

+ The abuse of history is its use with intent to deceive.

+ The irresponsible use of history is either its deceptive or its negligent use.

Table 1.2, 4 pages (19-22), is an exquisite typology of abuses within irresponsible history.

Table 1.3, 3 pages (26-28) is a delightful itemization of 19 general motives for historical writing, with many more refined motives included as subsets.

Table 1.4 on page 34 lists 22 attributes of abusers, and I cannot help but think of how easily they describe the most senior officials of most governments and corporations.

The author discusses the nature of dictatorships and their abuses as well as the post-dictatorship abuses that characterize the handing of their archives. I am of course reminded that the USA today is “best pals” with 42 of the 44 dictators discussed in Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025, *and* that Leon Panetta, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is refusing Congressional demands for archives on CIA's role in rendition and torture.

I learn from the chapter on defamation and how restrictive defamation laws are used to repress the truth. I also learn that the courts have made clear that charges of anti-Semitism as a means of repressing honest criticism of Israel and the Jewish lobby do NOT enjoy the same standing as normal charges of defamation because the anti-Semitic smear campaign violates rights of others rather that addressing the truth of the matter.

The author provides a fascinating discussion of judicial deference to historians in recognition that arriving at a best truth is a specialized craft.

The second half of the book on responsible history is equally engaging and most professional. It covers the duties of the living to the dead and the rights to memory and history. The author concludes that the dead do not have rights, but the living do have duties to both the dead of the past and the unborn of the future. Table 4.2 on pages 134-137 is a phenomenal listing of moral and or legal wrongs to the dead.

In examining memory and history, the author concludes, with full and proper documentation of work by others, that memory is a foundation for thought and therefore is a right; and that in exceptional cases the government can and must intervene to establish a right to the truth that is an essential aspect of transitional justice and is a right of the larger social group that has been wronged, not just of an individual. I learn–and perhaps this is Dutch humor but I appreciate it–that habeas corpus has a counterpart in history, habeas data.

The final chapter discusses and rejects eight reasons not to have a code of ethics for history, and then lists ten on page 187 that I provide in abbreviated form below.

01-focus-of-moral-awareness
02-formulates-rights-and-duties
03-instrument-to-teach-core-of-the-profession
04-compass-to-detect-irresponsibility
05-instrument-to-evaluate-conflicts
06-helps-reduce-irresponsible-use-and-abuses
07-clarifies-foundations-and-limits
08-helps-protect-historians
09-enhances-autonomy, transparency, and accountability
10-increases-public-trust-and-understanding

He concludes that the past will not go away and will remain both an area of conflict and abuse, and an area of reconciliation and responsible use. I am taken with one of the last lines in the book, on page 198:

“…historical writing is not an ordinary operation of memory. It is a rather peculiar operation of factual memory, based on freedom and integrity, r3espect, and the careful and methodically determined search for truth.”

This book is unique! It is in my view one of the most important works published in recent memory, and it has value for the future of humanity in defining the moral obligations of all professional researchers, not least of which are the spies–intelligence collectors, analysts, and managers.

2009/06/282009/12/04

Review: How to Sail Around the World –Advice and Ideas for Voyaging Under Sail

5 Star, Sailing

Unique, Not a Substitute for Manuals, But Practical Clever Sense, June 28, 2009

Hal Roth

I stayed up late to finish this book, and regret the publisher has not seen fit to offer Amazon readers a “Look Inside the Book.”

I am adding this book to my list of great sailing manuals, handbooks, and other guides, with the observation that this book is in no way a substitute for those more detail oriented step by step books BUT this book is also unique. It is PACKED with real-world experience and clever sense–much beyond common sense–that is literally priceless. Put clearly, I would not leave this book out of my calculations in planning to acquire and manage an offshore journey that includes an ocean crossing.

Chapter 15 on “Can You Be Seen At Night” is alone worth the price of the book. I have NEVER seen this much useful detail anywhere else, including the so-called everything guides. The author excels at providing contact information and specific recommendations and I absolutely would not go to sea in the future without buying the masthead light he recommends in the book. I also realized that the 65 MacGregor, which I have my eye on, falls just within the 65.6′ limits of international regulations on masthead lights sufficing (when sailing), and personally think MacGregor is making a mistake in thinking about a 70′ version.

This book has FOUR chapters on storm management, and I have NEVER seen it explained more sensibly, in logical progression. I am not a lifelong sailed despite a provisional D Skipper rating (less celestial), so these four chapters are for me the equivalent of a life-time tutorial that I badly need.

While speaking of celestial, this book persuaded me I have to get on with that qualification. The author is compelling in describing the circumstances under which GPS could go out, both locally or by military dictat, and I finally appreciate the urgency of having celestial capability in extremis.

The rest of the book is a joy. I now wish I had done this when my three boys were still in middle school range. The chapter on home schooling is fantastic, with lots of detail, and I am fully convinced that the author is correct when he says that two hours of focused study a day easily equal a “full” school day with all its distractions and change-ups.

The chapters on fuel for cooking and fuel for heating are both very important, and marvelous supplements to the more sterile ground as covered by others. The author ranges widely, covers the pros and cons well acorss the various fuel categories, and I put down the book knowing a great deal more. This merits a special comment: this author is gifted at talking sense. I understand his words more easily than the more formal manuals.

Final chapters include one on nine ideas covering tools, water, flashlights, mast climbing steps, nonskid desk surfaces, ship's book (history and details of every sail, fitting, etc.), cockroaches, enhancement to the topping lift, and stuffing box leaks with ACE bandages in or out of the hull.

The book does not mention piracy, so I am loading a graphic from an article I wrote recently, and anticipate the need for a global guide to piracy and rapid response services. I also see a need for fully concealable sniper rifles that are impervious to salt-water.

Absolutely a great value.

2009/06/282009/12/04

Review DVD – From Hell

5 Star, Crime (Organized, Transnational), Reviews (DVD Only)

Johnny Depp a Brand Name for Me, June 28, 2009

No one needs my review of this superb film, this annotation is just a marker for those who follow my generally non-fiction reading and viewing.

Johnny Depp has become an icon for me, a brand name. One of my teenagers brought this home and I put it on background while doing paperwork, but the TV is above my desktop and I watched every single minute, stopping as necessary when leaving the room.

I admire the reviewer that has researched Jack the Ripper more deeply and tells us that we have been let off the worst of the worst. That's fine by me. Between Johnny Depp's performance, the other stars in the cast, the over-all screenplay and the period depiction, this was simply a fine offering.

I might offer that Heather Graham shows great promise, brining to mind such stars as Jodie Foster and Julianne Moore.

I'd like to see more reviewers use the “Insert a Product Link” that Amazon offers, instead of just typing out the name of a book or DVD.

Here are some examples:
The Libertine
Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man's Chest (Widescreen Edition)
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
A Study in Red: The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper
The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Companion: An Illustrated Encyclopedia

2009/06/282009/12/04

Review: The Deepening Darkness–Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future

5 Star, Censorship & Denial of Access, Civil Society, Democracy, Education (General), Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Epic Work, Small Blinders, Over-All a MAJOR Integrative Work

June 28, 2009

Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards

I only recently learned of the literature on voices of women, and this is the first of several books I ordered to explore the subject. At tempted as I have been to take away one star for small blinders (notably the gross over-selling of anti-Semitism, and the complete oblivion to the fact that Dick Cheney used 9-11, even if he is a cross-dresser our response to 9-11 was NOT some deep psychic rage stemming from our humiliation–Cheney sent 1% of the country to war, and Bush asked the other 99% to go shopping.

Having said that up front, I stayed with five stars because this is an epic work, and I am deeply impressed by the rigorous documentation in notes, the spectacular bibliography, and the deliberate mention of names of minds being quoted in the body of the book, a certain mark of integrity that I always look for. Hence, while some of the points below in my notes come without the cited source, be assured that the authors have been meticulous.

QUOTE p. 19: “…patterns of injustice and moral slavery are supported by the repression of resisting voice and to show how such resisting voice is rooted in the human psyche and preserved in cultural forms that preserve and maintain it. …What patriarchy precludes is love between equals, and thus it also precludes democracy.” For the political science version of this, see The modern state.

Part I starts with Roman Patriarchy and if you are not a cultural studies ancient literature obsessive, you can skim most of this. I have a note: “marvelous handbook for teaching literature as culture & psyche.” See The Manufacture Of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, and On the Psychology of Military Incompetence for the modern equivalencies…and other books I have reviewed.

Part II covers resistance across time and culture and is a brilliant survey in detail–while leaving much for others to cover in follow-on works–of religion, psychology (notably a wonderful chapter on Freud first embracing women's voices and then rejected them), the artists, and politics. The Catholic Church comes in for its fair share of condemnation as a patriarchal organization as well as a criminal and hypocritical organization, but it is here that I note the immaculate conceptions the authors both portray of Jews and Israel–“can do no wrong” gets annoying after a while.

Part III, the shortest part, provides a once-over on western colonialism, the war on terror, and where we are going wrong now in seeking to turn back the progress made from the 1960's. All good stuff.

Here are my fly-leaf notes and a couple of quotes.

+ Gender and how gender equality and sexual tolerance are handled is both the foundation for democracy (dignity and equality for all) and the canary in the coal mine for failing democracy such as we have in the USA.

+ Resistance, once it acquires critical mass, is the pre-condition for being able to achieve transformation. This is a very important point and merits its own book. See my review of Responsible History for supplementary insights from another author.

+ Over-all this is a fascinating holistic view of cultural relations and why the matter. I particularly appreciate the focus on how important “feelings” are and how the repression of feelings, including sexuality, cuts off half the soul-brain for the questionable desire to assert control.

+ I could not stand the “femi-nazis” in my own era of learning (1970's) but now they have come of age. It is no longer about aggressive women trying to fight men on men's terms; what we have here is brilliant women making a well-documented case for how stupid men are to fall for the patriarchy propaganda, and THAT I can respect. This book, for those of us not familiar with the Voices literature, is a milestone.

+ I completely buy-in to the author's view that patriarchy supports racism, Puritanism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, the latter with a grain of salt. As “Responsible History” documents, way too many charges of anti-Semitism are defamation and no longer have standing in court.

+ The author's make a compelling case that a Republic in which the people are sovereign, equal, and entitled to equal voice, is completely anti-thetical to a top-down command and control patriarchy. Others have made this case and described Epoch B leadership, bottom up inclusive deliberative democracy. I cannot do justice to the originators, but see All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover)) and Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace for a taste.

+ They discuss how repression imposes disassociation that blocks ethical development as well as resistance.

+ They discuss the contradictions in laws that force women to disassociate their intelligence from their sexuality. I am moved by their citation of the work of others in which young girls learn they cannot have BOTH voice (honesty) AND relationships (steeped in patriarchy).

+ I am sympathetic to their discussion of fascism as over-compensation for male humiliation that becomes a psychological basis for violence, and I am even more in turn with the varied observations that fear feeds violence.

They conclude: “The corruption of manhood has been our theme.” They discuss the tension between voice and violence, and reiterate that the demonization of pleasure requires a split in consciousness–put another way, the USA has lost its mind.

QUOTE p. 266: “As we have found the roots of intolerance–whether racist, sexist, or homophobic–in the traumatic rapture of intimate relationships that marks the initiation into patriarchy, so the splits between mind and body, thought and emotion, self and relationships signal a disassociation that keeps us from knowing what we otherwise would know. It impedes the voice of experience, grounded in the body and in emotion and fostered by relationships, that would speak to the voices of authority, thus posing a threat to democracy in the same ways that totalitarianism targets the functions of the human mind.”

We're there. See Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

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