Tag: Politics

Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power – Now We Know!

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SubversivesAfter several months, yesterday I finally finished Seth Rosenfeld’s terrific book Subversives – The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power.

usually when I ‘m reading a book like this and I then pick up other books while reading it, I most time don’t go back to the book. This book an exception the book is just so good and the story that it tells about the FBI and the student protests at the University of California so much a part of my past that I couldn’t give up! While I was at the University of Florida (1970-1974) I was involved in two campus demonstrations one concerning black enrollment and studies and the other an antiwar demonstration after the announcement of the mining of Haiphong Harbor, etc nether approached the violence that was seen at Berkeley!

 Subversives is a fascinating book based on over 250,000 pages of FBI files, whose release the agency spent over a million dollars trying to stop, it took Seth Rosenfeld over thirty years to get the files released, but the fight was worth it. Subversives tells the story of the FBI’s program to combat the student protests not only at Berkeley but throughout the country. The book chronicles the story of the FBI’s surveillance, infiltration,planted news stories,poison-pen letters, and secret detention lists all revolving around the Free Speech Movement and other protests at the University of California , Berkeley!

The book centers around the intertwining of the lives of Clark Kerr, the liberal Quaker President of the University, Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement and Ronald Reagan, former actor, President of the Screen Actors Guild and future President of the US. While we all knew that the FBI was keeping track of leftist radicals during this period I don’t know if anyone knew the extents of the agency’s actions, beyond J. Edgar Hoover’s inner circle!! Since I was young and not that politically active in the early to mid-60s a lot of the action in the book was new to me, I particularly unfamiliar or forgot the fight and protest that arose around People’s Park. What really struck me about Reagan was how the events of these early years shaped his actions as President.

Here’s some praise for the book…..

“Subversives is more than a documentary history  it has the insight that comes only with relentless reporting. This book is the classic history of our most powerful police agency and one of the most influential political figures of our time secretly joining forces” – Lowell Bergman investigative report for The New York Times and Frontline

“Subversives will shock even those who have become used to the national security state and its excesses. With this book,Seth Rosenfeld restores the California tradition of courageous muckracking of Lincoln Steffens, and the sharp indictment of the powerful that we associate with Jack London.”  Ishmael Reed  author of Juice! and Mumbo Jumbo.

If you are someone like me who lived through the sixties and seventies this book will bring back a lot of memories and maybe bring back some of that old fire. The actions of the police and government officials during this time should be studied because as we watch the action in Ferguson, Missouri, the police are responding in much the same way as they did back then, and you know what they say  “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it” Let’s hope not! (Book 20 for 2014)!

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Book 36 for 2012: State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind

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So my goal for the Goodreads Reading Challenge was 40 books this year. For the longest time it looked like I would come nowhere near that total but a good October and November has brought me within 4 of that total. Now the trick will be to get 4 more books reads before the end of the year. December is always a challenging reading month, with so much to do getting ready of Christmas and then I usually am working more at Target, etc, so it will be tough but maybe doable!!

A good aspect of this year’s reading is that a third of the books that I’ve read (12/36) have been non-fiction. Certainly more than in previous years! Book 36 for the year is one of those non-fiction books State of Confusion:Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind by Dr. Bryant Welch.  Welch makes the case that many Americans have been manipulated by the Right with actions that are akin to “gaslighting” From Wikipedia:

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory, perception and sanity. It may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

The term “gaslighting” comes from the play Gas Light and its film adaptations, in which a husband secretly dims the gas lights in the house and, when his wife remarks on it, he claims that she is mistaken. This is done to convince the woman that she cannot trust her own judgment, and so will not be believed if she tries to report other strange things that are genuinely occurring, which the husband wishes to keep secret. The term is now also used in clinical and research literature.[1][2]

Bryant makes a valid case that, that is just what the Right does and the three prime States of Confusion are Paranoia, Sexual Perplexity, and Envy. All states that the Right uses to divide and confuse the nation! Chapter 6 is titled “Gaslighters: Architects of False Realities” sounds like the bubble world that many of the right live in- doesn’t it!! The Gaslighters include Fox News, and The Religious Right! The last chapters deal with the assault on Professionalism, Policy Implications and The Politics of Reality!

I thought that the book was well written and highly informative about what has gone on in America particularly over the last decade! Here’s what Robert Shrum says about the book:

“Bryant Welch makes a fascinating and compelling case that right-wing politics has subverted our democracy by infecting us with a form of political neurosis. This book unmasks the politics of fear-the deeper chords touched by campaigns to the dark side”

It’s a short book that took me way to long to read, but it is really worth reading!

Book 4 – The Big Con or maybe Book 3 of 2012

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So I finished book 4 for 2012 The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America by one of the senior editors of the New Republic Jonathan Chait. Oh wait that’s Book 4 what about Book 3 I forgot to write about it! What was it oh yeah, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything  by Joshua Foer. Guess I learned a lot, huh! Anyway that book was really good and did have some great ideas for remembering things. Joshua Foer became intrigued by the National Memory Championship and interviewed some of the participants trying to find out what made these people so adept at remembering. What he found out is that they are just like everyone else but they know the tricks of how to remember. From there Foer enters the world of the memory experts and trains to compete. The book follows his journey as he uncovers the secrets that date back to early Greek and Roman times, discuss folks with great memories like S, and some that can’t remember at all and through his journey he discover that a big part of being human is remembering! It amazes me that the world record for memorizing a deck of cards is around 37 seconds! But the tricks of the trade are interesting and some of them are useful for remembering things other than PI to a gazillion digits!

One of the main methods that is used to remember is to convert what you want to remember and then store it in a location in a building, or on a street that you know well. The buildings are called Memory Palaces and the competitors have many that they use. The point is when you need to remember you take a walk back through the Memory Palace and pick up the items you dropped!!

Anyway I was a good read and hopefully some of the tricks will be remembered and can prove useful! Cause like Tom Rush laments as we get older we tend not to remember quite as well! More about Book 4 later!

 

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Book 36 of 2011 – The Wrecking Crew – Thomas Frank

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Mother Jones: Kevin Drum: Republicans Don’t Care About the Deficit

As Drum and Krugman point out the Republicans don’t care squat about the deficit and why should they they created most of it and since it makes government look bad  and they hate government why is it a bad thing!

Book 36 for the year was Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew: How Conservative Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves and Beggered the Nation kinda sum it all up doesn’t it!!The book does sum it all up and tells the tale of how the Republicans have destroyed our functioning government. It’s quotes like these that caught my eyes over the last few chapters:

the main reason that conservative administrations immediately run up as large a deficit as possible is that it defunds the left

or

with their beloved government brought to the brink of fiscal collapse by repeated doses of supply side, the liberals would either have to acquiesce in the reconfiguration of the state or see the country destroyed.

from David Stockman and the Reagen administration: Deficits were a way to smash a liberal state that voters could not be persuaded to part with otherwise

from Robert Reich: “If the public thinks government is wasteful, that’s fine. That reduces public faith in government which is precisely what the Republicans want”

It’s a win-win for the Republicans!

from Louis Brandeis (Supreme Court justice 1916-1939)

“We can have democracy in this country or we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both”

So if you want a good primer on the Republican’s tactics for bringing down the government read this book!

Book 6 – The Rise of Islamic Captialism – Vali Nasr

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Book No 6 is another book concerning the Middle East The Rise of Islamic Capitalism – Why the New Muslim Middle Class is the Key to Defeating Extremismby Vali Nasr. Nasr was born in Iran and is a professor of International Relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University. The main thesis of the book is that the way to win in the Middle East is to support and strengthen the capitalism of the growing middle class. He believes that the majority of the populous of the Middle East want not a fundamentalist Islam but a more modern Islam that will blend religion with a strong economy. The book traces the failures of secularism throughout the Middle East and delves into the failure of the Iraniam Islamic revolution to spread. He discusses the current Iran predicament, Pakistan and finally folds up Turkey as a country that may have gotten it right. I found the book enlightening and informative! Here is a quote from the cover:

A brilliant guide to the complex landscape of the Middle East. The rise of trade, capitalism, and the merchant life is the most important trend at work there, one could counter the pernicious force of religious extremism” – Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World

I believe the above quote sums up the book correctly. It will be interesting to see how the current events in Egypt, Libya and Yemen play out in the coming months in relation to Nasr’s writing. Hopefully, he will be correct and the result will be a more democratic Middle East rooted in the Islamic faith but with a modern capitalistic middle class that will counter the extremism of Al-Qaeda.