Today’s broadsheet from the FM website pressroom. There are 5 sections, all with hot news.
- Links to interesting news and analysis
- Valuable Advice
- Quote of the Day
- News, updates to posts past on the FM website
- Plus, an Afterword
(I) Links to interesting news and analysis
(a) “Spanish Wind Power Tops 50% of Electricity Demand“, Sustainable Business News, 11 November 2009 — A big milestone for renewable energy.
(b) “Four Nuclear Myths“, Amory B. Lovins (Chairman and Chief Scientist), Rocky Mountain Institute, 13 October 2009 (PDF, 30 pages) — Myths supporting investments in nuclear power over renewable energy. A commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on similar writings.
(c) Breaking news story: “US Government Stages Fake Coup to Wipe Out National Debt“, ONN
(d) Background briefing about Yemen: “Yemen: Fear of Failure“, Ginny Hill, Chatham House, November 2008
(e) “End Clinton-era military base gun ban“, Editorial, Washington Times, 11 November 2009 — So that next time, somebody on the base can shoot back.
(II) Valuable Advice
- “Defend Yourself in Hand-to-hand Combat“, Claire Berlinski (author, photo here), posted at Learning to Fight, 12 November 2009 — “Ten Tips from Sifu Emin Böztepe (the “most lethal man in the world”).
(III) Quote of the Day
Am I the only one who smells Kabuki in the reports that President Obama has dramatically rejected all the Afghan war options with which he was presented, demanding to know where the “off ramps” are? If you were about to recommend a troop increase that was unpopular, especially with your Democratic base, wouldn’t you precede it with some drama like this to demonstrate that you are
- in charge,
- not being conned, and
- insistent on a withdrawal as quickly as possible?
Just asking.
— “Suckers of the Week“, Mickey Kaus, Slate, 12 November 2009.
Yep. That’s how these decisions were sold during the Vietnam escalation.
(IV) Updates from posts past on the FM website
(a) About Team Obama’s war with Fox News: “Did Fox Win the War?“, Mickey Kaus, Slate, 11 November 2009. For more on this see Foolish but dangerous attempts to manage the media by Team Obama.
(b) “Nazis, Soviets, Poles, Jews“, Timothy Snyder, New York Review of Books, 3 December 2009 — Review of The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans and The Holocaust in the Soviet Union by Yitzhak Arad — Subscription only (get one!). Excerpts:
But it was, as Evans notes, the Poles who told the British and the Americans about the Holocaust, not the other way around
… Evans insists on calling the Soviet Union “Russia” and its citizens “Russians.” Stalin, the Georgian leader of the Soviet Union, becomes a “Russian dictator,” and all Soviet institutions are “Russian.” … Russians were slightly more than half of the Soviet population. The institutions that held power were multinational, as was the Red Army. (The only expressly “Russian” military units were fighting on the German side. The Russian National Liberation Army, for example, raped and murdered thousands of Poles during the Warsaw Uprising.) With important exceptions such as Stalingrad and Leningrad, the war in the Soviet Union was fought not in its Russian republic but in Soviet Belarus and Ukraine.
… nearly half of the 5.7 million murdered Jews died in the occupied Soviet Union, but only one percent of that total perished in its Russian republic. Nevertheless, as Arad writes, postwar Soviet propaganda submerged the question of Jewish suffering within a narrative of Soviet losses, and put emphasis on the Russians as the Soviet people who bore the brunt. In early 1953, the Soviet leadership was circulating a petition among prominent Soviet Jews, who were to apologize to Russians for claiming that Jews had suffered, and thank Russians for saving them.
… That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance, and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact determined not only the course of the war, but the history of a considerable part of Europe. It defined a band of territory, running north to south from the Baltic to the Black Sea, that was invaded 3 times: first by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then again by the Soviets.
It was here, in Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe, that the Soviets concentrated the coercive might of the NKVD during that first occupation, deporting hundreds of thousands of people and shooting tens of thousands more. It was here, as Arad shows, that more than a quarter of the Holocaust killings took place. Ukrainian partisans, trained to kill Jews by the Germans, ethnically cleansed Poles from precisely these lands. It was also here that the Soviets, after later driving out the Germans, responded to armed resistance with ethnic cleansings of their own. It was here that the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe began, as Stalin claimed from the Allies at the end of the war the lands he had been granted by Hitler at its beginning.
(V) Afterword
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