Experimental Blog # 236

A quotation from the cover to "The Lithuanian Conspiracy and the Soviet Collapse - Investigation into a Political Demolition" by Galina Saposhnikova

    "Through interviews with leading participants{as many as 39} on both sides, <  > Galina Sapozhnikova captures the political and human dimensions of betrayal and disillusionment that lead to the collapse of the 20th century's greatest experiment in social  engineering …
    Termed "color" revolutions by the worldwide media, these various movements developed in several societies in the former Soviet Union and the Baltic states during the early 2000s. In reality, they were US intelligence operations which covertly instigated, supported and infiltrated protest movements with a view to triggering "regime change" under the banner of a pro-democracy uprising. The objective was to manipulate elections, initiate violence, foment social unrest and use the resulting protest movement to topple an existing government in order to install a compliant pro-US government.
    This book not only exposes the process, but sheds light on how these events play out < > It is key to grasping the template that today underlies similar events in Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and likely elsewhere, going forward."
    This book came out in 2018.

 

Experimental Blog # 235

Comments about the book "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs", the Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe by Lisa Randall

    In the author's own words, "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs explains our current knowledge about the Universe, the Milky Way, the Solar System, as well as what makes for a habitable zone and life on Earth."
    And, "Dark matter constitutes 85 percent of the matter in the Universe while ordinary matter - such as that contained in the stars, gas, and people - constitutes only 15 percent."
    The astrophysicist Lisa Randall theorizes that as the Solar System journeys around the Milky Way galaxy, and as it oscillates up and down, it periodically passes "through a disk of dark matter that is embedded in the plane of the Milky Way." This "periodicity" occurs roughly every 35 million years. The gravity of the dark matter disk can dislodge comets from the "Oort Cloud" that surrounds the Solar System and send them crashing towards the Sun and into the Earth.
    Beginning around 300 years ago people thought that Isaac Newton had "figured out the Universe", and some people even put his name on the "Newtonian Universe". Then, around the middle of the nineteenth century, along came James Clerk Maxwell; and he created, with some help from others, a different physics and universe for electromagnetic waves. Then just about 100 years ago came Albert Einstein. And he, too, with some help from others, put the two universes together. For many years, since then, people often talked about the "Einsteinian Universe".
    Lisa Randall writes about the dozens of people in the last century, or so, but especially in the last 30 to 50 years, who have contributed to the science of astrophysics, and many other sciences, too. There are so many contributors and there is so much "astounding" research that it seems quite incorrect to put anybody's name on the Universe today.

Experimental Blog # 234

Comments about "Becoming" by Michelle Obama

     Michelle Obama is the eleventh First Lady of the United States to write a book about her life's experiences. The first one was Julia Dent Grant, but her book was not published until many years after it was written.
    Michelle Obama can easily be described as intelligent, highly motivated, and an ultra-achiever; and her husband, Barack, can easily be described that way, too. Besides that, they both became lawyers.
    The book, "Becoming", starts out with many very strong descriptions of her childhood and youth, and of her very extensive family relationships. She starts her working life with several jobs that all seem to involve helping disadvantaged people in one way or another; and, so, she meets her future husband, and President of the United States; who is doing similar work.
    After they get married she also writes very much about their two daughters.
    Michelle Obama's entire focus, at least beyond bringing up her daughters, seems to be on changing society, specifically, American society. To the end of her book she is so involved with these efforts, in a variety of ways, that, except for rather briefly describing a few trips to England and Africa, she writes almost nothing about the rest of the world. The rest of the world could be India, China, South America, Russia, or other parts of Europe or Asia, or the United Nations. Nor does she write  very much, or anything, about meeting the leaders, or other people, from these countries, or places, in Washington, D.C..
    Nonetheless, Michelle Obama's book has to be considered a very important book, and it will very probably remain so for a long time. Everybody, at least all Americans, should read it.
    Everybody is human, of course; but, probably, many Americans thought that, whatever their politics might have been, Michelle and Barack and their family were among the best American families to ever live in the White House. If there is such a thing as "American luck", it seemed to show up during their time.

Experimental Blog # 233

More quotations from and comments about "The Undiscovered Paul Robeson - Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976" by Paul Robeson Jr.

"In June 1947, Truman veered to the left in his domestic policy < > The administration's Civil Rights Committee publication To Secure These Rights recommended an antilynching law, abolition of the pole tax, statutes protecting the right to vote, integration of the military, denial of federal funds to institutions that discriminate, and federal laws against discrimination and segregation in employment, interstate commerce, and public accommodations.
     By preempting the NAACP's civil rights agenda, Truman ensured that most black leaders would remain loyal to him. < > Paul's uncompromising left-wing political stance and his open attacks on Truman isolated him from the black elite ...."

    Paul Robeson consistently supported the efforts of W.E.B. DuBois; and, later on, he supported the work  and efforts of Martin Luther King. He also got along well with Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. However, he generally scoffed at the work of the other civil rights leaders: Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins. He is never quoted as saying anything about Ralph Abernathy.

    "Richard Helms, the CIA's chief of operations, had given the green light to widespread overseas operations involving the use of the new hallucinatory drug LSD, lethal toxins, and electroconvulsive therapy{ECT} against foreign and American targets. One of Helm's teams was MKULTRA Subproject 111, headed by Professor Hans Jurgen Fysenck < > of London's Maudsley Hospital."

    Unknown to him, Paul Robeson was certainly given LSD in Moscow by someone working for the CIA early in 1961. He very soon was put in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow and in a few weeks, or so, he recovered. Paul Robeson Jr. came to see his father; and he too, unknown to him, was given LSD. And, he too, was put in a psychiatric hospital, where he soon recovered.
    Paul senior's wife, Eslanda, was told by the soviet doctors that under no circumstances should her husband be given electroshock treatments. Nevertheless, she took her husband to a psychiatric facility in London sometime around September of 1961. He was at this facility most of the time until September of 1963; and during this time the official record shows that he was given 54 electroshock treatments. The official record also shows that he received 17 antipsychotic and other drugs which were intended to affect his brain.
    In around September of 1963 Eslanda Robeson took her husband to a psychiatric facility in communist East Berlin, East Germany. Paul Robeson recovered there and returned to America in December of 1963, and he never left America again.

Experimental Blog # 232

Quotations from and/or comments on  "The Undiscovered Paul Robeson - An Artist's Journey, 1898-1939" by Paul Robeson, Jr.{2001} and "The Undiscovered Paul Robeson - Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976"{2010} also by Paul Robeson, Jr. and "Here I Stand" by Paul Robeson{1957}

Quotations from "An Artist's Journey":

    Paul Robeson's father... In 1858, as a fifteen-year-old field slave on the Roberson Plantation in Robersonville in eastern North Carolina, he had escaped with his older brother, Ezekiel, on the Underground Railroad to Pennsylvania."
    The Reverend William Drew Robeson, the escaped slave, gave all of his five children a very religious up-bringing. However, in 1929 Paul, the youngest child, wrote in his diary, "God doesn't watch over everyone, because everyone isn't important". He did not seem to remember, "As you do to the least of these, so you do to me."

   "Paul read extensively < > He read the works of Marx and Engels in German, and those of Lenin and Stalin in Russian."
   "The Southern-born Woodrow Wilson had been elected president in 1912 and expanded segregation in federal office buildings. He also made it a policy of his administration to reject black applicants for federal jobs, and in 1914 he had refused to condemn lynching."

Quotations from "Quest for Freedom":

   Paul Jr. quotes his father as saying to him, "I'm a human being first, a Negro second, and a Marxist third. But all three of those levels are inseparably connected."
   "Stalin's "Great Purge" of 1937 had reached a peak by that time. < > In 1989, Soviet historian Roy Medvedev estimated that the number of official executions in 1937 reached 353,680."

   A fairly recent video from Russia stated that from 1934 through 1938 about 700, 000 people were shot in the Soviet Union for "political crimes". Another video entitled "Famine - 1933. Unlearned Lessons", which came out in 2008, stated that about 7,000,000 people died in the Soviet Union from starvation during what they call "dekulakization" and collectivization. Many women and children were included in this number.
   Yet another video from Russia{since deleted} was about a peasant village in southern Russia that was refusing collectivization in 1921. The entire village had taken refuge in a nearby forest, so the Red Guards used poison gas and exterminated the entire village, women and children included.
   During all of these awful events there were spectacular parades, ceremonies, and celebrations in Moscow, Leningrad, and probably other cities, as well. Many thousands of enthusiastic "builders of Socialism" took part in these events.

   It is difficult to say from these 3 books precisely, but Paul Robeson visited the Soviet Union during the years 1934, 1935, 1936, and 1937; during which time he put eight-year-old Paul Jr. in an elite school in Moscow. Paul Jr. says that Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who was about 20 months older than Paul Jr., was also in this school, but he never says that they met.  Paul senior again went to the Soviet Union in 1949, and, again during the years 1958, 1959, 1960, and 1961, and he was hospitalized there. Paul Robeson also went to a hospital in East Germany in 1963.
   They never say that either one of them met Joseph Stalin in person. However, in 1958 Paul and Essie Robeson met with Nikita Khrushchev in the Crimea.
   In 1952 Paul Robeson received a Stalin Prize, which has since been renamed a Lenin Prize. However, because his passport had been revoked he had to receive it in New York. To date there have been only about 6 Americans who have received this prize.
   These quotes and comments have concentrated entirely on Paul Robeson's involvement with the Soviet Union. He was also very close with American and other communists and many other people around the world.
   Needless to say, however, his accomplishments in music, on stage and in film, and in foreign languages and linguistics, and many other efforts were highly exceptional.




































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Experimental Blog # 231

Comments on and quotations from "In Putin's Footsteps"' - Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones by Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler

It has been almost 28 years since both the end of the Soviet Union and Communism in Russia, which soon followed. However, only now are American and other outsiders really beginning to find out what life in the "new Russia", its many cities and provinces, has become. This book presents both some of the old and familiar negative and, sometimes surprising, new positive evaluations.

"After taking over from Yeltsin as acting president on the first day of the new Millennium"{the year 2000}, the authors then point out that eighteen years later Vladimir Putin is still very much in charge and is just beginning his fourth presidential term in office.

"At times you can't help feeling that Moscow is Byzantium, its modernized version, with Mercedes and gourmet supermarkets."

"Cities of the Mighty Volga" - Ulyanovsk did not revert to its pre-Soviet name, Simbirsk. Whereas Samara did not keep its Soviet name of Kuibyshev.
"Examining the museum's exhibits{in Ulyanovsk} < > we realized that only four leaders have remained in Russia's recent, and well-curated, official historical memory. First, Lenin, < > Stalin comes second < > Leonid Brezhnev is the third < > {Putin is the fourth, of course.}"
"And what of the "reformers" - Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin? They have almost completely dropped out of history, at least as the Russian state now presents it."

The more positively presented cities seem to be:

"The Urals' Holy Trinity":
"Perm is the Urals' culture capital - the "first city in Europe," < > Others view it as the last European city < > The Perm Paradox."
 Yekaterinburg is called a "well-kept city" and it is compared to Chicago!
"Founded in 1586, Tyumen, the current hub of the Russian oil industry, has had an even shinier look than most." It is called the "Capital of Russia's Klondike".

Novosibirsk is told as "A Story of Science{ because of nearby Akademgorodok} and Serendipity". It is apparently Russia's third largest city and is positively described as "a stunning success."
 And, not for the first time, Vladivostok is compared to San Francisco. 

Magadan is called the "Gulag Capital". Even though this chapter is about 22 pages long it does not mention that an American politician named Henry Wallace, who became Secretary of Agriculture and then Vice President from 1940 to 1944, was reported to have visited this city, probably in the 1930s, and praised what he saw there![ Further checking-up turned up the fact that Vice President Henry Wallace visited Magadan in 1944]

Experimental Blog # 230

Quotations from and comments on "The Cold War" - A World History by Odd Arne Westad

"The human cost of Stalin's state-building was immense. Lenin had set a bloody pattern by executing at least one hundred thousand people without any form of judicial process."
"At least ten million Soviet people were killed by Stalin's regime from the late 1920s up to his death in 1953. < > In addition, at least three million died in the Ukrainian famine, which the regime did much to provoke and nothing to prevent."
"How could the Soviet system, based on terror and subjugation, appeal to so many people around the world?"

"Eastern Europe was remade by Communism, western Europe was remade by capitalism. < > Part of the reason for the success of the new were the disasters of the old. After Europe's calamitous half century, any stability would do, even one that was imposed by outside powers through the Cold War."

"Communism was to be China's weapon for modernization < > It would make the country rich and strong."

"By the late 1970s much of Latin America was ruled by military dictators. < > In all, fifteen out of twenty-one major states in Latin America were led by military dictators by the end of the decade."

"The Cold War in Europe ended because years of closer association between East and West had reduced the fear that the two sides had for each other, and because of western Europe's proven record of successfully integrating peripheral countries into the European Community."

    This is a very long book with about 629 pages of text and about 638 footnotes. The author was born, in 1960, and grew up in Norway. He later seems to have spent years in Britain at the London School of Economics; and only very recently has become a professor at Harvard University.
    Of course, everybody can only have their own subjective point of view; and this author can not be an exception. Norway has a short border with Russia; and the author is very involved with the Western European and American points of view.
    Although Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev seem to be, by far, the most written about people in this book, there are only 2 other Russians, Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev, as compared to 9 Americans, in total, in the top 20 people talked about in this book. The Americans are, in alphabetical order: James Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.
    The remaining 7 of the top 20, in alphabetical order, are: Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharal Nehru, and Zhou Enlai.
    It seems that the author, Odd Arne Westad, might say that these 20 people are the most important "world players" in the Cold War era.

Experimental Blog # 229

Quotations from and comments about "The Future is History" - How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen

"I spent my thirties and forties documenting the death of a Russian democracy that had really never come to be. Different people were telling different stories about this: many insisted that Russia had merely taken a step back after taking two steps toward democracy; some laid the blame on Vladimir Putin and the KGB; others on a supposed Russian love of the iron fist, and still others on an inconsiderate, imperious West."

"Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. < > The leaders of many of the Soviet Union's constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces..."

"The cliche' of the era was "floodgates." Everyone in every field was claiming that the floodgates had opened."
"For over a generation before Gorbachev came to power, Politburo membership had generally been a lifetime appointment.  <> Gorbachev started reshuffling the Central Commottee's membership several times a year ..."
"One after another, the Eastern European states allowed protests < > In Romania, where the Party would not budge, a rebellious army seized and executed the Communist dictator and his wife. But the revolutions elsewhere were described by both local and Western press as "velvet.""

"Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened."

"..Yeltsin might have appeared to be tackling the pillars of the totalitarian system, its machines of ideology and terror. < > By the end of 1991, Yeltsin had a country to run. But even with the former institutions of the Soviet state under his control, he faced a dire deficit of instruments of governance, and of people to use them."

"When Mikhail Gorbachev, as Party leader, looked at some of the secret archives for the first time in the 1980s, he felt shock, disgust, and disbelief - not only because of what had been done but because it had been done by his own Party and in its name."

"On January 2, 1992, the government lifted price controls on consumer goods, with the exception of bread, milk, and alcohol. < > Within a month, prices had gone up 352 percent..."

"Yeltsin no longer had the strength, or the popular support, to continue fighting the Communist Party. < > With resentment the dominant emotion in the land, Yeltsin could afford no public confrontation with the past."

The author's sources, as well as the author herself, perhaps, seem to become more removed from government actions during the leadership of Vladimir Putin. She writes about a "Nation Divided" and the assassination of Boris Nemtsov on February 27, 2015, who was the father of one of her sources, besides being a very important politician, who became a leader of anti-government demonstrations.

"So this was how it worked. The famous got a bullet in the heart and the less famous got poison in their tea."

Experimental Blog # 228

Quotations from "Red Famine" - Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum

"The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state."

"On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had "no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry," as a recent biographer has written."

"In just a few short months during the winter of 1929-30 the Soviet state carried out a second revolution in the countryside, for many more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself. All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken."

"The Ukrainian famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. < > "Excess deaths" continued throughout the rest of 1933 and 1934". < > agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, < > and 0.6 million lost births < > These figures include all victims, wherever they died - by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages - and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards."

"In his momentous "secret speech" in 1956, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, attacked the "cult of personality" that had surrounded the Soviet dictator and denounced Stalin for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people < > But Khrushchev, who had taken over the Ukrainian  Communist Party in 1939, kept silent about both the famine and collectivization."

"Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934 < > were not caused by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people's homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbors died of hunger."  

The author, Anne Applebaum, "lives in Poland with her husband, < > a Polish politician, and their two children" This is from the book jacket.  

Experimental Blog # 227

Comments on "Stalin's Daughter - The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva" by Rosemary Sullivan

    This book has about 632 pages of text plus about an additional 124 pages of family trees, preface, acknowledgements, list of characters{there are as many as 117}, sources, notes, bibliography, illustration credits, and index.
    Besides that, roughly the first 190 pages contain a great deal of information about Joseph Stalin in the years leading up to his death in 1953. More information about the Bolsheviks and the soviet government continues for another 80, or more, pages until Svetlana Alliluyeva defects to America at the American embassy in India in 1967.
    The author, Rosemary Sullivan, obviously has done an enormous amount of research and work, but her North American point of view, with its peculiarities, shows through nonetheless.
    Is it fair to also point out that Rosemary Sullivan apparently did not think about writing a biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva until long after Svetlana's four books were published in 1967, 1969, 1984, and 1991; and after she had died in 2011?

Experimental Blog # 226

Comments on "A Book for Granddaughters - Travelling to the Homeland" by Svetlana Alliluyeva

   It turns out that the book "The Faraway Music", mentioned in the last blog # 225, was not Svetlana Alliluyeva's last published book. Her fourth and last published book, apparently, is this one, "A Book for Granddaughters - Travelling to the Homeland"; which was written in 1988 in Wisconsin.
   It is mostly about her return to the USSR from England in October of 1984 with her American daughter Olga, who was about 13 years old. It is also true that they had gone to England, and not to Switzerland, which Svetlana preferred, not because Olga was not accepted in school there, but because Svetlana, herself, could not be a permanent resident in Switzerland.
   Svetlana's decision to return to the USSR was provoked by telephone conversations with her son that were unexpectedly resumed from England in 1982.  
   Although Svetlana apparently happily, more or less, met other relatives and friends in Moscow, after an absence of 17 years, her hopes of reconnecting with her son and daughter, Katya, were not fulfilled; so Svetlana and her daughter, Olga, soon leave for Tbilisi, Georgia on December 1, 1984.
   In Tbilisi matters go much better, especially for Olga, who easily makes friends and learns both Russian and Georgian fairly well in a year's time.
   By December of 1985, however, Svetlana has decided that since she has been unable to reestablish friendly relations with her Russian son and daughter, who lives and is a scientific worker in Kamchatka, she wants to leave the USSR, again.  
   After travelling from Tbilisi to Moscow, and back again; and experiencing many difficulties, including very serious, and mysterious, health problems, they are allowed to leave on separate days and to separate destinations. In the spring of 1986 Olga goes first back to her school in England, and Svetlana, with Olga's dog, Maka, returns to the USA in Wisconsin.
   Svetlana has written this book in 1988 in familiar surroundings in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
   It seems that Svetlana Alliluyeva had been discouraged from writing any more books. When she finished writing this book she was around 62 years of age; but she will live for another 23 years to be 85 in different places in England and Wisconsin; and perhaps visiting other places as well.

Experimental Blog # 225

Notes and comments on and quotations from "Twenty Letters to a Friend" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan; "Only One Year" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, translated from the Russian by Paul Chavchavadze; and "The Faraway Music" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, author and translator.

   The first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", was written by the author in the summer of 1963, about 10 years and 4 months after the death of her father, Joseph Stalin. At the time Svetlana had no ideas about publishing her manuscript as a book, or ever leaving the Soviet Union.
   Svetlana left the USSR on December 19, 1966 to go to India with her late husbands ashes. She, and everybody else, expected that she would return in a month, or so; but she managed to extend her stay in India to March 1967. At that time Svetlana wanted to stay in India permanently, "forever", she says; but the government of India was afraid to let her do that, so Svetlana felt that she had no alterantive but to ask for help at the American embassy. After secret detours of a month, or so, she arrived in America in the middle of the international sensation that her defection, "the daughter of Stalin", had created.
   During this time Svetlana had signed several documents that she very poorly understood that resulted in that she was completely deprived of any interference, or any other rights, over her manuscript, including the translation into English. Although her book became an international best seller, it produced many unpleasant and persistent "boomerang" effects for her.
   Svetlana's second book, "Only One Year", was written within 2 years after her arrival in America; and this time she made very sure that she kept possession of the copyright, and she also approved of the translator.
   The third book, "The Faraway Music", was written about 14 years later, in 1983, in Cambridge, England; where Svetlana had gone to live and to put her American daughter into a private school. Somewhat surprisingly, Svetlana wrote this book herself first in English.
   It seems that soon after Svetlana wrote this third book, she and her daughter actually went back to the Soviet Union, where they restored Soviet citizenship to her, However, things did not work out for her, and her daughter, there either, and she was allowed to leave again after staying less than 2 years. She never says a word about this long trip.
   In 1987 Svetlana herself translated her third, and apparently her last book, "The Faraway Music", into Russian.

Quotations from "Only One Year":

"...although I lived "at the top of the pyramid," < > my whole life, like that of the entire nation, became divided into two periods: before 1953 and after."
" ...in my early years, Communism was an unshakable stronghold. Unshakable remained my father's authority and the belief that he was right in everything without exception."
"Sometimes my father would suddenly say to me, "Why do you associate with children whose parents have been arrested?"
"In September 1957 I changed my name from "Stalina" to "Alliluyeva" - under Soviet law children could bear either their father's or their mother's name."
 "My first impression of America was of the magnificent Long Island highways. < > The second thing I noticed < > was the number of women driving cars. < > it was the variety of feminine types at the wheel that struck me: pretty young girls, < > many Negroes, young and old; women in furs and extraordinary big hats  ..."
Other sources say that Joseph Stalin was always reading, up to 400 pages a day. Although Svetlana relates an incident where Joseph Stalin is showing somebody his library and he says something like that although he is 70 years old; he is still learning.
""My father made up for his poor education only in the field of technical knowledge."
"He had a certain acquaintance with languages, dating back to his seminary days when he had studied Latin and Greek. He could read Georgian < > He knew Russian well in its simpler, conversational form < > With the help of a dictionary he could make out a simple German text."

   Svetlana very distinctly complained about the translation of her first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", that was translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. However, a very amatuer comparison of the English and Russian editions of this book reveals that, although this English translation is not a very literal translation that some people prefer, it always seems that the translator was trying to say the same thing in American English that the original text says in Russian. Perhaps the translator was in a hurry to "get the job done", for some reason.
   Svetlana also repeatedly makes it very clear that she has a very low opinion of all public schools; no matter that they are in America or the Soviet Union or anywhere else.That was why she moved to England. She seemed to think that Switzerland, where her daughter could not be accepted, and then England had the best private schools.
   However, wouldn't many people say that no country, including America, can really be better than its public schools? 

Experimental Blog # 224

Quotations from and comments on "Political Tribes" - Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua

"Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. < > Almost no one is a hermit. Even monks and friars belong to orders. But the tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is also an instinct to exclude. < > once people belong to a group, their identities can become oddly bound with it. < > They will sacrifice, and even kill and die, for their groups."
"In many parts of the world < > the group identities that matter most < > are not national, but ethnic, regional, religious, sectarian, or clan based."

"A striking fact about terrorists is that, unlike serial killers, they are not generally psychopaths. Most serial murderers, experts agree, exhibit traits consistent with diagnosable psychopathic personality disorders. By contrast, psychologists studying terrorism have struggled in vain for years to identify deviant or abnormal personality traits typical of terrorists."
"Indeed, there is now consensus among researchers that "terrorists are essentially normal individuals.""
"Very few people, no matter how angry, impoverished, or degraded, actually engage in terrorist activity. For most of us, it is incomprehensible that seemingly normal, likeable young men and women, often from loving families, could blow themselves up or participate gleefully in gruesome beheadings."

There are very informative and thought provoking chapters{close to one half of this book} specifically devoted to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Terror Tribes, and Venezuela.

The author's American chapters are entitled: "American Exceptionalism and the Sources of U.S. Group Blindness Abroad", "Inequality and the Tribal Chasm in America", and "Democracy and Political Tribalism in America". However, not all of this writing is entirely so informative or thought provoking. For instance, she writes a lot about the much talked about subjects of "race and racism", but not quite so much about the real significance of ancestry and related subjects.

None the less, Amy Chua has very interesting and thought provoking opinions and she expresses them very articulately.

Experimental Blog # 223

Comments and notes on "Istanbul" - A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes

This book contains over 600 pages of text and maps. In addition to this there are 29 pages of timeline, 66 pages of notes, 58 pages of bibliography, and 37 pages of index. It is indeed a "colossal undertaking ... a notable achievement."

"Legend has it that{in 657 BC} Byzas from Megara founds Byzantion as a Greek colony on the west side of the Bosphorus."
"Byzantion is renamed Constantinople"{in 330 AD}.
"After the sack of Rome{in 410 AD by Goths led by Alaric} and the collapse of the machine whose constituent parts - the army, tax collectors, loyalty to an idea - had kept the pax Romana operative, the West fractured."
"On 16 July AD 1054 < > Thus began the so-called Great Schism. The impasse would not be resolved until 910 years later in 1964."

A chapter is entitled "The City of Crusades AD 1090 - 1203"; of which there were four.

In 1453 the Ottoman Empire led by Mehmed II conquers Constantinople; which is now also called Kostantiniyye or Islam-bol.

"After the fall of Constantinople in AD 1453 it was Russia which took on the mantle of Orthodoxy."

In AD 1683 occurs the Great Siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed IV; but they are defeated.
"After the Viennese defeat{that is the Ottoman defeat at Vienna} < > The Russians, hearing reports of Ottoman distress, set off from Moscow with a million{!!} horses, 300,000 infantry and 100,000 cavalry." Don't these numbers sound too high to be true?

However, the author's many travels and other descriptions to the places, sites, and museums that she writes about make her book exceptionally interesting and vivid.

Experimental Blog # 222

Quotations from "What the Qur'an Meant - And Why It Matters" by Garry Wills

"... the Qur'an < > is a series of disjunct revelations made to Muhammad, as recorded by his followers on pottery shards or other handy surfaces. These were transferred to paper, then arranged by believers after Muhammad's death, not in chronological order but, < > according to length{longer ones earlier, shorter ones toward the end}."
"The oral traditions about Jesus and Muhammad did not take the forms we know for several decades after their death."

"A Desert Book"
"The Qur'an is haunted by < > the Arabian desert. < > One finds it in the yearning, everywhere, toward water < > Water as God's blessing. Water as miracle. Water creating oases. Water as reward. < > Water as the condition of happiness. Water as heaven."

"The Perpetual Stream of Prophets"
"People who have not read the Qur'an might be surprised at how much of it is devoted to prophets other than Muhammad. Over two dozen men{only men} are called prophets in the book. Each received a revelation from Allah, which he proclaimed by his preaching and his actions. From the time of Adam, these show a record of continual contact with all humankind..."

"... Muslims honor Mary, the mother of Jesus. < > She is the most honored women in the Qur'an - indeed she is the only woman named in the book."

"The Right Path{Shari'ah}"
"The word "shari'ah" occurs only once in the Qur'an, and there it does not mean "law". It is Allah's reassurance to Muhammad that he is traveling on the right "path"{shari'ah}. < > But the Qur'an does not furnish one with minute legal guidance."

"The economic world reflected in the Qur'an is not agrarian or industrial but commercial. Mecca < > dealt with merchant caravans coming and going, which involved the promises of payment < > and investment < > the instructions on Muslim business dealings show a hands-on expertise."
"God is a great accountant."
"The model for the true believers in Allah is the honest merchant."

"Muhammad < > did have thirteen wives{two marriages were unconsummated} and two concubines, and various women slaves. < > Like some Western monarchs, he had no male heirs < > and he had to rely on his own marriages and those of his four daughters to secure a legacy ..."

"Torah, Gospel, and Qur'an are all patriarchal, and therefore misogynist - as were the societies in which they took shape. But misogynism is not all that all of them are. In all three of them there are traces of dignity and worth intended by the Creator when he made women."
"Belief in women's inferiority is a long and disheartening part of each tradition's story."

"Reading the Qur'an is not initially an easy task. < > What is easy is to sense the overall tenor and priorities of the book. A few verses endlessly cited have to do with violence."
"The overall tenor is one of mercy and forgiveness, which are evoked everywhere, almost obsessively."

Experimental Blog # 221

Quotations and notes from "Lost Kingdom" - The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation - From 1470 to the Present, by Serhii Plokhy

"Despite what one reads < > and hears in official pronouncements, Russia < > is a relatively young state. Its history as an independent polity begins < > in the 1470s, when Ivan III, the first ruler of the Grand Duchy of Moscow < > challenged the suzerainty of the Mongol khans."
"By 1480, Ivan had successfully established his sovereignty over the lands of Mongol Rus' < > By 1490, Ivan's chancellery had begun to use the Kyivan descent of Muscovite princes as grounds to extend his claim < > to Kyiv itself."

More chronology:
"The Time of Troubles came to an end in 1613, when the Assembly of the Land elected the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov to the Muscovite throne."
"During Catherine's long reign of almost thirty-five years{1762-1796}, the formation of the imperial Russian nation begun under Peter I and Elizabeth took on new impetus and new characteristics."
"What seemed to be the end of Russia in September 1812 - the surrender of Moscow to the French army - turned out to be the beginning of the end of Napoleon's empire."

"Nicholas's Easter 1915 visit to Galicia was filmed by a Russian crew < > It was a symbolic high point in the long campaign of Russian nationalists to gather the lands of the former Kyivan Rus', construct a big Russian nation, including Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and bring together monarchy, religion, and nation in the service of the state." However:
"In May 1915, barely a month after the tsar's triumphal entrance into Lviv, the Germans < > began their attack on the Russian armies in Galicia < > By the end of September the Russian armies had lost most of Galicia, a good part of Volhynia, all of Poland, western Belarus, and most of the Baltic provinces."

{by} "February 1917 < > The socialists created a soviet{council} that became the real power in the city{Petrograd}, making the tsarist government all but irrelevant."
"The most confusing aspect of the term "Russian Revolution" is that it obscures what actually took place in the multiethnic Russian Empire - a revolution of nations, of which the Russians were only one."

"The road to the formation of the Soviet Union began in April 1922..."  An international conference took place in Genoa, Italy. "It was a major coup for the Bolshevik government, which had now been recognized for the first time as the legitimate successor to what remained of the Russian Empire. Diplomatic recognition would follow, starting with Britain and France in 1924; the United States didn't follow suit until 1933."

"Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953. < > He was mourned not just as the head of government but also as the leader of working people throughout the world."

Experimental Blog # 220

Comments on "Archaeology - The Essential Guide to Our Human Past" by Paul Bahn, the editor, and 13 additional authors.

The editor, Paul Bahn, apparently wrote about 15 pages of this overwhelming 555 page book. But there are 13 other additional authors: 6 men and 7 women. It seems that the 7 women authors account for almost two thirds of the writing in this book. In fact, the 2 leading authors, Jane McIntosh and Georgina Muskett, together, account for almost one third of the writing in this book; that is, maybe over 180 pages. Of course, Paul Bahn, as the editor, did a very great deal of other work, too.

The book jacket states that, "Beginning deep in prehistory, it{the book} takes in all the archaeological sites of the world as it advances to the present day." And, "it takes the reader on a tour through time and around the globe to hundreds of sites of archaeological importance." Besides that, we learn about the most modern archaeological uses of "magnetometers, ground penetrating radars, < > 3D laser scanners, < > DNA analysis" and even satellites and other applied sciences.

Experimental Blog # 219

Quotations and notes from "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" - The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford

"Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting. < > The species Homo sapiens < > emerged a mere 300,000 years ago, as far as we know, in pockets in the east and north of Africa."

"The seven billion of us alive today are, according to all the evidence available to us, the last remaining group of human great apes from a set of at least four that existed 50,000 years ago. < > Earlier people had been loitering around the continent{Europe} for up to 2 million years. < > Homo  erectus < > had great success leaving < > Africa and making it < > as far east as Java, and all over western Europe."

Mathematics and geneticists agree that, "... merely 600{???} years ago. Sometime at the end of the thirteenth century lived a man or woman from whom all Europeans could trace ancestry < > if we could document the total family tree of everyone alive back through 600 years, < > everyone European alive would be able to select a line that would cross everyone else's around the time of Richard II." Richard II lived from 1367 to 1400.??? 600 years ago would be 1417, which is in the 15th century. 1367 would be in the 14th century.

Beyond Europe it seems "that the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive on Earth" today, no matter how remote or isolated they might be, lived somewhere in Asia and not more that 3,600 years ago.

Experimental Blog # 218

Quotations from "The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside" - A Maverick of Electrical Science by Basil Mahon

"Oliver Heaviside, who lived from 1850 to 1925 < > founded much of the subject of electrical engineering as it is taught and practiced today: every textbook and every college course bears his stamp."

"I{Oliver Heaviside wrote} hold the view that it{that is, mathematics}is essentially an experimental science, like any other, and should be taught observationally, descriptively, and experimentally."

" ... someone had to bridge the gap between the world of the scholarly scientist and that of the practical-minded engineer."
"What gave Heaviside the power to bridge the great chasm was his unique approach to mathematics. To him, symbols and equations were not pale abstractions but components in a vivid picture of the physical world."

"The advance of electrical communications in the past hundred years is the greatest leap of knowledge in humankind's history. Radio, television, radar, cell phones, the Internet, satellite navigation: each has been turned from ambitious idea into everyday tool at incredible speed. With astounding skill and ingenuity, scientists and engineers have created hundreds of wonderful new devices and techniques ... < > On the face of it, we have left Heaviside way behind. But in one important sense it was Heaviside who made it all possible. By bridging what had been a great gulf between theory and practice, he brought advanced electrical science within reach of technologists." 

Experimental Blog # 217

Notes and quotations from "My European Family" - The First 54,000 Years by Karin Bojs

    This book is a very up-to-date summary of the applications of the most recent advances in high resolution DNA analysis.  Since the author, Karin Bojs, is not a scientific DNA researcher herself, she seems to be very able to give the views of all the contending scientists.

"Doubtless human beings have been singing and dancing since time immemorial, far longer than since the point when we first left the African continent."

" ...when modern humans in Europe interbred with Neanderthals, their descendants must have died out. Researchers can only see definite traces of interbreeding somewhere in the Middle East about 54,000 years ago, and further east in Asia."

    However, it turns out that since Europeans have not quite 2% Neanderthal DNA; it is equivalent that they have a Neanderthal great-great-great-great grandfather, one of 32!, in their family tree. Apparently, the DNA has persisted at this level for about 54,000 years because it is useful to human life."

"Blue eyes and dark skin are an extremely rare combination today, but many Ice Age people seem to have had such an appearance. Blue eyes, dark hair, and dark skin seem to have been commonplace in much of Europe. < > it looks as if many people among Europe's original population of hunters had black hair and quite dark skin. < > as late as 8,000 - or even 5,000 - years ago, many European hunters still bore the original gene variants from Africa, meaning that they were probably quite dark-skinned."

    Advanced DNA analysis has also been very useful, even revolutionary, in determining the times and places of the domestication of dogs, cats, horses, and other animals; and plants too.
    Most of all in this book, DNA analysis is continuing to provide more detailed information of all kinds on the settlement of Europe: the first neolithic migrants, the first farmers, the Iron Age Indo-European language carriers, and others.