Experimental Blog # 200

Comments on "Through the Embers of Chaos - Balkan Journeys" and "The Island That Dared - Journeys in Cuba" by Dervla Murphy

"Through the Embers of Chaos - Balkan Journeys"

The first few pages of this book describe a trip the author took to Croatia in 1991. At that time Yugoslavia had not yet disintegrated.
Part II of the book is about 50 pages, and it describes the author's visit to Serbia in 1999, about 8 years later.
Part III is about 280 pages, and it describes the author's journeys around Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo in 2000. During this time Dervla Murphy was 68 years old, and she traveled by bicycle! She often pedaled over 50 miles in one day, and went up and down who knows how many thousands of feet; and, it seems, on trails and roads that no one else would ride on.

Dervla Murphy's physical and mental stamina are extraordinary, and she seems completely fearless. She was attacked and thrown to the ground twice, but she continued to take risks that, probably, no one else would take. She did not carry a weapon, a gun, although she could pretend that she had one.


"The Island That Dared - Journeys in Cuba"

For about the first 100 pages of this book, in 2005, the 73 to 74 year old Dervla Murphy is traveling in Cuba with her daughter and her three granddaughters, aged 6, 8, and 10. She is not averse to requiring unusual physical and mental effort from them, but they don't seem to mind; and they apparently accept these things as "normal".

For the rest of this book, in 2006 and 2007, Dervla Murphy is "trekking" by herself, not riding a bicycle as she did on so many other of her journeys.

In the "Island That Dared" Dervla Murphy reveals her very "left-wing" sympathies probably more than in most of her previous travel books. However, people do not have to share the author's politics to be captivated by this book. She is very highly informative about many matters, including: Fidel Castro and Che' Guevera. Ultimately, however, Dervla Murphy is not always very clear, about Cuban "participatory democracy", for instance; or completely persuasive in her arguments.

Experimental Blog # 199

Comments on "Full Tilt - Ireland to India With a Bicycle" and "In Ethiopia With a Mule" by Dervla Murphy

These 2 books are the first and fourth books written by Dervla Murphy. They were published in 1965 and 1968 and are about trips that she took in 1963 and 1966-67 when she was 31 and 35 years of age.

The continuous abundance of so much detail and so many superlatives that the author uses in both books to describe her surroundings and the events of her travels, day after day; and the complete absence of photographs, even though the author took pictures with her camera, probably cause some readers to assume that her writing should not be considered to be 100% reliable. However, her writing certainly is captivating and informative. Both of these books receive very high reviews, even 40 years after they were written.

Dervla Murphy obviously has amazing strength and endurance for physical and mental pain and exhaustion, and challenges and dangers of all kinds. She also has remarkable ability to communicate and establish relationships with all kinds of people who are completely alien to her, even when they do not understand each others' languages. She also knows how to manage all kinds of animals, both friendly and domestic, as well as, dangerous and wild.

Experimental Blog # 198

Quotations and comments on "Silverland - A Winter Journey beyond the Urals" by Dervla Murphy

Here is one quotation from a very interesting summary, of about 4 pages, of the history of Belarus:
"A year later{1922} eastern Belarus became a Soviet Socialist Republic < > During the 1930s collectivized farms, artificial famines, heavy industries and Stalinist purges arrived; no one knows how many mass slaughterings took place. In the Kurapaty Forest, near Minsk, the bodies of more than 100,000 men and women were exhumed in 1988."

Joseph Stalin is mentioned on at least 17 pages in this book; and Vladimir Putin is written about on at least 27 pages.
The author clearly does not like the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and she mentions it on at least 10 pages.

"What Soviet citizens did enjoy was freedom from worry about jobs, housing. heating, education, health care, pensions. Although the implacable pursuit and punishment of dissidents continued after 1956, the mass of the population could then lead a notably less stressful life than their forefathers.."

"Thus the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury begat an unrestrained oligarchy eager to stamp on those seedlings of democracy - visible in corners of the Kremlin - which the West claimed to be nurturing."
Even more convincing, the author quotes the World Bank Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz, "For the majority of those living in the former Soviet Union, economic life under capitalism has been even worse than the old Communists had said it would be ...By siding so firmly so long with those at the helm when huge inequality was created through the corrupt privatization process, the USA, IMF and the international community have indelibly associated themselves with policies that, at best, promoted the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the average Russian.""

"In 2005 a reviewer < > diagnosed me as 'a typical old Irish Leftie [who] cannot disguise her sneaking regard for the Soviet Union'. Not quite a bull's-eye but Mr Thompson didn't quite miss the target."

"Stalin therefore expended human lives, instead of capital, on his gigantic development projects. At its zenith the gulag system, begun in 1930, controlled twenty-one million prisoners and was administered by 800,000 officials. < > During the Great Terror{1937-38} more than a million were executed and seven or eight million sent to camps. < > In contrast, between 1876 and 1904 the czar's regime imposed the death penalty on 486 criminals and terrorists, an annual average of seventeen."

Dervla Murphy is ideological about the world in the extreme, but she has virtually amazing physical and mental strength. She has traveled, very often by bicycle, all over the world; and she made this journey at about 71 years of age! And, besides that, during the winter!

 It seems a little bit surprising, however, that in spite of her apparently life-long interest in virtually everything left-wing, including the Soviet Union, that she has never bothered to study Russian. However, because of her age, she was born in 1931, she might be entitled to an allowance.

Experimental Blog # 197

Quotations from "Leaving Orbit" - Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight by  Margaret Lazarus Dean

"Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story."

"Hugely wasteful; hugely grand. Adjust the focus of your eyes and the same project goes from being the greatest accomplishment of humankind to a pointless show of misspent wealth."
"In reality, the most shuttle launches NASA ever accomplished in a single calendar year was nine, in 1985 - far short of the magic number of twenty-five."
"In all, twenty-four missions launched and landed successfully between April 1981 and January 1986."

"The space shuttle project never did get us any closer to Mars, but it deployed more than half the cargo ever carried to space and sent three hundred fifty-five people into orbit."
"The orbiting laboratory has been occupied non-stop since November 2, 2000 ..."

"Eleven crewed missions, including six successful trips to the lunar surface"
"December 1968: First trip to lunar orbit on Apollo 8"
"December 1972: Final moon landing Apollo 17"

"Ongoing Access to Low-Earth Orbit":
"April 1981: First test flight of space shuttle Columbia"
"July 2011: Final flight of the space shuttle program{Atlantis}

Experimental Blog # 196

Quotations and comments from "The Great Surge" - The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

"In 1993 almost 2 billion people around the world lived in extreme poverty < > Then, for the first time in history, the number began to fall < > in just eighteen years the number was cut by almost half: by 2011, it was down to just over 1 billion < > The proportion of the population of developing countries < > in extreme poverty {was} 42 percent in 1993 to < > 17 percent in 2011."
"In 1983 seventeen developing countries were democracies; by 2013, the number had more than tripled to fifty-six ..."

"The unprecedented progress in the world's poorest countries is ultimately good for the richest countries, and for the whole world."
" ... development helps spread and deepen shared values of openness, prosperity, and freedom."

"China accounts for about 60 percent of the decline in extreme poverty between 1993 and 2011, or about 560 million of the < > 955 million people. What about the other 395 million?" "In India, the number of extreme poor peaked in 2002 at 476 million; nine years later{!}, it had fallen < > to 300 million." The author lists about 33 other countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe that make up the rest of the decline in extreme world poverty.

"...the end of the Cold War meant the fall of dozens of dictators - on both the right and the left < > and new economic opportunities in dozens of developing countries around the world."
"Communism, totalitarianism, and strong forms of state control lost credibility."

The author emphasizes how important government and foreign aid, properly given, in education, infrastructure, and health care are vital to the economic development of the whole country.

Experimental Blog # 195

Quotations and comments from "1999 -  Victory without War" by Richard Nixon

"In its two-hundred-year history the United States has lost a total of 650,000 lives in war. Therefore, in the minds of Americans, no rational leader could contemplate starting a war that would kill tens of millions of people."
But the leaders of the Soviet Union, which has lost over 100 million lives in civil war, two world wars, purges, and famines in this century, have a different perspective. < > While the Soviet Union has been a victim in war, its government has made victims of millions of its own people. < > they do know it can be survived."

"Our loss in Vietnam, followed by the spread of Soviet power throughout Indochina, was a devastating strategic blow to China, which suffered twenty thousand casualties in a 1979 war with Soviet-backed Vietnam that would not have occurred if South Vietnam had not been defeated by the communist North."

" .. in Hangzhou in 1972 < > we planted a three-foot-high sequoia that I had brought with me < > In October 1987 < > the tree {was} ninety feet tall. Even more significant, they said that forty thousand saplings from the tree were thriving in seven Chinese provinces."

Chapter three, "How to Deter Moscow", reveals Richard Nixon's astonishing grasp of the details of nuclear deterrence in regard to the Soviet Union. It also calls to mind Richard Nixon's reputation as a skilled poker player as a young man, and why this skill provided a significant amount of money for him at times.
Richard Nixon finished this book on January 9, 1988, his 75th birthday. By this time he had been to the Soviet Union 6 times, 3 times as a private citizen. In the next 6 years he would visit 4 more times.

"1999" refers to the end of the twentieth century. "Victory without War" might be a deliberately ambiguous statement that could apply to either the Soviet Union or to America.
"For the balance of this century and the beginning of the next, the dominant players on the world stage will be the United States and the Soviet Union." Richard Nixon repeatedly expresses this assumption and that Mikhail Gorbachev will be the Soviet leader for years into the twenty-first century.
 However, only two years after Richard Nixon had finished this book, the Berlin Wall had come down and all the countries of Eastern Europe were throwing off their communist governments. In the next 2 years, by 1992, the Soviet Union itself would be falling apart and collapsing with surprisingly little violence. It is quite possible to believe that Richard Nixon's thought provoking, and unexpected, series of 4 or 5 books had something to do with this historical outcome.

It might be that the concept of geopolitical history and international relationships, that was being constantly advanced by Henry Kissinger and his likely student, Richard Nixon, was a challenge and a rebuttal to the more old-fashioned ideas of Marxist-Leninist historical determinism. Neither Henry Kissinger nor Richard Nixon seems to have explained geopolitical history very clearly; but, perhaps geo refers to particular places on earth and political refers to the people who live in those places and everything about them. This way of looking at the world is far more complicated than Marxist-Leninist determinism. And Richard Nixon excelled at details.

"The search for meaning in life has gone on since the beginning of civilization. It will never end, because the final answer will always elude us. < > Of this we can be sure: Meaning cannot be found in sheer materialism, whether communist or capitalist. < > It is because they addressed spiritual values and fulfillment that the world's great religions - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism - have inspired people for centuries." This is the first of 3 times that Richard Nixon  refers to the world's great religions in his books, but for some reason does not include Hinduism.

Experimental Blog # 194

Brief comments on 6 more of Richard Nixon's books:

About four years after Richard Nixon resigned from the American presidency in August of 1974 he completed his rather massive memoir, "RN - The Memoirs of Richard Nixon". His book is well over 1000 pages. Although it is difficult to imagine that very many people today would carefully read the entire book, it seems to be a very good source book for many conversations and other events of Richard Nixon's presidency. However, there is no mention of Elvis Presley. It is well known, and it can be easily verified, that Elvis Presley visited President Nixon at the White House and brought him a present of a 45 caliber colt revolver!

About two years after his memoir was completed, Richard Nixon, in 1980, published his third book entitled "The Real War". He later wrote that he wrote this book because he was afraid that America was losing the Cold War.

Richard Nixon's fourth book came out in 1982 and is entitled "Leaders - Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern World". In the third paragraph of this book Richard Nixon writes. "For the last thirty-five years I have had the exceptional opportunity, during an extraordinary period of history, to study the world's leaders firsthand. Of the major leaders of the post-World War II period, I knew all except Stalin.". Some of Richard Nixon's best writing is in this book as he describes his encounters, conversations, and sometimes friendships with at least 23 world leaders.

Towards the end of this book Richard Nixon writes, " < > I believe that before the end of the century we will probably elect a woman to the vice presidency and possibly to the presidency." A prediction that obviously did not come true. Otherwise, the book ends somewhat tediously.

All of Richard Nixon's books, except #s 5 and 6, have extensive indexes. "Real Peace" is only 107 pages, and in this book Richard Nixon repeatedly emphasizes the impossibility of war between the "superpowers", that is, America and the Soviet Union. The book came out in 1984.

"No More Vietnams" is perhaps Richard Nixon's most controversial book; maybe sometimes the worst and sometimes the best. He writes, "The Vietnam War began when World War II ended." "France had ruled all of Indochina - Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam - for over half a century." Some people might say that the Vietnam War began in 1887, when France declared Indochina to be a part of the French empire.

"In January 1969, the United States had 542,000 troops in Vietnam. By July 1970, as our operations in Cambodia came to an end, our troop level was down to 404,000. < > By July 1972, we would have only 45,600 troops stationed in South Vietnam."
"On April 30, 1975, with Soviet-built tanks rolling through the streets of Saigon, South Vietnam surrendered. Communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas had conquered Cambodia thirteen days before. Hanoi-backed Pathet Lao forces took over Laos a few days later. All the dominoes in Indochina had fallen."

Richard Nixon's ninth book, "Seize the Moment - America's Challenge in a One-Superpower World", was published in 1992. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s Richard Nixon was, in spite of his age, going to Russia every year. As the communists lost control, Russia almost seemed to have become Richard Nixon's favorite country, after America, of course.