So here’s what I learned.  Whenever anybody now-a-days mentions communism, especially if they are “right wing”, they sort of put it in the same category as socialism.  I guess because communism is such a bad word in this country, they think that by invoking it’s name in the same sentence as socialism that people will think they are the same.  Oh yeah, and that they are both BAD.  Since liberals do enjoy promoting some socialist programs, then the right tries to make them look bad too.  

Communist=Socialist=Liberals=Bad News. 

So the first thing I learned is that communism and socialism are not the same.  At all.  I guess to make that point I’ll have to explain what communism is and what Karl Marx actually thinks about socialism.  Marx wrote that there are two types of people in capitalist society.  There are the bourgeois who own the factories and the land, and there are proletariats who are the workers who do not own land and work for their wages.  An aside here: Communism came into being around the time of the Industrial Revolution.  There wasn’t a real big middle class back then.  So just about everybody fit into one of the two categories.  In fact, Marx said that the middle class that existed (artisans, craftsmen, shopkeepers, etc.) would be pushed down by the bourgeouis and become proletariats.  The bigger that the industries became, the more power they had over the workers, the more money they made compared to the workers.  Got it so far?

Marx believed that a man’s work was what made him….human, basically.  So to put a price on that work was like putting a price on what the man was worth as a person.  Marx thought that this was not cool.  Dude.  He thought that a man should work at whatever he was good at and what he loved.  But since industry was quickly usurping these kinds of trades, men had to go work in the factories to make a living even if they didn’t want to.  The quick and easy way to fix this dilemma was to take EVERYTHING away from EVERYBODY.  That’s right.  See the proletariats wouldn’t care because they didn’t own land and didn’t have much anyway.  The only people that would mind were the bourgeouis.  Good thing there weren’t that many blood sucking leeches so the proletariats could easily rise up and take over.  Get out your pitchforks!!

After the fun and exciting revolution (no Call of Duty back then to quelch the masses need for blood and gore), everyone would be on equal footing.  Here’s where it starts getting a little fuzzy for me.  If anyone with more knowledge would like to explain, I’m all ears because I’m really lost.  Nobody would have religion after the revolution.  Oh, and everybody would live out in the country because cities are for suckers.  I wish I could elaborate.

The problem with this grand plan was that the bourgeouis had a way of taking over the dang thing.  Then they’d turn the proletariats (who, let’s face it, weren’t all that bright) onto their enemies so that THEY could run everything.  Damn bourgeouis always f’ing stuff up!  But you see, they were sneaky.  They do stuff for the proletariats to make them think they weren’t getting a bum deal.  Things like public schools and free health care.  That’s right, they’d become socialists.  But they didn’t do that stuff out of the kindness of their hearts.  They were trying to make the proletariats think they weren’t slaves anymore.  But, according to Marx, they WERE still slaves, and the hand outs were just pulling the wool over their eyes.  So that’s the difference between Communism and Socialism.

Here’s the next thing I learned.  Communism isn’t BAD.  It may not work, but the guys who came up with it (it wasn’t just Marx, BTW, he wrote the manifesto, but there was a whole movement of philosophers who came up with this) really were trying to come up with a way to help people.  But if you went to Wal Mart today and did a poll, I’ll bet you that most people would say that communism is bad.  And then if you asked them to define communism, they wouldn’t be able to.  People’s heads are so filled with propaganda that they don’t even know what they don’t know.  Communists believe that they are free because their work is their own.  Capitalists believe that they are free because they can do what they want with the money they make from their labor.  It’s just a difference of opinion.  No reason to get angry.

Ok.  Thank goodness I’m done with that.  My final word?  Enlightening, but exhausting.  That’s three words.

Next up on the agenda is Thomas Fleming’s The Perils of Peace: America’s Struggle for Survival After Yorktown.  I don’t know too much about this part of American History, so it should be interesting. 

Just for my own amusement, I reread The Good Earth last week.  Just for giggles I looked up the book in Wikipedia because I love it.  I didn’t realize it’s the first book in a trilogy!  How exciting is that??  So I’ll be checking those out on my next library visit.

Until next time…

All I kept thinking about is how the exact same thing is happening now, only with the Muslims.  Didn’t I read that after 9/11 Muslim men and women were picked up for the same reason that the Japanese were after Pearl Harbor?   I try to imagine how it would feel if people of French descent (like me) were imprisoned.  How would I feel?  I seriously can not even begin to imagine it.  Would I be more angry at the government for putting my me and my family away, or would I be angry at the rest of you jerks for letting them?

So while I was reading that one, I started and finished Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.  This one was on my list so I feel really good about it.  I couldn’t find it at the library forever, and a week or so ago I looked again, and there it was!   So exciting.  This book is about a man in an African tribe.  He’s basically your average guy except that he’s super respected as a wrestler and everybody looks up to him.  He does some bad stuff, sure, but he’s pretty normal as far as the other fellows are concerned.  Then the big bad white man moves into his village.  Uh oh.  That’s never good.  I won’t spoil the ending for you.  Let’s just say it doesn’t end well for the brown people.  What else is new?

I’m now in the middle of The Communist Manifesto.  If you’ve read my My Space blog at all, you know how I feel about the philosophy books.  Plato’s Republic, is still the hardest book I’ve ever finished.  I guess I’m just dumb.  My copy of “the manifesto” starts out with a 59 page essay by some guy named John E. Toews.  He’s a professor.  If he teaches anything like how he writes, I don’t see how the students learn anything.  I have to admit, I didn’t even really try to understand some of it.  I just finished that and am a few pages into Marx’s actual writings.  I’ll update you on whether or not I understand it. 

Do I have to understand the book for me to be able to mark it off the list?  I don’t think so.  Maybe some of it will stick in my brain through osmosis.  Anyway it sounds cool.  “I just read The Communist Manifesto, and Marx has this to say about blah blah blah”. 

Shut up.  It DOES TOO sound cool. 

 Maybe I’m depressed.  I need to read some happier books.  If they have the new Slash autobiography at the library next week, I’ll pick it up.  Until then we have Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience.  It’s a collection of journal entries, letters, short stories, poetry, etc. written by some of the people shipped off to internment camps during World War II. 

So this book selection isn’t entirely my fault.  I know it’s a big downer.  But Dave is the one that chose the terrorist book, and it was just sitting there, so I HAD to read it.  This book was my nonfiction choice for the week.  My fiction book was The Awakening by Kate Chopin.  That one was pretty depressing too.  I don’t know what to say.  Depressing equals entertaining, I guess.  I also enjoy this website.

What’s wrong with me?

Imagine you wake up one morning and thousands of your countrymen are dead.  You’ve been attacked.  Women, children.  All dead in the streets.  It’s senseless.  You decide right then and there to join the fight against this evil.  So you sign up.  Maybe you don’t tell your parents.  You don’t want them to talk you out of it.  You’re shipped off, far from your home to train.  The leaders tell you that no one on the other side is innocent.  They all deserve death for supporting such a monstrous regime.  Women, children.  Collateral damage.  You agree because they tell you.  You work hard.  One day you’re called up to fight.  You’re nervous and excited.  You want to make them proud.  You don’t want to hurt, or maim, or kill.  But you will.  Because that’s what it will take for them to stop.  For the killing to stop.  So you attack.  Thousands are killed.  None are innocent, right?  Collateral damage.

Thousands are killed.

And a man on the other side just woke up.

Violence begets violence begets violence.

None are innocent.

Not even us. 

“All this is part of the post 9/11 nightmare – a nightmare which owes as much to the War on Terror as it does to the events that supposedly provoked it.  None of this was inevitable.  The decision to respond to the September 11 attacks through a global “war” was a political and strategic choice.  There were, and are, other means through which the world might have responded to the attacks, which did not require torture, clandestine prison camps, curtailments on civil liberties, the creation of a permanent state of emergency and an apparently limitless series of fraudulent and dishonest wars.  Though the GWOT [Global War on Terror] has been portrayed as a response to an unprecedented threat, its rhetoric, its assumptions and many of its methods have been borrowed from previous counter-terrorist crusades.  Once again, the anti-terrorist anathema has presented an image of a civilised and benevolent world threatened by a uniquely evil enemy, whose bloodthirsty deeds are beyond comprehension.  Once again, the official depiction of ‘terrorism’ has become a propaganda smokescreen, which denies any responsibility for the violence it depicts in favour of an absurd fantasy of a benign Western world threatened by monsters who hate its essential goodness.”

 The book I am currently reading is called The Infernal Machine: A history of terrorism from the assassination of Tsar Alexander II to Al-Qaeda by Matthew Carr.  You can read the reviews on Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/Infernal-Machine-History-Terrorism/dp/1595581790

I’m a little more than half way through this book, but I have to say that if you are planning on voting in the presidential elections of 2008, I urge you to read this book.  Reading the newspaper and watching the news is not enough. 

Once I’m done, I’ll be able to give a more thorough review, but there are so many things running through my brain in regards to this issue that I’ll just start by telling you my gut feelings.  The book starts out discussing the origins of modern terrorism which the author dates back to the invention of dynamite.  The first “terrorists” as we know them now were, according to Carr, the Russians who were trying to overthrow the Czar in the late 1800′s.  He then moves through history telling the story of the anarchists in the early 1900′s.  (50 points to anyone who can name the U.S. President assassinated in a terrorist attack by an anarchist.  No googling, jerks.)  The book touches on just about every terrorist group from the IRA to the South American guerillas. 

I must warn you, this book is not for the faint of heart.  But it’s not for the reasons you think.  While there are graphic stories of bloodshed, what scared me the most was that it seems like the politicians and leaders of this world haven’t learned a damn thing!  In every case, the terrorists were labeled “monsters”, “cowardly”, and “inhuman”.  In every case their only goal was to destroy “freedom” and “democracy”.  And in every case, the number of people killed in counter-terror attacks were more, sometimes THOUSANDS more than the original attack.  It’s truly baffling.

The fact that we are going through this AGAIN with Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and yet are not using the history so readily available to find out what works and what clearly doesn’t is unbelievable.  The fact that the same rhetoric that was used in the early 1900′s is still being used today and still works in persuading people is a testament to our ignorance. 

The one dangerous thing about this book is that it leads to reading other books.  For me, that’s awful.  I don’t need MORE stuff to read ya’ll!  I’ve just finished the chapter about the Reagan era Iran-Contra scandal, and I must know more.  I would love to pick the brains of the political pundits on Fox News about it.  I need to know how they DARE have Oliver North on that channel with his own show.  I know it’s old news, but the guys in charge then are still in Washington now!  Cheney, Rumsfeld…. those guys were all part of it.

I have so much to say about this book.  I’ll have to put it off and get my ideas clear.  One of them is the god awful way our government has abused our military personnel.  It’s really sickening.  Anyway, I’ll get to all that and hopefully my next entry won’t be so general and all over the place.