10 Essential Books for Understanding How the World Works

[82_28]

Gotta run, but I gotta say White Noise by Don DeLillo really affected me way back when.

So White Noise for now, from me.

[Seamus OBlimey]

[christs4sale]

The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry

It discusses the connections of the Son of Sam killings, the murder of Arlis Perry and the Manson Family. It introduces the possibility that they could all have been a complex form of strategy of tension.

[Seamus OBlimey]

[Seamus OBlimey]

[wordspeak2]

Surprised no one's mentioned "Killing Hope" by William Blum, a classic summary of CIA operations country by country all around the world since its inception.

I would also add "Blackshirts and Reds" by Michael Parenti, which illuminates the extremely untold realities of capitalism and fascism in the twentieth century, from an openly pro-socialist-revolution standpoint. Or Parenti's "Democracy for the Few," which is a very basic 101 primer on class politics in America.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Great call. Killing Hope trumps pretty much everything.

[julie doceanie]

Diaries of Victor Klemperer, in three volumes, detailing life in Germany from the '20s thru the '50s, from the point of view of one of the victims of a society experiencing a psychotic break with reality.

His description of his experience being firebombed in Dresden in 1945 was one of the most harrowing things I have ever read.

[JackRiddler]

Surprised no one's mentioned "Killing Hope" by William Blum, a classic summary of CIA operations country by country all around the world since its inception.

I did upthread, twice already.

I would also add "Blackshirts and Reds" by Michael Parenti, which illuminates the extremely untold realities of capitalism and fascism in the twentieth century, from an openly pro-socialist-revolution standpoint. Or Parenti's "Democracy for the Few," which is a very basic 101 primer on class politics in America.

Parenti: Yes!

.

[wordspeak2]

My bad on repeating the William Blum.

I'm glad you like Parenti, JR. I was privileged to meet him in person once, when I brought him out for a speaking engagement. I often find myself comparing Parenti to Chomsky. It's like, now here's what a genuine lefty writer who doesn't specialize in "conspiracy" topics but is not a disinfo agent would look like- Michael Parenti. The only totally ridiculous thing is that there aren't fifty Michael Parenti's out there. There's Christian Parenti, who's a decent writer, too. But on issues of socialism 101- which just about *everybody* needs schooling in- turn to Michael Parenti. "Blackshirts and Reds" gives a here-in-reality history of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Bloc that you'll get in few other places.
Parenti has also written a good synopsis of why U.S. elites hated JFK and wanted him dead (long before the awesome James Douglass book came out) and a general debunking of the horseshit false dialectic of "instititutionalism versus conspiracy theory" propped up by Chomsky, Berlet, Michael Albert, etc.

[JackRiddler]

My bad on repeating the William Blum.

Oh come on, I'm just playing. That's a recommendation to repeat many times.

I'm glad you like Parenti, JR. I was privileged to meet him in person once, when I brought him out for a speaking engagement. I often find myself comparing Parenti to Chomsky. It's like, now here's what a genuine lefty writer who doesn't specialize in "conspiracy" topics but is not a disinfo agent would look like- Michael Parenti. The only totally ridiculous thing is that there aren't fifty Michael Parenti's out there. There's Christian Parenti, who's a decent writer, too. But on issues of socialism 101- which just about *everybody* needs schooling in- turn to Michael Parenti. "Blackshirts and Reds" gives a here-in-reality history of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Bloc that you'll get in few other places.
Parenti has also written a good synopsis of why U.S. elites hated JFK and wanted him dead (long before the awesome James Douglass book came out) and a general debunking of the horseshit false dialectic of "instititutionalism versus conspiracy theory" propped up by Chomsky, Berlet, Michael Albert, etc.

Okay, finally, I've had it with Chomsky. It's the irrational JFK hatred.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/06/ ... ternative/

SNIP

These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. The first 9/11 [i.e., the Pinochet coup of 1973] was just one act in a drama which began in 1962, when John F. Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” — an anachronistic holdover from World War II — to “internal security,” a concept with a chilling interpretation in U.S.-dominated Latin American circles.

SNIP

What the fuck? Starting with the Spanish-American War (if not the Monroe Doctrine!) there was only one break in the continuous US imperialist effort to exploit, dominate and determine the governments of all other nations in the Western hemisphere, and that came under FDR. Chomsky has written often enough about the 1954 Guatemala coup, one of many such covert actions in Latin America during the tenure of Dulles (and, by proxy, United Fruit) at the CIA. That alone led to the murders of about 100,000 people by the time Kennedy took office. Of course Chomsky also knows that CIA and the Eisenhower administration prepared the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. They used mercenaries trained in Guatemala and Nicaragua and foisted the plan on the incoming Kennedy administration in 1961. Kennedy refused to fulfill the plan's intent, which was to involve US forces directly in Cuba.

Not that Kennedy's policies until his death were otherwise out-of-sync with the imperialist tradition, on which Chomsky has written so much. JFK's "Alliance for Progress" was an important rhetorical relaunch and tweaking of the same old approach to Latin America. I'm not among those who is convinced that Kennedy had to be overthrown because he was going to break with the imperialist past, end the Cold War, or withdraw from Vietnam. The evidence for a coming peace shift under the committed cold-warrior JFK is mixed at best, although that conclusion is supported by the key internal documents, in the case of Vietnam. However, I'm also of the opinion that all that mattered to the 1963 coup plotters was what they thought about JFK, not what JFK would have really done, and certainly not what Chomsky or I would have thought of JFK. This is a point that I've heard Parenti draw out in marvelous fashion.

Chomsky's passage is the equivalent of writing that the "drama" of the US in Afghanistan began with Obama's escalations of 2009-10, or that Obama's changing of labels and policies for the continued Bushian "War on Terror" was how it actually started. And it comes as a non-sequitur to an otherwise very well-argued article. It's hard not to attribute the self-derailing of his essay to a personal hatred or vendetta, or else a burning need to always cover for his stubborn, counterfactual denial of the November 1963 coup d'etat.

a general debunking of the horseshit false dialectic of "instititutionalism versus conspiracy theory" propped up by Chomsky, Berlet, Michael Albert, etc.

The crazy thing is, this supposed battle of the large-scale paradigms was basically invented overnight (by Albert, I think), so that they could selectively deny some of the things that institutionally-based actors do, while believing in others. Usually half of any Chomsky text on politics is itself susceptible to the "conspiracy theory" slur.

.

[Jeff]

I was in a big box bookstore earlier today, lamenting how limited and stupid the selection has become in the 15 or so years it's been open, when I lit upon The Coming Insurrection by "The Invisible Committee." What bubble have I been in that I missed this?

Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something over there.... It takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

Authorless, not even priced. I felt like Winston Smith discovering the writings of Goldstein. Meaning, the prose is so bracing, and the argument so necessary and true, I needed to shoo away the suspicion that the book is a tool of entrapment. But I can't remember the last time it took such an effort to not burst into tears while reading something on the subway:

Contrary to what has been repeated to us since childhood, intelligence doesn't mean knowing how to adapt - or if that is a kind of intelligence, it's the intelligence of slaves. Our inadaptability, our fatigue, are only problems from the standpoint of what aims to subjugate us. They indicate rather a starting point, a meeting point, for new complicities. They reveal a landscape more damaged, but infinitely more sharable than all the fantasy lands this society maintains for its purposes.

We are not depressed; we're on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, "depression" is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation. From then on medication and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation.

[julie doceanie]

Glenn seems to want us to believe that his hair is on fire about the premises and exhortations of TCI, but he just comes off as a huckster to me. He gave the book a pretty good plug, even holding it up to the camera so we know what it looks like. He's probably on the invisible committee and has a piece of the profits.

[norton ash]

The Story of Ferdinand
The Selfish Giant
The Happy Prince
The Sermon on the Mount

Everything I needed to know I saw betrayed and discarded by Grade 2.

[crikkett]

The Story of Ferdinand
The Selfish Giant
The Happy Prince
The Sermon on the Mount

Everything I needed to know I saw betrayed and discarded by Grade 2.

Well if you're going there, then by age 5 I had memorized "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein.