Michael Strevens. The knowledge machine: how irrationality created modern science.

 

Michael Strevens is one of dying out clan of real philosophers--currently, American humanities are being restructured according to the British model--namely, upper-class banter-boxes and media stars (N. Ferguson, S. Pinker, P. Frankopan, Y. N. Harari; though the last has some real merits) occupy academic chairs and inflate their underdeveloped concepts to the point of orthodoxy. His book contains two self-contradicting ideas: first, that scientists do not think as rationally as their disciplines would presume (correct), and, second, that modern science emerged only "when thinkers' intellectual horizons were closed off by unreasonable constraints on argument was modern science being born". Strevens considers these "unreasonable constraints" as conforming only to the experiment, while for the pre-modern, pre-scientific outlook, the authority of the Scripture, prevailing opinions and aesthetic beauty was equally valid criteria of knowledge. In the latter treatment, he is correct, but he blurs distinctions between personal opinions and drives of the modern scientists--though he mentions them precisely, such as the "eight-fold way" of M. Gell-Mann--and the science paradigm, which, indeed is a sanitized version of the former. With modern juggernaut of "deep learning", the hiatus between textbook paradigm and actual research is bound to widen. 

Daniel Gordis. We Stand Divided.

 Daniel Gordis' book consists of two unequal parts. One, in which he analyzes differences between American and Israeli Jewry is lucidly descriptive. The other, in which he expresses his laments about the relationship between American Jews and Israel is darkly prescriptive. 

The first part of the book explains that for the American Jews the chief goal was to stay on the equal footing with the dominant WASP elite. Once this goal has been achieved they began their own search of identity. 

For the Israeli Jews, the chief goal was to maintain their own nation-state and assure its security. Now, Israel is as secure and prosperous as it never had been.

The conclusion, which is drawn by Gordis in the second part of the book is paradoxical. In his view, the American Jews must now adopt the worship of the State of Israel as their highest aspiration in life. He blames lack of enthusiasm of the American Jewry in that regard on lack of acquaintance with Jewish values, etc. For instance, he mentions that the majority of Birthright students do not have elementary knowledge of the Torah, Talmud, the history of Palestine or Israeli politics. He supposes that more indoctrination will make American youngsters more devout... with respect to the ideology of the Netanyahu government. But it could be that the youth most acquainted with Jewish values and Israeli politics will assimilate Gordis' views less not more. 

In other words, Gordis insist that the worship of Israeli State must replace the Jewish G-d as the central part and parcel of the Jewish consciousness all over the world. This exercise of state idolatry, unachieved even by Mussolini regime could only be found in the thought of Evola, early theorist of fascism. For comparison, in the German Nazi pantheon "race" took precedence to the state and Soviet ideology differently emphasized Marxist version of world history, called by them "an inevitable historical process", "Communism" or the "Party" as the ultimate object of worship or the source of epiphany. 

Yet, Gordis, a contributor of "Bloomberg" and other media sources, is smarter and more profound than most Netanyahu apologists. 

Robert Gates. Exercise of power.

 

Previously, I identified neoconservatism as a contagious disorder of mind, similar to animal rabies. Even smart and well-rounded people after prolonged contact with neocons start repeating its ideological dogma in a continuous stream as a drunk spews profanities on everyone and no one in particular. 

Robert Gates may be one of the smartest neocons but neocon he became after he was bitten by some. He quotes as influences of his book "Exercise of Power" Hadley, Haas, Edelstein and Flournoy and no one else--all adepts of the great sect of neoconservatism. There is another frequently quoted source--Condolezza Rice--who cannot be called "neocon", or anything. Her only conviction in life was convincingly lying to superiors and castigating critics of her pompous ignorance as racists. 

The main premise of his book is that 535 mostly provincial lawyers, few knowing any foreign languages or traveled abroad with purpose other than sex tourism or murdering natives in the US colonial wars, can and able to determine the fate of 7.5 billion people on the Planet Earth. If only the "exercise of power" is correctly managed. It never occurs to Gates' mind that may be, the world domination may be neither possible, nor even desirable goal of the US foreign policy.

Concerning his prescription towards this goal, they are carefully worded and mostly sane--stop relying exclusively on the armed coercion, antagonizing the allies for trifle goals and such. But his belief in achievability of the world as an American Imperium is unswerving. 

Gates confidently proclaims that the United States is still the world's largest economy and the strongest military power. Well, how long ago he had looked at the IMF statistics of the GDP? Probably, Pentagon may still be ahead of all the world in the art of demolition of lots of buildings with civilians in them from the air--the ruins of Raqqa and Mosul testify to that. But the fact that all American military power could not defeat several tens of thousands of rag-tag Taliban militia for twenty years does not bode well for the perception of American military prowess. 

In the chapter on Iran he recycles the usual hogwash of "regime change". Obviously, this is to please "our friend Bibi" and his influential American supporters. Gates' approach is typical of neocon thinking--one size fits all and little thought is given to ethnic/tribal/linguistic problems. Regime change in Iran is more than likely result in even more hardline Shia state and it can split Iran into core Persian lands and leave Iranian Azerbaijan and Iranian Kurdistan to join compatriots abroad. Cleptocratic secular Sunni elite of much less populous Azerbaijan proper might not last either in the face of village Shiism or an aggressive Pan-Turkism. 

To partly justify war in Iraq--which he correctly views as a disaster--he claims that Iraq is a "democracy, kind-of". I still remember times when tribal-based Afghan mujahideen were also called different names--"Jeffersonian democrats" and "de-centralizers"

The chapter on Russia is the weirdest. It consists of two completely disjoint parts discussing the same thing--one pretty lucid, despite all his racial disdain and condescension--and another, recounting all neocon talking points. I suspect that Ministry of Truth Commissars now sitting in every respectable publishing house requested the second part as a precondition for publishing the book even from the person of Gates' stature. 

With China, Gates recommends approach much saner than the current incessant bullying. Yet, his views on American "soft power" are that of his youth. Chinese are not poor peasants anymore, tens of millions travel abroad every year, hundreds of thousands study in Western universities and a significant proportion of Chinese now enjoys similar availability of consumer goods and a better infrastructure . The idea of sending Americans lecturing them about American "freedoms" and "prosperity" as an instrument of political influence is preposterous. 

But the main reason that all these think tanks, aid programs and covert support of thugs are not likely to produce world dominion is that American model is not as attractive as it once has been. Moreover, recent attempts at intervention--Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere have hardly produced results, which the rest of the world wants to follow. 

And yet, the plank in American foreign policy thought went so low that if President Biden appoints Robert Gates his Secretary of State, this would be one of the better choices possible. It is by far superior to Albright-Power approach: "War yesterday, war today, war tomorrow". 

White, white and whiter... Strange image of the "Monocle"

 

Looking at "Monocle"--an almost single-handed creation of Tyler Brule--one can get a wrong impression that the Axis won World War II. The cool things only happen among the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon races, including the Swiss--can anyone imagine a cool Swiss?--with some sprinkle of the Japanese. Colored faces and references exist as a spicing of an otherwise white, white and whiter crowd. Jews are also somewhat there, on a periphery, as a funny ethnic grouping, but everyone knows that Fuhrer bolstered by his amazing victory mellowed to the Jews, and circa 1947 allowed the remnants of this peculiar race to emigrate to Madagascar. 

This crooked mirror of a modern metrosexual is even more absurd given the fact that Estonian Nazi grandfather of Tyler and his death squad probably would not be amused by gay Tyler at all. I would also add that a simple bullet in a head was considered by these thugs an act of mercy, which the member of a group scheduled for extermination must have earned. So he can use his ample experience of a fashion designer to imagine sadistic phantasies Grandpa and his goons would have displayed over his body and bodily fluids. 

The creators of this journal obviously imagine themselves as a global elite to whom the future belong. Remember the movie "Cabaret" and impeccably Arian Hitler Youth singing that "tomorrow they'll take Germany, the day after tomorrow--the whole world". An ovation by rural folks and tourists alike follows. Bisexual industrialist whom the protagonist asks whether he is still sure that he and his fat cat friends can control this tide, gets the message and decamps to Argentina. Time for Tyler Brule to look for the real estate somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere?  

The candidacy approved by Reichsfuhrer of the SS...

In 1970s the Soviet TV pioneered the series "Seventeen Moments of Spring" with the Soviet mole working in the Nazi Germany under the cover of the high ranking officer of the SD (Sicherheitdienst). While the story was entirely fictional, the main character had several real-life prototypes. [1] The series showed Nazis, including historic characters, not as cartoon villains but as highly intelligent and dangerous enemies and acquired a cult status, not in the least because some features in the "official" characterizations of the Nazi bigwigs, in particular, their low level of real education despite ornate degrees, reminded them of the descriptions of Soviet nomenclatura. In particular, hilarious were excerpts of their family status: "Has no mercy to the enemies of the Reich. Was not involved in dangerous liaisons. The candidacy of the spouse was approved by Reichsfuhrer of the SS".  The series generated a steady stream of anecdotes and jokes. 

So I imagine that when the CIA bosses called on Anna Applebaum of "Washington Post" fame and advised her to marry heavily drinking and philandering Pole from an illustrious family, Radoslaw Sikorski, they promised her that she will soon become a Queen of Poland and, after the conquest, the Empress of Russia. Sikorski, indeed, became the Foreign Affairs Minister for the Polish Republic. But after a drunken obscenity-driven escapade in a posh restaurant filmed by Polish investigative journalists, he had to retire. To compensate for her disastrous married life, she became a fury, an embodiment of Polish nationalism so extreme that sometimes, in her zeal to chastise the Russians, she is oblivious that her Jeremiads acquire anti-Polish and anti-Semitic accents. 

I mention first her scurrilous book "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine", heavy on plagiarism as most of her opuses and heftily reliant on sources provided by Nazi collaborators, who settled in Germany after the Second World War under the protection of Anglo-American allies--a favorite company of her main interlocutor, Serhii Plohii. [2] Let me be clear: nobody, except some crazy Stalinists denies the horrors, which befell USSR after the "collectivization" of the Soviet agriculture, which some call another serfdom for the peasants. [3] The first problem with the book, which obviously does not bother her, is that in 1933-1934, Ukraine was not a nation but an artificial construct cobbled by the Kremlin chiefs from Russian Malorossia, territory of the proto-fascist 1919 Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), which never controlled but a sliver of the territory of modern Ukraine [4], largely Rusyn lands of Subcarpathian Rus and other disparate pieces. But the fact that Ukrainian nationalists of the time, largely operated on the territory of Poland and wanted to carve their nation-state out of the body of Poland, does not bother her in the least as a born-again adept of Polish nationalism. 

Their desire to carve mainly Poland rather than USSR was a consequence of an obvious reason that majority of the populace of the "Soviet Ukraine" did not support (or even understood) their agenda. Moreover, Ukrainian pre-war nationalists--many future accomplices of Adolf Hitler and enthusiastic murderers of Jews and Poles--were organizing terrorist acts in the territory of interwar Polish Republic and were persecuted for this by the secret police. But, maybe, she just internalized too deeply a perennial illusion of the Polish elites that if Ukrainians (Hungarians, Czechs, etc.) hate Russians, they must madly love (and, somehow, slavishly obey) Poles. 

Anna Appelbaum is completely impervious to the facts, quoted by her, which contradict her narrative, obviously thinking that nobody with elementary knowledge of Soviet history would read her book. For instance, in the beginning, she recognizes that the confiscatory policies imposed by the commissars on Ukraine were first tried and tested in Russia proper. She accuses Pyatakov, himself the victim of the Great Purges in exporting "collective farming" to the early Soviet Ukraine. Certainly, Pyatakov having his brother murdered by the Ukrainian "freedom fighters" and observing mass pogroms in the wake of their takeover, had very little sympathy to the peasantry. Another blooper is that she mentions that only one of the three top Ukrainian leaders: Petrovsky, the head of the UkrSSR Supreme Soviet, protested to Stalin about confiscation of grain and agricultural animals (see also my ref. [3]).  Yet, the other two, Kosior and Chubar' who complied with Stalin's policies were later shot, while Petrovsky not only survived but was buried at the Kremlin Wall, next to Stalin. This hardly testifies to the deliberate planning of the famine to kill Ukrainian peasants unless Stalin planned to kill Russians, Kazakhs and others, and for what? 

Another opus, in recent "Atlantic" compares Republicans who support Trump despite all his real and imaginary failings, with 1) Vichy Nazi collaborators, 2) Russian soldiers raping German women (but not, for instance, Ukrainian or Polish who also came with the Soviet Army--no account of the WWII should be without it--obviously, in her view, American soldiers treated Japanese women in a chivalrous and gentlemanly way, and the revenge exacted by Poles on Germans being deported in the wake of war was legendary in its cruelty, and 3) East Germans informers of Stasi, who, according to her statistics were 99% of the total population. I wish Bundeskanzlerin Merkel corrects her with a heavy walking stick at some meeting.  

What is really surprising in all this drivel--is not her hatred of Russians--that is what she is paid for, though mad hatred rarely helps to understand even real and assumed enemies, but AA's reckless abandonment of both her Jewish heritage and her adopted religion of Polish nationalism. Now she joins the pack (parliament, murder) of the hate-filled harridans: Ann Coulter, Masha Gessen, Christiana Amanpour who are so much boiling with ill-will that like proverbial mad dogs they snap at everyone--friend and foe alike. 

[1]  Willy Lehmann, unemployed Weimar-era policeman recruited by the GPU, who became a mid-ranking but highly placed apparatchik of the SS economic division was the primary candidate but there were many others: Isai Borovoi, Alexander Korotkov, Norman Borodin, Yankel Chenyak, brothers Agayants etc. etc. For censorship reasons he was given an impeccably Russian pedigree. 

[2] Most of the correct facts in her book about Gulag were lifted from the book by O. V. Khlevnyuk, "The History of the Gulag" and she freely borrowed from Solzhenytsin's classic "Gulag Archipelago". And yet, she received Pulitzer for this work of rank plagiarism. 

[3] Applebaum's attempts to portray the Great Famine of 1933-1934 as an act of "ethnic cleansing" are highly counterfactual. Disastrous policy of "Collectivization" of Soviet Agriculture--the main cause of the famine--was spearheaded personally by Josef Stalin, a Georgian-Ossetian, sometimes over heavy objections by the Politburo. The largest proportional population losses were suffered by Kazakhstan. The chief of NKVD at the time was Menzhinsky, a Pole, with G. Yagoda, a Jew, as his acting deputy. People's Commissar for Agriculture, Yakovlev, was also Jewish. Local Ukrainian Soviet leadership was also heavily international: V. Kossior, head of the Party--a Pole, Vlas Chubar'--head of the Government, Ukrainian, head of Ukranian NKVD--Balitsky, Ukrainian, etc. etc. The only ethnic Russian in the first line of directors of collectivization was Politburo member Pavel Postyushev, later shot by Stalin, as were all of the above personalities except Menzhinsky who died from progressive paralysis in 1934. 

[4]  A term "proto-fascist" is somewhat misleading. The author would suggest the term "sado-terrorist" for the regimes, which do not have--in contrast to German Nazism and Soviet/Chinese Communism, or Pinochet in Chile, any positive development agenda besides terrorizing the population: Khmer Rouge, Idi Amin of Uganda, Bocassa of CAR, "Dirty War" regime in Argentina or von Ungern "Khanate" in Mongolia--but one can argue that some regimes (Franco, in Spain for instance) evolve into something more positive-minded, if not more humane. 

My gallery of American folk heroes

1. C'est ne pas une caricature

2. Prince Macaroon

3. Michael Bloomberg, conqueror of the world 

4. POTUS

5. Mitt Romney

6. No drama Obama.  

Michael Bloomberg, former and future Democratic/Republican/? candidate for President

Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History

An erudite but totally dissembled book. It mainly describes events peripheral to the emergence and development of Maoism, such as Maoist inspiration for the 1968 revolutionaries in France.

Why is that? Because Maoism was developed first as an ideological foundation of the Sino-Soviet conflict and only then Mao adapted it to serve other geopolitical and domestic purposes . In the current climate of neocon political correctness even a pretty grim description of the Soviet policies will be censured as long as it describes Soviet leaders as rational political actors with rational goals. 

We must begin with the fact that Mao, at first, did not purport to be anything but an orthodox follower of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin bloodline. Only after the death of Stalin and the armistice on the Korean peninsula, which obviated the need for the military alliance with USSR, he decided that time has come for him to become the fifth founding member of this lineage. Obviously, he recognized that Khruschev's campaign against "The Cult of Personality" and the turnover of the Communist Eastern European leaders (Rakosi in Hungary, Bierut in Poland, Gheorgiu-Dej in Romania, etc.) threatened his own control of China. So, after XX Congress of CPSU (1956) Mao had to proclaim himself, rather than tactless and bothersome leaders in Moscow, the titular head of the world Communism.  

With time, he developed his own alliances--with Tito in Yugoslavia, Enver Hoxcha in Albania, Ceausescu in Romania, Pol Pot in Cambodia--to further his own political goals. But the above list demonstrates that his primary goal was rivalry with the Soviet Union rather than designing an alternative model for the revolution in the Third World. Certainly, the Chinese Government was involved in affairs of Southeast Asia and Africa--war in Vietnam, independently, but together with the USSR and a botched attempt at a military coup in Indonesia--and had to adapt to realities and aspirations of these countries and their leaders. So, "proletarian revolution" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" had to be de-emphasized (rather than ditched) and his own neo-Confucian elevation of the peasantry to be proclaimed. 

As did the Soviets before him, he had to realize that regimes he supported, economically and militarily, sometimes imitate his style and appropriate his synthesis of Stalinism, Legalism and neo-Confucianism  (Kim Il Song in Korea, Ho Chi Ming in Vietnam, Pol Pot in Cambodia) rather than become his political allies. Vice versa, these regimes built their own version of economic autarky and xenophobic nationalism as he did to oppose the Soviet Union. 

With this conceptual framework, one can turn to Lovell's book and read historical anecdotes, which I am unable to supply. 

Jared Diamond. Upheaval. Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.

      Instrument of Finnish liberal democracy according to  Jared. 

Jared Diamond's trajectory reminds me of Simon Shama--after a single really great book--Landscape and Memory, he became so full of himself that the rest of his production could never match its quality or lucidity but his public pronouncements became more and more haughty. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" was not as marvelously innovative and strange as "Landscape and Memory" but became much more influential.

The author, as the most sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists in the US, is a left-leaning neocon--left-leaning means that supply-side economics and climate change denial are not a part of inviolable symbol of faith. [1] In his old age, he inherited dogma of liberal neocons but also their pitiful disdain of careful research in favor of grand concepts.

For instance, he writes, countering contemporary Soviet Union during the Winter War of 1930-1940 "...Finland, a liberal capitalist democracy" (p. 66), while acknowledging 8,000 Red Finns shot and 20,000 perished in concentration camps (p.66) out of 3 million-strong population after the Finnish Civil War. Concentration camps in a liberal democracy? Interesting. [2]

He, obviously, did not brush up his history of the Second World War since the middle school. "When I was growing up in the US during World War II, I just thought of Finland as the fourth axis power, along with Germany, Italy and Japan".  (p. 80) What about Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria as well as Slovakia, Estonia and Croatia, the latter bunch being carved out from Nazi-occupied states but reconstituted back into their prewar shapes?

"Among his [Kaiser's] many policies that resulted in Germany's entering World War one under unfavorable circumstances leading to defeat was his non-renewal of Bismark's treaty between Germany and Russia..." (p. 248) A simple internet check establishes that Dreikaiserbund --a mutual treaty between German, Austrian and Russian Empires was dissolved by Bismark himself in 1887--three years before the end of his Chancellorship, probably, because he thought that after unification of Germany, the utility of tripartite relationship was nil. In fact, this was Kaiser Wilhelm II who tried to achieve some form of new monarchical rapprochement with Russia in the form of infamous Bjorko Treaty (1905).

Even more numerous are Diamond's instances of extremely questionable judgement. Trying to whitewash the terror of right-wing regimes in Chile and Indonesia, he writes:

"Yet Chilean military crimes can't be blamed on Pinochet alone, because no one has suggested that he personally shot or tortured anyone..." So far, the same exact argument did not win many supporters when Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin were concerned.

"The tortures, killings, grinding poverty and insane policies associated with Communist dictatorships in Cambodia, North Korea and other countries warn us that a Communist alternative to Suharto could have been worse for Indonesia that was Suharto". This paean was repeated many times by dozens of dictators in Latin America and elsewhere. The most obvious problem with this, is that by Diamond's own admission, the 1965 Communist plot had little chances of success and could have been just a pretext for the Indonesian Army to launch a massive campaign of extermination.

"Annexation by Russia had motivated emigration by thousands of well-educated white people... Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians who immigrated after World War Two... didn't share the strong racist prejudices" (pp. 278-280). First, nobody was allowed out after the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states in 1939-1940. The exodus coincided with the withdrawal of the German troops in the end of the Second World II. To find out in which subjects these refugees were "well-educated" and how little racial prejudices they held, he must consult the history of Shoah in the Baltics. In fact, Estonia was the first and only country declared Judenfrei at Wannsee conference (1942). [3]

With respect to Australia of 1950s he also confidently proclaims "...the development of an independent foreign policy, instead of leaving Australia's foreign policy to Britain". Does he know where the British nuclear tests were conducted? Or he dismisses connection between defense and foreign policy altogether?

Sometimes, it seems that he only interviewed his own nationalist contacts in Finland and Chile, not even reading carefully the sources he quoted in his book. For instance, in Collier's history of Chile the Pinochet-era myth of Chile's economic revival is subjected to much more nuanced treatment. First, the years of Allende were not such uniform economic disaster as being claimed by contemporary US propaganda. Second, reforms by imported "Chicago boys" produced economic chaos and only after American advisers were replaced by equally pro-market but more pragmatic Swiss Hernan Buchi, Chile began to return to normalcy. Yet, it suffered a severe financial crisis. According to statistical data provided in Collier, one of his references, the Chilean economy by the end of Pinochet era grew little with respect to the end of Frei I era except for the retail and fisheries sector.

His nationalist lore-inspired history of the Winter War of 1939-1940 is not grotesquely counterfactual but for events further on, when Finland joined the Axis, comes straight from the Nazi propaganda. Finland, the most enthusiastic of the Nazi-allied powers, is even credited with "saving of Leningrad",  whose blockade ostensibly "saved" it from Nazi occupation. In fact, Germans never contemplated taking the city outright, fearing the protracted battles in the ruins of the large city--their fears were fully realized in Stalingrad--and Finnish-imposed blockade starved more than a million residents to death. The operations to cut Murmansk--a major supply port for American aid--from the mainland, tasked to Finland, ended up in miserable failure. Among detrimental consequences of the Soviet-friendly policies adopted by postwar Finnish Governments--"Finlandization", Diamond mentions Soviets forcing a nuclear power station on helpless Finns, which still supplies much of their electricity.

Remarkably, his study of countries in crisis omits the paramount survival story of the XX century, the State of Israel. This can be explained only by the fact, that in the climate of moral terror instilled by Derschowitz, Michael Oren and the like, any statement about Israel deviating from Netanyahu propaganda line even in the most respectful way, will likely be castigated and chastised.

Of course, no amount of indoctrination can lower Jared Diamond to the level of Francis Fukuyama or Neil Fergusson--that's why they taught in Harvard and he--in the "lowly" UCLA, so his book contains many useful and interesting observations and his final conclusions are surprisingly enlightened.

[1] Neocon dogma, in the approximate order of centrality:
1. Americans are the master race destined to rule the world by the "scientifically established" facts of geography and history (the concept of master race comes from Nazism, see below, and "scientifically established" predestination of human history--from Marxism).
2. The only perfect way to organize society is Anglo-Saxon financial markets-centered capitalism; all other models are "deviations" from this perfect model.
3. Russians are the vermin fouling everything they touch and ought to be enslaved or exterminated, the Jews of our age. (This, strangely central--given a comparatively small role Russian Federation plays in the current scheme of things---symbol of faith comes from the fact that, probably, many of the neocons performed as Nazi generals in middle school and tried to re-imagine World War II with them winning. Later, in their college age they were attracted to  Trotskyism--Russia must burn to stoke the flames of the world revolution.). Another explanation could be that they are heirs to Haushofer and Mackinder, et al. mystical garbage of the Heartland, Hyperborea and their militaristic occultism. 
4. Extremely anthropomorphic view of international relations.
5. There is a wall of separation between the world of "liberal democracies" (the countries with the US military bases or in the military alliances with the US; House of Islam of Islamic theology) and "evil dictatorships" (the ones without; the House of War) and any lasting peace between them is impossible. This, fifth point is a relative innovation coming from the ideology of Jihadis.
[2]  Operation of concentration camps seems to be a Finnish trademark. When, during 1941-1944, Finns (re-)occupied Korela, they put all of its Slavic population (40-45 thous.) in concentration camps. Death toll according to (supposedly democratic, scientifically minded) Finnish historians was 4,060 (such precision!), while according to the Russian (mendacious, propaganda-driven) was around eight thousand. Recently, about half of this discrepancy was explained--more than two thousand Jews and Communists were rendered to the German High Command for execution. I would not be surprised if the remaining 2,000 were young women  and girls forced into sex slavery in the German and Finnish Army barracks, most of whom were murdered either after contracting STDs or before their withdrawal. 
[3]  This demonstrates how quick is the path from subscription to the neocon dogma to something bordering on the Holocaust denial even for a prominent Jewish academic from Los Angeles. 

Monica L. Smith, Cities. The first 6000 years.

Monica Smith is absorbed by the superb quality of her own writing, so the book is all over the place and entirely unsystematic. But issues she chooses to argue are argued persuasively and competently--she is a professional archaeologist.

The book is an ode to conspicuous consumption and conspicuous discarding of trash. While this position is understandable for her profession--after all other civilizations' garbage is her treasury--but it smacks of willful neglect of economics, military affairs and the environment. Also it betrays her admiration for upper and upper middle classes and disdain for the lower classes. "Well-being of the upper classes depends on incessant supply of the poor" (Voltaire) was good for the ancien regime libertine, but it is quite strange for a California liberal arts professor.

Her willful ignorance of economics of production makes her storyline deficient. Her cities appeared ready-made as Athena emerged from the head of Zeus. First, because of paltry yields of crops, one had to have several agricultural families to support one family of urbanites. My own back-of-the-envelope estimates based on one of the wealthiest Roman provinces--Africa--suggest the proportion of urban to rural population 1:5-6 for equal food consumption in the city and in the village.  These estimate agrees well with the actual demographic proportions in pre-industrialized societies. Second, contrary to her assumption, urban populations of Hellenistic cities, Rome included, actively participated in agriculture.

Landlords decamping to their latifundia--and sleeping around with boys and girls of their freedmen managers during harvest are well documented in contemporary fiction. But, given the seasonal character of agricultural work, it is simply impossible to imagine that poor urbanites would not engage in seasonal sowing and harvest--or that the landowners will keep so many otherwise useless slaves for peak activities. At least, poor denizens of medieval London formed work gangs, which engaged in agriculture, animal husbandry and their own procreation in their native villages.

Obviously, for the nascent cities to emerge, they had either to be protective enclaves against the depredations of other humans or animals alike--similar to the pueblos, factorias, encomiedas and missions of early America--where most of the population still engaged in agricultural pursuits, or to be the centers of political power exploiting the countryside by armed coercion. The latter model is well known from the facts of the Norman Conquest of England.

She obscures the dual role of the cities as both defensive encampments and magnets for aggression--unlike villages, which have low concentration of wealth and need to be constantly exploited by the occupiers; hoards of artisanal goods, precious metals and food attracted invaders from the times immemorial. Heretofore, the defensive fortifications were first hallmarks distinguishing cities from villages.

There is a fantastic assumption that cities never died; at least in the last millenium, except, of course, Chernobyl. While she describes abandonment of Angkor Wat and Mayan cities, she claims that these were exceptions. If the example of numerous Central Asian states, with their urban centers, or Homeric Troy destroyed by nomadic invasions [1], first and foremost, by Mongols is not convincing enough for her, she obviously needs to visit our corner of the United States or Michigan where she graduated.

None of the cities of our so-called Southern Tier were razed by warfare. But if one looks at the vast expanse between Binghamton and Buffalo, whether on New York, or Pennsylvania side, she will observe a number of previously mighty cities, which slowly regress into villages. Elmira, Horseheads, Corning, Binghamton, Johnstown, Otsego, Oswego, Troy, Mansfield, Lock Haven, Williamsport, Sayre were once important and proud cities. Now the lifestyle of people there is more reminiscent of what Monica Smith observes in villages--no important centers of power, even if they are residencies of the county governments, religion, culture or economics, no vertical mobility of the population, the only young people staying are the ones repeating life trajectories of their parents, etc etc. And all this happened in the last hundred years.

[1] Merv, Urgench--in Khwarazmia, Qara-Kitai of the namesake state, etc. etc. and I am not an anthropologist.