Alexander Karp. The Technological Republic. Hard Power, Soft Beliefs and the Future of the West.

 A famed German education obviously greatly suffered lately. Gone is the gymnast and sometime Foreign Minister of the Bundesrepublik, Annalena Baerbock with her "360 degrees turn of policies" and "defenses of hundreds of thousands kilometers from the German borders". But, militaristic imperialist in the Willhelmian (i.e. colonial Victorianism on steroids) tradition Karp with a PhD in philosophy from a German university suffers from severe logic deficiency. 

    His justification of the European colonial expansion is based on a diagram showing the mean proportions of population and GDP of the "backward" and Western nations, who, in view of Karp and another cited colonialist Churchill, enjoyed democratic elections instead of tyranny and dictatorship. First, before the 17th century, i.e. the century when poor but war-proficient Europeans began to pillage the world for earnest, the most of the world's GDP was produced by China and India (see P. Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"). Second, most current GDP of the Western nations is centered around "financial services". Not to speak of Denmark or Holland, UK's share of the real economy in its GDP (mining, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation) is hardly 5%. What is the magic of the City of London and Canary Wharf, 2.5 square miles or so, where 20% of the British GDP is produced? Third, to consider even the then British Empire a democracy is a gross misstatement. Barely 10-15% of the population of the British Empire enjoyed any semblance of political rights, with even Canada, Australia and New Zealand having no control of the their foreign and defense policy until approximately WWII. Before, aristocratic English generals generously spilled blood of its colonial subjects in the fields of Gallipoli and Flanders. Other "Western" nations had even more limited suffrage, and foreign, defense and financial policies were largely excluded from any parliamentary control.

      Another oddity is his irony that the most powerful politicians and the civil servants earn a tiny amount of his and his tech- and private equity bros incomes. Earning a PhD from a German University and not knowing that salaries for the civil servants is a relative innovation? Till the end of the XIX century, the applicant for the British Foreign Office position had to prove a sufficient independent income. Most of the human history, politics, military commands and civil service were unpaid occupations, which aristocracies and patricians performed out of civic duty. The ones who absconded these duties for the private enrichment and/or pleasures of the harem/slave quarters were called "idiots" in Greek. His reasoning suffers not only from historic ignorance but from the lack of logic. Police officers occasionally have to arrest drug lords for whom their salaries are a small change. Should their salaries also be raised by a few orders of magnitude? Obviously, greed -- and not even fear -- is an only motivator for the tech bros but, for simpler people, it can be different. 

    Only when the middle classes became the backbone of the modern society, and bureaucracies had multiplied in size, the idea of government service as a paid profession proliferated. The demise of the political and economic significance of the middle class in the West and the rise of billionaire oligarchies (like Karp himself) resulted in the return of the "Ancien Regime"-type governments. There ambitious gentlemen knowing nothing in particular -- Oxbridge of XVII and XVIII century was described not as a "Cathedral of Learning" but as a place were gentlemen went drunk -- presided over civil services of their minions and sycophants. 

    What Karp proposes as the future of humanity is the rule by "philosopher kings" of the tech industry in the West and merciless colonial exploitation of its periphery by its armed might. Not so different from the "Beautiful garden vs. the Jungle" of the former EU Foreign Policy chief Borrell. I am too old and feeble to work that this future never comes. But the younger people may. 

    

Edwin Frank. Stranger than Fiction. Lives of Twentieth-Century Novel.

    This is a brilliant book, enlightened by the author's impeccable literary taste. One of a few books I read sequentially, from the beginning to an end. A little bit too heavy on a gay agenda. Frank succeeds in making book whole, not a series of essays, by showing obvious and not very obvious connections between disparate authors, some, who were not necessarily aware of each other significance or even existence. The author places a little bit too much importance on his own grandiloquence. 

Morgan Falconer. How to be Avant-Garde.

 The book must be titled "How to be a self-centric prick". Obviously, high art always attracted prima donnas, eccentrics, etc., but European High Modernism (EHM) got a head start, for the artists inherited an impetus from Symbolist movement with its cult of unusual, uncanny and bizarre. In fact, compared to the Symbolists, early twentieth century avant-gardists were quite a sedate bunch. This they compensated in tireless self-promotion made easier by the proliferation of printed press, increase in international travel and communication between different group of artists. But do not expect deep insights on the nature of EHM from Falconer. 

Tricia Romano. The Freaks Came out to Write.

     This is a book about the times when America was great. New York was a dirty, decaying rathole, but the people there carried the idea of infinite possibilities. Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Philip Roth, Normal Mailer measured the streets and the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Alexander Coburn wrote about their New York. These days, Manhattan is an abode of banksters and tourists with the sprinkles of homeless people here and there, more a transportation hub than a place where real people live. 

Amanda H. Podany. Weavers, Scribes and Kings: A New History.

     Very thorough reading of the texts from ancient Mesopotamia but with very limited reflection, which is typical of the modern Anglo-Saxon historical discourse. Real science is formulating hypotheses and proving them with facts or the results of experiments, even if they are proven wrong later. But the right of making mistakes is not conducive to earning a tenure in the modern hyper-competitive university culture. 

Denise L. Herzing. Is anyone listening? What animals are saying to each other and to us?

    

        There is a hint that dolphin system of ultrasound whistles and clicks form a some kind a vocabulary, which allows them to express rather complicated signals (I would not yet say "thoughts") and that they can distinguish between friend and foe of their own species sufficiently to cover up their communication from the latter. Only one unproven step -- namely that (some) animals can objectivize past experience to plan the future course of action -- removes them from what we humans mean by consciousness.  

David Chaffetz. Raiders, rulers and traders. The horse and the rise of empires.

    Eminently readable book with a lot of interesting information. However, what is strange, for Chaffetz is a horse rider himself, there is very little information on the evolution of harnesses, saddles, stirrup and other equipment needed to turn a horse into an indomitable war machine. Peacetime application of horses does not interest him that much. 

    Chaffetz' numbers of the size of pre-modern armies are taken from contemporary chronicles and are not reliable because chroniclers shamelessly exaggerated the numbers of the opponent and diminished the numbers of their own. For instance, he estimates the size of Mongol hordes as 600,000. But the army of such size in the absence of railroad supply would simply eat their horses first, and then die itself from starvation. In fact, the Mongols divided their troops into corps of 10,000 riders (tumen), each of each traveled by a different road. The next village, which they would plunder -- and they ate only meat considering plant eaters as cud chewing animals -- must be located within a length of march supported by slaughtering the village livestock. 

Angela Merkel. Freedom. Memoirs 1954-2021.

        

       Firstly, the English translations of non-fiction books cannot be considered true to the originals because New York publishing milieu edits them to conform to the ruling neocon ideology. Being beset in all corners of this big country, neoconservatism still runs triumphant in the BosNyWash corridor. So, I cannot be held responsible for the parts, which were either excised, heavily edited or added by request of the American editorial houses. 

Secondly, because the memoirs these days are created by professional imagemakers, they are serving the primary role of glorifying the notional author rather that to be testimony to the facts of her life. So, the most interesting things in the current memoirs are the ones, which inadvertently cropped into the memoirs past attention of media gurus. Such was a tacit admission by Chrystie Freeland, a former deputy Prime Minister of Canada that, during her time as a Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, she moonlighted for the Russian oligarchs in the capacity similar to Ghislaine Maxwell supplying them with nubile flesh. Without insider trading tips obtained during their drunken orgies, how could she come so well off from Moscow as to finance from pocket her electoral campaign? 

    Angela Merkel is certainly in a completely different category from C.F. both as a politician and as a human being. The only new thing except forgettable names for her municipal advisers I learnt from cursory glance of her book was her hatred of dogs for she mentions Putin's "canine stubbornness" or some other negative characteristic ascribed to dogs. 

    The most interesting events in foreign policy, which she could have described but did not was removal of Muammar Khaddaffi -- because she mentions the chaos after his demise and very probable cautionary messages to the Ukrainian Government after the Minsk accords she helped to negotiate. She now admits that the treaties were signed -- and deposited to the UN, which she mentions as her achievement -- in a bad faith, which is a centuries-long tradition of German diplomacy beginning at least from the violation of Pragmatic Sanction by Friedrich II. But, unlike Scholz, she probably cautioned the Ukrainian leaders that she would look the other way at their violations and help them, militarily and economically only if they do not challenge two basics. Namely, they would not make loose talk of obtaining nuclear weapons and try to recover Crimea by the military means. 

I shall look at "Freedom" again to find snippets other than her hatred of canines, which make the book worth reading.