Displaying posts categorized under

BOOKS

George Soros: The Man Behind The Curtain By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/george_soros_the_man_behind_the_curtain.html

Billionaire George Soros is that rare megalomaniac who not only believes he’s a god but revels in behaving like one. “It’s a sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out,” he once boasted to The Independent.

This god complex, combined with his downright amorality and bizarre ideas about society, makes the 92-year-old extremely dangerous to democracies, especially America. The warning comes loud and clear in Matt Palumbo’s recent book, The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros, which documents Soros’sdecades of financial dealings, political operations, and nefarious networks.

Early in the book, Palumbo highlights Soros’samorality, planted perhaps when his Hungarian Jewish family assumed Christian identities and collaborated with the invading Nazis. The teenaged Soros accompanied his phony godfather, who inventoried properties seized from Jewish families sent to concentration camps. Yet, he says he feels no guilt, only detachment.

“I was only a spectator; the property was being taken away. I had no role in taking away that property. So, I had no sense of guilt,” he said in a 1998 interview on 60 Minutes. He likened his actions then to his playing the markets later. “In a funny way,” he said, “it’s just like in the markets – that if I weren’t there – of course, I wasn’t doing it – but somebody else would – would be taking it away anyhow.” He recounts that period as “probably the happiest year of my life” and “a very happy-making, exhilarating experience.”

Orwell’s 1984, From Warning to How-To Guide Kevin Donnelly

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/09/orwells-1984-from-warning-to-how-to-guide/

As highlighted in George Orwell’s 1984, language and how it is used influences how we think and act, so controlling language is a key strategy employed by totalitarian regimes of the left and right to manipulate people and enforce group think.

In Orwell’s dystopian novel what is described as New­speak leads to a situation where “thoughtcrime” is impossible as “there will be no words in which to express it”.  Such is the insidious evil of distorting language to control how people think Orwell writes in ‘Looking back on the Spanish Civil War’, we now live in world where whoever rules is able to say “two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs”.

While the cultural-left’s use of politically correct language is widespread it should be noted using
language to persuade and convince has been evident since the time of the ancient Greeks. Rhetoric includes devices such as using emotive language, attacking the person, appealing to expert opinion and facts, generalising and employing logic and reason.

It also should be noted employing rhetoric is not restricted to the cultural-left. During America’s involvement in the Vietnam war the military used the expression ‘collateral damage’ to describe innocent civilians being injured or killed and ‘friendly fire’ when its soldiers were the victims of American firepower. Forcefully removing peasants from their farms and villages, instead of being described for what it was, was labelled as ‘pacification’.

The Prejudice that Never Dies From Fiamma Nirenstein, a powerful jeremiad on Jew-hatred. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-prejudice-that-never-dies/

A prolific journalist, media commentator, documentary producer, former Member of the Italian Parliament, and revered figure in Italy’s Jewish community (“she is our fiamma – our flame!” one Italian Jew told me years ago), Fiamma Nirenstein relocated to Israel nine years ago, where she currently serves as a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. She’s also written several books, the latest of which, Jewish Lives Matter: Human Rights and Anti-Semitism, has now been translated into English. Even if you don’t need to be told that anti-Semitism is evil, and even if you’ve read any number of works on the subject, you’d be wrong to take a pass on this one: Nirenstein is a brilliant, deeply informed student of Jew-hatred, and her new book – translated excellently from the Italian by Amy Rosenthal – is an elegant, passionate, and energetic distillation of her knowledge and wisdom, offering more than a few insights that, to me at least, are fresh and valuable.

For example, Nirenstein notes savvily that the kind of leftist professors who reflexively profess sympathy for peoples like New Zealand’s Maori, Australia’s aborigines, Canada’s First Nations, and Native Americans in the U.S. – routinely reminding the white residents of those countries that they’re living on stolen land and beginning every lecture at an academic conference by mentioning that the event in question is taking place on land once occupied by the Iroquois or Aranda or Tutchone tribe – are the very same people who hate Israel the most, even though you’d think that if they prized consistency they’d cheer the return, in 1947, of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah – which in the intervening centuries had been conquered in turn by (among others) the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks – to the descendants of their original inhabitants. As Nirenstein puts it, which tribal group could be a more archetypal example of “aboriginal people who returned home” than the Jews?

The intersectionality of antisemitism By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-716691

Fiamma Nirenstein’s latest book, Jewish Lives Matter, paints an aptly bleak portrait of the way in which Jew-hatred has had a happy resurgence in the West under the guise of human rights.

The term, which represents a genuinely high value, is so abused by the people who earn their livelihoods promoting it through various progressive movements and heavily funded NGOs, as well as by many of the very groups it aims to protect that its original meaning is all but a hologram.

As Nirenstein adeptly illustrates, this inversion of good and evil was given a serious push by champions of the Palestinian cause, whose false claims against the Zionist enterprise provided the perfect cloak for any antisemitism that was dormant, or at least kept under wraps, in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Indeed, while it was no longer acceptable to admit to a desire to annihilate the Jews, Israel became an acceptable target for what Natan Sharansky dubbed the three Ds: demonization, double standards and delegitimization.

“Today’s pro-Palestinian movements have found, especially in America, but also in France through the Islamic nexus, a conceptual link with the themes of racial injustice, colonial racism, and the persecution of blacks and women throughout history,” she writes. “Although Jews could only be identified by a very manipulative observer as the white oppressor or masculinist, this is precisely what has happened. The so-called intersectionality purportedly aimed at realizing human rights for all has become the catalyst for the current wave of antisemitism.”

THE TITLE of the book derives from this very phenomenon. Nirenstein, a prolific author, journalist and former member of the Italian Parliament, describes how the May 25, 2020 killing of African-American George Floyd at the hands of a sadistic Minneapolis police officer gave rise not only to riots on behalf of blacks in the United States but sparked an explosion of anti-Israel vitriol.

And this, she points out, was a full year before Operation Guardian of the Walls, Israel’s 11-day war against Hamas in Gaza, which would open the floodgates to Israel-bashing and open antisemitism on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, Paris and London.

Interview: Christopher Leonard, Author of “The Lords of Easy Money” The Fed has “wrenched this gap between the very rich and everybody else, which is the defining economic dysfunction of our time.” Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/interview-christopher-leonard-author

There’s an illuminating scene in Christopher Leonard’s The Lords of Easy Money that talks about the difficulty of trying to communicate the intricacies of Fed policy to mass audiences. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a trusted voice of the Tea Party movement and therefore someone who would have been expected to take an interest in the Fed’s plans for a massive intervention in the economy via the quantitative easing program, took on the subject in a free-flowing broadcast. Leonard describes what ensued:

Beck scrawled a long numeral on a chalkboard: 600,000,000,000. This represented the value of bonds the Fed just announced it would buy. “This is what they call quantitative easing,” Beck said. Then he walked to a new chalkboard with a confusing flowchart written across it that included a series of large, cartoonish arrows that seemed to signify the flow of money, or influence, or something like that, behind the Fed’s new program. Confusingly, the whole thing began with organized labor, depicted by a union boss wearing a bowler’s cap and with a cigar dangling from his mouth. It got weirder and increasingly inaccurate from there. The final cartoon on the flowchart showed a group of top-hat-wearing bankers…

Leonard described Beck’s understanding of the Fed as “like that of a very high drug user who had sat in a motel room, trying to eavesdrop through the wall while people talked about central banking.” I remember the broadcast – though I wasn’t a fan of Beck’s and occasionally wondered if his chalkboard theories about Obama as both Hitler and Stalin were really a brilliant parody I was too thick to grasp, I thought he was at least trying to say something critical about a truly dangerous Fed policy.

As Leonard notes, Beck got one important thing right, that the flood of cheap money punished ordinary savers, but the rest his presentation was so far-out, and over-focused on the idea that QE risked Weimar-style hyperinflation, that his audience probably ended up with a net minus from a knowledge perspective.

This was too bad, because the media treatments on the other, more “respectable” side, at 60 Minutes, CNBC, CNN, and the like, were either completely credulous in repeating the assertions of Fed officials that its policies were needed to “jumpstart the sluggish economy” or, if they were critical at all, focused only on the narrow question of price inflation. The much more serious question of the impact of Fed policies on asset prices simply didn’t fit well in our increasingly bifurcated media landscape, which didn’t know whether to identify the concerns of a figure like Leonard’s main character Thomas Hoenig as conservative or liberal complaints. In fact, Hoenig’s worries were about inherent institutional weaknesses that concerned both left and right demographics, making his story a tough sell to either media “side.” In this sense, a book like The Lords of Easy Money is a gift to media audiences that rarely get a clear look at a confounding topic.

How Woke Won. By Joanna Williams

https://www.spiked-online.com/books/

Woke has conquered the West. Identity politics, cancel culture and trans ideology reign. Censorship and public shaming are the price you pay for dissent. How did this once fringe ideology manage to take over our institutions? And how can ordinary people fight back? These are the questions at the heart of How Woke Won, the new book by author and spiked columnist Joanna Williams. She argues that we have much more in common than the woke would have us believe – and that it is time for us to come together to forge a freer, more democratic and truly egalitarian future.

U.S. Schools Get Bad Marx A book written in 1958 explains our current cultural upheaval. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/04/u-s-schools-get-bad-marx/

My father was a liberal Democrat. He worshiped FDR and didn’t care much for the GOP. His parents were staunch Republicans, and the political discussions I remember from the 1950s were always entertaining—if not a bit confusing—to this eight-year-old. Importantly, while my dad was a liberal, he was a virulent anti-Communist, and saw them as just as evil as the Nazis he went to war to eradicate.

The reasons my father hated the Communists are neatly spelled out in The Naked Communist, a book written in 1958 by political theorist W. Cleon Skousen, who eerily predicted our current state of affairs. In a section titled “Current Communist Goals,” he elucidates the plan in 45 steps, explaining that “many loyal Americans are working for these same objectives because they are not aware that these objectives are designed to destroy us.”

Skousen is especially insightful on the cultural and educational strife we are now experiencing. For example, in Step 20, he writes, “Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.”

While there certainly is a conservative media, is there any doubt that the predominant mainstream media runs far-left? A good example of press manipulation was the ongoing reference to the George Floyd riots—in reality, mass violence and 164 structure fires from arson in a four-day period in 2020—as “protests.” Another was the complete suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which may very well have altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Step 24: “Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them ‘censorship’ and a violation of free speech and free press.” In a similar vein, Step 25 reads, “Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.”

Compared to what we have now in films, TV, and music, Playboy and the ravings of Lenny Bruce in the 1950s seem Church-worthy.

In Step 30, Skousen foresaw the current mania to deny the greatness of George Washington and other iconic Americans who don’t toe the utopian party line.“Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the ‘common man.’”

The Bullies of Woke A new book exposes their assault on mental health. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/bullies-woke-mark-tapson/

Totalitarian Cancel Culture, the bullying trans lobby, and the race-mongering indoctrination of Critical Race Theorists, among other leftist assaults on society, have turned daily life into everyday battlefields for normal Americans who stand in the way of Progressive social engineering.

To address this ubiquitous, corrosive phenomenon, Canadian author Diane Bederman has written Bullies of Woke and Their Assault on Mental Health just published by New English Review Press. Ms. Bederman is also the author of Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, The Serpent and the Red Thread: The Definitive Biography of Evil, and The #IslamophobiaIndustry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West, all of which I have either reviewed or interviewed her about (see links) for FrontPage Mag.

Bullies of Woke documents the serious damage that bellicose leftist activists are wreaking upon the mental health of our children, who are subjected in schools and in the culture at large to unrelenting pressure to conform to, if not actually celebrate, woke ideology. In many cases our children are literally being bullied to death – committing suicide because they are unable to handle the aggressive bullying from the fanatical proponents of Progressive-driven movements such as Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, and Cancel Culture. Bullies of Woke is simultaneously a guidebook to the modern woke movement and a call to action for the silent majority to push back and restore common sense and bedrock Judeo-Christian values in our homes, our schools, and our nations in the West.

I asked Ms. Bederman some questions about her new book.

Mark Tapson:           Diane, your book covers a lot of ground and many questions come to mind, but let me just begin by asking what inspired you to view the left’s ideological assaults of Cancel Culture, Critical Race Theory, and the like through the lens of its impact on the West’s mental health?

Diane Bederman:   Mark, as much as I would like to take credit for this idea, a friend and I were talking about our world today, and we went from discussing the bullying by Progressives to mental illness. I had previously written about bullying and mental illness on my blog. And so it began.

The Origins of Woke A forgotten satirical book from the nineties predicted cancel culture. Phoebe Maltz Bovy

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-origins-of-woke?utm_source=email

At a church book sale in my Toronto neighborhood, I found The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, a bestseller by Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf first published 30 years ago. I always gravitate to books like this—first to see whether there is anything new in this world, and then to remind myself that the overly simplistic answer is no. (See also the 1995 compendium Debating Sexual Correctness. The #MeToo discourse existed prior to #MeToo.) It seems we’re living through a kind of 1990s revival—fueled, I suspect, by nostalgia for pre-Covid, pre-9/11, pre-internet times. Or maybe just by teenagers’ timeless desire to dress the way everyone did decades ago.

The front cover of the dictionary shows a man, a woman, and a dog, each affixed with labels such as “hair disadvantaged” (he’s balding), “woman of noncolor” (she’s white), and “nonhuman animal companion” (it’s a shaggy dog). None of them, though especially the woman and the dog, would be out of place in a 2022 farmers market. (Again: cyclical fashions.)

The back cover bears a warning: “Be sensitive or else!,” with the follow-up, “Welcome to the nineties. But you better watch what you say. If you’re not politically correct, not even your pet—oops, your animal companion­—will love you anymore.” Beard’s author bio begins, “Although Henry Beard is a typical product of elitist educational institutions and a beneficiary of a number of negative action programs, he has struggled to overcome his many severe privileges.” And Cerf’s: “Christopher Cerf is a melanin-impoverished, temporarily abled, straight, half-Anglo-, half-Jewish-American male.” Privilege disclaimers in the early 1990s! I had to have it.   

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard

Millard’s book is wonderful reading about the Spekes/Burton search for the source of the Nile. Burton is described as a swashbuckling, romantic hero, but he had a vicious side not documented in Millard’s book…..rsk

https://www.haaretz.com/2008-12-11/ty-article/musings-the-other-richard-burton/0000017f-dc0b-df9c-a17f-fe1bf0cd0000

“However, the manuscript with the most inflammatory content, a brand which, as it were, was a brand plucked from the flame, has been preserved to this day. It is entitled “Human Sacrifice among the Sephardine (sic) or Eastern Jews.” In it, Burton, one of the most educated men of his time, had given credence to that most ignorant of medieval prejudices: the blood libel. How he came to this is a story on its own. The Damascus Affair, about which he wrote, occurred in 1840. A Capuchin friar disappeared with his servant, never to be seen again. With the help of the fiercely anti-Semitic French consul, 13 Jews were arrested and confessed under torture to sacrificing the friar for religious purposes. The cause of the Jewish victims was taken up by the great and the good, and they were released and vindicated. By the time Burton wrote his inflammatory pamphlet, the Damascus Affair was history.”

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was one of the most intriguing of all Victorian adventurers. A truly extraordinary character, he was a spy, scholar, linguist, explorer, religious fanatic and pornographer. He was said to have learned 25 languages and 40 dialects. Burton spent much of his life as a soldier in India. With his excellent Hindustani, Persian, Gujarati, Urdu and Arabic, it was natural that he should be an active player in what became known as the “Great Game” – the espionage activity on the northwestern frontier of India popularized by Kipling in his novel “Kim.” To misquote the title of the old BBC adventure serial, he could well be described as “Dick Burton, special agent.”