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BOOKS

Unstoppable: The Incredible True Story of Siggi Wilzig

https://unstoppablesiggi.com/

Winner – Best of Los Angeles Award’s “Best Holocaust Book – 2021”

“A must-read that hopefully will be adapted for the screen. Greene lets Wilzig’s effervescent spirit shine through, and his story will appeal to a wide variety of readers.” – Library Journal

Unstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure. While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with his family to the darkest place the world has ever known: Auschwitz. Siggi used his wits to stay alive, pretending to have trade skills the Nazis could exploit to run the camp. After two death marches and near starvation, he was liberated from camp Mauthausen and went to work for the US Army hunting Nazis, a service that earned him a visa to America. On arrival, he made three vows: to never go hungry again, to support the Jewish people, and to speak out against injustice. He earned his first dollar shoveling snow after a fierce blizzard. His next job was laboring in toxic sweatshops. From these humble beginnings, he became President, Chairman and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed oil company and grew a full-service commercial bank to more than $4 billion in assets.

Siggi’s ascent from the darkest of yesterdays to the brightest of tomorrows holds sway over the imagination in this riveting narrative of grit, cunning, luck, and the determination to live life to the fullest.

Hunter Biden’s Beautiful Things is an ugly piece of fiction Only in America — and banana republics and one-party dictatorships — can naked nepotism be converted into virtue By Dominic Green

https://spectator.us/topic/hunter-biden-book-beautiful-things-cbs-interview/

“All this makes Beautiful Things more than a celebrity addict’s confession. It’s a whitewash, an attempt to spin Hunter Biden’s story back onto the familiar rails of pity and redemption – and yet another attempt by Hunter to spin some cash out of his famous last name while the media cover for him. There’s nothing of public interest in any of this, is there?”

Biden is dishonest. His memory is shot. He’s an influence-peddler pretending to be a victim, a lifelong exploiter of his public position who hides behind the lowest forms of sentimentality.

Hunter Biden, of course. You’d have to be on the wrong end of a three-day crack binge to confuse Hunter Biden with the impeccably honest, mentally agile and profoundly principled multimillionaire career politician Joe Biden.

Hunter has written an autobiography. Or rather, some desperate and shameless mercenary has ghosted it for him. It belongs to the most execrable category of literature, the political memoir — the sort of book written to launch a political career (Dreams From My Father) or, as in this case, to end one (Ten Percent for the Big Guy).

The book is called Beautiful Things and has a picture of Hunter as a child on its cover. NPR calls it ‘harrowing’ and compares it to ‘degradation porn’. Perhaps this is supposed to dissuade NPR listeners from looking too closely: NPR prefers ethical porn. But we should look closely, because Hunter Biden’s business dealings are a matter of national interest. So is the ongoing effort by a mostly pro-Democratic media to kill the story around him.

My New Book on Journalism, Exposing Corruption, and the Resulting Risks, Dangers and Societal Changes Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-new-book-on-journalism-exposing?token

On Mother’s Day in 2019, I obtained a massive archive of materials from Brazil’s most powerful officials. The reporting we did changed the country, and our lives.

In 2015, I travelled to Sweden for an event with former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein. It was billed as a conversation about modern journalism between the reporter who had broken the biggest story of the prior generation (Watergate) and the one responsible for the biggest story of the current one (NSA/Snowden revelations).

A couple of years earlier, at the height of the Snowden reporting, Bernstein and I had traded some barbed insults through the media. So before traveling to Sweden, he generously reached out to invite me to dinner in order, essentially, to clear the air so that we could have a civil conversation. The night before the event, we met for dinner at the hotel restaurant. We quickly laughed off the acrimony — it had been a couple of years prior, and both of us have had much worse said about us — and proceeded to have a perfectly enjoyable conversation.

Truth be told, I was excited to meet and talk to Bernstein. Though his Trump-era persona became conventionally fixated on melodramatizing Trump’s evils for CNN, at the time Bernstein for me was most associated with the high investigative drama of Watergate. As a kid, it was that journalistic triumph, along with the Pentagon Papers, that captured my obsessive attention and shaped my views of what journalism is: reporters and whistleblowers who risk everything and face various multi-level dangers to confront and expose corruption by the most powerful actors in society. Throughout pre-adolescence, I spent countless hours reading All the President’s Men and repeatedly watching the excellent 1976 film based on it — in which Bernstein was played by Dustin Hoffman and Bob Woodward played by Robert Redford — and that noble and exciting iconography stayed with me and shaped how I view what journalism should be. It still does.

Our two-hour conversation that night covered many topics, but one comment from Bernstein stayed with me. “I know you likely already know this,” he said, “but a story like the NSA reporting you’re doing is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so make sure to enjoy it while it lasts.”

Lessons From a Journalist’s First Encounter with Totalitarianism Hope springs eternal. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/hope-springs-eternal-lloyd-billingsley/

“The future seemed empty to Wraithby. It was easy to burn up the past, but not so easy to face a future lacking everything that had given the past substance.”

That is from Winter in Moscow, by Malcolm Muggeridge, first published in 1934, and proclaimed by historian A.J.P Taylor as the best book on Soviet Russia. In 2021, Winter in Moscow could well be the best book for what is now going on in America: surging totalitarianism, fake news, cancel culture, and wokeness. That dynamic was already on display when Muggeridge went to the USSR in 1932 as a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian.

Wokeness took the form of a general idea in narrow, empty minds, an idea pioneered by French historian Hippolyte Taine. Since these minds are incapable of questioning the idea, they become quite literally possessed. The prevailing general idea of the time was a classless, utopian society, which Wraithby, the name Muggeridge uses for himself, accurately calls the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

As Wraithby observes, “from time to time the Dictatorship of the Proletariat dramatizes its inner conflicts, assembles a cast and plays out on a stage a mimic battle. Triumphantly leads itself in chains through the streets of Moscow in honor of a mimic victory.”  In Red Square, Wraithby visits the Lenin mausoleum and reflects: “The head inside its glass case was fungoid, fresh and vivid like a fungus growing in darkness, unwholesome like a fungus, soft and poisonous.”

Noah Green – and ‘Not All Muslims Do That!’ Why the Capitol barricade crasher – and Farrakhan follower – is already out of the news.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/noah-green-and-not-all-muslims-do-jamie-glazov/

Introduction: Just recently, we witnessed U.S. authorities and the establishment media try their hardest to de-Islamize the Jihad mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, and to obscure the fact that the Jihadist perpetrator, Ahmad Al Issa, is a Muslim migrant ISIS sympathizer.

And now we see the same pattern with Noah Green, who crashed his car into a barricade at the U.S. Capitol building last Friday, hitting Capitol Police officers, one of whom was killed and a second severely injured. Green also got out of his car and charged officers with a knife. The establishment media clearly salivated at the prospect of the perpetrator being a white supporter of Donald Trump, so that they could perpetuate their false narrative about the threat of “white supremacist terrorism” all around us. But alas for the media, it was not to be: Green was a black man and a member of the Nation of Islam. And so he is, typically and expectedly, no longer in the news. President Biden heroically led the way, making no mention of Green’s ideology in his statement on the attack and, instead of condemning Green’s violence, alluding instead to the mob that stormed Capitol Hill in January. Even Facebook did its faithful leftist duty, deleting – within the blink of an eye – Green’s Facebook page, where the Capitol barricade crasher proclaimed himself a “Follower of Farrakhan.” Louis Farrakhan is, of course, the leader of the Nation of Islam, which, apart from things like stirring hatred of whites and Jews, embraces Islam’s jihad doctrine.

‘Not All Muslims Do That!’

Now that we have learned how and why the Left perpetuates Jihad Denial, we move on to examine the key arguments within its toxic agenda. As will be demonstrated below, the entire gambit is a lie and a fraud.

It’s Just the Extremists!

One of the most widely employed Jihad Denial arguments heard in our culture today is the infamous assurance that It’s not Islam, but the extremists! This proposition is interwoven with the central foundation of the Jihad Denial matrix: that it all really has nothing to do with Islam. The thinking goes like this: even when Jihadists quote their Islamic texts to justify their barbaric actions, it is not because of Islam. The terrorists, we are told, are just a very tiny minority of Muslims who have misunderstood and hijacked their own religion. They are, therefore, not even real Muslims.

How to Tell the Difference Between Real Education and Propaganda By Annie Holmquist

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/how-to-tell-the-difference-between-real-educati

The other day I ran across a passage from That Hideous Strength which seems oddly applicable to our time. A dystopian novel written by C. S. Lewis at the close of World War II, That Hideous Strength finds one of its main characters, Mark Studdock, working for N.I.C.E., an organization which pulls the strings in a controlling, totalitarian society.

Studdock is assigned to write propaganda articles for N.I.C.E., an assignment which he objects to when he receives it from his boss, Miss Hardcastle. Studdock argues that it won’t work because  newspapers “are read by educated people” too smart to be taken in by propaganda. The story continues:

‘That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘Haven’t you yet realized that it’s the other way round?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.’

Reading this, I couldn’t help but ponder how much of the American public thinks like Studdock. We are convinced that education is the panacea for all ills, and that if the masses could simply achieve one more grade level or degree, we wouldn’t have so many problems to sort through.

But what if that education is, as Miss Hardcastle implies in the passage above, the very thing blinding the eyes of the general public? Or perhaps we should say, what we call education.

The One-Party State By Richard Baehr

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_oneparty_state.html

The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, by David Horowitz

Regnery, 2021

David Horowitz has been warning for decades that the American left stands in opposition to America, in both its lack of appreciation of the principles of the American founding expressed in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and of the country’s history and achievements and economic system which have enabled the nation to grow and prosper.  America’s history is hardly blemish free, of course, with a long and troubling record with among others, Native Americans and Blacks who were brought to the country as slaves, and who faced mistreatment and discrimination after the Civil War for a century or more. But America’s record is also one of addressing and often overcoming these challenges to its founding principles, including the enormous sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of  lives in our Civil War, which resulted in the end of slavery, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, which saw new laws passed to finally finish off the Jim Crow system, eliminate imposed segregation, end discrimination in public accommodations, and create real voting rights for blacks and all citizens.

Horowitz’s latest book is clear on how the left views this history as an un-ending struggle by oppressed people of color against racism and white supremacy, which it argues has been the core value of our country since 1619.  The left argues that this requires an unraveling or destruction of all the systems of economic control and racism which exist and continue to damage marginalized groups.

Horowitz’s latest book is a stark warning on how close we now are to the left accomplishing its long-term goal of dominating American politics in perpetuity. Horowitz has always distinguished the left, with its Marxist and totalitarian orientation, visions and goals from a more conventional and mainstream liberal polity, which has always been part of the American two-party system, sometimes in power, sometimes not.  Today the left has moved from its ancestral home on the college campus which it has dominated for half a century, to gaining power and control of many other major American institutions, and now to a position of near dominance of American politics, through its control of the Democratic Party.

‘Minds Wide Shut’ Review: Dogma, Division and Distrust Can an academic world aiming for moral purity be redirected to the spirit of inquiry and toleration?By Michael S. Roth

https://www.wsj.com/articles/minds-wide-shut-review-dogma-division-and-distrust-11616795028?mod=opinion_major_pos12

Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us” is a plea for moderate, open-minded liberalism in an age of self-righteous certainty. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro are professors of literature and economics, respectively, at Northwestern University, where Mr. Schapiro is also the president. The two have taught and written together, and this book is a sequel to their “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From the Humanities.” That, too, was a plea to take the blinders off, especially aimed at economists who often tend not to pay much attention to fields other than their own.

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are academics who have spent a good deal of their lives on university campuses, and they know that things ain’t like they used to be. Their works return us to well-trodden paths of moderation and conversation, bidding us stay back from the slippery slopes that lead to dangerous dogmatisms. In this volume, literature professors are frequently taken to task, either for not realizing the greatness of the books they are privileged to teach or because they aim for moral purity and theoretical certainty.

Minds Wide Shut

By Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro
Princeton, 307 pages, $29.95

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are worried not only about the fate of parochial academic disciplines; they are concerned about the development of a culture that undermines the possibility of democratic disagreement. “We need to cultivate the skills of self-questioning, recognizing our own limitations, and attentive listening to those who differ,” they write, “all of which are necessary for respectful, productive dialogue.” The authors claim that too many faculty, students and citizens today believe in theories or take moral stances that claim to provide complete certainty about a vast domain of human experience. This commitment creates new fundamentalisms, making open-minded learning all but impossible. The fundamentalist spirit eliminates the consideration of important questions because it doesn’t tolerate the possibility that in some matters ambiguity or partial answers are the best we can do. Certainty shuts one’s mind.

THE MORAL SOCIETY BY RACHAEL KOHN *****

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/03/the-moral-society/

This book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, by one of the contemporary world’s most accomplished proponents of religion, ethics and philosophy, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died on November 7, 2020, is both ambitious in scope and richly rewarding on a topic that in the third millennium could not be more fraught.

Morality is a word that had almost vanished from the lingua franca of the swinging 1960s when Jonathan Sacks, then a student at Cambridge, enrolled in his first course on the Moral Sciences. By then the idea of morality as an objective reality was considered a quaint remnant of a previous era and the young Sacks was left bewildered by the prevailing mood of unbridled personal freedom that championed “feelings” over responsibilities. Linked with religion in the popular mind, morality already had had the stuffing kicked out of it by the cult anarchist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who proclaimed, “God is dead … We have killed him … Do we not hear the noise of the gravediggers burying God?” On April 8, 1966, Time Magazine was less subtle: on a black front cover glared the question, “Is God Dead?”

To the man who would become the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom for twenty-two years, knighted for his inter-faith work in 2005, a member of the House of Lords in 2009, and a prolific author of books on the essential role of religion in public life, we can presume the answer was a resounding No. But the surrounding culture reverberated with Nietzsche’s conviction that the Judeo-Christian era was at an end, along with its moral heritage. The French postmodernists, following Descartes’s radical scepticism, declared morality to be a matter of interpretation, leaving us with the relativisation of values. In America, the “Me Generation” put personal satisfaction and self-actualisation—the “I”—at the centre of existence, leaving the “We” of shared community values, commitments and responsibilities on a one-way descent to oblivion.

Sacks cautions that his book, which was fated to be his last, is not a work of cultural pessimism. However, in chapter after chapter, citing a now formidable corpus of literature on the decline of Western civilisation, he outlines the signposts of that cultural descent, beginning with the “outsourcing” of moral responsibility to government bodies in highly secularised democracies, to the monetisation of “happiness” in cultures driven by consumerism in an amoral free-market economy. No longer personally responsible for one’s neighbours, the individual is set adrift. Social capital diminishes and brings in its wake an epidemic of frantic materialism and profound loneliness. Self-medication and suicide rates spike in an attempt to assuage the malaise, but even the 2.41 billion active users of Facebook (as of June 2019) cannot stem the tide. “Unsocial media” actually feeds the condition of anomie (the loss of communal structures and shared values), by removing individuals from the face-to-face encounters that test those values on which society depends. The French Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim, who came to similar conclusions in the late nineteenth century when commenting on the social dislocations of the newly industrialised cities, remains relevant.

“Crisis of the Two Constitutions The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness” by Charles R. Kesler

House Divided Charles R. Kesler’s new book brings together the classical beginnings of the study of politics with the story of our nation in thought and deed.

American politics grows embittered because it is increasingly torn between two rival constitutions, two opposed cultures, two contrary ways of life. American conservatives rally around the founders’ Constitution, as amended, and as grounded in the natural and divine rights and duties of the Declaration of Independence. American liberals herald their “living Constitution,” a term that implies the original is dead or superseded, and that the fundamental political imperative is constant change or “transformation” (as President Obama called it) toward a more and more perfect social democracy, made possible by man’s increasingly god-like control of his own moral evolution. 

Crisis of the Two Constitutions details how we got to and what is at stake in our increasingly divided America.