Blogging the democratic revolution
On September 8, 1999, several hundred pounds of explosive detonated on the ground floor of a nine-story apartment building in the southwestern Moscow neighborhood of Pechatniki. 94 people were killed and 150 wounded. Five days later, a second building was leveled, this time on Kashirskoye Highway, again in the southern region of the city. In the collapse of the eight-story structure, 118 people were killed and 200 wounded. Almost immediately, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia would undertake a second massive military assault on the breakaway province of Chechnya, even though the Chechen rebels did not take responsibility for…
Have you seen the Venezuelan movie, Secuestro Express? It’s my favorite current movie. It’s also the most popular Venezuelan movie in history. The only other Venezuelan movie I have seen is Manuela Saenz, and that was weakly done. Secuestro Express is in a league with the best Mexican and Colombian movies, a real chair-gripping suspense and drama. I was screaming by the end of it. It documents a quick and dirty kidnapping of two rich young people – one callow, one not – by a gang of at least four thugs from the slums, one of whom has a glint…
What do most Americans think of when they hear the terms “Middle East” or “Arab world”? Perhaps images of angry young men wearing green head bands, marching to their death, in the West Bank, or car bombs in Baghdad. Others might think of imposing sight of Saddam Hussein or Yasser Arafat; the more informed might imagine the image of Muamar al-Qaddafi, decked out in his flamboyant robes. Many might imagine impoverished beduins or angry mobs protesting against the Zionist Enemy as they carry placards as they advance down a beige boulevard in Cairo or Damascus. Few would imagine Rami Khoury,…
I’m totally swamped with reading for my so-called “formal education,” but since it’s mostly on democracy and terrorism perhaps you all will be interested in checking out the books that I myself am reading at this time. – Democratization: A Critical Introduction: Very basic. If you’ve been reading this site, then you will easily understand all of the major concepts and theories introduced in this book. – The Dynamics of Democratization : Elites, Civil Society and the Transition Process: I like this one a bit more than the above, because it focuses a lot on the role of elites and…
It’s only lately with all this free time on my hands that I’ve been able to regularly read over Publius’ blogroll, so I stopped over at Tim Russo’s Democracy Guy blog to see if he was talking at all about his time working for NDI in Armenia. More than ever, it seems. He’s self-publishing a book online about his time doing democracy activism, providing slice-of-life details and funny anecdotes from the ground. The latest is about trying co-exist with scorpions, and failign. You’ll like it. He’s put up six chapters so far. Check them out here: 1, 2, 3, 4,…
I’m going to be starting a new feature here at Publius, where I take excerpts from books I’m reading or have read and post them along with some additional background or commentary. The first book we’ll be going over will be Kremlin Rising, a detailed look at Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in particular the years since the beginning of Putin’s rule. Written by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser of the Washington Post, it does not just focus on Putin himself, but an array of things troubling the country such as Chechnya, the AIDS epidemic, the…
Speaking from Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa really gave it to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. The short news account is here. It follows recent condemnations of the Venezuelan dictator by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, here.
I’ve been re-reading a few passages from Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza’s excellent book about the debilitating myths frequently found in Latin America that harm its development. The book is called ‘The Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.’ It has whole chapters on entitlement, Castro worship, liberation theology, nationalism, poverty, blaming the gringos, consorting with Sandalistas, and other useless, unconstructive things. Today I found something in the Cuban state press about Argentina that so haunted me I thought I would share it here. Argentina is blaming its shopkeepers for inflation, the mighty bete noire…
The great V.S. Naipaul, whose glorious fiction and non-fiction books critically delve into the world of the revolutionary countries now democratizing, shares his insights in a truly fascinating interview with the New York Times. It’s a must-read if you like literature or revolution. Read it here.
U.S. blogger Steven Vincent, whose book ‘In The Red Zone’ about Iraq, was kidnapped by Iraqi terrorists dressed as police in Basra and shot dead several times. His blog and his books were critical of terrorist infiltration into the Iraqi government, and were favorably reviewed. What an atrocity. What a damn shame. If you are not familiar with Steven Vincent, you can read about him here and here. UPDATE – with a hat tip to M: This recent essay about the sexiness of democracy in the Middle East is exquisite. What a terrible tragedy this writer’s death is! Don’t miss…
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has created another useless union this week, positively thrilling the Canadian press, but in Latin America, there is nothing new about it. So here is the deal: In Argentina during the 1990s, people used to joke about the extent of something known as ‘the corporate republic’ or ‘corporate state.’ The corporate state is not about companies but the expansion of medieval-guild-like organizations designed to keep individual people out of the system in the name of some exclusive collective. That’s what this new Chavez union is. But despite what Chavez claims, he’s hardly first to the party. In…
Alvaro Vargas Llosa, an author of The Complete Guide To The Perfect Latin American Idiot (it has a whole chapter on Castro worship) and now, Liberty for Latin America: How to undo 500 years of state oppression will be interviewed by Jim Lehrer of PBS. Alvaro Vargas Llosa is one of the world’s foremost experts on Latin America. Like Hernando de Soto, he’s a Peruvian, and he’s now at the Independent Institute, in Oakland. When people ask me where I learned about the place, I always point in his direction. He is one of the most brilliant and interesting intellectuals…
I just got done reading David McDuff’s eleventh installment of Dragons and Democracy. Always a good read!
Damn Nathan for hitting me with this chain letter! I’ll get him back for it! But who can refuse a chain letter? Plus, it’s about books, so instead of me writing about secret crushes and first kisses, I’ll be pointing you in the direction of good bathroom material. He did forward this to me to see my response, so here we go.
With everything going on, I haven’t been able to keep up as much with the usual blogs I read before Lebanon unfolded. So let me direct you to this series of posts I have been keeping up with called Dragons and Democracy, by David McDuff. He’s already on part 9, so you can scroll the the bottom of the post to get to the rest.
A series of posts I have been reading over at David McDuff’s blog. Part six is up, and he has links to the other five parts. Check that out.
David McDuff — I got it right this time — posts part 3 of his series Dragons and Democracy. The new Utopianism, if such it can be called, consists mainly of a rejection of reason: while the socialists at least had arguments and a program, the new anticapitalists ???????seem to have sunk to a lower mental level.??????? There are roots and precedents and roots for this malaise. Conquest points to the emotionalism of postwar French intellectual life, when ???????much of the emotional drive had not come so much from a devotion to the proclaimed social transformation as from a hatred…
That is the name of the new series of posts that David McDuff is doing. You may remember one of his other series entitled Going Back, where he discussed his impressions of the Soviet Union while living there in the sixties. This current series is his reflections on essays in the book The Dragons of Expectation – Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, which is about many things from the human mindset on ideas to history to democracy. The first post is located here and the next here.
I was looking at my shelf of books that I have read over the past three years, and I noticed a couple in particular that I had not seen or thought about in quite a while. These are two books that helped stimulate the early growth stages of my political awareness. The first one is a book by Lawrence Eubank called The Case Against Capital. What I like about this book is that it completely refutes Marxist economic theory (and what is not to like about that?). While the fall of the Soviet Union pretty much collapsed all serious consideration…
Laurence found a cool sounding book a posted a review he found. It’s called “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World????????s Last Dictators by 2025.” Twenty years wait? I’ll be an old by then. Speaking of which, I haven’t said much about myself, so before I hit the sack, how about making the comments for this post where you all guess my age?