- von Dach, Hans. Total Resistance. Boulder, CO:
Paladin Press, [1958] 1965. ISBN 0-87364-021-7.
- This is an English translation
of Swiss Army Major von Dach's Der totale Widerstand — Kleinkriegsanleitung
für jedermann, published in 1958 by the Swiss
Non-commissioned Officers' Association. It remains one of
the best manuals for guerrilla warfare and civilian resistance to
enemy occupation in developed countries. This is not a book for
the faint-hearted: von Dach does not shrink from practical advice
such as, “Fire upon the driver and the assistant driver with an air
rifle. …the force of the projectile is great
enough to wound them so that you can dispose of them right afterward
with a bayonet.” and “The simplest and surest way to dispose of guards
noiselessly is to kill them with an ax. Do not use the sharp edge but
the blunt end of the ax.” There is strategic wisdom as well—making
the case for a general public uprising when the enemy is near defeat,
he observes, “This way you can also prevent your country from being
occupied again even though by friendly forces. Past experience shows
that even ‘allies’ and ‘liberators’ cannot be removed so easily.
At least, it's harder to get them to leave than to enter.”
- Seuss, Dr. [Theodor Seuss Geisel]. Horton Hears a Who! New York:
Random House, 1954. ISBN 0-679-80003-4.
-
- Ross, John F. Unintended
Consequences. St. Louis: Accurate Press,
1996. ISBN 1-888118-04-0.
- I don't know about you, but when I hear the phrases
“first novel” and “small press” applied to the same book, I'm apt
to emit an involuntary groan, followed by a wince upon hearing said
volume is more than 860 pages in length. John Ross has created
the rarest of exceptions to this prejudice. This is a big,
sprawling, complicated novel with a multitude of characters (real
and fictional) and a plot which spans most of the 20th century, and
it works. What's even more astonishing is that it describes
an armed insurrection against the United States government which is
almost plausible. The information age has changed warfare at
the national level beyond recognition; Ross explores what civil
war might look like in the 21st century. The book is virtually
free of typographical errors and I only noted a few factual errors—few
bestsellers from the largest publishers manifest such attention to
detail. Some readers may find this novel intensely offensive—the
philosophy, morality, and tolerance for violence may be deemed “out
of the mainstream” and some of the characterisations in the last
200 pages may be taken as embodying racial stereotypes—you have
been warned.
- Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts: Mao's
Secret Famine. New York: Henry Holt, [1996]
1998. ISBN 0-8050-5668-8.
-
- Hirshfeld, Alan W. Parallax. New York: Henry Holt,
2001. ISBN 0-8050-7133-4.
-
- Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its
Enemies. Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato.
5th ed., rev. Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1945,
1950, 1952, 1957, 1962] 1966. ISBN 0-691-01968-1.
- The two hundred intricately-argued pages of main text
are accompanied by more than a hundred pages of notes in small type.
Popper states that “The text of the book is self-contained and may be
read without these Notes. However, a considerable amount of material
which is likely to interest all readers of the book will be found
here, as well as some references and controversies which may not be of
general interest.” My recommendation? Read the notes. If
you skip them, you'll miss Popper's characterisation of Plato as the
first philosopher to adopt a geometrical (as opposed to arithmetic)
model of the world along with his speculations based on the sum of
the square roots of 2 and 3 (known to Plato) differing from π
by less than 1.5 parts per thousand (Note 9 to Chapter 6), or the
exquisitely lucid exposition (written in 1942!) of why international
law and institutions must ultimately defend the rights of human
individuals as opposed to the sovereignty of nation states
(Note 7 to Chapter 9). The second volume, which dissects the theories
of Hegel and Marx, is currently out of print in the U.S. but a U.K. edition is available.
- Carlos [Ilich Ramírez Sánchez]. L'Islam révolutionnaire. Textes
et propos recueillis, rassemblés et présentés par Jean-Michel
Vernochet. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2003. ISBN 2-268-04433-5.
- Prior to his capture in Sudan in 1994 and
“exfiltration” to a prison in France by the French DST, Carlos
(“the Jackal”), nom de guerre of Venezuelan-born
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a true red diaper baby, his brothers
were named “Vladimir” and “Lenin”) was one of the most notorious and elusive
terrorists of the latter part of the twentieth century.
This is a collection of his writings and interviews from prison,
mostly dating from the early months of 2003. I didn't plan it that
way, but I found reading Carlos immediately after Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies
(above) extremely enlightening, particularly in explaining the
rather mysterious emerging informal alliance among Western leftists
and intellectuals, the political wing of Islam, the remaining dribs
and drabs of Marxism, and third world kleptocratic and theocratic
dictators. Unlike some Western news media, Carlos doesn't shrink
from the word “terrorism”, although he prefers to be referred to
as a “militant revolutionary”, but this is in many ways a deeply
conservative book. Carlos decries Western popular culture and its
assault on traditional morality and family values in words which
wouldn't seem out of place in a Heritage Foundation white paper.
A convert to Islam in 1975, he admits he paid little attention to
the duties and restrictions of his new religion until much later.
He now believes that only Islam provides the framework to resist
what he describes as U.S. totalitarian imperialism. Essentially,
he's exchanged utopian Marxism for Islam as a comprehensive belief
system. Now consider Popper: the essence of what he terms the
open society, dating back to the Athens of Pericles, is
the absence of any utopian vision, or plan, or theory of
historical inevitability, religious or otherwise. Open societies
have learned to distinguish physical laws (discovered through the
scientific method) from social laws (or conventions), which are
made by fallible humans and evolve as societies do. The sense
of uncertainty and requirement for personal responsibility which
come with an open society, replacing the certainties of tribal life
and taboos which humans evolved with, induce what Popper calls the
“strain of civilisation”, motivating utopian social engineers from
Plato through Marx to attempt to create an ideal society, an endpoint
of human social evolution, forever frozen in time. Look at Carlos;
he finds the open-ended, make your own rules, everything's open
to revision outlook of Western civilisation repellent. Communism
having failed, he seizes upon Islam as a replacement. Now consider
the motley anti-Western alliance I mentioned earlier. What unifies
them is simply that they're anti-Western: Popper's enemies
of the open society. All have a vision of a utopian society (albeit
very different from one another), and all share a visceral disdain
for Western civilisation, which doesn't need no steenkin' utopias
but rather proceeds incrementally toward its goals, in a massively
parallel trial and error fashion, precisely as the free market drives
improvements in products and services.
- McMath, Robert M. and Thom Forbes. What Were They Thinking?. New
York: Three Rivers Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8129-3203-X.
-