- Suprynowicz, Vin.
The Ballad of Carl Drega.
Reno: Mountain Media, 2002.
ISBN 978-0-9670259-2-6.
-
I was about write “the author is the most prominent
libertarian writing for the legacy media today”, but
in fact, to my knowledge, he is the only genuine
libertarian employed by a major metropolitan newspaper
(the Las Vegas Review-Journal), where he writes
editorials
and columns, the latter syndicated to a number of other
newspapers. This book, like his earlier
Send In The Waco Killers,
is a collection of these writings, plus letters from readers
and replies, along with other commentary. This volume covers
the period from 1994 through the end of 2001, and contains his
columns reacting to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001,
which set him at odds with a number of other prominent libertarians.
Suprynowicz is not one of those go-along, get-along people
L. Neil Smith
describes as “nerf libertarians”. He
is a hard-edged lover of individual liberty, and defends it
fiercely in all of its aspects here. As much of the content
of the book was written as columns to be published weekly,
collected by topic rather than chronologically, it
may occasionally seem repetitive if you read the whole book
cover to cover. It is best enjoyed a little at a time, which is
why it did not appear here until years after I started to read it.
If you're a champion of liberty who is prone to hypertension,
you may want to increase your blood pressure medication
before reading some of the stories recounted here. The
author's prognosis for individual freedom in the U.S. seems
to verge upon despair; in this I concur, which is why I no longer
live there, but still it's depressing for people everywhere. Chapter 9
(pp. 441–476) is a collection of the “Greatest
Hits from the Mailbag”, a collection of real mail (and
hilarious replies) akin to Fourmilab's own
Titanium Cranium Awards.
This book is now out of print, and used copies currently sell at
almost twice the original cover price.
- War Department.
Instructions for American
Servicemen in Britain.
Oxford: Bodelian Library, [1942] 2004.
ISBN 978-1-85124-085-2.
-
Shortly after the entry of the United States into the European
war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. troops began
to arrive in Britain in 1942. Although more than two years would
elapse before the D-Day invasion of Normandy, an ever-increasing
number of “overpaid, oversexed, and over here”
American troops would establish air bases, build logistics for
the eventual invasion, and provide liaison with the
British command.
This little (31 page, small format) book reproduces a document
originally furnished to U.S. troops embarking for Britain as
seven pages of typescript. It provides a delightful look at
how Americans perceived the British at the epoch, and also how
they saw themselves—there's even an admonishment to
soldiers of Irish ancestry not to look upon the English as
their hereditary enemies, and a note that the American colloquialism
“I look like a bum” means something much different
in an English pub. A handy table helps Yanks puzzle out the
bewildering British money.
Companion volumes were subsequently published for troops
bound for
Iraq (yes, in 1943!) and
France; I'll get to them in due
course.
- Klemperer, Victor.
I Will Bear Witness. Vol. 1.
New York: Modern Library, [1933–1941, 1995] 1998.
ISBN 978-0-375-75378-7.
-
This book is simultaneously tedious, depressing, and profoundly
enlightening. The author (a cousin of the conductor
Otto Klemperer) was a respected professor of Romance languages
and literature at the Technical University of Dresden when
Hitler came to power in 1933. Although the son of a Reform
rabbi, Klemperer had been baptised in a Christian church and
considered himself a protestant Christian and entirely
German. He volunteered for the German army in World War I
and served at the front in the artillery and later, after
recovering from a serious illness, in the army book
censorship office on the Eastern
front. As a fully assimilated German, he opposed all appeals
to racial identity politics, Zionist as well as Nazi.
Despite his conversion to protestantism, military service
to Germany, exalted rank as a professor, and decades of
marriage to a woman deemed “Aryan”
under the racial laws promulgated by the
Nazis, Klemperer was considered a “full-blooded
Jew” and was subject to ever-escalating harassment,
persecution, humiliation, and expropriation as the Nazis
tightened their grip on Germany. As civil society
spiralled toward barbarism, Klemperer lost his job, his car,
his telephone, his house, his freedom of movement, the
right to shop in “Aryan stores”, access to
public and lending libraries, and even the typewriter on
which he continued to write in the hope of maintaining his
sanity. His world shrank from that of a cosmopolitan
professor fluent in many European languages to a single
“Jews' house” in Dresden, shared with other
once-prosperous families similarly evicted from their homes.
His family and acquaintances dwindle as, one after another,
they opt for emigration, leaving only the author and his
wife still in Germany (due to lack of
opportunities, but also to an inertia and sense of
fatalism evident in the narrative). Slowly the author's
sense of Germanness dissipates as he comes to believe that
what is happening in Germany is not an aberration but somehow
deeply rooted in the German character, and that Hitler embodies
beliefs widespread among the population which were previously invisible
before becoming so starkly manifest. Klemperer is
imprisoned for eight days in 1941 for a blackout violation
for which a non-Jew would have received a warning or a
small fine, and his prison journal, written a few days
after his release, is a matter of fact portrayal of how
an encounter with the all-powerful and arbitrary state
reduces the individual to a mental servitude more pernicious
than physical incarceration.
I have never read any book which provides such a visceral
sense of what it is like to live in a totalitarian
society and how quickly all notions of justice,
rights, and human dignity can evaporate when a
charismatic leader is empowered by a mob in thrall to
his rhetoric. Apart from the description of the persecution
the author's family and acquaintances suffered
themselves, he turns a keen philologist's eye on
the
language of the Third Reich, and observes how the
corruption of the regime is reflected in the corruption
of the words which make up its propaganda.
Ayn Rand's fictional (although to some extent autobiographical)
We the Living provides a similar
sense of life under tyranny, but this is the real thing,
written as events happened, with no knowledge of how it was
all going to come out, and is, as a consequence, uniquely
compelling. Klemperer wrote these diaries with no intention
of their being published: they were, at most, the raw material
for an autobiography he hoped eventually to write, so when
you read these words you're perceiving how a Jew in Nazi Germany
perceived life day to day, and how what historians consider epochal
events in retrospect are quite naturally interpreted by those hearing
of them for the first time in the light of “What does this mean
for me?”
The author was a prolific diarist who wrote thousands of
pages from the early 1900s throughout his
long life. The original 1995 German publication of the
1933–1945 diaries as
Ich will Zeugnis
ablegen bis zum letzten
was a substantial abridgement of the original document
and even so ran to almost 1700 pages. This English
translation further abridges the diaries and still
often seems repetitive. End notes provide historical
context, identify the many people who figure in the diary,
and translate the foreign phrases the author liberally
sprinkles among the text.
I will certainly read Volume 2,
which covers the years 1942–1945, but probably not
right away—after this powerful narrative, I'm
inclined toward lighter works for a while.
- Smith, Edward E.
Masters of the Vortex.
New York: Pyramid Books, [1960] 1968.
ISBN 978-0-515-02230-8.
-
This novel is set in the Galactic Patrol universe, but is not part of
the
Lensman saga—the
events take place an unspecified time after the conclusion
of that chronicle. Galactic civilisation depends upon atomic
power, but as Robert A. Heinlein (to whom this book is
dedicated) observed,
“Blowups
Happen”, and for
inexplicable reasons atomic power stations randomly erupt into
deadly self-sustaining nuclear vortices, threatening to ultimately
consume the planets they ravage. (Note that in the
technophilic and optimistic universe of the Galactic Patrol,
and the can-do society its creator inhabited, the thought
that such a downside of an energy technology essential to
civilisation would cause its renunciation never enters the mind.)
When a freak vortex accident kills ace nucleonicist Neal Cloud's
family, he swears a personal vendetta against the vortices and
vows to destroy them or be destroyed trying. This mild-mannered
scientist who failed the Lensman entry examination re-invents
himself as “Storm Cloud, the Vortex Blaster”, and in
his eponymous ship flits off to rid the galaxy of the
atomic plague. This is Doc Smith space opera, so you can be
sure there are pirates, zwilniks, crooked politicians,
blasters, space axes, and aliens of all persuasions in
abundance—not to mention timeless dialogue like:
“Eureka! Good evening, folks.”
“Eureka? I hope you rot in hell, Graves…”
“This isn't Graves. Cloud. Storm Cloud, the
Vortex Blaster, investigating…”
“Oh, Bob, the patrol!” the girl screamed.
It wouldn't be Doc Smith if it weren't prophetic, and in this book
published in the year in which the Original Nixon was to lose the
presidential election to John F. Kennedy, we catch a hint of a
“New Nixon” as the intrepid Vortex Blaster visits the
planet Nixson II on p. 77. While not as awe inspiring in scope
as the Lensman novels, this is a finely crafted yarn which combines a
central puzzle with many threads exploring characteristics of alien
cultures (never cross an adolescent cat-woman from Vegia!),
the ultimate power of human consciousness, and the eternal question never
far from the mind of the main audience of science fiction: whether a
nerdy brainiac can find a soulmate somewhere out there in the
spacelanes.
If you're unacquainted with the Lensman universe, this is not
the place to start, but once you've worked your way through,
it's a delightful lagniappe to round out the epic.
Unlike the Lensman series, this book remains out of print.
Used copies are readily available although sometimes pricey.
For those with access to the gizmo, a
Kindle edition is available.
- Simon, Roger L.
Blacklisting Myself.
New York: Encounter Books, 2008.
ISBN 978-1-59403-247-9.
-
The author arrived in Hollywood in the tumultuous year of
1968,
fired by his allegiance to the New Left and experience in the civil
rights struggle in the South to bring his activism to the screen and,
at the same time, driven by his ambition to make it big in the movie
business. Unlike the multitudes who arrive starry-eyed in tinseltown
only to be frustrated trying to “break in”, Simon
succeeded, both as a screenwriter (he was nominated
for an Oscar for his screen adaptation of
Enemies:
A Love Story and as a novelist, best known for his
Moses Wine detective fiction. One of the Moses Wine
novels,
The Big Fix,
made it to the screen, with Simon also writing the screenplay.
Such has been his tangible success that the
author today lives in the Hollywood Hills house once shared
by Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.
This is in large part a memoir of a life in Hollywood, with
pull-no-punches anecdotes about the celebrities and
players in the industry, and the often poisonous culture
of the movie business. But is also the story of the author's
political evolution from the New Left through Hollywood
radical chic (he used to hang with the Black Panthers)
and eventual conversion to neo-conservatism which
has made him a “Hollywood apostate” and
which he describes on the first page of the book as
“the ideological equivalent of a sex change
operation”. He describes how two key
events—the O. J. Simpson trial and the terrorist attacks of
2001—caused him to question assumptions he'd always
taken as received wisdom and how, once he did start to
think for himself instead of nodding in agreement with
the monolithic leftist consensus in Hollywood, began
to perceive and be appalled by the hypocrisy not only
in the beliefs of his colleagues but between their
lifestyles and the values they purported to champion.
(While Simon has become a staunch supporter of efforts,
military and other, to meet the threat of Islamic
aggression and considers himself a fiscal conservative,
he remains as much on the left as ever when it comes
to social issues. But, as he describes, any dissent whatsoever
from the Hollywood leftist consensus is enough to put
one beyond the pale among the smart set, and possibly
injure the career of even somebody as well-established
as he.)
While never suggesting that he or anybody else has been the victim of
a formal blacklist like that of suspected Communist sympathisers in
the 1940s and 1950s, he does describe how those who dissent often
feign support for leftist causes or simply avoid politically charged
discussions to protect their careers. Simon was one of the first
Hollywood figures to jump in as a blogger, and has since reinvented
himself as a New Media entrepreneur, founding
Pajamas Media and
its associated ventures; he continues to
actively blog.
An early adopter of technology since the days of the
Osborne 1 and CompuServe forums, he believes that new
technology provides the means for an end-run around Hollywood
groupthink, but by itself is insufficient (p. 177):
The answer to the problem of Hollywood for those of a
more conservative or centrist bent is to go make movies
of their own. Of course, to do so means finding financing
and distribution. Today's technologies are making that
simpler. Cameras and editing equipment cost a pittance.
Distribution is at hand for the price of a URL. All that's
left is the creativity. Unfortunately, that's the
difficult part.
A video interview
with the author is available.