- Mallan, Lloyd.
Russia and the Big Red Lie.
Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1959.
LCCN 59004006.
-
It is difficult for those who did not live through the era to appreciate
the extent to which Sputnik
shook the self-confidence of the West and defenders of the open
society and free markets around the world. If the West's social and economic
systems were genuinely superior to totalitarian rule and central planning,
then how had the latter, starting from a base only a half century before
where illiterate peasants were bound to the land as serfs, and in little more
than a decade after their country was devastated in World War II, managed to
pull off a technological achievement which had so far eluded the West and
was evidence of a mastery of rocketry which could put the United States
heartland at risk? Suddenly the fellow travellers and useful idiots in the
West were energised: “Now witness the power of this fully armed
and operational socialist economy!”
The author, a prolific writer on aerospace and technology, was as impressed
as anybody else by the stunning Soviet accomplishment, and undertook the
daunting task of arranging a visit to the Soviet Union to see for himself
the prowess of Soviet science and technology. After a halting start, he
secured a visa and introductions from prominent U.S. scientists to their
Soviet counterparts, and journeyed to the Soviet Union in April of 1958,
travelled extensively in the country, visiting, among other
destinations, Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Yalta, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don,
Yerevan, Kharkov, and Alma-Ata, leaving Soviet soil in June 1958.
He had extensive, on the record, meetings with a long list of eminent
Soviet scientists and engineers, many members of the Soviet Academy of
Sciences. And he came back with a conclusion utterly opposed to
that of the consensus in the West: Soviet technological prowess was
about 1% military-style brute force and 99% bluff and hoax.
As one intimately acquainted with Western technology, what he saw
in the Soviet Union was mostly comparable to the state of the art
in the West a decade earlier, and in many cases obviously copied from
Western equipment. The scientists he interviewed, who had been quoted
in the Soviet press as forecasting stunning achievements in the near
future, often, when interviewed in person, said “that's all just
theory—nobody is actually working on that”. The much-vaunted
Soviet jet and turboprop airliners he'd heard of were nowhere in
evidence anywhere he travelled, and evidence suggested that Soviet
commercial aviation lacked navigation and instrument landing systems
which were commonplace in the West.
Faced with evidence that Soviet technological accomplishments were
simply another front in a propaganda offensive aimed at persuading
the world of the superiority of communism, the author dug deeper into
the specifics of Soviet claims, and here (from the perspective of
half a century on) he got some things right and goofed on others.
He goes to great length to argue that the
Luna 1
Moon probe was a total hoax, based both on Soviet technological
capability and the evidence of repeated failure by Western
listening posts to detect its radio signals. Current thinking
is that Luna 1 was a genuine mission intended to impact on
the Moon, but the Soviet claim it was deliberately launched into
solar orbit as an “artificial planet” propaganda
aimed at covering up its missing the Moon due to a guidance
failure. (This became obvious to all when the near-identical
Luna 2
impacted the moon eight months later.) The fact that the Soviets
possessed the technology to conduct lunar missions was demonstrated
when
Luna 3
flew around the Moon in October 1959 and returned the first crude
images of its
far side
(other Luna 3 images).
Although Mallan later claimed these images were faked and contained brush
strokes, we now know they were genuine, since they are strikingly similar to
subsequent imagery, including the
albedo map
from the Clementine lunar orbiter.
“Vas you dere, Ivan?” Well, actually, yes.
Luna 3 was the “boomerang” mission around the Moon which
Mallan had heard of before visiting the Soviet Union but was told was just
a theory when he was there. And yet, had the Soviets had the ability to communicate
with Luna 1 at the distance of the Moon, there would have been no
reason to make Luna 3 loop around the Moon in order to transmit its
pictures from closer to the Earth—enigmas, enigmas, enigmas.
In other matters, the author is dead on, where distinguished Western
“experts” and “analysts” were completely
taken in by the propaganda. He correctly identifies the Soviet “ICBM”
from the 1957 Red Square parade as an intermediate range missile closer
to the German V-2 than an intercontinental weapon. (The Soviet ICBM,
the
R-7,
was indeed tested in 1957, but it was an entirely different
design and could never have been paraded on a mobile launcher;
it did not enter operational service until 1959.) He is also
almost precisely on the money when he estimates the Soviet
“ICBM arsenal” as on the order of half a dozen missiles,
while the CIA was talking about hundreds of Soviet missiles
aimed at the West and demagogues were ratcheting up rhetoric about
a “missile gap”.
You don't read this for factual revelations: everything discussed here is
now known much better, and there are many conclusions drawn in this text
from murky contemporary evidence which have proven incorrect. But if
you wish to immerse yourself in the Cold War and imagine yourself trying
to figure it all out from the sketchy and distorted information coming
from the adversary, it is very enlightening. One wishes more people had
listened to Mallan—how much folly we might have avoided.
There is also wisdom in what he got wrong. Space spectaculars can be accomplished
in a military manner by expending vast resources coercively taken from the
productive sector on centrally-planned projects with narrow goals. Consequently,
it isn't surprising a command economy such as that of the Soviet Union
managed to achieve milestones in space (while failing to deliver adequate
supplies of soap and toilet paper to workers toiling in their
“paradise”). Indeed, in many ways, the U.S.
Apollo program was even more centrally planned than its
Soviet counterpart,
and the pernicious example it set has damaged efforts to sustainably develop and
exploit space ever since.
This “Fawcett Book” is basically an issue of
Mechanix Illustrated
containing a single long article. It even includes the usual delightful
advertisements. This work is, of course, hopelessly out of print. Used
copies are available, but often at absurdly elevated prices for what
amounts to a pulp magazine. Is this work in the public domain and hence
eligible to be posted on the Web? I don't know. It may well be: it was
published before 1978, and unless its copyright was renewed in 1987 when its
original 28 year term expired, it is public domain. Otherwise, as a publication
by a “corporate author”, it will remain in copyright until
2079, which makes a mockery of the “limited Times to Authors”
provision of the U.S. Constitution. If somebody can confirm this
work is in the public domain, I'll scan it and make it available on the Web.
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- Pennington, Maura.
Great Men Are Free Men.
Seattle: CreateSpace, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-4664-4196-5.
-
This is so bad it is scarcely worth remarking upon. Hey, the
Kindle edition is (at this writing) only
a buck eighteen, but you also have to consider the value of
the time it'll take you to read it, which is less than you might
think because it's only 116 pages in the print edition, and much
of that is white space around vapid dialogue. This is really a
novella: there are
no chapters (although two “parts” which differ little
from one another, and hardly any character development. In fact, the
absence of character development is only one aspect of the more
general observation that nothing much happens at all.
A bunch of twenty-something members of the write-off
generation are living in decadent imperial D.C., all cogs
or aspiring cogs in the mindless and aimless machine of
administrative soft despotism. All, that is, except for Charlie
Winslow, who's working as a barista at a second-tier coffee
joint until he can get into graduate school, immerse himself
in philosophy, and bury himself for the rest of his life in
the library, reading great works and writing “esoteric
essays no one would read”. Charlie fashions himself a
Great Man, and with his unique intellectual perspective towering
above the molecular monolayer of his contemporaries, makes
acerbic observations upon the D.C. scene which marginally
irritates them. Finally, he snaps, and lets loose a tepid
drizzle of speaking truth to poopheads, to which they respond
“whatever”. And that's about it.
The author, who studied Russian at Dartmouth College, is a
twenty-something living in D.C. who styles herself a
libertarian. She writes a
blog at Forbes.
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- Van Buren, Peter.
We Meant Well.
New York: Henry Holt, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-8050-9436-7.
-
The author is a career Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. State
Department. In 2009–2010 he spent a year in Iraq as
leader of two embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams (ePRT)
operating out of Forward Operating Bases (FOB) which were basically
crusader forts in a hostile Iraqi wilderness: America inside,
trouble outside. Unlike “fobbits” who rarely ventured
off base, the author and his team were charged with engaging the
local population to carry out “Lines of Effort” dreamed up
by pointy-heads back at the palatial embassy in Baghdad or in Washington
to the end of winning the “hearts and minds” of the
population and “nation building”. The Iraqis were so
appreciative of these efforts that they regularly attacked the FOB
with mortar fire and mounted improvised explosive device (IED)
and sniper attacks on those who ventured out beyond the wire.
If the whole thing were not so tawdry and tragic, the recounting
of the author's experiences would be hilariously funny. If you
imagine it to be a Waugh novel and read it with a dark sense of humour,
it is wickedly amusing, but then one remembers that real people
are dying and suffering grievous injuries, the Iraqi population
are being treated as props in public relation stunts by the
occupiers and deprived of any hope of bettering themselves, and
all of this vast fraudulent squandering of resources is being
paid for by long-suffering U.S. taxpayers or money
borrowed from China and Japan, further steering the imperial power
toward a debt end.
The story is told in brief chapters, each recounting a specific incident
or aspect of life in Iraq. The common thread, which stretches back over
millennia, is that imperial powers attempting to do good by those
they subjugate will always find themselves outwitted by wily oriental
gentlemen whose ancestors have spent millennia learning how to game
the systems imposed by the despotisms under which they have lived. As
a result, the millions poured down the rathole of “Provincial
Reconstruction” predictably flows into the pockets of the
bosses in the communities who set up front organisations for whatever
harebrained schemes the occupiers dream up. As long as the “project”
results in a ribbon-cutting ceremony covered by the press (who may, of
course, be given an incentive to show up by being paid) and an
impressive PowerPoint presentation for the FOB commander to help
him toward his next promotion, it's deemed a success and, hey,
there's a new Line of Effort from the embassy that demands
another project: let's teach widows beekeeping (p. 137)—it'll
only cost US$1600 per person, and each widow can expect to make
US$200 a year from the honey—what a deal!
The author is clearly a creature of the Foreign Service and scarcely conceals
his scorn for the military who are tasked with keeping him alive in a war
zone and the politicians who define the tasks he is charged with carrying
out. Still, the raw folly of “nation building” and the
obdurate somnambulant stupidity of those who believe that building milk
processing plants or putting on art exhibitions in a war zone will quickly
convert people none of whom have a single ancestor who has ever lived in
a consensually-governed society with the rule of law to model citizens
in a year or two is stunningly evident.
Why are empires always so dumb? When they attain a certain stage of overreach,
they seem to always assume they can instill their own unique culture in those
they conquer. And yet, as
Kipling wrote in 1899:
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
When will policy makers become as wise as the mindless mechanisms of
biology? When an irritant invades an organism and it can't
be eliminated, the usual reaction is to surround it with an inert
barrier which keeps it from causing further harm. “Nation
building” is folly; far better to bomb them if they
misbehave, then build a wall around the whole godforsaken place
and bomb them again if any of them get out and cause any further
mischief. Call it “biomimetic foreign policy”—encyst
upon it!
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- Bracken, Matthew.
Domestic Enemies.
Orange Park, FL: Steelcutter Publishing, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-9728310-2-4.
-
This is the second novel in the author's “Enemies”
trilogy, which began with
Enemies Foreign and Domestic (EFAD)
(December 2009). In
After America (August 2011)
Mark Steyn argues that if present trends continue (and
that's the way to bet), within the lives of those
now entering the workforce in the United States (or, at least
attempting to do so, given the parlous state of the economy)
what their parents called the “American dream”
will have been extinguished and turned into a nightmare along
the lines of Latin American authoritarian states: bifurcation of
the society into a small, wealthy élite within their
walled and gated communities and impoverished masses living
in squalor and gang-ruled “no go” zones where
civil society has collapsed.
This book picks up the story six years after the conclusion of
EFAD. Ranya Bardiwell has foolishly attempted to return to the
United States and been apprehended and sent to a detention and
labour camp, her son taken from her at birth. When she manages
to escape from the camp, she tracks down her son as having been
given for adoption to the family of an FBI agent in New Mexico,
and following the trail she becomes embroiled in the seething
political storm of Nuevo Mexico,
where separatist forces have taken power and seized upon the
weakness of the Washington regime to advance their agenda of
rolling back the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
and creating a nation of
“Aztlan”
from the territories ceded by Mexico in that treaty.
As the story progresses, we see the endpoint of the
reconquista in
New Mexico, Los Angeles, and San Diego, and how
opportunistic players on all sides seek to exploit
the chaos and plunder the dwindling wealth of the dying
empire for themselves. I'm not going to get into the
plot or characters because almost anything I say would
be a spoiler and this story does not deserve to be
spoilt—it should be savoured. I consider it
to be completely plausible—in the aftermath
of a financial collapse and breakdown of central authority,
the consequences of mass illegal immigration, “diversity”,
and “multiculturalism” could, and indeed will
likely lead to the kind of outcome sketched here. I found only
one technical quibble in the entire novel (a turbine-powered
plane “coughing and belching before catching”),
but that's just worth a chuckle and doesn't detract in any
way from the story. This the first thriller I recall reading
in which a precocious five year old plays a central part in
the story in a perfectly believable way, and told from his
own perspective.
This book is perfectly accessible if read stand-alone, but I strongly
recommend reading EFAD first—it not only
sets the stage for the mid-collapse America in which this
story plays out, but also provides the back story for Ranya
Bardiwell and Bob Bullard who figure so prominently here.
Extended
excerpts
of this and the author's other novels are available online at the
author's Web site.
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