Some not so obvious opinions

At least one reader of RtO noticed the outbreak of reviews of books about the Russo-German war. There will be more, and all readers who don't care are invited to skip over and wait for more Found Sounds or something.

Here's what's behind the outbreak.

My real interest is not the war itself. In fact, I find a good deal of the interest in the Eastern Front kind of creepy. Too many readers (who leave their spoor) seem to be too excited by the skill and victories of the Germans.

But, I am a baby boomer, raised on Cold War hysteria. It is my opinion that the Cold War cannot be understood until you understand the position of the Bolsheviks. My opinions about this were formed when I was around 25 years old, starting from a remark in one of Alan Taylor's essays and carrying on from there. I discovered that the narrative I was taught at Catholic school, and later, was wildly different from what appeared to be the facts.

Of course, in the '50s and '60s, facts about Bolshevism were hard to verify, due largely to the secretiveness of the regime, but secondarily to the deliberate falsehoods of the 100% Americans.

Now, in retirement, I have leisure to revisit my opinions. When I first studied the matter, some of the official histories of the western countries had not been completed (for example, Harry Hinsley's important history of British intelligence was only partly published). Now they have been, and, even better, at least some of the Soviet archives have been opened and some memoirs that were suppressed have been rewritten or published at last.

I have been reading and studying the tsarist and Bolshevik eras off and on for all these 45 years. Now I have a 3-foot stack of books about the Russo-German war to work my way through. (I've gone less than a foot so far.)

Here are the propositions that I came up with that I want to test:

1. The United States had no impact on the outcome of the war in Europe. The British pinned the Germans and then the Reds beat them, but before the US became a combatant,.

2. It was reasonable for the USSR to occupy the former aggressive fascist states for its future security.

3. The Bolsheviks were, unlike the tsars, not militarily aggressive. Between their defeat before Warsaw in 1920 and invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Red Army showed great reluctance to step outside its own borders. Only pressure from aggressive fascist states got it to do so.

4. Although the Bolsheviks would happily have subverted as many countries as they could manage (or what else was the Comintern for?), they were unwilling to export communism by military force. Time after time, the Russian communists stood by while foreign communists were slaughtered.

5. Since there was no aggressive foreign policy, it must be that domestic issues drove the actions of the USSR government and Soviet Communist party. The Number 1 issue was agriculture. It was the failure of Soviet agricultural policy that brought down the system.

6. Taking a long view, the Bolshevik revolution hardly happened. The preoccupations of tsarist Russia and its policies (aside from external military aggression) were the preoccupations of the Bolsheviks, and the policies were about the same, too.

I actually started this review about 10 years ago, concentrating on the security policies of the European states in the '30s. That was the last time I had to make a large adjustment in my views of Bolshevism.

I had, until then, accepted the common view that Stalin was taking advantage of the turmoil of the fascist aggression to grab provinces. Call this the doughty-little-Finland view.

I learned, from two obscure books by a Scottish Communist lawyer, what you will not learn in the conventional histories: That before it invaded Finland, the USSR attempted to buy Hango.

This was intended defensively, because the Russians were worried about the danger to Leningrad.

That was when, for me, the penny dropped and I realized that the Red Army was so far from being an aggressive instrument that it was reluctant to go outside its own borders. The scrupulous return to old borders after repulsing the Kwantung Army in Mongolia about the same time nailed it down.

Once you get that, the American Cold War narrative falls apart.

More crap from China

The United States has imported food from China since we have been a country, beginning with tea.

Contamination has always been a problem. China lost the tea market to Japan and India  because of quality issues.

Around 1900, when Petaluma was the center of western egg production, Chinese eggs were being imported to San Francisco for a penny for six dozen. My source -- Jack London, of all people -- did not mention contamination, but at that price there's reason to be suspicious.

An astonishing proportion of America's food now comes from China -- despite American agriculture's claims to be so efficient -- from apples to honey to dog food.

We are told by the free traders that this is good for consumers because competition is good, right? It's crap but, hey, it's cheap crap.

The latest Chinese food scandal has gotten minimal attention in the US press. The New York Times ran a skimpy story on May 3 based on a government press release and a couple of meaningless Chinaman-in-the-street quotes. Other papers did less, and the story of rat passing as lamb appeared on Yahoo! and a few sensationalistic websites.

The Guardian did by far the most complete report, but it leaves much to wonder about. But, here's news you can use: How to tell rat from lamb.

But even the Guardian's three stories leave plenty of questions whose answers are far from obvious.

First, authorities seized 20,000 metric tons of fake lamb, or 44 million pounds. That's what was in the pipeline, no word on how much of this stuff had already been eaten.

How do crooks manage this? They must have been splendid managers. I figure that 44,000,000 pounds of rat cutlets would require something on the order of 150,000,000 rats. The campaign against the Four Vermin was supposed to have knocked down the rat population.

So, first, how do you come by 150,000,000 rats without anyone's noticing? Where do you process it and who does it? There must have been thousands of rat butchers who took their renminbei without gossiping.

Hard to believe.

And where do you dispose of the skins and bones? As the video linked by the Guardian shows, there was quite a bit of labor involved. The scraps of rat were assembled with something the Chinese government calls "white meat" but appears to be fat. Where did that come from?

Was it hand labor that assembled the marbled rat cutlets, or did some ingenious Chinese engineer mechanize the fraud?

I have long advocated a market-based solution to pollution: If you can convince old Chinese guys that X will improve their sex drive, they will not only get rid of X for you (like rhinocerous horn), they will drive X to extinction. And make you rich to boot.

The flip side of this is, where is the profit in rat meat? Wouldn't it be easier just to raise a sheep?

I get where the scammers obtaned their fox and mink meat. The fur-farms probably were happy to give it away or even to pay to have it taken off. But rats seem more trouble than they are worth. 

Book Review 278: Thunder on the Dnepr

THUNDER ON THE DNEPR: Zhukov-Stalin and the Defeat of Hitler's Blitzkrieg, by Bryan Fugate and Lev Dvoretsky. 415 pages, illustrated. Presidio paperback, $22.95

My usual practice is to read a book completely before reviewing it, but rarely one is so bad that it isn't worth finishing.

Such is the case with “Thunder on the Dnepr.” I got 100 pages into this ridiculous work before quitting.

That was more than sufficient to understand the thesis of Bryan Fugate and Lev Dvoretsky: They believe that Stalin, who had been committed to defense by an offensive into the enemy's territory, was converted by three war games in January-February 1941 to a concept of defense in depth – great depth, about 500 miles.

There are more than a few problems with this concept, even before looking at Fugate and Dvoretsky's evidence. For one thing, it meant giving up about three-quarters of the USSR's productive capacity.

The evidence presented is both thin and silly.

We are to believe that everything turned on a war game conducted in February at some unknown location. This produced a map which (on page 65) we are told was so closely held that no one (except the 10 officers at the war game) saw it for 56 years; although (on pages 66-67) we are told that the Germans obtained not just one but two copies, including one that was, curiously, stored in a “Komsomol House” in Ukraine.

In fact, defense in depth would have been a good strategy, and it was used successfully in 1943. Even with two years hard experience, the Russians were so unskilled that their victory at Kursk in 1943 cost them four times the casualties of the Germans.

Fugate is pretty close to tinfoil hat territory.

Coverup among the rightwingers

This would hardly be worth mentioning, except that rightwingers cannot draw 2 consecutive breaths without claiming that the MSM is suppressing the real story.

Well, not in every instance. Not, for example, when LA's favorite Republican host -- until very recently he ran something called Republican Party Animals -- is exposed as Holocaust denier David Cole. Let's let the Guardian relate how the rightwing treated this news:

Some of Stein/Cole's erstwhile friends are media figures with blogs, newspaper columns and syndicated radio shows. They put a lid on the story. Not a word has been published or broadcast. "When people found out it was, 'Oh my God, get the fuck away from him.' There was debate about whether everyone would look guilty by association," said one entertainment industry artist, a member of Republican Party Animals, who requested anonymity. "The reason we were all so pissed at him is it plays into every horrible stereotype about the right."

Why am I not surprised?

Down with public money for religion

I will vote against the state constitional amendment, when it comes up in 2014, that would give public funds to private preschools.

I have no objection to public preschools, they are probably a fine idea, especially in this state where a high immigration rate and long hours on the job for parents means lots of children get to school age without much preparation.

And I don't mind private preschools, so long as they are paid for by the people who want them.

But to hell with using my money to fund the superstitions of whatever religion sets up these schools. And you know that's who'll do it.

The amendment, passed overwhelmingly by the State Senate, would require that the preschools not discriminate on  the basis of religion. But it does not say they would not teach religion.

I have abandoned most of the things the Roman Catholics taught me at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, such as McCarthyism, but back in those days the church was proud to remain independent of government.

Of course, in Tennessee there was no chance that the Catholic-hating Christian bigots who then (and still) dominate the Tennessee legislature were going to provide tax subsidies to the Whore of Babylon. So the Whore could take a high moral stand at no cost.

Times change. As soon as the RCs saw the chance of getting tax money they forgot all those sermons about independence. Even a Whore has her price.

RtO misunderestimates American innovation

RtO spoke too soon when it dissed America for failing, as alleged by the FBI, to have produced an Elvis-impersonating terrorist who signed his real name to his threatening letters: "A comforting familiarity" April 27.

It turns out it was a Wayne Newton impersonator. Wouldn't you have to be real tall to impersonate Wayne Newton? RtO didn't even know there are Wayne Newton impersonators. Is this a great country or what?

RtO also notes that the Wayne Newton impersonating terrorist (if we can assume the FBI got its man right this time) is a city boy, even if the city is only Tupelo, Mississippi. He appears to have bought his castor beans on eBay.

If there is one thing Mississippi has got, it's castor beans. They grow everywhere. (They grow on Maui, too, you see them pop up on just about any bare patch of earth around this time, thanks to the birds, who apparently are resistant to ricin.)

Foreign intelligence

So, Ted Cruz, Canadian, for POTUS?

Fo' real, according to the National Review Online.

This gushing piece does not raise the issue of Cruz's Canadian birth until the 13th paragraph, and then dismissively:

Cruz isn’t worried that his birth certificate will be a problem. Though he was born in Canada, he and his advisers are confident that they could win any legal battle over his eligibility. Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen when he was born, and he considers himself to be a natural-born citizen.

Unlike that other guy, the one from Kenya. Why isn't he also a "natural-born citizen," since his mother was a U.S. citizen?

Now, it's true that National Review has been uneasy with Obama birtherism, but you cannot say the same about the Republican Party as a whole. Some polls show a majority of Republicans believe Obama was not born in the United States.

I don't necessarily believe those polls are precise, but they are, hmmmm, suggestive. How far wrong could they possibly be?

That rightwing nutcases think Cruz's Canadian birth would not be a problem sort of proves the embedded racism of today's GOP, doesn't it? Whoever Cruz's father was, it would be a stretch to speculate that he was an African-American Communist.

RtO was not the first and is far from the only observer to see a new Joe McCarthy in Cruz. A reach for the Oval Office from a Senate career of thin achievement would be another parallel.

A dismissive attitude toward the original intent of the Constitution would be another.

If NRO is accurate. RtO will not vouch for that.