Reflection on The Joy of Sexus: Lust, Love, and Longing in the Ancient World by Vicki Leon

               This is a pretty cool social history book, mostly about how Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians got it on. There’s a lot of information about sexual norms, sex toys, conceptions of love and lust, and details about famous and not so famous people the survive to this day. By the end it feels like the author sort of runs out of sex stuff and starts talking about other things, but they’re all interesting details about classical life so it’s okay. The book is somewhat disorganized and is made up of several short pieces of info that last from bout 2-10 pages or so. I’ll just put some random facts I learned below.

               Roman women used olive oil as a lubricant and as a somewhat effective form of birth control (it slowed down the sperm). They also used alum, gum resin from the acacia tree, honey, vinegar, and wool plugs.

               Julius Caesar once said about masturbation, “To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and impotent it is a benefactor; they that are penniless are yet rich, in that they still have this majestic diversion.” I was surprised to see a quote from Caesar on this “majestic diversion.”

               The Sacred Band was a group of Theban warriors in Greece made up of homosexual couples, who were famed for how well they fought on the battlefield. They were defeated and killed each one by Philip II of Macedon. Apparently there is a memorial there, restored in 1902 by the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society of English homosexuals.

               Romans used to greet each other with a brief kiss on the lips. Because of this, oral sex was considered to be especially gross while anal sex not so much.

               The ancients thought that “hysteria” in women was caused by the womb moving around to different parts of the body. They would try to get it back by using bad smells to force that nomadic womb back into submission.

               In the ancient world, the difference between homosexual and heterosexual wasn’t really a thing. What was more important was who was penetrating and who was being penetrated, as the active and passive roles determined effeminacy.

Reflection on Hitler by Ian Kershaw

               This is an intimidating book. It gives the reader over 1,000 pages on the life of Adolf Hitler, which means that not only is it long, it is long and filled with lots of unpleasant stuff. Kershaw writes very well and this is a really full account. If you still want more, you can read the larger version, split into two volumes. I felt like I got enough Hitler for the next year or so.

               As a child, Hitler was strange from the get-go. It might have had to do with an unloving father who beat him and a very loving mother who tried to spoil him. He was basically a loner and only ever had a few friends at a time. He was smart, but as a result, he didn’t try hard in school and never developed much discipline. When he went to Vienna to apply to art school, he didn’t work very hard and failed to get in. Crushed, you would think he would study hard for the next exam. However, supported by funds from his family, he didn’t get a job, didn’t prepare, and didn’t pass the exam the next year. This was the start of dark times for him. He would soon end up in a shelter for men and had nothing when family funds dried out. He made some money selling his art (through Jewish dealers) and sustained himself for the time being in Vienna. There’s not a lot of evidence of anti-Semitism in his life at this point, but he was definitely predisposed to it just as much as most Europeans were at the time.

               Hitler wasn’t good at anything. He had no discipline. He had no will to work. But then, luckily for him, World War One started. He loved the war. Unbothered by all the death around him, he found it exciting and was swept up in the German nationalism that motivated many. He did not care much for his fellow soldiers and they made fun of him for his complete lack of emotional attachments. Instead, the only living thing he cared about was his dog Foxl, which he lost towards the end of the war.

               When he returned from the war, he was extremely bitter at the result. Like many Germans, he felt that they had been sold out and blamed the result on the Jews. Of course, the Jews had nothing to do with German failure in the war. While a few worked in finance in London, the vast majority were barely scraping by in Poland and Russia. Hitler would take out his rage eventually on those Polish Jews especially, killing 90% of them, including my great-grandparents. Channeling his rage, Hitler discovered that his one real talent was delivering a good rant. He could go on about politics for hours and this got him a job with the Reichswehr (the army), where he handled political education, inculcating soldiers with nationalism and anti-Bolshevism, the latter of which he associated with the Jews.

               One day, he was assigned to go as a spy to a political party in Munich. While at a meeting, he couldn’t resist and gave a speech that went over extremely well. He was immediately asked to join and he did so, joining the NSDAP, better known as the Nazi Party. Leaving the Reichswehr, Hitler became a major Nazi orator, giving speeches that attracted thousands to Munich beer halls. At these meetings, the goal was to incite violence and get Communists to show up so they could fight them. Eventually, the NSDAP attempted to take over the Munich government, but they failed and Hitler went to jail.

               At the trial, Hitler was allowed to give an hours-long diatribe by the sympathetic judge and was given little jail time. While in jail, he received constant visits from admirers to the point that he had to restrict his own visiting hours. The guards in prison were also admirers, frequently favoring him. He was only there for a few months though, which he mainly used to write his famous book, Mein Kampf. The book sold around 23,000 copies by 1929 and the numbers would rise stratospherically after 1933, when the Nazis took power. By 1936, an edition would be given to every newlywed couple on their wedding day.

               In his speeches, Hitler emphasized the need for centralized power and leadership in one man. Through most of the 1920’s, he stressed that it was not him, but that a pyramidal structure was important and should culminate in one man at the top. It would invariably be a man since Hitler had no regard for women as anything more than babymaking machines. He did not make many outright attacks on the Jews in his early speeches, realizing that it would put him out of the mainstream. Instead, like many racists do today, he focused on economic issues while dog-whistling his opinions on the Jews. By the end of the 1920’s, the message developed further to focus on the collapse of parliamentary democracy and the uselessness of democracy. The experiment in Germany had not turned out well, as those in power abused it, and those without it, like Hitler, certainly did not defend democracy either. Things started to develop in such a way that while the various parties in the Weimar Republic stood for certain interest groups, the Nazi party, now completely led by Hitler, was making arguments for the nation as a whole.

               After major wins in Parliament, Hitler demanded to be made Prime Minister, despite failing to win a majority. At no point in his career did he or the Nazi Party ever win a majority of the vote of the German people. Yet, he insisted to President Hindenburg and sabotaged others. In the chaotic Weimar system, they held 5 elections in 1932 and only the Nazis were able to keep their people mobilized. He gained the support of the right wing, desperate to avoid socialism and communist elements. Business leaders soon through their support behind Hitler. Once in power, the Fuhrer cult had a powerful effect on policy. While Hitler did little day-to-day, everyone wanted to “work toward the Fuhrer,” enacting policies they thought he would like. This led to a rapid, though chaotic transformation of the government. This system promoted the best people with the most initiative who could stay on Hitler’s good side. Certain people who thrived in chaos did very well.

               In treatment of the Jews, you could see the “working towards the Fuhrer” in action. Things were done at the grassroots level and filtered up. For example, there would be an act like some sort of raid on Jewish stores and businesses. They would then get a green light from above to continue or a red light to pause them and wait for criticism to pass. However, this created too much criticism. The Nazis realized that the German people like order and that the messy persecution drew too much attention to them. That’s why they passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, so that non-Nazis could say that at least they were organized about it.

               In the second half of the 1930’s, Hitler was hungry for land and started to expand German territory in the Saarland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and eventually Poland. He met very little resistance until 1939, when Britain and France finally got fed up with it all and declared war on Germany. This part is very long in the book but I’m not gonna write much about it here except to say that Chamberlain came off pretty well in the book actually and seemed more or less reasonable and not like the pushover that he’s known as.

                Kershaw writes that Hitler had a gambler’s instinct. He really knew how to “fail forward” and keep pushing through to more success. With the invasion of Poland, his luck ran out. It’s really hard to see how, once Britain and France declared war, he was going to triumph. Things looked good early on and it was definitely not for sure that he would end up toppled in 1945. Two things clinched it for him by 1942. The first was British persistence to stay in the war, aided by a miraculous retreat from Dunkirk. Second was the invasion of Russia, fueled by a huge underestimation of Russian power. The first could have been overcome if not for the second, which was a massive blunder not just on the part of Hitler, but the entire German military elite, who supported the decision. The major problem was that Germany was not ready for a full-scale war in 1939 and certainly not the two front war that would break out by 1939. By 1942, the Nazis had lost momentum and the Russians were pushing back. It became an impossible war for the Germans by 1943 when their second offensive against Russia stalled in the winter.

               By 1944, when it was clear to all that the war was lost, Hitler refused to admit defeat and wanted to take the entire German nation with him. It was due to his obsession with the capitulation in World War One that he felt he had to do this, so that even if he couldn’t win in his war, he could at least lose in the way he wanted to. He achieved that, killing himself with a gunshot to the head as the USSR troops closed in on his bunker, with German forces fighting until the very last moment possible. Hitler felt that if the war was to be lost, the people should be lost as well, as the Germans had proven the weaker in the struggle.

               In conclusion, this was a really good book and great insight into who Hitler was and why he did the things he did. IT gets into his head and into the machinations of the German state, explaining basically anything you’d want to know in detail. Five stars.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Hitler kept his relationship with Eva Braun so secretive that the German people only learned of it after the war ended.
• Until the war made the Nazis realize they would not have the sea control to achieve it, there was a serious plan to move the Jews to Madagascar.
• Shortly after Hitler invaded Poland, there was an attempted assassination that came very close. The would-be assassin drilled a hole in a column behind where Hitler would give a speech and inserted a time bomb, but due to the fact that Hitler finished early, the bomb exploded ten minutes after he left and the attempted assassin was captured, dying in a concentration camp.
• Due to how badly the war was going, Hitler did not give a single speech in 1944.
• In the last days of the war in April 1945, communications were so bad that Army High Command resorted to using a telephone directory to ring random numbers and ask them if they had seen any Russians.

Reflection on The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

               I thought this was going to be a political diatribe but it was not. I read it for my “Fantasy Bookball” competition that requires me to read a book by someone I disagree with. Shapiro’s book is mainly a history of western philosophy with some bits in the end about his place in the modern culture wars. It is a recommendable history given the author’s bias. He includes some things that are definitely more opinion and fact but it’s generally a solid introduction to the major western thinkers.

               The beginning has a lot of stuff about the bible and the whole book is especially religious, with an emphasis on the old testament. It makes me realize in the context of the Simon Schama books how different a Jew Shapiro is, openly embracing the west and including himself, uncontroversially, as a member, which would have been unthinkable 100 years ago. I think Shapiro’s place in the world is very interesting as a conservative Jew who definitely comes from the tradition of Baruch Spinoza in embracing secular thought; after all, he claims the west came from Jerusalem and Athens, embracing the two equally. That is not a very classically Orthodox Jewish opinion.

Shapiro makes an interesting point about the Middle Ages, arguing that they were not so dark after all, and that the Enlightenment was not a break with the earlier western thought but a continuation of it. I am sympathetic to his view and I do not think that the Middle Ages should be seen as a period of total decline in Europe. However, Shapiro should acknowledge that with the end of the Western Roman Empire, lots of technologies, philosophies, and thoughts were lost. He holds up the Church as the protector of intellectualism during these times and he’s right. However, it is clear that while Europe rebounded after the fall of the WRE, it was a slow rebound, and Europe was surpassed for a long time by the Muslim world to its immediate southeast. Therefore, the Enlightenment was a significant change, either reversing or speeding up what was already happening, but Shapiro goes too far in suggesting it was solely a sped-up continuation. That belief doesn’t make sense in the context of the true deficits of the Middle Ages, so while Shapiro makes good arguments about the lighter side of the Dark Ages, he doesn’t give the Enlightenment enough credit for the break it made.

               One example of some very fringe thinking that is inserted is when Shapiro says that FDR lengthened the Great Depression by nearly a decade, which is definitely bogus. It was government spending that gave people the jobs that ended the Depression! How Shapiro can advocate for the policies of Herbert Hoover is beyond me. He uses a lot of straw man arguments at the end and shows off why he’s so unlikable. Shapiro is a mean person who likes to humiliate others who don’t agree with him. At a fundamental level, he is naïve. In the conclusion, Shapiro writes that, “We used to believe in the Founding vision, supported by a framework of personal virtue culled from Judeo-Christian morality. We used to see each other as brothers and sisters, not “the 1 percent versus the 99 percent.” First of all, who is “we”? Certainly we did not all believe in the founding vision, as the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were all subject to fierce debate by the founders. Immediately after the formation of the USA, they split into factions of Federalists and Jeffersonians, proving that there was no “we” that believed in any one founding vision. Surely we didn’t all see each other as brothers and sisters when we fought a civil war and enslaved Africans. Shapiro’s history of western philosophy is good but his analysis of American history is straight-up dumb. His words are empty and his prescriptions for policy that are coherent are not good. The rest are largely incoherent mottos and slogans.

                

Reflection on Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

              I try to stay away from political and historical autobiographies because I always want the “real” story, but for whatever reason I picked this book up and really liked it even though I would only call myself a very casual Springsteen fan. To be honest I wanted to read a book about the Beatles, but when I failed to download one, I got this instead and I really liked it. Springsteen is a great writer and his personality really comes through the pages. I found the book to be a good source of information on his childhood and life, perspective on the Rock and Roll world, and wisdom to remember.

               One thing that sets the young Bruce apart from others is how he responds to failure (at least in the realm of music). When his band blows it at his first show, he decides to work harder, practice more, and get better. When he moves to California and realizes he’s not as good as he thought, he goes back to the East Coast and keeps honing his skills. A good lesson in any field is that once you give up, its over. To be great at anything you do, you have to push through failures and use them as inspiration.

               Bruce holds a weird place in music history. While he was definitely caught up in the hippie movement (growing long hair and moving to Greenwich Village), he was always an outsider there. He still came from a conservative, blue-collar home and stayed true to those roots. He never experimented with drugs and only took his first drink at 22 years old, scared due to his father’s alcoholism. His music definitely reflected that. When he made it big in the 70’s, he consciously chose not to follow the experimental and progressive rockers like Bowie into newer genres, but to revive the 1950’s style, country music, and folk tunes. His musical revolution, in my eyes, was a counter-revolution.

               Early on, Bruce decided to take charge. After the failure of “The Castiles,” his first band, Bruce tries to be the leaders and run things like an autocracy instead of a democracy. As a result he ended up with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, a move he later regretted for creating a grey zone between band members, where they were kind-of stars, but not number one. Bruce reveals a side of him in the book that is a leader and a manager of people, an ambitious side where Bruce comes first. Something I didn’t like was that whenever somebody got cut from a band, Bruce often made the decision or contributed to it, but as far as I can see in the book, never broke the bad news. One nice thing though is that he doesn’t seem to hold grudges. This is a truly happy guy who does not stay angry at anybody for a long time. Forgive and forget. When he wrongs someone else, he tries to repent, so I can really respect that he owns up to being wrong.

               All in all, this is a really cool book that anybody who likes a few Springsteen songs will enjoy. If you’re a big fan, you absolutely have to read it. I’ve never read a musical biography or autobiography before and this was an awesome introduction to the genre.

The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi

               This is a five-star book. The Warrens combine advice for politicians and advice for normal people in their explanation of a phenomenon that affects basically every American. The Two Income Trap asks one major question. Since women have joined the workforce, shouldn’t we all be much better off than we are now? It’s clear that women going to work did not make everyone rich, and the Warrens detail the reasons why, the main ones being that stay-at-home moms provided a crucial safety net and that household savings have been poured into homes in better school district as demand for education increases and the supply of good schools diminishes- parents need to get their kid into a good school and will pay a premium to move into its district. They also discus predatory lending practices that take advantage of people and they refute the myth of the immoral borrower.

               The book starts out by telling us that the people in the worst financial trouble generally have in common that they have kids. For a woman, having a child increases the likelihood of bankruptcy 66% in the United States. Women working outside the home has failed to improve the situation because parents don’t usually save the money from her paycheck. Generally speaking, they spend it as if it was the first salary. This is problematic because it doubles the chance of one parent losing their job (with two parents working its twice as likely) and raises their standard of living. While it is easy to say that thir spending is frivolous, it’s not usually so ridiculous. With a second person working a family needs another car plus insurance. They also need to hire someone for childcare. In addition, they are being pressured by the social force of worsening public schools to buy a house in a better school district (which comes at a huge premium) or pay to send their kids to private school. The authors point out that although a school may be public, parents pay for the tuition in housing costs in the district.

               An extremely problematic development in the last 40 years or so is that it has become more problematic to lend money to people who can’t pay it back than to loan money to people who can. That has literally turned the financial system upside down. Warren sort of predicts the housing collapse specifically when talking about subprime mortgages. While borrowers are not the same as they used to be- declaring bankruptcy with less shame than in the past (though still plenty of it) the lenders have changed as well. Since a wave of massive deregulations beginning in the 1970’s, lenders aggressively pursue people with bad credit. While your neighborhood bank or store would have loaned you money or put you on a tab years ago, they certainly would have cut you off if you couldn’t pay it all. Nowadays, they want to loan you even more money to put you in permanent debt slavery. Many people declaring bankruptcy receive dozens of offers for new credit cards and aggressive phone calls from companies that want to give them loans precisely because they are in such dire straits economically. That is the reverse of the way things work.

               The Warrens also go in on Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for supporting further loan deregulations in 2001, a specific bill that even Hillary Clinton had called “awful” until she received over $100,000 dollars in donations to her senate campaign from big banks. I like that Warren doesn’t pull those punches and she really makes clear that its not the Republicans or the Democrats that are the problem, but the leadership of both parties that receives legal bribes from unregulated banks.

               The last chapter of the book is a “Financial Fire Drill” that gives advice to two-income families on how to best prepare for disaster. It recommends checking if you can survive on only one income, and if not, trying to cut fixed expenses now, before a crisis hits, and to create an emergency backup plan. The biggest weakness most bankrupt families had was hope that their bad situation would end soon, but hope is the enemy in these times. Because you never really know when things will get better or worse, the best thing to do is be prepared and to live within your means (which may mean saving most of one spouse’s salary) so that when crisis hits, you’ll be ready.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Bankruptcy offers relief from credit cards, hospital bills, and electric and gas bills while offering no relief from taxes, student loans, alimony, and child support.
• 90% of families with children go bankrupt because of job loss, family breakup, or medical problems.
• When a person dies, no family member is responsible automatically for their debts. Only a cosigner is responsible. Many companies will call anyway to see if they can squeeze any money out of mourning family members.

Reflection on Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900 by Simon Schama

             While I couldn’t write a full reflection of the first book of the two Schama has released (about the years up to 1492) I actually have my notes on this one. Schama continues to skillfully use anecdotes about real people to link stories, though I think they came a little too heavy and too often in this book. My main complaint, however, is that he focuses way too much on western Europe, spending only 70 pages on Polish Jews and not much more on Jews in the Arab world. This is a book about Sephardi Jews above all else and some Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Berlin and Vienna. Russia and Poland are afterthoughts. For example, Schama mentions when discussing the Netherlands that many Jews arrived there seeking tolerance when in 1648 pogroms in Russia and Poland killed 90% of Jews there. I want more on that! How can you just mention it and then go into zero detail on something like that? Anyway, it was a good book and a well-told story, so I’m not too critical.

In the Ottoman world, the Jews had the advantage of choosing the winning side at the fall of Constantinople. Jews became integrated, despite the lack of many basic right, into the court of the sultan. Sultans often kept Jewish doctors above all others. Two Jews (both named Abraham Castro- one from Syria the other from Egypt) were critical funders of the construction of the Dome of the Rock. The Castros funded Suleyman when he built the “Old City” as it exists today, specifically the limestone walls, the seven gates, the thirty towers, two great mosques, the tiles for the Dome of the Rock, and the preservation of the Western Wall. It seems like Jews could do well in court and at higher levels but that normal people were discriminated against a lot, a pretty common theme in Judaism I think.

My favorite story in the book is a chapter about the Chinese Kaifeng Jews. It starts with the arrival of (Mateo?) Ricci, a missionary, in Kaifeng, a region of western China. He meets a man named Ai Tian, who Ricci thought was a lost Christian. Ricci showed Ai Tian paintings of the virgin and Child and others of the Baptist and the Apostles, but Ai Tian thought they were Rebecca and Jacob, and that the 12 disciples of Jesus were the 12 tribes of Israel. While Christian doctrine insisted that Jews were condemned to worldwide persecution, the Jews in China were not persecuted, living and worshipping freely, well-integrated into Chinese society. They followed all major Jewish customs, except those imposed by Christians such as being segregated from non-Jews, being forced to wear identification that they were Jewish, and being stigmatized as greedy and vindictive. They followed patrilineal descent, as did the Hebrews of old, meaning that they converted its of local women and after a few generations they looked Chinese. Though there were never many, it’s incredible to think of a Jewish community in China and how completely different it must have been.

The book also tries to answer the question of why Jews became traders in so many societies. It just made sense when you look at it logically- first of all, most Jews knew Hebrew. Second, there was an exodus, placing Jews all over the known world. Those two things create a completely unique phenomenon, with one group of people who speak the same language dispersed from India to England. That meant that they were logically the people who provided global links since, if you wanted spices from India, the best person to talk to was a Jew, who could go to India and find the Jews there, be welcomed, communicate, trade, and return with lots of cinnamon, pepper, and cumin. That gave Jews disposable income, which, since it was either illegal to lend money or only possible (among Christians) to do so at very high rates, made Jews likely to go into loaning money. It was not that great a business to be in. There were no protections for lenders, so kings and whoever may have owed money often refused to pay, sometimes killing or exiling the Jew that loaned him money.

Starting in the 17^th and 18^th centuries there was a sort of double-encounter between Jews and gentiles in the wake of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Jews started exploring knowledge outside of the Torah in the hard sciences and in philosophy. Gentiles started to question whether the treatment of the Jews was fair in light of the new moral value of individualism and humanism. It was helped along by high rates of Jewish literacy and the interest that Christians had in the Jewish people, being that Jesus was a Jew. A new group of thinkers, Hebraicists sought to learn Hebrew and the Torah, familiarize themselves with Judaism, and integrate with Jews to better convert them. Many Jews went about acquiring “worldly” knowledge to speak to the Europeans in their own moral language and show them that the Jews weren’t so different. The result was a heightened communication among the peoples and while few were converted, many found that the people on the other end of the religious divide were not so different from them. New Jewish thinkers like Mendelssohn and Spinoza revolutionized Jewish culture by introducing Jewish secularism, integrating Jews into Europe. Jews and Christians became friends in unprecedented numbers.

There’s a really cool story about a Jewish boxer in England named Dan Mendoza that would make an amazing movie. At 16-years-old he was discovered while fighting on the street by Richard Humphreys “The Gentleman Boxer,” who was the most famous boxers in England at the time. He helped train Mendoza and Mendoza quickly became one of the best on the circuit. He never hid his Jewishness and it was part of the draw to see him fight. However, one day Humphreys invited Mendoza to train in the house of a friend, which turned out to be a brothel. Surprised and indignant, Mendoza walked out, giving offense to Humphreys. Running into each other at a bar some time later, Humphreys challenged Mendoza to fight it out on the spot, and Mendoza declined. In the meantime, Mendoza beat “Butcher” Martin of Bath in 26 minutes when it had taken Humphreys well over an hour to do the same. Humphreys was embarrassed and his supporters and those of Mendoza would regularly fight in the streets. One day, Humphreys’ men kidnapped Mendoza while he was walking with his pregnant wife (who begged him to stop boxing) and locked him in a room that he escaped from. Now it was on. In an incredibly close and controversial battle, Humphreys edged out a tight victory. Injured, Mendoza went into training and Humphreys showed up one day wanting more. Mendoza, in black mourning a recently deceased child, thanked Humphreys for gracing the gym with his presence, at which point Humphreys jumped onto a table and mocked him. In a rematch held in 1789, Mendoza knocked Humphreys down after almost an hour of fighting. In a third match, Mendoza also won. It’s a story better told in the book with lots more detail but I was on the edge of my seat reading about the Mendoza-Humphreys rivalry.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Ulysses S. Grant tried to ban all Jewish people from Tennessee when he was a general in that theater during the Civil War. It never went into effect because he soon lost the area, but he accused them of being smugglers.
• Apparently there used to be a custom called helitzah, in which if a man died, his brother was required to marry his widow unless she threw a shoe at him. Apparently that cleared him of the responsibility.  

Reflection on 700 Sundays by Billy Crystal

               This is a short book about Billy’s father, who died when he was fifteen, giving them approximately 700 Sundays together, as that was the day when his dad would relax back at home. It’s about loss and about family and the Jewish experience in America. It was a good read while I’m in the middle of much more intense books.

Reflection on Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

               This is a very educational book essentially offering a really, really long response to the question “What were the causes and effects of the 2008 Financial Crisis/Great Recession?” When I say long, I mean it’s about 750 pages. It is extremely thorough, explaining things in four parts. It starts by explaining the causes of the crisis- how sub-prime mortgages creates a housing bubble and stock market boom and fed the rise of large and powerful investment banks. Tooze shows the reader how the foreclosures of subprime mortgages in tranches rated too highly by ratings agencies caused shockwaves in financial markets among the banks that had too many risky investments, like Lehman brothers. The second part explains the immediate responses in 2009 and 2010, mainly how the US government found a way to staunch the bleeding and save Wall Street. However, the US government would do nothing for average Americans and Europe would do nothing at all for anyone, leading to the Eurozone crisis. The third part deals with that very crisis, with the author putting the blame on Germany for restricting action until it was already too late and more costly and pointing out that the financial crisis spilled over due to European banks having large holdings in American finance and housing. Those banks’ home countries would try to assist them and find the debt to great for each individual country. The fourth and final part deals with the political ramifications of the handling of the economic crises. Through ten years, the economic crises created political crises, mainly through the rise of white nationalism across the West.

               It seems like Europe really screwed up by not taking decisive, unified action. Small countries had to respond and ended up in huge debt bailing out their financial institutions while the European Central Bank (ECB) did nothing. This is why Ireland went bankrupt. Another major impact of the crisis was the expansion of the role of the Federal Reserve to become the worldwide last lender of resort to banks that it deemed “too big to fail.” Already when the millennium began, 65% of the world’s economy was pegged to the dollar with most else pegged to the Euro. Afterwards, financial institutions became even more dependent on the Fed.

The bailouts sort of proved that the economic consensus from the 1970’s onward wasn’t free market capitalism, but rather a money-grab by the rich. If the elites really believed in the free market, wouldn’t they have let all the banks fail? Instead, they decided to save the vast majority, spending 1 trillion dollars of American taxpayer money to save the banks and absolutely nothing to help the people who just lost their homes. For me, this is the defining moment in how I see politics. The Republicans were so inept they couldn’t support taking any action. The Democrats were so deeply corrupted by Wall Street that they only took action to help their billionaire campaign donors. Only one political party had the willingness to try to solve the problem and it did not do the full job, only solving the rich people problem and not the real problem. In Asia, on the other hand, countries like China, Japan, and South Korea were all intelligent enough to use government-sponsored stimulus to save themselves from the worst of the crisis.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• By 2006, one third of all mortgages in the United States were for second, third, or fourth properties.
• During the recession, the median household net worth in the USA was cut in half from over 100,000 dollars to just over 50,000 dollars.

Reflection on Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

               This is the book about an Indian Brahman’s journey to discover the meaning of life and the best way to live. As he searches for the path of wisdom, Siddhartha meets friends and learns from people along the way. He describes his three talents as “waiting, fasting, and thinking” initially, but goes through a time when he learns the art of love and how to make money. He meets the Buddha and eventually Siddhartha determines that it is important to love all the “illusions” of the world and not to separate oneself from them. He determines that wisdom cannot be taught and can only be learned by oneself. “Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom.” It’s a good, short book that was not a hard read, but also wasn’t really as much about Buddhism as I had hoped.

Reflection on The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China by Julia Lovell

               I wanted to read this book because since the Deng Xiaoping book, I’ve been really interested in China. The First Opium War is considered the beginning of China’s “100 Years of Humiliation,” which, according to the Communist Party, ended with the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. The Opium Wars were a huge event in shaping modern China because they represented Chinese defeat at the hands of a modernized, European power. Chinese colonization was a huge shame and embarrassment for the so-called “Middle Kingdom.” This book not only covers the history of the wars, but also spends a very hefty chunk of the book (maybe about a third) discussing the result of the wars on the Chinese psyche and how Westerners and Chinese saw the conflict and each other. That is what’s really interesting in this book, because even today, the Opium Wars are a critical subject in Chinese schools that is useful for Westerners to know more about.

               One important theme in the book is blame. Who is to blame for the wars and the Opium addiction of the Chinese people? The British were conflicted, as some Brits blamed the Chinese for being addicted to the opium while others blamed their own country for bringing it to them. They were also conflicted on whether or not to go to war each time, with the decisions being highly controversial. On the opium, the Chinese were also split, but while they certainly argue that there is blame on the British and the West for exploiting them, in a greater sense they feel shame for having been exploited and there is a stronger current of self-blame. As for the wars themselves, that was, for the Chinese, clearly initiated by the British (this seems true to me), though the Chinese blame themselves for having been a country in a position to be dominated and manipulated.

               The Qing lost the First Opium War due to a massive underestimation of their opponents. While the Qing were good on land (they werehorse-lord Manchus from the north who conquered the ethnic Chinese) they had a weak navy. They also lacked the support of the people, as nationalism had not yet developed in China as it had in Britain. This meant that the Chinese people were really just as likely to side with the British as with their own emperor. The war was a Manchu war and not a Chinese one. The lack of urgency meant that generals took their sweet time to reach the front and often an Admiral leaving England would reach China before a Chinese general would arrive on the coast from another province. They were consistently surprised by British strength and, in their embarrassment, lied to the emperor and claimed great successes. This was very confusing for the emperor, who spent years thinking that he was winning when in fact he was being easily defeated. Neither the emperor nor his highest advisors felt that the British merited much attention and in their communications they refer to them as “rebels” or “thieves.” When it came time to fight, Qing forces often fled as they were completely outmatched. They used matchlock rifles (which required lighting a match to fire) against flintlock rifles, which were much more effective and quicker. Chinese troops moved slowly and took just as long to get to the front lines as the British reinforcements from India.

               Why did the British start the war? They wanted judicial power over their subjects when in China (essentially diplomatic immunity) and they wanted access to every Chinese coastal city, which was objectionable to the Chinese because they wanted a strict control over trade. They were extremely protective to the point where it was illegal for Europeans to learn Chinese and Manchu, as they wanted to keep them dependent and week. The British were, on the other hand, extremely greedy and capitalism will do as capitalism does. Capitalists sought to make money in China and Britain decided to protect their “right” to do so. The British would go to war again over a discrepancy in the Chinese-English translation, which promised in English permanent residency for English trader families, but not in Chinese.

A feature of Qing Chinese life was the examinations that were required to enter into the lucrative public service with its “Iron Rice Bowl,” AKA a cushy government job for life. Very, very few were able to enter and it was worse during the Qing years because during that time Manchus were given boosts to getting in while the Han Chinese they ruled over would struggle. This pressure caused the Taiping Rebellion, in which 15 million Chinese would die and the Qing would completely lose control over the south. It happened that this would coincide with the Second Opium War, which ended in the sack of Beijing and the Forbidden Palace, a quadrupling of the indemnities, and the Chinese yielding to every single English demand, essentially becoming a colony not solely of the English, but all of the western powers. This domination and humiliation took the form of razing villages and towns, destroying Beijing’s city walls and cemetery, playing hockey in sacred temples, and looting the emperor’s things. After the war, the Qing would go on to lose Indochina to the French and Korea and Manchuria to the Japanese. It was a truly horrible fate for a kingdom that had spent so long controlling all of its surroundings.

By the 1890’s, a new Chinese identity was forming which had both an admiration for and a hatred of the West. Younger Chinese admired Western advancement and innovation but hated that it came at the expense of Chinese power. Even the most important Chinese leaders at the turn of the century had trouble dreaming big. Sun-Yat Sen was known to take what he could get and regularly made promises that would never come true to sell off pieces of China in exchange for foreign support. In the 1920’s and 30’s, the Opium Wars started to take a more central place in Chinese historiography as the critical moment in the country’s modern history. Opium production and consumption would surge in China at this time, making huge profits for farmers and leaving many hopelessly addicted. At this time the popular narrative became one of self-blame, as it was the Chinese people themselves who wanted the opium so badly.

               Today, many Chinese see the Opium Wars as long-past history, but many young men called the fenqing, angry and nationalistic youth, use it as a major theme of the evil that can be done by the West. Chinese leaders remember it as a cautionary tale and it is still taught in schools as the beginning of modern Chinese history. It shows you the Chinese perspective in a few major themes being the self-criticism, the hostility to outsiders, and the need for technological advancement and modernization. This is a crucial book for understanding the big picture of modern China. I would like to read more about the period from the Boxer Rebellion through the Communist victory in the Civil War next.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Missionaries in China were allied with the drug smugglers and served as interpreters in exchange for passage along the coast.
• In the 1830s, growing opium yielded ten times as much money than growing rice.
• In 1856, opium was 22% of revenue for the British Indian government.
• The “Chinese Election” of 1857 was the first in which the Prime Minister addressed the nation in print.
• Allegedly, by the 1930’s the Chinese Fu-Manchu-style super-villain was so common that the British Guild of Crime Writers made its members swear an oath not to re-use the trope.
• In one retreat, Chiang Kai-Shek killed half a million people by destroying the Yellow River dykes in the face of a Japanese advance.
• China today executes between 1,700 and 10,000 people per year.