And then I’ll be another year older, based on Phoenix time. You know you’re really getting old when you have to stop and calculate your age.

You simply have to see this video. As Jeremiah says:

Another classic attempt to “explain and understand” China from the CIA/NSC archives, this one is like some sort of unholy mash-up of John King Fairbank, Max Weber, Henry Luce, Edward Said, and the KMT propaganda department…but there is some useful archival footage as well as interviews with seminal American “China watchers” such as Theodore White and Pearl Buck.

Watch it for the archival footage, laugh at it for the absurd stereotyping.

This is a guest post from my friend in Taiwan, William R. Stimson.

Since he stole the majority of the people’s votes in last year’s election, Iran’s Supreme Leader has also stolen for himself, or tried to, every other public occasion all through the year. Already by far the most powerful tyrant Iran has ever known, he demonstrated again and again, all year long, before the shocked eyes of the world to what unbelievably murderous and perverted lengths he will go not just to snuff out every last vestige of his people’s freedom – but to break their very spirit. On the first anniversary of the stolen election he had his riot police and government toughs out in greater numbers than ever before to arrest and intimidate anyone who dared speak out. People largely kept off the streets. His forces quickly dispersed the very few, and very small, scattered protests. Unlike the previous occasions all year long, from the clashes this time there emerged no telling incidents or images to be quickly posted on the internet and spread around the world. The New York Times could only report that at 2:30 p.m. a little old lady under the Hafez Bridge chanted some anti-government slogans. The riot police moved in to lay hands on her and drag her away. From every side, hundreds of bystanders rushed to her rescue. The police had to retreat. The little old lady went free.

No matter how much it’s been beaten back by the brutality of the Supreme Leader, there is still a voice in Iran that’s free. Thanks to one little old lady, it continues to tell the world, like it has all year long, that the people of Iran don’t approve of their Supreme Leader. They want their country back. They want to elect a leader who will address the real problems of the nation and serve not his interests, but theirs. It also continues to tell the world, like it has all year long, that Iran’s Supreme Leader doesn’t approve of his people. He wants to mold them to be something other than what they are. He wants to domesticate them, make them into a herd of tame goats, and keep the country essentially to himself for his own corrupt profit, his own narrow and twisted ideology, and his own Medieval geo-political vision.

This man tries to command Iran not with compassion and mercy but with fear and brute force. An impressive stone fort once similarly tried to command the Atlantic coast of Florida. Backed against a trackless and impenetrable swamp, its massive walls and many cannons all faced the sea – making it impregnable. But it fell to a conquistador who slogged his men, in heavy armor, through the steamy and tangled swamp to attack from behind.

Backed by his shallow misinterpretation of Islam, Iran’s Supreme Leader directs all the forces at his command to defend himself against his own people’s legitimate demands for fair play, compassion, and decency – and would seem on this first anniversary of the election to have won the day. In fact he has doomed himself to the fate of the fort. Had he not defended himself the way he did, he could never have been defeated. As it is now, nothing can possibly save him.

It’s only a matter of time before enough Iranians with Islamic compassion and mercy in their hearts come up from behind to expose him for the fraud he is. Against this, the willingness of his revolutionary guards and Basiji to assault the innocent people of Iran will not avail.

Iran is bigger than its supreme leader and his twisted vision, and so is Islam. In the end it is inevitable that both win out over him. All this present craziness will be over.

This is nice.

Snip:

It’s a mystery/action novel that pretty much pulls off something I would have thought improbable: combining an account of Iraq-war drama (the emphasis is on Abu Ghraib-type themes), with a portrayal of the urban China of these past few years, complete with overhyped art scene, dissident bloggers, lots of young expats, and constant uncertainty about what the government will permit or crack down on. Along the way, lots about the online gaming world that often seems the main passion of youthful Chinese, especially males.

It’s short; read it all.

A few nights ago I finished the new best-seller Matterhorn, a gritty, wrenching novel about the life of American soldiers serving in Vietnam, written by a highly decorated soldier, Karl Marlantes, who took 30 years to complete it. Matterhorn was originally 1,600 pages, and his editors cut it down to a less terrifying 600 pages. I bought it after reading James Fallows’ recommendation.

Anyone who still believes it’s sweet and glorious to die for one’s country should read Matterhorn, but so should everyone else. There cannot be a more graphic and beautifully written novel about war, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that most of it is based on actual events.

With no preparation or warning, the reader is thrown right into the vile, putrid world of jungle warfare, defined by the pus-dripping sores of jungle rot and immersion foot, and the constant battle with leeches that drop from the trees and silently suck the soldiers’ blood. Marlantes wastes no time; by page eight we are hurled into one of those horrific scenarios that we know we will never forget as much as we may want to: a leech gets inside a soldier’s urethra, and if it’s not removed his bladder will burst, killing him. Low clouds and rain make it impossible to send a medevac. How the poor inexperienced medic ultimately deals with this makes for literally the most harrowing reading I’ve ever endured. You simply have to put the book down, and sometimes you want to hurl it away.

The brutality of hand-to-hand combat, the racial tension between the black and white soldiers (which results in murder), the incompetent officers who needlessly send boys without food to die fighting for nothing except “body count,” scenes of heroism and betrayal and sheer misery as soldiers literally rot in the rain forest – Matterhorn makes you feel it, and it makes you shake with rage. There is no mention of politics or objectives beyond the battle at hand. It is all about the mission, to secure the mountain they’ve named Matterhorn and clear out North Vietnamese soldiers from the surrounding jungle, a fruitless, meaningless effort with no real strategy behind it. The book’s most repellent figure, Major Blakely, sends men off to die without food and knowing he’s screwed up the layout of their machine guns. He can’t be bothered. “The marines under him would make up for mistakes like that.” He only cares about the reports he prepares. With the most restrained writing, Marlantes makes you hate this man so much you want to see him tortured and killed.

They’d fight well with the imperfect machine-gun layout. The casualties would be slightly higher, with fewer enemy dead, but the statistics of perfection never show up in any reporting system. A victory is reported with the casualties it takes to secure that victory, not the casualties it would have taken if the machine gun had been better placed. There was nothing sinister in this. Blakely himself would not be aware that he’d positioned the machine gun poorly. He’d feel bad about his casualties for a while. But reflecting on why or what wasn’t something Blakely did. Right now the problem before him was to engage the enemy and get the body count as high as possible. He wanted to do a good job as any decent person would, and now he’d finally figured out a way to to it. He might actually get to use the entire battalion at a time, an invaluable experience for a career officer.

Marlantes goes back and forth, juxtaposing the brute horrors of jungle warfare with monsters like Blakely sitting in their office and blithely sending men to their doom. And just when you’re thinking no human being could actually be this cruel, this venal, they go ahead and do even worse things. The soldiers become ghosts, living in a strange altered state of consciousness, knowing they are being sent out to die for literally nothing. Another officer, always drunk, sips Jack Daniels in comfort and orders the men to keep pushing, blissfully unaware that a tiger is biting one the boy’s heads off, while others are losing their legs from trip mines. To the officer, they are red pins on a map. They will die for the officers’ pride.

The kids filed quietly to the edge of the strip to wait for the helicopters. Other Marines stopped to watch them, wanting to say an encouraging word yet not daring to break into their private world — a world no longer shared with ordinary people. Some of them were experiencing the last hour of that brief mystery called life.

“Where’s the gold?” a young soldier plaintively asks the book’s hero, Lt. Mellas, in one of the book’s most poignant moments. What are we doing this for? Is there oil somewhere? A prize? There was no answer.

It’s heartbreaking to think a large number of people still believe the Rambo argument, that if we just had more guts and more commitment we could have “won” in Vietnam. Won what? The greatest exercise in futility the US ever embarked on, a bright shining lie and a total and unmitigated catastrophe. Matterhorn makes it raw, makes you understand the hubris and incompetency that made it all possible, and makes you want to scream, to cry, to throw the book down in hopeless frustration.

There’s a lot more to this book. It’s not light summer fare, and it’s not always easy. Marlantes introduces one character after another after another, and I had to keep flipping back to remember who was who. And he uses a lot of military jargon and alphabet soup (necessitating a glossary at the end). But you know within a few pages you’re about to embark on a terrible journey, bloody and disturbing and stomach-turning, but one you have to take if you want to truly know what our soldiers endured in Vietnam and why they came back the way they did.

Unforgettable is a cliche we throw around too much. Some things really are unforgettable, and Matterhorn is one of them. Please read it.

Every Man Dies Alone is a rare book, one that to my knowledge has no precedent. It is a novel, based on an actual Gestapo file, that takes the reader into the daily life of everyday people living in Hitler’s Germany. What is unprecedented is that it was written by someone who lived through the nightmare and wrote his book almost immediately afterward, soon after which he died of a morphine overdose.

The book is also rare because it has languished, virtually unknown outside of Germany for more than half a century, which is completely inexplicable. This is a great and powerful book and one of the most penetrating and disturbing examinations of life in a totalitarian society, written before the historians and anthropologists wrote the books that have shaped so many of our impressions of the Third Reich.

Not that those impressions we have are inaccurate. But many of the histories were written years, even generations after the fact. This book was obviously incubating as the horror was living itself out, and emerged, more than 500 pages, only months after the last shots were fired in May 1945. Most of the first-hand accounts we’re familiar with came from the victims of Nazism, like the Diary of Ann Frank or the many Shoah stories. This book comes from a much different perspective, from the eyes of German citizens. (And I know, the Germans were victims of Nazism also, but they were also its enabler, whether they meant to be or not.)

There are probably too many fictional embellishments to the plot to categorize this as historical fiction, but it does what good historical fiction is supposed to: it takes you right there, so you feel the terror of the housewife being interrogated by an odious Gestapo official, you hear her prison door clank shut, leaving her in darkness, and you experience for yourself the confusion, rage and frustration of parents who are told their son has been killed in a war they don’t understand.

For more than two years, starting in 1941, a working-class husband and wife in Berlin actually decided to defy Hitler and do what they could to raise the consciousness of their countrymen, to tell them Hitler was a monster who invaded Russia with no provocation and was killing wholesale the flower of Germany’s youth. Their effort seems ridiculous: they would hand-write postcards with anti-Hitler messages and calls for worker sabotage, and drop them on the windowsills and in the stairwells of hundreds of buildings, hoping they would be read, passed around, and hopefully help turn people against Nazism. And that was all. But they had to do something, and by doing this small thing they placed themselves on a moral plane above the perpetrators and collaborators. They were heroes, fully aware they would eventually die for their crime.

Their effort was a total failure. Of the hundreds of postcards they dropped off, all but a tiny fraction were immediately handed over to the Gestapo. People wanted no part of the hopeless campaign. One day the couple slipped up and were caught by the Gestapo, tried and beheaded.

Fallada’s book offers a fictionalized account of this couple that includes a wide cast of unforgettable characters, nearly all of them repulsive. Take whatever your impression is of life under the Nazis, make it a hundred times worse, and you have Fallada’s world. And the book begins in 1940, when the Nazis were at their peak of power, having just swallowed continental Europe whole and appearing invincible. But even then, the German people were living in a stage of constant fear, and fear is what permeates every page of the book. A world of informers, extortionists, corrupt officials, a browbeaten population terrified into believing it must report everything to the Gestapo, lest they come under suspicion as an accomplice.

Nearly every scene is drowned in treachery, and often in blood. Totally innocent people are swept up, tortured and put to death over the most casual passing reference by the postcard-writing wife. And the Gestapo always wins. Torture, extortion and the threat of the concentration camps always get people to talk.

Every Man Dies Alone is a mystery novel, a breathless thriller about a two-year chase. It follows the Gestapo step by step as they pursue their prey, recording in painstaking detail the destruction and fear they leave in their wake. But I saw it most of all as a window into the lives of the “ordinary people” of Germany. Many of them hated Hitler and hated the atmosphere of terror. And yet they played along, and even gave the cards to the Gestapo. We are reminded that many Germans despised Hitler, especially after Stalingrad, but by the time war was declared in 1939 it was too late, they had handed Hitler total power, and now all they could do was survive as best they could. And yes, many, many others followed him blindly, believing in him until the very end.

The postcard couple are at the core of the book, but surrounding them is a constellation of supporting characters – low lives, Hitler Youth, a Jew in hiding, a compassionate judge who sees exactly what’s happening to Germany, a postal worker who learns her beloved son is smashing the skulls of Jewish babies in Russia, die-hard radicalized Nazis, and others who begin to have their doubts….

Each of these characters is interesting, each leaves a strong impression. But I have to say, several are one-dimensional, and Fallada spends way too much time going into their individual stories. (This is particularly true in the case of Enno Kluge, a compulsive gambler and con man who somehow gets involved, mistakenly, in the investigation; he ends up shot in the head and thrown in a river. Intriguing, but Fallada definitely gives us too much information.)

Also, the book is a little too long. It dragged for about 100 pages in the middle, but then took on ferocious speed as the Gestapo zeros in. The style isn’t rich or florid; it is simple and straightforward. But I hung on every word, and found myself reading late into the night.

Primo Levi called this, “The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.” I won’t disagree, though there’s so little to compare it to – there was hardly any organized German resistance to speak of until Stauffenberg’s ill-fated plot in 1944. It especially makes you wonder, to what extent were the ordinary German people responsible for the blight of Hitler, a question that has mystified me since I can first remember learning who Hitler was.

I lived in Germany as a college student, my former history professor served in the Waffen SS, I’ve spoken with countless students whose parents participated in Hitler rallies and I’ve read a fearful number of books about German history. I always am left with the same question, how much did the “ordinary Germans” know and to what extent can they be held accountable? Fallada helped me better understand all the forces pressing against the ordinary German seeking to survive in a time when death and betrayal were a possibility with each knock on the door. I will never know the actual answer, will never have a perfect understanding of this impossible question. But Every Man Dies Alone gave me a new perspective, and showed me what the Nazi terror meant for the simple factory worker, the mail deliverer, the lowlife pimp and gambler, the retired judge who knew what justice meant. I don’t think you can fully understand life in Nazi Germany if you don’t read this book.

As a quick note: I discovered this book quite fortuitously, when I was led to this article. This was the description that moved me to order it:

What was it like? I would ask myself, the years I lived in Berlin. What was it like in the leafy Grunewald neighborhood to watch your Jewish neighbors — lawyers, businessmen, dentists — trooping head bowed to the nearby train station for transport eastward to extinction?

With what measure of fear, denial, calculation, conscience and contempt did neighbors who had proved their Aryan stock to Hitler’s butchers make their accommodations with this Jewish exodus? How good did the schnapps taste and how effectively did it wash down the shame?

Now I know. Thanks to Hans Fallada’s extraordinary “Every Man Dies Alone,” just published in the United States more than 60 years after it first appeared in Germany, I know. What Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française” did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin. Like all great art, it transports, in this instance to a world where, “The Third Reich kept springing surprises on its antagonists: It was vile beyond all vileness.”

Fallada, born Rudolf Ditzen, wrote his novel in less than a month right after the war and just before his death in 1947 at the age of 53. The Nazi hell he evokes is not so much recalled as rendered, whole and alive. The prose is sinuous and gritty, like the city he describes. Dialogue often veers toward sadistic folly with a barbaric logic that takes the breath away.

Yes, it definitely takes the breath away. I’m grateful to the writer for steering me to this book I’d never heard of. Few novels can hold you and move you like this one.

Global warming in action – a moving video illustrates how the rapidly disappearing glaciers of Tibet are melting the culture away with the ice. Thought-provoking and refreshingly apolitical.

I have lots of thoughts about what happened last night, and I may keep expanding this post during the day if I have time. But this clear-headed perspective from one of our best journalists reflects, to me, the obvious – we have made an important step in the right direction.

For now, the significance of the vote is moving the United States FROM a system in which people can assume they will have health coverage IF they are old enough (Medicare), poor enough (Medicaid), fortunate enough (working for an employer that offers coverage, or able themselves to bear expenses), or in some other way specially positioned (veterans; elected officials)… TOWARD a system in which people can assume they will have health-care coverage. Period.

That is how the entire rest of the developed world operates, as noted yesterday. It is the way the United States operates in most realms other than health coverage. Of course all older people are eligible for Medicare. Of course all drivers must have auto insurance. Of course all children must have a public school they can attend. Etc. Such “of course” rules offer protection for individuals but even more important, they reduce the overall costs to society, compared with one in which extreme risks are uncontained. The simplest proof is, again, Medicare: Does anyone think American life would be better now, on an individual or a collective level, if we were in an environment in which older people might have to beg for treatment as charity cases when they ran out of cash? And in which everyone had to spend the preceding years worried about that fate?

There are countless areas in which America does it one way and everyone else does it another, and I say: I prefer the American way. Our practice on medical coverage is not one of these. Despite everything that is wrong with this bill and the thousand adjustments that will be necessary in the years to come, this is a very important step.

Period. I know all the disappointment from both sides, all the complaints, all the fears. Everyone has an idea for how this could have been done better. I’ve been watching the issue carefully for a year now, and I remember just a few weeks ago when the majority opinion was that this bill was impossible to pass. I remember all the cries of panic, again from both sides. Under the circumstances, I am amazed and delighted that we passed any bill at all, and for that we have the much demonized Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to thank. They did it. They pulled it off. Now comes the next battle, tweaking the bill, getting it signed and implemented, dealing with what’s not workable, etc. But for the first time we actually took the step forward, and for tens of millions of Americans a huge burden of doubt and fear and worry has been lifted. This was a victory for them and for all of us, even if it isn’t the bill we wanted to see. That will come in time.

Updates:

Must-read Paul Krugman piece on the use of fear by the GOP to stoke people’s basest instincts to help kill the bill.

Even more must-read: former bush speechwriter Frum lacerates Republicans whose strategy of just saying No to everything has come back to destroy them:

Invoking Republican Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) infamous remarks last July that killing the legislation would be President Obama’s “Waterloo,” David Frum offered a dire assessment of the GOP’s fate. “[I]t’s Waterloo all right: ours,” he wrote on his blog Frum Forum.

“Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s,” said Frum, a former speechwriter and adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster.”

“We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat,” he explained, on the day the House of Representatives cleared the historic legislation for the president to sign into law.

I’d love to see them try to repeal the bill. I’d love to see them try to take away health care from the sick and the needy. I’d love to see them try to re-enforce people getting dropped for pre-existing conditions. bring it on, as Frum’s boss used to say.

Even Jane Hamsher, with whom I had serious disagreements due to her insistence on an all-or-nothing approach (nice in theory, impossible in today’s super-charged, super-polarized political world) acknowledges this as a big step forward. I know, I wanted a public option, too, and I wanted Obama to flush out all the corporate interests and start doing what’s good for the actual citizens. I am also pragmatic and realistic, and believe these things have to be done one step at a time. We now have a foot firmly in the door.

Obama knew all along where he wanted to go. Maybe it wasn’t where I wanted it to go, but I have to credit him with pulling off a spectacular upset, for handing the right their greatest defeat in modern memory, and for proving he is a fighter. Yes, I wish he’d do more for my pet progressive causes, but in this climate, with today’s daunting threats, impossible for any one politician to conquer, I believe he’s about the best we can hope for. Watch his ratings soar, and watch the Republicans dig themselves in deeper with messages of hate and slander. Bring it on.

This is a guest post from long-time Peking Duck reader and contributor Bill Stimson. It’s not about China, but maybe there are some parallels?

Truth in Iran
by William R. Stimson

A fake president rants to a fake crowd about his administration’s mobilization to confront a fake enemy. Fake journalists are present to ensure that the fake story gets out. The real journalists are all in jail. The real media are all closed down. The real president gets attacked by thugs for trying to come out and speak to the real crowds that are trying to gather. The fake crowds have been assembled, paid, bussed in, and provided with flags to wave; but the real ones have been intimidated with arrests and even hangings and have had their means of communication cut. What few still do manage somehow to form are quickly chased down and attacked by the administration’s only real mobilization, the one against its only real enemy – its own people.

These descend from one of the world’s oldest and most magnificent linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions. In 13th Century Persian, its great poet Jalalud’din Rumi expressed the deepest and most utterly authentic pole of Islam. In lines still sung by schoolgirls all over Iran, he celebrated the intoxicating delight of the heart that breaks free from stale religious dogma and its niggling rules to flow with divine love emanating from the eternal now – a winged heart that heals everything it touches, and half the time doesn’t bother to categorize itself as religious, political, or personal. Many who sang and danced in the streets of Teheran prior to last summer’s election felt and expressed this heart that flies with truth and can see through the present order to a better world.

This joyous outpouring of people celebrating in the streets deeply alarmed Iran’s uptight supreme leader and his cohorts, who represent the diametrical opposite, most superficial and deadeningly fake, pole of Islam. For these sterile ideologues and harsh disciplinarians, religion is not an indwelling enlightenment dancing naturally out of the awakened heart, but entails forcing upon the mind and behavior of the populace an acquired belief system, outside authority, shallow legalistic codes, and (their own) political tyranny.

By rigging the election, the supreme leader thought to crush what he saw as a velvet revolution. But it wasn’t a velvet revolution. The velvet revolutions of Eastern Europe aimed to and did overthrow Communist regimes to install democratic ones. Iran’s opposition never set out to change Iran’s system of government – only make it function as it should according to its own constitution.

The green opposition movement could never have undone the supreme leader to the extent it has were it not for the fraudulent behavior he condoned and perpetuated, the mendacity, and the unbelievably cruel and brutal tactics unleashed against innocent civilians. Whatever in the end becomes of him and his cronies can only be what he and they deserve. That this victory is being won by a whole people, unarmed, standing together on the side of truth, will be seen as the defining moment of our times.

The unique power of Iran’s green opposition, and the reason it cannot be defeated, is that it is composed of so many disparate sectors of society, all sharing a certain core belief in a new and more wholesome direction and all acting from a deeply shared part of themselves. The government can take away the people’s Twitter, their Facebook, their Gmail, and even their cell phones. It can prevent them from gathering, it can imprison them, it can torture them, it can sodomize and rape them. It can even hang them. But it can’t seem to cut them off from their only real resource and means of communication – the heart that flies with truth.

* * *

It’s business, and unfortunately the project has forced me to literally ignore this blog. If I have any readers left when I get back around March 12 maybe I’ll start posting again. Until then it’ll be pretty dark here.