Noam Chomsky: How Close the World Is to Nuclear War

Author, historian and political commentator Noam Chomsky. (photo: Ben Rusk/flickr)Author, historian and political commentator Noam Chomsky. (photo: Ben Rusk/flickr)

From Reader Supported News (RSN)

An Excerpt

By Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk, Seven Stories Press

19 April 13

 

 

A powerful excerpt from the new book, "Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe."

 

aray Polk: What immediate tensions do you perceive that could lead to nuclear war? How close are we?

 

Noam Chomsky: Actually, nuclear war has come unpleasantly close many times since 1945. There are literally dozens of occasions in which there was a significant threat of nuclear war. There was one time in 1962 when it was very close, and furthermore, it's not just the United States. India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the issues remain. Both India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear arsenals with US support. There are serious possibilities involved with Iran - not Iranian nuclear weapons, but just attacking Iran - and other things can just go wrong. It's a very tense system, always has been. There are plenty of times when automated systems in the United States - and in Russia,it's probably worse - have warned of a nuclear attack which would set off an automatic response except that human intervention happened to take place in time, and sometimes in a matter of minutes. That's playing with fire. That's a low-probability event, but with low-probability events over a long period, the probability is not low.


There is another possibility that, I think, is not to be dismissed: nuclear terror. Like a dirty bomb in New York City, let's say. It wouldn't take tremendous facility to do that. I know US intelligence or people like Graham Allison at Harvard who works on this, they regard it as very likely in the coming years - and who knows what kind of reaction there would be to that. So, I think there are plenty of possibilities. I think it is getting worse. Just like the proliferation problem is getting worse. Take a couple of cases: In September 2009, the Security Council did pass a resolution, S/RES/1887, which was interpreted here as a resolution against Iran. In part it was, but it also called on all states to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That's three states: India, Pakistan, and Israel. The Obama administration immediately informed India that this didn't apply to them; it informed Israel that it doesn't apply to them.

 

If India expands its nuclear capacity, Pakistan almost has to; it can't compete with India with conventional forces. Not surprisingly, Pakistan developed its nuclear weapons with indirect US support. The Reagan administration pretended they didn't know anything about it, which of course they did. India reacted to resolution 1887 by announcing that they could now produce nuclear weapons with the same yield as the superpowers. A year before, the United States had signed a deal with India, which broke the pre-existing regime and enabled the US to provide them with nuclear technology - though they hadn't signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That's in violation of congressional legislation going back to India's first bomb, I suppose around 1974 or so. The United States kind of rammed it through the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and that opens a lot of doors. China reacted by sending nuclear technology to Pakistan. And though the claim is that the technology for India is for civilian use, that doesn't mean much even if India doesn't transfer that to nuclear weapons. It means they're free to transfer what they would have spent on civilian use to nuclear weapons.

 

And then comes this announcement in 2009 that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been repeatedly trying to get Israel to open its facilities to inspection. The US along with Europe usually has been able to block it. And more significant is the effort in the international agencies to try to move toward a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East, which would be quite significant.6 It wouldn't solve all the problems, but whatever threat Iran may be assumed to pose - and that's a very interesting question in itself, but let's suppose for the moment that there is a threat - it would certainly be mitigated and might be ended by a nuclear-weapon-free zone, but the US is blocking it every step of the way.

 

Laray Polk: Now that Iran's reactor at Bushehr is running, the current fear is that they're going to use the plutonium produced from the fuel cycle to make weapons. The questions raised about Iran's possible nuclear weapons program are similar to those asked of Israel--

 

Noam Chomsky: Since the 1960s. And in fact, the Nixon administration made an unwritten agreement with Israel that it wouldn't do anything to compel Israel, or even induce them, to drop what they call their ambiguity policy - not saying whether or not they have them. That's now very alive because there's this regular five-year Non-Proliferation Review Conference.In 1995, under strong pressure from the Arab states, Egypt primarily, there was an agreement that they would move toward a nuclear-weapon-free zone and the Clinton administration signed on. It was reiterated in 2000. In 2005 the Bush administration just essentially undermined the whole meeting. They basically said, "Why do anything?"

It came up again in May 2010. Egypt is now speaking for the Non-Aligned Movement, 118 countries, they're this year's representative, and they pressed pretty hard for a move in that direction. The pressure was so strong that the United States accepted it in principle and claims to be committed to it, but Hillary Clinton said the time's "not ripe for establishing the zone." And the administration just endorsed Israel's position, essentially saying, "Yes, but only after a comprehensive peace agreement in the region," which the US and Israel can delay indefinitely. So, that's basically saying, "it's fine, but it's never going to happen." And this is barely ever reported, so nobody knowsabout it. Just as almost nobody knows about Obama informing India and Israel that the resolutions don't apply to them. All of this just increases the risk of nuclear war.

 

It's more than that actually. You know, the threats against Iran are nontrivial and that, of course, induce them to move toward nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Obama in particular has strongly increased the offensive capacity that the US has on the island of Diego Garcia, which is a major military base they use for bombing the Middle East and Central Asia. In December 2009, the navy dispatched a submarine tender for nuclear submarines in Diego Garcia. Presumably they were already there, but this is going to expand their capacity, and they certainly have the capacity to attack Iran with nuclear weapons. And he also sharply increased the development of deep-penetration bombs, a program that mostly languished under the Bush administration. As soon as Obama came in, he accelerated it, and it was quietly announced - but I think not reported here - that they put a couple of hundred of them in Diego Garcia. That's all aimed at Iran. Those are all pretty serious threats.

 

Actually, the question of the Iranian threat is quite interesting. It's discussed as if that's the major issue of the current era. And not just in the United States, Britain too. This is "the year of Iran," Iran is the major threat, the major policy issue. It does raise the question: What's the Iranian threat? That's never seriously discussed, but there is an authoritative answer, which isn't reported. The authoritative answer was given by the Pentagon and intelligence in April 2010; they have an annual submission to Congress on the global security system, and of course discussed Iran. They made it very clear that the threat is not military. They said Iran has very low military spending even by the standards of the region; their strategic doctrine is completely defensive, it's designed to deter an invasion long enough to allow diplomacy to begin to operate; they have very little capacity to deploy force abroad. They say if Iran were developing nuclear capability, which is not the same as weapons, it would be part of the deterrent strategy,which is what most strategic analysts take for granted, so there's no military threat. Nevertheless, they say it's the most significant threat in the world. What is it? Well, that's interesting. They're trying to extend their influence in neighboring countries; that's what's called destabilizing. So if we invade their neighbors and occupy them, that's stabilizing. Which is a standard assumption. It basically says, "Look, we own the world." And if anybody doesn't follow orders, they're aggressive.

 

In fact, that's going on with China right now. It's been a kind of a hassle, also hasn't been discussed much in the United States - but is discussed quite a lot in China, about control of the seas in China's vicinity. Their navy is expanding, and that's discussed here and described as a major threat. What they're trying to do is to be able to control the waters nearby China - the South China Sea,Yellow Sea, and so on - and that's described here as aggressive intent. The Pentagon just released a report on the dangers of China. Their military budget is increasing; it's now one-fifth what the US spends in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is of course a fraction of the military budget. Not long ago, the US was conducting naval exercises in the waters off China. China was protesting particularly over the plans to send an advanced nuclear- powered aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, into those waters,which, according to China, has the capacity to hit Beijing with nuclear weapons - and they didn't like it. And the US formally responded by saying that China is being aggressive because they're interfering with freedom of the seas. Then, if you look at the strategic analysis literature, they describe it as a classic security dilemma where two sides are in a confrontation. Each regards what it's doing as essential to its security and regards the other side as threatening its security, and we're supposed to take the threat seriously. So if China is trying to control waters off its coast, that's aggression and it's harming our security. That's a classic security dilemma. You could just imagine if China were carrying out naval exercises in the Caribbean - in fact, in the mid-Pacific - it would be considered intolerable. That's very much like Iran. The basic assumption is "We own the world," and any exercise of sovereignty within our domains, which is most of the world, is aggression.

 

Laray Polk: Is there any type of nuclear racism involved in these issues?

 

Noam Chomsky: I think it would be the same if there were no nuclear weapons. I mean, it goes back to long-term planning assumptions, and I don't really think it's racism. Let's take a concrete case. We have a lot of internal documents now, some interesting ones from the Nixon years. Nixon and Kissinger, when they were planning to overthrow the government of Chile in 1973, their position was that this government's intolerable, it's exercising its sovereignty, it's a threat to us, so it has to go.14 It's what Kissinger called a virus that might spread contagion elsewhere, maybe into southern Europe - not that Chile would attack southern Europe - but that a successful, social democratic parliamentary system would send the wrong message to Spain and Italy. They might be inclined to try the same, it would mean its contagion would spread and the system falls apart. And they understood that, in fact stated that, if we can't control Latin America, how are we going to control the rest of the world? We at least have to control Latin America. There was some concern - which was mostly meaningless, but it was there - about a Soviet penetration into Latin America, and they recognized that if Europe gets more involved in Latin America, that would tend to deter any Soviet penetration, but they concluded the US couldn't allow that because it would interfere with US dominance of the region. So, it's not racist. It's a matter of dominance.

 

In fact, the same is happening with NATO. Why didn't NATO disappear after the Soviet Union collapsed? If anybody read the propaganda, they'd say, "Well, it should have disappeared, it was supposed to protect Europe from the Russian hordes." Okay, no more Russian hordes, so it should disappear. It expanded in violation of verbal promises to Gorbachev. And it expanded, I think, largely in order to keep Europe under control. One of the purposes of NATO all along was to prevent Europe from moving in an independent path, maybe a kind of Gaullist path, and they had to expand NATO to make sure that Europe stays a vassal. If you look back to the planning record during the Second World War, it's very instructive. It's almost never discussed, but there were high-level meetings from 1939 to 1945 under the Roosevelt administration, which sort of planned for the postwar years. They knew the United States would emerge from the war at least very well off and maybe completely triumphant. They didn't know how much at first. The principles that were established were very interesting and explicit, and later implemented. They devised the concept of what they called the Grand Area, which the US must dominate. And within the Grand Area, there can be no exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US plans - explicit, almost those words. What's the Grand Area? Well, at a minimum, it was to include the entire Western Hemisphere, the entire Far East, and the whole British Empire - former British Empire - which, of course, includes the Middle East energy resources. As one high-level advisor later put it: "If we can control Middle East energy, we can control the world." Well, that's the Grand Area.

 

As the Russians began to grind down the German armies after Stalingrad, they recognized that Germany was weakened - at first, they thought that Germany would emerge from the war as a major power. So the Grand Area planning was extended to as much of Eurasia as possible, including at least Western Europe, which is the industrial-commercial center of the region. That's the Grand Area, and within that area, there can be no exercise of sovereignty. Of course, they can't carry it off.

 

For example, China is too big to push around and they're exercising their sovereignty. Iran is trying, it's small enough so you can push them around - they think so. Even Latin America is getting out of control. Brazil was not following orders. And, in fact, a lot of South America isn't, and the whole thing is causing a lot of desperation in Washington. You can see it if you look at the official pronouncements. China is not paying attention to US sanctions on Iran. US sanctions on Iran have absolutely no legitimacy. It's just that people are afraid of the United States. And Europe more or less goes along with them, but China doesn't. They disregard them. They observe the UN sanctions, which have formal legitimacy but are toothless, so they're happy to observe them. The major effect of the UN sanctions is to keep Western competitors out of Iran, so they can move in and do what they feel like. The US is pretty upset about it. In fact, the State Department issued some very interesting statements, interesting because of their desperate tone. They warned China that, this is almost a quote, "if you want to be accepted into the international community, you have to meet your international responsibilities, and the international responsibilities are to follow our orders." You can see both the desperation in US planning circles and you can kind of imagine the reaction of the Chinese foreign office, they're probably laughing, you know, why should they follow US orders? They'll do what they like.

 

They're trying to recover their position as a major world power. For a long time they were the major world power before what they call the "century of humiliation." They are now coming back to a three-thousand-year tradition of being the center of the world and dismissing the barbarians. So, okay, "we'll just go back to that and the US can't do anything about it," which is causing enormous frustration. That's why they get terribly upset when China doesn't observe US sanctions on Iran. By now it's not China and Iran that are isolated on Iran sanctions; it's the United States that's isolated. The nonaligned countries - 118 countries, most of the world - have always supported Iran's right to enrich uranium, still do. Turkey recently constructed a pipeline to Iran, so has Pakistan. Turkey's trade with Iran has been going way up, they're planning to triple it the next few years. In the Arab world, public opinion is so outraged at the United States that a real majority now favors Iran developing nuclear weapons, not just nuclear energy. The US doesn't take that too seriously, they figure that dictatorships can control the populations. But when Turkey's involved or, certainly, when China's involved, it becomes a threat. That's why you get these desperate tones. Apart from Europe, almost nobody's accepting US orders on this. Brazil's probably the most important country in the South. Not long ago, Brazil and Turkey made a deal with Iran for enriching a large part of the uranium; the US quickly shot that down. They don't want it, but the world is just hard to control. The Grand Area planning was okay at the end of the Second World War when the US was overwhelmingly dominant, but it has been kind of fractured ever since - and during the last few years, considerably. And I think this is related to the proliferation issues. The US is strongly supporting India and Israel, and the reason is they've now turned India into a close strategic ally - Israel always was. India, on the other hand, is playing it pretty cool. They're also improving their relations with China.

 

Laray Polk: President Obama recently secured military basing rights in Australia and formed a new free-trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excludes China. Is this move related to the South China Sea?

 

Noam Chomsky: Yes, in particular that, but it's more general. It has to do with the "classic security dilemma" that I mentioned before, referring to the strategic analysis literature. China's efforts to gain some measure of control over nearby seas and its major trade routes are inconsistent with what the US calls "freedom of the seas" - a term that doesn't extend to Chinese military maneuvers in the Caribbean or even most of the world's oceans, but does include the US right to carry out military maneuvers and establish naval bases everywhere.For different reasons, China's neighbors are none too happy about its actions, particularly Vietnam and the Philippines, which have competing claims to these waters, but others as well. The focus of US policy is slowly shifting from the Middle East - though that remains - to the Pacific, as openly announced. That includes new bases from Australia to South Korea (and a continuing and very significant conflict over Okinawa), and also economic agreements, called "free-trade agreements," though the phrase is more propaganda than reality, as in other such cases. Much of it is a system to "contain China."

 

Laray Polk: To what degree are current maritime sovereignty disputes related to oil and gas reserves?

In part. There are underseas fossil-fuel resources, and a good deal of contention among regional states about rights to them. But it's more than that. The new US base on Jeju Island in South Korea, bitterly protested by islanders, is not primarily concerned with energy sources. Other issues have to do with Malacca Straits, China's main trade route, which does involve oil and gas but also much else.

 

In the background is the more general concern over parts of the world escaping from US control and influence, the contemporary variant of Grand Area policies. Much of this extends the practice of earlier hegemonic powers, though the scale of US post-World War II planning and implementation has been in a class by itself because of its unique wealth and power.

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The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
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Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

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Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

1 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

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