On Tyranny: The Threat Isn't Symmetric

I picked this up at the book store after having previously picked it up and put it down on a different visit.

It reminds me of the books that the right was talking about in the aftermath of the 2008 election, looking at the Rules for Radicals and The Road to Serfdom and totems that need to be held tightly to avoid the bad and turn the way to the good. I don’t know if we’re more politicized or not, but on this trip, I couldn’t help but think the Trump election had to be good for booksellers. Or maybe not. Perhaps most of these political books are more bought than read so as to claim allegiance to a tribe.

This book does show allegiance, but in a nice turn, it never directly addresses just what or whose tyranny we need to be on the lookout for, and how to avoid it, but it does just hover there ever so slightly. It is a small book both in terms of pages and the physical dimensions – making it a bit hard to hold in your hands but meaning that it is a quick read. It does feel timely, giving advice on twenty specific ways to avoid and be vigilant for and against. The hope is that we never have to use it, but the point is that tyranny creeps in but doesn’t announce itself. My only criticism is that it warns of oppression from the left and the right, but we know which side prompted him to write.

Mieville's October: What is to be Done?

This is the year we look back.

It’s a nice round number, and long enough ago that we have some distance.

The state that sprung up from the revolution is long enough ago that we can have discussions of what it meant without the baiting of the reds. Or we can for the most part.

Mieville does a good job here as a storyteller. I myself only knew the broad strokes of the timeline, not realizing how much time passed from the initial phases of the revolution to the place where the Bolsheviks took power. 

What really struck me was how much Lenin was in the background – hiding but providing the argument and not really at the physical front. 

Structurally, I like that the story doesn’t end at the storming of the palace, and there is the list of the major figures. We can see both the promise of the revolution and how much was lost in the purges.

It just forces the questions – can it happen again? Can it happen here?

On Keegan’s “The American Civil War”

At some point it came up this summer around the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg that I didn’t know who actually won the battle – this despite knowing that it was the anniversary of the battle.

That made me realize that I’m now pretty much a middle age man, so that to go with the reading on the founders in the last couple of years, it was my duty as an American to become an expert on the civil war.

And this book helped. Now I can knowingly make jokes about Lincoln keeping McClellan as the head general too long when there were other more talented and more decisive generals waiting in the wings.

I think that Keegan may be a little too close to some of the nitty gritty here in the first 80% of the book, but that’s where he’s the best so it makes sense that this is where he keeps his focus. (I’ve read other Keegan like “The Face of Battle,” so I already knew I liked his style. That he does get close to the day to day action and does it well is balanced out by the later quintile where he starts to play economist and sociologist where he is not as good. It sticks out in a bad way.

Overall, it was a worthwhile read.

And the winner of the Battle of Gettysburg? The union, of course. Why else would Lincoln go give his address there?