The 6 Characters You’ll Meet At Every Expat Bar

This has been making the rounds on friends' facebook pages, so I thought I'd steal it and post it here with the following comments.

1). Pretty spot on. More or less.
2). Ouch. Number 2 is a little bit too spot on for comfort. The truth stings a bit.
3). Despite the introduction, I'm not sure this is entirely universal. It's probably true around the world in developing countries but in Japan, for example, many of these characters were absent. (Not much need for overpaid aid workers in a country like Japan.)

Also if I had to add one category, in Cambodia I seem to run into the "pretentious back-packer" a lot. The kind of person who believes that because they have traveled to the far corners of the earth and because they appreciate literature in a deep way, they are somehow better than us ordinary slobs. If you try and talk to them in a bar, they'll quickly try and size you up to see if you're as deep and cultured as they are, and then dismiss you and move on to someone else.
(Perhaps this is just bitterness talking.)

This type of person will also often have trendy tattoos--often Kanji characters that they actually can't read, and will sometimes get defensive if you try and make conversation to them about what their tattoos really mean.

Rest in Peace Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, militant pundit, dies at 62

No doubt this is one of many similar entries all over the blogosphere right now. So be it.

I don't know if I should admit this, but I've actually read very little of Christopher Hitchens. (The only book of his I've read cover to cover is "The Trial of Henry Kissinger".) I find his verbose style a little bit hard to swallow in writing, and I much prefer hearing him speak than reading him. This probably says something about my limited intellect and limited reading abilities.

But I love hearing Hitchens speak. There was about a 2 year period in Japan (when my social life was a bit slow) when I became addicted to listening to him on youtube. In fact over a two year period I spent more hours watching his debates on youtube than I care to admit. Agree with him or disagree with him, he's got a razor sharp tongue and it's always a pleasure to see what biting comeback he will have to whatever remark is thrown at him.

I don't think there's anyone out there who agrees with Christopher Hitchens about everything. He's made a career of not towing the party line, and probably everyone has some dearly held issue he's trampled on.

I passionately disagreed with him on the Iraq War, and wondered how someone so smart could advocate for such a stupid war.
I've heard him recite his reasons for supporting the war ad infinitum, but I never really bought them. I know totalitarian Islamic societies have their problems, but Hitchens has forgotten Robespierre's quote

"The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and their constitutions. No one loves armed missionaries."

Call me cynical, but I still suspect Hitchens was motivated to support that war partly just because of a love off all the attention it brought him. It's the only explanation I can think of to explain the motives behind a man who, in his earlier writings, appeared to clearly understand just how little genuine humanitarian concerns motivate foreign wars.

On the plus side, I found Hitchens thoughts on Jefferson and Trotsky fascinating to listen to. I loved his take downs of Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. And I loved listening to him debate on religion. In fact I think hours of watching Hitchens talk about religion have helped me to move from an ambivalent agnosticism to a more militant agnosticism, so I can claim him as an influence on my own thoughts. I'll miss hearing about him.

Update: Back in this post, I stated that based on my own personal experience talking to Brits, many of them don't even know who Christopher Hitchens is.
At my new place of work, this continues to be true. When news of Christopher Hitchens' death went around the office, all the Americans and Australians knew who he was, but none of the British people I talked to did. Granted this is a completely unscientific survey, but it just may indicate that Christopher Hitchens was much better known across the sea than in his native land.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky at Occupy Boston

I Yell at Someone in the Streets over a Chomsky Article

Yesterday I was eating lunch with a friend at restaurant in Phnom Penh at a table out on the sidewalk. Another expat walked by and handed us a small little magazine booklet ("This Week" [LINK HERE] published by Lady Penh [LINK HERE]).
I leafed through it. Most of the booklet consisted of advertising. There were movie times for the local cinemas, and a calendar of events for local expat bars. The content of the magazine consisted of two articles: the best places to get coffee in Phnom Penh, and an editorial on Chomsky.

The PDF for this publication, including the article in question, can be read online [LINK HERE].

I read the Chomsky article first, and just sighed. “Look at how terrible this article is,” I said, pushing the booklet across the table to my friend.

“It is pretty bad,” my friend agreed.

Just around that time, the guy who had given us the booklet in the first place came back down the street. “You guys need another one?” he asked us.

“Look at this,” I said, calling him over to our table. “You’ve got an editorial here on Chomsky by someone who admits she hasn’t ever read any Chomsky.”

“So?”

“So it’s a waste of paper! Why would I want to read what she thinks about Chomsky when she hasn’t read anything by Chomsky.” (I may have raised my voice at this point.)

“Okay, wow, um…”

“Look, there are about 3 or 4 articles Chomsky wrote on Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge time. You can find them all on-line. Go look them up and read them. Chomsky didn’t say any of this.”

“That wasn’t actually me that wrote that article.”

“Well tell her then. She’s got her facts all wrong. Chomsky never said any of this.”

“He has.”

“No he hasn’t”

“Yes he has. Recently.”

“No he hasn’t. Get your facts straight.”

He tried to change the subject at this point. “Okay, well you should check out her website. There are a lot of other interesting things there.”

As he walked away, I called out after him, “Go and read the original articles.”

After the guy walked away, my friend looked at me, put his drink down, and said, “Wow.”

“Was I a little bit too hard on the guy?” I asked.

“You sir, are a history bully,” my friend said to me.

“I probably was a bit over the top just then.”

“In that guy’s defense, there was a picture right above the article of the girl who wrote it, and it clearly was not him.”

“Yeah, I know, I just wanted to yell at someone and he was right there. But he was distributing a magazine in which the only other article was about coffee, so he’s got to take some of the responsibility.”

“You’re probably going to call him back and yell at him about the coffee article next?”
He added, “You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen you get upset. And it’s over a history article. Well, I guess we all have our buttons. Some people yell at bad waiters or bartenders, you apparently like to yell at people in the streets over Chomsky articles.”

Okay, so I was probably a bit over the top. And it is always counter productive to yell at people. Calm, well reasoned arguments win people over to your side, not raised voices. If I ever see that guy again, I owe him an apology.

So let me take a few minutes to calmly explain my specific objections to the article in question. The Chomsky article in question appears on her blog here [LINK HERE]. If this was just someone’s blog, I wouldn’t bother. The fact that a print version of this article was being handed out up and down the streets of Phnom Penh makes me more motivated to write a rebuttal. 　(The print version of this article is slightly different than the blog form, but I’ll get into that more below.)

Let me start with a bit of background. Among the expat crowd in Cambodia it’s impossible to mention Chomsky’s name without someone bringing up the Khmer Rouge. I was recently discussing Chomsky’s theories with a co-worker, when another woman 3 desks down (who wasn’t even part of the conversation) yelled out, “Never forget he supported the Khmer Rouge. Never forget that.” And this is fairly typical.

Figuring out what Chomsky actually said about the Khmer Rouge is a bit of a headache. On the internet you can find lots of articles attacking Chomsky for his supposed support of the Khmer Rouge, and lots of articles defending him. For example you can read any number of articles by David Horowitz accusing Chomsky of supporting the Khmer Rouge. You can also read Christopher Hitchen's article "The Chorus and Cassandra" [LINK HERE] which defends Chomsky against Horowitz. Then you can read this article "The Chorus and Cassandra: A Response" [LINK HERE] rebutting Hitchens. There's also a very detailed article here which appears to go through everything Chomsky ever said on Cambodia with a fine tooth comb, "Averaging Wrong Answers" [LINK HERE]and Chomsky's response to that article [LINK HERE] and the author's response to Chomsky's response [LINK HERE].
Reading through all these articles and trying to figure out what Chomsky said when, what footnotes he used, and how reliable Chomsky’s sources were is a big mess. I was really having a hard time trying to make heads or tails about it.

Until I got a simple idea: go back and read the actual articles that Chomsky wrote about Cambodia during the 1970s. These articles are all available on line and easy enough to find, and in a couple hours you can read everything Chomsky ever wrote on Cambodia during the 1970s. You can read for example, “Cambodia” (1970), [LINK HERE] “The Cynical Farce that is Cambodia” (1978) [LINK HERE], and the one that Chomsky’s critics most frequently mention, “Distortions at Fourh Hand” (1977) [LINK HERE].  As for recent statements, you can find this 2009 interview with Chomsky on the Khmer Rouge [LINK HERE]. This blog here, which simply reprints without comment articles Chomsky has wrote on Cambodia over the years, is very useful [LINK HERE].
Once I had actually read these articles, I had a much clearer understanding of what Chomsky’s position had been.

You would be surprised how few people actually do this. 99% of the time whenever someone is going off about how Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge, they’ve never read the actual articles by Chomsky. They just read in somewhere in a Wall Street Journal editorial that Chomsky once supported the Khmer Rouge. (And the Wall Street Journal writer himself never read any Chomsky either. He just read somewhere that someone else said Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge and on and on it goes.)

Not surprisingly, this is the way distortions happen over time. The accusation goes from “Chomsky was insufficiently critical of the Khmer Rouge” to “Chomsky actively supported the Khmer Rouge” to “Chomsky still supports Khmer Rouge and believes they never did anything wrong.”

This last position is the one taken by Ms. Greenwood in her editorial. Despite the fact that Ms. Greenwood has not actually read anything written by Chomsky, as she admits in her 3rd paragraph.

“I have not bothered to read any of Chomsky’s work previously, and judging from Thayer’s description of his opinions, I doubt I will do so in the future.”

Okay, so she gets points for honesty by admitting this upfront. But why she would then feel the need to write an editorial on Chomsky I can’t fathom. And again, if this were just her blog, I would let it go. (I’m not proud of it, but if you search the archives of my blog, you’ll find me frequently spouting off about topics I’m ill informed on.) But this article was in print form as part of a professional publication being handed out on the streets.
Look, we’ve all talked jive about topics we were ill-informed on. But who takes the time to write up and distribute on the streets an editorial that essentially begins with “I’ve never read anything by this guy, but based on what so-and-so said he sounds like a real jerk.”

Then, based on her interpretation about what some other guy said about Chomsky, Ms. Greenwood goes on to make following claims, “He [Chomsky] still believes the Khmer Rouge atrocities were a mass fabrication, and he still believes that a vast media-and refugee?- came together to demonize the Khmer Rouge.”
Speaking as someone who has actually read what Chomsky wrote on the Khmer Rouge, I think if Ms. Greenwood were to actually read Chomsky she would find he had written nothing of the sort.

And then there’s the headline to this article. Noam Chomsky: “The Khmer Rouge Were Actually Pretty OK, Guys”

Now, this is serious. This would actually be a pretty damning quote if Chomsky had actually said this. But a Google search for these exact words indicates the only place they appear is on Ms. Greenwood’s blog. Which means this isn’t an actual Chomsky quote. This is her interpretation of what she thinks Chomsky believes (based on someone else’s editorial) which she decided to put in quotation marks next to Chomsky’s name.

To be fair, there is actually a difference here between the print version and the blog version. On her blog it’s not in quotation marks. In the print publication being distributed on the streets, it is. I suppose the charitable explanation would be that this was a mistake the printer made.
The less charitable explanation is that Ms. Greenwood does not understand that it goes against the ethics of journalism to make up quotes and attribute them to someone else.

Now this kind of mis-attribution is how rumors get started. Given how few people seem to read Chomsky’s actual articles, it means that there’s going to be several people on the streets of Phnom Penh who believe Chomsky actually said this. And perhaps will take Ms. Greenwood’s opinion that Chomsky is not worth checking out, and never read anything by Chomsky themselves. (Again, if this were just a blog article I would let it go. But this is in an actual magazine being actively distributed.)

It is true that Chomsky has refused to apologize for his media analysis articles written in the 1970s. That is, Chomsky still believes that in specific incidents reporters fabricated or exaggerated information about the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. And Chomsky still believes that the specific incidents of fabrication he mentioned in "Distortions at Fourth Hand" have not yet been proven false. This is what Chomsky is referring to when he says to the best of his knowledge no errors have been found in his writings.
This may be debatable. In some of the articles linked to above there are some questions raised about the accuracy of some of Chomsky's sources. (Go and read the articles yourself and make up your own mind.) But this is a separate discussion.

Ms. Greenwood misinterprets this to mean that Chomsky believes that the Khmer Rouge atrocities never took place. And this is plain wrong.

If a prominent intellectual did still believe that no Khmer Rouge atrocities took place, it would be quite something. This is the type of accusation you would think a person would want to double check very carefully before printing it off into fliers and passing it out to random people in the streets.

So what did Chomsky actually say about the Khmer Rouge? Well the best thing to do is not to take either my word or Ms. Greenwood’s word for anything, but to go read the actual articles Chomsky wrote at the time. To a certain extent I would only be adding to the white noise on this controversy by putting in my own opinion instead of simply redirecting people to the original articles.

However, that being said, my own reading of the whole controversy is as follows: when the Khmer Rouge were actually in power, Western journalists were not actually allowed into the country. Therefore Western Media had to rely mostly on second hand accounts and speculation as to what was actually going in the country. Noam Chomsky was critical of what much of the Western Media was reporting, and of their methods of obtaining information. He believed it was popular to exaggerate atrocities in Cambodia as a way to retroactively discredit the anti-war movement, and that at the same time the media was ignoring comparable atrocities going on in East Timor.
When the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 it turned out that the reports had not been exaggerated, and that things had actually been worse than people thought it was. So Chomsky was wrong.
But if you actually read the articles Chomsky wrote at the time, you will not find an endorsement of the Khmer Rouge. Read, for example, “The Cynical Farce that is Cambodia” and you’ll find him acknowledging that things my well be as bad as everyone says they are. Or if you read his much criticized article “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” you’ll find he has a lot of good reasons for being skeptical about the media reports. In the light of history we now know he was wrong, but he was wrong for some of the right reasons.

But don’t listen to me. Go and read his actual articles and form your own opinion.

The gentleman I met on the streets asserted to me that recently Chomsky has been saying all the things Ms. Greenwood has attributed to him. If so, I can’t find any examples on the Internet. If either of them are reading this, I would be happy to revise my position if you can show me where he Chomsky has actually said this. But don’t point me to an editorial someone else has written about Chomsky. Show me the actual Chomsky article or interview where he says all these things you’re attributing to him.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky Speaks to Occupy: If We Want a Chance at a Decent Future, the Movement Here and Around the World Must Grow

Why Labour are calling David Cameron 'Flashman'

(Also, for comparison's sake, it's interesting to see how the British version of this same article feels very little need to explain who Flashman is. Cameron like bully Flashman, says Miliband.)

Best. Controversy. Ever.

Teen tweeter won't apologize to Kan. governor

The Shawnee Mission East senior was taking part in a Youth in Government program last week in Topeka, Kan., when she sent out a tweet from the back of a crowd of students listening to Brownback's greeting. From her cellphone, she thumbed: "Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person (hash)heblowsalot."

She actually made no such comment and said she was "just joking with friends." But Brownback's office, which monitors social media for postings containing the governor's name, saw Sullivan's post and contacted the Youth in Government program.

....

Sullivan's mother, Julie, said she isn't angry with her daughter, even though she thinks she "could have chosen different words."

I don't know which I find funnier: the fact that the Governor's office thought it was a productive use of their time to complain about a high school student who said the Governor "blows a lot" ...

Or the fact that the high school student in question is stubbornly refusing to back down. (I said he blows a lot and I stand by that.)

The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia by Milton E. Osborne

Subtitle: Rule and Response 1859-1905

(Book Review)

There are unfortunately not many English language books available on the French colonial period in South East Asia, and the few books published can sometimes be difficult to track down.

This book was originally published in 1969, and then re-published in 1997 by White Lotus, a small publishing company in Thailand apparently dedicated to republishing classic works on South East Asian history.

When I was still in the US, I tried to order this book off of Amazon, but was not able to track down a reasonably priced copy.
(In Cambodia, White Lotus history books--or ripped-off photo copied versions of them-- are much easier to find.)

File this book under: dry, but readable. It’s not the most exciting book I’ve ever read, but if you’re interested in the subject material there’s not a lot of other books to choose from.

This book starts out almost immediately where John Cady left off in “The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia” so the two books compliment each other nicely if you read them in succession.
This is not a coincidence. As a scholar, Milton Osborne is less concerned with history as story telling than he is with trying to fill in gaps in the literature, so he states quite clearly in the footnotes his reluctance to retell what John Cady has already covered.

Also this book is not meant to be a popular history. Instead of trying to tell a compelling story, Milton Osborne wants to examine the nature of colonialism. As such there are a lot of chapters heavy on analysis of colonial systems, and very few chapters dedicated to narrative events.

As someone who prefers narrative rather than analytical history, I found several of these chapters quite boring, and it was a bit of a struggle to force myself to finish this book.

For example Milton Osborne spends several chapters detailing the French efforts to change the Vietnamese written language from one based on Chinese characters to being one based on the French alphabet.
This is interesting to a degree. (On my recent trip to Vietnam, it was astonishing to see how the Western alphabet had been so completely adopted to the local language, in contrast to just about every other Asian country which have all maintained their traditional writing systems.) But I wasn’t interested in it enough to go into all the detail that Osborne does.

In the same way, Osborne goes into great detail describing how the French Colonial authorities attempted to set up a legal system in Vietnam that compromised between local traditions and French judicial ideals. Again this is interesting to a point, but not to the detail that Osborne goes into.

All that being said, this book avoids academic speak, and is written in ordinary English prose. So assuming you’re interested in following Osborne through all this analysis, it is easy to read.

The book is divided into two sections, half dealing with Vietnam, and half dealing with Cambodia. Osborne contrasts the different approaches taken by the French to each country.
Vietnam was administered as a proper colony, with the pre-existing government in South Vietnam completely removed, and a new colonial government instituted.
Cambodia was administrated as a protectorate, with the pre-existing monarchy left intact, but forced to surrender much of its power to the French authorities.

The section on Cambodia, partly because it deals with the history of the relationship between the Cambodian king and the French authorities, reads much more like a narrative, and for that reason I found it more interesting than the section Vietnam. But this is a personal taste.

*****************************************************

Further thoughts:

1). This book was originally published in 1969, and it’s not hard to imagine that Milton Osborne must have had in mind the American efforts in Vietnam as a parallel to the French colonialists he was writing about.

Nevertheless, reading it today it’s impossible not to think of the occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So many parallels between the French effort to establish a stable government in Vietnam, and the American effort to establish stable governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, just leap right off the page at you.

There is for example the assumption by French intellectuals that colonization was good for the native peoples because they were liberating the Vietnamese people from a corrupt and oppressive government. (And actually the 19th Century Mandarin government of Vietnam actually was in some ways corrupt and oppressive, but as Milton Osborne shows the French attempts to colonize Vietnam and set up a new government created more problems than it solved.)

Osborne also details the various headaches involved in trying to create a judicial system that both respected local tradition and was acceptable to the French.

And Osborne goes into the trouble the French had in administrating a colony where they did not speak the language, and where there was a shortage of qualified translators.

Osborne describes the discrepancy between the vast majority of the population, which was hostile or indifferent to French rule, and the small number of collaborators who welcomed the French and actively worked with them. Osborne shows how the French government tried to represent the views of this small minority of collaborators as being representative of the whole population, and used this to discredit the idea that the vast majority of the Vietnamese wanted the French out of Cochinchina.

This brings me to thought number 2.

2). Writing in the post-colonial period, Osborne takes a somewhat negative view of the Vietnamese and Cambodian colonial collaborators. Although he repeatedly emphasizes his desire to understand them rather than to condemn, it is obvious he regards them as a problem that needs to be explained.

Something Osborne never touches on, but perhaps should have, is that during this same time period other leading figures in Asia were advocating learning from Western thought and culture.
Figures such as Sun Yat Sen in China, or Sakamoto Ryoma in Japan are still today regarded as national heroes in their respective countries because of the role they played in modernizing their nations, even though they advocated adopting Western institutions.

It could be that the colonial collaborators in Vietnam and Cambodia also sought to make their nations stronger through adopting Western institutions, and thought the best way to do this at the time was by working closely with the French.

This is an oversimplification of course, but I wish Milton Osborne would have explored the comparison between the pro-French Vietnamese intellectuals to the pro-Western intellectuals in Japan and China.

3) And finally, an interesting note on tropical diseases in Cambodia, that makes one worry a little bit.

Not the least of the difficulties that the French faced was the high rate of disease among the troops that they committed against the Cambodian insurgents. Sudden death from disease was a normal part of life for Europeans in the tropics during the nineteenth century, but the scale on which the diseases affected the troops in Cambodia was extraordinary. None of the columns sent against the insurgents seems to have been exempt. In one notable instance, 75 of a detachment of 120 men had to be hospitalized on their return from an operation. The chief French doctor described the situation following the beginning of the monsoon rains:
The onset of the rains has reawakened malarial infections and intestinal disorders which have assumed a gravity which, up until now, I have never seen before….

(p. 217-218).

Link of the Day
The Pentagon Papers and U.S. Imperialism in South East Asia

The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia: Rule and Response 1859-1905 by Milton E. Osborne

Conspirator: Lenin in Exile by Helen Rappaport

Subtitle: The Making of a Revolutionary

(Book Review)

There are a million and one books about Lenin.

What recommends this book in particular is how well it’s written. Helen Rappaport is one of those rare historians who makes history sound like a story.

I’ll just quote a couple paragraphs to illustrate this. In this chapter, Lenin is travelling across Finland, and being housed along the way by the Finnish underground railroad for Russian politicals. He was supposed to get off the train at Abo railway station, where he would be met by the Borg family. However when he didn’t show up, the Borg family assumed he had been picked up by the political police.

By 2.00 a.m. there was only one logical conclusion that could regretfully be reached: the gendarmes had picked him [Lenin] up en route. And then, suddenly, came a soft thud at the window. Down below, standing in the soft white glow of the snow, stood a lonely figure, clutching a small suitcase. Lenin, fearful of knocking at the front door at this time of night, had thrown a snowball up at Borg’s window to attract his attention.
He had indeed almost fallen into the hands of the Okhrana [Tsarist Police]. Leaving Helsingfors by train he soon spotted that he was being tailed by two agents. When he got off the train at Karis to have some supper in the station buffet the men followed and watched him closely. He had to get away from them; they would arrest him the minute he got off the train at Abo, the end of the line. So, as the train gathered speed out of the tiny station of Littois (Littoinene), the last before, Abo, he slipped out on to the running board, threw his suitcase ahead of him and leaped from the train. Luckily, a deep snowdrift broke his fall. The two agents decided it was not worth risking their necks to follow, and as he watched the red of the train’s tail lights disappear into the night, Lenin heaved a sigh of relief. He picked himself up and trudged off in the crackling frost the seven miles of country road into Abo, his only point of reference in the dark, looming pine forest on all sides.
At Borg’s apartment, seeing that he was frozen, hungry and exhausted, the Finns removed Lenin’s coat and boots. As he lay on the divan to recover, Borg’s wife Ida fed him hot milk with cognac and rubbed spirit on his hands and feet to get the circulation going. By now extremely agitated at the thought of being captured, as soon as Lenin heard there was still a chance of catching the Bore I [the ship], he insisted on being found a sledge so that he could leave straight away. Ludwig Lindstrom, who was to be his guide, told him that it would be very hard finding the way in the snow and the dark and they would have to wait till morning. Lenin was hysterical that the spooks would catch up with him before then. “I’ve already been in Siberia and I don’t want to end up there again!” he exclaimed. If Lindstrom wasn’t prepared to take him, he would set off on foot, alone and head north for the Gulf of Bothnia. He’d walk all the way to the northern border with Sweden at Torneo if he had to: “I’ve walked further distances in Siberia.”

That wonderful storytelling alone is enough reason to just lose yourself in this book for hours at your local coffee shop.

The subject material of this book is fascinating as well. Rappaport makes the decision to cover the beginning of Lenin’s life only very briefly, and to skip the end of his life when he was in power. As the title suggests, Rappaport focuses only on his years as a political exile in Europe.
This was a wise decision. Not only is this the period usually neglected by other writers, but it’s arguably the most fascinating part of Lenin’s life. The games of cat and mouse with the police, the fierce political squabbling among the exiled Russian community in Europe, and the idealistic pre-revolution socialist community in Western Europe are all fascinating.

Although Lenin is the most well-known of the Russian socialists, in some ways his story is the least interesting, and Rappaport will sometimes use Lenin’s life as a jumping off point to describe some of the various adventures of the Russian socialist community at the time (dodging police while smuggling in illegal literature or gun running).
Rappaport is particularly interested in highlighting some of the women in the Russian underground, who have largely been left out of history, but about whom she has fascinating stories to tell.

As for Lenin himself:
For the amateur historian, it’s hard to get an accurate picture of a polarizing figure like Lenin. Every book I’ve read on Lenin has given me a completely different picture of the man than the one before it, to the point where I’m not sure what to believe.

In this book, he is portrayed as an obsessive intellectual who spends hours in the library everyday, and who sometimes ignores the political events in the real world around him because he is so obsessed with working out his theories. (Rappaport writes that both the 1905 Revolution and the 1917 Revolution caught Lenin off-guard).
In today’s world, where politicians are thought of as almost anti-intellectual, it is surprising to think that Lenin, so obsessed with books and having such poor social skills, was able to manipulate his way into being the leader of a large country.

Which is not to say Lenin wasn’t a politician. The Lenin in this book is a Machiavellian type personality who uses all sorts of dirty political tricks to get his way. He splits the Russian Socialist movement into two parts—Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, then fights bitterly to make sure his Bolshevik faction gets into control. He demands total obedience from those in his faction, and won’t tolerate any views dissenting from his own. Based on the picture Helen Rappaport paints of him, it’s not hard to see how this would be the same Lenin who would go on to create a very authoritarian regime. At one point in the book Lenin is having a talk with a constitutional democrat, and he ends by saying, “Someday we’ll be hanging people like you off of the lampposts.”

Rappaport also highlights the women in Lenin’s life such as his long suffering wife and mother-in-law (who accompanied Lenin on his travels all over Europe) and a woman Lenin appears to have had an affair with—Inessa Armand. Rappaport tries to counter decades of hagiography which make Lenin into some sort of asexual revolutionary monk and instead portrays him as a man with sexual desires who might well have looked for satisfaction outside of his marriage.

A very well-written book, well worth checking out.

Link of the Day
Status of Forces Agreement

Conspirator: Lenin in Exile: The Making of a Revolutionary by Helen Rappaport Book Review (Scripted)

From The Guardian
Google: US law enforcement tried to get videos removed from YouTube

The technology giant's biannual transparency report reveals a 70% rise in takedown requests from US government or police

Google faced down demands from a US law enforcement agency to take down YouTube videos allegedly showing police brutality earlier this year, figures released for the first time show.
...
Figures revealed for the first time show that the US demanded private information about more than 11,000 Google users between January and June this year, almost equal to the number of requests made by 25 other developed countries, including the UK and Russia.

Unfortunate. But worth remembering the next time you hear people clucking their tongues about government censorship of the Internet in other countries.

The Game by Neil Strauss

Subtitle: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists

(Book Review)

From the back cover:

Nothing you have heard about The Game will prepare you for it. Neil Strauss reveals the bizarre world of the PUA (pick-up artist)—men who devote their lives to seducing women. None of this is fiction. PUAs have their own language and codes of honour, they trade strategies on-line, attend each other’s seminars and share houses called Projects.
Strauss lived among the players and survived—but not before he proved that the game works. He transformed himself from a balding, skinny writer into the smooth-talking Style, a man irresistible to women. Once an AFC (average frustrated chump) he became a legendary PUG (pick-up guru).
Here he describes not only his techniques of seduction, but his unforgettable encounters with everyone from Tom Cruise to Courtney Love, from Paris Hilton to Britney Spears. And that’s before things start to get really strange.
Shocking and hilarious, The Game is compulsively readable. It will change the lives of men and the way women understand them.

I came across the book by accident in the bookstore. I picked it up, looked at the back cover, flipped through it briefly, decided this wasn’t the kind of book I usually read, and then put it back on the shelf and moved on. Why waste my time reading junk like this when there were so many more serious history books on my reading list?
I walked on to look at the next book shelf, but then found myself walking back and picking up this book again. Was this just a marketing gimmick or was this for real? Was there really a secret way to pick-up women? And if I didn’t read this book, would I spend the rest of my life wondering?

So I ended up buying it.

For better or for worse (I’ll get to the flaws of the book later down) I found it to be a highly addictive read. I’m usually the kind of person who takes weeks to finish a book, but I had a hard time putting this down and blitzed through the whole book in a couple of days.

This book first came out back in 2005, and apparently was a best seller and a cultural phenomenon (W) long before I got around to it. So, as usual, I’m once again behind the times (one of the consequences of living abroad for so long I suppose).
Friends of mine who saw me reading this book mocked me for being interested in it, and then said they had read it years ago.
So, this review may be commenting on a cultural trend a few years too late. So be it.

The topic of this book pretty much sells itself—every male is interested in learning about the secret to picking-up women. With these kind of guaranteed sales, you might expect this to be the kind of book that the publishing industry simply cranks out and dumps on the public.
It is therefore a pleasant surprise to find out that this book is also well written.
Neil Strauss is a talented writer. He has an engaging style—the right combination of an eye for picking up little details, but a narrative that doesn’t get bogged down by them. To quote a sample piece:

When we arrived, the social workers led him down a long, dark hallway and into a claustrophobic cubicle with a sheet-vinyl floor. The therapist sat behind a desk, running a finger through a black tangle in her hair. She was a slim Asian woman in her late twenties, with high cheekbones, dark red lipstick, and a pinstriped pantsuit.
Mystery slumped in a chair across from her.
“So how are you feeling today?” she asked, forcing a smile.
“I’m feeling,” Mystery said, “like there’s no point to anything.” He burst into tears.
“I’m listening,” she said, scrawling a note on her pad. The case was probably already closed for her.
“So I’m removing myself from the gene pool,” he sobbed.
She looked at him with a feigned sympathy as he continued. To her, he was just one of a dozen nutjobs she saw a day. All she needed to figure out was whether he required medication or institutionalization.
“I can’t go on,” Mystery went on. “It’s futile.”
With a rote gesture, she reached into a drawer, pulled out a small package of tissues, and handed it to him. As Mystery reached for the package, he looked up and met her eyes for the first time. He froze and stared at her silently. She was surprisingly cute for a clinic like this.
A flicker of animation flashed across Mystery’s face, then died. “If I had met you in another time and another place,” he said, crumpling a tissue in his hands, “things would have been different.”
(From page 6).

My friend said of this book, “A lot of people think it’s a book about how to pick up women. But it’s not that at all. It’s a story about the kind of guys who pick up women.”
It is true that this book is first and foremost a memoir. However it does integrate all sorts of tidbits of pick-up wisdom.
In addition to his story telling abilities, the second part of Neil Strauss’s genius is his ability to integrate this pick-up information into a narrative structure. And this is a lot of what makes the book so addictive. On one hand you’re caught up in the story about this fascinating world of pick-up artists (and the soap opera like personality conflicts they have with each other). On the other hand, you’re learning tons of information about how to pick up women in bars.
As I read this book, I was constantly thinking to myself, “Aha, is that what I’ve been doing wrong all these years?” It can be a real eye opener.

Neil Strauss is also very compelling as the narrator. He approaches the world of the pick-up artists as a complete naïve, and his own admitted lack of success with women makes him the perfect everyman type narrator for this type of story. Because I identified so much with him and his social awkwardness, it made it a lot easier to see this whole world through his eyes.

It is no easy feat to sign up for a workshop dedicated to picking up women. To do so is to acknowledge defeat, inferiority, and inadequacy. It is to finally admit to yourself that after all these years of being sexually active (or at least sexually cognizant) you have not grown up and figured it out. Those who ask for help are often those who have failed to do something for themselves. So if drug addicts go to rehab and the violent go to anger management class, then social retards go to pickup school.
…
A man has two primary drives in early adulthood: one toward power, success, and accomplishment; the other toward love, companionship, and sex. Half of life then was out of order. To go before them was to stand up as a man and admit that I was only half a man.

…

The reason [we were] here [at this workshop] …. was that our parents and our friends had failed us. They had never given us the tools we needed to become fully effective and social beings. Now decades later it was time to acquire them.

(from p. 16 and 21)

Unfortunately, this likable everyman narrator does not stick around for the whole book. As Neil Strauss completes his transformation from average frustrated chump to master pick-up artist, he gets more and more full of himself.

He brags about how he was voted the best pick-up artist by the online community, and how the rest of the newer generation of pick up artists began emulating all his tricks.
The lowest point is perhaps when he devotes a whole chapter to listing his sexual conquests.

I realize the purpose of his bragging is to emphasize his transformation, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.

Finally, the book is written as a memoir. As memoirs go, I thought it was pretty good, but it does also suffer from the limitations of the genre.

For one thing, we’re limited to the perspective of Neil Strauss, who has clearly swallowed the kool-aid of the pick-up artists’ method.
As the book progresses, Strauss does question many elements of the pick-up artists’ lifestyle. He questions whether the obsession with finding routines and programs to pick up women turns the men into “Social Robots”. He questions if the obsession with picking up women comes at the expense of developing an unrounded personality, particularly with the younger members of the pick-up community who lack life experience. He questions whether any of them are any good at holding down a long term girlfriend. And he details how many of them are complete narcissists or control freaks.

But one thing he never questions is that these methods do definitely work to pick up girls. And that even the most socially backward person, by attending these workshops and practicing these techniques, will grow into a confident person able to successfully pull girls.
It sounded a little bit too good to be true, and I at times wished for the inclusion of a more objective outside view.

In fact, if one were inclined to be cynical, you could read this whole book as one long infomercial. Neil Strauss is still engaged in the business of the seduction community, and is selling books and DVD courses (W) related to it. Could his portrayal of his own social awkwardness at the beginning of the book be exaggerated to make the transformation that much more dramatic? Could his unquestioning view of the success of seduction techniques be related to his desire to drum up business for it?

For that matter, if one wanted to be really cynical, could this book also be designed to discredit his business rivals?

Which brings us to the second common failing of the memoir genre: the author comes off as the most likable and sane person in the whole story. Everyone else is at fault except him.
Even the friends of Neil Strauss, like Mystery (W) and Courtney Love (W) come off as likeable enough, but obviously mentally unstable.

His rivals, like Tyler Durden (W) come off much much worse.
(One of these days I’m going to have to research what the finer points of the libel law are. Obviously Neil Strauss got away with it, but one can’t help feel a bit sorry for Tyler Durden and Papa, hardly high profile figures outside of the seduction community, and the very public trashing they got in this best selling book. If they really are the manipulative scheming figures Neil Strauss portrays them as, then I guess they kind of deserved it. If…)

Final verdict: Highly entertaining, very addictive read. But judge for yourself how much of this is truth and how much of this is fiction.

************************************
Additional thought:
I’m thinking the writers of “How I Met Your Mother” must have all read this book. So much of the character of Barney Stinson and the theories he always spouts seems lifted right out of this book.

Link of the Day
The Meaning of Vietnam

2 comments:

Whisky Prajer said...

The "pump and dump" aspect to it all is repulsive and depressing, of course. Mary has made a case (persuasive, I think) for segments of society that go "feral" in some regard, and the "Game" community (should put scare-quotes around that word, too) more than qualifies. Also, n+1 did a terrific survey of Strauss and Mystery and their various Game spin-offs since Strauss's book, but it doesn't seem to be available on-line (alas). If I find it, I'll pass it along.

But a little "Game" goes a long way -- not a bad thing to be cognizant of, for either gender. In fact, my daughters will have their own copies of this book in another year or two. I will be making sure of that.

I've got a couple of friends (male) who obsess about this stuff. They cull blogs devoted to the subject matter, and pare down the various strategies. The one is married, the other not. Curiously, they both register on the Asperger's spectrum. Not sure what that says.

But it's worth the read -- so long as you find a used copy. I can't bear to think of filling his coffers any further.

October 29, 2011 at 4:26 PM 

Joel said...

I agree. It does seem to be a good thing to be aware of. And you wouldn't want to get too sucked into that subculture.

I bought a copy in Cambodia that was a photocopied rip-off (like most of the books here are, for better or for worse). So I guess my conscience is clean on contributing to his coffers

The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists by Neil Strauss: Book Review (Scripted)

The Iraq war is finally over. And it marks a complete neocon defeat

Well-written article on the legacy of the Iraq War