September was not as busy as it could have been. Quote of the month is "Remember from time to time that we have tendency to waste time"
The books read:
The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas Friedman, 1999
Indian Givers, by Jack Weatherfod, 1988
We eat the mines and the mines eat us, June Nash
Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire, 1972
Civilization and its discontents, Sigmund Freud, 1989
Let me Speak, Domitila Barrios De Chungara, 1978
Mongolian Nomadic Society, Bat-Ochir Bold, 2001
New Introduction lectures on psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, 1933
What is life?, Erwin Schrodinger, 1955
Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano, 1973
Inside CIA's private world, edited by H.Bradford Westerfield, 1995
Modern Latin America, Thomas E. Skidmore, 2005
What is life?, Erwin Schrodinger, 1955
A little book on life. The book explains what composes of life in terms of its physical structure rather than ethical.
p.11: But if you look at one of the droplets under the microscope you find that it does not permanently sink with constant velocity, but performs a very irregular movement, the so-called Brownian movement, whcih corresponds to a regular sinking only on the average.
p.72: What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
p.74: -(entropy) = k*log(1/D) where D is a measure of disorder.
p.82: We seem to arrive a t the ridiculous conclusion that the clue to the understanding of life is that it is based on a pure mechanism, "clock work" in the sense of Planck's paper. THe conclusion is not ridiculous and is, in my opinion, not entirely wrong, but it has to be taken "with a very big grain of salt."
June Nash, We eat the mines and the mines eat us
p.xiii: Their reaction to the genocidal threat in a massacre in which the army used machine guns and bazookas to kill children as well as men and women massed in a peaceful protest was combines with a general awareness that life could not be sustained and reproduced at the standard of living to which Indian and cholo peasants and workers had been reduced.
p.xvii: Dr.Guido Strauss’s plan did not include any mention of the forty on ndian tribes with a total population of about 120000 recorded as living in the zone specified for colonization in eastern Bolivia. {immigration}
p.9: Action may be paralyzed by the underlying contradictions if the confluct is not recognized and made explicit and somehow resolved. One such resolution is to impose a hierarchy of values that suggests priorities in the field of action. Another resolution is to forge hegemonies, so that the priorities of one social group are brought into alignment with those of another such as to form a partnership for some collective goal.
p.24: A collective consciousness arises in the shared historical experiences that give shape to each generation. Zeitlan and Petras (1968) have pointed to the significance of generational differences in the formation of political ideology in Cuba. Their thesis, which develops Karl Mannheims’ general formulation that common experiences during youth create a common world view(1932:270), is that “the specific historical period in which succeeding generations of workers first become involed in the labor movement had significant consequences for the formation of their political outlooks.”
p.55: In the Bolivian mining family there are three basic paradigms for relating to others: dependency, competition, and cooperation.
p.58: The organization of the mining family has changed almost more radically in the past half century than any other institution in Bolivian society. The change has been in a conservative direction, tending to minimize the political radicalization of miners, as the nuclear family emerged out of the shambles of the communal ayllu.
p.99: Bolivian workers point out that their social security law is one of the most advanced of South America, but the actual benefits are often not forthcoming.
p.170: There is a cannibalistic quality in the relationship between the workers and the mine. “We eat the mines,” one man told me at challa, “and the mines eat us”. Their feelings about ht emines are expressed in the names they give the work sites: moropoto, Black Anus;… El Tambo Mata Gente, People-Killer Inn.
p.232: In the first weeks of my stay, the administrators of the mine advised me about the miners’ inability to save, their lack of planning for the future, their drinking and fighting. These myths protect the sensibilities of the middle class, who would otherwise be overwhelmed with the inequalities which exist in a wage and salary structure that rewards the nonproducer and reduces the standard of the subsoil worker to a bare subsistence.
p.238: Many of the sons of workers who had entered college and were hoping to continue their education were forced to leave in order to work and supplement the family income when I was living in Oruro. This bourgeoisement of the workers and reinforces a snse of class solidarity when they accept the fact that there is no escape even for the future generation.
p.242: Many workers lost savings that they had put into old mining companies when they were nationalized, or the money they had saved became almost useless as the inflation rose to indices of over 40000 over 1937 base prices. When I asked one women hwy she had three sewing machines, she said she had bought them as a dowry for her daughters.
p.247: Price, waterhouse, Peat and company estimated that COMIBOL lost US $124 million between 1952 and 1957 in price changes alone. (Bedregal 1959), an effective way of controlling the revolutionary process taking place in Bolivia.
p.249: Bolivia’s deteriorating position in the world market for tin was reflected in the decapitalization of the nationalized mines. This was a result of both mismanagement as well as a shift in interest to oil. Arce (1965:15) blames much of the decline in the productivity of the mines on failure on the part of management on invest in exploration.
p.254:
The wage structure in mining fails to respond to change sin the cost of living and in the profits of production in accord with classical market theory in economics. In fact, the reverse situation has taken place in Bolivia: wages are declining in response to increasing costs in the subsistence products and the rising prices of tin.
Aime Cesaire: Discourse on Colonialism, 1972
p.21: My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thingification”. I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about “achievements,” diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileage of roads, canals, and railroad tracks. I am talking abou thtousands of men sacrificed to the Congo-Ocean. … I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life – from life, from the dance, from wisdom.
p.23: Every day that passes, every denial of justice, every beating by the police, every demand of the workers that is drowned in blood, every scandal that is hushed up, every punitive expedition, every police van, every gendarme and every militiaman, brings home to us the value of our old societies.
p.31: Once again, I systematically defend our old Negro civilizations: they were courteous civilizations. So the real problem, you say, is to return to htem. No, I repeat. We are not men fo r whome it is a question of “either –or”. For us, the problem is no tto make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive… It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.
p.41: M.Mannoni makes [Aime is criticizing him] his diagnosis: “The Madagascan does not even try to imagine such a situation of abandonment. … He desires neither personal authonomy nor free respobsibility.”
p.46: But what about this: “Everytihing in this world reeks of crime: the newspaper, the wall, the countenance of man.”
p.49: Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take repsobibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortureso fthe Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d.Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was incarnation of human progress.
p.51Lastly, it is for excessive egalitarianism, for once, that American thinkers are taken to task- Otto Klineberg, professor of psychology at Columbia University, having declared: “It is a fundamental error to consider the other cultures as inferior to our own simply because they are different.”
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents, 1989
p.27: The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against all the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself. There is indeed, another rand better path: that of becomein ga member of the human community, and , with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will. […] In last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it, and we only feel it in consuequence of cetain ways in which our organism is regulated.
p.33: The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beuty has no obvious use; nor it is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
p.48: The last, but certainly not the least important, of the characteristic features of civilization remains to be assessed: the manner in which the relationships of men to one another, their social relationships, are regulated – relationships which affect a person as a neighbour, as a source of help, as another person’s sexual object, as a member of a family and of a State.
p.49: Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger that any separate individual and which remain united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right’ is opposition to the power of the indivudal which is condemned as ‘brute force’. This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes th e decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions. The first requisity of civilization, therefore, is that of justice – that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law. […] The final outcome should be a rule of law to which all – except those who are not capable of entering a community – have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which leaves no one – again with the same exception – at the mercy of brute force.
p.59: The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable Since man doe sno t have unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal, he has to accomplish his tasks by making an expedient distribution of his libido.
p.69: Homo homini lupus = ‘Man is a wolf to man’ {Derived from Plautus, Asinaria}
p.88: The people of Israel had believed themselves to be the favourite child of God, and when the great Father caused misfortune after misfortune to rain down upon this people of his, they were never shaken in their belief in his relationship to them or questioned his power or righteousness. […] Thus we know of two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising form fear of an authority, and the other, later on, arising from fear of the super ego. The first insists upon a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions; the second, as well as doing this, presses for punishment, since the continuance of the forbidden wishes cannot be concealed form the superego.
p.103: In the course of our analytic work we have discovered to our surprise that perhaps every neaurosis conceals a quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which in its turn fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment. … When an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt.
p.105: In the developmental process of the individual, the programme of the pleasure principle, which consists in finding the satisfaction of happiness, is retained as the main aim. Integration in, or adaptation to, a human community appears as a scarcely avoidable condition which must be fulfilled before this aim of this aim of happiness can be achieved. … The development of the individual seems to us to be a product of the interaction between two urges, the urge towards happiness, which we usally call ‘egoistic’, and the urge towards union with others in the community, which hwe call ‘altruistic’.
p.12.: Man have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficultu in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and hteir mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the ‘HeavenlyPOwer’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary.
Domitila Barrios De Chungara: Let me Speak, 1978
In reading this book, I felt like having deep insight into social repression, class division and human suffering. My understanding human suffering was only limited to war zones and hunger stricken areas. Now I see how much people suffer in areas where poverty means eventual distinction of group of people and tyranny means more blood shed.
She was imprisoned with her child first. She said “I swallowed my tears, watching my children cry. In our own country, thrown out of our own village … where would we go? We’d been born there, we’d been raised there, we’d live there.” It turned out, her first imprisonment was much easier than the second. When Domitila was about to give birth, she was put in prison and tortured. She felt piece of her teeth in the month after repetitious beatings by officers. She was put in cell rather than hospital when she was just about to give birth. Pain was too much to bear, so she rarely remembers what happens in the cell. In her words, “The only thing I remember is that I knelt thre and covered my face because I could not stand anymore. … I noticed the head was coming out… and rightat htat moment I fainted.” Then she gained conscious but was soaking wet. It was blood and the liquid you lose during childbirth that had wet her all over. She says “Colonel [who was beating her] shouted ‘she gave birth?’ after hearing it from the guard. And he came in, ‘get up whore …’ and he kicked me. I did not feel much, because I was half frozen.” She lost her baby, and soon after had mental breakdown which resulted in hysteria. Thanks god, with help of her family she eventually recovered to be a leader in her community.
After reading this book, I am half paralyzed with horrible images of her life and fully convinced the brutality of the military regime. Moreover, I undertood that there is no limit to evil in humans, especially MAN.
Bat-Ochir Bold, Mongolian Nomadic Society, 2001
There are many books on Mongolian history. This is one of them which is written by professor in University of Iceland. The difference of this book from other history books is that its development was not based on chronological order and the author clearly not aimed to set certain timelines. Contents were: 1.Starting point for viewing the history of the Mongols, 2. Econmic conditions and their development, 3. Socio-political organization in the development of Monglia, 4. Social strata of Mongolian nomadic society, 5. The effect of Lamaism on traditional Mongolian nomadic society, 6. The dynamics of the development of Mongolia nomadic society.
The book had couple good insights on effect of Lamaism on tradional Mongolian society. Also it provided statistics on number of temples, lamas and households.
Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers, 1988
Contents: 1. Silver and Money Capitalism, 2. Piracy, Slavery, and the birth of corporations, 3. The American Indian path to industrialization, 4. The food revolution, 5. Indian Agricultural technology, 6. The culinary revolution, 7. Liberty, anarchism, and the Noble savage, 7 The founding Indian fathers, 9. Red sticks and revolution, 10. The Indian healer. 11. The drug connection, 12. Architecture and urban planning, 13. The pathfinders, 14. When will America be discovered?
The book was easy read. It portrayed the truths about the colonilization in Latin America, especially how much mita they took along with their precious metals. Very good insight into latin American culture and what it offered to world including the architecture and food. Indians in North America was not excluded but the book mostly concerned of latin America. I was surprised to find that the first pirates were given titles of “sir” by queen of Engand, and they did not have problems as long as the profits were flowing into country.
Before discovery of America, the precious metals used to come from Africa. Towns on the route in Africa and port for ships to Europe prospered. But once America was discovered along with it Cerro Ricos, the towns in Africa had nothing to support itself. As a result they opted for the slave trade to sustain the economy.
p.17; Asia experienced a temporary gain from the discovery of America, but Africa suffered. America had all the silver and gold Europe needed, and this destroyed the African gold markets and the dependent trade networks. Cities such as Timbuktu and the Songhoi Empire of which it was a part crumbled as merchants abandoned the ancient trade routes.
p.38: The discovery of America created what he called a “revolution in commerce.”. … These great trading companies helped create what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the “world system.” They made a single economy out of the previously diverse regiounal economies of the far east, sub Saharan Africa, India and south asia, the south pacific, and Europe together with the Americas. Goods could now be produced in any part of th world and transported to virtually any other aprt of the world, and all of this was accomplishe dusinght e standardized values of the gold and silver supplied by the Indians of America.
p.82: Now rather than allowing foreigners to experiment with the Indians by teaching htem to raise foreign trees, the government seeks the aid of the Indian sto teach researchers how to grow a wide variety of yams, potatoes, and tubers for which there exist no names in either English or Spanish.
Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano, 1973I am very happy to come across with Eduardo Galeano. If you think Thomas Friedman is the bestseller and “the man” today in journalism, then Eduardo Galeano was 70’s Thomas Friedman. My failure to categorise his writing style is not derived from neither my judgemental values nor my inability to distinguish cadres. Anyway, Eduardo Galeano has distinct style of his own and his writings should be categorized by itself. I would like to recommend this book to everyone who has little sense of “lefties”. Satisfaction is guaranteed.
p.12: Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into Europena – or later United States – capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits, and its mineral rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources.
p.14: New factories are built in the privileged poles of development – San Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City – but less and less labor is needed. The system did not foresee this small headache, this surplus of people. And the people keep reproducing. They make love with enthusiasm and without precaution.
p.18: When Alexander Von Humboldt investigated the customs of the ancient inhabitants of the Bogota plateau, he found that the Indians called the victims of ritual ceremonies quihica. Quihica meant “door”; the death of each chosen victim opened the door to a new cycle of 185 moons.
p.26: The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, allowed Portugal to ooccupy Latin American territories below a dividing line traced by the Pople, and in 1530 Martim Affonso dde Sousa founded the first Portuguese communities in Brazil, expelling French intruders.
p.39: This enormous mass of capital, Mandel notes, created a favourable climate for investment in Europe, stimulated the “spirit of enterprise,” and directly financed the establishment of manufacrtures, which in turn gave a strong thrust toeh Industrial Revolution. But at the same time the formidable international concentration of wealth for Europe’s benefit prevented the jumo into the accumulation of industrial capital in the plundered areas.
p.46: Sucre decayed along with Potosi. This valley city of pleasant climate, successively known as Charcas, La Plata, and Chuquisaca, enjoyed a good share of the wealth flowing from Potosi’s Cerro Rico.
p.50: In 1685 only 4000 Indian families remained of the more than 2 million that had once lived between Lima and Paita, according to the Marquis of Barinas. … While metals flowed unceasingly from Latin American mines, euqlly unceasing were the orders from the Spanish Court granting paper protection and dignity to he Indians who killing labor sustained the kingdom. … between 1616 and 1619, Governor Juan de Solorzano carried out a survey of work conditions int eh HUancavelica mercury mines “The poison penetrated to the very marrow, debilitating all the members and causing a constant shaking, and the wormers usually died within four years,” he reported to the Council of the Indies and to the king. But in 1631 Philip IV ordered that the same system be continued and his successor Charles II later reaffirmed the decree.
p.54: The Aztecs irrigation works and artificial islands dazzled Cortes – even though they were not made of gold. The conquest shattered the foundations of these civilizatins. The installation of a minig ecnomy had direr consequences than the fire and sword of war. The mines required a great displacement of people and dislocated agricultural communities; they not only took countless lives htrough forced labor, but also indirectly destroyed the collective farming system.
p.105: A coffee era began in Venezuela in 1873; coffe, like cacao continued to expand invading the humid lands of Carupano. … two products created the capital that enabled landlords, merchants, and moneylenders to live as wasteful parasites.
p.107: Ecuador’s economy depend on the sale of bananas, coffee, and cacao, three food products highly subject ot price fluctuations. According to official daa, seven of every ten Ecuadoreans suffer from basic malnutrition, and the country has one of the highest death rates in the world. (1960s)
p.111: Toward the end of the century [19th] coffee planters, by then the new Brazilian social elite, sharpened their pencils and totted up their accounts: subsistence wages worked out cheaper than the purchase and maintenance of increasingly scarce slaves.
p.113: A drop of only one cent in the price meant a losss of $65 million to the combined producing countries. With the price falling continually between 1964 and 1968, the consuming country – the United States – helped itself to more and more millions from the producing country, Brazil. But for the benefit of whom? Of the coffee drinking citizen? In July 1968 Brazilian coffee cost 30 percent less in the United States than in January 1964, but U.S. consumers did not pay less: they paid 13 percent more. Thus in the 1964- 1968 period mddlemen kept the 13 percent as well as the 30 percent, feathering their nests twice over.
p.120: In general – but especially in Guatemala – this structure of labor force appropriation is visibly identified with racism: Indians suffer the internal colonialism of whites and mestizos blessed ideologically by the dominant culture, just as Central American countries suffer foreign colonialism.
p.121: In 1912 President William H. Taft declared: “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South pole. The whole hemisphere will be ourse in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”
p.128: Thomas Melville: Jan, 1968 Guatemaln police murdered over 2800 intellectuals, students, trade union leaders, and peasant swho were trying “to combat the sicknesses of Guatemalan society.”
p.133: In our day the Uruguayan countryside looks like a desert: five hundred families monopolize half of all the land and , to crown their power, also control three quarters of the capital invested in industry and banking.
p.155: The uncommonly arrogant Lima oligarchy continued enriching itself and amassoing symbols of its power in the palaces and Carrara marble mausoleums which sprouted amid sandy deserts. Once it had been Potosi’s silver that nourished ht egreat families of the capital city; now they lived from bird-droppings and the shiny white clots in the nitrate fields – more vuilgar means to the same legant ends.
p.158: In the thirsty desert of Tamarugal, where the land dazzles one’s eyes with its brilliance, I have stood beside the ruins of Tarapaca. During the boom there were one hundred and twenty nitrate fields here; now only two remain in operation. …”Here money flowed and everyone thought it would never stop” I was told by the surviving residents.
p.166: But the worst of it was the dust: circles of light from the miners’s helmets danced dimly in the gloom, showing thick white curtains of deadly silica. It does not take long to do its work. The first sympthoms are felt within a year, and in ten years one enters the cemetery.
p.168: With a mere $5000 in declared capital, this pompously named enterprise secured a contract that enabled it to amass more than $900 million.
p.198: In the difficult early days, when British industry was still at a disadvantage, an Englishman caught exporting raw wool was sentenced to lose his right hand, and if he repeated the sin he was hanged.
p.207 [how the war against Paraguay wrecked the only successful attempt at independent development] Although Britain took no direct part in the ghastly deed, it was in the pockets of British mercahngts, bankers and industrialists that the loot ended up. The invasion was financed from start to finish by the Bnk of London.
p.218: As the finance minister in the period when [Argentina] the loan was contracted said “We are not in a position ot make measures against foregign trade, particularly British because we are bound to that nation by large debts and would expose ourselves to a rupture which would cause much harm…”
p.223: Congress voted the ultra-protectionist “McKinley” tariff in 1890, and the Dingley Act further hiked customs duties in 1897. Soon afterward the developed countires of Europe felt obliged to erect customs barriers against the invasion of dangerously competitive U.S. manufactures.
p.228: What happened to Latin America’s industrial bourgeoisie was what happens to dwarfs: it became decrepit without having grown.
p.241: According to this brief but meaty “capitalist manifesto”, the law of the jungle is the natural code governing human life; injustice does not exist, for what we know as injustice is merely an expression of the cruel harmony of the universe: poor countries are poor because … they are poor; our fate is written in the stars and we are born only to fulfil it.
p.252: Numerous daggers glint beneath the cloak of aid to poor countries. Teodor Moscoso, who was chairman of the Alliance for Progress, confessed: “It may happened that US needs the vote of a particular country in the UN or the OAS, and it is possible that the government of that country [following the sacred tradition of cold war diplomacy] may ask a price in exchange.
p.255: US has one-fourth of the votes in the World Bank: the 22 countries in Latin America have less than onetenth. The WB responds to the US like thunder to lightning.
p.261: But the most starling contradiction between theory and reality in the world market emerged in the open “soluble coffee war” in 1967. It then became clear that only the rich countries have the right to exploit for their own benefit the “natural comparative advantages” which theoretically determine the international division of labor.
p.266: Latin American underdevelopment is not a stage on the road to development, but ht eocunterpart of development elsewhere’ the region “progresses” without freeing itself from the structure of its backwardness and, as Manuel Sadosky points out, the “advantage” of not participating in progress with its own programs and goals is illusory.
p.270: Wages can remain low while productivity rises, and productivity rises at the expense of cuts in the labor force.
p.281: The poles of prosperity that flourished to supply Europe’s need for metals and foodstuffs were not interconnected: the ribs of the fan had their vertex across the ocean. People and capital were displaced according to the rising and falling fate of gold or sugar, silver or indigo, and only the ports and the capitals, the leeches of the productive regions, had a permanent existence.
p.282: Each Latin American country still identifies itself with its own port – a negation of its roots and real identity – to such an extent that almost all intraregional trade goes by sea: inland transport is virtually nonexistent. Furthermore, the global feight cartel fixes rates and itineraries to suit itself, and Latin America merely endures the exorbitant charges and ridiculous routes. Of the 118 regular shipping lines operating in the region only seventeen fly regional flags; freightage bleeds the Latin American economy of 2.6 billion a year. Thus merchandise shipped from Porto Alegre to Montevideo arrives faster if it goes via Hamburg, and the same for Uruguayan wool bound for the US; freightage from Buenos Aires to a Mexican gulf port is more than 25 percent lower if the shipment goes via Southampton. Shipment of timber from Mexico to Venezuela costs more than double the shipment of timber from Finland to Venezuela, although the maps still insist that Mexico is closer.
p.283: Bolivar prophesied shrewdly that the US seemed fated by Providence to plague America with woes in the name of liberty. … It is big load of rottenness that has to be sent to the bottom of the sea on the march to latin america’s reconstruction. The task lies in the hadnd of the dispossessed, the humiliated, the accursed. The Latin American cause is above all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and challenge. There aer ethose who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge.
New Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, 1933
Before reading Freud, I read five or six books by Carl. G. Jung. Jung is the one God who I worship in field of psychology, if I can say that. But without Freud, my god looses its heart. Reading this book by Freud gave me broader comprehension of the psychology in general and early development of psychoanalysis. In one word: “good book”.
p.27: For we must never forget that the dream-life is, as Aristotle has already told us, the way our mind works during sleep. The state of sleep represents a turning away from the real external world, and thus provides a necessary condition for the development of a psychosis.
p.31: Let me repeat the stages of dream-formation. The introduction: the wish to sleep, the voluntary withdrawal from the outside world. Two things follow from this: firstly, the possibility for older and more primitive modes of activity to manifest themselves, i.e. regression; and secondly, the decrease of the repression-resistence, which weighs on the unconscious.
p.32: The whole process of dream-foramtion, which is permitted by the sleeping ego, is, however, under the control of the censorship, a control which is exercised by what is left of the forces of repression. I cannot explain the process more simply; it is not in itself simpler than that.
p.43: We have kept our theory intact by dividing dreams into wish-dreams, and punishment-dreams. Even punishment-dreams are wishfulfilments, but they do not fulfil the wishes of the instinctual impulses, but those of the critical, censuring and punishing function of the mind.
p.90: Identification is a very important kind of relationship with another person, probably the most primitive, and is not to be confused with object-choice. One can express the difference between them in this way: when a boy identifies himself with his father, he wants to be like his father; when he makes him the object of his choice, he wants to have him, to possess him; in the first case his ego is altered on the model of his father, in the second case that is not necessary. Identification and object-choice are broadly speaking independent of each other.
p.95: For us the super-ego is the representative of all moral restrictions, the advocate of the impulse towards perfection, in short it is as much as we have been able to apprehend psychologically of what people call the ‘higher’ things in human life. … They have forgotten the difficulties of their own childhood and are glad to be able to identify themselves fully at last with their own parents, who in their day subjected them to such severe restrains. The result is that the super-eog of the child is not really built up on the model of the parents, but on that of the parent’s super-ego; it takes over the same content, it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the age-long values which have been handed down in this way from generation to generation.
p.105: Naturally, the id know no values, no good and evil, no morality. The economic, or if you prefer, the quantitative factor, which is so closely bound up with the pleasure-principle, dominates all its processes.
p.109: When the ego is forced to acknowledge its weakness, it breaks out into anxiety: reality anxiety in face of the external world, normal anxiety in face of the superego and neurotic anxiety in face of the strength of the passions in the id.
p.141: We suppose that there are two fundamentally different kinds of instincts, the sexual instincts in the widest sense of the word and the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction.
p.163: In short, we gain the conviction that one cannot understand women, unless one estimates this pre-oedipal attachment to the mother at its proper value.
p.172: The discovery of her castration is a turning-point in the life of the girl. Three lines of development diverge from it; one leads to sexual inhibition or to neurosis, the second to a modification of character in the sense of masculinity complex, and the third to normal femininity.
p.182: The mother can transfer to her son all the ambition which she has had to suppress in herself, and she can hope to get from him the satisfaction of all that has remained to her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not fimly assured until the woman has succeeded in making her husband into her child and in acting the part of a mother towards him.
p.220 If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life and it guides their thoughts and actions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.
p.221: In so far as religion brushes away men’s feaw of the dangers and vicissitudes of life, in so far as it assures them of a happy ending, and comforts them intehir misfortunes, science fannot compete with it. Science, it is true, teaches how one can avoid certain dangers and how one can combat many suffering with success; it would be quite untrue to deny that science is a powerful aid to human beings but in many cases it has to leave htem to their suffering and ccan only advise them to submit to the inevitable. IN the performance of its third function, the provision of precepts, prohibitions and restrictions religion is furthest removed from science.
p.234 reason- is among the forces which may be expected to exert a uynifying influence upon men – creatures who can be held together only with the greatest difficulty, and whom it is therefore scarecely possible to control.
p.235: The struggle, therefore is not yet at an end. The followers of the religious Weltanschauung act in accordance with the old maxim: the best defence is attack.
p.240: [according to anarchistic doctrine]What we give out as scientific truth is only the product of our own needs and desires, as they are formulated under varying external conditions; that is to say, it is illusion once more. Ultimately we find only what we need to find, and see only what we desire to see. We can do nothing else. And since the criterion of truth, correspondence with an external world, disappears, it is absolutely immaterial what views we accept. All of them are equally true and false. And no one has a right to accuse any one else or error.
Inside CIA’s private world.
The book was quite an insight into the world of agents. When I was young, we used to play as secret agents. It was thrilling game since it needed wit to play. In this book, Westerfield selected and published the papers which were once classified, but no longer fall into the category after cold war. An story of the Swedish recruit, the spy plane taking picture, how to survive through interrogation etc etc.
p.321: [economic intelligence] 1970s, beginning with some adaptations of existing econometric models of foreign economies, OER built its own model of the world economy which linked the principal countries through foreign trade flows and which hcould approximate and simulate the global impact of changes in national economic policies or of major shocks tro the world economy.
p.417 [counterespionage] This is a grim subject, and part of the mental preparation – a most impartn part – consists in accepting and living with tehse possibilities. An agent conditioned to face them honestly is likely to be far more capable and careful than change – taker who hopes somehow to get by without self-discipline and without the intensive preparation that is the only way to success in any clandestine operation.
p.419: [interrogation] The initial stages of any interrogation is best for the prisoner to play the role of a well intentioned but confused and innocent victim. The jails are full of prisoners who made the mistake of being clear and precise in their replies to seemingly harmless questions. The first thing every interrogator has to determine is whether his prisoner can tell a straight story about anything, or whether he is in a state of confusion. Prisoners are under no obligation to collaborate with their captors by exhibiting good memories and making coherent statements. This is the time to forget as much as possible.
In all interrogation sessions, the prisoner should try to discover the following:
a. What is know about him; more specifically, what evidence does the interrogator have? Even communist interrogators have to have evidence to convict sustpects. Nothing should ever be admitted unless the evidence that the interrogator exhibits is overwhelming. One should never assume that the case is hopeless and that one might as well tell all.
b. Where did the interrogator get his information? The prisoner often overlooks the fact that interrogator may let slip information which will indicate who betrayed the operation. By feigning stupidity and confusion and pretending no to understand questions, the prisoner may maneuver the interrogator into making further disclosures which may indicate the source of the betrayal.
c. What are the intentions of the authorities?
d. How much importance do the authorities attach to the prisoner?
The lexus and the Olive tree, Thomas Friedman, 1999
p.In July 1998 issue of Golf magazine reported that many golf courses are starting to sinstall the Spyder 9000 computer system in their golf carts, “which allows cart riders to keep score electronically, measure yardages digitally, view videotaped hole previews, view video golf tips, order lunch, check stock prices, and watch TV commercials.” The only thing it doesn’t do it is putt for you.
p.100: Asked if he had ever lost hope during the Cultural Revolution, he answered with a Chinese proverb: “No hand can block out the sun.”
p.102: His message was that Thailand had messed up. People knew it. They would now have to tighten their belts and get with the program and there wasn’t much else to say. Wasn’t he mad? I asked. Didn’t he want to burn down some government building in anger at being wiped out? No, Sirivat explained to me: “Communism fails, socialism fails, so now there is only capitalism. We don’t want to go back to the jungle, we all want a better standard of liing, so you have to make capitalism work, because you dong have a choice. We have to improve ourselves and follow the world rules… Only the competititve survive. It will probably require a national unity government, because the burden is so big. … Fablo Feldmann is a liberal and I asked him about the nature of the political debate in Brazil today. He responded: “The [ideological] left in Brazil have lost their flag. The challenge of the federal government is jobs and employment. You have to generate and distribute income. And what is the program of the left? They don’t have proposals to generate income, only to distribute it.”
p.147: Firs the African visits the Asian minister in his country, and at the end of the day the Asian takes the African to his home for dinner. The Asian minister lives in an absolutely palatial residence. So the African minister asks his Asian counterpart, “wow how can you afford such a home on your salary.”The asian minister takes the African over to a big bay window and points to a new bridge in the distance.. “You see that bridge over there?” the asian minister asks the African. “Yes, I see it,” the African says. Then the Asian miniter point a finger at himself and whispers “10 percent” signaling 10 percent of the cost of the bridge went inot his pocket. Well, a year later hta asian went to visit the African minister in his country and afound that he lived in an even more palatial home than his Asian counterpart. “Wow, how can you afford usch a home on your salary” the asian asked the African. The African pulled his asian counterpart over to the big bay windor in his living room and pointed out to the horizon. “Do you see that bridge over there?” the African asked the Asian. “No, there is no bridge there” answered the asian. “That’s right” the African miniter said, pointing to hiself: “One hundrew percent.”
p.148: Kleptocracy is the fact that in Albania tax cheating was so rampant that in 1997 the 35th highest taxpaying company in the country was an Albanian-American pizza parlor, and auto theft was so rampant that American officials estimated that 80 percent of the cars on the road in albania were stolen from somewhere else in Europe. … [It is no wonder that under Suharto Indonesians had a saying : If your neighbor steals you goat, whatever you do don’t take him to court, because by the time you get done paying off ht epolice and the judges, you will end up losing your cow as well.
p.150: the Times of India reported on December 17, 1998 that an eighteen-month-long search in the corruption riddled Indian state of Punjab had been called off. The search was for an official who could be given 100000($2380) award for providing “honest” government service, in a state where everything from electricity hookups to public school enrollments requires pauing a bribe to someone. But no official could be found who was appropriate for the award. Instead of identifuing a recipient for the award, the New Delhi newspaper said the search produced evidence that may be sused to bring charges agains 300 corrupt officials.
p.169: Wimar Witoelar, a popular Jakarta talk-show host, who was describing for me the young generation of the Indonesian middle class. He remarked that what many of these educated twenty – and thirty year olds had in common was that they wanted to get rich, without having to be corrupt, and they wanted democracy but they did not want to go in the streets and fight for it. This generation of Indonesians understood that under SUharto there would never be a democratic revolution from above, but they were terrified of democratic revolution form below, because fi the urban poor revolted it would be the year of living dangeriously all over again. So their whole strategy was revolution from beyond, or globalution. Their whole strategy was to do everything they could, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, to integrate Indonesia into the global system. They hoped that by tying Indonesia into these global institutions and markets – whether it was to the world Trade Organization, pizza hut, … - they might be able to import form beyond the standards and rules – based systems that they knew would never be initiated from above and could never be generated from below.
p.182: The Foreign Corrupt Practices act, passed in 1977, makes it illegal for American companies to pay bribes to advance foreign business deals. On November 20,1997 the twenty nine nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD which comprises the world’s leading industrial democracies agreed to adopt much of America’s anticorruption legislation.
p.317: “stay in school so you can buy all this stuff that I have”. I am not sure that’s the right message. The message should be, stay in school so you can do what you want to do in life.
p.330 [Brazil, Dejair Birschner, 48 yr ols mayor of Una] “do we have any future?” His question hit me like a fist in the stomach. It almost brought tears to my eyes, looking across the table at this proud, sturdy man, a mayor no less asking meif he and his villagers had any future. I knew exactly what he was asking in his question: “My villagers can’t live off the forest anymore, and we are not equipped to live off computers. My father and grandfather made a living off logs and my grandchildren might make a living off the Internet. But what are all the rest of us in between supposed to do?”
… they needed to start making a transition from an agro-economy to a more knowledge – based economy, beginning by better educating the town’s children.
p.331: Unfortunately, not everyone is equipped to run fast. There are a lot of turtles out there, desperately trying to avoid becoming roadkill.
p.335: As for the poorest human turles in the developing world, those really left behind by globalization, they will express their backlash by simply eating the rain forest – each in their won way – without trying to explain it or justify it or wrap it in an ideological bow. In Indonesia, they will eat the Chinese merchants by ransacking their stores, in Russia they will sell weapons to Iran or turn to crime. In brazil, they will log the rest of the rain forest or join the peasant movement in the brazilian countryside called “sem teto” who simply steal what they need.
p.390: Our leaders in their public speeches don’t use the term globalization. They use the term modernization. There is a cultural reason for this. The historical lesson is still fresh in Chinese people’s mind that china was forced into the international community in the last century by gunboats so globalization represents something that china doesn’t pusue but rather something that the west or America is imposing. Moderinization on the other hand is something we can control. There is an annual new year’s television program that is shown on the main ntational television channel.
p.406: If there is a common denominator that runs through this book it is the notion that globalization is everything and its opposite. It can be incredibly empowering and incredible coercive.
p.447: If you are not replacing everything you know by then, your career is going to turn sour fast. As Jim BOtkin and Stan Davis not I ntheir book “tH emosnter Under the bed,” in the knowledge economy you don’t earn a living, you “learn a living.”
The books read:
The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas Friedman, 1999
Indian Givers, by Jack Weatherfod, 1988
We eat the mines and the mines eat us, June Nash
Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire, 1972
Civilization and its discontents, Sigmund Freud, 1989
Let me Speak, Domitila Barrios De Chungara, 1978
Mongolian Nomadic Society, Bat-Ochir Bold, 2001
New Introduction lectures on psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, 1933
What is life?, Erwin Schrodinger, 1955
Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano, 1973
Inside CIA's private world, edited by H.Bradford Westerfield, 1995
Modern Latin America, Thomas E. Skidmore, 2005
What is life?, Erwin Schrodinger, 1955
A little book on life. The book explains what composes of life in terms of its physical structure rather than ethical.
p.11: But if you look at one of the droplets under the microscope you find that it does not permanently sink with constant velocity, but performs a very irregular movement, the so-called Brownian movement, whcih corresponds to a regular sinking only on the average.
p.72: What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
p.74: -(entropy) = k*log(1/D) where D is a measure of disorder.
p.82: We seem to arrive a t the ridiculous conclusion that the clue to the understanding of life is that it is based on a pure mechanism, "clock work" in the sense of Planck's paper. THe conclusion is not ridiculous and is, in my opinion, not entirely wrong, but it has to be taken "with a very big grain of salt."
June Nash, We eat the mines and the mines eat us
p.xiii: Their reaction to the genocidal threat in a massacre in which the army used machine guns and bazookas to kill children as well as men and women massed in a peaceful protest was combines with a general awareness that life could not be sustained and reproduced at the standard of living to which Indian and cholo peasants and workers had been reduced.
p.xvii: Dr.Guido Strauss’s plan did not include any mention of the forty on ndian tribes with a total population of about 120000 recorded as living in the zone specified for colonization in eastern Bolivia. {immigration}
p.9: Action may be paralyzed by the underlying contradictions if the confluct is not recognized and made explicit and somehow resolved. One such resolution is to impose a hierarchy of values that suggests priorities in the field of action. Another resolution is to forge hegemonies, so that the priorities of one social group are brought into alignment with those of another such as to form a partnership for some collective goal.
p.24: A collective consciousness arises in the shared historical experiences that give shape to each generation. Zeitlan and Petras (1968) have pointed to the significance of generational differences in the formation of political ideology in Cuba. Their thesis, which develops Karl Mannheims’ general formulation that common experiences during youth create a common world view(1932:270), is that “the specific historical period in which succeeding generations of workers first become involed in the labor movement had significant consequences for the formation of their political outlooks.”
p.55: In the Bolivian mining family there are three basic paradigms for relating to others: dependency, competition, and cooperation.
p.58: The organization of the mining family has changed almost more radically in the past half century than any other institution in Bolivian society. The change has been in a conservative direction, tending to minimize the political radicalization of miners, as the nuclear family emerged out of the shambles of the communal ayllu.
p.99: Bolivian workers point out that their social security law is one of the most advanced of South America, but the actual benefits are often not forthcoming.
p.170: There is a cannibalistic quality in the relationship between the workers and the mine. “We eat the mines,” one man told me at challa, “and the mines eat us”. Their feelings about ht emines are expressed in the names they give the work sites: moropoto, Black Anus;… El Tambo Mata Gente, People-Killer Inn.
p.232: In the first weeks of my stay, the administrators of the mine advised me about the miners’ inability to save, their lack of planning for the future, their drinking and fighting. These myths protect the sensibilities of the middle class, who would otherwise be overwhelmed with the inequalities which exist in a wage and salary structure that rewards the nonproducer and reduces the standard of the subsoil worker to a bare subsistence.
p.238: Many of the sons of workers who had entered college and were hoping to continue their education were forced to leave in order to work and supplement the family income when I was living in Oruro. This bourgeoisement of the workers and reinforces a snse of class solidarity when they accept the fact that there is no escape even for the future generation.
p.242: Many workers lost savings that they had put into old mining companies when they were nationalized, or the money they had saved became almost useless as the inflation rose to indices of over 40000 over 1937 base prices. When I asked one women hwy she had three sewing machines, she said she had bought them as a dowry for her daughters.
p.247: Price, waterhouse, Peat and company estimated that COMIBOL lost US $124 million between 1952 and 1957 in price changes alone. (Bedregal 1959), an effective way of controlling the revolutionary process taking place in Bolivia.
p.249: Bolivia’s deteriorating position in the world market for tin was reflected in the decapitalization of the nationalized mines. This was a result of both mismanagement as well as a shift in interest to oil. Arce (1965:15) blames much of the decline in the productivity of the mines on failure on the part of management on invest in exploration.
p.254:
The wage structure in mining fails to respond to change sin the cost of living and in the profits of production in accord with classical market theory in economics. In fact, the reverse situation has taken place in Bolivia: wages are declining in response to increasing costs in the subsistence products and the rising prices of tin.
Aime Cesaire: Discourse on Colonialism, 1972
p.21: My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thingification”. I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about “achievements,” diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileage of roads, canals, and railroad tracks. I am talking abou thtousands of men sacrificed to the Congo-Ocean. … I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life – from life, from the dance, from wisdom.
p.23: Every day that passes, every denial of justice, every beating by the police, every demand of the workers that is drowned in blood, every scandal that is hushed up, every punitive expedition, every police van, every gendarme and every militiaman, brings home to us the value of our old societies.
p.31: Once again, I systematically defend our old Negro civilizations: they were courteous civilizations. So the real problem, you say, is to return to htem. No, I repeat. We are not men fo r whome it is a question of “either –or”. For us, the problem is no tto make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive… It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.
p.41: M.Mannoni makes [Aime is criticizing him] his diagnosis: “The Madagascan does not even try to imagine such a situation of abandonment. … He desires neither personal authonomy nor free respobsibility.”
p.46: But what about this: “Everytihing in this world reeks of crime: the newspaper, the wall, the countenance of man.”
p.49: Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take repsobibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortureso fthe Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d.Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was incarnation of human progress.
p.51Lastly, it is for excessive egalitarianism, for once, that American thinkers are taken to task- Otto Klineberg, professor of psychology at Columbia University, having declared: “It is a fundamental error to consider the other cultures as inferior to our own simply because they are different.”
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents, 1989
p.27: The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against all the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself. There is indeed, another rand better path: that of becomein ga member of the human community, and , with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will. […] In last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it, and we only feel it in consuequence of cetain ways in which our organism is regulated.
p.33: The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beuty has no obvious use; nor it is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
p.48: The last, but certainly not the least important, of the characteristic features of civilization remains to be assessed: the manner in which the relationships of men to one another, their social relationships, are regulated – relationships which affect a person as a neighbour, as a source of help, as another person’s sexual object, as a member of a family and of a State.
p.49: Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger that any separate individual and which remain united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right’ is opposition to the power of the indivudal which is condemned as ‘brute force’. This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes th e decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions. The first requisity of civilization, therefore, is that of justice – that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law. […] The final outcome should be a rule of law to which all – except those who are not capable of entering a community – have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which leaves no one – again with the same exception – at the mercy of brute force.
p.59: The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable Since man doe sno t have unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal, he has to accomplish his tasks by making an expedient distribution of his libido.
p.69: Homo homini lupus = ‘Man is a wolf to man’ {Derived from Plautus, Asinaria}
p.88: The people of Israel had believed themselves to be the favourite child of God, and when the great Father caused misfortune after misfortune to rain down upon this people of his, they were never shaken in their belief in his relationship to them or questioned his power or righteousness. […] Thus we know of two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising form fear of an authority, and the other, later on, arising from fear of the super ego. The first insists upon a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions; the second, as well as doing this, presses for punishment, since the continuance of the forbidden wishes cannot be concealed form the superego.
p.103: In the course of our analytic work we have discovered to our surprise that perhaps every neaurosis conceals a quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which in its turn fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment. … When an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt.
p.105: In the developmental process of the individual, the programme of the pleasure principle, which consists in finding the satisfaction of happiness, is retained as the main aim. Integration in, or adaptation to, a human community appears as a scarcely avoidable condition which must be fulfilled before this aim of this aim of happiness can be achieved. … The development of the individual seems to us to be a product of the interaction between two urges, the urge towards happiness, which we usally call ‘egoistic’, and the urge towards union with others in the community, which hwe call ‘altruistic’.
p.12.: Man have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficultu in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and hteir mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the ‘HeavenlyPOwer’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary.
Domitila Barrios De Chungara: Let me Speak, 1978
In reading this book, I felt like having deep insight into social repression, class division and human suffering. My understanding human suffering was only limited to war zones and hunger stricken areas. Now I see how much people suffer in areas where poverty means eventual distinction of group of people and tyranny means more blood shed.
She was imprisoned with her child first. She said “I swallowed my tears, watching my children cry. In our own country, thrown out of our own village … where would we go? We’d been born there, we’d been raised there, we’d live there.” It turned out, her first imprisonment was much easier than the second. When Domitila was about to give birth, she was put in prison and tortured. She felt piece of her teeth in the month after repetitious beatings by officers. She was put in cell rather than hospital when she was just about to give birth. Pain was too much to bear, so she rarely remembers what happens in the cell. In her words, “The only thing I remember is that I knelt thre and covered my face because I could not stand anymore. … I noticed the head was coming out… and rightat htat moment I fainted.” Then she gained conscious but was soaking wet. It was blood and the liquid you lose during childbirth that had wet her all over. She says “Colonel [who was beating her] shouted ‘she gave birth?’ after hearing it from the guard. And he came in, ‘get up whore …’ and he kicked me. I did not feel much, because I was half frozen.” She lost her baby, and soon after had mental breakdown which resulted in hysteria. Thanks god, with help of her family she eventually recovered to be a leader in her community.
After reading this book, I am half paralyzed with horrible images of her life and fully convinced the brutality of the military regime. Moreover, I undertood that there is no limit to evil in humans, especially MAN.
Bat-Ochir Bold, Mongolian Nomadic Society, 2001
There are many books on Mongolian history. This is one of them which is written by professor in University of Iceland. The difference of this book from other history books is that its development was not based on chronological order and the author clearly not aimed to set certain timelines. Contents were: 1.Starting point for viewing the history of the Mongols, 2. Econmic conditions and their development, 3. Socio-political organization in the development of Monglia, 4. Social strata of Mongolian nomadic society, 5. The effect of Lamaism on traditional Mongolian nomadic society, 6. The dynamics of the development of Mongolia nomadic society.
The book had couple good insights on effect of Lamaism on tradional Mongolian society. Also it provided statistics on number of temples, lamas and households.
Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers, 1988
Contents: 1. Silver and Money Capitalism, 2. Piracy, Slavery, and the birth of corporations, 3. The American Indian path to industrialization, 4. The food revolution, 5. Indian Agricultural technology, 6. The culinary revolution, 7. Liberty, anarchism, and the Noble savage, 7 The founding Indian fathers, 9. Red sticks and revolution, 10. The Indian healer. 11. The drug connection, 12. Architecture and urban planning, 13. The pathfinders, 14. When will America be discovered?
The book was easy read. It portrayed the truths about the colonilization in Latin America, especially how much mita they took along with their precious metals. Very good insight into latin American culture and what it offered to world including the architecture and food. Indians in North America was not excluded but the book mostly concerned of latin America. I was surprised to find that the first pirates were given titles of “sir” by queen of Engand, and they did not have problems as long as the profits were flowing into country.
Before discovery of America, the precious metals used to come from Africa. Towns on the route in Africa and port for ships to Europe prospered. But once America was discovered along with it Cerro Ricos, the towns in Africa had nothing to support itself. As a result they opted for the slave trade to sustain the economy.
p.17; Asia experienced a temporary gain from the discovery of America, but Africa suffered. America had all the silver and gold Europe needed, and this destroyed the African gold markets and the dependent trade networks. Cities such as Timbuktu and the Songhoi Empire of which it was a part crumbled as merchants abandoned the ancient trade routes.
p.38: The discovery of America created what he called a “revolution in commerce.”. … These great trading companies helped create what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the “world system.” They made a single economy out of the previously diverse regiounal economies of the far east, sub Saharan Africa, India and south asia, the south pacific, and Europe together with the Americas. Goods could now be produced in any part of th world and transported to virtually any other aprt of the world, and all of this was accomplishe dusinght e standardized values of the gold and silver supplied by the Indians of America.
p.82: Now rather than allowing foreigners to experiment with the Indians by teaching htem to raise foreign trees, the government seeks the aid of the Indian sto teach researchers how to grow a wide variety of yams, potatoes, and tubers for which there exist no names in either English or Spanish.
Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano, 1973I am very happy to come across with Eduardo Galeano. If you think Thomas Friedman is the bestseller and “the man” today in journalism, then Eduardo Galeano was 70’s Thomas Friedman. My failure to categorise his writing style is not derived from neither my judgemental values nor my inability to distinguish cadres. Anyway, Eduardo Galeano has distinct style of his own and his writings should be categorized by itself. I would like to recommend this book to everyone who has little sense of “lefties”. Satisfaction is guaranteed.
p.12: Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into Europena – or later United States – capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits, and its mineral rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources.
p.14: New factories are built in the privileged poles of development – San Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City – but less and less labor is needed. The system did not foresee this small headache, this surplus of people. And the people keep reproducing. They make love with enthusiasm and without precaution.
p.18: When Alexander Von Humboldt investigated the customs of the ancient inhabitants of the Bogota plateau, he found that the Indians called the victims of ritual ceremonies quihica. Quihica meant “door”; the death of each chosen victim opened the door to a new cycle of 185 moons.
p.26: The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, allowed Portugal to ooccupy Latin American territories below a dividing line traced by the Pople, and in 1530 Martim Affonso dde Sousa founded the first Portuguese communities in Brazil, expelling French intruders.
p.39: This enormous mass of capital, Mandel notes, created a favourable climate for investment in Europe, stimulated the “spirit of enterprise,” and directly financed the establishment of manufacrtures, which in turn gave a strong thrust toeh Industrial Revolution. But at the same time the formidable international concentration of wealth for Europe’s benefit prevented the jumo into the accumulation of industrial capital in the plundered areas.
p.46: Sucre decayed along with Potosi. This valley city of pleasant climate, successively known as Charcas, La Plata, and Chuquisaca, enjoyed a good share of the wealth flowing from Potosi’s Cerro Rico.
p.50: In 1685 only 4000 Indian families remained of the more than 2 million that had once lived between Lima and Paita, according to the Marquis of Barinas. … While metals flowed unceasingly from Latin American mines, euqlly unceasing were the orders from the Spanish Court granting paper protection and dignity to he Indians who killing labor sustained the kingdom. … between 1616 and 1619, Governor Juan de Solorzano carried out a survey of work conditions int eh HUancavelica mercury mines “The poison penetrated to the very marrow, debilitating all the members and causing a constant shaking, and the wormers usually died within four years,” he reported to the Council of the Indies and to the king. But in 1631 Philip IV ordered that the same system be continued and his successor Charles II later reaffirmed the decree.
p.54: The Aztecs irrigation works and artificial islands dazzled Cortes – even though they were not made of gold. The conquest shattered the foundations of these civilizatins. The installation of a minig ecnomy had direr consequences than the fire and sword of war. The mines required a great displacement of people and dislocated agricultural communities; they not only took countless lives htrough forced labor, but also indirectly destroyed the collective farming system.
p.105: A coffee era began in Venezuela in 1873; coffe, like cacao continued to expand invading the humid lands of Carupano. … two products created the capital that enabled landlords, merchants, and moneylenders to live as wasteful parasites.
p.107: Ecuador’s economy depend on the sale of bananas, coffee, and cacao, three food products highly subject ot price fluctuations. According to official daa, seven of every ten Ecuadoreans suffer from basic malnutrition, and the country has one of the highest death rates in the world. (1960s)
p.111: Toward the end of the century [19th] coffee planters, by then the new Brazilian social elite, sharpened their pencils and totted up their accounts: subsistence wages worked out cheaper than the purchase and maintenance of increasingly scarce slaves.
p.113: A drop of only one cent in the price meant a losss of $65 million to the combined producing countries. With the price falling continually between 1964 and 1968, the consuming country – the United States – helped itself to more and more millions from the producing country, Brazil. But for the benefit of whom? Of the coffee drinking citizen? In July 1968 Brazilian coffee cost 30 percent less in the United States than in January 1964, but U.S. consumers did not pay less: they paid 13 percent more. Thus in the 1964- 1968 period mddlemen kept the 13 percent as well as the 30 percent, feathering their nests twice over.
p.120: In general – but especially in Guatemala – this structure of labor force appropriation is visibly identified with racism: Indians suffer the internal colonialism of whites and mestizos blessed ideologically by the dominant culture, just as Central American countries suffer foreign colonialism.
p.121: In 1912 President William H. Taft declared: “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South pole. The whole hemisphere will be ourse in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”
p.128: Thomas Melville: Jan, 1968 Guatemaln police murdered over 2800 intellectuals, students, trade union leaders, and peasant swho were trying “to combat the sicknesses of Guatemalan society.”
p.133: In our day the Uruguayan countryside looks like a desert: five hundred families monopolize half of all the land and , to crown their power, also control three quarters of the capital invested in industry and banking.
p.155: The uncommonly arrogant Lima oligarchy continued enriching itself and amassoing symbols of its power in the palaces and Carrara marble mausoleums which sprouted amid sandy deserts. Once it had been Potosi’s silver that nourished ht egreat families of the capital city; now they lived from bird-droppings and the shiny white clots in the nitrate fields – more vuilgar means to the same legant ends.
p.158: In the thirsty desert of Tamarugal, where the land dazzles one’s eyes with its brilliance, I have stood beside the ruins of Tarapaca. During the boom there were one hundred and twenty nitrate fields here; now only two remain in operation. …”Here money flowed and everyone thought it would never stop” I was told by the surviving residents.
p.166: But the worst of it was the dust: circles of light from the miners’s helmets danced dimly in the gloom, showing thick white curtains of deadly silica. It does not take long to do its work. The first sympthoms are felt within a year, and in ten years one enters the cemetery.
p.168: With a mere $5000 in declared capital, this pompously named enterprise secured a contract that enabled it to amass more than $900 million.
p.198: In the difficult early days, when British industry was still at a disadvantage, an Englishman caught exporting raw wool was sentenced to lose his right hand, and if he repeated the sin he was hanged.
p.207 [how the war against Paraguay wrecked the only successful attempt at independent development] Although Britain took no direct part in the ghastly deed, it was in the pockets of British mercahngts, bankers and industrialists that the loot ended up. The invasion was financed from start to finish by the Bnk of London.
p.218: As the finance minister in the period when [Argentina] the loan was contracted said “We are not in a position ot make measures against foregign trade, particularly British because we are bound to that nation by large debts and would expose ourselves to a rupture which would cause much harm…”
p.223: Congress voted the ultra-protectionist “McKinley” tariff in 1890, and the Dingley Act further hiked customs duties in 1897. Soon afterward the developed countires of Europe felt obliged to erect customs barriers against the invasion of dangerously competitive U.S. manufactures.
p.228: What happened to Latin America’s industrial bourgeoisie was what happens to dwarfs: it became decrepit without having grown.
p.241: According to this brief but meaty “capitalist manifesto”, the law of the jungle is the natural code governing human life; injustice does not exist, for what we know as injustice is merely an expression of the cruel harmony of the universe: poor countries are poor because … they are poor; our fate is written in the stars and we are born only to fulfil it.
p.252: Numerous daggers glint beneath the cloak of aid to poor countries. Teodor Moscoso, who was chairman of the Alliance for Progress, confessed: “It may happened that US needs the vote of a particular country in the UN or the OAS, and it is possible that the government of that country [following the sacred tradition of cold war diplomacy] may ask a price in exchange.
p.255: US has one-fourth of the votes in the World Bank: the 22 countries in Latin America have less than onetenth. The WB responds to the US like thunder to lightning.
p.261: But the most starling contradiction between theory and reality in the world market emerged in the open “soluble coffee war” in 1967. It then became clear that only the rich countries have the right to exploit for their own benefit the “natural comparative advantages” which theoretically determine the international division of labor.
p.266: Latin American underdevelopment is not a stage on the road to development, but ht eocunterpart of development elsewhere’ the region “progresses” without freeing itself from the structure of its backwardness and, as Manuel Sadosky points out, the “advantage” of not participating in progress with its own programs and goals is illusory.
p.270: Wages can remain low while productivity rises, and productivity rises at the expense of cuts in the labor force.
p.281: The poles of prosperity that flourished to supply Europe’s need for metals and foodstuffs were not interconnected: the ribs of the fan had their vertex across the ocean. People and capital were displaced according to the rising and falling fate of gold or sugar, silver or indigo, and only the ports and the capitals, the leeches of the productive regions, had a permanent existence.
p.282: Each Latin American country still identifies itself with its own port – a negation of its roots and real identity – to such an extent that almost all intraregional trade goes by sea: inland transport is virtually nonexistent. Furthermore, the global feight cartel fixes rates and itineraries to suit itself, and Latin America merely endures the exorbitant charges and ridiculous routes. Of the 118 regular shipping lines operating in the region only seventeen fly regional flags; freightage bleeds the Latin American economy of 2.6 billion a year. Thus merchandise shipped from Porto Alegre to Montevideo arrives faster if it goes via Hamburg, and the same for Uruguayan wool bound for the US; freightage from Buenos Aires to a Mexican gulf port is more than 25 percent lower if the shipment goes via Southampton. Shipment of timber from Mexico to Venezuela costs more than double the shipment of timber from Finland to Venezuela, although the maps still insist that Mexico is closer.
p.283: Bolivar prophesied shrewdly that the US seemed fated by Providence to plague America with woes in the name of liberty. … It is big load of rottenness that has to be sent to the bottom of the sea on the march to latin america’s reconstruction. The task lies in the hadnd of the dispossessed, the humiliated, the accursed. The Latin American cause is above all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and challenge. There aer ethose who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge.
New Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, 1933
Before reading Freud, I read five or six books by Carl. G. Jung. Jung is the one God who I worship in field of psychology, if I can say that. But without Freud, my god looses its heart. Reading this book by Freud gave me broader comprehension of the psychology in general and early development of psychoanalysis. In one word: “good book”.
p.27: For we must never forget that the dream-life is, as Aristotle has already told us, the way our mind works during sleep. The state of sleep represents a turning away from the real external world, and thus provides a necessary condition for the development of a psychosis.
p.31: Let me repeat the stages of dream-formation. The introduction: the wish to sleep, the voluntary withdrawal from the outside world. Two things follow from this: firstly, the possibility for older and more primitive modes of activity to manifest themselves, i.e. regression; and secondly, the decrease of the repression-resistence, which weighs on the unconscious.
p.32: The whole process of dream-foramtion, which is permitted by the sleeping ego, is, however, under the control of the censorship, a control which is exercised by what is left of the forces of repression. I cannot explain the process more simply; it is not in itself simpler than that.
p.43: We have kept our theory intact by dividing dreams into wish-dreams, and punishment-dreams. Even punishment-dreams are wishfulfilments, but they do not fulfil the wishes of the instinctual impulses, but those of the critical, censuring and punishing function of the mind.
p.90: Identification is a very important kind of relationship with another person, probably the most primitive, and is not to be confused with object-choice. One can express the difference between them in this way: when a boy identifies himself with his father, he wants to be like his father; when he makes him the object of his choice, he wants to have him, to possess him; in the first case his ego is altered on the model of his father, in the second case that is not necessary. Identification and object-choice are broadly speaking independent of each other.
p.95: For us the super-ego is the representative of all moral restrictions, the advocate of the impulse towards perfection, in short it is as much as we have been able to apprehend psychologically of what people call the ‘higher’ things in human life. … They have forgotten the difficulties of their own childhood and are glad to be able to identify themselves fully at last with their own parents, who in their day subjected them to such severe restrains. The result is that the super-eog of the child is not really built up on the model of the parents, but on that of the parent’s super-ego; it takes over the same content, it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the age-long values which have been handed down in this way from generation to generation.
p.105: Naturally, the id know no values, no good and evil, no morality. The economic, or if you prefer, the quantitative factor, which is so closely bound up with the pleasure-principle, dominates all its processes.
p.109: When the ego is forced to acknowledge its weakness, it breaks out into anxiety: reality anxiety in face of the external world, normal anxiety in face of the superego and neurotic anxiety in face of the strength of the passions in the id.
p.141: We suppose that there are two fundamentally different kinds of instincts, the sexual instincts in the widest sense of the word and the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction.
p.163: In short, we gain the conviction that one cannot understand women, unless one estimates this pre-oedipal attachment to the mother at its proper value.
p.172: The discovery of her castration is a turning-point in the life of the girl. Three lines of development diverge from it; one leads to sexual inhibition or to neurosis, the second to a modification of character in the sense of masculinity complex, and the third to normal femininity.
p.182: The mother can transfer to her son all the ambition which she has had to suppress in herself, and she can hope to get from him the satisfaction of all that has remained to her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not fimly assured until the woman has succeeded in making her husband into her child and in acting the part of a mother towards him.
p.220 If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life and it guides their thoughts and actions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.
p.221: In so far as religion brushes away men’s feaw of the dangers and vicissitudes of life, in so far as it assures them of a happy ending, and comforts them intehir misfortunes, science fannot compete with it. Science, it is true, teaches how one can avoid certain dangers and how one can combat many suffering with success; it would be quite untrue to deny that science is a powerful aid to human beings but in many cases it has to leave htem to their suffering and ccan only advise them to submit to the inevitable. IN the performance of its third function, the provision of precepts, prohibitions and restrictions religion is furthest removed from science.
p.234 reason- is among the forces which may be expected to exert a uynifying influence upon men – creatures who can be held together only with the greatest difficulty, and whom it is therefore scarecely possible to control.
p.235: The struggle, therefore is not yet at an end. The followers of the religious Weltanschauung act in accordance with the old maxim: the best defence is attack.
p.240: [according to anarchistic doctrine]What we give out as scientific truth is only the product of our own needs and desires, as they are formulated under varying external conditions; that is to say, it is illusion once more. Ultimately we find only what we need to find, and see only what we desire to see. We can do nothing else. And since the criterion of truth, correspondence with an external world, disappears, it is absolutely immaterial what views we accept. All of them are equally true and false. And no one has a right to accuse any one else or error.
Inside CIA’s private world.
The book was quite an insight into the world of agents. When I was young, we used to play as secret agents. It was thrilling game since it needed wit to play. In this book, Westerfield selected and published the papers which were once classified, but no longer fall into the category after cold war. An story of the Swedish recruit, the spy plane taking picture, how to survive through interrogation etc etc.
p.321: [economic intelligence] 1970s, beginning with some adaptations of existing econometric models of foreign economies, OER built its own model of the world economy which linked the principal countries through foreign trade flows and which hcould approximate and simulate the global impact of changes in national economic policies or of major shocks tro the world economy.
p.417 [counterespionage] This is a grim subject, and part of the mental preparation – a most impartn part – consists in accepting and living with tehse possibilities. An agent conditioned to face them honestly is likely to be far more capable and careful than change – taker who hopes somehow to get by without self-discipline and without the intensive preparation that is the only way to success in any clandestine operation.
p.419: [interrogation] The initial stages of any interrogation is best for the prisoner to play the role of a well intentioned but confused and innocent victim. The jails are full of prisoners who made the mistake of being clear and precise in their replies to seemingly harmless questions. The first thing every interrogator has to determine is whether his prisoner can tell a straight story about anything, or whether he is in a state of confusion. Prisoners are under no obligation to collaborate with their captors by exhibiting good memories and making coherent statements. This is the time to forget as much as possible.
In all interrogation sessions, the prisoner should try to discover the following:
a. What is know about him; more specifically, what evidence does the interrogator have? Even communist interrogators have to have evidence to convict sustpects. Nothing should ever be admitted unless the evidence that the interrogator exhibits is overwhelming. One should never assume that the case is hopeless and that one might as well tell all.
b. Where did the interrogator get his information? The prisoner often overlooks the fact that interrogator may let slip information which will indicate who betrayed the operation. By feigning stupidity and confusion and pretending no to understand questions, the prisoner may maneuver the interrogator into making further disclosures which may indicate the source of the betrayal.
c. What are the intentions of the authorities?
d. How much importance do the authorities attach to the prisoner?
The lexus and the Olive tree, Thomas Friedman, 1999
p.In July 1998 issue of Golf magazine reported that many golf courses are starting to sinstall the Spyder 9000 computer system in their golf carts, “which allows cart riders to keep score electronically, measure yardages digitally, view videotaped hole previews, view video golf tips, order lunch, check stock prices, and watch TV commercials.” The only thing it doesn’t do it is putt for you.
p.100: Asked if he had ever lost hope during the Cultural Revolution, he answered with a Chinese proverb: “No hand can block out the sun.”
p.102: His message was that Thailand had messed up. People knew it. They would now have to tighten their belts and get with the program and there wasn’t much else to say. Wasn’t he mad? I asked. Didn’t he want to burn down some government building in anger at being wiped out? No, Sirivat explained to me: “Communism fails, socialism fails, so now there is only capitalism. We don’t want to go back to the jungle, we all want a better standard of liing, so you have to make capitalism work, because you dong have a choice. We have to improve ourselves and follow the world rules… Only the competititve survive. It will probably require a national unity government, because the burden is so big. … Fablo Feldmann is a liberal and I asked him about the nature of the political debate in Brazil today. He responded: “The [ideological] left in Brazil have lost their flag. The challenge of the federal government is jobs and employment. You have to generate and distribute income. And what is the program of the left? They don’t have proposals to generate income, only to distribute it.”
p.147: Firs the African visits the Asian minister in his country, and at the end of the day the Asian takes the African to his home for dinner. The Asian minister lives in an absolutely palatial residence. So the African minister asks his Asian counterpart, “wow how can you afford such a home on your salary.”The asian minister takes the African over to a big bay window and points to a new bridge in the distance.. “You see that bridge over there?” the asian minister asks the African. “Yes, I see it,” the African says. Then the Asian miniter point a finger at himself and whispers “10 percent” signaling 10 percent of the cost of the bridge went inot his pocket. Well, a year later hta asian went to visit the African minister in his country and afound that he lived in an even more palatial home than his Asian counterpart. “Wow, how can you afford usch a home on your salary” the asian asked the African. The African pulled his asian counterpart over to the big bay windor in his living room and pointed out to the horizon. “Do you see that bridge over there?” the African asked the Asian. “No, there is no bridge there” answered the asian. “That’s right” the African miniter said, pointing to hiself: “One hundrew percent.”
p.148: Kleptocracy is the fact that in Albania tax cheating was so rampant that in 1997 the 35th highest taxpaying company in the country was an Albanian-American pizza parlor, and auto theft was so rampant that American officials estimated that 80 percent of the cars on the road in albania were stolen from somewhere else in Europe. … [It is no wonder that under Suharto Indonesians had a saying : If your neighbor steals you goat, whatever you do don’t take him to court, because by the time you get done paying off ht epolice and the judges, you will end up losing your cow as well.
p.150: the Times of India reported on December 17, 1998 that an eighteen-month-long search in the corruption riddled Indian state of Punjab had been called off. The search was for an official who could be given 100000($2380) award for providing “honest” government service, in a state where everything from electricity hookups to public school enrollments requires pauing a bribe to someone. But no official could be found who was appropriate for the award. Instead of identifuing a recipient for the award, the New Delhi newspaper said the search produced evidence that may be sused to bring charges agains 300 corrupt officials.
p.169: Wimar Witoelar, a popular Jakarta talk-show host, who was describing for me the young generation of the Indonesian middle class. He remarked that what many of these educated twenty – and thirty year olds had in common was that they wanted to get rich, without having to be corrupt, and they wanted democracy but they did not want to go in the streets and fight for it. This generation of Indonesians understood that under SUharto there would never be a democratic revolution from above, but they were terrified of democratic revolution form below, because fi the urban poor revolted it would be the year of living dangeriously all over again. So their whole strategy was revolution from beyond, or globalution. Their whole strategy was to do everything they could, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, to integrate Indonesia into the global system. They hoped that by tying Indonesia into these global institutions and markets – whether it was to the world Trade Organization, pizza hut, … - they might be able to import form beyond the standards and rules – based systems that they knew would never be initiated from above and could never be generated from below.
p.182: The Foreign Corrupt Practices act, passed in 1977, makes it illegal for American companies to pay bribes to advance foreign business deals. On November 20,1997 the twenty nine nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD which comprises the world’s leading industrial democracies agreed to adopt much of America’s anticorruption legislation.
p.317: “stay in school so you can buy all this stuff that I have”. I am not sure that’s the right message. The message should be, stay in school so you can do what you want to do in life.
p.330 [Brazil, Dejair Birschner, 48 yr ols mayor of Una] “do we have any future?” His question hit me like a fist in the stomach. It almost brought tears to my eyes, looking across the table at this proud, sturdy man, a mayor no less asking meif he and his villagers had any future. I knew exactly what he was asking in his question: “My villagers can’t live off the forest anymore, and we are not equipped to live off computers. My father and grandfather made a living off logs and my grandchildren might make a living off the Internet. But what are all the rest of us in between supposed to do?”
… they needed to start making a transition from an agro-economy to a more knowledge – based economy, beginning by better educating the town’s children.
p.331: Unfortunately, not everyone is equipped to run fast. There are a lot of turtles out there, desperately trying to avoid becoming roadkill.
p.335: As for the poorest human turles in the developing world, those really left behind by globalization, they will express their backlash by simply eating the rain forest – each in their won way – without trying to explain it or justify it or wrap it in an ideological bow. In Indonesia, they will eat the Chinese merchants by ransacking their stores, in Russia they will sell weapons to Iran or turn to crime. In brazil, they will log the rest of the rain forest or join the peasant movement in the brazilian countryside called “sem teto” who simply steal what they need.
p.390: Our leaders in their public speeches don’t use the term globalization. They use the term modernization. There is a cultural reason for this. The historical lesson is still fresh in Chinese people’s mind that china was forced into the international community in the last century by gunboats so globalization represents something that china doesn’t pusue but rather something that the west or America is imposing. Moderinization on the other hand is something we can control. There is an annual new year’s television program that is shown on the main ntational television channel.
p.406: If there is a common denominator that runs through this book it is the notion that globalization is everything and its opposite. It can be incredibly empowering and incredible coercive.
p.447: If you are not replacing everything you know by then, your career is going to turn sour fast. As Jim BOtkin and Stan Davis not I ntheir book “tH emosnter Under the bed,” in the knowledge economy you don’t earn a living, you “learn a living.”
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