More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.”
if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Rubáiyát: a collection of quatrains, exquisitely rendered into English by Edward FitzGerald, among others. Khayyám was an astronomer
Dirty money from the Shah of Iran and the Greek dictatorship made its way at different times into our electoral process.
Now it is Russia and Egypt.
each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States.
Midnight’s Children, the panoptic novel that introduced Salman Rushdie
Sir Penderel Moon, one of the last British administrators in India, who mordantly titled his book Divide and Quit.
Sigmund Freud once wrote an essay concerning “the narcissism of the minor differences.” He pointed out that the most vicious and irreconcilable quarrels often arise between peoples who are to most outward appearances nearly identical.
These men have a very brusque way with al-Qaeda and its local supporters, and have not just kept them at a distance but subjected them to very hot pursuit.
Trump surrendered to them, and abandoned the Kurds.
The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan, that ought to be much more famous
William Henry Harrison, said of him that “[u]nder the mask of patriotism and attachment to liberty, he has really been preparing the means of investing himself with arbitrary power.”
Now that all other examples of political revolution have become obsolete or have been discredited, the issue is whether the United States is indeed a different sort of country or nation, one that has a creed or an ethic that imposes special duties on it.
On the whole, he makes a sensible case that everyone has a self-interest in the strivings and sufferings of others because the borders between societies are necessarily porous and contingent and are, when one factors in considerations such as the velocity of modern travel, easy access to weaponry, and the spread of disease, becoming ever more so.
history has taught us that tyranny often looks stronger than it really is, that it has unexpected vulnerabilities (very often to do with the blunt fact that tyranny, as such, is incapable of self-analysis), and that taking a stand on principle, even if not immediately rewarded with pragmatic results, can be an excellent dress rehearsal for the real thing.
In Bleak House the wearisome and convoluted case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce eventually exhausts all the resources of the contending parties in the sheer costs of the suit. In The Case of Comrade Tulayev a random political murder becomes the excuse for a gigantic, hysterical, all-enveloping bureaucratic investigation, and also the talisman for an ideological witch-hunt that intends to lay bare the most imposing of all conspiracies and convinces the last doubter of the existence of a grand design.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1948),
Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.
dueling-and-drinking club
Congress for Cultural Freedom
Just as many of the people who believe in numinous coincidence and supernatural intervention are secretly hoping to prove that it is they themselves who are the pet of the universe, so many of those who overcompensate for inferiority are possessed of titanic egos and regard other people as necessary but incidental.
An excerpt of a short story by Ghazi Rabihavi gives an account of what it’s like to have to deal, after a thirteen-month wait, with the Ministry of Islamic Guidance: Unfortunately, your book has some small problems which cannot be corrected. I am certain you will agree with me. Take these first few sentences… nowhere in our noble culture will you find any woman who would allow herself to stand waiting for her husband to bring her a cup of coffee. OK? Well, the next problem is the image of the wind sliding over the naked arms, which is provocative and has sexual overtones. Finally, nowhere in
...more
Experience (2000), Martin Amis
In Time’s Arrow (1991)
A terrifying book
This reader has endured none of them; and I will proceed with caution and unease. It feels necessary because torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.
“Arma virumque cano, and Hitler-Stalin tells us this, among other things: given total power over another, the human being will find that his thoughts turn to torture.”
He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist.
Many surviving eyewitnesses of many tyrannical courts have told us that the most exacting and nerve-straining moments come when the despot is in a good mood.
Amis’s newly acquired zeal forbids him to see a joke even when (as Bertie Wooster puts it) it is handed to him on a skewer with béarnaise sauce.
History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality tale.
Corruptio optimi pessima: No greater cruelty will be devised than by those who are sure, or are assured, that they are doing good.
General William Graves, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force during the 1918
If we are all evil, then everything becomes a matter of degree.
flung themselves down by the millions and groaned great noises of worship and adoration.
Trump
In those and other details, his military and business backers let him have his way. They really had overstated, for “opportunist” reasons, the Jewish and Marxist threat. But they thought they owned a marionette. I did not know until I read Kershaw that the proposal for all German soldiers to take their “oath of unconditional loyalty” to the Führer himself actually came from the High Command. They thought this clever move would detach him from the vulgar Nazi Party and confirm him as their creature. A mistake. Arguably a very big mistake. They helped nationalize the concept of the lowest common
...more
Trump
He kept his Final Solution a state secret, to be conducted well away from German soil—a compliment to public opinion in its way—and, at the end, coldly decided that
Trump
He was a homicidal maniac in a hurry, and terribly afraid that he might not make it.
Trump
However, in point of fact Germany was governed by an ultra-rightist, homicidal, paranoid maniac who had begun by demolishing democracy in Germany itself,
Trump
“tumbril remark”
Something worthy of taking a person to the guillotine
Madame Defarge sits knitting with her fellow tricoteuses, coldly and contentedly marking each crashing slice of the blade.
But only a moral cretin thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews.
There is not just safety in numbers, but danger in numbers.
and they can help explain why the cartoons are so offensive.”
But the cartoons are not at all offensive.
Randall Kennedy not long ago became the second black American to publish a book called Nigger.
It’s always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it’s the victim of violence who is “really” inciting it.
Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims to temporal authority over the citizen, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny.
In ACLU circles, we often refer to ourselves as “First Amendment absolutists.” By this we mean, ironically enough, that we prefer to interpret the words of the Founders, if you insist, literally. The literal meaning in this case seems (to us) to be that Congress cannot inhibit any speech or establish any state religion. This means that we defend all expressions of opinion including those that revolt us, and that we say that nobody can be forced to practice, or forced to foreswear, any faith. I suppose I would say that this is an inflexible principle, or even a dogma, with me.
The most noticeable thing about all theocracies is their sexual repression and their directly related determination to exert absolute control over women.
It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be “charisma?”) it exerts. Take “Yes We Can,” for example. It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake.
Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps ten keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together.
It’s more that the prevailing drivel assumes that every adult in the country is a completely illiterate jerk who would rather feel than think and who must furthermore be assumed, for a special season every four years, to imagine that everyone else “in America” or in “this country” is unemployed or starving or sleeping under a bridge.
