Patrick Link > Recent Status Updates

Better understood as a yarn.

Podesta, church-state relations, etc.

Focusing on smaller towns and general themes. The book is very readable no doubt a factor in it having five editions.

Octave quits a job in a huff just to waltz into a new one.

Fine-grain look at terms like class and class conflict and what they entail.

They give them enough leeway to hang themselves.

Summit meetings degrade the institutions.

Loving the structure of focusing on one’s person at a time.

A little upstairs downstairs more hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie.

My first foray into the Chinese Imperial Court (Ming or otherwise). I think this will be a great exposure to the how’s and whys but I wish there had been more of a preface.

Quick read so far. Pervasiveness and rot.

I love early chapter a in novels like this with a party to introduce a lot of characters and show their stereotypes and prejudices. There should be something on balls and parties in nineteenth century novels, I’d read that.

The reason I keep coming back to Zola is that his characters are still with us. His bourgeois mother, Madam Josserand, with the crosses to bare of a husband less successful than she wanted and daughters that she can’t marry off and won’t put out to respectable suitors, is as familiar to me as the back of my own hand.

Prelude to Kohima where a rushed 50th Indian Parachute Brigade held 11th Battalion, 58 Infantry Regiment of the 31st Division and parts of the 15th Division for a week at Sangshak 40 miles from Imphal in March, 1944.

The British blunted Japanese operation Ha Go in February 1944 in Arakan. Slim and Mountbatten were particularly heartened by the method. Previously, the Japanese would isolate British units and attack their retreat routes. This time in Arakan they held their ground and were resupplied by air. Now on to the Japanese invasion of India in March.

The end of the short peace in 1803 featured a territorial revolution in Germany were a lot of the small states were consolidated into the medium and larger German powers called the Imperial Recess. Schroeder spins it as an attempt to save the German constitution which is I could imagine that would support such sweeping change. He takes some extra time here to add to his Bonaparte as boogieman theory rather justly.

On the foreign policy of the first eight months of Allende’s term. The decision to take a pragmatic approach was about the only one they could take and certainly the wisest. Damn Kissinger and his lies. The US was ideologically pure in its distrust and duplicity. The main success for Chile was a thawing with Argentina. Brazil, on the other hand, was nearly rabid with anticommunist fervor.

Two articles on the Spanish counter-revolution in 1856 where the army, previously a center of revolutionary action, had degraded into reaction and a familiar sequence of the betrayal of the workers by the liberal middle classes was quickly achieved by the army and the crown.

Plus ça change: in 1955 Allen Dulles told Eveland that Mossad had attacked US offices in Egypt to try and upset any possible arms deal between Nasser and the US, known as Lavon Affair. Also durning this time Egyptian troops in Gaza were attacked by Israelis in such a way as to go beyond justification
Adana Kural, the Turkish minister to Damascus said the US should back the Ba’ath Party so they don’t go commie.

The tittle tattle of CIA personnel and their foibles in DC and on stations is interesting. What really strikes me is how Eveland stands mute while others make assumptions or fill in their own blanks in most interactions. Such taciturn moments of course have their place and are eminently useful but is a heck of a way to internally decide who to give guns to.

Pg 35: start of definitions and five propositions

The contagion of stock speculation in Germany reminds me of the Zola novel Money set at about the same time.

Very readable. Getting into definitions used in the book like ideas of class.

Western-backed NGO puts a thorn in the side of Indian support for national liberation movements by supporting questions on Nagaland.