War
By Sebastian Junger
Twelve 2010, 304 pp.

From the first page, Sebastian Junger's War immerses the reader into the world of the soldiers in what has been dubbed “the most dangerous place on the planet” by President H.W. Bush: Afghanistan's Korengal Valley.

Fear, the first section of the book, establishes the necessary groundwork about the soldiers' thoughts on fighting an armed conflict and their emotions before and during battle. “Combat jammed so much adrenaline through your system that fear was rarely an issue; far more indicative of real courage was how you felt before the big operations, when the implications of losing your life really had a chance to sink in.”

Killing, in part two, explores the fundamental reason why soldiers kill and their reactions when that action is committed on one of their own. When Clinard, an infantryman, sees his commander lying lifeless at the top of a hill, he “stays bent double as if he's just finished a race and moans... in his strangle animal way”.

The final portion of the book, Love, is the most profound and chilling sections in the book. Like Junger so adroitly puts it: “The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.”

If you want an ideological book full of military strategies, condemnations of political incompetence, and pundit-bashing; indeed, go elsewhere. This book is for those who want to understand the life of these warriors.

Joseph Suh is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist

After America: Get Ready for Armageddon
Mark Steyn
Regnery Publishing

After America: Get Ready for Armageddon is pretty much exactly what you would expect from the fellow who brought you America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

In After America we pick up where the end of the world left off in Steyn's last book: Europe and much of the rest of the Western world is still in demographic upheaval and financial crisis. America is fast joining its declining neighbors in a race to the bottom. 

In Steyn's words, "It starts with the money." As he lays it out, the United States is being buried under a mountain of debt that it has no hope of ever paying off, at least at the current rate it is spending money and maintaining its entitled, ever-growing, unaccountable bureaucratic class. What shrinking amount of working class America is left to pay the bills can't possibly hope to keep up. The border to the south is getting hazier every day, the education system is churning out dumber and dumber students, and things show no sign of getting better anytime soon.  Read more

Mark Steyn, writer, polemicist, sometime-guest host for Rush Limbaugh, and all-around darling of the right, has a new book out that some of our more conservative Allies may be adding to their reading list.

After America: Get Ready for Armageddon - not to be confused with Mark Steyn's previous apocalyptic tome, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It - officially launched last week. Its topic? The collapse of Western society. In its own words: 

In his New York Times bestseller America Alone, Steyn warned of the impending collapse of just about every country in the western world except America. The good news is the rest of the west’s demise is still on schedule. The bad news is America has now signed up for the same program, supersized. And, unlike AIG, Fannie Mae, Detroit and Greece, the United States is big enough to fail, and spectacularly so. If, like Mark, you want to avoid that fate, then After America is the book for you. It starts with the money, because it always does - for Washington, as for London and Rome before it. But it ends with a ruined and reprimitivized planet - and even liberals won't like that as much as they think.

The Origins of Political Order:
From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

By Francis Fukuyama
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 585 pp, 2011

The Arab Spring -- that grab-bag of street protests, popular uprisings, and outright civil war that has flared across parts of the Middle East since early March -- was greeted with no small measure of excitement by observers in the West. After a post-9/11 decade spent worrying that places like Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia were infested with terrorist cells or training camps, their governments poised to fall into the hands of Islamist radicals, the idea that the citizens of these states might rise up against the autocrats in the name of secular values of freedom and democracy came as a tremendous, magnificent surprise.

One undercurrent to the ecstasy was a subtle but distinctily Whiggish sense that, well, it was about time. While the most of the rest of world had spent the last few centuries going through the expected evolution in liberty, prosperity, and representative government, the Arab states remained stuck at a medieval level of tribal politics. But the tribal despots are teetering at last, and the final jump to liberal democracy is surely now just a matter of a quick game of political hopscotch.

Yet if Francis Fukuyama is anywhere close to right, our hopes for these revolutions should be dramatically scaled back. Fukuyama's new book tries to answer the question, Where does political order come from? Or more concretely, Where does a virtuous, modern political order come from, one that combines a strong state with the rule of law and political accountability? Read more

"Come from the Shadows" should surely become required reading for every politician, journalist, soldier, NGO worker, activist or interested observer who wants to understand Afghanistan's struggle against tyranny, slavery and misogyny -- and how the international community can help.

Far from the Taliban’s grim desert strongholds, the country we visit with Terry Glavin is a surprisingly welcoming place, hidden away in alleys and narrow streets that bustle with blacksmiths, gem hawkers and spice merchants. This is the unseen Afghanistan, reawakening from decades of savagery and bloodletting.

 

Glavin shows us how events have unfolded in Afghanistan since September 11, 2001. Travelling with fluent interpreters and Afghan human rights activists, Glavin meets people from many walks of life—key political figures, teachers, journalists, farmers, students, burqa-shrouded women and soccer players—and in these pages they speak for themselves. And in the life story of Afghan-Canadian writer, translator and activist Abdul Rahim Parwani, he finds the story of Afghanistan’s agonies over the past 30 years.

The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis
The Berlin Years

By Klaus Gensicke
Vallentine Mitchell 2011 (English translation), 301 pp.

We often hear from advocates of the Palestinian Arab cause the argument that the post-war establishment of Israel was unfair to the Arabs. Since the Arabs played no part in the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War (the argument goes), they ought not to pay the cost of what Europe had done to the Jews.

Gensicke documents the efforts of the Mufti of Jerusalem to contribute to this mass murder. He demolishes the claim that Arabs had no share in that crime.

Read more

The Propagandist bears these latest travails with an unbowed spirit. It has been a week from hell. But we shall overcome.

The Mad Dog of the Middle East made a comeback and a complete rout of the Libyan rebels was only prevented last night by a United Nations resolution that has once more put Gaddafi's back to the wall. Meanwhile, Japan's nuclear facilities are still at grave risk of a meltdown, threatening not only the stalwart Japanese but perhaps the wider world as well. And throughout the week, the unapologetic response of some Palestinian groups and many so-called "human rights" activists to the unforgivable terror of the Itamar massacre in Israel shows off the heights of hypocrisy and hatred. 

Here are some of the top recent stories from The Propagandist.

• Iranian Nuclear Meltdown Threat
• The Jews of Libya. Their Story Is My Story
• Review of Farzana Hassan's "Islam, Women and the Challenges of Today"
• Trying To Make Sense Of The Slaughter Of Innocents
• Threats In A World Of Twitter
• Building Pyramids In Pyongyang
• Croatian Unrest Against Corrupt Government
• Chipping Away At Tyranny In Burma

Stay strong, allies. And give your thoughts to the Fukushima 50, true heroes fighting on the edge of chaos.

Confusion to our enemies!

Farzana Hassan, former president of the Muslim Canadian Congress, set out to write a book that would, in her words, “challenge young Muslim minds”, urging a re-examination of “traditionally held views, often rooted in classical jurisprudence that have come to be part of the entrenched narrative of Islam.” Hassan has a lot of misgivings over this narrative, which she straightforwardly interrogates in her book, “Islam, Women and the Challenges of Today.”

This is probably the right moment to disclose what I suppose constitutes a bias in reviewing a book about faith, which would be my lack of it—of the Mohammedan brand or otherwise. And worse, my atheism is not just personal, but political in that I am convinced that religion is frequently ridiculous, and often dangerous. I tend to agree with Sam Harris that religion is easily “the most prolific source of violence in our history” (2004). I can’t take seriously something I’ve seen no evidence for, and I agree with those who point out that there is much in the Qu’ran that is pretty near impossible to interpret in kinder light no matter how you twist it, from advocating violent jihad to blatant anti-semitism.

But as an insider to a community of faith, Farzana Hassan is espousing perhaps a more pragmatic approach in quelling the intolerance and fanaticism—and violence—that so often accompanies religious adherence. The worst excesses of religion are only likely to be shed when the cracks of light first beamed originate from the inside (with a healthy dose of exposure to the views of others to complement). Read more

The Transforming Fire
The Rise Of The Israel-Islamist Conflict

By Jonathan Spyer
Continuum 2010, 240 pp.

NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher was bang on when he recently wrote that “Israel has to be the most analyzed yet least understood country in the world.” There is a mountain of literature, and more added to it every day, examining Israel’s many challenges. Whether the issue is one of diplomacy, domestic politics, or the security situation, you can bet there are a dozen thoughtful books and countless articles on the specific topic in question. We have access to endless resources that help us comprehend the trends affecting the region in general, and the pressures confronting Israel in particular.

But can the same be said when it comes to understanding Israelis themselves? The very literature that illuminates the processes, patterns, and policies that shape the region and Israel’s place in it can often, ironically, leave us in the dark when it comes to what really makes Israelis tick.

Thankfully, Jonathan Spyer has given us a groundbreaking – and heartfelt – contribution that bridges the divide. His recently published work, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, is a masterful analysis of the changing dynamics in the never-ending war against Israel, as seen through the lens of one Zionist who was nearly killed in a tank in Lebanon.

Jonathan Spyer, currently senior research fellow at a prominent Israeli think-tank, made aliyah (immigrated to Israel) in the early 90’s from the UK. Having survived years of IDF duty in the West Bank and Gaza, not to mention a subsequent bout as an advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office, Spyer entered Lebanon in the summer of 2006 under no illusions for the difficulties facing Israel in its brief, painful war against Hezbollah. Spyer’s academic and government background, combined with front-line combat experience, makes for a rare and compelling treatise.

The Transforming Fire centres on the thesis that the war to annihilate Israel has recently shifted from one of Arab nationalism (or pan-Arabism) into one propelled by radical Islamic theology (pan-Islamism). If this is the case, as the evidence affirms, the consequences are enormous. Read more

The Road to Fatima Gate
The Beirut Spring, the rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian war against Israel

By Michael J Totten
Encounter Books, Publication Date: April 5th 2011

The current political and social upheaval throughout the Middle East and North Africa has highlighted something that those of us living in the region have known for a long time; just how rare accurate reporting and analysis of events in this area is.

Too much of the commentary produced by foreign correspondents and Middle East ‘experts’ is one-dimensional and it is the result of both the inability of writers to set aside their own cultural straight-jackets which have little or no relevance in this region, together with the commercial pressures to compete for headlines in a digital age in which speed and volume of content trump accuracy and quality reporting.

I often think of this prevalent sort of Middle East journalism in terms of mass-produced, flat-pack chipboard furniture. It’s not meant to last, it all looks pretty much the same, it doesn’t aspire to quality in terms of the materials used, and it comes in a one-size- fits- all form of presentation designed to appeal to the broadest possible consensus.

By contrast, Michael Totten is a master carpenter. His work is a long, slow process using only carefully selected quality materials, often acquired with difficulty. In terms of volume, he comes nowhere near the output of many of his colleagues, but what he does produce will stand the test of time because Totten does not seek to tell his readers (or himself) what they want to know – he informs them of what they need to know.

Read more