Reflections on Some Reading

While dealing with a major family illness of late (which has obviously slowed down my study and blogging), I've managed to fit some reading in.

One of those books is Masha Gessen's magnificent "The Future is History" (pub. Riverhead Books, New York, 2017, ISBN 978-1-59463-3), which I've mentioned in a recent post. The book sets out to provide an inside perspective on events over the last thirty or forty years in Russia, and does so quite well - for instance, attendance at the May Day military parades was largely neither coerced nor willing support, but rather just a simple opportunity for some human contact and a get-together. The comments along the lines of "we pretend to work so they pretend to pay us", and about the theory of "Homo Sovieticus", are also quite striking.

I'm going to have to re-read that book and think more about it (particularly the discussion around authoritarian vs. totalitarian vs. hybrid regime vs. illiberal democracy vs. post-communist mafia state [pp. 382 - 388], which struck me as a little excessively academic, but then, that's what academics do, and words do matter [I think the last definition is the most accurate, but also the clumsiest]) before I try to write a proper review, but some initial impressions are:

• the US-led West's ideological push for a rapid transition was, as I thought at the time, totally stuffed up, but the criminality occurred earlier than I thought, and I'm currently thinking that through; 
• a guide I've read somewhere is it takes around three generations for a major change to become established in a society - e.g., recovery from dictatorship. Russia and some of the other nations of the former USSR never really got to the starting point of that transition, and, in my opinion, the flawed capitalism-ideology driven influence of the US-led West, which ignored humanity and human needs, was a major cause of that failure, but the massive corruption that enabled, combined with the mob-style lawlessness, formed a fertile breeding ground for Putin's ascension - helped by Yeltsin's ineptness (although he is shown in the book to have some good moments: at that time, I had only seen one); 
• materially, life now in Russia is better; but
• Putin's weaponisation of homophobia has set the soul of Russia back by centuries.

That weaponisation of homophobia is also being undertaken in the West - notably in the USA, but I've also seen it in my nation, where it was an ugly influence in the last Commonwealth election (and I fear may also be a part of the current election), and where it created scars and divisions in the Equal Marriage debate that will take many decades to heal - when society starts that process.

Now, on the USA, I've also been reading (the conservative) Mary Ann  Glendon's "A World  Made  New" (Random House, 2002, ISBN 978-0679463108), about the formulation (also see here) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - and doing said reading on a "device", having finally weakened and added that to my lap top and non-smart mobile phone.

As a digression, the concerns I have about such things as "devices" are:

• environmental impact; 
• social impact - some is good, particularly for those who otherwise would have no contact, and for those is situations of repression (provided they use VPNs etc), but it has had a negative effect on other forms of social interaction and puts a barrier between us and some life experiences (which also applies, to some extent, to photography); 
• association with conflict minerals and human rights abuses such as child slavery; 
• the major flaw in the agreement to electronic book readers, which is that if the supplier decides you have broken their rules or the laws and removes your collection, if found to be wrong they do not restore your collection - you have to BUY everything again. THAT (based on two court cases that I know of) has been the ultimate reason I haven't bought or used such devices to date. (I'm trying to make sure I keep a record of what I have bought, so I can argue the case if it ever happens - note that in the two cases I mention, the users DID NOT DO ANYTHING WRONG, so this is not a case of "stick to the law/agreement" and you'll be OK".) 

Going back to Ms Glendon's fascinating book, I've been thinking about the USA (and many other matters) as a result of reading the book, and:

• after World War (part) One, the USA's refusal to engage with the League of Nations was probably the main reason (there were others - for example, see here and here) it ultimately was a failure - albeit one with many significant successes (see here, here [predecessor to today's ICJ], ILO [still in existence, and associated with wider acceptance of this], the Health Organisation [still existing as the WHO], the 1926 anti-slavery convention, and this) along the way - was the USA's boorish intransigence; 
• a few decades later, Franklin D and Eleanor Roosevelt set a pinnacle in the human rights arena - they truly were exceptional, both individually and as a team, and set the basis for what we do today in so many ways (although, true, they and their work did have flaws);
• less than a century after the USA sabotaged the League of Nations, it's appalling record on human rights (within its borders and without), combined with its political arrogance and yet more boorish intransigence, meant that the world went about setting up the International Criminal Court in such a way that the USA's refusal to engage with it did not sabotage the new human rights institution - and the fall from the USA's hopeful and inspiring beginnings and the peak of the Roosevelts mid-20th Century was complete, just as Russia's fall from the brief hope and promise after the fall of the Wall had also been made complete.

Subsequently, that fall was resisted under Obama, but has accelerated under POTUS45.

Now for another cup of coffee and to work out a way to reverse that slide :)

(I'm also reading Web Miller's autobiography [pub. deCoubertin Books, 2011, ISBN 978-0956431318; see here and here], and am looking forward to reading Bill Gammage's "The Biggest Estate on Earth" [reprint Allen & Unwin, 2013, ISBN 978-1743311325], which I am hoping I will be able to add in to the book I am writing on human rights as further illustration of how admirable the indigenous culture of Australia was, before the white invasion.)