Posted on 09/24/2005 5:31:37 PM PDT by Valin
I read the first volume, and it was very good. Quite revealing. At least we know the Russkies didn't have anything to do with the JFK assassination!
Excerpts, click on links below
Indira's India and the KGB
by Christopher Andrew
A charm offensive against Mrs Gandhi, agents in the media and the government, attempts to buy influence in Congress — in the second volume of the astonishing Mitrokhin archive Christopher Andrew reveals how the KGB targeted India
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1782367,00.html
See reply 3
I just finished the first volume. Can't wait for part 2 !
wodge, wadge
noun {C} MAINLY UK INFORMAL
a thick piece or a large amount of something:
- She cut herself a great wodge of chocolate cake.
- He hurried towards the staffroom with a wodge of papers under his arm.
Ping.
We learn something new everyday
thanks for posting.
Ping
I have a feeling that Vol. 2 will cause the same kind of fuss as Vol.1 did.
It's already doing that in India.
very interesting, especially the link on Allande.
I read a book a few years ago on the Venona files, very interesting and shows how top aids to FDR were soviet spies, including, I believe, the vice president was under some influence.
Very scary time.
Thanks.
Seems like the American pop culture has been taken over by the socialist despite this historical fact.
Seems like the American pop culture has been taken over by the socialist despite this historical fact.
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Even the pop culture is bent by market forces and represents the United States in ways the leftists don't even realize.. FYI:
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000017.html
They also have a tough time with democracy, and the idea of people – you know, the masses – making their own decisions. And the thing that breaks the heart of every European elitist is the inescapable fact that McDonald’s and Cheers are huge in Europe, because their own people can’t get enough of it.
I have never been to France myself, but I would presume that daily life there does not consist of squads of heavily armed US Marines rounding up the terrified population, herding them into McDonald’s at gunpoint, and shaking their last euros out of them. When France passes laws saying that some minimal percentage of their television programming must be produced in France, then that is an admission – and it must be, if you will pardon the pun, a galling one – that huge numbers of their people prefer our culture over their own.
Fact is, dreadful or not, McDonald’s is not subsidized by the US Department of World Hegemony. They are a business concern. The day European customers stop eating at McDonald’s, the McDonald’s will go away.
But they do not. They are growing like mushrooms. American television programming has to be legally constrained. I suspect that Spider-Man out-drew more Europeans in a weekend than all of the films of Truffaut's did in the United States over forty years. This is telling them something, and what it is telling them is that our culture has a greater hold over the imaginations of their own people than theirs does.
To the Average French Citizen, I imagine Spider-Man, Cheers and McDonald’s represent more or less what they do to Americans: a fun couple of hours, a few laughs, and something quick to scarf down when you’re in a hurry. Big deal.
But to the deep-thinking elites of Europe, these trends are catastrophic, and terrifying. For it shows them, yet again, that a mob of boorish, unsophisticated, common brutes – that’d be us – is able to produce art and music and culture that cleans the clock of any nation that lets it in the door.
Spider-Man and McDonalds, and the long lines of their own countrymen waiting eagerly for a taste of them, prove to them daily that the European cultural superiority that they so deeply believe in is…how do we say this delicately?…uh, wrong.
You don’t have to have the vast intellectual reserves of a French Minister of Culture to understand why our movies and music have such appeal abroad. They are, more often than not, each small ambassadors of freedom and optimism. From James Dean to Brad Pitt, Americans are cool; cool because they don’t spend their evening sitting around bumming cigarettes and discussing global warming. They have bad guys to fight and motorcycles to ride, vast stretches of open road to get lost in and a disdain for any authority whatsoever. Where the European hero is a deeply conflicted soul lost in an existentialist nightmare, the American counterpart is a member of a rag-tag group of Rebels flying out to destroy the Death Star. Or a no-nonsense cop who plays by his own rules. Or an ordinary person, who, as the result of chance (Spider-Man), determination (Batman) or accident of birth (Superman), uses amazing personal power to aid the weak and fight evil.
These are our myths. They lack the patina of history that elevates those of the Greeks and Norse and countless other mythologies. But they are not created in a vacuum. These stories come from our common heritage and our common beliefs. Our heroes are what we make them, and for this country, the most successful have been young men and women thrust into extraordinary circumstances, who fight evils and monsters and never, ever use their powers for personal gain.
Yes, these are fantasies. No, of course real Americans are not so altruistic. But these are the standards we create for ourselves, and these American heroes represent what we represent as a nation. Action over endless discussion and moral paralysis. Rebellion against authority. Defense of the weak and helpless. And most of all, the optimism of the happy ending.
We get a lot of criticism from our betters about how shallow and mindless the Hollywood ending is. Fair enough. It does turn its back on the untidiness of reality. But it is also an expression of how we would have things turn out in a perfect world, a world where freedom and justice triumph and reign. These are the things we believe in, and these are, not surprisingly, immensely attractive to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, those thoughts weren't mine, I copied that Verbatim from the link I gave.
Well, thanks for the link anyway... I usually just pass through without following the links, which I should (follow the links).
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