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THE HEREDITARY COMMUNIST MONARCHY

Kim Jong-Il has allegedly decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and designate one of his sons as his official heir and successor. This move would confirm that that North Korea’s extremely harsh- and increasingly bizarre – Stalinist regime is also de facto absolute monarchy.

While all Communist nations adopted a nomenklatura system that established a permanently priviliged ” New Class” of party elite, North Korea is the only state that succeeded in establishing a family dynasty. Romania’s late Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu, an admirer of North Korea’s juche police state, was believed to have wanted to establish his son Nicu as a successor when his hardline regime was overthrown in 1989 and Ceaucescu was executed.

Let us hope that history repeats itself sometime soon.

DEMOCRACY’S RIPPLE EFFECT

Following on the heels of Iraq’s historic election.The House of Saud dips its toe into democratic waters.

A lot of the quotes in the article are heartwarming. We should remember however that this was in a) a major urban center b) the reporter spoke to a lot of people with advanced degrees and most likely to hold liberal views and speak English and c) the scope of the franchise and offices was severely restricted. Nevertheless, it’s a good start and it is worthy of praise from the United States and Western countries. The al-Saud have been toying with this idea for several years but the positive outcome in Iraq certainly added an impetus by removing some of the likely objections of non-extremist Saudi conservatives.

On a personal note any further blogging today will have to wait until very late this evening. I am totally swamped with meetings and projects at work and a bombastic tantrum is probably in the offing.

HEY ! DICK MORRIS READS ZENPUNDIT !

Just kidding but I did get the drop on him by two days minimum.

ON MY READING TABLE

I cruised through Border’s recently and netted a few good catches that I have read or am starting to read. First off is BOYD – the Robert Coram biography of fighter pilot turned master military strategist, John Boyd. Skeptical of the tendency of biographers to oversell the importance of their subject, I emailed Dr. Barnett and asked him in his capacity as a professional military expert to give me an assessment of Boyd’s contribution to American military thinking. Tom sent me a one word reply:

” Substantial”.

With that endorsement, I began reading and Coram, a talented writer, draws the reader in just a few pages. It reminded me a little bit of I how I felt when I read Caro’s Master of the Senate.

Secondly I also finished Michael Scheuer’s Through Our Enemies Eyes ( I had already read Imperial Hubris ). You read Scheuer for the trees, not the forest. He’s a detail man on radical Islamist terror groups and al Qaida in particular. You learn useful things but you don’t walk away wanting to put the guy in charge of the GWOT ( reforming CIA management, yes – grand strategy, no). The book is ready for an updated edition to encompass recent events but it remains valuable to anyone intersted in al Qaida and Islamism.

My third book is a two-for-one translation of Japanese classics – The Book of Five Rings by Myamoto Musashi and The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagyu Munenori. I am re-reading the first, having done so once before about twenty years ago and look forward to the second which I have never read. The translator, Thomas Cleary, is noteworthy for translating works in Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Pali. Whoa ! I don’t even know what Pali is ( I’d guess an Indonesian or Indian language) and Japanese, Chinese and Arabic are all notoriously difficult and subtle languages to master. Where I come from, Cleary is what we’d call ” learned”.

Lastly but far from least is The Coming of the Third Reich by Cambridge historian, Richard J. Evans. The only reason I’ve left this one for later is that I’m fairly deeply read in the Nazi period already and I’m trying to raise my knowledge level in other subfields these days. Evans is accomplished at his craft and has a sharp, analytica,l mind. In his In Defense of History, Evans managed to make historiography interesting and relevant to the non-specialist ( a task which takes some doing, trust me) as he deconstructed the deconstructionist and pomo attack on History as a discipline.

Ah, if only there were ” Reading Fellowships ” to sit home and dive into the books. That would be something.

RULES OF A MASTER STRATEGIST

1. Think of what is right and true.



2. Practice and cultivate the science.



3. Become acquainted with the arts.



4. Know the principles of the crafts.



5. Understand the harm and benefit in everything.



6. Learn to see everything accurately.



7. Become aware of what is not obvious.



8. Be careful even in small matters.



9. Do not do anything useless.



Miyamoto Musashi