THE CHAOS THEORY

“The Plague” by Albert Camus

This is a horrifying read about the seemingly minute-by-minute account of the Plague in the French Algerian city of Oren.

It is told through the main vantage point of a doctor as well as several other fictitious characters in the story, with every single one of them has different attitude and reaction towards the growingly worrying pandemic.

And it is growingly, alright. Where the book takes us into the slow but steady realization that something is wrong, very wrong, an apocalypse-level wrong. And by the time they realized that this is something gravely dangerous, it’s all almost too late.

It is a story of powerlessness and resilience, in navigating life in the midst of a turbulent wave. It is a projection of extremes between suffering and compassion, madness and hope. And most of all, it is a tale of surviving death.

It feels too similar like the Covid pandemic that we all just experienced 4 years ago; all that quarantine, the social distancing, the protests, the overloaded hospitals, the serums (vaccines), the overworked social workers, even the silent mass burials where no family member can attend.

And the book perfectly captured the overall atmosphere when it was published in 1947. Camus nailed it.

“Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World” by Patrick J. Buchanan

I found this book when I was searching about the alternative history of World War II.

Previously, the widely-accepted narrative was pretty simple: Hitler triggered World War II after Nazi Germany launched a surprise attack on Poland 1 September 1939, which prompted a response from the Allied power (which consist of Britain, United States, Russia, China, and France). And when the Allied power won the war 6 years later, the good guys prevailed.

The common narrative will also say the moves by the Allies was necessary, to bring down Prussian militarism in Word War I that threatened to dominate Europe and the world, and to stop a fanatic Nazi dictator in 1939 who “would otherwise have conquered Europe and the world, enslaved mankind, massacred minorities on a mammoth scale, and brought on a new Dark Age. And thank God Britain did declare war. Were it not for Britain, we would all be speaking German now.”

But the recent events in world geopolitics 2023-2024 made me questioning this narrative. Were the good guys really won the war? After all, post World War II was the period of time when the biggest winner of the war, United States, became the dominant imperial power in the world, where everything from the UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, were all created for the benefit of the US and allies, which they frequently abuse by “opening up markets” abroad while still imposing tariffs domestically. And guess who are the permanent members of the UN Security Council (with veto power), the supposedly “police of the world”? Exactly, Britain, United States, Russia, China, and France, all the Allied power.

The ongoing genocide by Israel is also an eye opener, where no sanction imposed on Israel, even though the ICJ has declared that their actions are war crimes and an intent of genocide, simply because the West is funding them and supplying them with the weapons. Is international law no longer applicable, even when Israel is starting to attack their neighboring sovereign countries? Of course it is still valid, but only when Iran and Lebanon retaliate, or If Russia (who has since the 1950s became the enemy of the West) is the one who is doing the war crimes.

So, why this book? The author, Patrick “Pat” Joseph Buchanan, was an assistant and special consultant to US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. He was also a presidential candidate at one point in 1992. But perhaps he is more famous for being fired in 2012 from his job as a political commentator at the MSNBC network after he said minorities in the US will soon outnumber white Americans and that the country “is disintegrating, ethnically, culturally, morally, politically.” He is also labelled as a racist due to his open affiliation with white supremacist (allegedly, as claimed by Anti-Defamation League) and for blaming non-white immigrants (Hispanic in particular) for destroying white European heritage. Nasty human being, by the look of it. Some even said that if we want to understand Donald Trump politics today, we just need to see what Pat Buchanan did in the 1990s.

However, while his tone and intention look racist (at least through secondary sources), unlike Trump he did wrap this racist opinion based on solid data. And the data shows that in this rate of growth white Americans will indeed be a minority in the 2040s with Hispanic community taking over, that America’s white European heritage could be affected (with Latin culture could become the dominant force instead, which is nothing wrong, but I guess for a white racist American it would be a disaster).

Moreover, in 1999 he predicted that NATO expansion could cause Russia-Ukraine-US war, which is exactly what’s going on right now. And he also correctly predicted an immigration problem from Muslim refugees especially in Europe, although, again, he delivered the prediction in a borderline Islamophobic tone (at least from the way it was written on a report about him) and ignored the cause of the immigration: US atrocities in the Middle East.

So, why do I bother reading this kind of American-centric xenophobia? Because if we remove the bigotry, we’ll likely to find the harsh truths.

Pat Buchanan has also predicted that the sovereignty of the United States will be undermined by Israeli control, which turns out to be true and being revealed massively this year. Buchanan also criticized then-Vice President Biden in 2010 when he visited Israel, where Buchanan commented that Biden “was played for a fool” when Israel decided to build new settlement homes anyway in disputed area, something that didn’t change 14 years later when Biden keep supplying Netanyahu with billions of dollars of aid and weapons supplies in their genocide in Gaza (a place where Buchanan was vocal about lifting the siege there) despite Israel keep on doing what Biden administration warn them not to do.

Another Buchanan’s prediction can be traced back to 2005 when he said that Israel’s control over US foreign policy will drag the latter to the next war: the unnecessary war with Iran. Which is all too real today, where a lot of things that he predicted also came true today, down to the minor details such as his 1990 comment that the Congress is an “Israeli-occupied territory”; which got a backlash back then, but just look at the openly AIPAC-bribed Congress right now (not to mention Biden cabinet’s full of dual Israeli citizenship). In 2009 he also commented that the hundreds of Palestinians killed in the Gaza “concentration camp” will create a bunch of new Hamas fighters who want revenge on Israel; something that many in the West refuse to acknowledge and instead sticking to their tired old “Islamist jihadist” doctrine.

So, it got me thinking, is this guy really crazy, racist, and all that, or is he just being shunned by the status quo? And what else is Buchanan telling the blatant truth about but perhaps delivering it in a wrong way (or made it look wrong in the secondary sources)? Enter this book, where he shed a light into what really happened in World War I and World War II.

Buchanan made it very clear from the start that the focus of the book is not questioning whether Hitler and Nazi Germany is evil and whether the British were heroic (both are already established as such), but instead it is questioning whether the British’s statesmen were wise PRIOR to the wars and subsequently DURING the war after their failure to prevent a war have led to disastrous decision makings that made things gotten out of hand? As Buchanan explains, “[f]or their crimes, Hitler and his collaborators, today’s metaphors for absolute evil, received the ruthless justice they deserved. But we cannot ignore the costs of Churchill’s wars, or the question: Was it truly necessary that fifty million die to bring Hitler down? For World War II was the worst evil ever to befall Christians and Jews and may prove the mortal blow that brings down our common civilization. Was it “The Unnecessary War”?”

And this is his thesis, which cover World War I and World War II: “Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.” In other words, there would be no WORLD war.

World War II was also an unnecessary blunder by Winston Churchill that led to the rise of Soviet Iron Curtain (which would proceeded to kill much more people than the Nazis). Previously, Britain had a choice between 2 tyrants in Hitler’s Nazi (that control Central Europe) and Stalin’s Bolshevik (that control Eastern Europe), and they chose to be ally with Stalin and fight Hitler. Which was a strange decision, because as Buchanan remarks, “neither the Kaiser nor Hitler sought to destroy Britain or her empire. Both admired what Britain had built. Both sought an alliance with England. The Kaiser was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria. Thus the crucial question: Were these two devastating wars Britain declared on Germany wars of necessity, or wars of choice?”

Britain did so by creating an alliance with Poland. As Buchanan elaborates, “[h]ad Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.” Which prompted Buchanan to question in other chapter, “[i]f Hitler’s ambitions were in the east, and he was prepared to respect Britain’s vital interests by leaving the Low Countries and France alone, was it wise to declare war on Germany—over a Poland that Britain could not save?”

Yes, a lot of what ifs. However, Buchanan is constructing his arguments using primary and secondary sources, which makes the narrative of the book iron clad with facts. Narrative that gives us the big picture of the geopolitical map before World War I, the behind the scene politicking in the interwar period, and the diplomatic and military strategies used during both World Wars. Which is all very gripping to read. Of course, I had to be careful in reading it, in differentiating between historical facts and his opinions. And I concur that it wasn’t always clear. But when it’s clear, it reveals a lot of new things.

Such as Churchill’s many sins: “Churchill was unafraid to break the rules of war. As he had been prepared to blockade Antwerp before the Germans invaded, so he brushed aside international law, mined the North Sea, and imposed upon Germany a starvation blockade that violated all previous norms of civilized warfare. In the war’s first week, Churchill had wanted to occupy Ameland, one of the Dutch Frisian Islands, though Holland was neutral. To Churchill, writes Martin Gilbert, “Dutch neutrality need be no obstacle.” Churchill urged a blockade of the Dardanelles while Turkey was still neutral.”

Moreover, Buchanan continues, “[i]n December 1914, he recommended that the Royal Navy seize the Danish island of Bornholm, though Denmark, too, was neutral. Yet it had been Berlin’s violation of Belgium’s neutrality that Churchill invoked as a moral outrage to convince Lloyd George to support war on Germany and that had brought the British people around to support war. When the Germans accommodated Britain’s war party by regarding the 1839 treaty as a “scrap of paper,” the relief of Grey and Churchill must have been immense. The declaration of war was their triumph. And when British divisions crossed the Channel, the troops were sent, as the secret war plans dictated, not to brave little Belgium but straight to France.”

The book also reveals the injustice imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, which put the war reparation cost of World War I on the Germans: “Men who believe in the rule of law believe in the sanctity of contract. But a contract in which one party is not allowed to be heard and is forced to sign at the point of a gun is invalid. Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles only when threatened that, should she refuse, the country would be invaded and her people further starved. Though Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand had been invited to Vienna to negotiate the peace of Europe, no German had been invited to Paris. Francesco Nitti, the prime minister of Italy when Versailles was signed, in his book The Wreck of Europe, expressed his disgust at the injustice.”

As a result, the implementation of the Treaty wrecked havoc Germany’s economy, caused the lost of purchasing power due to hyperinflation, and the overall drop on quality of living, which paved way to the rise of a populist figure who wanted to get the demoralized Germany back to its glory days (and even took revenge to the perpetrators). As Buchanan remarks, “[a]t a London dinner party soon after Adolf Hitler had taken power in Berlin, one of the guests asked aloud, “By the way, where was Hitler born?” “At Versailles” was the instant reply of Lady Astor.” In fact, Hitler first caught the public attention by delivering again and again a speech that he titled “the Treaty of Versailles.”

Just look at Hitler’s speech that mentions Jews for the first time. As Buchanan describes, “[t]hree months after Kristallnacht, on the sixth anniversary of his assumption of power, January 29, 1939, Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag, publicly threatened the Jews of Europe. America, Britain, and France, he charged, “were continually being stirred up to hatred of Germany and the German people by Jewish and non-Jewish agitators.” Hitler then issued his threat: In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it.… I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

But the Nazis didn’t prosecute Jews in 1939, also not in 1940. Instead, “[t]hey began after Hitler invaded Russia, June 22, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen trailed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union exterminating Bolsheviks, commissars, and Jews. Writes Ian Kershaw, “[T]he German invasion of the Soviet Union triggered the rapid descent into full-scale genocide against the Jews.””

Hence, one of the big questions in the book, “[h]ad there been no war, would there have been a Holocaust at all? In The World Crisis, Churchill, the Dardanelles disaster in mind, wrote: “[T]he terrible Ifs accumulate.” If Britain had not issued the war guarantee [with Poland] and then declared war on Germany, Hitler might never have invaded France. Had he not, Mussolini would never have invaded France or Greece, or declared war on England. With no war in the west, all the Jews of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece might have survived a German-Polish or Nazi-Soviet war, as the Jews of Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland survived.”

But why invade France, you might ask? Because Poland is at Germany’s eastern border, which is now backed by Britain, and Germany will be attacked by Britain from the west. Hence, the need for Germany to create a buffer at France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to prevent Britain to get close to Germany (and not, as the common misconception suggest, due to Hitler’s imperial ambitions).

And why invade Soviet? As Buchanan remarks, “[o]n January 8, 1941, Hitler clarified and expanded upon his reasoning for attacking Russia: Britain is sustained in this struggle by hopes placed in U.S.A. and Russia.… Britain’s aim for some time to come will be to set Russia’s strength in motion against us. If the U.S.A. and Russia should enter the war against Germany the situation would become very complicated. Hence any possibility for such a threat to develop must be eliminated at the very outset.” Buchanan then continues, “[i]n early June, Hitler spoke to General Fritz Halder, who wrote in a diary entry of June 14: Hitler “calculates ‘that the collapse of Russia will induce England to give up the struggle. The main enemy is still Britain.’””

Indeed, the key to trigger a WORLD war, it seems, is the alliances and their war pacts. Which is why the Britain-Poland pact was crucial in triggering World War II. As Buchanan elaborates, “[b]ut because Britain issued the guarantee to Poland and declared war on Germany, by June 1941 Hitler held hostage most of the Jews of Western Europe and the Balkans. By 1942, after invading Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic states, and Russia, he held hostage virtually the entire Jewish population of Europe.”

Is that what the Jews were for Hitler, hostages for leverage against the Bolsheviks?? But what’s the significance of the Jews for the Bolsheviks, that made Hitler think it’s important to hold them hostage? This line from chapter 14 shed a little light into this: “Though a philo-Semite and supporter of Zionism, Churchill’s views on the roots of Bolshevism seem not markedly different from those of Hitler. In the Illustrated Sunday Herald of February 8, 1920, after the failed Allied intervention in Russia, Churchill wrote that in the “creation of Bolshevism” the role of “atheistical Jews … probably outweighs all others.”

And here’s the dark truth, even with so many Jews were captured “neither the Allies nor the Soviets were focused on the potential fate of the hostages Hitler held. At Casablanca in 1943, Churchill and FDR declared their war aim was “unconditional surrender.” At Quebec in 1944, Churchill and FDR approved the Morgenthau Plan calling for the destruction of all German industry. Goebbels used the Morgenthau Plan to convince Germans that surrender meant no survival. Annihilation of their hostages was the price the Nazis exacted for their own annihilation.”

Did you capture that? The reason why the Nazis killed all of the Jewish [hostages] is because they’re not a useful leverage after all, because the allied powers didn’t really care about them. And then the Nazis proceeded to annihilate 6 million hostages in a tit-for-tat of the allies killing the Germans, all of which accounted as part of the death of 50 million civilians + 25 million military personnels in World War II. Of course the Nazis and Hitler are still evil for killing all of the Jews, but Britain, France, US, and Soviet are equally at fault for not giving maximum diplomatic and military efforts to save them.

There are so many more similar revelations in this book that I cannot possibly name them one by one, including one whole chapter about Hitler’s ambitions (including evidences that he never intended to invade western Europe), one whole chapter about Churchill’s track records, and the post-war events where the US took control over the world’s power. It is one of the clearest books that explains the background chaos behind World War I and II, with impressive details. It is as if Buchanan has read every single book about the World Wars, from the big picture by great scholars, to individual biographies, to even any letters and notes that he can find. It is one of those instances where I don’t have to like the author in order to appreciate his book.

It is a massive book about massive topics that is not necessarily providing us with anything new, but rather pointing us to the area of history that are publicly available but often ignored: It shows the diplomatic side of Hitler, the politician rather than only the warmongering dictator. It also shows that Churchill and the allied powers are also conducting many evil things when the war broke out, even provoking Hitler to conduct his own evil actions (which was then highlighted as arguably the most evil action anyone has ever done – more evil than Mobutu killing 20 million people in Congo, Mao killing 40-80 million of his people, the genocide of 56 million Native Americans, or indeed Stalin killing 20 million people – In other words, they showed the reaction but not the cause).

And it raised the ultimate question: were the two World Wars preventable? Yes, yes they were. Even the Holocaust was also preventable, because after Poland surrendered on 6 October 1939 Hitler made a peace offer to Britain and France, but it was turned down. Hitler also offered peace in July 1940 after he conquered France for buffer and before he attacked Britain, but again the offer was rejected by Churchill. And if you recall, these events were before any action taken against the Jews in 1941.

All of which make Churchill’s famous quotation a bit more sense: “history is written by the victors.” Because how come Hitler who killed 6 Jews is [rightly] labelled as evil, but Churchill who starved 4 million people in Bengal Famine, among his other atrocities in Europe, is labelled as a hero? In fact, not only Churchill is being celebrated as a war hero and the greatest Briton of all time, as the 20th century ended he was also rewarded the honor of “the man of the century.”

Meanwhile, as Buchanan remarks, “[a]sked how he could ally with Stalin, whose crimes he knew so well, Churchill answered “that he had only one single purpose—the destruction of Hitler—and his life was much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell, he would at least have made a favourable reference to the Devil. Yet in his Ahab-like pursuit of Hitler “at all cost,” did Churchill ever reckon the cost of a war to the death—for Britain, the empire, and Europe? For as the war went on for five years after Dunkirk, those costs—financial, strategic, moral—mounted astronomically.” And Britain’s mighty empire crumbled because of that. This, is the main argument of this book.

So perhaps that common saying is not true after all, that Germany is NOT always on the wrong side of history. They only lost the wars and thus being put as the scapegoat for ALL the damages, in the history written by the winners (mainly Britain and the US). Conversely, if we take a look at the history of warfares and coups and conflicts, we would easily see that Britain and the US are behind almost every single atrocities in modern history, either directly or indirectly. Including, arguably, opting out of peace negotiations and instead provoking Hitler into war.

With this in mind, it is like that Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch where a Nazi soldier just realised that what they’re doing is a war crime, and proceeded to ask his friend “Hans, are we the baddies?” Only this time it’s the other way around. This book is making us realized that there are no good guys, and that the allied powers are also as (if not more) guilty as the Nazis.

“A Grief Observed” by C. S. Lewis

How can a benevolent God cause you so much suffering and death? This was the question asked by a devout Christian C. S. Lewis when his beloved wife passed away, leaving him with so much grief.

Lewis married his wife Helen Joy Davidman (referred in the book as simply “H”) when he was already 60 and have long become a celebrated writer as well as the famous don of Oxford. Helen was an extraordinary woman, with intelligence and accomplishments that can match his level, which instantly sparked a connection between them since they first met. In fact, the story of how they met was incredible. Their marriage lasted only a decade long, however, after she sadly passed away due to bone cancer. And it ruined Lewis and prompted him to question why did God took her away after only a very brief period of happiness following a lifetime of being a bachellor?

But instead of abandoning his faith, he decided to write a book about this doubt and torment. This book. And the journey was profound.

We can see early on in the book that he is hurting, confused and feel the sense of lost: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid”, Lewis then continues, “I dread the moments when the house is empty.”

He also hate the way he was grieving, when he said “on the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it – that disgust me.”

He then went to a depression stage: “And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself.”

And starting to question about God’s absence during his darkest period: “But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”

And he was angry: “I’m not in danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.”

He then became bitter: “To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking. ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now.’”

And traumatized: “At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy—our favourite pub, our favourite wood. But I decided to do it at once—like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash.”

But he then realized that “Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else.” And the fact that “The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

But he still missing her some more, when he said “It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone. How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly, we talked together that last night!” And when he said “I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the love-making, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.”

At some point in the book, he even began to question about his wife’s happiness in the afterlife: “‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why?”

But then, he started to see the light at the end of the tunnel: “Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously’. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid—for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.”

And he applied it to his own situation: “Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’”

And began to slowly heal: “You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it.”

And able to philosophize his experience: “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.”

And able to revisit his grief: “And then one or other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off—something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.”

He also started to see God from a different light: “Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly concerned about my memory of H. and how false it might become. For some reason—the merciful good sense of God is the only one I can think of—I have stopped bothering about that. And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere. Meet is far too strong a word. I don’t mean anything remotely like an apparition or a voice. I don’t mean even any strikingly emotional experience at any particular moment. Rather, a sort of unobtrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account.”

Despite still having some doubts for the future: “For this fate would seem to me the worst of all; to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode—like a holiday—that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged.”

And still can’t help for feeling the grief: “Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.”

Only this time is different. As Lewis remarks, “the greater the love, the greater the grief.”

In this, he has accepted the lost of his wife as a price to pay for loving her, a price very much worth paying. Because it is better to have loved and lost (however brief it was) than never experience them at all.

With this regards, Lewis realized that the key is not to avoid the inevitable suffering, but to embrace it as a part of the love you get to experience beforehand. A greater and better life that you can have if you have the courage to love (and bare the loss later on). And this, Lewis eventually realized, is what God intended for him all along.

“In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka

This is a story about a particular execution device in a penal colony located in an unnamed island. It is a brilliantly-written conversation between a visiting Traveler and the Officer of the colony, which describes the mechanism of the torture device in details.

The device was created by an Old Commander, whom the Officer is a devout follower. But after the Old Commander’s death the device had fallen out of favour by the new Commander due to its cruelty. Hence, the presence of the Traveler whose role was never explained but I suspect to be some kind of an overseas auditor or consultant, due to his nature that examines the device from a detached position.

It is a pretty simple short narrative, but like any other Kafka’s masterpieces the story has larger meanings behind it. It is analogous with the concept of a governmental “machine” that abuses its power and executes innocent citizens with impunity. It is also a conversation about morality, which is projected by the shock and disbelieve of the Traveler and his dilemma between paying respect to how things have always been done, no matter how wrong it is, or speaking up against it.

The Officer’s blind allegiance to the Old Commander is also telling, where the Officer can only sees the inherited device that his former boss created and the task-in-hand to operate it, without looking at the humanity of the victims. And at the end of the story it even revealed that he believes in a prophecy that the Old Commander could bizarrely rise from the dead, which is why the Officer is fighting for the device to be preserved for the Old Commander’s second coming.

All in all, the story explores the themes of injustice and the justification for brutal punishment, a familiar Kafkaesque environment. But the difference with this story is in this one the crime of the Condemned Man is clearly described, although a very minor one (a soldier must stand up for 12 hours in guarding a door and saluting the Commander but he fell asleep), which is not at all worthy of a torturous death.

It is yet another Kafka classic, which this time sees injustice from the vantage point of the executioner, who is conducting the whole atrocities by focusing only on glorifying the device and nothing else.

“Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami

How do you enthusiastically describe one of the weirdest stories ever written, but without spoiling any details?

You know a book is special when the mood of the book spilled over to your real life unconsciously. That’s how it felt for me during the 4 days I’m reading this book. It was as if I live in a dream state filled with omens, where nothing is concrete and time is none existent, where life is actually a metaphor.

This strange feeling is derived from the incredible story about a boy that gave himself the nickname Kafka, who ran away from home at the age of 15 and travelled to a faraway town of Takamatsu in the Shikoku island. No friends, no family, just himself in an unfamiliar place. The boy had no clue why he chose Takamatsu of all places, a small town miles away from his home in Tokyo. But as the story progresses, we will see that it was exactly where he is supposed to be.

It is a story filled with wonder and contemplation, with cluelessness and doubts, with sophisticated conversations about the meaning of life, of love and lost, of dealing with pain, and the existentialist question of who we are and what our purpose in life is.

These themes are portrayed through the strongest of characters in the book, a dumb simpleton, a crazy artist, a meticulous androgyny, a grieving soul, and more; all wrapped in a highly intriguing narrative with riddles that makes it hard to predict what will come next.

Two narratives, in fact, where from the beginning the book tells two separate stories intermittently between the chapters with one story in odd chapters and the other in even chapters: one is about a young boy looking ahead and the other is about an old man looking behind, both of whom will never meet with each other, but with a significant crossover of their stories in few chapters before they brilliantly went to their separate paths again.

Moreover, this book is also a projection of Murakami’s vast knowledge on literature. You see, for a 15 year-old Kafka is a stand up guy that can take care of himself, he’s pretty disciplined about his health and his fitness, but the number one thing that is most appealing about him is his love for reading books. In fact, the first thing he seeks when arriving at Takamatsu was the fabled private library, the Komura Memorial Library. And through his conversation with the highly knowledgeable librarian (that he eventually befriended) we get to learn about Murakami’s interpretation of the works of Natsume Soseki, the Tale of Genji, lessons from the Egyptian mythology, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and many more, including lessons from a trial of an ex Nazi officer, and of course the worldview of Franz Kafka that becomes the existentialist basis of this book.

Through all of this, the book shows the ability to dive deep into complicated topics without losing the easy-to-read narrative of the main story, where the breezy narrative is strong enough to withstand even several plot twists, which is a signature style of Murakami’s.

Hence, if this is a movie, this would probably be a Tim Burton movie, with all the out-of-the-world imaginations and symbolisms that don’t always make sense. It has everything, from a gripping beginning, to a sophisticated middle, and with bizarre twists at the last few chapters; all of which shows that “Kafka on the Shore” is one big modern-day Greek tragedy, as clearly explained by Oshima. It’s messy, it’s grotesque, it’s hella confusing at times with several things never explained, and with unexpected violence and taboo-breaking acts that will make your heart pound and your mind goes WTF?!

Brilliant, just brilliant!

“Transcending the Levels of Consciousness: The Stairway to Enlightenment” by David R. Hawkins, M.D., PhD

This book sits right at the border between spiritual mumbo jumbo and science. It is presented as a thesis of a serious research that dived deep into the science of consciousness, by a researcher who is a psychiatrist, a clinician, and then a self-proclaimed spiritual teacher even though he is openly an agnostic.

That’s right, it is one of those books where the author simultaneously talking about spirituality but berating religion that introduced the spirituality.

In this book Dr. Hawkins addresses the many different levels of consciousness, where he heavily uses a numbered scale that looks impressive at first, but then become questionable due to the fact that he never explained where he got the numbers from. This makes the numbers and figures highly subjective.

Here’s an example, using a scale of 1-1000 (with 1 as the lowest and 1000 as the highest level, while 200 marks the benchmark level for attaining consciousness): “The calibrated consciousness level of humans evolved slowly. At the time of the birth of the Buddha, the collective consciousness of all of mankind calibrated at 90. It then rose to 100 by the time of the birth of Jesus Christ and slowly evolved over the last two millennia to 190, where it stayed for many centuries, until the late 1980s. Then, at about the time of the Harmonic Convergence in the late 1980s, it suddenly jumped from 190 to 204-205, where it stayed until November 2003, when again, it suddenly jumped from 205 to its current level of 207. At the present time, approximately seventy-eight percent of all humanity calibrates below consciousness level 200, although that figure is only forty-nine percent in America. The significance is that the consciousness level of close to eighty percent of the world’s population is still below 200 and therefore dominated by primitive animal instincts, motivations, and behaviors (as reflected in the nightly news).”

So, first of all how can he quantify the COLLECTIVE consciousness of ALL mankind during the time of the Buddha? Then how can he measure the growth to 100 by the time of Jesus Christ as if it’s like a stock price movement that we can monitor on a screen, and to 204-205 in a very specific date November 2003 (that he never care to explain – spoiler alert: after further research, it was a Harmonic Concordance event in New York that he of course attended)? And what is the methodology behind his conclusion that the consciousness level of 80% of the world population is still below 200? He even presented a table with the level of consciousness of animals, again without explaining how he got the numbers from.

Which brings us to the next question, if Dr. Hawkins did not write this book using the scientific approach (with the sequence of: thesis, data gathering, findings or the interpretation of data, and then conclusion), and instead he jumps right to conclusion using the made up data that magically appears without explanation, why did he has to present his thesis as science? I suspect, to give credibility to his bland spiritual teachings.

Here’s more consciousness (or calibration) levels according to Dr. Hawkins, on a same scale of 1-1000: Bacteria 1, fish 20, reptiles 40, birds 105, wolves 190, deer 205 (is he telling us that the consciousness of 80% of world population is lower than a deer?), cats 240, family cat 245, cat’s purr 500 (no idea why), and a whole bunch of others. Meanwhile, Homo Sapiens 600,000 years ago was 80-85, the allegory of Adam and Eve calibrates at 70, Socrates’ statement calibrates at 700, megalomaniac leaders such as Hitler and Napoleon were in the 400s at first and then crashed, Yasser Arafat went from 440 to 65 because “peace would be the greatest threat possible” (sure, not biased at all), while he actually said skeptics have consciousness level below 200 (implying that we shouldn’t question his methods).

Moreover, according to Dr. Hawkins the consciousness level of Karl Marx is 130, Thomas Aquinas 460, Galileo 485, Aristotle 498, Newton 499, Marcus Aurelius 445, Shakespeare 465, Darwin 450, Einstein 449, Lao Tzu 610, Mahatma Gandhi in his 700s, Mother Teresa 710, the Buddha 1000 (of course), he even labelled the consciousness level of God, but at infinity level (I swear it’s like my kid assigning power levels to his imaginary play, with Gen-Z lingo of plus aura or minus aura). And Dr. Hawkins’s own teachings? From other sources outside this book, we can find that his books calibrate from 850-999.5 ranges! More than the level of Catholicism 510, the energy level of Christmas 535, Kabbalah 605, Ramayana 810, and far exceeded any other 20th century spiritual guru.

To be fair, there are some good psychological textbook contents in the book, especially when Dr. Hawkins refer to Freudian theories, while if we strip away the calibration levels of the various emotions from greed, fear, anger, all the way to love; his arguments actually make psychological sense. But when he does that, he uses unnecessarily big words to describe something simple. And then afterwards he often proceeded to write something factually absurd, such as his argument that a kamikaze pilot is suicidal in nature (yes the end goal is death, but it’s not performed by a depressed person but rather by a person with a sacrifice mission to destroy the enemy. More Patriotism, less “act of despair”).

He also criticizes “organized [Western] religion” quite often, but ironically using very weak examples to make his points, which shows the shallow depth of his understanding of religion (they all do, even Sam Harris, nay, especially Sam Harris). And not to mention his gross corruption of the sacred teachings of the [Eastern] Vedic spirituality, where he weirdly tried to blend his cliche interpretation of spirituality with his version of subjective science.

“Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld” by T. J. English

This is an incredibly violent history of jazz music and its tight relationship with the criminal underworld.

It is the story of a turbulent and harsh era in America, where according to the statistics by Tuskegee Institute between 1882 and 1912 there were 2329 instances of lynching of black people; horrors that created the tales of hardship that became the basis of the soul of jazz music.

As the author T. J. English wrote right at the beginning of the introduction, “[t]here is a reason that “Strange Fruit” still stands as the seminal jazz song. Written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and sung so memorably by Billie Holiday two years later, it beckons from the great beyond, elliptical and haunting. The song is both a ballad and a primal scream, an aching tone poem that carries with it the deep, heart-wrenching emotionalism of the blues, as well as the lucid, steely observationalism of someone who has been a witness to history. In form and content, it is a brutal diagnosis of the human condition in B-flat minor. That this song speaks for jazz at the core of its being is no accident.”

This partly explains why jazz music has this sad vibe to it, and a relatively somber tone.

English then continues, ““Strange Fruit” finds its power in the perverse metaphoric imagery of “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees . . .” Blood on the leaves, blood at the root. It is a song about lynching. And it is a song about America.”

It is in this kind of environment that the story of jazz began, in part 1 of the book, with Louis Armstrong as one of the main vantage points. It is when jazz musicians in New Orleans were given their first big breaks at venues owned by the mobsters, such as in whorehouses, clubs, honky-tonks, speakeasies, etc. That’s right, you cannot separate the history of jazz from the history of the mobsters, because their respective existance depend on each others.

As English elaborates, “[y]ou cannot understand America without knowing the history of jazz—or the mob. Taken together, they are part of the country’s origin story, symphonically intertwined, like an orchestral extravaganza by Ellington, with harmonic complexity, rich tonal shadings, dissonance, syncopation, and all the other elements that make a piece of music resonate in the imagination and remain timeless. Through the striving of numerous musicians, club owners, record label executives, and gangsters chronicled in this book, the contrapuntal groove between jazz and the underworld emerges as the heartbeat—and the backbeat—to the American Dream.”

Indeed, jazz is not a rigid music that is carefully created in conservatories or academies. But it is a freedom music with free-flowing improvs that mostly developed at night and became associated with vice – whorehouses, drinking, gambling, and artful carousing – which makes it the music of the people.

And this world fits both jazz musicians and mobsters, where during the age of segregation, mob-owned whorehouses and clubs became the safe space for all to mingle and interact, regardless of skin colour. As English remarks, “[t]he average Black musician had less to fear from an Italian mafioso inside a club than he did from the average white cracker out on the street. The early twentieth-century musician had less to fear from a gangster than he did from a policeman. For people in the jazz world, the bordello and the honky-tonk were a source of refuge from a society where, among other threats and indignities, lynching was an ongoing nightmare, and had been for generations.”

The book then elaborates on this in a massive scale; by telling the legends and stories of a cast of characters along the revolution of the music, through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War 2 era, all the way to the 1950s and 60s. First in Kansas City where jazz first branched out from New Orleans, then to Chicago and New York, before it spread everywhere to the likes of St. Louis, Pittsburg, Denver, all the way to the west coast in Southern California, and eventually Las Vegas, even to Cuba (which would gave birth to Latin Jazz).

The cast of characters are, on the musical side: Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Prima, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, to name a few; including Frank Sinatra as the primary vantage point in the story in part 2, and cameos from the likes of Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, Quincy Jones, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, and Charles Mingus.

On the criminal underworld side: Al Capone, Legs Diamond, Owney Madden, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, Johnny D’Angelo, Mickey Cohen, the Gallo brothers, Vinnie the Chin, Tommy Eboli, and many, many more. The book also covers the stories of notorious club owners and talent managers, such as Jules Podell, Morris Levy, and Joe Glaser, all of whom walked the blurry line between legitimate capitalism of the upperworld and the criminal underworld.

However, the interracial tollerance in the New Orleans days did not last long. Especially in the 1950s and 60s when racism became more blatant and mob violence increasingly got more brutal. And along with the evolution of the music, came new waves of problems: While in the old days if people wanted to hear a musician sings they needed to go to the club where the singer performs, in the 50s and 60s this arrangement gradually changed with the invention of vinyl records and jukebox. And thus the mobsters also got increasingly involved in the nasty battle to control the records, the distribution channels, and even the jukeboxes. And this book shows how this was brutally executed.

The book ended with a bit of a sour note, where by the late 1960s and 1970s the popularity of jazz music started to dwindle. And as its profitability declined, the mob also slowly left the industry in seach of other fish to fry. And by the 1980s, during the major prosecutions for mobsters, there was no longer a relationship with the jazz world. And so jazz – the real jazz as we originally know it – was never the same again.

All in all, this is one of the most impressive histories of a music genre ever written, narrated in a clear and concise manner despite the complicated multi-decades affairs that mimick the complexity of jazz chords and improvs. If only every music genre have this kind of biography. I really enjoyed reading it so much, while listening to the old jazz tunes from every single one of those eras.

“Notes From the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is a book that many considered as the first existentialist novel. The book is written in a first-person account by an unnamed narrator, a very minor clerk in the Civil Service who hated his mediocre job and only works in order to eat, who then decided to retire early after a distant relative passed away and leave him 6000 Ruble in the will.

And thus the narrator begins to live a life of inactivity and contemplation, writing in this rants or musings about his life and general observations, often in a bitter, cynical, and sometimes witty tones. It is a writing, as the fictitious narrator claims, only intended for himself and not to be shared with anyone else.

Perhaps the beauty of this book is that it’s not narrated by a saint with moral high ground, but an isolating (hence, “underground”) loser full of intoxicating spite, who has a humiliating social encounter with old schoolmates, and a weird pursue towards a prostitute half his age whom he both attracted to and repelled by. I.e. a broken angry man with a lot of complications.

It is through this unique vantage point that we can see an honest criticism about society, the dilemma between hating everyone he meets and the bitterness of being an outcast, a dilemma between yearning for a sense of connection to the world and at the same time wanting for total detachment and free-will from society.

Indeed, the book is a brilliant criticism of contemporary philosophies on rationalism and free-will, where Dostoevsky actually wrote it in response to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel “What Is to Be Done” that argued a utopian society can be constructed on natural laws of rational self-interest, that if such society is constructed humanity will no longer have the problem of evilness.

In this anti-thesis, Dostoevsky then argued that in asserting free-will people actually often act against self-interest, that people are willing to exercise free-will even if it goes against their best interest hence people will do things that aren’t aligned with those laws of nature (aka rebellion); which is demonstrated in part 2 of the book where the narrator gets into several conflicts. The narrator ultimately suggests that we can choose happiness (in the form of self-interest) or freedom (free-will) as our goal, but not both. This is why utopia never realised.

Funny how perspectives from 1864 can be so relatable even today in 2024, especially Part 1 of the book where Dostoevsky wrote down his core arguments, before illustrating it in the examples in part 2.

In a sheer coincidence I’m reading this book at the age of 41, just one year over the age of the narrator at 40, or 2 years younger than Dostoevsky when he wrote this book at 43. And I’m glad that I only begin to read it in my 40s because I’m at that age where I can really relate with his observations, just as I started to feel how unequal the world is and how there’s just so much bullshit going on; with my tolerance towards the cheaters, the liars, the backstabbers of the world is wearing thin; while still enjoying the connections with society as a whole.

“Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board” by Vince Houghton

This is a hilarious book about things that never happened. It is about those weird inventions that were almost created by America’s first intelligence agency (Office of Strategic Services (1942-1945)), its successor the CIA, as well as the bizarre operations ideas by the military, all during the fight against the Axis forces in World War 2 and the proceeding Cold War.

Yes, intelligence weapons. We’re talking about James Bond’s Q type of gadgets and military grade weaponries that have the invention of U-2 and SR-71 spy planes among the rare success stories (relative to the sheer amount of ideas), with “rare” as the key word here.

““Outcome history” is the traditional way of viewing historical events,” the author Vince Houghton remarks, “but it leaves much to be desired. It has severe limitations, primarily because its lessons are predicated on things that cannot be accurately quantified: fate, luck, misfortune, whatever you want to call it.”

Houghton then elaborates, “if the D-Day invasion of Normandy had failed because of a freak weather system, or a lucky shot from a German soldier that took out a key American leader on the beach (or any number of other misfortunate scenarios), would we think any less of Eisenhower’s plan? Using outcome-based history: yes. And therein lies the problem. Intent can be a very powerful tool for historians.”

Hence, the fresh approach of this book that uses not the outcome of history, not the alternate version of history, but the intent of what could have happened but never did. And the list of intent is long (like long, long). And reading it is like having a wild journey into the wacky and bizarre that will make us think “what the hell were they thinking?”

We’re talking about projects, missions, operations, and technology that they were seriously thinking about, but they’re either too risky, too expensive, too dangerous, way ahead of their time, or simply too dumb.

Inventions and operations such as: acoustic kitty, synthetic goat poop, cat suicide bomber, bat missiles, sun gun, giant inflatable balloon that looks like an omen in Shintoism, a chicken utilized as a thermoregulated weapon, an idea to create artificial tsunami, an operation involving digging a tunnel near the Soviet embassy, or covert air bases using not giant ships but floating icebergs.

It is also about the staggering 638 times the CIA tried (and failed) to assassinate Fidel Castro, plan to spike Hitler’s food with female hormones to make “his mustache fall out and his voice turn soprano”, a device they called Dyna-Soar (yeah I know, dinosaur), another one called the Ballistic Missile Boost Intercepts Project (or BaMBI), and many, many more, including the most bizarre idea of them all that becomes the title of the book, the plan to nuke the moon (with a contribution by Carl Sagan. Yes, THAT Carl Sagan).

And you know what the messed up part is? They’re all true stories!

Perhaps the most unsuspecting part of the book is where Houghton actually explains the science and technicality of the devices and operations, while also providing the full historical context for the intent of usage of the devices. Which makes this book not only highly amusing, but also very informative.

He is, after all, the historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, who earned a PhD in Diplomatic and Military History from the University of Maryland. And it shows in the quality of the book, a mix of expertise and madness that made me learn a lot and laugh a lot along the way. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book.

“Wahyu Yang Hilang Negeri Yang Guncang” by Ong Hok Ham

This is an excellent book on Indonesian history, broken down into 70 angles from 70 different articles that the author Ong Hok Ham wrote for Tempo magazine, in the span of 26 years from 1976 to 2002.

The articles consist of Ong’s signature blend of wide range of knowledge, skepticism, and wit, as well as his ability to make dull subjects into exciting stories that will make the reading experience truly enjoyable.

They tell the tales of sorcery for leaders, how some sultans are treated like a deity, the structures and customs of Javanese kingdoms, Jayabaya prophecies, the difference between agrarian kingdom and coastal kingdom, who are those “priayi” (or nobility class) really are, the complicated succession plans in different kingdoms (and the Dutch’s involvements), how the Dutch created the Chinese capitalist class in Hindia, on taxation, and a lot more in between, including the clearest ever explanation about the geopolitics of World War 1.

Moreover, although the 70 articles were stand-alone writings, the editor of the book has somehow brilliantly managed to organized them up into a connected flow under several major themes: 1. The concept and myth of power 2. Corruption and bureaucracy among those in power 3. Economy 4. Political changes and violence 5. Military and war 6. Indonesian nationalism 7. Other countries’ affairs 8. Social changes and other matters.

Overall, it is one of the most complete historical accounts of Indonesia, simply due to the format of article that allows Ong the freedom away from the usual structure of beginning-till-now narrative that most historical books are tied to. And instead, he was able to build a big picture view of Indonesia, from covering multiple topics and analyze them one by one.