BOOK REVIEW: Two books on Israel's 'nuclear vagueness'
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- Written by Marie Neptune
In its August 2005 number, Le Monde diplomatique briefly reviews two books by researchers who have studied Israel's nuclear program and policies, matters that ought to be of heightened interest at a time of international crisis over Iran's nuclear program. -- Joseph Algazy concludes his review by remarking: "In the end, what is striking in both Avner Cohen's book and Yoel Cohen's is the complicity and hypocrisy of the government of the United States as well as of the countries of the European Union with respect to Israel's nuclear activity." ...
COMMENTARY: Francis Wheen thinks we are all Marxists now (London <I>Observer</I>)
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- Written by Jay Ruskin
Francis Wheen is the author of Karl Marx: A Life (W.W. Norton, 2000) (which the publisher calls "the first major biography of Marx . . . a hugely entertaining biography"), so this comment, published Saturday in the London Observer, is really a sort of self-promotion. -- Wheen argues that we are all, in a sense, Marxists now -- not least an investment banker working on Wall Street who told a New Yorker business correspondent in 1997: "The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right. I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism." -- The reason Marx's text still attract readers is their acute analyses of "globalization, inequality, political corruption, monopolization, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence," Francis Wheen writes. -- Arthur Koestler, editor of the collection The God That Failed (first published in 1950 and still in print), once remarked that while Marxism as a philosophy may ultimately be false (like, say, Newtonian mechanics), as a first-order approximation of a description of the social order it had no rival....
BOOK REVIEW: McDermott's <I>Perfect Soldiers</I> & Hatzfeld's <I>Machete Season</I>
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- Written by Mark Jensen
Rose Jacobs of London's Financial Times reviews two new books about mass murderers and asks: "Are ordinary men permanently transformed by the evil they do? The Rwandan killers defend themselves by saying theirs were acts of war -- a defense also employed by Nazi war criminals. But this is not to say that they fail to understand the horror of their deeds. The hijackers were similarly self-justifying -- all non-Muslims were infidels, according to their interpretation of the Koran, justifying brutal acts. . . . [T]he grasping at justification by 'evil-doers' is almost encouraging in itself -- it is, after all, something we can all understand . . ." ...