Books about Invaded from Amazon.com

“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?

Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.

.
Price: $16.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $10.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $8.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The struggle against deadly microbes is endless Diseases that have plagued human beings since ancient times still exist, new maladies like SARS make their way into the headlines, we are faced with vaccine shortages, and the threat of germ warfare has reemerged as a worldwide threat.
In this riveting account, medical historian Howard Markel takes an eye-opening look at the fragility of the American public health system. He tells the distinctive stories of six epidemics–tuberculosis, bubonic plague, trachoma, typhus, cholera, and AIDS–to show how how our chief defense against diseases from other countries has been to attempt to deny entry to carriers. He explains why this approach never worked, and makes clear that it is useless in today’s world of bustling international travel and porous borders. Illuminating our foolhardy attempts at isolation and showing that globalization renders us all potential inhabitants of the so-called Hot Zone, Markel makes a compelling case for a globally funded public health program that could stop the spread of epidemics and safeguard the health of everyone on the planet..
Price: $8.30 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Amid his efforts to expose the Russian mob, Robert I. Friedman learned from the FBI that "the most brilliant and savage Russian mob organization in the world" had put a $100,000 price on his head. Reading Red Mafiya, it's not hard to see why: this is a brave book about a troubling subject. Friedman, a freelance journalist, describes the research behind it: "I ventured into the Russians' gaudy strip clubs in Miami Beach; paid surprise visits to their well-kept suburban homes in Denver; interviewed hit men and godfathers in an array of federal lockups; and traveled halfway around the world trying to make sense of their tangled criminal webs, which have ensnared everyone from titans of finance and the heads of government to entire state security services." Their racket involves heroin smuggling, weapons trafficking, mass extortion, and casino operation, among other activities. "Blending financial sophistication with bone-crunching violence, the Russian mob has become the FBI's most formidable criminal adversary, creating an international criminal colossus that has surpassed the Colombian cartels, the Japanese Yakuzas, the Chinese triads, and the Italian Mafia in wealth and weaponry," writes Friedman. They've even penetrated professional hockey, as Friedman shows in an eye-opening chapter ("Federal authorities have come to fear that the NHL is now so compromised by Russian gangsters that the integrity of the game itself may be in jeopardy").

Red Mafiya benefits from a breezy narrative in detailing a master criminal operation whose influence on the United States is growing rapidly. Russian mobsters already have siphoned off millions of dollars in foreign aid meant to prop up their country's economy--and they may have a more direct impact on American national security concerns in the years ahead: "The Russian mob virtually controls their nuclear-tipped former superpower," writes Friedman. Now, there's a scary thought. Lifting the Iron Curtain seems to have been a mixed blessing: it let freedom in, and organized crime out. --John J. Miller.
Price: $15.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book covers the history of the Canal Zone, the Panama Canal and Panama and the relations between the United States and its protectorate Panama from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s. This is a particularly turbulent era for Panama and the Panama Canal spanning the coup against Arnulfo Arias, the period of dictators Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, the drug trade, the Panama Canal treaties, and the American invasion ordered by President George Bush, Sr., in December 1989. It involves major foreign policy triumphs and disasters of presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush, Sr. What sets apart this volume from the commercial books that appeared right after the invasion is not only its massive level of information (a thousand pages and thousands of references), but the use it makes of archival and journalistic sources about Panama and the invasion which became available in the five years following the invasion. These! sources (military debriefings, trial proceedings in Miami and Panama on the Noriega case and those of many dictatorship collaborators, details of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International debacle, the absurd levels of foreign debt, the involvement of the World Bank, autobiographies of major players like George Shultz's, journalistic works by Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh and Public Broadcasting Service) were simply not available to the authors of most books on Panama published before the mid-1990s. Author Luis E. Murillo, a well known writer in Panama and university professor and researcher in the United States, has made full use of recently uncovered and public information, presenting it in a well organized and coherent narrative which is at the same time erudite and easy to follow. This book draws on interviews with important witnesses, fact-finding trips, Freedom-of-Information-Act classified documents, academic treatises, World Bank debt tables, Inter-American Development Bank reports, over 150 books, congressional hearings, and 3,000 media reports. It pays attention not only to American, but to Panamanian, Colombian, and European press accounts as well. The book includes verbatim, as an appendix, the Miami indictment against General Manuel Noriega (a major historical document) and 46 chapters, 8 appendices, 72 photographs, and 3 maps. Among the periodicals cited are The Miami Herald, La Prensa, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Congressional Record, Quiubo, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, La Nacion, Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, El Pais, El Tiempo, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Harper's, Life, The Journal of Commerce, The American Lawyer, Business Week, Time, The Economist. The maps and photographs cover Panama, Panama Canal Zone, Panama City, Contadora Island, General Manuel Noriega, General Omar Torrijos, Arnulfo Arias, Ruben Miro, Hector Gallego, Marcos McGrath, Panama Canal Treaties signing ceremony with Jimmy Carter, Ruben Dario Paredes, General John Galvin, Aristides Royo, Ricardo de la Espriella, Ricardo Arias Calderon, Nicolas Ardito Barletta, Guillermo Endara, George Bush, Hugo Spadafora, Carmelo Spadafora, Roberto Eisenmann, Guillermo Sanchez Borbon, Miguel Antonio Bernal, Omaira Mayin Correa, Roberto Diaz Herrera, Jesse Helms, Deborah DeMoss, Eric Arturo Delvalle, Jose Isabel Blandon, Alfonse D'Amato, Manuel Solis Palma, Guillermo Ford, Dick Cheney, Jose Sebastian Laboa, Eduardo Herrera, Nivaldo Madrinan, Luis Papo Cordoba..
Price: $42.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Among the United States' proudest 20th-century scientific achievements was the identification and control of many dangerous infectious diseases. But as medical historian Howard Markel reveals in When Germs Travel, quarantines and other disease-control programs often hid racism, nationalism, and class warfare beneath a veneer of public health. This book focuses on six epidemics to demonstrate how social structures and science can clash--tuberculosis, bubonic plague, trachoma, typhus, cholera, and AIDS. What these diseases have in common is that they were perceived to have been brought to the United States by "outsiders," who found themselves unwelcome even in a nation of immigrants.

In the diaries and memoirs of immigrants arriving during the early twentieth century, one repeatedly encounters evidence of the intense fear of the physicians at Ellis Island, the medical inspection process, and the potential for deportation.

In proving that radical responses such as quarantines are ineffective and not based on good science, Markel applies a personal perspective gained through his family's experiences as Eastern European immigrants as well as his own interactions with 21st century immigrant patients. The six epidemiological histories here are gripping, and Markel's style is reminiscent of Sherwin Nuland or Gina Kolata. Humanity is locked in an eternal war with microbes, Markel writes, and despite all efforts, "contagion cannot be confined to national borders." --Therese Littleton.
Price: $4.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]