A Neurotic in an Exotic Land; The Adventures of Professor Lucas


Here you will find some related writings (generally not as funny as the book) and a little info about the author, as well as an excerpt from the book.
The photo above should have been the book's cover!--and it
should be turned around!

ALL CONTENTS OF THIS SITE
COPYRIGHT (C) BY MARK J. LOVAS
All rights reserved.

Although some of the items I've now posted differ in their mood and style from the book itself, I am posting them here anyway because they date from roughly the time period in which the book was written--and, I believe they share a certain ambience with it. (note added 14 March 2010)



Thursday, December 29, 2011

godless Communism

As a child I heard the local Catholic priest lead prayers for the end of "godless Communism". I heard that countless times, and I wonder if my memory is distorted. Did the Irishman who loved whiskey not say it with a certain zest?

And is it only the godless variety he wished to end?

So far as I know, many people lost a lot when "communism" ended.....but I am no expert.
A more sober and expert analysis will be found at the link below.

Caveat: The link leads to an article primarily about Russia/The Soviet Union. It is, therefore, not of direct relevance to the subject of this blog. However, much that one could say about Russia would also be true in Slovakia. The change from what they called "communism" to whatever it is now had many collateral victims--and still does.....

(Thanks to Brian Leiter for drawing attention to this link.)

preview: (with added emphasis)


....most American specialists no longer asked, even in light of the large-scale human tragedies that followed in the 1990s, if a reforming Soviet Union might have been the best hope for the post-Communist future of Russia or any of the other former republics. On the contrary, they concluded, as a leading university authority insisted, that everything Soviet had to be discarded by “the razing of the entire edifice of political and economic relations.” That kind of nihilism underlay the “shock therapy” so assiduously urged on Russia in the 1990s by the Clinton administration, which turned the country, as a columnist in the centrist Literary Gazette recently recalled, into “a zone of catastrophe.” None of the policy’s leading proponents, such as Larry Summers, Jeffrey Sachs and former President Clinton himself, have ever publicly regretted the near-destruction of essential consumer industries, from pharmaceuticals to poultry, or the mass poverty it caused.
--Stephen F. Cohen, writing in "The Nation", link below.

The likes of Larry Summers, Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Clinton! They wouldn't look at the destruction they've caused! Of course not. No more would the likes of JP Morgan give a damn. Morgan caused a depression before the "great" one, and when asked about it by a reporter---Don't you owe an explanation to the public?---Morgan responded that he owed the public nothing.