Author: gcaw

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Atlantic Monthly

Defective: Return to Sender

Originally appeared in TheAtlantic.com.

Charles Robert Jenkins, a U.S. Army deserter, has teamed with Jim Frederick to write a memoir of his forty years in North Korea.

Sgt. Jenkins‘s punishment is in his face — a withered, jug-eared mug that looks about two decades older than its sixty-odd years. In January 1965, Jenkins deserted his unit in the Korean DMZ and slinked into North Korean territory, where he intended to turn himself in and go home after a prisoner-swap. The scheme failed badly. Instead of going home, he ended up confined with a handful of other American deserters, beaten bloody by one, malnourished from the start, and forced every day to do nothing but read and memorize the works of Kim Il Sung. It is a measure of the unpleasantness of the ensuing four decades that one low point was the ripping of a U.S. Army tattoo off his arm without anesthetic, and a high point was watching a bootleg video of Michael Jackson’s (admittedly sublime) “Thriller,” with the volume turned to nearly inaudible levels, lest someone hear it, turn him in, and possibly have him shot.

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San Francisco Chronicle

Gordon S. Wood on his peers’ work

San Francisco Chronicle

The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History

By Gordon S. Wood

The Penguin Press; 323 pages; $25.95

The past century has been thrilling for those interested in history but perhaps even more thrilling for those interested in historians. The profession in this country developed its first big fissures in 1913, when Charles Beard encouraged the Progressive School to jettison Founding Father fairy tales in favor of more disabused views of early America.

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Atlantic Monthly

Pump Up the Unrest

Originally appeared on TheAtlantic.com.

The U.S. hatched plans to broadcast Azeri-language programming into Iran, starting later this year, as a way to fuel unrest among the country’s Azerbaijani minority.

News of this enfilade of Turkic vibes arrived just as Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) was holding a Washington hearing on the status of Iran’s Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis. All these minorities have some grievances against the ayatollahs, but only the Azerbaijanis have yet to resist Tehran in any meaningful way. Not coincidentally, they’re also the largest and most powerful minority in Iran: they make up a third of the country’s population, and they are the only ethnic minority that could bring down the Islamic Republic. Unfortunately for the U.S., the Azeris really like Iran’s current government. Azerbaijanis are more religious than average (Tabriz is a city of mosques), disproportionately approve of theocratic rule, and wield enough clout that other more secular groups — such as the Kurds — have complained that Iran is ruled by a “Turkish government.”

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Atlantic Monthly

Anthrax and English Breakfast

Originally appeared on TheAtlantic.com

In the current issue of Microbiologist, researchers report that tea could be an antidote to anthrax.

Anthrax, scourge of tabloid staffers, has infected exactly one person in the U.S. during the last five years — a New York musician who contracted it from the raw African animal skins he used to make drums. Those of us who procure our hides from reputable sources face no danger. But if anthrax does break out, commonly consumed plants (slightly modified) do seem to be one of our best defenses. A few years ago, researchers rejiggered the genomes of tobacco cells to produce anthrax antigens, a first step toward making a safer vaccine. And now it appears that Earl Grey, in addition to his supposed aphrodisiac effects, could fight off the bacillus, without any modification at all.

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Atlantic Monthly

A Mayflower Compact

An FBI inquiry implicated New York governor Eliot Spitzer as an alleged client of expensive call-girls.

DC’s Mayflower Hotel was grimly quiet last night, dulled by a silence befitting the undertakers‘ convention it happened to be hosting, or a wake for the political career of its most famous guest in the last month, Eliot Spitzer. In the bar, guests sank into velvet cushions and speculated loudly about what a $4300-prostitute looks like. But their conversation eventually wandered back to other matters, and before long the bar had no reminder of the Mayflower’s newest notoriety, other than a single news crew outside the window, and a CNN ticker about a “DC hotel” in the background on the TV, with sound and subtitles conspicuously off.

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Atlantic Monthly

Bout Time

Acting on a US warrant, Bangkok police arrested Viktor Bout, the world’s most notorious arms dealer.

The big lie about Viktor Bout is that he escaped capture because he was hard to find. In recent years he did hide — the New York Times reports that during his two months in Bangkok he switched hotels often to avoid detection, landing finally at the swish Sofitel Silom — but during his previous two decades of international mischief he conducted himself with surprising openness. He didn’t get caught, because either through negligence or complicity, figures at the governmental level let him go, and let his business flourish.

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Atlantic Monthly

Crying Wolves

A genealogist exposed Surviving with Wolves, Misha Defonseca’s celebrated memoir of the Holocaust, as a pack of lies.

In Zimbabwe, for a few months during the early stages of the collapse of civil society under Robert Mugabe, I flitted from bookshop to bookshop, happy as a hummingbird in a tropical greenhouse. Paperbacks cost as little as a penny apiece, and hardbacks rarely topped a single US dollar. The inventory consisted largely of remainders or possibly even of books reported by distributors as unsold and destroyed. And one book was everywhere: Fragments, the 1995 Holocaust fraud by Binjamin Wilkomirski.

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Atlantic Monthly

The Las Vegas Treat

The Las Vegas police found ricin, a chemical weapons agent, in a Las Vegas hotel room rented by Roger Von Bergendorff, a 57-year-old computer graphics artist and pet enthusiast.

Extracting ricin — so potent that a single drop could kill you and your whole family — isn’t difficult, which is why a man with obvious social handicaps and no relevant training apparently succeeded in producing enough to poison himself half to death. Governments have made breathless claims about Al Qaeda’s desire to weaponize the chemical, and the dubious success of this poor man’s homebrew will stoke the fears of the stokeable.

My reaction: It’s good that the guy has a hobby. I hope Al Qaeda’s hobby is the same. Ricin is, first of all, one of the more pitifully ineffective chem-bio agents — botulin, sarin, and anthrax are much worse. But even if Al Qaeda produced those, their scientists would be far more likely to poison and kill themselves than to poison and kill others.

The recipe for ricin has been publicly available since 1962 (amateur chefs, click here), and almost no one has died by malicious ricin poisoning. Even if they were capable of buying ricin off the shelf, they’d have to figure out a way to inject or spray victims with the stuff, and anyone who’d submit to an injection or puff of mist from a stranger on the street probably would be easy to kill by conventional means anyway. Let us hope that Al Qaeda is following the fearmongers’ cue and ordering chemistry sets through the post right now, rather than conventional weapons available for the same price.

Originally appeared at TheAtlantic.com