Murderers In Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing by Jeffrey Tayler - book review - five stars

 

BOOK REVIEW-FIVE STARS

Murderers In Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing by Jeffrey Tayler

Murderers In Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing is another great true story from Jeffrey Tayler with cutting edge comparative analysis that cuts to the bone with shocking truthfulness. This eyeopener is very well done and a recommended read.

EXCERPTS;

A Russian Orthodox priest might replace “Islam” and “sharia” with “Christianity” and “the Ten Commandments” and deliver much the same (anti-Western) discourse in church up north. Resentment of the West now amounts to an ecumenical faith across Russia.

We hate Bush here. We’re all against Bush and the war in Iraq. You don’t know what you’ve got yourselves into.”

“You can see on Bush’s face that he’s a bad person, bad. He’s not worthy of sitting here with us to drink a beer.”

“September eleventh was a visitation from the Almighty. God gave us the attacks of that day as a lesson to remind us that he exists, that we’re all his children, all children of one god. It’s not just we in Dagestan who live on a powder keg, it’s all humanity now. For the first time, Americans can feel that for themselves.”

“I hear Condoleezza talking about democracy and that retard Bush telling us how to live, and I say, ‘America, shove your democracy up your ass and stop lecturing us!’ You meddle in other countries and fuck them up and then scold us about human rights. Shove it! I once thought Americans were a great people. But what kind of great people elects a fucking retard twice as president? You c’n tell by the look on his face that he’s a moron, a brainless cretin, but you elect him anyway!”

In Russia, where strength and cleverness are revered above all else, they mattered. Disdain for an America perceived as weak and stupid would embolden Putin in his confrontation with the West.

“Russia is getting stronger, Russia is rising, and you’re just going to have to get used to it.” She sneered. “We’ve got thousands of clever people in this country, brilliant people, scientists and schemers, and make no mistake about it: they’re out-and-out bastards. We live like shit, sure, but we don’t give a damn. Like it or not, we’re getting stronger, and we’re no fucking pansies. The Yeltsin days are over. We’re not taking any more orders from Bush or anyone else.” This kind of talk wasn’t entirely untrue. Russia’s Hobbesian human jungles hone ruthless talents of survival, and its poverty anneals the masses to discomfort; whereas Westerners, or so Russians think, are spoiled, fragile, and spineless. A predatory government forces Russians to develop tactics of evasion and subterfuge, while Westerners indulge their fancies in law-bound societies that permit frivolous pursuits and childish dissent.

Once in power Mao launched Soviet-style “reforms” that led to Soviet-style death and misery but on a Chinese scale—the collectivization of agriculture, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution... Millions died in purges and famines before his death in 1976. Outdoing Stalin, he became the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century. Yet his admirers—and even judging solely by this crowd, there are legions—laud him for ousting foreign occupiers, unifying China, and, for the first time in centuries, putting their country on a par with other world powers. That crowds throng to his embalmed body even now tells us that the future of this country probably does not belong to liberal reformers, that not all people march when freedom calls, that atrocities can be suffered and forgotten, and that justice is a malleable concept.

Ten or fifteen years ago no one expected such authoritarian capitalism would arise, but it is now strengthening by the day, carried forth on the shoulders of a compliant citizenry. Russia and China are working toward a rapprochement. Whether they succeed remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: the new Great Game that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union has ended, and victory has gone to the home teams.

Other books by Jeffrey Tayler reviewed on my blog:

Glory in a Camel's Eye

River of No Reprieve

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Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert by Jeffrey Tayler BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert by Jeffrey Tayler

Trekking through Morocco's southern desert.

The author, Jeffrey Taylor, is an extremely talented writer who exquisitely paints pictures with words. His talents have made all of his memorable books classics. I am thoroughly impressed and await his next book.

When it comes to out of the ordinary outlandish adventures Jeffrey Tayler has set a standard uniquely his own.

I am thoroughly impressed after enjoying three of his high adventure escapades.

Excerpts;

During the Middle Ages Arabic became a language of science and literature and, by way of Medieval Latin, contributed to English a wealth of now common words, among them “alcohol,” “algebra,” “syrup,” and “coffee.” From the eastern realms of their empire, the Arabs brought back Hindi (“Indian,” later called “Arabic”) numerals and passed them on to Europe;

The Indian concept of zero permitted the birth of modern mathematics and science. The Arabs kept alive the ancient Greek notion that the earth was round and, through a work in Latin, delivered it to Columbus, thus aiding his discovery of the Americas.

“Come, let us show you how to pray!” Another: “Embrace Islam! If you speak Arabic you must embrace Islam!” They meant to express goodwill toward me by urging me to convert. I smiled and tried to think of a way to answer without causing offense. Noureddine came over and stood next to me. “I’m going to teach him all about Islam.” Ali said, “God will send him faith when He chooses.” “God willing!” all said. That put an end to the conversation, and we moved on. It was a tactful way to evade the question, and I would remember it.

Faith was a personal matter, and that we accepted it as such made it possible for us to become good friends.

I wanted to relax as they had, but now, with this talk of floods, I found I couldn’t. “Wait a second,” I said. “We’re camped right in the middle of this wadi and you’re telling me we could be swept away by a wall of water in the middle of the night?”

I asked Hassan what the Qur’an suggest Ruhhal use to wash themselves after sex when they were in the desert, away from water. (Bathing after intercourse is obligatory in Islam.) Did they apply the same thorn-spiked sand they used before praying?

THE SUN that had warmed us back to life at dawn in February now exhausted us by nine A.M. with its fiery April resplendence.

Life is too short to hold grudges; and we must do good to others. Bad deeds always come back to us.

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River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler - Book Review

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler

This is extraordinary trip not just trough Siberia but through more than three hundred years of brutal, inhuman, and barbarous history from the Czars to Putin. Brilliantly written and superbly edited. Fast moving without a dull moment. Worthy of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS;

In the sixteenth century Russia was poised to shed its identity as Rus’, a European state of Eastern Slavs, and become Russia, a country that would be ruled by a majority Russian population but comprise more than one hundred ethnic groups on two continents, practicing not only Orthodox Christianity but also Judaism, Islam, Shamanism, and Buddhism. Muscovy and other north Russian principalities, most notably that of Novgorod, had already penetrated the European Arctic, taking advantage of the isolation that distance and cold afforded them from Tatar-Mongolian overlords, whose presence was strongest in the warmer and more fertile regions of the south, in what today is Ukraine.

Cossacks ventured down the Lena and its tributaries out into the Arctic and Pacific oceans, sailed through the channel dividing Asia from North America, and thereby delineated Russia’s easternmost boundaries. Cape Dezhnyov, Russia’s easternmost tip (just fifty-three miles from Alaska), bears the surname of the Cossack chieftain Semyon who in 1648 first navigated the strait, preceding by eight decades the Danish explorer Vitus Bering after which it would be (unjustly) named. It is even possible that some of Dezhnyov’s men found themselves shipwrecked on Alaska’s shores.

initiating the annexation of Siberia, Ivan the Terrible and the Cossacks facilitated Russia’s transformation from a middle-size European state into the largest country on earth, a Eurasian superpower with ports on seven seas covering, during the Soviet days, one-sixth of the planet’s land surface.

Russia still stretches some seven thousand miles east to west and almost three thousand miles north to south—enough terrain to accommodate roughly twice the territory of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii. Siberia, of course, would eventually yield a trove of resources far more precious than “fish tooth” and furs, including gold, diamonds, uranium, and, crucially, now, natural gas (of which it holds one-third of the world’s supply) and oil. Beneath Siberia’s permafrost lie the bulk of Russia’s 72 billion barrels of estimated petroleum reserves (the seventh largest on earth) and fourteen of its seventeen fields of natural gas. Oil alone accounts for 45 percent of modern Russia’s export revenues—in 2003 Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia in barrels pumped—and finances 20 percent of its federal budget.

The Lena River would serve as the watery highway down which Russia would travel to superpower status.

Putin spoke often of restoring the state, but for Russians, the state, since Ivan the Terrible’s days, had always been the problem, never the answer.

Life is grief, thieves get rich, the honest stay poor.

Russia is an exacting taskmaster, a bludgeoning educator, and those who suffer under its tutelage here cannot retain their naïveté and illusions—delusions—for long and survive.

As Russia steps back to autocracy, a mode of governance that led it to disaster in the past and could offer it nothing in the future, and, as well-publicized statistical indicators portend a population decline unprecedented in peacetime (Russia, thanks to calamitous birth, mortality, and disease rates, will probably shrink demographically by a third by 2050), I was seized by a desire to find out what had gone wrong. Had I really devoted my life to a doomed land?

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