Hegel´s Lessons on Plato

When a philosopher is reading another philosopher, either it is having a critical stance or agrees with, in the end the aim will be to promote his or her own philosophical concepts and theories. This is especially when you have to deal with big names of the history of philosophy, in this case Hegel´s reading on Plato. A reading which is incomplete, fragmentary, subjective and in the end, serves exclusively the main philosophical narrative of the author. It does not reveal anything new and the observations and conclusion shall be regarded with a very critical eye. 

Reading Hegel again, although in a translation of the French translation from the original German - experience taught me to be vigilent to any philosophical French translation from German as it embelishes the vocabulary but does not always have the right liguistic tools to convene the original German meanings - was a novel intellectual experience for me. 

There, in the secret chamber of the lost books, Plato and his dialogues were as fresh as I left them more than a decade ago. Hegel and his acrobatic Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis - a triptic that I use often in various intellectual constructions by default - were also there. Only that my critical thinking evolved meanwhile which meant that I can read in many ways the use and often misuse various philosophical sources in order to build a different system of thought. It is an intellectual reflex of the modern age, overwhelmed with so much information and texts from the Antiquities onwards. Our age is left therefore only with the critical part. We rarely want to build anything and creating systems is a feareful approach which announces intellectual theologies - with low regard, if any, to individual freedoms. 

Philosophical exercises are useful mind-games but I don´t believe in the philosopher-king. I never did.

´Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe´

I don´t remember when I´ve read the last time about spy stories in Eastern Europe. It used to be a topic I dealt with as a historian, especially when reconstructing intellectual profiles and histories from this part of the world. Personally, I´ve considered it a real hole of rats that disgusted me deeply. Once you start searching through the files carefully set up by the so-called ´intelligence´ services of the time, there is no end of human ignominy. It helps when you try to avoid to have role-models but still, why they should be so low and accept to betray their neighbours, friends, relatives in exchange for money or priviledges that will never amount to the harm they did. I remember I met once a woman who once was recruited when she was in school, a teenager. She accepted. When the public discussion about collaboration and relationship with communist secret police was hot, that woman met me for a coffee and confessed that once she said candidly ´yes´. I tried to be polite with her, finish my coffee and avoid her for the rest of my stay. Simply, don´t want to have anything to do with such people and it is my personal choice for reasons of mental hygiene.

Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe, edited by Valentina Glajan, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu. is a volume of stories collected from the Stasi archives, Romania´s Securitate and the Ukrainian KGB, among others. In addition, there are also chapter on the representation of the Cold War in movies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

If you are not familiar with the Cold War context and its intricacies do not expect to understand it by reading this book - that I had in audiobook format - but otherwise the stories outlined are really interesting for the specific topics addressed. For instance the story of a Romanian Jew that worked as a secret police officer before being dismissed after ten years of activity on an anti-Semitic ground - which happened very often at the time. Another chapter deals with the many faces of the GDR spymaster Markus Wolf. Literature and the production of books in general were a very important matter of interest for the secret services at the time. They use writers as informers and censors in a clear effort of divide the intellectuals and keep them under the state control. The story of the Romanian-born Hungarian Jew Ana Novac - her real name was Zimra Harsanyi - , a Shoah survivor, a plawriter and memorialist that died in Paris, is an example in this respect. People that were in contact with her were writing surveillance notes with a strong personal note of disdain for her burgeois habits and her sexual activities. Another topic that I´ve found personally very interesting regards the Turkish men working as seasonal labour force in the West that were recruited by the East during their trips to the communist part of Berlin looking for fun and sexual adventures. The story of the Orthodox priest who denounced his collaboration with the West that a couple of years after the end of the Soviet Union was among the ultranationalist Russian-speaking publication Zavtra is no surprise. 

Personally, I was interested in reading more stories from the secret files but that was maybe rather an intellectual voyeurism. I was entering the mood of terrible stories and was ready to remember that this is how the human nature works, regardless the intellectual preoccupations and the particular education. The final part of the book deals with the movies representations of the Cold War, through the analysis of a couple of the productions. The relevance of the topic of surveillance, in a post-Cold War context remains, but as in many respects regarding the multi-polar world, there is a lot of political ambiguity and circumstantial meaning. 

Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe were not intended to be more than fragments of a complex mosaique that still has its own secrets. It has a critical box of tools as well as conceptual delimitations and definitions which are very helpful for the reader that have not experienced directly the political pressures of the time. Personally, I would be curious about the feedback about such stories from someone who never faced the restriction of democratic freedoms. 

Maybe it is about time to delve back into some Cold War stories or write more myself. One day...

Rating: 4 stars

Behind the Diplomatic Battle for the Iran Deal

Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumpf of Diplomacy by Trita Parsi is a detailed, step-by-step account of the heated debates for closing the Iran deal. Parsi, one of the founder and former president of the American-Iranian Council, is a frequent editorialist and commenter on issues pertaining to diplomatic developments in the Middle East, particularly Iran.

For someone interested to read more about the diplomatic steps and proceedings leading to the conclusion of this unique agreement, between two countries whose diplomatic relations were frozen for decades, the book is an useful read. How Obama succeeded to dupe his European partners while working hard to achieve the deal through mysterious ways, including by using a very secret Oman channel, is, among others, an important element to understand the post-Cold War diplomatic games. 

The author´s appreciation for the Iranian top diplomat, Javad Sharif, is clear and compared to a certain part of the local Iranian elites, he certainly may deserve the praise. On the other hand, Sharif himself acknowledged recently in the Iranian Parliament, on an exasperating tone, how much he and his ´diplomats´ worked together to achieve political and ´revolutionary´ aims endeavoured by the militant side of the regime, including the late Qasem Soleimani. In a plain translation, diplomatic positions and outposts of Iran were used for undiplomatic aims, such as planning terror attacks or fuelling Hizbollah and its proxies. Candidly, in the book, Parsi mentions Hizbullah, which is funded regularly with money and ideology by the regime in Tehran, as ´a close ally of Iran´. For an academic approach, I would have expected a critical approach on Sharif and its interesting diplomatic game.

Also a critical stance is missing when it comes to Israel. Clearly, during the negotiations, the long-term prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a hawkish opposer of it, and a supporter of military strikes against Iran, despite the clear opposition of the Israeli intelligence and military establishment. But not all that glitters is gold and taking ad litteram Netanyahu´s declarations and accusing him and the ´lobby´ - that is not called throughoutly this but described in clear terms as one - does not bring any contribution to understanding the complexity of the problem. Blaming Netanyahu and the pro-Israeli voices for  the mishaps of an international system is wrong. Some people simply deserve each other.

As I had the book in audio format, a sidenote is for the pronunciation of non-English words: from Madrid to Persian and Hebrew names, the results are horrendous. Like the content of the book was not deceiving enough. 

Rating: 2 stars

A Modern History of Iran by Abbas Amanat

Iran: A Modern History by Abbas Amanat is a massive historical compedium, which resumes 20 years of work and a time span which covers five centuries. Iran is very often mentioned nowadays in purely political context but few are those - including among journalists and especially politicians - with at least a basic knowledge about this country.

The reason is not only because they might not want to but there is a relative scarcity of general, well-structured information about Iran. One can find snapshots of various kinds of information, but rarely a big picture which covers important data such as historical context, geographical delimitations, economic background, political evolution and cultural developments. 

Abbas Amanat, director of Yale Program in Iranian Studies, was able to introduce to the reader all those details in over 1000 pages of history. It starts with the 16th century with the Safavid Empire, but it offers an overview of the previous historical sequencies by placing the Persians in the world tempo of the previous centuries. The book relies on a multiplicity of sources, double checked and neutraly introduced into the narrative. The research ends with the Green Movement - the protests following the fraudulent presidential elections from 2009. 

The book combines chronological details while following mentality patterns and structures which helps to better understand the religious and political developments and the conflicts and interferences of the two, as well as the positioning of Iran in modern times in various geopolitical contexts. From the conceptual point of view it is an excellent way to offer a basic timeline while filling it with information that helps to understand not only the moment when the events are taking place, but also the bigger picture of the time, what F. Braudel and Ecole des Annales labelled as the long durée.

Personally, I reserved a couple of months to go through the information and most probably will need at least one year to get into more details of various historical time frames and events mentioned more or less in detail. Besides translating in a simple but not simplistic way the realities of six centuries of dense Iranian history, Iran: A Modern History is also a noteworthy example of how to write histories nowadays. Recommended to anyone curious to find more about Iran than what is usually featured in the media but also to historians patient enough to learn not only about a country, but also searching for their writing style.

Rating: 5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review