Month: March 2022

Madeline Albright and Russian Sanctions

Madeline Albright, the first US female Secretary of State, is dead. And people are celebrating.

I mean, the US government is mourning. Flags are being lowered at half-staff in certain government offices, and Bill Clinton is speaking of her great legacy. But go look at what people are commentating on social media, and her entire legacy seems to be centered around a single interview. An interview which as Newsweek states, has Albright stating that the death of Iraqi children was “worth it” as a result of sanctions.

I come not to praise Albright. I know very little of her career, and really not enough of U.S. foreign policy between the Cold War and 9/11. But I would argue that the fulmination of the humanitarian costs of sanctions is highly concerning given current events.

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Reminiscences: Douglas MacArthur, World War I, and Enjoyment

The latest book I have picked up is Douglas MacArthur’s Reminiscences, the memoir he finished just before his death. As of right now, I have finished the chapters of his life up to the outbreak of the Second World War. MacArthur was already 61 on the eve of the Japanese invasion, yet those first 61 years of his life only cover a little over a quarter of his biography.

There is a great deal to notice in his book. As is to be expected of a man with such an outsized ego, MacArthur spends much of the time defending his actions. He rarely criticizes anyone by name (Ferdinand Foch and Philippe Petain are the only ones to receive any such attacks, and those are both mild, qualified ones such as the fact that Petain was too cautious to take advantage of decisive moments), but he does spend a great deal of time talking about his accomplishments. Perhaps the most notable time is the Bonus March, where MacArthur declares that by not firing a shot, he dispelled a movement which why initially filled with discontented American patriots at first, was taken over by Communist radicals planning revolution.

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