Reading Assignments

Things being what they are and with me feeling as I do, there is no column this week. No apologies. Instead, I offer two reading suggestions. 

The first is Scott Ritter’s 2022 book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union. I’m about one-third through it and I can say it’s fascinating. Scott is a fine writer and did several cool things. First, he took an otherwise “dry” subject and made it interesting. Second, the book is full of a not-too-distant history of a kind to make Generation X a little nostalgic. Third, I think if he had added a few more personal details and interactions about and between the various characters he walks through, he would have come close to Erik Larson’s style of history that reads like a novel. Give Disarmament a read and see what you think.

The second item is South Africa’s ICJ Proceedings Application for a genocide investigation against Israel. From page 30:

C. Genocidal Acts Committed against the Palestinian People

43. This section provides an overview of the acts in which Israel has engaged that are genocidal in character, having regard to their nature, scope and context. These acts are ongoing, and ongoing in a conflict context, where Israel is deliberately imposing telecommunications blackouts on Gaza and restricting access by fact-finding bodies173 and the international media.174 At the same time Palestinian journalists are being killed at a rate significantly higher than has occurred in any conflict in the past 100 years. In the two months since 7 October 2023, the number of journalists killed already exceeded that of the entirety of World War II.175 Further detail will be provided regarding these acts over the course of these proceedings. However, such information as is available establishes that Israel: (1) is engaged in killing Palestinians in Gaza — including Palestinian children — in large numbers; (2) is causing serious bodily and mental harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including Palestinian children; and is inflicting on them conditions of life intended to bring about their destruction as a group. Those conditions include: (3) expulsions from homes and mass displacement, alongside the large-scale destruction of homes and residential areas; (4) deprivation of access to adequate food and water; (4) deprivation of access to adequate medical care; (5) deprivation of access to adequate shelter, clothes, hygiene and sanitation; and (6) the destruction of the life of the Palestinian people in Gaza; and (7) imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births.

​Read the whole thing. And many thanks to SA for doing something, anything, while most of the rest of the world sits by doing nothing. More from me, later.
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Deo vindice.

This piece was published at Perrin Lovett on January 10, 2024.