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Showing posts from November, 2024

THE LUMUMBA PLOT : A COLD WAR ASSASSINATION

THE LUMUMBA PLOT  The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination  The race of one-upmanship between USA and USSR during the cold war era was heating up. The competing blocks fought for the supremacy in all aspects of life and at any cost. The roles of their agencies CIA and KGB was very crucial and is well documented in the now declassified files.  This book is written by Stuart A Reid who is executive editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and is now associated ith CFR.  It revolves around the Democratic Republic of Congo which was also known as Zaire for some time. The central African country is one of the largest country in the world criss-crossed by River Congo. The country was a  personal estate of King Leopold of Belgium before becoming the  colony of Belgium.  After a brief struggle, the country got its Independence on 30 June 1960 but due to absense of administrative machinery and institutions to support the sudden withdrawal of Belgian...

GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL : 3 DRIVERS WHICH CHANGED COURSE OF HUMAN HISTORY

 A Scholarly Work Guns, Germs and Steel - The Fates of Human Societies written by Jared Diamond and published by Penguin Random House in 1998 is a brief history of evolution of human civilization. Before we delve into the specifics of the book, we must introduce the author Jared Diamond, for he is one of the prolific author writing on evolution, human history. He is professor of Geography at UCLA and won Pulitzer Prize for this book. In order to explore the evolutionary process deeper he studied anthropology, biology, genetics, linguistics, ecology and history. His scholarship leaves an indelible mark which is evident in the book. The book revolves around the quest of the author to find answer as to why human development proceeded at such different rates in different continents and societies. What factors have caused this differential rate of evolution where even nearly placed societies experienced different growth trajectory. He spent 33 years in New Guinea for understanding the s...