Stephen D. Shenfield | Author and Translator
Waste and want: Grapes of Wrath revisited
- Published on 01 August 2010
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In his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 25), John Steinbeck described how food was destroyed during the Great Depression:
Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground.
The people come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges… A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships… Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out [with nets]. Slaughter the pigs and bury them…
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must be forced to rot.
A Cold War mystery
- Published on 19 May 2022
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Who started the Stalinist purges in Eastern Europe?
Between 1948 and 1954 hundreds of thousands of people were arrested and interrogated, often under torture, by the secret police in the countries of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. There were show trials and executions. The victims were members of the ruling ‘communist’ parties, including quite a few who had occupied prominent positions. In Czechoslovakia alone nearly 170,000 party members were arrested, almost causing the economy to collapse.
Stalin himself presided over these purges. After Tito’s Yugoslavia broke away from the bloc, he feared that the ‘Titoist’ contagion would spread and other countries would follow Yugoslavia’s example. He was also determined to destroy ‘fifth columns’ in preparation for a possible war with the West.
However, as George Hodos, a rare survivor of the Rajk trials in Hungary, stresses in his book Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe (Praeger 1987), most victims were actually loyal Stalinists. Only a few, such as Gomulka in Poland, really had ‘Titoist’ tendencies. If this point is accepted, an explanation of the vast scale of the purges has to rely on a single factor – Stalin’s well-known paranoia.
Unless that paranoia was deliberately exploited by an outside player. Is it possible that while Stalin presided over the purges someone else actually started them? After all, it would not have been the first such provocation. It was disinformation spread by agents of Nazi Germany that triggered Stalin’s disastrous purge of the Red Army’s officer corps in 1937. Could Western secret services have played a similar game at the end of the 1940s?
Beware: cell phones!
- Published on 16 August 2021
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Just look at that photo! How cute! Do a search on 'kid' and 'phone' and you'll find lots of equally cute photos of little children using cell phones. Many brands are specifically designed for the toddler market. The average age at which children now get their first cell phone is six, but clearly many get one earlier. It is common to amuse babies by showing them moving images on a cell phone.
Observe that in these photos the kids are holding the phone right up against the ear, where radiation will do the most damage to their vulnerable young brains. It would be somewhat less harmful if they left a gap of an inch between ear and phone, but neither they nor their parents even realize that there is any cause for concern -- that 'children absorb more microwave radiation than adults because they are smaller, their brain tissues are more absorbent, and their skulls are thinner' (L. Lloyd Morgan, Santosh Kesari, and Devra Lee Davis, Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure, December 2014).
Captives of Coca-Cola
- Published on 14 October 2021
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In July 2018 the attention of The New York Times and then Esquire magazine was somehow drawn to a mountain town in southern Mexico and the truly remarkable amount of Coca-Cola drunk by its residents. The British Broadcasting Corporation has produced a documentary on the same topic.
The town is San Cristobal, in the Central Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state. A third of its quarter-million or so residents are of Mayan descent. Their average per capita daily consumption of ‘the friendliest drink on earth’ is a gallon – the whole of a two-liter bottle and most of a second, delivered to numerous local convenience stores from a bottling plant on the town’s outskirts.
How to resolve the dispute over the South China Sea?
- Published on 12 September 2021
- Hits: 775
I have read quite a few expert analyses of the dispute over the South China Sea. None of them even raise this question, let alone attempt to answer it. Isn’t it the responsibility of experts not only to analyze such disputes but also to search for means to resolve them? After all, world peace is at stake – perhaps even human survival, China and the United States both being nuclear powers.
