George of Sylvania

Tag: booktok

  • Nuclear War: A Scenario

    Nuclear War: A Scenario

    This post is brought to you by our current executive branch, the country committing ongoing genocide in Palestine, and the trouble they are causing in the Arab World.

    In 2024 I read the book Hiroshima by John Hersey which was the first time in possibly 20 plus years I had spent reading about World War Two. When I was in junior high and high school, I was obsessed with that period of history, whether it was through video games, movies, or television, it was all I liked to study. My grandfather served in the Pacific Theater on the U.S.S. Drayton as a Signalman, which heavily influenced my decision to join the military after I graduated high school.

    Spending time looking through his photo scrapbook that included his initiation into the Domain of Neptunus Rex as he crossed the equator left me with a romanticized version of this history. He had been dead for a while and all I had to go on was what he left behind, and I constantly ignored my dad telling me that he (my grandfather) would have taken my dad to their fishing cabin in Canada. Thank God I have lived long enough to be ashamed of supporting our military industrial complex, and the war crimes they have been committing.

    Anyway, back to the book.

    In this almost second by second account of what happens if the US were to experience and respond to a nuclear bomb, it really makes you sick with how much can go wrong in such a short time. The fragility around this, and the fragility of what it takes to maintain our nuclear arsenal displays how truly weak our leaders are to result to this kind of destruction. In short:

    These weapons should not exist.

    The infrastructure around these weapons should not exist.

    The people leading the country right now should never have access to this kind of destructive power.

    These are things I have believed for a few years, but, this book will cement it in the long run.

    10/10, this should be a must read for everyone.

  • Are we the Baddies?

    Are we the Baddies?

    Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen was one of my first books out the gate in 2025, and I still think about it. When I think of the detailed research of this book, what comes to mind is, The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees, another one worth your time, because of the minutia Jacobsen goes into.

    If you are unaware of Operation Paperclip, it was the name given when the United States government brought n*zi scientists into the US to work on military projects, health and medicine, and the space race. The lengths of which the government forgave the acts of despicable men in the name of “fighting” communism made me almost physically sick while reading. One doctor who was working on hypothermia continued his work in the US that had been conducted on prisoners.

    Per the books description:

    In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich’s scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis’ once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler’s scientists and their families to the United States.

    Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg; one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. space program. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?

    Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich’s ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century.

    I enjoy a hard read, and this one was difficult. The complicity of our government to do horrible things is not a secret. After all H*tler was influenced by our treatment of Indigenous people and eugenics is a very American science. But to see how quickly people are willing to throw away morality in the name of power makes me physically sick.

    This meme is still true, especially when we consider the cruel actions of our current administration.

    That said, 10/10 read, you should read this book. It will drop scales from your eyes in a very needed way. Some of it may be old hat, but even portions of that

    Grace and peace.