Peter Dale Scott

Genius: This book can be read by 911 propaganda worshipers without them rejecting it, because it studiously avoids rejecting the big print version of the 911 propaganda story. At the same time, it is full of (1) US dealing in Asia, and (2) the dishonesty and corruption of the 911 commission.
Genius: The 911 Commission Report's lies and omissions can, should and are used to extract the deeper truths that the Commission is/was trying to hide. Genius!

Good: overview of back-office, covert actions in Asia and the middle east
Good: very full of information and leads off to other areas
Good: I am pretty well informed about these subjects, and I was educated
Good: Completely ignores the propaganda story about hijackers learning to fly, or anything that in support of that story, even though noting the bizarre history and ownership of the flight schools that "they" or some people attended

Neutral: This is two books: (1) A history of US interference in Asia, the Middle East and the like, and (2) the corruption and incompetence of the 911 commission.

Bad: Really, in the book's design, it supports the "muh, Arabs did it".
Bad, or necessary: Avoids out-right mocking of the 911 propaganda fantasy.… (mehr)

"Not since Robert Duncan's Ground Work and before that William Carlos Williams' Paterson has New Directions published a long poem as important as Coming to Jakarta!" ―James Laughlin

A devastating revelation of violence, exploitation, and corrupt politics, Coming to Jakarta derives its title from the role played by the CIA, banks, and oil companies in the 1965 slaughter of more than half a million Indonesians. A former Canadian diplomat and now a scholar at the University of California, Peter Dale Scott has said that the poem "is triggered by what we know of the bloody Indonesian massacre… However it is not so much a narrative of exotic foreign murder as one person’s account of what it is like to live in the 20th century, possessing enough access to information and power to feel guilty about global human oppression, but not enough to deal with it. The usual result is a kind of daily schizophrenia by which we desensitize ourselves to our own responses to what we read in the newspapers. The psychic self-alienation which ensues makes integrative poetry difficult but necessary." With a brilliant use of collage, placing the political against the personal––childhood acquaintances are among the darkly powerful figures––Scott works in the tradition of Pound’s Cantos, but his substance is completely his own… (mehr)