Skip to main content

Guns and Butter

I've been reading C. J. Chivers' The Gun, which is about as fascinating a book as I've read. Chivers' book is a history of the AK-47; it's relatively nonjudgmental from a political point of view, and traces the emergence of the AK-47, first as an Eastern Bloc weapon, and then as the world's go-to weapon for criminals, revolutionaries and terrorists. One excerpt I find particularly interesting:

Any distillation that treats the AK-47 as a spontaneous invention, the epiphany of an unassuming but gifted sergeant at his workbench, misses the very nature of its origins as an idiosyncratic Soviet product. The weapon was designed collectively, the culmination of work by many people over many years, and the result of a process in which Senior Sergeant Kalashnikov was near the center in the mid and late 1940s. This process was driven not by entrepreneurship or by quirky Russian innovation and pluck, but by the internal desires and bureaucracy of the socialist state. The motivations that fueled it were particular to a moment in history. The Soviet Union, once a technologically backward society that had been brutalized and organized by Stalin's police state, had been militarizing throughout its existence, and it had recently been fully transformed into a military-industrial economy by war and its fear and hatred of Hitler. As Hitler exited the stage, this economy's potential for arms-making was harnessed again, this time in a mix of almost religious revolutionary ideology - socialism was, according to the party's core teaching, to sweep the world in an irresistible advance - and to a rational suspicion of the united States, with which it was compelled to compete...

What makes the origins of the AK-47 interesting are not these easy platitudes, but the larger insights its story provides. The Soviet Union of the late 1940s was at a high point in its history. When it focused on technical tasks, it could excel. And when it focused on creating an automatic weapon that could be carried and managed by almost any man, it was able to quickly make on of the world's superproducts, and one of the truest symbols of itself.


If you have even a passing interest in history, military or otherwise, pick this book up. It's a fantastic read.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Apparently, Liberals Are The Illuminati

posted 10/5/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Greetings, sheeple, from my stronghold high atop the Wells Fargo Building in downtown Salt City, where I type this before a massive, glowing bank of monitors that display the ongoing progress of my 23-point plan for complete social control. Whether you want to demonize me as a "liberal," or prefer the Glenn Beck update "progressive," we all know the truth, and it's time to pull the curtain aside: like all left-leaning persons, I am actually a member of the Illuminati. How else to explain how much power my side of the aisle wields in U.S. American politics? According to conservatives, liberals/the Illuminati control the media * , science * , academia in general * , public schools * , public radio * , pretty much anything "public," the courts * , and Hollywood * . Hell, we pretty much control everything except for scrappy, underdog operations like WND and Fox News, or quiet, marginalized voices like

The Garden Is Dead, Long Live The Garden

posted on 8/30/2015 by the Salt City Sinner  The last two times that I wrote about gardening, the tone was uncharacteristically less “playful whimsy” than “agonized demon howl.” This is with good reason. The cockroach-hearted fauxhemian Whole Foods crowd at Wasatch Community Gardens, you see, did a terrible thing to me and many other people – they decided that agreements are for suckers and that what the world really needs is another blighted patch of asphalt rather than a large and vibrant community garden, and so they killed my garden (and the gardens of many others) dead, dead, dead. Forgive my bitterness: there is something about loving a patch of actual soil, about nurturing life from tiny green shoots to a luxurious canopy of flowers and vegetables that brings out a protective streak in a human being, and also a ferocious loyalty. The destruction of Sugar House Community Garden did not, however, end my gardening career – heavens, no! Instead, I and a handful of

Cult Books: One Good, One Terrible

  I’ve finished writing a new novel (stay tuned for details) in which the massacre at Jonestown in November 1978 plays a pivotal role. Both to research it and because the phenomenon interests me, I’ve read more than a few books on cults and cultic ideology over the last year.