The best Military Leader Biographies: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

There are several accounts of North Korean prison camps from defectors who escaped them. Here are some translated drawings from one such escapee.

You could also look up the book Escape From Camp 14 though the subject of the book has admitted that some of the details are not correct.

Basically, most of the personal accounts you'll find get lots of scrutiny for being sensationalized, but if you look at the commonalities of the accounts, life in there does not look "light" in any way, shape, or form.

������ McCarthy bae

edit-

I remember the first time I stickied a "McCarthy was right" post, a couple of years ago. There was a lot of backlash by misled people spouting all of the lies you commonly hear about that hero.

It's nice to see the change in sentiment around here.

Also also read Blacklisted From History, the go-to book about the truth about McCarthy. Warning, it's pretty dry, but you're guaranteed to learn something you didn't already know, however much you think you do. The parts about total black holes in history (Like certain newspaper days/articles surrounding McCarthy events "going missing" from microfilm libraries) alone is insane.

The book you'll want to read is Blacklisted from History.

Basically, every primary source we'd use to confirm or deny the public facing image of McCarthy is missing, and presumably destroyed. We're instead expected to trust second hand sources of dubious veracity, often from the exact people McCarthy was accusing.

Escape from Camp 14 is a great read; not only does it detail what life is like in the political prison and labor camps, but the struggles that North Koreans face after successfully defecting to the south.

"North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk.

In Escape From Camp 14, Blaine Harden unlocks the secrets of the world’s most repressive totalitarian state through the story of Shin’s shocking imprisonment and his astounding getaway. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence—he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his mother and brother.

The late “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il was recognized throughout the world, but his country remains sealed as his third son and chosen heir, Kim Jong Eun, consolidates power. Few foreigners are allowed in, and few North Koreans are able to leave. North Korea is hungry, bankrupt, and armed with nuclear weapons. It is also a human rights catastrophe. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people work as slaves in its political prison camps. These camps are clearly visible in satellite photographs, yet North Korea’s government denies they exist.

Harden’s harrowing narrative exposes this hidden dystopia, focusing on an extraordinary young man who came of age inside the highest security prison in the highest security state. Escape from Camp 14 offers an unequalled inside account of one of the world’s darkest nations. It is a tale of endurance and courage, survival and hope."

It can also be extraordinarily depressing. But it is informative.

They may not 100% match up, but they significantly match up.

And for those not familiar with the Venona Papers, these are Soviet archives that were briefly available in the early 1990s after the fall of the USSR that largely validated Joe McCarthy. The key book on the topic is M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies. A good chunk of Ann Coulter's book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism is based on Evans' book.

After leaving office, he led a dangerous expedition into the uncharted Amazon to find and map one of the sources of the Amazon river. It's an amazing story, and very well told: The River of Doubt.

Nothing McCarthy did lost him the support of the public. He lost the support of the public based on things reported about him that were entirely false. The internet didn't exist, it was harder to see through the communist bullshit.

I'd recommend giving Blacklisted By History a read.

Escape from Camp 14

Did you know Amazon will donate a portion of every purchase if you shop by going to smile.amazon.com instead? Over $50,000,000 has been raised for charity - all you need to do is change the URL!

Here are your smile-ified links:

Here's a "quick" primer

^^i'm ^^a ^^friendly bot

I learned all of this stuff because someone left a copy of the book Skunk Works on a shelf in a storage closet at work. I never was interested in the topic beforehand and didn't expect to be so enthralled but it offers a fascinating insight into the world of US black military programs. I'm not usually one to offer endorsements but legitimately I couldn't put this book down. The matter of fact nature and the first hand account is fascinating.

From Ben Rich's book, SkunkWorks, he would take ball bearings and roll them across desks at the Pentagon "Here's your new plane on radar". Took them a while to prove to many that it was true.

An excellent comment, it's so far down in the thread it will not get a lot of attention, but I'm glad you wrote it. I'm not religious, but I find this stuff fascinating. Your comment actually reminded me of a very interesting book I read, Zealot that tries to pin down as much of the historicity of the real person of Jesus, as much as such a thing is possible. It contains a lot of similar insights like the one you wrote here.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Making of the Modern World

I amazingly flipped through the book right to the right page, I have no idea how I did it.

"In their new effort to be as un-chinese as possible, the mongols dropped the traditional evenhanded approach to diverse religion and granted ever more favor and power to Buddhism, particularly to its Tibetan variation, which contrasted most strongly with the Confucian ideals of the Chinese. Unable to criticize their mongol rulers directly, the Chinese people turned much of their hatred toward the foreigners who helped the mongol administer their empire. The Tibetan Buddhist monks in particular became the object of hatred, since local people along the newly opened Mongol route to Tibet carried the obligations not merely of feeding, housing, and transporting the monks, but of carrying their goods for them as well. The monks, often armed, acquired a terrible reputation for abusing people who served them. The Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs strongly defended the monks at court and imposed a host of special rights for them. At one point the bureau tried to enforce laws that stipulated that anyone who hit a monk would have his hand cut off, or that anyone who insulted or defamed a monk, if convicted, could have his tongue cut out. The Mongol officials eventually overturned these laws as incompatible with Mongol rule, which forbade the use of body mutilation as a punishment."

Perhaps torture is a strong word, but not far off. The writing is a bit vague over if/how long the law was active, but it is the thought that counts lol

I seem to recall, in Ben Rich's book "Skunk Works", more engine wasn't enough. They had to use the computer to constantly manipulate the control surfaces to keep the thing in the air.

That story (or a variation on it) was in Ben Rich's Skunkworks memoirs, yep.

The radar demonstrator's RCS was considerably smaller than a bird—more on the order of a large bird's eyeball. Birds sitting on the test stand definitely would be noticeable.

Let's not forget all the Soviet soldiers summarily executed or sent to die in gulags for "political crimes," like being captured by the enemy, or retreating to save their own lives, or writing in private letters about the hardships of Soviet army life.

That's bullshit. Read about the development of New York's freeway system under the guidance of Robert Moses in the last century, captured in Robert Caro's Power Broker. Every time Moses went back to the "We need to build more highways" well, it just made the problem of traffic worse, and it was never, *never* about making things better for the city, but to secure his legacy and keep his authority / power intact.

The solution -- better support and improvement for public transit -- is what the city needed, but Moses vision of the city and its needs -- more freeways -- was a product of his own narrow imagination, dated by decades by the time he really got going with freeways. It was something for rich folk.

I read this like 20 years ago, and have the audiobook now. I've spent many a commute hour listening to Mr. Rich's memoirs. Here's a linky to Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003

Fun side note, my stepmom's father (step-grandpa?) was a machinist @ Skunk Works. I mentioned this book to her and she said, oh yeah dad gave Kelly Johnson rides home every so often when his car was in the shop. Uhhh, what Mari?

It was in the book "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich: (assuming my memory isn't shot)

https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003/

That's funny, They want to stop trump from writing a book.

but Amazon still sells Mein Kampf and no one bats an eye

​

https://www.amazon.com/Mein-Kampf/dp/0395925037

​

We truly live in clown world.

I only heard this song once at bootcamp, as Money_breh said, during the capping ceremony.

My RDCs played an interview with David Goggins or an audiobook of Extreme Ownership on Sunday mornings.

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/1250067057

A little different than what OP said but I’d recommend reading The River Of Doubt. It’s really cool, if I’m remembering right, it’s in a way his suicide march

Amazon Link

The story of the development of the Stealth Fighter is absolutely riveting. The book to read is:

(Skunk Works)[https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003] by Ben Rich. Ben Rich was the head of Lockheed Martin's "Skunk Works" division that developed this amazing airplane. The book reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, but it's non-fiction and all true. Deserves the incredible 4.8 average star rating on Amazon, everyone loves this book.

When they were testing the car-sized wooden model of the initial stealth design, the radar operator at first thought the model had fallen off the 12 foot pole it was mounted on. The radar was only 1500 feet away from the model. Then, the radar operator all of a sudden picked up the model. A crow had landed on top of the model and the radar saw the crow. When the bird flew off, the model of the aircraft was invisible again. The stealth design technology was so unexpectedly incredible, they had to spend half a million dollars designing a new stealth pole, because the radar would see the pole.

If I remember correctly, the radar cross section of the final stealth fighter -- the first true stealth aircraft ever built -- was the equivalent of a marble, roughly the size of an eagle's eyeball.

Sure, here is a fantastic presentation of how SkunkWorks was created: https://youtu.be/pL3Yzjk5R4M It talks about U2, A-12/SR-71 and F-117. it's very interesting. Also, you can find a book from Ben Rich itself about SkunkWorks. https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003

If you are actually interested, check out this book: Blacklisted by History.

I am reading through that right now (actually listening, as I got it in audiobook form), and it's shocking how lied to we are in school, with regards to McCarthy.

Candice Millard has a killer book about Roosevelt exploring an unmapped tributary of the Amazon after losing the 1912 election. It's fascinating stuff, highly recommended.

Communism the theory, and communism in real practice, are very very different. I base my idea of communism on what always happens in practice, as do most scholars and historians.

The defining work on the topic would be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago

That's the condensed version, the full 3 volume version is even better. This is what living under communism is actually like, and an analysis as to why it is that way.

Since the USSR we still don't have a counter case where am attempt has caused anything but poverty and misery. Without freedom and a profit motive, society cannot function. Look also to the original settlers of America, who tried a form of socialism and almost all starved.

Your mentality just leads to an easy out of taking any responsibility for anything.

Sure we can use these extreme hypotheticals like a truck materializing out of nowhere and annihilating someone, but, when do you actually hear people taking about luck most often? It's in day to day life, about day to day things. People hate the idea that they're in control of their own lives and luck isn't a big factor, because it suggests that their shortcomings are their own fault and not some nebulous force they can offload all of the blame onto.

I strongly recommend this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/1250067057

You should read Blacklisted by History, by Stanton Evans. Turns out the Venona Papers vindicated McCarthy.... And then let that sink in. The communist have been infiltrating our government since the 1920's..

I don't know about Assasin's Creed. I'd have to think on a list of books, but one that covers a lot of this is "Zealot"

Edit: It's by Reza Aslan https://www.amazon.com/ZEALOT-Life-Times-Jesus-Nazareth/dp/140006922X