Reddit mentions of The Modern Middle East: A History

>So what are good sources of information for current news and good books/articles for past history?

That's something that I'm currently working on. I've only begun to dive into the history of the world within the past year. There are innumerable books and documentaries that serve this purpose for innumerable regions and events in the world. But I believe the starting point for anyone should be a book on US foreign policy. Once you begin to learn about how the US has acted internationally, you will obtain a view of the world that is essential for understanding current events.

One recent pair of works that I recommend is "The Untold History of the US". It is a 800 page book alongside a 10 part documentary series that tells a story of the US not known to most people. Here is the first part of that series available for free. Here is the companion book.

>How did you learn about these sources?

I keep a journal and I've meant to do a write up of this for a while now, so I'll be as detailed as possible. The following is both for your sake, and for mine. This is also a story of how I came to hold the political views that I have, so bear with me if you disagree with my views. Reading about history will inevitably force you to form opinions, and as I've learned more, I was pushed further and further to the left. But anyways, here it is.

I took a class on Latin American history, and I learned about the history of the island in the Caribbean my parents come from, the Hispaniola (the island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti). I learned how the US occupied it repeatedly during the 20th century and installed dictators in each country, and how it became a trade slave of the US with its sugar production.

I was being more and more interested in politics and current events, after learning about Obama and drones. I didn't have internet access and I hated television, but I had to do something, so I vowed to only watch channels without commercials. So I was watching PBS, CSPAN, and Al Jazeera. One night I saw an interview on PBS done by Tavis Smiley. During this time, Martin Luther King was being celebrated. The interview centered around the "real" Martin Luther King, and how he is unjustly known for only a few words that he spoke during a march. So I read his last major speech, and his speech about the Vietnam War. In the latter speech, he says "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is the US government", and I couldn't believe what I was reading. After some searching, I realized that he was actually a socialist. I learned that he had planned a march for economic justice that would join all races, to trump any march in the history of the country, and he did this with the two socialists who organized the march that made him famous. They were Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph.

Martin Luther King died while helping a union of black sanitation workers, a month before the march. I doubted the mainstream narrative of the killing due to what I learned the US was capable of when I read about the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and I came across COINTELPRO, the operation run by the FBI to stop leftist movements in the US. I was watching yet another channel with no commercials, and it's called LinkTV, which is a leftist channel that shows mainly documentaries. I saw one called "American Coup", which was about how the US toppled the government of Iran with clandestine CIA operations. Oddly enough, today is the day, 50 years after it happened, that the CIA admits to doing it. Anyways, at this point I was intensely both anti-government and anti-capitalist.

As I pondered all of the problems with the US, like its media, healthcare, the military industrial complex, the corruption of congress, etc, I came across this speech by an economist at the University of Massachusetts. He spoke of a new type of democratic economic enterprise called a cooperative, and how it solves many problems that traditional capitalist enterprises cause. the political atmosphere of Germany, that has a party called Die Linke, or the "Left Party". Their slogan is, "Germany can do better than Capitalism". Being from the US where questioning capitalism is out of the question, I couldn't believe that Germany had the political atmosphere for that, so I started learning about the politics of Germany.

That's really when my interest of international affairs and politics took off, and when I finally began to read about other countries. Inevitably, to understand the current events of a country you have to understand its history, so I started reading about the history of Germany. Once I saw its relationship to the USSR, I started reading about that. All the while, everything I learned about the US was brimming in my mind.

I learned about the media in the US because of a documentary I saw called "Shadows of Liberty". It will be available here for free here during the first two weeks of September. Because I refused to watch TV with commercials, I began watching Al Jazeera English. It covered the civil war in Syria extensively, and it frequently airs documentaries. One of them was "The Reckoning", which details the history of Syria during the latter portion of the 20th century to give a context to current developments in Syria. I then borrowed this book on the history of the modern middle east from a local library.

By this time it was around March, and Hugo Chavez died. He was a very controversial figure, and I wanted to learn why. Here in the US they paint him as a dictator, but my faith in US media was destroyed, so I questioned that as well. This video quite nicely sums up a few of the experiences I've had about learning about Venezuela and Chavez. While he did a few things I don't agree with, and I don't like his stances on a few issues, I learned that Chavez was a hero to Venezuela. This documentary goes into a overthrow of the government that happened in 2002 to oust Chavez, but was saved by the masses of Venezuelan people who wanted their leader back. By this time I was well aware of US involvement in Latin America, and could contextualize the events well, due to a book called The Open Veins of Latin America.

After this, I was ready to tackle history around the world with much more ease. I learned of the miners strikes in the UK, and the market socialism of Yugoslavia that was a socialism vastly different than others. I learned of some of the great feats of China and the USSR after only knowing what mistakes they made. I learned about Anarchism and Anarchist Spain during the 1930's, and the war between Iraq and Iran. I learned of Zimbabwe's agrarian reform, and Mexico's revolution in the early 1900's. I learned of South Africa's fight with apartheid, which put the US on supporting it and Cuba fighting it alongside Mandela. It was just historical event after event, and after some time, you really can't pinpoint specific avenues of thought that you've been taking through by reading and watching documentaries. History becomes just one large living organism that you begin to understand more and more fully as you go on.

I cut it a bit short because its late, but feel free to ask me anything now that you know me a bit more personally, haha.

I really dont know where to start.
You didn't know Iran/Syria were allies before the civil war and now to are raising a long dead UAR. That has been broken beyond repair for a very long time indeed.

This really isnt interesting for me. If you can't see the advantages of a Sunni state rather than Shiia then i'm not interested it going on. I can only lay out ideas infront of you. I cant give you the wherewithal to consider those ideas. Or are you considering them? It seems like you dismiss the idea out of hand, the UAR!

Could I recommend this book to you? The Modern Middle East: A History Its pretty decent and would give you some foundation on what alliances there are and how they came about. I'm done.

The Modern Middle East is by far the best and most concise book I have read on the subject.

Most of my knowledge comes from a college class on Middle Eastern history. I'd recommend this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Modern-Middle-East-History/dp/0199766053. It's refreshingly unbiased.

You're just ignoring the history. Why did any of this happen in the first place...western involvement dating back over 100 years. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Go read a book. Here's a good one](https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Middle-East-History/dp/0199766053)

Do you mean The Modern Middle East: A History by Oxford University Press? I agree with you that I am looking for more of a textbook than a particular POV. In fact, I have been reading up on Wikipedia over the past few days.

"The Israel Lobby" sounds interesting. Will take a look once I understand the basics.