The author attended a presentation I made at the Arizona Professional Writers Group in August 2022. I also participated in a presentation she made to the same group’s “Book Club” the next month, which offered an excellent opportunity to get acquainted. Her book helped connect the dots between several circumstances around past President Trump that many Americans, including me, wondered about. According to Ms. Graham, her unique perspective is due to her heart residing in the United States while her soul lives in Russia.
Graham updated the initial book Democrazy to From Democracy to Democrazy: A Warning To All Americans, as the first version came out a few weeks before the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress and a little over a year before Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, which provided important new material. She expresses the objective of both books as “How the U.S. was caught in an evil, repulsive and dangerous vortex from 2016-2020 and beyond.”
Her life circumstances offered access to many insights most Americans would ignore, “My work with the CIA was extremely clandestine, top-secret clearance. My father worked there, and he wanted me in his office – so by the ripe old age of 16, I had top-secret clearance. I graduated from HS (high school) in 1962 and went to work there while I attended college and afterward. My last meeting with CIA personnel was in Scottsdale in 2014 – 50 plus years later.”
She lived in the former Soviet Union, soon to become Russia, for twenty years, and two of her children attended Moscow Public Schools. She’s also an excellent cross-cultural communicator and speaks Russian and Ukrainian, among other Cyrillic-based languages. She worked as a manager with Science Applications International Corporation and the largest “Russian Language Data Base” in the U.S. for twelve years. She told me of her first-hand experience with Russia’s operations and the Russian daily infiltration of the U.S. As she put it, “I bring a different perspective on Russia and Putin than the “Russian Experts” in DC who have spent time in Russia as an ex-pat and consider themselves “well informed.”
One of the most dramatic scenes was when the former President met with Putin in Helsinki. Trump said he “believed Putin’s denial of election interference over the finds of U.S. intelligence.” The Director of the CIA called it “nothing short of treasonous,” and Arizona Senator John McCain described it as “one of the most disgraceful performances by any American president in memory.” And ends with the provocative comment, “Ask Yourself Why?”
The author includes an article from the July issue of “The Moscow Times,” which Graham says describes similarities between Hitler, Stalin, Putin, and Trump:
At the same time, he (Putin) is as banal as the dictators and autocrats of the 20th century. These dictators all fostered the cult of the leader, relied on the indifference and obedience of the masses, deified the state, maintained a cult of strength, militarism, and heroic death, confused themselves with the state, and built an autarkic economic model, often surviving by extracting rents from resource dependence. They also refused on principle to allow a rotation of power, fought against “national traitors,” imprisoned their opponents, imposed censorship, and sought to rule forever.
I was pleased to learn that one of the significant reasons the author wrote the book was in response to the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, “Like so many others across the U.S. and around the world, my gut response was disbelief, outrage, and blind fury. The news replayed his death over and over and over… A malevolent tragedy is playing out in our country, and now—finally—spectators are recording these murders.”
She highly recommends and quotes Robin DeAngelo’s White Fragility, a book about Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, “Race is an evolving social idea created to legitimize racial inequality and protect white advantage…” and quotes expatriate writer Richard White, who said, “There isn’t any Negro problem; there is only a White problem.” White pointed out that “racism against people of color doesn’t occur in a vacuum.” She then explains how Trump and other Republican leaders have used mistrust and hatred to stoke their white supremacist base.
The book is enhanced with humorous, pithy, insightful cartoons, which add some levity to break up some of the dire circumstances she writes about. The author includes detailed “endnotes” at the end of each chapter and a bibliography. She also has several impressive testimonials, including a letter to the author from President Biden on August 3rd, 2022 – “Your story is an integral part of the American story, and I am humbled that you shared it with me…Through trials and triumphs, we will always be a Nation where hope runs deep and optimism reigns. Folks like you remind me of that truth every day.” Keep the Faith, Sincerely, Joe Biden.
Her book was rated #1 by Amazon in July 2023 for three categories: Political Parties, International Relations, and Legal systems.
About the Author:
Elizabeth Graham has spent about twenty-five years living and working abroad—mainly in the Soviet Union, then Russia, and then the five countries of Central Asia. She had also served as a consultant in the war-torn areas of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Afghanistan.
Product details
- ASIN : B0C94VKCL6
- Publication date : June 22, 2023
- Language : English
- File size : 22819 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 238 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : B0C5BVCHBK
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,454,120 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #181 in Legal System
- #440 in Political Parties (Kindle Store)
- #617 in United States Judicial Branch
The Reviewer
Mark Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala. He spent over forty years helping disadvantaged people in the developing world with such groups as Make A Wish International, Hagar USA, MAP International, and Food for the Hungry. His book, Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond, was recognized by the Arizona Literary Association. His second book, My Saddest Pleasures: 50 Years on the Road, was the 2023 Peace Corps Writers’ Award for Best Travel Book winner. He’s a contributing writer for Literary Traveler, Wanderlust Journal, and The Authors’ Show. “The Million Mile Walker Review: What We’re Reading And Why” can be found in the Arizona Authors’ Association Newsletter, Authors Digest. His wife and three children were born in Guatemala. You can learn more at www.MillionMileWalker.com.