What this book brings to light is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment. The government needs to declassify the details of these open-air bioweapons tests so that we can begin to repair the damage these pathogens are inflicting on humans and animals in the ecosystem.

I believe that history will judge the tick-borne disease outbreak that began in 1968 as one of the worst public health failures of the last century. In the beginning, we were slow to recognize this triple threat. A situation that is now out of control, spreading far and wide, could’ve been contained with an early intervention of tick-control projects and a public education campaign.

Arno J. Mayer, in his controversial book Why Did the Heavens not Darken? The 'Final Solution' in History (1988), goes right back to the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, the storming of Magdeburg on May 10, 1631, when thirty thousand men, women and children were murdered, and even further back to the mass murder by the Crusaders of eleven hundred innocent inhabitants of Mainz in 1096, to find equivalents to the mass murders of Jews during World War II.
On the other hand, there is no mention of the European slave trade, which forcibly removed fifteen million Negroes between continents, and killed perhaps just as many. Nor are the nineteenth-century European colonial wars or punitive expeditions mentioned. If Mayer had as much as glanced in that direction, he would have found so many examples of brutal extermination based on clearly racial convictions, that the Thirty Years' War and the Crusades would seem to lie unnecessarily far back.
On my journey through the Sahara alone, I have been in two Mainzes. One is called Zaatcha, where the entire population was wiped out by the French in 1849. The other is Laghouat, where on December 3, 1852, after the storming, the remaining third of the population, mainly women and children, was massacred. In one single well, 256 corpses were found. That was how one mixed with the inferior races. It was not considered good form to talk about it, nor was it anything that needed conceiling. It was established practice.

We faced a fork in the road one decade after Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were laid to rest. As described in chapter 1, during the late 1970s, jobs had suddenly disappeared from urban areas across America, and unemployment rates had skyrocketed. In 1954, black and white youth unemployment rates in America were equal, with blacks actually having a slightly higher rate of employment in the age group sixteen to nineteen. By 1984, however, the black unemployment rate had nearly quadrupled, while the white rate had increased only marginally.76 This was not due to a major change in black values or black culture; this dramatic shift was the result of deindustrialization, globalization, and technological advancement. Urban factories shut down as our nation transitioned to a service economy. Suddenly African Americans were trapped in jobless ghettos, desperate for work.

The economic collapse of inner-city black communities could have inspired a national outpouring of compassion and support. A new War on Poverty could have been launched. Economic stimulus packages could have sailed through Congress to bail out those trapped in jobless ghettos through no fault of their own. Education, job training, public transportation, and relocation assistance could have been provided, so that youth of color would have been able to survive the rough transition to a new global economy and secure jobs in distant suburbs. Constructive interventions would have been good not only for African Americans trapped in ghettos, but also for blue-collar workers of all colors, many of whom were suffering too, if less severely. A wave of compassion and concern could have flooded poor and working-class communities, in honor of the late Martin Luther King Jr. All of this could have happened, but it didn’t. Instead we declared a War on Drugs.

The collapse of inner-city economies coincided with the conservative backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, resulting in the perfect storm. Almost overnight, black men found themselves unnecessary to the American economy and demonized by mainstream society. No longer needed to pick cotton in the fields or labor in factories, lower-class black men were hauled off to prison in droves. They were vilified in the media and condemned for their condition as part of a well-orchestrated political campaign to build a new white, Republican majority in the South. Decades later, curious onlookers in the grips of denial would wonder aloud, “Where have all the black men gone?â€�

No one has made this point better than sociologist LoĂŻc Wacquant. Wacquant has written extensively about the cyclical nature of racial caste in America. He emphasizes that the one thing that makes the current penal apparatus strikingly different from previous racial caste systems is that “it does not carry out the positive economic mission of recruitment and disciplining of the workforce.â€�77 Instead it serves only to warehouse poor black and brown people for increasingly lengthy periods of time, often until old age. The new system does not seek primarily to benefit unfairly from black labor, as earlier caste systems have, but instead views African Americans as largely irrelevant and unnecessary to the newly structured economyan economy that is no longer driven by unskilled labor.

But since the Soviets were complicit in Nazi aggression, resistance was no less criminal than the invasion itself. Since the Soviets “allowed Hitler to begin a warâ€� in 1939, Snyder writes, they had no right to complain when he turned his guns on them in 1941.