So . . . who is this Chivers fellow, anyway?

There is little known about Michael G. Chivers, though we surmise that he belongs to the Western family known as Chives:

Chives
Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia, Chives have insect-repelling properties, which might extend toward repelling other pests. Shoggaths, for example. Or fanatical members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)!

But this is sheer speculation, so let us leave these airy regions and turn to the fellow's own vacuum-packed self-identification, which can be found on page 566 of Emanations: 2+ 2 = 5. Ah, here it is:

Michael G. Chivers is lives on the South Coast of England and collects fridge magnets.

Eh . . . "is lives"? What the feck does that mean? Something must be missing. Perhaps Chivers had actually written:

Michael G. Chivers is a member in good standing of the RCP who lives on the South Coast of England and collects fridge magnets.

Now that would make more sense. Except for the RCP detail. That is disappointing. I had thought that beneath him. How could you, Chivers?

But I still didn't know much about the man until I conducted some rather arduous research - I reached over to my book shelf, pulled out Emanations: Second Sight, and checked page 370 - and from these hard-won research results, I uncovered an entire sheet of information about the man. Except that I suspect all of the information there to be fraudulent. False. Fake. Untrue. Incorrect. Etc.

Let's see if that "unpatriotic rotten doctor commie rat" will have the audacity to show his traffic-cone-topped face on this blog of mine anymore.

Roger Scruton's Notes from Underground: A Scene

Amazon

I'm currently reading, on my iPad, Notes from Underground, a novel by the conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton about the twilight years of Communist Prague, and I came upon this passage, which occurs soon after the young protagonist has met an equally young, mysterious woman:

She was standing a pace away from me, her back to the chapel, her eyes fixed on the Nusle steps.

"Do you see that old woman?" she asked.

I turned my eyes in the direction of hers. The woman with the dog was coming down now, handing her body from step to step, gripping the rail and muttering.

"Like the poodle in Faust," she went on, "he comes in many forms."

"Who?"

"Mephistopheles. The spirit who always denies."

How would you feel about a woman you'd just met if she uttered those words to you? The protagonist is already in love, so we can imagine his feelings. I think such words would spark my interest if I weren't in love, and thrill me if I were.

But I'd be expected to like that sort of thing, wouldn't I?

Taking Exception to American Exceptionalism?

Walter McDougall
Familiar Photo

FPRI Notes

My old, paleoconservative history professor from UC Berkeley has posted an informative e-note on the origin of the familiar but puzzling concept "American Exceptionalism":

What does it mean to say the United States is exceptional? If it just means unique, then the claim is unexceptional because no two countries are exactly alike. If it just means that Americans have believed their country is special, then (as a British skeptic writes) there is "nothing exceptional about this exceptionalism. All great nations cherish national myths." If it means that the U.S.A. was exceptionally virtuous given its precocious dedication to civil and religious liberty, equality, justice, prosperity, social mobility, and peace and harmony with all nations, then ipso facto the U.S.A. is exceptionally vicious for falling so short of those ideals. If the term means rather that Americans are somehow exempted from the laws of entropy governing other nations -- that (as Bismarck reportedly quipped) "God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America" -- then such exceptionalism can only be proven sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, the very illusion that a nation is under divine dispensation may perversely inspire the pride that goeth before a fall ("thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God") or the many bad ends to which reckless adolescents are prone. Finally, if American Exceptionalism means that its power, values, and "indispensable" status render the United States exempt from the rules of behavior it makes and enforces on other nations, then enemies, neutrals, and allies alike are sure to push back.

One might get the impression that McDougall is skeptical of "American Exceptionalism." If so, one would be right!

For these reasons "exceptionalism" is more trouble and probably even more danger than it's worth: it either means nothing at all or altogether too much. But the principal reason to banish the term from historical discourse is that the icky, polysyllabic, Latinate moniker did not even exist until the mid-20th century! No Puritan colonist, no founding Patriot, no Civil War statesman, no 19th century poet, pastor, or propagandist employed the word. To be sure, most of them believed the United States to be an historic undertaking, even a "new order for the ages." But far from believing their nation to be an exception to the rules of nature governing other men and nations, they both hoped their example would transform the whole world and feared that a lack of republican virtue would doom their experiment. In neither case would Americans stand apart from the rest of the human race.

So . . . who coined this troubling, troublesome, risky expression? Not quite this guy:

Not until 1835 did a foreigner, Alexis de Tocqueville, catalogue the features of New World democracy and conclude: "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." Note, however, that he applied the term to Americans' position rather than to the people themselves, and argued that American institutions and values were the very opposite of universal. In any event, his adjectival usage had no echo and inspired no noun -- no "ism" -- among Americans themselves. Exceptionalism as some sort of birthright is an anachronism!

One might argue that this exceptional position places Americans themselves in an exceptional role -- and thus of course the opposite of universal -- but never mind. Yet if not Tocqueville, who then applied it to the American people? Not this guy either:

Flash forward to 1906 when another foreigner, German sociologist Werner Sombart, asked why the United States seemed unique among industrial, urban societies in that its working classes showed no interest in the ideology or politics of Socialism. He identified many reasons why American workers seemed content with capitalism, but nowhere did Sombart employ any word that could be fairly translated as exceptionalism. He referred instead to the "idiosyncrasies of the spiritual culture" (Eigenart der geistigen Kultur) or "American popular soul" (die Eigenarten der amerikanische Volksseele). But what was the source of this spirit? Must one hypothesize that it just dropped from the heavens "on the chosen people" (auf das ausserwählte Volk)? Not at all, he insisted, because the same entrepreneurial spirit could be found in London or Berlin. It was just purer and far more pervasive in the United States thanks to such factors as the Protestant ethic, democratic consensus, two-party system, high standard of living, social mobility, and safety-valve of an open frontier. For Sombart Americans occupied an extreme on the sociological spectrum, but were not exceptional, not "off the charts."

Idiosyncratic, extreme . . . but not exceptional. Where, then, did the expression come from?

The real origins of the notion of an exceptional United States lurk in the recondite disputations of the two greatest transnational movements in the early twentieth century: the Catholic Church and the Communist International. Both had reason to fear that Americans might be immune to their presumptively universal appeals.

Good Lord! Or not:

Ever since 1784, when Bishop John Carroll set up the first Catholic diocese in the United States, the Vatican displayed confusion about how to grow a doctrinal, hierarchical church in a mostly Protestant land that enjoyed religious freedom and material plenty. A century later European prelates grew alarmed by reports from American bishops about the erosion of doctrine and obedience among Catholic immigrants and their children. (European rabbis were equally alarmed about Jewish immigrants.) In 1899 Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, that condemned a heresy called Americanism, a name to which "there is no reason to take exception." The encyclical attributed this Americanism to the nation's revolutionary origins, individualism, Anglo-Saxon culture, liberalism, egalitarianism, and separation of Church and State, all of which tempted American Catholics to stray from the straight and narrow path.

That's it? Seems rather too little to attribute the concept of "American Exceptionalism" to Catholicism. This Communist debate, however, seems much more likely as the source:

Finally, in the 1920s, the American Communist Party leader Jay Lovestone rendered a diagnosis of American society that echoed those of Sombart and the Vatican. His purpose was to explain why his comrades' agitation and propaganda had achieved so little by way of organizing the factory workers of Pittsburgh or Detroit. The reason was, argued Lovestone, that capitalism in the United States was exceptionally productive and stable, which made it hard to "raise their consciousness," which meant the proletarian revolution would take much longer than elsewhere to develop. The report engendered discreet discussion, mostly in Russian journals, until Soviet dictator Josef Stalin anathematized the theory as a form of deviationism. Then Wall Street crashed and the American Communist Party coined the term, in . . . April 1930, in the form of an obituary. "The storm of the economic crisis in the United States," it proclaimed, "blew down the house of cards of American exceptionalism."

Hmmm . . . so there it is, a Communist coinage of the expression "American Exceptionalism." How ironic. I gather that in McDougall's view, "American Exceptionalism" was stillborn as a concept. But if so, how did this miscarriage of suchness come to be adopted by the mainstream?

Read the entire article to find out.

Princelings, Princelings . . . Whom to Believe?

Bo Xilai

Wikipedia

Most of us who keep up with the news have read more than we even want to know about Bo Xilai and China's so-called 'princelings' . . . so let's read some more. Eric X. Li, a venture capitalist in Shanghai who often writes for the Korea Herald, tells us in "The myth of the princelings in China" (May 6, 2012) that there's nothing truly amiss in contemporary China:

The Bo Xilai saga of power, wealth, corruption and murder has brought the issue of China’s princelings (offspring of the Communist Party's former and current senior leaders) to the front and center of the international discourse on contemporary China . . . . Many commentators, including some leading political analysts on China, are framing the princelings as if they are . . . influencing policies in their favor and pushing for promotions of candidates who represent their interests. There is no empirical evidence to support such a conceptual framework . . . . [T]hey are nothing like . . . the oligarchs of post-Soviet Russia . . . . Among the ones who are successful, many have indeed excelled on merit [and some have] moved up the ladder through apparently only hard work and merit . . . . [U]pward mobility, both political and economic, is the underlying force of China's vitality. The current Politburo, the country’s highest ruling body, consists of 25 members. Only five of them come from backgrounds of power. The remaining 20, including the president and the premier, come from completely ordinary families. In the larger Central Committee, those with privileged backgrounds account for a much smaller percentage . . . . In economics, if one goes down the list of China’s richest, a vast majority of them are entrepreneurs who started with nothing . . . . Chinese society in general is rather sanguine about the privileges of princelings and the newly rich alike. Perhaps it is a sign of maturity . . . . A healthy society exercises moderation and tolerance towards privilege as long as mobility is sufficient, which is certainly the case for contemporary China.

Well, that's all good to know, i.e., that Chinese society is largely a meritocracy, the Communist Party, the Politburo, and the Central Committee included. Mr. Li is so persuasive -- and an expert, too, as one who has undoubtedly risen on merit alone as a venture capitalist in Shanghai -- that we probably need not venture beyond his expertise in asking questions . . . but let's do it anyway. Minzin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, tells us in "The myth of Chinese meritocracy" (JoongAng Daily, May 17, 2012) that much is amiss in contemporary China:

Political scandals sometimes perform a valuable function in . . . . debunk[ing] political myths central to the legitimacy of some regimes . . . . One enduring political myth that went down with Bo [Xilai], the former Communist Party boss of Chongqing municipality, is the notion that the Party's rule is based on meritocracy . . . . Bo personified the Chinese concept of "meritocracy" -- well-educated, intelligent, sophisticated and charming (mainly to Western executives). But, after his fall, a very different picture emerged. Aside from his alleged involvement in assorted crimes, Bo was said to be a ruthless apparatchik, endowed with an outsize ego but no real talent. His record as a local administrator was mediocre . . . . Unfortunately, Bo's case is not the exception in China, but the rule. Contrary to the prevailing perception in the West (especially among business leaders), the current Chinese government is riddled with clever apparatchiks like Bo who have acquired their positions through cheating, corruption, patronage and manipulation . . . . [M]any Chinese officials use fake or dubiously acquired academic credentials to burnish their resumes. Because educational attainment is considered a measure of merit, officials scramble to obtain advanced degrees in order to gain an advantage in the competition for power . . . . Of the 250 members of provincial Communist Party standing committees, an elite group including party chiefs and governors, 60 claim to have earned PhDs . . . . [O]nly 10 of them completed their doctoral studies before becoming government officials . . . . If so many senior Chinese officials openly flaunt fraudulent or dubious academic degrees without consequences, one can imagine how widespread other forms of corruption must be . . . . [One] common measure used to judge a Chinese official's "merit" is his ability to deliver economic growth. On the surface, this may appear to be an objective yardstick. In reality, GDP growth is as malleable as an official's academic credentials [and i]nflating local growth numbers is so endemic that reported provincial GDP growth data, when added up, are always higher than the national growth data, a mathematical impossibility . . . . [A]s competition for promotion within the Chinese bureaucracy has escalated, even fake academic credentials and GDP growth records have become insufficient to advance one's career. What increasingly determines an official's prospects for promotion is his guanxi, or connections . . . . [P]atronage, not merit, has become the most critical factor in the appointment process. For those without guanxi, the only recourse is to purchase appointments and promotions through bribes . . . . [a] practice . . . called maiguan, literally "buying office" . . . . Given such systemic debasement of merit, few Chinese citizens believe that they are governed by the best and the brightest. But astonishingly, the myth of a Chinese meritocracy remains very much alive among Westerners who have encountered impressively credentialed officials like Bo. The time has come to bury it.

Whom to believe? Personally, I trust the venture capitalist in Shanghai, Mr. Eric X. Li, who's living, working, and investing in what Alan Greenspan might call China's 'exuberant' economy, rather than some elite fellow like Professor Minxin Pei, who's living, teaching, and writing columns in the United States, a corrupt country where, as Mr. Li notes, "advantages are even institutionalized, such as legacy admission programs at U.S. Ivy League universities"

An easy call . . .

Václav Havel: Living in Truth

Václav Havel
October 5, 1936 - December 18 2011

Salon

Havel was one of my heros though I know far less about his life and works than I ought. Life is short, my reading list long.

I paid more attention to him and his writings when I was living in Europe, between 1986 and 1995, though usually only what I came across in one of the many newspapers that I read back in those largely pre-internet days. He was in the news a great deal as Communism fell in Eastern Europe, so there was a lot on him as he moved from dissident prisoner to president of Czechoslovakia within a matter of months. I now have more access, due to the internet, but far less time, so I've read less of him in more recent years.

He died only a couple of weeks ago, as everyone knows, and I was moved to look for something appropriate to mark his passing, so when I found these words of his from a 2008 interview conducted by a fellow ex-dissident, Adam Michnik, in which Michnik asked Havel what advice he would give to a young person today on how to live, I had what I needed:

The basic imperative:

"To live in truth"

[This] has its tradition in Czech philosophy but basically has biblical roots -- it does not mean just the possession or communication of information. Because information, like a virus, circulates in the air so one person may absorb more and another one less. Truth, however, is a different matter because we guarantee it with our own self. Truth is based on responsibility. And that is an imperative that is valid in every age. Obviously, it takes slightly different forms today. Luckily, you don’t have to hang portraits of a Havel, or a Klaus or a Kaczyński in the shop windows anymore and of course we no longer live under totalitarian pressure -- but that doesn't mean we've won. We still need what I refer to as an "existential revolution" even though it might look different in different places.

But basically, what matters is that you have to stand up for what you believe is the truth. (Adam Michnik, "After the Velvet, an Existential Revolution?" Gazeta Wyborcza, November 20, 2008)

To live in truth. A high calling, not easy to harken to since one might also have to die for truth, but Havel lived this imperative despite the risk, and so should we.

Requiescat In Pace, Havel. You've earned it if anyone has.

Menand Remembers Kennan

George F. Kennan

Pinnacle of Power
1952

Photo: AKG Pressebild-Ullstein Bild/Granger Collection

The New Yorker

Another fascinating article on George Kennan appeared recently, this one in The New Yorker, written by Louis Menand and titled "Getting Real: George F. Kennan's Cold War" (November 14, 2011), and it's even longer than Kissinger's article, or seems longer, and provides a fuller view of Kennan's life. Unlike Kissinger, Menand isn't concerned with defending his own legacy, for he never served in government making policy at the pinnacle of power. He's a Harvard professor of literature, not a political scientist. But he offers an interesting point about Kennan as the author of America's "Containment Policy" -- Kennan resented the attribution despite his seminal "Long Telegram" and his follow-up article, signed "X," published in Foreign Affairs:

Kennan's second major Cold War treatise [the first being the "Long Telegram"] was the 1947 article for Foreign Affairs, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." The essay began as a paper written for Forrestal. In many respects, it was an eloquent re-statement of the Long Telegram, and it is famous for a single sentence: "It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

This gave a name to American Cold War policy, and, with a few tweaks and many exceptions, what Kennan had called "containment" remained American policy until the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Wherever there was "Communist aggression," the United States pushed back. As long as the Communists remained in their box, the United States did not (except rhetorically) seek to intervene. And, as Gaddis says, even Reagan, despite talk of liberation and "rollback," stayed largely true to containment policy.

The article was signed with an "X" because Kennan did not want it to seem that, as a State Department employee, he was stating policy, but his identity was quickly revealed, and for the rest of his career he was known as the author of containment. He had reasons to resent this.

Menand explains the reasons underlying Kennan's resentment:

[A]s someone who proposed policy rather than administered it, Kennan was susceptible to the standard fate of policy intellectuals. Either he could get credit for providing a rationale for what was already the government's de-facto policy or his recommendations could be harnessed to purposes he did not endorse.

Kennan's fate was to have his idea of containment conflated with the Truman Doctrine's promise in March 1947 of military aid "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." This might sound like containment if the outside pressure were Soviet Russia, but Truman made a general call to arms, and that was apparently not Kennan's intention:

Kennan was appalled when he read the draft of Truman's speech, and for the rest of his life he protested that he had meant containment to be a policy of selective confrontation, and its means to be diplomatic and economic, not military. But he was construed otherwise.

One wonders if Kennan doth protest too much. Knowing Russian history as well as he did and having had personal experience of the Soviets from his time in the diplomatic service in Moscow, did he really believe that diplomatic and economic confrontation alone would contain the Soviet Union? Absent the back-up threat of military confrontation? Diplomacy without strength offers merely a comforting blanket woven of words in a Hobbesian world of naked power, and economic sanctions alone would make a Bolshevik laugh. Kennan must have known these things. Perhaps he would not have pressed military confrontation in places like Vietnam, but one wonders if his resentment had less to do with foreign policy disagreement and more to do with the doors that closed him off from the corridors of power.

Kennan's life was no tragedy, but he did suffer the melancholy consequences of having been at the pinnacle of power and influence relatively early in his career, only to see his personal influence decline as he drifted further and further from the center of power in a long life of protest, like the anonymous voice in T.S. Eliot's poem Prufrock: "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."

Kennan lived to be 101 and died in 2005.

Fallenness as the Human Condition?

Fallenness?

(First Things)

A couple of days ago in a comment on the common Muslim dismissal of Christian "inconsistency" -- namely, the charge that Christians are inconsistent in granting legitimacy to a secular sphere when they ought to realize that God is ruler over all -- I wrote the following in response to a point that I recalled in the writings of Seyyed Hossein Nasr:

Yes, I recall his criticism of Christian 'dualism' -- as I think he called it -- echoing the typically Muslim critique of Christianity's 'inconsistency' in distinguishing between the sacred and the secular as two legitimate spheres.

In my opinion, the Muslim critique radically underestimates what Christians call human fallenness. Integralist visions always do underestimate our human capacity for evil and attempt to construct an ideal society subsumed under one big idea. The result is always Hell on Earth.

I suppose there's much more that should be said about this, but I will simply cite a bit from other thinkers who take 'fallenness' seriously, though they use the expression "original sin." Edward T. Oakes, in a November 1998 article for First Things, "Original Sin: A Disputation," accepts that the critics of original sin have a point in their criticism of the negative consequences that at times result from a belief in original sin, but then argues that this very harm is evidence of original sin's validity and that worse harm results from a commitment to what is called "progressivism":

It might sound intolerably paradoxical to say this, but it is precisely the very harm that sometimes comes from the doctrine of original sin that proves its validity. This is a point made time and again by Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish emigré intellectual now at the University of Chicago, author of a three-volume history of Marxist thought and a man who therefore knows something of the harm visited upon the human community by doctrines of progressivism. In his recent book of essays, Modernity on Endless Trial, he shrewdly notes how this third objection to original sin can be turned into a supporting argument . . . .

The "harm" referred that results from belief in original sin varies from a morbid obsession with one's individual guilt to a fatalistic acceptance of injustice in society, and Oakes goes on to cite Kolakowski's concession on this point, along with his observation that the denial of fallenness has even worse results:

The possible disastrous effects of the concept of original sin on our psychological condition and on our cultural life are undeniable [because of its use to keep people “in their place” and not alter unjust social structures]; and so are the disastrous effects of the opposing doctrine, with its implication that our perfectibility is limitless, and that our predictions of ultimate synthesis or total reconciliation can be realized. However, the fact that both affirmation and rejection of the concept of original sin have emerged as powerful destructive forces in our history is one of many that testify in favor of the reality of original sin. In other words, we face a peculiar situation in which the disastrous consequences of assenting to either of two incompatible theories confirm one of them and testify against its rival.

I take it that Kolakowski means that if a belief in fallenness has such consequences as a morbid obsession with personal guilt or a fatalistic acceptance of social injustice, such improper reactions are only to be expected of fallen creatures, but that the consequences of affirming human perfectability are even worse because such an affirmation raises the standard of expectations -- both individual and social -- far beyond what human beings are capable of and results in such utopian monstrosities as the Communist totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, which tried to scale the heights of heaven upon a mountain of corpses. In my opinion, Islamist integralism leads to the same result.

I'm indebted to my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, for the link to the First Things article. Bill has been discussing several of the logical conundrums confronting those who take original sin seriously, and he would be well worth reading on the subject, though I've had too little time lately to do so myself, being immersed in teaching and editing.

Major Fallacy: Nazis Deceived by Nonexistent Man With Qualities

Major William Martin

(Image from New York Times)

Jennet Conant, in "The Man Who Never Was," written for the New York Times (May 6, 2010), reviews Ben Macintyre's true story of the fictional Major William Martin, a British military man who didn't exist but who fooled the German high command by a clever ruse. The invented "Major Martin" was a corpse disguised as a fake courier carrying on his body papers outlining the real plan of invasion by way of Sicily disguised as a false plan and a false plan of invasion by way of Greece diguised as the real plan. This corpse, "who would wash up on the Spanish coast, was a complete fraud, but the lies he would carry from Room 13 of the British Admiralty all the way to Hitler's desk would help win the war."

The story is stranger than fiction because it began as fiction but grew to reality, initiated by an idea listed in a now-famous "Trout Fisher" memo, a document attributed at the time to Director of Naval Intelligence John Henry Godfrey but now known to have been written by another fellow working for British intelligence. This memo appeared early on, in September 1939, merely three weeks into the war:

"The Trout Fisher," said the memo, in that peculiarly sporting style that only the English can pull off, "casts patiently all day. He frequently changes his venue and his lures." Although issued under Godfrey's name, it was most likely the work of Ian Fleming, whose gift for intelligence planning and elaborate plots, most of which were too far-fetched to ever implement, later served him so well in his James Bond series. The memo was "a masterpiece of corkscrew thinking," Mac­intyre writes, laying out 51 schemes for deceiving the Germans at sea, including one to drop soccer balls coated with phosphorus to attract submarines, and another to set adrift tins of booby-trapped treats. Far down on the list of suggestions, No. 28 -- "not a very nice one," the author(s) conceded -- proposed using a corpse, dressed as an airman, carrying spurious secret documents.

That this suggestion was in turn based on an idea used in a detective novel by Basil Thomson, an ex-policeman and former tutor to the King of Siam who made his name as a spy catcher in World War I, only adds to the fantastic quality of Macintyre's entertaining tale. First Fleming, an ardent bibliophile, dusted off this quaint literary ploy; then the trout-fishing admiral, who always appreciated a good yarn, had the cunning to know that "the best stories are also true," and dispatched his team to turn fiction into reality. In many ways it was a very old story at that, as indicated by the operation's first code name, "Trojan Horse." A bit of gallows humor led to the plan's name being changed to the rather tasteless Operation Mincemeat.

The double-bluff worked. The Germans fell for it. But the story is even more fascinating, incorporating one Ewen Montagu, and his younger brother, Ivor, brilliant scions of a Jewish banking dynasty who attended Cambridge and there not only invented the rules for table tennis but also founded the Cheese Eaters League . . . though Ivor also became a Communist and Soviet spy who kept a watchful eye on his older brother as the M15 kept their watchful eyes on him. Unaware of Ivor's scrutiny as Soviet spy, which perhaps posed little danger anyway, Ewen took the bones of the corpse idea laid out in Fleming's "Trout Fisher" and put 'mincemeat' upon those bones, for he gave the ruse its name, "Operation Mincemeat," and helped work out the realistic details of Major Martin's fictional life. Ewen later wrote a book in 1953 on the successful operation, The Man Who Never Was, which was dramatized as a movie in 1956.

Truly a story thus even stranger than stranger than fiction . . .

Regret Over Missing November 9, 1989: The Whinge of History?

Professor Niall Ferguson

(Image from Wikipedia)

Professor Niall Ferguson, a Harvard historian who knows a lot more about money than I do, also knows a lot more about history than I, for he knows that the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrated for its twentieth anniversary this past week, was not the world-shaking event that it's commonly thought to be:

Was the fall of the Berlin Wall not really History with a capital H, but just news with a lower-case n -- a wonderful story for journalists but, 20 years on, actually not that big a deal? Could it be that what happened 10 years earlier, in the annus mirabilis 1979, was the real historical turning point?

Ferguson may sound as though he's merely raising the question here, but he's already persuaded himself, or he wouldn't be writing this article, "The Year the World Really Changed" (November 16, 2009), for Time Magazine.

So when did the world really change? Ten years earlier:

[T]he events of 10 years earlier -- in 1979 -- surely have a better claim to being truly historic. Just think what was happening in the world 30 years ago. The Soviets began their policy of self-destruction by invading Afghanistan. The British started the revival of free-market economics in the West by electing Margaret Thatcher. Deng Xiaoping set China on a new economic course by visiting the United States and seeing for himself what the free market can achieve. And, of course, the Iranians ushered in the new era of clashing civilizations by overthrowing the shah and proclaiming an Islamic Republic.

He has a point -- or, more precisely, four of them, which he emphatically expounds upon:

Today it is the Americans who now find themselves in Afghanistan, fighting the sons of the people they once armed. It is the free-market model of Thatcher and Reagan that seems to lie in ruins, in the wake of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression. Meanwhile, Deng's heirs are rapidly gaining on a sluggish American hyperpower, with Goldman Sachs forecasting that China's GDP could be the biggest in the world by 2027. Finally, the most terrifying legacy of 1979 remains the radical Islamism that inspires not only Iran's leaders, but also a complex and only partly visible network of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers around the world.

Ferguson is obviously a pessimist, intent on proving that the world is far worse off today than twenty years ago and that it is worse because of watershed events thirty years ago. But I'm willing to consider his position for we have something in common. Both of us missed the breaching of the Berlin Wall, a gap in our life experiences that I, for my part, have long regretted and that Ferguson, for his part, initially admits to having regretted:

What exactly was the historical significance of Nov. 9, 1989? Having spent much of the summer of that year in Berlin, I have long bitterly regretted that I was not there to join in the party the night the wall came down. I mean, what kind of an aspirant historian misses history being made?

But rather than wallow in the mire of bottomless regret, he constructs a ladder of interlocking counterfactual questions and climbs out. I should perhaps borrow his ladder and climb out as well.

I can then stop kicking myself for going to bed instead of to Berlin that Tuebingen night of November 9, 1989, for like Ferguson, I didn't miss history after all.

Joshua Stanton: Red-Baiter?

Professor Elaine Kim

UC Berkeley

(Image from East Bay Express)

Robert Koehler of the The Marmot's Hole has posted a short blog entry siding with Joshua Stanton of One Free Korea against Christine Ahn, who accuses Stanton of 'red-baiting' her in having called her a "North Korean apologist" several years ago.

The accusation comes in an article favorable to Ahn published in the East Bay Express, one of the papers that I used to read for free back in my Berkeley days and now discover that I can read for free online . . . not that I'm much inclined to.

And just to ensure that you get both sides of this story, you can read Joshua's so-called 'red-baiting' of Ahn from several years ago as well as his recent response.

The East Bay Express article isn't just about Ahn, but also about several left-leaning activists pushing for peace and negotiations with North Korea, including Professor Elaine Kim, coordinator of UC Berkeley's Asian American Studies Department, who tells us:

Many Americans also may be unaware that North Korea's economy was doing quite well during the 1960s and 1970s, even surpassing that of its southern neighbor. But a reduction in trade with the Soviet Union, and the impact of the American embargo and sanctions, helped freeze North Korea's development. "The reason they don't have energy for all their infrastructure is . . . the US and its allies who embargo them don't allow them to trade with anybody the US trades with," said Kim. As a result, for example, there are streetlights, but no electricity in them. Many North Koreans are extremely slight and seemingly malnourished. "This is a crime," she noted. "Talk about human rights -- this is a crime against humanity that was allowed to happen. And they're trying to say that it's because Kim Jong Il is a dictator and wants to keep everybody enthralled, that's why it's like that?" she asked, incredulously. "Hello! Let's have some reality here."

Professor Kim may be well-intentioned, and I'm no expert on North Korea, but even I can see manifest flaws in her argument just from my having kept up with the news in the daily papers for the past 30 years. The North's economy in the 60s and 70s was being subsidized by the Soviet Union, so it looked as though it were "doing quite well" when it in fact was decaying like all communist economies modeled on the Soviet one. Moreover, it was already clearly declining in the 80s despite continued Soviet subsidies. Finally, when the Soviet subsidies stopped after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, the North Korean economy didn't just 'freeze' in its development, it immediately went into a very steep decline and effectively collapsed despite the North Korean state's coercive power for mobilizing the workforce. This collapse is not because "the US and its allies . . . don't allow . . . [the North] to trade with anybody the US trades with," a statement that is obviously incorrect, for North Korea has extensive trade with China, one of America's biggest trading partners. As for the lack of electricity to the North's city streetlights, a bit more of it might be available for city lighting if the electrical grid weren't constructed primarily to serve the ruling elite, whose mansions receive much of the available power. And as for malnourishment, this is due to North Korea's state-run agricultural sector, a Soviet-model system that just doesn't work and that has fundamentally collapsed. The North could feed itself if it allowed a free market in agriculture, but the ruling elite isn't willing to relinquish any control for fear of losing complete control. And yes, it is "because Kim Jong Il is a dictator and wants to keep everybody enthralled." Let's do "have some reality here."

Joshua Stanton may be brusque in his statements about North Korea, but he offers an honest reality check.

Park Wan-suh on the 'Democratic Youth League'

Park Wan-suh

(Image from Dong-A Ilbo)

At the onset of the Korean War, Park Wan-suh, just out of high school and naive about politics, felt torn between North and South, even when she saw the refugees streaming through Seoul from north of the city, and she told herself:

Maybe they were evil landowners, or from the families of police who had led the crackdown on leftists, and had been terrified even before anything actually happened. (Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, page 213)

In the very next line -- albeit from what we later learn was bitter experience -- she castigates such thinking:

Even though I didn't want the Korean People's Army to invade, not even as an idle fantasy, my thinking had been quite affected by leftist ideology. (page 213)

Reality hit hard when the North took Seoul for three months, enabling the Democratic Youth League to run Seoul National University, where she had recently started attending classes:

The Democratic Youth League ruled the school. Their "democratic" study method was to take turns reading Soviet Communist Party history or a full newspaper page of Leader Kim Il Sung's teaching, and then treat it with fawning adulation. Nothing is more exhausting than having to offer glowing praise when it doesn't flow naturally. I had the marked sensation of my vital energy evaporating. Despite reading the same text over and over, we had to maintain the peak of enthusiasm we'd shown the first time. The new lessons sounded no different, but we were expected to add a fresh spark to our fervor. Absurd. Even if that had been possible, it would have been a fraud. I couldn't carry it off unless I muttered to myself what an idiot this leader was if he was so taken with charade. (pages 227-228)

As for 'real' subjects taught in the occupied university, Park remarks:

The Democratic Youth League lessons consisted of endless study of the obvious, things that elementary-school kids would have understood the first time around. (page 228)

But lessons weren't the point:

Our major task was to encourage others to come back to school. Each of us received several of our fellow students' dossiers, including the hand-drawn maps to their homes within them. Track down the absentees, we were told. Urge them to return. I learned later that students were frequently rounded up with this tactic and sent to the army . . . . [but] I ignored the instructions. (page 227)

She means the male students, of course. When the South's forces retook Seoul after its three months in Communist hands, young men spilled out of hiding . . . but not all of them:

[T]he full revelation of how many had been taken away or killed defied our wildest imagination. The scale was too immense, too cruel . . . . What the communists had done was so outrageous that a barrage of complaints came forth. (pages 231-232)

Unfortunately for Park, she was rounded up in the group of 'leftists' to suffer punishment in spite of her reluctance to cooperate with the Democratic Youth League and despite her 'inner resistance', for her family was mistakenly believed to be high-level leftists, and Park endured a series of harrowing interrogations at the hands of anticommunists that might have turned her truly communist if she hadn't experienced its stultifying, horrifying omnipresence during the North's three-month occupation of Seoul.

Her brother, conscripted into the North's army, apparently saw even worse -- for when he escaped in the chaos of the North's retreat, he returned home a physical, emotional wreck -- but whatever he did see was merely hinted at in Park's book, so I can also only hint at it here.

Bernstein on Kolakowski's "Big Lie"

Richard Bernstein

(Master Media Speakers Bureau)

I guess that mainstream media ain't dead yet, or I wouldn't be learning so much from it. Yesterday was Ignatius applying Dostoyevsky to Putin; today is Bernstein applying Kolakowski to Iran.

I first read Leszek Kolakowski in Martin Jay's U.C. Berkeley seminar nearly 30 years ago, and except for excerpts since then, I've read little . . . though I keep promising myself to read more because every time that I read words that he wrote, I feel that I've learned something very important, such as what he said about "the big lie" -- which Richard Bernstein summarized a couple of days ago in his New York Times "Letter from America" column, "In Tehran, Shades of Tiananmen" (July 1, 2009):

Years ago, the Polish-born philosopher Leszek Kolakowski explained the remarkable adherence of totalitarian dictators to the big lie, which Mr. Kolakowski distinguished from the ordinary political mendacity -- an excellent recent example of which was the claim by Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina that he was enjoying a respite by hiking in the Appalachian Mountains when he was with his mistress in Argentina.

The ordinary political lie, in Mr. Kolakowski's view, didn't seek to erase "the distinction between truth and falsity," while the totalitarian big lie does. It defines truth as what the holders of power say it is, and, in this sense, as Mr. Kolakowski wrote in an 1983 article in Commentary Magazine, it is "the very core of a political system, the heart of a new civilization."

"By training people in this confusion," Mr. Kolakowski wrote, "and by inoculating them to believe that nothing is true in itself" it will "produce a new 'socialist man,' devoid of will and of moral resistance."

Kolakowski was speaking of Soviet-style socialism of the totalitarian sort, but Bernstein wonders if the concept can be extended further, a question stemming partly from his conversation with a Yale history professor:

"The Iranians are telling medium-sized lies," Timothy Snyder, a professor of East European history at Yale said in a conversation this week. The main thrust of the Iranian propaganda is to blame external enemies for internal problems, a practice, Mr. Snyder said, that was first used on a grand scale in mid-19th-century Europe, well before the era of total thought control.

Still, there seem to be more than faint echoes of the classic big lie in the case of Mr. Ahmadinejad and the actions of the security services.

"One reason the lie has to be big," Mr. Snyder said, "is that people will feel that if their leaders must have a lot of confidence to tell a lie that big, they are either crazy or they have a powerful security force behind them."

This doesn't mean that the lies Iran’s leaders are telling are going to work. Indeed there are plenty of signs that they won't. At the same time, events in Iran have proved that the leaders are eager to control information and they do have a powerful and ruthless security force behind them.

I wonder if the big lie can ever truly work anymore. Contemporary media is making the control of information significantly more difficult. Even something as 'silly' as "twittering" turned out to play a serious role in relaying information through short "tweets." Imagine how much more the young Chinese today would know about the killing of demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing 20 years ago if the new media that we have now had been available then. I don't think that any totalitarian system can erase "the distinction between truth and falsity" anymore because such a system requires "absolute control over every living soul" -- as Leonard Cohen puts it in "The Future" -- and that sort of system cannot be maintained without enormous expense of wealth, time, and energy against the tides of democracy.

As for those of us who belong to the more sophisticated West, we disdain the crude attempts at an erasure of "the distinction between truth and falsity" used in Soviet Russia, Communist China, or Islamist Iran, for we've developed a far subtler, much more efficient means: a quotidian relativism of everyday life.

Paradoxically, then, the West is best. Relatively speaking.

Dostoyevsky: "to set up heaven on earth"

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

with

Tower of Babel in Background

'a little heaven on earth'

Marten Jacobszoon Heemskerk van Veen

(Image from Wikipedia)

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, also called Alyosha, is the 'hero' of Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. At the age of 19, he opts for the life of a monk, an existential choice that Dostoyevski describes in a very intriguing manner:

I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped, had not finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his studies is true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a great injustice. I'll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered upon this path only because, at that time, it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to light. Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch -- that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them. The path Alyosha chose was a path going in the opposite direction, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift achievement. As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast to the poor and follow Me, if thou wouldst be perfect." (Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov (New York: Random House, 1950), pages 25-26)

Had Alyosha turned atheist, he would have been a very dangerous man, for that turn would have turned him from a revolutionary of the soul to a social revolutionary and turned his spiritual energies from seeking perfection of his own soul to seeking perfection of all society. Socialism of the late 19th century was often a violent doctrine, looking back for inspiration to the French Revolution, and though Dostoyevsky does not make explicit in this passage that Alyosha would have turned to violence in pursuit of a socialist society, such might be implicit given that Alyosha is described as the sort of passionate young man "seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, [even] life itself," for his aim of perfection.

Dostoyevsky's insight into the religious impulse behind revolutionary socialism has since become nearly a sociological cliché -- the secularization of eschatology -- but it remains an interesting inquiry. My own thoughts on this matter, partly impelled by Dostoyevsky's depiction of Alyosha, turn from the moment of a revolutionary grab for power to the process of constructing utopia, the Tower of Babel being built "to set up heaven on earth." Such utopian visions always turn to dystopian realities because the search for perfection, when no longer directed toward one's individual soul, where it would have better experienced the bitter, personal truth of human imperfectibility, directs itself instead toward a perfection of mankind believed attainable through constructing a society so totally regulated that it exerts ideological force upon the innermost being of each individual. This never works, of course, for no social mechanisms can perfectly construct, or reconstruct, the soul. Human evil is ineradicable by merely human means, so the mechanisms must be applied with ever-greater pressure toward bending human nature to the revolutionary will, a repression that never totally succeeds and must therefore become ever more repressive . . . except that the revolutionaries, being merely human themselves, come to apply the machinery not for the explicit aim of human perfection but in the implicit interest of personal power. They grow cynical and accept bribes but must constantly extol the revolution and revolutionary purity -- and thereby only succeed in constructing a totally dishonest society. Thus does the misdirected quest for perfection result in deeper corruption.

Gary Saul Morson also has some thoughts on this theme in Dostoyevsky's writings.

Finding Fraud Behind Facade: Google-Mapping North Korea

"A Glimpse at North Korea"

Glimpse of? Glance at?

(Image from Wall Street Journal)

Although I've used Google Maps to locate my family home back in the Ozarks and check the unimpressive elevations of some of the local knobs and high points around my hometown and even to look at some of the old swimming holes in the creeks where I used to play, I'm not truly proficient.

Not like Curtis Melvin.

Melvin is a doctoral student at George Mason University who uses Google Earth to download photographs of sites in North Korea.

Sites like the palatial mansion of North Korea's 'Beloved Leader' Kim Jong-il:

The vast complexes of Mr. Kim and other North Korean leaders are visible, with palatial homes, pools, even a water slide . . . . Mr. Melvin says the images also make clear the gulf between the lives of Mr. Kim and his impoverished people. "Once you start mapping the power plants and substations and wires, you can connect the infrastructure with the elite compounds," Mr. Melvin says. "And then you see towns that have no power supply at all." (Ramstad, "Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide")

We've long known about this sort of thing in North Korea, but looking at the images gives focus to one's anger at an elite that lives in huge mansions and passes its leisure time on enormous playgrounds as the common people starve because the country can mass produce only empty rhetoric about its egalitarian paradise.

For the visual evidence, go to the slideshow, and take a look there at the elite's water slide (Nr. 3), at Kim Jong-il's own personal golf course (Nr. 7), and at one or another of King Kim's palatial homes (Nr. 8).

You can see all this and more by way of Evan Ramstad's article "Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide: Citizen Spies Lift North Korea's Veil," which appears in the Wall Street Journal's May 22nd issue. How do Curtis Melvin and his band of citizen spies create these maps? Ramstad tells us:

Mr. Melvin is at the center of a dozen or so citizen snoops who have spent the past two years filling in the blanks on the map of one of the world's most secretive countries. Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts, they affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe. The result is an annotated North Korea of rocket-launch sites, prison camps and elite palaces on white-sand beaches. (Ramstad, "Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide")

Mr. Melvin is an astute observer who notices details in unexpected ways and uses these to fill in his map:

The recent report of Mr. Kim at the hydroelectric station in Wonsan, for example, showed Mr. Kim looking at a painting of the complex. Mr. Melvin studied the painting, noticing it depicted a unique pattern of roads. He then spotted the roads on the satellite image, along with the giant pipes, and added the station to his map. (Ramstad, "Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide")

Mr. Melvin and his associates call what they do "democratized intelligence." They are accomplishing some of the more important work in what is being done among the bloggers and other internet users all over the world who are engaged in unofficial distributed intelligence work.

You can learn more about Mr. Melvin's project by going to his website, North Korean Economy Watch, which I have only just learned about through Sonagi's report over at the Marmot's fine blog -- so a big hat tip to Sonagi, the Marmot, Joshua Stanton, Evan Ramstad, Curtis Melvin and all those involved in exposing the fraud behind the facade in North Korea.

Now if we can just persuade South Korea's 'progressives' to look through this 'telescope' and see the truth.

In Search of Lost Time Lost...

À la recherche du temps perdu

Marcel Proust

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've occasionally posted entries on martial arts expert and memoirist Jacques Sandulescu, a Romanian who at 16 years old was abducted by Soviet troops and sent to a work camp in the coal fields of the Ukraine's Donbas region.

Eventually, after tremendous suffering but also encounters with kindhearted Russians and Ukrainians, he escaped despite horrific injuries from a mine collapse and made his way to the States where he ultimately met the writer Annie Gottlieb and lived happily ever after. Annie relates a recent anecdote. The two of them were watching a History Channel program about Hitler, which set Annie to thinking about the life that Jacques might have led if the politics of fascism and then communism had not erupted in all their enormity. Looking at the image of Hitler onscreen performing a "spittle-spewing oratory," Annie got angry:

I said, "See that sonofabitch? He's the one who destroyed your world. If he hadn't started the war, Stalin might have stayed put. You would have been the mayor of [your town], you would have owned [a large tract of land] . . ."

J said, "But I never would've met you!"

At that Romanian's romantic words, Annie melted: "Awwww. An armful of WWII. Beats roses."

But Jacques is getting on in years, his hardscrabble life has taken its toll, and he gets confused sometimes . . . yet remains alert even in his confusion, as Annie shows:

A: Where are you going?

J: (trying to get up from his wheelchair) To the phone.

A: Who do you want to call?

J: (looking at me like I'm supposed to know) My mother!

A: I'm sorry, baby, your mother died a long time ago.

J: (not missing a beat) Then the phone call won't cost anything.

I hope that I'm that alert when I grow great in years and dimmed in memory.

At the moment, however, I have a lot of grading to do, so I'm breaking off for now. Meanwhile, here's a touching video that also concerns memory, My Name is Lisa, a short story of about six and a half minutes that won third place in some video competition and that both saddens and uplifts.