Derek B. Miller's Blog, page 4
March 7, 2022
Seven Thoughts on Geopolitics
A scholar at The Graduate Institute in Geneva, where I did my doctorate (summa cum laude, thank you very much), posted these seven points on LinkedIn.
I believe they constitute the conventional wisdom among certain intellectuals. I'm a different kind and I do think it comes down to personality, not only analysis. My responses are below.
HIS MAIN POINTS:
1. "Cool heads and sober judgement" are critical ingredients for analysing an ongoing war; academia can provide a foundation for sober judgement about the war in Ukraine.
2. Militarising Europe is dangerous and poses significant risks for the post-Second World War European project that has shaped the regions stability and prosperity.
3. European economies have been weaponised, this is why efforts to end the war must include economic disarmament.
4. So far, the United States has drawn the most significant strategic wins from the war in Ukraine.
5. When preparing for peace, Western leaders need to be reflective about their own actions that stimulated the conditions for this war, especially by normalising foreign intervention.
6. There will be no peace without China: It is the only country with leverage over Russia at this point.
7. We have reached the future: Climate change, population growth, pandemics, geopolitical shifts and scientific revolutions are now happening all at once. Current institutions are not ready for handling this complexity, and this is why we need to rethink and redesign the institutions for an era of rapid and deep transformation.
MY REPLIES:
1. We are not trying to merely analyze an ongoing war. We are looking to win one. While I too agree with Yoda that anger clouds judgement, academia has generally proved timid, critical, insulated, and unwilling to give operational advice – i.e. recommendations for courses of action. I know this from 10 years at UNIDIR where we had to pull academics kicking and screaming out of their enclaves where there opinions might have moral consequences.
2. Militarizing Europe is the only way to protect it from authoritarian and expansionist countries, like Russia, that literally want to annex other sovereign states. The post-WWII project was indeed aspirational towards stability and prosperity, but those exist within a system that is able to maintain itself. That includes (but is not limited to) military preparedness.
3. One of the greatest surprises and brilliant tactical moves against Russia has been the weaponization of economic and soft power. Indeed, should this become scaled back, Russia will be invited back into the fold. I don’t think there’s much debate about that (e.g. SWIFT, Mastercard and Visa, travel, etc.) But things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
4. The world is now waking up to what a true global disorder will look like if there is no Pax Americana. Obama was negligent in resisting Putin, and Trump was a full collaborator (and remains one). America has not instigated this but now even the Russophiles in the GOP are starting to realize that isolationism won’t work. NATO was meant to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” The Germans need to perk up a bit more and will in time, but those other two goals could not be more clearly needed.
5. The Kremlin is working very hard (here’s a great example: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdb5...) to push the argument that Western foreign interventions made this seem reasonable. They didn’t. That is simply Russian propaganda. The worst example of Western intervention in the last 25 years was the U.S./British decision to invade Iraq to remove Saddam based on lies. Even in that case, however, the UN resolutions had been maintaining no fly zones in northern and southern Iraq since about April of 1991 (!) because Saddam had murdered over 100,000 people (mostly Kurds, Shiittes and Marsh Arabs) in the uprisings against him after the war, and because he had never stopped trying to attach planes; foster international terrorist networks, etc. Likewise, the U.S. never intended (and didn’t) annex the country.
6. China is driven by the Legalist tradition more than Communist ideology and — in a nutshell — China will do whatever is good for China at all times and forever. It wants Taiwan and it will use this crisis to its benefit. Whether that makes it learn towards or away from peace remains to be seen and that depends on whether Putin is a worthwhile investment.
7. Current institutions are already being aggressively eroded by American negligence, Chinese hostility, European technocrats, and a general malaise all across Geneva and Brussels. They will indeed need to be reconceptualized and the mechanisms re-built, but we live in a world without serious architects right now and if Geneva is going to be useful as anything other than a place to drink after skiing, it needs to turn out students and leaders who think bigger than the problems — not people who plan to slot in and cash out.
Onward.
I believe they constitute the conventional wisdom among certain intellectuals. I'm a different kind and I do think it comes down to personality, not only analysis. My responses are below.
HIS MAIN POINTS:
1. "Cool heads and sober judgement" are critical ingredients for analysing an ongoing war; academia can provide a foundation for sober judgement about the war in Ukraine.
2. Militarising Europe is dangerous and poses significant risks for the post-Second World War European project that has shaped the regions stability and prosperity.
3. European economies have been weaponised, this is why efforts to end the war must include economic disarmament.
4. So far, the United States has drawn the most significant strategic wins from the war in Ukraine.
5. When preparing for peace, Western leaders need to be reflective about their own actions that stimulated the conditions for this war, especially by normalising foreign intervention.
6. There will be no peace without China: It is the only country with leverage over Russia at this point.
7. We have reached the future: Climate change, population growth, pandemics, geopolitical shifts and scientific revolutions are now happening all at once. Current institutions are not ready for handling this complexity, and this is why we need to rethink and redesign the institutions for an era of rapid and deep transformation.
MY REPLIES:
1. We are not trying to merely analyze an ongoing war. We are looking to win one. While I too agree with Yoda that anger clouds judgement, academia has generally proved timid, critical, insulated, and unwilling to give operational advice – i.e. recommendations for courses of action. I know this from 10 years at UNIDIR where we had to pull academics kicking and screaming out of their enclaves where there opinions might have moral consequences.
2. Militarizing Europe is the only way to protect it from authoritarian and expansionist countries, like Russia, that literally want to annex other sovereign states. The post-WWII project was indeed aspirational towards stability and prosperity, but those exist within a system that is able to maintain itself. That includes (but is not limited to) military preparedness.
3. One of the greatest surprises and brilliant tactical moves against Russia has been the weaponization of economic and soft power. Indeed, should this become scaled back, Russia will be invited back into the fold. I don’t think there’s much debate about that (e.g. SWIFT, Mastercard and Visa, travel, etc.) But things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
4. The world is now waking up to what a true global disorder will look like if there is no Pax Americana. Obama was negligent in resisting Putin, and Trump was a full collaborator (and remains one). America has not instigated this but now even the Russophiles in the GOP are starting to realize that isolationism won’t work. NATO was meant to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” The Germans need to perk up a bit more and will in time, but those other two goals could not be more clearly needed.
5. The Kremlin is working very hard (here’s a great example: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdb5...) to push the argument that Western foreign interventions made this seem reasonable. They didn’t. That is simply Russian propaganda. The worst example of Western intervention in the last 25 years was the U.S./British decision to invade Iraq to remove Saddam based on lies. Even in that case, however, the UN resolutions had been maintaining no fly zones in northern and southern Iraq since about April of 1991 (!) because Saddam had murdered over 100,000 people (mostly Kurds, Shiittes and Marsh Arabs) in the uprisings against him after the war, and because he had never stopped trying to attach planes; foster international terrorist networks, etc. Likewise, the U.S. never intended (and didn’t) annex the country.
6. China is driven by the Legalist tradition more than Communist ideology and — in a nutshell — China will do whatever is good for China at all times and forever. It wants Taiwan and it will use this crisis to its benefit. Whether that makes it learn towards or away from peace remains to be seen and that depends on whether Putin is a worthwhile investment.
7. Current institutions are already being aggressively eroded by American negligence, Chinese hostility, European technocrats, and a general malaise all across Geneva and Brussels. They will indeed need to be reconceptualized and the mechanisms re-built, but we live in a world without serious architects right now and if Geneva is going to be useful as anything other than a place to drink after skiing, it needs to turn out students and leaders who think bigger than the problems — not people who plan to slot in and cash out.
Onward.
March 6, 2022
Feeling Useless? Me too. Let's talk.
Feeling Useless? Me too. Let's talk.
Derek B. Miller
6 March, 2022
My wife, Camilla, is the chief of staff to one of the most important and operationally-active humanitarian agencies in the world. She's often working from home and so am I. That means, as I work on a novel she's helping coordinate humanitarian relief operations; assisting the secretary-general work with the UN, the Red Cross, national agencies, the international media and more; and is generally elbows-deep in the war in Ukraine and the refugee crisis.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to make sure the plot elements in my novel align and whether I'm using a semi-colon correctly or at least defensibly when the copyeditor comes for my head.
I'm reminded of Billy Crystal and Carol Kane telling the cast of The Princess Bride of "have fun storming the castle!" except they were happy not to be storming the castle whereas I'm eating my heart out having so little to contribute.
It's worse, actually, because unlike those two old witches I actually have something to contribute. I'm a scholar of international relations and a long-time "Europe watcher" on security affairs and I worked at the UN for a decade. I know what's wrong with Mearsheimer's arguments about "NATO expansion" as a provocation to Russia (see my other blog); and I have some operational knowledge that's useful across a range of topics. But … you know … I'm out. I'm eating pistachio nuts watching the war and hoping a patriotic member of the FSB puts a bullet in Putin's head and ends all this (yes, I am in favor of assassinations and soon you will be too).
The consequence is that I'm left in a circumstance that results in a feeling. The circumstance is that I can see it all and there's basically nothing I can do about it but "spill ink," which is what certain people are inclined to do (like me, but I'm hardly alone). The feeling is one of frustration, weakness, impotence in the sense of powerlessness, but rather than it resulting in a sense of defeat or acceptance I'm burning with a drive to "do something" to move the world into a preferred condition.
The war against Ukraine by Russia is, unquestionably, the catalyst for my discontentment and my worries and my feelings. But that term — preferred condition — actually contains some hints at how to change these conditions and change my feelings. And, perhaps, yours. All me to explain.
Putin didn't wake up and think, "let's invade Ukraine." He planned for this. A (rock-solid in my view) argument can be made that his support for Trump and his efforts to get Trump to block $391 million in military aid to Ukraine was part of a long-term effort to prepare for this war, not to mention making Russia more economically self-sufficient to withstand sanctions and a host of other preparations.
While no Western actions could have deterred his ambitions, or motives, to attack and annex Ukraine, we certainly could have reduced his capabilities. How do I know? We're doing it now. You've read the news and you've seen the actions. Among others:
• Switzerland has seized Putin's money (I lived in Geneva for a decade and I'm shocked they were willing to do this, but also delighted).
• Cutting off Russia's access to SWIFT and international banking.
• Sending weapons to Ukraine from … everywhere, even Sweden which hasn't sent weapons abroad since 1939.
• Shutting down airspace to Russian aircraft.
• Britain's long-since-overdue crackdown on dirty Russian money in London real estate and in the City.
• Denying use of Mastercard and Visa to Russia.
… the list goes on and on.
All of this, of course, is a reaction and was not "proactive" (a term I still won't use without quotation marks). While some of it might only be justified in the context of Russia's most immediate actions, other actions could have been taken long ago and for full-valid reasons such as continued interference in democratic elections and our internal affairs; spreading lies and propaganda to undermine civil society and our domestic institutions; and otherwise being a monumental pain-in-the-ass in what seems to have been a consequence-free universe across eight years of a distracted and weak Obama administration and with active support for Russia from the Trump administration.
Our preferred conditions are only going to be reached "proactively." They are going to be achieved with a tremendous re-think and redirected action in democratic societies based on a more conceptual and practical reality which is this: Democratic societies exist in a broadly non-democratic world, and if they want to maintain their internal integrity they need to see themselves as distinct and needing of specific protections otherwise the bubble will burst and democracy — as a social practice and a pillar of primary structuring institution — will end.
To wit:
• All citizens should vote: That means non-citizens should not vote, and all barriers to voting for citizens should be as reduced as reasonably possible as part of an on-going agenda to bring our people into the democratic fold. That means all citizens. And if I'm not being clear enough: Stop block black people from voting. Voting should be easy and quick and encouraged. If we want voter IDs, all we need to do is create simple and free ways for everyone over 18 to have such an ID. If my iPhone can recognize my face, I don't see why the voting system can't figure it out.
• No more "dark money." Better yet, no more money at all. Democracy should be paid for in our taxes. Our submarines are. So … what's the problem?
• Change the media laws. News organizations (or divisions, etc.) should not be chasing ratings. Will this up-end the entire news system of the United States? Yes. Which is what we want. Think bigger than the problems.
• Update our educational systems: Americans can vote at eighteen years old. That means they will be entrusted to help direct the future of the state at eighteen years old. Are they being prepared for that responsibility? Obviously not. The world is not a "safe space." Ask the Ukrainians. Teenagers need to be prepared to make the world safe for democracy not make democracies safe for themselves.
I could go on.
But won't these undermine civil liberties? Won't they limit free expression? Isn't that a gateway to tyranny?
The GOP would have you believe that protecting our democracy from actions that will undermine it from within are tyrannical. So allow me to be clear about this: If our legislatures recognize (based on valid reasoning) that our democracy will only survive under certain conditions, then we need to make sure those conditions exist.
Here's an analogy no one is making: The military is a volunteer military. You sign yourself in, and you sign yourself out. Once you're in, you follow orders. You don't wander off the base or else you're AWOL. You accept some measure of mental and physical abuse as you're being prepared for war. You follow the chain of command. If you're not to this, don't join or get out. Why? Because the military can only function as a system if certain conditions are met and showing up, being prepared to fight, and following orders are at least three of them.
Our democracy is the same. We must voluntarily give up certain civil liberties so that civil liberties continue to exist. We do that in a formal manner by passing laws that protect democracy from internal and external threat. It's really not that complicated.
So far, we all seem to be going the opposite direction. Money is the driving force in politics. Freedom of speech exists for those who can afford it. Voter suppression is everywhere. Gerrymandering is choosing the voters rather than the voters choosing the politicians. No one is willing to give up anything for the greater good.
If no one is willing to sacrifice for the greater good, we won't a country. Ask the Ukrainians.
What this all means is that there's plenty of work to be done at home and abroad because what's happening now was not unforeseeable; was not inevitable; and will happen again in one version or another. So one thing to do is focus on what gets you most motivated and attack. Find out who is working on this and get involved. Don't complain. Build strategies for change, based on clear theories for change (i.e. arguments that withstand scrutiny) and then execute them.
Let's stop waiting until we fail to try and succeed.
Derek B. Miller
6 March, 2022
My wife, Camilla, is the chief of staff to one of the most important and operationally-active humanitarian agencies in the world. She's often working from home and so am I. That means, as I work on a novel she's helping coordinate humanitarian relief operations; assisting the secretary-general work with the UN, the Red Cross, national agencies, the international media and more; and is generally elbows-deep in the war in Ukraine and the refugee crisis.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to make sure the plot elements in my novel align and whether I'm using a semi-colon correctly or at least defensibly when the copyeditor comes for my head.
I'm reminded of Billy Crystal and Carol Kane telling the cast of The Princess Bride of "have fun storming the castle!" except they were happy not to be storming the castle whereas I'm eating my heart out having so little to contribute.
It's worse, actually, because unlike those two old witches I actually have something to contribute. I'm a scholar of international relations and a long-time "Europe watcher" on security affairs and I worked at the UN for a decade. I know what's wrong with Mearsheimer's arguments about "NATO expansion" as a provocation to Russia (see my other blog); and I have some operational knowledge that's useful across a range of topics. But … you know … I'm out. I'm eating pistachio nuts watching the war and hoping a patriotic member of the FSB puts a bullet in Putin's head and ends all this (yes, I am in favor of assassinations and soon you will be too).
The consequence is that I'm left in a circumstance that results in a feeling. The circumstance is that I can see it all and there's basically nothing I can do about it but "spill ink," which is what certain people are inclined to do (like me, but I'm hardly alone). The feeling is one of frustration, weakness, impotence in the sense of powerlessness, but rather than it resulting in a sense of defeat or acceptance I'm burning with a drive to "do something" to move the world into a preferred condition.
The war against Ukraine by Russia is, unquestionably, the catalyst for my discontentment and my worries and my feelings. But that term — preferred condition — actually contains some hints at how to change these conditions and change my feelings. And, perhaps, yours. All me to explain.
Putin didn't wake up and think, "let's invade Ukraine." He planned for this. A (rock-solid in my view) argument can be made that his support for Trump and his efforts to get Trump to block $391 million in military aid to Ukraine was part of a long-term effort to prepare for this war, not to mention making Russia more economically self-sufficient to withstand sanctions and a host of other preparations.
While no Western actions could have deterred his ambitions, or motives, to attack and annex Ukraine, we certainly could have reduced his capabilities. How do I know? We're doing it now. You've read the news and you've seen the actions. Among others:
• Switzerland has seized Putin's money (I lived in Geneva for a decade and I'm shocked they were willing to do this, but also delighted).
• Cutting off Russia's access to SWIFT and international banking.
• Sending weapons to Ukraine from … everywhere, even Sweden which hasn't sent weapons abroad since 1939.
• Shutting down airspace to Russian aircraft.
• Britain's long-since-overdue crackdown on dirty Russian money in London real estate and in the City.
• Denying use of Mastercard and Visa to Russia.
… the list goes on and on.
All of this, of course, is a reaction and was not "proactive" (a term I still won't use without quotation marks). While some of it might only be justified in the context of Russia's most immediate actions, other actions could have been taken long ago and for full-valid reasons such as continued interference in democratic elections and our internal affairs; spreading lies and propaganda to undermine civil society and our domestic institutions; and otherwise being a monumental pain-in-the-ass in what seems to have been a consequence-free universe across eight years of a distracted and weak Obama administration and with active support for Russia from the Trump administration.
Our preferred conditions are only going to be reached "proactively." They are going to be achieved with a tremendous re-think and redirected action in democratic societies based on a more conceptual and practical reality which is this: Democratic societies exist in a broadly non-democratic world, and if they want to maintain their internal integrity they need to see themselves as distinct and needing of specific protections otherwise the bubble will burst and democracy — as a social practice and a pillar of primary structuring institution — will end.
To wit:
• All citizens should vote: That means non-citizens should not vote, and all barriers to voting for citizens should be as reduced as reasonably possible as part of an on-going agenda to bring our people into the democratic fold. That means all citizens. And if I'm not being clear enough: Stop block black people from voting. Voting should be easy and quick and encouraged. If we want voter IDs, all we need to do is create simple and free ways for everyone over 18 to have such an ID. If my iPhone can recognize my face, I don't see why the voting system can't figure it out.
• No more "dark money." Better yet, no more money at all. Democracy should be paid for in our taxes. Our submarines are. So … what's the problem?
• Change the media laws. News organizations (or divisions, etc.) should not be chasing ratings. Will this up-end the entire news system of the United States? Yes. Which is what we want. Think bigger than the problems.
• Update our educational systems: Americans can vote at eighteen years old. That means they will be entrusted to help direct the future of the state at eighteen years old. Are they being prepared for that responsibility? Obviously not. The world is not a "safe space." Ask the Ukrainians. Teenagers need to be prepared to make the world safe for democracy not make democracies safe for themselves.
I could go on.
But won't these undermine civil liberties? Won't they limit free expression? Isn't that a gateway to tyranny?
The GOP would have you believe that protecting our democracy from actions that will undermine it from within are tyrannical. So allow me to be clear about this: If our legislatures recognize (based on valid reasoning) that our democracy will only survive under certain conditions, then we need to make sure those conditions exist.
Here's an analogy no one is making: The military is a volunteer military. You sign yourself in, and you sign yourself out. Once you're in, you follow orders. You don't wander off the base or else you're AWOL. You accept some measure of mental and physical abuse as you're being prepared for war. You follow the chain of command. If you're not to this, don't join or get out. Why? Because the military can only function as a system if certain conditions are met and showing up, being prepared to fight, and following orders are at least three of them.
Our democracy is the same. We must voluntarily give up certain civil liberties so that civil liberties continue to exist. We do that in a formal manner by passing laws that protect democracy from internal and external threat. It's really not that complicated.
So far, we all seem to be going the opposite direction. Money is the driving force in politics. Freedom of speech exists for those who can afford it. Voter suppression is everywhere. Gerrymandering is choosing the voters rather than the voters choosing the politicians. No one is willing to give up anything for the greater good.
If no one is willing to sacrifice for the greater good, we won't a country. Ask the Ukrainians.
What this all means is that there's plenty of work to be done at home and abroad because what's happening now was not unforeseeable; was not inevitable; and will happen again in one version or another. So one thing to do is focus on what gets you most motivated and attack. Find out who is working on this and get involved. Don't complain. Build strategies for change, based on clear theories for change (i.e. arguments that withstand scrutiny) and then execute them.
Let's stop waiting until we fail to try and succeed.
March 3, 2022
The Blame The West Crowd
Mearsheimer, Chomsky, and the whole "blame the West" crowd. A few thoughts:
By this time you've probably heard John Mearsheimer, the international relations scholar, say that the West precipitated this crisis by expanding NATO too far eastward. And Chomsky, of course, never misses an opportunity to blame the West for whatever is happening in the world.
As it happens, I'm an IR scholar too (the Dr. Pepper jingle comes to mind here). So here are a few reasons why Mearsheimer is wrong and why — despite his baldness, oversized suit, and crooked tie which seem to inspire confidence in people for reasons I still don't understand — you should not accept this blame-the-West narrative. I'll be brief:
• Mearsheimer believes that Ukraine is in Russia's sphere of influence and U.S. discussions with Ukraine about joining NATO provoked Russia. But here's the funny thing about that argument. Ukraine doesn't seem to consider itself within Russia's sphere of influence and rather than responding to U.S. overtures, it is internally driven to look westward. That is, Ukraine's culture, history, preferences, ambitions, and fears have already placed it inside our sphere of influence. Why? Because of how it's been treated by Russia (either as the core of the USSR or since independence). Mearsheimer is prepared to place the preferences of Russia over those of Ukraine. Why? Because Russia is more powerful. Which is … wait for it … exactly why Ukraine wants to join NATO. If Russia wanted to be more influential in its near-abroad it should have produced a positive and attractive vision of the world. It is didn't. As for what Russia wants? Who cares?
• Mearsheimer believes Ukraine is a buffer state. That means, powerful forces from the west would have to cross through Ukraine to reach Russia giving it time to mobilize, defend itself, etc. From a strictly military perspective that's true. But it's not a territory. It's a country, with a territory of its own, a government, and a population (per international law). I reject the idea of buffer states because I don't believe there are any buffer people. You don't want the West to attack (which we're not planning to do anyway)? Don't be a bunch of assholes. The idea that Russia gets to be a bunch of assholes and then have territory as a buffer for when we get aggrevated is not a reasonable geopolitical or "rational" analysis.
• Mearsheimer — for real — advocates the controlled proliferation of nuclear weapons as a way to stabilize the world. All policymakers know this is madness but since he subscribes to a school of thought called Neo-realism, he's talked himself into it. But Neo-realism A) has generally proved itself to be non-falsifiable as a theory, which means that you can't find a way to test it so that the test can, at least conceivably, result in a negative and this is because B) it is based on "rational actor theory" and every time you say, "but … these people acted like this, which is the opposite of what you predicted" they just say, "ah, but to them it was rational" thereby redefining it and slipping away from the problem like jelly under a door and C) it can't account for non-state actors who can't be deterred which, if the world has learned anything from Islamic terrorism which seems to want to start a global war, deterrence against non-state actors without territory doesn't work.
• Lastly: Nations are not pool balls. They don't simply respond to external forces. They have ideas, ambitions, memories, interpretations, traumas and aspirations that are dymanic, rich, complex and are most often what drive their actions in the world. Far, far too often we think that a country acted because of something "we" did. Very often, it's because of who and what they are.
This war is Putin's fault.
— Derek B. Miller (Ph.D. summa cum laude in international relations and wearer of a leather jacket and boots).
By this time you've probably heard John Mearsheimer, the international relations scholar, say that the West precipitated this crisis by expanding NATO too far eastward. And Chomsky, of course, never misses an opportunity to blame the West for whatever is happening in the world.
As it happens, I'm an IR scholar too (the Dr. Pepper jingle comes to mind here). So here are a few reasons why Mearsheimer is wrong and why — despite his baldness, oversized suit, and crooked tie which seem to inspire confidence in people for reasons I still don't understand — you should not accept this blame-the-West narrative. I'll be brief:
• Mearsheimer believes that Ukraine is in Russia's sphere of influence and U.S. discussions with Ukraine about joining NATO provoked Russia. But here's the funny thing about that argument. Ukraine doesn't seem to consider itself within Russia's sphere of influence and rather than responding to U.S. overtures, it is internally driven to look westward. That is, Ukraine's culture, history, preferences, ambitions, and fears have already placed it inside our sphere of influence. Why? Because of how it's been treated by Russia (either as the core of the USSR or since independence). Mearsheimer is prepared to place the preferences of Russia over those of Ukraine. Why? Because Russia is more powerful. Which is … wait for it … exactly why Ukraine wants to join NATO. If Russia wanted to be more influential in its near-abroad it should have produced a positive and attractive vision of the world. It is didn't. As for what Russia wants? Who cares?
• Mearsheimer believes Ukraine is a buffer state. That means, powerful forces from the west would have to cross through Ukraine to reach Russia giving it time to mobilize, defend itself, etc. From a strictly military perspective that's true. But it's not a territory. It's a country, with a territory of its own, a government, and a population (per international law). I reject the idea of buffer states because I don't believe there are any buffer people. You don't want the West to attack (which we're not planning to do anyway)? Don't be a bunch of assholes. The idea that Russia gets to be a bunch of assholes and then have territory as a buffer for when we get aggrevated is not a reasonable geopolitical or "rational" analysis.
• Mearsheimer — for real — advocates the controlled proliferation of nuclear weapons as a way to stabilize the world. All policymakers know this is madness but since he subscribes to a school of thought called Neo-realism, he's talked himself into it. But Neo-realism A) has generally proved itself to be non-falsifiable as a theory, which means that you can't find a way to test it so that the test can, at least conceivably, result in a negative and this is because B) it is based on "rational actor theory" and every time you say, "but … these people acted like this, which is the opposite of what you predicted" they just say, "ah, but to them it was rational" thereby redefining it and slipping away from the problem like jelly under a door and C) it can't account for non-state actors who can't be deterred which, if the world has learned anything from Islamic terrorism which seems to want to start a global war, deterrence against non-state actors without territory doesn't work.
• Lastly: Nations are not pool balls. They don't simply respond to external forces. They have ideas, ambitions, memories, interpretations, traumas and aspirations that are dymanic, rich, complex and are most often what drive their actions in the world. Far, far too often we think that a country acted because of something "we" did. Very often, it's because of who and what they are.
This war is Putin's fault.
— Derek B. Miller (Ph.D. summa cum laude in international relations and wearer of a leather jacket and boots).
March 2, 2022
Putin's Obsession with Nazis
Why does Putin bang on about Nazis as the justification for invading peaceful, sovereign Ukraine?
The media has covered, in great length, how Putin considers the fall of the Soviet Union to be a catastrophe and how he wants to rebuilt a "greater Russia," of which Ukraine is a crowning jewel. What it has not discussed in a meaningful way, as far as I can tell, is why his justification is "Nazis" rather than "the devil made me do it," or "aliens" or "the fountain of youth must be there somewhere."
What we say to justify our actions matters. It can morally validate us, or it can exonerate us to ourselves or others even if those justications — those rationalizations — are self-delusional or lies. As a reminder, Hitler could have justified his rise to power; his nation's anger at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; and his passion for Aryan superiority by something other than anger at the Jews. After all, Fascism began in Italy in 1922 with Mussolini, and he didn't bang on about the Jews. It wasn't until 1938's Racial Laws in Italy that Mussolini even paid attention to the Jews and that was only because of Hitler's insistence.
So … why Nazis?
The Bolshevik revolution wiped out the Czar and his ministers, as everyone knows from the Rolling Stone's Sympathy for the Devil. When they did this, they did not only assassinate everyone. They threw Russian history under the bus, made a clean political and cultural break with it (to a point), and classified all of it as "bad." After all, if you're going to have a good revolution, it needs to be against something bad.
In the 1989-1990 period when the USSR crumbled and a kind of proto-democracy inspired by liberal values took root in Russia, they experienced another revolution, and this time it was the USSR that was bad. This means that — conservatively — the previous 150 years of the nation's history was now "bad."
I cannot recall any other nation in history having to build a new society on the foundations of that much self-hatred. It may be unique to world history.
So what was left? What was good?
Stalingrad.
Conveniently forgetting that Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler to divide up eastern Europe after Germany won the war, Russia looks back on the German attack on its country and the savage fighting that turned back the Nazi tide, established an eastern front in the war, and saved Mother Russia from the huns as a great victory and a sourse of pride.
Geopolitically, and as a part of diplomatic history, we know that Stalin was complicit in the suffering and at best the Russians held back their own self-serving mistake. But on a human level, on a personal level, in the drama of the heart, the Russian fight was noble and admirable, and self-sacrificing and a model of resistance that should make anyone with a soul a little misty.
Twenty million people died. Pause on that number. It is the entire populations of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, dead.
Russians hate Nazis. They may ACT like Nazis, but they hate Nazis. Both Bolsheviks and Russians — ideologues and nationalists — hate Nazis. If you're going to fight something for a good reason, and you're Russian, it's going to be Nazis.
Even if there are no Nazis.
And even if all of it was your fault.
— Derek B. Miller
2 March, 2022
The media has covered, in great length, how Putin considers the fall of the Soviet Union to be a catastrophe and how he wants to rebuilt a "greater Russia," of which Ukraine is a crowning jewel. What it has not discussed in a meaningful way, as far as I can tell, is why his justification is "Nazis" rather than "the devil made me do it," or "aliens" or "the fountain of youth must be there somewhere."
What we say to justify our actions matters. It can morally validate us, or it can exonerate us to ourselves or others even if those justications — those rationalizations — are self-delusional or lies. As a reminder, Hitler could have justified his rise to power; his nation's anger at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; and his passion for Aryan superiority by something other than anger at the Jews. After all, Fascism began in Italy in 1922 with Mussolini, and he didn't bang on about the Jews. It wasn't until 1938's Racial Laws in Italy that Mussolini even paid attention to the Jews and that was only because of Hitler's insistence.
So … why Nazis?
The Bolshevik revolution wiped out the Czar and his ministers, as everyone knows from the Rolling Stone's Sympathy for the Devil. When they did this, they did not only assassinate everyone. They threw Russian history under the bus, made a clean political and cultural break with it (to a point), and classified all of it as "bad." After all, if you're going to have a good revolution, it needs to be against something bad.
In the 1989-1990 period when the USSR crumbled and a kind of proto-democracy inspired by liberal values took root in Russia, they experienced another revolution, and this time it was the USSR that was bad. This means that — conservatively — the previous 150 years of the nation's history was now "bad."
I cannot recall any other nation in history having to build a new society on the foundations of that much self-hatred. It may be unique to world history.
So what was left? What was good?
Stalingrad.
Conveniently forgetting that Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler to divide up eastern Europe after Germany won the war, Russia looks back on the German attack on its country and the savage fighting that turned back the Nazi tide, established an eastern front in the war, and saved Mother Russia from the huns as a great victory and a sourse of pride.
Geopolitically, and as a part of diplomatic history, we know that Stalin was complicit in the suffering and at best the Russians held back their own self-serving mistake. But on a human level, on a personal level, in the drama of the heart, the Russian fight was noble and admirable, and self-sacrificing and a model of resistance that should make anyone with a soul a little misty.
Twenty million people died. Pause on that number. It is the entire populations of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, dead.
Russians hate Nazis. They may ACT like Nazis, but they hate Nazis. Both Bolsheviks and Russians — ideologues and nationalists — hate Nazis. If you're going to fight something for a good reason, and you're Russian, it's going to be Nazis.
Even if there are no Nazis.
And even if all of it was your fault.
— Derek B. Miller
2 March, 2022
February 26, 2022
If Kyiv Falls
IF KYIV FALLS
Derek B. Miller
26 February, 2022
[This is revised and updated from an earlier posting]
It's nine o'clock in the morning in Barelona, where I live, and ten o'clock in Kyiv, Ukraine where the lawful government of a peaceful country is under assault from the Russians who — we're told by Western intelligence agencies — want to kill the elected leader, kill his family, and install a new government; a Russian government that thinks that will be the end of the story.
Will it be?
We don't know. But I don't think so, and there three reasons that I want to explain: hatred of Russian interference, the long memory of people's war, and love of freedom.
• Russian Interference:
Putin thinks that killing President Zelensky, murdering his family, and installing a puppet regime will work. It is too soon to know whether Zelensky's and the people's gallant stand in Kyiv will help turn back the Russian forces or whether the country will fall. They are profoundly outnumbered and surrounded. But what I am certain about is that even if it does fall — and it may — Ukraine will not become the puppet state that Putin thinks it will.
Through language, religion, history, and affinity, there are some parts of Ukraine that feel a deep connection to Russia. On a social level, there are friends and families across the border. The languages mutually comprehensible. Arts, business, literature … life … are all connected. On a personal level — especially among the young — these countries are not enemies. But at a historical level, at a macro level, there is a profound difference and animosity.
Among the reasons (and there are many) is that millions of Ukrainians were starved to death in the Great Famine of the 1930s when Stalin's collectivization and "revolution from above" (read: tyranny with an ideological justification) ended peasant farming and imposed his own from of Communism. From our distance in 2022 this may seem like a mere geopolitical fact or a sad piece of very old history. But as some eighty-percent of the Ukrainian population was living in rural areas, this meant people died from starvation and the horror, the terror, the grief lived on and was deeply remembered. The blame was clear.
Since then, Russia has been trying to destabilize Ukrainian democracy as it is a threat to both Russia's so-called sphere of influence and Putin's own authoritarian aspirations.
The thing is: Ukrainians like their freedom. The young people born in the mid-80s and afterwards have no experience without it. They can be occupied, and they might be, but only so long as the occupying force continues to act like one: with a police state, targeted killings, suppression of freedom of speech and political thought and action, periodic displays of brutality and torture and killings to keep the population subdued and other related tactics from the totalitarian occupier's handbook. We might recall here Russia's brutal support of Assad during Syria's war, and also its own war in Chechnya, to gain a sense of the kind of war Russia is regularly prepared to wage.
All of this takes time, money, people willing to do it, casualties they will inevitably suffer and growing discontent in Russia itself (especially among its own younger people). It's not easy occupying a nation-state the size of Texas. People don't like being occupied. It creates hatred and anger and aggression and all of that has to go somewhere.
• People's War:
European history — at the risk of sounding glib — has been a long game of capture the flag. Capture the other country's capital and you've won (at least for a while). Capture Berlin, Berlin falls, documents are signed, and a kind of peace arrives with paperwork. This is the game of princes that Machiavelli discussed, this is the system of statecraft that Hans Morganthau explained in his 1948 classic Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace when he introduced theories of political realism “to bring order and meaning to a mass of phenomena which without it would remain disconnected and unintelligible.”
A brief aside: Political scientists have continued to quote Morganthau far more often than they read him. They often and mistakenly think that he was proposing a universal explanation for how nations act. But he wasn't. As he explained in that same book, “The great political writers [Fénelon, Rousseau, and Vattel] of that age were aware of this intellectual and moral unity [of Europe], upon whose foundations the balance of power reposes and which makes its beneficial operations possible." In other words, the understood system of politics and war that made it intelligible and practicable was reposed upon a culturally shared understanding of how it all works, developed over time, and limited to that civilization.
Putin, despite his Communist roots and KBG mentality, is treating the invasion of Ukraine in exactly this way: trying to kill the head of state and capture its flag. If that continues to be the case, Russia will assume that the occupied will lose heart, lose faith, forget their earlier aspirations, and can be subdued or distracted into accepting the new status quo. Here we face either the "enlightened tyrant" model or the unenlightened one.
The first type will give people their material distractions and allow them to accumulate some wealth and comfort in return for their lack of freedom and love of their nation and hope that the tactic turns the tide so eventually there is a tipping point where people would rather have their iPhones and Twitter and fresh eggs rather than their own country. It can work.
Putin, however, doesn't seem very enlightened to me, however, and I strongly suspect he'll adopt the hard tactics of the police state like those mentioned. Western intelligence already suggests this is the case, and his mentality and character and training all suggest it.
So Putin's strategy if for the Ukrainians to give up — not just materially but spiritually, as it were — will it work?
I don't think so, even if Kyiv falls.
What Morganthau described as the Western way of war has almost never been the case in non-Western countries and, interestingly, it has not been the case in Communist countries where the ideas of Lenin, Mao, Giap and others have all prescribed a "people's war," and on-going, relentless, partisan resistance. Lenin once quipped that "politics is a continuation of war by other means," (inverting Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum), meaning that war against the west is a permanent state, and one only negotiates to gain an advantage in that war — a lesson I believe Putin has taken to heart, and will never negotiate "in good faith" whether or not he's a Communist per se.
Ukraine is not a Communist country. But, like Putin himself, it is a country with a memory and culture of people's war persists. In my judgement — and it is only a judgement — it is going to mobilize the people to resist. The invasion of their country is going to remind them of Stalingrad, it is going to remind them of Partisan and Communist tactics. I would also mention: those tactics work. The West has not won a war against a communist or non-Western adversary despite having a closet-full of flags.
• Love of Freedom
The late scholar Adda B. Bozeman once wrote that political systems are transient expedients on the surface of civilization. Governments, and forms of government, come and go, but the primary structuring ideas that sustain a society through time cannot be wished away, occupied, or destroyed. They persist. The reason is not magical or mystical but rather simple. Those ideas cohere into ways of life (a phrase borrowed from Jerome Bruner), and they are committed to them, and that commitment is a living thing.
It is what sustained Spain through eight hundred years of Moorish occupation.
Ukraine loves its freedom. The young people only know freedom (despite a very rocky period of freedom since statehood); older people remember what it was like not to have it. Combined with hatred of Russian interference and a mindset of people's war, see Ukrainian resistance persisting and my mind is casts back to John Steinbeck for the answer as to why Ukrainians will never give up.
A short story you may not have heard: Shortly after he published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, the American novelist John Steinbeck took a trip to Latin America to work on a movie. America was still not in the war and his experience proved to him that Nazi propaganda was widespread, increasingly effective and needed to be countered. Dr Donald V. Coers explained in his 1991 study John Steinbeck Goes to War, that the novelist wrote to President Roosevelt arguing that, ‘a crisis in the Western Hemisphere is imminent, and is to be met only by an immediate, controlled, considered, and directed method and policy.’
Steinbeck wanted to do something about it personally. He found an audience and supporter in the Office of Coordinator of Information at the Office of Strategic Services, then under Colonel William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. The OSS was the forerunner to the modern CIA and Wild Bill had a reputation for out-of-the-box thinking (insofar as he cared about the box at all). With his support, Steinbeck published a book of propaganda to support the occupied peoples of Europe. It was called The Moon is Down. It’s one of my favorite books.
The story was set in an unnamed peaceful, defenseless country in the north of Europe that had been occupied by the Nazis, a country widely accepted to be Norway. In the story, the occupied people were not encouraged to be super-human resistance fighters. Instead, it was about the fundamental ideas that — as Bozeman might have phrased it — organized and sustained that community through time: ideas of liberty, and participatory government, and freedom of thought, and independence of action – and how they could not be simply ordered away by the occupiers. In the book, the Nazis came to the dawning realization that they were up against a force much more powerful than themselves. Killing the leaders and occupying the country did not change the hearts of the people.
As Coers tells us, Steinbeck wrote a fable that celebrated ‘the durability of democracy’, and argued through his story that ‘free people are inherently stronger than the “herd people” controlled by totalitarian leaders, and that, despite the initial advantage of the militarily mighty dictators, the democracies would eventually win the war’.
Dr Coers learned through his documentation of the impact of The Moon is Down that the occupied peoples of Europe – of Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and elsewhere – had been deeply moved by the book; a book that, in my opinion, might give heart to the Ukrainians if the worst comes to pass.
As he writes, ‘Their explanations of its effectiveness are remarkably similar: somehow an author living thousands of miles away in a land of peace sensed precisely how they felt as victims of Nazi aggression.’
In Norway — where I lived for a decade — they were so moved that in 1946, King of Norway bestowed on Steinbeck the Haakon VII Cross, a medal given only to those who distinguished themselves by ‘outstanding service to Norway during the war’.
If Kyiv falls, I don't think the people of Ukraine will accept the occupation and I hope that the people of Europe will assist them materially, financially, spiritually.
They will persist, whether through continued armed resistance or by their continued faith and practice of the freedoms they will not relinquish simply because they are being ordered to. And the reason is because they can't. They are a democracy. They are not Russians and will never tolerate being dominated by the Russians again. They love their freedom. They have a mindset of resistance.
I hope win.
_______
Derek B. Miller, Ph.D., is an American novelist and international affairs professional. He is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, and Research Associate at the Centre for Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding, The Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland. He is the author of Norwegian by Night and other novels.
Derek B. Miller
26 February, 2022
[This is revised and updated from an earlier posting]
It's nine o'clock in the morning in Barelona, where I live, and ten o'clock in Kyiv, Ukraine where the lawful government of a peaceful country is under assault from the Russians who — we're told by Western intelligence agencies — want to kill the elected leader, kill his family, and install a new government; a Russian government that thinks that will be the end of the story.
Will it be?
We don't know. But I don't think so, and there three reasons that I want to explain: hatred of Russian interference, the long memory of people's war, and love of freedom.
• Russian Interference:
Putin thinks that killing President Zelensky, murdering his family, and installing a puppet regime will work. It is too soon to know whether Zelensky's and the people's gallant stand in Kyiv will help turn back the Russian forces or whether the country will fall. They are profoundly outnumbered and surrounded. But what I am certain about is that even if it does fall — and it may — Ukraine will not become the puppet state that Putin thinks it will.
Through language, religion, history, and affinity, there are some parts of Ukraine that feel a deep connection to Russia. On a social level, there are friends and families across the border. The languages mutually comprehensible. Arts, business, literature … life … are all connected. On a personal level — especially among the young — these countries are not enemies. But at a historical level, at a macro level, there is a profound difference and animosity.
Among the reasons (and there are many) is that millions of Ukrainians were starved to death in the Great Famine of the 1930s when Stalin's collectivization and "revolution from above" (read: tyranny with an ideological justification) ended peasant farming and imposed his own from of Communism. From our distance in 2022 this may seem like a mere geopolitical fact or a sad piece of very old history. But as some eighty-percent of the Ukrainian population was living in rural areas, this meant people died from starvation and the horror, the terror, the grief lived on and was deeply remembered. The blame was clear.
Since then, Russia has been trying to destabilize Ukrainian democracy as it is a threat to both Russia's so-called sphere of influence and Putin's own authoritarian aspirations.
The thing is: Ukrainians like their freedom. The young people born in the mid-80s and afterwards have no experience without it. They can be occupied, and they might be, but only so long as the occupying force continues to act like one: with a police state, targeted killings, suppression of freedom of speech and political thought and action, periodic displays of brutality and torture and killings to keep the population subdued and other related tactics from the totalitarian occupier's handbook. We might recall here Russia's brutal support of Assad during Syria's war, and also its own war in Chechnya, to gain a sense of the kind of war Russia is regularly prepared to wage.
All of this takes time, money, people willing to do it, casualties they will inevitably suffer and growing discontent in Russia itself (especially among its own younger people). It's not easy occupying a nation-state the size of Texas. People don't like being occupied. It creates hatred and anger and aggression and all of that has to go somewhere.
• People's War:
European history — at the risk of sounding glib — has been a long game of capture the flag. Capture the other country's capital and you've won (at least for a while). Capture Berlin, Berlin falls, documents are signed, and a kind of peace arrives with paperwork. This is the game of princes that Machiavelli discussed, this is the system of statecraft that Hans Morganthau explained in his 1948 classic Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace when he introduced theories of political realism “to bring order and meaning to a mass of phenomena which without it would remain disconnected and unintelligible.”
A brief aside: Political scientists have continued to quote Morganthau far more often than they read him. They often and mistakenly think that he was proposing a universal explanation for how nations act. But he wasn't. As he explained in that same book, “The great political writers [Fénelon, Rousseau, and Vattel] of that age were aware of this intellectual and moral unity [of Europe], upon whose foundations the balance of power reposes and which makes its beneficial operations possible." In other words, the understood system of politics and war that made it intelligible and practicable was reposed upon a culturally shared understanding of how it all works, developed over time, and limited to that civilization.
Putin, despite his Communist roots and KBG mentality, is treating the invasion of Ukraine in exactly this way: trying to kill the head of state and capture its flag. If that continues to be the case, Russia will assume that the occupied will lose heart, lose faith, forget their earlier aspirations, and can be subdued or distracted into accepting the new status quo. Here we face either the "enlightened tyrant" model or the unenlightened one.
The first type will give people their material distractions and allow them to accumulate some wealth and comfort in return for their lack of freedom and love of their nation and hope that the tactic turns the tide so eventually there is a tipping point where people would rather have their iPhones and Twitter and fresh eggs rather than their own country. It can work.
Putin, however, doesn't seem very enlightened to me, however, and I strongly suspect he'll adopt the hard tactics of the police state like those mentioned. Western intelligence already suggests this is the case, and his mentality and character and training all suggest it.
So Putin's strategy if for the Ukrainians to give up — not just materially but spiritually, as it were — will it work?
I don't think so, even if Kyiv falls.
What Morganthau described as the Western way of war has almost never been the case in non-Western countries and, interestingly, it has not been the case in Communist countries where the ideas of Lenin, Mao, Giap and others have all prescribed a "people's war," and on-going, relentless, partisan resistance. Lenin once quipped that "politics is a continuation of war by other means," (inverting Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum), meaning that war against the west is a permanent state, and one only negotiates to gain an advantage in that war — a lesson I believe Putin has taken to heart, and will never negotiate "in good faith" whether or not he's a Communist per se.
Ukraine is not a Communist country. But, like Putin himself, it is a country with a memory and culture of people's war persists. In my judgement — and it is only a judgement — it is going to mobilize the people to resist. The invasion of their country is going to remind them of Stalingrad, it is going to remind them of Partisan and Communist tactics. I would also mention: those tactics work. The West has not won a war against a communist or non-Western adversary despite having a closet-full of flags.
• Love of Freedom
The late scholar Adda B. Bozeman once wrote that political systems are transient expedients on the surface of civilization. Governments, and forms of government, come and go, but the primary structuring ideas that sustain a society through time cannot be wished away, occupied, or destroyed. They persist. The reason is not magical or mystical but rather simple. Those ideas cohere into ways of life (a phrase borrowed from Jerome Bruner), and they are committed to them, and that commitment is a living thing.
It is what sustained Spain through eight hundred years of Moorish occupation.
Ukraine loves its freedom. The young people only know freedom (despite a very rocky period of freedom since statehood); older people remember what it was like not to have it. Combined with hatred of Russian interference and a mindset of people's war, see Ukrainian resistance persisting and my mind is casts back to John Steinbeck for the answer as to why Ukrainians will never give up.
A short story you may not have heard: Shortly after he published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, the American novelist John Steinbeck took a trip to Latin America to work on a movie. America was still not in the war and his experience proved to him that Nazi propaganda was widespread, increasingly effective and needed to be countered. Dr Donald V. Coers explained in his 1991 study John Steinbeck Goes to War, that the novelist wrote to President Roosevelt arguing that, ‘a crisis in the Western Hemisphere is imminent, and is to be met only by an immediate, controlled, considered, and directed method and policy.’
Steinbeck wanted to do something about it personally. He found an audience and supporter in the Office of Coordinator of Information at the Office of Strategic Services, then under Colonel William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. The OSS was the forerunner to the modern CIA and Wild Bill had a reputation for out-of-the-box thinking (insofar as he cared about the box at all). With his support, Steinbeck published a book of propaganda to support the occupied peoples of Europe. It was called The Moon is Down. It’s one of my favorite books.
The story was set in an unnamed peaceful, defenseless country in the north of Europe that had been occupied by the Nazis, a country widely accepted to be Norway. In the story, the occupied people were not encouraged to be super-human resistance fighters. Instead, it was about the fundamental ideas that — as Bozeman might have phrased it — organized and sustained that community through time: ideas of liberty, and participatory government, and freedom of thought, and independence of action – and how they could not be simply ordered away by the occupiers. In the book, the Nazis came to the dawning realization that they were up against a force much more powerful than themselves. Killing the leaders and occupying the country did not change the hearts of the people.
As Coers tells us, Steinbeck wrote a fable that celebrated ‘the durability of democracy’, and argued through his story that ‘free people are inherently stronger than the “herd people” controlled by totalitarian leaders, and that, despite the initial advantage of the militarily mighty dictators, the democracies would eventually win the war’.
Dr Coers learned through his documentation of the impact of The Moon is Down that the occupied peoples of Europe – of Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and elsewhere – had been deeply moved by the book; a book that, in my opinion, might give heart to the Ukrainians if the worst comes to pass.
As he writes, ‘Their explanations of its effectiveness are remarkably similar: somehow an author living thousands of miles away in a land of peace sensed precisely how they felt as victims of Nazi aggression.’
In Norway — where I lived for a decade — they were so moved that in 1946, King of Norway bestowed on Steinbeck the Haakon VII Cross, a medal given only to those who distinguished themselves by ‘outstanding service to Norway during the war’.
If Kyiv falls, I don't think the people of Ukraine will accept the occupation and I hope that the people of Europe will assist them materially, financially, spiritually.
They will persist, whether through continued armed resistance or by their continued faith and practice of the freedoms they will not relinquish simply because they are being ordered to. And the reason is because they can't. They are a democracy. They are not Russians and will never tolerate being dominated by the Russians again. They love their freedom. They have a mindset of resistance.
I hope win.
_______
Derek B. Miller, Ph.D., is an American novelist and international affairs professional. He is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, and Research Associate at the Centre for Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding, The Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland. He is the author of Norwegian by Night and other novels.
January 22, 2022
The Rise of Jewish-American Comedy During the Holocaust
I wrote a novel called How to Find Your Way in the Dark and while writing it I observed something. It was something big: an observation about a unique and influential human experience that, if we pay closer attention to it, might help us understand more about who we are and what it means to be alive.
How big?
About as big as the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, almost exactly that size.
How can people fail to see something as big as the Atlantic ocean?
There are answers to this worth noting. This is my personal list:
Distance (it’s too far away in time or space);
Direction (we’re looking the wrong way — literally or metaphorically);
Distraction (our focus prevents us from seeing the unexpected);
Dissonance (our brains reject what we can’t or won’t believe); and
Indifference (to notice something … we have to care).
Writing a novel focuses the mind but also allows it to wander through material in a way that I never experienced as a scholar. In writing non-fiction I was trying to make a case for something. In writing fiction I’m trying to tell a story and I don’t know where it is going even while writing it. The latter leaves the mind open to observation and analysis in a way that the first, alas, sometimes does not.
Here’s what I noticed: The rise of Jewish-American comedy — which would impact every aspect of mass media comedy across the world by the 1960s — reached its maturity in form and practice in the Catskills of New York while the Holocaust was raging in Europe. In one way, this is a simple fact. It invites a shrug. But what makes it a fact of intellectual and philosophical enormity is that the Jewish world was laughing its greatest laughter while crying its deepest tears at precisely the same moment. Those to the west of the Atlantic knew about those those events to east.
In casting my mind around the globe and through time, I can't evoke a more dramatic, consequential, radically juxtaposed, world-changing couplet of events as the attempted annihilation and genocide of an entire people in one region while those safely in another were perfecting a new form of happiness so delightful it would define entertainment across the planet for all foreseeable future.
And I’m not being histrionic: The stand-up comedy of Zimbabwe, circa 2021, came from the Catskills as directly as the hip-hop of Pakistan comes from the Bronx.
On the one hand, there’s the history of Jewish-American comedy and everything Seinfeld talks about in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. This is well-documented, often discussed, and well-known.
On the other, there is Holocaust studies. That is a vast, complex, and deeply-engaged academic discipline that is — itself — multi-disciplinary, drawing on history, psychology, sociology, forensic science, law and the list goes on.
What I don’t see is anyone pulling these parts together into a single, coherent story of radical juxtaposition let alone risking interpretation and analysis. As a scholar and a novelist, I am declaring that if we did, there would be treasure to be uncovered, and you don’t have to be Jewish to care.
For example: How on earth did that happen? How could people in the Catskills keep their sense of humor at a time like that? Or was it a reaction to the times? Or were they aloof and emotionally distant? Was it an example of American exceptionalism, or was the Jewish community acting in a way unique to itself? Is this kind of dissociative behavior seen in other communities under stress? Were the themes and subjects and topics of the humour influenced by the darkness of events in Europe? In a word: What the hell was going on?
It isn’t like no one could be asking these questions from the perspective of studying humor or comedy. I came across the peer reviewed journal HUMOR (in capital letters, yes really, and no it's not an acronym): the International Journal of Humor Research, which covers such diverse and inadvertently-hilarious topics as interdisciplinary humor research; humor theory; empirical studies in humor, laughter, comedy and related fields from around the world and, (my personal favorite because it promises off-kilter metal skull caps, electrodes and lab coats) humor research methodologies and measurements of sense of humor.
There are also books that discuss “funny” in which the authors insist there’s nothing funny about the funny they’re discussing. Take Jeremy Dauber's Jewish Comedy: A Serious History and Ruth Wisse's No Joke: Making Jewish Comedy. both of which insist on their own seriousness and even use colons (which is the universal warning symbol against reading pleasure) but I don’t see the connections being made there either.
I find this very odd.
Much of this peak in influence, activity, and creative comedic intensity was between the 1930s and the 1950s. Also between the 1930s and the1950s were the 1940s. Which brings us to Holocaust Studies.
Holocaust Studies has nothing to do with comedy. I cannot prove this, but I have a suspicion that since the subject (the industrial mass murder of millions) is so bleak one might be pilloried for even trying to talk about humor. I’m thinking of the controversies around Roberto Benigni’s 1997 La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful). Granted, that was a drama and a comedy itself whereas I’m discussing scholastic research but I still suspect there’s something to it.
There are indeed certainly studies of comedy in Germany at the time; about how daily life including jokes persisted; and even a movie called The Last Laugh by Ferne Pearlstein about making jokes about the Holocaust. But none of this goes for the gold ring and tries to answer how did we became utterly hilarious during the Holocaust?
Why is this not a documentary investigation on Netflix?
*
Here’s how I got interested: My novel How to Find Your Way in the Dark is set between 1937 and 1947 in rural Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut, and the Catskills in New York (among other places). I set a good chunk of it at Grossinger's in Liberty, New York in 1943, which was the premiere Jewish resort. To understand Grossinger's I read the local newspapers that had been available to every influential Jewish guest and every world-class Jewish musical, comedic, or theatrical act that passed through Grossinger's.
How many Jews? How many acts? How influential?
I tried to find out but I couldn’t (not within reason). My hunch? Every political, financial, artistic, and intellectually influential Jew on America's eastern seaboard passed through Grossinger's and read those newspapers in the early 1940s.
Is that true? No. But for the sake of this discussion, it’s close enough for rock n’ roll and here's why I can say that (I get the following numbers from Tania Grossinger’s Growing Up at Grossinger’s (2008)): By the mid-1940s, every week, Grossinger's ordered 300 standing ribs of beef for steaks and roast beef, 1,000 pounds of poultry, 27,000 eggs—all cracked by a woman named Rosie by hand—1,000 pounds of potatoes, 500 pounds of Nova Scotia lox, 70 cases of fresh oranges for juice alone, and 700 pounds of coffee. Every single morning the bakery produced 4,600 rolls and another 4,600 mini pastries. They made 36 pounds of cookies with every meal and 800 portions of pie, and the guests had a choice of at least three kinds of pie during lunch and dinner. Grossinger’s covered almost 850 acres of land, and was the home to thousands of guests every week. They had 60 chambermaids and twenty women in the laundry room washing 7,500 sheets and pillowcases and 20,000 bath towels every week.
That's a lot of Jews.
Were they influential? Grossinger's was one hundred miles from Manhattan, which had the largest (and most influential) Jewish community. Grossinger's was the premiere resort and therefore the place to see and be seen. Is this a deductive argument rather than an empirical one? Yes. But it's a good one and an excellent place to begin an enquiry.
I read the newspapers from almost every day between 1938 and 1944. I read a lot of local papers — like the Examiner-Recorder, the Hartford Courant and the Fitchberg Sentinel and others (including the New York Times and Boston Globe) — that pulled their international news from AP and elsewhere. That means, I was reading what the people there were reading at the time. And while they didn't know what we know today, I'm here to say that they did know a lot; a lot more than we often admit to each other or ourselves. Beatings, murders, deportations, humiliations, disenfranchisement … it was all there, if not (yet) the death camps. I could go on but my point is this: The most funny and the most not-funny of Jewish life was printed on paper and under the noses of the people laughing it up.
As it happens, I’m not only a novelist but an academic by training (I have a Ph.D. summa cum laude in international relations and a couple of masters degrees) and in my head alarms are sounding like Aaaoooogha, Aaoooogha, Aaooogh. These, to me, are not a signal to dive like a submarine but to rise above; above what we know and what we now understand about how individuals and entire cultures attend to comedy and tragedy so that the human experience can be more greatly appreciated and enriched and used as a guide for the perplexed (to coin a term). Because hidden inside this rich-point of investigation are secrets about what it means to be alive; what it means, personally and communally, to be — on one hand — parochial, provincial, dismissive, exclusionary and even scornful of what is foreign and strange and distant and irrelevant to us, while — on the other — being responsive and attentive, empathetic and engaged with the worst of what humanity can throw at us. It may bring us a little closer to an understanding of joy; the joy that God (if there is a God) surely wants for us: joy in the face of darkness. Joy as a response to the darkness.
How big?
About as big as the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, almost exactly that size.
How can people fail to see something as big as the Atlantic ocean?
There are answers to this worth noting. This is my personal list:
Distance (it’s too far away in time or space);
Direction (we’re looking the wrong way — literally or metaphorically);
Distraction (our focus prevents us from seeing the unexpected);
Dissonance (our brains reject what we can’t or won’t believe); and
Indifference (to notice something … we have to care).
Writing a novel focuses the mind but also allows it to wander through material in a way that I never experienced as a scholar. In writing non-fiction I was trying to make a case for something. In writing fiction I’m trying to tell a story and I don’t know where it is going even while writing it. The latter leaves the mind open to observation and analysis in a way that the first, alas, sometimes does not.
Here’s what I noticed: The rise of Jewish-American comedy — which would impact every aspect of mass media comedy across the world by the 1960s — reached its maturity in form and practice in the Catskills of New York while the Holocaust was raging in Europe. In one way, this is a simple fact. It invites a shrug. But what makes it a fact of intellectual and philosophical enormity is that the Jewish world was laughing its greatest laughter while crying its deepest tears at precisely the same moment. Those to the west of the Atlantic knew about those those events to east.
In casting my mind around the globe and through time, I can't evoke a more dramatic, consequential, radically juxtaposed, world-changing couplet of events as the attempted annihilation and genocide of an entire people in one region while those safely in another were perfecting a new form of happiness so delightful it would define entertainment across the planet for all foreseeable future.
And I’m not being histrionic: The stand-up comedy of Zimbabwe, circa 2021, came from the Catskills as directly as the hip-hop of Pakistan comes from the Bronx.
On the one hand, there’s the history of Jewish-American comedy and everything Seinfeld talks about in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. This is well-documented, often discussed, and well-known.
On the other, there is Holocaust studies. That is a vast, complex, and deeply-engaged academic discipline that is — itself — multi-disciplinary, drawing on history, psychology, sociology, forensic science, law and the list goes on.
What I don’t see is anyone pulling these parts together into a single, coherent story of radical juxtaposition let alone risking interpretation and analysis. As a scholar and a novelist, I am declaring that if we did, there would be treasure to be uncovered, and you don’t have to be Jewish to care.
For example: How on earth did that happen? How could people in the Catskills keep their sense of humor at a time like that? Or was it a reaction to the times? Or were they aloof and emotionally distant? Was it an example of American exceptionalism, or was the Jewish community acting in a way unique to itself? Is this kind of dissociative behavior seen in other communities under stress? Were the themes and subjects and topics of the humour influenced by the darkness of events in Europe? In a word: What the hell was going on?
It isn’t like no one could be asking these questions from the perspective of studying humor or comedy. I came across the peer reviewed journal HUMOR (in capital letters, yes really, and no it's not an acronym): the International Journal of Humor Research, which covers such diverse and inadvertently-hilarious topics as interdisciplinary humor research; humor theory; empirical studies in humor, laughter, comedy and related fields from around the world and, (my personal favorite because it promises off-kilter metal skull caps, electrodes and lab coats) humor research methodologies and measurements of sense of humor.
There are also books that discuss “funny” in which the authors insist there’s nothing funny about the funny they’re discussing. Take Jeremy Dauber's Jewish Comedy: A Serious History and Ruth Wisse's No Joke: Making Jewish Comedy. both of which insist on their own seriousness and even use colons (which is the universal warning symbol against reading pleasure) but I don’t see the connections being made there either.
I find this very odd.
Much of this peak in influence, activity, and creative comedic intensity was between the 1930s and the 1950s. Also between the 1930s and the1950s were the 1940s. Which brings us to Holocaust Studies.
Holocaust Studies has nothing to do with comedy. I cannot prove this, but I have a suspicion that since the subject (the industrial mass murder of millions) is so bleak one might be pilloried for even trying to talk about humor. I’m thinking of the controversies around Roberto Benigni’s 1997 La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful). Granted, that was a drama and a comedy itself whereas I’m discussing scholastic research but I still suspect there’s something to it.
There are indeed certainly studies of comedy in Germany at the time; about how daily life including jokes persisted; and even a movie called The Last Laugh by Ferne Pearlstein about making jokes about the Holocaust. But none of this goes for the gold ring and tries to answer how did we became utterly hilarious during the Holocaust?
Why is this not a documentary investigation on Netflix?
*
Here’s how I got interested: My novel How to Find Your Way in the Dark is set between 1937 and 1947 in rural Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut, and the Catskills in New York (among other places). I set a good chunk of it at Grossinger's in Liberty, New York in 1943, which was the premiere Jewish resort. To understand Grossinger's I read the local newspapers that had been available to every influential Jewish guest and every world-class Jewish musical, comedic, or theatrical act that passed through Grossinger's.
How many Jews? How many acts? How influential?
I tried to find out but I couldn’t (not within reason). My hunch? Every political, financial, artistic, and intellectually influential Jew on America's eastern seaboard passed through Grossinger's and read those newspapers in the early 1940s.
Is that true? No. But for the sake of this discussion, it’s close enough for rock n’ roll and here's why I can say that (I get the following numbers from Tania Grossinger’s Growing Up at Grossinger’s (2008)): By the mid-1940s, every week, Grossinger's ordered 300 standing ribs of beef for steaks and roast beef, 1,000 pounds of poultry, 27,000 eggs—all cracked by a woman named Rosie by hand—1,000 pounds of potatoes, 500 pounds of Nova Scotia lox, 70 cases of fresh oranges for juice alone, and 700 pounds of coffee. Every single morning the bakery produced 4,600 rolls and another 4,600 mini pastries. They made 36 pounds of cookies with every meal and 800 portions of pie, and the guests had a choice of at least three kinds of pie during lunch and dinner. Grossinger’s covered almost 850 acres of land, and was the home to thousands of guests every week. They had 60 chambermaids and twenty women in the laundry room washing 7,500 sheets and pillowcases and 20,000 bath towels every week.
That's a lot of Jews.
Were they influential? Grossinger's was one hundred miles from Manhattan, which had the largest (and most influential) Jewish community. Grossinger's was the premiere resort and therefore the place to see and be seen. Is this a deductive argument rather than an empirical one? Yes. But it's a good one and an excellent place to begin an enquiry.
I read the newspapers from almost every day between 1938 and 1944. I read a lot of local papers — like the Examiner-Recorder, the Hartford Courant and the Fitchberg Sentinel and others (including the New York Times and Boston Globe) — that pulled their international news from AP and elsewhere. That means, I was reading what the people there were reading at the time. And while they didn't know what we know today, I'm here to say that they did know a lot; a lot more than we often admit to each other or ourselves. Beatings, murders, deportations, humiliations, disenfranchisement … it was all there, if not (yet) the death camps. I could go on but my point is this: The most funny and the most not-funny of Jewish life was printed on paper and under the noses of the people laughing it up.
As it happens, I’m not only a novelist but an academic by training (I have a Ph.D. summa cum laude in international relations and a couple of masters degrees) and in my head alarms are sounding like Aaaoooogha, Aaoooogha, Aaooogh. These, to me, are not a signal to dive like a submarine but to rise above; above what we know and what we now understand about how individuals and entire cultures attend to comedy and tragedy so that the human experience can be more greatly appreciated and enriched and used as a guide for the perplexed (to coin a term). Because hidden inside this rich-point of investigation are secrets about what it means to be alive; what it means, personally and communally, to be — on one hand — parochial, provincial, dismissive, exclusionary and even scornful of what is foreign and strange and distant and irrelevant to us, while — on the other — being responsive and attentive, empathetic and engaged with the worst of what humanity can throw at us. It may bring us a little closer to an understanding of joy; the joy that God (if there is a God) surely wants for us: joy in the face of darkness. Joy as a response to the darkness.
January 8, 2022
So … it's 2022. Now what?
This year, Transworld at Penguin Random House (which should have been called Random Penguin but wasn't and I'll never understand why) will be publishing HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK if they manage to select a cover. Which is no longer assured as they seem to be on cover design version 302 or something. In any case, those in the Commonwealth will get it this summer.
Under the brilliant leadership of Bill Scott-Kerr, they have also bought Norwegian by Night and The Girl in Green from Faber and Faber where the latter, in particular, was languishing in indifference. Now, I'm hoping that novel (what should be a classic war novel of that period) will find some of the audience it deserves. It did take about seven years to write, after all. I am very attached to that book and it is very alive for me.
Those of you who listened to my Audible Original, QUIET TIME, might remember the short stories of Beatrice Livingston. I'm happy to announce that I'm in negotiations with Norwegian publishers to create a children's book from Beatrice's story THE CHRISTMAS TREE WHO WAS AFRAID OF THE DARK which I'll produce with Icelandic illustrator Bjørg Thorhallsdottir (https://bjorgsunivers.no).
I have also submitted a new novel to my agents called THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI. I hope it will find a publisher this year and an audience in 2023.
And, of course, I am working on another book. The working title is THE WOMAN WHO RUINED EVERYTHING, inspired by the interpolated novel The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious by Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote. Mine is set where I got married: In Sestri Levante, Italy.
A big year. I hope you stick with me and spread the word about these novels and stories that mean so much to me and, I'm pleased to say, so much to many others too.
Happy New Year.
Derek.
Under the brilliant leadership of Bill Scott-Kerr, they have also bought Norwegian by Night and The Girl in Green from Faber and Faber where the latter, in particular, was languishing in indifference. Now, I'm hoping that novel (what should be a classic war novel of that period) will find some of the audience it deserves. It did take about seven years to write, after all. I am very attached to that book and it is very alive for me.
Those of you who listened to my Audible Original, QUIET TIME, might remember the short stories of Beatrice Livingston. I'm happy to announce that I'm in negotiations with Norwegian publishers to create a children's book from Beatrice's story THE CHRISTMAS TREE WHO WAS AFRAID OF THE DARK which I'll produce with Icelandic illustrator Bjørg Thorhallsdottir (https://bjorgsunivers.no).
I have also submitted a new novel to my agents called THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI. I hope it will find a publisher this year and an audience in 2023.
And, of course, I am working on another book. The working title is THE WOMAN WHO RUINED EVERYTHING, inspired by the interpolated novel The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious by Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote. Mine is set where I got married: In Sestri Levante, Italy.
A big year. I hope you stick with me and spread the word about these novels and stories that mean so much to me and, I'm pleased to say, so much to many others too.
Happy New Year.
Derek.
November 25, 2021
How to Save Thanksgiving
How to Save Thanksgiving
Derek B. Miller
I am preparing for Thanksgiving from a great distance. It is a distance of space and time. I’m in Oslo, Norway, and the people who celebrate it — my compatriots — are far away. Norway has adopted almost every American trope and commercial impulse one can imagine, but this is simply one cultural product that is stubbornly rooted in soil. Unlike Halloween, this one isn’t going to wash over me here. I have to reach across the world and bring it over and try and explain it to my kids.
Explain what, exactly? In our revisionism, in our striving for a new humanist moral foundation on which to stand — however destructive the method, however mechanical the process — we can no longer have the Thanksgiving we used to have (assuming we ever had it). We don’t get to have the one that Charlie Brown gets to have. The one awash in watercolors and small town, idyllic life. One impervious to the times and politics and the sounds of discord on the streets and academic journals. One that is hermetic in its immutability, and exists more as a mood and a smell and a sense of wellbeing than a holiday or break or respite.
That’s the one I want, of course. That’s my north star. Well, maybe not Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving per se. I’d rather have Lucy’s. I’d rather do Thanksgiving than have it done to me as she’s always the one holding the football but … you understand.
The story we’re meant to celebrate is clear enough. A bunch of pilgrims in 1620, in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, were starving. Through industry, cooperation with the local tribes, and their generosity towards us (we were all there) they managed to survive the winter and press on, helping create America. We give thanks to that experience and also craft a story of national origin. We then relive and enact that moment as ritual.
We don’t look at it from a distance. We don’t take a suspecting glance at it and keep it at arms length. Thanksgiving is a shared performance of the most sensual kind: Food and wine and talk and sport. There’s no sitting this holiday out. There’s no place to stand apart from it. You have to roll up your sleeves and kick up those heels and enact it.
What’s hard to think about — emotionally, historically, but also from the context of the performance — is what happened afterward. The smallpox and broken treaties and lies and massacres and self-delusion, and fabricated history, and myth-making. The utter destruction of the native American communities and cultures. All of that cries out silently, pleading for a mature nation — a moral nation — to better understand itself so we all can grow into a better one.
Thanksgiving, clearly, had its victors and its vanquished. It has its Jews who crossed through the Red Sea for the Promised Land and it had its Egyptians who didn’t make it. I mention this for a reason.
I’m Jewish too, so — from a distance — I lasso Passover to Norway and pull it on over too. I tell the kids about how we were slaves in Egypt (possibly not, but let’s run with it) and about the plagues (ditto) and the parting of the Red Sea (double ditto). But then … something nice happens in that meal. Something I’ve never seen in another culture and it’s one that makes Passover deep and important and worthwhile for me. As we read off the names of each plague that tortured Egypt so we could be free, we dip a finger into our glass of red wine and remove a drop, placing it on a napkin. We do this each time the name of the plague is read aloud. And we do it so that we remember those who suffered and died so we could be free. We do not drink a full measure of wine knowing that others died so we could be happy.
America, it seems to me, is on the cusp of either coming to a mature reconciliation with its past or else being divided and hence destroyed by the internal contradictions. If we love our country we have to recognize the situation we’re in and come to a solution to address it. There is simply no other way.
The Jews, in my view, have found an elegant and poetic expression for addressing the harm that preceded freedom. It is a ritual, a gesture, that serves to carry cultural wisdom forward through time. Americans, as yet, have not. What we’ve achieved (and it is glorious what we have achieved) is reposed upon slavery and mass murder and lies and we have yet to find even the smallest gestures to attend to that truth. So … what do we do?
This year, Thanksgiving will be a battleground of political animosity. One doesn’t need to read tea leaves to know this. There is a pathway forward, though, and I think the Passover ritual holds a clue.
Here is one important truth followed by a suggestion to consider.
The truth is this: Things do not always continue for the reasons they begin. They also don’t have to.
We do not necessarily stay married for the reasons we got married. We do not necessary live where we do for the reasons we moved there. Time and experience and judgement and reason and emotion and circumstance — the full drama of biography — changes our motive forces into something else. There is no reason we need to come to a shared agreement of America’s past and the origins of Thanksgiving in order to do it better and enjoy it now.
Here’s the challenge: We need a means — a performance — to say that progress doesn’t come by throwing out the past but rather by embracing and confronting and understanding it; one that reveals that we don’t need to reshape our history to create a moral lesson but rather we can create a new moral lesson with the raw stuff of our history; one that says we can be grateful for the America we have and that giving true thanks only comes by holding fast to the eternal values that unite us as a community — not as individuals fleeing history and one another, but as a community anchored in a real history and intent on making a better one. And Thanksgiving should be fun and happy and sincere.
Here’s my suggestion: I propose that every American family set out a place setting at our tables, and pile it with food and fill it with wine, and leave that place empty. We leave it empty to remember that our table will never be complete. That not all of us are here to share the moment. That we give thanks for what we have while remembering that what we have came at a cost. We remember the Jewish idea that questions unite us and answers divide us. So we create a space for questions without the burden of answers. We invite our children to ask about the empty chair, and we find a way to talk to each other about it — because the talk itself is virtuous. Because the talk is uniting.
In this way, Thanksgiving remains the holiday we want, while it becomes something more: it becomes the vehicle for remembering, not forgetting. It becomes the way we grow by talking with one another rather than conspiring in our silence. And in this way we do what Lincoln asked for us to do when he codified Thanksgiving in a proclamation in 1863 — in the midst of the Civil War — which was to use the opportunity to “heal the wounds of the nation.”
________
Derek B. Miller (Ph.D) is the author of six novels, most recently How To Find Your Way in the Dark. He lives in Oslo, Norway with his wife and two children.
Derek B. Miller
I am preparing for Thanksgiving from a great distance. It is a distance of space and time. I’m in Oslo, Norway, and the people who celebrate it — my compatriots — are far away. Norway has adopted almost every American trope and commercial impulse one can imagine, but this is simply one cultural product that is stubbornly rooted in soil. Unlike Halloween, this one isn’t going to wash over me here. I have to reach across the world and bring it over and try and explain it to my kids.
Explain what, exactly? In our revisionism, in our striving for a new humanist moral foundation on which to stand — however destructive the method, however mechanical the process — we can no longer have the Thanksgiving we used to have (assuming we ever had it). We don’t get to have the one that Charlie Brown gets to have. The one awash in watercolors and small town, idyllic life. One impervious to the times and politics and the sounds of discord on the streets and academic journals. One that is hermetic in its immutability, and exists more as a mood and a smell and a sense of wellbeing than a holiday or break or respite.
That’s the one I want, of course. That’s my north star. Well, maybe not Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving per se. I’d rather have Lucy’s. I’d rather do Thanksgiving than have it done to me as she’s always the one holding the football but … you understand.
The story we’re meant to celebrate is clear enough. A bunch of pilgrims in 1620, in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, were starving. Through industry, cooperation with the local tribes, and their generosity towards us (we were all there) they managed to survive the winter and press on, helping create America. We give thanks to that experience and also craft a story of national origin. We then relive and enact that moment as ritual.
We don’t look at it from a distance. We don’t take a suspecting glance at it and keep it at arms length. Thanksgiving is a shared performance of the most sensual kind: Food and wine and talk and sport. There’s no sitting this holiday out. There’s no place to stand apart from it. You have to roll up your sleeves and kick up those heels and enact it.
What’s hard to think about — emotionally, historically, but also from the context of the performance — is what happened afterward. The smallpox and broken treaties and lies and massacres and self-delusion, and fabricated history, and myth-making. The utter destruction of the native American communities and cultures. All of that cries out silently, pleading for a mature nation — a moral nation — to better understand itself so we all can grow into a better one.
Thanksgiving, clearly, had its victors and its vanquished. It has its Jews who crossed through the Red Sea for the Promised Land and it had its Egyptians who didn’t make it. I mention this for a reason.
I’m Jewish too, so — from a distance — I lasso Passover to Norway and pull it on over too. I tell the kids about how we were slaves in Egypt (possibly not, but let’s run with it) and about the plagues (ditto) and the parting of the Red Sea (double ditto). But then … something nice happens in that meal. Something I’ve never seen in another culture and it’s one that makes Passover deep and important and worthwhile for me. As we read off the names of each plague that tortured Egypt so we could be free, we dip a finger into our glass of red wine and remove a drop, placing it on a napkin. We do this each time the name of the plague is read aloud. And we do it so that we remember those who suffered and died so we could be free. We do not drink a full measure of wine knowing that others died so we could be happy.
America, it seems to me, is on the cusp of either coming to a mature reconciliation with its past or else being divided and hence destroyed by the internal contradictions. If we love our country we have to recognize the situation we’re in and come to a solution to address it. There is simply no other way.
The Jews, in my view, have found an elegant and poetic expression for addressing the harm that preceded freedom. It is a ritual, a gesture, that serves to carry cultural wisdom forward through time. Americans, as yet, have not. What we’ve achieved (and it is glorious what we have achieved) is reposed upon slavery and mass murder and lies and we have yet to find even the smallest gestures to attend to that truth. So … what do we do?
This year, Thanksgiving will be a battleground of political animosity. One doesn’t need to read tea leaves to know this. There is a pathway forward, though, and I think the Passover ritual holds a clue.
Here is one important truth followed by a suggestion to consider.
The truth is this: Things do not always continue for the reasons they begin. They also don’t have to.
We do not necessarily stay married for the reasons we got married. We do not necessary live where we do for the reasons we moved there. Time and experience and judgement and reason and emotion and circumstance — the full drama of biography — changes our motive forces into something else. There is no reason we need to come to a shared agreement of America’s past and the origins of Thanksgiving in order to do it better and enjoy it now.
Here’s the challenge: We need a means — a performance — to say that progress doesn’t come by throwing out the past but rather by embracing and confronting and understanding it; one that reveals that we don’t need to reshape our history to create a moral lesson but rather we can create a new moral lesson with the raw stuff of our history; one that says we can be grateful for the America we have and that giving true thanks only comes by holding fast to the eternal values that unite us as a community — not as individuals fleeing history and one another, but as a community anchored in a real history and intent on making a better one. And Thanksgiving should be fun and happy and sincere.
Here’s my suggestion: I propose that every American family set out a place setting at our tables, and pile it with food and fill it with wine, and leave that place empty. We leave it empty to remember that our table will never be complete. That not all of us are here to share the moment. That we give thanks for what we have while remembering that what we have came at a cost. We remember the Jewish idea that questions unite us and answers divide us. So we create a space for questions without the burden of answers. We invite our children to ask about the empty chair, and we find a way to talk to each other about it — because the talk itself is virtuous. Because the talk is uniting.
In this way, Thanksgiving remains the holiday we want, while it becomes something more: it becomes the vehicle for remembering, not forgetting. It becomes the way we grow by talking with one another rather than conspiring in our silence. And in this way we do what Lincoln asked for us to do when he codified Thanksgiving in a proclamation in 1863 — in the midst of the Civil War — which was to use the opportunity to “heal the wounds of the nation.”
________
Derek B. Miller (Ph.D) is the author of six novels, most recently How To Find Your Way in the Dark. He lives in Oslo, Norway with his wife and two children.
August 28, 2021
New podcast on my latest book
If you're interested in my latest novel, HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK, you might enjoy this podcast/interview I did while on my annual motorcycle trip, sitting in a courtyard in Carcassonne, France. That was a nice evening …
https://thecuriousmanspodcast.libsyn....
https://thecuriousmanspodcast.libsyn....
May 18, 2021
Talking about book covers …
HOW TO FIND YOUR WANT IN THE DARK is coming out in July, 2021, in the United States and in January of 2022 in the UK and Commonwealth. The American cover is locked in and the British one is in development.
It's an interesting process because the two books have to appeal to very different readerships with different expectations. One might have assumed that since English is English (I'm hearing Mr. Incredible shouting "math is math!") and people like nice book covers these would be the same.
Oh no. My British publisher explicitly said to me, on seeing the American one, "that's nice but it would never work here."
What does it mean for a cover to "work"? What indicates it? How do you measure that? I'm a social scientist too. I want to know these things!
But I can't ask because I'm a team player and have to trust the professionals to do their jobs. I confine my views to, "that's a nice blue …" and other such earthquakers.
On Patreon I'll post the rejected covers and show how it all evolved. Join me there if you're interested.
— Derek
https://www.patreon.com/derekbmiller
It's an interesting process because the two books have to appeal to very different readerships with different expectations. One might have assumed that since English is English (I'm hearing Mr. Incredible shouting "math is math!") and people like nice book covers these would be the same.
Oh no. My British publisher explicitly said to me, on seeing the American one, "that's nice but it would never work here."
What does it mean for a cover to "work"? What indicates it? How do you measure that? I'm a social scientist too. I want to know these things!
But I can't ask because I'm a team player and have to trust the professionals to do their jobs. I confine my views to, "that's a nice blue …" and other such earthquakers.
On Patreon I'll post the rejected covers and show how it all evolved. Join me there if you're interested.
— Derek
https://www.patreon.com/derekbmiller
