Rod Dreher's Blog, page 203
October 8, 2019
China’s Present, America’s Future
After reading the John Lanchester review of two new books on China’s surveillance totalitarianism (I wrote about the Lanchester book here, in connection with the NBA scandal), I bought one of the titles: We Have Been Harmonised: Life In China’s Surveillance State, by Kai Strittmatter. As regular readers know, I am forced by my new book project to limit my readings to subjects related to totalitarianism. From Lanchester’s review, I sussed that what’s going on in China today is exactly what I fear is coming here, regarding “soft totalitarianism.” Mind you, there is nothing “soft” about what is being done to the Uighurs of Xinjiang by that bloody regime in Beijing. But overall, the iron fist is very much in a velvet glove in communist China, thanks to technology.
I stayed up till after midnight last night reading Strittmatter’s book. It’s stunning stuff. The future I’ve been imagining all year, as I’ve worked on this project, already exists in China.
Excerpts from the book by Strittmatter, a German journalist who lived and worked in China:
The China we once knew no longer exists. The China that was with us for forty years – the China of ‘reform and opening up’ – is making way for something new. It’s time for us to start paying attention. Something is happening in China that the world has never seen before. A new country and a new regime are being born. And it’s also time for us to take a look at ourselves. Are we ready? Because one thing is becoming increasingly clear: over the coming decades, the greatest challenge for our democracies and for Europe won’t be Russia, it will be China. Within its borders, China is working to create the perfect surveillance state, and its engineers of the soul are again trying to craft the ‘new man’ of whom Lenin, Stalin and Mao once dreamed. And this China wants to shape the rest of the world in its own image.
Emphasis mine. More:
The Party believes it can use big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to create steering mechanisms that will catapult its economy into the future and make its apparatus crisis-proof. At the same time, it intends to use this technology to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen. Ideally, one where you can’t even see the surveillance, because the state has planted it inside the heads of its subjects. This new China won’t be a giant parade ground characterised by asceticism and discipline, as it was under Mao, but an outwardly colourful mix of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people devote themselves to commerce and pleasure and in so doing submit to surveillance of their own accord. Still, for the vast majority of subjects, the potential threat of state terror will remain ever-present, the background radiation in this Party universe.
Something close to James Poulos’s concept of the Pink Police State.
More:
It’s time for the democracies of the West to recognise China as the challenge that it is. A confident, increasingly authoritarian China, that is changing the rules of the game every day. This is not the China that the optimists once dreamed of: a country that might go down the same route as South Korea or Taiwan and, having reached a similar stage of economic development, set out along the path to democracy. It is a Leninist dictatorship with a powerful economy and a clear vision for the future: this China wishes to reshape the world order according to its own ideas, to be a model for others, to export its norms and values. And make no mistake: these norms and values are not ‘Chinese’ – they are the norms and values of a Leninist dictatorship. China is creating global networks, increasing its influence. And the liberal democracies are being confronted with this new China just when the West is showing signs of weakness, and the world order it has constructed over the past few decades is sliding into crisis.
Finally, this passage:
The gulf between official and non-official language is wider in authoritarian societies than in others. But because the private sphere is deprived of oxygen in totalitarian systems, people who live under them have official language forced on them at every turn. As a result, they develop split personalities – all the more so when the language of propaganda is the language of lies – and end up adopting what George Orwell perceptively called Doublethink and Doublespeak in 1984: ‘To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy’. Each subject acts a part, to his neighbours, his colleagues, the political apparatus – and as long as he is aware of this, he can still laugh or sigh about it in secret. For most people, though, the part they act quickly becomes flesh and blood, and because it is impossible to keep the two spheres perfectly separate, the language of the political apparatus always winds up corrupting the language of the people.
This state of living is hard to imagine in the US. But not as hard as it ought to be. Almost every day I hear from readers — some in corporate America, some in academia — who tell me stories about how they walk on eggshells in their workplace, out of fear of saying something that offends against political correctness. This almost always has to do with homosexuality or transgenderism.
One lawyer told me recently that in his white-shoe law firm, everyone during Pride month was expected to take one of the firm-provided rainbow flags and display it at their desk as a sign of solidarity. He declined to do it. He said not one word about LGBT, but his Bartleby-the-Scrivener-like withholding of assent was the only one like it in the entire firm. He is sure that it was noticed, and that this is going to have consequences at some point.
What is so interesting to me about this is that people are not simply afraid of saying the “wrong” thing; they are afraid of failing to say the “right” thing. Political correctness lives in their heads, because it has, or can have, real-world consequences for them. Nobody is going to a gulag because they refuse to use the politically correct pronoun, but doing that sets one apart as politically unreliable — a “bigot” who contributes to a “hostile work environment” that makes LGBT people feel “unsafe” — and paves the way for a future dismissal.
Now, an employee may know that when he refers to the man in the dress in the workplace as “she,” that he is following a professional convention, and that the language does not reflect biological reality. Perhaps he feels safe in recognizing that he only has to lie in that way in the office. But consider that more and more of us will be going into private spaces — our homes, the homes of our friends — that are monitored by smart speakers. We know that these things monitor, and even record, our conversations, and that in some cases these conversations are stored. People love smart speakers: “Alexa, play some John Coltrane.” They are becoming accustomed to living with that technology, because it makes life more convenient and pleasant.
In this way, they are becoming accustomed to being monitored. If the government installed a smart speaker in your house, you would scream bloody murder. But if you order one from Amazon and use it to fulfill your consumer needs, you welcome surveillance technology into your living space.
This is how it’s going to happen in America. This is how it is happening in America. We’re going to swallow the bitter pill of technocratic tyranny because it is covered with the honeyed narcotic of consumer convenience.
Now, Edward Snowden has revealed that the US government has the technological capacity to spy on anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world, in real time. The NSA can activate the camera and microphone in your laptop or your smartphone, without you knowing it. Snowden writes in his new book about how the NSA has built the capacity to capture and store all digital communications (he quotes a public speech that the CIA’s top tech guy gave, in which he revealed this). It is impossible to monitor all of it, but they don’t have to. Voice recognition software, and facial recognition software, does this automatically, and flags for agents things that are potentially problematic, from the agency’s point of view.
In China right now, the technology exists, and is in use, that recognizes faces from CCTV cameras on the street. If you are identified by the cameras going into, say, a church, the computers make a note of it, and it automatically debits your Social Credit Score — which governs your ability to buy, to sell, and to participate in daily life. No human being has to have observed the recording of you entering the church. It was entirely mechanical — but it will have imposed a cost on your liberty.
We can do this here too. What prevents us from doing it at this point is political and cultural resistance. We need to understand the threat, and use what liberties we still have to protect ourselves from surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state — which in China, are the same thing.
Consider, though: given that our smartphones, our smart devices (in the Internet of Things), including our smart speakers, have the capability of monitoring our conversations, how safe would you feel in the future going to the home of conservative friends whose beliefs you share, but who have a smart speaker? What if the speaker overhears you using language banned at work, records it, and automatically tips off Google, or Amazon, or even the state? If you think it can’t happen here, you are making the fundamental mistake that Solzhenitsyn warned against. That being the technological reality, wouldn’t you allow, for your own safety, the rules of the workplace to govern the language you use in the private sphere?
And don’t you think that ultimately, this kind of thing will change the way you think? Of course it will! Strittmatter:
In a world where the distinction between truth and lies has been abolished, there are just facts and alternative. The dominant values are not morality and a sense of responsibility, but usefulness and profit. If you do see the truth, it will do you no good to tell it; in fact, it’s dangerous. Best of all is to acknowledge the lie as true and embrace it passionately – that’s what the fanatics do. But they will only ever be a very small group. The next best thing is deliberately to avoid learning the truth, to live a life of benumbed ignorance –and if you do happen upon the truth, keep quiet and pretend you haven’t. These two groups represent the majority of the population. Anyone who speaks the truth is either stupid or suicidal. The smart people in such a world are not the clear-sighted and wise; the smart people are the cunning and shrewd. There’s no room here for common sense, or rather, ignorance is the new common sense, necessary for survival or used to justify opportunistic advancement.
These are the kinds of political and cultural issues that we had better start thinking about and talking about now. I’m hoping that the book I’m writing will help launch these conversations. China represents a potential future for us Americans — for corporate oligarchs, future tyrants, and the right-thinkers of the administrative state to keep the Deplorables in line. I’m only a few chapters into the Strittmatter book, but so far, I heartily recommend it. The books I’ve been reading about the Stalinist-style communist states of the 20th century are riveting, but dated. China shows how the 21st century tyrants are doing it.
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October 7, 2019
NBA To China: ‘How Now Kowtow?’
I’m very far from alone in pointing out that the National Basketball Association’s suck-up to China is contemptible. Both conservatives and progressives have spoken out against the NBA for kowtowing to Beijing over the pro-Hong Kong democrats’ tweet sent out by the Houston Rockets’ general manager. Daryl Morey tweeted, “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” He deleted it shortly after sending it, and subsequently seems to have been compelled to disavow the tweet:
2/ I have always appreciated the significant support our Chinese fans and sponsors have provided and I would hope that those who are upset will know that offending or misunderstanding them was not my intention. My tweets are my own and in no way represent the Rockets or the NBA.
— Daryl Morey (@dmorey) October 7, 2019
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Why? Read all about it here. Basically, the Chinese Communist Party hit the roof, putting millions of dollars of NBA revenue at risk (US basketball is big in China). NBA executives fell all over themselves to thrown Morey and the Hong Kong protesters under the Red Army tank in order to protect their revenue.
Note well: in 2016, the NBA pulled the league All-Star game from North Carolina to protest the state’s transgender bathroom bill. They claimed it was a matter of principle. Now we see exactly what the principle$ of the NBA mean when it comes to offending the Chinese Communists.
Houston Rockets star James Harden has spoken out against US police shootings of black men, and defended Colin Kaepernick’s right to dissent, but he’s cool with China’s rolling over free speech and democracy in Hong Kong:
James Harden, a Rockets guard and one of the N.B.A.’s biggest stars, directly apologized to Chinese fans on Monday.
“We apologize. We love China, we love playing there,” he told reporters in Tokyo, where the Rockets were preparing for their preseason game.
“We go there once or twice a year. They show us the most support and love. We appreciate them as a fan base, and we love everything they’re about, and we appreciate the support that they give us,” said Harden, who three years ago spoke out about the shootings of two black men by police.
The question is how an American league that prides itself on promoting progressive values squares those values with allowing an apologist for authoritarianism to own one of its teams. What’s more, why is a league run by a commissioner who rightly criticized President Trump’s Muslim travel ban for going “against the fundamental values and the fundamental ingredients of what makes for a great N.B.A.” also running a training camp for young players in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, amid camps of a far different kind?
Woke politics often seems to train our collective attention down on our navels rather than out at the world. Is the issue of gender-neutral bathrooms really as morally urgent as a country that is, as Pete Buttigieg sharply put it, “using technology for the perfection of dictatorship?” This is a worldview that encourages companies to take cost-free stands on the progressive cause of the moment and do absolutely nothing to uphold fundamental progressive values when doing so requires more sacrifice than the time it takes to write up a news release. A worldview that fails to force companies like the N.B.A., Apple, Google and Disney to account for the fact that they are serving as handmaidens to totalitarians is not one worth taking seriously.
Michael Brendan Dougherty rips the league a new one, and then some:
In America, you can buy a Volkswagen and criticize Angela Merkel. You can turn around and sell financial products back to German buyers who hate president Donald Trump. But free trade with China has certain conditions attached.
And the conditions have an insidious effect. There are layers of self-censorship and self-abasement that extend into America. The NBA doesn’t just abase itself in order to keep its access to China’s lucrative markets. The reporters who cover the NBA are afraid to criticize the league and its president. ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski, who followed the controversy over the 2017 all-star game in Charlotte, has been studiously silent on this controversy. ESPN, his Disney-owned parent company, which editorialized extensively in favor of the NBA’s anti–North Carolina protest, is running only the most pro forma news coverage of the NBA controversy.
Most of what is called political correctness in America is not actually enforced by the government directly. It is instead enforced by corporations who design their workplace-education policies and, increasingly, their hiring guidance based on the fear of litigation risk. By doing so assiduously, corporations also seek to curry favor with the political class and receive a moral indulgence for their rank profiteering. But it’s interesting to see how quickly and easily a Communist Party command structure, when joined to the profit motive, can inspire Americans such as Daryl Morey, whose employers grant them “freedom of expression,” to voluntarily go through a public ideological struggle session, as if there were two legitimate sides in the protests over civil rights in Hong Kong.
And here are Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance denouncing the Woke Capitalists of the NBA:
Well. Alan Jacobs pointed out today a brand-new essay by the great John Lanchester, writing in the London Review of Books about China’s surveillance totalitarianism. Here’s a link to the essay, but its paywalled. I have a copy, and will post a few excerpts. You can read some on Alan’s blog — and I recommend that you click to see his dire prediction about where this is going.
Meanwhile, here’s some Lanchester:
The party’s plans for it, as set out in the State Council’s ‘next generation artificial intelligence development plan’, published in 2017, are the most ambitious of any government in the world. (It’s noteworthy that this paper, which is fully as alarming as Document Number Nine, was freely published by a government press. The CCP is proud of what it has in mind.)
‘Digitalisation has brought the Chinese people the historic opportunity of the millennium,’ the plan says. What does that mean? It means that China feels that it fell behind the West by missing out on the industrial revolution, and intends not to repeat the mistake with this coming wave of technological change. When it comes to AI the party really, really isn’t messing around. ‘The widespread use of AI in education, medical care, pensions, environmental protection, urban operations, judicial services and other fields will greatly improve the level of precision in public services, comprehensively enhancing the people’s quality of life.’ Oh, and by the way: ‘AI technologies can accurately sense, forecast, and provide early warning of major situations for infrastructure facilities and social security operations; grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner … which will significantly elevate the capability and level of social governance, playing an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability.’ This is as pure a dream of a totalitarian state as there has ever been – a future in which the state knows everything and anticipates everything, acting on its citizens’ needs before the citizen is aware of having them. It is an autocratic fantasy, a posthumanist dream, hiding in the plain sight of a Chinese government white paper.
I mentioned to you readers earlier this summer that a Polish tech entrepreneur I interviewed this past summer told me that AI is developing so fast, and is becoming so good, that those administering the technology will be able to guide people into making decisions that they (the administrators) want them to make, without the people understanding that they are being manipulated.
More Lanchester:
China has been a dictatorship for seventy years. The idea that prosperity and the internet would in themselves make the country turn towards democracy has been proved wrong. Instead, China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state. The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalised the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalisation is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen’s behaviour, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.
We have no need to reach a conclusion about the prospects for this new China – there’s plenty of time for that, and the chance of averting this future for China by wringing one’s hands about it is exactly zero. One point which stands out for me, though, draws on Bran Ferren’s immortal observation: ‘Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ In other words, when technology is introduced, it doesn’t quite function as it’s supposed to; by the time it really does work, we stop noticing that it is technology and just accept it as part of the furniture of life. With the side of the new technology that concerns ‘security’, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether the surveillance really works or not. Of course, it matters deeply for the individual citizen: facial recognition currently has an error rate as high as 15 per cent; combine that with a judicial system that has a conviction rate of 99.9 per cent and some law- abiding people are going to run into problems. However, from the state’s point of view, that matters less than the deterrent and coercive power of omnipresent surveillance combined with social credit. People will change their behaviour because they know they’re being watched. It doesn’t need to work in order to work.
Lanchester points out that all the technology that China is using to implement a truly totalitarian society already exists here. The companies here that developed it and control it are using it to make us buy stuff. What if it moves significantly from being mostly a consumer technology, and becomes a political technology? Or, to look at it a slightly different way, what if the line between consumer technology and political technology becomes blurred out of recognition by Woke Capitalism? Lanchester:
The risk for the developed world is that all the apparatus of surveillance and manipulation that the CCP is developing as a matter of deliberate policy, we develop inadvertently, and end up adopting through negligence, or nescience, or because we’re thinking about other things. In 2013, at the behest of Alan Rusbridger, I spent a week reading the Snowden papers that the Guardian had to destroy in the UK but kept a copy of in New York. They provided a striking portrait of the security services’ attitudes to the huge boon given them by new technology. After all, it wasn’t as if democracies collectively decided to give the security services an exponentially greater and ever growing level of access to their citizens’ private lives. It was just that new technologies came along and changed the way people lived, and those changes just happened to open their lives up to new levels of surveillance and scrutiny. This new bounty just fell into the lap of the secret services, and they accepted it gleefully.
That’s how it would be with facial recognition and AI and big data too. It wouldn’t be a Dr Evil move on the part of Western democracies to access all the new information; they would just take it because it was there, because it suddenly became available. And this, I think, is something we can’t allow to happen. In the developed world, the discourse around the internet is beginning to shift away from the idea of a deregulated, extra-governmental space and to acknowledge the need for legislation and accountability. China has repeatedly done the diametric opposite of us; this time we should live up to the values excoriated by Document Number Nine, and do the exact opposite of them. We should take China’s example seriously, and learn from it, and begin with a complete ban on real-time facial recognition. We should retain that ban unless and until we understand the technology and have worked out a guaranteed way of preventing its misuses. And then we need to have a big collective think about what we want from the new world of big data and AI, towards which we are currently sleepwalking.
This is what the book I’m working on now is about. I am interviewing people who lived under the 20th century form of totalitarianism, to get an idea of how one endures that without losing one’s humanity and one’s soul. You’d better believe that it’s coming here, and we had better get ready for it. Maybe we can stop the worst of it. Father Tomislav Kolakovic told the Catholics he met in Slovakia, in 1943, that the Nazis were going to be defeated, but that their country was going to fall under Communist rule. He taught them how to prepare for totalitarianism. Five years later, the priest’s prediction came true — and the 300 or so young Catholics he trained became the backbone of the underground church, which was the main expression of Slovak resistance.
Let the reader understand.
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Happy Birthday Clive James
Clive James (BBC)
James Marriott on Twitter tells me that the great Clive James turns 80 today. Time to resurrect his wonderful Schadenfreude poem, “The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered”:
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.
Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots–
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
“My boobs will give everyone hours of fun”.
Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error–
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.
As a fun exercise, I was thinking yesterday about the three people I would want to be with on a long car trip. My trio: Clive James, A.J. Liebling, and Les Murray. I wonder what it says that two of them are Australians.
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Trump To Kurds: ‘You’re Fired!’
Because I don’t pay close attention to the Middle East, I didn’t see this coming:
In a major shift in United States military policy in Syria, the White House said on Sunday that President Trump had given his endorsement for a Turkish military operation that would sweep away American-backed Kurdish forces near the border in Syria.
Turkey considers the Kurdish forces to be a terrorist insurgency, and has long sought to end American support for the group. But the Kurdish fighters, which are part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., have been the United States’ most reliable partner in fighting the Islamic State in a strategic corner of northern Syria.
Now, Mr. Trump’s decision goes against the recommendations of top officials in the Pentagon and the State Department who have sought to keep a small troop presence in northeast Syria to continue operations against the Islamic State, or ISIS, and to act as a critical counterweight to Iran and Russia.
Administration officials said that Mr. Trump spoke directly with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on the issue on Sunday. And the officials indicated that the 100 to 150 United States military personnel deployed to that area would be pulled back in advance of any Turkish operation but that they would not be completely withdrawn from Syria.
More:
“Allowing Turkey to move into northern Syria is one of the most destabilizing moves we can do in the Middle East,” Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and former Marine who served in the Iraq war, said on Twitter on Sunday night. “The Kurds will never trust America again. They will look for new alliances or independence to protect themselves.”
And:
Officials described a military and political tension as the American military is pulled between two important allies in the civil war in Syria. Turkey is a major NATO ally, but the Kurdish S.D.F. forces have been a partner in the fight against ISIS.
“We are not going to support the Turks and we are not going to support the S.D.F.,” the official said. “If they go to combat, we’re going to stay out of it.”
Here’s an explainer. Excerpt:
The prospect of a Turkish military push into northern Syria has caused deep fear in Kurdish areas there, as well as a burning sense that the Kurds have been betrayed by the United States after years of partnership on the battlefield.
The Syrian Democratic Forces — a loose coalition of militias that is led by Syrian Kurdish fighters and came together expressly to fight ISIS with American backing, training and air support — accused the United States on Monday of failing to fulfill its obligations, paving the way for Turkey to invade.
The S.D.F. also warned that a Turkish incursion could undo the gains made against the Islamic State.
I will update this post as I read more about this situation, but my first impressions are these:
No question, the United States has sold out an ally. Morally it’s a disgrace. But I’m not at all sure that Trump has done the wrong thing here. In fact, though I’m open to having my mind changed (let’s hear your arguments!), I think he might have done the right thing in an ugly way.
Of course the usual Washington foreign policy claque is howling at Trump for doing this. One prominent voice is taking his side:
I stand with @realDonaldTrump today as he once again fulfills his promises to stop our endless wars and have a true America First foreign policy.
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) October 7, 2019
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Why should we stay involved in Syria? I’m not asking rhetorically — I’d really like to know. As the Times story points out, the only allies we have are the Kurds. The Turks — arch-enemies of the Kurds — have an obvious interest there, and they have had to bear an enormous burden of caring for war refugees. They’re understandably tired of it.
The Russians have an obvious interest too. The Assad regime is their longtime ally, and the Russians have a Mediterranean base on Syrian territory. Iran has also long been an ally of the Assad government, seeing Assad-run Syria as necessary to balance US and Saudi influence in the region.
What is the compelling interest for the United States to remain militarily engaged in Syria?
For years, ISIS has watched as America’s reliance on the YPG/PKK [Kurds] has enervated the second-largest army in NATO. It has cleverly preyed upon this tension by waging terror attacks in Turkey it declined to claim credit for, knowing full well that Erdogan and his government might blame them on the PKK, which it did on more than one occasion.
Turkey, meanwhile, had maintained a see-no-evil policy (or worse) with respect to ISIS as its sovereign territory became a staging ground for exported jihad, not to mention a fallback base of operations for the many agents of ISIS’s Amniyat, or intelligence service, who were dispatched out of Syria and into Western Europe.
“Trump considers the Middle East a place of sand, death, and oil that America isn’t stealing but should.”
In other words ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (yes, he’s still alive) exploited the Kurdish Question before and will exploit again now that all-out war between Turkey and Syria’s Kurds is a foregone conclusion.
And so long as the inevitable carnage stays in the neighborhood, we can be reasonably sure that Donald Trump won’t care or will treat this as just the latest manifestation of a regional pathology, and not an unforced error of lousy U.S. policy-planning.
If Trump’s move will likely allow the resurgence of ISIS, then do we not have a reason to remain in the region? On the other hand, it seems like there is no exit strategy — that we will stay pinned down in Syria forever. Are we prepared to do that?
In related news:
The costs to the US of the war in Afghanistan are approaching $ 1 trillion. @statista_com via @SoberLook pic.twitter.com/m8l7WikQOV
— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) October 6, 2019
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What about the Christians in the region? A European friend texted this morning with great alarm, saying that this move guarantees the destruction of what remains of the historic Christian communities there. America — pious America, led by Evangelicalism’s Christian Warrior President — pretty clearly does not give a damn about those people.
To refresh your memory: I generally favor exiting from America’s foreign wars. I am non-interventionist in my foreign policy orientation. The fact that so many interventionists are screaming bloody murder at Trump this morning makes me instinctively side with him. Maybe Trump has done the right thing here, though in an ugly way.
Or maybe he has done the wrong thing. Maybe the cost of withdrawing from Syria in this particular case is not worth it. Maybe the harm of the betrayal of a US regional ally, and the exposure this now gives to the defenseless Christians of the region, outweigh non-interventionist principles in this particular case?
What do you think? Not that anything we believe is going to change matters. That die has been cast, it appears. (Though this move has upset some leading GOP senators — so far, I’ve seen anger from Graham, Rubio, and Sasse — and that may well make them less likely to stand with Trump in a Senate impeachment trial.)
Whatever you think about Trump’s move on Syria, let us recall that we — the United States of America — lit the fuse on all this with our unjust war on Iraq.
UPDATE: From our Big Cheese editor, this truth:
Wacky tweets and a chaotic policymaking process aside, it says a lot about the state of DC that Trump may have marginally increased his chances of being removed from office by attempting to end a war Congress never authorized in the first place.
— Jim Antle (@jimantle) October 7, 2019
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UPDATE.2:
I'm not against getting out of Syria. I'm against using the opportunity to encourage a NATO ally to basically annex part of it and commit ethnic cleansing.
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) October 7, 2019
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UPDATE.3: John Zmirak has been a huge Trump supporter. He’s bailing on this issue. Excerpts:
Trump seems about to throw away the American coalition’s victory over ISIS. The Syrian Democratic Forces who did the bulk of the fighting captured many thousands of ISIS fighters. They hold them and their families, an estimated 60,000 people, near Iraq border.
If Trump lets Turkey and its al Qaeda jihadist allies invade the Kurdish heartland, the SDF won’t waste its soldiers on guard duty. It has announced it will release the ISIS fighters. Overnight, ISIS is back. It will likely stream into nearby Iraq, and prove the last straw in collapsing that country’s already fragile government. Christians and Yezidis will once again be killed, raped and sex trafficked. Iraq will likely collapse again into civil war. That will leave the only power in the region capable of picking up the pieces: Iran.
More:
We are pulling out our troops, so Turkey can repeat the butchery it committed in Afrin, Syria in January. But if Turkey does again what it already did once and has promised to do again? We’ll slap it with … economic sanctions. Is that likely to impress the dictator who wants to re-build the Ottoman Empire? A man who has clapped tens of thousands of journalists in jail?
Look, I’m a skeptic of U.S. intervention. I was one of the few conservatives to oppose the Iraq war back in 2002. But U.S. soldiers aren’t fighting in Syria now, and Trump’s not bringing them home. He’s just moving them around from where they are useful to where they’ll be useless.
Trump may very well alienate key allies by this move, at a time when he needs them most. The Christian right has spoken up more and more about the fate of Syrian Christians. At last we make some atonement for our total neglect of Christians in Iraq, 75 percent of whom Islamists killed or made refugees while U.S. troops looked on.
I don’t think the Christian Right (meaning, pretty much, white Evangelicals) is going to seriously back away from Trump over a bunch of non-Evangelical Middle Eastern Christians. I would like to be wrong about that.
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The Madness Of King Don
From a ’70s-era Hostess snack cake commercial
OK, I’ll get to the Turkey move in the next post, but can we talk about this for a second?
As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2019
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….the captured ISIS fighters and families. The U.S. has done far more than anyone could have ever expected, including the capture of 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. It is time now for others in the region, some of great wealth, to protect their own territory. THE USA IS GREAT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2019
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People, this is not how normal presidents talk. This is not even how our abnormal president abnormally talks. This is how a cartoon Fu Manchu villain talks.
This is not a cartoon Fu Manchu villain. This is the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world. I know Trump trolls his enemies all the time on Twitter, but this is weird even for him.
Is the impeachment siege causing him to lose his mind? I’m serious. “In my great and unmatched wisdom … will totally destroy and obliterate … .” At best, this is making the United States an international laughingstock. At worst?
(This post is not a commentary on Trump’s withdrawal from Syria. I will post on that separately. This is solely about what these tweets reveal, or may reveal, about his mental state.)
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October 5, 2019
Red State Royalty
This just happened in a so-called Red State:
A gay high school senior in Tennessee was crowned to his school’s homecoming court Friday night while wearing a dress, which was met with widespread support from school officials and fellow students.
White Station High School in Memphis, Tennessee, posted a photo Friday congratulating Brandon Allen, 17, on his victory.
The image, which has been liked and shared thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter, showed Allen covering his mouth in shock and wearing a gold sequin off-the-shoulder gown, diamante tiara and holding a floral bouquet awarded to members of the royal court, a gender neutral title that the school introduced this year in place of the traditional Homecoming King and Queen titles.
“Thank you to everyone who has contributed to me becoming queen,” Allen, who identifies as gay, wrote on his Instagram profile. “You guys truly looked stunningly beautiful and I am so honored to have been able to walk with you guys!!”
Junior Emmett Campbell, 16, who shot the photo and identifies as transgender, told NBC News: “It was such an incredible thing to witness. It was a moment of acceptance and validation for the LGBT+ community from our entire school.”
Note well that the students of the school voted to change the rules to make it possible for a biological male to run for homecoming queen (now “homecoming royalty”). It is at this point that the leadership of a rightly functioning institution says to the students, “No, young people, despite what you’ve seen on TV, males cannot be queens.” But we don’t have these institutions anymore, not like we used to.
The school’s principal, Carrye Sowell Holland, wrote on Facebook:
Here’s the thing: it’s Brandon’s right to run for homecoming court under Title IX. It’s the students’ choice of who they want to support as homecoming royalty. I’m exceedingly proud to be the principal of our amazing school. You don’t have to agree but disrespectful comments will be deleted. WSHS loves and supports everyone regardless of who they are or what they believe. Thank you for the love and light from so many of you.
Title IX is the federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sex. One imagines that Brandon, who wears a dress, identifies in some way as female. What else could the principal’s words mean?
In any case, this is being celebrated by media and school officials as another glorious milestone on the road to utopia.
This is why I remain skeptical of my friend Sohrab Ahmari’s “fight” plan. Where is the army we are going to take into battle? This stuff is happening in what is supposed to be the culturally conservative part of America. I would not be all that surprised if it happened in my own city, which is basically Trumpistan. I think our position, as religious and social conservatives, is dramatically weak. I would love to be proven wrong. I’m not kidding. If you have solid reason to show that I’m wrong about this, please post it in the comments.
Eventually, Nemesis will come. Nature will reassert herself, and it’s not going to be pretty.
UPDATE: Reader Kevin Burke:
I attended an October fest celebration in a small town in a suburb of a northeast city last night. One of the activities featured a great local band playing some fun dance music and most of the dancers were young children there with their parents. They danced in the streets to the music with that joy and abandon that is beautiful thing to see. Parents enjoyed a beer as the kids danced. Idyllic night right?
A few hours in and man dressed in drag (looked like he was doing Divine from those John Waters Movies – he was as large as Divine as well) He was dressed in a very tightly fitting glittering dress, copious clownish make-up, and wild wig.) At first I thought he was there as a joke, for early Halloween action or whatever. But no. He had various children’s gifts and fun trinkets to hand out. He was part of the borough’s activities just like the craft beer stalls.
Here’s the thing that saddened me. The parent’s all brought their little children over to this demonic looking figure to receive the goodies. I thought, my Lord in Heaven, most people are truly sheep formed by our media and entertainment overlords, who do the bidding of the social revolutionaries.
Five or ten years ago, parents would have snatched up their children and avoided this man. They would have at least been highly suspicious and likely notified local law enforcement. Now this is celebrated as a sign of how understanding, tolerant and compassionate we are. I felt like I was suddenly immersed in a live experience of one of your columns…which often seem far away and more fringe events that while important, in ways you articulate well, was not so close to home.
Last night, it was in my backyard…and I was probably the only person that disapproved of this evident by all the selfies being taken with this guy. It reinforces once again your Benedict Option message to create communities that serve as a support, that empower us in moral and spiritual truth, and are a buffer to this insanity.
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Did Adam And Eve Really Exist?
Writing in USA Today, biology professor Nathan Lents says that a forthcoming book by the physician and genome scientist Joshua Swamidass makes a plausible scientific case for the existence of a pair that was the mother and father of us all. Excerpts:
The scriptural challenge is that Adam and Eve are purported to be the ancestors of everyone “to all the ends of the earth,” by the year 1 BCE. But we know with as much certainty as scientifically possible that our species does not descend from a single couple and instead has its origin in Africa around 300,000 years ago. We have evolved through a long line of ancestry that connects with all other living things going back nearly 4 billion years.
So there’s that.
And yet, in his upcoming book, “The Genealogical Adam & Eve,” Swamidass makes an audacious claim: A de novo-created Adam and Eve could very well be universal human ancestors who lived in the Middle East in the last 6,000-10,000 years. This is not the first attempt to reconcile the Garden of Eden story with science, but rarely does someone with Swamidass’ credentials do what most scientists would deem unthinkable: Take the story seriously. However, some atheist scientists are taking Swamidass seriously.
More:
Swamidass is not peddling pseudoscience. Indeed, earlier this year, he and I teamed up on the pages of Science to rebut claims by evolution critics. In addition, “The Genealogical Adam and Eve” went through a rigorous process of open peer review, involving scholars from many diverse disciplines and even some secular scientists, including myself and Alan Templeton, a giant in the field of human population genetics. Invited to find fault in his analysis, we couldn’t, partly because the hypothesis is so narrow, but also because it appears to be correct.
Prof. Lents, who is not a religious believer, explains that Swamidass, who is an Evangelical Christian, believes in evolution. And:
To be clear, Swamidass’ theory does not prove anything about the Adam and Eve story. It doesn’t even offer positive evidence for it, but that is not the goal. Instead, he provides a bridge for those whose faith insists on the real existence of Adam and Eve. Until now, they have had little choice but to reject evolutionary science, at least partly but often wholly. Classes are taught in some evangelical churches that discount evolutionary science in its entirety, a troublesome prospect, being that 1 in 4 Americans identify as evangelical Christians. But if Adam and Eve could exist within the natural world, we might have a resolution to one of the greatest cultural conflicts of the past two centuries.
If memory serves, this was the Catholic writer and physician Walker Percy’s supposition: that at some point, a man and a woman who had developed normally, according to evolution, became ensouled by the action of God. Thus, Adam and Eve.
This is not going to satisfy Biblical literalists, but it is still fascinating stuff. Many of us Christians read Genesis as a “true myth,” one that tells a fundamental truth about something that happened in the spiritual history of mankind, but that is not literally true. In other words, there may not have been a literal garden of Eden, but at some point there was a metaphysical and spiritual event called the Fall. The Fall happened because of the exercise of human agency. It was not a symbolic event, the Fall: it represents the aboriginal catastrophe for humanity, and indeed for the Cosmos. It is not necessary to believe that there was actually a physical Garden of Eden to believe that Genesis tells the truth about Creation and Fall.
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October 4, 2019
‘Bless Me, Ficus, For I Have Sinned’
A reader sent this story from Sojourners magazine, the stalwart journal of progressive Christianity, saying that they appear to have left Christianity behind. Why? Because they published this cockamamie piece by Claudio Carvalhaes, the Union Seminary professor who led a class to confess their sins to a synod of houseplants. Carvalhaes explains himself thus:
Last week our chapel service was called Temple of Confessions.
As we gathered in the narthex of James Chapel, I gave an introduction that included these words:
Many of us have a disconnected relationship with nature and relate to nature as outside things, as “it.” Today we will try to create new connections by talking to the plants, soil, and rocks and confess how we have related with them. Confessions are also forms of mending relations, healing, and changing our ways. We are all manifestations of the sacredness of life and the “we” of God’s love is way beyond the human, so let us confess to “each other” including plants, soil, rocks, rivers, forests.
We processed into the chapel carrying plants and placed them on soil. Immediately people started to come to the plants, to confess their forms of relation or non-relation. One student said something that stuck with me: “I don’t know how to relate to you in this subjective way. I am afraid that if I do I might discover a level of pain that I don’t know whether I can bear.”
Hoo boy. Sounds like As The Orchid Turns up in that hysterical hothouse.
More:
When we confess to plants, to forests, to each tree, every meadow, to birds, fish, rocks, animals, rivers, and mountains, we repent, mourn and reconnect ourselves to a much larger web of life, made of people, animals, creatures, and ecosystems that we have lost, taken away from our common home.
This understanding demands a reinterpretation of democracy. When are we going to consider the seeds and the panther and the zebras and the cows and horses as part of our democracy?
Amen! My elderly dog Roscoe deserves a vote! So does the rosemary bush on the back porch. Sorry to tell you, Prof. Carvalhaes, but they’ll probably go Trump.
I’m all for being more ecologically sound in our theology — the Catholic and Orthodox churches, for example, have strong teaching in this area — but this is nuts.
Prof. Carvalhaes is a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Whee!
Here’s a video from the seminary in which Prof. Carvalhaes explains it all:
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‘Nobody’s Listening Anyway’
In my county, which has taken on far more illegal immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries than our schools and social-service institutions can handle, it’s the legal immigrants from Asia (and, to a lesser extent, legal Hispanic immigrants) who manage to embarrass the white, progressive politicians on their completely unconditional support of illegals. But your correspondent is right: these “brown,” legal immigrants who oppose illegal immigration barely exist in the media narrative.
This year our school system opened with 2,500 more students than it had back in June. (Yes, 2,500.) Kids are attending class in hastily rented trailers. Trying to put a positive spin on things, school leaders told reporters last week that overcrowded schools show that our county is a desirable place to live. They jacked up taxes a couple years ago to pay for ESL classes and gang interdiction programs.
Crime is up here. Violent crimes, including rape, have risen, and identity theft has doubled. MS13 is shaking down local businesses, most of them run by Hispanic and black entrepreneurs.
Local lawmakers want to make it possible for people to turn garages, sheds, and outbuildings into dwellings—which means 15 or 20 people (or more) could end up packed into a house and its back yard. The media reported, vaguely, that the “more diverse” areas of the county support the initiative.
The public recently discovered that our county gives our tax money to organizations that provide free legal assistance to illegal immigrants. I am literally paying to help bail criminals out of jail and to pay for lobbyists and protesters who attend pro-illegal-immigration rallies.
Just mentioning any of these facts would get me (and in a couple of cases has gotten me) branded by my white, liberal neighbors as some sort of far-right reactionary—even though I have no problem with measured, reasonable immigration, and even though I appreciate that most of the local illegals just want to escape violent, impoverished hellholes. But there’s no room for a 50-year-old white taxpayer to say, quite reasonably, “our community can’t absorb all of these people; we can’t just let everybody in; we can’t afford to let everybody in; and our elected leaders have messed it all up”…even though that would have been perfectly acceptable coming from a Democrat a couple years ago.
My county is run 100% by Democrats. Both of my senators are Democrats. Seven of my eight Congressmen are Democrats. In my state legislature, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2 to 1.
I’m not a white nationalist or white identitarian. I’m not opposed to a manageable infusion of new immigrants of any color or background. But at a time when centrist Democrats and mainstream Republicans are AWOL on this issue and any questioning of current policy is considered “hate,” what else can I do expect maybe, possibly consider voting for Trump? My vote won’t make a difference, and nobody’s listening anyway.
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View From Your Table
Miami, Florida
Reporting in from Miami, readers. As soon as I got off the plane, I followed a hunch that the Florida woman who bit our Cajun camel’s testicles might be hiding on Calle Ocho under a pile of vaca frita at the town’s most famous Cuban joint. I feel the need to defend the honor of our swamp dromedary, and get that woman sorted. In the end, I was wrong. She wasn’t under the mound of rice and beans either. I press on.
If you’re in south Florida and want to come talk Benedict Option tomorrow, I’ll be at the Christ the Saviour Orthodox Cathedral on Saturday October 5 from 10:30am until 3pm. Tickets and more information here. I’ll be interviewed at length on stage by Father Joseph Lucas. We’ll break for lunch, and then in the afternoon, take your questions.
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