Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 121

Ukraine’s Bolshevik Shadow

When George Kennan was asked in 1967 by Foreign Affairs to reflect on the accomplishments and failures of Soviet rule at the 50-year mark, he stated that without a doubt, the October Revolution that had brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia had altered world history and was the single most consequential event of the 20th century. Indeed, at any point before the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, it was difficult to exaggerate the enormity of the events of 1917.

Much has been written in hindsight about how this seemingly indomitable Soviet colossus actually stood on feet of clay, fooling both the West and its own leadership. After 74 years of Soviet rule, not a single post-communist state has reverted back to an embrace of Marxism. Lenin and his ideology have been relegated to the museum, never to return. There are still communist parties in the former Soviet space, but they appeal to the youthful nostalgia of pensioners and a kind of Red conservatism, which has little in common with the Marxist-Leninist tenets that once inspired revolution and policy from Havana to Hanoi.

A hundred years after the revolution, the ideological hold of communism is long gone. But the state built by the Bolsheviks—communism’s concrete manifestation—has quietly survived to this day. And as much as its current leaders are loath to admit it, Ukraine is no exception.

In Russia, the centenary of the revolution was met with a mix of indifference, attempts at reconciliation, and a certain grotesque carnival flair typical of Putin’s Russia. Putin opened Moscow’s first monument to victims of Stalin’s Terror while Russia’s aging communist-in-chief, Gennady Zyuganov, announced that he was seeking the presidency for the fifth time. He did this shortly after making a speech urging his followers to heed the wisdom of Stalin, while attending an Orthodox-themed event at a cathedral that Stalin had once demolished. The Kremlin’s terse statement that there would be no official commemorations of the anniversary, meanwhile, pointed to the unwillingness of Russia’s ruling establishment to publicly wade into a period of tumult and collapse of state authority. The Kremlin’s idealized version of Russia’s history would no doubt skip the entire period between Alexander III and Stalin.

In Ukraine, the centenary was approached in a different manner, albeit a no less problematic one. For Ukrainians who have recently lived through the Euromaidan Revolution of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, and the war in the Donbas, the events of a hundred years ago do not seem like ancient history. Ukrainians are all too familiar with the power of protests, and know from recent experience that popular unrest can lead to revolutionary change from below, forcing political elites and foreign powers to reckon with events outside their control.

Speaking broadly about the anniversary of the Ukrainian Revolution and the Civil War period, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko said that the erstwhile Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) failed because it could not unite the Ukrainian people in the face of Russian aggression. Moscow was thus able to exploit internal divisions to take control of Ukraine. He went on to say that the lessons from 1917-21 still have bearing for today’s Ukraine and that if past Ukrainian leaders like Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, or Symon Petliura could travel to the future, they would deliver a stern warning to Ukraine’s current crop of officials about curbing their own political infighting.

The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, first set up in the 2000s to research contentious and heavily politicized issues in modern Ukrainian history but lately engaging in crude revisionist history of its own, offered a similar analysis. According to the Institute’s chairman Volodymyr Viatrovych, the Ukrainian Revolution was an effort to defend Ukraine from Bolshevik invasion, which was tantamount to the Russian aggression that persists to the present day.

Ukraine is a pluralistic society where neither Poroshenko’s nor Viatrovych’s views necessarily reflect the majority opinion on the events of 1917. But their voices are influential ones, and their interpretation disguises the fact that the current Ukrainian state is at best only loosely related to the Ukrainian National Republic. Far more palpable was the influence of the Bolsheviks, who remolded Ukraine both according to their long-term ideological aims and immediate political considerations.

Decades of Soviet propaganda and mythmaking, combined with the post-Soviet turn towards nationalism and romanticization of the anti-Bolshevik groups, have distorted the facts surrounding the Ukrainian Revolution and subsequent civil war. The short-lived iterations of the Ukrainian government from 1917-21 were in no position to engage in any sort of serious nation-building. Only the conservative government of Pavlo Skoropadskyi attempted to build institutions and promote the Ukrainian language, but even he was forced to rely on former Tsarist officials. Literacy was still low at the time, and for the predominantly agrarian society, all sides to the conflict were a source of great misery as they carried out grain requisitions and implemented forced conscription.

The Ukrainian government, despite its initial democratic-socialist leanings, began to heavily favor the old landed elites and greatly alienated the peasants. The Whites, with their rigid pro-Russian nationalism, fared no better in their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian peasantry. The peasants were also skeptical of the Bolsheviks, with many viewing the Civil War as an unnecessary fratricide, but they wished to preserve the gains of land reform that occurred in 1917. In the hungry years of 1918 and 1919, lawlessness and violence became widespread. Troops loyal to the Ukrainian government, the Whites, Makhno’s anarchists, and the Reds all committed reprisals against the local population, including anti-Semitic pogroms.

The success of the Bolsheviks in Ukraine cannot be attributed only to the infighting among the opposition. Operating initially from a position of weakness and forced to rely primarily on guerilla tactics in Ukraine, the pro-Soviet groups were able to forge a temporary alliance with the anarchist leader Nestor Makhno, whose troops had occupied most of southeastern Ukraine and managed to check both the Kyiv-backed forces and the Whites. When the Red Army advanced, they created a new military administration whose reach far surpassed even the old Tsarist bureaucracy. The Red Army, faced with a constant need for new conscripts, adopted a comprehensive system of registering individuals at the village level to combat desertion and evasion from a war-weary population.

Coercion went hand in hand with a propaganda effort that no other party to the conflict could match. Unlike the Whites, the Reds published propaganda materials extensively in Ukrainian and wasted little time in removing old Tsarist symbols of Russification. In their place, new monuments were erected to Ukrainian revolutionaries and national icons such as the poet Taras Shevchenko. The impact of these policies on the Ukrainian countryside was probably modest, since many peasants lacked a cogent ethnic consciousness, but they did help court Ukrainian intellectuals in the cities. The Bolsheviks were also greatly aided in the rise of anti-foreign sentiment after both the German occupation in 1918 and the Polish intervention in 1919.

Just as Soviet Russia broke with the ancien régime, so did Ukraine. Much of the local Tsarist elite either fled, were impoverished, or were killed during the Civil War. Ukraine’s intellectuals also emigrated, although some would later return to the Soviet Union and pay dearly during Stalin’s Terror. War communism and conscription necessitated a deeply hierarchical system that would later be reinforced with more layers of control in the 1930s. At the same time, until Stalin solidified his control, there was a significant degree of independent thinking among Ukrainian communists. A separate Ukrainian Communist Party independent of the Bolsheviks survived until 1925.

The Bolsheviks viewed the question of nationalities as crucial to the long-term success of the revolution. As a result, they launched an impressive campaign of korenizatsiya  (nativization) to promote literacy, native cadres, and the use of local languages. As a result of Soviet policies promoting urbanization, cities in Ukraine became predominantly Ukrainian. After being banned with various degrees of severity under the Tsarist period, there was an explosion in Ukrainian-language magazines and newspapers. Korenizatsiya eventually caused Stalin and his acolytes to suspect growing Ukrainian nationalism among Ukrainian party members and was reversed in the 1930s, but it undeniably had a substantial role in strengthening a sense of Ukrainian identity. It likely contributed to the fierce resistance that Stalin’s forced collectivization policies set off throughout Ukraine in 1930.

A typical Korenizatsiya poster (Wikimedia Commons)

These are not esoteric arguments over the historical record. Since 2014, Ukraine has embarked on a thorough campaign of “decommunization” where Soviet symbols and monuments have been taken down. Cities and streets bearing names of Soviet figures have been renamed, with only a handful of exceptions. Indeed, one of the most symbolic events of the protests in Kyiv in 2014 was the toppling of the Lenin statue in the city center.

Monuments are an easy target: they cannot adapt to the vicissitudes of prevailing public opinion, and they often serve as glaring holdovers of the previous order that would-be revolutionaries want to do away with. The problem is that the monuments are only the most visible part of the much deeper and ubiquitous influence of the Soviet period on the modern Ukrainian state.

When the Bolsheviks set out to create a Soviet Ukraine, they remolded and shaped everything from the arts and education to labor unions, military institutions, and the penitentiary. Some of the Bolsheviks’ lasting legacies are easy to discern today—Ukraine’s modern delineated borders—while others are subliminal, such as the continued influence of the Soviet legal system on Ukraine’s judiciary.

Millions of ethnic Ukrainians earnestly took part in the Soviet experiment. As they were building a new state, policies such as korenizatsiya increased the prestige of the Ukrainian language and facilitated the creation of a stronger Ukrainian ethnic identity. Ukrainian Soviet leaders like Mykola Skrypnyk, the Head of the Ukrainian People’s Commissariat and largely forgotten today, had a clear vision for a distinctly Ukrainian national communism. The man in the Kremlin had different plans. Stalin would drive Skrypnyk to suicide and unleash a thorough purge of the party ranks in Ukraine. His collectivization policy led to the Holodomor, a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. Although Stalin undoubtedly bears the greatest share of responsibility for the Holodomor, local party and village activists who carried out the policies also share culpability that should not be overlooked.

Discussing these dark chapters in Ukrainian history is painful, but it is more constructive than propagating false or simplified narratives. By moving away from simple monikers of “Ukrainian heroes” and “Russian or Soviet villains,” Ukraine can finally come to terms with its past, embrace its contradictory origins, and blunt the effect of modern Russian propaganda directed against Ukraine. Moreover, Ukraine’s society, with its heightened sense of civic consciousness after the 2014 revolution and the war in Donbas, would be quite receptive to a more nuanced national narrative. If Ukraine is to succeed in its reform efforts, it must have an honest conversation about its origins.

The post Ukraine’s Bolshevik Shadow appeared first on The American Interest.

UNSC Resolution 242 at Fifty

Today marks exactly 50 years since the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed one of its most cited and most misunderstood resolutions. UNSC Resolution 242 established a diplomatic framework for dealing with the aftermath of Israel’s lightning victory over a coalition of Arab states in the Six-Day War, and it did so in a manner that diverged dramatically from accepted precedent.

The resolution itself is remarkably short and, fittingly for a diplomatic initiative that needed to appeal to all four belligerent parties plus both major superpowers, deliberately ambiguous on many key points. It establishes two central steps for settling the conflict, namely territorial withdrawal from Israel and recognition and peace from the Arabs, while affirming three other, secondary, principles: freedom of navigation, a “just settlement of the refugee problem,” and territorial inviolability. All five principles are to be effected as the outcome of a diplomatic process.

No demands are presented unconditionally to any of the parties in the manner of other UNSC resolutions at the end of Arab-Israeli wars, which established and sought to enforce ceasefires. There was no need. The Security Council resolution that passed at the end of the 1973 war temporarily froze all sides’ forces in their current positions, while the 2006 resolution included demands for an immediate Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Blue Line, as well as a first-ever redeployment of Lebanese forces in accordance with the 1990 agreement that ended the Lebanese Civil War. But in 1967, the resolution that passed didn’t come right at the end of the war in June, but five months later in November.

A great deal of ink and anguish have been expended on the disagreements in interpreting the text of 242, particularly on the barren discussion of the missing definite article in the clause dealing with the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” More broadly, there has never been a consensus on the balance of the two primary principles. Israel has always preferred to think of it as partial territory and full peace; the Arabs, full territory and partial peace; and the international community eventually, but by no means immediately, coalesced around a reading of full withdrawal and full peace. In retrospect, the model that might have been most fruitful was the one that has generally reigned in other postwar settlements involving territorial conquests: partial territory and partial peace.

But the truly remarkable aspects of 242 are precisely those about which there was no real disagreement at all, but rather a broad unspoken consensus. The first is the complete absence of the Palestinians. In a certain sense, there is nothing surprising about this. The war was fought between four states, and it is their problems and demands (withdrawals, recognition, waterways, and so on) that had to be addressed, not the Palestinians’.

Accordingly, the Palestinians are only obliquely referenced in the clause on the “refugee problem.” We can choose to read this clause very narrowly as only referring to the refugees emerging from the June 1967 war that the resolution dealt with, but this seems to miss the point. By November, the refugees from the June war were already largely being dealt with in the standard manner for war refugees, with many returning home and others being resettled. We can choose to read this clause very broadly to include all refugees from Arab-Israeli conflicts over time, but again this would be to address a large problem (hundreds of thousands of Jews displaced from Arab lands after 1948, as well as hundreds of thousands of Jewish displaced persons from Europe at the end of World War II) that had already been solved by the time this resolution was passed. The only reasonable reading of the refugee clause is as a politically palatable reference to the ongoing crisis of displaced civilians from the losing side of a previous war, nineteen years before the one which the resolution ostensibly seeks to treat.

The second major point of consensus has even more fateful consequences. By leaving any determination about territories and borders to a diplomatic settlement, 242 effectively (if inadvertently) froze in place a special territorial regime which I will call the “semi-permanent occupation.” The resolution gave no room for Israel to make any substantial modifications to its prewar borders—themselves only armistice lines rather than internationally recognized borders—and it gave the Arab states no room for recovering any of the territory they lost except through a peace process which would, at a minimum, entail “respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence” of Israel.

Needless to say, it gave no room for any party to pursue what we now call the “two-state solution.” No party spoke for the Palestinians in the first place, and any independent Israeli move would have been regarded as the establishment of a puppet regime on territory still claimed by Jordan (and possibly Egypt as well).

And thus, the basic parameters of the semi-permanent occupation (SPO) were born. The resolution involved no annexation, no withdrawal, and no new line — a sharp and significant departure from usual postwar diplomatic processes.

In general, most wars involving territorial conquest have been followed by a diplomatic process I’ll call the “standard model.” Territory is conquered, usually by the winning side but sometimes by the losing side as well, but it doesn’t stay occupied for long after the war ends. A new line is drawn, generally to the advantage of the side that won the war, and all the remaining occupied territory is restored to the losing side. The new line might be a formal boundary, and it might just delineate an armistice or a long-term truce. It might not even be agreed upon by the belligerent parties, but rather come from multi-party talks or an international conference or superpower imposition.

It’s not difficult to imagine how such an adjustment might have taken place in the aftermath of Israel’s astonishing victory in June 1967. But the fact remains that it did not, with grave and unforeseen consequences for all parties involved. The reasons for this divergence from the standard model flow from four complicating properties of the 1967 war—and one unique property of the larger Arab-Israeli conflict.

1.

When two countries fight a war over a disputed territory, and one country’s army makes substantial gains across a front (or even if both do), it’s pretty clear where to start a diplomatic process. But the Six-Day War directly involved the armies of four countries across three separate fronts. Notably, the only truly quiet frontier for Israel at the time was the established and internationally recognized border with Lebanon. Complicating matters even further, the three members of the Arab coalition arrayed against Israel in the war comprised members of opposite sides of deeply divided rival Arab alliance systems. Ongoing mistrust and intrigue meant that any diplomatic breakthrough by Jordan could be sabotaged by Egypt and Syria, and vice versa.

The previous Arab-Israeli war saw Israel conquer much of the same territory from Egypt in a similar span of time in October 1956.  Within less than four months, all Israeli forces were withdrawn from the Sinai in an international settlement that restored Egyptian sovereignty over occupied territory, secured Israeli shipping rights in the Gulf of Aqaba, established a multinational force patrolling the joint border, and included a tacit understanding that Egypt would not use the Gaza Strip as a base for attacks against Israel.  This settlement held for eleven largely peaceful years, and there is no reason why a similar settlement couldn’t have been hammered out between Israel and Egypt in the subsequent war, but for the fact that the subsequent war saw Israel and Egypt fighting across one front of a much more complicated encounter.

For an even more imperfect analogy, we can compare the different paths to final peace settlements with Germany and Japan after 1945. Japan was occupied by one country, the United States, and a final peace settlement was signed in 1951. By 1952 Japan was a full member of the United Nations, the organization first declared during wartime to defeat it as well as Germany, and whose postwar charter still exempts both countries from the protections against foreign aggression. Six years might seem like a long time to reach a peace treaty, but consider that the Austrian State Treaty (and the subsequent withdrawal of occupying Allied armies) only happened ten years after the war’s end in 1955.  The Germans entered the UN only in 1973, and the final settlement between Germany and the four countries that occupied it in 1945 had to wait until 1990.  (Peace treaties with other defeated Axis powers were much simpler endeavors.  Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania all accepted border changes which were mostly to their respective disadvantage.)

2.

Multiple fronts and competing alliances make for a much more complex postwar situation, even in cases where one side can claim a decisive victory. But the problem of multiple fronts is rendered even more acute here by one very special front that throws up its own challenges. Those challenges themselves emerged from both of the unspoken consensuses of 242: no territorial changes without a full deal, and no mention of the Palestinian problem. Fifty years on, it’s easy to see how the entirety of the Arab-Israeli conflict can nearly be reduced to the attempt to find an adequate agreement on the West Bank and Jerusalem. It is obvious today that the most lasting rupture of the war was on the Israeli-Jordanian front, and that this rupture survives long after the Israelis and Jordanians themselves signed a full peace treaty.

But this was not obvious at the time. On the contrary, a downgrading of this front was a necessary corollary of the two quiet areas of agreement alluded to above. The front that mattered most to the superpowers and the international community was the Israeli-Egyptian one, which was and remains the bloodiest front of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That conflict is now a century old and has claimed more than 90,000 lives, but at least half of those were in five Israeli-Egyptian wars in a 25-year period from 1948 to 1973. And it was Israeli-Egyptian fighting in the early 1970s which nearly brought the superpowers into direct confrontation and led them, very briefly, to exchange nuclear threats.

In hindsight, however, it is clear that Israel’s rapid, unplanned conquest of the West Bank from Jordan upended nearly every aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict in ways that are beyond the scope of this essay. The new situation on this front was quite unlike anything the standard model had ever been called on to deal with. For one, there were not two parties, one on each side of the line, fighting and then negotiating over where it should run, but three: Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians. Each of the three had valid historical and legal claims to make on the West Bank, and while no pair had the means of concluding an agreement on its own, each one of the three had the means of sabotaging any diplomatic progress the other two might make. Moreover, 242 held the land in a legal limbo, with no country legally exercising sovereignty and one of the three claimants having no legally constituted government at all.

It is true, of course, that Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank before 1967 was not internationally recognized and that the Green Line separating it from Israel was not an international border but merely an armistice line. But Jordan governed the West Bank as an integral part of the monarchy, not as an occupied territory, and certainly not as an occupied territory that also hosted an entitled minority of settlers. Nothing like this situation obtained after the war. A cross-party consensus held that the Israelis could not incorporate the West Bank into Israel itself, that the Jordanians could not recover the West Bank without making peace with Israel, and that the Palestinians, who had no state and no army and did not fight in the war, were not a party to the 242 diplomatic process, if one ever genuinely got underway. This consensus was a dead end.

With the passage of time, the growth of a large Israeli settler population only complicated the matter.  At the same time, the easing out of Jordan as a player on this front and the establishment of a Palestinian Authority—by international treaty and eventually even something resembling electoral legitimacy—allowed for both limited self-government and the prospect of at least a partial settlement. But the contours of the 242 status quo, with its semi-permanent occupation in wait of a full diplomatic peace without the tools for attaining it, remain unchanged.

3.

Another factor in the divergence from the standard model is the rapidity of Israel’s military victory. A short war suggests a decisive victor, which should, intuitively, mean an easier process of reaching a postwar settlement. On closer inspection, the opposite is the case. In a longer war, the situation on the ground reflects changes brought about by the successes and failures of the warring parties. Refugees have fled to one side or the other of the front, provisional governments are providing essential services, and so forth.

By the time fighting over Mandate Palestine ended in 1949, not only had the demographic balance in the country begun to fit more or less along the lines of the opposing armies, there was no obvious alternative to armistice lines that resembled closely the placements of forces at the end of fighting. The only two other existing options were not remotely feasible. Israel could not just inherit the borders of the Mandate as most other post-colonial states did, since nearly a quarter of it was occupied by Arab armies and there was zero Jewish population remaining in those areas. And Israel was not going to retreat to the UN partition lines, as they were demographically no longer relevant, would have rewarded the Arab rejection and attempt at ethnic cleansing if not worse, and, most importantly, there was no Palestinian-Arab state or provisional government to take possession of these lands and govern them.

In 1967, very little had changed on the ground during the week of fighting. And the UN Security Council resolution that sought to deal with the aftermath wasn’t imposing a ceasefire as in other wars, because all fire had ceased long before anyone got around to writing up the resolution. Furthermore, the ceasefire lines (the river to the east, the canal to the west) were clear and defensible to all sides, so there was no rush by any party to get negotiations underway, as there would be between Egypt and Israel at the end of the 1973 war, when ceasefire lines left both sides worrying about exposed positions far from reasonable supply chains.

The shortness of the war was probably not pivotal to the stalemate of the semi-permanent occupation, but it certainly contributed. Another time-related aspect of the war would turn out to be much more fateful.

4.

Temporal factors are unique in this war not just because of its short duration, but also because of its timing.  Postwar outcomes that more closely resemble the “standard model” are typical for border wars occurring during periods of great global instability, particularly the fluid periods that follow the collapse of an old global order and the gradual coalescing of its replacement by a new one. The last century saw three such periods: roughly 1917-1924, 1944-1953, and 1989-1995.

If you set out to pick the one year in the entire twentieth century that is farthest from any such fluid period, you would land on 1967: the exact midpoint of the post-World War II global order, coming 22 years after Hiroshima and 22 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The war began and rapidly ended at the peak of Cold War-era stable bipolarity. Global statesmen were not converging upon the Congress of Vienna or the Versailles Conference to hash out new borders and impose grand diplomatic settlements on warring parties; they were actively engaged in maintaining a comfortable status quo.

In any case, as we have seen, what concerned the superpowers at this time was the Israeli-Egyptian conflict—something that would concern them even more six years later, when its fifth eruption in a generation nearly dragged both powers into a nuclear confrontation.

This factor, more than any other directly related to the war itself, explains much of the 242 anomaly. Backwards-looking memories place the 1967 war at the center of the Cold War conflict, but in reality it was peripheral. Israel was not yet a major U.S. client, and Jordan was not then or ever a Soviet ally. The war happened off the edges of the global alliance structure, and far away from any major conflict that would have necessitated the kind of grand, border-changing, state-creating, diplomatic initiative that accompanied equally peripheral wars in the three more fluid periods of 20th-century diplomacy.

5.

Other factors explain the novelty of 242 as well, especially the impulse to “learn lessons” from previous rounds of postwar diplomacy and the inevitable over-learning that such an impulse generates. None of the four factors discussed above — multiple fronts, multiple players on one front, short duration, and inauspicious timing in the global order — is unique in its own right, but the combination of all four is. And the Six-Day War was not merely a unique war but a war in a unique conflict.

The wording of the resolution ignores the existence of a Palestinian national movement with real claims on the land, even while acknowledging their genuine historical grievance at the result of a previous war. And it ignores entirely that the very existence of Israel is at the center of the conflict of which the recent war was just one episode.

The standard model might work where the dispute is about land or resources or even holy sites and refugees.  But when one side regards accepting the very existence of the other as an insufferable concession, any diplomatic process that makes overly ambitious demands (full peace instead of a truce) with no clear benchmarks (territorial compromises to be negotiated by all parties) among competing belligerents with vastly different interests is doomed to fail. When it leaves no room for any party or combination of parties to alter a status quo in any meaningful way by the adoption of half-measures, it has the inevitable result of cementing a reality of semi-permanent occupation.

The semi-permanent occupation has been reasonably tolerable for the Arab states that lost the war, allowing them to pursue their own means for disengaging from a conflict they had no hope of winning. But it has been a catastrophe for the Israelis and Palestinians themselves, who still find their very national existence questioned and threatened in a way nations in other conflicts, even bitter conflicts, do not.

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Hope Deferred for Zimbabwe

A drawn-out coup in Zimbabwe has now culminated in the resignation of Robert Mugabe and the elevation of his former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has already been named ruling party chief and the party’s 2018 presidential nominee. Mnangagwa’s rise to the nation’s highest office is not surprising, for all of its bizarre behind-the-scenes orchestration. But it isn’t particularly promising for those who care about democratic progress, either.

Despite Mnangagwa’s track record of employing all forms of state power over the past 37 years to enforce the will of the ruling party—often by brutal means—his checkered past is not eliciting much serious criticism. That may be because alongside human rights abuses, Mnanagagwa has shown a willingness to leverage his international connections for economic growth at home—promising, it now seems, to put the onetime “breadbasket of Africa” back on track after decades of neglect under Mugabe.

This agenda derives not so much from Mnangagwa’s concern for his country’s future as from his recognition that he is no Mugabe. Though a veteran of Zimbabwe’s liberation war—still the greatest mark of legitimacy in Zimbabwe—he lacks his predecessor’s iconic status, not to mention the mostly unified party backing that enabled Mugabe’s long rule. To maintain a tight grip on power, Mnangagwa knows he can’t be a lax autocrat; he’ll need to perform in a way Mugabe never found necessary—at least, perhaps, until his toppling.

Mnangagwa finds himself in a post-Mugabe world of active citizen engagement at home and economic opportunities abroad. His domestic and international goals will be mutually reinforcing: with the support of key international partners, he hopes to grow the economy, earning sufficient domestic support. And with enough domestic support, he wants to avoid the sort of Mugabe-esque political violence that might keep Zimbabwe a pariah state, and in so doing facilitate foreign investment and trade.

Mnangagwa needs to achieve at least a semblance of democracy in order to achieve the requisite stability that makes these goals—and his sustained power—possible. But we can expect that a truly representative and responsive state will be postponed under Mnangagwa in favor of economic reform. There are few signs that this power-hungry, longtime Mugabe loyalist will put Zimbabwe on a path to free elections and government accountability. In fact, when it comes to establishing democratic norms, it is likely that the Mnangagwa presidency will replicate the same concentrated power and sham rule of law that characterized Mugabe’s rule.

A veneer of democracy and a promise of growth may appease those eager to see any positive change to the collapsed economy, but things could easily go awry for the new leader if his foreign benefactors, elite supporters, or constituents become disillusioned and turn against him.

Tapping foreign ties for growth

China is Mnangagwa’s inspiration and model, and this hints at the type of economic transition he might try to emulate. Mnangagwa received military training in China early in his career, and has since helped facilitate cooperation between the two countries’ militaries while maintaining financial connections there. Beijing may have even known of Zimbabwe’s coup before it happened: military chief Constantino Chiwenga, who is loyal to Mnangagwa, met with Chinese counterparts in China on November 10th, just before leading the military takeover.

Perhaps taking a page from East Asian strategies of state-led growth, Mnangagwa has become an increasingly vocal supporter of agricultural reform as an important step in Zimbabwe’s path to recovery. State-enforced political stability reminiscent of modern China’s approach also figures prominently in Mnangagwa’s thinking. A carefully managed coup to remove an increasingly destabilizing dictator may have appeared to China the best way to protect its many investments there (if indeed it did intervene); Mnangagwa’s contingent would have proven loyal partners in this effort.

He also hopes to maintain the support of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a body established to promote cooperation between 16 states in the region. For what it’s worth, the organization’s representatives have appeared in the past to favor Mnangagwa, who previously served as chair of its committee for ministers of justice and appears best poised to resuscitate Zimbabwe’s economy—though they cannot openly support a coup.

Mnangagwa appears to prioritize Zimbabwe’s special relationship with the Chinese, but there is evidence that he also hopes to cultivate ties with the West. In recent years he has reached out to foreign investors and international institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, likely angling to receive aid upon implementing requisite reforms. He has long been London’s preferred successor, and he granted a rare, candid interview earlier this year to a British journalist.

The painstaking way Mnangagwa’s faction has managed the recent “change of power” demonstrates the new leader’s desire to uphold a veneer of constitutional order that will earn his government the respect of regional and certain international powers. For a reformer who wants to leave his options open, it is far too early to burn bridges.

Ensuring domestic stability

Mnangagwa’s growth agenda is impossible without a degree of domestic support to make his rule appear credible. He already commands the loyalty of many elites within the ruling party—he is probably behind the arrests this past week of many potential adversaries—but opposition leaders are poised to challenge him at the polls in 2018. Even if Mnangagwa maintains the party’s support, he must placate an increasingly demanding civil society.

Given these political constraints, Mnangagwa is likely to ensure his foes within the party—those most likely to present a serious challenge—remain out of the picture. He will probably continue to order unconstitutional arrests and sentencing, while seeking to convince the world of his targets’ criminality. The long-term support of seemingly loyal elites is no guarantee; party factionalism is a fixture of Zimbabwean politics, and has previously led Mnangagwa himself to orchestrate political violence surrounding elections. He will need to award the spoils of his rule to the right supporters if he is to remain the party’s chosen leader.

Outside the party, Mnangagwa will likely attempt to draw key opposition figures close to him in a transitional unity government leading up to Zimbabwe’s next election, or an eventual coalition government—all while denying them real power. Morgan Tsvangirai and Joice Mujuru, two prominent leaders of opposition parties, are among the probable candidates for subordinate positions. Bringing them onboard would signal to voters that Mnangagwa is serious about unity, while keeping potential enemies close. But true power sharing and accountability are likely anathema to a man whose career is defined by consolidating power around his erstwhile boss.

Using violence if power is threatened

If Mnangagwa’s tactics fail to produce the requisite semblance of support, past actions suggest he would employ violent force against competing parties or factions, momentarily forgoing positive foreign and domestic relations to secure his own power. Once the primary enforcer himself, Mnangagwa now commands his own loyal network of enforcers—primarily from the security sector—who are almost certainly open to doing the dirty work of intimidating or eliminating rivals while their leader’s hands remain clean. Even now, General Chiwenga is the one holding talks with Mugabe while Mnangagwa waits in the wings.

Earning support at the polls will be a challenge. It is said that Mnangagwa inspires more fear in the people of Zimbabwe than even Mugabe. Mnangagwa is widely believed to have directed a series of massacres in western Zimbabwe beginning in 1983 against the Ndebele people, of whom 20,000 perished. In 2008, he contributed to another violent campaign against his party’s political opposition, resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of people forcibly displaced. It is these and other campaigns, along with his political shrewdness over the years, which have earned him the nickname of the “Crocodile”—and his supporters, “Team Lacoste.”

But a history of violence as a loyal subordinate does not portend violence as president. Power is of utmost importance to Mnangagwa, but he knows that meaningful economic recovery—and a concomitant democracy that elicits international respect—is the only way to assure it. He almost certainly does not want to resort to violence, but is also likely to direct subordinates to use force to prevent any one person or group from encroaching upon his own power if he perceives an existential threat. Mnangagwa undoubtedly believes that after decades of faithful service, his time has finally arrived. For this lifelong party loyalist, the stakes are simply too high to risk an ignominious early retirement now.

The post Hope Deferred for Zimbabwe appeared first on The American Interest.

The Revolution Was Printed

Five hundred years ago this autumn, Martin Luther may or may not have nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, as tradition has it. Wherever they were posted, the theses spread across Europe thanks to a revolutionary information technology: the printing press. As historian Carlos Eire recently argued, “No printing press, no Reformation.” But beyond tensions within the Church and a new information technology, there was plenty more happening in 16th-century Europe.

At the dawn of the early modern period, the foundations of medieval European society were shifting. The rise of humanism and a spirit of discovery preceded whatever may have happened on October 31, 1517 at that church in Wittenberg. Erasmus had already urged individuals to elevate themselves through learning and textual analysis. Europeans dreamed of a wider world after Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492 and Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, which opened Asia. These developments took more than a century to change the mental maps of Europeans, and disentangling the impact of the Reformation, as if it were solely a theological exertion, is impossible.

Luther’s religious revolution touched off sparks across Western Christianity—among his opponents as much as his supporters. The fires of argument, fueled by paper, led to a literate mass readership, fed sectarian fragmentation and radicalization, and launched cycles of competition and innovation.

As our own post-Cold War world order crumbles amid another information revolution, those 95 theses look like a tweetstorm that started a hurricane, where the original message was rapidly repurposed in ways beyond Luther’s imagining. A lot was going on then (as now), which contemporaries imperfectly understood. Even limiting our focus to the connection between religion and technology, the story has many chapters.

Prelude and Print

Before print, innovations were already driving down information costs, as the leading historian of early books, Andrew Pettegree, has shown. By the early 15th century, paper (made from clothing rags) began to replace scarcer parchment (made from animal skins). Woodcut prints, succeeding hand-drawn illumination, allowed mass reproduction of illustrations and short texts.

Transportation costs dropped, too, as economic historian Carlo Cipolla demonstrated: The 13th-century opening of the St. Gothard Pass across the Alps cut land transportation costs between northern Italy and Germany, while the cargo-to-crew ratio for ship transportation doubled in the 150 years after 1400. Reduced transportation costs enabled a network of trade fairs where books were prized items. Batteries of copyists provided product: In the mid-15th century, Cosimo de’ Medici contracted with Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci for 55 scribes, who produced the amazing quantity of 200 illuminated books in two years. The veneration of books went beyond the elite: Two decades before the printing press, Van Eyck’s massive “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” altarpiece (1435) in Ghent’s St. Bavo’s Cathedral depicts at least twelve figures with books.

Printing was a capital-intensive business. Presses, adapted from wine presses, were just the most visible part of its supply chain. Watermills pulped rags for paper, and paper stocks had to be kept in inventory. Consistent, durable type had to be molded and cast; ink had to be viscous enough to be readable, yet fast-drying so as not to soak through to the other side of the paper.

To cover these costs, the product had to sell. Our idea of early print is the Gutenberg Bible (c. 1454), but that was an expensive product with a limited market of scholars and connoisseurs. As with the later personal computer and smartphone, high-tech products become profitable only once the market is broadened and economies of scale attained. Fortunately for the future of print, by the 16th century roughly 30 to 40 percent of males were literate in several major cities, with additional audiences among urban women and in rural areas. Production moved away from luxury scholarly, religious, and scientific books and turned to smaller, more disposable items such as Books of Hours (prayer books), schoolbooks, short broadsheets or pamphlets on current issues, chivalric romances, and even pattern books for the latest fashions. Shorter runs speeded inventory turnover, tying up less capital in unsold books, and allowing publishers to adjust to market demand.

Mass Media, Mass Movements

The new medium still lacked its first superstar author, however. That man was, as Pettegree’s recent book calls him, Brand Luther. Like James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald (America’s first large-circulation penny-press newspaper), and Donald Trump on Twitter in later centuries, Martin Luther created a mass readership that couldn’t look away.

Luther’s German-language Bible famously codified the language’s vernacular, but his greatest contribution to the new medium was as a controversialist. Formerly an unprepossessing monk in the obscure eastern German town of Wittenberg, Luther turned out to have a flair for writing and churned out Flugschriften (8- or 16-page German-language religious essays) in a biting style. By 1530, his writings in German had sold two million copies in over 2,000 editions, and he continued upward from there. Luther’s antagonists, both Catholic and Protestant, responded in kind, leading to a print explosion, with writers often timing their latest releases for the huge Frankfurt Fair.

Luther recognized the importance of graphics, and worked closely with a stable of Wittenberg printers to make the look of his publications attractive and consistent, turning the city into a major print center. His ally in Wittenberg was one of Renaissance Europe’s greatest artists, Lucas Cranach, a major player in the woodcut revolution who recognized that graphics could turn eyeballs in bookstalls into the early modern equivalent of clicks.

Before Cranach, title pages, which served as the covers of these proto-paperbacks, featured the author’s name and perhaps a low-quality woodcut.  Cranach developed a cover-page woodcut template that Wittenberg’s printers could slot into their forms. The elaborate woodcuts—of a quality previously reserved for high-end prints—featured a central block into which the author and title could be inserted. They sent books jumping off the shelves. With few intellectual-property protections, Cranach’s designs were lifted by printers in other cities and widely influential. The flavor of 16th-century book production in Nuremberg, a city that Luther called his “eyes and ears,” is currently available in a National Gallery of Art library exhibition.

Luther’s first fame came from his attack on indulgences, which allowed sinners to buy their way out of purgatory. A Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, anticipated Harvey Weinstein’s penance of cash contributions to opponents of the National Rifle Association. He raised money for the giant St. Peter’s Basilica with the slogan, “When a coin in the cashbox rings, another soul from purgatory springs.”

Luther’s assault on church corruption resonated in early modern Europe, where all kinds of verities were being undermined, even as religion remained at the core of everyday life. The economic pendulum was swinging to Europe’s west. As Eire notes, the new access to Asia and the Americas led to a constant stream of discoveries of new plants, animals, and peoples, devaluing received knowledge from classical authors. All this new knowledge found its way into books.

The political world was also in turmoil as centralized nation-states consolidated; most Italian city-states, for example, effectively lost full independence after the French invasion of 1494 launched a half-century of wars. Ottoman power waxed in the century following the capture of Constantinople in 1453. Renaissance popes, who seemed more interested in self-glorification and expanding their territories than in spiritual guidance, had their temporal ambitions wrecked by the Sack of Rome, carried out by the troops of the eminently Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1527.

These disruptions paved the way for the truly revolutionary aspect of Luther’s theology, which followed from his rejection of indulgences: He argued for the salvation of the inner soul by faith alone, and ultimately for the rejection of the “Antichrist” papacy and its futile rituals involving only the outer, inauthentic self. This radical notion upended the whole church hierarchy, but with implications for the political hierarchy as well. Given the entanglement of church and regional politics, if the Catholic Church was devalued, so was a prince who leveraged its status for worldly purposes.

This created political opportunities in the Holy Roman Empire. In Saxony, where Wittenberg is located, Elector Frederick the Wise had previously taken steps to limit Emperor Charles V’s powers. Frederick sheltered Luther, even after Luther’s excommunication by the Pope. He never explained why, and may have never even met Luther. But despite Frederick’s continued observance of some Catholic rituals and collection of 19,013 relics (which drew in pilgrims seeking indulgences), he knew that Luther’s theology undermined Charles’s absolutist claims to be the Universal Monarch.

Founders of revolutionary ideologies never foresee the implications of their positions. Luther presumed that all who read the Bible would arrive at his interpretation, but this turned out not to be the case. And if faith was enough without intermediaries, those who had discovered God’s truth had little need to respect political hierarchies either, including those of the hundreds of entities that comprised the Holy Roman Empire. One result was the rise of the millenarian Anabaptist cult of John of Leiden, whose proto-totalitarian, libertine theocracy in Münster anticipated elements of Jonestown and the Branch Davidians before being destroyed by combined Catholic and Lutheran armies in 1535.

Of much greater significance was the so-called Peasants’ War of 1524-25, in which disputes over taxes and land morphed into a series of uprisings that sought the end of serfdom and the transformation of society in the name of Christian freedom. Luther, who was blamed for these further challenges to early modern society, ultimately came down on the side of authority.

If the study of the Bible alone was insufficient to prevent theological error, the doctrine of faith alone would need subtle adjustment. Luther would have to guide his flock to the correct interpretation of the faith.  He created a catechism, prayer books, and hymns. The former monk and his wife, the former nun Katharina von Bora, modeled the holy German family, in contrast to the Roman Catholic priesthood, where nominal celibacy was often belied by informal families on the side. The resulting hierarchy was flatter than that of Roman Catholicism and, with its use of the vernacular instead of Latin, more accessible to its parishioners; but a hierarchy it nevertheless was.

Luther died in 1546. Despite his opposition to relics, Cranach’s standalone woodcut portraits of Luther had raised him almost to the status of a saint in Lutheranism’s core territories, where a common legend was that portraits of Luther would not burn.

Luther’s passing came just as Charles V neared a seemingly final triumph over the German Protestant states in the Schmalkaldic War of 1546-47.  But in the next round of war, the Emperor was vanquished and nearly captured. He soon abdicated and retired to a monastery. Lutheranism survived and became the state church in those jurisdictions whose rulers adopted it, a policy described by the Latin phrase cuius regio, eius religio.

This safeguarded the Lutheran status quo, but the next and more radical phase of the Protestant revolution, which would ultimately spread Protestantism around the world, had already begun. John Calvin, after fleeing the absolutist monarchy of France’s François I for the Swiss city-state of Geneva, created a theocracy that imposed a rigid theological and moral code on his followers. Calvin departed from Luther in believing that faith was insufficient for—or even irrelevant to—salvation.  Instead, in an even more radically individualistic doctrine, his theology held that God predestined a small elect for salvation (all others were damned), and that none could affect their eternal destiny by faith or good works—or even predict their fate. Like Luther, Calvin shied away from the implications of his theology, which made moral behavior on earth irrelevant. Instead, believing that every act, no matter how small, reflected God’s will, Calvin guided his flock down the path of righteousness by codifying his faith in the massive Institutes. During the last 15 years of his life, Calvin turned out at least 100,000 original words a year for the press.

Calvin had not wanted to become a theocrat—he preferred a quiet life as a theologian—but he came to regard this as his calling. Nor did he intend to trigger waves of violent revolution, instead demanding that his followers worship openly in Roman Catholic states and gladly bear their martyrdom. (He condemned secret Calvinists as Nicodemites, after Nicodemus, who denied to the ancient Romans that he followed Christ.)

Calvin’s followers took away a different, more militant message, which was particularly attractive in states whose rulers aggressively expanded their absolutist powers, such as France, the Low Countries under Spain’s Philip II, and Stuart England. (While England’s Tudors also had absolutist designs, the so-called via media of the 16th-century English Reformation incorporated enough Calvinist elements to keep the lid on.) Unlike the fragmented Holy Roman Empire, these larger states offered little possibility of exit to a more congenial jurisdiction next door. Calvin’s belief that acting righteously could be a sign of grace became the basis for a proto-Leninist creed under which a small, often secretive elect would fight to establish God’s kingdom on earth and bear persecution by their enemies as God’s will. The wealthy merchants whom Max Weber infused with the Protestant ethic were not necessarily the core Calvinist militants; in the Dutch Republic, the leading merchants tended to oppose hardline Calvinism, and the divisions sometimes led to violence.

The civil wars that followed lasted for decades in France and the Low Countries, while political and religious conflict convulsed England for much of the period from 1630 to 1690. Radicalization was fueled by the new print medium. As Luther had found, once arguments were placed before a mass public, they were open to disputation from all sides, leading to scrums that reached audiences far beyond those of medieval scholastics. When mass media led to mass movements, there was a need to engage the populace beyond theology, leading to a profusion of short broadsides and news releases playing up the home team’s victories, which ultimately gave birth to the modern newspaper. These briefer accounts could be read aloud, so that even illiterate members of the community, or those unable to afford purchases, could keep up. Ballads were a catchy way of memorializing commitment to the cause. One, the Wilhelmus, forms an acrostic in tribute to William of Orange, the first leader of the Dutch Revolt; today it is the Dutch national anthem. Hymns rallied the faithful, particularly in the Lutheran tradition. German presses published two million hymnals in 2,000 editions between 1520 and 1600—and in one Catholic hymnal of the period, a third of the hymns had been adopted from Protestant texts.

Much of this print production survives today, if at all, in only one or two copies. Many of these items became widely known only when the internet provided access to the online catalogues of scattered libraries. The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, one of early modern Europe’s major print centers, offers a cross-section of the media melee during France’s brutal Wars of Religion (1559-98). The eccentric government official Pierre de L’Estoile, spent almost a half-century filling 1,200 scrapbooks with every bit of print he could find, including pamphlets strewn by the Duchess of Montpensier from baskets as she rode through Paris. In 1589, he picked up 300 tracts peddled in the streets: ‘There was no little preacher who couldn’t find a place in his sermon for a list of injuries against the King, no pedant so obscure that he didn’t write a couple of sonnets on the subject, no minor printer who couldn’t find a way to roll some new libelous and defamatory discourse off the press every day.” The polarizing print output helped fuel the slaughter.

The Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation—at one time treated as merely a reaction to the modernizing impulse of the Reformation—was also part of the process. The Pope may have been St. Peter’s apostolic successor, but Catholicism had never been as unitary as claimed. Absolutist states such as France and Spain had considerable power over their national Catholic churches, while local notables controlled many of the ecclesiastical positions elsewhere, from which they derived revenue—often to the resentment of the locals. At first, Catholicism was slow to respond to Luther, but the outpouring of Protestant print created a need for a print response for a mass audience, followed by a catechism, prayer books, and the Index of prohibited books. Protestant evangelism led to counter-evangelism. To win the allegiance of wavering elites in places such as Poland, the Catholic Church resolved to be the leading provider of education.

While the Counter-Reformation was directed from the top down, with clergy taking the lead, in some ways, ironically, it led to further decentralization. In order to accomplish its outreach, the Catholic Church created or re-energized a profusion of competing transnational religious orders for men and women. Catholicism’s signature order, the Society of Jesus, began as the militant arm of the papacy, but its vow of absolute obedience coexisted uneasily with its commitment to the pursuit of learning and reasoned argument. Within decades after its launch in 1540, the Jesuits became a semi-autonomous worldwide movement, evangelizing in the far-flung new Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas and Asia, and sometimes challenging established secular powers. Its independence ultimately led to the order’s suppression by the Papacy in the 18th century.

By the late 17th century, following the Thirty Years War in Central Europe and the Nine Years War (which followed Louis XIV’s expulsion of the Huguenots from France and England’s Glorious Revolution), most violent religious impulses were exhausted in Europe. But the quest for secular knowledge and disputation, which had moved in parallel with religious impulses from the beginning of the early modern period, continued. The print revolution and its Reformation progeny had set off a competitive cycle that encouraged more literacy to make more converts by making better arguments. Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden of Utrecht University calculate that the production of books exploded from about 12.6 million in the half-century from the start of print (c. 1454 to 1500), up to 200 million for 1601-50, to nearly 650 million for 1751-1800. In contrast, the Ottoman Empire’s first Arabic-language printing press published its first book only in 1728.

Information Revolutions: Causes and Consequences

Like the Reformation, other Western information revolutions across the millennia eventually turned into contests for state control, with varying results.

As Pettegree has observed, in the first centuries of the Common Era, the scroll was displaced by the codex (bound sheets of papyrus and later parchment). Unlike scrolls, this ancestor of the book could more easily be copied, corrected, and repaired. This cheaper form of information, combined with the Roman Empire’s transportation revolution, enabled the wide dissemination of standardized, annotatable texts and the rise of one of the first creedal state religions, Christianity, with its emphasis on the spiritual equality of mankind. The Roman Empire turned Christian, but as with the Reformation, the wide availability of texts led Christianity to fragment into opposing sects (Catholics, Arians, Monophysites) in different polities. It was later challenged by another codex-based creedal religion, Islam, that itself soon fragmented.

More recently, during the “short 20th century” of 1919-89, three big information revolutions buttressed the cohesion of the huge nation-empires, democratic and totalitarian alike. Each country’s movie, radio, and television industries required huge capital investments to create vertically integrated production and distribution—networks. Many entities, such as the BBC, were state-controlled. Even privately owned oligopolies, as in the United States, were subject to tight regulatory or informal oversight. This favored the dissemination of a single, easily digestible, pro-regime message. George Orwell’s 1984 satirized Big Brother’s nonstop broadcasts, but in the real world, even more loosely controlled media, such as the Hollywood studio system operating in cooperation with the Hays Office, put out a consistent message of patriotism and morality in which the good guys and the authorities always won. In totalitarian environments, there was little to stop government from fanning the flames of state radicalism.

As the political, economic, social, religious, and scientific verities of the short 20th century broke down, communications fractured, first through multiple cable channels, then through the internet and social media. As in the Reformation, today’s low-information public (whose functional literacy may be in decline) drinks from the firehose of new information. New media fuels radicalization as purveyors segment their audiences and grab eyeballs through ever more outrageous content. Authoritarian states have already been clamping down, fearing unrest, even as some try to turn the hose on others. In recent months, with the revelations of Russian disinformation campaigns on Facebook, Google, and Twitter, Western democracies have been considering whether to do the same.

Our current information revolution has arrived as faith in liberal democracy and its elites is weakening, just as the Reformation arrived when the medieval verities were breaking down. Neither Luther’s faith alone, nor Calvin’s predestined elect, nor the Counter-Reformation’s absolutist papacy restored the earlier unities. Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” but what the message is this time around remains to be seen.

The post The Revolution Was Printed appeared first on The American Interest.

Why I’ve Had Enough of George Orwell

Why is it always Orwell o’clock? Why is everything mildly unpleasant about government instantly Orwellian? Why is every banal propaganda effort obviously 1984 sprung to life? Why is it all as crushingly predictable as the Orwell Prize, the outstandingly foreseeable new Churchill And Orwell double biography, and now a new life-size bronze Orwell statue outside the BBC?

There is a simplicity and a clarity to Orwell’s prose. It flows nicely. But  there is also nothing special about it other than the fact it has been canonised as the ultimate in English authorial excellence.

This is still very much a surprise to me, because there is just so much wrong with it. Are the violent caricatures of Jews in Down And Out In Paris And London really defending the downtrodden in 1933? Are the rantings (against amongst others, vegetarians) in The Road To Wigan Pier even coherent? Were the baying hysterical yellow people forcing a European into Shooting An Elephant really an appropriate metaphor for colonialism in 1936? Is Julia, the paper-thin vamp in 1984, really a character at all?  

Stranger, too, is the idea that George Orwell was a master of prophecy. And this is not merely a matter of a few false calls. Orwell was a man wholly addicted to tub-thumping socialist augury. The gentleman non-pseudonymously known as Eric Blair categorically announced in 1937 that “the upper-middle class is clearly finished.” He predicted in 1941 alone that: the British Empire would be converted into “a socialist federation of states”; the London Stock Exchange would imminently be “torn down”; Britain’s country homes would be transformed into socialist “children’s camps”; and Eton and Harrow faced immediate post-war closure. He was making claims that were childish even for his time. This addiction to announcing the future is why even his oft-quoted and more often imitated 1941 essay England, Your England reads much more like a strange sermon from his own parallel universe belonging to British socialist totalitarians than anything genuinely reflective.   

But none of Orwell’s silly predictions would really irritate if  the canonisation of 1984 was not a net negative for our political debate. This is not to say the novel is not a decent evocation of Stalinism—it is. It’s just that its lodging itself as the English language’s only universally-read dystopia hampers awareness of what really threatens democracy today. It strikes me as rather glib to say that 1984 is relevant because Orwell was worried about surveillance and “newspeak” words losing their meaning. Orwell’s actual warnings—about homogenization, the destruction of information, a world without wealth and only unlimited powers of the state—are now miles away. If anything, the threats to democracy are the opposite of “Orwellian.”

This is the problem of bringing everything, always, back to Orwell. He has nothing to say about social fragmentation, financialisation, ethnic splintering, unaccountable corporations, offshore kleptocrats, or echo chambers, to name but a few. Instead, he leaves too many political minds forever chasing, Quixote-like, the totalitarian windmill of untrammeled state power. They ignore the real anemic state before their eyes, which struggles to keep up with corporate algorithms, is unable to fulfil its promises, or tax the super-rich.       

Orwell was no visionary when it comes to economics, either. Recall his Floating Fortresses in 1984, explicitly designed to eat up the surplus production of a population. His inability to meaningfully reflect on the dynamics of capitalism (beyond moralising condemnation), let alone imagine a consumer society, is a fascinating wooly mammoth frozen in ice from the postwar era. It is a reminder of how utterly written-off by European intellectuals the market economy was immediately after the war—and what a shock the 1950s consumerist takeoff in living standards proved to be.

Most of the Orwell cult only irritates, but one thing legitimately grates: the idea of Eric Blair as a monument to British decency. The author of 1984 not only wrote a deathbed list for the authorities denouncing notable writers and public figures as Communist sympathisers. He had meticulously kept throughout the last decade of his life a paranoid notebook filled with 135 names. These, he had variously labelled what he called “cryptos,” “F.T.s” for fellow travellers, or those he alleged were Stalinist sympathisers, suspect agents or outright members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Orwell’s list included figures as eminent as the future leader of the Labour Party Michael Foot, the broadcaster and writer J.B. Priestly, and the the historian E.H. Carr. Whilst occasionally it was right, more often than not the list was absurd.

There is a notable and obvious overlap in Orwell’s notebook between many of 1940s London’s prominent gay, Jewish and anti-colonial public figures and the accused “cryptos.” Orwell’s bigoted commentaries fill his suspects notebook. Jews are clearly labeled (“Polish Jew”, “English Jew”, “Jewess”) whilst others were mislabeled (“Charlie Chaplin — Jewish?”). The African-American bass singer and future civil rights activist Paul Robeson finds himself in Orwell’s list with the note “very anti-white,” whilst the half-Jewish poet Stephen Spender is damned as a “sentimental sympathiser… tendency towards homsexuality.” Orwell was a British McCarthyite before the hour. It was only Orwell’s death in 1950 that saved his reputation from his paranoia.

Yet his many defenders, when (rarely) confronted with these facts, urge us to separate the man from the message or his novels, as if he were T.S. Eliot. The slight difference here is of course that George Orwell is canonised not for something distinct from his politics and his prejudices, in the way the intensely anti-Semitic T.S. Eliot is hailed for The Wasteland. His reputation in Britain today is above all as a moral giant.

Yet one does not have to look very far to find a man known to his friends, such as the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, as being “at heart strongly anti-Semitic,” a man whom they remembered gratuitously raising the fact or question of his contemporaries’ Jewishness and remarking at the preponderance of Jews working alongside him at the Observer. Not only are Orwell’s diaries full of accusations that the Jews controlled the media; they also record that when presented with rumours that Jews predominated amongst those sheltering in the London Tube during the Blitz, he rushed (“Must check this”) to verify the baseless accusation, only to then dwell on the fact the Jews made themselves conspicuous.

Orwell’s books, too, are heavily stained with anti-Semitism. His 1933 novelistic impressions and imaginings in Down And Out In Paris And London (where he would regularly visit a Parisian aunt in the cinquième arrondissement) contains constant and violent caricatures of Jews. “It would have been a pleasure to flatten the Jew’s nose,” he recalls. Whilst the Romanians, plongeuers and tramps Orwell meets have names and identities, the Jews are only ever Jews—whether it is “a red-haired Jew, an extraordinarily disagreeable man” he fantasises about punching in Paris, or when he returns to London and sights “a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, who was guiltily wolfing down bacon.” These are not feelings that George Orwell was shy to admit, even in writing. His 1945 musings on the illogicality of anti-Semitism as an ideology goes as far as to ask, “Why does anti-Semitism appeal to me?”

The time-stamp on these musing matter when it comes to judging his reputation as the now bronze-cast moral authority outside the BBC. This is quite different from judging Shakespeare on whether or not Shylock is an anti-Semitic caricature, given that The Merchant of Venice was written at a time when Judaism was a question of peripheral relevance to Elizabethan writers. Orwell first published the year Hitler came to power.

Surely, these publicised facts should have dented the Orwell myth, or at least checked it out of the lofty Mount Olympus of unquestionable moral magnificence the way Winston Churchill’s colonial record has done even to him. But no. And this, I believe, is because the secret to Orwell’s popularity is not in the facts of his life, or even in his journalism (though he hardly ever engaged in what we would call reporting), and certainly not in his prophecy. The secret of Orwell’s appeal lies in his rhetoric: everything is simple, everything is right or wrong, and everything—if you only listened to him—can finally be solved. George Orwell in fact reads nothing like a political thinker but like a Sunday morning country vicar: incredibly English, quietly demagogic, and thirsting for justice to be done.  

Britain and America would benefit from reading a little less Orwell, and not just for the same reasons they would benefit from making fewer comparisons to the 1930s. Today, we need fewer morally zealous political writers on all sides—and more serious people that are honestly grappling with complexity.

The post Why I’ve Had Enough of George Orwell appeared first on The American Interest.

Sideswiping the White-Collar Crime Wave

The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives

Jesse Eisinger

Simon & Schuster, 2017, 400 pp., $28

“The floodgates opened and all the forces of evil invaded . . . . Loyalty, truth, and conscience went into exile, their throne usurped by guild and deception, treacherous plots, brute force, and a criminal lust for possession. . . . All duty to gods and to men lay vanquished; and Justice the Maiden was last of the heavenly throng to abandon the blood-drenched Earth.” —Ovid, Metamorphoses, 125-150 (8 AD)

In this dystopian era we often hear tales of the dire threats posed by relatively new high-powered technologies like genetic engineering, robotics, nuclear power, and cyber-spying. But one of the most problematic social innovations ever conceived is actually more than two centuries old. This is the “corporation”—a real-world example of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory experiment run amok if ever there were one. Left to its own devices, it may eventually wreck the planet and drive most of us “non-corporate persons” under.

We tend to forget that “corporations” are not natural entities. Paradoxically, like many other truly revolutionary innovations in the history of capitalism, they were originally creatures of an entrepreneurial state groping for creative solutions to the big problems of the day. Since our silly contemporary biases about whether solutions happen to come from “markets” or “governments” had not yet been invented, pragmatism won out.1

As of 1816, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was the leading U.S. state to charter limited-liability corporate entities for the purpose of raising capital, mainly for worthy public investment projects. Eventually the Massachusetts legislature granted several hundred corporate charters, subject to strict conditions. These included: ten-year term limits, renewable only with the legislature’s approval; corporate activities limited to specific domains like canals and textiles; and strict prohibitions on acquiring the shares of other corporations or expanding geographically. Importantly, these corporate charters were also conditional on an affirmative duty to engage in “good behavior.”

To make a long story shorter, over the succeeding two centuries, under the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of giant global industries like transportation, energy, steel, defense, and IT, increased competition for the lucrative corporate registry business from Delaware and other U.S. states as well as offshore havens, and a line of Gilded Age Supreme Court decisions that recognized “corporate personhood,” all these restrictions were swept aside, while other corporate powers were expanded. By the 1930s, as Columbia Law professors Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means recognized,

The corporation is a means whereby the wealth of innumerable individuals has been concentrated into huge aggregates and whereby control over this wealth has been surrendered to a unified direction. The power attendant upon such concentration has brought forth princes of industry, whose position in the community is yet to be defined. The surrender of control over their wealth by investors has effectively broken the old property relationships and has raised the problem of defining these relationships anew….2

Today, corporations and banks possess powers that have become almost super-human. They live forever, unless terminated by investors, creditors, or—rarely, at least in the United States—governments. Although subject to (weak) anti-trust laws, exchange controls, and restrictions on foreign investment, they are nevertheless mainly free to hang out with multiple partners, acquire cross-share holdings, merge, divorce, and spawn unlimited captive offspring. Under the neoliberal policies that have prevailed since the 1980s, they are also free to expand across most state and national boundaries and markets, even as millions of human counterparts wait patiently for passports and visas or are subject to the Border Patrol’s tender mercies.

On top of all this, from a legal standpoint, corporations have also become full-fledged U.S. citizens. Even though “corporations” are never mentioned in the original U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the other 17 amendments, by now our fellow corporate citizens have acquired almost all the constitutional rights of individual U.S. citizens except the right to vote and the prohibition against self-incrimination. These include such invaluable ones for criminal defense as the right to counsel, due process, equal protection, the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unlawful searches and seizures, the right to trial by jury, and attorney-client privileges.

Indeed, in 2017, several U.S. defense contractors achieved the penultimate inversion of the obligations originally associated with state chartership. Under the terms of their contracts, they are allowed to invoke the Federal government’s own sovereign immunity. This prohibits anyone—including the Federal government—from suing them for malfeasance, no matter what they do.

U.S. corporations and banks have recently become much less shy about wielding this combination of increased political rights and financial clout, demanding favorable treatment not only from public officials but also from prosecutors and judges. For example, in 2016, reported spending on Federal contributions and lobbying by the U.S. financial services industry totaled $1.44 billion—about $7,373 per Congressperson per day. Spending per day by non-financial services lawyers and lobbyists added another $250 million, or about $1,282 per Congressperson per day.

Across both leading political parties, this kind of influence spending has increased dramatically since the 1990s. Of course these donors are not charitable organizations. So the fact that their investments have continued to expand suggests that they must be earning healthy returns—whatever those returns might be. It is also worth noting that the way the Supreme Court has been interpreting political corruption lately, those on the taking end of corporate lobbying increasingly need not worry about serious consequences. If a Congressman caught red-handed with tens of thousands of dollars in cash in his freezer can get his corruption conviction overturned, one has to wonder if any way of accepting bribes can be brazen enough to get a Congressperson in trouble.

All this has permitted today’s giant corporations to accumulate seemingly limitless wealth on a global scale. They park revenues, costs, assets, and loans in “separate entities” located in dozens of low-tax/low-regulation “havens.” They also use these jurisdictions as parking lots for under-regulated hedge funds, investment funds, insurance companies, and “facilitation payments.” Aside from occasional Panama/ Paradise Papers exposés, they keep all this activity well hidden, beyond the scrutiny of First World investigators and taxmen, let alone developing countries.

As we all know by now, in the years leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis, this kind of chicanery encouraged the world’s largest corporate financial institutions, including ostensibly blue-chip entities like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, to commit boatloads of outright fraud and all but bankrupt the world’s economy. They then pleaded that they were “too big to fail” and got bailed out by Western taxpayers. Meanwhile, most of them got caught red-handed in an unprecedented spree of corporate crime, including helping First World elites and multinational corporations to move wealth to tax havens.

After eight years of low interest rates that helped finance their recovery, these very same giant corporate banks then escaped with less than $300 billion of partly tax-deductible fines and settlements. There occurred no jail time for senior executives, no revocations of operating licenses or corporate charters, and not a single solitary apology.

On top of all this, with no shame whatsoever, these same institutions recently joined forces with the Trump Administration, demanding the first in a series of deep U.S. corporate tax cuts. If this passes, it will set off a global tax war and a race to the bottom that will repay their $300 billion corporate fine bill many times over.

All told, then, it is not really surprising that U.S. multinational corporations and bank profits, stock market valuations, and political influence are now at record highs. Decades ago they declared a class war; now they may have finally won it.

Asleep at the Switch

As this author and others have noted, one predictable result of all this increased corporate power was a corporate crime wave. That, in turn, created enormous pressures on the U.S. law enforcement system’s conventional approach to tackling corporate crime.

Ever since U.S. courts recognized “corporate crimes” as prosecutable in the early 20th century, this system has relied on the same procedures as those for individual crimes. Since they are to some extent public entities, one would hope that a higher standard of conduct might apply to them—and for a time, in various ways, it did. But they now enjoy the full privileges of individual protections like the presumption of innocence and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

Of course the prosecutorial system was never perfect. Responsibility has long been scattered across multiple Federal agencies like the Department of Justice, the SEC, the Postal Service, and the IRS, and loosely divided among 50 publicity seeking U.S. Attorneys. For decades, prosecutors, FBI agents, and other investigators who specialize in corporate crimes have struggled to compete for resources with the latest crimes du jour—terrorism, cybercrime, drugs, and street gangs. The Federal judiciary’s support for prosecutorial tactics has also varied significantly over time. Moreover, corporations have long had relatively deep pockets, a full panoply of stalling tactics and creative defenses, and access to the best “white collar” criminal defense attorneys money can buy—much of it hand-trained by the Justice Department itself.

However, it is now clear that in the past decade, even as all available evidence indicates that corporate financial chicanery was exploding, this system became weaker than ever. For example, as of 2017, the number of “white collar” criminal prosecutions and convictions is at the lowest level in 22 years. Indeed, during Trump’s first year, so far, there have only been about 6,000 Federal white-collar criminal prosecutions of all kinds—a 46 percent drop from their 1995 total (10,913), and just 6 percent of total Federal criminal prosecutions. Bank fraud cases will account for only 8 percent of all Federal white-collar crime prosecutions.

It is important to note that this negative trend is not peculiar to the Trump Justice Department. Under the Obama Administration, Federal white-collar criminal prosecutions peaked in 2011 at 10,100, and then fell dramatically to 6,240 in 2016. Bank fraud cases accounted for less than 6-8 percent of all white-collar crime cases during this period—which, in turn, accounted for just 5-6 percent of all Obama Justice Department criminal prosecutions.

All this is a little hard to square with the undeniable existence of a corporate crime wave. Similar trends have also recently been observed in the United Kingdom. So what’s going on? Have prosecutors simply been abandoning the field to the enemy? Are they short of resources, relative to their opponents’ new tactics and skills? Or, like Pogo, have they met the enemy, only to find that “he is us?”

This is the question at the center of Jesse Eisinger’s new book, The Chickenshit Club. Eisinger is a veteran financial journalist with a 20-year career at publications like the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica. This book, his first, has already earned him a Pulitzer.

To begin with, even apart from any other merits or faults, Eisinger certainly deserves credit for tackling this great puzzle head-on and spending years in the equivalent of the legal mortuary to bring so many sordid details to light. He is hardly the first to have done so, but this book is a useful addition to getting at the key question: Why is it that at a time of record corporate crime of all kinds—especially big-ticket securities fraud and all sorts of other misbehavior by the world’s largest financial institutions—did the entire U.S. law enforcement system for prosecuting such crimes basically drop the ball?

More specifically, why did George W. Bush and especially Barack Obama underperform George H.W. Bush during the Savings & Loan banking crisis of the 1980s, when there were 30,000 criminal referrals and 1,000 felony convictions, including 600 bankers and 300 savings and loans? As Professor William Black noted in his 2013 interview with Bill Moyers on this subject, under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations, financial regulators like the Federal Reserve produced zero criminal referrals, and zero senior bankers at major Wall Street institutions went to jail. (The complete omission of Professor Black from Eisinger’s index is puzzling, given his well-known authority on the subject.)

To tackle this question, Eisinger invites us to join him on a kind of guided tour of high-profile “white collar” crime cases since the 1980s, complete with family portraits of leading prosecutors, judges, and whistleblowers. He’s been immersed in this story for years, and his account, while voluminous, is methodical. He also waited just long enough to publish so that he is able to tell a complete story of the Obama Administration’s prosecutorial dropped ball.

What we get is not Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Eisenger’s prose does not sparkle, but then again this is a book about long-time lawyers and corporate crooks: They do not inspire sparklers. If one wants a quick dive, certain chapters, like chapter ten on Wall Street law firms and chapters seven, 12, and 13 on the failed KPMG, Lehman, and Goldman investigations, are especially pointed.

Among Eisinger’s most interesting findings:

The Rotary Club. After 30 years of soaring corporate crime, we do not just have a “revolving door” at the Department of Justice; we have a stairway to heaven. Especially since the early 1990s, when the “white collar” defense industry started to boom, it became the norm for virtually every single senior official at the Justice Department and many experienced U.S. prosecutors to rotate back and forth between $150,000 positions at Justice and $3-$4 million partnerships at major Wall Street and DC firms. The most prominent rotations include:

Of course, according to these self-same former officials—Lanny Breuer for example, now returned to serve as Covington & Burling’s Vice Chair—this kind of lucrative circulatory system is absolutely essential to providing the Justice Department with access to the very “best and brightest” lawyers—even if they do say so themselves.

On the other hand, this kind of self-serving argument is easily exaggerated. First, apparently we are able to do without this Justice Department “Chickenshit/Rotary Club” for criminal prosecutions that do not involve “white collar” defendants—since there is no “revolving door” for attorneys who handle those kinds of cases. Second, this clubby system has almost certainly contributed to the rise of “we happy few” cronyism and intrinsic conflicts of interest on the part of the white-collar criminal defense bar. That, in turn, has helped to proliferate “deferred prosecution agreements,” corporate fines as a substitute for jail or corporate sanctions, and the Justice Department’s growing tendency (one of Eisinger’s key themes) to settle cases rather than to litigate them.

Furthermore, we really don’t have to speculate about this. We just have to study the illustrious careers of prosecutors like Stanley Sporkin and Robert Morgenthau, as described by Eisinger. This allows us to imagine a very different career path for U.S. white-collar prosecutors—a dedicated unit of elite government prosecutors with abundant resources, decent salaries, and the most important long-term reward of all: the sheer satisfaction of winning critical cases against major felons.

Fumbling on the Goal Line. The Obama Administration emerges from Eisinger’s tale with far more egg on its face than either of the Bush Administrations. Bill Clinton’s Administration is barely mentioned. (This may be partly because the giant corporate frauds of the 2000s were just getting started. But the involvement of Attorney General Holder and perhaps former White House counsel/Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer in the dodgy 2001 pardon of Marc Rich certainly deserved a mention.) Of course the relatively aggressive approach taken by George W. Bush’s Justice Department under Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson and Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff to the prosecutions of Enron, PNC Bank, AIG, and KPMG probably did set the stage for an untimely “backlash” by the corporate defense bar in 2007–08, as Eisinger puts it.

But it is also clear from the long-term track record right through 2016 that something more fundamental was going on. Time and again, Attorney General Holder and Assistant Attorney General Breuer, as well as their successors Loretta Lynch and Leslie Caldwell, respectively, decided to settle for corporate fines and “deferred prosecution agreements” rather than tougher corporate sanctions, let alone jail time for key executives. At the time, the “record billion-dollar fines” looked good on paper, and helped the Justice Department pay its bills. But from the standpoint of serious deterrence, these settlements were paper tigers.

They Really Did It. Whatever the reasons for the Obama Justice Department’s “George B. McClellan” type generalship, as Eisinger puts it, it was certainly not the absence of indictable corporate crimes. As Eisinger makes clear, Obama’s Justice Department turned a blind eye to abundant evidence of grotesque culpability at the highest levels, not only at the usual suspects like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG, but also at Wall Street’s most hallowed institutions—especially Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. One can almost hear the SEC’s former chief prosecutor Stanley Sporkin, a law-and-order Republican, rising up from his grave, shouting, “Where the hell are the rachmones and sechel?”—that’s compassion and common sense for those unsure of their Greek.

This failure to prosecute these giant Wall Street firms to the hilt for helping to produce the largest global financial crisis since the 1930s was no mere technical foul. By helping to discredit Hillary Clinton for her—in retrospect—really quite modest but ill-considered associations with Wall Street, it set the stage for Donald Trump’s surprising 2016 victory. It is also hard to imagine Trump being able to do a compete U-turn and hand over his entire economic policy to a team of 14 senior “revolvers” from Goldman—including Gary D. Cohn, its President from 2006 through 2017, right through the financial crisis—if Goldman Sachs had gotten its just deserts.

Overall, then, Eisinger gives us a helpful, comprehensive account of the long-term deterioration of the U.S. criminal justice system with respect to prosecuting corporate crime. At the end of the day, however, he does not really nail down the answer to his puzzle. His tell-all journalist approach is at its best in chronicling the epic battles by the handful of “heroic” prosecutorial risk-takers. To the extent there are true heroes in this dark tale, they include not only better-known champions of tough prosecution like Stanley Sporkin and Senator Carl Levin, but also several lesser-known figures who also deserve to be remembered, like Judge Jeff Rakoff, James Kidney, and Justin Weddle. There’s no doubt that in any given situation, individual initiative and risk-taking can make the difference in the prosecutorial world.

Ultimately, however, Eisinger gives us a kind of morality play, a heroic tale of a comparative handful of quixotic prosecutors who were willing to take risks to avoid membership in James Comey’s “Chickenshit Club.” Ultimately, they lost out to the far more numerous self-seekers who were in it just to check some boxes on the cv, score some publicity, settle a few big cases, and get back to their private practices.

So this quixotic tale doesn’t quite do it. We get a hint at the fundamental difficulty in Chapter Three, where Eisinger provides a lengthy discussion of the history of “white collar” criminal prosecutions, but misses the main point. As we have argued here, the whole notion of “white collar crime” is really a sugarcoated placebo, a subtle diversion from the real problem. The problem is not a crime wave that was launched by thousands of detached solo proprietors or independent contractors. “White-collar crime” is a euphemism for corporate crime—in particular, the blinding fact that since the 1990s, many of our largest financial corporations, as well as many multinational corporations, have become involved up to their eyeballs in serial enterprise-wide criminality—mortgage fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, tax dodging, price fixing, bribery, and a host of other financial crimes.

To concoct, organize, administer, and conceal all this shameful activity, and then escape real hard-time prosecution for it, they had the able assistance of the country’s very best brains at its most prominent accounting firms and law firms. Indeed, even while all this was going on, many of their lead partners were occupying critical revolving-door positions in the very Federal agencies that were supposed to regulate and prosecute.

This is the structural problem at core of the puzzle addressed by Eisinger. It is not a problem that will yield to quixotic risk-taking by this or that heroic individual beavering away at the heart of this heartless system. Putting new Sporkins on the same old treadmill and encouraging them to take risks and work harder is not going to do it. The whole system of essentially lawless, organized corporate irresponsibility is broken. We need another one. Anything less is an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.

1Ayn Rand notwithstanding, the list of state-sponsored innovations that have recently been fundamental to market economies include antibiotics, GPS, numerous vaccines, wind farm turbines, nuclear power, and most of the technology that has enabled Apple and Google (including semiconductors, the Internet, wireless communications, GPS, the Google search algorithm, touch screens, and bar codes) to become the most valuable corporations—and largest corporate tax dodgers—in history. See Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (Anthem Press, 2014, 2016), which underscores the key point: There are no examples of truly successful weak-state, laissez-faire corporate capitalist economies, but plenty of examples of unsuccessful ones

2See Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (Transaction Press, 1932), p. 4.

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Beware the Russian Elephant

The most insidious element of Moscow’s information war could be the very idea of information war itself. In “Don’t Think of an Elephant” the cognitive linguist George Lakoff defines winning and losing in politics as being about framing issues in a way conducive to your aims. Defining the argument means winning it. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant they will end up thinking of an elephant. “When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame…when you are arguing against the other side, do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame—and it won’t be the frame you want.”

As the West considers how to respond to the Kremlin’s use of bots, trolls, bullshit news, dark ads and hacks as tools of foreign policy, the way we describe things will define whether we prevail. To anyone grappling with this, it means entering a labyrinth of language, where each turn opens up a new puzzle, where worlds are created with the words one utters. Describe “it” as an “information war” and one landscape arises. Is it the one we want?

The Kremlin certainly does frame what it is up to as “information warfare.” According to its own security doctrines, and amplified incessantly by its many TV toadies, the West wages information war against Russia with our conniving use of the BBC and human rights NGOs, minority rights campaigns and anti-corruption investigations. In this frame there is no space for any idea of “truth” or universal values. There is no difference, in this view, between RT and the BBC, between accurate and inaccurate news, between backing the far Right in the West or human rights NGOs in Chechnya. The implications of this frame is to reduce all discourse to a conflict between two sides, with no “good” or “bad,” and only an array of tactics to destroy your rival. All information is War. The long-term implications go deeper. If all information is reduced to “war,” out go any dreams of a global information space with ideas flowing freely hither and thither, all bolstering deliberative democracy. Instead the best future one can hope for is an “information peace” where each side respects the other’s “information sovereignty”: a favorite concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for enforcing censorship.

This leaves us with a paradox. On the one hand, it is necessary to recognize and reveal the way the Kremlin uses information with a military mindset to confuse, dismay, divide and delay. On the other, one risks reinforcing the Kremlin’s world view in the very act of responding to it. We already see the preliminary consequences in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, where leaders are taking advantage of the information war frame to accuse critical journalists of being traitors, witting or unwitting tools of Moscow.

So if our ultimate aim is still a world of open information borders, one has to find a language which calls out the Kremlin’s method while not giving in to it. UK Prime Minister Theresa May tried to do so last week when she accused Moscow of “seeking to weaponize information, deploying its state-run media organizations to plant fake stories and Photoshopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions.” “Weaponize” is a gratingly overused term, but it is helpful in implying that information does not have to be a weapon, that the underlying theme of what Moscow is doing is to try to reduce it to such.

But this is just the first puzzle. The next one is to frame our own actions. If our ultimate aim is still a world of free-flowing information contributing to stronger democracy, then the idea to stress is not that any information is foreign, but that it is inaccurate and deceptive. The problem with Russia’s use of information is not that it is Russian, but that it does not meet media or even PR industry standards. For this, however, one needs to have a domestic frame in place which can articulate these standards. In Germany, for instance, all political parties refused to use bots in the last general election; there is still a cultural taboo around politicians lying; media are expected to be accurate; expressing Nazi sympathies is illegal; there is disgust at the idea of citizens’ data being used covertly to manipulate them. This means that Russian media operations in the country, which have included spreading fake stories about immigrant crime and the use of bots to boost the far-Right AfD party, can be criticised for their inaccuracy, manipulative nature and darkly divisive messaging rather than for being foreign. In the UK, the broadcast media, if not print, is still held to standards of accuracy and balance. Thus the UK’s TV regulator can torture RT for its poor reporting rather than resorting to the language of warfare. You’re not a weapon; you’re just a crap journalist. Even Britain’s amoral PR industry has some standards. When one of the country’s most famous PR firms, Bell Pottinger, was caught this year conducting covert social media campaigns in South Africa aimed at exacerbating racial tension, an action not dissimilar to Russia’s in the United States, it was thrown out of industry associations, disgraced and bankrupted.

In this sense the United States, however, seems to be in some sort of bind. In a country where the President peddles conspiracy theories and blatant lies; where the quality media have allowed themselves to be defined by partisan affiliation rather than by the public interest; where deceptive advertising in elections is seen as standard and where its most exciting internet companies make money on non-transparent manipulation of people’s data, it must be hard to find a frame to criticize the Kremlin’s actions. Thus one is left with a focus on the foreignness of the phenomenon, and the proliferation of terms like “malign influence” or “meddling” which are so far subjective and unspecific. The ideal trick would be to take the negative methods the Kremlin uses to undermine democracy and transmute them into a frame which strengthens it. The United States lacks that.

Among those who appreciate this dilemma, there appears to be a search for a language which tries to solve it. I keep getting invitations to events, and I may have drafted a few myself, about strengthening “democratic resilience” or “democratic integrity” in the face of Russian actions. These are helpful in as much as they try to invoke a pleasant positive ideal rather than the negative paranoia implicit in “meddling,” but they are also, perhaps purposefully, vague. Another ersatz word used commonly is “hybrid threat,” where “hybrid” is a polite way of saying “Russian.” And then there’s “Strat Com,” which seems now to encompass everything from public affairs to media development to digital literacy to subversion.

But, the realistic part of one asks, will noble notions of high-quality media be enough to survive in a world of disinformation run rampant? Probably not. The Kremlin, and any centralized authoritarian regime, can unite all its national media, hackers and social media workers at will, while easily censoring at home. Democracies are by their open nature vulnerable domestically, and find it hard to focus particularly well abroad. The British government can’t tell the BBC what to do, nor should it. Foreign services, the military and security services will do the information operations which they do abroad, but whenever they have too much influence over domestic media the result has been disastrous. In some senses this is a game we should be losing.

This doesn’t mean being soft, however. Whatever language one uses, the Kremlin is clearly screwing with us. But the response to information campaigns does not necessarily have to be in the information space. Indeed there is nothing more the Kremlin would like than to go meme to meme, message to message. Information is one of the few areas where it can amplify its stature, and where it has no reputation or moral higher ground to lose.

But the Kremlin actually finds itself in a dilemma: it needs the media fireworks of a verbal conflict with the West to distract from its own failures domestically and to give it meaning, but it is also reliant on the very same West for advertising to fund its hate speech-filled television channels, for technology to extract its oil, and for banks and law courts to protect its elite’s investments. These are the spots to target. If this were a war, after all, you would never engage the enemy in the battle he desires. There are more painful measures to take against his active measures.

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The Great Eurosion

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

Douglas Murray

Bloomsbury Continuum, 2017, 352 pp., $26

The Retreat of Western Liberalism

Edward Luce

Little, Brown, 2017, 240 pp., £16.99

The Fate of the West: Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea

Bill Emmott

Economist, 2017, 272 pp., $26

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Oswald Spengler. The writings of the great German historian, who published his two-volume Decline of the West between 1918 and 1924, are back in vogue. Spengler warned that a Western-centric worldview—and the concomitant presumption that history was a march towards modernity and progress—was not fitted to the challenges of civilizational survival. As the centenary of his work approaches, fears of internal combustion or eclipse by Asia have bubbled to the surface once more, prompting handwringing in Europe and infecting the American mind with a heavy dose of pessimism too.

Europe “has lost its way,” America “searches for its identity,” and the rise of Asia seems inexorable, explained the French philosopher and one-time associate of Che Guevara, Régis Debray, in a 2013 issue of New Left Review, and so “Spengler’s infamous coinage . . . features once again in the comment pages.” The economist David Goldman, a friend of Steve Bannon, writes in the Asia Times about the failings of globalists under the pseudonym “Spengler.” Alexander Dugin, the champion of Eurasian supremacy said to be the Kremlin’s favorite intellectual, waxes lyrical about Spengler’s wisdom, relishing his depiction of the inevitability of Western decline.

Predictably, Spengler makes an appearance in two of these three arresting books here in review, and flecks of the angst of Mitteleuropa are visible on them all. Douglas Murray, arguably the most controversial and certainly the most eloquent conservative writer in the United Kingdom today, acknowledges the standard rejection of Spenglerism—that fretting about decline is just part of the Western psyche. But he counters that the West has failed to heed Spengler’s warning about the fate that befalls civilizations when they lose their spirit and soul. Today, much of Western Europe is suffering from “an exhaustion caused by a loss of meaning,” making it weak and vulnerable to enemies and rivals. He cites another German concoction, Geschichtsmüde, to describe this feeling of being “weary of history” and opens with a powerful line from Stefan Zweig’s famous 1942 novel, The World of Yesterday to describe the current predicament: “I felt that Europe, in its state of derangement, had passed its own death sentence—our sacred home of Europe, both the cradle and Parthenon of Western civilization.”

Bill Emmott, former editor of the Economist, ponders what Spengler would think if he were transported to 2017. On the one hand, he would have things to say that have a whiff of the Alt-Right: about the inadequacy of democracy as a system of government; or the recurrent flaws in our foreign policy, from the hubris that makes us intervene abroad to the “lily-livered” weakness that means we fail to conquer in those places we do tread. On the other hand, Emmett suggests Spengler would ultimately have his eye drawn to the two major challenges most likely to bring about sunset in the West, for which we have yet to find a suitable answer: the demographic crisis caused by an ageing society; and the rapid technological advancement by which human beings spend billions of dollars daily in a concerted effort to make themselves economically obsolete.

Edward Luce, the long-time Financial Times columnist and a former speechwriter for Larry Summers during the Clinton Administration, prefers to invoke Spengler’s contemporary, Thomas Mann, who complained of those, like Spengler, who cultivated a “sympathy for the abyss.” Just because the “end of history” has proved short-lived—so Luce argues toward the end of his short and vivid book—this does not mean that we should embrace the inevitability of the “clash of civilizations” as an alternative thesis.

Yet the truth is that Luce does little to alleviate the enveloping gloom. After a compelling account of the breaking of the Western social contract—the discrediting of genuine meritocracy and the collapse of social mobility—he produces a chapter called “Fallout” that envisages a potential U.S.-China war. Thus, his narrative swings ominously from the Elephant Chart (which shows the comparative stagnation of Western middle-class incomes against the global median in the past thirty years), to the Thucydides Trap, which Luce fears President Trump is more than capable of triggering through strategic blunder or an errant tweet.

These are more than the wails of a privileged of a few. Throughout the West, fears of decay and sclerosis manifest themselves horizontally—across the political spectrum—and vertically, up and down the social hierarchy. Nearly everyone agrees that something has malfunctioned in the body politic and the economic contract. But on the diagnosis, let alone the cure, there is very little consensus. Some reach for the opioids, in the form of a political quick fix, while others prescribe a return to first principles to steady the ship of state for stormy seas ahead. Liberals act like conservatives, trying to hold on to the hard-fought gains of struggles past as electorates keep conjuring up nasty surprises, while conservatives become radicals, advocating an abrupt rupture with a complacent and flabby status quo that will lead us all to ruin if left to run its course.

Firmly in the latter camp is Murray, who adapts his title from one of the most influential British political books of the past century, George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, published in 1935. One can also see the influence of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, Christopher Caldwell’s 2009 book that warned about the challenges to the European way of life by mass migration from the Muslim world.

But Murray is his own man. With considerable intellectual bravery, he has spent the best part of the past decade upsetting Britain’s genteel commentariat as the scourge of multi-cultural mores and its willful delusions about the causes of the growing terrorist threat. Such is the shift in mood about the question of immigration (tied up, however much one might hope to see them separated, with the politics of Islam) that he now occupies unfamiliar terrain somewhere to the right of a new center ground. The publication of his latest book is an intellectual event that his critics cannot ignore. It has spent 20 consecutive weeks in the Top Ten of the British bestseller lists, rising to number one in the non-fiction charts. In terms of its impact on the British political psyche, it is perhaps comparable to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy of 2016, which surged to the top of the American bestseller charts shortly after President Trump’s inauguration.

If Europe is dying, says Murray, it is because it is killing itself. In failing to control mass immigration while jettisoning European founding values (a combination of Judeo-Christian culture, the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the Enlightenment), Europe, he argues, has inflicted upon itself “two simultaneous concatenations from which it is now all but impossible to recover.” Never one to shirk a row, he returns to the infamous 1968 speech by Conservative shadow minister Enoch Powell, who predicted “rivers of blood” as a consequence of mass immigration. As Murray admits, Powell’s speech flunked because parts of it “made it too easy for his political opponents to attack him.” Were he around today, however, Murray wonders whether Powell might have thought that he underestimated and understated his case.

For Murray, Europe’s “existential civilizational tiredness” has deep historical roots. It can be partly explained by an indissoluble residue of guilt about past European imperialism and an exaggerated disdain for nations and nationalism as societal bonds. “The nation state,” said German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1996, “cannot solve the great problems of the 21st century.” The void left by the decline of Christian belief has created a space for the “ever-inflating language of ‘human rights’,” in which lawyers and bureaucrats become the new priesthood. The assumption that economic prosperity or equal rights were all that man desired has fed into a failure to take hostile ideologies at their word (to be explained away as grievances to be remedied, or needs to be met). The spate of terrorist attacks across Europe, seemingly on an ever-upward trajectory, are partly explicable by the botched approach that European governments have taken in trying to soft-peddle Islamist groups over the past few decades.

While the picture that Murray paints is one of incremental decline (and tough reading for many), one episode illustrates his point more than any other. This was Angela Merkel’s August 2015 unilateral declaration that all Syrian asylum-seekers were welcome in Germany—no matter which EU country they had first entered—which created a profound political rupture in Europe, encouraging a refugee flow of hundreds of thousands.

At the time, the champions of the move adopted the Obamian catch phrase Schaffen Das (“We can do this”). Noble instincts must be acknowledged. This was, in part, a conscious act of repentance for uglier episodes in the German past. But the domestic and international adulation Merkel initially received evaporated within a few months. Germany alone began to strain under the weight of new arrivals, now reaching an estimated million in number. Between April 2015 and August 2016, Merkel’s approval rating slipped from 75 to 47 percent, opening the doors for Alternative für Deutschland to improve its results in regional and then national elections. Other European states began to bite back against the decree, feeding into the narrative of a resurgent neo-nationalist Right in much of Eastern and Southern Europe. “It was not France that said come,” complained then-French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. The sight of hundreds of thousands of refugees marching through Europe acted as a backdrop in Britain’s EU referendum campaign that was seized upon opportunistically by the UK Independence Party.

Although Murray supported Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, he does not tell this story of European tribulations with any relish. His lament is more forceful for the fact that he exhibits a genuine pan-European consciousness, albeit one that will offend some cosmopolitan sensibilities. In my view, he invests too much in European high culture as the barometer for civilizational health (perhaps betraying my own less sophisticated taste for soccer over opera). But the point is that the multilingual and highly literate Murray is deeply invested in Europe’s cultural hinterland, and weaves his story through music, painting, and literature. He bemoans the “over-ripeness” of contemporary European art and its descent into the “parasitism” and the “studiedly insincere.” He speaks with bemusement of attending an academic conference in Heidelberg, once the beating heart of European intellectual life, where every word—country, nation, state—was torn down by postmodernists until nothing was left but an ambient ennui.

For Murray, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq is the most “emblematic” writer of modern Europe. His controversial novel, Submission, depicts France in 2022 under sharia law. It was published the day of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in January 2015. It is a sign of the times that Emmanuel Macron recently said much the same of Houellebecq in an interview with Der Spiegel: He “is surely the novelist who best describes contemporary phobias and fears, portraying the postmodern character of our society.”

Luce and Emmott set themselves a more ambitious task in assessing the state of the West as whole—more specifically, the state of liberalism in the West. Like Murray, they believe that the Western liberal democratic system is creaking under the weight of its own contradictions and that its greatest enemy is from within. Unlike Murray, they see this as coming from a surge in populism that threatens to pollute the liberal ideal. Although they acknowledge the structural inequities that have fed this political rebellion against established elites, fear of Trump looms large in both their books. Both cite Fareed Zakaria’s warnings about the rise of “illiberal democracy”; and, with their eyes trained firmly on the White House, both invoke Jefferson’s mantra that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

As an Oxford graduate, former Clinton Administration speechwriter, and long-time journalist for the Financial Times, one might expect Luce to be soaked through to his core with a certain worldview. It is to his great credit that he begins his book with a refreshingly honest and good humored self-critique. Journalists, he writes, have a habit of flattering themselves that they are writing the first draft of history and “have an annoying habit of designating what we failed to predict as serenely inevitable in hindsight.”

From his undergraduate days around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) in Oxford—the degree of choice of Britain’s governing elites—Luce describes how he was inculcated with a “conceit about the primacy of Western thought.” A teleological belief in “Progress” remains the closest thing to a shared religion in the West. For that reason, there are many who are in denial about the alternative world opening up before them. Luce unleashes an unexpectedly fierce critique of “Davos Man,” a species first identified by Samuel Huntingdon in 2004. The annual gathering of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland includes “the world’s wealthiest recyclers of conventional wisdom—and consistently one of the last places to anticipate what is going to happen next.” This will be hard reading in a place where the Financial Times is the newspaper of choice.

Luce is surely right in observing that the West’s “souring mood is about the psychology of dashed expectations rather than the decline in material comforts.” At the same time, however, the metrics also make for uncomfortable reading. The West’s middle-income problem is “real and deepening,” caused above all by economic plateau and then stagnation. For the past century and a half at least, the concept of modernity was an inherently Western one. The presumption, seemingly proved over the longue durée, was that liberalization of an economic system would be accompanied by the arrival of an open society. The rise of Asia—more specifically, China—is so unsettling precisely because it seems to outline an alternative path to prosperity and modernity.

Since the start of the 21st century, 25 democracies have failed around the world. Luce recounts a conversation with Francis Fukuyama about this worrying state of affairs, who wonders “whether this is market correction in democracy; or a global depression.” At some point in 2008, too, the so-called Washington Consensus suffered a mortal blow. In the West, it is the “left behind” or the “precariat,” the squeezed middle classes, who are leading the revolt. Suddenly, armies of pollsters, manifesto writers, and concerned think tankers try to understand their plight. Yet the disruptive economy and its pillaging effect on the West’s blue-collar workforce was regarded as a rather arcane subject until last year—that is, until a handful of crucial swing districts in Rustbelt America turned red in 2016, and more than a third of the British Labour Party’s core vote (more than half in former manufacturing and shipbuilding towns in the north of England) plumped for Brexit. Take that.

What is to be done? Luce is careful not to lay all at the door of Trump or Brexit. In keeping with the new mood, he pleads for a better understanding of those who voted for both. Reaching for another gem of German culture, Bertold Brecht, he is aware of the hypocrisy of elites who long “for the government to dissolve the people and elect another.” Perhaps inevitably, however, his prognosis becomes increasingly Trump-centric as it reaches its crescendo. Trump and the UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage—who has, it is worth noting, never been elected to parliament in the UK after countless attempts—become the pantomime villains, “arsonists in charge of the fire brigade.” The Art of the Deal, we are told as the analysis slightly runs out of puff, is no match for The Art of War. We are asked to consider what Trump would do if he took a “magic pill” that gave him knowledge. The answer, of course, is exactly the opposite of what he has done so far. The author notes that sales of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt shot up in the wake of Trump’s victory. But this tells us more about the people buying these books than it does about Trump himself or his movement.

Bill Emmott is sensitive to the idea that every Davos Man was caught with his trousers down in 2016. On the contrary, in a recent letter to the London Review of Books, he claims to have seen the portents of danger before most. He is the chair of an organization called wakeupfoundation.eu, an “educational charity that aims to raise public awareness of the dangerous trends currently under way in Western societies.” His primary concern, the theme of his book, is to preserve “openness,” which he believes is the foundation of political and economic success in the West, and to guard against the “tribalism” that has been belched forth into the current political debate from an atavistic past. Once again, the ogre-like figure of Trump is the perfect symbol of what has gone wrong.

Unlike many highbrow European commentators, Emmott does not lick his lips at America’s troubles. He is under no illusion about the fact that the health of the United States is what matters more than anything else to the functioning of the West. He quotes Leonard Cohen’s memorable line, “You’re not going to like what comes after America.” Yet given the urgency of tone he adopts about the “fate of the West,” what he prescribes is rather milky. His answer to the fundamental questioning of the existing social contract is technocratic tinkering at its edges. In the manner of a traditional liberal, his answer to economic inequality is greater equality of legal rights in the labor market. Likewise, the response to the collapse of faith in the financial system after 2008 is anti-trust regulation. For record disapproval ratings for Congress, we need campaign finance reform. In Britain, trotting out an old idea, it is time to jettison the “first-past-the-post” electoral system, which maintains the two-party system, to ensure “equality of voice.” And it is hard to sustain his argument that the weakness of Thatcherism was that it led to an “inequality of political rights and voice.” Whether it was justified or not, as the price of modernizing a failing British economy, Thatcherism sank whole industries and left gaping holes in regions of the country that have yet to recover.

As for rescuing the European project, Emmott endorses the Macron approach (an end to austerity) over the more fiscally cautious strategy of Angela Merkel. He prescribes not “more Europe” but more “collaboration” between its national states. Should all these levers be pulled in short succession, he believes an opportunity awaits to “set America straight again,” along with the rest of the West. While his optimism is welcome, this seems akin to fighting a new war with old weapons. Such exercises in soul-searching are much needed. But one suspects Spengler would have thought that something of the soul is still missing.

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Stickin’ and Stayin’

Here’s Little Richard

Craft Recordings, 2017

Two compact discs, $16.99

It’s a longstanding bugaboo of mine that Little Richard frequently isn’t afforded the same artiste treatment that a number of the early rock and rollers receive. This general recognition, of course, has come years after the fact, from when we began to take rock seriously as a subject to be written about and discussed the same way we do other musical and art forms. With that discussion, though, comes the expectation that the subject in question will possess a degree of proper seriousness. For instance, Elvis Presley is seriously primordial. Chuck Berry is seriously articulate. Jerry Lee Lewis is seriously unhinged. Carl Perkins is seriously down home. Gene Vincent is seriously hip. Little Richard is the subject of two biographies, one by Charles White from 1985, and a fine biography, by poet and TAI contributor David Kirby, in 2009. But somehow the door to the pantheon has remained only slightly cracked open for him.

The man born Richard Penniman in Macon, Georgia, on December 5, 1932, is someone who might have written the word “bugaboo” into a song, precisely because it’s a word that’s fun to say. With his make-up, outrageous hair, campy mannerisms, Little Richard was seen as a manic figure, which, oddly enough, enabled him to be both highly sexual and asexual at the same time. His songs were full of passionate, even squealed, cries for various lady loves, but they were also slathered in bouts of wordplay that had an Edward Lear element to them. Little Richard’s rhymes were more about their sound than their sense.

Put simply, Little Richard’s music just felt good. It made your brain bubble, your eyes twitch, and your legs vibrate. As someone else said, he was the quasar of rock and roll. I’ve been feeling it all over again thanks to Craft Recordings’ jam-packed new reissue of Here’s Little Richard, perhaps the finest debut album by any of this first generation of rockers.

It was easy to dismiss Richard as kitsch, a purveyor of nonsense lyrics that he slapped together as would-be buzz phrases that could join the popular patois. Think of something like “the bee’s knees” from the jazz age, and the assorted similarly veined phrases that never caught on. Here’s Little Richard commences with “Tutti Frutti,” arguably the most energetic song of the 1950s. It’s always struck me as a kind of split atom jump blues, which was a style that Richard worked throughout his first record with “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Long Tall Sally,” and the beyond-frantic “Jenny Jenny,” a tune that meshes with the most desperate pulsations of the heart when the heart wants what the heart wants, and to settle for less is to settle for a manner of death.

There is an infectious tribal element in Richard’s early music, almost like he deals in a musical version of hoodoo comfort food. But rather than dishing out nonsense in his lyrics, I hear the scat vocals of people like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald elongated into clauses that then join together to make a poetry far more accessible than what the Beats were coming up with at the time. In part this was because those words were percussive devices in Little Richard’s best tunes, extensions of the drum beat at his back and his own piano notes. The piano wasn’t exactly the coolest instrument to make your bones with in early rock and roll. You were better off with a guitar, naturally, or just a microphone. Only Little Richard and the recently departed Fats Domino—and of course Jerry Lee Lewis—were able to rock the piano like it had rarely been rocked before.

Domino came out of the boogie woogie tradition of Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis, with those rolling, chordal, cyclical sheets of sound—long before Coltrane—furling, unfurling, refurling in great bluesy riffs. There’s a wave-like quality to that style of piano playing, a persistent rhythmic lapping that is dominated by riffs. Consider the riff of “Blueberry Hill”; it’s not a coincidence that a riff-centric guitar band like Led Zeppelin turned it into one of their best covers on their early shows.

But our man Mr. Perriman was not a riff merchant. He was the Lord of the Lick, a shorter phrase, like a shout out from a balcony that comments on the proceedings below. But Richard did something truly original: He organized his songs so that they became riff collages.

And then there is the voice. A lot of the great rock and roll singers have incredible range, but Richard is notable in that not only does he have a ton of range; it starts at a higher level than almost any of his peers, and extends to the sharpest, furthest out point, thanks to that incomparable falsetto he was able to control. If you think of a rock and roll singer’s range as being charted upon a sword blade, Little Richard would have the sticking point way at the end all to himself, your last stop in the range game, the sharpest part of all.

Paul McCartney was the only Beatle who could come close to doing that, so he sang the Little Richard songs. Ironically, Buddy Holly might have been best at covering him, a singer who was seriously learned and professorial, which is telling. Holly was one smart guy, and note how he peppered his version of “Slippin’ and Slidin’” with his own style of falsetto, those crazy hiccupped vocals that are akin to Richard’s full-throated shouts coming back to earth to gather strength in an intake of breath. They were contributors, if you will, to the same mechanism, the same principle.

The big allure for longtime Richard listeners such as myself with this reissue is the second disc of outtakes from the sessions. When you’re this good, your finished product often feels effortless, but this dude worked hard in the studio, going full bore on each cut. Listening to the four outtakes of “Rip It Up,” I’m reminded of Jimi Hendrix and tales of his studio sorcery, where he would blast out one doozy of a guitar solo, only to have another go on a subsequent take and blast out a different one of comparable quality.

Little Richard was the same way, and you hear a lot of Fats Waller in those outtakes. A great jazz musician, Waller suffered, to a degree, from the same shortchanging as Little Richard, on account of how outrageously fun he was as an entertainer. The same thing applies, in its own way, to “Best Picture” awards. A movie has to be serious to the point of sententious to win big, usually something ostensibly for your betterment, as if art that flashed a mile-wide smile couldn’t assuage the soul just as readily.

We should also remember that Richard had a degree of Art Tatum-type virtuosity in his playing, as any pianist who tries to replicate those strung-together licks can tell you. If you have any experience trying to learn or play piano, you’ll be lucky if you don’t feel like your knuckles are going to break as you listen.

The point is that ebullience is a form of virtuosity in and of itself. Little Richard’s music is the rock and roll codex version, and this album is a sacredly unsacred whale of a disc that is the bee’s knees of 1950s debuts. He could have had a better name for it, maybe: The bugaboo blues basher.

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The Outlines of Trump’s Asia Strategy

During its long and eventful trip, the Trump Administration laid down important markers as it fashions its strategic approach to Asia. While North Korea is the most urgent issue the region faces, strategic competition with China is the most important. On the former count, Trump is working with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Moon Jae-in to develop a long-term approach that contains and rolls back the threat. On the latter count, Trump began to outline his vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific.

The anchor of a “grand strategy” for Asia is Japan. President Trump and Prime Minister Abe enjoy a warm relationship akin to that between George W. Bush and Jun’ichiro Koizumi. If the two stay close, the visions they outlined have a real chance of succeeding.

North Korea

The first order of business for the United States and Japan was solidifying their common approach to North Korea. While “maximum pressure” appears to be affecting both North Korea and China, the policy needs more time. Many more Chinese and North Korean individuals and entities need to be sanctioned, and Beijing must see that its worst fears of a full-blown trilateral alliance between Tokyo, Seoul, and Washington will become a reality. At the same time, the Japanese and the Americans have to agree on possible strategic end states for the peninsula and on reactions to a host of contingencies should North Korea decide to use force.

South Korea represents a bigger challenge, as Moon Jae-in is not in perfect strategic harmony with Trump and Abe. The U.S. President did listen intently—an oft-overlooked characteristic of his diplomacy—to Moon’s plea for eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula. And the President’s speech in Korea was powerful and well received. No President has gone further in describing the contrast between freedom and prosperity in South Korea and atrocity and misery in the North. He outlined a vision for a free peninsula, though it is still unclear whether the Administration sees that aspiration as its grand strategic objective.

Bilateral with China

The trip to China was uneventful; there is little for the two countries to discuss as they disagree on almost everything. The real substance of China policy is made through actions to strengthen relations with U.S. allies and partners around China, through U.S. force posture, and through trade enforcement actions that will push back against China’s predatory practices. Despite the partisan shots at Trump, his trade approach to China enjoys widespread bipartisan support. He should be faulted, however, for his praise of Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power. Xi is a dictator, and China’s authoritarian rule is the single biggest cause of friction between the United States and China. Regrettably, it seems the current U.S. President, like his predecessor, has chosen the route of neglect in addressing China’s human rights abuses.

Most importantly, the U.S. government and the broader strategic community still have not internalized the reality that Xi has abandoned market reform and his economy is on a path toward stagnation. The danger is not of a stronger China overtaking the United States, but of a weaker but more aggressive China (think Putin’s Russia) lashing out or trying to achieve quick “wins.” A new approach to the region will have to account for this new reality.

The Free And Open Indo-Pacific

While China was a courtesy call at best, the most important parts of Trump’s trip were in Southeast Asia, where he began to lay out his vison for a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” The initial idea seems to have germinated in India and Japan.

This aspiration is promising, but needs to be translated into strategy and concrete plans. The idea is to create a stronger balance of power against China’s expansionism by further tying a very willing India into the East Asian region, and the United States, Japan, and Australia further into the Indian Ocean region. But there is a values dimension as well. The organizing structure appears to be the so called “quad” of the great maritime democracies: the United States, India, Japan, and Australia. All are committed to free societies, a free and open maritime commons stretching from the Western Pacific through the Indian Ocean, and the rule of law.

The problem is with open markets. The United States and Australia are the only almost fully open markets of the bunch (the United States still protects certain industries that are important to Southeast Asia, which is why the Trans-Pacific Partnership ended up weaker than it might have been). But India is certainly not a free and open market. Japan has been prepared to go quite far in opening its market further. The so called TPP-11 could help, as would a bilateral free trade agreement with Washington.

Thus, the economic dimension of the Indo-Pacific strategy will be most difficult. There really was no free trade champion in the 2016 U.S. presidential election; for now, Americans seem to have had their fill of multilateral trade deals. Even so, President Trump has said he would negotiate “better” deals, and he should be encouraged to do so. The prizes are the Southeast Asian economies and India, where growth is held back thanks to high tariffs, high levels of state intervention and the dominance of state-owned enterprises. The Asian “South” and the United States may be the only potential drivers of global growth. As the United States continues to grow, and its market continues to far surpass that of China’s (by almost $45 trillion in net national wealth), it has enormous leverage on trade deals.

There is another piece to economic statecraft, and that is a response to the state-led construction and infrastructure projects China refers to as One Belt, One Road (OBOR). The United States made some strides in committing to joining with Japan’s version of the Overseas Private Investment Council to spur more regional private investment. But in the end, investment decisions will be made based on the market changes in the key countries such as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Diplomatic Frameworks

On the one hand, the diplomatic road ahead is clearer. As he should have, the President offered to play a more diplomatically active role in the South China Sea dispute. His administration should offer to help allies and partners resolve disputes amongst them on the basis of hundreds of years of international maritime custom.

On the other hand, the diplomatic approach to Southeast Asia is complicated by its authoritarian turn and loss of trust in the United States after President Obama’s tepid response to China’s militarization and expansionism in the South China Sea.

Given the intensification of the competition with China, it is most important to put partnerships with countries like the Philippines and Thailand on firmer footing, and then, once trust is re-established, press them on human rights. This was the approach taken by Ronald Reagan that eventually led to Asia’s turn toward democracy.  The other alternative is to lose these alliances to China while gaining nothing on human rights.

In short, the diplomatic piece of the new strategy could consist of a “superstructure” of the maritime democracies and a set of bilateral and trilateral engagements. (A big missing piece is Taiwan, a which is both free and open and could be an important piece of any maritime pushback against China.) The new diplomacy must also abandon a passive approach to diplomacy over maritime disputes.

The Military Dimension

On the military front, the United States can take three mains steps. The first priority must be to fix our own budgetary mess. The United States is running a global strategy for a 355-ship navy with just 274 ships. It will either begin to rebuild, or it will have to decide where in the world to stop making commitments. Arguably, the most reassurance the United States can provide Asia would be to fund a 355-ship navy.

Second, a security assistance program built for the Cold War must be fixed to ensure that our partners get what they need quickly, without imposing onerous, undue restrictions on how these capabilities are used. Critically, the United States finally has a real chance to knit together an Indo-Pacific maritime domain awareness system, as our Unmanned Aircrat Systems export policy changes to allow for wider exports, and more countries have similar fighter aircraft and Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities. Washington and its partners can ensure that the systems the allies and partners have bought become interoperable.

Third, with the White House no longer micromanaging Pacific Command, the military has all kinds of ideas about how to keep the maritime waterways free and open, and should be allowed to challenge China in the South China Sea and East China Sea in ways restricted over the past several years.

Getting Back in the Information Game

But the most important tool will be the rebuilding of U.S. capacity for public diplomacy, political warfare, and information campaigns. We have for too long ignored how powerful China’s global propaganda operations have become. Beijing’s mouthpieces constantly repeat the themes that China’s rise is inevitable and the United States is in decline. Unfortunately, these concepts are often repeated unwittingly in top American media. But these themes are easy to rebut because they are so far from reality. Despite the machismo, Xi is on the cusp of several mini-crises, including a trend toward a stagnant economy, a population that will look as old as Europe by 2030 but without the wealth, and imperial overstretch. China’s good money is leaving—for the United States.

In contrast, Asia’s “quad” has the truth on its side. China not only offers no compelling vision for the region as it cracks down on human rights and cultural and intellectual freedom, it is facing what Xi has called a deteriorating security situation—especially as it counts the forces of globalization as a security threat.

But the “free world” is not even fighting back against Chinese political warfare. For President Trump’s Asia vision to work, he needs to rebuild the United States Information Agency and realize that any success in Asia will be undermined by Chinese attempts to propagate a message to Asians that the United States is in decline and retreat.

In sum, President Trump laid out an inspiring vision for the future of Korea and a comprehensive outline to compete with China. But there are many potential pitfalls and minefields along the way—and the hard work of translating visions and aspirations into to concrete plans and policies has just begun.

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