Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 18

Iwo Jima and “The Purest Democracy”

As age diminishes the generation that fought and survived World War II—and as our nation marks the war’s 75th anniversaries—the words “Iwo Jima” still give us pause. The battle came near the end of a long and costly war, there was an agonizing loss of life, an amazing photograph captured a moment of triumph, and it inspired many classic novels and films.

Abundant bravery and awful sacrifice have, however, overshadowed a significant moment that occurred as the battle closed. A junior Navy chaplain in a humble setting—a rabbi, Lieutenant (junior grade) Roland B. Gittelsohn—gave one of the finest orations in American history. I make this claim: Of all the words that aimed to capture the meaning of America’s role in the Second World War and to chart the way for the postwar future, this is the speech for textbooks, anthologies, classrooms, recitations, YouTube, memorial ceremonies, and movie scenes.

Navy Chaplains with the Marines in Battle

With 71,000 Marines and 22,000 Japanese locked in mortal combat for five weeks in an area of only eight square miles, Iwo Jima was an island of death. Indoctrinated in their schools and propagandized in the army, the Japanese were so unwavering in their resistance that only 216 were captured during the battle, though a few thousand more emerged from caves in the days and weeks afterwards. The tally of American casualties was 26,000, among them 6,800 dead.

Moving with the Marines and the corpsmen as they faced death were Navy chaplains of the three major faiths—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish. Just as World War II forged a new and more unified America, it transformed the chaplain corps and its understanding of ministry in a pluralistic society. Many chaplains developed collegial bonds and friendships unheard of in their civilian pastoral care, and they ministered for people of different faiths (and no faith) without hesitation. Solidarity among chaplains laid the ground for the postwar interfaith movement.

The first Jewish chaplain sent by the Navy to the Marine Corps was Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn (1910-95), who left Central Synagogue in Rockville Center on Long Island for the service. He recalled the example of Protestant Chaplain Herbert Van Meter (1915-82), “one of his dearest friends.” In Hawaii for some weeks when the Division had no Jewish chaplain, Van Meter had organized and led Jewish Sabbath services so often that he was called “Rabbi van Meter.” During the battle, Van Meter

would crawl between attacks from one foxhole to another, trying to reassure his weary, frightened Marines. He would grasp the hand of one, squeeze the shoulder of another and hold firmly to the uncontrollably trembling body of a third. He prayed with them, read psalms to them, helped them feel unashamed of their fear by confessing that he was terrified himself.

The Division Chaplain of the Fifth Marine Division, Warren F. Cuthriell (1900-92), a Baptist, received a rare Navy citation—“whenever the situation permitted, he sought to be of help to men of other faiths as well, winning the affection of all in the division who knew of his selfless devotion to his duties.” Soon after the battle, it was Army chaplain Newton C. Elder, a Presbyterian, who “co-opted” a plane, flew to Saipan, and returned with “nearly half a ton” of matzos, gefilte fish, Haggadahs and wine for the three Jewish chaplains on Iwo to celebrate Passover with their Marines. They were surely grateful that the angel of death had passed over their own foxholes.

The transformation from a parochial to a pluralistic chaplaincy was not, however, instantaneous. Chaplain Gittelsohn encountered the anti-Semitism of the times: a drunk Marine who said, “One good thing Hitler has done is kill the Jews;” a chaplain who refused copies of Jewish Welfare Board and Anti-Defamation League pamphlets, saying, “If you want your Jewish boys to read this trash, give it to them yourself. I refuse to put it on the shelf for Christians to read”; chaplains who voiced demeaning stereotypes of Jews.

Even while the battle was underway, two large cemeteries were staked out, and the thousands of dead were interred in long trenches with chaplains providing the appropriate rituals. For the unknowns, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish rites were administered. Having worked together in the gruesome but sacred task of consecrating burials all day and into the night, “three chaplains—a Baptist, a Methodist, a Jew—wearier than they had ever been before, climbed into the trench, stood there together before the last row of graves, and held the flashlight for each other as they prayed.” Chaplain Gittelsohn said “it was impossible to forget the brotherhood and love of men like these.”

Dedicating the Fifth Marine Division’s Cemetery

The Fifth Marine Division’s cemetery, laid out in the shape of a cross at the base of Mount Suribachi, eventually held more than 2,200 graves, 38 of them unknowns. The final throes of the battle could still be heard in the distance when it came time to dedicate the cemetery on March 21, 1945. According to plan, Major General Keller Rockey (1888-1970) spoke a tribute to the dead for the Marine Corps and the nation. His remarks were to be followed by the religious dedication.

There were 17 chaplains in the division. Division Chaplain Cuthriell wanted Rabbi Gittelsohn to speak at a joint funeral service, and the Jewish chaplain wrote out a sermon by hand on onionskin paper. In a moment that showed the limits of interfaith solidarity, however, some Protestant chaplains protested that it should not be a Jewish chaplain that prayed over the graves of mostly Christian Marines, and Catholic chaplains voiced their traditional objection to holding a single service for all faiths. They proposed that, following the commanding general’s secular tribute, chaplains and Marines of the three major faiths would move to different corners of the cemetery for their own services.

Cuthriell replied that “the right of the Jewish chaplain to preach such a sermon was precisely one of the things for which we were fighting the war.” When he learned of the objections by some of his fellow chaplains, Gittelsohn later wrote, “I do not remember anything in my life that made me so painfully sick.” The rabbi might have stood on principle, but sensing his superior’s distress, he agreed to lead the Jewish burial service, speaking the same words he had written out for the joint service.

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Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn

Only 40 or 50 men, joined by three of the Protestant chaplains who were upset by the decision to hold separate services, gathered around Chaplain Gittelsohn, but his words rank among America’s finest eulogies. They expressed America’s highest aspirations, and they still speak to our current concerns.

This is perhaps the grimmest, and surely the holiest task we have faced since D-Day. Here before us lie the bodies of comrades and friends. Men who until yesterday or last week laughed with us, joked with us, trained with us. Men who were on the same ships with us, and went over the sides with us, as we prepared to hit the beaches of this island. Men who fought with us and feared with us.

Gittelsohn’s repeated mentions of “we,” “our,” and “us,” along with his images of shared experiences, set up the sermon’s major theme. “We” have become a brotherhood on this battlefield, and we must carry that spirit back to our country, where Americans are still divided by race, class, and faith. Surely his recent experiences with anti-Semitism suggested the theme. So did seeing how African-American Marines in Amphibian Truck and Depot companies were so often given the grim duty of recovering remains.

Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors, generations ago, helped in her founding, and other men who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores. Here lie officers and men, Negroes and whites, rich men and poor…together. Here are Protestants, Catholics, and Jews…together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination. No prejudice. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy. [Gittelsohn’s ellipses]

Gittelsohn, with no library at hand and little time to prepare, leaned on the frame of the Gettysburg Address, speaking of dedication.

We dedicate ourselves . . . to live together in peace the way they fought and are buried in war. . . . Any man among us the living who fails to understand that, will thereby betray those who lie here dead. Whoever of us lifts his hand in hate against a brother, or thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in the minority, makes of this ceremony and of the bloody sacrifice it commemorates, an empty, hollow mockery. [Ellipses mine]

A Marine Corps combat correspondent, Sergeant Dan Levin, was within earshot of the service. In his memoir, From the Battlefield, published on the battle’s 50th anniversary, he reflected, “Once I went into the Marines I left the question of our war’s transcendent meaning to others. Let them make the overriding ideal statements, so that these heroes’ deeds (and mine) would be placed within a moral universe. . . . I . . . could quietly go on with the business of falling, one among many, rifle pointed ahead, shielding the simple rose of freedom with my heart.” Hearing “the slight young chaplain” that day, Levin wrote, “I was vaguely thrilled. . . . I was composing a dispatch in my head, and paragraphs of my story and his speech must have shuttled in and out, like alternating presses.” That first, vague impression deepened with time, and in 1949 he would publish his novel of the Marines and the battle, Mask of Glory, with its bracing theme of Americanization.

[image error]Grainy black-and-white film clips of the ceremony show immaculately graded and packed sand with perfect rows of white wooden crosses, “with here and there a Star of David blooming,” in Levin’s words. Some Marines still wore their combat dungarees, and others were in new uniforms as they stood in formation around the cemetery’s perimeter until the rifle salutes, the prayers and the hymns were finished. Then they swarmed across the sand to find the graves of lost buddies. No Marine said a word when another Marine sobbed.

A Sermon’s Long Reach

Other chaplains in the Division had Rabbi Gittelsohn’s words typed, mimeographed, and circulated, and many Marines sent copies home. One reached Time magazine, which published excerpts in July. Quotes from the sermon in newspapers and magazines and broadcasts by Robert St. John and Fredric March reached many stricken American families. One grieving mother wrote Gittelsohn, “Our son . . . sleeps there with his buddies. . . . He was killed February 20. . . . I wish I might read all of your sermon—it would be like a service in honor of the boy we love so well. May I have a copy, please?”

After he returned to his congregation in 1946, Rabbi Gittelsohn spoke at a service for Gold Star families in the New York area, seeking to direct their sadness and grief.

Somewhere there’s a miner’s son just the age of your boy who never had a decent chance in life because his father was killed in a mine accident and he himself has had to slave in the mine ever since. Do something for him, and you keep your boy alive. Somewhere there’s a Negro who can’t be the artist or scholar he wants to be because his skin happens not to be the exact shade of yours or mine. Spend the rest of your days achieving justice and fulfillment for him, and you keep your boy alive. Somewhere there’s a Jew, a young Jew like your son, who has miraculously lived through the horror of Holocaust. Keep that young Jew alive, bring him into Palestine where he can rebuild his life with dignity. Thus you will keep your son alive.

Over the next half century, Gittelsohn became a major figure in American Jewish life and President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. His words at the Fifth Division Cemetery were often recalled, and on the 50th anniversary of the battle, less than a year before his death, he repeated many at the national ceremony at the Iwo Jima memorial.

One of his young congregants became a chaplain. Rear Admiral Harold Robinson was the Navy’s senior reserve chaplain when he retired in 2008. Year after year he joined Marines on active duty, traveling to Okinawa, Guam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I was with him on one trip. Deplaning at an airfield in Iraq during a short refueling stop, he commandeered a chapel Humvee to visit a Jewish Marine at a camp some distance away, telling the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, “It’s only a 40-minute drive!” (I had visions of Moses parting the traffic with his staff as they tore across Anbar province.) Amazingly, he reappeared just as the general was ready to board.

The Gettysburg Address still inspires Americans because, after a costly battle, Lincoln’s words drew on the American past, summed up the sacrifices of the present, and helped point the way for the nation’s future. The chaplain’s themes—overcoming racial and religious prejudice, providing a decent living for all Americans, engaging in the world—animated public policy in the postwar period. For the Second World War, it was the young rabbi who best captured, in stirring and memorable prose, the higher meaning of the war.

Chaplain Robinson helped me understand that I was drawn to Gittelsohn’s sermon because it so well expressed my own American beliefs—beliefs that the war had clarified—beliefs my parents had absorbed during the war and passed on to me—beliefs that came to animate so many postwar developments in American life.

Isolationism: “When the last battle has been won, there will be those at home, as there were last time, who will want us to turn our backs in selfish isolation on the rest of organized humanity, and thus to sabotage the very peace for which we fight. We promise you who lie here: we will not do that!”

Inequality: “When the last shot has been fired, there will still be those eyes that are turned backward not forward, who will be satisfied with those wide extremes of poverty and wealth in which the seeds of another war can breed. We promise you, our departed comrades: this, too, we will not permit.”

Profit over principle: “Once again there will be those to whom profit is more important than peace, who will insist with the voice of sweet reasonableness and appeasement that it is better to trade with the enemies of mankind than, by crushing them, to lose their profit. . . . We will not listen!” (Gittelsohn was no doubt thinking of American companies that had sold scrap iron to Japan until the Roosevelt administration issued an embargo in 1940. The chaplain’s words might help us consider American firms that have helped China develop its internet firewall and visual monitoring technology.)

Life: “Somewhere in this plot of ground there may lie the man who could have discovered the cure for cancer. Under one of these Christian crosses, or beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may rest now a man who was destined to be a great prophet to find the way, perhaps, for all to live in plenty, with poverty and hardship for none.” 

I recently polled some military historians and Marine Corps University faculty to ask what speech, oration, or proclamation best captured the meaning of World War II, just as the Gettysburg Address and President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address unlock the deep meanings of the Civil War. Some pointed to Winston Churchill’s exhortation to fight on the beaches and landing fields; others pointed to FDR’s Four Freedoms. One expressed resolve and the other war aims, but both came too early in the conflict. General Eisenhower’s Guildhall Address in 1945 is indeed moving and eloquent, but it viewed only one theater and our ties with one ally.

In 1945, Gittelsohn’s words embraced Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; whites and blacks. There were American Indians among the Marine code talkers, and he knew that Japanese Americans were fighting with the U.S. Army in Italy. Gittelsohn had surely heard the first reports from the death camps.

In 1945, few imagined an American future of immigration from every continent. Few foresaw that American places of worship would come to include Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh temples, and mosques. Is there any hint in the chaplain’s sermon that America would refuse new peoples and new faiths?

Soldiers of the United Kingdom fought “for King and country,” but British strategy often aimed to secure the British Empire. Stalin spoke of “Mother Russia” when his intent was to keep the peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in tight bondage to his ruthless will. Americans in contrast fought to make the world—and the American nation—a better place.

And there’s this: The ordinary Marine might not have the theology, but his heart sensed what Gittelsohn came to understand of the war. In 1955 he wrote,

To me, mature religion means recognizing that life is a creative partnership of man with God—that God needs man’s cooperation in a sense quite as much as we need His. Just as it was necessary for us as human beings to do our share in cooperation with God in order to win the war, rather than allowing God to take the entire responsibility.

A few years after the war, the remains of the Marines who fell on the island were repatriated and buried in accordance with the wishes of their families. Some lie at the Punch Bowl in Honolulu, but most rest in local cemeteries throughout America. The day before Memorial Day, when veterans place a flag by a Marine grave with a date of death in February or March, 1945, they catch their breath, shake their heads, and say to themselves, “Iwo.” Iwo Jima, the island. Iwo Jima, the battle. Iwo Jima, the prayer. For the lost, and for the living.

The whole text of Chaplain Gittelsohn’s sermon is available on the website of the Marine Corps History and Museums Division here.

The post Iwo Jima and “The Purest Democracy” appeared first on The American Interest.

In a Pickle with a Peck of Pickled Peppers

Everyone who comes of age in an English-speaking cultural milieu knows of the classic tongue-twisting rhyme about Peter Piper and his “peck of pickled peppers.” Those who never looked into the origins of this quirky little bastard of a verbal tease—often mistakenly called a nursery rhyme—are missing out on some harmless fun. So if you’re in the market for some, get a load of this.

Here’s the whole tongue-twister, just to set the stage:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked.

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,

Where’s the peck of pickled peppers that Peter Piper picked?

So the first question a harmless fun-seeker would ask is who wrote this?

Patience is a virtue. Before I tell you, you need to know that Peter Piper is based on a real person.

Peter Poivre was a British colonial administrator, missionary, and horticulturalist who loomed over the island of Mauritius in the 1760s. He established a tropical botanical garden in 1768, arguably the first of its kind anywhere. About 37 hectares of it still exists today in northern Mauritius: the Botanical Garden of Pamplemousses. It is the original model for the Singapore Botanical Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage site, that I now enjoy on a regular basis.

Poivre is credited with smuggling clove and nutmeg seeds out of the Spice Islands (the Maluku Islands, also written Moluccas in prior times, in present-day Indonesia, just east of Sulawesi and west of Irian Jaya), then controlled by the Dutch. From there, those seeds and herbarium seedlings ended up in several places within the British Empire of the day, including the Seychelles and here in Singapore, when spices were worth their weight in gold. That is the likeliest answer to the question posed at the end of the rhyme: “Where’s the peck of pickled peppers that Peter Piper picked?” On commercial spice plantations, guarded by British arms and shipped in British vessels to market.

As for the rhyme itself, no one knows who came up with it, so no exact answer to the question posed above exists. But by 1813 the rhyme had made its way into print, in John Harris’s Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation. Harris was obviously interested in promoting fine elocution, not in amusing babies in nurseries, and the publisher who let him get away with that title arguably deserved electrocution. But the book sold well enough, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Whoever made up the rhyme knew Latin. How so? Because Piper is substituted for Poivre, and piper is Latin for pepper. Poivre, of course, is French for pepper. What a nice name for someone who swipes spices from the Dutch, don’t you think? The Dutch for pepper? Peper, of course. Which begs the question: Where did the root for the English word pepper come from?

The best way to hit upon the answer takes us all the way back to King Solomon’s court.

Yes, you heard right: because by roughly the 960s BCE the ancient United Kingdom of Israel had established robust trade ties with India, known as the land of Ophir in the Bible. Evidence for this may be found in the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible itself. From several sources, notably the work of David Shulman, one learns that the books of Kings and Chronicles contain at least four words of Indic/Dravidian/Tamil origins. These include the word for parrot (tukki, from tokai in Tamil, which originally meant the back feathers of a male peacock), and a word for beryl or topaz (tarshish). Tarshish, of course, is the place to which Jonah tries to flee after God tells him to go to Nineveh, and is often presumed by commentators to be Spain; more likely it refers to the west coast of India, probably near Cochin.

One of these Indic-origin words is pippali, likely from the Sanskrit, or pilpil as it travelled west into Aramaic and Hebrew, or pepper as it came down to us in English via piperi in Greek and piper in Latin. But be careful: The kind of pepper these words initially referred to is not the same kind as you probably assume it to be—fear not, however, for elucidation awaits just below.

Now, Rabbinic Judaism doesn’t begin show up for at least 500 years after Solomon, and the Talmud in more or less its current form was roughly 1,500 years in the future during First Temple times. When it does show up, however, the study of it eventually came to embody a word closely derived from pilpil, namely pilpul.

Pilpul is a method of conceptual extrapolation by which a pairing of friends—a havrutah (or havrusah if your pronunciation of Aramaic is Euro-twisted, and havruthah if it’s really excellent)—goes back and forth debating, arguing, sometimes shouting and sometimes cooperating, in the explication of a sentence, phrase, or sometimes a single word in the text of either the Mishnah (the first, older part of the Talmud, written in Hebrew) or the Gemorrah (the second, newer part, written in Aramaic). Usually the effort to understand and interpret references older texts—especially the Torah, but also the Prophets and the Holy Writings—and sometimes texts written even long after the codification of the Talmud. So a havrutah involves a virtual multigenerational conversation embedded in written texts launched by a rapid-fire oral-dialogical exercise.

Now as human cognitive-cultural achievements go, this sort of thing bears interest in its own right, but our more modest quest here is to figure out how this exercise got to be called pilpul—roughly, “peppering.”

A weak consensus exists that the method itself is not that old; most date it back only to the late 15th century in Central Europe, where it is associated with the Maharal of Prague and exegetes such as Yacub Pollak and Shalom Shachna. But however old the method, the inference is obvious as to how the name arose: One shakes pepper onto food in rapid sprays of spice dust; in a similar way, words burst forth from the two sides of a havrutah: They are metaphorically spicy and rapidly strewn. Picture mouths drawn as dueling pepper shakers. That about captures it, save for a tiny bit of promised etymological clean-up.

Our English word “pepper” is very unsatisfactory because it refers to more than one kind of plant. The spice that people in ancient Greece and then Rome cared about from as early as the fifth century BCE came from India, and they cared about it as a medicine as well as a spice. This was the long pepper—piper longum, from the piperaceae family. If you have never been to an Indian or Nepalese market, like the wondrous Tekka market here in Singapore, you’ve probably never seen one. Black pepper—piper nigrum—comes from the same piperaceae family but is native to the aforementioned Maluku (Spice) Islands. (Yet another variety of the piperaceae family is the Java pepper—piper retrofractum—which is native to Java and Bali; the fruit looks like a stubbier version of the long pepper.)

Black pepper arrived in Europe via the caravan trade in about the 12th century, a trade dear to Jewish merchants, who uniquely maintained a presence at several caravan route points, including the nearest-to-retail-market terminus. (Ever wonder why the surname Peretz is relatively common among Russian Jews?) Black pepper eventually displaced the long pepper in European markets because it was much cheaper. Like the Romans before them, Europeans began referring to the useful part of both plants by the same word—piper, pepper, and so on, depending on the vernacular of the time and place.

The popularity of pepper was a factor in motivating the European Age of Discovery; there was lots of money to be made, especially as a new North American market opened up. The history of Southeast Asia in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, certainly including Singapore, is inseparable from the imperial competition among the Portuguese, Dutch, and British to control the spice trade, which by then focused not on the Indian long pepper but on the black pepper (and the “green” and “white” pepper that come from different uses of the same plant), as well as on other spices and on musk, resinous agarwood, and gambier.

Alas, the word “pepper” eventually came to include the fruits from plants that give us hot red and green peppers in a great many varieties, with spice “alarms” measured on the familiar Scoville scale. But the same plant genus also produces sweet peppers—bell peppers, banana peppers, and so on. The thing is, long and black peppers come from a completely different genus of plants than these, which are from the capsicum genus, not the piperaceae genus.

Moreover, capsicum and piperaceae are native to different continents: long and black pepper to Asia, red and green pepper (hot and sweet) to the Americas. The edible parts of the plants are different, too. From long and black peppers we use dried peppercorns, which are a drupe fruit that grow on a vine. The dried fruits are usually ground up but sometimes they are used whole in pickling mixtures and certain recipes. In red and green capsicum peppers the fresh flesh and the seeds of the fruit, both fresh and dried, are used.

The conflation here is analogous to the confusion between sweet potatoes and yams. Many Americans think these are just two different names for the same thing, and, unfortunately, some people who work in grocery stores are among them. They look similar, but sweet potatoes come from the Old World while yams are native to the Americas. The plants are from different genera and so look very different; moreover, one has an anti-inflammatory effect when eaten, and the other worsens inflammation.

It’s not hard to figure out how the pepper conflation happened. When Europeans set foot in the New World and encountered capsicum, it reminded them of long peppers. Study photos of long peppers and you’ll see that they turn red when ripe and have an elongated spikey shape. Their texture is nothing like a ripe capsicum pepper, but they’re both spicy hot. That, apparently, was enough to do the trick.

It’s a shame we Westerners have not since come up with more precise language for these different plants. Tamil speakers do it. When they wish to refer to long peppers, they use pippali or pilpili (and some thipili, for reasons not important to us at the moment). Their word for capsicum peppers is milch, and their word for black pepper is milaku, probably after the Maluku Islands where it is native. These folks know their spices, and they know how to use them, as those foreigners who have tried earnestly to eat their way across Little India here soon learn. We Westerners now use the word pepper to refer mostly to plant fruits that are not even related botanically to those from which the word pepper originally derived.

Finally on this point, many languages have versions of pilpil or pippali as their word for pepper, including Farsi and Arabic—but there is a twist in Arabic. Arabic lacks the “p” sound, so pilpil got transmuted into filefil, the logic of which is apparent to Hebrew readers, who know that the same alphabet symbol is used to designate an “f” and a “p” sound—the latter with a dot in the center. The same tonal relationship inherent to the shape of the human mouth is illustrated by the spelling of the German word for pepper: pfeffer.

You, of certain experienced palate, can see where this is leading, can’t you? Yes: The origin of the word falafel goes back to pilpil, or pepper. This suggests that the original version of the falafel ball included a whole lot more “shock yo’ mama” added to those ground up chickpeas than it typically does today.

Arabic doesn’t always transmute “p” into “f”; sometimes it transmutes “p” into “b.” That’s why the name for one of the three headwater sources of the Jordan River, which the Romans named after the god Pan (Panias), became Banias to Arabic speakers. And it’s why the Arabic word for an orange, which came from Portugal, is a bortiqal.

No explication of metaphorical uses of the various words for pepper would be complete, or even acceptable, without reference to baseball. (If you’re feeling dizzy about now, just sit down and breathe deeply.)

As all civilized people know, pepper is a name used to describe a practice drill where someone with a bat hits slowly pitched balls back to a group of fielders. The distance between batsman and fielders is only about 8-10 yards, and the right way to perform the drill is as fast as possible. Pepper is designed to tone reflexes in hand-eye coordination. It’s also lots of fun.

Some may try to argue that the word pepper used to describe this baseball prep drill comes originally from pilpul, and that some clever Jewish player—Moe Berg, probably—should be credited for introducing it. This is an example of over-the-top Jewish chauvinism. Moe Berg had better things to do. For a cure, if you feel drawn to such nonsense, read my book Jewcentricity: How the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Nearly Everything. It’ll fix your problem.

Since we’re talking baseball, it’s inevitable that we must now move from peppers to pickles. Neither the real Peter Poivre nor the invented Peter Piper knew that a pickle refers to a rundown in baseball, wherein a baserunner is stranded between first and second base, or between second and third base, or between third base and home plate, with barely a prayer of avoiding getting tagged out. Neither Poivre or Piper ever witnessed Leo Durocher using lots of “p” words, which must have included both “pickle and “pepper” at one time or another, to spit tobacco juice on any umpire who ended a pickle by making a call he didn’t like. That’s because baseball had not yet been invented in 1768 or 1813, so not their fault.

How did a baseball rundown come to be called a pickle? Did the use originate in baseball and then flow outward to become a generic term for someone in a dicey situation, or did the general usage come first to be later imported into baseball lingo? The latter.

If one consults the OED and other sources useful for running down (ahem) such puzzles, one learns that the word pickle—meaning a vegetable preserved in a brine concoction of some sort—is quite old. The first known literary use goes back to Le Morte d’Arthur, circa 1440 (published in 1485). By the 16th century examples can be found of reference to “ill pickles.” But two relatively recent uses, as literary history goes, are responsible for the contemporary English usage of pickle to mean a dicey situation: One comes from Shakespeare and the other pertains to the demise of Horatio Nelson.

In The Tempest, from 1610, Shakespeare has Alonso say:

And Trinculo is reeling ripe:

Where should they

Find this grand liquor that hath gilded ’em?

How camest thou in this pickle?

And the Bard has Trinculo answer:

I have been in such a pickle since I

Saw you last that, I fear me, will

Never out of my bones: I shall not fear fly-blowing.

I am open to anyone explaining to me what the deuce “fly-blowing” means, but that’s beside the point. [“Fly-blowing” refers to the infestation of meat or other food by maggots; so he was saying he was pickle-proofed against putrefaction. —ed.] Trinculo’s “I have been in a pickle” is the modern phrase. Here it seems to point to a protracted state of inebriation. But to generalize out of that, even in the early 17th century, to a generically precarious situation did not take a trebuchet scientist.

As for Admiral Nelson, who was killed by a French sniper during the Battle of Trafalgar, the story goes that his body was dumped for purposes of preservation into a barrel of “refined spirits” for transport back to England for proper burial. When the barrel was opened, the cask proved empty, but Nelson’s “pickled” body was preserved well enough for the purpose.

Why was the cask empty? No one fessed up, but the indelicate technique of sailors’ siphoning rum beyond their allotted ration by use of a gimlet was likely to blame. So not only did Nelson being in a pickle come into use, so did the phrase “Nelson’s Blood” as a euphemism for brandy or run. There’s even a pub in London called “Tapping the Admiral,” but never mind.

Now, well you may ask, what is all this language-heavy stuff doing in a magazine about politics? It is doing its job as an introduction to this concluding section. You might want to get yourself a drink before reading on.

Back in the 1980s there loomed a crisis of Social Security insolvency. Jimmy Carter had earlier claimed that his Administration had fixed the problem at least out until 2050. But like a lot of things about the Carter Administration, this turned out to be very wrong. In 1981 a bipartisan fix-’er-upper plan was put together in the House Ways and Means Committee, centered in the subcommittee on Social Security, which was chaired at the time by a Texas Democrat named J.J. Pickle. The subcommittee’s bill was voted down by the full committee, 14-18. So Pickle was, so to speak, in a pickle.

The Reagan Administration decided to create a commission to solve the problem. It opened for business in December 1981 with 15 members, five each appointed by the President, the Senate Majority Leader, and the Speaker of the House (in the flesh, Ronald Reagan, Howard Baker, and Tip O’Neill). On this commission was a crusty Florida Congressman, a liberal Democrat, named Claude Pepper. I’m not making this up. No one could make something like this up and be believed.

To make a long story short—told brilliantly at greater length in TAI by Philip A. Wallach—Pickle and Pepper became the main antagonists in a drawn out process that lasted until April 1983. The result failed to really fix the Social Security problem, but it did put a sturdy Band-Aid on it. After all, if the solution then had been worth all the sturm und drang we wouldn’t be facing the same problem again today—which we are. At the time some members of the press called the Pickle-Pepper set-to “the battle of the condiments.” They made that up, not me.

So we have moved from tongue twister to brain twister. You, dear reader, have been peppered with eclectic shrapnel above and beyond the call of duty. You have been dragged from the 10th century BCE to the day before yesterday. As a shotgun-seat passenger you have sideswiped the Latin, French, German, Russian, Dutch, Greek, Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Sanskrit, and Tamil languages. You have been shanghaied into a yeshiva. You have been clobbered by unsought botany lessons. You have been pepper sprayed with a cloud of politics, from early-modern mercantilism to social security reform. And you’re still here!

But what possible use to you is any of this? Well, harmless fun is often useless. Its value, beyond that of a precious distraction thumbing its nose at mortality, is simply that it causes no harm which, given the state of the world, is no small thing when you think about it. You might even crack a quiet, knowing smile the next time you hear the famous rhyme.

That said, here’s a little something that might be of actual use. I like to garden, and in my garden I have always grown a variety of (capsicum) peppers. Sometimes, with a little luck to go with timely rain and good sun, I have harvested more peppers than my extended local family and friends can eat without wastage—many pecks, even a bushel or three. I have often pickled the surplus in gallon-sized glass containers. In other words, I have made pickled peppers.

My pecks may be found not in the Seychelles or Singapore, but in the downstairs “overflow” fridge at Antebedlam, our manor house at Belching Chicken Farms, in Wheaton, Maryland. They are really good. They are at this very moment marinating happily, getting ever better, while we live the year in Singapore.

Recipes for pickle brine are many and varied. I’ll not divulge mine in detail, but I will reveal that black pepper (piperaceaea, piper nigrum) mixed in with red and green peppers (capsicum) is involved. And I can say this: Now that long peppers (piper longum) have passed my palate, the next time I pickle peppers, assuming I get the chance, they will be added, expectantly and proudly, to my recipe.

Peppers can change your life, you know, as they did Peter Poivre’s. Plant a garden. Grow some peppers. Pickle the surplus you don’t eat fresh. Teach others, especially young people, how to plant, nurture, harvest, and pickle. The time you invest in peppers will likely be time you won’t spend staring at screens. On that basis alone your life will improve. It will become delicious.

The post In a Pickle with a Peck of Pickled Peppers appeared first on The American Interest.

Why Putin’s Threat to Belarus Can’t Be Ignored

In Europe this month, all eyes were trained on the NATO heads of state gathering in London, followed by the Paris meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelenskyy and the dramatic election in Britain. These major events, however, largely overshadowed another consequential meeting—one held on December 7 between Putin and the long-term leader of Belarus. Theirs is a relationship that bears watching.

Meeting for more than five hours in the Russian resort town of Sochi, Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko discussed a roadmap for integrating the two countries. An ambitious plan to harmonize tax, customs, trade, and regulatory regimes, and to adopt a single, common currency, is on the table. Many view this as the Kremlin’s plan for the “soft annexation” of Belarus. In an interview late last month, Belarus’s Ambassador to Moscow, Uladzimir Syamashka, stated that Lukashenko and Putin had even approved plans to establish a common government and parliament.

But ahead of the Sochi meeting, Lukashenko declared, “We never intended and never will become part of any other state—even the brotherly Russia.” After the meeting and upon Lukashenko’s return to Minsk, a top Belarusian military official announced that Belarus is willing to take part in NATO war games—to be called “Defender Europe”—next year. Belarus is even willing to play the “China card”; it announced last week its intention to borrow $500 million from Beijing to pay off existing debt.

Opposition inside Belarus to closer relations with Russia is building. Before the December 7 meeting, more than a thousand demonstrators braved the secret police to protest against integration in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Another demonstration was soon scheduled for December 20, the day Lukashenko and Putin agreed to meet again. Early reports estimated nearly 2,000 people turned out in Minsk that day, many chanting “No Union with Imperial Russia.” Ahead of this second protest, Belarusian authorities detained two opposition figures, Paval Sevyarynets and Maksim Vinyarski—a reflection, perhaps, that the pressure on Lukashenko is growing both internally and from Moscow.

Dubbed “the last dictatorship in Europe,” Belarus can appear to the outside observer as if frozen in time. In power for more than 25 years, Lukashenko is the longest serving leader in Europe and announced last month that he will run for yet another term in next year’s so-called presidential election. The secret police is still called the KGB, statues of Lenin are ubiquitous, and Red Army lore is widely celebrated.

Last month’s parliamentary elections, widely panned by international observers, were like a Soviet redux wherein the regime parties dominated every seat in parliament and the opposition was not even given the chance to compete. “These elections have demonstrated an overall lack of respect for democratic commitments,” said Margareta Cederfelt, leader of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) short-term observer mission. “In a country in which the power and independence of parliament is limited and fundamental freedoms are restricted for both voters and candidates, parliamentary elections are in danger of becoming a formality,” she added.

And yet beneath the surface of the country’s ossified political structure, its social foundations are quickly shifting. Belarus is undergoing three simultaneous transformations. First, a national revival is instilling a stronger sense of Belarusian identity. In this mostly Russophone nation, there is rising interest in the Belarusian language, culture, and history. Second, a growing civic consciousness, especially among the younger generation, is being channeled into an increasingly vibrant civil society. Third, the decades-long acceptance of Belarus’s status as a loyal subject of the Kremlin is gradually coming undone as Belarusians increasingly look to their independent statehood as a value to be promoted and defended.

President Putin has taken notice of these trends and is trying to quash them. The Kremlin has been using many of the same covert techniques it uses in countries like Ukraine or Georgia to shape the political landscape to Russia’s advantage. A new report by the International Strategic Action Network for Security (iSANS) lays out the rapid encroachment of Russian malign influence on Belarus. “In the last two years Belarus became a separate target for Russian political, financial and media actors,” the report argues. “Many media involved in the information attack on Belarus, are sponsored and promoted by ‘patriotic businessmen’ close to Vladimir Putin or connected, directly or through proxies to, the Presidential Administration of Russia.”

Many Belarusians are worried that soft annexation is only the beginning. Unlike Lukashenko, Putin faces term limits that require him to step down from the presidency in 2024 after serving two consecutive terms. Speculation in Moscow and Minsk is rampant that Putin will find some other way to stay in charge of the country. The “castling” maneuver with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev whereby the two men swapped jobs spurred massive Russian street protests in 2011-2012. A presumably safer scenario for Putin is therefore to take over a Russia-Belarus union state, eliminating the term limit conundrum by creating a new office for Putin to fill.

First broached in the 1990s when Boris Yeltsin was Lukashenko’s Russian counterpart, the union state seemed attractive to the young Belarusian leader. Given Yeltsin’s aging, doddering, and drunken appearance, Lukashenko fancied that he, not the Russian leader, would take the helm of a union state. Putin’s rise to power changed that outlook.

A union state run by Putin would be a huge blow to Belarus’s sovereignty and independence. As it is, the regulatory harmonization that Putin is pushing would see Belarus, a country of close to 10 million people, completely swallowed up by a much larger Russia of 145 million. Perhaps even more significantly, the Russian economy is 29 times the size of the Belarusian one, meaning Minsk will be a rule-taker, not a rule-maker.

There is little the West can do to prevent a regulatory merger of the two countries or, worse, the establishment of a full-blown union state. However, there are small steps that can be taken to encourage civil society, support the country’s national revival, and resist Russian soft power encroachment. In the current situation where Lukashenko feels compelled to pursue integration, the West’s only option is to play the long game.

One area of particular concern identified by iSANS involves online space and information security. Russian efforts in this area are crowding out Belarusian competitors, degrading the country’s ability to maintain a separate, distinct online identity. Belarusian civil society, bravely struggling against significant odds, has urged Western Internet service providers to help preserve autonomy for Belarusian social media. Not only is this important for preserving and protecting the independence of Belarus, it also helps counter Kremlin efforts to expand its malign influence in Belarus and beyond.

EU countries should also make it easier for Belarusians to travel to the West by eliminating visa fees and investing more in youth and student exchanges. Testimony, including from an iSANS representative before a recent Helsinki Commission hearing, underscored this point. Western financial institutions like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank should also aim to support more direct investments provided Belarus can be coaxed to move forward with market access reforms.

For more than a dozen years, Lukashenko’s regime has been hit with sanctions from both the European Union and United States for its human rights record. More recently, those sanctions have largely been lifted as the West seeks a rapprochement to offset Russian influence. Any additional sanctions relief, though, should be conditioned on further liberalization within Belarus, measured by clear benchmarks established to mark progress on media freedom, human rights, and the broadening of civil society. Both the West and Belarusians have a clear interest in preserving the country’s independence and sovereignty against Putin’s threats, and growing Russian pressure is proving to be a mobilizing catalyst for civil society in Belarus. Lukashenko, however, remains a problematic partner in that endeavor. For the sake of Belarus’s independence and sovereignty, and given the impact deeper integration could have on Putin’s political future, the Belarus-Russia relationship should not be overshadowed any more.

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No Way to Run a Country

In an increasingly interconnected world, the United States and Israel are often regarded as the gold standard of bilateral relationships. Promoting democratic freedoms, enabling competitive markets, and collaborating closely across a wide range of fields, the two allies boast a wide range of “shared values and interests” to which they are beholden.

Here’s another thing both countries now have in common: grossly dysfunctional politics.

Eyes are transfixed on Washington as the U.S. Congress conducts spirited hearings to determine whether President Donald Trump has committed offenses that warrant his removal from office. Governing, meanwhile, seems low down on the list of priorities for the nation’s lawmakers, many of whom are absorbed with campaigning prodigiously to win the renewed favor of their constituents next November. The climate is raucous and divisive, leading some to doubt the Republic’s continued viability as a unified entity—never mind that assorted arms of the Executive Branch are wont to broadcast contradictory statements of record.

Israel’s predicament is equally disheartening. Back-to-back elections this year produced no obvious victor—both the incumbent (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) and his primary challenger (former IDF Chief-of-Staff Benny Gantz) failed to cobble together a new ruling coalition. The Jewish state now stands before the nightmare of an unprecedented third ballot within the fleeting span of 12 months. The interim void is being filled by an outgoing, transitional government with scaled-back faculties. A distraught Israeli electorate faces the genuine possibility of a stalemate that could extend deep into 2020, with polls forecasting similarly inconclusive results from a repeat vote in which an embattled Netanyahu would endure, hypothetically, at the helm of his Likud party.

“Democracies on the verge of a nervous breakdown” was the poignant diagnosis rendered by two participants in last month’s Halifax International Security Forum who argued that the prevailing sentiment at the meeting—attended by a cross-section of the world’s foremost officials and pundits—was a consuming fear not of foreign adversaries, but of sinister enemies within. Israel offers a compact laboratory for studying the spread of this political pathogen, whose various strains are infecting civil discourse and the honorable exercise of representative authority in the West.

Though Israel appears divided from afar, the outlook of its citizens is rather sanguine. This year’s World Happiness Report ranked Israelis in 13th place among 156 surveyed populations with regard to the quality of their lives. A precarious security environment and other challenges notwithstanding, the people of Israel give the impression of being largely content with their personal and collective lots. Economic prosperity, a series of diplomatic triumphs, and a period of relative safety meant that the 2019 campaigns saw very little debate over substantive issues. The dividing line between the candidates lay elsewhere.

Famous for the grand ideological battles of its past—Likud vs. Labor, hawks vs. doves, capitalists vs. socialists—Israel has, by many indications, discarded that earlier paradigm. What persists nonetheless among a vocal majority of citizens are allegiances to particular blocs and their acknowledged leaders. This form of identity politics, grounded less in policy than in personality, has generated the “hung jury” which stands to be reconvened soon in another election, after last-ditch efforts to craft a compromise meet with failure. (The exception which proves this rule about Israeli tribalism taking precedence over pressing operational affairs is the excessive attention devoted by rival parties to limited matters concerning the country’s fragile religion-and-state balance, a core component of subjective identity if ever there was one.)

Evidence of this paradigm shift was palpable last January, when Benny Gantz launched his bid to unseat Netanyahu. Character, not practical disagreements, took center stage. “Thanks for your service for ten years,” the would-be Prime Minister tipped his hat complimentarily to the sitting one, “[but] we’ve got it from here.” In fact, much of Gantz’s talk was fairly standard boilerplate—pledging not to relinquish the Golan Heights to Syria, guaranteeing that a united Jerusalem would always remain Israel’s capital, saber-rattling against a malicious Iranian regime—and also consistent with Netanyahu’s own philosophy. Rather, it was Netanyahu’s alleged indiscretions and the acrimony that he has sowed among varied sectors of Israeli society that Gantz assailed relentlessly. (The Prime Minister was indicted subsequently on multiple counts of corruption, including bribery and fraud.) Spin doctors from Netanyahu’s camp have insisted that the objections of Gantz and his cohort to sharing power with the Likud amount to nothing more than a petty “personal” veto of Netanyahu, amplifying the turn from ideology to personality.

This alternate reality has contaminated Israel’s public square. A space once renowned for its robust and nuanced discussion of how best to improve the nation’s welfare is now little more than a popularity contest. The political process has devolved into a simplistic, binary choice—Bibi, yes or no—with the platforms of parties contending for seats in parliament reduced to whether or not they will support Netanyahu’s leadership.

The lack of consensus on this singular question bears no small degree of responsibility for the current paralysis of governance. The dynamic is similar to the one now at work in America, where the figure of Donald Trump has effectively eclipsed most other measures of his performance.

Intense polarization, indigenous not only to Israel and the United States, has made it all but impossible to restore confidence in the establishment. Deploying almost hackneyed distinctions between Left and Right as straw-men—the positions of the anchor Likud and Blue-White factions are indistinguishable from each other on many key markers—more cynical Israeli politicians camouflage their self-interest with principle, rallying the masses to action under false pretenses. Netanyahu’s cries that he is the innocent victim of a larger conspiracy to “topple the Right” fit comfortably into this rubric, as does Trump’s conflation of accusations against his person with “an assault on America.” The visceral hostility of Netanyahu’s demographic base (centered among Israel’s more religious, right-wing, geographically peripheral and less affluent populations) toward the “elites” who run Israel supposedly has provided a fertile environment to stoke class resentment. Think Trump’s masterful exploitation of Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate “deplorables” quip.

This no-holds-barred, scorched earth strategy is undermining the legitimacy of storied agencies in both the United States and Israel. Modern technology is a potent device in this crusade, with social media like Twitter supplying a force multiplier. No institution is above reproach, but as faith crumbles in the pillars of Israeli and American democracy, it becomes ever more difficult to preserve internal order and cohesion.

The bank of targets for this onslaught is rich. Echoing Trump’s familiar refrain that he is prey to “the Greatest Witch Hunt in American History,” Netanyahu is proclaiming that he too has been railroaded by a politically orchestrated “witch hunt.” Under this shared banner, both have inveighed incessantly against law enforcement, each demanding to “investigate the investigators,” thereby signaling that the courts and the police are not to be trusted or obeyed; both have pursued expansive immunity from prosecution. The civil service that Trump has demonized openly as the “deep state”—a deliberately provocative label for the bureaucracy which oversees the vital and methodical functions of public life—has also been subjected to unbridled attack; Netanyahu has implied that officers of his own government are involved in staging “an attempted coup.” National solidarity is eroded further when the Prime Minister and the President lash out against the mainstream media for disseminating “fake news,” dispatching Israelis and Americans into hermetic echo chambers where they are fed a steady diet of tailored truth. Trump’s “Fake News Equals the Enemy of the People!” calculus injects an exceptionally dangerous element into this toxic mix.

Israel’s governability crisis also stems from structural anomalies within the country’s own system. A qualifying electoral threshold of 3.25 percent lowers the bar for numerous splinter factions to gain entry into parliament, making for an undisciplined legislature. Nine different lists of candidates—some of them running as amalgams of multiple lists themselves—have seated members in the current Knesset, with the smallest slate representing less than 200,000 eligible voters. Diffuse centers of gravity make it difficult to coalesce around bills and decisions that correspond to the interests of a broad spectrum of Israeli society.

This obstacle to effective administration is compounded by the constraints of governing through coalition. With larger parties having to satisfy the sectarian interests of smaller ones in order to secure majorities, control transfers disproportionately to these satellite groups, which wield coveted “spoiler” rights. With the tables thus reversed, it is often a minority of Israelis whose will is performed, much to the chagrin of the majority. Exemptions for Ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not wish to report for military service in the IDF are a classic example of this incongruity.

It is said, only half-jokingly, that there is no accountability in Israel, where politicians hide behind party slates. Israelis cannot “write their member of Congress,” because no politician answers directly to constituents of a defined district. Candidates for office are selected either by party bosses—evoking images of smoky Tammany Hall-style backrooms—or through closed party primaries, and so they have only these audiences to impress. Fulfilling the desires and concerns of the wider public has modest bearing on the political futures of Israel’s elected proxies.

The present alignment has left Israelis with dwindling confidence in the capacity of their leaders. Numerous senior appointments remain frozen until after a new government can be sworn-in—the Israel Police has been under the command of an acting commissioner for over a year already. (Unlike the United States, Israel does not submit these officials for formal confirmation hearings, where partisan wrangling commonly determines their fate.)

A bigger worry is that partisanship is infecting decisions about national security. Netanyahu’s promise in September that he planned to extend Israeli sovereignty to areas such as the Jordan Valley raised eyebrows. The proximity of his announcement to that month’s vote disclosed a suspicious willingness to suddenly advocate policies he had eschewed during the previous decade of his premiership. Netanyahu’s motives were called into question yet again when he entrusted Israel’s Ministry of Defense to someone he had once called “childish,” and its Ministry of Justice to a junior backbencher. He has also voiced enthusiasm for a joint defense pact with the United States, an idea that is controversial among Israel’s top security practitioners and analysts.

These frictions come at an inopportune juncture for Israel. Tenuous quiet on its borders is still pierced by sporadic missile fire from both Gaza and Syria. The more serious menace posed from Tehran continues to escalate, amid mounting consternation in Israel that the United States—which abandoned its Kurdish allies to fend for themselves in Syria and then offered slight response to the bombing of oil fields in Saudi Arabia—will not step up to the plate and join in confronting Iranian belligerence. Israel’s caretaker management, meanwhile, is incapable even of shepherding a national budget, amid projections of growing deficits.

Futile attempts by President Reuven Rivlin, Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein, and others to forge a so-called National Unity Government belie what may be irreconcilable differences between the protagonists. Israelis, in their desperation to avoid an expensive and superfluous election that resolves nothing, were primed to accept a compromise between Netanyahu and Gantz. But the roughly even split among the electorate will not disappear automatically. Fifty-fifty, after all, doesn’t mean each voter is halfway between the Likud-led bloc and its opposition on the Israeli political spectrum. Rather, it means that disparate voters wanted their preferred candidates to win a full 100 percent of the ballot—and their rivals to come up empty-handed. No miracle of a unity coalition will seal overnight the long-entrenched fault lines within Israeli society.

None of this is to say that the apocalypse is a foregone conclusion. Leaders pass from the stage, and time can heal rifts. Blue-White, for instance, claimed that it will not hesitate to form a government together with the Likud if Netanyahu is removed summarily from the equation. Rumblings have also been triggered within the Likud, where former Education Minister Gideon Saar has thrown down a gauntlet, charging that Netanyahu—whose morality Saar has been cautious not to deprecate—is chronically unable to lead the Likud to victory and should thus be replaced. Saar’s logic has not fallen on deaf ears among the party faithful, who are fearful of losing their grip on power and its privileges.

Israelis attest to being happy with their circumstances partly because of their successful track record at extracting themselves from tough situations and building a thriving democracy under perilous conditions. “We survived Pharaoh, we’ll survive this too,” is a common adage in Israel. But, sadly, the country’s experience with governance may get worse before it gets better.

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Announcing the State of the World 2020 Conference

The American Interest is pleased to team up with our friend and TAI contributing editor David J. Kramer, who leads Florida International University’s annual State of the World Conference. TAI will co-sponsor this year’s conference—a major international forum hosted by the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs at FIU and the McCain Institute for International Leadership.

On January 9-10, leading political thinkers will discuss some of the most pressing issues facing the globe—including the 2020 U.S. elections, democracy and human rights, immigration, and foreign policy hotspots including Venezuela, China, Russia, and the Middle East. Panelists include TAI publisher Charles Davidson, editor-in-chief Jeffrey Gedmin, Peter Skerry, Daniel Twining, Eric Edelman, Victoria Nuland, and Cindy McCain.

Visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/state-of-the-world-2020-tickets-84735162151 for more information and to register for the conference.

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Peace, “Process,” and Liberal Politics

Among the many headlines to emerge from last weekend’s general election in the United Kingdom, few have the symbolic importance of the story dominating the news in Northern Ireland: For the first time since the partition of Ireland in 1921, the province has elected more nationalist than unionist Members of Parliament. Read in parallel with the surge of support for the Scottish National Party and the alternative nationalism that is represented by the Conservative landslide in England and Wales, the political cultures of the once united kingdom have never seemed so diverse. Commentators have already identified this election as another episode of the Great British Break-off, encouraging the trend towards devolution that began with the institution of Scottish and Welsh parliaments in 1999, as well as the revitalization after the Good Friday Agreement of the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland. It’s a process that would presumably reach its conclusion in Scottish if not Welsh independence, and in the re-unification of Ireland.

Yet the situation may not turn out to be quite so straightforward. In Northern Ireland, the language of the peace “process” has often been understood as suggesting inevitable movement in a single direction and toward the realization of nationalist hopes. But declining shares of votes for the two major parties, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin, and the success of smaller parties, including the Alliance Party and the long dormant Social Democratic and Labour Party, suggest that politics is becoming more complicated, increasingly multipolar, and—ironically, given the context of Brexit—more evidently European. This growing electoral diversity points to both the success and the failure of the Good Friday Agreement, as well as to the emergence of a new political landscape that Northern Ireland’s governmental institutions may find difficult to reflect.

As across the rest of the United Kingdom, in this hollowing out of support for the largest nationalist and unionist parties, Northern Ireland’s general election has delivered some powerfully symbolic blows. The most significant of the DUP losses occurred in North Belfast, where the seat that was being defended by Nigel Dodds, the deputy leader of the party, was won by John Finucane of Sinn Féin. This local contest was bitterly fought and haunted by both candidates’ experiences of the Troubles. In 1989, John’s father, Pat Finucane, a human rights lawyer well known for defending IRA prisoners, was murdered by the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA), allegedly with the collusion of British intelligence, while sharing a meal in his home with his three children and his wife. In 1996, Nigel Dodds was visiting his critically ill son in a Belfast hospital when IRA members entered the ward and opened fire on his police bodyguards, with one shot hitting an incubator in the intensive care unit. In Northern Ireland, the past is always politics, and no one was surprised when both of these outrages were raised in the North Belfast contest. But Finucane made headlines when he refused to condemn the IRA’s armed assault on his rival. Like other Sinn Féin politicians who attend IRA commemorations without rejecting their illegal actions, Finucane has argued that “selective condemnation . . . cheapens our past” and acts as a “barrier to reconciliation.” In other jurisdictions, it would be unthinkable for a candidate to refuse to condemn an armed attack on his rival. But in North Belfast, there was little electoral cost to Finucane’s own act of selective condemnation.

But if Sinn Féin enjoyed a stunning victory in North Belfast, their share of the vote, like that of their principal rivals, has markedly declined. With overall turnout down by 3.6 percent, the Sinn Féin vote declined by 6.7 percent, creating space for the growth of Aontu, a recent schism from the party with strongly pro-life opinions, and the SDLP, whose share of the vote rose by 3.1 percent. The DUP vote declined by 5.4 percent, while that of the Ulster Unionist Party, their slightly more progressive rivals, increased by 1.4 percent. This is a sharp reversal for the DUP, who, in the context of the wider Conservative landslide, have moved from being kingmakers in the government elected in 2017 and led by Teresa May to becoming, at best, jesters in the court of Boris Johnson.

Only the Alliance Party can consider the election to be an unmitigated success. With their share of the vote rising by a massive 8.8 percent, the cross-community party widely known for its progressive social values built upon its remarkable achievements in the last local council and European elections to show that it has the potential to become a significant political voice. This accomplishment is all the more notable when compared with the obliteration of its sister party, the Liberal Democrats, across the rest of the United Kingdom.

But the extraordinary achievement of the Alliance Party points both to the success of the cultural transformation that has been the effect of the Good Friday Agreement, as well as to the limitations of the institutions that the Agreement created. The Agreement was premised upon the assumption that the binary nature of Northern Ireland politics would continue—that the most pressing issue would continue to be that of the border, and the possibility, or impossibility, of its being removed. This explains why the devolved assembly in Stormont has been required to operate on the basis of compulsory power-sharing—meaning that the largest unionist and nationalist parties have been required to work together to govern the province, a situation that also offers both of these parties very effective strategies to make governance impossible, as the collapse of the government almost three years ago proves.

As negotiations begin to get Stormont up and running, this compulsory power-sharing arrangement will need to be modified—or even abandoned—to take account of the province’s increasingly pluralist politics. The rise in support for a non-aligned middle ground is likely to continue. The generation of young people who have grown up in the increasingly confident peace that the Agreement created are less satisfied than are their parents by the political possibilities that have been offered by the largest nationalist and unionist parties. Much of the surge of support for the non-aligned Alliance Party can be explained by the fact that a new generation of Northern Ireland voters is now less interested in questions related to the constitution than it is in questions related to identity, gender politics, and issues like abortion rights and climate change. This explains why the most socially conservative parties, including the DUP, are having to “move with the times”—a process, to use that contested term, that heralds the end of the old religious nationalisms that once powerfully influenced both unionist and nationalist ideals and that will allow new kinds of futures to emerge.

As the electoral dust settles, the key question to emerge from the province’s general election results might not be possibility of a border poll, but why Northern Ireland, of all places, might become a bastion of liberal politics.

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Merkel’s Split-the-Difference Strategy Isn’t Working

On more than one occasion in recent years, a German politician has indicated that Germany must find its way between the United States, China, and Russia, suggesting a kind of soft equivalence between the three. But developing policies that reflect that position is going to be increasingly difficult to do.

The U.S. Congress, for instance, has just passed (and the President will likely sign into law) the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020. Included in the act is a measure (Sec. 7501, “Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act of 2019”) that would allow the U.S. Government to sanction companies and their executives helping to construct Nord Stream II—the pipeline that would move natural gas from Russia directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Both Congress and the Trump Administration view the pipeline as a gift to Putin. Once completed, it would increase revenues that support Russian misbehavior, mitigate the current sanctions placed on Russia for its Ukraine invasion, and undercut a source of revenue for Kiev as Russian gas moves from the overland system through Ukraine to the Nord Stream system. It’s a concern shared not only by the United States but also by Ukraine’s neighbors and the European Union, which in recent years has wanted to decrease, not increase, European dependence on Russian energy supplies.

Berlin’s argument has been that, as Russia’s primary gas customer and its primary distributor to the rest of Europe, it will have the leverage to ensure that Russia doesn’t use its control over gas supplies to its strategic advantage. However, since 1) a steady supply of natural gas is a necessity to meet Europe’s energy requirements, 2) completion of Nord Stream II will give the Kremlin control over some three-quarters of gas imports to Europe, and 3) German coffers will be directly tied to that steady supply, it is difficult to see how the advantage doesn’t lie with Moscow. Regardless, given President Trump’s own predilection to pick on Germany for its underwhelming level of defense spending, it is doubtful that he will pass up the chance to use the new sanction measure as a way of digging at Chancellor Merkel and the coalition government she leads.

And while the push to make a choice on energy ties with Russia is coming from Washington, a new push to challenge Berlin’s relations with China is coming from within not only the German parliament itself but also Merkel’s own ruling coalition. Members of the Bundestag, led by Norbert Röttgen, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, have drafted a bill that for all intents and purposes would exclude the Chinese telecom equipment company Huawei from Germany’s planned 5G network. In contrast with German intelligence’s assessment that “there may be areas where [Huawei’s] participation doesn’t have to be excluded,” the proposed measure would exclude the company’s equipment from “core” as well as “peripheral” areas of the network. Not unreasonably, Röttgen and his allies in the parliament believe Merkel’s “cutting-the-baby-in-half” solution is no solution at all when it comes to German communication security, now or in the future.

The government’s argument is that excluding Huawei might delay Germany’s ability to put in place a 5G network by a year or two and may cost more, since the alternative European providers are not subsidized as Huawei is by its government. But putting aside whether such a delay really matters all that much, or whether the added cost of depending on a more reliable technology supplier is really a cost at all, the more likely reason for Merkel not wanting to exclude Huawei altogether is the possibility of Chinese retaliation against German exports to China. China is Germany’s third-largest export market. With German economic performance being less than stellar, it seems doubtful that the Chancellor and her government would want to anger Beijing. Indeed, China’s Ambassador to Germany, showing none of the subtlety that Chinese diplomats are supposedly noted for, said there would be “consequences” if Huawei were excluded from the German telecom market and, more pointedly, that “the Chinese government will not stand idly by.” The Ambassador then offered a joke that German car manufacturers, deeply invested in the Chinese domestic market, aren’t likely to find all that funny: Perhaps the Chinese government, he said, would conclude that “German cars are not safe.”

As the issues raised by Nord Stream II and Huawei indicate, it’s not easy keeping an equipoise between the United States, China, and Russia. Choices have to be made. And one suspects that the choices will not get any easier with Chinese ambitions hardly cooling, with Putin’s sense that Europe’s resolve to keep up sanctions for Ukraine is waning, and with President Trump’s relationship with Berlin feeling as toxic as ever. To be clear, Germans don’t simply equate the United States with China and Russia, but the skepticism they have toward the latter two is leavened by the pessimism they feel toward the former. Nevertheless, Transatlantic ties are fraying not just because of Trump, but because Berlin has not fully accepted the fact that a leadership role in Europe requires putting security and strategic interests over and above narrow national interests. Attempting to find some middle ground is a circle not readily squared.

The post Merkel’s Split-the-Difference Strategy Isn’t Working appeared first on The American Interest.

The Roots of the Rift

We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel

Daniel Gordis

Ecco, 2019, 293 pp., $26.99

“The President signing an executive order defining Jewishness as a ‘nationality’ makes me f___ing ill,” tweeted New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum on December 11, after President Trump formally included those of Jewish ancestry under the umbrella of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “I’m Jewish, I’m an American & we need to get this schmuck out of office.” (She later deleted the tweet.)

Forget, for a moment, that the notion that American Jews deserve protection as a people was espoused by President Obama’s Justice Department, supported by bipartisan congressional majorities, and endorsed in 1987 by the Supreme Court, or that the executive order itself was designed to prevent anti-Semitism.

Most Jewish Americans consider themselves adherents to a faith, not members of a nation—or at least not any sort of Jewish nation. They’re Americans, after all. By contrast, Israeli Jews, even those who disdain President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fundamentally regard themselves as members of the Jewish people, a historic nation and not just a religious tradition.

These and other fissures run through the foundation of contemporary global Jewry, as communities in the United States and Israel—far and away the two largest Jewish populations in the world—increasingly find themselves at odds for numerous reasons, among them divergent views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the assimilation rate of American Jewry, and the treatment of non-Orthodox Jews in Israel.

But while these issues have exacerbated tensions, Daniel Gordis, the American-born and -educated vice president of Jerusalem’s Shalem College and a keen analyst of the global Jewish scene, persuasively argues that they’re symptoms, not causes, of a deeper division over what Judaism truly should be about.

“Although most observers . . . believe that the fraught relationship is due to what Israel does,” Gordis writes in We Stand Divided, his illuminating study of the rift, “a closer look at the Jewish communities in Israel and the United States suggests that the real reason has to do with what Israel is.” While Gordis overestimates the severity of this division, largely because he studiously avoids quantifying it, he imbues the debate with much-needed historical context and philosophical explication.

That history began long before Israel ever existed. “For most of the time since Theodor Herzl launched political Zionism at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897,” Gordis notes, “the relationship between American Jews and Herzl’s idea, and then the country it created, has been complex at best and often even openly antagonistic.”

He locates the rift’s origins in three distinct but related sources: different understandings of the painful lessons of Jewish history; divergent philosophies of the nature of Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people; and varying approaches to universalism and particularism.

Historic Tension

First, Gordis turns to history to better understand the nature of the division. Lest we be tempted to think Israeli and American Jews have only recently begun feuding, Gordis forcefully reminds us it was ever thus. He skillfully excavates several long-forgotten, and some never-before-revealed, stories of the tensions between these communities dating even to before Herzl’s time. For instance, the leading lights of the most prominent rabbinic seminaries of all three major Jewish denominations expressed everything from skepticism to outright rejection of Zionism as late as the early 1950s. Many mainstream American Jewish communal leaders rejected Israel’s “presumptuous” prerogative to try Adolf Eichmann for war crimes on behalf of all Jews worldwide. And vigorous debates between intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, a European refugee and celebrated émigré to the United States, and Gershom Scholem, a German-born Israeli scholar, prefigure those of their 21st-century counterparts, separated literally and figuratively by an ocean.

In addition to embodying historic tension, the American-Israeli divide also reflects a tension about history.

Jews in the United States have tended to regard their uniquely respected, secure, and prosperous standing in American society as an escape from, or perhaps a triumph over, cyclical historic trends that have always wound up subjecting Jewish diaspora communities to persecution, mistreatment, expulsion, and even extermination. The United States has been so welcoming to its Jewish citizens over more than two centuries that, in many ways, it doesn’t even feel like exile. Indeed, Gordis quotes Jacob Blaustein, the president of the influential American Jewish Committee, telling Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1950 that “we repudiate vigorously the suggestion that American Jews are in exile.”

Poppycock, said and say the leading lights of Zionism. There can never be a vacation from history, according to this view, and the only safe, stable home for the Jews is the Holy Land. After all, they argue, German Jews themselves believed in the 19th and early 20th centuries that history had ended and that genuine acceptance had accompanied their economic success. Zionism, said Ben-Zion Dinur, one of Israel’s founding fathers, entails “casting off Exile . . . . making clear the accommodation and inauthenticity at the heart of Exile, its instability and the ups and downs it invariably brings.” Jews dwelling among other nations will always remain at the mercy of their hosts, per Dinur, and only sovereignty and physical land can secure the Jewish future.

This debate over whether history has ended necessarily informs contemporary disputes, or what Gordis terms the “messiness of history.” If we’ve transcended our past as a people, many American Jews argue, there’s no reason to shed blood over a patch of land. Indeed, some on the left today contend, with J Street co-founder Daniel Levy, that if the Jewish state “can only survive by the sword . . . . then Israel really ain’t a very good idea.”

Israelis recoil in horror at such suggestions. Of course every resident of the Jewish state would prefer to live her life without serving in the Israeli military, without having to take cover from incoming missiles, without exploding buses and stabbings and murderous car-rammings. But these events lie largely beyond Israelis’ control, and the alternative—relocating or subjugating eight million Jews—is unthinkable. Because history is here to stay, Israelis can never let our guard down.

A Religion or a People?

Second, a debate over the nature of Judaism itself fuels the rift. Contemporary American Jews, comfortably ensconced as full-fledged, flourishing members of society, tend to regard Judaism primarily as a faith tradition, while Israelis tend to see Jews as a historical people. Diaspora Jews have always yearned to be accepted as members of the nations in which they dwell, their religion informing their personal and communal practice but never challenging the hospitality of their host countries. Jewish Israelis, however, largely downplay the religious aspects of Judaism in favor of its national characteristics. This gap reflects the distinction between individual or communal tradition and morality on one hand and national existence on the other, or between “Judaism-as-justice and Judaism-as-survival,” as Gordis puts it.

Jewish Americans take umbrage at any suggestion that they are anything less than fully American, and therefore express great reluctance to accept the framing of Jews as a nation. “If we accept” Trump’s executive order, tweeted director and screenwriter Brian Koppelman, “we are saying we are not Americans. We are other. And can and should be separated. This is the banality of evil. We are in it. Witnessing it. And must stop it.”

Israeli Jews, however, loudly trumpet their existence as a nation, in no small part because their neighbors, especially the Palestinians, have long denied the existence of any sort of Jewish nationhood. “Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own,” recites Article 20 of the Palestinian National Charter. “They are citizens of the states to which they belong.”

This distinction exists in negation as well. Gordis observes that while Israelis refer to “Jews and Arabs,” that is, two nations or peoples, Americans refer to “Jews and Christians,” that is, two faith traditions. And whereas American Jews regard with suspicion any attempt to accentuate their nationhood, Israelis revel in it. For similar reasons, non-Orthodox streams of Judaism have never attracted a serious following in the Jewish state, as Israelis who eschew a commitment to religious observance satisfy their Jewish desires simply by participating in everyday life.

The Universal vs. the Particular 

Finally, the rift derives from varying notions of universalism and particularism. “America and Israel are exceedingly different,” Gordis posits. “Created for different purposes, they believe in and foster very different sorts of societies with very different values and different visions of Judaism.”

Indeed, while there are several similarities between the founding of Israel and the United States—both countries declared independence from British rule, both fought bloody wars to secure that independence, both were inaugurated mostly by immigrants—Gordis asserts that the United States is a country founded on a set of ideals, not on ethnic or racial grounds, while Israel was founded as a homeland for the Jewish people. The United States runs on pluralism and a separation of church and state, while the Israeli public square is thick with religious and cultural meaning.

Likening the American founding to the New Testament and Israel’s to the Old, Gordis argues that the United States articulated a universal vision available to all mankind while Israel held the torch only for Jews. This discrepancy, Gordis contends, accounts for much of the rancor that has permeated the relationship between the communities over the decades.

Yet this distinction is oversimplified and imprecise, as the gap between the two countries is less pronounced than Gordis presumes.

First, Israel itself has vacillated between the universal and the particular, insisting on serving as an Or LaGoyim, a Light unto the Nations, a beacon of hope and promise for the entire world, and a Jewish version of the shining city on a hill. In a passage Gordis himself quotes, Israel’s Declaration of Independence recites that, in the Land of Israel, the historic Jewish people “first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.”

Israelis regard themselves as exemplars of ethical behavior, as pioneers of life-saving technologies, as a people quite literally saving the world. The Jewish state takes tremendous pride in deploying rescue crews to South America and the Himalayas within hours of natural disasters. The Israel Defense Forces take tremendous pains to avoid civilian casualties even amidst the most harrowing and life-threatening situations.

Of course, Israel falls short of this promise at times, and there are plenty of elements in Israeli society resistant to the pursuit of universalist goals. Gordis correctly observes that demographic change in Israel has aggravated the divide in recent years. Most notably, after years in the political, cultural, and social wilderness, Mizrahim—Jews who originated in the Arab Middle East and North Africa—have begun to exert “greater influence on Israeli society and culture,” which in turn “helps shape an Israeli society that strikes many American Jews as distinctly illiberal.” In addition, ultra-Orthodox Jews have increasingly flexed their demographic muscles, pushing Israeli politics and culture further rightward.

But contemporary Israel very much craves universal respect—for its cultural, political, and technological achievements—that it is too often denied by countries still hostile to the Jewish state. Meanwhile, within the United States, including among its Jewish community, a movement toward the particular has gathered steam.

The ascension of Trump has bred a new nationalism on the American right, ranging from the benign culture-language-and-land of National Review’s Rich Lowry to the Biblically inspired Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony (an Israeli with a wide intellectual following in the United States who preceded Gordis at Shalem College) to darker precincts of the alt-right. While American exceptionalism for conservatives has traditionally revolved around the country’s democratic values and universal ideals, a more particularistic approach is slowly gaining purchase.

In addition, the American Jewish community is gradually but definitively becoming more traditional, as less observant Jews increasingly intermarry and disaffiliate even as Orthodox Jews, who are generally more strongly attached to Israel, procreate at much higher rates. A widely circulated 2013 Pew study found that Orthodox Jews made up only 10 percent of the larger American Jewish community, while the more religiously liberal Conservative and Reform Jews accounted for 53 percent. But leading Jewish demographers expect the Conservative and Reform population to halve within 30 years and to fall below the Orthodox within 40.

Thus, pace Gordis, macro trends suggest that over the coming decades, the universal-particular gap between the United States and Israel is likely to close, not widen, and along with it, support for the Jewish state is likely to rise. Unfortunately, as Gordis candidly acknowledges, We Stand Divided “avoids, at least for the most part, the use of statistical analyses” because such numbers “invariably raise further questions.” Without a firm foundation in data, however, Gordis’s theoretical structure is prone to wobbling.

Finally, the recent reemergence in the United States of virulent anti-Semitism on both left and right has rightfully alarmed the American Jewish community and punctured its sense of invulnerability to the world’s oldest hatred. When Jews are demonized, assaulted, or murdered— whether by neo-Nazis in Pittsburgh and San Diego, Black Hebrew Israelites in Jersey City, anti-Zionist progressives on countless college campuses, jihadists in Tel Aviv, or mullahs in Tehran and Beirut—we have a way of finding common cause and overcoming differences.

Both quantitatively and qualitatively, then, there are grounds for optimism in the relationship—although perhaps my own bias is showing.

After nearly four decades leading a rich and fulfilling life as an American Jew, I moved to Israel with my family five years ago in search of something more than the religious experience I had enjoyed in the United States. Seeking that national experience of peoplehood that Jews can only truly experience in Israel, we moved to the Middle East in order, as a friend put it, to fulfill our Jewish destiny. But despite enjoying a richer and more comprehensive Jewish experience in the Jewish state, my love of the American Jewish community remains undiminished. The near-constant back-and-forth travel of family and friends between the countries helps ensure the continuity of that relationship.

Gordis certainly does yeoman’s work in exposing the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the American-Israeli divide, along the way shattering pernicious myths. And he’s right to suggest that we cannot expect the perspectives of American and Israeli Jews to ever fully align. But it’s equally important to remember that we remain one people, one faith, one family, experiencing all the joy and sorrow that bring us together. As Gordis concludes, Jews the world over must “recogniz[e] that neither side can live without the other, that each is a critical contributor to what the Jewish people are today.”

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The Outrage-Industrial Complex

I AM OUTRAGED! And I know you are too. That’s because these days, everyone is outraged. After all, there are so many things to be outraged about. And there are a growing number of people, opinion pages, media outlets, political spam emails, and Russian social media bots to remind us about all of them. How can one not be outraged by cultural insensitivity, the hordes of illegal immigrants pouring into our country, the assault on reproductive freedom, abortion-on-demand, hetero-normativity, transphobia, transgender bathrooms, neo-socialism, neo-fascism, liberal fascism, neoliberalism, micro-aggressions, liberal snowflakes, insensitivity to religious minorities, and the war on Christmas? It is our civic duty to be outraged: To refuse righteous indignation is morally suspicious at best, callous and selfish at worst. Also, one must be outraged by the appalling lack of outrage demonstrated by other people. What kind of cold-blooded monster isn’t outraged by all of these things, as well as many more I haven’t mentioned (omissions that I’m certain some readers will find outrageous)?

Outrage has become the defining emotional state of our era. The French aristocracy in the 18th century prized sangfroid and irreverent wit; the British in the 19th century valued an unflappable composure and the legendary stiff upper lip; Americans in the early 20th century exhibited a hard-bitten stoicism in the face of adversity and, in the mid-20th century, the cool, bureaucratic mastery of the Organization Man; by the 1970s, we aspired to the hipster Zen state of “chilled out.” Today, we display and demand paroxysms of rage. Why? For one, it seems a large and growing share of the national economy is now devoted to ensuring that we are kept in a constant state of rage and frustration. We are encouraged to fuel the engines of outrage with our time and money: by tuning in to ideologically charged television programming and sending donations to Political Action Committees who promise to fight against the latest outrages. The obligation to express outrage helps to stoke the fires of discontent and keep these authors of outrage employed and well-compensated. Welcome to the era of the Outrage-Industrial Complex.

Of course, rabble-rousing for fun and profit is nothing new. What is new is the predominance of outage among people of every social class and profession. Outrage is now a tool of the comfortable establishment conservative as well as of the political radical and the underdog; once the stance of the cliched angry young man, it is now a universally shared orientation toward the world; once an atypical response to extreme circumstances, outrage is now a default reflex.

Of course, there is a good reason we feel an obligation to feel and express outrage: We assume it is a reliable force for social change. The absence of outrage in the face of the outrageous reflects a cowardly quietism, resignation, or apathy. For most of the modern era, the menace of comfortable complacency has been an enduring concern. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of the apotheosis of modern technocratic rationality, the pathetic “Last Man,” motivated only by a bland, passionless utilitarian hedonism. Aldous Huxley imagined a dystopian future of anodyne comforts, bland diversions and narcotically induced bliss. The great urbanist Lewis Mumford worried that the American suburbs of the 1950s were a “retreat from unpleasant realities” where the “self-centered individual” would “shirk public duties” in favor of the cosseted insularity of the nuclear family. Mumford argued that a centralized mass media would lull the common person into a soporific trance with sanitized current events programming (not Fake News, but News-Lite) and bland middlebrow entertainment. He lamented that “all knowledge and direction can be monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals,” resulting in “the passiveness and docility that has crept into our existence.”

If complacency engendered by mass media was the enemy of liberty, it would follow that political engagement through more accessible media of communication would be the friend of freedom. It hasn’t turned out that way. Today, social media radically decentralizes and democratizes communication, and the docility Mumford feared is nowhere to be seen. Instead of passiveness, we are crippled by indiscriminate rage and reflexive opposition. Ubiquitous outrage is a now a source of political impotence. The rage porn of ideological talk radio, televised political commentary, and political campaign email spam keep us intoxicated by a false sense of urgency and efficacy. But outrage as a constant state of affairs is impotent. The outraged themselves fall victim to the same corrosive anger they hope to direct at the power structure; we are all locked in an arms race of outrage in which stalemate is the only possible outcome. And of course, stalemate favors the status quo. The expression of outrage is no longer a form of effective political protest; instead, it is an aesthetically debased form of entertainment. The Angry New World of the Outrage-Industrial Complex offers the narcotic distraction of a Soma holiday, but without relaxation or pleasure; Nietzsche’s Last Man is already among us, gorging on a diet of Fox News and Facebook.

The stately lawns of universities have long been fertile ground for grassroots outrage, left, right, and ideologically eclectic. But today the Outrage Industry exploits youthful energy in an especially diabolical way: By manufacturing deliberate provocations, the authors of outrage managed to profit by making themselves the targets of protest. Professional provocateurs such as Ben Shapiro, Ann Coutler, and Milo Yiannopoulous add nothing of value or interest to political discourse, but they thrive because they are skilled in provoking young people to express outrage. Their strategy is simple: Dangle a few choice offensive comments about sensitive topics such as affirmative action, feminism, or sexual orientation, and wait for earnest undergraduates to rise to the bait and stage a noisy outraged demonstration, thus allowing the provocateurs to wrap themselves in the First Amendment and lament the outrageousness of the heckler’s veto. Thousands of dollars in police overtime later, the speakers enjoy notoriety, not for their ideas, but for the outrage they inspired.

Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing was a master class in the politics of outrage. The claims against Kavanaugh were easily plausible enough to warrant a thorough investigation, but because the coin of realm had become outrage instead of truth, we got a battle of righteous indignation instead of an inquiry that might have established the facts. First, a flurry of accusations, some much more credible than others, but all equal opportunities for noisy demonstrations of outrage. Then, the counter-punch. Kavanaugh and his handlers understood that this was no time for the kind of judicious temperament one would hope for in, well, a judge—what the emotional ritual demanded was an offering of outrage equal to that of Kavanaugh’s accusers, a demonstration, not of his objective innocence but of his subjective fury at his accusers. Those of us who saw Kavanaugh’s red-faced performance as either laughable or frighteningly unhinged were out of step with the times, applying the etiquette of a bygone era to the outrage economy of today. Kavanaugh may have failed to meet the accusations of his critics while embarrassing himself according to antique standards of gentility and decorum, but he succeeded in evening the score of outrage. As for the hapless Christine Blasey Ford’s calm and careful testimony: She had brought an academic seminar butter knife to a rage-fueled gunfight. Perhaps this was simply politics as usual, but political gamesmanship reflects what the public will respond to and accept. Sadly, today’s politicians correctly surmise that outrage trumps reasoned deliberation.

Our current President is an endless fount of outrage: He deliberately provokes outrage in others and demands outrage on his own behalf from his supporters and subordinates. The most recent example of the latter is the bogus outrage over my colleague Pam Karlan’s innocuous pun that “while the President can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.” Cue the outraged mother Melania, tweeting: “a minor child deserves privacy . . . Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed”—as if the mere mention of the boy’s name violated the innocence of youth. Soon, in the hands of the architects of outrage, Karlan’s off-the-cuff wordplay had morphed into an “attack” on the child himself and an attempt to “drag a 13-year-old child” into the impeachment process. Faux outrage competes for attention with the truly outrageous, creating an impenetrable fog of roiling anger: A play on words and a power play to influence an election are both equally outrageous, the indignation over one a formal, scripted answer to the outrage over the other. In the culture of pervasive outrage, everything is an outrage, so nothing is.

The great theorist of early American political life, Alexis de Tocqueville, noted the centrality of impassioned political discourse in American culture: “Debating clubs are . . . a substitute for theatrical entertainment,” he wrote. “An American does not know how to converse, he argues; he does not speak, he holds forth.” The ubiquitous outrage of today is a perversion of this American custom of politics-as-entertainment: Now, instead of reflecting sincere and mature political engagement, conspicuous outrage takes the place of it. The difference is that practical concerns and objective considerations anchored the partisan fervor of the past. For Tocqueville, American political discourse, however melodramatic and unrefined, was an extension of a pragmatic engagement with society: An ideological debate would be continuous with a technical discussion of how best to pave the roads or repair a bridge. Today, the complexity of technology and the global economy makes many practical concerns beyond the comprehension of non-specialists, so the Outrage-Industrial Complex channels this once productive impulse into the largely symbolic controversies of the culture wars, where differences in style take on moral importance, imagined slights become a crisis of state, and the difference between a Barron and a baron can be made to seem as important as the difference between a Republic and a kleptocracy.

The merchants of this economy of obfuscation, discord, and malcontent—be they social media executives, talk radio hosts, or the professional provocateurs of television and the college lecture circuit—feed on the withering hull of our democracy while wrapping themselves in the mantle of civic virtue. The Outrage-Industrial Complex debases our politics, swindles us out of our time and money, and makes us miserable. It’s an outrage! But how to fight it without just feeding the monster? Happily, resisting the outrage industry is not only virtuous—it can also be fun. Whenever I talk to students who wish to organize a demonstration against the latest outrageous speaker invited to speak on campus, I advise them to hit back harder—by going to the theater or the movies or by staying at home with a good novel. We should starve the profiteers of outrage by ignoring them: Without our rage, they are nothing.

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The Dead End of the Normandy Format

On December 9, Ukraine’s new President Volodomyr Zelensky met face to face in Paris with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He retained his dignity and ceded nothing—quite an accomplishment, given the pressures and competing interests bearing down on him and his hapless and struggling nation. After long meetings, the perpetrator and the victim only agreed to swap prisoners, impose ceasefires in certain areas, and meet again in April. Zelensky later described the outcome as a “draw,” a success against his nemesis. 

Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany met as members of the so-called Normandy Format, which aims to resolve a war that began after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Initially, talks involved Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and the European Union in Geneva in 2014, under the auspices of the United Nations. But these failed and Putin rejected out of hand participation by the two power blocs. He then cherry picked France and Germany instead. 

The leaders deliberated in the Élysée Palace for eight hours, punctuated by an undoubtedly splendid dinner. That day, three Ukrainian soldiers died, bringing military deaths to about 4,100, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. To date, Russia’s predation has resulted in 14,000 deaths, the displacement of 1.5 million Ukrainians, the decimation of Ukraine’s industrial heartland, and the takeover of Crimea. The conflict represents Europe’s biggest humanitarian disaster since the Second World War.

And yet, French President Emmanuel Macron pursues détente with Russia, and in recent months has roiled European politics and undermined Ukraine. He immediately dubbed the summit a success, but in reality, his effort was merely a beau geste, as the next one will be. Nothing will change as long as Vladimir Putin remains President of Russia and Macron is driving this process. 

Putin’s goal has not been peace, but rather to co-opt his Format partners while inflicting human and economic pain on the Ukrainians. Since 2015, French exports to Russia have nearly doubled, and Macron now claims that a direct relationship with Russia is “very important” to Europe. Germany, represented at the meeting by lame duck Chancellor Angela Merkel, is about to become Europe’s hub for Russian natural gas with the completion by Russia’s Gazprom of its Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Most EU members have fought the project because it will bypass and weaken Ukraine. They believe it is a weapon, in the form of an underwater pipeline, that will give Putin the power to plunge the Soviet Union’s former satellites and republics in Europe into darkness or recession.

“Once Nord Stream 2 is built, Putin can do with Ukraine whatever he wants, and then we have potentially his army on the eastern border of the EU,” Poland’s former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki warned two years ago.

Ukraine’s other ally, the United States, also has a President with Putin on his speed dial. Instead of fulsome support for the embattled country, the White House has been enmeshed in the impeachment quagmire. Without a strong American wind at its back, Ukraine’s “street” rose again before the meeting and thousands preemptively gathered to warn against the abrogation of any “red lines” or capitulation to Putin. These mass demonstrations against the Kremlin worked as they have in 2004 and 2014.

Then Washington emitted confusing signals. The day after Paris, President Donald Trump hosted Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the White House—a coveted meeting that Zelensky had been denied since his election. But two days later, Congress imposed tough sanctions designed to delay Nord Stream 2 for two, possibly three years, to prevent “Putin from leveraging billions of dollars that could be used to fuel Russian aggression,” as co-sponsor Ted Cruz crowed.

Trump and Brexit have also agitated the continent as a whole, but for weeks Macron has issued a series of statements that have upended Europe. He described NATO as suffering from “brain death,” and announced he wants to limit the size of the European Union, form a European army, and bring Russia in from the cold. Last month, he unilaterally opposed the opening of accession talks with Albania and North Macedonia, leaving four other Western Balkans countries in the lurch and sending a chilling message to Ukraine. Simultaneously, Putin has been lobbying Serbia, Moldova, and others to join its Eurasian Economic Union trade arrangement. But in 2014, when Ukraine snubbed that arrangement and signed an association agreement with the European Union instead, Moscow invaded the country in response. 

Adding to the pre-summit anxiety was a tweet from France’s former ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, that acceded to Putin entirely and exposed Élysée realpolitik: “The fundamental question: Will Putin be satisfied with Ukraine as a buffer state between Russia and EU/NATO, or does he want it as a satellite-state?” 

Ironically, Macron misses the mark when it comes to reconstituting the European Union. Sanctioning and isolating the Kremlin is the only defense against future aggression, and Ukraine is Europe’s only bulwark against Russia. Its military is the same size as France’s, with 205,000 active personnel, and its battle-hardened troops have protected the eastern wall of Europe against Russia for nearly six years. Economically, the country is a prize with a young, educated workforce, world-class IT sector, massive agricultural and industrial potential, and an electorate that has voted overwhelmingly for democracy, the rule of law, and Europeanization.

The Paris summit was a flop. In the press conference, Putin thanked both Macron and Merkel, but ignored Zelensky. Then two days later, at his press conference in Moscow on December 10, Putin sabotaged any upcoming talks when he said: “[T]he Ukrainian side keeps insisting: ‘give us the opportunity to close the border using our troops.’ But I can imagine what would happen next. There would be Srebrenica, as simple as that.” It was a reference to the massacre in which Bosnian Serbs—these days favorite clients of Putin—killed more than 8,000 Muslims in the worst mass slaughter in Europe since World War II.

Putin and his regime are thugs and kleptocrats, and only they can stop this war, not Normandy salons populated by comfortable dilettantes in glamorous venues. Russia’s leaders may think of its occupied territory as a bargaining chip, but the chip has no currency, given the plunder and devastation they have wreaked. Alternatively, they may want the area as a gray zone to influence and vandalize Ukraine’s western trajectory. Whatever the strategy, however, the war will remain another frozen conflict and Ukraine must move on. Its only option is to safeguard itself from the marauder to the east and prosper. So is Europe’s.

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