Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 5

Hard Truths About China’s “Soft Power”

Soft Power With Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds

edited by Kingsley Edney, Stanley Rosen, and Ying Zhu

Routledge, 2020; 296 pages; priced from $155.00 (hardback) to $22.48 (six-month e-book rental)]

When opening Soft Power With Chinese Characteristics, a timely new volume that arrives amid a flood of COVID-19-fueled disinformation, it is important to notice the irony embedded in the title. The phrase “with Chinese characteristics” is used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) whenever it borrows a Western idea or practice to utilize for its own purposes. For example, in the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping was introducing market forces into China’s dead-in-the-water planned economy, the new system was not described as “capitalism”—that term would have conceded far too much ground to the enemies of socialism. Rather it was dubbed “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

This touch of Newspeak did not bother Deng’s free-market champions in the West; they knew what Deng meant, and many a capitalist smiled knowingly at his motto: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; if it catches mice, it’s a good cat.” But the phrase “with Chinese characteristics” is no longer so benign. For Deng, it was a way to camouflage the fact that he was moving the Chinese economy in the direction of capitalism. For today’s Communist rulers, by contrast, it is a way to camouflage policies that are profoundly anti-democratic.

As explained by media scholar Zhan Zhang, one of 20 academic contributors to this volume, the Chinese meanings of “Western political language” (words like “democracy,” “freedom,” “equality,” “justice,” and the “rule of law”) “differ significantly from the meanings as understood in the West.” For example, “the basic European respect for individual rights and freedom is not on the individual level in the Chinese value system, but instead on the social level. This means that freedom is not about one’s individual freedom, but is rather a collective freedom for the group and society.”

It is tempting to ask Zhang if she has ever heard of George Orwell. To be fair, she is explaining the CCP point of view, not defending it. But the ghost of Orwell hangs over this volume, because as many of the contributors make clear, what the CCP means by “soft power with Chinese characteristics” is the exact opposite of what political scientist Joseph Nye meant when he coined the term back in 1990. And it doesn’t help that the term itself tends to get lost in a semantic fog.

Over the years, Nye has repeated the definition of soft power so often, he can doubtless do it in his sleep. Here is an example from an essay he wrote in 2017: “Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one prefers, and . . .  soft power is the ability to affect others by attraction and persuasion rather than just coercion and payment.” In the words of Georgia Tech researcher Dalton Lin and University of Taiwan political scientist Yun-han Chu, the CCP’s pretense of using “persuasion” to get Taiwan to surrender its independence “turns the soft power logic on its head and blurs the line between attraction and coercion.”

In addition to exposing the Orwellian aura of “soft power with Chinese characteristics,” this volume reveals and critiques the larger information strategy of the CCP. The first chapter, by the distinguished scholar and Hoover Institution fellow Suisheng Zhao, delves into the CCP’s recently stepped-up effort to construct and propagate a “narrative” intended to remind the world of China’s “century of humiliation,” reassure it about China’s peaceful rise, and (most important) ready it for the peaceful decline of the West, especially America. With apologies to Zhao, and mindful that “narrative” is one of the great weasel words of our time, I offer here my own synthesis:

To begin with the moral of the story: The West is solely responsible for China not being the world hegemon it so richly deserves to be. For 5,000 years before the devastation wrought by the British and European colonial powers, the Middle Kingdom and its constellation of loyal vassal states had been an island of perpetual peace, political virtue, and social harmony—in stunning contrast to the rest of the world, in which human life was nasty, brutish, and short.

But then, toward the end of the fourth millennium, disaster struck in the form of barbaric Western invaders who, insanely envious of China’s shining civilization, laid waste to it in an orgy of violence, lust, and greed. This was by far the worst event in history, because (let’s face it) the Chinese people are humanity’s finest flower, and as such, they had the farthest to fall.

But the Mandate of Heaven cannot be destroyed. So, after the “century of humiliation” had passed, a glorious Leader appeared, and led the Chinese people to redemption in the form of a glorious Revolution, led by a glorious Party which has struggled unceasingly to raise the Chinese people from the ashes of Western-imposed misery.  This mighty task has taken many decades, so enormous was the damage. But thanks to the unerring wisdom of the Revolution’s Founding Leader and his glorious Successors, especially the Present Leader who has graciously agreed to remain Emperor—er, General Secretary—for life, the Chinese people are now ready to reclaim their inheritance as the greatest and most civilized race on the planet. And because China also commands the planet’s greatest and most advanced technology, its new civilization is destined to subsume not just Asia but the entire world.

Zhao is too serious a scholar to present the CCP narrative in this fanciful way. What he does do is highlight the contrast between the Party’s “reconstruction of the benign Chinese world order,” blessed with tianxia (unity under heaven) and wangdo (royal virtue), and its actual behavior, which is that of a sovereign state in a “social Darwinian world” of cutthroat competition among sovereign states. He quotes with approval the verdict of seasoned China scholar June Teufel Dreyer: “Supporters of the revival of tianxia as a model for today’s world are essentially misrepresenting the past to reconfigure the future, distorting it to advance a political agenda that is at best disingenuous and at worst dangerous.”

It may be objected that the narrative of a “benign Chinese world order” cannot work as soft power, because it is not likely to attract or persuade anyone who does not belong to the implied master race of Han Chinese. Nor, I hasten to add, is it likely to appeal to the millions of ethnic Chinese both inside and outside China, who may feel patriotic toward their homeland but who know better than to believe that it ever was, or will be, a paradise on earth. As for the “century of humiliation,” the exploitation and brutality of the Western imperial powers have been exhaustively chronicled, not least by Western historians working under conditions of academic freedom that have almost never existed in China.

According to Nye’s definition, the two aspects of power that are “hard” are coercion (military force) and payment (economic clout). In 2007 Walter Russell Mead attempted to clarify the concept of hard power by distinguishing between the military aspect, which he called “sharp power,” and the economic aspect, which he called “sticky power.” The metaphors were apt, but Mead’s new terminology never caught on.

In 2017 there was another attempt to elaborate on Nye’s concept: a timely report from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) entitled Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence, in which Chris Walker and Jessica Ludwig of NED, along with four regional experts, offer detailed analyses of how the CCP (and the Kremlin) have been using political pressure and economic clout to “pierce, penetrate, and perforate the political and information environments” in four fragile democracies: Argentina, Peru, Poland, and Slovakia. This new definition of “sharp power” is one that deserves to catch on.

Still, the semantic fog surrounding these terms is vexing to most people, which is why the CCP can get away with calling its sharp power “soft.” I have never been a fan of the term “soft power,” because during the 1990s, the inevitable connotations of the word “soft”—weakness, frilliness, and (dare I say it?) unmanliness—contributed to the decline of U.S. government support for a host of activities under the heading of public diplomacy. Yet these activities, which range from cultural programs to educational exchanges, foreign-language news media to assistance with internet access, are not mere frills. If they were, then every authoritarian regime in history would not have copied them as a way to deliver their Big Lies in packages that mimic the more truthful ones coming from the United States.

To readers whose hackles rise at the very thought of a government being truthful, I willingly admit that every government tells lies. But not every government tells lies—or gets away with telling lies—to the same extent.  When President Trump claims that hydroxychloroquine, a common treatment for malaria, is “a strong drug” that “we ought to try” against Covid-19, there is an outcry in the press and an immediate correction from the nation’s leading public health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci. When a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry insinuates that the virus was introduced into Wuhan by U.S. Army soldiers visiting in October, the rumor floods through every possible channel of state-controlled media, and any “troublemaker” who dares to object is swiftly and ruthlessly silenced. At the moment, there is a troubling resemblance between the misinformation emanating from the White House and the disinformation being propagated by the CCP. But if the two governments were really the same, then the resemblance would be normal and we would not find it troubling!

This is not to suggest that the U.S. government has never used propaganda. In the lead-up to America’s entry into World War I, they fabricated reports of hideous atrocities committed by the evil “Hun,” then pressured the fledgling film studios to incorporate these fabrications into movies to help shake the American public out of its isolationism. This may have worked at the time, but by the 1930s, both London and Washington realized how much damage their hate propaganda had done. Not only did it inspire Hitler and Goebbels, it also fostered incredulity toward early reports of Nazi atrocities.

This realization led to a change of heart. There was plenty of lying and spying during World War II and the Cold War, but when it came to communicating with large populations in foreign countries, both Britain and America took the relative high road of refusing to spread blatant falsehoods. Instead, they developed the craft of public diplomacy, defined as any and all efforts to attract and persuade others without resorting to gross deception. Pitted against the aggressive propaganda of the Third Reich and the Soviet Communist Party, this approach was decidedly asymmetrical. But it worked.

Can this (relatively) truthful approach succeed in today’s era of digitally enhanced authoritarianism? Since 2008, when the Russian Federation under President Putin began the first of three incursions into neighboring countries, the Kremlin opened what the RAND corporation calls “a firehose of falsehood.” That firehose has two streams, one directed outward and the other inward. The outward-directed stream seeks to pollute the global information space with disinformation, conspiracy theories, and paranoid fantasies in the hope of sowing division and cynicism among the citizens of liberal democracies. The inward-directed stream pushes a “narrative” in which every tragic occurrence in Russian history is blamed on the West, and only the current Great Leader can restore the nation’s glory.

Clearly, this Russian “narrative” resembles the Chinese one. Both are intended to beat back the “thuggish domination” of Western “discourse hegemony.” This language, quoted in the chapter by Daniel C. Lynch, a professor of Asian and International Studies at Hong Kong University, was taken from a source at Wuhan University’s Institute of Marxism. But it could just as well have been taken from a Russian source, because both authoritarian “narratives” share a common ancestor: Soviet Communism.

As noted by co-editor Ying Zhu in her riveting chapter about the Chinese film industry, the Soviets were teaching propaganda to the Chinese 20 years before Mao’s Revolution. In 1928 the Kuomintang (KMT) enlisted the aid of a Bolshevik expert in mounting an information offensive against its political rivals, one of which was the Communist Party. As Zhu writes, “the KMT’s active political intervention in [China’s] cultural affairs shared similar tenets and pedigree with its archenemy, the CCP; both were trained by the Soviets.” (emphasis added).

Authoritarian propaganda is expensive. In a chapter entitled “The Ironies of Soft Power Projection,” co-editor Stanley Rosen, a veteran China expert at the University of Southern California, points to the contrast between the CCP’s huge investment in “sharp power,” over $10 billion a year, and the U.S. government’s minimal support of public diplomacy. Rosen also observes that, while U.S. investment in soft power has been in decline since the end of the Cold War, that decline has accelerated under the current administration: “What Trump has done is to move from the American government’s benign neglect to active sabotage of soft power.”

Rosen is not unduly worried about this, because American soft power has many sources besides the government. Indeed, foreign attitudes toward America are largely shaped by nonstate actors of every stripe, from corporations to universities, foundations to small businesses, NGOs to QUANGOS (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations). Many of these nonstate actors are connected to the government in some way. But even congressionally funded QUANGOs like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the National Endowment for Democracy do not operate as direct instruments of the state. As for the myriad contractors that partner with government agencies, they often proceed (for good and ill) with minimal oversight.

Because of the major role played by non-state and quasi-state actors, some observers argue that the U.S. government should quit investing in soft power altogether. I disagree, because there are some things only the government can do, such as support responsible foreign-language news reporting in countries where the media are censored or corrupt; convey a fuller picture of American society, culture, and institutions than is conveyed by commercialized popular culture; and (not least) engage in the nearly lost art of explaining, defending, and seeking support for U.S. policies in a way that involves listening as well as lecturing.

To argue that the U.S. government should support such activities is not to argue that it needs to match the $10 billion budget of the CCP’s sharp power offensive. Washington has never spent that kind of money on public diplomacy. Back in 1981, when President Reagan was gearing up for the final charge against the Soviet Union, the Kremlin was spending $2.2 billion on overseas propaganda, as opposed to the $480 million budget of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Under Reagan the USIA received a major infusion of cash, peaking at $881 million in 1986. But even that fell short of the billions being spent by the faltering USSR.

Speaking of billions, there is one topic upon which all these authors agree: “Beijing is using the strongest instrument in its soft-power toolbox: money.” China scholar David Shambaugh (not a contributor) wrote these words back in 2015, when Xi and other Chinese leaders had been traveling to “more than 50 countries . . . [to] sign huge trade and investment deals, extend generous loans, and dole out hefty aid packages.” The reader might ask what is wrong with that, since as Shambaugh continues: “Major powers always try to use their financial assets to buy influence and shape the actions of others; in this regard, China is no different.”

But here the semantic fog thickens, because while Nye classifies payment, along with coercion, as hard power, that hardly resolves the matter. Where do we draw the line between a nation using its economic clout to do legitimate business overseas, and the same nation using its clout to bend a resistant population to its will? At present, the only way to draw this line is on a case-by-case basis, as the aforementioned NED report on sharp power does so well.

As it happens, the same case-by-case approach is taken by several of the authors in Soft Power With Chinese Characteristics. Not all use the term “sharp power,” and some use “soft power” in a way that suggests either a lack of knowledge or a studied indifference regarding the concept’s original meaning. But in most cases, what these authors’ careful analyses of the CCP’s methods in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and East Asia reveal a consistent pattern of “soft power” being used as camouflage to cover the use of China’s massive economic clout in ways that are patently manipulative, deceptive, and coercive. In an era when many China scholars are playing it safe by letting their research chill for several hours in the ideological refrigerator before serving it up to the reader, it is refreshing to find such an impressive array of experts willing to tell it like it is.

These include the aforementioned Daniel C. Lynch, who probes the shaky condition of the Chinese economy and asks whether it portends a shift to unabashed hard power; Australian scholar Wanning Sun, who reveals the CCP’s growing control of diasporic Chinese-language media; Latin American expert R. Evan Ellis, who takes a hard look at Chinese sharp power in Latin America; historian Antonio Fiori, who together with Stanley Rosen takes an equally sobering look at the CCP’s activities in Africa; Taiwanese experts Dalton Lin and Yun-han Chu, who mount a scathing critique of how the pretense of soft power is used to camouflage the CCP’s coercive tactics in Taiwan; Hong Kong scholar David Zweig, who gives a quietly devastating account of Hong Kong’s struggle to retain its autonomy; and finally, a trio of authors:  Yun-han Chu and Min-hua Huang (in Taiwan) and Jie Lu (in Beijing), who painstakingly assess the delicate balancing required by East Asian countries torn between China’s economic power and America’s democratic ideals.

Speaking of democratic ideals, it is hard to plow through this long, complicated, yet invaluable book without asking yourself how the story will end. By “story” I mean not the fabricated “narrative” being propagated by the CCP, but the true history of this extraordinary civilization as it collided with modernity, was engulfed by it, and then sought to engulf it in return. That true history is only partly written, because of all the crimes committed by the CCP, the greatest is its deliberate erasure of the past. That is why I admire writers like Rowena Xiaoqing He, whose 2014 book Tiananmen Exiles captures with a fine brush the subjective experiences of three pro-democracy activists who came of age amid that heroic attempt to expand the liberties that blossomed so briefly in the years following Deng’s economic reforms. As a member of that generation, she recalls how difficult remembering can be:

Thoughts, feelings, and fragments needed to be understood and woven together. I compare it to the unfolding of a traditional Chinese water-and-ink painting. When you first unfold the picture, you will see only pieces of water and ink here and there. It is hard to tell where the sky is, which part is water, which is cloud, which is stone, and which are the bushes. Not until you unfold the entire picture will you discover the artistic meaning.

The phrase “hearts and minds” is a dreadful cliché, but it is relevant here, because while the truth of recent Chinese history lives on in the hearts of those who witnessed it, they are getting older, and the young are being blindfolded by the regime. All the more vital, then to produce bold, careful, scholarship like this, which is capable of clarifying the mind even when the heart is muddied by lies.

The post Hard Truths About China’s “Soft Power” appeared first on The American Interest.

A Ruinous Obsession

A life in a discarded shoe box. A while back, as I was struggling with a text at the Public Library in the hamlet of Bengtsfors, Sweden, I came across the donated remains from a childless couple’s life. Among the pile of artifacts peaked out a shoebox full of photographs taken between 1938 and 1952.

Admittedly eager to be distracted, I pulled out the box and studied the photos. Among the pictures, many featured the couple’s travels through Germany on their way to holiday in Weiz, Austria in the years after World War II. Snaps from Hamburg, Cologne, Nuremberg, and Magdeburg—all in ruins. Hardly a house is left standing.

The husband, Bertil Birgfeldt, stands in the midst of the devastation, a Swedish tourist, bashful in his beige coat. He stands there as our representative. Bertil was not a party to this war. He shared neither in the desperation of defeat nor in the grim satisfaction of victory. The war never came to Sweden. He had probably read about the destruction in the newspapers. His facial expression hints at the complicated emotions of finding himself amid the wreckage of a once-modern country. In 1945, 4.8 million of Germany’s 18.8 million houses were reduced to rubble.

Etymologically, the word “ruin” has its roots in the Latin ruere—to fall; to fall apart. Ruins are part of the course of civilizations, their unburied remains. Like bodies, buildings are destined to decay. In Magdeburg, centuries of deterioration happened in 36 minutes.

On January 16, 1945, a thousand tons of bombs fell on the city. The Royal Air Force had by then perfected the bombing of civilian centers. First regular bombs tore off the roofs to expose buildings’ more flammable insides and ripped up the roads to make them impassable for fire trucks. Then the firebombs.

Allied aerial photos show a city without people. Debris piled up between roofless walls. Not since the ravages of the Mongols had defeat been so devastating. There had been destructive wars, yes, but this one scorched every family, every city, every home. It was hard to see any future after this.

The German American political scientist Hans Morgenthau suggested that Germany should be made into “goat pasture.” It seemed a plausible alternative. The East German national anthem was, appropriately, called Auferstanden aus Ruinen—risen from ruins.

In an act of sheer will, the cities were cleared.  Women, the Trümmerfrauen, did much of the manual labor. An estimated four million men were dead and an additional four million were in captivity. Temporary railroad tracks were laid so that an entire city could be moved, barrowload by barrowload.

By the time I grew up, there were fewer war ruins in West Germany. My father, who studied medicine in Munich in the late 1960s, spoke somewhat disparagingly of Britain where they were still collecting money the restore their blitzed churches while West Germany smelled of fresh paint.

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West Germany did not mention the ruins in its national anthem; removing them became a sort of national obsession. A time traveler could take the case of Germany as a sign of parallel realities, for there are few visible signs of Ragnarök 1945 in 2020. At least not in the cities that tourists visit.

I don’t know anyone who knows anyone in Magdeburg. When I decided to visit the city, I sent out messages to German friends, asking if they knew anyone in the state capital. For no one knows the peculiarities of a city better than those who live there.

Few of them had ever been to Magdeburg, although the “Maid of the river Elbe” is little more than an hour’s journey from Berlin. My friends are college-educated, they may work in Berlin or Dresden, but they all come from the west. Magdeburg also has a tattered reputation.

When international media mention the city, it is often because of rightwing forces have made electoral gains. In the municipal elections of 2019, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party captured 14.4 percent of the vote. Historian Jörg Arnold writes that the bombing remains important for the city’s identity. It has allowed citizens to see themselves as victims, despite the crimes of the Nazis’.

On January 16, a dozen or so rightwing radicals held a march to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the victims of the Magdeburg bombing, which they claim numbered 16,000. The real figure is between two and four thousand. The German establishment prefers to eulogize the victims of the local concentration camp, Magda.

The city’s ill repute is also due, in part, to Magdeburg being rather ugly. Before the war, it was different. With its baroque architecture, innumerable inns and narrow streets, Magdeburg was a postcard of pre-industrial Germany, not unlike Dresden. True, the city had burnt down in 1631, but it rose larger and more beautiful than before. On a personal note, I grew up thinking Magdeburg was a primary German city, on par with Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. In the Lutheran world I grew up in, Magdeburg was “our” German capital.

The World War II bombing of Magdeburg was as thorough as the destruction of Dresden a month later. Ninety percent of the houses in the city center were destroyed. And with that, old Magdeburg perished. Its remains are buried in the hillocks east and west of the city, mountains of ruins.

Once, Germans adored ruins. For Goethe, ruins were aesthetic triggers for the refined mind. He even built a few new ruins in his park in Weimar. “The Abbey in the Oakwood,” Germany’s perhaps best-loved painting, portrays a ruin. In 1924, Kurt Krause’s guide to “German ruins” was a bestseller. Be careful of what you cherish, some might say.

“The ruin bears witness to two cosmic forces, nature and (human) spirit, working against each other,” wrote German sociologist Georg Simmel in 1911. He saw ruins as being “permeated with a disturbing melancholic charge,” an insistent reminder of the short span of your own existence. The ruin predicts a future when also our world will decay. Simmel writes that “Architecture is an extension of the human soul—the same conflict between upward striving and being cast downwards that happens in the ruin also occurs continuously in the human soul.”

On my way into Magdeburg, I stop at a ruin. The Crystal Palace was Magdeburg’s most fashionable dance hall. After jumping the fence and climbing in through a gap in one of the wardrobe wings, I enter the main hall. The roof had caved in between me and the podium, an insurmountable obstacle. For the first time, I understood what Simmel spoke of. It is as if a hundred years of music, laughter, and joy echoed on the outer edge of consciousness as I wandered from floor to floor and finally found myself on a bar stool by an infinitely long and moldy hardwood counter.

The Crystal Palace burned in the bombing but reopened in 1949. It shares the fate of many buildings that apparently survived the war in East Germany. Shoddy repairs only postponed its final deterioration. In 1986, the city authorities left the grand hall to decay.

Now that it is too late, posters outside announce that the Crystal Palace should be saved. Unfortunately, there is not much left to salvage. The masonry crumbles with water-laden rot. This is the case with many buildings in former East Germany. An estimated 1.3 trillion euros have so far been directed from western to eastern Germany, but it has not been enough.

“I tell my friends in Bavaria: Imagine that BMW, Airbus, and Bayer all closed down tomorrow. That’s what happened in the GDR. Magdeburg was known as the Stadt des Schwermaschinenbaus, the city of heavy industry. The loss of jobs still reverberates, but people in the West seem to have run out of solidarity.”

Historian Michael Stöneberg is an expert on Magdeburg’s recent history at the Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg. He takes me through the museum’s exhibition, which includes the chapters of the city’s demise—first “The Bloody Magdeburg Wedding” in 1631, one of the great war-crimes of history.

He explains that Magd is another word for a maiden, and the memory of the killings, rapes, lootings, and burning of the Protestants’ main city was used in both Catholic and Protestant propaganda. “Blood Wedding” was meant to evoke the kind of love Protestants could expect from Catholics. The city’s name was even turned into a verb—magdeburgisieren meant to destroy a city.

“The GDR wanted to rebuild Magdeburg. The city was one of few cities designated to be rebuilt in the ‘national tradition,’ reminiscent of what used to be there, in a centrally planned reconstruction program. The destruction of the city center gave the architects the opportunity for a tabula rasa which was realized by a very thorough clearing of the remains. Room was created for communist aesthetics.”

This was most clearly manifested in Großer Platz, a giant open square in the very center, meant for public rallies. But it was never finished; it, and a number of other city spaces in Magdeburg, remained empty. The GDR did not have the cash to realize all its planned projects. The idea of rebuilding representative structures with bricks recycled from the ruins, as attempted with the Großer Platz, was abandoned in the 1960s, and Magdeburg was instead given rows of prefabricated buildings, without any obvious plan for what the result should look like. “Many people feel Magdeburg was treated poorly,” Stöneberg says.

In addition, the industrialists who had largely financed the city’s beautification, cultural life, and famous museum collections had no place under communism. As they say, Stöhneberg chuckles, “the first generation creates wealth, the next manages it, and the third studies art history.” The urban population was anyway not the same after the war. Many were immigrants displaced from the lost German provinces in the east. Today there is surprisingly little will for Magdeburg to rebuild the ruins that are still standing.

Recently, there was a referendum on whether the Abbey of St. Ulrich should be rebuilt. The Citizens of Magdeburg narrowly voted no. “War ruins were not romantic ruins,” says Stöneberg, “they bore memories of something people would rather forget, or they stood for a present age that is lacking the will to rebuild.”

Germany not only chose to forget but was also forced to. The actor and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger, born in Thal in 1947 where Birkenfeldt vacationed, writes in his autobiography Total Recall: “How could we relate to the incredible drama when nobody wanted to talk about it?”

“The Third Reich was being officially erased. [….] Everything having to do with the Nazi era was confiscated. Books, films, posters, even personal journals and photographs. You had to give over everything. The war was supposed to be erased from your mind.” The war became a non-topic for the war generation.

The Allied approach was reasonable, given that German militarism had started two world wars. The militaristic mindset needed to be discouraged. West Germany was demilitarized before belatedly joining NATO in 1955. Both German states hosted occupying foreign forces until 1989.

To the extent that the war was discussed, it was in biographical works such as Ernst von Solomon’s Die Fragebogen (The Questionnaire, 1951). The questionnaire was an Allied standard form where Germans were ordered to disclose their relationship with Nazism. Solomon’s answer is a 500-page long book. This conservative author’s answer can be summarized as follows: We Germans tried to be patriotic and supported our country under the Nazi regime by complying with the law, supporting the military, and carrying out our duties while trying to avoid being involved in atrocities.

There is an element of self-pardon to this argument. The Second World War was not “just another war”, it was a collapse in civilization. The “I just followed orders” logic enabled Nazis to make stellar careers in West Germany and quickly put the gas chambers and war crimes behind them.

The reckoning first came with the children of the war generation. Many felt disgust when confronted with the crimes of the Third Reich and their parents’ selective memory. The sins of the fathers haunted the children and countless books were written to disown the parents.

Meanwhile, the academics were eagerly discussing whether Germany’s sins were due to taking a wrong turn, or whether Germans are essentially bad. The idea of Germany as a Täternation (abusive nation), according to sociologist Bernhard Geisen, became a source of identity among German elites. This is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that no historical figure or event can be celebrated or commemorated in Germany—be it Frederick the Great or the ’68 generation—without it ending in a discussion about how the object remembered relates to Nazism.

The Jewish author Jean Améry offered a wry comment on this pathology: “Such is the German post-war despair. The German feels like a victim of a Kafka-esque trial. Mysterious forces have transformed him into an insect. He is simply continuing the mechanisms that have been put in place.”

A similar identity evolution did not occur in the GDR. This was partly because the bombed-out East Germany was forced to pay war reparations. Entire factories were dismantled and transported to the Soviet Union. An example is the Zinkhütte Magdeburg, which is still operating in Kazakhstan.

Germany’s reunification was not only a meeting between communism and capitalism, but also a confrontation between two different national identities. East Germany defined itself as anti-fascist, a “better Germany”. It didn’t have the same need for a self-recrimination forty years later.

In February 1993, the renowned playwright Botho Strauss sent shockwaves through Germany’s cultural elite with an essay in Der Spiegel with the cryptic title “The Swelling Song of the Billy Goat” (Anschwellender Bocksgesang). In it, he attacked left-liberal logic, attacked Germany’s modern self-image, and spoke out in favor of the nation.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how controversial this was. German intellectuals enjoy a degree of popular respect unheard of in most Western countries. And the country’s modern self-image as a post-national nation-state was at the same time universally accepted and self-contradictory.

Suddenly, here was a citizen in good standing shamelessly declaring himself to be of the Right. According to Strauss, widely shared (and seldom-heard) skepticism towards Germany’s open-door immigration policies was not the result of xenophobia, as it was nearly always portrayed. Rather, it was a positive impulse, a protection of the collective self.

The essay was a metapolitical act, a “rebellion: against the total rule of the present, which wants to rob and rid the individual of all presence of an unenlightened past, of what has come about historically, of mythical time.” Strauss advocated an attitude that would seek “to re-establish contact with prolonged and unmoved time, […] being essentially a deep recollection and in that sense a religious or proto-political initiation.”

This might sound impenetrable to Anglo-American ears, but there is a logic. The German conservative tradition is distinct when it comes to the importance of culture. Strauss echoes Johann G. Herder’s view (1744-1803) that cultures are seen to grow and wither according to their own internal logic. To sever a nation from its historical roots is, in this view, unpardonable.

Strauss criticized not only the cultural pathology of liberalism; he also criticized the entire system as a failure—as a false liberation. Germany’s modern self-image was a romantic fiction: self-denying and thereby self-effacing. Among the flourishes of the German intellectual were salvos like, “We are challenged to be compassionate and obliging to the hordes of starving and homeless, we are committed to goodness by law.” [and] “Intellectuals embrace the unfamiliar, not for its own sake, but because they hate our own and welcome that which destroys it.”

The debate that followed was venomous. Strauss was skewered by most of the German elite in a flurry of op-eds. They said he was out of touch with the new Europe, that he was a nationalist, and that his criticism of the liberal society could legitimize (in countless euphemisms) Nazism.

The essay was published amidst tension between East and West in the wake of the reunification and the rise of rightwing radicalism in the East. What identity should Germany embrace now that it had become united and powerful? What about the war? Was it OK to be proud to be German?

Strauss essay was  a conservative cri du coeur: “To be of the right, not by cheap beliefs or by low intentions, but of one’s entire being, is to experience the overwhelming power of memory; which sees the human rather than the citizen, rouses him and makes him feel lonely [in the modern world].”

One of the country’s most celebrated writers, Martin Walser, later called it: “Perhaps the wisest, clearest and most far-reaching text that has been published by a German intellectual since 1945.” The essay sparked a debate, but it did not lead to any national awakening. Rather, the debate seemed to shrink the corridor of opinion by making conservatism intellectually suspicious. Even today, Strauss’ name rarely appears in print without an asterisk.

The man behind the “New Right” think-tank Institut für Staatspolitik, Götz Kubitschek, thinks Strauss was ahead of his time: “The debate at that time was ultimately settled by the power imbalance between the editors and the public—with suffocation as a result.”

“What followed, however, was a whole new generation, influenced by the ‘goat debate’, and which today operates in a changed political reality.” This is a veiled reference to the rise of the AfD, where Kubitschek plays the role of a Steve Bannon. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel has called Kubitschek “the most important intellectual on the New Right in Germany”. Die Zeit calls his knight’s estate in the village of Schnellroda, a long hour’s drive south of Magdeburg, “the nucleus of a new rightwing empire.”

One afternoon in March, as the one-pub village is bathing in the spring sun, I meet Kubitschek in his study. He is dressed in a blue wool sweater and work pants with the mud stains of a farmer. In the German fashion, he first proposes a walk around the farm, parts of which date back to the 13th century.

Kubitschek hails from Ravensburg on Lake Constance. He looked for a long time for a home in the east. “We had to look at forty different estates before we found this one”. I ask what the manor had cost? “You won’t believe me, under $10,000,” he answers with an embarrassed shrug. He prefers to live in the countryside, where “life has the right proportions”. He has furnished a library on the second floor. The books range widely from the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, via Carl Schmitt, to the above-mentioned revolutionary conservative philosopher Ernst von Salomon, who is Kubitschek’s intellectual hero.

Before the interview, Göts invites me to supper with the family. We are nine around the table and the meal begins with lowered heads and a prayer. While we talk about world events, dishes are passed around with dark homemade bread, eggs from the farm, and goat sausage from the farm’s flock.

The living room has a curious aura, not unlike the entire property. Framed posters of classic-style paintings hang on the walls, along with a lot of Catholic paraphernalia. On the toilet door is a humorous sign that reads Goethe war hier with the word nie (never) in a tiny font below.

In the staircase up to the study, there is an old school map of Germany from the interwar period, soiled with red paint along the edge from when Antifa attacked the home of its former owner, a professor. A 9 mm pistol lies on Kubitschek’s work desk. Kubitschek is reviled by the radical Left and he fears for his family’s safety. It nevertheless makes me feel uneasy.

The wooden ceiling and the ancient stone walls seem to creep closer as darkness falls outside the narrow windowpanes as we finally get to the point. I ask him why a people who had a romantic relationship with ruins are now most concerned with getting rid of them?

Kubitschek disagrees with the broader premise. “There are memorial ruins in most German cities, such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. And in the east, there are industrial ruins after the GDR in every town.” But he takes the point: “The war was a disaster. It is a German trait that we wanted to return to tidy orderliness.”

“It is also about optics. The medieval ruin evokes a sense of past greatness. The romantics forgot all the pain that characterized life back then. This room,” he says with a sweeping gesture, “has seen joy, weddings—but also suffering. People have probably died here, in this room. What we have inherited from past generations grounds us, connects us.”

I mention the Swedish photographs that set me on this quest. Kubitschek is most interested in the fact that they were discarded. “The same is true in Germany. People do not want to inherit objects, not even their parents’ books. That’s not how I see things. I don’t even like museums; they display objects what are no longer useful. What I like is to see is an ancient water post that is still in use.”

“What about Magdeburg?” I ask. He takes a sip of beer. “Magdeburg is grisly. The destruction of our cities is a loss that cannot be repaired. Magdeburg was shaped by a 1950s view of modernity that rebels against the 1,000 years that preceded it and is today reviled. But people still have to live in it.”

“What does this say about Germany?” I venture. “Germany may be beyond redemption. In the eagerness to break with the Third Reich—which is fair and reasonable—we have disowned all our history, saddled ourselves us an impossible identity that lacks grounding, but is stipulated from elites.”

I ask if this is also not a sort of romanticism—to espouse an identity one cannot possibly live up to?  Kubitschek disagrees. “Germans’ willful amnesia of our past—who we are and who we were—can only lead to ruin. Much like individuals, nations are most beneficial to others when they have a realistic and positive sense of self.” Far away, in a cold distance, a goat bleats.

On my way back to Berlin, I notice derelict old buildings in every town. Chancellor Angela Merkel has argued that “Germany needs to come to terms with itself”. Germans need “to get over themselves” is more often heard in NATO circles where they are tired of German self-recriminations.

The question of German identity is vital to the future of Europe. A new bout of patriotism could trigger pathologies in neighboring states that could derail the European project. And, yet, the selfless impulse that triggered the migration crisis of 2015 could do the same.

In the wake of the Goat-debate, Angela Merkel shifted the Christian Conservative Union in a socially liberal direction. It is hard to pinpoint a single clear conservative victory during her fourteen years in power. This helps explain why conservative voters are flocking to the rightwing AfD. Merkel views the AfD as untouchables, which has contributed to the ongoing German culture war between liberal and national conservative forces.

German academics and journalists effectively stigmatize rightwing views. A quote from Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of the Green Party, help explain: “Germany doesn’t need nationalism,” he said, “because nothing has ruined Germany as much. When I hear AfD’s slogan, I see the cities I grew up in. Cities where we played in the ruins. Our toys were the remnants of the war. It is a very strong memory for me.”

To this, Götz Kubitschek says, “We do not want to go back to the past, all we want is for Germany to become a normal country. We need to stop instrumentalizing the past. We must break out of this collective psychosis. There is no moral world championship to be won, it’s an illusion.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger ends his biography, with a piece of advice that could offer a way out of this deadlock: “Don’t blame your parents. They have done their best for you and if you have been left with problems, those problems are now yours to solve.” The German debate is not there yet.

All of this makes any redeeming agreement on identity and past unlikely. While Merkel is on her way out, her appointed ideological successor in the CDU, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer bowed out. The Corona crisis may give the more conservative Jens Spahn a chance to shine as health minister. Taken all together, we can at minimum conclude that while the future is unknowable, we can still hope that Germany’s future may yet be shaped by a kind of conservatism that is less national and less romantic than what the AfD represents.

The post A Ruinous Obsession appeared first on The American Interest.

A Dispatch from the Duchy of Riverdale

“But what if You-Know-Who is re-elected?” our neighbor Victoria asked. We were sitting on our porch. I had grilled some kosher steaks. Part of my naturalization process (I’m an immigrant from Germany): every summer I host at least two grill parties.

“If Lord Voldemort gets re-elected, we’ll declare our independence,” my wife said. My wife has always been very practical about these matters. “The Republic of Riverdale. Sounds good, too!”

Riverdale is where we live. Technically Riverdale belongs to the Bronx, but it is more affluent than other parts of our borough. North of us is the city of Yonkers; south of us, a neighborhood called Kingsbridge. Most Manhattanites don’t even know we exist (thank God). The Republic of Riverdale would have a little more than 48,000 citizens; mostly white, many Hispanics, quite a few Jews. We live in a pretty goyische part of Riverdale, which means that apart from us there is only one other Jewish family on the block. Our house belongs to a row of red-brick houses built in the forties. Of course, we all know each other. Our children have playdates. Among our friends are Jews and Christians and Atheists, African-Americans, Koreans, people of Irish and Estonian descent. The Republic of Riverdale.

“No, I don’t think Riverdale should become a republic,” I said. The thing is, I’m a monarchist. My fellow Americans tend to think I’m joking whenever I say so. I’m not. I happen to believe that the best form of government is the constitutional monarchy—more stable than a republic, less prone to authoritarian tendencies (think the UK, think the Netherlands), and last but not least, much more beautiful. I love the pageantry that comes with monarchies. And of course, the most humane and civilized entity ever to exist on the European continent was the Habsburg Empire. (Yes, I have a picture of His Apostolic Majesty Kaiser Franz Josef hanging in my study.) But Riverdale, alas, is much too small to be a full-grown monarchy, let alone an empire. Hence: a Duchy.

“Who would be the Duke?” Victoria asked. “Or the Duchess?”

“We could import one,” I said. “Importing royalty is a time-honored tradition. Perhaps we could find a descendant of Ranavalona III and ask him or her to come over and be our Sovereign.” Seeing the blank stares around the table, I explained, “Ranavalona III was the last Queen of Madagascar. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a Madagascan Duke or Duchess?” We raised our glasses. “The Duchy of Riverdale!” And: “To our independence!” Yes, I added silently, independence from the rotten Disunited States of America.

All this happened some nine months ago—or in other words, in a different era. Already, it has become hard to imagine that people—real people, not images on a screen—congregated on our porch to share a meal and some excellent Gruner Veltliner. The Duchy of Riverdale has become a community of people who cautiously avoid each other, greet each other from a distance. The last time I talked to Victoria she was walking her dog: I talked to her standing on the stoop of our house. The other day we took a walk around the block. We waved to our Korean neighbors from in an empty parking lot which overlooks their porch and chatted a bit. Our son, who is seven, has not had a playdate in a long time. I don’t know when he’ll have a playdate again. I don’t know when we’ll be able to leave the house again. The statistics are grim. I expect that very soon the hospitals and morgues of New York City will overflow with the dying and the dead.

At the same time, I notice that people have become more considerate. Kinder. The other day we had a conversation with our neighbor Bob (from porch to porch). He is elderly and lost his wife not long ago to cancer. We exchanged the latest news on the virus. My wife told him that Mo Willems (author of such classics as “Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus!” and “Time To Pee!”) now hosts an hour of “lunch doodles” every day at 1 pm on YouTube. Perhaps his grandchildren in Boston might be interested?

I suspect that there are hundreds of Duchys, Domains, Fiefdoms all over the country. Thousands, perhaps. Somewhere I read that all over the DC area militias are forming, armed not with guns but with smartphones, delivering groceries to elderly people, running errands for them. I expect nothing from the coward in the White House who shivers with fear of the virus and compensates for his fear by tweeting racist nonsense. I expect very little from the federal government. But I have heard governors tell the truth and I have seen mayors behave like statesmen.

Ever since the election of 2016, I’m no longer sure I like America. But I like Americans. Not the screaming crowds at the fascist rallies which Hair Furor likes so much, but hard-working, decent Americans whom I’ve met here in New York and in the Midwest (my brother lives in Minnesota) and New Mexico and California and some other places in between, many of them immigrants like myself.

I came to America in 2007 with two suitcases and a guitar. I became an American citizen five years later, in a ceremony that moved me more than I would have thought possible. Why did I immigrate? I won a green card in the lottery. I was 42 years old at the time, worked for the literary weekend section of a well-known German newspaper (Die Welt), living a comfortable middle-class existence. I gave all that up: my beautiful apartment in Prenzlauer Berg (a section of Berlin which has since become very trendy), my cushy job, my claims to a German pension. I knew it was now or never. I had fallen in love with New York City. I wanted to live there. Also, I had grown a bit weary of Germany – weary of the self-righteous lectures about Israeli politics, weary of the constant need to explain myself, weary of the spiritual poverty of Jewish life in Germany. (I’m not very religious, but I’m not unreligious either.) My first year in New York City was lonely. During my second year, I met the woman who became my wife. Seven years ago, our son was born, and when he says the blessings over grape juice and bread on Friday night, I know that I’m the luckiest man alive.

As soon as I had become a naturalized citizen, I joined the Republican Party. For this, I had two reasons. One, everybody in my family—my wife, my brother, my sister-in-law—was a Democrat. This is a two-party-system, I thought. Someone ought to be a member of the other club. Two, I’m very small-c conservative in my personal habits. I like traditions. I like institutions. My natural instinct is to respect religious people whatever their faith may be. When something is called “progressive” I immediately wince. (The Armenian genocide was progressive. So was eugenics. And Lenin.)

But by now I’m convinced that the Republican Party is not a party, it is a mental disease. I changed my party allegiance in January 2017 when Lord Voldemort gave his nice little blood-and-soil inauguration speech. There is, I believe, an important difference between the two political parties in the United States. Faced with their inner darkness, the Republicans plunged right in. Those few who failed to do so were shunned, mocked, ostracized. The Democrats also had a moment when they faced their dark and irrational side, their Freudian “id”. The dipped in their big toe; they dipped in their whole foot. For a few weeks, I was afraid that the Democrats would go the way of the British Labour Party (which has turned into an abomination). But in the end, the Democrats decided, “We’d rather not”, and voted for Joe Biden instead of the cranky socialist from Vermont.

To be very clear about this: Should there be elections this November, I want the Republicans to suffer an overwhelming and humiliating defeat. This would be the only thing that could save them. Before new life can blossom from the ruins, there must be ruins.

Talking about ruins and blossoms, here is something else that has changed: my appreciation of Germany. When I was a new immigrant, there were moments when I thought, “How wonderful I’m no longer among se Tschörmanns.” Now I’m not so sure anymore. Sometimes I catch myself watching YouTube videos of Hamburg, Regensburg, Munich, taking virtual walks. I recognize that many things are better over there: not just the health care system or the gun laws. Watch the speech Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, gave about the coronavirus. She is sane! She talks like a human being—a mensch! She behaves responsibly and tells the truth! Wouldn’t it just be miraculous to have a President like that?

The Germans have come a long way since World War II. They have also come a long way since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germans have reason to be proud of their humane Constitution—their Grundgesetz—of their open, multicultural society (Turkish Germans have long ago risen into the German middle class), of the way in which they remember Nazism (in most German cities you now find stolpersteine—small brass tablets in the pavement with the names of Jews who were deported and murdered), of the way in which they dealt with the legacy of the Stasi, the East German secret police (every German citizen was able to view his or her personal Stasi file).  Yes, there is the dreadful “Alternative für Deutschland,” an extremist rightwing party in the Bundestag. But at least the “Alternative für Deutschland” is not in power. And Angela Merkel doesn’t try to appease them. It isn’t the Germans who are putting children in cages. We are.

I started typing this essay before the sun came up. Now another day has broken in the Duchy of Riverdale. The silence is unreal. Birds are chirping, the sun is shining through bare branches. I’m suffering from high blood pressure; I have a history of asthma. If the virus finds me, it might well take me. I don’t know how many more mornings I will see. I don’t know whether I will ever see my son’s bar mitzvah, whether I will dance at his wedding. The news is becoming more dire by the hour: the health care system is already beginning to be overwhelmed. Soon there will be no doctors, no nurses left to tend to the sick.

The world is no longer looking to America for leadership—it is looking to South Korea, to China, partly also to Europe. Every 150 years or so mankind goes through some major catastrophe; usually, it comes out better at the other end, but for those living during the radical change it is not so pleasant. Maybe this is how the American Republic ends—with an insane president at the helm, ruled by a sinister cult, making an unstoppable pandemic much worse than it needs to be. But I hope and pray for the America of the Duchy of Riverdale, and the countless hundreds like it across this massive country, to pull through and revitalize the whole.

The post A Dispatch from the Duchy of Riverdale appeared first on The American Interest.

“I’m Not Interested in Telling War Just from One Perspective”

Novelist Maaza Mengiste left Ethiopia as a girl in the midst of revolution, an experience that led her to begin questioning the ways that conflict affects communities and families. Her latest novel, The Shadow King, tells the story of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1941) through the eyes of Ethiopians and Italians alike. TAI Contributing Editor James Barnett recently reviewed the novel and subsequently spoke with Maaza to discuss the legacy of the war, the current discourse surrounding refugees, and Western perceptions of African literature. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

James Barnett for TAI: I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your background. Where were you born, and what got you interested in being a writer?

Maaza Mengiste: I was born in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and I left during the very early days of the [1974] revolution. I moved to Nigeria, Kenya, and eventually settled in the United States. I think that my path to writing really began in the first move that I made to Nigeria. My whole life has been spent trying to make sense of that move, that initial step outside of the country, beginning with questions of “Why did I leave? What was happening in the country?” And that became the focus of my first book, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. As I’ve become older, and I’ve written my books and I’ve figured out the history of Ethiopia a little bit, I’ve also begun to wonder, well, what are the effects on communities and on families, on groups of people, to have gone through this? What happens within the spaces of conflict or war between men and women? And the second book is really focused on World War II. But these are questions that I’ve been asking for a long time.

I think that I started writing the minute I started reading; I started my path towards becoming a writer. I loved to read and I was really invested in books—in any kind of storytelling. I would gravitate to that. And I started finding out as I moved through middle school, and then into high school and into college, that I seemed to have a knack for analyzing stories and looking at them in terms of many aspects—character or plot or larger questions. I liked doing that. It was just the way I read and I didn’t know that that’s what you would need to do to become a writer.

JB: What writers influenced you the most?

MM: When I was in college, I came across the work of two writers. The first was a Ghanaian writer, Ama Ata Aidoo, and her book Our Sister Killjoy. I didn’t think you could write a book like that. I was looking at the way that she structured it, the kinds of stories she was telling, all of the questions she was asking in that book. It moved me; it shook up my ideas of what a writer could take on. And of course it’s a story about migration, about a woman in Africa moving to Europe. Other books that I had read in college that were not about some of these issues: I could find them interesting, but this one really spoke to me.

So I started paying attention to writers who were working in areas that directly connected to me. And it’s one of the ways that I came across the work of Toni Morrison and really began to read her in earnest. Song of Solomon was a book that taught me how language could work in the service of—I don’t know how to say it—in the service of stories that people wish were not told; Morrison’s language could force you to read something even as you found the facts of what was happening traumatic and brutal. The language could carry you through that. And Song of Solomon really, really did that for me and every book by Morrison that I read after that pushed me in that direction as well.

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JB: I see some parallels there with The Shadow King that’s set amid the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, which was obviously a great trial for Ethiopia. What inspired you to write about this subject?

MM: Well, I had grown up in Ethiopia—and also in the United States—hearing these stories constantly of Ethiopia’s fight against the Italians: When they were less equipped, had fewer numbers, their strategies were not as advanced militarily as the Italians—but somehow, they won. And I became really interested in that story. As I was writing my first novel, I knew this was a story I wanted to take on. I thought it would be a pretty straight-forward David versus Goliath story, which is what I heard growing up. But it was only once I got into the research that I discovered women and really started to think about the everyday lives of the soldiers living in the midst of war.

JB: Was your plan always to center the novel around female resistance fighters? Or did you make that decision later in the process of researching?

MM: I made that decision later in the process. I was not aware of women fighting. The stories I had heard were about men. Women followed behind the men and did the tasks of gathering wood, getting water, cooking the food—all those roles that were supportive of an army. But I didn’t know that they were really part of the army itself. Once I started discovering one or two or three or four women, I realized this is the story that I’d been wanting to write. The original draft I had was not quite working and I couldn’t figure it out. But the minute that these women seemed to step forward, I knew I had found something.

JB: Ethiopia stands out among African countries vis-à-vis its experience with European colonialism. Its history of resistance to the Italians—first in the late 19th century, then again in the ‘30s—made Ethiopia something of a lodestar for a lot of African independence movements and Pan-Africanist thinkers in the second half of the 20th century especially. In your experience, how do Ethiopians themselves remember these wars? Do the wars’ legacies engender a sense of exceptionalism, or is there also contention over these legacies?

MM: There is definitely contention, because I think that the sense of Ethiopia as being a unified country—it’s not the truth. It’s not the way it happened. Which is why I say that Ethiopia’s victory is in some ways illogical. People continued to fight, but Ethiopia was not unified. There were people within the country who said, “Why do we want to be under Hale Selassie? Why do we want to continue this monarchy, this legacy of rule that has kept our people—whether it’s the poor, or those who are enslaved, whether it’s based on ethnicity—has kept our people down. Why do we want that? Isn’t it possible that the Italians will treat us better? Isn’t it possible that the Italians will free the slaves? Isn’t it possible that they will not see the hierarchies that are in place in the country? They’ll create a new system where we have a chance to move forward.”

So, the idea of an African nation facing a European nation and, through the strength of its singular unity, winning, is, I think, just part of the legend. And, of course, people have always known this, but I think this is becoming talked about more in recent years.

JB: In your book, you dedicate some space to developing two Italian characters, really giving a level of depth to the Ethiopians’ adversaries. Why did you choose to include these characters in a story that’s mostly focused on the Ethiopian perspective of the war?

MM: It would have been much easier to leave the Italians out. It would’ve been so much easier for me. I think the book would have been done in half the time. But I’m not interested in telling war just from one perspective, and this war had dozens—if not more. All I wanted to do was think about maybe two or three or four of them.

I was very curious about the Italians. How did they conceive of this conflict, not just the people who were officers but the foot soldiers? I found that an interesting question. And obviously you can’t have a war without two or more sides, and I wanted to explore as many of them as I possibly could while still keeping my characters, the Ethiopian ones, central. But I think that putting the Italian characters into the book also complicated questions of loyalty and betrayal and love and all the questions I was asking about from the Ethiopian side. When the Italians came in, they made it even more complicated. And for a writer, that’s really interesting territory to move in.

JB: And you included the perspectives of some of the Ascari, the soldiers recruited from Italy’s African colonies, who made up the bulk of the invading forces. Did you make a conscious effort to share those perspectives? I’m curious as well if you found it difficult to find sources that illuminate that history.

MM: I found some material on the Ascari. Really what I was doing was talking to people who knew those who had been in the military. Some of the people had been fighters for the independence of Eritrea. I met them in Rome when I was doing research and it was my opportunity to just sit there and learn. And the role of the Ascari—I really feel that I have not done enough with it. I’ve just barely touched it. But I did want to pay attention to them so that they would not be ignored. Because they were not treated as well as they should have been by the Italians. They were not given the respect that they should have been. I wanted to acknowledge that in some way. I was interested in war from many different sides and if I were going to do the Italians, then how could I possibly ignore the Ascari?

JB: Based on your experience doing research for the novel in Italy, is there much of a popular reckoning with this war among Italians today? This was, after all, Mussolini’s first real taste of adventurism abroad.

MM: When I’m around my group of friends in Italy, everybody’s aware of this history. Within my insular group, there are people who specialize in this history, and so at a first glance it might seem like Italians are really open to discussing this moment. But as soon as I step out of my own communities, when I’m there and I start moving out and talking to people, nearly all of them, every Italian tells me, “We haven’t talked about this. We weren’t taught this. Nobody remembers this. We don’t know enough about it.” Even in textbooks, it’s like one or two lines, maybe a paragraph: Mussolini went in and then he left. It might be something that innocuous and then it moves on to the next lesson. So Italians in general really don’t speak enough about this. It’s uncomfortable for those who are aware of it.

JB: A big issue in Italy today and across Europe—before coronavirus started grabbing all the headlines—is migration. You’ve written about this a bit before. In one powerful essay, you invoked Primo Levi’s writing on the Holocaust to make the case for humanizing refugees amid the tragedies that many of them face in their efforts to cross the Mediterranean. As a novelist and an essayist with this focus, and given your own background, how do you view the current discourse on refugees and migration in Europe and the United States?

MM: Well, it’s awful. I think the human rights record is dismal. It’s really frightening to think about the consequences of laws that people are making for political reasons and not for humanitarian reasons. It’s discouraging and disheartening and infuriating. I have been inspired by those captains of rescue ships that just refuse to back down in the Mediterranean and rescue refugees and migrants despite the laws that are trying to prevent them from doing that. I see those people as literally being on the front lines of a different war that’s being fought at the borders. And the human beings that are trying to cross borders are the casualties; and they’re unarmed.

I think this is something that we are going to look back on and be horrified that we allowed to happen. And we’re in the midst of this coronavirus crisis and every day as I’ve been hearing the news, I’ve been waiting to hear about what is happening in detention centers, what’s happening in the refugee camps. We haven’t heard that. The focus has all been on grocery stores that have no food and restaurants and how many people can go in or stay out. We haven’t moved out into the periphery to really look at people who are going to be devastated by this in ways that we may not be, those of us closer to the center. Because we have accommodations. We have rights.

JB: Earlier you mentioned how one of the books that inspired you as a young woman was by a Ghanaian author. I’m reminded of an article in Quartz Africa a while back that lamented the fact that for all of Africa’s diversity and all the exciting stories there, so many books written about Africa or by Africans feature the same cover of an Acacia tree. The author’s point was that there’s far more to Africa and African literature than pretty landscapes, but for a lot of publishers in the West, when they see an African novelist, their instinct is to market this in a way that appeals to Western stereotypes or preconceived notions of the region. I’m curious, are you generally happy with how your novels have been received in the U.S. and Europe? How about African novelists generally or those in the diaspora? Or do you think there’s a tendency among Western critics to either ignore or misunderstand contemporary African literature?

MM: I think there are many layers to your question. On the one hand, people who have read my book carefully have come away with it understanding the questions I’m asking. They’re talking about the characters; they’re really looking at this in terms of the story. I think if people haven’t read the book and they don’t know how to approach the book, there are biases and assumptions about what kind of story it is. And I’m talking about my book, I’m talking about every African book. Those assumptions are in place as guiding posts. And they’re almost a hundred percent wrong.

By that I mean, when writers go to conferences or festivals and the audiences have not read their books, the questions that get asked as a way to step into the book are really questions of ethnography, questions about politics, questions about sociological practices—all these things that have nothing to do with the creative work. And I think other writers don’t get that. European writers don’t have to deal with that. There is no wading through the bulk of unnecessary information to get into a creative work. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I think when audiences stare at a book that’s from the continent of Africa, they feel that they have to know [the answers to] all these other questions before they can approach the creativity. But they don’t have any of those questions when they approach a European work. Those questions don’t exist. So I think that gets frustrating. I think the Acacia tree has been removed from the covers, but the “Acacia tree” questions still exist.

JB: That’s a good way of putting it. As a writer of historical fiction, how do you think about the balance between adhering to historical fact and taking some artistic liberty? Is this a particular challenge when dealing with real historical figures? The character of Ethiopian emperor Hale Selassie in your latest novel comes to mind.

MM: I think that as a writer of fiction, my parameters are wider than for a historian. That character of Haile Selassie is in many ways still a fictional character. It’s still a figment of my imagination. I am recreating scenes with him that I don’t really know happened. But I found him an interesting character because he was central to the war.

The book is set in Ethiopia, but I’m looking at the history of Ethiopia through the lens of women and girls. I wanted to talk about Selassie’s daughter, Zenebework, whom he gave in marriage when she was 14 to a man who was nearly 50. And two years later, she was dead.

I wanted to begin in the home when I talked about history. That’s why the book begins in small spaces and then it moves into the battle later. And I wanted to look at what happens in the home as a characteristic of what war is like, but also what people are capable of outside the home.

A lot of people still don’t talk enough about Zenebework. And Haile Selassie I think was instrumental in erasing her from the memory of the country, even though I’m sure he and his wife and their children never forgot her. He basically allowed her to die. He did not get her from that house because he wanted to maintain power and form an alliance between families that were feuding. My imagination has created this character who’s haunted by this girl. I wanted to look at the nature of a leader by what he does and how he behaves in his family.

JB: Your novel begins and ends with the fall of Haile Selassie’s regime in the 1974 revolution, which is also the subject of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. Why did you choose to feature this revolution as the bookends of The Shadow King rather than focus exclusively on the events of the 1930s? Does your personal experience or your family’s experience with this revolution play into how you depicted it in the novel?

MM: Well I wanted to begin with the revolution because I think that all of the dots are connected. We can’t talk about ’74 unless we talk about 1960 and the uprising [an attempted coup against Selassie -ed.]. But we can’t talk about 1960 unless we talk about 1935 and ’36—when Haile Selassie fled and left his people—and the bitterness that people still had in 1960 and 1974, and the nature of his rule over those decades. All of this came to a head in 1974.

People were fed up. Revolution doesn’t erupt out of the blue. Neighbor is not coming after neighbor just because they feel like it and they’re naturally violent. There are reasons for that and those reasons are outside of politics, often deeply personal, deeply intimate, deeply connected to what they’ve experienced or what their family has experienced. I wanted to keep exploring those personal experiences in this second book and also explore how memory is carried over from decade to decade. I wanted to see how the memory of the 1935 war was still carried through over the decades to 1974.

JB: As you said earlier, it seems like one of the reasons that the legacy of the war is contentious is because there’s still this contention over Hale Selassie’s reign. So it seems appropriate to conclude the novel, after we’ve already seen him flee into exile, by noting that the chickens came to roost, if you will.

MM: Yeah, he created a system—or helped to perpetuate a system—in Ethiopia where the people who were conquered were permanently subjugated beneath the people who had done the conquering. There’s a series of hierarchies based on class, based on ethnicity—and he compounded it in many ways. At the same time as he’s creating schools and all of this, there was still a lot of discrimination in Ethiopia. But I really wanted to focus on his home.

JB: Do you have any other projects in the pipeline that you’d like to put on our radar, or are you enjoying a well-earned rest after your latest novel?

MM: I will announce that I am launching www.project3541.com, an online archive of stories and photographs dealing with the war between Ethiopia and Italy from ’35 to ’41. And I am putting out a call for photographs and stories related to these histories, not only from Ethiopians but from everyone whose family might’ve been involved in this war in one way or another. So that is something I’m really excited about.

The post “I’m Not Interested in Telling War Just from One Perspective” appeared first on The American Interest.

Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and the Lost Art of Risk

Bitches Brew

Miles Davis

Columbia Records, 1970

Listening to music is a series of adjustments made by the ear, and we might say that the best musicians cause us to recalibrate the most. They do this in the framework of a composition, a bar, a modulation, from recording session to recording session, album to album, era to era. They are what I think of as the Melvilliean musicians: artists who shape-shift, but whom one can instantly identify, no matter the guise they take.

Miles Davis, attending some gala awards function in the 1980s, was once asked by a wealthy white woman what he happened to do in life. Davis—an angry man on his most subdued days—snapped back that he had only reinvented music about half a dozen times.

It’s a boast, for certain, but a boast that smacks of truth. Davis didn’t invent bebop in the mid-1940s—in fact, he hardly had the technical chops at the time to navigate the 300 beats-per-minute tempos—but he was there with Charlie Parker as the Yardbird stepped on the gas. And when bebop proved too hot, Davis launched his cool jazz style, giving French art-song music American style and flair. From there it was on to a form of hard bop more sophisticated than everything else in that greasy, funky, church-y sub-genre, a populist chamber music that came to be known as modal jazz.

His Second Great Quintet of the mid-1960s was more sophisticated still, with greater brawn and power than even the band a decade earlier with John Coltrane had possessed. Miles Davis did not monkey around with standing still, which was clearly not for him—feet had to beat upon new streets. So, he ditched his finest band, plugged in, à la Dylan, experimenting with electronic jazz on In a Silent Way in 1969, then cut a series of sessions in August of that year which officially became, in March 1970, the record that the world knew as Bitches Brew.

Laurence Sterne, when he was writing Tristram Shandy in the mid-1700s, made the statement that his interests in doing so were purely financial. If you’ve read Tristram Shandy, that might make you chuckle, but it’s also heartening, because why shouldn’t it have sold? It was ribald, funny, audacious, pure prose groove—which is also how I view Bitches Brew, in music form.

Davis would borrow against his royalties with his record label, Columbia, which by the end of the 1960s honcho Clive Davis found discomfiting. He didn’t think Miles sold enough to merit the megawatt star treatment. Having never seen a red light that he didn’t take as a personal affront—or, just as often, a racial slight—Davis threatened to walk on over to Motown, a label he maintained better shared his style of thinking. At which point Clive Davis advised the trumpeter to lose the suits and the jazz clubs that had been his métier for so long, don some Indian threads, and take up residence in the rock clubs of the land, notably the Fillmore East in New York and the Fillmore West in San Francisco.

Resistant at first, Davis realized two things: First, most rock musicians were inept as performers, and second, he could do what they did far better—and make a veritable mint in the process. As an added perk, he might just reinvent music for time number—what are we up to at this point?—five or six.

In a Silent Way is a beautiful album. Its electricity is understated, like the hum of energy through a wire. Tony Williams, the drummer wunderkind and holdover from the just-departed Second Great Quintet, plays with a level of control that can itself impart how to be a more disciplined person, thinker, partner. Were this a Beethoven work, it would be the Missa solemnis, rather than the Ninth. Call it enriching.

But it couldn’t prepare audiences for Bitches Brew, Davis’s next electrical statement—a violent, churning cauldron of molten sound. Davis wasn’t just going to get the white rock and roll-buying audience—he was going to shock, floor, and galvanize them. This was tantamount to a form of risk-taking that we hardly ever see in the arts these days. Davis was far too smart and talented to believe in retreads. The art that mattered, he knew, and the art that sold, was the art that went where others artists dared not. Age and era don’t really matter—we love the mold-breakers.

Bitches Brew was a mold-detonator. Recorded between August 19-21 in summer 1969, Davis had a simple directive for producer Teo Macero: Stay the hell out of the way, man, just get down the sound. Don’t talk, don’t offer feedback, let me navigate my lane.

What Davis wanted that lane to be was twofold: a throwback to the famous, bebop-birthing jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in the 1940s, and a scaling back of chord-dominated music—all that sheets of sound stuff—to the root of the chord and extemporizations around it. The scaling back he likened to Stravinsky, while the Minton’s jam sessions were to be channeled by way of Kind of Blue, his modality-based celebration of the chord from 1959. His musicians could do anything they wanted, so long as they worked from the root of the chord that Davis provided them. The resulting record was made up of six compositions, all of them but one over ten minutes long, the title track bubbling right under half an hour.

In musician parlance, this was a mother of a band. It’s a big band, we might say, but big bands didn’t usually play high-decibel avant-garde populist groove rock-jazz. Consider the brace of electric pianists who took their turns throughout the three-day session: Larry Young, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul. That is, frankly, nuts. Their resounding note clusters out Deep Purple-d Deep Purple, rattling your rib cage as the likes of John McLaughlin—who was a Hendrix-level player—strafed away on guitar.

Wayne Shorter swapped out his tenor sax for a soprano, sounding like a beefier version of the more lyrical John Coltrane on the instrument. There were a lot of drummers and percussionists, because Davis wanted a new kind of Wall of Sound, borrowing some of Phil Spector’s thinking, but with more grit and hoodoo. Jack DeJohnette immediately became to fusion drumming what Tony Williams had been to Davis a few years before—the keeper of the skins who freed the artist within, granting Davis a certain courage to come screaming in, to paraphrase what John Lennon said to Ringo Starr before a take of “Don’t Let Me Down.”

Along with James Brown and Sly Stone, Davis comprises the holy trinity of groove of this era, and yet, neither of those other masters of rhythmic form ever had something so snaking, so gargantuanly basilisk-like, as “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” which kicks off side four of this double album set. Macero was a felicitous producer, and he adopted Davis’s less-is-more command. The unedited master takes are like a jungle of sound. It’s wild, teeming, passionately verdurous. On the finished album, overgrowth has been hacked away, the sound is elemental, something that both seeps from and sustains the Earth.

Davis said he wished the sessions were filmed so he could have seen what they looked like after, with him running around, conducting, holding up the charts he wrote which pinpointed the chords and their roots from which he wished the latest vamp to flow. Davis was at his best as a trumpet player, ironically, when he was in conductor-mode; there seemed to be this release that came with being an active auteur that helped him tap into pockets of his playing he might have otherwise left dormant. He was thinking less as a player, and more as a shaper of sound, which only made him a better player, one who now used the wah-wah to searing effect.

What Davis left out of his many remarks on race was that it wasn’t just white hippie kids buying the rock and roll of the time, it was black youth, and, frankly, black people of all ages, because the music of James Brown, Sly Stone, Hendrix, and Sam Cooke possessed a sophistication that the Bach of Art of Fugue would have understood. A unit like Led Zeppelin was de rigueur—a group of needlessly loud ham-fisters compared to these people. With Bitches Brew, Davis was bringing rock and roll home again. But whereas Big Joe Turner and Chuck Berry had done that in the early and mid-1950s with rhythm and blues, Davis did it with jazz. And in doing so, he burned away color lines with this form of molten music that could also cool you down, take away your post-dance sweats without giving you the chills.

There is a remarkable in-person document of this time in Davis’s latest rebirth, from the Fillmore East on March 7, 1970, a few weeks before the release of the album. He was supposed to be opening for Steve Miller, whom he hated as a musician, and rather than prostrate himself to the Man—and Davis always excelled at giving it to the Man—Davis showed up late for the gigs so that Miller had to go on first. The promoter Bill Graham chewed him out, which essentially led to Davis telling him to suck eggs, did he hear what Davis’s band was doing on stage?

Any time I hear this music—captured on Live at the Fillmore East March 7, 1970: It’s About That Time—I wonder what the hell the people there must have been thinking.

It’s spring 1970, you’re at the East Coast’s premiere rock venue, you’re probably used to heady sounds, and have likely had more than your fair share of what Cream, Hendrix, the Stones, the Who, the Beatles, and Byrds had been up to. But I don’t know what might have prepared you for this. It must have felt disorienting, but happily so—not so much a drug trip but a rhythm trip. When you think another layer of groove cannot be added, that we are groove-saturated, Davis has the boys reach for another coat of pure groove. A new electric piano riff is overlaid, another ambulating wall of percussion, a further tower of wah-wah trumpet.

As for the record label: Davis had made his point and, further, he got his sales. Reviews were mixed at first, which is usually how it goes with envelope-pushing art. It’s often the formulaic works with ready “comparables” which get the clean-sheets of glowing reviews. Davis instead hogtied your ears and said, “Behold, this is new!” I would imagine that the next time he wanted to borrow against his royalties for another fancy car or a beach house, he pretty much could just say, “Bitches Brew, boys, Bitches Brew.” But by that point he would have been on to something else anyway.

The post Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and the Lost Art of Risk appeared first on The American Interest.

A More Sustainable Pandemic Strategy

On March 16, the Imperial College London published a coronavirus study that had an enormous impact on officials in the United States and UK. Disseminated widely and rapidly by the media, its predictions about the course of the outbreak alarmed officials into ratcheting up both voluntary and involuntary restrictions on daily activities to slow the pandemic, while also shutting down much of the economy. Its conclusions about the future were especially dire. Government officials in the United States were already beginning to move in the direction of more aggressive disease containment. The day before its publication President Trump declared the coronavirus outbreak a national emergency. But the study’s findings provided the official scientific rationale for the change in course that had already been brewing, and in the process added momentum to it.

The study performed an important service in this regard. Even the public already knew by March 16 how important it was to “flatten the curve” to slow the rise in the number of cases, so as not to overwhelm the health care system, but no one knew what it would take to do so, and officials still spoke as if washing our hands and coughing into our shirtsleeves would do the trick. The study demonstrated how this was insufficient, and how more aggressive measures were needed. I agree with the study in this regard. The study’s emphasis on social distancing, which has led to the closing of non-essential businesses and restrictions on small gatherings, will help to lower the anticipated April peak in COVID-19 cases. My concern is with what follows the April peak, for by then economic issues will start to rival in importance the public health issues. The two trillion-dollar stimulus plan likely to be passed by Congress cannot be renewed every month going forward. There’s not enough money. In addition, the severe economic dislocation resulting from aggressive public health measures such as lockdowns and “shelter-in-place” orders might cause public health problems in their own right, stemming from mass unemployment that causes people to lose their houses and their ability to buy food. True, the study’s authors specifically state that economic policy is outside their bailiwick. Theirs is a purely epidemiological analysis, they say. Yet policymakers who use the study’s findings do not have the luxury of ignoring the economic dimension. For this reason, policymakers would be wise to make a closer inspection of the study, and especially its simulation parameters and unwarranted assumptions. These reveal not only an alternative approach to the pandemic, but also reasons for more optimism.

The study distinguishes between disease mitigation, in which the rate of viral infection is slowed to prevent the health care system from being overloaded, and disease suppression, in which the pandemic is stopped dead in its tracks. With neither mitigation nor suppression, the study predicts 2.2 million deaths in the United States from COVID-19. With mitigation the number of deaths is only halved. Although the demand for critical care beds decreases with mitigation, it is still estimated to be eight times higher than the existing number of beds, leading to many deaths from lack of health care. In addition, many people during mitigation will still get the disease, and some of them will die, even with health care.

Mitigation in the study includes measures such as case isolation, household quarantine, and social distancing for people over age 70. In case isolation, symptomatic cases stay home for seven days. In household quarantine, both the patient and all household members remain at home for 14 days. The study assumes that case isolation and household quarantine will only be in place for three months, while social distancing for the 70 plus age group will only be in place for four months. But why so short a time? Most Americans already expect anyone with COVID-19 to stay home for seven days, and to always stay home for seven days. Nor would most Americans think it outrageous to compel an entire household to remain isolated for 14 days if a member caught the disease. Many households are stocking up on food for just this purpose, to hunker down for 14 days. They would think it natural to always compel a household to do so, including themselves, and not just over a three month period. Few people would expect case isolation and household quarantine to last only three months.

In addition, many people age 70 and over would be quite comfortable with social distancing for longer than four months, especially since they are most at risk. Many seniors are retired and do not need to risk the social contact that comes with employment. Only 15 percent of this age group works, and often in service areas or in white-collar jobs that can frequently be done in isolation. Many of their recreational activities can also be done in isolation. Half of all female seniors (and they compose a majority of this age cohort) live alone. The study’s assumption that social distancing among seniors would be difficult and intolerable beyond four months thus seems unwarranted.

There are other questions about the study’s assumptions concerning mitigation. The study assumes only 70 percent of Americans will comply with case isolation, that only 50 percent will comply with household quarantine, and that only 75 percent of seniors will comply with social distancing, which is why the mitigation numbers are so disappointing. These estimates are too pessimistic. The compliance rate for these measures would likely be much higher. Driving is a good measure of what can be accomplished in this regard, for driving is practically a symbol of American freedom, and something that one would expect Americans to be loath to part with. Yet rates of driving appear to have already dropped fully by half in states with high COVID-19 case numbers, such as California and New York, while driving in states with few case numbers, such as Wyoming, have not, which is to be expected. When Americans feel a sense of urgency in their immediate environment, they reliably change their behavior.

As for those few infected households that refuse to accept the 14-day quarantine, most Americans would probably not see it as a violation of the country’s founding principles to force them to comply. Such enforcement is already taking root even in places like Kentucky and Fort Worth, Texas. This is the opposite of what one might expect, given the strong suspicion of government embedded in these regions, including among legislators.

Thus, mitigation may offer more possibilities than the study suggests, and the COVID-19 mortality rate may not be nearly as high as it predicts. In any event, rather than try mitigation, the study recommends suppression, which would include some combination of case isolation, home quarantine, closure of schools and universities, and social distancing of the entire population—all for a five-month period. The two suppression scenarios run in the study include, first, home quarantine, case isolation, and general social distancing, and, second, school and university closure, case isolation, and general social distancing. Curiously, no scenario in this part of the study includes all four modalities—for example, both home quarantine and school closure—which is surprising, since home quarantine for 14 days, as noted above, is something that most people would readily accept, along with school and university closure until the fall. True, we do not have official nationwide school and university closure until the fall as of this moment. Many districts plan to re-open at the end of April. But two weeks ago the plan had been to re-open in early April, and today there is growing expectation among the public that the schools will remain closed until fall. People sense government officials are trying to let them down gently, and it comes as no real surprise to them whenever the school opening date keeps being postponed. It is why Liberty University’s recent announcement that it would re-open its campus this semester received national attention. It went against the grain of what the public had already expected. Thus, for all practical purposes, schools and universities are closed until fall.

The addition of home quarantine to the policy mix that includes school closure would logically reduce the projected number of COVID-19 cases, which is already dramatically lowered through the other three suppression modalities. Indeed, even without home quarantine, the mix of school closure, case isolation, and social distancing of the general population lowers the number of new critical care cases dramatically after an April peak.

The study has other questionable assumptions and conclusions regarding suppression. First, as noted above, the study assumes that case isolation, home quarantine, and social distancing (at least for those 70 and above) would continue for no more than five months in a suppression strategy. In fact, they could go on for much longer, and with little public inconvenience or outcry. Second, the study seems to view school and university closure for five months as a continuous restriction. It doesn’t take into account the summer months, when school is out. On the one hand, this makes school closure an easy restriction, for the three summer months of closure come for free. On the other hand, summer may make the situation more difficult, and not less, given that students will no longer be bottled up inside institutions other than the occasional summer camp (a point that becomes relevant below). In any event, the fact that the study does not view school closure during summer as a significant epidemiological event is problematic.

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Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, March 16, 2020

Third, when combined with case isolation and general social distancing, the study judges school and university closure to be a more effective suppression strategy than home quarantine. But a close inspection of the graph (reproduced here from page 19 of the study) exposes an important nuance. Yes, the line that represents school and university closure (combined with case isolation and general social distancing) adheres very close to the x-axis, meaning few new COVID-19 critical care cases crop up after April, while the number of critical care beds available easily accommodates those that do. Yet the line that represents home quarantine without school and university closure runs only a little higher off the x-axis, and roughly tracks the line representing the current number of ICU beds available, which suggests the U.S. health care system could handle the scenario of suppression through home quarantine almost as well as it could the scenario based on school closure. This is important, as the public will likely accept home quarantine for 14 days. In contrast, school and university closure for the fall semester threatens social and economic havoc.

In addition, the line representing the suppression of critical care cases through home quarantine (along with general social distancing and case isolation) lifts off again when the five-month test period ends. But then, why would it end? As noted above, the public would accept a 14-day home quarantine strategy for good. The only major issue is the viability of general social distancing over a long period of time (to be discussed below).

Even with relying on school and university closure for only five months (which, as noted above, would probably happen anyhow for six months), the number of COVID-19 cases does not skyrocket again until October. This leads to one of the more irritating aspects of the study: It fails to take into account society’s capacity for innovation. For example, the red line in the study’s graphs, which represents the number of critical care beds in the U.S., remains constant between now and the rest of the year. This is inconceivable once the full force of America’s industrial sector comes online. It is more than merely plausible that the United States could double or even triple the number of fully equipped ICU venues between now and October. In the next two weeks alone, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will build 10,000 new critical care bed sites. Even the study’s primary author, Neil Ferguson, has recently revised his number of expected deaths in the UK downward, from several hundred thousand to twenty thousand, precisely because the recent aggressive public health steps taken by the government means there will be enough ICU beds to match the now-lower expected number of cases during the April peak. Nor does the study take into account the new and innovative anti-viral drug technology that will likely arise between now and October, if not to prevent COVID-19 then at least to treat it.

The question of closing schools this fall doesn’t even come into play, though, for the suppression strategy of case isolation, home quarantine, and social distancing for at least those above age 70 could continue for a very long time, with few complaints, and with little effect on the economy, until a vaccine comes along. The key question is whether the public will tolerate social distancing of the general population necessitated by this suppression strategy for longer than five months, while keeping the economy from cratering any further than it already will.

It is important to note that the study does not equate social distancing of the general population with a total lockdown, or with preventing people from going to work—which is what we have now in some cities and states. According to the study, social distancing for seniors is defined as lowering contacts in the workplace by 50 percent, which is easily doable, since many seniors are already retired and not working, and those who work typically do so in jobs amenable to teleworking. The study defines social distancing of the general population as reducing contact outside of the household, school, and workplace by 75 percent. What this means is that everyday socializing in the general population must be reduced by 75 percent. Social contact among the general population in the workplace is only expected to be reduced 25 percent, which is even less than the 50 percent reduction in social contact assumed for seniors in the workplace.

Yet sifting through these parameters and assumptions, one can discover another, more sustainable pandemic strategy that can save many lives without destroying our economy, which a strategy of total lockdown would threaten to do. The South Korean method that involves rigorous testing everywhere won’t work, since the United States will only have 27 million test kits by the end of this month. It is too late to use testing to confine the infection to specific regions, as the disease has already spread too far across the country. The major method left to us is social distancing, with the issue of school and university closure also a matter of debate, and home quarantine a given.

Another Option

To understand how general social distancing could work—and do so without destroying the U.S. economy—one must first understand the psychology of the American consumer who drives the American economy. At least in terms of discretionary spending, that person is mostly upper-middle class or higher. Low-income people obviously spend, but they do not have the same spending power beyond buying basic necessities, while lower middle-class people typically spend on practical consumer durables but not much more. While the middle classes drive consumer spending in Asia, it is the upper-middle class and rich that drive consumer spending in the United States, including leisure, luxury goods, entertainment, retail, and other services. To keep the consumer economy going in the United States, which is 70 percent of the American economy, these people need to keep buying.

Stores that sell basic goods are not at risk of bankruptcy or laying off workers. Everyone needs groceries and prescription medication. The companies at risk are those that sell everything else, especially to the upper-middle class and higher. But upper-middle class Americans have a peculiar psychology: They are extremely risk-averse, across their lives—for example, on how they invest, where they choose to live, the activities they pursue, and their social lives. With this temperament, upper-middle class consumers during the pandemic will avoid risk at all cost. A store telling them that it will provide them with masks, gloves, and some hand wash free of charge if they enter accomplishes little. Risk still exists, and so many will stay away. Not even “helicopter money” from the Federal government will change this behavior. Helicopter money will help low-income people buy basic necessities; it will not encourage the upper-middle class and the rich to jumpstart the consumer economy.

The online economy bypasses this risk, and those companies that sell products and services online will succeed and continue to employ workers. Every effort should be made to convert stores to this model, although most already have. Upper-middle class people will continue to patronize them while social distancing. This also includes stores that sell basic necessities.

Yet 25 percent of Americans do not use the Internet, whether because they cannot afford the service or because they lack access to broadband. Many of these Americans must still physically go to the store, but doing so risks violating social distancing in the general population. For social distancing to work, the Imperial College study says there must be a 75 percent reduction in social contacts outside of home, school, or work. Requiring low-income people to get their basic necessities by physically patronizing stores would likely violate this rule right off the bat. CVS, for example, sells drugs, but will only deliver them by mail if a customer registers online. As Congress ladles out money, it is essential to ensure that every American who consumes basic needs independently, outside of an institutional caregiver, has Internet access through a computer or some communication device, while also ensuring that the stores that service them can deliver food and prescription drugs to their residences. Otherwise we will have the paradox of an economy improving from upper-middle class people spending on luxury goods and a pandemic worsening from low-income people forced to venture out for shopping for basic goods.

The upper-middle class will patronize stores in person, but the stores must account for the mindset of the risk-averse and organize shopping in a way that satisfies their concerns. That means, for example, curbside delivery service (something that Best Buy has recently implemented); curbside consultations; pre-visit consultations through phone or Internet; better Internet product visuals; special traffic rules that let shoppers sign up on the Internet for a specific time slot, allowing that store to restrict the flow of customers so that only a handful can shop at a time. This would require stores to expand their hours or even shift to 24-hour schedules and spread workers out (which would actually help workers to social distance, too). Customers would also have to be reassured that they could avoid touching anything, including doors, while in the store, and that employees would also abide by social distancing rules.

Plane travel will require stringent rules to tempt upper-middle class consumers to use them in the near future, but those rules are manageable. Passenger planes must travel at 60 percent capacity to break even; planes will have to fly at that capacity to space passengers out and preserve social distancing. Americans Airlines has just recently announced its intention to improve social distancing on its planes along these lines. Screens will have to be placed between passengers. In addition, airlines will have to administer the new FDA-approved COVID-19 virus test that yields results in 45 minutes to all boarding passengers, and prevent those who test positive from boarding. Special head gear beyond masks for passengers would ease jitters. All these steps may seem ridiculous, but the psychology of sufficient numbers of upper-middle class consumers will demand it. So will the economy. Much of the consumer economy today (and therefore the economy in general) is organized around the sale of non-essential items—for example, leisure, entertainment, retail, restaurants, and travel for fun. This is the Achilles’ heel of a consumer economy geared not to the vital purchases of all income groups, but to the caprices of the upper-middle class and the wealthy. It is not the economy we might wish to have, but it is the economy we do have, and we must satisfy the peculiar consumer psychologies that come with it.

Economically speaking, finding a short-term treatment for COVID-19 is just as important as finding a long-term vaccine, and for the same reason: Fear moves upper-middle class people. It is why the anxiety grew dramatically in the United States not after the initial deaths of very elderly and debilitated nursing home residents in Washington state, but when middle-aged people without pre-existing disease started dying. At that point the fear became palpable, and the economy, at least in regard to non-essential purchases, began to collapse. Finding a treatment for COVID-19 won’t prevent a person from getting the disease, but the goal is to prevent a person from dying of the disease, to dissipate the mass fear stalling the consumer spending that drives the economy.

The same is true for the antibody test that shows whether one has had COVID-19. Many cases of the disease are asymptomatic, and so many upper-middle class people wonder if they have already had the disease. If they discover through the test that they have, they will feel immediate relief and re-start their old spending habits. Every upper-middle class person I’ve spoken with over the last few weeks has confessed this point to me. In terms of getting the economy moving again, the antibody test, which will emerge soon, should be made not only available but ubiquitous. For many upper-middle class people it will have the same salutary effect on their psychologies as a vaccine.

The 75 percent reduction in social contact outside the home, school, or workplace among the general population is the Imperial College study’s stiffest requirement for suppression, but it is achievable. To some degree, social distancing complements a longstanding trend in American upper-middle class behavior. Over the past few decades, the public square has shrunk, while upper-middle class people have recreated many of the amenities of public life inside their homes: in-home entertainment centers, in-home gyms, in-home bars, in-home game areas, in-home offices, and in-home restaurant-grade kitchens. Socializing in upper-middle class culture often takes the form of conversation through social media. In addition there exists a range of services from coaching to therapy to yoga to financial counseling that upper-middle class people purchase online. This foundation will allow for effective social distancing and strong consumer activity to exist simultaneously.

As for the workplace, the study expects only a 25 percent reduction in social contact at work to accomplish satisfactory disease suppression, which should not be hard to achieve, especially if workers, including unions, are flexible—for example, in the spreading out of shifts. A large number of workers in the service economy can simply work from home. Given that very large companies with more than 10,000 employees now employ almost 40 percent of Americans, and that another 15 percent of Americans work for government, many options exist for social distancing. Not all businesses are small restaurants, bars, and pubs with inflexible schedules, small manpower bases, small physical spaces, and tiny profit margins to tide them over during an economic downturn. Even the enormous chain restaurants can usually compensate for financial losses in one region by making more money in others. Finally, someone will have to deliver all these goods to the houses of the upper-middle class and rich. Domino’s Pizza just announced that it will hire 10,000 delivery people. More Uber drivers will also be needed. This will provide temporary work until the pandemic ends.

Yet the above logic applies only to people between the ages of 30 and 70 (with social distancing in the above 70 age group taken into account in the first part of this essay). It does not apply to young people, who tend to have the opposite sensibility. Rather than being averse to risk, they seem almost to court it. As the pandemic rages, young people are still partying on the beach and in off-campus fraternity houses that remain open despite colleges having been shut down. In Baltimore, where I live and go on solo walks, while carefully social distancing, I see young people all the time playing, laughing, hugging, and kissing in the parks and on the campuses of closed schools, both uptown and downtown, to this day. How can social distancing be achieved in this group to get to the necessary 75 percent reduction in social contact? It cannot.

This is where the Imperial College study becomes unreasonable in its assumptions. It argues that the most effective suppression strategy demands school and university closure, which causes the line representing new critical care cases to curve down after April toward zero, before climbing again, dangerously so, as students return to school in the fall and the weather cools. Thus, policymakers face a fork in the road in late April, depending on whether the critical care case numbers going forward actually do, in fact, decline. I do not believe they will plummet quite so much, as students out of school congregate. They find each other. Keeping them from doing so is like fighting the winds or reversing the tides. It is impossible, especially when both parents work, and even more so when a single parent does. These young people will go home after their fun and infect their parents or next-door neighbors, which increases the caseload. Much of the ground gained through social distancing among the general population of adults risks being lost. Early statistics out of China suggest that 80 percent of transmission occurs through the household.

If the study is correct, then school and university closure would have to continue through the fall semester, assuming no treatment for COVID-19 is found by then. The study assumes only a five month school closure; to prevent the fall spike school closure would have to be extended. The spike might be less intense than predicted if home quarantine is added to the policy mix. As noted above, the study does not combine school closure and home quarantine in its test case. If school closure is needed in the fall it will require college students to learn online, and younger students to be homeschooled.

But who will homeschool the children when the parents are working? Even more relevant, who will be at home to prevent the children and teenagers from going outside, finding their friends, and getting infected? The study assumes that contacts in the community will increase by 25 percent with school closure. This seems like a low number, given the determination of young people to find each other. It is why more than half of the coronavirus infections in New York are between 18 and 49. Young people even throw coronavirus parties. “If I get corona, I get corona,” one teen declared at a party last week. At least in school, the authorities can force some kind of social distancing on young people in the classroom. Without school, young people will be free to roam. The school closure strategy in the fall really pins all our hopes on finding some kind of treatment for COVID-19, since implementing closure would be economically disastrous as well as medically useless.

The alternative strategy, and one more likely to be needed, I believe—as the critical care case numbers probably will decline after the April peak, just not quite as much as expected—is to let students return to school in the fall. However, for college students it must be a one-way trip. No going home on weekends or holidays. This is key. College students will congregate no matter what. Great effort at social distancing should be tried in college—for example, through spacing in classrooms, converting to single-occupant dorm rooms, using alternative housing nearby, such as now-vacant hotels, setting up Quonset hut-like rooms for students on vacant campus land, or even using now-unused cruise ships to house students if the college is on a coast. But most likely these social distancing efforts will not work. The students will find each other; they will infect one another. Fortunately, their mortality rate is almost negligible, and, most important, they will not be going home to infect their parents if they remain at college.

Other adjustments will have to be made for the fall semester. Commuter schools will need to move to totally online platforms, or simply not offer classes for that semester, to prevent students going to and from home. In addition, colleges in general will have to craft an online alternative for students with pre-existing disease, and for those students who would prefer to stay at home and not take the risk of being in close contact with other students. Finally, teachers will need physical protection against infection from students—for example, teaching by video-feed.

Keeping the colleges open is important for an economic reason. In many towns and cities, a college or a hospital is the major employer. The biggest employer in Baltimore, for example, is Johns Hopkins, which has both a college and a hospital. Colleges serve as an economic lifeline for many towns—another downside of the global economy in which our manufacturing base was long ago off-shored. Not to have the students in college would destroy the delicate eco-system that enables many of these towns to survive. With hospitals busy treating COVID-19 cases and colleges busy educating students, and with much of this activity funded by the Federal government, these towns can survive economically.

As for younger children, kindergarten can be cancelled for the fall semester. Children who are kindergarten age or younger can remain at home. If they are in daycare, however, because a single parent works, or because both parents work, a big problem arises, as the children can become infected in daycare and then return home to infect their parents. The same problem exists for pre-college students attending school. Global capitalism gave us open borders and the easy transmission of the COVID-19 virus; it also created a wage scale that demands both parents work, even if one parent would prefer to stay home and raise the children. The practice leaves society little wiggle room.

If a technological solution to the pandemic has not been found by the fall, then one alternative is to switch to a suppression strategy that includes home quarantine, case isolation, and general social distancing, which will lead to a spike in critical care cases, according to the study, but one that might be managed with the new ICU beds and ventilators that will have come along by then. Another alternative, if society is desperate and the lives of hundreds of thousands truly are on the line, is to separate children from their parents for a month or two, to prevent the spread within the household. In other words, for a short period of time children can live at daycare. Hopefully, it won’t come to that.

As for pre-college youths, no obvious solution exists. A key point of the strategy I have outlined is to keep young people as far apart from adults and seniors as possible, and for as long as possible. In summer, when young people are roaming, without school to occupy them, rather than see the line representing the school closure suppression strategy adhere close to the x-axis, I expect it will rise somewhat, as young people, many of whom will be asymptomatic, infect their elders. Even summer camp will have little positive effect, as summer camp for young people is not a one-way trip; nor is it structured around a classroom, where young people can be made to social distance. On they contrary, young people play with each other in close proximity. Fortunately, summer weather is warm, which may suppress the coronavirus. Yet on the return to school in the fall, unless an enormous number of boarding schools are suddenly built for young people, there will be going back and forth between home and school, which will be a problem.

As for the small bars and restaurants in NYC closing down, and which have received an enormous amount of press attention, probably nothing can be done to save them. Older adults and seniors happily order take-out, but many twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings want to do more than just eat when they go to these venues. They want to “see and be seen;” they want to find each other. It is the reason why so many NYC bars and restaurants exist. Since they are non-essential, as so much is in the American consumer economy, and veritable petri dishes, it is probably wise to let them close for the foreseeable future. Curiously, but not surprisingly, the more expensive restaurants that cater to middle-aged, upper-middle class, and rich adults who are content with take-out seem to be holding on.

But there is hope—and one that I am very confident in holding. According to the study, after the April peak, things improve, and we gain time to strategize and work out the kinks in our suppression strategy. We have until the fall.

During that time, the kind of technological innovation that is the hallmark of capitalist societies can hopefully work its magic. I believe that the discovery of COVID-19 treatments, coupled with improvements in screening, will get us through this crisis, or at least help us muddle through until a proper vaccine is developed. Innovation will be our salvation, as it has been countless times before in our past.

The post A More Sustainable Pandemic Strategy appeared first on The American Interest.

How We Can Manage the Pandemic and Preserve our Democracy

The COVID-19 pandemic presents the United States not only with its worst public health crisis in a century but also the most formidable challenge to its democracy since World War II. How can an open and free society summon the discipline and cooperation needed to confront this pandemic? How can our medical providers, our emergency responders, our police, and our armed forces, continue to do their jobs if large numbers of them are falling ill and even dying? How long can we shut down most commerce and services before our economy, and with it our social fabric, comes undone? How can people vote freely and safely in the remaining primary elections, and in the general election on November 3, if we continue to need pervasive physical distancing and quarantines? How can the United States Congress function as our legislative branch if many of its members—whose jobs require them to commute back and forth from Washington—fall ill or, God forbid, die?

We cannot overcome this crisis with anything like the levels of vengeful partisan polarization, win-at-any-cost politics, and presidential deceit and wishful thinking to which we have become accustomed. The crisis poses an existential challenge to our democracy, our prosperity, and our global leadership. We have to get this right, fast. And we need to come together as a nation around a strategy and a set of basic principles. Hopefully, the passage of the $2.2 trillion economic relief bill will show what we are capable of.

Any strategy requires clear goals, and the means and sequence of steps to get there. Our goals must be to minimize deaths while protecting the health of our democracy, our economy, and our social fabric. Here is what a national strategy might look like.

Managing the Health Crisis

Today, the first step—Phase I—must be an all-out collective effort to “flatten the curve” of the contagion through a broad but temporary suspension of in-person social and economic life. (This is normally referred to as “social distancing,” but since virtual social interaction remains both possible and, for mental and societal health, essential in this crisis, I prefer the term “physical distancing.”) Even if, as some medical scientists are now suggesting, the death rate from the virus proves to be only a fraction of the initially reported 1 to 3 percent of all cases of infection, no country in the world—and certainly not the United States—seems to have sufficient medical-care capacity (hospital beds and staff, protective gear for medical workers, medicines, and ventilators) to manage the surge in critical cases that would result from a laissez faire posture of just letting the virus take its course. One of the most respected epidemiological centers in the world, at Imperial College, London, estimated earlier this month over two million Americans and half a million Britons could die in such a scenario.

How long radical, “stay-at-home” distancing should go on is now at the crux of the debate. Faced with the staggering implications of the virus coursing through a country with much weaker infrastructure and health care capacity, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ordered his entire country—1.3 billion people—to stay at home for three weeks. After first pursuing a “herd immunity” strategy that was pretty close to letting the virus take its “natural” course, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson—himself now diagnosed with the virus—has imposed a near-total lockdown on the entire United Kingdom that, The Telegraph reports, “will be reviewed every three weeks but is likely to last for months.” Many American institutions, such as universities and school systems, are planning for a months-long shutdown of most in-person activity.

Yet, as Dr. David L. Katz wrote recently in a provocative New York Times op-ed, it may be possible, and in fact advisable, to take a more targeted approach to distancing once the curve of contagion has been flattened and our health care facilities have been shored up with the vast increases in safe testing and treatment capacity that they need. Then, we could open up the economy and society to normal life for most but by no means all Americans. As long as the virus is still spreading, the key in that Phase II would be to selectively continue physical distancing by “preferentially protecting the medically frail and those over age 60, and in particular those over 70 and 80, from exposure.” For the roughly 70 million Americans who are over age 60 (or the more than 50 million over age 65), this would still mean fairly radical quarantine, with potentially significant costs to individual physical, mental, and economic well-being, but it could at least enable economic and social life to return to something closer to normal for the rest of society. If they are still in the work force, some of those older Americans could continue working from home. Others would need special support. With—and only with—a surged capacity for more widespread testing, we would know who would be safe to physically engage and assist those under quarantine.

Phase III—general relief—might come as early as summer, when high heat and humidity might slow the spread of the virus in those parts of the world with temperate climates, such as the United States and Europe. But this might only be a partial and temporary respite, until the virus returns with a vengeance in the fall, like the influenza did in 1918. Unless the virus mutates in the next season into something with a much lower mortality rate for the elderly and impaired, tens of millions of Americans would, under this scenario, need to remain quarantined from contact with anyone who could not be shown (as the result of a recent test) to be free of the virus. Such broad quarantining of the vulnerable population would need to continue until a vaccine was tested and made available.

Biomedical science is working now at lightning speed to search for such a vaccine, with four variants already being tested in animals. But the necessary testing process makes it unlikely that a vaccine will be available before the fall of 2021. And even then, there could be a desperate scramble for supply. That would also be the case for any antiviral drugs that are discovered to be effective in treating COVID-19. The United States and many other countries must begin now—with government direction and assistance—to develop large-scale domestic production capacity for the vaccine and other critical pharmaceuticals. Otherwise, the world could enter the 2021-22 virus season facing two types of equally agonizing “beggar-thy-neighbor” scenarios: the rich countries of the world cornering all available supplies, while poor countries were left defenseless, or some large countries that produce vaccines, such as China and India, only exporting them after all their domestic needs (for more than two billion people) were met.

Long before we reach that point—in fact, now—the President should invoke the Defense Production Act to direct American manufacturing companies to surge production of essential medical supplies, especially testing kits, respirators, protective masks, goggles, gowns, and ventilators (to keep the most critically ill breathing), as well as diagnostic and other equipment. We are already over a week past President Trump’s pledge to invoke the act, yet incredibly, the self-proclaimed “war-time President,” whose country is facing a real war-like emergency, is now hesitating to exercise the legitimate war-like powers he has to expedite production of these materials. No American car manufacturer has yet risen to the production challenge; although Ford, General Motors and Tesla have pledged to make masks and ventilators, they have not yet done so, as the typical production plant could take months to retool. There is no time to lose, even if it means constructing plants from scratch. In addition, the President should answer New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s call to have the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers build temporary hospital facilities where the needs are greatest. Trump said a week ago he is “looking into” the possibility of such deployment, but time is of the essence as illnesses proliferate to near-catastrophic proportions in some states.

Protecting our Democracy

We also need to act urgently, now, to secure the most critical functions of our democracy: our legislative process, our party nominating conventions, and not least, our elections.

The Congress must move as quickly as possible to change its rules so it can function, and most of all vote on resolutions and legislation, from a physical distance. We don’t have the time in this crisis to wait the three years that it took for the House of Representatives to change its rules in 1973 to adopt electronic voting in the chamber. The 116th Congress is one of the oldest in history. Nearly half the Senate (48 members) and a third of the House (147 members) are over 65. Mitch McConnell recently turned 78 and Nancy Pelosi just turned 80. A few members of Congress have already been diagnosed with the virus and at least 35 members of the House and Senate are self-quarantining and so cannot vote. It is long past time for Congress to develop electronic means to deliberate publicly and then verifiably vote from a distance (which should have been instituted after 9/11). We are at risk of losing the capacity for Congress to function legally and legitimately if it does not adopt this vital change in its rules. That could accelerate a dangerous slide toward unchecked executive power at precisely the moment in history when we have a President who is deeply disrespectful of institutional checks on his power.

Although they are still months away, it may also be necessary for the two party conventions to be held virtually, and planning for this must begin soon. Imagine that the virus is still spreading when the Democratic Convention is supposed to take place in Milwaukee in mid-July, or that new infections are popping up when the Republicans meet in Charlotte in late August, in each case in indoor NBA basketball arenas. The virus could sweep through and devastate an entire party leadership—governors, senators, local officials, party activists, and their support staff, as well as journalists and observers. The two parties now have several months to prepare to stage virtual events in which committees can meet, platforms can be adopted, delegates can caucus, the presidential and vice-presidential candidates can be nominated, and keynote and acceptance speeches can be given—all through internet meetings, distance voting, and studio television broadcasts that will be widely viewed as legitimate across the country.

That leaves the biggest challenge, and the one with the greatest potential to generate a crisis—the November 3 election. Nine states (soon to be ten) have already postponed their remaining presidential primaries, mostly to June 2. These were the right decisions from both a political and public health perspective. But we still have plenty of time to ensure that the general election on November 3 takes place as scheduled. For the legitimacy and integrity of our democracy (as hundreds of political scientists have recently declared), it must not be postponed.

To ensure that a fair November election amid an ongoing or resurgent pandemic, Americans must be able to vote at home (returning ballots by postage-free mail or drop-off). Some states (Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) have been doing this uniformly, and others (Hawaii and Utah) were already set to switch to vote by mail this year. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden have proposed legislation that would “guarantee every voter a secure mail-in paper ballot and help states cover the cost of printing, self-sealing envelopes, ballot tracking and postage.” Unfortunately, this non-partisan initiative appears stillborn due to partisan politics and ideological resistance to federal mandates in election methods. Yet, as former Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele and conservative writer Eli Lehrer observe in their endorsement of it, “vote-by-mail does not favor any particular political party” and appears to increase turnout across the board. Hence, we at least need to strongly encourage, and provide federal aid to enable, states to give all voters the option of voting by mail in November, as the bipartisan leaders of the 2013-14 Presidential Commission on Election Administration, Bob Bauer, Ben Ginsberg, and Nathaniel Persily, have just urged. The $2.2 trillion relief bill provides $400 million for election assistance. This is only a small down payment on the need, which the above authors put at $2 billion. With his fellow election scholar Charles Stewart III, Persily has recommended a level of federal assistance to state and local electoral administration similar to the $3 billion Congress authorized in the wake of the 2000 election debacle. This could enable states to acquire the ballots and equipment necessary for large-scale voting by mail, and to educate the public about the process of casting (and counting) mail ballots.

Where voting proceeds in person, early voting at central locations should be expanded (as the Wyden-Klobuchar bill provides), polling stations should be sanitized, poll workers should wear protective masks and gloves, and lines should be managed so that voters are spaced apart. We may also need to recruit non-traditional poll workers, such as college students, who are less at risk of growing seriously ill from the virus than the more common poll workers of advanced age.

In addition, the Brennan Center urges expanded online voter registration, extended voter registration deadlines, and extending the deadline for the Electoral College vote (which this year falls on December 14) to the end of the calendar year to allow for the resolution of any electoral disputes arising from the slower pace of counting mail ballots.

These are no longer theoretical issues for election specialists, just as the question of how to contain a pandemic is no longer just an academic matter for public health specialists. We are facing a grave crisis on multiple fronts. The President’s cavalier disregard for intelligence briefings squandered precious weeks when we could have better prepared for the public health challenge. But we can still prepare to conduct the party conventions and the November 3 election on time, in safe, inclusive, and transparent fashion. And we still have time (though precious little) to keep this virus from killing Americans on a massive scale. For the sake of our democracy, our economy, and the people and country we love, we must put partisan politics aside and act on these imperatives now, before it is too late.

The post How We Can Manage the Pandemic and Preserve our Democracy appeared first on The American Interest.

How Not to Democratize China

Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis

Ci Jiwei

Harvard University Press, 2019, 432 pp. $45.00 

Democracy is no stranger to China, but for well over a century it has wandered homeless throughout the length and breadth of the land. Hong Kong-based political philosopher Jiwei Ci joins a long line of Chinese political and thought leaders who have prescribed democracy as a remedy for what ails the Chinese body politic. In 1898, as the Manchu dynasty was collapsing, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao advocated British-style constitutional monarchy as the vehicle for introducing democracy to China. Democracy was one of the three pillars of nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People (along with nationalism and people’s livelihood). In 1918, Chen Duxiu, a leader of the New Culture Movement, invoked “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” to extricate China from its post-dynastic morass. Even Mao Zedong, ideologically committed to a violent and bloody seizure of power, feigned devotion to democracy in his 1940 screed New Democracy aimed against Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, a weak “strongman” bravely resisting Japanese aggression. More recently, the student-led Chinese citizens’ movements of spring 1989 valorized democracy as it peacefully urged the calcified leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to undertake meaningful political reform. Chinese democracy is not an oxymoron.

Ci’s paradoxical and quixotic contribution to this legacy is to call upon party supremo Xi Jinping to take the lead in preparing the Chinese people for an orderly transition to the simulacrum rather than the reality of a democratic system, in which the CCP would retain its leading position in a highly centralized Chinese state that would guarantee Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity—objectives that Ci, like the CCP, prioritizes. Unless Ci possesses the medieval alchemists’ philosopher’s stone that was supposed to transform base metals into gold, the notion of transmuting the neo-Maoist authoritarian egotist Xi Jinping into an avatar of democracy is preposterous. One might as well try persuading tigers to become vegans. To be sure, Ci’s book is intellectually challenging, erudite, and consistently engaging, but it is a purely cerebral exercise, almost devoid of empirical history, sociology, and real politics. Unfortunately, it contributes little of value to the serious task of contemplating a possible future transition from an authoritarian hybridized “communist” political system to some sort of democratic future for China. Taken as a whole—notwithstanding Ci’s intermittently sharp criticism of actually existing “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” his pose as a detached philosopher, and his prudential argument in favor of Chinese democracy—he comes across as a soft apologist for an abhorrent regime.

Ci’s point of departure is what he describes as a looming crisis in political legitimacy for the ruling CCP. As the revolutionary legacy upon which its presumptive right to rule is based fades into oblivion, the party will require a new foundation for its legitimacy. The CCP leaders that follow Xi Jinping, Ci says, will be much weaker than he and unlike him will lack any connection to the revolutionary legacy. (Xi’s father was a core member of the first generation of revolutionary leaders headed by Mao Zedong.) Neither performance legitimacy—the Party’s success in presiding over decades of rapid economic growth—nor its self-identification with the rise of China as a world power will provide an adequate substitute. Chinese society in Ci’s view already exhibits a growing equality of social conditions—thus in social if not political terms, China is already a democratic society. The problem for legitimacy is supposedly the lack of “fit” between society and politics, a problem (or “contradiction” in the Maoist sense) that can only be resolved by CCP-supervised democratic preparation of the Chinese people, who should accept the role of responsible, mature citizens in a vaguely democratic system whose political institutions and governing processes Ci deliberately leaves undefined. His only caution is “to avoid the dogma that the only genuine form or method of democracy is the one that prevails in its many variations in contemporary Western democracies. It is especially necessary to do so in order to leave room for due consideration of China’s special need for a strong state with exceptional centripetal force” (emphasis added).

Here Ci’s views are entirely congruent with those of the ruling CCP which deploys “exceptional centripetal force” to maintain control over those of its citizens who dare to think for themselves as well as over Tibet and Xinjiang—all while threatening de facto independent Taiwan with coerced integration into the PRC, a prospect the vast majority of Taiwanese understandably reject. Incidentally, it is telling that Ci fails even to mention, let alone seriously analyze, Taiwan’s successful transition from authoritarianism to democracy as a possible template for China, lest that exercise antagonize CCP bigwigs. By his frequent adulatory references to the CCP’s great achievements, Ci apparently seeks to ingratiate himself with the top leaders of the CCP in the manner of Machiavelli addressing Lorenzo de’ Medici. Ci’s dismissive references to contemporary Western democracies ignore the reality of functioning Asian democracies in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and other distinctly non-Western states. Yet his strictures against the hegemony of neo-liberalism and capitalist dominion in Western democracies are pertinent to a potentially democratic China where the party-state already collaborates with China’s ultra-wealthy and politically well-connected capitalists. In addition to his silence regarding Taiwan’s democratic transition, Ci has nothing to say about the post-communist transitions in Russia and East and Central Europe. Such ground facts are invisible or irrelevant from the heights at which he operates.

I can address only a few of the numerous problems with Ci’s scenario for a partial transition to democracy. First is the notion that the CCP’s right-to-rule rests upon “communist teleological-revolutionary legitimacy.” In fact, the CCP came to power not through a popular revolution, but through a civil war following a debilitating eight year war of resistance to Japanese aggression, from 1937 to 1945. While Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government and armies bore the brunt of the fighting, the Chinese communists opportunistically took advantage of the conflict to expand their own territory and armed forces, acting like a parasite infecting a weakened body. Communist revolutionary legitimacy rests upon an historical myth that Ci does not challenge. Ci’s distance from political as opposed to political-philosophical discourse is demonstrated by his failure to examine actual power relations. Nor does he analyze the political role of classes, social groups, ethnicities, religions, regional interests, or anything concrete that actually operate in politics.

A second dubious contention central to his prudential case for democracy is that contemporary Chinese society is already substantially democratic in the sense that Tocqueville, whom Ci frequently cites along with Althusser, Gramsci, Kant, and others, discerned in his classic Democracy in America. The lack of a formal, legally prescribed social hierarchy in Chinese society, however, is hardly tantamount to even a rough equality of social conditions. Chinese society is marked by vast inequalities of wealth, a yawning gap between urban and rural, marginalized and oppressed ethnicities (primarily Tibetans and Uighurs), and above all the existence of a privileged caste of communist cadres and their families that enjoys power and privileges denied to the hoi polloi. Thus Ci’s prudential argument for democracy based on the need for “fittingness”—aligning political reality with social reality—collapses.

Third, even were one to accept the myth of communist revolutionary legitimacy, there is no reason to accept Ci’s ex cathedra assertion that the passing of the first and second generation revolutionaries and their progeny necessitates a new foundation for legitimacy that only the simulacrum of democracy—for that is all he offers—can provide. Just as the myth of the inexhaustible wisdom of the Founding Fathers of the United States helps sustain American democracy, even in its current “eviscerated” form (as Ci calls it), so the myth of the PRC’s founding fathers, suitably nurtured and burnished by the CCP propaganda organs—the Ideological State Apparatuses, to use Althusser’s term that Ci borrows—can arguably sustain the PRC when combined with ample servings of hyper-nationalism, pride in China’s global power status, and at least adequate economic performance. That the Communist Party no longer believes in or aspires to anything resembling what communism used to entail matters far less than Ci supposes. The moral vacuum that reigns in contemporary China and breeds corruption, chicanery, and outright fraud may actually advantage the CCP. The Party is a political organization whose protean character, ideological elasticity, and control of the levers of hard and soft power may suffice to prolong its grip on power in what is at root a quasi-bourgeois, consumerist society where political opposition is ruthlessly suppressed.

In his discussion of politics in the Special Administration Region of Hong Kong, Ci dismisses the democratic aspirations of large numbers of Hong Kongers as merely a manifestation of their irrational desire to maintain a sense of apartness from mainland Chinese citizens, as a matter of identity politics and pretensions to cultural superiority. His is the perspective of an unsympathetic and supercilious academic mandarin who believes that democracy in Hong Kong is impossible because sovereignty inheres in China and Hong Kongers must know and accept their subordinate place. Despite his lip service to the value of citizens’ moral and political agency and his proclamation that the Chinese Dream cannot be fulfilled without democracy, Ci consistently privileges acquiescence and obedience to constituted authority in order to preserve stability and order over the freedoms and uncertainties of democratic political systems. His concept of democracy is pallid and anemic. He views the political world in antinomies, as comprising stark and unbridgeable contradictions with no possibility of compromise. Ci’s straitjacketed logic is impeccable; his politics are purblind.

Finally, we must confront the fact that Ci does not discuss any alternative paths toward democracy in China in which the Communist Party does not lead the way. Like the CCP leaders who rule the nation in the name of the people, Ci perceives the people not as a pillar of democracy but as a potential mob threatening to loose anarchy and mayhem (luan, meaning disorder or chaos) upon the land unless their political aspirations are properly channeled by their betters. This is a well-worn idea and not without foundation. A century ago, Sun Yat-sen posited a lengthy but undefined period of political tutelage during which his Nationalist Party would exercise unilateral power in the interests of the nation and the people while they were educated and domesticated into becoming responsible citizens of the republic. But who would decide when that point had arrived?

Ci’s vision for China is of democracy deferred, deferred until such time as the Chinese people, after a period of democratic preparation initiated and supervised by the Chinese Communist Party—a party that to its marrow is hostile to democracy—pronounces that China is now ready for a democratic transition. Yet anything other than a sham democracy would threaten the CCP’s monopoly of power, as democratic transitions did to ruling communist parties elsewhere, if not in the short term than soon thereafter. Ci speaks of China’s “urgent need for democracy” not because of the intrinsic value of democracy (which he doubts), but because he is convinced that the legitimacy democracy will confer will best secure stability and order for a unitary and centrally controlled China. Like Confucius, the peripatetic teacher who sought in vain for a ruler who would implement his teachings rooted in humaneness and virtue, Ci appeals to Xi Jinping, who, if he follows Ci’s advice and leads China toward the promised land of democracy, would be “justly remembered as the most admirable One in CCP history.”

But that is not how Chinese modern history has worked. Rather it has been marked by civil and foreign wars, mass conflicts and tragedies, and sharp changes of direction, not by orderly and measured progress. The last word belongs to Hu Shih (1891-1962), the liberal philosopher who said, “the only way to have democracy is to have democracy.”

The post How Not to Democratize China appeared first on The American Interest.

The Sino-Semitic Connection

Having sideswiped the memory of Calvin Coolidge in Part III and snookered a twisted Navy Seals motto into service in Parts IV and V of this essay series, we now embark upon the last of three promises made back on December 10: Redeeming the claim that Jewish diaspora history can help us understand Singapore.

James Thurber once warned that, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards,” so we need take care not to exaggerate similarities between the Jewish historic diaspora experience, spanning around 1,800 years in dozens of countries, and the experience of overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, which spans an even longer period—some date it all the way back to the 11th-century BCE Chou Dynasty—in nearly as many countries. That said, there’s no need to exaggerate to discern several striking similarities.

Don’t take just my word for it. It’s not as though commentary on the matter over the years has been scarce. Pronouncements and speculations aplenty, mostly thin and anecdotal but some seriously scholarly, have been offered up by Jews, Chinese, and others. Unsurprisingly, not a few have claimed that overseas Chinese are “the Jews of” this or that Southeast Asian country.

It’s not just overseas Chinese among Asian groups resident in Singapore who have been compared to the Jews. In private conclave some South Asian landsmen have pitched me the metaphor that, for example, Sindis are the Jews of India, and if not Sindis then Gujaratis. Depends whom I’m talking to, and in these cases the conversation typically acquires the tones of a would-be mutual admiration society. Jewcentric stereotypes are everywhere present, but on these curious occasions they’re all wearing what strike me as slightly eerie-looking happy masks.

So maybe the Chinese in Singapore are the Ashkenazic Jews of Asia and the Indians are the Mizrahi Jews of Asia? No, that’s silly. At least no one calls the Malay community here the Jews of anything—but they too are, you might be surprised to learn, mainly a diaspora community despite their being usually labeled ”indigenous.”

When Stamford Raffles showed up in Singapore in 1819, fewer than a thousand people actually lived on the island. Hundreds of years earlier there had been a significant Malay population, complete with a government and military, palaces and fortifications. But by the early 19th century only the Orang Laut—Sea Nomads or Sea Gypsies—loomed around the island, dividing their times between fishing and piracy. Most Malays in Singapore today are 19th and early 20th century immigrants from Malaya, Java, Sulawezi, Borneo, and the Riau Islands, and among them are about a half dozen subgroups distinguished by place of origin and dialect.

Malays aside, what does it mean to say that such-and-such an Asian ethnicity, represented here in Singapore, are “the Jews” of such-and-such a place? Well, to pith it down, it means a group of kindred folk who come from afar and manage to dominate the commercial zones of pre-modern economies, and whose appearance, manners, skill sets, language, and religion set them apart from the majority of society.

The result, often enough, is that while these minority groups have the tacit or explicit consent of governments to operate, because they bring new goods, skills, trade, and investment to the local economy, their economic success joined to their small-minority status generates suspicion, resentment, envy, and sometimes violence directed against them. At some lowest-common-denominator level of historical sociology, the expulsion of more than 50,000 “overseas” South Asians from Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1972, where they owned more than 90 percent of the country’s businesses and paid in more than 90 percent of the government’s tax revenue, resembled closely enough for discomfort the expulsions of Jews from several European countries over the centuries.

So the key questions: What if any social science/historical logic binds these two mostly unconnected historical experiences—the Jewish diasporic and the overseas Chinese—and does that logic have any contemporary traces in Singapore? In short, twice yes. Let’s see—very briefly, despite the complexity of the subject—just how that is.

It’s best to start with obvious differences between the Jewish diasporic experience and that of overseas Chinese. Jews en masse were exiled or fled from their homeland during the Hadrianic persecutions and especially upon the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, after which no Jewish sovereignty resumed until May 1948. For about 18 centuries too, no Jewish majority existed in Eretz Yisrael except in parts of Jerusalem. Overseas Chinese come not from all of China proportionately, but mainly from its southern regions, and while political upheaval and chaos at various times were important factors in incentivizing emigration, no foreign power ever occupied all of China and expelled most of its population. So there was always a majority-Chinese state and society for wanderers to return to. At least before the 20th century, return flows of overseas Chinese to China was always greater than return flows of Jews to Israel/Palestine.

Certain similarities, however, are really more striking and relevant. First, both Jews and Chinese moved into areas whose populations were significantly less well-educated. The Jews, who became the “people of the book” during and on account of a prior exile—the Babylonian Exile of 586 BCE—were probably the most deep-literate mass society of the ancient world. The Chinese also elevated a written/literary culture over a folk/oral one, albeit for very different reasons. The ambit of the early Chinese state encompassed so many non-mutually intelligible dialect groups that only a pictographic written language could work as a way to communicate from the center out to all provinces. Magnifying this circumstance was the fact that Chinese, as a tonal language, probably has a higher proportion of one-syllable words than any other language, making a phonetic alphabet so cumbersome as to be impractical. The resultant “father language” rather than “mother tongue” outcome shaped the mandarin system, and ordained its emphasis on written language competency.

The common result in both Jewish and Chinese history was an intense elite emphasis on educating children, which, over time, became the belle ideal of refinement throughout both cultures. This was true despite the fact that literacy rates were historically low in Chinese society, “home” and overseas, compared to Jewish society. But the ideal mattered, so that when eventually conditions allowed a vast expansion of deep literacy among overseas Chinese, and hence a greater facility for abstract concepts, that expansion ensued. This cultural facet, which over so much time transformed into an epigenetic characteristic, contrasts dramatically before the modern period with the cultures of nearly all of the host societies within which diaspora Jews and overseas Chinese lived.

Both diaspora Jews and overseas Chinese also enjoyed deep if narrow stocks of social trust. The tightness of their affinity was no doubt shaped by pressures set against their minority status and by the more than occasional distrust of the majority population—all reinforced, of course, by the fact of their having separate language, religious, and customary practices. Add the fact that Jews and Chinese were often prohibited or dissuaded from owning land in their sojourns, and one can see how both turned to mainly urban-based business and trades to survive. That meant becoming involved in monetized economies. We take that for granted nowadays, but subsistence agriculture does not require monetization except at the margins—and this is still true in places, like Cambodia, where more than 75 percent of the population is rural and is engaged in only para-commercial agriculture.

The Jews brought one other advantage with them when they first moved in significant numbers from the Eastern Mediterranean and Visigothic Spain into Europe in the few centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire: the concept of zero. Zero had come to the Jews via India, Persia, and the Arabs to Córdoba in Spain during Almoravid times. (The Arabic word sifr, zero or empty, is a direct translation of the Sanskrit sunya. Thus the English word “cipher,” which has long since shifted meaning, but whose cryptic connotation traces back to its origin.) It is very hard to do long division and calculate inventory and insurance problems using Roman numerals, but the decimal system, with a concept for zero, did not enter Europe until the 13th century—thanks to the great Italian mathematician Fibonacci, who not incidentally grew up in North Africa—and then only slowly.

The Chinese came upon zero from India more directly, the movement of the concept to China being linked—whether historically or notionally is a matter of debate—with the coming of Buddhism during the Han Dynasty, roughly during the 1st century CE.

No matter the details, diasporic Jews and those overseas Chinese who were educated had zero and so were numerate, and for long periods the common folk among whom they lived did not and were not.

General numeracy aided the process of pooling capital, which enabled the formation of informal joint stock companies for purposes of both investment and insurance. Both diasporic Jews and overseas Chinese, in other words, created functional banks for themselves to leverage financial economies of scale before any of their host societies did. And that, in turn, is why Jews in the Middle East and especially in Europe, and Chinese in Southeast Asia, often became moneylenders as a main or side business. There were no publicly accessible banks at the time in these places, only other family/clan groupings that, by and large, remained economically unincorporated.

Joint stock companies are also able to function in, and indeed help to create, larger-scale markets. Both diasporic Jews and overseas Chinese developed the technique of sending scouting parties from central points of operation to more far-flung locations to set up trading posts, learn about local resources and market demand, and link heretofore separated economic zones together. Not infrequently they married local women, had families, and thus created new nodes in their trading networks—hence the origin, notably, of the Peranakan Chinese-Malay culture, which dates to 15th century Malacca, and which had a significant historical influence here in Singapore. Nearly everyone involved prospered from the development of larger markets, but by having countrymen and relatives in control at both ends of the system, for production through to marketing, the Jewish and Chinese business families prospered more.

Finally on this point, it almost goes without saying that to be successful as traders and businessmen, more is needed than luck, location, and relative advantages over the majority population. Certain behavioral traits also matter a lot, among them: a decent work ethic, the ability to defer gratification, patience, self-discipline, and the aforementioned social trust if, as is typical, members of a diasporic group need to be able to depend and count on one another for mutual support.

Now, as a sidebar to the so-called Asian values debate in the early 1990s, which was mainly about political tendencies and not economic ones, some people in Singapore, and elsewhere in the rising Asian Tigers, began to claim that Confucian values explained why Chinese prospered at business, and by indirection why Singapore, as a majority-Chinese society, prospered economically as well. What to make of this?

Well, since diaspora Jews did pretty well at business and trading too, and no one thinks of Jews as being influenced by Confucianism, at the very least one must grant that useful behavior traits can be captured and passed along by more than one cultural system. It also ought to be pretty obvious that while culture works as a receptacle, incubator, and promotor of functional learned behaviors, it is neither static nor determinist. Can what some call epigenetic cultural traits double back and affect genetic endowments proper over a long enough time? The evidence suggests that the answer is yes, but that does not make them the same kinds of things. So the idea that there is something truly innate in Confucian-inflected cultures that necessarily conduces to business success is very close to self-preening racist nonsense. Evidence? If one takes the description of business-positive traits offered up by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay on the Protestant ethic and sets them side by side with supposed Chinese business-positive traits bandied about during the “Asian values” episode, I defy anyone to discern a huge difference.

The relationship between functional need and cultural adaptation is broadly dialectical. So just as culture can pick up certain traits it can also lose them, as a re-reading of Daniel Bell’s Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism or, for that matter, Ibn Khaldun’s 1377 Muqaddimah—a still-brilliant treatise on the broad historio-cultural oscillation of diligence and decadence—will attest. Singapore is not an exception. Neither is anyplace else.

As a general point, note further that both diasporic Jews and overseas Chinese depended on governmental and other authorities to guarantee basic stability—law and order, in other words—for their trading networks to prosper. This turned out to be a sometimes thing, but differently for the two sets of diasporic communities.

Sometimes authorities would extort the Jews for the “favor” of allowing them to live and operate their businesses. Sometimes they lost control and locals attacked them, often egged on by religious prejudice. Sometimes authorities expelled them, from towns, from provinces, from whole countries.

Overseas Chinese did not have it quite so bad on balance. A sharing of Buddhist faith helped ameliorate tensions in some circumstances, despite the fact that there are three different main schools of Buddhism and overseas Chinese sometimes held to a school not that of the local majority. More important, probably, while Chinese migration into Southeast Asia goes back a very long way in history, the vast majority of it took place within the past 500-600 years, and dovetails with the European arrival in the region. The overseas Chinese mainly piggybacked on European mercantilist colonialism, setting themselves up as middlemen in the China trade. They benefitted from the European projects and the Europeans benefitted from them in ways that lack any direct parallel with Jewish history in Europe during this same period. Jews were inside European metropoles; overseas Chinese plied the European periphery where European authority was looser, its purposes were narrower, and the options of diasporic community tradesmen concerning whom to deal with were often more abundant.

The inherent insecurity of the Jews’ position in Europe led to incentives to gain some protection from extortion by means of anticipatory deference, and some protection from mob violence by showing loyalty to the nobility or the government, as the case may have been. For the Jews this created a smallish sub-class of hofjuden (court Jews). Nothing exactly analogous happened with overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. One reason was that while Jews lived in a Christian-only sea, the more so after the Reconquista of Iberia in the late 15th century, Chinese lived in a far more plural sectarian environment, with Hindus, Buddhists, Christians (in the Philippines, for example), and Muslims from the 12th century onward.

That meant that the Chinese were not the only major source of middlemen and foreign courtiers: Arabs, Persians, Thais, Chams, and others were also active as traders and go-betweens in the regional mix. Only in Thailand, during the final years of the Ayutthya kingdom and later with the Chakri kings (so 18th and 19th centuries) did anything comparable to Chinese “hofjuden” arise. Elsewhere, as already suggested, Chinese middlemen (kapitans), often Peranakans, helped smooth trade between British and Dutch merchants and China. But the pattern differed from place to place and from European group (including, earlier, the Portuguese and Spanish) to group.

Finally in this regard, the rise of modern nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries proved problematic for both diaspora Jewish and overseas Chinese communities. The problem arose sooner for the Jews in Europe, but it followed not long behind—just about a century or so—for Chinese in Southeast Asia. King Vajiravudh (a.k.a. Rama VI) infamously called the Chinese in his country the “Jews of Siam” and wrote a newspaper article in 1914 damning them in terms that any European anti-Semite would have lauded: “Money is their God. Life itself is of little value compared with the leanest bank account.”

Yet when Asian nationalism did arise, most forms took on an anti-colonialist and then later an anti-Japanese attitude. Overseas Chinese communities were not spared to the extent that they were roped in as perceived accomplices or beneficiaries of European colonialism. There were episodic boycotts, intimidation, sabotage and vandalism, petty larceny, kidnappings, and extortions too numerous to count. History also relates a number of “pogroms”—recent examples include Kuala Lumpur in May 1969 and Jakarta in May 1998. Chinese overseas communities have also been particularly vulnerably during periods of general mayhem: in Indonesia in 1965, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, for two notably horrific examples. But no national-scale mass murders or mass expulsions of minority overseas Chinese communities have occurred in Southeast Asian countries, whether Muslim-majority or otherwise. That would have had to be a government’s doing, and no government has yet done such a thing.

In truth, most if not all European colonial operations used local Chinese—again, Peranakans in particular—as go-betweens and political deflection shields of sorts to do their dirtier work. True, too, some Chinese business families were eager to be so used, particularly if by so doing they could engage with relative impunity in activities that look rather sordid in retrospect. Yes, the British government imposed opium on China by force of arms in 1838 and thereafter, but not a few Chinese businessmen, including some in Singapore like Cheang Hong Lim (of Peranakan descent) and in Hong Kong, made fortunes not from gambier and spices but from opium and its oft-related “trades” of gambling and prostitution.

Related to these trades were the many Chinese “secret societies” that arose, some organized by dialect group, some by “trade” specialization, some around home-origins in China, some around major business personalities and families, many a mash-up of several factors. There is but a pale parallel to overseas Chinese secret societies in Jewish diasporic history. There are atypical cases of Jewish self-defense organizations rising to deter assault, and there are certainly cases of Jews engaging in outside-the-law trades in, for example, the Polish and Lithuanian regions of the 18th and 19th century Russian Empire, particularly near borderlands like East Prussia where smuggling goods and people seem natural activities. And once transplanted to America, groups of Jewish immigrants often formed impromptu fraternal societies, called landsmenschaften. But these were not secret, never violent, and rarely functioned as covers for or informally facilitated criminal behavior.

Naturally enough, newly nationalistic local communities where ethnic Chinese had long been minorities were none too happy with this sort of business, or with the below-the-law secret societies the helped operate and protect them. Their legacies have not been entirely dispelled to this day largely because new grievances, justified or not, have piled up on old ones. Despite decades of independence, small Chinese minorities still exert vastly disproportionate economic and, in many cases, political influence in every Southeast Asian country (except Laos) in Singapore’s neighborhood.

How disproportionate? In Indonesia about 2.8 million ethnic Chinese, about 1.2 percent of the population, are said to own about 90 percent of the retail economy. Malaysia is a variation on the same theme: About 6.5-7.0 million ethnic Chinese, roughly 25 percent of the population, own nearly as much. Ditto for the Philippines, where the Chinese are only about 1 percent of the population. Indonesia and Malaysia are the countries closest to and most relevant to Singapore, and of the seven ASEAN countries listed above these, along with tiny Brunei, they are the only majority-Muslim ones.

Indonesia and Malaysia have approached their overseas Chinese communities differently. Post-independence Indonesia pressured ethnic Chinese to take Bahasa surnames, and to blend into the majority culture. But with a much higher percentage of Chinese, Malaysian governments have institutionalized instead a kind of permanent affirmative action for Malays, sometimes called “Bumiputra preference,” which ethnic Chinese everywhere, not to exclude Singapore, describe as a form of systematic discrimination.

Until quite recently, too, and still to a considerable extent, Malaysian Islam has been more attracted to orthodox and lately neo-fundamentalist forms exported from the Gulf, while Indonesian Islam has always been more syncretic, Sufi-inflected, tolerant, and relaxed. The reasons for these difference are many, but one has to be that the larger number of Chinese in Malaysia has created a kind of religion-as-identity-politics backlash for Muslims, while the existence of several significant non-Muslim populations in Indonesia (for example, Buddhists in Bali, Christians in the Maluku Islands) has mitigated that effect in Indonesia (but did not prevent bloody Muslim-Christian confrontations in the Malukus, especially in the 1999-2002 period).

Fully 25 years ago Sterling Seagrave, in his masterful Lords of the Rim, estimated that if one summed the ethnic overseas Chinese economic quotient it would come to about $450 billion per annum, and that this “invisible empire” disposed of some $2 trillion in liquid assets. Just to give some sense of scale, Thailand’s GNP for that year, 1995, came only to $169.3 billion. Reliable figures are notoriously elusive, but in 2020 it is likely that the economic power of minority overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (so excluding Singapore, where ethnic Chinese are around 73 percent of the total) still sum to ownership and liquidity figures larger than those of any single country, even Indonesia with a population of about 271 million. The economic rise of China itself has been a factor in facilitating the growing prosperity and influence of overseas Chinese communities, despite their ambivalent relationships to China itself.

Overseas Chinese economic clout has existed for a long time, and so has the temptation to translate that clout into political influence. Case in point: Sun Yat-sen raised the vast majority of the money he needed to bring down the Qing Dynasty and establish the Republic of China in 1911 from overseas Chinese, not from Chinese in China. Dr. Sun spent a fair bit of time in Singapore in the years before 1911. The villa where he lived is now the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Museum, and its exhibits are revelatory on this point.

Of course, there is no cabal of overseas Chinese leaders that meets in secret rooms to coordinate the concerted use of their money, any more than the sinister conspiracy theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were ever true. But some of the larger business families among Teochew, Hakka, and Hokkien dialect groups do manage “bamboo” business networks that spread beyond national borders, just as the Rothschild banking family had offices at one time during the 19th century in London, Paris, and Amsterdam.

In truth, too, the circumstances of overseas Chinese communities vary widely. In Thailand, for example, the community is significantly integrated in the general population and there is much intermarriage; in Myanmar, it is hardly integrated at all. In Vietnam, it is the Hoa dialect group among Chinese that dominates, but Vietnam is a special case also in another sense, since it is the only Sinic deep culture in the region; all the others are Indic. What’s in aggrieved majority-population imaginations often matters more than mere facts, and try as one may, there is no stopping major lava flows of irrationality in mob-like settings once they start, whether those flows threaten diasporic Jews or overseas Chinese.

Do the aforementioned numbers line up with the situation of Jews in Europe in, say, the 12th or 16th or 19th and early 20th centuries? It is an expansive question, to say the least. But if we take, say, 1920 as a snapshot benchmark year—pre-Holocaust but statistically real, so to speak—we see that Jews as a percentage of the population were as high as 18.2 percent in then-newly reborn Poland; 12.5 percent in Lithuania; about 11 percent in Ukraine; 5.8 percent in Romania; but only 3.3 percent in Austria, and just 0.88 percent in Germany. Did Jews nevertheless predominate in the professions in urban areas and in certain areas of commerce in these countries? There’s no genuinely simple answer that gets at complex truths, but a rounded-off answer that doesn’t do too much violence to reality is “yes.” So yes, the overseas Chinese and Jewish diasporic numbers do line up, close enough anyway for folk music and government work, and the admittedly potted comparative historical sociology sketched above, I think, more or less explains why.

When we speak of diasporic/exilic/overseas experiences involving many centuries and more than a dozen major host countries, it is very hard to generalize safely, let alone usefully—particularly when anything like empirical evidence is hard to impossible to come by. But some generalizations about the development of stereotypes that leap out of these histories, and their recent and contemporary implications, can be put forth as speculative for you, dear reader, to make of what you will. Stereotypes arisen out of complex, pluralized histories are as inevitable as death and taxes. No one is obliged to enjoy them. But almost no one is spared from having to deal with them.

Let me post up four stereotypes, each of which, as always, has some scintilla of truth at its core, to be matched against actual observations any sentient person can make here in Singapore: one about the joint diasporic Jewish/overseas-Chinese penchant to business-mindedness, with sideways implications for the place of gambling in these cultures; one about the joint obsession with money and employment of supposed “sharp” business practices; one about the stigma of excessive alcohol consumption combined with a claimed obsession with food; and one about the latter-day nervousness and insecurity, paranoia even, of these two groups of communities.

Intrigued? I’ll just bet you are. But you’re going to have to wait for Singapore the Improbable VII . . . coming soon to a magazine near you.

The post The Sino-Semitic Connection appeared first on The American Interest.

Why Jeane Kirkpatrick Should Still Be Our Guide

Editor’s Note: This is the last essay in our series, “The Foreign Policy Debate We Need.” Here, Svante E. Cornell replies to five critics of his essay, “How Should America Deal with Authoritarian States?” Read Cornell’s original essay here and the replies from Giselle Donnelly, Michele Dunne, Shadi Hamid, Mark P. Lagon, and Gary J. Schmitt here.

In these pages I suggested that a revised Kirkpatrick doctrine could help American policymakers find ways to deal more systematically with authoritarian states. Five commentators have since raised thoughtful objections to this thesis. I welcome these comments, as they advance my original objectives—first, to advance discussion of the differences among authoritarian states and, second, to engage opinion leaders on how American policy should treat them. Space constraints do not permit a rebuttal to each of the objections raised, so I will respond by addressing a few of the critics’ recurring themes.

First, it is important to restate what I did not say. I did not suggest that authoritarian states are better partners for the United States than democracies. And I did not argue that America should stop promoting democracy. What I did argue is that authoritarian states are here to stay, that some can be quite reliable partners, and that we should have a workable standard for differentiating among them. I also argued that we should change the way we seek to promote democracy. “Naming and shaming” and applying coercive measures has not worked. We should be willing instead to build trust with the more benign authoritarians and thereby create channels that can advance meaningful change.

Several respondents emphasized their preference for democracies over authoritarian states, which they refer to as odious, outrageous, or the like. Who could disagree? But this is mere virtue signaling and provides no foundation for policy. Who would dispute that democracy has been in retreat globally, or that various forms of authoritarianism are likely to remain the norm in much of the globe? Like it or not, policymakers must therefore deal with the world as it is, and not as a band of countries eagerly waiting to be badgered into programs of democratization.

It is appropriate for human rights activists to react in a principled and even emotional manner to the abuses that accompany authoritarian systems. But policymakers must take a cooler and more strategic approach. This means asking, first, what policies advance American interests? If the answer includes the promotion of democratic governance, they must then ask whether that cause is advanced by isolating a given authoritarian government or engaging with it.

It is perhaps understandable that American officials often come to despise their authoritarian interlocutors, and would celebrate their overthrow. But the notion that ousting authoritarian rulers leads to democracy is manifestly false. True, Iraq may be freer today than under Saddam Hussein. But in spite of the deaths of over 4,000 U.S. servicemen, ten times that number wounded, and several hundred thousand dead Iraqis, Freedom House still lists the country as “not free,” and with a government that is under the thumb of theocratic Iran. Since then, neither the “color revolutions” across Eurasia nor the “Arab Spring” that engulfed much of the Middle East has ushered in participatory democracy and open societies. In each of these cases, and others as well, all too many Americans, including policymakers, harbored unrealistic hopes that were bound to fail.

“Regime change” has not only failed to produce results in the countries where it has been tried, it has also had a profoundly negative effect on those authoritarian rulers who survive. They invariably concluded that they must intensify repression and band together to prevent regime change imposed from without. Thus, the effort to promote democracy through force or through the selective application of carrots and sticks has reached a dead end. It is time to realize that enduring changes emerge from within authoritarian systems and not from without, and that the key to successful democracy promotion is to engage with authoritarian states in such a way as to strengthen agents of change on the inside. To accomplish this we must first build partnerships with these states. But this is possible only if we have developed rigorous criteria for deciding which authoritarian states we should partner with, and which we should shun.

Critics also take issue with the importance I accord to ideology among my criteria for differentiating among authoritarian regimes. Yes, ideology matters, much more so than American policymakers tend to acknowledge. Note, for example, the similarity between America’s openness to radical leftist regimes and the more recent open door to purportedly “moderate” Islamists. This, indeed, is perhaps the strongest reason why Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 40-year-old insights are so relevant today. Several of the commentators, notably Michele Dunne and Shadi Hamid, take issue with my identification of Islamist ideology as the kind of totalitarian force America should treat as an enemy. Their objection ignores the obvious reality of the past two decades: wherever “moderate” Islamists have come to power, they have shifted rapidly in an authoritarian direction, while pursuing foreign policy objectives that directly undermine American interests. This is both their goal and strategy for reaching it. At risk of repetition, let me reiterate Kirkpatrick’s observation that those who consider America to be the source of evil in the world and the perpetrator of imperialism, are not “authentic democrats or, to put it mildly, friends.” This is true for both Turkey and Qatar, even though both host U.S. military bases.

Islamists have learned to exploit the rhetoric of democracy and human rights to advance their cause, and to curry favor in the West in order to resist the authoritarian leaders keeping them in check. Far too often Americans and Europeans have taken these claims at face value, leading us to accept Islamists as a force for democracy. Turning a deaf ear to their stated ideological convictions, we have accepted them as democrats simply because they have identified democratic elections as the best path to power. But they have shown no interest in internalizing the deeper values of democracy, including respect for minority voices and the institution of checks and balances.

In the Sunni Middle East two broad blocs currently compete with each other. One is comprised of conservative, often monarchical regimes as in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Morocco, and Egypt, which oppose political Islam and seek to maintain the status quo. The other, which includes Turkey, Qatar, and the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, is the Islamist bloc. Both sides are authoritarian, and neither is a natural partner for the United States. Still, the Islamist forces promote anti-Americanism, seek to undermine or destroy Israel, and sponsor extremist groups in Syria, Libya and other conflict zones. In spite of this, many in the United States consider them preferable to the more conservative regimes, for the former “talk the talk” of participatory politics and the latter do not.

The commentators took particular issue with my discussion of al-Sisi’s Egypt. But they missed the point. My intention was not to excuse or whitewash any of the serious problems with the regime in Cairo. Rather, it was to propose that it is by no means a worse partner than the anti-American and anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood regime that preceded it. Lest we forget, Muhammad Morsi urged Egyptians to nurse their children on hatred for Jews, whom he branded as the descendants of apes and pigs. When he was called out on such vicious statements, he attacked his critics in what he called the Jewish-controlled U.S. media. It is certainly true that Sisi’s regime has failed to provide adequate protection for Egypt’s Coptic minority, but the Muslim Brotherhood actively incites violence against them. Which is worse?

Still, some American pundits cling to the notion that Islamists are democrats. One can only stand in amazement when Hamid argues that Islamist parties have not actually gone on to “cancel democracy after being elected to power.” To be sure, Erdoğan in Turkey has not abolished elections. But who would seriously argue that Turkish elections are free and fair, and that the country is a functioning democracy? The reality is that wherever Islamists have taken sole control of the state they have refused to give up power. Before Morsi could consolidate his control in Egypt, the country’s military forces removed him from power. Significantly, the most respected Egyptian liberals supported this move, which enjoyed the backing also of a large popular uprising. By contrast, more democratic tendencies prevailed in Tunisia precisely because the Islamists there never ruled alone and knew that if they were to yield to the temptation to grab total power, it could silence whatever voice they had.

Underlying this line of criticism is the notion that we must accept the blending of politics and religion in the Middle East because “politics and religion are inevitably intertwined in Muslim-majority countries.” This reflects the demeaning dogma that secular governance may be appropriate for the West but is somehow unnatural for Muslims. It also equates Islam with Islamism, and neglects the primacy of non-Islamist ideologies in the Muslim world for most of the 20th century. As Hassan Mneimneh has argued, it “accepts the Islamist notion of the uncontested primacy of a totalitarizing religion.” Is this not equivalent to saying in the 1930s that the deep culture of Germany and Italy condemns both countries to fascism? This view also ignores the dismal failure of Islamists in power. More often than not their own actions undermine popular support and lead to a revival of secularism.

In the final analysis, American policymakers need better tools for dealing with authoritarian governments. Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 essay is a good starting point, because it challenges us to look deeper as we seek to differentiate between friend and foe, and not to be fooled by authoritarians who proclaim their commitment to the “popular will.” She would certainly have agreed that America’s best friends are other democratic states. But she refused to lump together all of the many regimes that are likely to remain authoritarian for the foreseeable future. She exhorted Americans to examine more closely their ideologies, specific actions, and international links. Only by carefully and prudently distinguishing between authoritarian states can the U.S. develop sound policies towards them.

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