Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 585

UN Calls for Worldwide Online Censorship

As the Islamic State marauds across Syria and Iraq engaging in the sexual enslavement of Christian and Yazidi women and girls, the United Nations has decided to devote its resources to studying “just how rough it is being a woman on the Internet in North America.” In a new report suggesting that online harassment in the U.S. and Canada is a crisis on the same order as “mob lynching of women, reported femicide and the sex and human trafficking trades”, a UN committee calls for a sweeping global censorship regime to make the Internet friendlier to women. A piece in the Washington Post by Caitlin Dewey sums up the news:

On Thursday, the organization’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development released a damning “world-wide wake-up call” on what it calls “cyber VAWG,” or violence against women and girls. The report concludes that online harassment is “a problem of pandemic proportion” — which, nbd, we’ve all heard before.

But the United Nations then goes on to propose radical, proactive policy changes for both governments and social networks, effectively projecting a whole new vision for how the Internet could work.Under U.S. law — the law that, not coincidentally, governs most of the world’s largest online platforms — intermediaries such as Twitter and Facebook generally can’t be held responsible for what people do on them. But the United Nations proposes both that social networks proactively police every profile and post, and that government agencies only “license” those who agree to do so. […]At one point toward the end of the paper, the U.N. panel concludes that “political and governmental bodies need to use their licensing prerogative” to better protect human and women’s rights, only granting licenses to “those Telecoms and search engines” that “supervise content and its dissemination.”

There’s no doubt that internet harassment, threats and bullying are real and persistent problems. But online nastiness is a problem for both genders: While women may be subjected to particularly vile types of harassment, a Pew survey suggests that men are targeted just as much, if not more. And no matter how severe the problem is, it is absurd to suggest, as the report does, that online harassment of women in the West is comparable to the actual, physical brutality inflicted on women regularly in many parts of the world. (For example, the UN body that issued the report includes commissioners from China, where sex-selective abortion and female infanticide are notoriously widespread; from India, where the rape rate is rising so quickly that several countries have issued travel advisories for their citizens; and from the United Arab Emirates, where women who violate provisions of Sharia can be subjected to flogging or stoning).

The UN report, while surely well-meaning, represents a typical moral panic—a sense of crisis and fear blown far out of proportion. As with most propagators of panics, the authors of the report want to crack down on civil liberties. As Dewey explained, the report appears to be proposing a government-enforced internet censorship regime, whereby websites and social media companies would be punished if they did not agree to monitor and police offensive content to the satisfaction of the United Nations. Needless to say, this type of censorship already exists in many countries (particularly those countries with the worst records on women’s rights) but the UN Broadband Commission—nominally a proponent of a free and open internet—would apparently like to see it exported to Western democracies as well.This is not the answer. Online harassment should be socially stigmatized, and, when it crosses over into the realm of true threats or other illegal conduct, reported to the authorities. But the world wide web is not an American liberal arts college campus; it can not be made into what college activists call a “safe space,” and the UN has no business trying to make it one.

The Political Right(s) in France

A crisis long brewing in French politics is coming to a head in the run-up to the 2017 presidential elections. For decades, France’s political elites have failed to solve the country’s major problems—most notably its anemic economic growth, high and chronic unemployment, the regulation of immigration, and the integration of immigrants. Both the Right and the Left, in their current forms, are showing signs of exhaustion. The French, who since the Revolution have trusted politics to give sense to their lives as citizens, no longer do.

The sole beneficiary of this situation is the Front National (FN), a populist Far Right party that is now entrenched in French political life. The party’s rise is both a symptom of France’s worsening problems as well as the result of the party’s exploitation of a rightward shift in attitudes over the past 25 years, by focusing on law and order, immigration, and the debate over French identity. After moving toward the left for most of its history, is French politics now turning to the far Right?What makes the French Right so singular in a country long identified with a dominant Left culture? How has a resurgent Far Right been able to challenge the moderate Right as well as the Left to transform today’s political landscape? Is the Front National, led by Marine Le Pen, destined to remain a protest party, or is it en route to government? How central is ideology in its identity and appeal? Can the Right and Far Right eventually reconcile? To answer these questions we have to understand the historical context that shaped the French Right’s trajectory and identity.The invention of the Right and Left stands among the most significant and enduring legacies of the French Revolution. The division stemmed from the debate about the Royal veto in the 1789 Constituent Assembly. Defenders of the veto gathered to the right of the podium, as was the custom for the friends of the King, and opponents gathered to the left. The ensuing revolution not only put the Left and its ideals of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” on the right side of history, but entrenched its values deep into the national political culture. What better illustrates the moral superiority of the Left than, for example, David’s painting “Gift of Liberty to the World” or Victor Hugo’s account of the 1830 revolution in Les Misérables? The most revered political figures, including Gambetta, Jaurès, and Clémenceau were on the Left; the most reviled on the Right, like Marshall Pétain, or classified as such for having repressed popular revolts, like Guizot in 1848 or Thiers in 1870 against the Paris Commune.By contrast, born counter-revolutionary, the Right started off with a chip on its shoulder and never quite overcame its original legitimacy deficit. In fact, for most of France’s political history, the Right remained on the defensive, as the Left drove the movement of ideas as well as their institutionalization into political parties. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, all three issues that had pitted the Right versus the Left were eventually won by the Left: the Republican form of government prevailed over the monarchy, Catholicism and religion were largely removed from politics and education, and egalitarian economic ideas counterbalanced the free market.By the same token, new political parties all originated from the extreme Left of the political spectrum before moving toward the Center-Left or even the moderate Right. It was said that there were two types of Left parties: the authentic ones, and Right parties pretending to be on the Left. The two Napoleons, Marshall Pétain, General de Gaulle, and even the leaders of today’s Far Right Front National, leaders Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, all rejected being labeled as Right.The French Right is also singular for its lack of ideological as well as institutional stability over time. This might seem paradoxical in a country not only where Right and Left were invented but also where both have characteristically defended irreconcilable interests and ideologies. For example, political issues have shifted across the political spectrum, most often originating on the Left and ending up on the Right, for example, in the cases of economic liberalism, the idea of the Nation, colonization, and, today, secularism (laïcité). Beyond general inclinations for the defense of political and social order, including private property, on one end, and equality and progress, on the other, the Right and Left eluded definitions based on intrinsic and permanent differences. Instead, both kept reinventing themselves by responding to the specific challenges of each time period. The Right has historically been opportunistic, disinclined to be guided by doctrines and constrained by stable political parties.In fact, the vision of the Right and Left as two unified blocs engaged in ideological warfare has to be balanced by the Revolutionary myth of national unity which frowned upon factions, including political parties. The late and reluctant adoption of parliamentary democracy also weighed against the formation of stable political parties like the British Conservative Party or the GOP. All the dominant issues that have divided French society have actually split the Right and Left as much as they pitted one against the other, such as the Dreyfus Affair, Vichy, decolonization, Gaullism, the institutions of the Fifth Republic, and even the revolts of May 1968, abortion, and the death penalty. Today, the same applies to liberal reforms of the economy, the control of immigration, as well as the role of laïcité and national identity in the integration of immigrants.Pluralism is another fundamental characteristic of the French Right. Certainly, the Left also has been pluralistic, with liberal (the French prefer to say “Republican”), radical (communist, for example), and anarchist strains, but it has shown greater ideological and electoral integration. In his seminal study of the Right(s) in France, the historian René Rémond identified three lineages in the Right from its origins to the 21st century, which he labeled “traditionalist,” “liberal,” and “Bonapartist.” Rémond later acknowledged a fourth strain, called “Revolutionary Right,” coined by the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell. Today’s four Rights are only updated and composite versions of those formed in the 19th century.The “traditionalist” strain was first defined by the reactionary Right, which dominated the restoration of the monarchy after Napoleon’s demise. It advocated the alliance of the throne and altar and the return to a corporatist society based on family, parish, and trade; like Burke, it rejected abstraction, but also the values of individualism, democracy, and progress inherited from the Enlightenment. The “traditionalists” resurfaced during the Third Republic, established by the liberal Left in 1870, first under the conservative presidency of Marshal MacMahon, who instituted a Catholic “Moral Order,” symbolized by the Basilica of Sacré Coeur in Paris. Second, in the form of influential reviews and grassroots political organizations (“leagues”) such as “L’Action Française,” inspired by monarchist, Catholic, anti-parliamentary, nationalist, and anti-Semitic intellectuals, including Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras. Fuelled by the 1870 defeat by Prussia and later the Dreyfus Affair, their extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism spanned both world wars. Today’s Front National encapsulates most of what remains of that strain of the Right, especially its vocal, albeit shrinking, constituency of Catholic fundamentalists. Recent legislation on gay marriage triggered an unexpectedly strong, largely Catholic grassroots opposition. In the United States, the role of religion gives traditionalism more a cultural than a political content.The liberal strain of the Right, which dominated the constitutional “Monarchy of July” (1930–48) contrasts strongly with it traditionalist rival. Liberals such as Lafayette and Tocqueville welcomed the legacy of the Enlightenment. They tended to be agnostic and promoted individual liberty, parliamentary democracy, and separation of power, but stopped short of supporting universal suffrage. Most liberals represented the business interests of the rising bourgeoisie. King Louis-Philippe’s Prime Minister, François Guizot, famously encouraged the French to get rich (“Enrichissez-vous!“). Liberals in France have consistently failed to nurture support among the masses and the middle class, and remain an elite group. By contrast, the liberal “Republican” Left has been widely influential, with its emphasis on people as citizens rather than individuals seeking liberty from government. Over the past two decades, the elitist liberal Right has been largely discredited after the Left successfully associated it with the ills of globalization.The “Bonapartist” political tradition refers to the leadership styles of both Napoleons (the first and the third), Général Boulanger (nicknamed “Général Revenge” following the defeat against Prussia—he never governed), and Général de Gaulle. The aspiration of these leaders was to achieve national unity under a strong leader and executive, and to restore the State’s authority. They sought to balance the need for political order with popular sovereignty and plebiscites. Of course, the Bonapartist political tradition still permeates the institutions of the Gaullist Fifth Republic, as well as the inner culture and workings of the Gaullist party. It stands as the most singular French political tradition on the Right, since traditionalism and liberalism alone have dominated the Right in most other Western democracies.Zeev Sternhell’s “Revolutionary Right” refers to what was known as fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. France’s version of fascism blended nationalism with the anarchist tradition of late 19th-century unionism best expressed by Georges Sorel. It combined anti-statist socialism, anti-capitalism, and the anti-Semitism of the Left. Its revolutionary character derived from its goal of replacing traditional bourgeois society with a brand new social and political order, as well as from attempts to mobilize impoverished masses and glorify violence. However, this strain of the far Right remained marginal in France. The nationalist “leagues” had traditionalist rather than revolutionary aspirations, as had the Vichy Regime, promoting a return to an agrarian and corporatist society under the slogan “Work, Family, Country.” French fascism was mostly confined in the 1930 and 1940s to Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français, and to the second half of the Vichy regime. Doriot was a former communist leader turned pro-Nazi and anti-communist; he advocated a break with the bourgeois order to his mostly proletarian base, but had no electoral success. The Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain was staffed with traditional conservatives, fascist collaborationists, left-leaning pacifists, and former officials of the left-wing Front Populaire government. It gradually shifted from the reactionary Révolution Nationale to a form of fascism based on heightened anti-Semitism and a police-state.Having inherited this DNA, what does the Right look like today? The Right and far Right were understandably discredited after France’s liberation from Vichy and the Nazis. Ideas of the Left, communism included, dominated. However, the instability and weakness of the left-leaning Fourth Republic, in particular its inability to solve the Algerian crisis, gave General de Gaulle the opportunity to return to power in 1958, solve the Algerian crisis, and establish new institutions. Although de Gaulle placed himself above the Right/Left divide and rejected the “Right” label for the sake of national unity, the new institutions of the Fifth Republic, his own upbringing and military career, as well as his leadership style and priorities, clearly revealed the imprint of the Right, mostly in the “Bonapartist” mold. In fact, the Fifth Republic has been the first and only Republic not founded and dominated by the Left; it has also been the longest and most successful of all, including the Third. Five of the seven presidents of the Fifth Republic have been on the Right—including four Gaullists! For the first time, the Left, more dominant than ever on the intellectual scene, suffered a deficit of political legitimacy until it won the presidency in 1981.De Gaulle marginalized the remnants of the Vichy and pro-“French Algeria” far Right; their candidate scored a mere 5 percent in the 1965 presidential election. But the Gaullist party failed to absorb its small independent-minded liberal and Christian Democratic allies. Liberal Valéry Giscard d’Estaing became President in 1974, and Christian Democratic candidates achieved as much as 15 percent in 1965 and 18 percent of the votes in 2007. These parties typically seek to weaken executive power in favor of parliament and are more pro-European and market-oriented, but with a more elitist character than the more populist Gaullists. Almost invariably, presidential elections have pitted a mainstream Gaullist versus a more liberal candidate from the Gaullist, liberal, or Christian Democratic ranks, and the former usually wins. However, intense personal rivalries and lasting divisions have taken their toll within the Right’s electorate.In addition to its pluralism and more pragmatic than ideological inclination, the Right’s emphasis on personal rivalries induced by France’s strongly presidential system has prevented it from developing a clear and stable doctrine to challenge the legitimacy of the ideas of the Left. Instead, the French Right has chronically suffered from an ideological dependency with respect to the Left, sometimes extending even to foreign policy. This inferiority complex is partly explained by the Gaullists’ shared statism with the Left, and the liberal’s elitist guilt. Whereas the Right’s discourse is anti-Left in opposition and at election time, it is “Left Lite” in government. The Right did not challenge the radical Left’s ideas after the fall of communism, even condoning the financial rescue of the communist daily L’Humanité by a socialist government on the grounds that it was “part of France’s heritage”! The Right backed off from its promise to suppress the wealth tax and 35-hour week. It has shunned away from supply-side economics, preferring to follow the Left’s habit of spending ever more public money. Jacques Chirac had to campaign on a left-leaning message to become President in 1995, having attributed his 1988 loss to a series of privatizations “à la Thatcher.” In fact, since the revolts of May 1968, the Right has, in vain, tried to “buy social peace” with taxpayers’ money, in constant fear of being destabilized by violent Street protests and public sector strikes. As de Gaulle said: “in France, reforms end up in revolutions”; now, they do so outside them as well.The Right’s watershed moment was Nicolas Sarkozy’s election in 2007. Sarkozy shed the Right’s guilt and tapped into the deep French aspiration for change, advocating a “rupture” with a failed “social model” and the excesses of 1960s culture. His other breakthrough consisted in lifting the Right’s self-imposed taboo on the issues dear to the far Right Front National—and a growing fraction of the electorate: law and order, immigration, and national identity. As a result, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s score shrank to 10 percent from 17 percent in the previous cycle. Alas, what could have opened up a new path for the Right and French politics altogether instead turned into a missed opportunity. Sarkozy’s decision to involve the Left and the unions in devising economic reforms (the “big bang” method backfired in 1995) led to mini-reforms that disappointed his electorate. Likewise, he did not muster the necessary courage to address the sensitive issue of immigration. At reelection time in 2012, Sarkozy’s Right-leaning campaign lacked credibility: his right flank felt betrayed, and his left flank found his campaign to be excessively tough.In the 1980s, neither the Right nor the Left could have anticipated the return of the far Right in French politics. Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the Front National in 1972 by merging several right-wing activist groups. He had been a paratrooper in Algeria and Indochina, and was elected to the National Assembly in 1956 as a representative of a populist, anti-tax, and anti-supermarket party led by small businessman Pierre Poujade. However, it was not until the 1980s that Le Pen’s new party broke into the national political scene, with surprising double-digit results in local and European elections. As a presidential candidate, Le Pen scored 14 percent in 1988, 17 percent in 2002 when he elbowed out the socialist candidate to qualify for the run-off, and 10 percent in 2007. His daughter Marine even reached 19 percent in 2012. How have the Front National and its leaders risen so fast?From the outset, Jean-Marie Le Pen pushed immigration as his signature issue. In 1974, President Giscard d’Estaing triggered a new wave of immigration by making the switch from a job-based system to one favoring family regrouping. The parallel rise of immigration and unemployment gave the Front National its slogan “One million jobless are one million immigrants too many.” Just as aptly, Le Pen took advantage of increasingly negative public opinion on Europe by exploiting the themes of national sovereignty, the ravages caused by a liberal Europe open to global competition, and, of course, immigration encouraged by European leaders. After long enjoying strong but shallow support, Europe, since the 1980s and 1990s, has become the focal point of all the anger and frustration associated with a sputtering economy and chronic unemployment.Le Pen’s own charisma and populist, anti-elitist rhetoric were the perfect vehicles to deliver his message. Yet the Front National could not have grown so fast without the perfect political storm that for several decades has been gathering over France: declining economic growth, high and chronic unemployment, exploding levels of crime, massive immigration, and an identity crisis. The inability of mainstream political parties to keep their electoral promises and solve the country’s problems led to an ever-deeper distrust of politics. The Front National’s political space opened as the Gaullist and Socialist parties converged toward liberal economic reforms that workers typically reject. Simultaneously, the emerging issues of immigration and law and order moved public opinion to the Right. Instead of positioning itself on these issues, the Right chose to treat the Front National as a pariah party and its agenda as taboo. They attempted to de-legitimize the FN, in other words, hoping it would go away. Instead, voters cried foul, and the Front National secured a quasi-monopoly on these crucial issues.In the 1980s and 1990s, the collapse of the Communist Party, the traditional protest party of French politics, further shifted that function to the Front National. The working-class has been more exposed to unemployment, crime, and immigration that any other group. Today, the FN is the leading party among workers (28 percent), farmers (37 percent), independent workers, the young, and the unemployed; its supporters have the lowest level of education and income of any political party. The Socialist Party, too, has been emptied of its popular constituents and has increasingly embraced unpopular liberal economic policy. Its culturally liberal elites have too often been tempted to consider white working people as close-minded, racist, and Islamophobic. In the recent YouGov/Hoover Institution survey “Multinational Partisanship Study,” 31 percent of French respondents said they felt closest to the FN, versus 26 percent and 24 percent to the Gaullist and Socialist parties, respectively. The FN draws as many voters from the Left as from the Right. In the economically depressed northern and eastern parts of the country, the Left used to dominate; in its other regional stronghold, the Mediterranean southeast, immigration has radicalized the traditional Right, made up in part by former Algeria colonists.Beyond its choice of issues, the Front National has shown a remarkable ability to adjust to its changing environment. After taking over from her father in 2011, Marine Le Pen undertook to turn the party from a protest to a governing party, including publicly condemning her father’s anti-Semitic rhetoric. A second adjustment consisted of an economic platform more consistent with the party’s base. When Jean-Marie Le Pen’s core constituents were independent workers challenging corporate France, the message was clearly liberal and anti-statist. By contrast, today’s broader but often-distressed social base seeks the protection of the State against the globalized economy that implies saving the welfare state from the burden of undeserving immigrants. The Front National’s economic platform, which includes exiting the Eurozone, opposing spending cuts, and bashing the rich, smacks of the far Left.The third adjustment relates to the Front National’s core immigration and identity message. The Front National has recently shifted its emphasis from immigration to the integration of immigrants, as well as the threat of Islam: Islam, not the FN, should be perceived as the major threat to democracy, it says. But shifting the battlefield to the religious and cultural, a realm of deep anxieties in French society, required the party to embrace laïcité, the French version of separation of Church and State. This represents a major realignment in French politics: the far Right has always defended France’s Catholic foundations, in contrast to the Left, which, by inventing laïcité more than a century ago, sought to protect politics and education from too much Catholic influence. Why the turnaround? In order to argue, for example, against the building of mosques with public money, against women-only doctors in hospitals, separate hours in swimming pools, and against alternative lunch menus in public schools, the Front National needed a tool as widely legitimate in French culture as laïcité. Meanwhile, the Left is now split on laïcité. Multiculturalists defended laïcité as long as it constrained Catholic influence in the public sphere. But when it comes to Muslims, the new dispossessed class, “bobos,” immigrant groups, and the far Left are more inclined to advocate for diversity rather than laïcité.But what about the Front National’s ideology? Is it another racist and fascist party, as the Left wants us to believe? Has ideology been a draw or an obstacle to its success so far?There is no denying the central role the typical nationalist and anti-Semitic far Right ideology played around Jean-Marie Le Pen. His core supporters were anti-communist, anti-Gaullist, and apologists for Vichy if not also the Third Reich, and for keeping Algeria French. They often shared the militarism, conspiracy theories and cult of political violence of the most extreme “leagues” of the Third Republic. Le Pen never believed in racial equality and infamously said that the Holocaust was “a detail of history.”Yet, these constituencies and their ideology, formed in the battles of the past, became a major handicap for the party’s identity and future growth. The FN under its new leadership has come a long way to break with its original ideological obsessions, such as anti-Semitism. In a dramatic turn of events, Marine Le Pen went as far as excluding her own father from the very party he founded and led for forty years. It would increasingly be a mistake to caricature the FN as essentially an anti-Semitic party out of the 1930s. It is now permeated by a more diffuse political culture, accommodating a much broader and diverse rank and file.The FN has always had mixed fascist, “Bonapartist,” and “traditionalist” traits. A majority of FN supporters reject the Right/Left dichotomy and a corrupt political class. They believe that France is in deep decline, has too many immigrants, and needs a strong leader to restore order. For many of them, the world is changing too fast and in the wrong direction, and they perceive a need for the State to protect them. The party’s inclination is to bring back an idealized past more than to invent a radically new social order. It nurtures a traditionalist and Catholic proclivity and yet is split on gay marriage. In foreign policy, it is not unlike the former “paleo-conservatives” of Pat Buchanan in the United States, with an isolationist, protectionist, anti-immigration, and traditionalist message. A stronger national defense is not a priority. Like so many European extremist parties, the Front National has expressed its admiration for Putin’s nationalist and traditionalist values, his cult of order and authoritarian leadership. The FN and the Tea Party share a nationalist message and populist style, but the former is “Bonapartist” and statist while the latter is libertarian.Is the Front National more racist than fascist? As part of a broader shift of public opinion to the Right, it represents a radicalized version of what a majority of the French people think: 99 percent of its supporters think there are too many foreigners in France, versus 70 percent in the rest of the population; 94 percent believe Islam is incompatible with French values, 20 percent more than the national average. Yet, according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey, positive attitudes of Muslims in France are 72 percent, versus 27 percent negative. For Jews, the figures are 89 percent versus 10 percent. These attitudes, among the least prejudiced in Europe, certainly do not reflect those of the FN or the much more pervasive anti-Semitism found in the banlieues and the far Left. Scholars, even on the Left, have shown that the white working-class has been leaving the immigration-dominated banlieues not out of racism, but as a consequence of crime.A year and a half before 2017 presidential elections, it is increasingly clear that the Front National has transformed French politics. It is one of three large parties, alongside the Gaullists/liberals and the Socialists. With the Left in decline, the FN is engaged in a fratricidal competition with the moderate Right, and it has the momentum on its side. It dominates the debate on the leading issues, and it is at the heart of the other parties’ electoral strategies.Most early polls show Marine Le Pen ahead in the first round ballot, with 25-28 percent of the vote. The re-Christened Gaullist party (Les Républicains, LR) would be a close second, pushing incumbent Socialist President Francois Hollande out of the run-off . If Hollande faced Le Pen in the run-off, she would win by a sliver. Only the LR candidate, probably Nicolas Sarkozy or former Prime Minister Alain Juppé depending on the primaries results, would beat Le Pen.The pressure exerted by the Front National is such that it forced the moderate Right to organize primaries for the first time in its history, to preclude multiple candidacies. The primaries are of the utmost importance, since the LR candidate, whoever he is, will ultimately win the presidency. As in the past, the two leading candidates of the Gaullist party, Sarkozy and Juppé, illustrate its “Bonapartist” and liberal tendencies, respectively. A more open primary would favor Juppé, since support for Sarkozy is concentrated among core activists. But more importantly, the ideological shades of the candidates reflect the conflicting strategies with respect to the Front National that have torn the moderate Right since Sarkozy’s failed re-election campaign. Sarkozy’s strategy (which won in 2007 and lost in 2012) is to retain voters tempted by the Front National at the risk of legitimizing some of the its issues and ideas. It involves a tough discourse on values, law and order, immigration, and national identity. His rivals, including Alain Juppé, prefer to criticize and discredit the Front National’s ideas and to pursue a centrist platform, including a more positive view of immigration and multiculturalism. A possible outsider, Bruno Le Maire, stands between them. Sarkozy possesses the most personal handicaps: most people do not want such a polarizing figure back, and he might face competition from Juppé ally Christian-Democrat François Bayrou in the first round of elections. Unlike Alain Juppé, he would receive minimal support from the Left in a run-off against Marine Le Pen.Whoever the next President is, the problem of relations between the two Rights will rise anew. Even if Marine Le Pen is elected, the Front National won’t be able to elect enough legislators to form a majority in the National Assembly; she will need the support of a fraction of LR legislators. At the elite level, Gaullists, liberals, and Christian democrats have a history of fierce antagonism with the far Right. Yet both sides are well aware of the porosity that exists between their electorates on issues of immigration, integration, and law and order. In exchange for concessions on Europe and economic policy from the Front National, part of the LR could be enticed to join forces with its rival on a few selected issues. Of course, the risk for the Center-Right would be to lose support from its more moderate wing. This is why the Front National is unlikely to turn its fantasy of absorbing the “moribund” LR into reality. In France, the Right and far Right have never been united in a single party, and the ideological span they cover has seldom been wider.If Sarkozy, Juppé, or Le Maire becomes the next President, it will probably be the moderate Right’s—and the country’s—last chance to succeed. The legitimate concerns of ordinary citizens will have to be addressed head on. Reducing immigration and better integrating immigrants (by, among other things, fighting discrimination) should be among the new President’s priorities. A bridge between a Right that is too soft and a far Right that is too extreme could be provided by a renewed intellectual leadership, which is no longer the Left’s monopoly. This group includes journalist Eric Zemmour, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, and novelist Michel Houellebecq. If the upcoming presidency is yet another failure, the specter of a Front National victory the next time around will rise, and with it the risk of a civil war pitting the far Left and immigrant groups against the government and the far Right.

China’s Suffering Corn Farmers

Thousands of Chinese corn farmers aren’t getting paid this month after China’s largest corn refinery, Global Bio-Chem Technology, suspended operations, the Financial Times reports. The refiner’s fate is tied up with the country’s propped up corn prices, which Beijing keeps at a level higher than global prices, a policy that “destroy[s] margins for corn processors, feed companies and other private agricultural firms that are the mainstay of the rural economy.”

On the ground, this is what China’s economic mess looks like. Back in the glory days of yesteryear, stuff like this didn’t happen — the rising tide lifted all boats, even leaky ones. But it is very hard to run an economy that is partly state-controlled and partly market-driven; distortions like the corn bubble are sort of baked into the cake. Of course, it is very hard to turn a communist system into a capitalist one, and as China repeats its familiar pattern of promising Singapore-style reforms and then backing away from them, a saying popular in 1990s Poland comes to mind: It is much easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.China’s push to be as resource independent as possible points to a specific underlying weakness to which people, hypnotized by the country’s apparently rapid growth, don’t always give enough consideration. Compared to the U.S., China has a very slender resource base. China has seven percent of the world’s arable land, but twenty percent of the world’s population. The country is bigger than the U.S., but has one-sixth the amount of arable land per capita. China’s resulting heavy dependence on imported food is a huge geopolitical weakness, and would be a serious vulnerability in the event of a confrontation with the U.S. No wonder, then, that the Chinese are looking at all kinds of ways to expand agricultural production, and that makes this corn disaster particularly bad news for Beijing.

An Independence Stalemate?

Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Catalonia, which were billed as a referendum on the region’s secession from Spain, produced mixed results. A group of pro-independence parties called “Together for Yes” captured 62 out of the Parliament’s 135 seats, but did so with less than 50 percent of the vote. If “Together for Yes” can form a coalition with CUP, a secessionist party on the Left, the pro-independence forces will have a majority of seats under their control. That has emboldened the leader of the independence movement, Artur Mas, to declare a “democratic mandate” for independence. NYT:

“We have a democratic mandate; we have won against all odds,” Artur Mas, the Catalan leader, told supporters in central Barcelona on Sunday night as votes were still being counted. “Just as we, as democrats, would have accepted defeat, we ask that others recognize the victory of Catalonia and the victory of the Yes” bloc for independence, he added […]

Raül Romeva, leader of the “Yes” list, told supporters on Sunday that “nobody can say that we don’t have legitimacy.”

But it’s an open question whether a coalition with CUP will work out. And, perhaps more importantly, the supposed democratic mandate is also in question: Wining an absolute majority was seen as crucial to the legitimacy of the independence movement leading up to the vote. In some ways, this was the worst possible result. A long, bad-tempered struggle likely lies ahead.

The Left Has Won, Let the Purges Begin

Well, that didn’t take long: The lefties now controlling the labor party are looking to drive their moderate colleagues out into the cold. The Times of London reports:

A plot to target Labour MPs who refuse to serve under Jeremy Corbyn has been revealed in a leaked email from a senior officer in Britain’s biggest union.

The plan is the first concrete evidence of moves to mobilise Mr Corbyn’s supporters against moderate MPs.The day after Mr Corbyn’s election as Labour leader this month, Tony Woodhouse, a member of Unite’s executive council, wrote to fellow officials that the “hard work starts now”. He added: “We know what the right of the party who will try to undermine him and we also know what the media will do I [think] we should do a massive recruiting drive in the CLPS [constituency Labour parties] where MPs have said they wouldn’t serve in his shadow cabinet.”Moderate Labour MPs fear that Mr Corbyn’s allies will use the influx of hundreds of thousands of new supporters to purge critics. The Labour leader denies that he wants to make it easier for local parties to deselect his Westminster critics, a tactic likened by a shadow cabinet member to “punishment beatings”.

It says something about Corbyn’s commitment to the old left causes that his supporters see the recent leaders of Britain’s Labour Party as unacceptably tainted. And now, with far-left parties shutting down (to allow their members to join Labour under Labour rules that forbid members from belonging to another party), and Corbyn’s moves to allow grassroots supporters in local parties more of a voice in policy-making (by grassroots, Corbyn means the activists who paid three pounds to vote in the leadership election he recently won), the potential for a Labour meltdown is growing.

If by some perverse miracle this group gets its hands on national power, look for a similar approach to free speech. In the far-left universe, there is only the freedom to agree. We see this on many U.S. college campuses now, and there are plenty of people who would like the government to act the same way, banning “hurtful” or “inaccurate” speech.The UK has always had a softer spot for the nanny state than the U.S., and the UK system doesn’t provide as many protections against a parliamentary majority that takes leave of its senses. The thought police and the PC enforcement brigades would have a field day with Corbyn and the hard left in power. Fortunately, that is very unlikely to happen, but the rise of the intolerant Labour left is another sign that democracy in Europe isn’t nearly as strong as one could wish.

Ukraine, Russia, and the EU Strike Gas Deal

European officials have helped broker a deal between Ukraine and Russia that will guarantee natural gas deliveries this winter. The European Commission announced the agreement:

The European Commission, the Russian Federation and Ukraine have agreed on the terms of gas deliveries to Ukraine for the upcoming winter period from the 1st of October until the end of March 2016. They have initialised the binding protocol and submitted it to the respective governments for confirmation.

Vice-President Šefčovič said: “The agreement on the terms of the new Winter Package is a crucial step towards ensuring that Ukraine has sufficient gas supplies in the coming winter and that there is no threat to the continued reliable gas transit from Russia to the EU. The initialising demonstrates that both parties live up to their roles as reliable partners in the gas business. I am confident that the agreement will be soon confirmed and smoothly implemented for the benefit of all parties concerned.”

The deal will ensure that Europe gets the gas it needs through Ukraine, which has committed to secure transit through its territory. Russia, for its part, has agreed to price the gas for the Ukrainian market at levels comparable to those offered to Ukraine’s neighbors. It’s yet one more sign that President Vladimir Putin is currently keen to normalize relations with Europe in hopes of having some of the EU’s sectoral sanctions lifted when they come up for renewal in January.

Meanwhile, an August Pew study making the rounds on Twitter today shows that a large majority of Europeans have no confidence that Putin will “do the right thing regarding world affairs.”

Public Unions and Sadistic Prison Guards

Why is it so hard to fire abusive prison guards? Because they’re unionized. Here’s an eye-opening account of one abusive corrections officer’s ability to keep his job in New York. A taste:

Inmates at Ulster, a medium-security state prison, are required to stay in place and keep their voices low during the count. Fabian, who was serving a one-year sentence for a drug conviction, had been talking to another inmate, but he said in a recent interview that he thought he had been following the rules.

After the count was over, the guard escorted him past a set of double doors out of view of other inmates and the prison’s electronic surveillance cameras. Fabian said the officer, Michael Bukowski, a seven-year veteran, had then ordered him to face the wall and brace himself in the “pat-frisk” position, arms outstretched and legs spread. As he did so, Fabian recalled, he looked down and saw the toe of a boot swinging up between his legs.

He saw a flash of light, felt a piercing pain and collapsed. “He told me to get up, but all I could do was crawl back to my cube,” Fabian, who is now 21, told investigators later. He lay on the floor in his cubicle in the prison’s dormitory, groaning and crying, for almost an hour before hobbling to lunch. In the mess hall, a sergeant sent him to the prison’s medical unit. He was soon loaded into a van and driven 80 miles north to a hospital in Albany. Doctors there performed emergency surgery, removing part of his right testicle.

Questioned by an investigator from the state corrections department’s inspector general’s office a few days after the episode on July 22, 2014, Bukowski said he knew nothing about the injury. He said he had “counseled” Fabian about the importance of keeping quiet during the count. He acknowledged that he had raised his voice, and that when he sent Fabian back to his cubicle, the inmate was “crying a little.” Corrections officials concluded that the guard had used excessive force and was lying. Officer Bukowksi was suspended without pay on July 31, 2014, and the department soon moved to fire him.

More than a year later, however, Bukowski is still a state employee. His disciplinary case remains unresolved, although he faces a criminal charge of assault. His case, described in court documents and interviews, offers a stark example of the intricate protections that shield New York’s 20,000 corrections officers, even when there is compelling evidence of abuse.

The same mechanism applies to bad cops on the street: union rules make it harder to reward good ones and get rid of the bad apples. And of course, the same thing happens in schools, where teachers are protected by union rules. Most guards—and most cops and teachers—aren’t incompetent or sadistic. But enough are that it is in all our interest that we take another look at how public employees are managed.

Some people get better with seniority on the job, and some get much worse—especially when it’s a job that involves working with people under difficult circumstances. Some teachers—and cops and prison guards—mature and develop with experience, and at 60 are wiser, more knowledgeable, and more compassionate than they were at 25. Some, however, are just marking the days to retirement. Some become hardened and uncaring, dulled by routine and sunk in an “Us vs. Them” mentality that makes them unfit for their work. And a few go genuinely bad.Unfortunately the (union dictated) pension systems in place in most states and cities heavily penalize workers who change jobs, even as union rules make it virtually impossible to get rid of those who no longer perform well. All over America there are civil service workers who cling like grim death to jobs they hate simply because defined benefit pension rules keep them shackled in place.Reform would reward workers who do well and who grow on the job, weed out the incompetent and the brutal, and encourage job mobility so that fewer workers feel “stuck” in a job or profession that no longer attracts them. The only losers in this reform would be bad workers and union bosses. Everyone else—employees and clients and the community in general—would be better of.Meanwhile, there are few clearer illustrations of the way that blue institutions crush blue political constituencies. Bad cops, bad teachers, and bad prison guards are problems for the poor and minorities. But the public sector unions are hugely powerful in the Democratic party. At the national level, they are among the biggest funders. At the state and local level, they are also big funders and are a reliable sources of votes and campaign workers. In Detroit, the unions were vital enablers of the organized criminal conspiracy that bankrupted the city and blighted the lives of two generations of mostly minority kids, who were stuck in failing schools in a declining city that was being pillaged by thieves claiming to represent black identity politics.This situation offers a clear perspective on how the Democratic Party is failing to serve the interests of the people it claims to protect. But Republicans shouldn’t be smug. That Democrats, saddled with such a dysfunctional policy agenda and chained to such retrograde institutions as public sector unions, enjoy a near monopoly on the support of poor, urban, and minority voters is a crushing indictment of a massive GOP leadership failure—and of a deeper problem in American society as a whole. It is only in the country of the blind that the one-eyed man is king.

ACA Co-Op Watch: Another One Bites the Dust

Another co-op created by the Affordable Care Act is going under—this time in New York. Health Republic Insurance of New York will join the three other ACA co-ops that have so far gone out of business. It’s a familiar story: The co-op offered some of the best premiums in New York, and those low rates meant that it did not take in enough money to cover the claims it had to pay out. More, via Politico New York:

The insurer’s low premiums attracted roughly 20 percent of the New York market, but the company never had the reserves to cover all those members. From the beginning, many industry insiders wondered whether its offerings were too generous […]

The company also failed to estimate just how much it would cost to cover members in upstate New York, where residents are historically less healthy than those nearer to New York City. Board members’ desire for statewide coverage proved too ambitious and costly, and earlier this year, Health Republic announced it was pulling out of upstate New York, unable to provide coverage there without substantially raising premiums.

These co-ops were supposed to be a triumph of social and financial engineering, ornaments of the sparkling new health care system Obamacare advocates thought we were getting. The reality: Not only in New York, but elsewhere too, high costs are dragging them down.

The poor state of these co-ops is not a sign that health care reform isn’t necessary. It is. Nor is it a sign that too many ordinary Americans don’t need a better national health care policy that helps them meet their health care needs. They do. And it’s not a sign, either, that everything in Obamacare is bad. It isn’t.But it is one of many signs pointing to an increasingly undeniable reality: Obamacare isn’t the answer to America’s health care problem. The law involves too much wishful thinking, too many giveaways to powerful interests, too much political grandstanding, and too little attention to the underlying forces driving health care costs through the roof. We desperately need a better heath care in this country, but we will have to look elsewhere for policies that will help us build a better system.

The Education of Henry Kissinger

In the fall of 1947, Henry Kissinger, just out of the army, took up residence at Harvard University. And Smoky the cocker spaniel went with him. Kissinger, who had acquired Smoky on a whim while on active service in Europe during World War II, had asked his girlfriend to arrange the dog’s flight back to the United States, and he sent detailed instructions to his parents about how to look after the animal (“Don’t ever beat him.”).

Kissinger: The Idealist, 1923-1968

by Niall FergusonPenguin Press, 1,004 + xvi pp, $36

But Harvard did not allow pets to live in student halls. “As charming as dogs may ever hope to be,” wrote his army mentor, Fritz Kraemer, who had moved heaven and earth to get his protégé into the school, “Smoky still poses a problem.” Kissinger went ahead and took the dog with him anyway. In the end, America’s oldest university relented. Kissinger, the college authorities concluded, may have been suffering from shellshock; the dog might be the only thing keeping him out of the sanatorium.

The story of Smoky is revealing of the character who emerges in this first volume of this authorized life of the Harvard professor, 56th U.S. Secretary of State, and controversial foreign policy eminence grise.From early in his adult life, Kissinger seemed to understand that he was perceived as boring. (“Perhaps Kissinger’s only weakness,” Kraemer admitted in his reference, “[is] his somewhat unyouthful, though friendly, seriousness, which is coupled with the absence of an active sense of humor.” So Kissinger outsourced the lightheartedness, letting the dog do the work. Later he would cultivate the unlikely (and inaccurate) image of a playboy, and make sure to wax lyrical about his love of soccer: like Smoky, they added color to an otherwise deadly serious character.But the dog, as his name suggests, was also a smokescreen for young Henry. As Niall Ferguson makes clear, the casual anti-Semitism at Harvard even in the 1940s made it a daunting place for a Jew to study, particularly one with a noticeable foreign accent. Kissinger thought it better to be in on the joke, laughing at himself by accentuating his difference, including that accent. Roy Jenkins, the mid-century British historian and politician, would often remark that the greatest figures of the past such as Churchill, De Gaulle and Lincoln often had a strong element of the ridiculous about them. Kissinger understood that fact implicitly, embraced it even, and used it as a protective barrier against xenophobia and anti-Semitism.The sentimentality Kissinger showed towards Smoky (“You may say it is only a dog, but he has been a good pal to me”) may come as a surprise, particularly to younger readers, who perhaps think of him as a ruthless, pragmatic foreign policy realist. The stories of his rages as President Nixon’s National Security Advisor are legion, but the soft-hearted dog lover is perhaps less well known. That common perception of a scheming Machiavellian character willing to sell anything and anyone down the river to further his own cause is one element of the subtle corrective that Niall Ferguson offers in this biography of Kissinger “the idealist.”Niall Ferguson, another Harvard professor, had quite some task in taking on this authorized biography. The stakes were bound to be high in writing a life of one of the most famous politicians of the modern era, whose reputation for good and ill far exceeds that even of most American Presidents. The fact that Kissinger is back in fashion as a geopolitical thinker, courtesy of ISIS and President Putin, adds not just to interest and presumably sales, but also to the pressure of expectation. Moreover, as Ferguson concedes, because the book was written at Kissinger’s suggestion, “hostile reviewers will allege that I have in some way been influenced or induced to paint a falsely flattering picture.” Ferguson also has to contend both with an excellent previous biography by that master of the art, Walter Isaacson, and the well-known fact that Ferguson was not Kissinger’s initial choice (fellow British historian Andrew Roberts was asked first).In truth, Ferguson is a tad sensitive about these facts. He takes swipes both at Roberts (“cold feet”) and at books written using only “a dozen documents (the total number cited in one widely read book about Kissinger).” In truth, he has no need to worry. For Kissinger: The Idealist is a brilliant, magisterial work, as clever, perceptive, and occasionally contrarian as its complicated subject. While the author is broadly sympathetic to Kissinger as a conservative thinker, he does an outstanding job presenting the material in a way that makes his own case while leaving readers room to draw their own conclusions. In this way, then, Ferguson comes close to meeting his own gold standard: in Ranke’s famous phrase, history “as it actually was.”Kissinger’s journey from refugee escaping Nazi Germany to Secretary of State is an astonishing one, but it is also a tale that is extremely well known in its broad outline. Ferguson’s response to this problem is to play what we might call the “Robert Caro” card: a big study that explores every avenue, takes time to turn over each stone and scan every horizon. His publisher also seems to have wanted a big book. Just as Churchill recognized the headlining power of the “Thousand Bomber Raid” as opposed to a “900 or so bomber raid,” Penguin Press manages to nudge Ferguson past the 1,000-page mark by double-spacing the footnotes in larger than typical font, thus giving readers a book that looks suitably weighty on a coffee table, but which requires them to hire a forklift truck in order to read it.The drama in the Kissinger story begins in 1938 with young Heinz fleeing from Fürth, southern Germany, to the United States to escape the Nazis. Kissinger always said later that he never “thought of myself in those terms,” but the reality is that at least 23 members, and perhaps as many as thirty, of his immediate family subsequently died in the Holocaust. When Kissinger, now Secretary of State, returned with his parents to the place of his birth to receive honorary citizenship in 1975, he did so with visible grace and forgiveness. His mother, however, remained implacable. “I was offended in my heart that day, but said nothing,” she wrote afterwards. “In my heart, I knew they would have burned us with the others if we had stayed.”That was the environment in which Heinz—soon renamed Henry—was raised in the United States for the remainder of his childhood. Perhaps what saved him from adopting his mother’s understandable anger was that he was as entranced by the New World as much as he remained attached to the old. From Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood to the “Yankee Clipper” Joe DiMaggio and Orson Welles’s stunning radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds, the U.S. in general and New York in particular, even in the Depression, seemed like a place of astonishing creativity, enthusiasm and vitality to the young immigrant.And yet it was also a place of reassurance and comfort. About a quarter of the city’s population was Jewish; Washington Heights, where the Kissingers settled, was a comfortable, middle-class Jewish community. If there were concerns that Jewish immigrants, even reasonably wealthy ones, were living in new “ghettos,” the experience of fighting the Second World War soon changed that for Kissinger and his generation. By the time he returned home in 1946, having served in Germany as a Counterintelligence Corps agent, he found, Ferguson notes, “the United States little altered, but he knew that he himself was quite different.” Facilitated by Kraemer and the G.I. Bill, Kissinger enrolled in the class of 1950 at Harvard. He would stay at the university for the next 21 years of his life.Unlike Arthur Schlesinger Jr., only five years his senior but already an associate professor and (aged 28) a Pulitzer Prize winner, Henry Kissinger was never “golden” at Harvard. Instead he bludgeoned his way to success through relentless hard work and the epic scale of his intellectual ambition. “He worked harder, studied more,” wrote a roommate. “He’d read until 1 or 2 a.m. He had tremendous drive and discipline.” Certainly he was relentless. His undergraduate thesis, portentously called “The Meaning of History,” at 388 pages, was so long that it prompted the introduction of maximum word limit that even today is still known as the Kissinger Rule. A PhD dissertation on Castlereagh and Metternich followed that was published three years later as A World Restored.That book, which examines the diplomacy that reestablished a balance of power in Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, is often seen as a key to Kissinger’s subsequent statecraft. “Kissinger’s purpose in writing,” his friend Stephen Graubard said, “was principally to instruct himself.” Ironically for a Government major, Kissinger’s conclusion was that social science had become an enemy of effective statecraft, because “scholarship of social determinism has reduced the statesman to a lever on a machine called ‘history,’ to the agent of a fate which he may dimly discern but which he accomplishes regardless of his will.” That was an important counterblast against the move toward theory in political studies, but it also made it next to impossible to get the book through the peer review process of American university publishers; in the end it was London and George Weidenfeld, another refugee from Nazi Germany, who took a risk on the young scholar.Kissinger’s PhD had won the Harvard government department’s 1954 prize for the best dissertation, which at the time would have given him reason to be confident of an assistant professorship at the university. There was no such luck for Kissinger. In general, he was not popular with faculty, most of whom found him ponderous and self-important. More significant was his conservative mindset and what was perceived as the old-fashioned nature of his research. When his doctoral adviser asked a friend at MIT whether he was interested in a political scientist who knew something about Metternich, the sharp reply came back, “Hell, no!” Kissinger faced the possibility of oblivion—or at least Chicago, the university that did eventually make him offer. “In 1954 at Harvard,” he wrote later, “I was always an oddball, I was always in that sense an outsider. I had one hell of a time.”What saved him was a chance encounter with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in Harvard Yard. Schlesinger, pulling a note from his pocket that he had received that day from a former U.S. Air Force Secretary Thomas Finletter, asked Kissinger what he thought about Finletter’s defense of the Eisenhower Administration’s nuclear strategy of “massive retaliation.” Immediately afterwards, Kissinger dashed off an essay, “The Impasse of American Policy and Preventative War,” that argued local war was still possible even in the thermonuclear age. Schlesinger was so impressed that he helped Kissinger get it published in Foreign Affairs the following year. Almost overnight, writes Ferguson, “Kissinger would be one of the foremost American experts on nuclear strategy, a best-selling author, a star guest on television talk shows, the subject of debate in Washington, and the object of denunciation in Moscow.” Some even cited him as the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, the mad nuclear strategist played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film of the same name. Kissinger, incidentally, never forgot his debt to Schlesinger.That stratospheric rise inevitably brought with it proximity to power, but for more than a decade it was unclear to which political mast Kissinger would nail his colors. Ferguson’s detailed approach really comes into its own as we witness the various circumlocutions, evasions, omissions, and somersaults that Kissinger performed as he tacked, at times deftly, at others less so, between Nelson Rockefeller, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon. Ferguson, however, refutes the argument of Seymour Hersh that Kissinger was, in effect, a traitor who leaked information from the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam in order to ingratiate himself with the Nixon campaign.Indeed, for a man so often seen as Machiavellian, Kissinger emerges from these pages as curiously lacking in guile. “Yes, he sincerely believed he was the man best qualified as the next national security advisor,” Ferguson notes, “but he scarcely went about getting that job in a rational way.” Indeed, more often than not, Kissinger seemed “indifferent to his own career prospects.” Why else would he have reenlisted in 1968 with Nelson Rockefeller, a candidate with little chance of stopping Nixon from getting the nomination in 1968, other than because he admired him?If Kissinger was sometimes his own worst enemy throughout the 1960s, McGeorge Bundy—dean of arts at Harvard and later NSC adviser and White House chief of staff—was not far behind him. Ferguson skewers Bundy time and again as devious, lordly, and hubristic. Something about Kissinger’s status as a celebrity public intellectual increasingly offended Bundy’s patrician ways. When in 1968, with Nixon forming his administration, Kissinger asked Bundy for advice, the former dean could not believe that they were talking about anything more substantive than an assistant secretaryship. When Kissinger was announced as National Security Advisor, Bundy was astonished. He must have been the only man in Washington who was.This engrossing first volume closes in November 1968 with Kissinger standing on the threshold of power. The story, Ferguson says, has been a Bildungsroman, “the tale of an education through experience, some of it bitter.” What characterizes Kissinger for his biographer is that at every stage—from fleeing Germany as a refugee, discovering the horror of the Holocaust, learning about History itself at Harvard, and developing a political ability to “project beyond the known” as an action-intellectual—Kissinger “learned something new about the nature of foreign policy, cumulatively building an understanding of international relations that, by the end of the 1960s, had few rivals.”Yet just as Kissinger prepares to move into the White House, his first mentor, Fritz Kraemer, returns to warn his protégé about the lesson of Bismarck in making power an end in itself. “You are beginning to behave in a way that is no longer human (menschlich),” he cautioned, “and people who admire you are starting to regard you as cool, perhaps even cold.” That judgment may sound like sour grapes from an early guru, but as Ferguson points out, there was a kernel of truth in his words. For “what Kissinger had yet to learn was the answer to Kraemer’s—and his own—most difficult questions. Could the idealist inhabit the real world of power and retain his ideals?”In order to answer that question, Kissinger would be thrown together with Richard Nixon and his “gang of self-seeking bastards.” Kissinger understood the challenge only too well. “I used to find the Kennedy group unattractively narcissistic,’ he reflected, “but they were idealists. These people are real heels.”One way or another, Henry Kissinger was about to learn how to be a realist.

The Next Stage

The hallmark of identity wars, both religious and ethnic—as the fighting bogs down and passions are more bitter, communities start purging minorities—has arrived in Syria. The New York Times:

In one of the most ambitious deals yet struck between combatants in the multisided war in Syria, supporters and opponents of President Bashar al-Assad will essentially trade territory in two different parts of the country, stop bombing and besieging one another’s civilians and pledge to observe a six-month cease-fire.

If the deal holds, it will be the most far-reaching since a pact struck more than a year ago that allowed the evacuation of rebel fighters from the center of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city.The deal would end attacks by the government and its allies on Zabadani, a city between Damascus, the capital, and the Lebanese border that has long been held by local insurgents, as well as attacks by rebels on the Shiite villages of Foua and Kefraya in Idlib Province.But it involves a sectarian population exchange, sending the Shiites in Idlib to other government-held areas, and moving Zabadani’s Sunni rebels and their families to insurgent-held Idlib, raising the specter of forced demographic change.

When it’s organized, it’s called ‘exchange of populations’. When it happens on the fly in wartime, it’s called ethnic cleansing or mass flight. Literally tens of millions of people were forced out of their original homes during the 20th century in exactly this way—most of them before 1950. Hindus and Muslims in British India as it divided, Palestinian Arabs and Jews from across the Middle East, Germans after World War II, Greeks and Turks after World War I, Crimean Tatars, Balkan Serbs, Bosniaks, Albanians and Croats… In Iraq, Christians, Sunnis, Shias, Kurds and Yazidis have all lost their homes.

It’s a terrible thing, but more than once it has been embraced by world powers as better than what in many cases is the likeliest alternative: a genocide of the weak, the destruction of the losing side in a civil war.So far, every twist in the story of the Syrian civil war has revealed new and deeper visions of the hell of hatred and brutality that civilization and order normally keep under wraps. Even the most destructive wars sometimes ultimately burn themselves out, but this one still seems to have a long way to go. With Iran and Russia bolstering a sagging Assad, and panicky Sunni states shoveling money and weapons toward any force they think can stand against Iran’s allies, the conditions for an even longer and more destructive war are beginning to appear.