August 3, 2008
NOW? YOU'VE ALL BEEN TORIES SINCE TONY WON:
So are we all tories now? (Carole Cadwalladr, 8/03/08, The Observer)
This is blitzkrieg, total warfare and, last week, the Panzer divisions of the ideological wing of the Conservative party managed to take the equivalent of Poland, claiming for themselves not only the entire British seaside but also the Smiths, Radiohead and Gorillaz. For as well as trouncing Gordon in the first inaugural Fake Holiday Photo Op head-to-head, Cameron also presented a selection of his favourite CDs, to Barack Obama, and in so doing branded them with the Conservative stamp.But then, increasingly, what isn't? Everything that I, as a paid-up, Guardian-reading, organic muesli-eating, Red Ken-voting, farmers' market-visiting, lentil-cooking, metropolitan-living, city cyclist, hold dear - being nice to battery chickens and veal calves, buying fish that has been caught by a grizzled old man using nothing more technologically advanced than a bit of a string, buying only the most humanitarian coffee beans known to man - suddenly all these things seem to have become not only part of the Conservative party manifesto but also, and believe me, it pains me to say this, posh.
It's like the Twilight Zone. I'm wondering if my brain was accidentally switched by aliens for, say, Kirsty Allsopp's? Or did the entire country fall on its head and start seeing things funny? Because one minute, the bicycles and the muesli and the lentils were all manifestations of a certain home-spun knit-your-own-hemp-socks leftiedom as practised by what the Daily Mail used to call the tofu classes. And the next you're reading an interview with David Cameron in the Daily Mail and there he is saying that he knits his own hemp socks and actually bathes in organic tofu.
Or near enough. And it's just so confusing. Because back in the days when Tories charged around in their 4x4s and shot things out of hedgerows, you could just ignore them and know you never wanted to be one of them. Bloodsports and ridiculous young toffs were Tories.
Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, Senator Obama is fighting off the charge that he's posh because it's radioactive.
FAREWELL TO A TRUTH-TELLING FRIEND:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89 (BBC, 8/03/08)
Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died at 89, Russian media say.
Obituary: Alexander Solzhenitsyn (BBC, 8/03/08)
Born into a family of Cossack intellectuals, Alexander Solzhenitsyn graduated in mathematics and physics, but within weeks the Soviet Union was fighting Hitler for its survival.Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer and was decorated for his courage, but in 1945 was denounced for criticising Stalin in a letter.
He spent the next eight years as one of the countless men enduring the gulags. He was one of the lucky ones to survive.
The rest of us were the lucky ones.
MORE:
_REVIEW ARCHIVE & LINKS: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (BrothersJudd.com)
-LECTURE: A World Split Apart (Text of Address by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,Thursday, June 8, 1978)
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918 - 2008(dwhudson, August 3, 2008, GreenCine)
-OBIT: Nobel prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies aged 89 (guardian.co.uk, 8/03/08)
-OBIT: Soviet Dissident Writer Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89 (Reuters, August 3, 2008)
-OBIT: Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89 (VOA News, 03 August 2008)
-WIKIPEDIA: Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
-OBIT: Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, R.I.P. (National Review, 8/04/08)
-OBIT: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the man who exposed the horrors of Soviet Communism, dies aged 89 (Tamara Cohen, 04th August 2008, Daily Mail)
-OBIT: CHRONICLER OF THE GULAGS: Russian Literary Giant Solzhenitsyn Dies: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the man whose writings exposed the brutality of Stalin's murderous labor camps, has died at the age of 89. Death, he told SPIEGEL last year, "is a natural milestone of one's existence." (Der Spiegel, 8/04/08)
-VIDEO: Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89; David Remnick Reflects (Open Culture)
-ESSAY: Understanding Solzhenitsyn (William F. Buckley Jr., April 14, 1976, National Review)
-ESSAY: Solzhenitsyn -- a Rightist? (William F. Buckley Jr., August 1975, National Review)
-OBIT: Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies aged 89 (Damien Francis, 8/04/.08, guardian.co.uk)
-INTERVIEW: An Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Joseph Pearce, February 2003, St. Austin Review)
-INTERVIEW: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death': In an interview with SPIEGEL, prominent Russian writer and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn discusses Russia's turbulent history, Putin's version of democracy and his attitude to life and death. (Der Spiegel, 7/23/07)
FROM THE ARCHIVES: BRIDGEHEADS AND CORNERS:
It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
[originally posted: 2004-07-25]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE VISION THING :
Reagan, 'hero in history' (Arnold Beichman, 5/31/02, Washington Times)Mr. Reagan fits perfectly a definition of what Sidney Hook called the "hero in history." That phrase was the title of a book in which the philosopher dealt with the role of personality in history and the impact of that force on mankind:"The great man or woman in history is someone of whom we can say on the basis of the available evidence that if they had not lived when they did, or acted as they did, the history of their countries and of the world, to the extent that they are intertwined, would have been profoundly different. Their presence, in other words, must have made a substantial difference with respect to some event or movement deemed important by those who attribute historical greatness to them."
An immediate test of that definition is to consider how different a world it would be today had Jimmy Carter defeated Mr. Reagan and won a second term in 1980. For it was Mr. Carter's stupendous misjudgment of Soviet history and ambitions that led him early in his term to exult that, "we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear."
It would be one thing if only Jimmy Carter had misunderstood the USSR this profoundly, but such misjudgments were commonplace at the time. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger are justifiably reviled for their personal abuse of power, but inexplicably hailed as master statesmen. Both were certain, even into the 1980s, that communism was a permanent and formidable system with which the West would have to come to reach an accommodation.
Then came Ronald Reagan, who, in his speech at Westminster in 1982, which Mr. Beichman cites, declared :
The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.This is not cultural imperialism; it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy. Who would voluntarily choose not to have the right to vote, decide to purchase government propaganda handouts instead of independent newspapers, prefer government to worker-controlled unions, opt for land to be owned by the state instead of those who till it, want government repression of religious liberty, a single political party instead of a free choice, a rigid cultural orthodoxy instead of democratic tolerance and diversity.
Since 1917 the Soviet Union has given covert political training and assistance to Marxist-Leninists in many countries. Of course, it also has promoted the use of violence and subversion by these same forces. Over the past several decades, West European and other social democrats, Christian democrats, and leaders have offered open assistance to fraternal, political, and social institutions to bring about peaceful and democratic progress. Appropriately, for a vigorous new democracy, the Federal Republic of Germany's political foundations have become a major force in this effort.
We in America now intend to take additional steps, as many of our allies have already done, toward realizing this same goal. The chairmen and other leaders of the national Republican and Democratic party organizations are initiating a study with the bipartisan American Political Foundation to determine how the United States can best contribute as a nation to the global campaign for democracy now gathering force. They will have the cooperation of congressional leaders of both parties, along with representatives of business, labor, and other major institutions in our society. I look forward to receiving their recommendations and to working with these institutions and the Congress in the common task of strengthening democracy throughout the world.
It is time that we committed ourselves as a nation -- in both the public and private sectors -- to assisting democratic development....
What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.
Within a decade his goal had been made a reality. That he achieved his world altering vision mostly peacefully--with a minimal amount of bloodshed in Central America, Afghanistan, and a few other hot spots--only makes it all the more remarkable. Alone among world leaders and nearly alone among Western elites (Robert Kaplan gives credit to Richard Pipes and George F. Kennan--I'd add Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), Reagan looked at the seemingly mighty and intractable Soviet Union and saw a society teetering on the brink of collapse, needing only a determined push from the West to come toppling down.
One wonders if what is required right now is not a similar vision of the Islamic world transformed by a secularization of politics and economics. The received wisdom is that Islam is simply incapable of this kind of Reformation, that because of the unique circumstances of its birth and its resulting totalitarian nature it can not be redeemed as a mere religion. But what if, once again, conventional wisdom is wrong? What if a hero of history, maybe it will even be George W. Bush, were to give this same type speech and pursue the same type program, applying steady rhetorical and infrastructural pressure to replace the current repressive regimes of Islam with freer, more democratic, more protestant, more capitalist governments and cultures? Mightn't we say that we still harbor : " a hope for the long term--the march of freedom and democracy which will leave totalitarian Islam on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people"?
[originally posted: 2002-05-31]FROM THE ARCHIVES: YOU TALKIN' TO ME?:
Solzhenitsyn and Russia's Golgotha: a review of The Solzhenitsyn Reader (JOHN COURETAS, CERC)
This new volume includes Solzhenitsyn’s famous 1978 commencement address at Harvard (deserving to be read at least annually), where he catalogued the West’s failings, including rampant materialism, the superficiality of the media, and the moral cowardice of intellectuals. (A prophet tends to speak his mind, even when invited to the most exclusive parties.) At Harvard, before the cream of the Cambridge intelligentsia, Solzhenitsyn accused the West of leaving behind “the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.” He took the political and intellectual elites to task for cowardice, a “lack of manhood” in its dealings with international aggressors and terrorists. He lamented the “boundless space” that the West had provided for human freedom but without making any distinctions for human decadence. “The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer,” Solzhenitsyn told the Harvard crowd.As a boy, Solzhenitsyn was deeply influenced by his Aunt Irina who instilled in him a love of literature and of Russian Orthodoxy. But he drifted away from the Christian faith under the spell of state indoctrination in Marxist-Leninism. It was his experience with the realities of the Soviet system that brought him to his metanoia, the change of mind that put him on the road to repentance. “He returned with adult thoughtfulness to the Christian worldview of his rearing,” the editors write. “Solzhenitsyn’s mature articulation of Christian truths was deeply informed by his experience in the prison camps. There he witnessed human nature in extremis and learned about the heights and depths of the human soul.”
Solzhenitsyn reserved his harshest condemnation for his own, particularly the Soviet leadership, and could not forgive what he saw as passivity in so many Russians during the long terror. [...]
Russian historian George Vernadsky estimated that between the years 1917-1920 “several hundred bishops, priests, and monks were either shot or starved to death in prisons.” In 1922, the Soviets confiscated religious art and liturgical items, citing the need to raise funds to combat a famine, and in the process, Vernadsky wrote, “many priests were arrested and a number executed, among them the bishop of Petrograd, Benjamin.” To this day, the Russian Orthodox Church holds an annual memorial service in Butovo, the location of a former secret police camp now known as Russia’s Golgotha. No one knows exactly how many died at the “shooting field” in 1937-38, although the official number tops 20,000 people. Among them were more than 1,000 clergymen, including seven bishops. Witnesses said "enemies of the people" were brought to the shooting range in food vans marked "MEAT." Shootings went on non-stop day and night in the later stages.
The Russian exile theologian Vladimir Lossky defined evil as “nothing other than an attraction of the will towards nothing, a negation of being, of creation, and above all of God, a furious hatred of grace against which the rebellious will puts up an implacable resistance.”
[originally posted: 2/02/08]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: TITANS:
Alone Together: SOLZHENITSYN AND THE JEWS, REVISTED (Richard Pipes, 11.14.02, New Republic)Recently Alexander Solzhenitsyn published a long book called Dvesti let vmeste, or Two Hundred Years Together, the first of two volumes devoted to the history of Jews in Russia from the third partition of Poland in 1795, when Russia, until then effectively without Jews, suddenly acquired one million Jewish subjects. It covers the years between 1795 and 1916. The follow-up volume will bring the story up to the year 1995.One cannot help but marvel at the intellectual energy of a novelist who in his seventies undertakes research on a vast and tangled historical theme with which he has only the most superficial familiarity. In his introduction, Solzhenitsyn says that during his work on the Russian Revolution he had frequently run into the problem of Russo-Jewish relations but found no history that illuminated the subject in a balanced matter. His book is an attempt to remedy this lacuna. He makes a conscious effort to show empathy for both sides, calling on Jews and Russians to display "patient mutual understanding and an acknowledgment of their share of sin"--the ultimate sin being the 1917 revolution that brought Russia untold miseries.
Someone familiar with Solzhenitsyn's treatment of Jews in his historical novels cannot escape the feeling that, at least in some measure, this undertaking is an effort to rid the author of the reputation for anti-Semitism. Although Solzhenitsyn has always indignantly rejected this accusation, it was not entirely unmerited. In Lenin in Zurich, he depicted the Russian Jew Alexander Parvus-Helphand as a slimy, sinister, almost satanic figure as he attempted to hire the exile Lenin to work for the Germans. In The Red Wheel, when dealing with the assassination of his hero Peter Stolypin by Dmitry Bogrov (whom he named "Mordka" or Mordechai, lest anyone miss his nationality), Solzhenitsyn attributed to the assassin, without any historical warrant, a desire to prevent Stolypin from reforming Russia, since what was good for Russia was bad for the Jews. In fact, Bogrov came from a thoroughly assimilated family--his grandfather was a convert and his father a member of the Kievan Nobles' Club--and he had no Jewish interests in mind.
Solzhenitsyn's new book (which is not yet available in English) helps to clarify the writer's attitude toward Jews. He draws a sharp distinction between religious Jews and assimilated Jews, notably those assimilated Jews who joined the revolutionary movement. For the former he has admiration that verges on mystical reverence. "The preservation of the Jewish people for more than two thousand years in diaspora," he writes, "arouses amazement and respect": "The role of the small but energetic Jewish nation in the vast and expansive history of the world is undeniable, powerful, persistent, and even salient. Russian history included. But it remains an historical mystery for all of us. For the Jews as well. This strange mission by no means brings them happiness either." He also respects Zionists and expresses esteem for Israel. But his attitude toward assimilated Jews is ambivalent, and he seems uncertain about whether or not they contributed to Russia's well-being. His difficulty is due to the fact that he is a nationalist; nationalism in general--and Russian nationalism in particular--is not readily compatible with tolerance toward Jews, partly for religious reasons, partly because they refuse to dissolve without a trace in the ethnic community in the midst of which they live.
When the history of the Cold War is written, by a generation that didn't live through it and have an opportunity to misunderstand it themselves, two writers will tower above all others in terms of the clarity with which they comprehended their times and wrote of the evil at the core of the Soviet Union. In this review, one of them, Richard Pipes, writes about the other, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Savor the moment. [originally posted: 2002-11-21]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE REAL SOLZHENITSYN
-REVIEW: of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology By Daniel J. Mahoney (Robert P. Kraynak, First Things)Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and former Soviet dissident, is not yet dead, but he is in danger of fading into oblivion in the West and of being dismissed as a crank in his own country. This is a terrible shame. For Solzhenitsyn is one of the giants of the twentieth century-a heroic witness to truth who resisted Communist tyranny and exposed the horrors of Soviet forced-labor camps in The Gulag Archipelago. He is also a powerful novelist whose works of historical fiction-The First Circle, August 1914, Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich-depict the enduring struggles between good and evil in the human heart.
If these achievements are not enough to save Solzhenitsyn from premature death, then one can read Daniel Mahoney's inspiring new book Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology to appreciate the philosophical and spiritual reasons for keeping him alive. The most important reason, Mahoney tells us, is Solzhenitsyn's understanding of "the permanent propensities of the modern mind"-namely, the fatal attraction to utopian ideologies and the totalitarian temptation to radically alter human nature. Solzhenitsyn not only dissects these propensities; he also provides a way out-an "ascent from ideology," in Mahoney's words, that aims at healing the human soul by recovering the God-given natural order of things as well as the spiritual basis of political freedom.
In presenting a reasoned defense of Solzhenitsyn, Mahoney joins a distinguished group of scholars, including Edward Ericson and Alexis Klimoff, whose mission is to rehabilitate Solzhenitsyn in Western eyes. Their task is formidable, because most Westerners have accepted the demonized caricature of Solzhenitsyn as a Russian "ayatollah," a Tsarist reactionary, a nationalistic extremist, and, to boot, an anti-Semite.
These scholars must also contend with the bias of modern intellectuals against any attempt to portray Solzhenitsyn as a spokesman for responsible political freedom. As Mahoney points out, "Contemporary intellectuals and journalists will not tolerate any serious challenge to the enlightenment or progressivist assumptions underlying modern liberty." What he means is that Western intellectuals are intolerant because they are hardly aware of decent alternatives to the secular theories of freedom and rights flowing from the Enlightenment. Hence, it is almost inconceivable to them that Solzhenitsyn could hold traditional beliefs about God, Orthodox Christianity, the mystical basis of the Russian nation, and the soul's eternal destiny while also being a spokesman for responsible political freedom (meaning constitutional limits on power, moderate nationalism, private property, and local self-government). And yet this is the real Solzhenitsyn, according to Mahoney, not the demon of Western journalism. [...]
Mahoney begins by arguing that the most reliable statement of Solzhenitsyn's political views is not the sensational Harvard Address of 1978 but rather the largely ignored Liechtenstein Address of 1993. This is a bold and original way to interpret Solzhenitsyn. The Harvard Address created a huge stir because it criticized Western liberal democracies for their loss of courage during the Vietnam War and for their adherence to legalistic rights without moral restraints. The Harvard Address was strident (though also powerful and inspiring, in my view) and seemed to offer no third way between the spiritual exhaustion of Western democracy and the tyranny of Soviet communism.
The later Liechtenstein Address continues the criticism of modern Western life, challenging its notion of progress for diminishing the human soul by glorifying materialism and trivializing death. Yet the address also sounds a new theme by praising the moral strengths of Western democracy-especially Ronald Reagan's inspiring political leadership that enabled the West to win the Cold War, as well as the constitutional restraints on power that protect personal liberty. The mature Solzhenitsyn, Mahoney demonstrates, is a man capable of prudent political judgment who clearly recognizes that political freedom is indispensable for survival as well as for spiritual renewal.
Mahoney locates a crucial element of Solzhenitsyn's political teaching in his analysis of Peter Stolypin, the Prime Minister of Russia from 1906-11. Solzhenitsyn's appreciation of Stolypin has been largely unknown because it appears in the second edition of August 1914: The Red Wheel I (1989), which few have read. What Solzhenitsyn claims in the Stolypin chapters is that a moderate alternative to Tsarist autocracy existed in Russia in the early twentieth century-namely, a peaceful evolution toward a European-style constitutional monarchy under the enlightened statesmanship of Prime Minister Stolypin.
The main features of Stolypin's plan were the preservation of the Romanov dynasty and Orthodox Church, combined with economic and political reforms-reforms that would have given land to peasants and established local self-governing councils. Tragically, Stolypin was assassinated by terrorists who feared the success of his plan (which Solzhenitsyn estimates could have created an independent peasantry in twenty years and prevented Communist revolution). Mahoney's analysis shows Solzhenitsyn to be a Burkean-style admirer of constitutional monarchy that gradually evolves toward ordered liberty while preserving his nation's distinctive traditions.
Had Mr. Solzhenitsyn been content to demolish the legitimacy of the Soviet Union, his contribution to mankind would have been more than sufficient. That he also showed us the rot creeping into the foundations of our own culture makes him one of the most extraordinary men of our time. [originally posted: 2003-05-30]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE LIES WE LIVE BY
Remembering the Gulag: a review of Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (Hilton Kramer, New Criterion)What has to be understood, of course, is that the horrors of the Soviet system had never penetrated the public imagination in this country on anything like the scale that made the Nazis a familiar symbol of evil and criminality. Even as kids Americans of my generation recognized the swastika as an emblem of the “bad guys,” if only from the movies we saw and the comic books we read. No Soviet symbol ever acquired a comparable status in the public mind. Nor did Hollywood make any movies about heroic anti-Soviet resistance movements. As Anne Applebaum writes in the introduction to her magisterial study of the Soviet camps—Gulag: A History, a book that is certain to remain the definitive account of its subject for many years to come—
The Cold War produced James Bond and thrillers, and cartoon Russians of the sort who appear in Rambo films, but nothing as ambitious as Schindler’s List or Sophie’s Choice. Steven Spielberg, probably Hollywood’s leading director (like it or not) has chosen to make films about Japanese concentration camps (Empire of the Sun) and Nazi concentration camps, but not about Stalinist concentration camps. The latter haven’t caught Hollywood’s imagination in the same way.
Besides, Russia (as most people still called the Soviet Union) had been an ally in the war against Hitler, and was thus identified in the public mind as somehow belonging to “our” side. In the mainstream media and entertainment industries, the Soviet Union remained exempt from critical scrutiny, and the Gulag did not exist. Yet, as Ms. Applebaum also writes:
[N]ot all of our attitudes to the Soviet past are linked to political ideology… . Many, in fact, are rather a fading by-product of our memories of the Second World War. We have, at present, a firm conviction that the Second World War was a wholly just war, and few want that conviction shaken. We remember D-Day, the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the children welcoming American GIs with cheers on the streets. No one wants to be told that there was another, darker side to the Allied victory, or that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. To admit that by sending thousands of Russians to their deaths by forcibly repatriating them after the war, or by consigning millions of people to Soviet rule at Yalta, the Western Allies might have helped others commit crimes against humanity would undermine the moral clarity of our memories of that era. No one wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another. No one wants to remember how well that mass murderer got on with Western statesmen. “I have a real liking for Stalin,” the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told a friend, “he has never broken his word.” There are many, many photographs of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt all together, all smiling.
This is why The Gulag Archipelago and Solzhenitsyn himself met with such resistance and hostility in this country after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. “Soviet propaganda was not without its effect,” writes Ms. Applebaum. “Soviet attempts to cast doubt upon Solzhenitsyn’s writing, for example, to paint him as a madman or an anti-Semite or a drunk, had some impact.” Let us never forget the infamous passage in George Steiner’s New Yorker review of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974: “To infer that the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal simplification but a moral indecency.” Nor was Steiner alone in his hostile response to Solzhenitsyn’s revelations. The late Irving Howe, who had found so much to admire in Leon Trotsky, took to the pages of The New Republic to offer Solzhenitsyn moral instruction on the correct way to think about socialism.
Has anything really changed in our public comprehension—or incomprehension—of the Gulag since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final dismantling of the Soviet camps?
There must surely be others, but the only three excellent fictional portrayals of the Gulag I can recall are: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963); Forever Flowing (1970) by Vassily Grossman; and Archangel by Gerald Seymour. And the degree to which we've had to lie to ourselves about how complicit we were in the Soviet Union's crimes is amply displayed when folks protest that there was no way we could have done anything otherwise than leave the regime in place at the end of WWII, thereby making a necessity of what was in truth an expediency. [originally posted: 2003-05-14]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: TAKE THAT SOLZHENITSYN!
Mark Steyn takes on A World Split Apart (Mark Steyn, American Enterprise, July/August 1998)The important thing to remember about Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech is that it was given by a Vermonter. So when, after being asked if he could recommend the West as a model for his country, he says, "I would frankly have to answer negatively," the reasonable response is, "Are you crazy, man? You live in Cavendish, Vermont, for Pete’s sake!" Like most Granite Staters, I have fundamental differences with my Green Mountain neighbors over taxes, education, Ben and Jerry, and a zillion other issues. But compared to anywhere but New Hampshire—certainly compared to Mother Russia, Chechnya, Georgia, Romania—Vermont looks pretty good.
Alas, Solzhenitsyn is enough of a Soviet man that he seems to have absorbed the old Communist habit of discussing "the people" without the tedious bother of actually coming into contact with any of them. Real people—like his fellow townsfolk in Cavendish—are curiously absent from his speech. This helps to explain why, though everything he says is right in theory—indeed, his remarks about "TV stupor," press "superficiality," and "legalistic relationships," are unexceptional—yet here we still are, doing…O.K.
What Solzhenitsyn never seems to notice, at least not in a Western context, is the resilience of the people. Despite our descent into "the abyss of human decadence," the most popular forms of liquid manure in America are actually unchanged in their bourgeois sentimentality from a century ago: Today, "the people" enjoy Celine Dion singing the big ballad from Titanic, The Bridges of Madison County, "Touched by an Angel," and the like. The only difference is that, whereas a hundred years ago our betters told us to put down our parlor ballads and listen to Schubert, now they tell us we should be watching Natural Born Killers and The People vs. Larry Flynt. These films open to rave reviews and small loyal audiences in a handful of metropolitan fleshpots, but on general release across the country, they flop. When they come to Lebanon, New Hampshire, or Barre, Vermont, no one from Cavendish goes to see them. There is no commercial imperative to produce these films, only the dreary obsessions of our vulgarized elites.
Solzhenitsyn notes of Communism that "Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East." The key word in that sentence is intellectuals—which is why, in democratic America, it proved immensely easy to withstand the East. Even in hippy-dippy Vermont, no avowed Communist could ever be elected as Cavendish Town Clerk or School Board Chairman. [...]
"West" and "East" are, of course, generalizations. Within the "West" there are vast differences between Continental Europe and the English-speaking world—and even between the British Commonwealth and the United States. But you can’t help but notice that those countries which attempt to insulate their peoples from rampant materialism and the barbarities of commercial culture are the ones sunk in the deepest slough of spiritual poverty. The obvious reason would seem to be that those societies which most regulate the media and consumer products tend to regulate everything else, too.
Why did Solzhenitsyn never see anything outside his door that he could commend as "a model to my country"? Perhaps because he rarely peered outside his door. The most striking thing about Solzhenitsyn’s place in Cavendish was the fence—not, as elsewhere, a low white picket, a decorative skirting for the clapboards and shingles. In an area where few lock their homes and many don’t even have keys, Solzhenitsyn had a formal security fence. In the early days, it was assumed he feared a midnight wake-up call from rogue kgb agents. But as time went on, it became clear that he was as much concerned to keep Vermont out. If Solzhenitsyn had wanted something to put on the mantel alongside his Nobel Prize, he could easily have won an Ugliest House in Vermont competition. There is, in other words, more than one form of spiritual poverty.
For 18 years Solzhenitsyn endured a sort of self-imposed cabin fever, which the up-market essayists who sought him out in Cavendish dignified as "reclusiveness." Not far away in Stowe, there’s another model of artistic exile—the Trapp Family Singers, refugees from the century’s other great tyranny. They never made much money from The Sound of Music, but they run a popular ski lodge and Elisabeth von Trapp still sings every Christmas on wdev radio. They at least understand the virtues of a culture secure in itself.
When Solzhenitsyn returned to Moscow, it was to a new dacha in a compound enclosed behind an eight-foot barrier, with the Moscow cable company supplying him with mtv, cnn, and all the other American TV he couldn’t receive in uncabled Cavendish. Perhaps, behind his steel door in a toxic society far more spiritually enfeebled than America, he regrets his speech. Maybe he realizes that the best anyone could hope for is that Russia turns out half as agreeable as the Vermont he never quite lived in.
As we Westerners like to say, you wanna get outta the house more.
Usually my eyes glaze over whenever tracts like A World Split Apart or philosophers like Leo Strauss are discussed. Thank God for Mark Steyn, a man who can render pretty much any subject worth reading and has an uncomfortable (for his critics) tendency to see how well their positions are justified by plain common sense. [originally posted: 2003-06-09]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: IF ONLY PEVEAR AND VOLOKHONSKY WOULD TAKE UP HIS MANTLE:
Thomas P. Whitney, Solzhenitsyn Translator, Dies at 90 (MARGALIT FOX, 12/13/07, NY Times)
Thomas P. Whitney, a former diplomat and writer on Russian affairs who was best known for translating the work of the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into English, died on Dec. 2 in Manhattan. He was 90. [...]Mr. Whitney translated two of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s major books: “The First Circle” (Harper & Row, 1968), a novel of life in Stalin’s prison camps; and “The Gulag Archipelago,” a 660-page historical exposé of the Soviet terror system, published by Harper & Row in 1974. Both works, like nearly everything else Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote in those years, had been banned in the Soviet Union and were smuggled out for translation.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, could not accept it until 1974, when he was forcibly deported to the West. His Nobel address, also smuggled out, was published in book form by Harper & Row in 1972, in Mr. Whitney’s translation. (A competing translation, by F. D. Reeve, was issued the same year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
[originally posted: 12/12/07]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: "UNTOUCHED BY THE BREATH" (Thank you, Pat)
An Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Joseph Pearce, February 2003, St. Austin Review)Pearce: Do you believe that the West is in the same blind alley [as Russia] and also has nowhere to go?
Solzhenitsyn: Over the last twelve years I have stopped viewing Russia as something very distinct from the West. Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word "modernity" if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China. With the exception of those areas we should not use the words "the West" but the word "modernity". The modern world. And yes, then I would say that there are ills that are characteristic, that have plagued the West for a long time and now Russia has quickly adopted them also. [...]
Pearce: A British journalist recently stated that you believe that Russia has overthrown the evils of communism only to replace them with the evils of capitalism, is that a fair statement of your position and, if so, what do you feel are the worst evils of capitalism?
Solzhenitsyn: In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.
Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive. [...]
Pearce: Is the only hope a return to religion?
Solzhenitsyn: Not a return to religion but an elevation toward religion. The thing is that religion itself cannot but be dynamic which is why "return" is an incorrect term. A return to the forms of religion which perhaps existed a couple of centuries ago is absolutely impossible. On the contrary, in order to combat modern materialistic mores, as religion must, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch. Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.
Pearce: Related to this, there are two points of view amongst members of the Catholic Church about the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. One side says that it was good because it modernised the Church, the other side saw it as a surrender to the modern values with which the Church was essentially at war. What are your own views?
Solzhenitsyn: This question stands also now before the Russian Orthodox Church. It also has two currents within it. The one which is hierarchically dominated does not want to develop at all whereas the reformers seek change. For instance, a question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service. I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this fear but alas I also fear that if religion does not allow itself to change it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come to meet it somewhat.
Pearce: Does this pessimism, for want of a better word, apply to society's prospects of rediscovering, or rising to, religion?
Solzhenitsyn: I would have to say that the road is very difficult and the hope is very small but it is not excluded.
If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn hasn't given up hope how can anyone else? [originally posted: 2003-06-03]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: EIGHTEEN SHOPPING DAYS UNTIL "START OF THE COMMON ERA" DAY:
Modern Tomes: The best conservative writing of the last 20 years. (George H. Nash, July/August 1997, Policy Review)A number of years ago, the writers Malcolm Cowley and Bernard Smith invited a group of American intellectuals to identify the nonfiction books of recent decades that had most impressed them and had to some extent influenced their thinking. The result was an intriguing volume entitled Books That Changed Our Minds. In it, 11 contributors analyzed such classics as The Education of Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West.The Cowley-Smith anthology came to mind recently when the editors of Policy Review asked me to compile a list of the most important and influential works advancing conservative ideas in the past 20 years. At first the task seemed simple, as obvious candidates sprang quickly to consciousness. Then it became more daunting, as the sheer scope of conservative literature since 1977 came into view. How to extract from this vast and specialized cornucopia a mere 10 or 15 titles? Moreover, many conservative books of the last two decades have been intellectually important and richly deserving of recognition but not, alas, as influential as they ought to be. Many other conservative writings in this period have been primarily of intramural significance-applauded inside the movement but unfortunately little noticed outside it.
How, then, should we navigate the rapids? It is here that the Cowley-Smith volume of years ago suggests a decisive criterion: Which writings of a conservative character in the past 20 years can be said to have changed minds? Which have discernably altered America's public conversation and (in some cases) its public policy?
What follows, then, is neither an exhaustive canon of recent conservative "great books" nor a mechanical compendium of bestsellers. It is, rather, a chronological list of 12 books, two articles, and two speeches that, at least as much as many others, have given the intellectual climate of our time a conservative cast.
Happily enough, three of these are actually on-line, including the Solzhenitsyn address, which I personally consider to be the best speech of modern times:
-SPEECH: A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University (Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, June 8, 1978)
-SPEECH: Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals (Ronald Reagan, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983)
-ESSAY: Dan Quayle Was Right: The social-science evidence is in: though it may benefit the adults involved, the dissolution of intact two-parent families is harmful to large numbers of children. Moreover, the author argues, family diversity in the form of increasing numbers of single-parent and stepparent families does not strengthen the social fabric but, rather, dramatically weakens and undermines society (Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, April 1993, Atlantic Monthly)
[originally posted: 2002-12-07]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: PROPHET WITH HONOR (via Tom Morin):
Toast of the TV in Russian Eyes: It's Solzhenitsyn (STEVEN LEE MYERS, 2/09/06, NY Times)
The first episode of "The First Circle" was the most watched program in the nation last week, narrowly edging out "Terminator 3," according to TNS Gallup Media. By this week, though, it had slipped to fifth place, at least in Moscow — national figures were not yet available. But it was still attracting 15 million viewers a night.Solzhenitsyn was greeted as a prodigal son when he returned from exile in 1994, only to see his later works — "Russia in Collapse," an apocalyptic political attack on society's ills in 1998, and "Two Hundred Years Together," on Judaism in Russia in 2004 — met with public indifference. He once had his own talk show, until it was canceled because of low ratings.
"This would-be prophet has played no significant role in Russia's political dialogue since coming back," a commentator for the official Russian Information Agency, Anatoly Korolev, wrote in August 2004.
Now, 18 months later, in the twilight of an immeasurably influential career, he is back before the public in a society that has not always known what to make of its most famous living writer.
"I assumed that bringing it to the screen would be possible in 300 years," the director, Gleb Panfilov, said in a television interview, recalling his desire to make the film after first reading "The First Circle" while it was still banned, some 30 years ago. "But it happened earlier."
The series is the first Russian film based on Solzhenitsyn's writings. In a country where attitudes toward the Soviet history remain deeply conflicted, it amounts to the popularization of some of the darkest episodes.
"The young people today say: 'Oh, he is not a good writer. Communism is over. He is not so interesting,' " the writer Viktor Yerofeyev said in a telephone interview. "In the history of Russia, he is in the first place."
"It is like Germany after the war," Mr. Yerofeyev added. "In two or three generations people really start thinking about what happened in their country."
Solzhenitsyn, now 87, is credited as the screenwriter and narrates long passages. He also served as a consultant during filming, advising the crew on how to recreate the claustrophobic atmosphere of the network of forced labor camps known as the Gulag, where he served eight years after criticizing Stalin in 1945. "There is not one drop of falsehood," his wife, Natalya, told Izvestia.
As reclusive as he was when he lived in exile in Vermont for 18 years, he has not discussed the series publicly, but Mr. Panfilov reported that he had tears in his eyes when he saw the edited version.
"The First Circle," first published in the West in 1968, chronicles three days in the lives of prisoners at Mavrino, a "special prison" set up in a country estate outside Moscow in the aftermath of World War II. The political prisoners there, chosen for their expertise, work on two projects: a secure telephone for Stalin and a method of voice recognition needed to identify a suspected traitor. [...]
The series — seven and a half hours in all, shown without commercial breaks — is appearing on Rossiya, one of Russia's two state-owned television networks. Given the Kremlin's influence over what is broadcast, many here have interpreted the production as a signal of a new willingness to examine Stalin's legacy critically, if not to embrace Solzhenitsyn per se.
"As my mother said, 'Stalin is shown like a bastard,' " Mr. Yerofeyev said. "It means the Kremlin's power is not, let's say, monolithic." [...]
Viktor A. Moskvin, director of the Russian Abroad Foundation, a cultural center created by Solzhenitsyn, said the screenplay amounted to a distinct new work by an author, born in 1918, whose life spanned the entire Soviet era and now the beginning of another, different one.
"It is an important work at the beginning of the 21st century," he said. "It will help develop democracy."
[originally posted: 2/12/06]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE WORLD'S STILL SPLIT APART (via Paul Cella):
The Last Prophet: Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Ian Hunter, July/August 2003, Touchstone)
Who has been the most influential person of the last half-century? A tough question, that. I asked several of my acquaintances; interestingly enough, their immediate and unanimous response was: "Oh, Pope John Paul II, of course." Other names mentioned were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, Billy Graham, and--for sheer evil--Osama bin Laden.As it happens, my vote (though I am not a Roman Catholic) would also go to Pope John Paul II, who has stood astride our age like a colossus. But a case could be made for another man, one whose name was not mentioned by a single one of my respondents: Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn. [...]
And what of the future? Is it possible that Russians might slow down, think, perhaps even pray, change directions? With God, anything is possible—but even Solzhenitsyn considers it unlikely. He told Pearce: "The characteristics of modernity, the psychological illness of the twentieth century, is this hurriedness, hurrying, scurrying, this fitfulness—fitfulness and superficiality. Technological successes have been tremendous but without a spiritual component mankind will not only be unable to develop further but cannot even preserve himself."
In his last public appearance in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn said that one defining characteristic of contemporary humanity is "the loss of the ability to answer the principal problem of life and death. People are prepared to stuff their heads with anything, and to talk of any subject, but only to block off the contemplation of this subject."
Will Solzhenitsyn’s powerful voice be heeded? Not in the West, certainly, where he is a forgotten man. In Russia, then? It seems unlikely. The Russian writer Alexander Genis was probably correct in describing Solzhenitsyn as "the last remaining prophet in the abandoned temple of absolute truth."
Of course it is a common fate of prophets to be ignored, even ridiculed, in their own time and generation, yet to be appreciated, occasionally even heeded, by posterity. It may prove to be so with Solzhenitsyn. If Russia is to find a path out of its quagmire, it will perforce have to consider his critique of how it got there; and if Russia hears about its past from him, it is not beyond all hope that it might hear him when he speaks of its future.
Indeed, what other towering figure from the 20th Century struggle against the ism's--Nazism, Communism, Socialism, etc.--continues to speak so powerfully to the condition in which we find ourselves today? What's may be most remarkable is that, were it not for George W. Bush--were Howard Dean president, for example--Mr. Solzhenitsyn could deliver most of his notorious 1978 Harvard Commencement address again now. Consider just this passage:
A Decline in Courage [. . .]
may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
Take a look at the UN, France, Germany, Canada, the Democrats, etc., and ask yourself how much things have really changed in the intervening 25 years.
[originally posted: 2003-09-04]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE ONE WHO UNDERSTOOD THE COLD WAR WAS MERELY A BATTLE:
Friend Paul Cella has a good note up about ISI's Solzhenitsyn Reader.
[originally posted: 10/29/06]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: SURVIVAL CERTAINLY IS OF THE FITTEST THOUGH:
Russia’s Population Implosion (Sergei Kapitsa, Project Syndicate)
Years ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn coined the phrase “preservation of the people,” by which he meant Russia’s cultural survival. Today, it applies to Russia in a far more literal way.Although I am a physicist, I began to study demography about15 years ago, in the belief that the key global problem was not so much the threat of nuclear annihilation as the dynamics of population growth. It was a grim recognition that Russia faces the opposite problem: a rapid decline in population that threatens every aspect of Russian life. [...]
Solzhenitsyn himself recently suggested that Russia’s national idea should be based on Ivan Petrovich Shuvalov’s proposal to Empress Elizabeth 250 years ago. “Every move, every law should be assessed in terms of whether it helps to preserve the people,” according to Solzhenitsyn. “If not, down with the law.”
Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion is crude, but right in a fundamental sense. Our public thought is fragmented, and the country’s intelligentsia, who are partly responsible for tending to society’s values and goals, are behaving in often-destructive ways. The live-for-the-moment mentality of hedonism and greed that they have encouraged is embodied in Moscow’s casinos, of which there are more than in the rest of Europe – or, for that matter, Las Vegas.
These values – reflected in the way people dress, how they behave in public, and the language they speak – are not the values of human life. A crime subculture is spreading in Russia, and it is attaining the status of official culture. Where the intelligentsia is not directly complicit, its members have, simply by remaining silent, refused to accept the responsibility that accompanies freedom. By contrast, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, and other writers in Russia’s great literary tradition fully understood this responsibility.
The current Russian interpretation of freedom is instead characterized by a narrow, individualistic permissiveness that is incompatible with collective tasks. In other words, Russia’s population crisis is one manifestation of a crisis of ideas.
This, of course, raises the broader question of whether declining birthrates, in Russia and elsewhere, imply a crisis of the liberal idea of freedom, with its focus on individual rights?
Odd that there are still folk who think survival of the species is a physical imperative, rather than a spiritual drive.
[originally posted: 2/27/06]
FROM THE ARCHIVES: HEART PIECES:
"Evil": Scoff if you must, but you can't avoid it. (Christopher Hitchens, December 31, 2002, Slate)There is probably no easier way to beckon a smirk to the lips of a liberal intellectual than to mention President Bush's invocation of the notion of "evil." Such simple-mindedness! What better proof of a "cowboy" presidency than this crass resort to the language of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats? Doesn't everybody know that there are shades and nuances and subtleties to be considered, in which moral absolutism is of no help?Apparently everybody does know that, since at election times the same liberal intellectual will, after much agonizing, usually cast his vote for whichever shabby nominee the Democratic Party throws up. And he will do so, in his own words, because this is "the lesser evil." So, it seems that we cannot quite do without the word, even though it's worth noticing that some people only employ it in an ironic or relativist sense, as a quality that must be negotiated with, accommodated, or assimilated.
Though the word is often heard on the lips of preachers and moralists, it does also figure in the reflections of modern moral philosophers. Faced with the evidence of genocidal politics in 20th-century Europe, Hannah Arendt, for example, posed the existence of something she termed "radical evil" and suggested that intellectuals were failing to allow for its existence as a self-determining force. Her phrase "the banality of evil" also enjoys wide currency, serving to help us understand the ways in which "ordinary men" can be mobilized or conscripted to do exceptionally ghastly things. If she had said "radical sinning" or "the banality of sin" she might have seemed sermonizing or naive, but then President Bush did not refer to an "axis of sin," did he?
It may not be of much help, in propaganda terms, to describe an enemy as "evil." Time spent in understanding and studying a foe is always time well spent, and absolutist categories may easily blunt this rigorous undertaking. But how far can certain analyses be taken without running up against a recurrence of Arendt's dilemma?
We've been arguing for some time that Mr. Hitchens is in the process of becoming a conservative, so it's gratifying to see him pick up the cudgel on behalf of the concept of evil. However, he still has a ways to go, as witness the way evil seems to be a quality of others here.
Eventually, one comes to the view that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn expressed so well:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.
Or, in the words of the poet, Geoffrey Hill:
Evil is not good's absence but gravity's[originally posted: 2003-01-05]
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
MR. POTTER'S NEIGHBORHOOD:
Fix this medical ethics glitch (Oregonian, 7/29/08)
Opponents of physician-assisted suicide are fired up this summer, and rightfully so, over an ethically questionable provision of the Oregon Health Plan.The conflict came to light in a recent report in The Register-Guard of Eugene. The newspaper described the sad plight of Barbara Wagner, a 64-year-old Springfield woman with lung cancer.
After her oncologist prescribed a cancer drug that would cost $4,000 a month, the newspaper reported, "Wagner was notified that the Oregon Health Plan wouldn't cover the treatment, but that it would cover palliative, or comfort, care, including, if she chose, doctor-assisted suicide."
Liberalism achieves its ultimate confusion as the state, which came into existence to protect us, offers to kills us.
IN A REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY...:
The post-national candidate (Jeffrey T. Kuhner, August 3, 2008, Washington Times)
Despite the large, cheering crowds and media glitz, the tour has given his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, the opening he needs to win - and win convincingly - in November.During his visit to Europe, Mr. Obama demonstrated the radical anti-Americanism at the heart of his candidacy. He proclaimed himself "a citizen of the world" - not simply a citizen of the United States. Also, he vowed that, as president, he would consider the "needs, interests and perspectives" of all nations, and not just America´s "narrow, strategic" objectives.
In other words, Mr. Obama pledged to subordinate our national interest to international concerns. This is unprecedented for a would-be president. The primary role of commander in chief is not to be the spokesman for the international community; rather, it is to defend and advance U.S. national interest.
This flies in the face of the attempt by Europe´s ruling elite to create a socialist super-state. The European Union aims to eradicate national identity and state sovereignty in favor of a Continental federation. The EU seeks to forge a new world order based on multilateralism, the dominance of international institutions such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, and the projection of soft power. This leftist globalist worldview underlines European hostility to President Bush. He is everything they despise: a unilateralist, a cowboy and a patriot. In the eyes of most Europeans, Mr. Bush is a dangerous right-winger because he puts America´s national interest first and foremost.
The liberal media are trying to portray Mr. Obama´s warm reception abroad as a powerful sign he is capable of being a world leader. As usual, they are wrong. Europe´s socialists love Mr. Obama because he is one of them.
...you represent your country's demos, not the other's.
MORE:
Obama's Eloquence Fatigue (George Will, 8/03/08, Real Clear Politics)
Does Obama have the sort of adviser a candidate most needs -- someone sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much? If so, Obama should be told: Enough, already, with the we-are-who-we-have-been-waiting-for rhetorical cotton candy that elevates narcissism to a political philosophy.And no more locutions such as "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship." If they meant anything in Berlin, they meant that Obama wanted Berliners to know that he is proudly cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is not, however, a political asset for American presidential candidates. Least of all is it an asset for Obama, one of whose urgent needs is to seem comfortable with America's vibrant and very un-European patriotism, which is grounded in a sense of virtuous exceptionalism.
Otherwise, "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship" are, strictly speaking, nonsense. Citizenship is defined by legal and loyalty attachments to a particular political entity with a distinctive regime and culture. Neither the world nor the globe is such an entity.
WHILE DEMOCRATS RANT AT THE EMPLOYERS AND REPUBLICANS RAVE AT THE IMMIGRANTS:
Hovering Above Poverty, Grasping for Middle Class (Michael A. Fletcher and Jon Cohen, 8/03/08, Washington Post)
Low-wage workers in the United States are gripped by increasing financial insecurity as they inch along an economic tightrope made riskier by pervasive job losses and rising prices. Many struggle to pay for life's basics -- housing, food and health care -- and most report having virtually no financial cushion should they stumble.Still, they remain inspired by the American dream, with most saying they are more apt to move up economically than slip backward even if they are frustrated now. Most also expect better for their children. [...]
Although they feel increasingly squeezed, just 3 in 10 low-wage workers blame their employers for their plight, while 6 in 10 said they are responsible for their own financial situation. A similar proportion said people can get ahead by working hard.
But they are also unsparing in their view of the federal government. The vast majority said the federal government bears at least some responsibility for their situation, and 2 of 3 said the same about corporate America. More than half said that government programs aimed at helping working families "aren't having much impact," while another 2 in 10 said they are actually making things worse.
At the same time, many low-wage workers benefit from multibillion-dollar government programs aimed at helping them. About half said they took the Earned Income Tax Credit last year, which supplements the income of low-wage families, and about half of those with children said they received health care for their children through Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which is jointly funded by the federal government and the states.
Crystal Willis, 21, a sales associate in Oklahoma City, is one of those who benefits from a public safety net. "I make a decent amount, but I don't make enough to support our family," she said. "The baby's on WIC [the federal Women, Infants and Children program] so we can afford our formula. If I had to pay for everything, we'd barely be making it, if we were making it at all."
Also, Congress last year approved the first increase in the federal minimum wage in a decade. The second phase of the increase went into effect in July, raising the minimum wage to $6.55 a hour -- less than the inflation-adjusted 1997 level of $6.88. Nonetheless, it meant pay raises for an estimated 2 million U.S. workers, according to Holly Sklar, director of Business for Shared Prosperity, a Boston group that advocates for policies that reduce economic inequality. Despite their dissatisfaction with government, majorities of poll respondents said the government should make it a "top priority" to get them more affordable health insurance, cheaper gas, financial assistance for higher education and public works jobs.
Nearly half of low-wage workers said illegal immigrants take jobs from legal residents, and half of those believe that they are jobs that residents would want. Still, only 1 in 5 said that they or their family have been hurt by illegal immigration.
Half of low-wage workers believe the growth in international trade has made things worse for the country as a whole, nearly triple the number who said it made things better. Fewer feel impacted personally. More than half said trade has not made much of a difference in their lives, while just over 1 in 4 said it had made their lives worse. Thirteen percent said trade made it better.
You can't really call them poor, but has any country ever had a lower class that's better adjusted or more sensible?
NO CANDIDATE CAN WITHSTAND BEING EXPOSED AS A NORTHERN LIBERAL:
Beware the Ides of August (JOHN P. AVLON, 8/2/08, Politico)
August traditionally is considered a quiet month before presidential campaigns kick into high gear at the conventions and then rocket on to Election Day.But politics never takes a vacation, and the last month of summer has been a killer to more than one presidential campaign — just ask would-be presidents Dukakis and Kerry. [...]
Think back to the summer of 1988: George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You” was top of the charts, but voters’ minds were far from set despite Dukakis’ 17-point lead over then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. Dukakis presented himself as a pragmatic governor, an embodiment of the American dream who could reclaim the lost promise of the Kennedy administration. After the nominee’s surprisingly eloquent convention speech in July, the post-Reagan liberal restoration seemed on track.
Then August rolled around.
IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR CULTURE:
Atheist Richard Dawkins blames Muslims for 'importing creationism' into classrooms (Daily Mail, 03rd August 2008)
Britain’s most famous atheist has blamed devout Muslims for importing creationist theories into the country’s science classes.Professor Richard Dawkins, who wrote the bestselling book The God Delusion, believes that children should be taught the theory of evolution instead of the idea that God created the universe.
IT ALL BEGINS WITH DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY:
Conservative Internationalism: Jefferson to Polk to Truman to Reagan (Henry R. Nau, August/September 2008, Policy Review)
This essay...argues... that Ronald Reagan tapped into a new and different American foreign policy tradition that has been overlooked by scholars and pundits. That tradition is “conservative internationalism.” Like realism and liberal internationalism, it has deep historical roots. Just as realism takes inspiration from Alexander Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt and liberal internationalism identifies with Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, conservative internationalism draws historical validation from Thomas Jefferson, James K. Polk, Harry Truman, and Ronald Reagan. These four American presidents did more to expand freedom abroad through the assertive use of military force than any others (Lincoln doing as much or more to expand freedom domestically by force). But they expanded freedom on behalf of self-government, local or national, not on behalf of central or international government, as liberal internationalists advocate, and they used force to seize related opportunities to spread freedom, not to maintain the status quo, as realists recommend. All of these presidents remain enigmas for the standard traditions. The reason? They represent the different and overlooked tradition of conservative internationalism.6Jefferson is claimed by isolationists and liberal internationalists, but he was neither. He doubled the size of American territory, and although this expansion took place on the North American continent when America was militarily weak, Jefferson ’s policies can hardly be called isolationist or pacifist. In fact, he used all the military, especially naval, power that the United States had at the time and combined threats and diplomacy deftly to seize the opportunity to grab Louisiana. The Louisiana Purchase may have fallen into his lap, as some historians later argued, but he had to place his lap in the right position to catch it.
James Polk expanded American territory by another 60 percent. And, yes, he expanded American freedom — which, although tarnished by black slavery (which Mexico had abolished in 1829), gave at the time the vote to more white male citizens than any other country and launched a trajectory of future emancipation that, with all its blemishes, made America the leading light of liberty in the twentieth century. He was one of the most ambitious and successful American presidents, and while his star, like that of Jefferson, has been diminished by rear-view mirror charges of racism and imperialism, he was, again like Jefferson, a pioneer of his day not only in expanding liberty and but also understanding the close and reciprocal interaction between force and diplomacy — a particular emphasis, as I will show, of conservative internationalist thinking.
Harry Truman expanded for the first time the cause of freedom beyond the confines of the western hemisphere and inspired the Cold War policy of militarized containment that incubated democracy in Japan, Germany, and throughout Western Europe. Had Truman not inserted American forces on European soil to stop a potential Soviet advance from Berlin to the English Channel, liberty might well have been lost in the very countries where it originated.
Ronald Reagan then transformed Truman’s containment policy into a competitive strategy to defeat, not just co-exist with, the Soviet Union. He saw the opportunity to end Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe that none of his predecessors saw and ultimately opened the doors of freedom for communist Europe and a good part of the rest of the world as well.
Before we consider the conservative internationalist foreign policies of these four presidents, let ’s look in more detail at the principal tenets of the conservative internationalist tradition and explore how this tradition differs from realism and liberal internationalism.
Main tenets
We can summarize the conservative internationalist tradition in terms of eleven tenets. First, the goal of conservative internationalist foreign policy is to expand freedom and ultimately increase the number of democratic, constitutional and republican governments in the world community. In this respect, conservative internationalism shares the same goal as liberal internationalism. Modern conservatives are liberals. They believe in liberty and do not defend the authoritarian status quo as traditional conservatives did. But they are classical liberals like Jefferson who embrace the ideas of John Locke and Adam Smith. They are not social liberals. Like Fredrick Hayek and William F. Buckley, they shout “stop” to the ideas of economic and institutional equality when those ideas threaten liberty.
Thus, conservative internationalists give priority to liberty over equality and work to free countries from tyranny before they recognize these countries as equal partners in international diplomacy. Jefferson and Polk were unequivocal about expanding liberty, even if it involved imperialism, because they believed that liberty would eventually bring greater equality. By contrast liberal internationalists give priority to equality over liberty and grant all nations, whether free or not, equal status in international institutions, because they believe treating countries equally will eventually encourage liberty. For conservative internationalists, legitimacy in foreign affairs derives from free countries taking decisions independently or working together through decentralized institutions; for liberal internationalists, legitimacy derives from all countries, free or not, participating equally in universal international organizations.
Second, conservative internationalism focuses initially on material, not ideological, threats. In this respect, it shares much with realism. Both focus on immediate dangers and do not seek military might or imperialism for its own sake. Poverty (Darfur) or oppression (Myanmar) abroad is not enough to trigger intervention, as it may be for some liberal internationalists. There has to be a physical effect on the United States, as realists require, such as terrorist attacks or oil supply disruptions. In the absence of material threat, conservative internationalists are perfectly content with domestic “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The difficulty today is that material threats to freedom are more difficult to perceive. Terrorism is an “immanent” rather than an “imminent” threat. It is present potentially everywhere in sleeper cells and illegal arms networks, but it is not visible actually in any specific location until it happens. Such a threat blurs the distinctions between known threats which can be contained, emerging threats which can be preempted, and future threats which have to be prevented. Compared to Soviet missiles, the terrorist threat is more emerging and future than known. To cope with such a threat, conservative internationalists expect to have to take more preemptive or preventive actions, not as matters of choice but of necessity. Neither containment, which realists recommend, nor treating terrorism as crime, which liberal internationalists recommend, is likely to suffice.
Third, while conservative internationalism starts with threat and geopolitics, it does not end there, as realism does. Conservative internationalism seeks a balance of power that not only defends the status quo but also seizes related and incremental opportunities to expand freedom. It seeks, in short, a balance of power tilted toward freedom. Force is useful not just to deter despots but also to weaken them. Liberal internationalists consider such offensive use of force as provocative and detrimental to diplomacy. Conservative internationalists see it as incentivizing negotiations. Jefferson, Polk, and Truman all positioned forces to seize opportunities to change the status quo. Perhaps the best example is Ronald Reagan ’s policy toward Eastern Europe. As I recount below, he established early on that his objective was not just to stabilize Eastern Europe, as containment and realists prescribed, but to revoke the Yalta compromise and set Eastern Europe free. This policy did not call for direct intervention to “roll back” communism. Rather, it was a patient diplomacy of outcompeting the Soviet Union across the broad front of economic, military, and ideological contestation. Had Reagan stopped with geopolitics, Gorbachev may have never climbed to the top of Russia ’s leadership scaffold. Russia needed him to meet Reagan’s deeper challenge of domestic reform, not merely to stabilize Russia’s military position in Eastern Europe.
Fourth, although conservative internationalism is more ambitious than realism, it is prudent in picking its targets for expansion. It espies the incremental opportunities for freedom primarily on the periphery or borders of existing free societies. Truman succeeded ultimately because he gave priority to freedom in Western Europe where strong democratic countries (initially Britain and later France and Italy after they avoided communist governments) surrounded recent or still fascist ones (pre-war Germany and after the war, Spain, Portugal, and Greece). He did not get distracted by Eastern Europe, Latin America, or the Middle East, where democratic influences were much weaker. Similarly, Reagan concentrated on freedom in Eastern Europe, which is why he avoided costly military ventures elsewhere.
Both Truman and Reagan accepted the reality that the United States might have to cooperate with nondemocratic governments in lower-priority areas to secure freedom in higher-priority areas. Conservative internationalism does not support a universal campaign to end tyranny everywhere. In theory, it believes that democracy is universal. But, in practice it promotes democracies where they are most easily influenced by the proximity and power of existing democracies. It encourages an “inkblot” rather than “leapfrog” strategy to expand freedom.
Fifth, conservative internationalism expects to use more force to achieve its objectives than realism or liberal internationalism. The reasons are simple. The objective of expanding freedom is more ambitious than preserving stability favored by realists, and the obstacle to expanding freedom is authoritarian and oppressive states that readily use force against their own people and thus are not likely to compromise with other nations, as liberal internationalists expect, without a contest of strength. As Ronald Reagan once put it pointedly: “if [oppressive countries] treat their own people this way, why would they treat us any differently? ” For conservative internationalists, therefore, force is not a “last” resort that kicks in after diplomacy and economic sanctions fail; it is a “parallel” resort that accompanies diplomacy at every turn — demonstrating resolve, creating policy options, and narrowing the maneuvering room of authoritarian opponents. Conservative internationalists remind us that there was no diplomatic option of un inspectors in Iraq (whom Saddam Hussein had kicked out in 1998) until a massive invasion force assembled in the Persian Gulf.
Force is not a last resort that kicks in after diplomacy fails; it accompanies diplomacy at every turn.
By contrast, liberal internationalists aspire to domesticate world affairs and therefore play down the use of military force. They do not reject the use of force. Far from it — Wilson and Roosevelt, preeminent liberal internationalists, led America into war. But liberal internationalists believe it is possible to reduce the salience and use of military force in international affairs. Wilson ’s League of Nations as well as Roosevelt’s un sought to pool national military forces into a single international force which, because it was now preponderant, could be downsized through disarmament and arms control to constitute a police force. Diplomacy and international institutions would suffice to resolve international disputes and, if some states resisted peaceful solutions, economic sanctions would bring them to heel. The use of traditional military force was a last resort and then only with the consent and thus legitimacy of the international community as a whole.
Sixth, as prevalent as force is in a conservative internationalist perspective, it does not substitute for diplomacy. The best force can do is win a war. It cannot win the peace. Defeated governments and countries have to be reconstructed. That ’s a diplomatic task. Thus conservative internationalists give equal weight to force and diplomacy. They time diplomatic initiatives to coincide with maximum military strength and know when to cash in military gains to advance diplomatic ones. The best example here, I will show, is President Polk. He was a master at marrying the use of force and diplomacy. So was Ronald Reagan.
Seventh, diplomacy for conservative internationalists does not mean primarily international institutions. Conservative internationalism is not enthusiastic about international institutions even if, or one might say especially if, these institutions are effective. It advocates a “small government” version of internationalism and thus does not favor, like liberal internationalism, the construction of a world community through centralized organizations and rules. Nor is conservative internationalism indifferent to the big government or garrison state implications of foreign policies that pursue military adventures beyond immediate dangers.7 Conservatives are naturally suspicious of governments and favor self-reliance and civil society institutions. They take their cue from Thomas Jefferson. In his first inaugural address, Jefferson said: “Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted to govern himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? ”8 Jefferson laid down the conservative internationalist precept that the first and best government is self-government and that national and international governments should only do what local and national governments cannot do.
Democracy, for conservative internationalism, is not only a local process, but also a difficult one.
Eighth, democracy for conservative internationalism is not only a local process, but also a difficult one. Culture constrains democracy. It may not make democracy permanently impossible in some countries, as some realists argue, but it does make democratic development messier and more imperfect than liberal internationalists expect. Enduring democracy has three key pillars: regular (not one-time) elections in which competing parties rotate in power; elected authorities that control the major bureaucracies, especially the military; and an independent civil society that protects free speech, private property, and impartial justice. None of these pillars is easy to construct. Best then to target democracy where it is most likely to succeed, namely on the border of existing democracies, and make compromises with authoritarian realities in other places as long as the process of freedom inches forward.
Ninth, the best tool for inching freedom forward not only in bordering but also distant regions is economic engagement or the free movement of goods, capital, and people. Both conservative and liberal internationalists agree on this point. But liberal internationalists see a greater need to moderate international markets through international regulations and foreign aid. They worry about greed and inequality and promote legal structures to restrain business. Conservative internationalists have more confidence in self-reliant individuals exercising private choice in a competitive marketplace. They worry about unaccountable institutions and corruption and rely more on religious and other moral foundations of society to restrain individual license. Conservatives see development not as a process of helping others, full stop, but of helping others help themselves.9 Free trade encourages self-help; aid creates dependency, not only among recipients but also among donors who become addicted to compassion and paternalism.
Liberal internationalists worry about greed and inequality and promote legal structures to restrain business.
Tenth, and unlike liberal internationalists, however, conservative internationalists do not expect economic liberalization to lead automatically to political liberalization. Liberal internationalists believe that powerful historical forces, particularly the forces of modernization, abet the march of freedom. The world will eventually become free and force obsolete if prosperity spreads far enough and diplomacy is patient enough. Conservative internationalists are not so sure. They support modernization and globalization but worry that political freedom may not follow ineluctably from economic development. Ideologies shape human behavior more deeply than material forces, and cultures do not disappear with prosperity. Fascist regimes in Germany and Japan modernized but did not liberalize. And China today is modernizing but not democratizing. Hence it is essential to maintain the role of force should modernization merely produce stronger adversaries. What is more, modernization brings new ideological challenges. It secularizes and potentially weakens the spiritual and moral character of some societies, while it uproots traditions, especially religious traditions, and radicalizes the politics of other societies. Conservative internationalists see a continuing role for religion in a secular world; liberal internationalists tend to see secularism prevailing.
Eleventh, and perhaps most important, conservative internationalism accepts the premise that public opinion in free societies is the final arbiter of American foreign policy. Unlike realism it does not assume that foreign policy elites know best or that public opinion will always accept a policy as long as it succeeds. But unlike liberal internationalism, it is also not willing to wait for unanimous consent to act. No democracy requires unanimity to act domestically, and no community of democracies, let alone institutions that include both democracies and nondemocracies, should require unanimity to act internationally.
However, because conservative internationalism expects to use force more aggressively than either realists or liberal internationalists, it faces a tougher sell with public opinion. In democracies, public support for war is limited, especially if casualties persist or the threat is less visible, as in the case of terrorism. That reluctance, most of us would agree, is probably a good thing. Hence, when faced with persisting public opposition either at home or among democratic countries, conservative internationalism is more willing to scale back or terminate interventions. It seems incongruous to conservative internationalists to persist in a policy to spread freedom to new democracies if that policy cannot be sustained by majority support in the old democracies.
The best way to illustrate these eleven tenets of the conservative internationalist tradition is to explore the policies of the presidents that pioneered this tradition and compare their policies along the way with other presidents that fit standard interpretations more easily — Jefferson with Hamilton and realists, Polk with Andrew Jackson and nationalists, Truman with Franklin Roosevelt and liberal internationalists, and Reagan with both liberal internationalists (Jimmy Carter) and realists (Richard Nixon).
Tenet Two is, of course, quite wrong. There simply has been no serious threat to America since we gave the Brits the heave ho, and even that didn't require war, though we opted for one. Besides, no policy that is as ideal driven as the one he outlines could constrain itself to only being implemented when there were physical threats.
TROUBLE ON MAGIC MOUNTAIN:
Tony Blair memo damns ‘fatal’ Gordon Brown errors (Jonathan Oliver and Isabel Oakeshott, 8/03/08, Sunday Times of London)
Gordon Brown suffered a devastating new blow to his authority last night with the publication of a secret memo revealing Tony Blair’s true opinion of his performance.The former prime minister made a scathing attack on his successor in a memo to a Labour colleague last autumn.
The secret document contains a catalogue of criticisms of Brown’s performance since taking office, accusing him of playing into David Cameron’s hands with a “lamentable confusion of tactics and strategy”.
Blair warns that the embattled prime minister may have made a “fatal mistake” by “dissing” the government’s own record to cash in on “anti-TB [Tony Blair] feeling” when he had “nothing to put in its place”.
We have dissed our own record: Astonishing secret memo in which Blair accuses Brown of ‘hubris and vacuity’ (Simon Walters, 03rd August 2008, Daily Mail)
The bombshell disclosure comes as it emerged that Mr Blair has had regular talks with his close friend and political ally, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who challenged Mr Brown’s leadership last week.The memo shows that Mr Blair backs many of Blairite Mr Miliband’s private views about Mr Brown’s failings.
And it blows the lid off public assertions that Mr Blair supports his successor, claiming Mr Brown has made ‘fatal’ blunders by disowning Mr Blair’s record; failing to produce new policies; distancing himself from the Iraq War; and leaving the political landscape ‘wide open’ for the Tories to take the lead.
The Mail on Sunday has also learned that Mr Brown may be forced to call off his plan to reshuffle the Cabinet in September, which carries his last hopes of reviving the Government.
David MillibandAlly: Blair has had regular talks with his close friend Foreign Secretary David Miliband
Labour MPs who support Mr Miliband say that if Mr Brown’s political fortunes do not improve in the next few weeks, Cabinet Ministers, including Mr Miliband, could stage a mass revolt and refuse to accept new jobs.
'Gordon’s position may be so weak that Ministers say to him collectively that he is the one who will have to be moved, not them,’ said one MP ally of Mr Miliband.
David Cameron is the TB candidate.
FIGHT THE POWER:
The Last Battle (MICHAEL R. GORDON, 8/03/08, NY Times Magazine)
The goals of the surge against Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia were political as well as military. The old strategy assumed that elections and the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis would take the steam out of the insurgency and help the United States to manage with fewer and fewer troops. Iraqi politics, it assumed, would enable the military strategy.Petraeus’s new approach turned that formula on its head. It postulated that a troop increase — and a strategy that put a premium on protecting civilians — would win over hesitant Iraqis, generate intelligence about the insurgents and give Iraqi leaders the confidence to turn away from their militias and private armies and work together. More than half of the American reinforcements were allocated to the regions surrounding Baghdad that Al Qaeda militants used to mount their car-bomb attacks, while the rest were distributed throughout the city. The theory was that once Al Qaeda was weakened, that would eliminate the rationale that Shiite militias like Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq were needed to protect the Shiite population. Breathing space would be created for political reconciliation. Military action would enable Iraqi politics.
To encourage political change, the United States was working from the top down as well as bottom up. Before the surge, the White House had taken the measure of Maliki, a compromise choice among the Supreme Council and the Sadrists who was named prime minister precisely because his Dawa Party had no militia and thin popular support. (Later he broke with the Sadrists, thus becoming much more dependent on the Supreme Council.) Maliki often told American officials that he had a vision of partnership among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But Stephen Hadley, President Bush’s national-security adviser, reported in a confidential memo on Nov. 8, 2006, that Maliki was having difficulty figuring out how to be a strong leader and — as a leader of the Dawa Party, which was an underground movement during Saddam’s day — was “naturally inclined to distrust new actors.”
If Maliki broadened his political base, rose above sectarianism and moved against the Shiite militias, Hadley wrote, the United States should do what it could to give the Iraqi prime minister more control over Iraq’s security forces and persuade other politicians to support him, including Sunnis and, notably, the Supreme Council, which had established itself as the most potent party in Maliki’s coalition.
But even as it sought ways to support Maliki, the United States was also hedging its bets by working with tribes in Iraq’s far-flung provinces. Before the surge, the American military had joined forces with Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi (known as Abu Risha) and other Sunni sheiks against Sunni insurgents. The additional American troops during the surge reinforced that effort and encouraged it to spread. The Iraqis called the tribal movement a Sahawa or Awakening. The Americans initially called the tribesmen “concerned local citizens,” but when translated into Arabic that came out something like “worried Iraqis.” So the name was changed to “Sons of Iraq.”
The Americans were working, in Sam Parker’s terms, with both the “powers that be” and the “powers that aren’t.” In theory, the efforts to buttress Maliki and to work with the tribes would eventually merge. Some of the Sons of Iraq would be incorporated into Maliki’s security forces. Others would get jobs building the new Iraq.
The prospect of provincial elections was expected to provide another opportunity for the “powers that aren’t,” including the tribal movement, to work their way in. Many Sunnis were effectively disenfranchised by their decision to boycott previous votes, as were the many Shiites who were influenced by Sadr’s ambivalent pronouncements. Other Iraqis also found themselves politically marginalized by a system that required them to vote for a party, not an individual.
The coming provincial elections are to be far more open and promise to be a significant step forward for democratic inclusion. Sunni tribes in Anbar, for example, see the vote as an opportunity to wrest control from the Iraqi Islamic Party, which currently represents Sunni interests in Baghdad. Sunnis in Nineveh, who make up a plurality of that province’s electorate but chafe under a Kurdish-dominated provincial government, view the elections as an opportunity to redress an imbalance; so do Sunnis in Diyala Province, which has a Shiite governor.
But the provincial elections also represent a democratizing opportunity for many Shiite voters, who do not necessarily want to be represented by the “powers that be.” More than 500 politicians and parties have registered to participate in the provincial elections, including 40 in Basra alone. These represent a potential challenge to the Supreme Council and Dawa parties in Maliki’s coalition, which have the backing of powerful politicians in Baghdad but have done a poor job of delivering services to the Iraqi public, even as the central government’s coffers have filled as a result of high oil prices.
How fair those elections will be is the critical question. “The provincial elections are very important because they have the potential to usher in new leadership that is not drawn from the former exiles,” Joost Hiltermann, an expert on Iraq at the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization, told me. “The Supreme Council and Dawa have not excelled at governance at the local level. If they cannot prevent elections, and it is probably too late for that, they will try to delegitimize the Sadrists and control the process though the domination they have accumulated over the years at the local level. Dawa, for example, has used its control over the Iraqi Red Crescent to appoint local officials to make sure they bring out the vote.”
While we've sided with the wrong folks, we've also created conditions where the Iraqis will sort it themselves after we're gone.
