December 21, 2007
Serving Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:20 PM EST In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where I find myself right now, we buy the much-prized if misnamed Coney Island hot dogs for lunch, bringing them back home with another local specialty, what seems to be a raisin cookie with delusions of grandeur. My friend’s father reminisces about the boxer Jack Johnson pulling up in a vast limousine before the unprepossessing Coney Island Hot Dogs, so that he could escort his white wife into the only restaurant in town that would serve them. It is not perhaps too much of a surprise that someone in these parts did. In those days, the ancients who marched at the head of parade on what I believe was called Decoration Day had formerly been the militia who’d turned out to get in Lee’s way on his road to Gettysburg. My friend’s father also remembers the beautifully braided manes of the horses that pulled the bread wagons through those streets, and the less carefully groomed horses that pulled the milk wagons. The industrial age was at high heat when my friend’s father was a boy, and it is useful to be reminded that in the city where they made steel with locally mined coal and iron, the work of daily life was still done by animals. The hot dog stand is within sight of what had been a steel mill, one of ones that helped win the Second World War. In those days Woody Guthrie’s guitar was carved with the grandiloquent slogan that “This Machine Kills Fascists,” which was not true, but the things they made in Johnstown did kill Fascists, and pretty effectively, too, as did the men of Pennsylvania generally, who numbered more winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor than the citizens of any other state. Their city then housed more than 100,000 people, in those days most of them working in the mills or off at war. It is now less than a quarter of that size, and all the mills are gone, although not all the soldiers. In church on Sunday, an Annapolis cadet was one of the pallbearers, and a little sheet of paper by the door asks the small congregation’s prayers for those of its members who are in Iraq, of whom 25 are listed. The sign in front of a local bakery announces that it sends Gobs, a much-loved confection, overseas, and my guess is this does not mean to investment bankers in London. The woman behind the counter at a small store selling wonderful smoked meats told me that yes, they do have a mail order business; last week they sent 24 cases of beef jerky to Iraq. I was recently reminded that the whole country was like that in the 1940. Last year one of my cousins turned some home movies into a DVD and sent copies to the rest of us. It was startling to see so many New York and Chicago relatives, some of whom I had never before heard mentioned, wearing various uniforms. I knew that my father had served in the infantry, and two uncles in the Air Force. But who was that naval officer? Who were those others? Thinking back on it, I am surprised that I was surprised. When I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, everyone’s father seemed to have been a veteran of the Second World War, and younger uncles had all served in peacetime, or during the Korean War. Teaching modern undergraduates at a good liberal arts college, this is very far from the case, although I do teach the odd general’s daughter or veteran. But in the main those I teach, who are bombarded with talk of “service learning,” do not themselves serve, at least in one distinct older meaning of that word. The names in that list at the church tended to have either more consonants or more vowels than do the names of most of my students (or colleagues), and one other difference came to mind: I do not think those men and women would have watched a DVD like the one my cousin made with quite as much wonderment as I did.
December 21, 2007
S. M. Stirling’s Strange World of Alternate History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 AM EST S. M. Stirling is one of the most prolific writers of alternate history marketed as genre fiction, and one of the best. Last fall Stirling for the first time published two books almost simultaneously, A Meeting at Corvallis, which was released in September, and The Sky People, released that November, and just has or will soon publish sequels to both The Sunrise Lands and In the Halls of the Crimson Kings. Both novels are variants of conventional alternate history, an expanding genre not only in numbers but in form. So what is the conventional form of so decidedly unconventional a genre? And what is Stirling now doing with it? Stirling won his first laurels on the strength of what now seems a more conventional effort, the truly chilling and immensely effective Draka trilogy, which consisted of Marching Through Georgia (1988), Under the Yoke (1989), and The Stone Dogs (1990). The three novels were republished in one large volume as The Domination in 1999, shorn of 16 remarkable appendices glossing the departures from real history that produced Stirling’s alternate timeline. Too much analytical or baldly narrative history can ruin the pleasures of reading novels, but the plausibility of an alternate history genre is sometimes increased by systematic historical analysis and technical information; Stirling solved the problem by including miniature essays in the original paperback volumes, and the appendices are still available online here. The trilogy, now out of print but readily available from online used book dealers, is peculiarly impressive, certainly the most chilling alternate history I’ve ever read. There is also a sequel, Drakon, and a volume of short stories set in Stirling’s alternate timeline by other authors (Drakas!). The original trilogy remains the most disturbing alternate history I have read; it describes an anti-America established in late-eighteenth-century South Africa. The Draka novels are “conventional” alternate history because they imagine and develop a history differing from our own, beginning at one branching point; conventional alternate histories are worlds that very well might have been, and plausibility counts for a lot. In Stirling’s case, a small series of plausible alterations in the 1770s—Maj. Patrick Ferguson’s breechloader is adopted by the British and distributed to Tory units in the South, the American Revolution is thus more bitterly fought, culminating in our conquest of Canada, and the Dutch join the French and Spanish in declaring war on Britain after Saratoga. In a conventional alternate history smallish initial changes produce others and culminate in a history fascinatingly and sometimes horrifically different from our own. In Stirling’s alternate timeline, the British take and keep Capetown, settling South Africa with the American Tories who were historically re-settled in Canada. French émigrés join them, also the Confederates who are defeated in a replay of the American Civil War, also various refugees from the liberal nineteenth century. Most of the alternate path is self-generating, a logical consequence of the first relatively small alterations. Over time, a profoundly illiberal political and economic order takes root, and eventually becomes an independent and profoundly illiberal continent-spanning state. Stirling’s trilogy begins in an alternate 1942, his middle volume traces a very nasty cold war between his Draka and his alternate (and extremely attractive) United States, and his third volume describes the victory of one of his cultures over the other. Both cultures, however, are versions of our America, and the Draka are our dark twin. The trilogy is hypnotic, and sometimes harrowing, so harrowing that you can find detailed Whiggish analyses on the web insisting that Stirling’s alternate history could not have happened, which seems to me to suggest that people fear that it could have; after all, no one posts long arguments insisting that vampires, Orcs, trolls, and Frankenstein monsters cannot exist. The trilogy is illuminating for a number of reasons, one being that it powerfully suggests that no special Providence insured a liberal and democratic modernity, another because it rotates American culture a fair number of degrees and argues that in a different context, certain of its original elements—for example, race-based slavery in a dynamic and otherwise egalitarian culture—could have intensified and mutated, rather than be rooted out or slowly wither. Another reason the Draka trilogy illuminates is that, written at the end of the Cold War, it dramatizes some of the most frustrating, and most terrifying, elements of the Cold War’s logic and structure, in a different and less auspicious historical context. Nuclear weapons on both sides mean that radical evil cannot readily be fought and defeated; it can only be destroyed at the cost of suicide, unless some unforeseen military technology breaks the stalemate. In the real Cold War, the strategic balance was pretty robust, but at the time many feared a destabilizing innovation might have occurred on either side, and in Stirling’s history, one does. The trilogy ends in a startling and extremely unpleasant fashion, and before that it holds a terrible mirror up to Americans. These hideously distorted features of our culture are how mad polemicists see us. What if we somehow resembled such a thing? What if we were in fact menaced by such a thing? If the Draka trilogy works for a reader it is because the reader is persuaded that this history could have happened, which is how all conventional alternate history works. Stirling has since written alternate histories that could not have happened. What does it mean to write an alternate history that could not have happened? And how does one do it? After the Draka books, Stirling wrote a trilogy beginning with Island in the Sea of Time, taking as his point of departure something that by the rules of conventional alternate history cannot happen: An inexplicable physical event hurls the early 1990s island of Nantucket into the Bronze Age. This event spawns a trilogy more or less descended from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Robinson Crusoe, also from Jules Verne, and more immediately from a much-loved alternate history from the 1930s, Lest Darkness Fall. Plausibly stranding moderns in a barbarous pre-scientific world is harder to do in the 1990s than it was in the nineteenth century, where the partially unexplored Africa and Asia of Victorian imagination could contain a remarkable array of lost civilizations, and this is probably why Stirling employs a one-time suspension of natural law as we know it. But once the original and necessarily inexplicable event occurs, the laws of physics and chemistry do operate as we know them, and the events of the trilogy observe the rules of conventional alternate history. The succeeding events follow logically. The trilogy is in one sense old-fashioned: The alternate history is one in which moral as well as technical progress unfolds, so that history in one of its optimistic Enlightenment senses is accelerated. In this sense the trilogy reverses the thrust of the Draka books, where the idea of progress as anything inevitable is brutally subverted. Island in the Sea of Time, and its sequels, are an older kind of adventure story, but still recognizably alternate history. A couple of years later Stirling wrote The Peshawar Lancer, reviving another kind of old-fashioned adventure story, the fictions of the British Raj. Stirling assumed asteroid strikes (and resulting nuclear winter) in 1878 wiping out the Northern Hemisphere, with enough warning to allow some mass emigration to British India (and, it turns out, French Algeria). The novel begins more than a century later, and it is a decidedly playful alternate history filled with homages to Kipling and other romancers of the Raj. Up to a point, The Peshawar Lancers is conventional alternate history. The science is plausible (in 1815 the eruption of a volcano on Tomboro, in modern Indonesia, did produce, in some places, a year without summer, and resulting crop failures and famines; there was increased emigration from Germany to North America). Dust particles of a given size block incoming solar radiation but do not trap heat, and scientists have posited comparable phenomena as the cause of ice ages and of the extinction of species. The Peshawar Lancers is not conventional alternate history in that Stirling seems at least as interested in reanimating a dead literary subgenre—Anglo-Indian imperial adventure stories—as in exploring a plausible alternate history. The Raj is dead, India looks set to become a leading world power, and a once lively and influential element of our popular culture, the Raj’s sometimes delightful, sometimes detestable imperialist yarns, are now history themselves, something irretrievably of the past, in danger of being kept alive only by hostile professors of post-colonial studies, rather than by loving civilian readers. For more than a hundred years a number of those yarns were enthralling, sometimes magical, and Stirling has written an homage to them, half-disguising it as conventional alternate history. What about the two books Stirling published in 2006? A Meeting at Corvallis is the conclusion of a trilogy (the earlier volumes were Dies the Fire and The Protector’s War), and another is in the works. These novels imagine the world left behind when Nantucket was displaced into the Bronze Age. In this new world, the laws of physics have changed. Explosives do not work, nor does electricity, and the behavior of gases under pressure has also changed. No explanation is given. There is a vast dying off, outlining the fragility of modern societies dependent on existing high technologies to even feed themselves. The world that survives sees a very ugly neo-feudalism triumph in Portland, Oregon, while more (and some less) humane political orders arise on Portland’s periphery, and in other parts of the world, whose older inhabitants are modern human beings with a scientific world view. The rules have changed, but reason still allows men and women the (sadly reduced) power to manipulate their environment, although harsh necessities exert powerful pressures on social forms. These are very much adventure novels, and like The Peshawar Lancers, they are filled with homages to older forms of popular historical fiction, some of it from the 1930s. But the trilogy does not seem to be animated by medievalist nostalgia, or not by too much of it. Stirling, in some ways a feminist and antiracist writer, is always interested in and extremely intelligent about technology and engineering. He invents a subtly different technological history in his Draka trilogy, with (among other things) different developments in tropical medicine, steam power, small arms, and dirigibles. Here he is interested in what sort of technology would be possible with his changed natural laws and a lot of abandoned machines and buildings to cannibalize. His survivors include some technically literate people (it turns out that the parts of scores of millions of abandoned cars have some crucial military uses), but it is not obvious how a scientific (or feminist) worldview will survive in a newly feudalized, increasingly religious, and fundamentally agrarian world. His trilogy is also very much about war. Adam Smith (and Aristotle before him) speculated about the links between military technology and political forms. Stirling knows about those connections, and he explores them in great detail. These are adventure stories, but their politics are tricky, and they owe a great deal to older forms of adventure story, whose conventions they intermix and sometimes invert. The Sky People is set in 1988, in an alternate timeline in which the Russian and American space race revealed in the 1960s that Mars and Venus are rather like what some science fiction writers and adventure story writers thought they might be like between the early twentieth century and the 1950s. In fact, Stirling’s Venus and Mars are not wholly unlike what Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasized Venus and Mars might look like when he wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912, the same year he published Tarzan of the Apes. Burroughs, who published around a hundred books, would have been the king of the pulps, except that he quickly became much more than that. In 1939 a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist described Burroughs, in The Saturday Evening Post, as the greatest American writer, necessarily making his case by ruthlessly antiliterary criteria. Although Burroughs, born in 1875, had graduated from Andover, attended a military academy, and aspired to West Point, his fictions did not espouse a proper Victorian-era scientific world view. He wrote escapist adventure stories, occasionally with some ludicrously pseudoscientific premises. He also enthralled millions, and his sales were still going strong when I was a boy and may still be. Amazon lists 1,156 results for old E.R.B., as he was affectionately known when I was a kid patrolling the paperback racks. The Sky People is a poker-faced homage to the Mars and Venus of the pulps, although the science is as good as it can be, given what we now know. My guess is that you cannot read Burroughs if you are even a couple of years into puberty, whereas Stirling is clearly writing for adults, although presumably ones who read Burroughs at a tender age. What is he up to? First of all, science fiction—and alternate history is normally understood to be a subcategory of science fiction—used to be an attempt to imagine the future, occasionally with startling success; the lovely title of a history of the genre is The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. A conventional alternate history attempts to imagine a plausible history, a different past, just as a conventional sci-fi novel tries to imagine a plausible future. Stirling’s alternate history is in this instance a history that by the traditional standards could not have happened (we now know what Mars and Venus are like—we have of course sent probes to both planets). Traditional sci-fi updates its science to keep up with real science, but The Sky People refuses that move. A second thing: Some interesting intellectual and cultural historians have investigated what we used to think the future would look like, and a very good science fiction story, the only one Invention & Technology has ever published (William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”) explored the same thing. But Gibson’s story is sour, even savage, about the limitations of the past’s imagination of the future; revealing those limitations is its point, which it makes by juxtaposing an imagined future to a real one. Stirling’s imagination of the same thing is instead affectionate, a fiction of history about older fictions of history. Thinking back on Stirling’s brilliant conventional alternate history, I now think that conventional alternate history attained its sometimes eerie power because it was a bit scandalous. It was conceived in an era dominated by the idea of progress. History was supposed to be lawful and heading someplace good. Hegel claimed that the real was the rational, and popular conceptions of history generally reflected that conviction. History was supposed to come out the way it had, and imagining a world where it came out differently (and often worse) provided a perverse excitement. In the West, at least, we no longer have such strong confidence about how history is going to turn out, or in its lawfulness. This loss of confidence may have first unleashed a flood of alternate history, which has been a booming genre over the last couple of decades—if anything goes, why not play around with some of the possibilities?—but the same cultural change robs alternate history of some of its power. It is less scandalous, because there is less pop-Hegelianism for the genre to push against. Stirling’s newer books celebrate the fictiveness of the fictions we used to make about history and about the future. To use an overworked but not always useless term, they are post-modern—a sort of post-modernist alternate history. Intensely aware of the history of the literary form they work in, they play with that form, and with its history. If you grew up reading the popular literature of the last century and change, they can be a lot of fun.
December 20, 2007
NAFTA Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:25 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s lead piece on this site this past Monday, on the anniversary of NAFTA, gives his assessment of the achievement in its title: “Why NAFTA Was a Very Good Thing.” My impression of the recent economic analysis is that to date NAFTA has been more like a pretty good thing, since increases in Mexican GDP traceable to it have been smaller than expected, but I have no real quarrel with his judgment. His piece did remind me of a Q&A I once did with the vigorously pro–free trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati, for a quarterly once published by American Heritage and Forbes titled Audacity magazine. Bhagwati, the economist other celebrated economists reportedly wanted as the first head of the World Trade Organization, made a simple and interesting point: NAFTA, then in the news, was an FTA—a free trade area—and that FTAs were not the same thing as free trade. FTAs are formed by groups of states agreeing to eliminate tariffs, quotas, and preferences on most, sometimes even all, goods traded within the treaty area. The point of an FTA is that not all states agreeing to play by these rules can join; FTAs discriminate in favor of insiders and against outsiders. Free trade treaties in theory open to all states agreeing to play by the specified rules—treaties like the World Trade Organization—are gains for free trade; FTAs can be the tools of people seeking a return to autarky, or at least protection from some international competition. That does not man that Bhagwati was opposed to NAFTA. If I remember correctly, he gave it something like two cheers, because you have to take what you can get, and hostility to free trade remained formidable even in one of the least protectionist political cultures in the modern word, the United States in the 1990s. One of the oddities of intellectual life is the fact that a few ideas absolutely dominant in a profession—for example, the advantages of free trade in economics—generally seem counterintuitive to most other educated people. In the case of free trade, that does not mean that fights within the profession stop about the details. Bhagwati was a militant (and prescient) critic of unregulated financial flows in and out of currencies, and was less than aggressive about U.S. demands for greater protection of intellectual property. But he was a strong enough free trader to be depicted as a rightist on the academic left. Who really believes in free trade, other than mainstream economists? Do the Chinese, Japanese, and French political elites believe in it with any passionate conviction? Much evidence suggests that they do not. Does the U.S. Congress? The evidence on that one is less than persuasive.
December 15, 2007
States and Armies in the Eyes of the Times Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:00 PM EST An interesting article in today’s New York Times reports on what the article’s tone and headline (“Ethiopians Said to Push Civilians Into Rebel War”) seems to consider an outrageous scandal. Ethiopia has an occupying force in neighboring Somalia, where it recently helped a not-necessarily very popular indigenous government overthrow an Islamist theocracy, and when I read this headline, my first assumption was that the Ethiopian military was grossly breaching international law by forcing Somali citizens to do something like clear minefields in Mogadishu. If you read the Times article, however, you discover that the (elected) Ethiopian government is conscripting Ethiopian citizens of Somali ethnicity into militias, attempting to restore order in a rebellious province (Ogaden). The Times’s article’s lead paragraph is revealing: “The Ethiopian government, one of America’s top allies in Africa, is forcing untrained civilians—including doctors, teachers, office clerks and employees of development programs financed by the World Bank and United Nations—to fight rebels in the desolate Ogaden region, according to Western officials, refugees and Ethiopian administrators who recently defected to avoid being conscripted.” Why is this a shocking scandal? Liberal states have often claimed the right to conscript their citizens. Sometimes these citizens are minimally or very imperfectly trained for the war they will face, which may cause a ghastly and unnecessary loss of life, but liberal regimes like the United States, Great Britain, and France have waged some of their major wars by precisely such means. Waging war incompetently makes for tragedy and needless human cost, but the tone of the Times piece suggests not tragedy but crime, and under-training troops is not in the literal sense of the word a crime. Similarly, from a traditional liberal perspective, if a regime does not have legitimacy derived from having won honest elections, it may well lose the moral authority to conscript its citizens—but the government of Ethiopia has been elected and reelected in multi-party elections. I am not sure how honest the last round of Ethiopian multi-party elections (in 2005) are generally thought to have been, but Ethiopia is more of a democracy than are most states on the continent of Africa. The people being conscripted are in this case members of a minority, being ordered to put down an insurgency waged by other members of their group, but the United States (along with almost all other liberal regimes) claims a comparable right, and has at times exercised it. Some of the Ethiopians being conscripted work for international organizations and NGOs, and some are even doctors and teachers (!), but democratic states are invariably accorded the right to conscript their own citizens, independent of employment status. A scene in the admittedly imperfect Saving Private Ryan, in which a very capable Captain of Army Rangers reveals himself to have previously worked as a teacher of expository writing in a Pennsylvania high school, is normally thought to be peculiarly affecting: In democracies, citizen soldiers drawn from all walks of life are the nation in arms, once a liberal ideal. The Times article somehow suggests otherwise, which I think reveals a kind of contempt for the rights of the state, even of a state possessing a degree of democratic legitimacy, as opposed to an NGO or supra-national body. I think the moral hierarchy here revealed—states presumed wicked, NGOs and multinational organizations presumed just, teaching and practicing medicine presumed just, killing anyone presumed unjust—deserves more critical reflection than it seems to receive at the paper of record. We revere the conscript armies in which our ancestors served, putting down rebellion or smashing politics not all that much less attractive than some of the politics practiced by the Union of Islamic Courts, the government the Ethiopians recently smashed in Somalia. Could it be that the Times thinks a relevant fault of the Ethiopian government is the one mentioned first in the paragraph above—being “one of the America’s top allies in Africa”? That may be ungenerous; the government in question has an abundance of faults, although not necessarily more than do the scores of governments with which it shares a continent. But whatever faults it has, conscripting teachers to put down a rebellion is not very clearly one of them. So history certainly changes. For most of the last few hundred years in the West, one of our characteristic sins was to immoderately admire the state, above all in its claim and capacity to monopolize legitimate violence. Now, in some quarters, people who seek to break that state monopoly are regarded very tenderly, and no human association seems to attract less careless admiration than does the democratic state.
December 15, 2007
Sherman and Hood Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:15 AM EST On Monday, Christine Gibson’s lead piece for this website commemorated the day General Sherman reached Savannah in 1864. Near the beginning her piece, Ms. Gibson quotes Hood’s reply to Sherman’s request for a truce as Sherman compelled the civilian population to evacuate Atlanta: Hood complained that “the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.”
I have been thinking about this piece since reading it last Monday. One of my fist reactions was that Hood seems to have had a curiously feeble grasp of the dark history of war. When one reads Sherman’s actual note of September 7, 1864, the moderation of its language, and of the measure announced, is pretty striking, given the language of Hood’s response two days later. Here is what Sherman wrote to Hood, provoking the latter’s outrage: “GENERAL: I have deemed it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go south and the rest north. For the latter I can provide food and transportation to points of their election in Tennessee, Kentucky, or farther north. For the former I can provide transportation by cars as far as Rough and Ready, and also wagons; but that their removal may be made with as little discomfort as possible it will be necessary for you to help the families from Rough and Ready to the cars at Lovejoy’s. If you consent I will undertake to remove all families in Atlanta who prefer to go South to Rough and Ready, with all their movable effects, viz, clothing, trunks, reasonable furniture, bedding, &c., with their servants, white and black, with the proviso that no force shall be used toward the blacks one way or the other. If they want to go with their masters or mistresses they may do so, otherwise they will be sent away, unless they be men, when they may be employed by our quartermaster. Atlanta is no place for families or non-combatants, and I have no desire to send them North if you will assist in conveying them South. If this proposition meets your views I will consent to a truce in the neighborhood of Rough and Ready, stipulating that any wagons, horses, or animals, or persons sent there for the purposes herein stated shall in no manner be harmed or molested, you in your turn agreeing that any cars, wagons, carriages, persons, or animals sent to the same point shall not be interfered with. Each of us might send a guard of, say, 100 men, to maintain order and limit the truce to, say, two days after a certain time appointed. I have authorized the mayor to choose two citizens to convey to you this letter and such documents as the mayor may forward in explanation, and shall await your reply.” It is worth noting that the most valuable civilian property Sherman threatened to expropriate was property in human beings, human beings his troops had made free. In any case, Sherman had, to a degree that seems startlingly mild by most past and future standards, brought the cost of the war home to some of the voters of the Confederacy. His subsequent burning of most of what remained of Atlanta—Hood had burned some of it when he evacuated the city on September 1, and Sherman spared the city’s churches and hospitals—helped Lincoln win the 1864 presidential election, arguably one of the crucial events in the creation of liberal modernity. If it was a crime, it was a crime at least somewhat extenuated by its outcome. The burning of Dresden, 80 years later, may or may not have saved enough lives to justify the lives there ended, but the burning of Atlanta may have been indispensable in achieving a morally urgent end. Had Hood and Sherman not burned Atlanta, it is conceivable that McClellan might have won the 1864 election. Near the end of her piece, after recounting the foraging, looting, and reprisals that Sherman’s men committed on their march to Savannah, Ms. Gibson writes that “As for Sherman, history has yet to reach full agreement on whether he was an ingenious hero or a shameless sadist.” My sense is that relatively few if any competent historians have thought Sherman a shameless sadist. The question that remains open is whether Sherman’s conscious decision to bring some of the cost of the war home to the Southern electorate that had demanded it was a grievous crime. The notion that it was a grievous crime requires the assumption that civilians should never be the intended victims of war, no matter how vile their cause, nor how guilty they are of having begun a war, nor what means their own troops have used to prosecute a war, nor how relatively mild the cost military action intends to impose on them. There is indeed much to be said in favor of this assumption. There may also be something to be said against it. It may be relevant to recall that wholly exempting enemy civilians is not how the Allies won either world war, or how the United States defeated the Confederacy, and that while the victors in those three wars might have been victorious without the direct and indirect measures they took against enemy civilians, such hypothetical restraint would almost certainly have protracted all three wars, perhaps very considerably increasing their toll, and might even have lost one or more of them.
December 14, 2007
Back Talk III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that “since talking back to journalists seems to work so well, I wonder why candidates so seldom do it. Journalists, after all, have public approval ratings on a par with congressmen and people who talk on cell phones at the movies.” Alexander Burns replies that “confronting the media works well sometimes, but when the tactic fails, it can fail very, very badly.” If this is true, why is it true? Why does attacking the despised media fail? My first and perhaps unthinking response is that nowadays the press often sticks together and holds grudges, while very sustained attacks on some politicians can go unchallenged by what would once have been the faction of the press nominally favoring their own side. Press assaults on Clinton and Blair, for example, were immoderate, amazingly persistent, and in the long run effective, and more effective because essentially unchallenged. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, none of them right-wing papers, long exulted in Clinton-baiting, just as in the U.K. the distinctly left Guardian and the Mirror were pretty savagely anti-Blair. It is logically possible that this is because Clinton and Blair were uniquely odious men, but it seems more likely that they were gifted politicians who had aroused the envy and malevolence of journalists nominally sympathetic to the parties they led. They were simultaneously attacked by the press controlled by their avowed enemies, for example The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in this country and the Telegraph in Britain. When the press consistently depict itself as the hero/victim of modern politics rather than one of the often abusively powerful, criticizing it is understandably hazardous. In a more general sense, modern politicians as a class have remarkably few friends in the British and American press, and in some cases too few avowed enemies. I have the impression that in the old days, the press was seen as controlled by rich men with obvious political loyalties, so you could discount hostile coverage from the predictable sources and rely on partisan support from your own side. The modern press is more likely to affect neutrality, so its attacks are less readily dismissed as mere partisanship. Since the press’s motives, while sometimes very ugly, are more complicated than mere partisanship, it is harder to counterattack the press.
December 9, 2007
The Rape of Nanking Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:35 PM EST Today, December 9, is the seventieth anniversary of the day the Japanese Imperial Army arrived outside the walls of the city now known as Nanjing, which in 1937 was the capital of China. The Japanese demanded surrender within 24 hours, and on the tenth of December began to bombard the city. The city fell on the thirteenth, which is when the events still known as the Rape of Nanking began. Respectable Japanese estimates of the numbers of civilians and prisoners of war killed in the course of the subsequent Japanese atrocities—rape, murder, theft, and arson—range between 100,000 and 300,000, while current Chinese estimates range between 200,000 and 400,000. Estimates of rapes run between 20,000 and 80,000, many of them public rotation rapes followed by murder and mutilation of the victims. A number of the allegations about Japanese behavior are significantly uglier than what has just been noted, but they are available in almost any account of the massacre, for curious people with very strong stomachs. Disputes about the massacre are legion, with some Japanese politicians and schoolbook authors still denying that anything startling took place. In 1982 a Japanese government banned mention of any massacre in Nanking from textbooks, on the grounds that the alleged events were not established historical facts. This was wholly indefensible, but problems of definition are legion. A number of different estimates use a time frame of six weeks for the atrocities associated with the Japanese army’s entry into the area, but historians dispute what precise territory should be considered the scene of the crime. If you exclude the suburbs, the numbers go down; if you consider the six counties making up the Nanjing Special Municipality, the numbers go up. Still, no respectable estimate goes below six figures. The massacres are rarely mentioned at any length in most modern books I read recounting the origins of the Second World War, or by my students, when they enumerate the causes of American entry into the Second World War, but rising American determination to stop Japanese aggression in Chine spiked sharply when news of the massacres reached the United States. It is more common than it used to be to hear that by 1941 the U.S. had backed Japan into a corner, leaving Japan no choice but humiliation or war, and it’s much less common than it used to be to hear about what moved American opinion to push Japan so hard. Japanese rightists explain government-backed Chinese interest in the Rape of Nanking as a cynical excuse for mobilizing nationalist sentiment. This may be true, but Japanese inability to face the fairly recent past is at least as remarkable as widespread Chinese interest in a crime of such magnitude. What is more remarkable yet is that although the numbers murdered in Nanking may be the equivalent of three or four Hiroshima bombings, no phrasemakers describe the horrors of the twentieth century as those of “the age of Auschwitz and Nanking.” “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” however, has become a familiar yoking of crimes. The politics of historical memory has in recent decades been a popular topic in my profession. Oddly enough, the people who profess the greatest interest in it seem likeliest to have the most imprecise and wispy memories of the Rape of Nanking.
December 8, 2007
Soviet Westerns Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:10 PM EST Arts & Letters Daily today links to a diverting piece from The New Statesman by the journalist and filmmaker Lucy Ash, “Wild, Wild East,” about the fascination Soviet leaders had for American Westerns. The piece quotes Orson Welles claiming that Stalin was a great fan of John Wayne but was so disturbed by Wayne’s anti-Communism that he sent KGB assassins after him. This seems unlikely, not least because the KGB was founded in 1954, the year after Stalin’s death, but it is a diverting anecdote, and no doubt deeply gratified Wayne. Ash also reports that Leonid Brezhnev was a passionate admirer of Chuck Connors, the star of the TV series The Rifleman, an enthusiasm I have read about in several other places. Ash claims that Connors presented Brezhnev with twin Colt .45s, after which Brezhnev permitted The Rifleman to be broadcast on Soviet TV. Ash writes that enthusiasm for our Westerns inspired the Soviet Union to try to develop an indigenous capacity, quoting Russians as claiming that the best of these is The White Sun of the Desert, which I intend to check out. The movie’s hero is a demobilized Red Army soldier caught in a showdown between a Red Army cavalry unit and Muslim counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War, with the arch-villain a Muslim leader who murders some of his own wives to escape the Red cavalry, and the hero, who only wants to go home after the wars, determined to rescue the remaining wives. Ash describes the Russian hero as a man who serenely lights his own cigarette from a smoldering fuse attached to a bundle of dynamite, which reminded me that, as in the case of the coordination of tanks and tactical airpower, a technique invented by the Germans, or the realist novel, a literary form pioneered in Western Europe, the Russians are not necessarily maladroit when adapting things invented elsewhere. As Ash told her story, I was quickly persuaded by her assertion that the Western was made for the Russians: Siberia as the West, indigenous peoples hostile to Russian expansion as the Apaches, and a shared enthusiasm for strong silent types. On the other hand, people may not need immediately obvious cultural-historical parallels to the history of the United States to make and bolt down their own versions of Westerns. The Germans were for a long time mad for their novelist Karl May, one of the best-selling German writers of all time, greatly admired by Germans as various as Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, and Hermann Hesse. Between 1912 and 1968 Germans made 23 movies of May’s books. As for Westerns recast in local costume, one of the greatest westerns ever made is surely Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, in which Toshiro Mifune plays a masterless samurai who hires out to two competing gangs of gangsters fighting over control of a terrified village, and cleans up the town by betraying both of them. Yojimbo was remade first by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti western starring Clint Eastwood in the Mifune role, and then as an entirely American neo-Western, one updated to the 1930s. That later remake was by Walter Hill, and is titled Last Man Standing, with Bruce Willis playing a version of Mifune’s character. So we exported Westerns, and in some famous cases wound up re-importing and re-adapting what we had originated. Cultural interpenetration is an intricate business. It is also a very wide-ranging one. A year or so ago, my friends were off to see a very highly praised Thai Western, Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger. Americans have sent more dreams out into the world than we may realize.
December 7, 2007
The Memory of Surprise Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:20 PM EST This is the date that was to live in infamy, although so far December 7, 2007, has passed with little mention of the attack on Pearl Harbor. There is an AP wire story in The New York Times, but nothing by any Times writer, other than a snide throwaway that John McCain tersely mentioned the event a day early on the campaign trail. When I was a kid, December 7 did live, if not wholly in infamy; people remarked on the anniversary of the Japanese attack, older people sometimes with solemnity, younger ones mostly if not entirely in a mildly comical tone. That mildness was testament to the fact that Japan had switched from being a hated enemy to an unthreatening junior ally in a single instant, the moment of the surrender. There was a brief revival of Japanophobia in the eighties, when Japanese economic success seemed to coincide with the end of American economic hegemony, and there were references to economic Pearl Harbors on our auto and consumer electronics industries, but the Japanese economy tanked for what seemed like a decade, and the American economy turned out to be in the middle of a generation-long boom, which is probably why Japanophobia fizzled. While it lasted, it was a little ugly. I remember an alarmist novel by a very popular writer, one that became a movie, and it had a scene of sadistic Japanese tycoons murdering a beautiful blonde American call girl as background to further sneak attacks on our economy, and that seemed to be shades of Fu Manchu. But it was a flash in the pan, and a of couple years ago I threw away half a shelf of economic journalism on the Japanese threat to America; nothing dates faster than ominous previsions of the future. Thinking it over, the perdurable effect of the Pearl Harbor attack was on our Cold War strategic posture, and on our deeper strategic thought. World War II began for Americans with a absolute strategic and tactical surprise, the loss of the core of our Pacific battle fleet in one bloody morning, two battleships sunk and six damaged. By strategic analysis as it then stood, we had sustained a devastating loss, for battleships took years to build. In fact, the two surviving carriers mattered more than the ravaged battle fleet, and the conventional wisdom nowadays is that relative American and Japanese industrial capacity mattered infinitely more than anything that could have happened on December 7. But we remembered that we had been hit by what seemed a bolt from the blue, and those first hours in which the country seemed defenseless. As it happened, our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, also entered World War II as the victim of devastating strategic and tactical surprise, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. The effect of the surprise achieved by Hitler was exponentially more deadly than of that achieved by Admiral Nagumo. Fewer than 2,500 Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, but the first season of Barbarossa saw three million Soviet dead, missing, and captured before the German drive stalled in front of Moscow in December. The memory of the cost of being surprised was a deep trauma for both Soviet and American strategists, even though both countries emerged from the war as absolute victors. Those strategists spent the better part of the next five decades fearing an equivalent strategic surprise and procuring and deploying force structures designed to minimize the possibility. The unnamed memory of Pearl Harbor is almost certainly in the room when American planners debate what to do about Iranian nuclear potential. Surprising the Americans, of course, destroyed the Japanese empire, just as surprising the Soviets annihilated the Third Reich; within a very few years, both initial victories had become the two most Pyrrhic victories in all of history. The defeated seem to very vividly remember what those first victories cost them, for Japan and Germany are now among the least militarist cultures in the modern world. The victors, too, have their memories of those first surprise attacks, and their strategic cultures have been shaped by them as decisively as they have been shaped by anything. So in crucial places we do remember Pearl Harbor, even if we may not remember just what we are remembering.
December 7, 2007
Mining Disasters Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:10 AM EST A piece in The New York Times states that at least 70 miners are dead in a coal mine in Shanxi Province, with another 29 miners missing. The Times is cautious about the relative magnitude of the tragedy, remarking that this toll represents “one of the country’s worst mining accidents this year,” an unsubtle reminder that coal mining remains a peculiarly deadly trade. In China, around five thousand miners are killed each year. By a coincidence, another story in the Times reports a strike in South Africa, tens of thousands of workers protesting the death rate in that country’s mines. Around two hundred miners die each year in South Africa. By a more macabre coincidence, today is the centenary of the Fairmont Coal Company mining disaster, the worst such event in American history. One hundred years ago in Monagh, West Virginia, at 10:20 a.m., what is thought to have been a methane explosion ignited coal dust and killed 362 miners, some of them boys, injuring around twice as many more. The earth shook eight miles away; the force of the explosion knocked street cars off their rails, toppled horses, and smashed buildings and pavements. It was a bad week for American coal miners: six days later another 239 were killed in a coal mine in Jacobs Creek, Pennsylvania. In fact, it was a bad decade. Less than two years later, 259 miners would die when a coal mine in Cherry, Illinois, caught fire. A few years before, 179 had died on January 25, 1904, when the Harwick Mine exploded, in Springdale Township, Pennsylvania. British and American miners, who suffered a truly staggering number of deaths and crippling industrial accidents, had a deserved reputation for militancy, and when I was a young graduate student they were the heroes of the then-growing field of labor history. In those days you could still very easily buy records of their songs. Some were startlingly grim, some harshly witty, others eerily if understandably mournful. Somewhat perversely, in those days people also mourned the closing of coal mines, and when Margaret Thatcher helped kill off the industry in Great Britain, she was loathed with an intensity unparalleled in the very considerable annals of Thatcher hatred. It was, in truth, hard not to be moved by the miners, but it seemed worth remembering that their deeply impressive solidarity had been bred by a couple of centuries of suffering no one should have had to endure. It was not wise to take that solidarity as the natural consciousness of working people, as a number of labor historians then seemed to do.
December 6, 2007
A Forgotten Anniversary Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:00 AM EST Monday was an interesting anniversary—the date conventionally given for the start of the Greek Civil War. In late 1944 the Communist-controlled Greek resistance movement ELAS controlled most of the country; the Germans had evacuated Greece and the Allies had simultaneously landed in that country in October of 1944. On December 3, 1944, fighting broke out in newly-liberated Athens between ELAS and the British Army. The civil war was complicated, as was the history that preceded it, probably too complicated to even summarize here. The war lasted until 1949 and was pretty brutal, at least 40,000 killed and more than a million people relocated during the fighting. The Greek right was supported first by the British and then by the Americans, in a long and ugly contest. I think it is worth remembering the start of the Greek Civil War because of the way it ended. It is nowadays fashionable to say that guerrilla wars are unwinnable, so what seems worth pondering today is that ELAS lost. That loss is a particularly remarkable outcome if one assumes that revolutionary nationalists are particularly likely to win guerrilla wars, and forces compromised by collaboration with imperialists and occupiers peculiarly likely to lose them, which are the assumptions one sees almost every day in newspaper commentary on modern war in general and the Iraq war in particular. In Greece, as it happens, the resistance, while brutal, had indeed fought the Germans, while the Greek right was markedly tainted by collaboration with the country’s occupiers and by a near-fascist prewar dictatorship. All through the civil war the Greek right murdered and tortured thousands of often heroic anti-Fascist partisans as well as considerable numbers of civilians, which by the conventional wisdom should have doomed it. But it won. It is not pleasant to acknowledge it, but this even may have been the best outcome for the people of Greece. A Communist-controlled Greece, had Stalin in fact wanted such an outcome, which at the time he did not, would have almost certainly have been an even nastier place than the Greece the right’s victory produced—but one does not have to assume that the right’s victory was the least bad outcome to reflect on the fact that the right’s victory was, by the conventions of modern pseudo-historical wisdom, an almost impossible outcome. In fact, guerrillas lose almost all the time, much, much more often than they win. Sunni Arab guerillas, for example, are extremely unlikely to win in Iraq. What is amazing is that for the last three years much of what passes for respectable opinion has insisted on the contrary, invoking history as proof of that contention. History, of course, is usually remembered very selectively. Here’s another piece of history: It took a long time to produce a stable and democratic Greece. Greek politics were nasty and volatile for decades, and in 1967 an ugly rightist coup brought back torture and authoritarian rule to the country. Greek politics is to this day marked by very ugly anti-Americanism, some of it deserved. Greek political culture remains in many respects unattractive. Almost 50 years after the start of the civil war, Greece is also, as far as one can tell, a moderately prosperous and very stable democracy, an outcome that would have seemed impossible in 1944, or even in 1974, the year democracy was reestablished in Greece. Thirty years after the outbreak of the current round of the Iraqi civil war will be 2033. It seems slightly perverse to insist that in 2033 Iraq will almost certainly not be a democracy, but I seem to read and see such an insistence almost every day.
November 30, 2007
L. Sprague de Camp Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 AM EST This last Tuesday was the centenary of the birth of L. Sprague de Camp, who provided a few generations of teenaged boys with a remarkable amount of pleasure as a writer of alternate history, fantasy, and science fiction, and produced some durable work in a lot of other genres, writing over a hundred books. De Camp had a degree in aeronautical engineering from Caltech, along with an M.S. in engineering, and he spent the Second World War working in the Philadelphia Naval Yard with two other writers, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, who were even more famously associated with the golden age of American science fiction, and both of whom, like de Camp, actually knew some science. De Camp’s engineering background may have given him his determined rationalism and aggressive contempt for cant—he wrote a once-famous history of the Scopes trial and a number of books debunking pseudoscientific hooey of various kinds. This distaste for pseudoscience did not stop him from producing some delightful fantasy novels. One of those books, in which some Depression-era Americans entered the world of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, cost me an astonishing amount of money in fines and a fair amount of baffled disappointment, since at the age of 15, on the strength of what I took to be de Camp’s salacious wit, I borrowed a volume of Spenser from the public library, and found the poem so inaccessible that I abandoned it, forgotten, in an obscure corner of my parents’ house. De Camp’s most celebrated and beloved work of alternate history, Lest Darkness Fall, from 1941, in which a time-travelling American engineer arrests the fall of Rome, arguably kicked off that genre in America, and it is still in print. Lest Darkness Fall was a response to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and it is still generating homages and sequels, the most recent a short story, “The Apotheosis of Martin Padway,” by S. M. Sterling, reprinted just this year in a collection of Stirling’s short fiction; Stirling is probably the closest thing de Camp has to an heir among current writers of alternate history. As a fantasist, de Camp was witty and a little bawdy, also learned, and a lot of fun. Other personae included what seemed a gentle but not too gentle version of another traditional American type, the village atheist, and de Camp was an older and admirable sort of American in other ways, too: He wrote some histories of invention, technology, and engineering, also a good monograph on the history of naval weapons, which are all subjects more kinds of people seemed to care about when I was a boy than appear to now. He was also a pioneer in writing the history of the profession he went into: He wrote biographies of other American writers of fantasy, including books on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, which made him some enemies among cultists, and he made other contributions to the history of genre fiction. It seems only fair to return the compliment, and note the centenary of his birth.
November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon wonders what would have happened had the Electoral College not awarded Lincoln the Presidency in 1860, when the man who became our greatest President secured only around 40 percent of the popular vote but 60 percent of the electoral vote. Mr. Gordon points out that had the electoral vote for one reason or another reflected the 1860 popular vote but the Constitution’s mechanisms otherwise remained the same, the election would have been decided in the House. Mr. Gordon notes that “with each state getting one vote in the House, I very much doubt that Lincoln would have emerged the victor. Instead, Douglas would have led us through the nation’s greatest crisis (unless, of course, he managed to prevent secession altogether).” He then asks, “So would there be today a Douglas Memorial at the western end of the Mall in Washington? We’ll never know. But Douglas died in June 1861 (of typhoid fever, but he apparently was also suffering from throat cancer, which would have killed him soon enough), barely three months into the presidential term. So Herschel Johnson, former governor of, ummmm, Georgia, his vice-presidential running mate, would have probably inherited the White House, unless the Senate had chosen Lincoln’s running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, which is highly unlikely.” This is an interesting counterfactual. Had Douglas become President the South might not have seceded, but if it had, there is no good reason to assume that Douglas would not have fought to crush the rebellion; in the last months of his life, he supported the Union with great passion. On the other hand, what does seem unlikely is that Douglas would have emancipated the slaves in the states in rebellion, as Lincoln did in 1862. It took Lincoln a long time to get there, and Douglas seems unlikely to have ever made it. He was profoundly deaf, dumb, and blind to the viciousness of slavery, and as late as Christmas 1860 he sought to head off secession by proposing the invasion and annexation of Mexico, to create another and vast slave state as a bribe to the South (Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, and for my money Douglas’s proposal was on the approximate moral level of the Nazi invasion of Poland). Douglas might well have lost the war had he fought it; without Emancipation, it is possible to imagine decisive British and French intervention. Douglas might have secured the Union at the price of slavery, or at least tried, and succeeded for at least four years, maybe for eight, perhaps long enough for rebel trenches to be bolstered by barbed wire and defended with Gatling guns. The Electoral College is in some obvious respects an anti-democratic mechanism. So is the Supreme Court, at least after the innovation of judicial review of legislation, and so is the Federal Reserve system—all work to thwart the swiftest possible victory of majorities. I would not mourn the abolition of the Electoral College and the direct election of the President, but my guess is that Mr. Gordon is suggesting that people who detest all barriers to immediate majoritarian politics should think hard about precisely what they are wishing for.
November 14, 2007
Historical Probabilities and Markets Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:55 AM EST A friend sent me a link to a paper given earlier this month at Columbia to a group of economic historians. The paper is by Kim Oosterlinck and Marc D. Weidenmier, titled “Victory or Repudiation? The Probability of the Southern Confederacy Winning the Civil War,” and it begins with an abstract, a summary of the argument and conclusions. In this case the abstract reads: “Historians have long wondered whether the Southern Confederacy had a realistic chance at winning the American Civil War. We provide some quantitative evidence on this question by introducing a new methodology for estimating the probability of winning a civil war or revolution based on financial market[s]. Using a unique dataset of Confederate gold bonds in Amsterdam, we apply this methodology to estimate the probability of a Southern victory from the summer of 1863 until the end of the war. Our results suggest that European investors gave the Confederacy approximately a 42 percent chance of victory prior to the battle[s] of Gettysburg/Vicksburg. News of the severity of the two rebel defeats led to a sell-off in Confederate bonds. By the end of 1863, the probability of a Southern victory fell to about 15 percent. Confederate victory prospects generally decreased for the remainder of the war. The analysis also suggests that McClellan’s possible election as U.S. President on a peace party platform as well as Confederate military victories in 1864 did little to reverse the market’s assessment that the South would probably lose the Civil War.” To my ear, possibly a somewhat prejudiced one, the paper itself contains a remarkable assumption—”First, we assume that the probability of debt reimbursement (for the Southern Confederacy) is equal to the probability of victory.” This seems peculiar, and in some ways close to ridiculous. My intuition is that bond prices tell you a lot about investors’ estimates of probabilities, but in many cases little about the probabilities themselves, not least because investors can be wildly wrong. For example, I’d bet that Spanish bond prices in 1898 would under-predict the chances of a U.S. victory against Spain, because of a European sense that we were bumptious, inept savages, and Spain the land associated with the still-remembered and once-feared tercios, and similarly overestimate German chances against the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, because of a general ignorance of logistics, one that afflicted most observers at that moment. Markets can and do get political risk wrong, and I would imagine that they have no special abilities in assessing military risks. So I think this assumption—that the interest rate in one sense is the probability—may be free-market fundamentalism. Then again, thinking it over, what better method of estimating alternate historical probabilities is there? The defense of taking bond prices as an estimate of a historical probability is that markets are composed of a large number of people with a straightforward interest in assembling all of the relevant information and getting the answer right. They do not have to appeal to an editor or a committee chair; everyone in a market wants to make money and can only hope to do so by accurately weighing risk. Markets are sometimes said to predict the outcome of recent American elections better than do polls or political scientists (I have no idea if this in fact true). On the other hand, in retrospect we sometimes think alternate historical probabilities reflect factors unknown or under-appreciated at the time—to return to the sort of example I gave above, the tyranny of logistics. Rommel needed a given port capacity in Egypt and Libya, which did not exist, to reach Alexandria, if the ground between the sea and the Qattara Depression was defended with modest competence. He did not himself understand this. Why would investors understand this better than did German generals? There is a chance, of course, that they would, although I do not know if they did, and as it happens, I have never looked at British government debt between 1939 and 1941. Maybe I should. Switch from war to politics: investors may or may not understand the stability of Chinese Communist rule and hence over-price or under-price Chinese bonds, but why simply assume that they do or do not get this as right as anyone can? If they do change their estimate of this question next year, and downgrade Chinese debt, does it make any sense to say that the probabilities of a Communist collapse have truly changed, or just the prices? Over the last decade I had the eerie experience, not once but several times, of hearing very intelligent economists say that China cannot fail, then I’ve explained why I thought it could and seen them waver—and I know nothing much about China. Those experiences have made me think that no one knew too much about the stability of the new political economy of China. What seems clear is that intelligent economists repeat the conventional wisdom as readily as do the rest of us, and if they do, what about the much less intelligent myriads in a market for foreign debt? I am curious about what John Steele Gordon thinks about this issue.
November 11, 2007
Max Raabe Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:45 PM EST New York’s Carnegie Hall has organized a festival celebrating Berlin. It is called “Berlin In Lights,” and it opened last week with a concert by a German musician named Max Raabe, who led a dozen other musicians in a band called the Palast Orchester. You can get an idea of what Raabe is like in concert by forking over $267 for a DVD of a live performance, Max Raabe & Palast Orchester: Dance & Film Music of 1920s, and while I have never seen this DVD—until that concert kicking off “Berlin In Lights” I had neithr seen nor heard Max Raabe—I have now sent off for it. You also see footage of their acts on YouTube, or listen to the music on CDs. German friends had raved about Raabe, and now I know why. The material he plays and sings, dance band and other popular music of the 1920s and early 1930s, is witty and charming, sometimes remarkably so, and Raabe’s delivery of his introductions to the music is very droll, very dry, and generally delightful. If you are German, it also seems to have astonishing poignancy. Raabe and the music he has revived reminds my German friends that their country’s twentieth century extends past wars and staggering brutalities into the mass and popular cultures of the Weimar Republic, which is to say into a lively, raucous, intelligent, and playful musical culture. Raabe reminds them that they do not live forever and only in the shadow of Hitler. Visiting one of those friends in late July a few years back, I asked about a military parade going past in the distance, and was told that July 20 is the day volunteers for the German army take their oath of allegiance to the German constitution. It is the day German soldiers came closest to assassinating Hitler, and as my friend sadly remarked, “We do not have too many military traditions of which we can be unreservedly proud.” July 20 is one such. That year I had seen Omaha Beach, Bastogne, and a fair number of U.S. military cemeteries, which made my friend’s observation suddenly and simultaneously obvious and disorienting. He thought every people better off with some history it can proudly commemorate, and while this thought does not seem to have made too much headway among all of the dominant schools of academic history in our country, I suspect he was right. He was also the first person I ever heard listening to the Comedian Harmonists, a musical group not too dissimilar to Raabe’s, three of whose Jewish members Hitler chased into exile. My friend needed a usable past, and he had found one, in a less than obvious place. The music Raabe performs includes American music, too, because a number of the German-Jewish composers who escaped the Third Reich made it to Hollywood and Tin Pan Ally, and we know their music, some of it, anyway, as American music. It appears in the scores of Marx Brothers movies and a lot of other places an American audience recognizes without knowing the German origin of the music. Max Raabe made me reflect on the two-way traffic between German and American popular music. Our musicals owe a lot to their operettas, our émigré composers owed as much to the classical training they received in Germany, while German popular music owes a lot to our blues and jazz, some of which we exported only to see it come home, transmuted abroad and then widely diffused via our mass media, by Germans who brought it with them when they fled the Nazis. American culture had been made, and will be continue to be made, by an intricate and subtle set of exchanges.
November 11, 2007
Norman Mailer Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST Charles McGrath’s obituary of Norman Mailer in The New York Times notes that “Mr. Mailer saw little combat in the war and finished his military career as a cook in occupied Japan. But his wartime experience, and in particular a single patrol he made on the island of Leyte, became the raw material for The Naked and the Dead.” I am trying to decide if this is a slightly malicious sentence; it certainly risks bad taste to refer, apparently slightingly, to how “little” combat Mailer saw. Is the bit about winding up a cook in occupied Japan intended to diminish any moral authority that might otherwise flow from “a single patrol” on Leyte? My father fought in the Ardennes and subsequently commanded a company of laundrymen during the occupation of Germany. Had he subsequently become one of the most famous of American writers, would Mr. McGrath note that he’d seen only a few months of combat, and wound up commanding a laundry company? My guess is that Mr. McGrath’s motives, if they are hostile, include irritation at Mailer’s lifelong interest in violence and possibly at his particular self-assumed role in confidently explaining violent men—Americans from Texas and other rustic places—to allegedly more epicene Americans from Brooklyn and Harvard, two places Mailer lived before he made that combat patrol on Leyte. One of the books where Mailer does that, in the context of an imagined hunting trip in Alaska—Why Are We In Vietnam?—is a book I have taught. It is in some respects dated, frequently grossly obscene, at times hilarious, contains many of the things that enrage Mailer-phobes, and vexes some students while fascinating others. People who dislike Mailer are prone to say that he glamorized violence and rustics for people who knew nothing about either, since people who did know were said to have no desperate interest in those subjects. So it may be relevant that the last time I taught Why Are We In Vietnam? the student who was most impressed by the book hailed from Texas, knew soldiers, and had himself hunted bear in Alaska. My father, who did not admire The Naked and the Dead, nonetheless gave little evidence of being deeply bored by all depictions of war, despite having seen for those few months a fair share of it. I once taught Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which also comes in for some abuse in one of the obituaries. Rereading it for the first time since 1970, I was at first appalled by what looked like preening, screeching narcissism; I had loved the book when it came out, as had all of my friends. It was being taught to one of them (at Amherst) within a year or two of its publication, and I recall my friend quoting his teacher rhapsodizing about it. Having assigned it before rereading it, I plowed on through, and, happily, my opinion changed by the time the book itself altered its pitch and register. In the 1970s and ’80s I read through a lot of Mailer, at which time he seemed to combine startling strengths and glaring weaknesses. In the early 1970s one of my teachers regretfully remarked that Mailer’s writing was marred by his decision to become a whore to what both men called the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age; it tended to make Mailer’s writing and thinking breathless and frantic. From this distance, it may also make him an invaluable guide to the style and imagination of an age that is suddenly very far from us and not too easy to know from his epigones. It seems as easy to carelessly sneer Mailer into clownish insignificance as to breathlessly overvalue him. He did some odious things, was capable of appalling misjudgments, and said a lot of silly things. What fascinates is his ability to fascinate, despite an unseemly compulsion to do so. So determined to dazzle, he ought by all rights to have failed, and he didn’t. The country suddenly seems smaller with Mailer under it rather than strutting on the surface of things.
November 4, 2007
Paul Tibbets IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:20 PM EST I posted on Paul Tibbets and Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons before reading Alexander Burns’s post on the same topic. Mr. Burns writes that “part of the reason why the President’s call was so difficult was because he did have choices, both politically and morally. It’s easy to frame the debate over Hiroshima in binary terms—should Truman have used nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or left them unused altogether? These, however, were not the only options available to the man in the Oval Office. He could have chosen other targets, or issued a warning first, or not dropped the second bomb, or taken any number of alternative courses. I’m not saying America, or the world, would be better off today if Truman had done so. But if one wants to make an effective assessment of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it makes sense to consider the full range of Truman’s options, and the painful degree of freedom he actually had.” I think much of this is true, and wisely said. Truman had choices other than using both bombs or using neither. What about the choices Mr. Burns mentions? If Truman had attacked Hiroshima but waited longer before attacking Nagasaki, he would still have used a nuclear weapon against a civilian population, and I don’t think he would have escaped much if any of the opprobrium he has since suffered (and Tibbets, who attacked only Hiroshima, would presumably be the object of the same amount of vituperation he has suffered in history as it did happen). Attacking a city with a nuclear weapon is sometimes said to violate one of the principles of just-war theory: It is necessarily indiscriminate. Hiroshima had significant war industry, and there were military camps located nearby, including Field Marshal Shunroku Hata’s 2nd General Army Headquarters, which was responsible for the defense of southern Japan. Hiroshima was also a communications center, storage point, and assembly area for troops. Conventional bombers attacking these targets would have killed a lot of civilians—at least one conventional air raid (the attack on Tokyo on March 9, 1945) killed more people than died in the attack on Hiroshima. But if sufficient restrictions had been made on their use, conventional bombers attacking those legitimate targets in and around Hiroshima would not have killed as many civilians as a nuclear weapon had to kill when used against a city. Another criterion used to judge a military act under just war theory is proportionality: The force used must be proportional to the wrong endured and to the possible good that may come. An earlier end to the war in the Pacific, compared with the costs of later endings, may meet the criterion of proportionality, as my previous post suggested. In any case, I have never met anyone, or read anyone, who seemed prepared to justify Hiroshima, and do so sincerely, but was enraged by the odiousness of attacking Nagasaki. What about a warning that we were about to use a nuclear weapon? The book I linked to in my previous posts argues, I think persuasively, that a warning would have been a good idea but would almost certainly not have affected Japanese decisions. That means that a warning would have been prudent in forestalling accusations of American criminality but in all likelihood would have saved no civilian lives. So while I have never heard a good argument against issuing a warning, I think that conclusion, if you accept it, somewhat lowers the moral stakes when we assess that particular alternative. What about choosing other targets? A demonstration shot, with one of the only two weapons we had, might have significantly reduced the probability of bringing the war to the earliest possible conclusion. Effective use of one of the two weapons, on the other hand, almost certainly risked the charge of a criminal lack of discrimination. So while I agree that Truman had many choices, I am not sure he had many if any prudent choices that would have spared a Japanese city and its civilian population.
November 3, 2007
Paul Tibbets III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:50 PM EST John Steele Gordon posted yesterday about the death of Paul W. Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 that at Harry Truman’s order dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Mr. Gordon notes, of the resulting controversy, that “Truman really had no political choice. I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative. Many of those deaths would have been American servicemen, of whom President Truman was commander in chief.” I am glad Mr. Gordon posted this, because I think it is true, but I also think his tactful remarks risk understating the moral pressure an ideal observer might have felt to use a nuclear weapon at Hiroshima, because while many of the lives Truman may have saved were American, most of them were not. The author of an interesting recent book on the morality of World War II, which I reviewed I reviewed on this website last year, offers several very professional estimates of how many lives the use of nuclear weapons saved; his most conservative estimate is that between 850,000 and 1.8 million lives were spared by the decision to drop the bombs, and that most of those lives were not American. I should underscore that this conservative estimate is very conservative indeed. In 1945 between 100,000 and 250,000 Asian noncombatants were dying every month, and a blockade of Japan that lasted through 1946, one of the most likely alternatives to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, could have killed as many as 10 million Japanese (the inhabitants of Tokyo were down to 800 calories a day in early 1946, and MacArthur brought in 800,000 tons of food to avert famine) So most of the lives Truman probably saved by dropping the bomb were, like the lives he took, Asian civilian lives, and many of them were the lives of enemy civilians, rather than American soldiers. Soldiers, by one way of reckoning, assume the risks of war when they take up their trade. By contrast, no Japanese civilian had voted for war, and very few of those who would have died in the famine, or the invasion, had committed atrocities. By one way of reckoning, a war leader has a special obligation to spare enemy civilians. Paul Tibbets probably saved, at Harry Truman’s orders, a staggering number of innocent lives. It is a little odd that almost no one says this in public, whereas the obscenely stupid phrase “Hiroshima and Auschwitz,” with its implied moral equivalence, is on many lips, and at the tip of many pens. Truman may not have long considered those Asian civilian lives when he made his decision, but we have to consider them, because we know things Truman did not, and we certainly ought to consider those lives when assessing Tibbets. Instead of being praised, in our day Tibbets is often explicitly damned, sometimes by people of imperfect moral standing. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that the victim’s of Hiroshima are the victims of simple and wholly vicious mass murder, the decision to kill them having been made for the worst of reasons. That assumption is made very frequently; as a specimen, Tibbets’s obituary in The New York Times notes that “while he was deputy chief of the United States military supply mission in India in 1965, a pro-Communist newspaper denounced him as “the world’s greatest killer.” This is a curiously self-abnegating claim for a pro-Communist newspaper to make, given Stalin’s record (a reasonable though conservative modern estimate of deaths from Stalin’s repression, leaving out all famine deaths) is four million. Of course, by 1965 Stalin had been dead for more than a decade, and perhaps the Indian pro-Communist paper meant “greatest living killer.” Well, Mao was still ticking along in 1965, and modern estimates of what is euphemistically called surplus mortality under Mao get to 70 million. If that high-end estimate is off by an exponent it would still make a pro-Communist newspaper unduly modest when awarding Tibbets the greatest-killer prize. The point is not that everyone does it, because everyone doesn’t. The point is that Tibbets probably saved more lives than anyone in history ever has by a comparably swift and discrete action.
October 28, 2007
Winners and Losers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:10 PM EST An interesting show now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City is titled “Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945.” A wall placard near the beginning of an exhibit of photomontages, in 1918 a new and now almost a vanished art form, notes that in Germany photomontage sought to capture what the placard calls the fragmentation and mechanization of modern life, with the implication that in Germany the form rarely conveyed a sunny view of life, but notes that in Poland and Czechoslovakia, where independence from foreign subjection and domination were the outcome of the First World War, photomontage was more optimistic and even celebratory. Looking over the exhibits, this seemed fair enough, and the placard reminded that events often described as catastrophic are not catastrophic for everyone; for some people they are in fact good news. The First World War is a particularly pointed example of this phenomenon. From the German point of view, it was a bitter defeat culminating in gross injustice. The latter half of that view was soon echoed by many decent (perhaps excessively decent) Englishmen, who were within a decade prepared to see the war as a catastrophe, as were most Americans. This is the view we have inherited. Pick up almost any textbook on twentieth-century history, and World War I is depicted as a catastrophe, a tragedy, a senseless slaughter, etc. If you are a Pole or Czech, of course, the First World War meant national liberation. That process was interrupted in 1939, which saw German annexation of the Czech lands, Soviet reoccupation of Eastern Poland, and the subsequent murder of six million Poles, followed by more than 50 years of Soviet-imposed tyranny. Now the Czechs and Poles are again masters in their own house, and my guess is that World War I still looks like liberation to them, merely the first installment, but liberation all the same. If you are a Czech or a Pole, was it worth it? My guess is that it was, and that this view is underappreciated in the English-speaking world because people who have not lost their political independence to a foreign conqueror in a thousand years—and who may secretly mourn the loss of domination of a quarter of the globe—probably underestimate the sweetness of being master in one’s own house. My guess is that most Irishmen also see the First World War as something less than a pure catastrophe, and for similar reasons. Of course, there used to be a good joke (the punch-line was “the Elephant and the Irish Question”) about the tendency of Irish nationalists to quite absurdly see every phenomenon through the prism of their own national myth, but it was, I am fairly certain, an English joke. The death of millions of people may seem like a stiff price to pay for the political independence of some Poles, Czechs, and Irishmen. And wouldn’t they have gotten their freedom anyway, had the war not broken out? Maybe, maybe not, and in any case the First World War was the graveyard of four empires, the Russian, German, Hapsburg, and Ottoman, and while it briefly expanded three others, the French, British, and Japanese, we now think it left them as walking corpses. So add to the list of nations in the long run freed by the war most of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. National independence has been accompanied by other kinds of catastrophe in many of those lands, but cries for the return of the former masters are still pretty muted. An educated person shown in 1914 a prevision of what was to come would very possibly have quoted Heraclitus: “War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free.” Most of us no longer know Heraclitus, or the Greek in which an educated middle class European would a century ago have quoted him, which does not make our world worse than the one the wars destroyed. The tag from Heraclitus is true, whether we know the tag, or agree with it. To bring this up to date, most of the evidence suggests that the outcome to date of the Iraq war still looks less unrelievedly disastrous to many Shiite and almost all Kurdish Iraqis than it does to Sunni Iraqis, Europeans, and Americans. That placard at the Guggenheim rather startlingly reminded me of this.
October 28, 2007
Historical Contingency Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 AM EST Alexander Burns posted on “Contingency and Political History,” considering the case of Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in October 2002, and he speculates that had Wellstone not died in that crash, he’d very possibly be neck-in-neck with Hillary Clinton in the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. By this theory, Wellstone would be rewarded by the Democratic electorate for his vote against authorizing the use of force in Iraq. Mr. Burns goes on to name a few other politicians whose deaths in plane crashes seems to have altered, generally in a smallish way, American political history—a man who might have kept the Republican John Danforth out of the Senate in 1976, another who would have similarly obstructed the senatorial ambitions of the Republican John Warner in 1978. I have no reason to doubt either the probability of those outcomes, had those candidates not died, or Mr. Burn’s assurance that recent American political history is marked by a fair number of deaths in crashes. If anything, these accidental deaths do not seem to me to be dramatic enough to sufficiently underscore Mr. Burns’s larger point, that contingency bulks larger in political history than we like to think. Another way to make that point is to consider not premature deaths but deaths for a time improbably avoided. Winston Churchill, for example, was hit by a taxi in 1931, in New York City, and badly hurt. UPI wrote his obituary that night but had to periodically update the draft for another third of a century. Had Churchill died that day, it has sometimes been asserted that he would now be remembered only as the cranky opponent of Indian independence. My hunch is that this whimsy too confidently dismisses the possibility that had Churchill died that day, India might now be a province of the Third Reich, the Japanese empire, or the Soviet Union, in which case Churchill’s crankiness about Ghandi’s character would not now be memorable. Then there is Hitler, who was repeatedly exposed to enemy fire on the Western Front, where he was both wounded and gassed. Had Hitler died on the Western Front, or a couple of years later in the Beer Hall Putsch, or in any of the failed assassination attempts, it seems safe to say that history would be unimaginably different. Hitler beat the odds again and again, almost certainly a fantastic piece of bad luck for the rest of us. One could go on with examples of this kind, although at considerable risk of anticlimax. It occurs to me that that this sort of reflection probably isn’t as stimulating as would have fairly recently been the case. My hunch is that more and more people in the West have a lively sense of the role of contingency in history, an awareness that may be behind the boom in alternate history. It was not always such. In the summer of 1969, a month or so before departing for college, I was part of a left reading group, invited by a girl a year or two older, on whom I had a desperate crush and for whom I was prepared to do anything, as the following may suggest: The first book we read was the once-famous The Role of the Individual in History, by Georgi Plekhanov, first published in 1898. In 1969 Plekhanov seemed at least mildly heretical, even a bit thrilling, because Great Man theories of history were not yet the subject of systematic derision by our schoolteachers. Most of us believed in Great Men, probably because all of our parents had several times voted for someone they thought a Great Man, and in a few cases had served in armies or navies commanded by people they had taken for such. Plekhanov didn’t believe in Great Men, and he was determined to smash any idea to the contrary, which he did with a vigor that in the summer of 1969 startled me. His polemics against the idea of great men shaping history still had something to push against, a sort of popular Carlylean conviction that Great Men were a real portion of historical explanation. Nowadays, Plekhanov is, I’ll bet, a name unknown not only to my students but to most of my colleagues, but in one sense his thought has triumphed, at least in the schools. Outside the schools, I think a sense of historical contingency is on the rise.
October 22, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:50 PM EST Alexander Burns writes that we may be talking past each other when addressing the possible loss of our government’s moral compass, particularly in wartime, when compared the values of the World War II generation. Possibly we are, but I am not sure. Mr. Burns was focusing on torture, I responded by broadening the discussion to other cases of moral restraint, or its lack, in American war-making. If torture is the only issue, and what is being discussed is what a government authorizes rather than what its servants actually do, I agree that the compass bearing has altered—but by how much? One relevant consideration may be the conduct of men who became postwar policemen and prosecutors and were veterans of World War II. In the South, a lot of them famously used electric cattle prods on black criminal suspects, and did so for several postwar decades. Elsewhere, American police often beat suspects or people who had otherwise irritated them, sometimes pretty savagely. When I was an adult in New York City, a police precinct in Queens made the papers because it had revived electric torture but used stun guns rather than cattle prods; I doubt that was the only such use in the 1980s. When I was an emergency medical technician in 1971 and 1972, I saw police prisoners who seemed to have been interrogated with some violence and in any case claimed that they had. The use of torture on criminal suspects in peacetime may not seem to address our moral compass in wartime, but my guess is that what men will do when they face a lesser threat is a useful hint about what they will do when they fear a greater one. There is also the possibility that people who will torture suspected criminals will not as freely torture soldiers in uniform, so the American moral compass may point in the same direction more often than one might have thought. The Bush administration does seem to have (mostly) restricted its use of torture to men who did not fight in uniform or observe most of the current laws of war (although I remember one case of an Iraqi general dying under interrogation). If the Bush administration generally restricts the use of torture to “unlawful combatants,” that certainly does not excuse its tortures, but it does make it harder to say with great confidence that it does things the World War II generation would never have considered. We do not know what the World War II generation would have considered if it had faced the threats we feared in the wake of 9/11, or in the face of insurgencies making effective use of terror tactics. At other times, Americans did use torture against such adversaries, and did so on a broad scale—certainly against insurgents in the Philippines, about a century ago. Much has been alleged about what the United States did or advised be done in Southeast Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, and while we might want to discount some of those allegations, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss all of them. The United States did not use much torture in World War II, but it was, after all, fighting under circumstances where torture seemed a less crucial tactic than it may seem in counterinsurgency and anti-terrorist campaigns—and we in any case employed tactics and strategies at least as cruel. Again, this does not in any way excuse current American torture; my point is only that we should not too quickly assume our gross moral inferiority to our fathers and grandfathers. I wrote above, “if torture is the only issue,” but it seems to me it isn’t, and cannot be, if we are assessing moral compasses in wartime, and what Mr. Burns also calls “moral decay.” The extreme restriction of our willingness to attack enemy civilians as our primary targets, and the significant restriction of our willingness to kill great numbers of enemy civilians as collateral damage, seem to me to be evidence that our moral compass has also altered in a direction opposite to the one indicated by our government’s new tolerance of torture. An example: we often hear that the United States has no military option against the Iranian nuclear program, because Iran can reply by ramping up terrorism against Americans, in Iraq and elsewhere. It is pretty easy to work out what Franklin Roosevelt or Truman would have done to the vulnerable cities of an Iranian enemy who launched significant terror attacks against American civilians; to paraphrase Admiral Halsey, when it was over the Persian language would have been spoken only in Hell. As far as I know, no one at Halsey’s level talks that way today. Here is another example: In 1991, the United States pretty quickly refrained from attacking retreating Iraqi Republican Guard units at Mutla Ridge, because some decades after World War II it seemed under some circumstances unethical to attack armed and uniformed enemies even in wartime. In Serbia, in the wake of genocidal attacks on Bosnian Muslims and later Kossovars, there were significant criticisms of U.S. reprisal attacks on Belgrade’s electrical grid. Some Americans are, it is true, more willing to publicly or covertly countenance torture than was once the case, and that is certainly relevant when assessing moral compasses, but there are other kinds of evidence we should also consider, and when we do, I find it more difficult to draw a conclusion.
October 20, 2007
Reprisals and the Lessons of History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:45 PM EST Today is the anniversary of the Kragujevac massacre in German-occupied Serbia. Over the three days of October 19 to 21, 1941, German troops murdered between 2,300 and 7,000 Serbian men and schoolchildren in reprisal for a partisan attack. This is also the anniverary of the day, three years later, when the Yugoslav partisans, in combination with the Red Army, liberated Belgrade. A few moments ago I posted a blog entry that included mention of the tendency of some World War II GIs to commit reprisal killings. One point of GI reprisal killings was to discourage breaches of the laws of war by making clear that there was a cost to killing prisoners. This may have worked, since there were relatively few German killings of U.S. or British POWs, but it probably didn’t, since significant Russian reprisals did not seem to discourage German massacres of Soviet POWs; relative German restraint against the U.S. may have had some other cause than fear of retaliation. There is some evidence that moderate reprisals sometimes work—for example they do seem to have discouraged official sanction of the Confederate practice of enslaving black American soldiers captured while fighting for the Union. On a sufficiently savage scale, things are no more clear. Reprisal killings may (or may not) work. In the case of Yugoslavia, horrific reprisal killings like the Kragujevac massacre discouraged some partisan groups (for example, the Chetniks led by General Draja Mihailovich) and massively energized others (the ones led by Tito). It would be simpler if savage measures always failed or always succeeded. The evidence points toward less predictable outcomes.
October 20, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:20 PM EST Alexander Burns posts that he was struck “by this Washington Post article on a group of World War II veterans who interrogated Nazi POWs at Fort Hunt. ‘Back then,’ Petula Dvorak writes, ‘they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.’ Said one former interrogator: ‘We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.’” This struck Mr. Burns “as an incredibly sad illustration of yet another way in which the World War II generation is passing away. Comparing the interrogations at Fort Hunt with those at Guantanamo Bay, it’s hard not to wonder if the 60 years since the Second World War haven’t brought about some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government. It’s a good thing that there are lawyers and legal reporters wrestling with the subject of torture. But there’s something tragic about the fact that they even have to.” I also read the article in the Washington Post, and pondered it a bit. After thinking about it, I am not sure that there has been an unmistakable “decay in the moral compass of the American government,” if that means restraint in what we are prepared to do in wartime. The Bush administration’s insistence on loosening the definition of torture has shocked and disgusted many Americans, but I am by no means certain that we nowadays wage war with much less tenderness and restraint than the World War II generation did. That earlier generation attacked civilian populations on a pretty grand scale, sometimes accepting massive civilian casualties as collateral damage, but sometimes aiming more directly at enemy morale. Our current willingness to kill civilians is significantly less than that shown by our immediate ancestors. I am not saying that they were in this respect wrong, or that we are right, but I doubt that the difference means that we have lost our moral compass, at least in the sense I think Alexander Burns probably means to imply. We certainly seem to treat most Americans of Middle Eastern origin better than we once treated many Americans of Japanese origin (or than we treated some Americans of German origin in 1917 and 1918), and we accord more liberties to citizens who in the mid-1940s might well have been considered enemy Fifth Columnists. When we caught enemy combatants out of uniform in the 1940s, we sometimes simply executed them. How about killing prisoners who surrendered in uniform? We did it during the Second World War, more than we do it now. We did it against enemies who had shown themselves likely to perfidiously feign surrender—the Japanese—and we did it in reprisal against German troops. My father, fighting in the Bulge alongside American paratroopers, watched them shoot a number of SS POWs, then send one back across the lines with the message “tell your friends not to shoot paratroopers when they are caught in trees,” as the SS had done in Normandy. My father reported that he had no passionate objection to this procedure, because it happened right after news of the Malmedy Massacre had gotten out, and as it happens, the 70 American prisoners murdered by the SS at Malmedy had been on their way to reinforce Sankt Vith, where my father was fighting, and reprisals seemed well within the de facto rules of war. We also shot troops who surrendered after fighting to the last round. Our moral compass does not point in precisely those directions today; I have heard the case that it should, at least with respect to reprisals, but it doesn’t. What about torture? The editor of American Heritage recently told me about what he was pretty sure had been the torture of a German U-boat commander taken prisoner in the Battle of the Atlantic. I am not sure how often American troops tortured prisoners during World War II, and I suspect it was fairly rare—but I do know that American interrogators tried to beat confessions out of the men accused of committing the Malmedy Massacre after the war was over, and I have seen similar allegations about similar events. What about other treatment of prisoners that fell short of torture but was not by our modern standards exemplary? I once met a former GI who had helped stop the First SS Panzer Divison in the snows of Belgium, and recollected taking a prisoner, a 17-year-old boy. A Dutch interrogator slapped the boy, stuck a pistol in his eye, and barked out a question, and the boy spat in the Dutchman’s face. The American infantrymen all froze, and then the Dutchman slapped the boy again, knocking him to the ground, and, thankfully, that was the end of it, but it seemed clear that had the interrogator shot the German boy, no one would have been absolutely astonished. “That kid had guts,” the GI observed 60 years on, respectfully, but without agonies of self-reproach. This memory came upon the vet a few hundred yards from a field where the First SS Panzers committed one of 18 massacres with which it is credited in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge. The GI seemed to imply that slapping the boy around, even threatening his life, did not wholly annihilate the moral import of stopping the 1st SS Panzers in its tracks. My guess is that he was right, and I’d also guess that our moral compass, while somewhat different, is not wildly less accurate in 2007 than it was in 1944.
October 9, 2007
A Dying Language II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s post on Morse code is startling and a bit distressing. It had not occurred to me that Morse could be dying until he mentioned the fact, which now seems blindingly obvious. Where (and why) would it have survived? I am, I suppose, just old enough be someone who for couple of weeks thought about getting a ham radio operator’s license. I very, very briefly learned Morse, although not well enough to remember much of it now, and considered getting a merit badge for this feat, before a very early departure from the Boy Scouts. I do remember my father bringing home what was called a short-wave radio, a thing not much smaller than a breadbox, painted what in the late 1950s seemed a very snappy white-streaked beige. It is still by the bed in the room I lived in as a child—I noticed it a couple of years ago—and it had, of course, tubes in it. Perhaps a decade ago, when visiting my mother, I turned it on, and I waited for a very long time while they warmed up. I do remember listening to the pips of Morse when it first arrived. I did not know Morse well enough to decode the messages and marveled that they might have come from anywhere in the world. If the information visible through the great glass plate on the front of the machine was any guide, and in retrospect I am not sure it was, some of them came from remarkably far away. They were to me what I dimly remember H. L. Mencken observing freight cars had once been to small boys growing up inland, and oceangoing ships to small boys who had seen a port—infinitely romantic evocations of both the breadth of the world and the fabulous yet suddenly conceivable prospect of getting into contact with a larger patch of it than one had yet seen. One might not have to learn the French the terrifying Mr. Nolan barked at us in grammar school; I somehow got the notion Morse would do. In books then written for boys, Morse got you out of bad jams—locked in a room by kidnappers, or in a German POW camp’s cooler, you softly rapped SOS (or some other message) against a wall, and good things happened, a reward for being prudent and resourceful enough to have learned Morse code. And as it happened, I knew that Morse really could get you out of places and into the much wider world. It had gotten my grandfather out of a tiny town in West Virginia, when he’d walked down a mountain and gotten a job as a telegrapher at the age of 13. From there he’d become a conductor on the B&O, and then a merchant seaman who had rounded the Horn—all because he’d known Morse code. I remember telling that story to the former editor of American Heritage Magazine, and I remember him whistling respectfully. “A lightning slinger!” he’d exclaimed, a phrase that did not make Morse code any less romantic in my twenties than it had been when I was half that age. Now it turns out that Morse is dying. The world suddenly (and I am sure irrationally) seems much smaller, and a deal less intoxicating.
October 8, 2007
Japanese Textbooks Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:15 AM EST An interesting story in today’s New York Times, “Okinawans Protest Japan’s Plan to Revise Bitter Chapter of World War II,” describes recent attempts by Japan’s Education Ministry to purge high school textbooks of embarrassing facts. The Japanese Education ministry has long had a reputation for minimizing Japanese atrocities against foreigners—recent changes have tended to suppress references to the Rape of Nanking, the sexual enslavement of Koreans, etc.—but the story in the Times explains that the Ministry is now sanitizing textbooks by purging or eliding discussion of the Army’s atrocities against people who are (nowadays, anyway) more or less considered Japanese. More precisely, the Ministry is removing references to the role of the Japanese Army in pressing or coercing Okinawan civilians into mass suicide, and in some cases murdering their families, out of fear of being raped and murdered by the approaching American forces. Previous accounts of the suicides—at least the ones I’ve seen—asserted the effectiveness of propaganda about the Americans as genocidal rapists, but the Times article states that there were no mass suicides by Okinawan civilians in villages that were not occupied by the Japanese Army. That suggests that on Okinawa, unlike on Saipan, propaganda without coercion was unlikely to produce many results. The Education Ministry is widely reported to worry that accurate history is incompatible with patriotism. This worry seems to me to be overblown. I think Japanese patriotism will wax, and inhibitions on the expansion of the armed forces wane, in response to escalating Chinese aggressiveness and bluster. Pacific (or militaristic) political cultures matter, and in many cases probably require certain versions of history to flourish, but popular access to an accurate history of the Second World War seems unlikely to forever forestall Japanese rearmament. The tendency to think that control of the past is attainable, and means control of the future, is pretty widespread—it is presumably part of the point of the Howard Zinn school of American history, as well as of the Japanese Education Ministry’s revisions of textbooks. This tendency probably reflects the omnipotence fantasies of historians (and Education Ministry types) more than it reflects reality. To pick a recent example, some EU-friendly histories tend to mute or otherwise blur the history of intra-European conflicts. I was intrigued to see a recent issue of an EU-financed magazine imply the equal plausibility of English beliefs that Louis XIV was running an ominously expansionist foreign policy, and French notions that he was the victim of English aggression fueled by Protestant bigotry. Further EU integration may come, or it may not, but in a modern democracy government propaganda does not go unchallenged, and an egregious example of it is generally more contemptible than it is alarming.
October 4, 2007
Vanished Countries Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:05 AM EST The homepage of this website always notes a few of each day’s anniversaries and links to a Wikipedia page containing a list of many more. If you followed that link yesterday, you learned that it was the anniversary of the creation of the kingdom of Yugoslavia, which is potentially misleading; what happened on October 3, 1929, was that a state called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, formed on December 1, 1918, changed its name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. “Yugoslavs” means “South Slavs,” which implies a common identity, an implication that in retrospect seems like a pious and wishful hope, although it seemed real enough when I was a young man. In 1929 Yugoslavia was troubled by particularly tense relations between its largely Orthodox Serbian plurality (just under 45 percent of the population in 1921) and its strong and militant largely Catholic Croatian minority (22.5 percent in 1921). The tensions did not subside with the change of name, and The kingdom of Yugoslavia disintegrated when the Germans invaded it in 1941. The cruelty of the German occupation (and the massive atrocities committed by the forces of the Croatian fascist state established by Germany) provoked an extremely energetic partisan movement led by Josip Broz, who became famous under his Communist Party code name, Tito. Tito, the only European partisan leader of the Second World War whose forces are thought to have more or less liberated their own country, in 1943 proclaimed what was variously known as the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, the Democratic Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, etc. Tito’s proclaimed state survived various attempts to destroy both him and it. Soon after the war Tito broke with Stalin, and he became something of a hero to many in the West. His rule was initially quite brutal, but serially seeing off both Hitler and Stalin was widely conceded to be a remarkable feat. One letter to Stalin apparently read “Stop sending people to kill me. If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.” As one American statesman declared at the time, Tito might be a bastard, but he was our bastard now. By 1970, when I visited Yugoslavia, Tito was admired for many reasons, probably more than he should have been admired for, but his apparently indisputable achievements included having built a fairly prosperous and relatively liberal Communist state. And there was not only a state called Yugoslavia; there seemed to be Yugoslavs. In 1970 I sat among them in a restaurant in Rijeka, eating a three-course state-subsidized meal that cost one dinar—eight and a half cents—and admiring the Yugoslavs who sat around me. Tito died in 1980, and Yugoslavia survived him by little more than a decade. At the end of the Cold War, the Republic of Yugoslavia collapsed in protracted, ugly, and brutal wars of secession, and eventually became what are now the separate states of Bosnia and Herzogovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Croatia; Bosnia and Herzogovina is itself divided into mutually-hostile regions, and another state, Kosovo, may yet emerge from what was once Yugoslavia. The disintegration began on June 25, 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence; on June 5, 2006, Serbia and Montenegro both declared theirs, in the wake of a plebiscite. I am pretty sure that Yugoslavia is the only country I have ever visited that subsequently disappeared; at least as painful, and just as shocking, is that what seemed to be a nationality disappeared with it. Poland disappeared between 1795 and 1918, but Poles didn’t, and as a result, Poland could be resurrected. Yugoslavia disappeared, and “Yugoslavs” disappeared with it, probably forever. Had Yugoslavians always been a fiction, an identity enforced first by Serbian military power, than by Tito’s power, and finally, and briefly, by fear and inertia? I don’t think so—I think Yugoslavia could have gone either way—but I could easily be wrong. In either case, the history of a name, Yugoslavia, reminds us that while we are very frequently told that federal structures are the rule in Europe, and will increasingly be the rule elsewhere, and that nation states are a thing of the past, none of this is necessarily true. And proclamations about the direction history is inevitably taking should be met with the gravest skepticism.
October 3, 2007
Alternate Civil Wars Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:55 AM EST Brisbane, Australia, is 14 hours ahead of the city in which I live, so getting up this morning to participate in a discussion on an Australian radio program meant a phone call at an early hour. But the topic, a question of alternate history, fascinates me, and the particular question—what would have happened had the United States lost the Civil War, and the Confederacy established itself—is one of the two hardiest counterfactuals in the canon of alternate history (the other is a victorious Hitler), so I was eager to see how Australian academics and radio hosts think about it. It turned out that the Australian historian thought that one effect would probably be a weaker and distinctly more isolationist United States. In the real world, where the United States is currently both hegemonic and interventionist, it is easy to see the fascination of an alternate historical path in which the United States is a backwater. But is an independent Confederacy really a plausible first step on such a path? A few months ago I blogged about the conclusion of Harry Turtledove’s 11-volume series of novels on a victorious Confederacy, and in November of 2005 I published an essay on this website on what was at that point the whole of the Turtledove cycle. Turtledove, as far as I know the best-selling American author of alternate history, offers a vividly imagined alternative to the view that a successful Confederacy would have meant the United States playing less of a role in world affairs. Turtledove assumes that the Confederacy would have won its independence because of British and French intervention, at least to block the United States’s naval blockade of the Confederacy. Since the blockade was a crucial part of the Anaconda Plan that in real history did finally strangle the rebellion, British and French intervention does seem a likely part of any Confederate victory. It is Turtledove’s great insight that this would have plausibly entailed the swift entry of both the United States and the Confederacy into the European balance of power, soon to change because of the rise of the newly unified German empire. In Turtledove’s world, the Confederacy becomes an Entente ally, the United States in reaction a German ally, and when the First World War breaks out, it extends to this continent. Trench warfare sets in, and the United States slowly and gruelingly conquers Canada and is eventually successful against the C.S.A., taking Kentucky, Oklahoma and part of Texas. Defeat radicalizes the C.S.A., which over the next two decades becomes a state reminiscent of Nazi Germany, and when the Second World War breaks out, it, too, extends to this hemisphere, and ends with the final conquest of the C.S.A. The Australian academic seemed to think that the rump United States left after a Confederate victory would have had the relative power of Canada. That seems a bad guess. The current United States is five times as populous as Britain or France, and if, as seems extremely likely, the rump U.S.A. would have continued to industrialize and to have had around three times the population of the C.S.A., a fully-mobilized rump-U.S.A. would still have dwarfed the military power of any other belligerent during the First World War. A world in which the United States was actively engaged in international politics before 1890 would certainly have been very different from either real history or history as imagined on today’s radio program. It is Turtledove’s insight that the Allies might well have lost both world wars with the United States divided, but that the European powers that might have succumbed to fascism in such a world would not necessarily have been the ones who were so infected in the actual world. The phone connection to Australia was shaky, and they dropped me from the show after 20 minutes, so I never got to hear whether the Australians thought the C.S.A. would have abolished slavery on its own. In Turtledove’s world, that is what happens, and a lot of alternate Civil War histories assume the same thing. I’m not so sure. The academic work that won William Fogel a Nobel Prize demonstrated that American slavery was increasingly profitable. Bruce Catton reviewed that work for American Heritage, and I later interviewed William Fogel for the magazine on a different subject. Since slavery was profitable, maybe it would have continued. Had it done so on the eve of the European conquest of most of the world, the example of successful race-based slavery in an apparently modern society (the C.S.A.) might have made European imperialism even uglier. One of the greatest works of alternate history, S. M. Stirling’s Draka trilogy, anatomizes an illiberal and deeply racist modern society with what is in effect slave-manned industry. How plausible was such a future? There is evidence on both sides, and Stirling’s trilogy caused some bitter disputes. A lot of people want to imagine that an irresistible course of history doomed the C.S.A. and slavery. There is a good chance that Grant and Sherman were the ones who accomplished that, and that they could have failed, with very, very bad consequences. So I certainly wish that phone line to Brisbane had held up—I’d love to know where the Australians think that alternate path could have ended.
October 2, 2007
The Plane That Didn’t Win the War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 AM EST Yesterday was the anniversary of the first flight of an American jet aircraft, the Bell P-59 Airacomet. The event took place, amidst great secrecy, on October 1, 1942, and the event is as good as a secret now, because almost no one has ever heard of it. The Airacomet was an experimental jet fighter, although not a very good one—it had poor engine response and reliability, as did all early turbojets, and with a top speed of only 413 mph, while the world’s first deployed jet fighter, the German Me 262, had a top speed of 541 mph. The P-59 never saw combat, nor did any American jet during the Second World War. The United States did not undertake a crash program to develop a jet fighter, whereas the Germans did, and they managed to build a considerable number of Me 262s (more than 1,400, of which perhaps 200 saw combat). We won the war anyway, and thereby hangs a tale. One of the most common World War II counterfactuals asks what would have happened had Hitler not inhibited the development of the Me 262, the world’s first operational jet fighter, by insisting that it be redesigned as a bomber. The implications appear suitably vast: Hitler’s Europe has been described as “a fortress without a roof,” but with more jet fighters, wouldn’t the Luftwaffe have swept the B17s and Lancasters from the skies, then savagely contested the air over Normandy, letting Rommel drive the Allies into the sea? The answer is no, because while the Allies didn’t always have the most advanced military technology, they often had the most cost-effective technology. Germany was the first state to develop and in some cases deploy a number of novel military technologies; these included ballistic missiles with inertial guidance systems, cruise missiles, wire-guided missiles, and jet aircraft. In addition to the Me 262, there were prototypes for other hypermodern warplanes, including one, the Go229, that looked like a flying wing, and might have functioned (if inadvertently) as a stealth fighter. The Me 262 was appreciably faster than any allied aircraft in level flight, and as the terse maxim of air-to-air combat has it, “speed kills”: A much faster aircraft fights at its own discretion. Had the Me 262s wrested command of the air from the Allies, this would have cancelled what is often said to have been the greatest American and British military advantage in the fight against Hitler. The German army and its admirers have often insisted that superior German combat skills would have crushed the soft and clumsy Western Allies, had the latter been denied their hordes of unopposed fighter-bombers. So what went wrong? Not what a lot of people have claimed, because it is not true that Hitler first ordered the Me 262 to be redesigned as a bomber, thereby appreciably slowing its development, then insisted that it be deployed in the role of fighter-bomber, seriously delaying its appearance in fighter units. The “redesign” of the Me262 simply attached pylons to the airframe to allow it to carry a few bombs. This required no great design work and was completed while the engineers went about the very arduous task of debugging the Jumo 004, the turbojet engine that would power the Me 262. As for deployment, Hitler issued his edict in May 1944 and rescinded it the following September—at about the same time as the Jumo 004 entered mass production. Since the effective operational debut of the aircraft depended on the availability of production engines with a reasonable running life, it is doubtful whether Hitler’s edict delayed that debut by more than a few days. Shortages of nickel and chromium to make high-temperature alloys for the Jumo 004 seriously delayed, and finally crippled, the Me 262. The turbine blades, which were exposed to temperatures over 700 degrees Celsius combined with tensile stresses of up to 15 tons per square inch, developed “creep”—the metal deformed and the blades lengthened—and the flame tubes slowly buckled out of shape. As a result, the preproduction Jumo 004 had a running life of 10 hours. When the engine went into mass production, the engine life had been extended only to 25 hours. Also, given constraints on industrial capacity, more Me 262s would have meant a lot fewer conventional fighters, so the Luftwaffe would still have been in bad trouble somewhere. Had the Me 262s shown up earlier, and in greater numbers, the Allies would almost inevitably have accelerated development of their own jets, the Meteors, Vampires, and Shooting Stars—and British jet engine technology was superior to the German. But they didn’t have to, in part because the Me 262s had to survive the tactics evolved by Allied pilots flying excellent conventionally powered aircraft. Allied pilots hit the German jets on the way up, before they reached their top speed, and smashed up their airfields. Germany also had problems producing jet fuel in large quantities, very serious maintenance difficulties, and more problems training large numbers of pilots, ground crew, and mechanics for a radically new aircraft. Germany had no natural rubber, the jets landed at speeds of 150 mph, and synthetic rubber tires were not up to the stresses. Leaving aside the difficulties of the new technology, the questions of opportunity cost, cost-effectiveness at the margins, and potential Allied responses were intricate and, from the German point of view, not encouraging. Why, then, does the Me 262 haunt the alternate histories? Perhaps the legend spread because Allied domination of the skies over Western Europe has remained an invaluable sop to German military self-esteem. More comforting to recite that the numberless Jabos (fighter-bombers) doomed the German army, no matter how skillfully it fought, than face the interesting fact that American, Soviet, and British troops got steadily better over the course of the war, and Germans worse (in the Vosges and the Ardennes in 1944, United States troops stymied German offensives without benefit of vast airpower or numerical superiority). For Americans, among whom the myth of the Me 262 as a potential war-winner has had a very hardy life, the Me 262’s aura may have a culturally determined plangency. We imagine that our own technological superiority, especially in aircraft, still the most glamorous and “modern” military machines, is part of the natural order, an extension of the muskets that routed the Iroquois or the revolvers that won the West. We enjoy imagining ourselves as Edison’s heirs, the nation of tinkerers, Connecticut Yankees who vanquish cruel and proficient warrior foes with irresistible science. A world where our enemies had the better warplanes may look like the world turned upside down, macabre and perversely fascinating. So we should remember that we tested a jet fighter relatively early in the war, found it wanting, and designed a number of devastating propeller fighters. When we did build the military technologies of the future—atomic bombs are the most famous—we made terrifying weapons, but a lot of what we designed and built, and of what our allies designed and built, was the logical development of existing technologies. As the historian Richard Overy once put it, Germany tried to fight a 1940s war with what would become the technologies of the 1950s, and that was a very bad idea. The P-59, correctly identified as an idea whose time had not quite come, is only an obscure footnote to history—which is a tribute to the wisdoma of the American planners who decided to scrap the plane.
September 30, 2007
Munich and History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 PM EST The homepage of the website notes that this is the anniversary of the 1938 Munich Agreement, where Great Britain and France betrayed the people of Czechoslovakia and spawned a very durable analogy. At the time, Neville Chamberlain triumphantly remarked that “my good friends, for the second time in our history a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” Churchill memorably as well as prophetically demurred, his most durable, prophetic and pithy phrase being that “you were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.” Churchill being Churchill, there are a pretty fair number of memorable remarks to choose from: “You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude,” which was eerily prophetic, but there was also “we have sustained a defeat without a war,” which has the savage compression more often found in a politican’s mouth when Thucydides has composed the phrase at leisure, and then put it there. There is also “do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.” There was such a recovery, Churchill incarnated it, and for a generation Munich was the epitome of a particular form of moral cowardice, stupidity, and self-deception. After an analogy to Munich was blamed for getting the United States into the Vietnam War, pejorative references to Munich fell into disrepute among some liberals, while on the political right attempts to rehabilitate Chamberlain saw the suggestion that the canny old fellow had wisely delayed war until the Spitfires were ready, etc. I find this remarkably unpersuasive, for reasons discussed on this blog in August of 2006, here and here, but it is worth noting that Munich remains not only the analogy many people love to hate, but the catastrophic misjudgement some people still long to exonerate. (For example, as recently as 2006 a historian published a defense of Chamberlain’s policy at Munich titled Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain, 1936-1939.) Pondering this on the anniversary of the Munich Agreement, I think the simple power of the Munich analogy provokes most of the venom directed against not only the analogy, but against the conventional assessment of the agreement itself. What are taken to be the horrible and by implication avoidable consequences of the Munich Agreement, widely believed to include a significant portion of the scores of millions of dead of the Second World War, still make the strongest argument we know for the possible virtues of preemptive war. People who detest the notion of preventive war, often for excellent reasons, are tempted to go that one last, mad step, and suggest that there has never, ever been a case for such a policy. I think it was Robert Heinlein, born a century ago this year, who once remarked that the difference between a man and a cat is that while neither will sit on a hot stove twice, a cat will never again sit on a cold stove either. Thinking over the historiography of the Munich Agreement, that thought suddenly seems unfair to the cat.
September 29, 2007
The Great (Board) Game II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:45 PM EST Alexander Burns yesterday posted about a board game, Avalon Hill’s Diplomacy, which he described as “kind of like Risk, but without the dice.” I haven’t played Diplomacy since college, nor Risk for rather longer, but that description rings true. An interesting thing about Diplomacy in the context of our thread about Great Powers is that as I remember its rules, the game, if played properly, could never end. Diplomacy was a zero-sum game: one side won, which meant all the others lost. An ending required one power to control all of Europe, and rational actors would always combine against so great and obvious a threat—or at least they should have. But they didn’t, so the game always did end. Players made mistakes, which meant failing to realign with other threatened powers quickly enough to restabilize the state system. They too vividly remembered grudges, which they avenged at a greater long-term cost than they were willing to see, or they let clamoring greed excessively mute the shrewder voice of fear, and they took a smaller prize that in the long run let a current friend but future master extinguish their sovereignty. Balance of power theory as classically articulated has that problem: People are often too greedy or too angry or too stupid to see their real collective interest. Additionally, most actors, when threatened by a very great power, do not seek to combine against it, either in Diplomacy or in diplomacy. Some people engage in what the theorists call balancing behavior, but most people seek to propitiate a risen and truly threatening power by sucking up to it, or by seeking to grab a share of the loot. One thing Diplomacy did teach you, if you could learn, was that open treachery was (until the penultimate moment) self-defeating. If you lied repeatedly, nakedly, and shamelessly, few would again trust you, and you were without allies. But since repeated betrayal was necessary, you learned to use evasive and ambiguous language, to which you could later point in self-exculpation. The game taught you, with great precision, what the phrase “diplomatic language” means. People learned that they had to pin you down, and when they thought they had and later discovered that they hadn’t, there was rueful admiration for your successful misdirection, rather than hatred for your deceitfulness. Diplomacy was in that sense less than perfectly realistic but not hopelessly so; it may have captured the frame of mind of some successful old-regime diplomats. Mr. Burns mentions “the dearth of new board games after the model of Risk or Diplomacy.” There was one fascinating hybrid game called World in Flames, which when played with all of its modules simulated the warfare, war economies, and some of the diplomacy of the period 1936 to 1950. Diplomacy, which started in a very abstract version of 1905, had very few pieces and fewer rules, whereas World In Flames, which aimed at much less abstraction, had thousands of pieces and what seemed like thousands of rules. Like Diplomacy, it was best with seven players (the British Commonwealth, Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States, Italy, Japan, and China), and while hard to play—understanding the rules could be real work—I found it utterly fascinating. As I got older, however, it was increasingly difficult to find the time. Before age and responsibilities carried me away, I helped write a few of the rules for a diplomatic module and test some of the other rule sets the game successively employed. Unlike Diplomacy, World in Flames, played competently could end, although in my experience it rarely did, since it seemed to take 80 hours or so (at tournaments it was played over a weekend), and the side that realized it was clearly losing tended to concede. I did notice that people who played it were older—they had grown up on the Avalon Hill historical military simulation games of the 1960s. My guess is that games of its kind lost their audiences to people who grew up with computer games. Too bad. World In Flames was hypnotically interesting, if you were that sort of person. A friend, lost at sea for a couple of days (a small plane had crashed), later claimed that he’d spent some of what he’d thought were his last hours planning a set of moves, and regretting that he would never make them. True story.
September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:20 PM EST John Steele Gordon asked of the term “Great Powers,” what defines a Great Power? In an initial answer he quotes his college professor, who defined the term to mean “any country whose interests must be taken into account by every other country.” I think this was true in a particular way. “Great Power” is in part a historical term, denoting one of those European states—when the term was coined, France, Great Britain, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia—that could in combination with any two of the others make an unassailable combination. The concept, if not the language, dated back to the mid-eighteenth century (in some ways, earlier), and lasted through the beginning of the First World War. I was once told that the great German historian Ranke thought that there would always be five Great Powers, with some falling from that rank as others rose. There is something to the last half of that—Spain had once been a superpower, before there was such a phrase, and Sweden a Great Power, but neither was either by the time of Castlereagh, the British foreign minister Mr. Gordon indentified as having coined the phrase "Great Power." There was once something to the first half of it: Bismarck clearly thought in terms of the number five when he remarked that the secret of diplomacy was simply to be one of the three rather than one of the two. After reunification, Italy became an honorary Great Power, but it didn’t possess the requisite military strength to play the role (Bismarck again, on Italy: “What a good appetite, but what poor teeth!”). After 1905, Japan in a sense became a Great Power, initially because it could affect the military balance of a system involving Russia. So Great Powers were states with the capacity to significantly sway the European balance of power by their own diplomacy; Middle Powers (Sardinia, at one period, similarly Saxony and Bavaria) were powers one might have to take seriously, but the movement of one of them did not almost inevitably alter the balance of power. An implication of the historical term Great Power was that power was additive in a straightforward way. One counted corps or divisions (at one time, battalions), or ships of the line, or battleships, or dreadnoughts, and toted up the numbers on either side. The alliance possessing the significantly larger number of the relevant unit of force could in theory get its way on any question where the other side could possibly back down. In an age in which decisions for war were made by monarchs or elite groups advised by smallish numbers of specialists, and war aims did not generally involve the extinction of an adversary’s sovereignty, backing down was usually possible, which didn’t mean that the apparently weaker party would inevitably do so, as the existence of war between coalitions, sometimes vicious and protracted wars, very clearly demonstrates. The habit of counting units of force to determine dominance, and assuming that the will of the stronger would usually prevail, lasted well into the nuclear age, where elaborate disputes over counting made up a discipline once wittily dubbed “nuclear theology.” There were almost always obstacles to counting and getting reliable and useful results, and there were often difficulties with weighing the effective power of a coalition, which might have various troubles bringing its theoretical quantitative advantage to bear. But a Great Power was simply a power whose numerical weight was thought intrinsically additive, impressive and decisive. Nowadays, most people realize that nuclear weapons are rarely this sense additive. Past a fairly low threshold, you do not necessarily get a proportionate or even obviously useful increment of power by having more of them, which helped dissolve the simple category of Great Power. Leaving aside nuclear weapons, increases in the relative power and reach of some states notoriously made two states first “superpowers” and then made one state a “hyperpower.” That would be us. Former Great Powers, even in combination, seemed dwarfed by the power of either superpower or the subsequent hyperpower. Claims that the current hyperpower cannot enforce its will by means of violence to my eyes suggest only what are by most historical standards the peculiarities of the current hyperpower—its relative restraint and moderation. In the past, economic power was not too sharply distinguished from military power, because it was thought that it could readily be turned into military power, by raising and equipping, or renting, military or naval units. The events of 1940, when Germany defeated and apparently came near to crushing the British and French empires, ought to have made clear the fact that the potential military strength suggested by economic power may not matter if the conversion of the latter into the former lags too much. It is possible that military power can nowadays be pretty effectively restrained by law, as Mr. Burns suggests. Alas, I have my doubts.
September 23, 2007
The Jetsons Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:20 PM EST The homepage of this website reports that today is the anniversary of the first broadcast of The Jetsons (in 1962), a TV cartoon of the early ’60s. I can only dimly recall the show, although I remember that I didn’t much like it, which in retrospect surprises me, because it appeared just around the time I fell in love with science fiction. Maybe I disliked it because it wasn’t really sci-fi; as it happens, very little real sci fi is comedy, maybe because science fiction at least pretends to be interested in how things will be different, whereas comedy has a tendency to assume, even to insist, that things are always pretty much the same. That comic proposition—that nothing important really changes—is of course a more dubious proposition for the historically-minded. Then again, because science fiction prides itself on its serious interest in how things would be different doesn’t mean that the genre often gets the future right, or doesn’t unthinkingly project a present uglier than its authors recognize into a future that might in some respects be much better. Interestingly enough, the most impressive science fiction story on that very theme, William Gibson’s wonderful “The Gernsback Continuum” is to the best of my knowledge the only science fiction story American Heritage ever published, in its quarterly magazine Invention & Technology. The Jetsons was something else, in part an inversion and in part a repetition of The Flintstones (both shows were done by the same company, Hanna-Barbera). One of the core jokes both shows shared was indeed that nothing that matters about human nature really alters; the Flintstones were a paleolithic version of The Honeymooners, the Jetsons a sci-fi version of The Donna Reed Show. One thing that occurs to me now is that by the logic of Hanna-Barbera, in the old days typical Americans were blue-collar, whereas in the future they would be white-collar. That was an interesting speculation for 1962, true in part, I suppose. A friend reminds me that the Jetsons was in some ways prophetic, in others decidedly not: You could read a newspaper off a screen, but you listened to music on a phonograph or a tape recorder, so the Jetsons foresaw the Internet but not the CD. Wikipedia adds that the Jetsons used folding money, not credit cards, and vacuum tubes rather than integrated circuits. I cannot recall whether the show either quietly mocked or unthinkingly recapitulated the logic of comedy when it suggested that nothing much really changes. I write this while taking a break from reading a short and impressive novella, Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution, which features an 89-year-old Sherlock Holmes surviving into 1944. I was told the punchline in advance, which has not yet spoiled the story for me. The very black joke of the punning title of The Final Solution seems to be that the future may hold truly dreadful and quite unimaginable surprises. It is as far from the anti-historical sensibility of The Jetsons as you can possibly get.
September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:10 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, of President Ahmadinejad’s invitation to speak at Columbia University, “Everyone’s entitled to free speech, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s entitled to an auditorium, an audience, and a microphone at one of America’s greatest institutions of learning. Once an invitation is extended, however, it should be maintained unless there is an exceedingly compelling justification for its withdrawal.” In 2002, I heard this view ascribed to Lawrence Summers, when Harvard’s literature faculty extended an invitation to the British poet and Oxford lecturer Tom Paulin, who had recently remarked that Brooklyn-born Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza strip should be shot dead (it is not clear why Paulin wanted to spare Bronx-born settlers, but in any case, Brooklyn Jews did seem to peculiarly excite his animus). After the Harvard English department had first proffered and then withdrawn an invitation to deliver the Morris Gray Lecture, Lawrence is said to have counseled that they were wrong on both counts, at which point Paulin was reinvited. Other accounts allege that Summers in fact (or first) pushed for the withdrawal of the invitation, and that the English Department first submitted and then resisted, but if the version I heard is correct, Summers believed that the harm done by appearing to legitimize a call for murder was more than offset by the danger of making it look as if Harvard could be bullied into withdrawing an invitation to speak. The Harvard Crimson made the opposite case, arguing for canceling the invitation: “When the English department learned that he advocated killing civilians and considered the Israeli military a modern-day incarnation of the SS, the content of his poetry became immaterial. . . . To let Paulin give a distinguished lecture at this University after expressing such an offensive and violent message would inevitably legitimize his hateful rhetoric.” I think (although I am not quite sure) the Crimson was wrong about that, although less wrong than some of the Harvard faculty, who couldn’t see any problem at all and in a curious non sequitur asserted that Paulin’s critics had yet again failed to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (no kidding). I think Alexander Burns is wise to distinguish between the right of free speech and the seemliness of Columbia’s higher echelons extending what rather looks like an honor. It is indeed odd to extend what looks like an honor to a man who in his official capacity presides over the judicial murder of homosexuals and the more surreptitious murder of many others. As I read John Steele Gordon, Mr. Gordon in this particular respect agrees with Mr. Burns. As I read the Columbia Spectator online, I notice that at least one student leader is “disappointed” that President Bollinger has spoken more harshly about President Ahmadinejad than he has about an abrasive opponent of illegal immigration, who at the invitation of a student political group addressed a Columbia audience last year. That undergraduate is probably not the only American who this week finds President Bollinger a bit of a disappointment.
September 22, 2007
Henry Kissinger Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:50 PM EST The homepage of this website notes that this is the anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s 1973 confirmation as Secretary of State. As I write this, a poll of readers asked to rank Kissinger’s merits in that post has a plurality (30 percent) assessing him as a good Secretary of State, and slightly smaller number (28 percent) assessing him as a great one. My guess is that what I consider a wild overestimate probably reflects disenchantment with the Iraq war, since over the last few years Kissinger’s alleged “realism” has often been juxtaposed to the supposed idealism of the current generation of neoconservatives, who are in one hostile interpretation damned as utopians (this is of course only one interpretation of the neocons, who are in other equally hostile accounts understood as profoundly cynical machiavels, covert Israeli agents, witting or unwitting tools of the oil companies, etc.) According to this particular theory, Kissinger knew the limits of the possible, while his neocon successors did not, and they thus madly sought to democratize a stable Baathist Iraq. By this account order in Iraq necessarily rested on tyranny, and the imperatives of containing Iran required that such a tyranny be based on minority (Sunni Arab) support, rather than majority Shiite support. Whatever the merits of this analysis of Iraq, Kissinger was not, in his day, a particularly realistic statesman, if realism is taken to include even a remotely accurate assessment of the trajectory of international politics. He seems to have had small grasp of economics—by one account, he encouraged the shah of Iran to support the 1973 oil embargo, so as to increase Iranian revenues. Kissinger certainly thought the shah of Iran a sturdy and perdurable American surrogate, our reliable gendarme in the Gulf, which was a fantastic blunder. He was remarkably indifferent to demands for liberty in the old Soviet bloc, Latin America, Greece, indeed everywhere, which means that he did not understand the forces that would within his lifetime destroy the Soviet bloc. He shared this failing with many, but those with whom he shared it are not normally called statesmen of genius, and unlike most of them, his own decisions brought us the shame of supporting tyrants without any durable gain in security; there are places (Greece, for example) where we are still hated for what Kissinger so complacently condoned. He also had a nasty habit of deriding people who took human rights more seriously than his sort of “realist” tends to do. Kissinger’s “realism” was in various other respects strikingly unrealistic. He thought the early-1970s United States a declining power, and the Soviet Union a rising one, a thought widely shared but less than prescient. A few years ago American Heritage published an interview with Ralph Peters—I conducted it—under the title “The Shah Always Falls”. Kissinger is the man who thought shahs rarely fall. He conducted American foreign policy accordingly, and I think very badly. In 1980 I heard an improbably amusing economist, asked for his opinion of Reagan’s chosen economic advisers, pause very briefly before judiciously characterizing them as “naive, but ill-willed.” Almost all liberals and many conservatives used to know this about Kissinger, although they rarely put the thought so pithily. It is not the least dispiriting sign of our times that people willing to use any stick to beat the administration have decided to use this one: Kissinger as statesman and “realist.”
September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:25 PM EST Josh Zeitz blogged that he had recently been interviewed by the Times about “a recent report that showed New York City’s non-Hispanic white population growing after several decades of sharp decline; at the same time, the number of immigrants in New York City, both the foreign-born and their children, is approaching levels last seen at the start of the twentieth century.” Josh notes that other American cities—he mentions Washington, D.C., and Newark—are witnessing comparable changes. Fred Allen replied that his parents, just back from Europe, reported that the difference between New York and a lot of European cities is not the presence of immigrants—there are a lot of immigrants in many European cities—but the American immigrants’ pleasing sense of ownership of the streets they bestrode. On his parents’ account, European cities feel as if they are inhabited by people who “look like a ghettoized underclass, stuck in the outskirts of the city, segregated from mainstream life.” On the strength of a trip to Queens last December, this seems to me like a partial but trivial exaggeration. I was in search of good kielbasa, a form of Polish sausage. An older woman in my friend’s hometown from whom my friend’s mother had bought homemade kielbasa had stopped making the stuff, and my friend had heard that in Polish neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn you can find pretty good sausage. You can indeed, along with fine pirogi, babka, and smoked trout, etc., and in one part of Queens you can buy all of these things in a neighborhood where the ATMs have screens with instructions in Polish, the newsstands sell only Polish publications—scores of them—and there are a remarkable number of perfume shops, which seems to be a Polish as well as a French thing. There are good and amazingly cheap Polish restaurants, where only Polish was spoken other than to us, ditto butchers and grocers, in one of which the butcher returned change to my friend with one of the few Polish phrases I know, one that more or less means “thank you, noble Lady,” not a phrase one commonly hears in other New York City shops. So it is not true to say that in New York City immigrants are never segregated from mainstream life to any degree. This was partial segregation, but it was only partial—people clearly living there had jobs in Manhattan, because the place was much quieter on a workday than on a weekend—and it was cheerful. No one seemed irritated at us for entering Polish turf, which would not be the case with a number of immigrant neighborhoods in European cities (and for that matter in 1920s Chicago, when my father grew up there). What happens to people in neighborhoods like that one in Queens? One tiny piece of anecdotal evidence: Over the past decade and change I have known New Yorkers who have employed successive Polish cleaning ladies. The first one in the series was a young woman who curtsied and called some of her employers “noble sir.” After two years, she was gone. She had gotten a job as a draughtsman in a machine shop. My guess is that curtseying and calling her employers “noble sir” vanished soon thereafter, and old-world atavistic charm aside, I am not sorry for that. The successor she recruited cleaned apartments for a number of years and then became an engineer, and the third one also moved on. The current one in the series is still cleaning apartments, but my guess is not forever. As these women move on, their English improves, and other things change too. They become Americans. Somehow, we have helped make them so; there is clearly some sort of push-pull, but the eerie gift we have for doing our part of this is clear when you think about the competition. Americans, who pioneered the mass production of automobiles, are sometimes gloomy about how other people now do this very effectively, to our apparent hazard. The Japanese, for example, make fine cars, but they are not good at making Japanese people using anything other than the most traditional method—and they do not even care to try. The Germans are also dab hands at mass-producing cars—they could not do this very effectively when it was a question of mass-producing tanks, and a good thing too, but now they clearly have it licked. But they cannot make Germans very well, other than from existing stock. They are ambivalent about trying, and maybe when they try more wholeheartedly they’ll do better, but the smart money is not taking any bets on it. Americans, on the other hand, are very effective at making more Americans out of any and all material. Then the new Americans make other things. I today read that 40 percent of American scientists were born in the European Union, which seems high but not impossible, and I am certain that a fair amount of other American scientists were born in places like India and China and Korea. I do not know quite what they make, or will make, but my guess is that the People’s Republic of China is likely to be very unhappy if it ever decides to invade Taiwan, and one reason for that is the high probability that some of the things new Americans make are going to be doozies. I posted back in July about the P47, a very effective machine a couple of immigrants designed in the early 1940s. The strategic consequences of American receptivity to immigration is a longstanding theme in our history. We should not be surprised by the things new Americans invent, because they are, after all, people with practice: they began by remaking themselves. Somehow we let them do it. Why are most host countries so much less good at this? I’m not sure. During nativist panics we repeatedly forget that we are good at this, or insist that this time it is different, but so far we have always been wrong. Nowadays the anti-nativists also tell a different story: America is and has always been a salad bowl and not a melting pot, we have usually been cruelly unwelcoming, and so on. And much of that is true—at least until you look at the phenomenon in comparative perspective.
September 13, 2007
Bonapartism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST Alexander Burns posts that if General Petraeus takes the advice of the New York Sun, “to tell Congress that he needed its full support for the Iraq war, and that if he didn’t receive it he would resign and run for President,” he would be taking “an essentially Bonapartist course of action.” I don’t think General Petraeus would have been well-advised to take the Sun’s advice, but in the extremely remote possibility that he had, he would not, in my opinion, have been acting in a Bonapartist fashion. The historical Bonaparte eventually seized power with (and held it by reliance on) armed force, and his nephew, who won a national presidential election, subsequently mounted a successful coup d’état, later relying on plebiscites rather than contesting elections (although there was a very late phase of “liberal empire,” with an elected legislature having some power). Outside of the stricter Marxian rhetorical traditions, I think Bonapartist mostly means generals seizing power, and holding it, by means of bayonets; inside the Marxian traditions, there are some important additional implications, but the use of bayonets rather than ballots alone is still part of the idea. The Sun, as far as I can tell, while abrasively and stupidly suggesting that Congress stop criticizing the administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq, is not suggesting the use of violence to overturn the Constitution. Nor am I sure that demanding that Congress support the war or see Petraeus resign and run for President would be fairly comparable to MacArthur’s behavior in 1951. MacArthur was insubordinate to his commander-in-chief; Petraeus has not been, and if he made such a remark to Congress, giving his professional advice and mentioning the right he shares with many of his fellow citizens (to run for the Presidency), he would not necessarily be committing the military offense of insubordination; for one thing, I can imagine his Commander in Chief approving his remarks. Mr. Burns also quotes Niall Ferguson saying that 1951 was “perhaps the only moment in its history that the American Republic came close to meeting the fate of the Roman Republic.” I do not know the context, but Niall Ferguson seems to be making a bombastic and ridiculous remark. If 1951 was in fact our closest approach to a century of civil war culminating in centuries of despotism, and I have no reason to think otherwise, we have no great cause for alarm. At the time, people who were closer to the horrors of the last century thought they saw something more genuinely dangerous in MacArthur’s ambitions than most of us do when looking back more than 50 years later, in the same way that Huey Long looked more like Hitler if you were an excitable contemporary living in the Bronx than he does to us now. Then again, “close” may mean something to the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University that it does not mean to other speakers of English. As for extremely irritating remarks made by American generals, ones that comport very ill with democratic government, I’d pick the general who announced that President Clinton would not be physically safe if he ventured onto that general’s army base. At the time, I wanted Clinton to send the Secret Service to interrogate this general, who was apparently harboring traitors in his command. I probably overreacted—but not as much as Professor Ferguson seems to have done, with the benefit of a lot more hindsight.
September 13, 2007
Wodehousiana Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:30 PM EST The admirable website Arts and Letters Daily, which sometimes links to AmericanHeritage.com, comprises columns of links. The extreme right column contains links to “Essays and Opinion”; to that column’s left are links to reviews (“New Books”); one more column to the left are links to “Articles of Note”; and on the extreme left are a series of columns, one atop another. Many of them are links to the front pages of newspapers, magazines or blogs, but near the top there is also a column titled “Note Bene,” which usually links to more whimsical pieces. The top of the “Note Bene” column is now occupied by a piece described as “Wodehouse Types”, and if you follow the link you arrive at a meditation on a recent Daily Telegraph obituary of Lord Michael Pratt, a gentleman described by the Telegraph as “one of the last Wodehouseian figures to inhabit London’s clubland,” with the assertion that “he will also be remembered as an unabashed snob and social interloper on a grand scale.” The piece goes on to note that “The epithet ‘Wodehousian’ is raising eyebrows, in this online newsgroup and perhaps in the more literary corners of clubland itself.” The eyebrows are raised because some seem to think that Lord Michael Pratt was too unpleasant a character to make his way into a Wodehouse novel. Anthony Gottlieb, author of the piece, demurs, pointing out that Wodehouse managed, among sketches of other fairly nasty characters, a pretty effective parody of the British fascist Oswald Mosley (Wodehouse’s Mosley figure is named Roderick Spode). P. G. Wodehouse, who lived 93 years and published 96 books, is probably best remembered for creating the character (and brilliant first-person narrative voice) of Bertie Wooster, the quintessential British upper-class twit, who is repeatedly saved from comic disasters—often marriage to a beautiful but maddening girl—by his butler Jeeves. Bertie and Jeeves probably descend from Plautus, where the upper-class twit and the clever slave were perfected although not invented. The two seem peculiarly English, but they are in fact immensely popular other places—for example, Wodehouse sells amazingly well in India, was once loved in Hungary, and, among other places in America, in Brooklyn, where my mother first ran across him. I was in my early teens when she commended him to me—we were both poking around a public library in Westchester—and more than 40 years later I now teach him; he makes a nice companion to Plautus. Wodehouse raises the question of the presence of British literary culture in America, and in a special way. America began as a set of British colonies; British literature has always been part of our literature, bids fair to remain so for the foreseeable future, and is a component of the literature Americans read in a way other world literature is not—for one thing, we read it without translation. The parity with American literature (maybe the near-primacy) of British literature in America is not simply a function of the coercive powers of schoolteachers; many Americans still find British popular and canonical literature all on their own. When I was a kid, a lot of people still ran into The Prisoner of Zenda, and many of my students have still found Jane Austen. Wodehouse seems to me to be a special case, in two senses a peculiarly hybrid author. First of all, he died an American citizen, and for that matter spent most of his long life living in either American or France. He spent some time in Hollywood and for the last part of his life lived on Long Island. A lot of American popular culture would not have existed without him. He collaborated with Cole Porter on Anything Goes, frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern (he wrote the lyrics to Show Boat’s “Bill”) and Guy Bolton, and a lot of his writing was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. But Wodehouse seems to me to be a hybrid author in another sense, which is that from early on he wrote with an American audience in mind. He was popular here from near the beginning of his career, and he set some novels and stories in Hollywood that were consumed by British as well as American popular audiences. He worked with comic types from both cultures, and displayed them for the pleasure of vast audiences on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as at least one shore of the Indian Ocean). It would be absurd to deny Wodehouse’s Englishness, but it would be foolish to forget that Salman Rushdie admired him as much as Eveyln Waugh did—or that my mother, who was a resident of Crown Heights when she discovered Wodehouse, was one of tens of millions of Americans who have loved him as much as either of those two ever did. There are literary inventions from the purely popular as well as the high literature of other nations who are also part of our mental worlds—some characters of Dumas, certainly, and Cyrano—but the field is mostly British. American popular creations have been exported in mass quantities, of course, so the traffic is two-way. And in some cases, like Wodehouse’s, the two-way traffic is conducted by (and within) a single writer.
September 11, 2007
September 11 and Hindsight Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:35 AM EST Fred Schwarz’s lead piece on this site today describes the issue of American Heritage published in the aftermath of 9/11, for which the articles had to be written within a week of the attacks. I published an article in that issue, to which Fred Schwarz provides a link, and I followed that link with some apprehension. To my gratification and indeed astonishment, relatively little I wrote on that occasion strikes me as appallingly stupid now. At least one thought, though, seems to me to have been over-optimistic. I suggested that destroying a terror-sponsoring regime—the one at issue was the Taliban government then ruling almost all of Afghanistan, which had given shelter to bin Laden—might begin to make the sponsorship of terror less attractive to other regimes employing such tactics and proxies. In the light of subsequent history, this was a bad reading about the relationship between the Taliban and bin Laden. The former may have been the partial prisoner of the latter, rather than the latter the distinctly junior ally of the former. Also, while some positive effects of destroying a sponsor regime may have been visible at first—for example, some accounts suggest a brief period of covert Iranian overtures to the United States, and these overtures may have been further encouraged by the initial U.S. victory in Iraq—the sincerity and wholeheartedness of those overtures is disputable, as is the ability of those who made them to deliver the goods. Furthermore, subsequent U.S. difficulties in Iraq are widely said to have had the opposite effect to the one I hoped for, and are instead encouraging Iranian intransigence. Allowing an enemy to provoke you with impunity, or at the risk of only feeble and transient reprisals, does have the effect of encouraging further and greater provocations, but failed reprisals, reprisals that are perceived to have failed on a very grand scale, seem even likelier to produce further provocation. According to many accounts, the United States is now being driven out of Iraq by successful terrorism in significant part sponsored by Iran, and is being seriously harassed in Afghanistan by terrorism sponsored by elements within the Pakistani intelligence services, by terrorists permitted to shelter on Pakistani territory. This latter pattern may change, for the sponsored have recently begun murdering their sponsors, but the general tendency of events is to make terrorism look more and more like the magic bullet anyone can employ against the Americans or their allies. It is again claimed that it always works, and that the costs to the sponsor remain pretty low. If the United States is indeed driven out of Iraq by successful Iranian-sponsored terror, and/or is driven out of Afghanistan by neo-Taliban who are staging out of Pakistan, the chief price to be paid for that will be paid by Iraqis and Afghans. But we are likely to pay a price, as well, somewhere down the line, and maybe not very far down the line. The price may be much cheaper than staying in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it will not be wholly negligible. On the other hand, most people continue to acknowledge that leaving the Taliban in place while bin Laden continued his career as their visibly honored and ominously industrious guest would have been an almost inconceivably flaccid and foolish response to 9/11. Our subsequent attempt to reconstruct the government of Iraq is now widely taken to be proof that trying to do certain things is idiocy. Maybe so. It remains true that, as Christopher Hitchens likes to note, doing nothing does not mean that nothing will happen; it means that something else will happen. Knowing what not to do is not the same thing as knowing what to do. A poll reported in today’s New York Times suggests that many Americans remain unsure about what to do in Iraq. The Times itself seems to be surer, if not necessarily wiser.
September 10, 2007
Hitler’s Strategic Bombers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:35 AM EST John Steele Gordon asks my opinion of Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, which he found compelling. While I do not agree with every single thing Overy says in it, I greatly admire the book, have several times assigned it in two courses I teach, and particularly admire the chapters on bombing, the wartime economies, and the development of new technologies. Overy was originally an immensely impressive specialist on the German war economy and the air war, before branching out to other aspects of the Second World War, and I think those three chapters show that. Mr. Gordon goes on to remark that “had the Germans developed a strategic bomber, capable of heavy loads and long range, the ability of the Soviets to move their armaments factories eastward, out of range of the Luftwaffe, would have been greatly complicated.” I have seen other people speculate to this effect, but I am not sure I agree. Here’s why: The Ural bomber program, advocated by Walter Wever, the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, and cancelled after his death in 1935 by his successor, Ernst Udet (and not supported by Udet’s successor, Hans Jeschonnek), had produced two prototypes, the Dornier Do19, with a range of 1,600 kilometers, and the Junkers Ju89, with a range of 2,980 kilometers. If the Luftwaffe had deployed any strategic bomber in time for Barbarossa, it would most likely have been one or the other of these. How would they have fared? The distance from Moscow, which the Werhmacht never quite reached, to the great tank factory in the Urals, Chelyabinsk, is 1,919 kilometers, which means that had the Do19 actually gone into production, it would not have had the range to reach the Urals, even if the Wehrmacht had somehow held onto the outskirts of Moscow. The distance from Stalingrad, which the Wehrmact did reach, and most of which, to its sorrow, it for some months occupied, was 1,359 km, which still lets out the Do19, but Ju89s, had they gone into mass production, could have reached Chelyabinsk from either Moscow or Stalingrad. Off the top of my head, the only potential German escort fighter with the range to reach Chelyabinsk from Stalingrad would have been the Me110, a notoriously bad dogfighter. While most Soviet fighters were designed to fight at lower altitudes than the 22,000 foot ceiling of a Ju89, some could at least reach much higher altitudes (the MiG1, available in 1941, could reach 39,000 feet, the LaGG3, also available in 1941, could reach 33,000 feet, as could the Yak 1b, available in 1942), and had the Luftwaffe possessed Ju89s, Soviet designers would have produced fighters designed for higher performance at a suitable altitude—they were very good at their trade. In any case, fairly early in the war we had Lend-Leased the Soviets (among other aircraft) P39s, which had a ceiling of 35,000 feet. Unescorted World War II bombers flying by day and facing capable fighters were effectively on suicide missions; bombers escorted by badly outclassed fighters were in a comparable case (Bf110s used as escorts during the Battle of Britain were not quite flying coffins, but they were very badly outclassed); and for the first couple years of the war, bombers attacking distant targets by night were lucky to drop any bombs within five nautical miles of their targets. Even with significantly better accuracy, you had to drop an awful lot of bombs to do any damage, but Ju89s didn’t carry many bombs. The Ju89 had a theoretical bomb load of 1,600 kg (3,520 lbs.), compared to a B17G’s theoretical capacity of 17,417 lbs. (7900 kg) of bombs (while a B-17 rarely carried more than 2300 kg. In combat, we’ll never know what a Ju89 could actually have carried from Stalingrad to Chelyabinsk). The Luftwaffe was designed for ground support, which early on it did extremely well, and for achieving air superiority over the battlefield, which in 1940 it also did extremely well, so well that Germany achieved, in my opinion very much against the odds, the swift and cheap conquest of France and the resulting domination of the Continent. The resources this victory directly and indirectly secured in turn made Nazi Germany extremely formidable. With limited resources (and many calls on those resources), I think this was the most effective possible approach for the German air force. Had significant resources been diverted into building strategic bombers, that improbable 1940 victory would have been. I think, even less likely.
September 8, 2007
The Blitz Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:55 PM EST The homepage of this website notes that today is the anniversary of the beginning of the Blitz, the Luftwaffe’s sustained bombing campaign against London that began on September 7, 1940. There would be raids on London for the next 57 days, and if you discount one raid-free night where the Luftwaffe was prevented from attacking by miserable weather, there would be 76 days of uninterrupted bombing. Before September 7, the Germans had attacked London’s civilian population only incidentally, or by pure accident. On September 5, however, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to make London the main focus of its attacks, and on the 7th, 300 bombers escorted by 600 fighters attacked by day, with another 180 bombers attacking that night, between them killing 436 Londoners and wounding 1,600 more. One intention was to avenge the Royal Air Force’s attack on Berlin of August 25, itself a reprisal for an unauthorized German raid on London the day before. The other intention was to let the Luftwaffe win the war on its own. When the bombing was done, any invasion was expected to be a walkover. There were two targets, one of them being the remaining aircraft of Fighter Command (the much-anticipated “last 50 Spitfires”), which would be forced to deploy over London and be destroyed. The other target was the civilian population of London. The intention was to produce panic and social division, ideally the threat of civil war, which would force the British government into a compromise peace. It was long a commonplace to say that Hitler lost the war when he directed the Luftwaffe away from its previous military and industrial targets and toward a monomaniacal focus on London, and while that is not so obvious, since there was no clear alternate path to a German victory over Britain in 1940, the attack on British morale famously failed. The long-run result of that famous failure is that strategic bombing—attacks on enemy morale, production, or armed forces, made by aircraft alone—has widely come to be considered an inevitable failure. This sturdy judgment, which has handily survived the crucial role strategic air attacks played in securing the surrender of Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Milosevic’s Serbia, along with the indispensable contribution strategic bombing made to the victory over Nazi Germany, encapsulates one of the false notions asserted with eerie confidence by people who are very confident that they are bravely uttering a profound and heretical truth. When directed at civilian morale, the purveyors of the conventional wisdom “know” that strategic bombardment is both an inexcusable crime and a manifest folly; when directed at economic or military targets, at least a folly (and when civilians are killed in the course of such attacks, an outcome which is almost inevitable, the charge of crime is nowadays pretty common). The apostles of strategic bombing, who generally and often grossly overstated the case for their form of warfare, claiming the power to deliver victory unassisted, admittedly bear some of the responsibility for the now widespread dismissal of their form of war. But current specialist scholarship, which has for decades been revising upward our estimate of the contribution strategic bombing made to victory over the Axis, is almost always ignored by people who pronounce on the subject. With the exception of the popular conception of the British World War I experience on the Western Front (“lions led by donkeys”), my guess is that no mistake about war is held by a larger number of educated people.
September 7, 2007
The Old Order Passeth II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s interesting post “The Old Order Passeth” notes that for the first time in 10,000 years agriculture is no longer the primary source of global employment, and its diminishment should not be mourned, because, as Mr. Gordon puts it, “Agriculture made civilization possible, but it made prosperity possible for only the few.” That is harsh, but not unjustly so. Agriculture produced a greater division of labor, storable economic surpluses, cities, and literacy, to list only a few of its achievements. It made people more numerous—a lot more numerous—but in most cases it also made them sicker and shorter and certainly much more unequal, in terms of both wealth and status. Rural life was proverbially dull and weary—a vivid American expression once described it as life spent staring at the wrong end of a horse—but in most times and places it was also remarkably unequal. That inequality was enforced by violence; when the inequality was occasionally challenged, rural life meant looking at the wrong end of a landlord, the one holding the sharp, pointy thing. I only became vividly aware of what bad luck the agricultural revolution meant for most of humanity in 1995, when I read a remarkable book by Robert O’Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War, which tersely described the order produced by agriculture as “the plant trap.” Not too long ago, more people seemed to remember something of this truth. In school, we were taught that over the gates of German medieval towns a phrase proclaimed Stadt Luft Macht Frei!”—town air makes men free. According to Mr. Gordon’s account, which stresses the fact the it also allows them to become richer, the decline of the share of world population engaged in agriculture means a chance at abundance (rather than subsistence) as the fate of most of the species. If this is true—and I think it is—it is of course not the only possible majority fate. Hordes of unemployable paupers living in urban slums is also a possible fate, but Mr. Gordon surely knows that. What animated his post, I think, was the fact that we are eerily sentimental about the rural past. We have a tendency to imagine rural life as virtuous and just, with the city as the zone of corruption and wretchedness. This is perverse sentimentality held with remarkable tenacity, and it affects people who ought to know better. In the country, I confess that I am unattractively proud when I can identify the crops raised in a field: That is rape seed, I smugly assert. Rationally, I am prouder of my grandfather, who escaped a farm in Appalachia to reach, after various hazards, including rounding Cape Horn as a merchant seaman, the idylls of Brooklyn. That was the progress of civilization, and as Mr. Gordon reports, it is now in reach of the majority of our kind.
August 22, 2007
Eisenhower’s Reputation Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:50 AM EST If you are a certain age, Alexander Burns’s lead piece on Eisenhower yesterday leaves a certain mystery intact, which is the contempt liberal intellectuals and academics had for Eisenhower during his Presidency. At the end of Eisenhower’s second term, American historians were confident he would be remembered as one of the worst American Presidents, but by the end of the century his stock had risen so sharply with the same crowd that he was ranked as one of the best twentieth-century Presidents. What happened? I remember schoolyard chants of “Whistle while you work./ Stevenson’s a jerk./ Eisenhower’s got the power./ Whistle while you work,” but they were done without the knowledge of our parents, who greatly admired Stevenson. My own knowledge of adult contemporary attitudes is indirect, because I was born the year before Eisenhower won his first election, and my sense of the mystery was thus derived from listening to adults look back on the 1950s. So what did the adults seem to resent or dislike? For one thing, Eisenhower was the first Republican to break the 16-year Democratic lock on the Oval Office, so he represented the end of the New Deal political culture they had grown up in and loved. For another, a certain sort of educated liberal American was besotted by Adlai Stevenson, and it seemed incredible that a man as superficially mediocre as Eisenhower could twice defeat a man as superficially enthralling as Stevenson. Eisenhower’s verbal clumsiness was constantly mocked, and the mockery was tinged with a sense of bitter loss: They could have had someone they loved and passionately admired, and they got that dull clown instead. When I got old enough to read biographies of Eisenhower, one oddity of the experience was the discovery that there had been excellent reasons to dislike him, but those had not registered on me at the time, and people rarely mentioned them in retrospect. He had been timid about McCarthy, shamefully so, and in 1952 permitted a very ugly campaign to be waged in his behalf. Most shamefully, he refused to denounce Joseph McCarthy even when McCarthy foully slandered George Marshall, a genuinely great man to whom Eisenhower owed everything. After the election Eisenhower consistently avoided confronting McCarthy, and he similarly shrank from leadership in the wake of the landmark schools-desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education; he had hoped to preserve separate-but-equal schooling and only reluctantly enforced the law. His moral prestige was enormous, and his leadership might have had an enormous effect; he instead allowed Southerners to believe he was secretly on their side. This was surely the great moral challenge of postwar American politics, and Eisenhower failed it. These failings were not, however, mentioned by the adults who disliked Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s real virtues were similarly invisible, at least in those days—his enormous tact in coalition warfare, which made a genuine contribution to victory, the moral splendor of the letter he wrote in anticipation of a failure on D-day, his caution during the Cold War, when he was at the helm and was being urged to very risky endeavors. He was not a daring general, but neither was he a shamefully timid one, and he had some of the subtler military virtues. It seems strange to reflect that neither his virtues nor his vices contributed to my perception of local adults’ sense of him while I was growing up. His rise in public estimation, I think, came from his seeming to have been a do-nothing but to have been followed by do-somethings who often did something dangerous. Even when he was mocked and scorned, he was never hated, which is striking in an age when political hatred thrives. His age seems a very long time ago.
August 20, 2007
Churchill and India Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:25 AM EST A couple of days ago Alexander Burns linked to a review of a couple on books on the partition of the Indian sub-continent, which appeared in a recent article in The New Yorker. I have now read the piece, by Pankaj Mishra, and I think it makes a number of unpersuasive remarks about British responsibility for the creation of Pakistan, and particularly Winston Churchill’s “destructive role in the history of the Asian subcontinent.” Mr. Burns concludes his post by noting that “it’s not as easy to plan the future of men and states as some would like to believe, and the history of India and Pakistan is a good reminder of that.” This is true and wise, but it is also true that after a certain point, some historical outcomes seem very likely. My sense is that long before Churchill had anything much to do with the history of the subcontinent, partition was such an outcome. Mishra writes that “As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain ‘a bulwark of British rule in India.’ Certainly Churchill, who did not want his views on India to be ‘disturbed by any bloody Indians,’ was disinclined to recognize the upsurge of nationalism in India. . . . In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Churchill had been loudest among the reactionaries who were determined not to lose India, ‘the jewel in the crown,’ and, as Prime Minister during the Second World War, he tried every tactic to thwart Indian independence. . . . In 1942, as the Japanese Army advanced on India, the Congress Party was willing to offer war support in return for immediate self-government. But Churchill was in no mood to negotiate. . . . Churchill’s divisive policies had already produced a disastrous effect on the Indian political scene. Congress Party leaders had refused to share power with Jinnah, confident that they did not need Muslim support in order to win a majority vote in elections. These attitudes stoked Muslim fears that the secular nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru was a cover for Hindu dominance. While the Congress leaders were in prison, Jinnah, with Churchill’s encouragement, steadily consolidated Muslim opinion behind him.” Churchill could be nasty (and remarkably foolish) about Gandhi, and he was certainly hostile to the prospect of Indian independence, but I don’t think any hopes he may have had about the effects of Hindu-Muslim antagonism had any discernible effect on the fact, intensity, and consequence of sectarian consciousness, and my guess is that in the long run his aggressive hostility to Indian independence probably had little effect on the course of Indian history. Churchill was out of power when he made some of his silliest remarks about India (from 1929 through 1932), and while the offensive remarks he made at that time have hurt his reputation, they had little if any effect on British policy. After 1935 Churchill’s attention turned from the threat of Ghandi, which he misread, to the threat of Hitler, which he did not. When he became prime minister, in 1940, he was generally more concerned with the latter threat, and after 1941 with the threat of Imperial Japan, than with the challenge of Ghandi, except when they intersected, as they did in 1942. There is a school of thought that blames Churchill for the failure of the 1942 Cripps Mission—which is what Mishra does (the Cripps Mission was an attempt to secure Indian support for the war effort in return for full dominion status and, if desired, full independence after the war). There is also a school of thought that blames Gandhi and the Congress Party for the failure of the Cripps Mission, and a theory, which Mishra seems to share, that had the Cripps Mission succeeded, there would have been no bloody partition of India. There is something to be said for both of the first two positions, but the last, I think, is almost certainly wrong. Mishra writes that “nothing in the complex tragedy of partition was inevitable.” Maybe, but my impression is that much current scholarship tends to push back rather than forward the date at which partition became very, very likely, back, in fact, to the 1920s, when Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) left the Congress Party over differences about Muslim needs and rights. I think current scholarship tends to put more of the blame for partition on Congress and specifially on Nehru, both of them being unwilling to take Muslim fears of Hindu domination with sufficient seriousness, and a bit less of the blame on malevolent and inept British authorities. British authorities were sometimes inept and malevolent, but after the First World War Indians made more and more of their own fate. Jinnah did not need encouragment from Churchill to reject a strong, unitary state, and had Churchill not jailed the leaders of Congress in 1942, they seem unlikely to have successfully reversed decades of growing Muslim sentiment. There was indeed a long period during which Indian Muslims would have accepted a weak federal state, but Congress kept demanding a strong and centralized one. These were incompatible demands, and partition was the result. Mishra implies that Congress was made obdurate by British policy (such as holding elections, which Hindu majorities won), but it seems a little strange for an anti-imperialist to greatly blame a colonial power for holding honest elections. Mishra is right to point out that (as in Iraq) simple majority rule in multi-confessional and multi-national states can have ugly consequences, but the acceptable moral alternative (other than partition) is not wholly clear. Mishra does not like British imperialism. Fair enough, although I am generally struck by the fact that in most respects its record compares well to all the other varieties of imperialism we know about, including the ones practiced by various subcontinental regimes before the British arrived, and in some cases after they left (if you think about Kashmir or Afghanistan). The tragedy of partition, real and ghastly, contains many lessons. The notion that it was largely the fault of post–World War I British imperial policy is not, I think, one of them. As for Churchill, while he tried (and failed) to protract British imperialism, it may be worth recalling that he did manage to cut short the career of German imperialism. Old-fashioned souls persist in thinking that the latter achievement may outweigh the former intention.
August 16, 2007
The First Torpedo Bombers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:35 PM EST More on anniversaries: paging through a book of (mostly Japanese) naval history yesterday afternoon, I learned that on this date 92 years ago, the Royal Navy’s Flight Lieut. W. L. Walsh flew a Sopwith Schneider float-plane off the 120-foot flight deck of the converted liner Campania as she steamed into a wind of 17 knots, becoming the first pilot to successfully take off from a ship at sea in wartime. That seemed plausible enough; in 1911 Eugene Ely, a U.S. Navy airman, had taken off from and landed on the USS Philadelphia, and 1915 sounded right for someone doing it for the first time under less controlled conditions. What astonished me was a preceding sentence, which claimed that a couple of days earlier, on August 12 Flight Cdr. C. H. K. Edmonds had become the first man to launch an aerial torpedo against an en enemy ship. The ship was a Turkish merchantman off the Dardanelles, and Edmonds, flying at 75 miles an hour, had to descend to 15 feet off the surface to launch his torpedo at range of 300 yards. He scored a direct hit. When an officer of the Royal Navy destroys an adversary it is normally seen as a case of dog bites man, so the astonishing part was that 1915 sounded a couple of decades too early for anyone to have done it with an air-launched torpedo, of which more below. Historical records are funny things, and people can be picky. It came out that the merchantman had actually been put out of action four days earlier by a submarine, which meant that Edmonds had not been the first pilot to sink a functioning enemy ship with a torpedo, so Edmonds went out again on August 17 and hit a Turkish supply ship under way in the Sea of Marmora. Less than an hour later another British pilot, Flight Lieutenant G .B. Dacre, torpedoed another moving ship, a Turkish steam tug. That made it all stranger—apparently aircraft were using torpedoes at sea on a daily basis in 1915. I’d not realized that anyone had torpedoed an adversary from the air until the Second World War, and when I called a friend, fellow-blogger, and editor, someone who knows more about navies than I do, he thought exactly the same thing. I think the main reason for our astonishment is that the standard story of naval aviation describes the effectiveness of carriers at Pearl Harbor as the great and shocking technological surprise of naval history. In this version of history, the deadliness of carriers was prefigured only by the Royal Navy’s devastating raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto on the evening of November 11 to 12 1940, the attack that gave the Japanese the idea for Pearl Harbor. In the conventional wisdom, carriers made battleships obsolete overnight, but now it turns out that carriers had been launching torpedo bombers for decades. I think another reason for our surprise was that World War I is normally seen as a sterile period in naval innovation, other than in the case of submarines. Wrong again. A third reason for our surprise is that if you have ever seen the first aircraft used in the war, a lot of them are spidery, minute, and fragile machines, some not much bigger than the pilots who flew them. A torpedo, by contrast, is a large and heavy weapon, and neither of us could imagine a First World War aircraft able to take off from a carrier possibly carrying one. Surprise: By the end of the war, the Royal Navy had deployed the Sopwith Cuckoo, with a 46-foot wingspan (and folding wings, being purpose-built for aircraft carriers), which carried a torpedo 18 inches in diameter (and mounted a warhead weighing more than 300 pounds). Some lessons from all of this: Technological history does not necessarily conform to the simplified versions of it you remember from school, where great innovations change the world overnight. Another lesson is that the First World War was not a case of complacent British generals and admirals hostile to innovation slaughtering their own men because of their inability to innovate under pressure. First World War British elites, both naval and military, deployed most of the innovations that would be associated with the Second World War, from the tank to tactical airpower to combined arms operations to the aircraft carrier, and they won. We do not associate them with extremely effective military innovation; we reserve that honor, if not too many others, for twentieth-century German elites, who indeed fielded, as the British author Peter Fleming once dryly observed, the mightiest and most innovative army ever to be defeated in war. But that is a mistake. Blundering Anglo-American armed forces, almost entirely composed of people who would rather have been civilians, are generally imagined to have simply muddled along, until, as a Hollywood screenwriter had a notional Frenchman put it in Casablanca, wrong in detail but correct in spirit, they blundered all the way into Berlin.
August 15, 2007
Two Annniversaries Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:45 PM EST Yesterday marked two vastly important anniversaries, that of V-J Day, the surrender of Japan, which got a single New York Times story in its honor, and the sixtieth anniversary of the partition of the Indian subcontinent upon British withdrawal, the date Pakistan celebrates its independence (India is celebrating its independence today). I read a couple of newspaper pieces on the famous kiss in Times Square, one in the Times pondering the recreation of the event on its sixty-second anniversary by some 75 couples, another today in the same paper perhaps a little snarkily asserting the improbability of anyone ever celebrating the end of the Iraq War with a memorable kiss. That seemed a backhanded tribute to V-J Day; at least it once meant something great and impressive to Americans, whereas Iraq, the comparison insists, never will. (Perhaps significantly, the piece does not bother to speculate on how Iraqis may remember the end of their war.) The transformation of a once-terrifying Japan into a peaceful and immensely rich democracy, largely achieved by American arms, is yesterday’s news, hence almost no news, and as it happens, the newer schoolbooks often teach that we didn’t even do it. Some of them insist it was the Soviet declaration of war that made Japan surrender (much-disputed by the specialists, and for my money very effectively disputed, but the specialists rarely write the schoolbooks). Americans, often depicted as deep-dyed with brutal and dishonest military triumphalism, seem to have this year missed V-J Day when glorying in our arms. What about consciousness of the creation of India and Pakistan? There were a couple of pieces in today’s Times, one of them very interesting, noting that India has begun teaching some of its own political controversies in its schools and suggesting that this is a sign of India’s new wealth, confidence, and political maturity. India, in my boyhood celebrated as the world’s largest democracy and nowadays one of the world’s most striking contemporary successes, ought to be big news. If you are the sort of person who reads op-eds on foreign policy, you may be newly accustomed to hearing that non-Western societies do not value democracy when it can possibly be suspected of having been imposed on them by another culture, that the occupier only leaves when terrorism, the poor man’s only possible weapon, forces him out, that neoliberal nostrums do not make anyone rich, etc. The history of India ought to complicate this sort of conventional wisdom a little more than it does. Perhaps the history of Pakistan ought to complicate the conventional wisdom, too. Anyone whose knowledge of the world is largely based on reading op-eds and editorials can be forgiven believing Israel to be the only state in the world in which religious affiliation is intimately connected to ideas of full and idealized citizenship (and for that matter, privileged access to citizenship, enshrined in something not wholly unlike Israel’s law of return, also exists in Ireland, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, Serbia, Japan, India, Armenia, Finland, Bulgaria, Spain, etc., another fact under-reported in op-eds). As a threat to world peace, Israel is probably oversold and Pakistan—which having started a fair number of wars seemed only five years ago on the verge of a nuclear war, and which seems to have exported the designs for nuclear weapons to North Korea, and which is widely accused of helping the Taliban kill Afghans, Americans, and various other people—remarkably undersold. Anniversaries are not only interesting when they make us remember some history; they are also interesting when they signally fail to do anything of the kind.
August 12, 2007
Freds and History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:10 PM EST This group blog is unusual in having three contributors named Fred. Fred, once a common name, is now a relatively rare one; from 1885 to 1896, it was the fifteenth most popular boy’s baby name, but now it is no longer in the top 1,000. I know this last detail because one of the two Fred bloggers circulated this piece from the Washington Post to the other two Freds. It is a bit of journalistic whimsy provoked by the as-yet-unannounced presidential candidacy of Fred Thompson, and it generated a brief intra-Fred exchange of views on the name. I don’t know how one quickly determines the frequency of names for most historical periods, but for the United States in 1990, the Census Bureau has put the data online at http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames.html, and as recently as 1990 Fred was still the seventy-first most popular name for a male American. Name frequency does change over time, sometimes quite sharply, and one theory for the phenomenon is that nowadays most Americans want names for their children that are uncommon but not too uncommon, so success in finding such a name leads to overkill. The name can catch on very broadly, in which case after a while it necessarily drops into relative obscurity. The census data tells nothing about the specific mental associations of particular names, but on the strength of the Washington Post piece, my own view, which is that the name Fred has long connoted affable stupidity, seems to be shared by a significant number of Americans. I don’t know why this should be so, but I have just been told—by neither Fred-blogger—that the two fictional Freds mentioned in the WaPo article, Fred Flintstone and Fred Mertz, both share the qualities of affability and at least mild stupidity, and this may explain the aura now surrounding the name; there was a further speculation that Fred Flintstone is named by mental association with Fred Mertz. This implies that one fictional Fred damned a whole tribe with a reputation for sweet-tempered doltishness, which seems odd, but I can think of few other possible explanations. I don’t think problem is literary association, because there are few Freds in high literature—off the top of my head, I recall only Fred Vincy in Middlemarch, and he is not doltish. There is Frederic Moreau in Sentimental Education, who is not stupid, but that is immaterial, for a co-blogger has pointed out that Frederics do not have the same reputation for sappiness. There are a fair number of stupid and affable Freds in P. G. Wodehouse, but an awful lot of Wodehouse characters are affable and stupid, not just the Freds. All of this leads to the thought that while more things have a history than we often think—I remember being quite startled to discover how rapidly the choice of American Christian names has come to change over time, versus how slowly French usage has changed, at least until quite recently (it was long controlled by law)—not all of history is readily explicable.
August 7, 2007
Bismarck and Tirpitz Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that “We will, of course, never know if the Germans could have won the Battle of the Atlantic by having concentrated on submarines before the outbreak of war instead of trying to build a surface fleet to take on the Royal Navy. But surely had the shipbuilding capacity and the design talent that went into building such ships as Bismarck and Tirpitz (quite possibly the finest battleships ever built) gone into submarines instead, the Battle of the Atlantic would have been an even nearer-run thing than it was.” It is almost certainly true that the Bismarck and Tirpitz were a waste of German resources, most crucially of steel, but it was not necessarily mad for the Germans to have built the ships. First of all, the Bismarck and Tirpitz, laid down in peacetime, were intended for a world war that was supposed to break out at a time of Hitler’s choosing, probably in 1942 or 1943. Battleships take years to build, so these ships had to be laid down well in advance of their expected use. What most obviously failed was less the projected force structure of the German Navy than Hitler’s diplomacy. The ships were intended to be part of a large German battle fleet, one that would include the even larger battleships of the Z Plan, and were expected to defeat first Britain and then the United States (the plans for ships that could fight on our side of the Atlantic is now considered an important clue about Hitler’s long-run intentions). But even in the war they actually fought, the Bismarck and Tirpitz made a significant contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic. What may have been the greatest German victory in the battle, the destruction of convoy PQ 17, occurred only because the Tirpitz put to sea, at which point the convoy scattered and was destroyed piecemeal by submarines and aircraft. The Tirpitz, which turned back before engaging, had done dreadful execution by putting to sea at all. She did the harm she did because any modern battleship could have swiftly and effortlessly destroyed any Allied convoy with normal escorts, i.e. corvettes and Destroyer Escorts and perhaps a few slightly heavier combatants, none of which had any chance against a capital ship. So the Bismarck and Tirpitz were a fleet in being, and tied down the scarce and precious British capital ships reserved to deal with them if they ever broke out. When they did break out, however briefly, they caused vast alarm. So I think Mr. Gordon goes too far when he writes that “The Bismarck and Tirpitz proved useless.” When Mr. Gordon states that had the steel that went into them been used for submarines, those subs “could have devastated British shipping before Britain could have acquired the escort vessels and long-range aircraft (properly armed to attack submarines) that finally proved the key to winning the battle,” I also disagree, because without any German capital ships, much more of the RN of 1939 would have been available for escort duties, and the RAF had fairly long-range bombers available from the beginning of the war (the Blenheims, the Whitleys, the Hampdens, etc.) but was generally very unwilling to use them to help keep the sea lanes open, instead insisting that they be used for strategic bombardment. So some of the vulnerability of Allied shipping was the result of bad doctrine, which aggravated shortages of escorts and aircraft. The planes available in 1939 did not have the range of the B-24s that would completely close the mid-Atlantic gap left by shorter-ranged land-based aircraft, but they would have helped immensely, and with no German surface fleet, some RN carriers would also have been freed up for duty in the mid-Atlantic. When Mr. Gordon writes that the Bismarck and Tirpitz were “quite possibly the finest battleships ever built,” my guess is that (to his credit) he has no idea what a minefield he is entering. Mr. Gordon seems, on the strength of his posts, a sane man with many interests, so he probably has no idea of the rhetorical savageries and monomanias that afflict the very passionate and extremely learned people who specialize in hypothetical match-ups of WWII battleships. I am not such a person, but I have met some and read others. These people tend to point out that the Bismarck and Tirpitz had smaller and fewer guns than did many of their rivals (by comparison, USN Iowa-class ships had 9 x 16” guns vs. 8 x 15”). The Iowa-class ships also had better armor, speed, range, and infinitely better AA and sensors. Having 16” vs. 15” main armament meant 10,000 lbs. of extra weight in the broadside, 24,000 lbs. vs. 14,000 lbs. Interestingly enough, the French Richelieu or Jean Bart also had deadlier fire than either German battleship, as well as better turret and deck armor, and came close to or matched the Bismarck on AA, speed, and armor belt. Had they been completed, Stalin’s Sovyetskiy Soyuz-class BBs might have handled the Bismarck and Tirpitz pretty roughly—they were better armed and armored. The RN’s HMS Vanguard, laid down in 1941 and finished in 1946, was also a deadlier ship than the Bismarck, and the great Japanese battleships (for example, the Yamato and Musashi) were vastly superior. I have read people who argue, I think persuasively, that while the Bismarck and Tirpitz had some brilliant qualities—for example, excellent optics—they had one very great strength, which is that they were hard to kill at short range by direct gun fire, but this was offset by the fact that they were not too hard to disable.
Mr. Gordon also writes that “I wish someone would write a new book on Mahan and how his theories affected twentieth century warfare. I have the perfect title for it: The Influence of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History Upon History.” There is indeed an essay on that theme, and if I remember correctly—I am up on the Cape, and cannot easily check—it has a comparable title: “The Influence of History Upon Sea Power”. [Perhaps “The Influence of History Upon Sea Power: The Navalist Reinterpretation of the War of 1812,” by Mark Russell Shulman, Journal of Military History, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 1992). – Editor]
August 1, 2007
The Guerre de Course Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:55 PM EST In this website’s lead piece earlier this week “The Confederates’ Devastating Naval Weapon,” John Steele Gordon wrote that the Confederacy’s campaign against U.S. merchant shipping “was perhaps the South’s greatest victory of the war”, noting that “an inferior naval power, unable to slug it out gun for gun with a stronger power, has little alternative but to adopt the strategy of the ‘guerre de course,’ or war on the run. It means attacking the enemy’s commercial shipping with fast vessels that can strike quickly and then flee over the horizon and hide in the vastness of the ocean. This has a greater effect than merely capturing a few ships and cargoes, for it sends insurance rates soaring and forces the enemy to divert naval resources needed elsewhere.” He continues, “The strategy can be devastatingly effective. Had Germany concentrated more on building submarines before World War II instead of diverting much of its shipbuilding capacity to a surface fleet that could not match the Royal Navy’s, it might well have won the Battle of the Atlantic and thus the war.” As for the Second Word War and the Battle of the Atlantic, maybe, and Churchill later claimed that he’d worried about this more than he did about any other part of the war. On the other hand, had the Germans deployed more submarines sooner, the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy might then have earlier adopted convoying, and more quickly allocated long-range aircraft to the Battle of the Atlantic, which could have shut down the threat, because when the Allies eventually did that, they won the Battle of the Atlantic. Submarines were so devastating because the Allied navies initially fought them so ineffectively, resenting the diversion of resources to antisubmarine warfare, and made the early mistake of committing too large a force to an attempt to hunt down enemy subs, when there was not enough force left over for escort duties. But what the Allies had to do was have their merchantmen avoid the subs, or drive off subs that found merchantmen; finding and sinking enemy submarines was by comparison irrelevant to the outcome of the war. Aircraft forced the subs below the surface, where most of them were slower than most merchantmen, which did a lot to win the crucial defensive portion of the battle, and convoying did the rest. But however great a mistake the Germans made in not committing more resources to the guerre de course, I think that for the Confederacy the guerre de course was a strategic blind alley. The reason the guerre de course had to fail was that in the 1860s the industrialized United States already spanned a continent, and in the long term it needed to import very little—maybe nothing—to prosecute the war. The Confederacy had a feeble industrial base and needed to import a good deal while exporting cotton to pay for what couldn’t be had on credit. The C.S.A. did superbly at the guerre de course, and lost anyway. The U.S. Navy applied our sea power via the Anaconda Plan, which Mr. Gordon notes worked brilliantly, and made a significant contribution to the American victory; compared with the casualties inflicted on the battlefield by the Confederate armies, the Confederate navy’s effort never produced effective political pressure on the American government. All the Confederate navy did was add to the United States’ costs, and whatever the C.S.A. spent on naval war was money wasted. Come to think of it, when did the guerre de course ever produce a victory in war, rather than merely add to a war’s cost? Commerce raiding was the naval strategy of the Confederacy, the Wilhelmine empire of Germany, and also of the French monarchy, the French Republic, and the Napoleonic Empire. It failed every time. This is not to say that total blockade by a superior naval force, one that strangles an enemy’s economy, will not make a great contribution to victory—blockade was part of the mix of forces that worked against the Confederacy, also against Wilhelmine Germany. Blockade did terrible damage to imperial Japan, and it would almost certainly have inflicted many millions of casualties had it gone on into 1946. Blockade might do terrible damage to the Islamic Republic of Iran if we tried it, and its probable effects on the Chinese economy may be keeping Taiwan free. But the guerre de course waged by an inferior naval power has a pretty feeble record.
July 28, 2007
The End of Turtledove's Confederacy Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST A year and a half ago I reviewed for AmericanHeritage.com a volume in Harry Turtledove’s vast cycle of novels about a Confederacy that achieved its independence in 1862. That volume was the second in a tetralogy called Settling Accounts, which recounted a series of campaigns of an alternate Second World War in part played out on American soil, just as earlier trilogies had recounted an American portion of the First World War and a couple of decades of political history describing the 1920s and 1930s in Turtledove’s alternate universe. On Monday he will publish In at the Death, the eleventh and perhaps concluding volume of a series comprising two trilogies and a tetralogy, plus the novel that set the whole thing going, How Few Remain, first published in 1997. So Turtledove has been knocking out better than one a year in this series for a decade. What can one say about the end of this enormous effort? It is impossible to say almost anything without revealing crucial plot details, so people who want to read Turtledove for the plot should stop reading this blog post now. For anyone else: The author has left room for at least one more trilogy about his postwar world, but his Confederacy is finally conquered, after attempting to exterminate its African-American population, and (spoiler ahead) having developed a nuclear weapon but neither an effective delivery system nor the capacity for repeated production. The two most popular settings for alternate histories are alternate versions of the American Civil War and the Second World War, with the more chilling and memorable books seeing the bad guys win. Turtledove, who alone in his profession has fused these two scenarios, may owe his comparatively big readership to that trick alone, although he has some other virtues. People who dislike his form of alternate history decry him for mechanically recycling actual history—there are a Confederate Hitler, Goebbels, and Manstein (in this case, real history’s Patton), a Confederate Stalingrad (Pittsburgh), a Confederate Auschwitz, etc. For the critics, they all seem too close to their inspirations in what alternate history buffs call “our time line” to give the pleasure the genre sometimes delivers, which includes more ingenious alteration, sometimes subtle, sometimes wild. There is something in this criticism, but it seems less damning of the final volume of the vast series than it may have been before. Turtledove is not simply restaging the known and real history of the New World; the present leaks in too, and to disturbing effect. He has incorporated elements of the Iraq War into his series for a few years now—there are suicide bombers, and a fair amount of other terrorism, including the mutilation of soldiers. For what is in effect a triumphal victory of a cause the author clearly supports, the book is much sadder and grimmer than one might have expected. When the Americans win and are afflicted by terrorists, either in the Confederacy or in Canada or Utah, there are systematic reprisals, usually mass shootings of hostages. It is not clear that they work, but neither is it clear that they fail, or that terror would subside faster without what were in the 1940s the traditional countermeasures. The American Final Solution does not seem an apology for the actual German version, a cry of “Anyone could do it,” because Turtledove’s American South, in the wake of the loss of a First World War, is quite plausibly one of the more tormented and race-obsessed industrialized cultures anyone has ever imagined. For that matter, the countermeasures Turtledove’s American Army takes against partisans are not the ones the Nazis took in real history; they are significantly less dreadful. In terms of military ethics, the soldiers who fight for his United States are recognizably the sort of people who fought for ours in the same decade. The worlds Turtledove has created are by no means the most interesting alternate history written in our time, even among the work characterized as genre fiction. As it happens, this year saw an American alternate history (Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union) that critics took as a work of serious literature, after deciding the same thing a couple of years ago about Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and after having retrospectively upgraded Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle. But Turtledove, a one-man industry, has probably made it much easier for others to publish in his genre by producing the readers for other, and to my taste better, writers of genre fiction. Anyone who likes alternate history owes him something, and this latest effort will in no way disappoint anyone who made it through the first ten.
July 27, 2007
Reagan as Military Victor Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:15 PM EST Fred Allen writes “Fred Smoler and Alex Burns have basically been asking why so many Americans think Reagan was their greatest President when usually, around the world and through time, people name the winner of a major war as their greatest leader. Isn’t it possible that people think Reagan was the winner of a major war—the Cold War?” The traditional argument that Reagan did something that won the Cold War holds that Reagan’s defense budgets exhausted the Soviets while his moral clarity debunked them. I do not find either part of this argument particularly plausible. Most American Cold War Presidents, probably all American Cold War Presidents, were fairly explicit about their conviction that the United States was morally superior to the Soviet Union, and most of them spent a healthy chunk of money on defense. As it happens, most of the great strategic investments of the 1980s—assuming for the sake of the argument that those were what did the trick—were authorized by Jimmy Carter, who also championed human rights in the East Bloc, and who began aiding anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan (another alleged cause of our Cold War victory) six months before the Soviet invasion of 1979—and I say all of this as someone who has grown to think less and less of Jimmy Carter. So while it is certainly possible that people think Reagan won the Cold War, I am not sure why they think this. Even if they do think it, it seems implausible to admire as a military victor someone who never waged victorious war on any foe more formidable than Grenada, an occasion he absurdly called our finest hour, while allowing our forces to be massacred and driven into the sea in Beirut. Even by the most generous assessment, it is hard to argue that Reagan won the Cold War, since the Soviet Union disappeared on the next President’s watch, and the crucial decision, the Central Committee’s agreement to give up its monopoly of power, only occurred on February 7, 1990, also occurred on Bush’s watch. In any case, why admire the alleged and improbable victor of the Cold War more than one admires as victors people who commanded the forces that destroyed Hitler’s Reich?
July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:10 AM EST Alex Burns writes that “there’s at least the semblance of a pattern that people today are reminiscing about right-of-center nationalists from the recent past. I suggested in my last post that this had to do with a popular yearning for “supposedly more straightforward times. . . . That most of these ‘greatest’ men—all of them but Salazar and Reagan—were accomplished anti-Nazis, seems to confirm this. If there’s one international conflict remembered for its moral clarity, World War II is it. In the midst of our comparatively muddled struggle with Islamic extremism, one inclines toward sympathy with this nostalgia.” I agree with Mr. Burns’s argument that the appeal of the Second World War when choosing a greatest fellow citizen derives from its moral clarity, at least among the general populations of France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, and very probably among Germans (although among some contemporary elites—academics, journalists, etc.—there is nowadays an attempt, in my view grossly excessive, to muddy the moral clarity of the war). In the popular mind, greatness, which is what the polls are measuring, still seems to consist of leadership in war and politics, despite an academic fashion for deemphasizing war, conventional political history, and the notion of “great men” generally (a recent book on Garibaldi, recently and extensively reviewed in The New Yorker, apparently argues that Garibaldi cannot have been a great man because we have learned that there are no such people). It is interesting that polls do not show people rejecting the very category of great men, but instead confirming a pretty old-fashioned idea of who fits that category. The polls may be silly, but perhaps those polled are less so. My guess is that ordinary people very sensibly think you are the greatest national figure if you stopped Hitler because they retain a lively impression of just how urgent a task that was, and I also suspect that Reagan’s current celebrity is a mark of the decline of history teaching in the schools, specifically an academic bias against war as an object of interest and profound achievement. If you do not put political and military history in the foreground, and I suspect many American schools no longer do, you seem to open up the door to Ronald Reagan dominating the popular mind. This is probably an unanticipated result, given the ambition of the people who revise curricula, but not, in a sour way, an entirely unamusing one. Mr. Burns also writes that “if we’re ever fortunate enough to live in generally peaceful times, I wonder whether we would find people choosing Martin Luther King, William Shakespeare, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Louis Pasteur, and Johannes Gutenberg as their ‘greatest.’” Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who saved the lives of 12,000 Jews and issued visas to more than 20,000 other refugees from Hitler, was indeed a splendid man, but his choice as the greatest Portuguese would confirm the primacy of unpeaceful times when denominating greatness. If Mr. Burns is right, and I was making my choice in a peaceful time, I’d presumably have voted for Camoens, the Portuguese epic poet, in part because I once learned, with considerable difficulty, to pronounce a loose approximation of his name, and that was so much trouble that I’ve never gotten him out of my mind. But in fact I cannot imagine doing picking Camoens, maybe because I’ve read only a few lines of The Lusiads; I’d have no trouble picking Shakespeare, although I have no great objection to the choice of Churchill. Oddly enough, the sort of people who spend a lot of time attempting to debunk Churchill are often the same sort of people who spend a lot of energy trying to debunk Shakespeare (you may have to spend your life in universities to know a lot of such people). Churchill, of course, seemed to hold Shakespeare in rather lofty esteem. He would, though, wouldn’t he? It also occurs to me that a century ago, a lot of Americans would have ranked Goethe with (or at least close to) Shakespeare, and one reason for Goethe’s precipitous fall is his simple bad luck in having written in the language spoken by Hitler. I do not think Shakespeare’s reputation is too much dependent on his luck in writing in the same language as that spoken (to considerable effect) by Churchill, the man associated in the popular mind with stopping Hitler. But it probably hasn’t hurt.
July 26, 2007
Another Great Rightist II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:00 PM EST Alex Burns posted today on what he thinks is a rule about admittedly dodgy polls about the people perceived to be the greatest leaders of nations. Conceding the silliness of some results, which may tell is more about the spirit in which some questions are answered than about the depth of popular conviction, he thinks such polls may "teach us something all the same. The conclusion I might draw is that right-of-center leaders from the recent past are generally the best focal points for popular nostalgia. Whatever their differences as leaders, Reagan, Salazar, Churchill, Adenauer, and de Gaulle are all remembered for their belligerent, can-do nationalism. This attitude may not always have produced the best policies, but it has allowed these men to live in popular memory as representations of supposedly more straightforward times." Maybe so, but here is another possibility: De Gaulle, for example, remembered as the greatest of Frenchmen because he stood against Vichy and Hitler, is admired as much as an imagined man of the left as of the right, in the Jacobin tradition of left patriotic militarism, and moreover as someone who restored republican government. De Gaulle was the man who outfought the French Communist Party for bragging rights to the Jacobin military tradition—a patriot rightist move—but then again, he was the man who decided to give up in Algeria, admittedly after overthrowing an elected government in a near coup, and he crushed a military movement that sought to hang on to Algeria. So de Gaulle was both a man of the right and something else; I am not certain his status in French eyes is fundamentally a tribute to his rightist incarnation. Churchill had once been a Liberal, he was never trusted by most Tories, and he preserved British parliamentary democracy against rightists who sought an accommodation with Hitler, some of whom feared the left more than National Socialism, and valued their empire more than a democratic order in Europe. Churchill was a liberal imperialist, an almost vanished species, not a conventional rightist, and he chose to lose the empire rather than preserve it at the price of any kind of liberalism. He said of his contribution that he had only been the roar of the lion—that the British people had been its heart. This sounds a bit like liberal democratic rhetoric. He was an aristocrat, but scarcely a simple rightist. Adenauer was an anti-Nazi, several times imprisoned by the regime, and he restored a German democracy; he was a rightist compared with the Social Democrats, a leftist compared with the actual and ghastly German right of very recent times. If the Germans most admired Bismarck, it would be another story. Reagan is tricky. For one thing, my honest guess is that Americans will go back to thinking Lincoln their greatest President, if they have ever really stopped, and (to say the least) Lincoln is not an obvious rightist. Americans also long admired Jefferson, not a rightist in his day or in ours, and also liked Washington, who declined both a throne and the leadership of a military dictatorship. Rightists get more rightist than Washington. For most of our history, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were thought our greatest Presidents, and I do not rate very high Reagan's chance at keeping the top slot in memory. Stalin is credited with very literally saving his country, from people who vowed to murder or enslave every Russian, and looked to come close to doing it; part of his status derives from that association. Some also derives from a contrast of national prestige and order compared with current decline and chaos. Some of it may be a reluctance to concede the horrors of what was done in one's name, by people like oneself. And where is the competition for greatest democratic Russian leader? Yeltsin, who presided over chaos and immiseration? The Stalin ranking is mad and sad, but it does not make for a rule.
July 26, 2007
Robert A. Heinlein Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST 2007 is the centenary of Robert A. Heinlein, one of the great American science fiction writers (July 7, 1907–May 8, 1988), and today Arts and Letters Daily, a splendid website, links to three pieces on Heinlein. All are celebrations. An article in The Wall Street Journal celebrates Heinlein’s politics—he was a strong anti-Communist, and also a libertarian—and, as was once traditional when admiring science fiction writers, his predictive powers, crediting him with foreseeing Chernobyl in 1940 and inventing, although not patenting, the waterbed. A piece on Reasononline centers on his politics, and is graced with a complicated understanding of them. Heinlein’s taste in politicians included both Upton Sinclair and Barry Goldwater; he evinced what was taken for a fascistoid streak in Starship Troopers, helped popularize hippies and the sexual revolution in Stranger In a Strange Land, and was, as the piece notes, his own kind of libertarian (in the 1950s, he tried to form a national organization, the Patrick Henry Leagues, to raise taxes for a stronger defense). The third article, at the Space Review website, charts Heinlein’s very considerable influence on people who have pushed for the American space effort. My vastly affectionate memory of Heinlein’s writing centers, as is probably appropriate for this blog, on his use of history. The first Heinlein novels I found were three of his young-adult books, Tunnel in the Sky (1955) Between Planets (1951), and Have Spacesuit Will Travel (1958), which were for some reason in one of my sixth grade classrooms. I must have been 10 or 11, I took them home, and read them enough times that years later I could quote pages at a stretch. I soon found the other young-adult novels in libraries, and was most rhapsodic about Starman Jones (1953), Farmer in the Sky (1950), The Star Beast (1954), and Citizen of the Galaxy (1957). There is an old tag about people inventing the past and remembering the future, and it seems to me that the latter half of that phrase is precisely what Heinlein’s best young-adult novels did. Farmer in the Sky was about sodbusters settling the Great Plains, disguised as the terraforming of Ganymede; Between Planets was the American Revolution restaged on Venus; Citizen of the Galaxy was in part about abolitionism; Starman Jones was a reworking of the voyages of exploration to the New World; etc. They were patriotic visions of our history fused with a sense that the American story would continue into the future, replaying similarly glorious themes. Heinlein could tell a story, and at least by the standards of an 11-year-old, he was a thrilling stylist. I read everything he wrote through the late 1960s, then trailed off. I am a bit abashed to reflect that very little I have ever read since has given me more pleasure. It is now the fashion to say that we must always contextualize and historicize works of imagination, with the implication that we should acknowledge that all writing about the future will be the future remembered rather than truly imagined. Maybe so, although it can be done in remarkably different ways, giving very different amounts of pleasure. If you were a certain sort, at a certain time, Heinlein gave astonishing pleasure. He had other tricks, old and good ones, beside restaging the pageant of American history—there were wicked stepfathers and journeys of development, a celebration of duty, and of the pleasures of old-fashioned American iconoclasm, also at moments a commitment to a kind of humanism, a vision glorying in what our species could be. Looking at the shattered remains of a vanished civilization of insectoid aliens, a teenager mused something to the effect that they had not let their environment push them around, they had mastered nature through reason and engineering, so he supposed that they were men. It is an old-fashioned sentiment, although by my lights not an unattractive one. He linked a number of his novels into a “future history,” which fascinated me and others. In an age that believed in the inevitability of history, a history of the future was not as scandalous as an alternate history of the past, but it could be almost as hypnotic. He had his quirks and his crotchets, but he was a very resonant voice in our mid-century popular culture, and maybe something more. By a historical irony, Heinlein is widely remembered as a fascist, on the strength of Starship Troopers (a novel inspired by successful wars against fascists), and became vastly popular because of counter-cultural enthusiasm for one of his least representative novels, at a time when he was about to support Goldwater. Along the way, he seems to have helped inspire a remarkable number of the people who designed and built America’s spaceships, when we used to do that sort of thing. If we do so again, or if anyone else ever does, the great days of Heinlein’s fame may still be ahead of him.
July 19, 2007
“Man’s Best Friend” Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:35 AM EST Yesterday’s lead piece on this website——“Isn’t It Ionic?”—describes a failed experimental aircraft designed by Alexander de Seversky, a Czarist émigré and aviation pioneer. The piece notes that the Ionocraft worked, after a fashion, but explains why predictions that ion drives would soon propel aircraft the size of city blocks at great speeds and altitudes of 300,000 feet didn’t pan out. The piece is nonetheless, and properly, respectful about Seversky, noting that he designed a number of things that did work, one of them being the P-47 Thunderbolt. I hadn’t known that, and as I read it wondered how many readers had ever heard of a P-47. Probably not too many, which if true, seems unfair. I once heard someone make an interesting case that the P-47 was the most efficient and effective Allied fighter of the Second World War. It was not as good an air-superiority or escort fighter as a P-51 Mustang, nor as deadly a fighter-bomber as an RAF Typhoon, but it did everything a fighter or fighter-bomber could do very effectively—it was, this man claimed, second best at everything, which is no mean feat. In some cases, trying to do everything is a mistake, since a machine designed for so many disparate purposes does nothing well enough; the classic case of a World War II–era aircraft designed to do everything but doing nothing very well was the French Potez 63. But the P-47 did everything well enough. It was a clumsy dogfighter below 8,000 feet, but since it escorted heavy bombers, Luftwaffe fighters had to engage P-47s at higher altitudes, where it did just fine: P-47s made 3,752 air-to-air kills, and in the first three months of 1944, the period in which the Allies more or less destroyed the Luftwaffe, P-47s shot down more German fighters than did P-51s. After those three months, P-47s flying below 8,000 feet didn’t have too many Luftwaffe fighters to worry about. You could even make a claim that it was the plane that won the war. In Europe the Thunderbolt flew more sorties than P-51s, P-38s, and P-40s combined. Seversky designed the P-47 with another Georgian refugee (the European kind of Georgian, not the sort Sherman chased into the Carolinas), Alexander Kartveli. It was the largest Allied fighter built during the war, perhaps twice the size of a Spitfire, and it was a very rugged aircraft. It carried 500-pound bombs, its eight machine guns could inflict heavy damage on lightly armored targets, and for harder targets it carried various rockets, which could be devastatingly effective; I have met Americans who saw P-47s destroy a panzer regiment in less than 20 minutes. That was probably not a unique event; between June 6, 1944 and V-E Day (May 7, 1945), P-47s destroyed 86,000 railway cars, 9,000 locomotives, 6,000 armored fighting vehicles, and 68,000 trucks. As far as I know, it is the only American aircraft to have inspired a work of classical music (Bohuslav Martinu’s P-47 Thunderbolt Scherzo for Orchestra). A few years ago, I heard it receive a more jocular tribute, although not, I think, a less respectful or less sincere one. Following some former World War II infantrymen, at that time in their early eighties, through the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, I saw one of them nudge another as they passed a P-47, and point a thumb at the plane. “Man’s best friend,” he murmured. The other grunted assent. It had the air of an old joke, except that as far as I could tell, neither one was wholly joking.
July 18, 2007
Mysteries of Life After Woolworth Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:50 AM EST Josh Zeitz’s feature article on this website yesterday , published on the tenth anniversary of the event it commemorates, is titled “Why Woolworth’s Had To Die.” Josh’s argument about the necessity for the death invokes a couple of causes: If I understand him correctly, he suggests one cause was that Woolworth (along with other chain store five and dimes) perished because it stayed relatively down-market despite rising postwar affluence, which cost it some customers. The other cause was that suburbanization moved many of Woolworth’s customers out of the old downtown business districts and into shopping malls, where newer retailers out-competed Woolworth on price, quality, variety and the design of stores. This makes sense, but what puzzles me is why a decade ago modern Manhattan could not support a Woolworth’s, but now it can support an apparently infinite number of chains of what are nominally pharmacies—Duane Reade, Rite Aid—that seem to me to be not entirely unlike the Woolworth stores of my childhood, minus the lunch counter and the needles and thread. I suppose a five and dime sold a much greater variety of goods than a Duane Reade does, but the gap is surely closing fast. Within three blocks of this apartment there are as many Duane Reades and one Rite Aid, which raises the next question: How can one account for the precise sorts of retailers who serially overpopulate the niche vacated by Woolworth stores? Five and dimes vanished from this part of town decades after I moved into it, and shortly after they disappeared you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting an ice cream store or a Szechuan restaurant, which presumably filled the gap left by the lunch counters of the five and dimes. Within a couple of years most of those outlets vanished in turn, to be replaced by cell phone stores. The cell phone stores were briefly threatened by an astonishing efflorescence of Victoria’s Secret outlets, which almost immediately disappeared. Why was the demand for fried dumplings, if not infinite and eternal, so much more tenacious than the appetite for fancy lingerie? I do not know, but it was. In any event, a number of the cell phone stores survived, and are now being threatened both by a rash of banks and by neo–five and dimes thinly disguised as pharmacies, some of which have the same vague and subtly demoralizing seediness I remember attending the five and dimes. Amazingly, as I think upon them the Woolworth stores begin to possess, if only in retrospect, a mild appeal. Until a moment ago I could still remember their perfect charmlessness, but now that Josh Zeitz writes of them in the past tense, the five and dimes evoke the virtues of a more egalitarian city and have attained the variety of glamor that enshrouds something Hopper painted, rather than the banality of anyplace my mother dragged me when Eisenhower was President and she needed something for the house. I am pretty sure this is mere nostalgia. I am also convinced that someone will someday mourn the passing of the Duane Reades and Rite Aids. But right now I can’t quite imagine it.
July 16, 2007
Hiss and History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:00 PM EST A line on the homepage of this website links to a Slate piece by Ron Rosenbaum on Alger Hiss. Rosenbaum writes about the fact that an American historian, Kai Bird, and a Russian historian, Svetlana Chervonnaya, have collaborated on a piece in the current The American Scholar titled “The Mystery of Ales.” As Rosenbaum tells the story, the two attempt (and signally fail) to clear Hiss’s name, or at least muddy the waters, by the nasty expedient of smearing another 1940s liberal who worked in the State Department, a man named Wilder Foote. Ales was the code name of a Russian spy; some modern scholarship on the Hiss case has tended to assume that Hiss was Ales, and the article Rosenbaum is writing about disputes that identification, suggesting that Foote better fits the bill, which Rosenbaum thinks unpersuasive to the point of being contemptible. I think Rosenbaum makes a good case, but I am depressed that he has been provoked to make it. At this point in my life, I do not much care about the Hiss case, and for that matter I never did; I am of the wrong generation and came from the wrong sort of political background (my father was a Truman Democrat) to have cared passionately about Hiss. I have, however, known and been close to people who knew Hiss in the 1930s and after, and who cared very much about the case. They were on both sides of the question, although by the 1970s most of the people I knew who had known Hiss, and who had at one time been convinced of his innocence, had moved to the position of assuming that he had been rightfully convicted of perjury and had almost certainly committed espionage. What Hiss meant to part of that group, the ones who were liberal patricians, was that contrary to their own first instincts, one of their own sort could indeed be a traitor. They did not thereby assume that all Communists were potential traitors, although they did think that in the wake of Hiss you had to think about the possibility, and they certainly didn’t think that non-Communist liberals were any likelier to be traitors than were, for example, Irish-American senators from Wisconsin. But Hiss had first seemed like a pure victim of gutter politics and Red-baiting in what they explained was the original sense of the phrase (falsely accusing a liberal of being a Communist), and they had reluctantly come to the sad conclusion that he was something very different. These people had remained liberals, but they were more aggressively anti-Communist liberals than they had been before. The Hiss case was a milestone for them, the way the Moscow purge trials had been one more than a decade before. I also knew at least one unashamed former Communist union organizer who had known Hiss, although not before his release from prison, and who resolutely insisted on Hiss’s innocence. This was something of a paradox. Why should people who had been loyal Communists insist that someone they had liked and admired could never have been one? Why should people who had not been Communists, but thought Communists the most honorable of people, also insist that Hiss had to be innocent? After a while, I decided that they thought Hiss had to be innocent for the same reason that they were sure the Rosenbergs were innocent, and that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been a sad necessity for the beleaguered Soviet Union, and on, and on, and on: because that was the party line, and it was the nature of a certain sort of loyalist to cling to the line. This was a bad habit of mind, one that occurred all over the political spectrum; on the right; these were the sort of people who (for example) didn’t care that McCarthy had lied about the number of combat missions he’d flown, almost tripling the number, or that one of his first political acts had been to curry favor with German-American voters by intervening on behalf of SS war criminals who had murdered American POWs in the Ardennes. The people who hewed to lines came in all political hues, but every one of them had the same kind of intellectual smell. What did change, after a while, or at least seemed to, was that people stopped arguing about Hiss, or even talking about him. The people I liked and admired mostly decided that Hiss could be guilty but that McCarthy was not on that account less of a villain, or liberalism any less compelling a politics. Finally, Hiss disappeared, and eventually the Soviet Union did too. But now Ron Rosenbaum comes along and shows that Hiss’s ghost is back and is haunting at least some magazines and websites. I am trying to cheer up about this. I believe Kai Bird is almost exactly my age, which makes him just old enough to have come by Hissocentrism honestly, or at least not insanely. I once asked a sophisticated sociologist of science why, given his views on the derisory effects of new evidence and good arguments on individuals’ adherence to paradigms, he thought bad scientific ideas ever disappeared. He thought about this for a second, and then opined that he thought bad ideas disappeared when the people holding them died. Here’s hoping.
July 14, 2007
How Goes the War? VI Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:15 PM EST John Steele Gordon asked for my opinion of J.D. Johannes’s assessment of the Iraq war posted at Tech Central Station. The article asserts that “June 2007 saw a dramatic turnaround in our military fortunes, with the insurgents in headlong retreat in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diayala. But Al Qaeda continued to dominate its chosen battlefield: America’s living rooms.” I think there has indeed been good news in Anbar, as well as a fall in Iraqi casualties in Baghdad, and there is some evidence that the pattern in Anbar has repeated itself in a smaller way in some other places. Reducing Iraqi fatalities through more aggressive American action against insurgents in Baghdad does mean that American casualties have risen, although it would be strange to cite increasing American casualties as in themselves proof that the American effort is failing, when they are just as likely to be proof of the opposite. There is, unfortunately, some reason to doubt that the good news in Anbar will soon be repeated over most of Iraq. In Anbar province Sunni Arab militias now calling themselves the Anbar Salvation Council, which had once been the backbone of the insurgency, have recently turned on AIQ (Al Qaeda in Iraq) elements, and are now (to a degree) cooperating with American forces, although not with the elected Iraqi government, which is at best uneasy about the new American strategy in Anbar. There are similar trends in other regions—for example, Ninevah and Salahaddin—but all of these areas are dominated by Sunni Arabs, where there is less potential for protracted sectarian conflict than in more mixed regions, hence fewer Shiite reprisals for AIQ atrocities, and hence a smaller temptation for Sunni Arabas to look to AIQ atrocities as legitimate and necessary deterrents to Shiite actions. A sustained decrease in Iraqi casualties in Baghdad requires either a sustained increase in the numbers of American troops fighting there or significant numbers of reliable and competent Iraqi national forces augmenting those American troops, and neither of those outcomes is anything like certain; given U.S. manpower constraints, a sustained increase in U.S. troop numbers actively engaged Baghdad seems particularly unlikely, and there are no greatly encouraging results in our efforts to produce larger numbers of reliable Iraqi national forces. But good news is not bad news, and there has been some good military news from Iraq. Mr. Johannes also argues that most Americans do not know the extent of the good news, that media coverage of the war is the source of their ignorance, and that creating an impression of an inevitable insurgent victory is a crucial part of insurgent strategy. The first two assertions may be true, and the third is certainly true. As a general rule, I think it is hard to evaluate reports of progress or failure coming out of Iraq, because it is hard to tell how representative or even accurate any piece of news may be, and most observers appear to have a tendency to use news to confirm preexisting views. Impassioned partisans rarely give evidence a cool and disinterested examination, and this may be particularly true for wars. Are opponents of this war wishing for an American defeat, as Mr. Gordon suggests? In a very few cases, certainly: if you read (for example) the Guardian and The Nation, you can find a few such people, and if you read more widely, you can find more. But most American opponents of the war are not, in my opinion, consciously hoping for an American defeat; rather, they cannot (and in most cases could never) imagine any good outcome to the use of American force in Iraq. They urge actions that will make defeat certain in the belief that they are cutting short the duration of what they take to be at best an American tragedy, easily persuading themselves that they are doing the Iraqis no great harm, since the American military presence is simply assumed to be making things worse. I think there is very little clear and indisputable evidence for that latter proposition, so the question is what men and women are thinking when they choose to consider uncontestable a likely absurdity. I shall not try to answer that question here. In the case of American journalists who have been embedded with military units in Iraq, or Americans who are in Iraq for other purposes—I know some, and have read others—in my experience their reports are sometimes encouraging, sometimes discouraging, but almost always reports on a small and possibly unrepresentative piece of the war, or the country, and reporters and other observers are subject to their own momentary hopes and despairs. It is notoriously hard to judge the progress of a counterinsurgency campaign in the middle of things. Successful counterinsurgency campaigns tend to take a long time—consider the British victory over the Provisional IRA (1969–1997), or the campaign in Dhofar (1962–1976), or the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), or the Second Malayan Emergency (1967–1989), etc. There may be no indisputable progress for long periods of time, but the fact remains that most insurgencies fail. In Iraq, the chances for an AIQ victory are derisory, and the chances for a neo-Baathist or other Sunni Arab recapture of a unified Iraqi state also look derisory. We may lose in Iraq, but our most militant and brutal adversaries are also likely to lose, along with many (maybe all) other Iraqis. In any case, the modest good military news from Iraq coincides with some bad political news from both Iraq and the United States. In Iraq, the factions within the government seem deadlocked on the measures many American observers have decided are to be the benchmarks of progress in Iraq. If these benchmarks are not met, further pressure will build for a withdrawal of American forces, and they may carry the day. The leaders of all Iraqi factions (other than AIQ) seem to agree that a withdrawal anytime soon would be a disaster, but that does not seem to have spurred too much willingness to compromise, or made too much of an impression on the American Congress, or on the editorial writers of most of the papers I read. With respect to the question of whether people who have lost children in a war have any special claim on our deference to their views of that war: I do not think they do. Joseph Kennedy, Sr., lost a son in a war he detested; both my grandfathers had sons survive that same war, which they supported. I do not think I need defer to JFK’s father over my own grandfathers when judging the merits of the Second World War. Similarly, I have the impression that support for the war in Iraq tends to be higher among people with children bearing arms there than among those with no children at risk, and if this is no longer true it has certainly been the case until quite recently. This pattern does not mean that opponents of the war would have been obliged to suspend their own judgment because they did not have sons and daughters at immediate risk. Mr. Gordon also writes that “for better or worse, we started a war in Iraq and now must deal with the consequences of that action . . . what we should have done or not done in 2003 is one question and what we should do in 2007 is entirely another. In July 2007 the only alternative to war is not peace. It is catastrophic defeat.” On this particular issue, I think Mr. Gordon has a very good case.
July 11, 2007
Irving and Grass Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:15 AM EST In 2006 the novelist Günter Grass published a memoir, Peeling the Onion, revealing that as an adolescent he had served in SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. The memoir has now been translated into English, with one section appearing in the June 4th issue of The New Yorker. This revelation about Grass’s military experience has produced something of a controversy, and in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, the novelist John Irving has written a very long and in some ways peculiar defense of Grass, one raising some questions about the legitimate uses of hindsight, for Irving loudly scorns those who have criticized Grass “from the cowardly standpoint of hindsight.” What did Grass do that was so terribly wrong? During the Second World War, I think, nothing. On the evidence he has now made available, Grass was conscripted into the Waffen SS as a seventeen-year-old, during which service he never fired a shot in anger, but failed to take a morally sophisticated view of the Third Reich, a defect that ought to be set against his having been raised in a totalitarian society. It is hard to condemn such actions and inactions, and relatively few have done so. The critics have instead condemned Grass for his tardiness in revealing these details, in the context of his pronounced self-righteousness and sometimes execrable political judgment thereafter. After all, Grass served as Germany’s national scold for half a century, while concealing his very ordinary life between 1943 and 1945. Much of what Grass said in that self-assumed role was ridiculous, or worse. Amazingly, Irving quotes some of it while intending to praise: “In 1979, Grass wrote: ‘There’s no shortage of great Führer figures; a bigoted preacher in Washington and an ailing philistine in Moscow.’” Jimmy Carter was (and remains) a sometimes exasperating prig, and one who has said some foolish things, but any comparison between Carter and Adolf Hitler is surely an example of moral idiocy, and a comparison of Hitler to Brezhnev isn’t all that much better, especially if what Grass found most offensive in Brezhnev was philistinism, rather than, say, invading Czechoslovakia. The generally reliable Ian Buruma recently reported that a few years later Grass made a similarly ludicrous comparison: he likened the stationing of U.S. Pershing missiles on German soil to the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. This was poisonous nonsense; it sounded bad at the time, and it may sound a little worse when you discover that the speaker was a former SS man. Germans themselves understandably tended to find irritating Grass’s insistence that East Germany had no right to voluntarily join a democratic West Germany, and when voluntary unification did occur, Grass compared it to the Anschluss (Hitler’s annexation of Austria). When Der Spiegel five years later ran a cover depicting a Grass novel being torn apart, Irving writes that “The magazine might as well have conducted a book burning.” Well, a Nazi book burning, which the remark necessarily recalls, generally involved the banning by law of the books being burnt, and eventually, in a number of cases, the incineration of their authors, whereas the reunified German state in which Der Spiegel published that cover was not much for burning either books or people. Hindsight has not been kind to the Reagan:Hitler comparison, and Irving’s remark on book burning suggests that he has as feeble an understanding of the historical peculiarities of the Third Reich as does his hero, and also a curious notion of courage, and of its opposite, cowardice. With respect to courage and cowardice, Irving several times praises Grass’s courage, while impugning the cowardice of his critics: “Grass’s most egregious critic—Christopher Hitchens, in Slate—calls him ‘something of a bigmouth and a fraud, and also something of a hypocrite.’ It is Grass’s craven critics—the fatuous Hitchens among them—who should feel ashamed.” Why courageous? Wherefore craven? It took initially significant literary gifts but no vast courage to be Günter Grass in West Germany, where Grass made a very good career out of being the self-appointed national scold. Christopher Hitchens, whose self-described contrarianism seems genuinely fearless, is an odd man to call a craven critic, and while many find Hitchens maddening, few have ever called him fatuous—reckless and vitriolic, maybe, but not fatuous. As alliteration, both “Grass’s most egregious” and “craven critics” recall Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism”: comically bad writing under the curious misapprehension that it is good writing. Irving’s piece is on more than one occasion unintentionally amusing: For example, while it begins with praise of Grass’s literary gifts, Irving implies that these literary gifts are not least so great an achievement, for which much should be forgiven if anything at all need be forgiven, because they served to inspire Irving to become a novelist. Irving’s second sentence, in a piece approaching 4500 words, notes that “. . . Dickens made me want to be a writer—but it was reading “The Tin Drum” at 19 and 20 that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’s full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language . . .” Justifying more than sixty years of bullying and evasiveness on the grounds that Grass is indirectly responsible for producing The Cider House Rules is not a risk-free rhetorical strategy. Similarly, Irving praises Grass’s “moral certainty,” a quality less consistently alluring than Irving seems to think it is, in Grass or in anyone else. So it turns out that hindsight, which is proverbially said to be always 20/20, can on occasion fall sadly short of that high rating. In this case, hindsight has failed not Grass’s enemies, but his friends.
July 7, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon responds to Fred Schwarz’s unhappy reaction to watching a film of the musical 1776 (film version, 1972) by noting that most films of musicals are pretty awful. Mr. Gordon grants two exceptions, Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret (film version also 1972) and their Chicago (film version, 2002). I agree that those are both brilliant examples of musicals surviving adaptation to film, and I can think of some others (Marat/Sade, if that is not cheating, and the film of Guys and Dolls has its pleasures). In any case, Mr. Gordon tactfully avoids judging the question of how bad a musical 1776 is in its unfilmed version. Fred Schwarz notes that it “opened on Broadway in 1969 and ran for several years. . . . I had to wonder how such a pro-war, flag-waving musical could have been so popular. Were audiences supposed to see the plucky, underdog, guerrilla-fighting American colonists in the role of the North Vietnamese?” I have never seen the film and I do not know what I would make of the staged play if I saw it now, but I did see 1776 when it came out, not because it was thought to be a brilliant musical, but because my parents took us to see a fair amount of theater, musical and otherwise; they had both grown up in the city, and although they then lived in one of its suburbs, going to a lot of plays was still something a fair number of New Yorkers did. I do not remember hating the musical—I was much moved by “Mama Look Sharp,” which did not seem to be a gung-ho prowar effusion, since it was sung by a an actor playing a dying teenage militiaman crying out for his mother—but the play was indeed patriotic, and I do not have much confidence in my theatrical connoisseurship at the age of 17. Looking at a Googled list of song titles from the original cast recording, I can distantly recall only a few scraps of five out of the ten songs, nothing at all of the others, and none other than “Mama Look Sharp” with any emotion; in cold print, the lyrics of many of the songs look appalling. Then again, the lyrics of “Mama Look Sharp” aren’t much when read on screen, without the music, and neither, for that matter, are the lyrics to Mozart and Da Ponte’s “Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro” or “Piú docile io sono,” when compared with their power when sung. I have seen Beaumarchais, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, and Sir Kenneth Clark all credited with the remark that “what is too silly to be said can still be sung,” and it is true. I have been pondering Fred Schwarz’s wonderment at 1776 doing so well in 1969, and I think one explanation may be that in 1969 antiwar sentiment among the Broadway-supporting classes had not reached a pitch and intensity that would make too many theatergoers sympathetic to the Howard Zinn school’s take on the Founders. There would come attempts to reimagine Americans as the Viet Cong—one such attempt came from the right, in John Milius’s 1984 movie Red Dawn—but 1969 was in some ways an innocent and quite traditionally patriotic era. The early-1970s dorm room political culture I described in a previous post, and to which Fred Schwarz refers, was still a minority political culture, and in most respects it would remain one. What would disappear from our mass culture would be as broad and vivid a memory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political history as is presumed in both The Devil and Daniel Webster and 1776.
July 5, 2007
Stephen Vincent Benét Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:30 PM EST Stephen Vincent Benét wrote “The Devil and Daniel Webster” in 1937. I was thinking about that short story yesterday, because I once celebrated the Fourth of July by reading it aloud to some undergraduates the summer after I’d graduated from college. In that time and at that place, patriotism was not a fashionable political or moral posture, and my initial impulse was not love of country but injured pride. One of the other people present had for some reason remarked that Benét was a Popular Front hack, and I wanted to rebut the part about hackery. I had no idea whether Benét had sported any affiliation to the Communist party, but I’d loved the story since hearing it read aloud around a fire at summer camp, hearing its author patronized was irritating, and I was surprised to learn that neither the fellow condemning Benét nor anyone else in the room had ever heard of it (or of anything else the man had written). Their ignorance was in fact a mark of their sophistication—I had a more middle-brow background than those people did, and much less exalted taste. In any event, a friend who admired the poem “John Brown’s Body” and liked some of the fiction had just lent me a book of Benét’s collected short stories, which meant the evidence was readily at hand, and I let rip. My memory of the occasion is that the others conceded that the story provided authentic if modest pleasure—they thought it low, but oddly appealing. Googling it, I discover that the thing is available on-line, and any reader of this blog ignorant of the story may decide the question for her- or himself. I am sufficiently uneasy about its merits to have refrained from re-reading the story, for this event took place well over thirty years ago, and I make no promises; it is very possible that “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is like Tolkien or Edgar Rice Burroughs, wonderful if read (or heard) young enough, unendurable if first encountered thereafter. Having just Googled not only “The Devil and Daniel Webster” but also Benét and the Popular Front, I was intrigued to get an awful lot of hits on the latter subject, so maybe my college friend was right, at least in part of what he said. If so, it is intriguing to compare the sensibility and successes of the Popular Front to those of the New Left of the early 1970s, or for that matter the Left of today. Making someone like Daniel Webster into a folk hero for school children does not seem like the kind of thing many (if any) people on the Left have attempted since the 1930s, and I am not sure the Left has done too brilliantly from this abstemious choice. And as it happens, I do not think that an initially uncritical enthusiasm for Webster, contracted at a tender age, bars a citizen from critical thought for the remainder of his life. At the height of the anti-war movement of the early 1970s, I remember a Fourth of July on which I asked a pretty militant friend “Neighbor, how stands the Union?,” and got a prompt and enthusiastic “rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible!” Both the question and the answer are from Benét’s story. By the time I finished high school I had encountered Samuel Eliot Morison’s witty and deflating remark on Webster (his joke went something like “two eyes like live coals, under a precipice of brow; no man was ever so great as Daniel Webster looked”), which gave me a sense of Webster pretty directly opposed to the one I’d gotten from Benét’s story a decade or so earlier. But I am grateful to have gotten that earlier sense first.
July 3, 2007
Kyuma’s Fate Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:25 PM EST A New York Times story reveals that Fumio Kyuma, Japan’s defense minister, has been forced to resign over what the Times calls a “gaffe.” Wikipedia defines the word gaffe with admirable clarity: “A gaffe is a verbal mistake made by a company or individual, usually in a social environment. The mistake comes from saying something that is true, but inappropriate.” What inappropriate truth did Fumio Kyuma utter? According to the Times, “In a public appearance on Saturday—the unofficial start of the campaign for the upcoming election—Mr. Kyuma said that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 ‘ended the war,’ adding, ‘I think that it couldn’t be helped.’ Otherwise, Mr. Kyuma said, the war would have dragged on and the Soviet Union would have ended up occupying northern Japan.” It is possible, although unlikely, that Mr. Kyuma, a politician on Japan’s right, was simply sucking up to Japan’s chief ally—unlikely because the former Minister did not apparently make a habit of saying things Americans wanted to hear. For example, according to the same article, “Mr. Kyuma himself also once called America’s war in Iraq a mistake, angering Vice President Dick Cheney, who pointedly refused to meet him during a visit to Japan in February.” It is also possible that Mr. Kyuma’s misfortune indicates a certain convergence between some American and most Japanese views of the Second World War. The Japanese have long focused, to a degree Chinese and Koreans find maddening, on a view of Japan as the Second World War’s chief victim; in this narrative, the uniqueness of being the target of nuclear weapons has a very conspicuous role in establishing Japan’s moral purity as supreme victim nation. On the evidence of Mr. Kyuma’s fate, this view is not about to change anytime soon. So I think convergence with (some) American views of the war may have arrived by a different route: I am afraid that I just about can imagine an untenured American academic imperiling his or her job by insisting that the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was crucial in ending the war, and probably unavoidable.
July 1, 2007
The Somme Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon posted about an item in today’s newspaper: “Today’s Times obituary page has another entry in the ‘In Memoriam’ section that refers to a far larger tragedy, one that began 91 years ago today. It reads: “The British Expeditionary Force
The Somme
1 July 1916
0730-2130 hours
54,000 KIA/WIA” The Somme was a ghastly ordeal for the British Army, especially the first day; many of July 1’s 19,240 British fatalities may have occurred in the first minutes of that day. The Battle of the Somme has come to stand for absolutely futile slaughter, but over the last generation, British specialist historians of the First World War have come to understand that the Somme was also a ghastly ordeal for the German Army, which thought it had come close to being destroyed there (one German officer described the battle as “the muddy grave of the German field arm,” and something like his opinion was common among Germans who fought on the Somme). The first hours were the worst, but the battle lasted until mid-November, with few if any other moments of it resembling that first day. A significant school of thought now considers the battle’s long-run effects a crucial victory in a merciless war of attrition, a war Britain won, an outcome for which we should be grateful. This is not an indisputable view, but it is a respectable one, although almost unknown outside of specialist circles. Most of what non-specialists think they know about the Western Front of the First World War consists of a generalization extending the first and unrepresentative hours of the battle to the whole of the war; there is also a case that what most modern Europeans (and many Americans) think of war generally is a projected universalization of the first day of the Somme. Some of the British historians who have developed the new view are John Terraine, Gary Sheffield, and Brian Bond. Terraine’s best essays on the subject are contained within his The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War, 1861-1945; Sheffield’s most relevant book is simply titled The Somme; and a brilliant short essay by Bond is The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History. Bond describes what he and other specialists now think happened on the Western Front, what he thinks ordinary people (including other academics) instead believe, and why he thinks that startling discrepancy developed. It is a very impressive little book. It has just come into paperback, and while it will run the buyer $20 for 138 pages, I think Bond’s heretical, irascible, and very learned essay, originally three lectures given at Cambridge, is very much worth the money.
June 26, 2007
Literary Merit Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 PM EST Responding to a piece I wrote for this web site on Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Fred Schwarz blogged about what, if anything, it means to call someone a “writer of the first rank,” which is what I called Chabon. I had written that Chabon, Philip Roth, and perhaps Kingsley Amis were the only writers of the first rank to write novels of alternate history, and Fred Schwarz pointed out that The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s novel of alternate history, which I have praised on this web site, has just been reissued by the Library of America. Assuming the point at issue—that there is such a thing as a writer of the first rank—an edition by the Library of America is suggestive (it probably has a distinguished advisory board) but not necessarily decisive. The Library of America also publishes Harriet Beecher Stowe, an immensely influential writer—Lincoln called her “the little woman who started this great big war”—but I do not think influence, or emotional power, or moral clarity, are the same things as literary merit. For my money, Stowe is not in Fielding’s league as a literary artist. If there are ranks, I’d put Fielding in the first rank, and Stowe somewhere else. Fred Schwarz at one point states that literary ranking is “simply a matter of opinion.” Let us assume that is true, but granting the assumption, are all opinions of equal worth and weight? Put bluntly, does my opinion matter any more than Fred Schwarz’s? Not as a measure of literary value, if such a thing exists, but it may matter more in a practical sense. I am (with almost no relevant professional training, but that is another story) a tenured professor of literature, which means I get to assign old books to young people, which may help keep an author in print. So my actions matter to the fate of some books, a very little bit, even if my opinion doesn’t, or shouldn’t. However, if my opinion is wrong, and also shared by all the professors of literature in the United States, my feeling is that a great book will still be a great book, no matter what professors (and other critics) say. There was a time when the professors thought ill of Dickens. I believe they were fools to so think, but professors have some influence, and a dead author they despise may disappear from the stores and eventually from most of the libraries. I think some such authors then await rediscovery in a more enlightened age (which is what happened to Dickens, who was in any case dismissed only by the professors, never by the reading public, and was always in the stores and libraries—not all writers the professors despise are so fortunate). Many people in my profession think otherwise, consider my belief to the contrary mysticism or vulgar error, and think the question of literary merit an empty one, even an absurdity. It may amuse Fred Schwarz to know that his views of literary merit are to some degree more representative of what professors of literature nowadays allege than are my own. As it happens, my profession thought otherwise a few decades ago, and it may think otherwise again; I certainly hope so. One other factor: Fred Schwarz is a skillful writer and an effective polemicist, and he may thereby influence popular taste more than I do—I teach as few as 30 students a year, and never more than 150. That is not too much influence on popular taste, or on publishers’ decisions. When I publish anything, it is rarely on what is sometimes called canonical literature, the writing I had called literature of the first rank (I am by professional training a historian). Dickens rose in critical esteem in some part because a non-professor (Edmund Wilson) wrote an important essay praising his genius. Fred Schwarz at one point suggests that “the only way to say for sure that a writer is major (which is not the same as being good) is if his or her works are still available decades later. This uses what is effectively a popular vote, the only objective method, to decide, but restricts the franchise to literature lovers, the only people who buy books that are more than a few years old.” There is quite a lot to be said for this view, but I also think some very old books are in print only because they are old, and some very good old books drop out of print for a while because people in my profession stop forcing the young to read them. If, by some mischance, Dryden drops out of print (and fewer and fewer people seem to assign Dryden), I think Mcflecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel will still be works of genius. Fred Schwarz writes that “I just don’t like Ian McEwan. And people who don’t like Michael Chabon just don’t like Michael Chabon.” I have heard professors of literature say the same thing about Dryden. There is another possibility. People who cannot understand the greatness of Dryden may be wrong, sadly wrong, denying themselves wisdom and pleasure because they will not do the work to comprehend something initially inaccessible to them. I cannot prove that, and my view is currently an unfashionable one, but I hold it nonetheless, and not only about Dryden. When I was 15 or 16, I tried to read The Faerie Queene. I found it incomprehensible. Luckily, I tried again: in my late thirties, I heard a colleague lecture on it for a couple of weeks. My life was the richer for the experience.
June 25, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality V Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:55 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes that “By globalization I do not mean simply free trade—trade without the taxes we call tariffs or artificial barriers such as quotas. It is perhaps true that the world had more free trade in 1914 than in 1990. But it had less globalization in 1914 than it had in 1990 and a lot less than it has now. In 1914 the developed world exported manufactured goods to the undeveloped world (much of which the developed world had sovereignty over) and imported mostly raw materials and agricultural products in exchange. . . . By globalization I mean integrated markets and globalized manufacturing. . . . This new and irreversible world came about for three reasons. (1) Led by the United States, the world has been reducing trade barriers since the end of World War II to the point where they are a mere ghost of what they once were. (2) Ocean transportation costs have declined by orders of magnitude. Just as the collapse of overland freight transportation costs, thanks to the railroads, made national markets possible in the nineteenth century, containerization and much cheaper air freight have created global markets that were impossible before. . . . (3) International communications costs have virtually disappeared.” I think this is a very reasonable definition of globalization, although it omits one sense in which the world economy of 1914 was more globalized than today’s: There were fewer legal barriers to emigration and immigration. You did not need a passport to leave or enter the United States, or Great Britain, or many other places. That aside, Mr. Gordon’s stress on technical rather than regulatory changes is certainly plausible: Transport and communications costs have indeed dropped sharply, and the industrialization of much of Asia is another vast change. On the other hand, from the perspective of Great Britain, the first industrialized nation, the industrialization of Germany and the United States was probably as powerful and alarming a change in the world as Asian industrialization is to the United States and European Union today. One comparison I’d draw between the two periods is that Britain was tempted by the allure of de-globalizing policies (protectionism) as we are now, and to draw what is to my mind a much more disturbing parallel, the economic elites in the new industrialized nations were not nearly as wedded to free trade as British elites had been for the previous half century or so. Mr. Gordon writes that the sharply increased costs of de-globalization via protectionism—he thinks there would be massive inflation—are an insuperable barrier to any reversal of policy across the board. Maybe so, but Europeans have long put up with very expensive food, despite their bankers’ powerful fears of inflation; the Japanese retail sector had very high prices because of various trade barriers; and the Chinese, who ought to fear retaliation by way of protectionism for their tolerance of massive theft of intellectual property, seem almost perfectly indifferent to that threat. I am skeptical about whether common sense and fear of probable consequences are a reliable barrier against illiberal economic policies. There seems to be an illiberal wave sweeping a significant portion of Latin America, I have the impression that profoundly illiberal zero-sum thinking is pretty common in Chinese policy making circles, and I think India could go either way; a lot of desperately poor people in India are at significant short- and mid-term risk from a liberalized economy, and they vote in large numbers. Historically, the social tensions generated by liberalized economies have rarely occurred within fully democratic states, and by one theory (I do not share it) they couldn’t have, since voters would have stopped liberalization before the rewards came rolling in. Non-democratic states (China springs to mind) run their own risks. They are too good at repressing protest over the costs, thus avoiding reforms and palliatives until a revolutionary wave swamps the kleptocratic elites. I agree that very bad economic ideas are self-defeating. In some famous cases, though, they are self-defeating because they provoke wars which states with badly run economies then lose. This is a feedback mechanism with a good long-run outcome, but the short-term costs are very high indeed.
June 24, 2007
Okinawa University, 1946 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:25 PM EST I posted three days ago about the battle of Okinawa, which ended on June 21, 1945. By a fluke, the following day, cleaning out one office in the course of moving to another, I found a sheaf of papers from Okinawa. A friend’s father, an artilleryman, had fought there. Stuck on Okinawa for a while—there was a shortage of shipping—he’d helped found and become one of the instructors at the Okinawa University Instruction Center, which the forward to its typed-out curriculum (my copy is dated January 1946) describes as “an institution of learning for servicemen; an institution founded on democratic and civilian principles, as close to the American prewar pattern as possible.” Everyone at the university—it began with 800 students and what looks like a few score faculty—was in the armed forces, and almost all of them were very eager get out. A remarkable number of them decided to pass the time doing intellectual work rather than the more grimly practical and physical tasks they had been doing a few months before. The university’s head, a first lieutenant, was titled its commandant rather than its president, but otherwise the proudly asserted closeness to a prewar American university is often persuasive. The sheaf of typed paper lists a captain with an M.A. as dean of admissions, along with a registrar (a corporal with a B.S.), other administrators, and chairmen of fairly conventional academic departments (agriculture, business, economics, English, foreign languages, history and government, mathematics, something called mechanical-technical, music and art, natural sciences, and social sciences). The chairmen themselves, and their credentials, look a little odd by modern standards—for one thing, they are identified by military ranks rather than academic ranks, and no one had a doctorate. The chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages, Private First Class Faulkner, had a Baccalaureat de l’Ensignement Secondaire and a Certificat de License, both from France (there is no further information). The chairman of the Mathematics Department, a corporal, had a B.A. and an M.A., as did the chairman of the Economics Department; a couple of the others had masters of science degrees, and one an M.F.A. Some of the courses were offered for high school credit, others were at university level; some were practical—my friend’s father taught a course in reading blueprints (five hours of lectures a week, a minimum of another hour of academic work a day)—and others less so (Latin, an advanced course in harmony, etc.). The main texts for each course are listed, and they look pretty orthodox (a physiology course uses Gray’s Anatomy, Cunningham’s Textbook of Anatomy, by Jamison, and Applied Physiology, by Best and Taylor). I found this sheaf of paper oddly moving, and it also established some historical distance. In these documents the adults of my childhood, when almost everyone’s father had fought in the Second World War, look more like the most flattering depictions of them deployed in New Deal propaganda than like any later and allegedly more realistic portrayals. They look like citizen soldiers with a flair for improvisation, an explicit commitment to democracy, and a determination to better themselves. They must have had their share of the ordinary vices, and I suppose most of them had some traditional vices no longer strikingly conspicuous among academics—various unpleasant attitudes about race and gender—but to be blunt, I do not know if the faculty of any place I have taught, left to their own devices and unemployed, would be able to found and administer a university, despite having done little else in their lives other than attend or work at universities. I fear that in many cases my colleagues would decline to do their jobs on a purely volunteer and wholly unpaid basis. Nor, as it happens, am I am entirely confident that they could successfully invade Okinawa. John Maynard Keynes, at one time the bursar of a Cambridge college where I was several times a temporary member of High Table, argued against professionalizing the post he then held, asserting that it was “much easier to make a Bursar of a Fellow than a Fellow of a Bursar.” Maybe so, but on the strength of this evidence, I have the uneasy suspicion that it may also be easier to make a professor of an artilleryman, than it would be to nowadays work the reverse transformation.
June 23, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:05 PM EST John Steele Gordon makes several arguments against a recent article in Foreign Affairs that describes increasing opposition to globalization and recommends steps to decrease what the authors take to be evidence of increasing inequality in the United States, as an attempt to defuse that increasing opposition. For now, I’ll address just one of his arguments. He writes that “the ongoing integration of the world economy is unstoppable, whether we like it or not. Trying to stop it would be like trying to stop the Industrial Revolution in, say, 1830. American participation in the process might, at enormous economic cost, be delayed, but, with 30 percent of the world’s GDP, not for long. The last serious attempt to wall off the American economy from global influences was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. It was one of the major reasons an ordinary recession turned into the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, as American exports in particular and world trade in general collapsed.” I am skeptical about the analogy with industrialization in 1830, because while no one ever succeeded in reversing the Industrial Revolution, people did manage to very effectively roll back globalization during and after the First World War. The world economy was much more globalized in 1914 than it was in 1990. There would of course be a great economic cost to such a reversal, but as Mr. Gordon points out, there may have been a very great cost to Smoot-Hawley, and we did it anyway. The evidence for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes persisting in self-destructive economic policies is superabundant, and while democracies may be less likely to persist in self-destructive policies, the historical record suggests that they can do it for quite a while, and opposition to free trade has been impressively tenacious. Europe, which expresses vast sympathy for Africa, persists in protectionist policies that devastate Africans while costing Europeans a lot of money. Australians, now pretty committed free-traders, sought to protect manufacturing for decades, during which time they succeeded in devastating that sector of their economy. India was also protectionist for decades, which cost it vast potential growth. Etc. A web interview with economist Bryan Caplan, the author of a recent book titled The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, suggests that American voters are more than capable of making very bad choices about economic policies. I do not share anything like all of the views expressed by Professor Caplan, but I am curious about what Mr. Gordon makes of his position.
June 21, 2007
Okinawa Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:45 PM EST Today is the anniversary of the American victory on Okinawa, the largest and last amphibious invasion of the Second World War. The invasion began on April 1, 1945, and 82 days later Okinawa had become the bloodiest battle of the island campaign in the Pacific. Okinawa was one of the few islands the Japanese were able to extensively fortify before the Americans hit the beaches, and the only island where they had a lot of artillery and armor. The Japanese flew 1,900 kamikaze missions, sinking dozens of ships and killing around 5,000 American sailors. The Japanese army inflicted more than 72,000 American casualties on Okinawa itself, more than 12,000 of those casualties killed or missing in action; the Japanese army itself suffered around 66,000 dead. More than 140,000 Okinawans, a quarter of the civilian population, died in the battle, many of then used as human shields by the Japanese (others were simply murdered, either to prevent their surrender to the Americans or for other reasons). Around a third of the surviving Okinawan population was wounded in the battle. A 1995 memorial on Okinawa lists the 237,318 fatalities known at that point to have died as a result of the battle. Most of the elements that made Okinawa so ghastly a battle would have been reproduced in any invasion of Japan, along with some new and worse possibilities, and a desire to avoid another Okinawan campaign on a much vaster scale was almost certainly among the most powerful American motives for using nuclear weapons against Japan. To read even a terse summary of the battle is to understand that American policymakers had other things on their minds in the summer of 1945 than the problem of dealing with Stalin, and that having those more pressing concerns, they are unlikely to have used nuclear weapons for the sole or even primary purpose of intimidating Stalin. To teach in a liberal-arts college, however, is to discover that the belief that intimidating Stalin was in fact our main or even sole motive has become an article of faith for an amazing number of nominally educated Americans. Almost all of my students, a self-selected and generally very impressive group, had acquired this misinformation somewhere along the road. In most cases, they were apparently taught it in school, where they were not taught much, if anything, about the battle of Okinawa. The conventional wisdom about American motives for bombing Hiroshima, like the conventional wisdom about the criminal idiocy of British commanders on the Western Front in World War I, is one of the cases where professional opinion among specialists has been moving in the opposite direction from non-specialist “educated” opinion for almost a generation, but has made almost no headway outside the tiny worlds inhabited by military and diplomatic historians. This is dispiriting, and instructive.
June 21, 2007
Japanese Attacks on the U.S. Mainland Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:45 AM EST Jack Kelly’s lead piece on the website today, “Forgotten but True: Japan Attacks the American Mainland,” details the handful of attempts by Japan to strike at the continental United States during the Second World War. Today is the anniversary of the most dramatic, when a Japanese submarine, the I-25, fired 17 shells at Fort Stevens, at the mouth of the Columbia River on the Oregon coast. The I-25 managed to damage a baseball backstop; as a reply to the shock of the Doolittle Raids, the I-25’s first foray was a damp squib, as was a follow-on raid with a sub-launched seaplane a couple of months later. Late in the war, incendiaries launched by balloon from across the Pacific did manage to kill three Americans, a mother and two children who found a balloon bomb and picked it up; this was a couple of months before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These events have had a long afterlife as Second World War trivia questions and bar bets, and I think they usually divert American audiences made privy to them because of the fantastic disproportion between the horrific effectiveness of American attacks on the Japanese Home Islands and the contrastingly comical ineffectiveness of the Japanese attacks on the lower 48. I do not have the impression that people feel sympathy for the Japanese on the strength of the contrast. People who take an interest in Second World War trivia usually know that scores of millions of civilians died as a direct or indirect result of Japanese actions during the Pacific War. The comic effect seems to be a very old and perhaps morally coarse one: We laugh at the impotence of our enemies. To my ear, our laughter is morally palliated by a parallel knowledge of how much harm our enemies could do on other occasions (the Rape of Nanking, or the Bataan Death March, or the mass murders in Manila, for example). The laughter is in any case a rare and unrepresentative portion of our response to the adversaries we fought during the Second World War, even more than 60 years on. Most wartime attempts to ridicule the Axis, the sort that got into Hollywood shorts and second features, look bizarre nowadays, and not too much anti-Axis humor has matured with the passage of time. All wars are ironic, a famous critic once asserted. Not that one—not yet, or at least not too often.
June 20, 2007
The Victorians Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:25 AM EST The lower-left corner of the homepage of this website always features a “Today In History” section, and today it notes that this is the anniversary of Victoria’s accession to the throne. When I was a boy, Victorian was a word of cheap and easy abuse. It seemed to mean a combination of madly priggish, moralistic, absurdly formal, hostile to pleasure, phobic about sex, and broadly hypocritical. While always depicted as inevitably dying, Victorianism was simultaneously imagined to be very much alive, because it was still worth attacking. In my high school, a much-loved English teacher would recommend Lytton Strachey’s 1918 classic Eminent Victorians as a delicious and deadly attack on a common foe. Victorianism was despised without being feared; in most cases, Victorian was a word one used with a sneer or a snigger; we knew of no other culture to which we felt so lazily (rather than earnestly) superior. In 1969, when I was 18, George MacDonald Fraser published Flashman, taking off from a Victorian classic, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), a copy of which existed in my parent’s house, although unread by me. The book, marketed as a deadly comic attack on the Victorians, was an immense success and had a long series of sequels. Read with even modest care, though, it was simultaneously an attack on the Victorians and a loving and very knowledgeable celebration of them: Fraser’s Victorians had some vices we lacked in the same form—pretty gross sexual hypocrisy, for example, and remarkably ill-regulated workplaces, also more overt racism—but they also possessed astonishing virtues—courage, earnestness, prodigious energy, and moral seriousness. The books, copiously footnoted, jokey, at times sexy, quite learned, usually adventure stories in exotic settings, became a bit more formulaic as the series went on, but that mix of attitudes about the Victorians stayed mixed, and if anything it was the joking about Victorian vices that aged first. Meanwhile, the libertine spirit of the early 1960s, which made such easy jokes about Victorian sexual prudery, developed some neo-pruderies of its own, and the Victorians seemed more and more an irretrievable past, hence less worth mocking. Inside the academy, truly loathing the Victorians became a more specialized passion, one pursued most industriously by post-colonialists, for whom Victorian imperialism was the worst of crimes, and by the occasional harder-line Marxist preserved in amber, for whom Victorian famines were the moral equivalents of Hitler’s and Stalin’s industrial-scale killing sprees. In 1995, the science-fiction author Neal Stephenson wrote a novel, , The Diamond Age, that included a much-admired subculture called neo-Victorian. This year a development deal was announced: George Clooney is producing a six-part miniseries. This seems to me to be a sign of the times. The Victorians, still alive and vigorously despised in my adolescence, and more or less vanished during my adult life, are suddenly something we can look at with admiration. It is not that they are finally conceded to be gone, so that we can look at them with dispassion. Watching their fate evolve through their treatment in popular cultural materials, it turns out that there is a case to be made for missing them.
June 20, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:15 AM EST In an interesting article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “A New Deal for Globalization”, Kenneth F. Scheve, professor of political science at Yale University, and Matthew J. Slaughter, professor of economics at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, survey some very recent history and argue for redistributing income to preserve free trade. They suggest doing this by making payroll taxes, now flat, progressive, and their argument goes like this: Americans are becoming more protectionist, there are already policy changes in response to the trend, and this is happening because increased income inequality has accompanied globalization, and the latter is blamed for the former. Scheve and Slaughter are decidedly in favor on globalization, pointing out that “trade and investment liberalization over the past decades has added between $500 billion and $1 trillion in annual income—between $1,650 and $3,300 a year for every American. A Doha agreement on global free trade in goods and services would generate, according to similar studies, $500 billion a year in additional income in the United States.” But they note that while globalization has been increasing aggregate American wealth, “real income growth has been extremely skewed, with relatively few high earners doing well while incomes for most workers have stagnated or, in many cases, fallen. Just what mix of forces is behind this trend is not yet clear, but regardless, the numbers are stark. Less than four percent of workers were in educational groups that enjoyed increases in mean real money earnings from 2000 to 2005; mean real money earnings rose for workers with doctorates and professional graduate degrees and fell for all others. In contrast to in earlier decades, today it is not just those at the bottom of the skill ladder who are hurting. Even college graduates and workers with nonprofessional master’s degrees saw their mean real money earnings decline. By some measures, inequality in the United States is greater today than at any time since the 1920s.” And they note that “public support for engagement with the world economy is strongly linked to labor-market performance, and for most workers labor-market performance has been poor.” By their account, free trade is the golden goose, increasing income inequality the ax poised to kill it. I suspect they are right about that, not least because other than Anglo-American economists and a small portion of the political class, very few people seem to be enthusiastic free traders: European Union electorates are not instinctive free traders, nor are Chinese policymakers, nor, in my experience, are the majority of the Americans I have ever heard opine on the subject. Scheve and Slaughter seem to think that people may in fact have made a legitimate inference on the relationship between growing inequality and free trade, but I do not think you have to believe that to support their proposal. If they are wrong about the plausibility of the connection between inequality and globalization, that does not mean voters will stop making that connection, and they seem likelier to do it when they feel most pressed and stressed. The history of support for free trade suggests that the passion does not go from strength to strength; it waxes and wanes. American democracy is good at turning changing popular sentiment into changing policy. Europe is different. Widespread popular support there for the death penalty, for example, has yet to make an impression on the political class. And as it happens, the European elite does not need to bribe its electorates into supporting free trade, because much of the elite is itself hostile to free trade. We’re different, which means bribery may be a good investment for everyone.
June 17, 2007
Nixon’s Uniforms Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:15 PM EST Josh Zeitz and John Steele Gordon are united in ridiculing Richard Nixon’s burst of enthusiasm for snazzier uniforms for the White House police. As Mr. Gordon remarked, Nixon had been “impressed with the uniforms worn by the presidential and royal guards who had greeted him on a European tour,” but “the entire nation collapsed as one in helpless mirth. The new uniforms soon disappeared, beginning with the hats, which were never seen again. If the United States is to have an imperial Presidency, it seems it will have to be clothed in workaday, republican garb.” I think this is absolutely right. The most vivid and deadly word used to mock those uniforms at the time was “Ruritanian,” which tells you something about what Americans didn’t like about Nixon’s new uniforms. Ruritania was originally an imaginary German state invented by Anthony Hope as the scene for the action in The Prisoner of Zenda, first published in 1894. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines Ruritanian as “of, relating to, or having the characteristics of an imaginary place of high romance,” which describes The Prisoner of Zenda very nicely but misses the reason the word was a devastating crack at President Nixon’s sartorial ambitions for the White House police. The fact is that over the decades the word changed its connotation, and another and I think more accurate Web dictionary defines Ruritanian as “of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a mythical place of high, typically comic-opera romance: ’designed Ruritanian uniforms for the honor guard.’” Ruritanian came to connote slightly goofy, jokey escapism and a kind of Eurotrashy pompousness and triviality. Old and fading powers clung to their plumes, punctilio, and protocol; we were, in one image of ourselves, brusque, direct, and possessed of the fact of power rather than the elaborate poses of the formerly powerful. To call Nixon’s new uniforms Ruritanian cruelly distinguished them from the stern dignity and lack of swank associated with an idealized vision of the Republic. This did not mean we were not imperial, it meant we were not comic-opera types. We could still be Roman, which meant very imperial indeed, but Romans in their great days scorned excessive pomp and were the more impressive for that fact. This points, I think, to a peculiarity of the United States, which is that while we are a society with significant economic inequality, we are in cultural terms a remarkably egalitarian society, and few of us are particularly enraptured by the symbols of traditional European social hierarchy. Shooting is in much of Europe a gentleman’s amusement, but in America it is a sport of both would-be gents and rednecks, with the latter more numerous. The same is true of fishing, and in most of the country, golf. In 1970 the American President had more or less unchallenged imperial power, which was not yet the subject of Schlesinger’s polemic but was not forgiven monarchical pretensions. President Bush, in some ways possessed of much more imperial power than Nixon ever had, comports himself as an imaginary plebeian, with a rustic accent and a frontier tone, and for four years he inspired considerable affection on the strength of this demeanor. He had gone to Andover and Yale, but few made much reference to those details. Nixon, painfully aware that he had gone to neither Andover nor Yale, was briefly seduced by wicked old Europe, falling for a vision that would never have caught Bush’s eye. One lesson is that while in 2007 it may or may not be useful to speak of an American empire, one has not settled the question by pointing to the absence of pith helmets.
June 16, 2007
Imperial Presidencies III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:00 PM EST Josh Zeitz, pondering Richard Nixon, recalled Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s 1973 meditation on “the vast expansion of the federal state since the 1930s and the consequent emergence of an increasingly powerful and autonomous executive branch”. Schlesinger identified “the unchecked ‘imperial presidency’ as a threat to democratic values” and “noted that Nixon was not the first President to wield these expanded powers injudiciously, even if he ultimately proved to be the worst offender in modern presidential history.” Polemics about “the imperial presidency” were a significant part of the rhetorical world in which I came of age, but they did not go unchallenged. One of the more interesting challenges I remember hearing occurred when I was asked to be a member of a panel arguing about War Powers Act on local cable TV—this was in the early 1980s. Preparing for this, I wandered over to the Columbia Law School and read through the debate in Congress, then repaired to the main library and reread the relevant parts of the Federalist Papers, some diplomatic history, etc., and showed up loaded for bear, prepared to annihilate any miserably benighted advocate of the imperial Presidency. The debate was held in the auditorium of the suburban high school from which I’d graduated in the late 1960s, and I was feeling pretty cocky; I was then teaching the history of political theory at Columbia, I knew what I thought was a lot of military and diplomatic history, and the only other panelist likely to know anything about the subject was a high school teacher of American history. I remember winning the debate, although I knew at the time that I did not deserve victory. That high school teacher saw both sides of the question, which can suppress the instinct to go for the polemical kill, and did, whereas the audience was at that moment in our history pretty tired of imperial Presidents. It wanted to hear a nasty, unfair, one-sided case, and I gave them one. The instructive part of the day came because I knew from anecdotes that the high school teacher had spent his adolescence eating wormy cabbage in a Japanese internment camp in China, where his family wound up after fleeing Hitler’s Germany; the ones who didn’t get to China were killed by the Nazis. The high school teacher was too much of a gentleman to relate this family history in a debate, but he did note that FDR had not had nearly enough imperial authority to stop Hitler in his tracks, which significantly more U.S. aid to France in 1939 and 1940 would almost certainly have done. By later standards the isolationists in the 1930s Congress had significantly crimped the powers of the executive, so FDR had instead schemed to get us into war. He’d done it too slowly and much too cautiously, because he lacked the imperial authority to swiftly intervene in a war that killed at least 50 million people. That was how the high school teacher saw it, anyway, and he made a good case, one weakened when appealing to a crowd by his sadness and uncertainty when making it; he was passionately opposed to Reagan administration foreign policy, as he had apparently been opposed to the Vietnam War, two other achievements of imperial Presidents, but he did not know what sort of legal arrangements could possibly restrain LBJ and Reagan while leaving FDR and Truman free hands. Making sure that there could never again be an FDR tricking a too-hesitant America into a necessary war—in effect, one of the goals of some of the day’s reformers—seemed to that teacher to be a possibly suicidal outcome. It seems to me that if Bush gets us into a war with Iran, imperial Presidents will get an even worse name, but if Bush fails to use force and Iran one day launches nuclear weapons at Israeli, European, or American cities, opponents of imperial Presidencies will be widely execrated. Josh writes that “if history has shown us anything, it’s that unchecked presidential authority often leads to great abuses of the law and the public trust.” That high school teacher would probably reply that this is indeed one of the things history has shown us, but that history has shown us more than one thing.
June 14, 2007
French Anti-Americanism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:10 PM EST Alex Burns, citing a March 2003 Pew poll with contrary data, wonders where I got the notion that anti-American sentiment in France did not increase in the run-up to the Iraq war. I remember reading this a couple of years ago, although I do not remember where, but Googling now, I find an article titled “Global Anti-Americanism and the Lessons of the "French Exception", published in an electronic version of The Journal of American History (Vol. 93, No. 2, September 2006), by Phillipe Roger, whose book I had cited in the previous post. Roger writes, “It is worth noting, for instance, that in the polls taken by the U.S. State Department in the fall of 2002 (which showed strong evidence of the surge of adversarial views in Germany and Great Britain), France, which was in the forefront of political opposition to the Bush administration, showed no sign of aggravated anti-Americanism, with negative opinions staying at the same level as before the diplomatic crisis (a 1 percent variation, irrelevant in such polls).” That said, I would not claim that French anti-Americanism hasn’t risen since the Iraq war, because I have seen polling data suggesting that it has. On the other hand, a little over a year ago I gave a seminar paper, on which occasion I met a distinguished and I thought shrewd American academic who had just spent a term teaching in Paris at one of the Grandes Écoles. He reported that on the strength of his experience with students from the French elite, whose views he seemed to think were a leading indicator of majority opinion in France, the French were about to become both more pro-Israeli and more pro-American, in part in reaction to the wave of immigrant riots and arson that had recently swept France. I do have the sense that some (by no means all) European opposition to the American invasion of Iraq was inspired by fear that troubles with Muslim immigrants would worsen in the wake of any war. Now that the troubles have duly worsened, the same anxieties may have produced an opposite and somewhat perverse and misconceived reaction: The Americans may be imagined to be hitting back at Islam, after having provoked it, and after it has newly alarmed the French. When something frightens us, our responses can be contradictory, and volatile.
June 12, 2007
More Normandy Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:35 AM EST Alex Burns wrote, in response to my post on a visit to Normandy in June of 2004, that this year’s anniversary saw so many fewer comparisons between the U.S. and the Third Reich, and so much less notice of the anniversary in every respect, for a straightforward reason, which is that decennial anniversaries make for a bigger splash. He also suggests “two other explanations, both related to the use and abuse of historical memory. The first is that, while critics of American policy are apparently less willing, this week, to twist the stories of World War II in order to assail the United States, so are boosters of American policy more timid in their creative employment of the same stories. In 2004, Le Monde editorialists were not the only ones misusing the history of the Second World War. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Giuliani likened George Bush to Winston Churchill, and in an interview with ‘Good Morning America,’ Dick Cheney seemed to liken himself to FDR while answering a question about the relationship between military service and presidential leadership. What’s more, at least as early as 2002, Donald Rumsfeld was likening the Bush administration’s global attitude to that of Churchill in 1938 and implying, less than subtly, that its liberal critics had more in common with the hapless Neville Chamberlain.” This is a very logical and initially persuasive speculation, but thinking it over, I am not sure that I agree with it. The implication seems to be that the analogy-mongering on both sides meant that absurd levels of anti-Americanism were provoked by absurd levels of Francophobia (and Europhobia). However, in the case of France, where the ludicrous Hitler analogy I quoted had surfaced, anti-Americanism did not actually increase in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and the burst of American France-baiting in the run-up to the war. France was the only Western European country where anti-Americanism did not increase in 2003-2004—it had reached its natural (and pretty high) limit under President Clinton (a man the French did not particularly dislike). French anti-Americanism does not seem to track egregiously bad behavior by the United States, for its modern form dates to 1927, which was not a date of peculiarly vicious American misbehavior, but did see the publication of a striking cluster of anti-American books, starting a very durable tendency in French intellectual fashion (as reported by Phillipe Roger in The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism). A modern low in the sentiment was hit in the mid-1980s, when President Reagan made us loathed over much of Western Europe, but not in France, which had recently discovered the Soviet gulag. Oddly enough, now that the war in Iraq is going as badly as both Chirac and the French Left had predicted, the Fifth Republic’s most pro-American French President has just been elected. How can we account for this? Here’s one guess: In June of 2004, it was not so clear that Iraq would go so badly, so the perceived danger of American hegemony (to French amour propre, at any rate) looked very real. That is also what happened in 1927—we looked like we were going to leave Europe in the dust. It didn’t help that we hadn’t done anything for France lately, nor that we did not look like a reliable partner against a resurgent Germany. On Roger’s theory, it is mostly increasing U.S. power and apparent hyper-modernity that provokes apprehension and animosity, and my guess is that comparisons to the Nazis are simply the ultimate expression of those sentiments. When the threat of American hegemony looks most acute, any rival of America’s may look good, and Chirac sought to bring in the Chinese as French allies against the U.S. When the Americans began to falter, a second look at the prospect of Chinese hegemony may have made that alternative seem less appealing. There are various other possibilities, of which the most Francophile is a notion I once saw asserted by Ralph Peters, interviewed a couple of years back in American Heritage, although that is not where I came across the remark. Peters observed that the French are actually foul weather friends—they are only there when we really need them. We did not think we needed them in 2003-2004, and they didn’t turn up. We need them more now, and here they seem to be. Alex Burns offers a second theory about the decline of the U.S.-in-Iraq-as-Hitler analogy, which is that “a more apt historical analogy has developed for the Iraq war: Vietnam. These days, when people talk about Iraq, they are far more likely to refer to the Tet Offensive than the Normandy invasion.” Mr. Burns is skeptical about the perfection of this analogy, and I agree with him. Some people did make the Vietnam analogy in 2004, although I have the impression that this was more common in the U.S. and the Third World than in Europe. My guess is that the Vietnam analogy was less impressive in 2004 because the memory of the apparently effortless American victory of 2003 was too recent, and in France it may even have looked a bit like the German victory of 1940, although with fewer casualties to either civilians or invaders. It is in any case worth remembering that the U.S. war in Vietnam in its own day itself provoked a fair amount of the very hardy U.S.-as-the-Nazis analogy. The only other people to be as frequently compared to the Nazis are the Israelis, while in the most recent books on the strategic bombing of the Second World War and the forced transfer of populations in 1945, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Nazis have become the Jews. It’s a lively world out there in analogy land.
June 6, 2007
Normandy Beach, 2004 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:20 PM EST Three years ago I had the privilege of attending the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion in the company of some American veterans of the invasion. Three years on, not too much of a fuss is being made about June 6. This may be a mild improvement on the sixtieth anniversary itself, at least in Europe, where in 2004 there was a lot of noise about a supposed paradox of June 6, of which more below. That day, after the ceremony, one of my most vivid memories is of bumping into a lively, sturdy octogenarian accompanied by two gigantic and affable middle-aged sons, the older guy a veteran of the 16th Infantry, one of the two regiments that first landed on Omaha Beach. He was an obviously Polish-American retired auto worker with a sense of humor: “It’s an Irish name,” he explained of his mass of consonants. When queried, he announced that he’d been in F Company—which I happened to know took 91 percent casualties—and he’d hit the beach in the first wave: “Nothing in front of me except a fish, pal!” Bumping into him and his sons a couple of days later, you learned a bit more. Within a very few minutes he was the only survivor of his platoon. He was skeptical about films of men running up the beach to attack the German fortifications—he thought it had taken him 10 hours to crawl 10 yards—and proud of the fact that to the best of his knowledge, sick with swallowed seawater, amid omnipresent shelling and machine-gun fire, he’d been the first American to relieve himself in France, although those were not his precise words. It was a cheerfully self-mocking and in part antiheroic story, yet according to his sons, when he saw current members of the First Infantry Division at the cemetery, he pumped his fist and shouted “Big Red One!” And they pumped their fists too, and shouted back: “Big Red One! Wahoo!” Maybe pumping your fist, grinning, and shouting is mere theatricality. Or maybe that’s the real part, and joking about how frightened you were is the theater. The man seemed impervious to what the French commentariat had taken to calling the paradox of June 6. It wasn’t always entirely clear what they meant by this, but the paradox seemed to result from a collision of the lingering (sometimes grudging, sometimes palpably sincere) French enthusiasm for being liberated with the broad French loathing of the American and British attempt to extend what was described as a similar favor to the Iraqis. The French commentariat insisted that these efforts had nothing whatever in common, and that the two Americas—Bush’s and Roosevelt’s—had nothing in common either. That same week Le Monde ran a headline speculating on the date for the construction of an American gulag, and one striking proposal sought to deny Bush access to France on the sixtieth anniversary: Bush led an America that “does not chase out an occupier, but occupies, does not crush oppressors, but oppresses, does not chase out an invader, but invades, does not crush fascism, but nurtures its ‘Islamist’ form.” To most Anglo-American eyes this list of antitheses, while disturbing, was imperfectly persuasive: The Americans and British had crushed one form of Iraqi fascism at the risk of abetting another; they had removed an Iraqi oppressor while at least a few of them had resorted to some shameful oppressive tactics themselves; etc. But these smaller paradoxes did not aggregate to a vast and paralyzing paradox of June 6. The Anglo-American mind may be less supple than the Gallic journalistic mind tends to be—these paradoxes were troubling, rather than dispositive, and they were less airily entertaining to the reader than they’d probably been to the writer—but after fuller consideration, they did not seem irresolvable. Speculation about an imminent American gulag suggested an imperfect familiarity with Mogadan, Vorkuta, and Kolyma. And the paradox of June 6 lost some of its tension in the face of the trouble various European opponents of the Iraq war had in getting their story straight. Up the beach at Arromanches, then-Chancellor Schroeder was insisting that Germany, too, had been liberated on D-day. None of the vets on my tour remembered the Germans welcoming this liberation with any great enthusiasm; a number of them still carried scars, and a few shrapnel, which they thought testimony to the imperfect German appreciation for their efforts. In ’44 and ’45, the Germans had resisted their liberation much more strenuously than the Iraqis had in 2003, and if thousands of Iraqis were trying to blow up their liberators a year on, and mutilate their corpses, this may have been because the liberators didn’t have any French troops with them. Back in ’45, the French had replied to terror aimed at their occupation force with extremely effective mass reprisals. That day in Normandy, a darker thought intruded: Maybe there was no German insurgency after the war because the British and Americans had taken fewer pains to spare German civilian lives during it, and those civilian deaths may have finally soured the Germans on war. When truly aroused, the Americans and British practiced terror wholesale. Retail terror as a resistance tactic may not have seemed a very promising approach in 1945. In any case, Schroeder seemed to think that Germans could be liberated despite their striking lack of cooperation in the process, although he did not seem to have worked out that this was a dangerously suggestive argument, one capable of extension from the Rhine to the Euphrates. And as it happened, not all the civilian dead had been German. Many thousands of French civilians had died in the course of the Normandy invasion and the subsequent fighting. Perhaps this was some part of what the French meant by the paradox of June 6. But while some of the European commentators made a few attempts to imply that those civilian deaths dissolved any moral credit that might otherwise have attended the American and British destruction of a tyranny, this move did not seem to catch on. Most of the French, at least, seemed to understand that freeing France was worth civilian casualties. They were at least as confident that freeing Iraq from Saddam wasn’t. Maybe that was because the French and Germans had grown more tender-hearted over 60 years (although the Algerians, the Tutsi and the Bosnian Muslims, among others, might have doubted this interpretation). Or maybe they just cared less about other people’s liberty than they did about their own. A most ingenious paradox, that French paradox of June 6, but it resisted easy unpacking. Now it seems to have disappeared. This year, no one is making noise about how we are betraying our legacy, nor, for that matter, about the legacy itself. In Northern Lebanon, the Lebanese army is crushing some terrorists hiding amidst civilians with tactics at least as indiscriminate as any the Americans were using in 2004. No great paradox is being observed about that event either.
June 4, 2007
Midway at 65 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:50 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s lead piece on this website today, “The Miracle at Midway,” echoes the title of Gordon Prange’s celebrated 1983 book on the battle, and recounts the great story economically and I think with perfect accuracy. Was Midway a miracle in the modern sense of the word, meaning a vastly improbable event? The improbability of the outcome is somewhat diminished by writers who stress the successes of the American code-breakers, but superior intelligence on the enemy’s plan cannot alone explain the outcome; the British had that at Crete. The outcome at Midway was certainly a stroke of great luck. The U.S. Navy, which fought against great odds, inflicted savage, irreplaceable, and disproportionate losses, did so with inferior aircraft and less experienced pilots, and seized the strategic initiative from Japan. Had the Japanese sighted American ships at different times, or had different types of planes been airborne or below deck at different moments, it is certainly possible to imagine the destruction of the U.S. Navy’s fleet carriers and the preservation of the Japanese carriers. Reading about Midway tends to reduce one’s sense of the miraculous because it gives a sense of the vast role of luck in that particular naval battle, one of the handful of carrier battles ever fought, in most of which luck seems to have had significant sway. Luck was imagined to have less of a role when admirals modeled surface engagements in the age of ironclad battleships—the hitting power of guns versus the effectiveness of armor seemed to make the thing a pretty pure science—but there were not too many battles between ironclad fleets, any more than there would be a lot of carrier battles, and at one of the most famous of them, Jutland, luck again had a pretty large role. There was also, of course, a lot of luck on Hitler’s side in the Battle of France—probably more than the Americans enjoyed at Midway—and one lesson of military and naval history is that we may be inclined to understate the role of luck in shaping the outcomes of great events. Historians enjoy explaining outcomes, and acknowledging a very large role for luck does not do much for developing a system of explanation that looks like a science. Neither generals, admirals, nor historians have much of a bias in favor of luck as an explanation of events. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule. Napoleon, who was not without faith in his own skill, was nonetheless interested in the role of fortune on battlefields, and famously asked of any general proposed for a command, “Is he lucky?” But if Midway saw a lot of luck on our side, it is not, I think, too easy to imagine a resulting Japanese victory (or stalemate) in World War II had the luck run the other way. I remember hearing more than once that the United States built (from the keel up) and launched more than a hundred major surface combatants over the course of the war, and the comparable number for Japan was zero. I am not absolutely certain of those numbers, but they are at least close to correct. We were also making steadily better weapons, training better pilots, developing better doctrine. Luck could decide battles in the Pacific, but no plausible amount of battlefield luck could save Japan; if we were willing to see it through, we were going to win. That, of course, is probably true of almost all the wars we have fought: Iraq may be an exception, but Vietnam, although it is very unfashionable to say so, probably wasn’t. Japan was convinced that American willingness to absorb casualties in a war fought thousands of miles from our shores was relatively slight and would be the key to their victory. They got that wrong, of course. In retrospect, their decision to risk so much on that assumption seems mad. Iran and Syria, which arm Iraqis with specialized weapons to kill Americans, and in the case of Iran send advisers to assist, make a similar calculation, yet no one calls them mad for doing so. That seems strange, in its way stranger than the outcome at Midway.
June 3, 2007
Knocked Up Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:55 PM EST I saw Knocked Up last night, a summer comedy movie yesterday released to enthusiastic reviews, and one prompting a short thought about cultural history. Knocked Up has a simple premise: Katherine Heigl, an actress who looks like the sort of girl who runs out on Menelaos, plays a newly-hired TV interviewer of celebrities, one who is impregnated in the course of a drunken one-night-stand with Seth Rogen (she is celebrating her hiring). Mr. Rogen looks like an ordinary mortal, and his character’s idea of entrepreneurship is to develop a commercial website identifying all the nude scenes ever played by all actresses, with special attention to which bits of each actress were undraped at which precise moment in each film (he is regrettably unaware that such a service already exists). His friends, also his roommates and business partners, are other youngish men of comparable ambition and discipline and possess a similar fondness for marijuana. Mr. Rogen’s character seems fantastically unsuitable for the role of fatherhood, but this initial appearance is misleading. Knocked Up is a very bawdy, very funny, and in the last analysis very sweet love story. There is a tendency to describe history, cultural and otherwise, as cyclical, an alternation between opposed tendencies. More precisely, the depiction of sexuality in comedy is sometimes imagined to be the alternation of a dishonest and priggish vision, one punishing non-reproductive sex as mere lubricity and celebrating self-restraint, with a libertine vision, one less moralistic and more honest about the body’s pleasures, but perhaps indifferent to the moral claims of the familial, sometimes tending toward the heartless and dishonest in its own way. By this theory the vision of Cheaper by the Dozen, as Ellen Feldman criticized it, yields to the most Saturnalian elements of Animal House, and then things swing back again, forever and ever. Knocked Up suggests that this is silly. Knowledgeable vulgarity about the adult body and its claims does not mean a movie cannot serially attend to a loftier sense of human sexuality; comedy can be the enemy of asceticism and idealism without becoming the friend of the darkest cynicism. People who greatly dislike America tend to say we are peculiarly likely to be monsters of amoral carnality, or else mad prigs. On the evidence of one summer comedy at least, we are a little more interesting than that.
June 2, 2007
FDR and Breaking Coalitions Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:30 PM EST A few days ago I wrote that Franklin Roosevelt’s margins of victory had steadily increased, a piece of misinformation I’ve carried around in my head since reviewing and presumably misreading a book on FDR and the press in 1991. John Steele Gordon politely pointed out the error, and Alex Burns wrote an interesting response about the remarkable stability of FDR’s vote totals over time, noting that Roosevelt’s political genius included keeping a large and potentially fragile coalition intact for more than 12 years. Of course, some of this success was the result of the Republicans not taking aim at a few of the most vulnerable fracture lines in the New Deal coalition. As Mr. Burns writes, “In 1940, for example, Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, who refused to drum up the nation’s spirit of anti-interventionism until the last weeks of his campaign. Charles Peters, in his snappy little volume Five Days in Philadelphia, has suggested that Willkie’s restrained campaign saved Roosevelt’s agenda but doomed his party’s fortunes at the ballot box.” Willkie toyed with exploiting isolationist and antiwar sentiment—in the election campaign of 1940 he supported conscription, then changed his mind, in pursuit of electoral advantage—but his heart wasn’t in it. Willkie was a liberal internationalist; after he lost the 1940 election, he passionately supported Lend Lease, and in the summer of 1941 he supported unlimited aid to the United Kingdom while it was fighting Hitler. He seems to have known what he was doing: his Wikipedia entry asserts that “Shortly before Willkie died, he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between ‘here lies a president’ or ‘here lies one who contributed to saving freedom,’ he would prefer the latter.” I hope Willkie really said that, because there is some evidence that it was true. Clay famously claimed that he’d rather be right than President, and as a wag noted, he was neither. Willkie, at least, was batting .500. Failing to effectively exploit a political adversary’s weakness, inhibited in doing so only by one or another scruple, is not the sort of story we tend to tell about our politicians nowadays. One of the better political novels written over the last couple of decades, Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, told the opposite story: Politicians want to win, will do whatever it takes, and are by implication the clear moral inferiors of journalists, novelists, academics and whoever else writes about them. Primary Colors had the grace to seem sad about this alleged state of affairs, in which it makes a fairly striking contrast to the posture assumed by most political commentators I read in the daily or monthly press. It is interesting to speculate about just how archaic an example Willkie may be. Commentators on the Democrats’ refusal to politick more resolutely against a clearly unpopular war tend to explain that diffidence as simple cowardice, but it occurs to me that in some cases there may be something more Willkie-like at work. To take only joy from a disaster damaging to one’s country as well as to one’s political adversaries is scarcely unknown in American politics—to pick a single example, Nixon’s advisers in 1968 were allegedly gleeful when they heard the news of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—but it is not the only possible response to bad news, and assuming that it is seems perverse.
June 1, 2007
JFK, Myths and Countermyths Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:05 PM EST A shrewd and suggestive post by Alex Burns (“Kennedy at 90”) ponders the fate of a JFK who had not been assassinated at in 1963 and runs over a few published alternate histories in which the assassination did not happen, at least one of them very sunny. I fondly remember a darker counterfactual published in the sometimes nasty, often tasteless, and occasionally brilliantly funny National Lampoon. In it, unless my memory is off, JFK evades Oswald’s bullet, then withdraws the troops from Vietnam but sends them to Northern Ireland to expel the British, which prompts protests and civil disobedience from the graying parents of the now-indifferent children who protested the Vietnam War of actual history. JFK also gives away enough government money to every American teenager to fund a year of subsidized globetrotting, thus ensuring no youth revolt; repeals the Twenty-Second Amendment; and is still President in the late 1970s, at which time he makes a stoned pass at his own daughter. The 1960s upheavals have been averted, which in the late or mid ’70s, when the piece was published, was considered a nasty outcome by the sort of people who read the Lampoon. One point of that joke, I think, was to remind Kennedy-worshipping baby boomers that the President they mourned had been anything but a utopian radical and rather had sprung from a sometimes parochial American political subculture and had an imperfectly attractive libertine side. Another point of the joke was the simple pleasure of blasphemy. JFK was still worshipped by much of the culture. But blasphemy can have a point, and in this case, did. Mistaking a man for a god is an error, one the Lampoon’s joke sought to correct. Alex Burns writes that the historian Nigel Hamilton’s alternative history “usefully emphasizes the historical influence of chance events like the assassination.” Of course, that thought cuts many different ways. It is possible that JFK would never have had the vision and courage to ram through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As Mr. Burns notes, JFK certainly wasn’t very bold about civil rights in the years he did serve as President. It is possible that a Kennedy Presidency (Maybe JFK, maybe RFK) would have fought the Vietnam War more vigorously, and for that matter, won it (no bombing pauses, which on one theory lost us the war, by allowing North Vietnam to learn to cope with us, and maybe much more). Fear of a Chinese reaction restrained LBJ and possibly Richard Nixon from certain escalatory possibilities in Vietnam, but that might not have restrained JFK, who was willing to risk nuclear war—after all, he did it in Cuba. He was a Cold Warrior, and at times a reckless one. One oddity of the myth of JFK, and specifically of the myth that all our ills sprang from his premature death, is that it created a counter-myth, in which only his vices were on view. I remember reviewing in the early 1990s a venomous and I thought madly one-sided biography of Kennedy by a formerly-besotted historian at the University of Wisconsin. Kennedy was the last President to cast a durable glamour over a large portion of the press and the academy, and the reaction, when it came, was a little ugly. Now, I think, the reaction is over, at least in the case of Kennedy, but it may have had a long half-life encompassing new objects. The reaction to the unmasking of JFK may included the fact that American journalists and academics are nowadays far more likely to take a mechanically antiheroic view of public men than succumb to the blind worship of any political hero. This is sometimes seen as a great improvement, but my hunch is that stupidity inverted is still a kind of stupidity.
May 30, 2007
How Important Is Television News? V Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:50 PM EST An interesting exchange between Josh Zeitz and John Steele Gordon—“How Important Is Television News?”—prompts these mild thoughts: Josh Zeitz points out that despite Euro-phobias about Fox news running America, the facts are that Fox news has a much wider audience than its cable rivals, a much smaller audience than its network rivals, and a staggeringly smaller audience than NPR’s main news shows. So what is commonly perceived as the electronic right dwarfs the electronic center and is in turn dwarfed by the electronic liberals, and we thus have some grounds for assuming that broadcast news does not much affect our politics, since our electoral politics are often more Foxist than NPR-ist. In any case, Josh Zeitz then looks back at the 1960s, when the alleged effects of broadcast news are said to have turned the American people against segregation and the Vietnam War, and finds that a lot more people were reading newspapers than consuming broadcast news, which suggests that broadcast news cannot have been a significant source of social upheaval. My guess is that who listens matters as much as, maybe more than, how many listen; what looks a lot like upheaval requires a few hundred thousand in the streets of a few cities, repeated over a few years. If demonstrators were over-represented among watchers of broadcast news, that could have mattered. My guess, as it happens, is that it didn’t. I was pretty demonstration prone, and I did not watch or listen to broadcast news. I also read comic books, Zap Comix, to be precise. And I talked to people. 1960s colleges concentrated millions of people in the presence of books, comics, and one another, at a time of life when they had a certain amount of free time, while a steadily expanding economy boomed in a climate of broad idealism and general disinhibition. This may have mattered more than the then novelty of some electronic media. Figuring out the link between what people watch, listen to, or look at and their politics can be tricky. A generation ago, a famous historian discovered that the pre-Revolutionary French spent a lot more time looking at anti-Royalist pornography than reading Rousseau, and some people concluded that porn killed the Old Regime, leaving Rousseau in the clear, and that the French Revolution was more about anti-aristocratic misogyny than more lofty conceptions of politics. I have the impression that we have since returned to a more balanced view: Misogyny mattered more than we once thought, but the French had some conventionally political ideas in addition to the ones spattered through the porn. Do the media matter? Sometimes. I cannot imagine the impeachment of President Clinton without the eager assistance of the media, subsequently disavowed. But sometimes much less than you’d think. The newspapers were steadily more anti-FDR between 1932 and 1944. He won his elections by steadily larger margins. And during the impeachment, New York magazine polled to see how many Americans had heard of any of the much-revered shrieking scolds monopolizing the TV political talk shows. Fewer than 2 percent, if I remember correctly. A fair chunk of the other 98 percent came out to vote in 1998, and the Republicans regretted it, along with some of the media commentators, who opined that the electorate had forfeited the confidence of the press and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. In 2000 there was indeed some penitence on the part of the electorate, although not quite among a majority of it. Some of the same media that had two years before chastised the electorate for too-easily forgiving Clinton now rebuked it for punishing Gore. Go figure. As to the effect of the electronic (and print) media in their current form, one last note. I came of age in a period of relative media civility, at least at the high end of the business. For most of the history of this republic, the press has been sharply politicized and remarkably venomous. One thing I have noticed about the last few years is that political groupings nowadays tend to read their own media. They have a common news source less often than they did in my youth. This does not seem like a healthy development, but we survived it for something like two centuries, and my guess is that we’ll survive it again.
May 30, 2007
American Jews and the Middle East Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 AM EST Josh Zeitz wrote, on the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, that it is “established lore that the Six-Day War encouraged American Jews to reconsider their liberalism on domestic and foreign policy”. He goes on to express skepticism that anything of the kind occurred, especially at the level of foreign policy, since “the standard narrative on American Jews and the Six-Day War is wrong. . . . On a grassroots level Jews continued to identify as liberal Democrats. Exit polls in 1968 indicated that 87 percent of New York City’s Jews voted for the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, down only slightly from 1964 totals, when 92 percent supported Lyndon Johnson. Four years later . . . Jews continued to vote Democratic but in somewhat diminished numbers. Exit polls suggested that McGovern won 66 percent of the Jewish vote nationally but a whopping 85 percent among New York City Jews.” Struck by the durability and breadth of the notion that American Jews control American foreign policy and push it to the right (Josh Zeitz teaches at Cambridge, where this view seems more common than one would have hoped, given the weight of evidence on the other side of the question), he concludes that “the Six-Day War . . . laid the foundation of an inaccurate but still resonant charge that blames American Jews for so many of the world’s woes, even as it fundamentally misreads American Jewish political culture.” I more or less agree with this account of the situation, for given the standard correlates of electoral behavior (wealth is one of them), American Jews continue to vote for the Democrats and support a liberal foreign policy in remarkable numbers. I am not sure that events in the Middle East will always be irrelevant to the electoral behavior of American Jews, but I do think the pattern Josh Zeitz describes will continue for quite a while, although the likely reason for this is not a very cheering one. Here’s why: For most of the period 1967–2007, both major U.S. political parties have followed similar policies on Israel and the Palestinians. While various lunatics contend that this agreement between the major American political parties has occurred because the omni-competent Jews control both of them, a more plausible explanation is that both Democrats and Republicans have seen the long-term future as a two-state solution, which means there will eventually be an Israeli state and a Palestinians state living alongside one another, with at most minor changes in the 1967 borders, and mutual recognition. Israeli politics has sometimes been dominated by a coalition that rejected a two state solution, and most large Israeli political parties have supported the construction of Jewish settlements in areas occupied in 1967, settlements that have often exasperated American Presidents. However, as long as the Palestinian political leadership (the PLO for most of the period since 1967) has conspicuously failed to consent to a two-state solution, instead insisting on what is described as a bi-national and secular state in Palestine, there has been no reason for the Americans to fall out with the Israelis, because no obvious opportunity for a stable peace was being lost on account of Israeli intransigence. From the White House’s perspective, the Israelis can occasionally be very annoying, but they are rarely truly infuriating for any significant length of time. There thus has been no reason for any large number of American Jews to decide that any American President was treating Israel badly. There was a very small exception to this pattern in 1992, but otherwise it has held strong for 40 years. In 1994, when the Palestinian leadership endorsed a two-state solution, the Israeli leadership followed suit, so there was still no obvious reason for the United States to fall out with the Israelis. Since 2000, two dramatic things have happened that have only reinforced this pattern. First, the PLO seems to have been unwilling to accept a two-state solution when one was on offer that year. Although this version of events remains contested, its accuracy is now, alas, irrelevant, because in January of 2006 Hamas won control of the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas explicitly rejects a two-state solution. Until Palestinians accept a two-state solution which the Israelis then reject, the chance of a protracted and truly serious rift between the United States and Israel seems slight, which means that American Jews, even if they care passionately about Israel—and there is some evidence that fewer do than was once the case—have no reason to prefer one U.S. party to the other on the grounds of U.S. policy toward Israel. The perennial demand for the United States to be “more even-handed between Israel and the Palestinians” wanes as soon as the Palestinian leadership visibly declines to accept the permanent existence of an Israeli state in part of Palestine. So for the foreseeable future, my guess is that support for Israel will not much distinguish Democrats and Republicans. Palestinians can probably change that. So far they haven’t.
May 23, 2007
Should America Ignore the Middle East? Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:50 PM EST Edward Luttwak, a very lively polemicist with a taste for intellectual heresy (I interviewed him for American Heritage back in 1989) has published an essay in Prospect Magazine arguing that we pay far too much attention to the Middle East. In the face of the conventional wisdom about Middle Eastern oil becoming more and more important with the industrialization of China and India, Luttwak argues that on the contrary, Middle Eastern oil is becoming steadily less important: “Between 1981 and 1999—a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged—oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world’s crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975.” He notes that oil producers with burgeoning populations who can produce nothing else cannot readily employ oil embargos. They must either sell the oil, or starve. There are probably some fallacies lurking in that—oil is fungible, and demand rising, etc.—but for now, let us ignore them. Similarly, Luttwak thinks that commentators on the Middle East regularly fall victim to what he calls the Mussolini syndrome, which he defines as credulity sufficient to take a militarily contemptible adversary at his own very inflated self-valuation (which is how other European powers regarded Italy until they actually fought her or were allied to her). Luttwak thinks that the conventional military power of Middle Eastern states (other than Israel) is derisory, and notes that Western states have twice crushed what was almost certainly the most formidable Middle Eastern Muslim state, Iraq, with almost no Western casualties. He thinks Iran is even more militarily hopeless than Iraq was, and he seems to imply that destroying Iranian nuclear facilities will not produce any devastating increase in terrorism, because Iran is already employing terrorists, whom we have handily survived and against whose employer we can cheaply and effectively retaliate. He thinks Iran is a crumbling multinational empire with a regime loathed by many, perhaps most, of its subjects, and he has a case. As for the cultural creativity of the Middle East, and hence its long-run economic power, Luttwak notes that it has the second lowest literacy rate of any region in the world, one more reason that “we devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa.” There is a lot more, all of it provocative, and while I think the conclusion—that we can and should ignore Middle Eas—is close to ridiculous, the notion that experts can mistakenly assume the crucial importance of a power or region is almost certainly right. Post-World War II France fought hard for its empire, lost, and got steadily richer, while the crimes it has committed to maintain neo-colonial influence in Africa have secured it amazingly small if any advantage in the world of nations. At the end of the nineteenth century, European states regularly contemplated war for generally valueless African colonies. In the mid-nineteenth century, energy resources (of wood) seemed to be running out, and in the eighteenth, access to the hi-tech naval construction material oak also seemed worth fighting for. Stalin won a pyrrhic victory against Finland for some useless buffer territory around Leningrad. At the end of the nineteenth century, the apparently vast wealth of Argentina, the looming economic giant of the New World, mesmerized some economic strategists. Not only Mussolini wasted the time of most strategic analysts who thought about him; Napoleon III produced a lot of useless anxiety too. Cases of geopolitical-analyst tribes who agreed on the crucial importance of something and were ludicrously wrong would repay close study. It seems too much to hope that Luttwak is right about the Middle East, but the larger question is fascinating.
May 22, 2007
That Curious New Yorker Cover Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:30 PM EST Some disconcerting cover art made me reconsider the Star Wars blog I posted last night, which deprecated the power of visual over verbal material. The May 28 New Yorker arrived yesterday, its cover (which you can see here) a painted cartoon of U.S. soldiers hoisting an American flag over what seems to be the chassis of a burnt-out vehicle; I puzzled over this image a bit, and then decided that the flag was being raised over the remains of an Iraqi car bomb, or perhaps a U.S. soft-skinned vehicle destroyed by an IED. The flag is at half staff, which is the symbol of respect for (and mourning of) the dead. The image recalls the famous Rosenthal photo of the flag being hoisted atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima, the iconic image of American sacrifice and victory in war. The painting is titled “Half Staff.” What does it mean? My first thought was that it is about the use and abuse of history. The image of sacrifice and triumph in war had been here redeployed to create a context in which there has been much sacrifice but no triumph, so as to argue that perhaps there can be no triumph in Iraq. The memory of the Second World War is sometimes deployed to justify or make sense of the war in Iraq, but this art disputes such a use of memory. Troops can take an almost impregnable mountain if they are prepared to pay the price; in the Second World War, we commonly understand our experience to mean that enough sacrifice took enough mountains, metaphorical and otherwise, and we won. In Iraq the burnt-out car, if Iraqi, may suggest psychological and not physical territory is being contested, i.e., territory that cannot be subdued in similar fashion. The cartoon may argue that we are making a category mistake; this is not a war like that other one, and it cannot come out the same way, which is to say, successfully. The cartoon may mean this without it being true, but the compression the cartoon achieves is remarkable. Millions of words have been deployed to argue that this war is in some fundamental way not at all like that other one, which the cartoon does wordlessly and with greater power. On the other hand, the cartoon may be referencing the recent loss of some American soldiers in a particular ambush, some of whom have disappeared, and who are very probably dead. So the painted flag is at half staff, and real flags should be. The cartoon may be arguing that we have not sufficiently attended to the deaths of our young men, who deserve to be as present to our grieving minds as past soldiers are, around this coming Memorial Day weekend. This is a common trope among both opponents and defenders of the war, for different reasons. The New Yorker, first a cautious defender of the war in Iraq, latterly an opponent, could intend a number of things on that score. As noted above, the cartoon’s possible arguments may be false—for example, the discipline and sacrifice of British soldiers in Northern Ireland eventually defeated a terrorist insurgency there (most terrorist insurgencies waged by ethnic or sectarian minorities in the long run fail, although few fail to enemies as disciplined as the postwar British army, and thus as relatively disinclined to reprisal by atrocity). But in this case, anyway, I have never seen a false verbal argument as quietly powerful and impressive as this possibly false non-verbal argument. I am not sure why that is. Perhaps it is because the argument, while compressed, is also stripped down; its strongest visual element honors and mourns the dead, whereas some verbal argument equivalents do not do that sufficiently persuasively. If a category mistake is here implied, it is done without gloating. In any case, it may be worth remembering that despite the sort of memory the Suribachi flag-raising evokes, the war against Japan did not end in victory because of U.S. sacrifice. It ended because when Japan sought to break its enemies’ will by creating fear via deployment of a weapon even more high tech than the suicide-driven car bomb—the Japanese went in for suicide-piloted plane bombs—the United States decided to inflict exponentially greater terror, which broke Japanese will. In the case of Iraq, this is extremely unlikely to be done by the U.S. What is more likely is that the Shiite majority the Sunni Arab minority seeks to terrify into submission will inflict that crushing counter terror. So if discipline and sacrifice fail in Iraq, and it may, counter terror will again prevail, rather than the terror of our current adversaries. Which doesn’t make that New Yorker cover any less powerful a work of art.
May 21, 2007
Star Wars Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:40 PM EST The homepage of this website notes that this is the anniversary of the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back, the first Star Wars sequel. It wasn’t much, and by my standards, things got steadily and rapidly worse; I stopped watching after the beginning of the second trilogy. Too bad. The first installment of Star Wars, in 1977, was in its own way thrilling. What happened? In part, someone apparently made the decision to drop the mental age of the intended audience by a few decades with each successive episode. Maybe family movies were the best business to be in, or maybe someone only thought that was the case, but the effect was dispiriting. Another possibility is that nothing had ever before looked like the first installment, which was thus visually thrilling. I have a vague sense that the first one was very early CGI, so maybe nothing could have ever looked like that before—the trick photography of earlier film was suddenly measured against new technical possibilities, and found wanting. There was also some visual wit, and an intriguing pseudo-realism about the way that movie looked. Before 1977, I am pretty sure that all TV and move spaceships were gleaming and spanking new, the very essence of visual hypermodernity. In Star Wars, old spaceships looked rusty and dented, in some cases clearly obsolete. When I looked at the movie seven years on, preparing to debate it with some minor academic luminary at a seminar on recent cultural history, I was startled to see how dreadfully it had aged. What had looked startling in 1977 looked very dreary, decidedly old hat, by 1984. Seen a second time, Star Wars was filled with very little homages, visual and otherwise, to incompatible genres of film—World War II bomber movies, epics of the British Raj, tramp steamers in the South Seas, and so forth down the line, but those genres were mostly invoked only with petty visual tropes: a 1940s-style pilot’s leather jacket, something two-barreled that moved like a pom pom gun (but was set in a ball turret), or a solar topee. Some of the characters were savagely indebted to older movie personae, and those, too, were oddly melded. Someone obviously knew the history of the movies but didn’t sufficiently value the thematic conventions of the genres that were being pillaged, at least not enough to do them any real justice. Star Wars had looked wonderful, but it seemed to have economized on aspects of the writing, which didn’t matter when irony and wit were allowed to dominate the tone but suddenly mattered all too much when irony and wit were pared away. One of the oldest jokes about the movies turns on an actress allegedly so dumb she slept with the writer, a joke that has an oddly sharp point when pondered in the light of the Star Wars sequels. And it turns out that nothing, absolutely nothing, ages so fast as the look of the new. Perhaps the movies, as a very learned screenwriter I used to know long insisted, are not really a visual art.
May 20, 2007
Whatever Happened to the Aviators? II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:10 PM EST John Steele Gordon titled a blog entry on Charles Lindbergh with the question “Whatever happened to the aviators?” The question is answered in the piece itself, which notes that within something like half a century an extremely rare experience—heavier than air flight—became a very common one, and correspondingly a more difficult experience to romanticize. The (sometimes black) magic of flight is not quite gone; most movie footage of helicopters (I recently rented Blood Diamond, where this was still true) or fighter bombers (any episode of 24 where the USAF is attempting to shoot down a terrorist cruise missile, on the evidence of that show a curiously ubiquitous weapon in the terrorist arsenal) still assumes the romance of aviation, at least of military aviation. But in general, I concede the point; flying now seems humdrum to a lot of people. If our species is unlucky, this very fact may make our age impossibly glamorous to posterity. We’ll be the ones who mastered the heavens, and then fell, Icarus-like, in some catastrophe; we’ll probably be simultaneously thought justly punished for our hubris and almost inconceivably magnificent. If, on the other hand, the species is lucky, people will rather marvel that we ate imperfectly thawed garbage while packed together like sardines, merely to fly very slowly in machines efficient only at depleting the ozone. This will be a little like the way I cannot quite credit the astonishing dangerousness of early steam trains, and the fact that people boarded them other than at gunpoint. Early aviation was hazardous and achieved an ancient and for millennia apparently hopeless ambition, so early aviators were justly famous. I think Charles Lindbergh, at least, was romantic for additional reasons. He was American, in a decade when that generally meant hope and hypermodernity to Europeans (and to most other peoples who’d heard of us), and he did what he did quite alone, in an age when merely collective endeavors in both war and economic life seemed the common fate. So Lindbergh’s feat was both atavistically heroic and forward-looking. There is a nice essay on Lindbergh and the imagination of modernity in Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, part of a large, ambitious, and interesting (if not entirely persuasive) argument. In any event, while the romance that gilded First World War fighter pilots was probably the result of an attempt to preserve the ethos of The Iliad in an age of industrialized slaughter, Lindbergh’s feat was dangerous without being murderous; he was a distinctly postwar hero, and at first blush an appealingly modest and taciturn one. He came a cropper only when he took the Luftwaffe at its leaders’ boastful valuation and in consequence developed some eventually ugly politics. Subsequent events took the shine off Lindbergh, but not off all pilots, because the Luftwaffe, too, came a cropper, at the hands of a smallish number of other pilots. That last bunch remain, for those who remember them, the most romantic heroes of all time. Aviator now sounds not only period, but camp; Spitfire, on the other hand, sounds period, but it is not yet camp, and I am not sure it ever will be. Back in 1981 I remember eating my lunch at a pub opposite the British Library, idly watching some other patrons, lean, silver-haired men in beautiful suits. One of their number was talking, with slightly unusual animation for someone who looked like that, about something he’d done that weekend. His arm waved, and the blade of his hand described an arc, which the arms and hands of speaking middle-class Englishmen rarely did, and I realized he was describing having recently flown a small airplane. With a sudden thrill, and perhaps a little too much imagination, I told myself that they were all old enough. It was suddenly like seeing Odysseus and Ajax talk about old times, except insofar as it wasn’t, for it was more morally satisfying than that first sight would have been. Perhaps the glory of aviators is not entirely dead.
May 19, 2007
Cheaper by the Dozen Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:15 PM EST I read with great interest Ellen Feldman’s post on Cheaper by the Dozen. I am not sure I’ve seen the movie, but I did read the book, because it was one of the volumes my elementary school’s librarians pushed on schoolchildren. In those days, some of the books I read came to my attention in that fashion, and the same books were also given as presents by well-meaning if unimaginative adults. Many were published in series—I remember the Landmark books (biographies), general science-ish things that were collectively called the About books, and some slim Prussian-blue volumes that seemed to be older and shorter accounts of the sorts of people covered in the Landmark series. All of these seemed inferior to the books you found on your own, because they were tainted by the approval of the school authorities and could be guaranteed to lack the erotic charge that came your way when you accidentally pulled Balzac’s Droll Stories off a top shelf at home. But among this inferior class of book recommended by school librarians, books not published in series or published too recently somehow seemed more legit, more like real books. I was suspicious of Cheaper by the Dozen because the goody-two-shoes types who accepted librarians’ suggestions without any evident skepticism had all read it before I had, but in the event, Cheaper by the Dozen was readable enough. As it happens, I also remember—very vaguely—something like the scene Ellen Feldman quotes from the film—the deadpan joke played on the Planned Parenthood visitor. At the time it puzzled me. This would have been the late 1950s, almost everyone in our school was part of a family with three children, and while a family with a dozen children seemed engagingly old-timey, even gently mocking someone who wanted people to have families more like the ones I knew about seemed an off note, not malevolent but strange. Years later, in a grad school labor history course, I “learned” that Frank Gilbreth’s time-and-motion studies were a villainous attempt to intensify the rate of surplus value extraction (I paraphrase here, although perhaps not as much as the reader may think). In this little demonology, Gilbreth was conflated with his rival Frederick Winslow Taylor, from whom he in fact differed a bit, but the point of the lesson was that the apparently innocent texts of a childhood in the Eisenhower years concealed vicious ideological indoctrination. My guess, half a century on, is that this was not the whole of the truth of Cheaper by the Dozen, and that the scene Ellen Feldman quotes from the movie version is nastier than the alleged Taylorism of the text. Later in grad school we learned that Lenin and Stalin had admired Taylorism; that really set the cat among the pigeons, although most of the pigeons soon learned to forget the presence of the cat. In the case of the film’s pro-natalism—its ideological commitment to large families, and hostility to birth control—I do not remember quite how much of that was in the book. The book was published in 1946, around the time the families I grew up with were starting, which points to one of the great truths about propaganda for pro-natalism: It is a hard sell. Hitler made it work, but not too many others have. My guess is that middle-class people in the West may well begin to have larger families than are now the case in the currently rich countries, but not because of ideological attacks on birth control. As for the sexual politics of 1950s American film, I remember the odd experience of sitting through an afternoon double feature at a revival house in the late 1970s, where I had gone to recover from the rigors of grad school, possibly from a labor history seminar. The bill was Topper (1937) followed by Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948, from a book published in 1946, the same year as Cheaper by the Dozen). Most of the members of the audience were retired couples, who could date a film within a year from the characters’ dresses, and did. My memory is that the female characters in Topper were sexier, less kittenish, more grown-up, and that there was something off-puttingly pro-natalist about the later film. And I remember thinking that the history of sexual liberation, like many other histories, does not always move in straight lines.
May 17, 2007
The Stark Incident Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:45 PM EST Jack Kelly’s lead piece on this website, “Iraq Attacks America (Accidentally?), 1987,” commemorates an Iraqi attack on an American frigate, the USS Stark, in which 37 American sailors were killed. The Stark was part of an operation aimed at protecting commerce in the Persian Gulf, more specifically one that would eventually protect neutral merchantmen from Iranian attacks, in a war started in 1980 by Iraq with a full-scale invasion of Iran, and subsequently escalated by Iraq into a naval war marked by attacks on oil tankers, which provoked Iranian reprisals. Why was the United States siding with Iraq? In part because the Islamic Republic of Iran had kidnapped American diplomats during the hostage crisis of 1979–1981, thus violating one of the more sacred principles of international law, and thereby had made itself into an outlaw state in a pretty literal way: Having so foully broken the laws of nations, Iran was refused the protection of the law. That phrase is more than a little bombastic; more pertinently and usefully, Iran was deprived of significant U.S. military assistance, which might otherwise have been afforded her in the face of naked aggression. There were other reasons for American support of Iraq—for example, protecting the weaker oil-rich Sunni Arab Gulf states from a radical Shiite Iranian regime, which made the Iraqi Baathists look like a lesser evil, and stopping any single power from controlling the oil reserves of both Iraq and Iran. But had the Iranians not seized our diplomats, it seems almost inconceivable that the United States would have repeatedly and fairly openly intervened on the side of the very obvious and in many ways despicable aggressor. American policy was at times confused, at other times inept, and sometimes contradictory, but we won our end, which was to ensure the (temporary) survival of Iraq as an independent state, no matter what that state’s crimes. The Iraqis lost their initial territorial gains pretty quickly; after a year or so, Saddam Hussein was fighting only for survival, which he managed (for a while) to secure. Over the course of the war Iraq inflicted something like a million casualties on Iran, which means that the earlier pleasures of humiliating and enraging the Americans, which were very sweet at the time, and the political intricacies of which may have created the Islamic Republic, turned out to be very expensive. To the extent that the price of those pleasures was belatedly understood, they may have turned from sweet to bitter, but it is not clear that many if any Iranian Islamists thought (or think) a million casualties were too high a price for seizing and maintaining power. That means it is not clear that any lesson was learned about not paying too much for your whistle, to recall a phrase from Poor Richard’s Almanack, one my maternal grandfather tended to quote with some frequency. Are there any other lessons from the policy that claimed 37 dead aboard the Stark? Fewer, I think, than once seemed to be the case. At the time, it seemed clear that we had no idea what we were doing during the Iran-Iraq War, semi-covertly aiding first one side, then the other, unless we were absolutely pure and at every moment brilliantly effective Machiavels, which seems unlikely, given all other available evidence about the people who devise and administer American foreign policy. In retrospect, though, the worst outcomes—the annexation of Iran’s oil provinces by Iraq, or of all of Iraq by Iran—were avoided. Having learned that the price of naked aggression is not always war with the United States, and that it is often a bad idea to pick on anyone remotely your own size, let alone bigger, Saddam invaded Kuwait, from which he was not-too-expensively expelled, at least in terms of American lives and treasure. So the Reagan and Bush Administrations muddled through, and as far as the Iraq-Iran War goes, it is not clear what a better and clearly attainable outcome would have looked like. The United States winked at one great evil to punish and ward off another; we were ham-handed, dishonest, and at times cowardly; many of the people who devised and executed our policy were fools or worse. But pointing this out is more damning if an obviously superior alternate policy can be sketched out. And a quarter century on, I am less sure than I used to be that it can be.
May 15, 2007
Edward Jenner Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:40 AM EST The front page of this website noted yesterday that May 14 is the anniversary of Edward Jenner’s 1796 first vaccination of a patient. Jenner had noticed that milkmaids did not generally get smallpox, and he inoculated an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, with material gathered from cowpox blisters on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes. I think modern historians of medicine now count Jenner as one of six people who over a period of a quarter century tested the possibility of using a cowpox-derived vaccine to immunize people against smallpox, but when I was a small boy reading more simplified and heroic accounts, Jenner invented vaccination, and modern medicine was born. It may in fact have been born at any one of a number of earlier and later moments, depending on how you choose to define medical modernity; I remember learning only later in life that for almost all of history the medical profession was in many respects as likely to kill you as to cure you, and that this would continue to be the case for many decades after Jenner. The crucial episodes in changing that ratio of results, as I remember the heroic and simplified version of the story, included vaccination, antisepsis, and antibiotics. In the popular histories of my youth, there were a fair number of medical heroes and very few if any medical villains. Then, when I was in my thirties, HIV was discovered, and there were some reported cases of doctors refusing to work on patients who had been infected with the virus. It was shocking, and instructive: Doctors looked less systematically heroic than they had before, and the art and science of medicine looked less absolutely impressive. In the first decades of the antibiotic revolution, laypeople may have had an easy notion that all infections could be cured. It wasn’t true, HIV brought that home, and more skepticism about medicine, science generally, and technical expertise seemed to find expression in both mass and elite culture. But we tend to overcorrect mistakes. The great revolution in our technical culture is biotechnology, and over the next decades it seems as reasonable to expect fantastic increases in our power over disease as it is to expect new pessimism and humility. Possibly as a result, the antiscientific prejudices of some academics in the humanities are now starting to look as old-fashioned as that mid-twentieth century fawning on the medical profession. Some simplified stories, after all, remain largely true. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox an eradicated disease, and I remember reading about it and thinking that for almost all of history, that would have been a nonesense sentence. How, during all those millennia, could a disease possibly have been “eradicated”? Jenner remains a real hero, in fact a wonderful one, even after the more sophisticated versions of medical history have been written and widely circulated.
May 12, 2007
LoveMusik Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:35 PM EST A new musical, LoveMusik, chronicles the intertwined lives and careers of the composer Kurt Weill and the actress Lotte Lenya, who were first Germans and then Americans, part of that vast gift Adolf Hitler made to the United States of America when he forced a lot of fiercely talented Europeans across an ocean and almost all of them stayed. The musical is based on a published collection of Weill’s and Lenya’s letters to one another over a quarter century, Speak Low, edited by the music historian Kim Kowalke, which has been turned into a musical by Alfred Uhry, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, at the request of the director Harold Prince. I am not sure how good LoveMusik is—few if any of the very beautiful Weill songs in its score are sung in anything like their entirety, the play seems too long and by its end mawkish—but in places I found it wonderfully affecting. It begins in Weimar Berlin, with the first encounter of its principals, an occasion on which Lenya seduced Weill in a rowboat, and ends with an irritable and nervous Lenya putting on stage makeup, waiting to reprise what was arguably her greatest achievement with Weill and Bertolt Brecht, the 1927 production of The Threepenny Opera. She thinks she is running the risk of ridicule by reviving the role, and her director agrees, but they will prove to be mistaken, of which more below. Weill had other great operas, some of then with the same collaborator and singer—The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and Happy End—and a string of successes in America, where he died at the age of 50—but Threepenny Opera remains, I think, the most accessible and probably the most famous work from his period as a European composer. Weill remade himself into an American composer in exile (although did not think of it as exile; he was, in his view, very much an American) by assiduously studying American popular music, and he wrote for both our stage and our screen. Some of what he did in America has passionate admirers, and their admiration is not foolish; I have seen delightful revivals of some of the American musicals—One Touch of Venus and Lady In the Dark—but the Weimar period saw Weill’s most brilliant work. Neither that work nor the Berlin years generally become the focus of LoveMusik, which rather recounts Weill’s and Lenya’s complicated collective life (they were twice married, in 1926 and 1937, divorced in 1933, and both marriages had their difficulties). But the play does end with what I find a moving reference to the most influential recreation of The Threepenny Opera for an American audience, the 1954 production at the Theatre de Lys. That is the production the actress Donna Murphy is preparing for as LoveMusik closes, and she is wearing the costume her character Jenny wore in the photograph taken for the album cover of the recording of that famous production. It took me a minute to realize that, my visual memory only cueing when the orchestra began the raucous, thrilling overture to The Threepenny Opera, and the play ended. Walking out onto a New York sidewalk, I reflected that while Weill and Lenya were Americans, one thing immigrant Americans do is add to the great, fabulously rich intermixture of our culture. Weill and Lenya let Americans take possession of one of the most harshly brilliant periods of modern European culture; the memory (and reworking) of Weimar is now as much ours as it is anyone’s, a mass legacy probably in significant part inherited via the effect of that 1954 play revived in Greenwich Village. American culture is so easily exported that people annoyed by its ubiquity somehow imply that the business is done at the point of a gun, or the moral equivalent thereof, which is of course ridiculous—although it is true, as LoveMusik reminds us, that a fair amount of the culture we’ve imported arrived at the point of a gun.
May 11, 2007
Gary Hart III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 AM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that “there are some situations in which a public figure’s sex life is fair game for journalists. When a politician sets himself up as an advocate of moral virtues or family values, but leads a life that’s inconsistent with his own ethical prescriptions, it should be legitimate for journalists to challenge him.” I do not agree to this without some pangs, since there are degrees of hypocrisy, some more culpable than others, and I can imagine some hard cases making for bad law, but the broad principle seems right. I suspect Mr. Burns is also right when he writes that “we live in a time when public personalities have to lay open their private lives, and regrettable though that may be, I doubt that it’s possible to turn back the proverbial clock”—but I am not absolutely certain. I can imagine the United States adopting European Union–style privacy laws, although the EU instead moving in our direction seems more likely. If the U.S. did that, the courts might in the long run uphold such laws, despite current views of the First Amendment difficulties; if Congress felt sufficiently strongly, its use of the impeachment power would almost certainly contract the courts’ views of the First Amendment. The Internet, if it stays as weakly regulated as it is now, would in any event make such laws ineffective, although I suppose foreign politicians just might enforce laws protecting the sexual privacy of all politicians more vigorously than they police, say, child pornography; self-interest can make for impressive solidarity. As a general principle, I am not positive that any social or legal trend is irreversible, which is sometimes a comfort (slavery), and sometimes not (once again, slavery). My suggestion of deterrence by way of reprisal was not too serious, but when all is said and done, it might have some useful effect on what was once known, perhaps wishfully, as the respectable press. If salacious gossip appeared only in those tabloids you can buy at a supermarket checkout counter, the ones retailing news of UFOs and such like, people would probably be less likely to credit that gossip. And the threat of effective reprisal does sometimes work; tort law is not without its successes, ditto, in their day, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
May 8, 2007
Gary Hart Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:30 PM EST Today’s lead piece on this website, by John Steele Gordon, is titled “Gary Hart’s Monkey Business: How and Why a Candidate Got Caught.” Monkey Business, as Mr. Gordon points out, was the name of the yacht on which Hart was photographed with a woman to whom he was not married. The photographs appeared after the press had staked out Hart, after getting a tip that he was having an affair, and after reporters had seen the woman emerge from Hart’s townhouse. My memory is that when the press could not immediately prove that Hart had slept with the woman, a reporter asked him whether he had ever slept with any woman to whom he was not married. Hart, if I recall correctly, was understandably flustered when asked this question. Mr. Gordon concludes by noting, I think correctly, that “his political career ended because he failed to realize that the rules of the game with regard to the private lives of politicians had also fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of Watergate.” It would be nice if we could figure out how to restore the older rules. I think a politician’s sexual life is none of my business, any more than mine is of a politician’s. I find it disgusting that the press hounds politicians about legal aspects of their consensual sexual lives, and does so with orgiastic hypocrisy, claiming some purpose higher than boosting circulation by appealing to salacious interest and Grundyism. The First Amendment is normally taken to guarantee the press’s right to so invade the lives of politicians, so European-style privacy laws will not, apparently, survive judicial scrutiny. Here’s what might work: A rich and public-spirited citizen could endow a foundation to fund the similar hounding of reporters who write such stories and editors and publishers who print them. I think something like this briefly flared up, on a purely volunteer basis, during the hounding of President Clinton, when the sexual irregularities of a few reporters (and Republican elected officials) were circulated by some sauce-for-the-gander types. All of those thus exposed were outraged, but a few of them also shut up. A $100 million endowment, to fund absolutely tireless gossips who would be restricted to violating the privacy only of those who had cast first stones, but who would then hound such types to the grave, would be money well spent. This would not work with hard core exhibitionists, and we have a few exhibitionist-moralists in the press, but we do not have too many. People who exult in invading other people’s privacy are nonetheless generally more chary of seeing their own private lives on public view.
May 7, 2007
Royal America Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon points out that Louis XVI was not the grandson but the great-great-great-grandson of Louis XIV. My error, and an embarrassing one; I once knew this, more or less (I might have been off by one or two grands) and wrote without thinking. He also notes, parenthetically, that “the counterfactual history of an undivided British Empire is toothsome to contemplate, but I prefer what actually happened.” “Toothsome” means agreeable, attractive, or delicious. I am pretty sure Mr. Gordon does not mean that he finds the idea of a durably hegemonic British empire purely exhilarating, or preferable to the history that actually happened, but rather that he finds it intriguing and not absolutely repellent to think about that alternate world, and if so, I agree with him. But while we agree, I am pretty sure many either don’t or wouldn’t, not least because of my strong impression that an undivided British Empire—undivided in the sense of retaining control of what is now the United States—is oddly underrepresented in novels of alternate history. So people who enjoy thinking about alternate historical worlds have been oddly chary about thinking about that one. Is that because a British empire including what is now the United States is too awful to contemplate? That seems unlikely. People write a lot of novels about dystopian alternate worlds—the most common themes of alternate history are Hitler victorious and the Confederate States of America victorious—but amazingly few people write about George III victorious. One exception is the 1995 novel The Two Georges, by Harry Turtledove and the actor Richard Dreyfuss, who imagined an imperial America abolishing slavery without a Civil War, with the results that technological innovation is much slower and the subversive, pro–American independence Sons of Liberty terrorist group is a viciously racist organization, with the result in turn that black Americans are very, very loyal royalists. I don’t remember whether this British Empire was also better for Native Americans, but it very possibly would have been. In the historical empire, the imperial authorities back in London tended to be less mass-murderous than the settlers on the expanding frontiers. Turtledove and Dreyfus seemed to be liberals thinking hard, and a bit pessimistically, about American populism and democracy; it was not a brilliantly-written book, but it was a mildly interesting one. Uchronia.net, the magisterial Internet resource for alternate history, contains a list of all points of divergence for alternate histories, and it looks as if Turtledove and Dreyfuss have rather few rivals in exploring this theme. Tracking it by looking at points of divergence in the 1760s and 1780s does not exhaust the possibilities. That approach would miss, for example, Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, which are playful fantasies of an Angevin Empire grown to include North America and surviving into the twentieth century. But it is suggestive. There are more alternate histories of a British Empire that retained greater relative strength because the United States didn’t stay unified—not just the Confederacy-victorious books but also intriguing one like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, where the British Empire develops computers in the early nineteenth century. There is a grim and fascinating novel, Simon Louvish’s The Resurrections, in which post–World War II decolonization never happens because the Seco |
