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 |
