Dear Guy,
I am a self-aggrandizing 8-year-old. Some of my greedy friends say there is no Obama. My security guard says, "if you read it in a blog, it's so." Please tell me the truth. Is there an Obama?
Condoleeza O'Reo
________________________
Condoleeza, your piggy little friends are wrong. The have been infected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see on cable TV. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Condoleeza, whether they be men's or children's, are as little as yours. In this great universe of ours, men are mere insects, or ants, in their intellect as compared with the boundless (and warming) planet around them, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and power. How can you doubt if Obama is The One?
Yes, Condoleeza, there is an Obama. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and credulity that can be exploited, and you know that they abound and give to all our lives their highest beauty and joy. Alas! how hopeless would be the world if there were no Obamas to market the audacity of hope? It would be as flat and profitless as if there were no Condoleezas, and no international oil cartel. There would be no childlike faith in market economics then, no poetry, no sensational and carnival-like electoral cycles to make tolerable this subservient existence. We would have no enjoyment, then, except in blackberries and pornography. The brilliant white light with which credulity enlightens the warming planet would be extinguished. It would be like a sad and melancholy existence in a dreary world unillumined by Adam Smith's restricted economics or the guidance of the magnificently gifted oligarchical families whom the Almighty has in his infinite wisdom sent to lead our hesitant and faltering footsteps along Wall Stret's pathway to perfect and perpetual profit. Where would we be in our fallen state if it were not for the Browns, the Bloombergs, the Cheneys, the Clintons, the Corzines, the Cuomos, the Daleys, the Doles, the Forbes, the Humphreys, the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts, the Saltonstalls, the Tafts and the Youngs sent to guide us? Where would we be without Ebony and Fortune? America then would look like Renaissance Italy without the Borgias, the Medici, the della Rovere, the Sforzas and Niccolo Machiavelli to enlighten and bring order to their city-states and their assiduous mayors (podestas).
Not believe in Obama! You might as well not believe in flunkys or fairies. You might get General Petreus to draft civilians to watch all the oil derricks on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus going down a derrick, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things are those that neither voters nor children can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on Wall Street? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there, or in the Congress, or the Pentagon,or armed resistence to the global financial empire.
You can tear apart the Middle East in a quixotic quest for weapons of mass distruction, but there is a veil covering the unseen world of fantasy which not the strongest man, not even the united strength of all the strongest military forces in the world could ever tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love and an irrepressible attraction toward the summum bonum can push aside the curtain of transient profit to picture the supernal beauty and glory of another world beyond. Is it all for real? Ah, Condoleeza, in all this world there is nothing more real and abiding than our illusions.
No Obama! Thank the Almighty! He lives and lives in the hearts of humankind forever. A thousand years from now, Condoleeza, 10,000 years from now, Obama's fiat mintage of small change will continue to inflate and gladden the credulous hearts of ambitious men who share a childlike faith in the American form of predatory plutocracy.
-----Wall Street Sun
Deo gratias
NIHIL OBSTAT
NIHIL OBSTAT
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
DUCK SOUP: PHANTOM GOURMOND VISITS MAISON DE MOTYL
Alexander J. Motyl. Imperial Ends. The Decay, Collapse and Revival of Empires. New York: Columbia University Press, c. 2001.
A couple of weeks ago the reknowned Continental chef Magda de Motyl picked me up at my luxurious East Side Apartment above 82nd Street, a mile north of Bloomingdale's, escorted me to the subway and accompanied me under the river to emerge in one of the many grimy, decaying neighborhoods of working-class Newark, New Jersey. She held my hand feverishly as we ascended a low eminence to enter at last a majestic, Viking-style eating hall ("Maison de Motyl") at the peak of the low-browed hillock ("Freedom Heights"), where the eyes of all men could feast upon us in repressed envy.
APERATIF
At the gentle urgings of my solicitous escort, widely reknowned as a witty conversationalist, I resolved to try the Canard au Motyl, modestly named after herself. As we dallied over the Bloody Marys and indulged in footsie under the table, the chef (famous in Newark) explained duck anatomy to me. Duck, she explained, was now back in fashion after a long absence. It is a migratory fowl with a central torso and peripheral limbs that sometimes act independently. "Theorizing about duck," she breathed confidentially, "may be a challenge but it is not insurmountable." Duck disposes of a hierarchically organized nervous system with a brain at the center and a rim of peripheral ganglia that feed information to the center, which in turn parcels out commands to the limbs. Decay is caused by a weakening of the brain; decline is a weakening of the fowl's physical prowress and a decline in prestige throughout the barnyard pecking order; disassemblage represents a rotting away of the extremities; attrition is manifest when rodents in the hen-house appear to nibble away at the weakened and near-immobile corpus; and revival is made manifest by the re-emergence of a healthy brain and torso, possibly after a vetinary's injection to restore the fluid circulation in a desiccated body which has lost confidence in its capacities.
The chef's appreciation of the duck is focussed exclusively on its anatomical structure. She denies it free will, and ardently believes that "agency-oriented, choice-centered and intentionalist" behavior is beyond the capacity of a dumb bird.
Recalling the assiduous observations of a hospitable Baltic guide for Hamburgers and Frankfurters touring from Germany, Rein Taagepera (the "Latvian Flash"), Ms. Motyl notes that the ideal trajectory of a falling duck imitates a parabola. In the tenebrous background of the refectory a hand-wound grammophone began to grind forth a recitation of "Parabolic ballad" by the famous Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky., who wrote:
Each gets to the truth with his own parameter
a worm finds a crack, man makes a parabola"
Evidently the same holds true for ducks. The same would be true for all ducks, should other factors not intervene. All ducks have the same morphology, and this identical structure holds the key to understanding the relationship between brain and limbs, head and wings, core and periphery. Nevertheless, Ms. Motyl's sample is delimited to the swamps and shores of eastern and central Europe, without regard to the Mediteranean, the Atlantic, or the slanted morphological characteristics of Oriental ducks. She is pessimistic regarding the survival of a single endangered species, le carnard russe or Russian Duck, predicting its increasing isolation within a restricted habitat.
ANTIPASTO
Dissecting the torso of the fallen fowl at our table with a ceremonial flourish of rhetorical scalpels, my loquacious chef pointed again to the brain as supreme in the hierarchy of avian organs, communicating along ganglia to subordinated control cells in the extended limbs which cannot communicate or signal to each other. But as she looked momentarily askew, I whispered surreptitiously into my cell-phone recorder that she seemed unaware of the radically differing morphology of the corporately-dominant Oriental species, the Japanese Kereitsu and the Korean Chaebol. The Japanese duck has its stomach as the center,or energy bank, with all the other organs feeding from it or contributing to it. The Korean Chaebol takes the heart as the structural center, pumping red blood cells around the corpus including the subordinate stomach with its bank of digestive energy, and used to enjoy a distinctive 5-year feeding cycle for both its northern and southern sub-species. Both of these spreading species slant quite markedly away from the "straight-and-level" European duck structure with which my companion is, apparently, exclusively familiar. But with all species, when the peripheral organs begin to communicate directly with each other, by-passing the Center, disassemblage occurs as the corpus disintegrates.
Kitchen theorists of cuisine take "stability" of the anatomical structure of duck as their base-line. They are uniformly troubled by change. A spark, or a shock, such as a shotgun blast, is requisite to down a ruptured duck. But "One could," Chef Motyl ventured with a wink, "just as easily start with change, and puzzle over stability." But as a trusted employee of the trans-Atlantic Kitchen Condominium, she wouldn't dare. For it would be a form of culinary treachery to entertain the concept that a duck could expire from internally-generated causes. It must always be downed by "shocks from outside," such as errant stones flung by a blindfolded Fortuna, or a wicked boy. Theories of change, to the loyal kitchen crew, are as incomprehensible as "theories of anarchy."
Nevertheless, after darkness falls, the kitchen scullions mutter sotto voce that anatomical theory alone cannot explain the timing of life events in a duck's aging, that rational choice theories erroneously attribute a capacity of ratiocination to an avian brain which lacks the capacity to embrace it, and that anatomical structuralism downgrades both the ideology of avian supremacy shared by all birds and the species-specific cultural quackery of duckdom, just as practitioners of haut cuisine do not transcend the blood-red lines of their own practice. Even Chef Motyl concedes that structuralist or morphological theories of duck anatomy are partial theories. But she simply prefers them (or finds them more accessible) to "agency, choice, and intentionalist" theories, which are self-contradictory, quite confusing,and and above the capacity of the average dead duck anyway on its way to the cutting board.
PASTO
The health of the edible fowl begins to decline as the brain, or center of the normal avian nervous system, begins to expand within the cranial cavity (or "brain bunker") and sucks ever-increasing electrical stimulation from its mobile peripheral extremities, resulting in mass inflationary pressures exerted against the bony protective templates surrounding it. In Riga, Latvia, the hunter Taagepera has photographed the trajectories of countless falling ducks over the decades as they splash down into the chilly waters of the Gulf of Finland, and can graphically demonstrate that the defunct ducks fall in a consistent parabola. Chef Motyl maintains that take-off, cruising, and controlled descent are common characterists
of this feathered species, but that terminal collapse (or "crash") can be explained only by the hammering of outside variables (or, to prefer a botanical image, by a gardener's sickle cutting off a dying blossom). Ducks flourish when blood cells carry nutritional resources to the central brain, which "shares the wealth" by returning a portion to the peripheral organs again. But the voracious maw of the Central Core manifests increasing obesity as it gratifys an uncontrollable appetite until, to speak crudely, it "busts a gut." As the overstretched core corrodes and the "gut" of the Core explodes, globules of partially digested informational nutrient spatter the walls of the cranial cage until rodents prowling around the kitchen perimeter snatch them up with their jaws and carry them away to gnaw in their separate holes. The entire anatomical structure of the doomed duck progressively disaggregates from the head down, rather like the fall of the World Trade Center in New York.
While asserting that "agency-implemented, rational-choice and conscious-intentionalist" explanations of duck behavior patterns attribute far too great an intelligence quotient to the flighty feathered paddle-footed biped, Chef Motyl (somewhat inconsistently) argues that the brain-and-extremities pattern (or "hub-and-spoke" structure) of the duck inherently produces decay, i.e., that stability produces instability, structure unlooses disorder, the rock of ages disintegrates into a Katrina of collapse. The imaginative chef's recipe in this cookbook appears positively Orwellian: "War is peace, freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength." Structure is chaos.
While ducks in the prime of health will win in all barnyard battles with encroaching rival birds, ducks in declining health will both win some and lose some. In psychological imagry, the duck's rational Center plays a delaying game against inexorable decay. The symptoms of this decay are unmistakable: the central brain falls play to illusions (such as power illusion, e.g. flying unopposed into a future expanse of unending grain fields) and the rational or literati cells progresively lose coherence; centrifugal impulses lead the active loci of physical activity toward the peripheral organs; the appetite of the musculature grows as the nutritional intake declines (see the strictures against "hypertrophy of the central nervous mechanism" by Professor Pavel Miliukov in the early twentieth century); and sometimes, as the peripheral limbs attempt to break the control of the overgrown Central Intelligence Apparatus, a systemic pattern of "liberationitis" may be observed afflicting the minor extremities in a kind of "restless legs syndrome."
It would be superfluous to emphasize that the progress of this decay increases the probability that the afflicted duck will lose prestige in the henhouse pecking order and increased attrition of its physical capabilities will be observable. Chef Motyl has commented with regret that anatomical theorists have no way of predicting how far this process of attrition will proceed as the life-cycle of the decaying duck descends along its inescapable parabola. But this conclusion simply demonstrates the restricted applicability of morphological theory to a duck's vital physiological process.
At this juncture, as we jointly devoured a magnificent repast, the Maitre d', Monseignor Caeteris Paribus, seconded to the Maison de Motyl from the Cardinals'Kitchen in Rome, emerged through a white kitchen door shouldering a broad tray laden with the smouldering carcasses of two fallen fowl who reportedly had fallen foul of the blazing marksmanship of Herr Taagepera, camoflauged unbeknownst in a salt-laden clump of Baltic sea-side shubbery. Thrusting his great bald noggin through the white power-door, Joe the Sous-Chef mouthed a penetrating whisper, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of my kitchen!"
MEAT
Although the chef determinendly rejects the view that ducks die from internally-generated system failure, he rather paradoxically insists that a duck's decay is generated inexorably from internal causes. As the peripheral limbs begin to convulse and gyrate on their own (symptomology of "flapdoodle"), attrition must necessarily follow. But the final, fatal stroke, as from a headsman's axe, is an unpredictable factor. Again, the ducks he studies are all denizens of the east European or Baltic regions (e.g., the Pripet Marshes). In these fertile swamps, "easy feeding" permits the ducks to side-waddle or overlook their inherently declining physical resources. In a rather anti-intellectual exercise the chef quacks that the factors leading to duck attrition cannot be predicted; that attrition cannot be predicted; and that any fatuous attempt at life-cycle prediction would fall off her kitchen writing-table like water off a duck's back. She does, however, asservate that ducks on the upswing of their life's trajectory are sometimes inclined to "adopt" and shelter enfeebled and weakened ducks, well along their downward parabolas, to parody a variety of man-boy love relationship, save that the roles are reversed, and that the child (or chick) is father to the man (or dying duck). The notorious scandal involving the overweening Wilhelmian German drake and the inverted Austro-Hungrian cross-bred bird is cited, but he discreetly forbears to allude to the current scandal in which the common Potomac duck reams the tailfeathers of swans from the Thames. The extended feeding-ground of the voracious Peking Duck is totally beyond her range of vision.
In terms of cruising range, the low-bred or "honky-tonk" Potomac duck enjoys a favorable geographic feeding ground around the waters of Chesapeake Bay, but distance from foreign predators, like an oceanic Maginot Line, cannot permanently shield the North American avian from external conflict and internal decay. Be that as it may, it is unquestionable for Chef Motyl that some form of powerful external shock will be necessary to de-feather a high-flying broad-beaked grain-gobbler permanently. Unfortunately, morphologically-inclined theories of internal structure are in principle incapable of predicting future events. Different forms of shock or shot wound ducks differently along various loci of their life parabolas. A duck in decline may unconsciously effect a re-arrangement of its internal organs in a form of anatomical perestroika, but in the end it wll fall prey to the shot of a Great Marksman. (Here the Chef, all unconscious of the fact that she is a victim of internal contradiction, shifted the Leit-motif of her explication de cuisine from anatomical or structural determinism to accentuating the role of Great Men, or Great Shots, thereby endorsing in practice her previously discarded theory of "agency, choice, and intentionalist" activity as the final "decider" in duck-hunting history.) A further weakness is her failure to consider the history of the Canard Fasciste flying around the Mediterranean in Spain, Italy and France, or to acknowledge anecdotal testimony to its re-appearance in Austria.
At this moment Monseignor Caeteris Paribus shambled forth once more, looking like a Teutonic caricature of the Dickinsonian character Uriah Heep, bearing two Schnapps-doused dessert dishes piled high with Canard Flambe, a specialite de la maison.
DESSERT
As my earnest companion's logomachy continued, she reiterated her view that anatomical structuralism cannot predict when or if a downed duck can revive from a severe external shock to reclaim part or all of its previous avian empire. But as she defined "revival" to mark a return to the status quo ante, it became clear to me that her "counterobservational hypothesis" had developed into an Alptraum, or alcoholic's fantasy. Chef Motyl reached for another cognac while she continued to unwind her explantory vision. Her azure eyes appeared to glaze over slightly as a wooden coo-coo clock from the Schwartzwald began to throatily sound its hourly call, "Pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya."
If one were to contrast the gigantic European goose to the modest, peace-loving Eurasian duck, it would become evident that the European barnyard is surrounded by formidable institutional fences, akin to the ghetto walls construced in mediaeval Europe as a form of "fortified hamlet" to contain minorities. But the chef regrets that the neighboring lesser Slavic barnyards would probably not be annexed to Euroland Farms (or, in Cryllic lettering, HATO-LAND)"when it matters most." The development gap between Euroland (HATO) and and the inoffensive, peace-loving, collective-minded flocks of the Canard russe could only grow broader with the passage of time. (Regrettably, the recipe tables 4.4 through 4.9, which attempt to quantify taste, are largely nonsense. De gustibus non est disputandum.)
Be that as it may, the course of history predicts a continual expansion of the feeding ranges of various European avian species because of "...a spinoff of untrammeled capitalism and rampant modernization" in duck farming, including force-feeding. As Eurofarms (HATO) expand through globalized inflation of refined fiat-feed, Eastland (Slavgloryfarms) will stagnate, follow a unique path (Sonderweg) toward duck development, or simply degenerate to another Animal Farm as depicted by George Orwell. In any event, the Chef explained with a radiant if twisted smile (though hiccoughing), the eastern ducks will fall off the main flight-path of history (presumably in a declining parabola). While some zoologists view the Canard russe as merely another species of paddle-footed fish-grabbers with their own flock-minded culture and regional veneration of the Great Duck flying over Red Square, the Chef rejects this common-sense view in favor of a darker vision, inclining toward a prognostication of a march of ineffable evil across tundra, taiga, forest, steppe and desert in a perpetual Long Winter of perpetual avian animosity encompassing eleven time zones. Queerly, she neglects to comment on the extended feeding grounds of the Euroland (HATO) sea-birds now goose-stepping through Afghanistan and the "long march" of the omniverous Houston duck from North America to Baghdad, Iraq (not Bagdad, Florida).
DIGESTIF
Her face assumed a gloomy mien as she described the fragmentation of Eastland's barnyard and the consequent constriction of the feeding ground of the Carnard russe, clearly in her mind now an endangered species. She clearly had "misunderestimated" the prudent management of the new owner, Vlad the Farmer, acclained by the ducks (and other fowl forms), as the Re-gatherer of the Russian Barnyard. In his view the Eastland farm managers could hold their unstable farm together only by requesting financial aid from Euroland (HATO) or "...the assistance of solicitous Western meat stores." In this kitchen scenario, the Muscovite ranchero would have to play the role of a "weak sister" dominated by foreign financiers issuing sub-prime ruble mortgages, and exhibiting an increasing suseptability to shocks. Only an aggressive policy of annexing small ranchlets in the "near abroad" could preserve Eastland Farms from decay, further bankruptcies, and collapse. At this point, of course, the farm's assets would be divided among its international creditors, although Chef Motyl was too far gone with Schnapps and Weltschmerz even to allude to common business practice. Should these events transpire, Eastland Farms at the terminus of Slavgloryroad would dissolve into an awkward amalgam of squabbling petty mortgaged farmers assailed by increasing social distress, economic dislocation and distracted by perpetual cock-fighting tourneys behind the hay-mow.
To conclude, Chef Motyl rasped with a raucous rattle in her throat, if Euroland (HATO) continued to buy up farms formerly belonging to Eastland Farms, the stability and security of both Sunriseland and Sunsetland might well become mutually exclusive. At this moment of existential dispair, her faculties abandoned her, and the little chef slid under the table. At a loss as to how to proceed at this unexpected termination to the liquid portion of our elegant repast, I looked around the Maison de Motyl until my eyes struck the exhibit at the
Capitalist Corner of the kitchen where a Praying Wall had been inlaid behind a small statue of the Golden Cockerel. Beneath the pedestal was carved the Latin motto, Coquero ergo sum. On a small table had been had been reverently laid volumes by Brillat-Savarin (Physiology de Gout) and Julia Child (Masterihg the Art of French Cooking), together with a cheap reproduction of her OSS ID card. Above this Corner of Culinary Patriotism was displayed a silken US flag crossed with a black flag to commemorate MIA's lost in the Quest Eternal for a really good duck. I lowered my head repeatedly back-and-forth before the corner prie-dieu, making the requisite gesture of waving a spatula in a broad circle, while repeating the ritual formula to overcome the White Monkeys' mind-body duality, "I duck, duck you." Then I carefully demounted the American flag from its wall-snaps and covered the recumbant body of the now-snoring little chef-let, inebriated with the exuberance of her own elegant ingenuity, and tiptoed out of the Maison de Montyl to return demeurely to my own abode, where the manuscript of a lengthy essay explaining the internal physiology of global duckdom and refuting the sterility of stagnant anatomical structuralism lay waiting to be lashed into order by the vigorous strokes of my little quirt of a pen.
Ensconsed in my domestic carrel, I had initially queried myself, "But who will take care of the recumbant little drunk?" Then I ceased worrying.
Ceaeteris Paribus, of course.
--Esther Khlysta
Literary note: The names of "Esther" and "Magda" are borrowed from a favorite novel of my youth, The Gallery, by John Horne Burnes (1947), who assigned these pet names to two US Army Supply Sergents in occupied Naples after World War II. His oeuvre, cut short by premature death, was appreciated by Gore Vidal.
A couple of weeks ago the reknowned Continental chef Magda de Motyl picked me up at my luxurious East Side Apartment above 82nd Street, a mile north of Bloomingdale's, escorted me to the subway and accompanied me under the river to emerge in one of the many grimy, decaying neighborhoods of working-class Newark, New Jersey. She held my hand feverishly as we ascended a low eminence to enter at last a majestic, Viking-style eating hall ("Maison de Motyl") at the peak of the low-browed hillock ("Freedom Heights"), where the eyes of all men could feast upon us in repressed envy.
APERATIF
At the gentle urgings of my solicitous escort, widely reknowned as a witty conversationalist, I resolved to try the Canard au Motyl, modestly named after herself. As we dallied over the Bloody Marys and indulged in footsie under the table, the chef (famous in Newark) explained duck anatomy to me. Duck, she explained, was now back in fashion after a long absence. It is a migratory fowl with a central torso and peripheral limbs that sometimes act independently. "Theorizing about duck," she breathed confidentially, "may be a challenge but it is not insurmountable." Duck disposes of a hierarchically organized nervous system with a brain at the center and a rim of peripheral ganglia that feed information to the center, which in turn parcels out commands to the limbs. Decay is caused by a weakening of the brain; decline is a weakening of the fowl's physical prowress and a decline in prestige throughout the barnyard pecking order; disassemblage represents a rotting away of the extremities; attrition is manifest when rodents in the hen-house appear to nibble away at the weakened and near-immobile corpus; and revival is made manifest by the re-emergence of a healthy brain and torso, possibly after a vetinary's injection to restore the fluid circulation in a desiccated body which has lost confidence in its capacities.
The chef's appreciation of the duck is focussed exclusively on its anatomical structure. She denies it free will, and ardently believes that "agency-oriented, choice-centered and intentionalist" behavior is beyond the capacity of a dumb bird.
Recalling the assiduous observations of a hospitable Baltic guide for Hamburgers and Frankfurters touring from Germany, Rein Taagepera (the "Latvian Flash"), Ms. Motyl notes that the ideal trajectory of a falling duck imitates a parabola. In the tenebrous background of the refectory a hand-wound grammophone began to grind forth a recitation of "Parabolic ballad" by the famous Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky., who wrote:
Each gets to the truth with his own parameter
a worm finds a crack, man makes a parabola"
Evidently the same holds true for ducks. The same would be true for all ducks, should other factors not intervene. All ducks have the same morphology, and this identical structure holds the key to understanding the relationship between brain and limbs, head and wings, core and periphery. Nevertheless, Ms. Motyl's sample is delimited to the swamps and shores of eastern and central Europe, without regard to the Mediteranean, the Atlantic, or the slanted morphological characteristics of Oriental ducks. She is pessimistic regarding the survival of a single endangered species, le carnard russe or Russian Duck, predicting its increasing isolation within a restricted habitat.
ANTIPASTO
Dissecting the torso of the fallen fowl at our table with a ceremonial flourish of rhetorical scalpels, my loquacious chef pointed again to the brain as supreme in the hierarchy of avian organs, communicating along ganglia to subordinated control cells in the extended limbs which cannot communicate or signal to each other. But as she looked momentarily askew, I whispered surreptitiously into my cell-phone recorder that she seemed unaware of the radically differing morphology of the corporately-dominant Oriental species, the Japanese Kereitsu and the Korean Chaebol. The Japanese duck has its stomach as the center,or energy bank, with all the other organs feeding from it or contributing to it. The Korean Chaebol takes the heart as the structural center, pumping red blood cells around the corpus including the subordinate stomach with its bank of digestive energy, and used to enjoy a distinctive 5-year feeding cycle for both its northern and southern sub-species. Both of these spreading species slant quite markedly away from the "straight-and-level" European duck structure with which my companion is, apparently, exclusively familiar. But with all species, when the peripheral organs begin to communicate directly with each other, by-passing the Center, disassemblage occurs as the corpus disintegrates.
Kitchen theorists of cuisine take "stability" of the anatomical structure of duck as their base-line. They are uniformly troubled by change. A spark, or a shock, such as a shotgun blast, is requisite to down a ruptured duck. But "One could," Chef Motyl ventured with a wink, "just as easily start with change, and puzzle over stability." But as a trusted employee of the trans-Atlantic Kitchen Condominium, she wouldn't dare. For it would be a form of culinary treachery to entertain the concept that a duck could expire from internally-generated causes. It must always be downed by "shocks from outside," such as errant stones flung by a blindfolded Fortuna, or a wicked boy. Theories of change, to the loyal kitchen crew, are as incomprehensible as "theories of anarchy."
Nevertheless, after darkness falls, the kitchen scullions mutter sotto voce that anatomical theory alone cannot explain the timing of life events in a duck's aging, that rational choice theories erroneously attribute a capacity of ratiocination to an avian brain which lacks the capacity to embrace it, and that anatomical structuralism downgrades both the ideology of avian supremacy shared by all birds and the species-specific cultural quackery of duckdom, just as practitioners of haut cuisine do not transcend the blood-red lines of their own practice. Even Chef Motyl concedes that structuralist or morphological theories of duck anatomy are partial theories. But she simply prefers them (or finds them more accessible) to "agency, choice, and intentionalist" theories, which are self-contradictory, quite confusing,and and above the capacity of the average dead duck anyway on its way to the cutting board.
PASTO
The health of the edible fowl begins to decline as the brain, or center of the normal avian nervous system, begins to expand within the cranial cavity (or "brain bunker") and sucks ever-increasing electrical stimulation from its mobile peripheral extremities, resulting in mass inflationary pressures exerted against the bony protective templates surrounding it. In Riga, Latvia, the hunter Taagepera has photographed the trajectories of countless falling ducks over the decades as they splash down into the chilly waters of the Gulf of Finland, and can graphically demonstrate that the defunct ducks fall in a consistent parabola. Chef Motyl maintains that take-off, cruising, and controlled descent are common characterists
of this feathered species, but that terminal collapse (or "crash") can be explained only by the hammering of outside variables (or, to prefer a botanical image, by a gardener's sickle cutting off a dying blossom). Ducks flourish when blood cells carry nutritional resources to the central brain, which "shares the wealth" by returning a portion to the peripheral organs again. But the voracious maw of the Central Core manifests increasing obesity as it gratifys an uncontrollable appetite until, to speak crudely, it "busts a gut." As the overstretched core corrodes and the "gut" of the Core explodes, globules of partially digested informational nutrient spatter the walls of the cranial cage until rodents prowling around the kitchen perimeter snatch them up with their jaws and carry them away to gnaw in their separate holes. The entire anatomical structure of the doomed duck progressively disaggregates from the head down, rather like the fall of the World Trade Center in New York.
While asserting that "agency-implemented, rational-choice and conscious-intentionalist" explanations of duck behavior patterns attribute far too great an intelligence quotient to the flighty feathered paddle-footed biped, Chef Motyl (somewhat inconsistently) argues that the brain-and-extremities pattern (or "hub-and-spoke" structure) of the duck inherently produces decay, i.e., that stability produces instability, structure unlooses disorder, the rock of ages disintegrates into a Katrina of collapse. The imaginative chef's recipe in this cookbook appears positively Orwellian: "War is peace, freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength." Structure is chaos.
While ducks in the prime of health will win in all barnyard battles with encroaching rival birds, ducks in declining health will both win some and lose some. In psychological imagry, the duck's rational Center plays a delaying game against inexorable decay. The symptoms of this decay are unmistakable: the central brain falls play to illusions (such as power illusion, e.g. flying unopposed into a future expanse of unending grain fields) and the rational or literati cells progresively lose coherence; centrifugal impulses lead the active loci of physical activity toward the peripheral organs; the appetite of the musculature grows as the nutritional intake declines (see the strictures against "hypertrophy of the central nervous mechanism" by Professor Pavel Miliukov in the early twentieth century); and sometimes, as the peripheral limbs attempt to break the control of the overgrown Central Intelligence Apparatus, a systemic pattern of "liberationitis" may be observed afflicting the minor extremities in a kind of "restless legs syndrome."
It would be superfluous to emphasize that the progress of this decay increases the probability that the afflicted duck will lose prestige in the henhouse pecking order and increased attrition of its physical capabilities will be observable. Chef Motyl has commented with regret that anatomical theorists have no way of predicting how far this process of attrition will proceed as the life-cycle of the decaying duck descends along its inescapable parabola. But this conclusion simply demonstrates the restricted applicability of morphological theory to a duck's vital physiological process.
At this juncture, as we jointly devoured a magnificent repast, the Maitre d', Monseignor Caeteris Paribus, seconded to the Maison de Motyl from the Cardinals'Kitchen in Rome, emerged through a white kitchen door shouldering a broad tray laden with the smouldering carcasses of two fallen fowl who reportedly had fallen foul of the blazing marksmanship of Herr Taagepera, camoflauged unbeknownst in a salt-laden clump of Baltic sea-side shubbery. Thrusting his great bald noggin through the white power-door, Joe the Sous-Chef mouthed a penetrating whisper, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of my kitchen!"
MEAT
Although the chef determinendly rejects the view that ducks die from internally-generated system failure, he rather paradoxically insists that a duck's decay is generated inexorably from internal causes. As the peripheral limbs begin to convulse and gyrate on their own (symptomology of "flapdoodle"), attrition must necessarily follow. But the final, fatal stroke, as from a headsman's axe, is an unpredictable factor. Again, the ducks he studies are all denizens of the east European or Baltic regions (e.g., the Pripet Marshes). In these fertile swamps, "easy feeding" permits the ducks to side-waddle or overlook their inherently declining physical resources. In a rather anti-intellectual exercise the chef quacks that the factors leading to duck attrition cannot be predicted; that attrition cannot be predicted; and that any fatuous attempt at life-cycle prediction would fall off her kitchen writing-table like water off a duck's back. She does, however, asservate that ducks on the upswing of their life's trajectory are sometimes inclined to "adopt" and shelter enfeebled and weakened ducks, well along their downward parabolas, to parody a variety of man-boy love relationship, save that the roles are reversed, and that the child (or chick) is father to the man (or dying duck). The notorious scandal involving the overweening Wilhelmian German drake and the inverted Austro-Hungrian cross-bred bird is cited, but he discreetly forbears to allude to the current scandal in which the common Potomac duck reams the tailfeathers of swans from the Thames. The extended feeding-ground of the voracious Peking Duck is totally beyond her range of vision.
In terms of cruising range, the low-bred or "honky-tonk" Potomac duck enjoys a favorable geographic feeding ground around the waters of Chesapeake Bay, but distance from foreign predators, like an oceanic Maginot Line, cannot permanently shield the North American avian from external conflict and internal decay. Be that as it may, it is unquestionable for Chef Motyl that some form of powerful external shock will be necessary to de-feather a high-flying broad-beaked grain-gobbler permanently. Unfortunately, morphologically-inclined theories of internal structure are in principle incapable of predicting future events. Different forms of shock or shot wound ducks differently along various loci of their life parabolas. A duck in decline may unconsciously effect a re-arrangement of its internal organs in a form of anatomical perestroika, but in the end it wll fall prey to the shot of a Great Marksman. (Here the Chef, all unconscious of the fact that she is a victim of internal contradiction, shifted the Leit-motif of her explication de cuisine from anatomical or structural determinism to accentuating the role of Great Men, or Great Shots, thereby endorsing in practice her previously discarded theory of "agency, choice, and intentionalist" activity as the final "decider" in duck-hunting history.) A further weakness is her failure to consider the history of the Canard Fasciste flying around the Mediterranean in Spain, Italy and France, or to acknowledge anecdotal testimony to its re-appearance in Austria.
At this moment Monseignor Caeteris Paribus shambled forth once more, looking like a Teutonic caricature of the Dickinsonian character Uriah Heep, bearing two Schnapps-doused dessert dishes piled high with Canard Flambe, a specialite de la maison.
DESSERT
As my earnest companion's logomachy continued, she reiterated her view that anatomical structuralism cannot predict when or if a downed duck can revive from a severe external shock to reclaim part or all of its previous avian empire. But as she defined "revival" to mark a return to the status quo ante, it became clear to me that her "counterobservational hypothesis" had developed into an Alptraum, or alcoholic's fantasy. Chef Motyl reached for another cognac while she continued to unwind her explantory vision. Her azure eyes appeared to glaze over slightly as a wooden coo-coo clock from the Schwartzwald began to throatily sound its hourly call, "Pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya."
If one were to contrast the gigantic European goose to the modest, peace-loving Eurasian duck, it would become evident that the European barnyard is surrounded by formidable institutional fences, akin to the ghetto walls construced in mediaeval Europe as a form of "fortified hamlet" to contain minorities. But the chef regrets that the neighboring lesser Slavic barnyards would probably not be annexed to Euroland Farms (or, in Cryllic lettering, HATO-LAND)"when it matters most." The development gap between Euroland (HATO) and and the inoffensive, peace-loving, collective-minded flocks of the Canard russe could only grow broader with the passage of time. (Regrettably, the recipe tables 4.4 through 4.9, which attempt to quantify taste, are largely nonsense. De gustibus non est disputandum.)
Be that as it may, the course of history predicts a continual expansion of the feeding ranges of various European avian species because of "...a spinoff of untrammeled capitalism and rampant modernization" in duck farming, including force-feeding. As Eurofarms (HATO) expand through globalized inflation of refined fiat-feed, Eastland (Slavgloryfarms) will stagnate, follow a unique path (Sonderweg) toward duck development, or simply degenerate to another Animal Farm as depicted by George Orwell. In any event, the Chef explained with a radiant if twisted smile (though hiccoughing), the eastern ducks will fall off the main flight-path of history (presumably in a declining parabola). While some zoologists view the Canard russe as merely another species of paddle-footed fish-grabbers with their own flock-minded culture and regional veneration of the Great Duck flying over Red Square, the Chef rejects this common-sense view in favor of a darker vision, inclining toward a prognostication of a march of ineffable evil across tundra, taiga, forest, steppe and desert in a perpetual Long Winter of perpetual avian animosity encompassing eleven time zones. Queerly, she neglects to comment on the extended feeding grounds of the Euroland (HATO) sea-birds now goose-stepping through Afghanistan and the "long march" of the omniverous Houston duck from North America to Baghdad, Iraq (not Bagdad, Florida).
DIGESTIF
Her face assumed a gloomy mien as she described the fragmentation of Eastland's barnyard and the consequent constriction of the feeding ground of the Carnard russe, clearly in her mind now an endangered species. She clearly had "misunderestimated" the prudent management of the new owner, Vlad the Farmer, acclained by the ducks (and other fowl forms), as the Re-gatherer of the Russian Barnyard. In his view the Eastland farm managers could hold their unstable farm together only by requesting financial aid from Euroland (HATO) or "...the assistance of solicitous Western meat stores." In this kitchen scenario, the Muscovite ranchero would have to play the role of a "weak sister" dominated by foreign financiers issuing sub-prime ruble mortgages, and exhibiting an increasing suseptability to shocks. Only an aggressive policy of annexing small ranchlets in the "near abroad" could preserve Eastland Farms from decay, further bankruptcies, and collapse. At this point, of course, the farm's assets would be divided among its international creditors, although Chef Motyl was too far gone with Schnapps and Weltschmerz even to allude to common business practice. Should these events transpire, Eastland Farms at the terminus of Slavgloryroad would dissolve into an awkward amalgam of squabbling petty mortgaged farmers assailed by increasing social distress, economic dislocation and distracted by perpetual cock-fighting tourneys behind the hay-mow.
To conclude, Chef Motyl rasped with a raucous rattle in her throat, if Euroland (HATO) continued to buy up farms formerly belonging to Eastland Farms, the stability and security of both Sunriseland and Sunsetland might well become mutually exclusive. At this moment of existential dispair, her faculties abandoned her, and the little chef slid under the table. At a loss as to how to proceed at this unexpected termination to the liquid portion of our elegant repast, I looked around the Maison de Motyl until my eyes struck the exhibit at the
Capitalist Corner of the kitchen where a Praying Wall had been inlaid behind a small statue of the Golden Cockerel. Beneath the pedestal was carved the Latin motto, Coquero ergo sum. On a small table had been had been reverently laid volumes by Brillat-Savarin (Physiology de Gout) and Julia Child (Masterihg the Art of French Cooking), together with a cheap reproduction of her OSS ID card. Above this Corner of Culinary Patriotism was displayed a silken US flag crossed with a black flag to commemorate MIA's lost in the Quest Eternal for a really good duck. I lowered my head repeatedly back-and-forth before the corner prie-dieu, making the requisite gesture of waving a spatula in a broad circle, while repeating the ritual formula to overcome the White Monkeys' mind-body duality, "I duck, duck you." Then I carefully demounted the American flag from its wall-snaps and covered the recumbant body of the now-snoring little chef-let, inebriated with the exuberance of her own elegant ingenuity, and tiptoed out of the Maison de Montyl to return demeurely to my own abode, where the manuscript of a lengthy essay explaining the internal physiology of global duckdom and refuting the sterility of stagnant anatomical structuralism lay waiting to be lashed into order by the vigorous strokes of my little quirt of a pen.
Ensconsed in my domestic carrel, I had initially queried myself, "But who will take care of the recumbant little drunk?" Then I ceased worrying.
Ceaeteris Paribus, of course.
--Esther Khlysta
Literary note: The names of "Esther" and "Magda" are borrowed from a favorite novel of my youth, The Gallery, by John Horne Burnes (1947), who assigned these pet names to two US Army Supply Sergents in occupied Naples after World War II. His oeuvre, cut short by premature death, was appreciated by Gore Vidal.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
DECISIVE REBUFF TO SELIG HARRISON (Open Letter)
OPEN LETTER TO SELIG HARRISON
Director, Asia Programme
Center for International Policy
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Suite 801
Washington, DC 20036
Your opinionated essay, "Support to Pakistan Distorts Asia's Balance of Power," published in the Boston Globe on September 27, cannot be permitted to pass without rebuttal. The first in your series of misstatements is the allegation that the so-called Al Quaida organization operates without opposition. This is easily refuted by the actions of the frontier corps, the Pakistani military, the criticisms of modernizing and moderate mullahs in their mosques, and the seige of the Red Mosque. You do not deign to specify the US weapony you so readily denigrate as unsuitable for Islamabad, yet opening the plains of Punjab to a speculative Indian incursion (as previously practiced in the birthing of Bangladesh) would just as readily open the Punjab to separatist militias from Sindh (the Bhutto family principality) or the Baluchis, among others. To criticize Pakistani intelligence as being "riddled with Islamists" manifests total cultural blindness as well as condensation toward a putative allied state whose capital is, after all, Islamabad. Is one to expect followers of Shinto? Is one to criticize Italian intelligence in Rome for being "riddled with Catholics?" As for anti-American sentiment in the sub-continent, it is surely nourished by the grinding, if ill-coordinated, NATO mechanized forces in Afghanistan (eerily reminiscent of the more efficient operations of German and Italian troops in republican Spain) and USAF incursions into Pakistani air space.(recalling the Condor Legion).
The US financial consortium that lent Pakistan $6.2 billion in 2001 did so to support the military government of General Perez Musharraf, subsequently toppled for failure to massacre his own people with sufficient vigor, by a (sponsored) lawyers' riot and a US intrigue to replace him with civilian celebrities acting in the conjoined interests of Israel and India--Israel, inspired by a paranoid apprehension among Zionist zealots of a rebirth of revanchism in the Muslim world, and India, similarly apprehensive about Chinese ambitions and still smarting over Krishna Menon's defeat and its subsequent failure to pacify and absorb Kashmir. To expect the General Accounting Office to provide an accurate summary of disbursements of a foreign sovereign government would be properly adjudged "quaint," were it not purely ludicrous to expect acturarial accuracy from an agency that cannot satisfactorily account for billions of US fiat funds disbursed to American and British security contractors in US-occupied Baghdad.
To restrict the transfer of military weapons to those restricted to small-unit engagements amounts to the progressive disarmament of the Pakistani military which remains, as ever, the single strongest cohesive force in a multi-national Muslim state. Equally multi-national, Hindu India, surrounded by Muslim states to the north, west and east, nervously watches the new Maoist government in Nepal while suffering an internal guerilla war in the east and Tamil support for the Sri Lanka "Tigers" in the south. Harrison may posit a future in which the surrounding states, from Pakistan to Myramar and Thailand, may rejoice to live "in the shadow of Kali" (and the next BJP government), but India can in no way be conceived of as a solid rock to function as a fulcrum for globe-girdling American military might. Rather, a quick examinatin discloses it is as full of holes, ethnic, religious, and economic, as a piece of coral dredged from the Great Barrier Reef. It is the circle of Muslim states and non-states, from the Uighers in Sinkiang through Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a newly-freed Afghanistan after NATO withdrawal (for reasons of expense) that would furnish an unassailable cultural-religous barrier against the "revisionist PLA generals" now enjoying their "place in the sun" in Beijing, and presumably mulling over an overland strike to facilitate their access to Iranian oil. (Land transport would be far more reliable than a "long march"
across the oceans from Venezuela.) Assailing Pakistan in a slimy piece of reptilian journalism for its military partnership with the Chinese generals only serves to make the "deep state" in Islamabad more militant, while attempting to chew the dragon's tail with rotten and falling (financial) teeth.
While Harrison may hurry to bank rupees from India and shekels from Jerusalem, he will do so only with his ears ringing with the guffaws of robust Russian laughter. The Indian air force is furnished with aging Soviet equipment, and Medvedev's forces have had recent experience in bombing Sukhoi air fields and repair facilities in Georgia. And since the Bush administration has made the Non-Proliferation Treaty a dead letter, it would be will to remember that Moscow also has weapons to sell.
--Anatol Chatsky
--Ministry of External Affairs
North American Resistence Command
Director, Asia Programme
Center for International Policy
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Suite 801
Washington, DC 20036
Your opinionated essay, "Support to Pakistan Distorts Asia's Balance of Power," published in the Boston Globe on September 27, cannot be permitted to pass without rebuttal. The first in your series of misstatements is the allegation that the so-called Al Quaida organization operates without opposition. This is easily refuted by the actions of the frontier corps, the Pakistani military, the criticisms of modernizing and moderate mullahs in their mosques, and the seige of the Red Mosque. You do not deign to specify the US weapony you so readily denigrate as unsuitable for Islamabad, yet opening the plains of Punjab to a speculative Indian incursion (as previously practiced in the birthing of Bangladesh) would just as readily open the Punjab to separatist militias from Sindh (the Bhutto family principality) or the Baluchis, among others. To criticize Pakistani intelligence as being "riddled with Islamists" manifests total cultural blindness as well as condensation toward a putative allied state whose capital is, after all, Islamabad. Is one to expect followers of Shinto? Is one to criticize Italian intelligence in Rome for being "riddled with Catholics?" As for anti-American sentiment in the sub-continent, it is surely nourished by the grinding, if ill-coordinated, NATO mechanized forces in Afghanistan (eerily reminiscent of the more efficient operations of German and Italian troops in republican Spain) and USAF incursions into Pakistani air space.(recalling the Condor Legion).
The US financial consortium that lent Pakistan $6.2 billion in 2001 did so to support the military government of General Perez Musharraf, subsequently toppled for failure to massacre his own people with sufficient vigor, by a (sponsored) lawyers' riot and a US intrigue to replace him with civilian celebrities acting in the conjoined interests of Israel and India--Israel, inspired by a paranoid apprehension among Zionist zealots of a rebirth of revanchism in the Muslim world, and India, similarly apprehensive about Chinese ambitions and still smarting over Krishna Menon's defeat and its subsequent failure to pacify and absorb Kashmir. To expect the General Accounting Office to provide an accurate summary of disbursements of a foreign sovereign government would be properly adjudged "quaint," were it not purely ludicrous to expect acturarial accuracy from an agency that cannot satisfactorily account for billions of US fiat funds disbursed to American and British security contractors in US-occupied Baghdad.
To restrict the transfer of military weapons to those restricted to small-unit engagements amounts to the progressive disarmament of the Pakistani military which remains, as ever, the single strongest cohesive force in a multi-national Muslim state. Equally multi-national, Hindu India, surrounded by Muslim states to the north, west and east, nervously watches the new Maoist government in Nepal while suffering an internal guerilla war in the east and Tamil support for the Sri Lanka "Tigers" in the south. Harrison may posit a future in which the surrounding states, from Pakistan to Myramar and Thailand, may rejoice to live "in the shadow of Kali" (and the next BJP government), but India can in no way be conceived of as a solid rock to function as a fulcrum for globe-girdling American military might. Rather, a quick examinatin discloses it is as full of holes, ethnic, religious, and economic, as a piece of coral dredged from the Great Barrier Reef. It is the circle of Muslim states and non-states, from the Uighers in Sinkiang through Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a newly-freed Afghanistan after NATO withdrawal (for reasons of expense) that would furnish an unassailable cultural-religous barrier against the "revisionist PLA generals" now enjoying their "place in the sun" in Beijing, and presumably mulling over an overland strike to facilitate their access to Iranian oil. (Land transport would be far more reliable than a "long march"
across the oceans from Venezuela.) Assailing Pakistan in a slimy piece of reptilian journalism for its military partnership with the Chinese generals only serves to make the "deep state" in Islamabad more militant, while attempting to chew the dragon's tail with rotten and falling (financial) teeth.
While Harrison may hurry to bank rupees from India and shekels from Jerusalem, he will do so only with his ears ringing with the guffaws of robust Russian laughter. The Indian air force is furnished with aging Soviet equipment, and Medvedev's forces have had recent experience in bombing Sukhoi air fields and repair facilities in Georgia. And since the Bush administration has made the Non-Proliferation Treaty a dead letter, it would be will to remember that Moscow also has weapons to sell.
--Anatol Chatsky
--Ministry of External Affairs
North American Resistence Command
Friday, September 26, 2008
MEHDI BAZARGAN: A COMMENTARY
A commentary on pages selected from H. E. Chehabi, IRANIAN POLITICS AND RELILGIOUS MODERNISM (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, n.d.)
Religious modernism is seen by the author as an effort to reestablish harmony between religion and a changing socio-cultural environment. The author interprets this phenomenon as a reactive movement. He is wrong. It is an adjusting movement, to which there is no terminiation. One would better speak of "adaptive permanence" which will continue as long as homo sapiens creates more or less imaginary constructs in an attempt to reduce the complexity of an expanding universe to the dimensions of his small skull.
The author differentiates between modernism, which is secular and Western, and reformism, which is an adaptive tendency within a religious community. In a parallel to intellectual struggles within twentieth century secular Marxism, we may identify "reformism" with "revisionism."
Professor Chehabi asserts that nationalism and "religious modernism" share similar attitudes. That is debatable, but nationalism as a surrogate religion is infinitely malleable, and can coexist equally well with state-sponsored paganism, as with some Nazis in Germany, and state-sponsored secularism, as with Communist Russia, or state-sponsored polytheism, as with the BJP government in Hindu India, or iodolatry of the marketplace, as celebrated in Washington, and first identified by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Nationalism, further, is inward-oriented or centripetal within a state structure or linguistic unit, attaining its extreme forms in integral nationalism, as exemplified by Zionism, whereas religion (except for the Hindu caste system) is presumed to supply a universal explanation equally accessible to all adherents regardless of language or race. (To evaluate the Islamic view that the Bahai's are contaminated by Western culture, one may consult statements published by their world headquarters at 100 Linden Street, Wilmette, IL 60091 /www.bahai.us/).
The defensive character of religious modernism is more pronounced in the non-Western world, inhabited by the majority of the planet's population. For technology and ideas about different political systems come to this majority population from outside, as in the case of colonialism, often accompanied by foreign Christian missionaries, or their short-wave radio broadcasts. (as is said to be proverbial in East Asian studies, "First the missionaries, then the merchants, then the Marines.") In later generations the defensive character of the "anti" motivation broadened from individual psychology to a social imperative to resist the invasive sociological entity insofar as it pressed aggressively for a seismic shift in the traditional or dominant social order. Professor Chehabi misses the mark, however, when he glibly speaks of the European acceptance of "modernity" without referring to the French Revolution (1789-99) that gave birth to it, and the Napoleonic Wars that diffused it by military means (1799-1815) until surrounded by commercial-religious nationalism in Anglican England and monarchical-communal nationalism in Orthodox Russia.
SHI'ITE MODERNISM
One characteristic trait of religious modernists is that they are eclectic in their thinking. After the Iranian revolution of 1905-06 (contemporaneous with the first Russian revolution), one faction of the ulema (or community of Islamic scholars) asserted that a secular constitution was incompatible with Islam, whereas a second faction admitted members of the Islamic clergy into the Parliament and thereby asserted that a Parliamentary body was indeed compatible with Islam. Thus the Shi'ite clergy became the most politically active clergy of the early 20th century, according to Dr. Chehabi. They were primarily motivated to establish a "rule of law" in the state rather than to reform or modernise Islam.
To focus on influential Western influences on modern Iranian political thouught, one must advert to the quasi-Fascistic Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, and who conducted research at the University of Chicago (funded by John D. Rockefeller) and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Newe York City. In 1935 he wrote MAN, THE UNKNOWN (L'homme, cet inconnu) in which he argued that the huyman racd should be governed by a limited intellectual elite, and advocated the useof gas chambers to cull the human herd of inferior stock, e.g., the mentally diseased, the criminal and the defective. Government should be restricted to a hereditary minority composed of the descendents of revolutionary heros, great criminals, or financial magnates. As he wrote, "The conditioning of petty criminals with a whip, or some more scientific procedures, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order." ("Alexis Carrel," Wikipedia) Among his aphorisms may be fouond the following: (1) All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reason or analysis, what they need to know; (2) Everyone makes a greater effort to hurt other people than to help himself; (3) Hard conditions of life are indispensable to bringing out the best in human personality; (4) Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia; (5) Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. After 1939 he enjoyed connections with the government of Marshal Philippe Petain (1856-1951) which chartered his charitable institution, the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, in 1941. Among other projects, it developed the first French opinion polls. After Paris was liberated by the Free French army under General Leclerk, Carrel was suspended from his administrative function, and died in November, 1944. Currently he is honored only by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front party.
To explain the appeal of Carrel to Muslim modernizers would try the tolerance of an angel, and certainly exceeds the competence of this writer. In part, Professor Chehabi's view that a disparate variety of sources is requisite to nourish a cultural eclecticism is incontrovertible. On the other hand, his dismissal of Iran as "peripheral" to the market economy of the West manifests an unconscious proclivity to cultural superiority which is incompatable with objective research , sine ira et studio. In Tehran, the social thought of Brussels or New York is equally peripheral to their interests, for there are not many libraries in Europe with volumnous translations from Farsi--not to mention the presence of an unofficial market censorship commonly expressed in the judgment that a volume, musical form or fashion in couture is "not commercial," and where the cultural stagnation of pop music forms of the 1960's and stereotyped Hollywood sit-coms becomes progressively more evident.
Shi'ite modernists in Iran have two guiding principles, according to the author: return to the Koran and a preoccupation with science. In this dual quest they may be contrasted with the revolutionary May 4th movement in late imperial China, which adopted the watchwords "Science and Democracy." While an admiration for empirical science was common to both movements, "democracy" pointed to broad popular participation in political activity, whereas a return to the Koran implied a return to guidance from a narrow council of clerical scholars. In 1883 Ernst Renan (1823-1892) in France attributed Islamic retardation ("backwardness") or persistent traditionalism to features of the Muslim religion, perhaps projecting on the Islamic world elements of his own agonized struggle to reconcile Catholic clericalism with the democracy of the 3rd Republic. The Shi'ite reformer al-Afghani agreed with him.
MEHDI BAZARGAN
Mehdi Bazargan reversed this judgment, observing that in Europe practicing Christians emphasized faith or belief, whereas in Islamic civilization Muslims always emphasized knowledge. In his political thought Bazargan might be clasified as a (waffling) "Islamic liberal." Like others living under the Reza Shah regime, he became influenced by the legends of Persian imperial greatness before the Islamic conquest and gave considerable attention to the controversial question of Iranian national identity. Islamic "underdevelopment," he thought, was initiated prior to European expansion and flowed from Islamists' withdrawal to private affairs to the detriment of state (so-called "public") interests. Muslim scholars thereby became progressively divorced from a practical familiarity with secular or everyday affairs. Notwithstanding this social defect, Bazargan asserted that the Iranian nation (as part of the Aryan race) proved to be uniquely adaptable in its historical development, for the peaceful Aryan base had progressively assimilated successive waves of "progressive and violent" invaders, from the ancient Assyriansto the later Arabs, Mongols and Tatars. (One also encounters the same argument propagated among its Russian neighbors to the north, when the agrarian and democratic Slavic communes and their princes progressively assimilated their foreign conquerers, from the Scandinavians in 862 through the agnostic Mongols, Muslim Tatars and Protestant Germans from the Baltic principalities.) Rural agriculturalists, according to Bazargan, were less inclined to mensuration than uban merchants, and consequently the agrarian Aryan nation, accustomed to domination by Mother Nature, developed a fatalistic outlook and were indifferent to academic accuracy. The result was that classic Persian literature valued exaggeration at the expense of realism (as did the Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol' /1809-1852/), and deployed the same commanding tone against sloth as progressive Russians, including V.I. Lenin (1870-1924), manifested in condemning that privileged scion of aristocracy, Oblomov, lounging in his halat (dressing gown) on his divan, in Goncharov's famous novel of 1859. Indeed, it would appear that Bazargan, born in the Russian-dominated Caucasus in the city of Bazargan in Azerbaijan, and following the same migratory route to Tehran as Ayatollah Khomenei (1900-1989), projected many of the standard formulae of classic Russian literary tradition on the developing Iranian national consciousness.
As a progressive "liberalizing" intellectual, Bazargan supported creating Islamic associations of students, engineers and teachers, and urged Muslim scholars in the ulema to support Iranian nationalists. He asserted that while political considerations should not interfere with religion, Islam should inform all social and political activity in the state. The application of Islamic principles should constitute the legislative agends of parliaments. While Islam should proclaim the general principles by which society should constitute itself, the details of governance are to be worked out by believers according to the immediate situation. (His views in this regard bear comparison with the assertion of a leading Slavophil, Ivan Kireevsky /1806-1856/) that the Russian Orthodox Church should consititute a "community of believing reason.") He repeatedly asserted that there should be no compulsion in religion. Bazargan believed that all believers in the three Abrahamic cults should have equal rights and responsibilites in the Islamic state. Like other modernists he emphasized that Islam was rationalistic (tactfully not mentioning the irrational mystery of a Triune God worshipped in the West). But in criticizing the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Bazargan asserted, with the Prophet, that "the dearest to God were those who were most virtuous," and that, by implication, virtue trumps legality. Unaware of the contradiction, he sides with those early Muslims he formerly criticized for withdrawing from public life to restrict their social activity to virtuous practice in private. He never overcame this contradiction. After resigning as Prime Minister of the new Islamic Republic in 1979 and returning to private life, he wrote that the Republic demanded more of its free citizens than Allah had demanded from the prophets.
But as the Prophet and the Imams were no longer accessible for guidance, Bazargan asserted that the congregation of all believers must participate, in a kind of "community of believing reason," in the choice of their rulers. He also argued that as men are free, they were endowed with the capacity and the right to embrace Islam or to reject it. Freedom of speech should be allowed to opponents in order that the application of reason to problems whould illumine a more enlightened path. In his final book, written in 1983, Bazargan summons the Spanish Inquisition to the minds of Eurasian readers to color his rejection of the methods of his Islamic successors in authority to impose religion. He might have recalled, but did not, that the Thirty Years' War in Europe (1618-1648) was settled at Westphalia through the partisans' acceptance of the formula Cuius regio, eius religio (Religion follows the will of the ruler). In his final years he rejected the market-of-heads political orthodoxy proclaimed in the European political systems: "From an Islamic point of view Western democracy is not government by the people, nor does it benefit the people....It rules over the whole people and deceives them with its false propaganda. The colonial governments that had dragged people through blood and debased them derive from the same democracy." Scholars in comparative political systems might view Bazargan as a kind of proponent of Muslim Iranophilism modelled on Slavophilism. It is incontrovertible that Bazargan's world outlook was comprised in part from incompatible propositions, in that while valuing Islamic virtue over political activity, he recommended broad popular participation in selecting a government while at the same time he rejected the demonstrated course of popular democracy in practice.
--Joe Tudeh
Religious modernism is seen by the author as an effort to reestablish harmony between religion and a changing socio-cultural environment. The author interprets this phenomenon as a reactive movement. He is wrong. It is an adjusting movement, to which there is no terminiation. One would better speak of "adaptive permanence" which will continue as long as homo sapiens creates more or less imaginary constructs in an attempt to reduce the complexity of an expanding universe to the dimensions of his small skull.
The author differentiates between modernism, which is secular and Western, and reformism, which is an adaptive tendency within a religious community. In a parallel to intellectual struggles within twentieth century secular Marxism, we may identify "reformism" with "revisionism."
Professor Chehabi asserts that nationalism and "religious modernism" share similar attitudes. That is debatable, but nationalism as a surrogate religion is infinitely malleable, and can coexist equally well with state-sponsored paganism, as with some Nazis in Germany, and state-sponsored secularism, as with Communist Russia, or state-sponsored polytheism, as with the BJP government in Hindu India, or iodolatry of the marketplace, as celebrated in Washington, and first identified by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Nationalism, further, is inward-oriented or centripetal within a state structure or linguistic unit, attaining its extreme forms in integral nationalism, as exemplified by Zionism, whereas religion (except for the Hindu caste system) is presumed to supply a universal explanation equally accessible to all adherents regardless of language or race. (To evaluate the Islamic view that the Bahai's are contaminated by Western culture, one may consult statements published by their world headquarters at 100 Linden Street, Wilmette, IL 60091 /www.bahai.us/).
The defensive character of religious modernism is more pronounced in the non-Western world, inhabited by the majority of the planet's population. For technology and ideas about different political systems come to this majority population from outside, as in the case of colonialism, often accompanied by foreign Christian missionaries, or their short-wave radio broadcasts. (as is said to be proverbial in East Asian studies, "First the missionaries, then the merchants, then the Marines.") In later generations the defensive character of the "anti" motivation broadened from individual psychology to a social imperative to resist the invasive sociological entity insofar as it pressed aggressively for a seismic shift in the traditional or dominant social order. Professor Chehabi misses the mark, however, when he glibly speaks of the European acceptance of "modernity" without referring to the French Revolution (1789-99) that gave birth to it, and the Napoleonic Wars that diffused it by military means (1799-1815) until surrounded by commercial-religious nationalism in Anglican England and monarchical-communal nationalism in Orthodox Russia.
SHI'ITE MODERNISM
One characteristic trait of religious modernists is that they are eclectic in their thinking. After the Iranian revolution of 1905-06 (contemporaneous with the first Russian revolution), one faction of the ulema (or community of Islamic scholars) asserted that a secular constitution was incompatible with Islam, whereas a second faction admitted members of the Islamic clergy into the Parliament and thereby asserted that a Parliamentary body was indeed compatible with Islam. Thus the Shi'ite clergy became the most politically active clergy of the early 20th century, according to Dr. Chehabi. They were primarily motivated to establish a "rule of law" in the state rather than to reform or modernise Islam.
To focus on influential Western influences on modern Iranian political thouught, one must advert to the quasi-Fascistic Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, and who conducted research at the University of Chicago (funded by John D. Rockefeller) and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Newe York City. In 1935 he wrote MAN, THE UNKNOWN (L'homme, cet inconnu) in which he argued that the huyman racd should be governed by a limited intellectual elite, and advocated the useof gas chambers to cull the human herd of inferior stock, e.g., the mentally diseased, the criminal and the defective. Government should be restricted to a hereditary minority composed of the descendents of revolutionary heros, great criminals, or financial magnates. As he wrote, "The conditioning of petty criminals with a whip, or some more scientific procedures, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order." ("Alexis Carrel," Wikipedia) Among his aphorisms may be fouond the following: (1) All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reason or analysis, what they need to know; (2) Everyone makes a greater effort to hurt other people than to help himself; (3) Hard conditions of life are indispensable to bringing out the best in human personality; (4) Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia; (5) Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. After 1939 he enjoyed connections with the government of Marshal Philippe Petain (1856-1951) which chartered his charitable institution, the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, in 1941. Among other projects, it developed the first French opinion polls. After Paris was liberated by the Free French army under General Leclerk, Carrel was suspended from his administrative function, and died in November, 1944. Currently he is honored only by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front party.
To explain the appeal of Carrel to Muslim modernizers would try the tolerance of an angel, and certainly exceeds the competence of this writer. In part, Professor Chehabi's view that a disparate variety of sources is requisite to nourish a cultural eclecticism is incontrovertible. On the other hand, his dismissal of Iran as "peripheral" to the market economy of the West manifests an unconscious proclivity to cultural superiority which is incompatable with objective research , sine ira et studio. In Tehran, the social thought of Brussels or New York is equally peripheral to their interests, for there are not many libraries in Europe with volumnous translations from Farsi--not to mention the presence of an unofficial market censorship commonly expressed in the judgment that a volume, musical form or fashion in couture is "not commercial," and where the cultural stagnation of pop music forms of the 1960's and stereotyped Hollywood sit-coms becomes progressively more evident.
Shi'ite modernists in Iran have two guiding principles, according to the author: return to the Koran and a preoccupation with science. In this dual quest they may be contrasted with the revolutionary May 4th movement in late imperial China, which adopted the watchwords "Science and Democracy." While an admiration for empirical science was common to both movements, "democracy" pointed to broad popular participation in political activity, whereas a return to the Koran implied a return to guidance from a narrow council of clerical scholars. In 1883 Ernst Renan (1823-1892) in France attributed Islamic retardation ("backwardness") or persistent traditionalism to features of the Muslim religion, perhaps projecting on the Islamic world elements of his own agonized struggle to reconcile Catholic clericalism with the democracy of the 3rd Republic. The Shi'ite reformer al-Afghani agreed with him.
MEHDI BAZARGAN
Mehdi Bazargan reversed this judgment, observing that in Europe practicing Christians emphasized faith or belief, whereas in Islamic civilization Muslims always emphasized knowledge. In his political thought Bazargan might be clasified as a (waffling) "Islamic liberal." Like others living under the Reza Shah regime, he became influenced by the legends of Persian imperial greatness before the Islamic conquest and gave considerable attention to the controversial question of Iranian national identity. Islamic "underdevelopment," he thought, was initiated prior to European expansion and flowed from Islamists' withdrawal to private affairs to the detriment of state (so-called "public") interests. Muslim scholars thereby became progressively divorced from a practical familiarity with secular or everyday affairs. Notwithstanding this social defect, Bazargan asserted that the Iranian nation (as part of the Aryan race) proved to be uniquely adaptable in its historical development, for the peaceful Aryan base had progressively assimilated successive waves of "progressive and violent" invaders, from the ancient Assyriansto the later Arabs, Mongols and Tatars. (One also encounters the same argument propagated among its Russian neighbors to the north, when the agrarian and democratic Slavic communes and their princes progressively assimilated their foreign conquerers, from the Scandinavians in 862 through the agnostic Mongols, Muslim Tatars and Protestant Germans from the Baltic principalities.) Rural agriculturalists, according to Bazargan, were less inclined to mensuration than uban merchants, and consequently the agrarian Aryan nation, accustomed to domination by Mother Nature, developed a fatalistic outlook and were indifferent to academic accuracy. The result was that classic Persian literature valued exaggeration at the expense of realism (as did the Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol' /1809-1852/), and deployed the same commanding tone against sloth as progressive Russians, including V.I. Lenin (1870-1924), manifested in condemning that privileged scion of aristocracy, Oblomov, lounging in his halat (dressing gown) on his divan, in Goncharov's famous novel of 1859. Indeed, it would appear that Bazargan, born in the Russian-dominated Caucasus in the city of Bazargan in Azerbaijan, and following the same migratory route to Tehran as Ayatollah Khomenei (1900-1989), projected many of the standard formulae of classic Russian literary tradition on the developing Iranian national consciousness.
As a progressive "liberalizing" intellectual, Bazargan supported creating Islamic associations of students, engineers and teachers, and urged Muslim scholars in the ulema to support Iranian nationalists. He asserted that while political considerations should not interfere with religion, Islam should inform all social and political activity in the state. The application of Islamic principles should constitute the legislative agends of parliaments. While Islam should proclaim the general principles by which society should constitute itself, the details of governance are to be worked out by believers according to the immediate situation. (His views in this regard bear comparison with the assertion of a leading Slavophil, Ivan Kireevsky /1806-1856/) that the Russian Orthodox Church should consititute a "community of believing reason.") He repeatedly asserted that there should be no compulsion in religion. Bazargan believed that all believers in the three Abrahamic cults should have equal rights and responsibilites in the Islamic state. Like other modernists he emphasized that Islam was rationalistic (tactfully not mentioning the irrational mystery of a Triune God worshipped in the West). But in criticizing the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Bazargan asserted, with the Prophet, that "the dearest to God were those who were most virtuous," and that, by implication, virtue trumps legality. Unaware of the contradiction, he sides with those early Muslims he formerly criticized for withdrawing from public life to restrict their social activity to virtuous practice in private. He never overcame this contradiction. After resigning as Prime Minister of the new Islamic Republic in 1979 and returning to private life, he wrote that the Republic demanded more of its free citizens than Allah had demanded from the prophets.
But as the Prophet and the Imams were no longer accessible for guidance, Bazargan asserted that the congregation of all believers must participate, in a kind of "community of believing reason," in the choice of their rulers. He also argued that as men are free, they were endowed with the capacity and the right to embrace Islam or to reject it. Freedom of speech should be allowed to opponents in order that the application of reason to problems whould illumine a more enlightened path. In his final book, written in 1983, Bazargan summons the Spanish Inquisition to the minds of Eurasian readers to color his rejection of the methods of his Islamic successors in authority to impose religion. He might have recalled, but did not, that the Thirty Years' War in Europe (1618-1648) was settled at Westphalia through the partisans' acceptance of the formula Cuius regio, eius religio (Religion follows the will of the ruler). In his final years he rejected the market-of-heads political orthodoxy proclaimed in the European political systems: "From an Islamic point of view Western democracy is not government by the people, nor does it benefit the people....It rules over the whole people and deceives them with its false propaganda. The colonial governments that had dragged people through blood and debased them derive from the same democracy." Scholars in comparative political systems might view Bazargan as a kind of proponent of Muslim Iranophilism modelled on Slavophilism. It is incontrovertible that Bazargan's world outlook was comprised in part from incompatible propositions, in that while valuing Islamic virtue over political activity, he recommended broad popular participation in selecting a government while at the same time he rejected the demonstrated course of popular democracy in practice.
--Joe Tudeh
Monday, September 22, 2008
OPEN LETTER TO DOGU ERGIL (Ankara University)
Dogu Ergil, "Turkey's Crisis and Future," MIT Center for International Studies. August 2008.
A REBUTTAL
By the thinnest of margins the Constitutional Court permitted the governing Justice and Development party government to proceed with its Muslimizing programme, permitting young women to wear the jihab at universities. You note, moreover, that the party has "lost its enthusiasm" for liberalizing and democratizing Turkey in its quixotic quest for EU membership.
Predictably you condemn the Ergenekon discussants as aspiring to impose "an isolationaist dictatorial regime" upon the secular republic established by the actions of General Kemal Ataturk. The hypothetical popular demands you visualize for "liberalization and globalization" may conceivably echo the programme advocated in Langley, VA, but it is dubious if Anatolian farmers in their mosques and the urbanized Istanbul elite, meeting in coffee shops or Mariott Hotel bars, really desire to be "globalized" under the credit pump of fiat currency underlying the marketization of the Anglo-American economic model. Progressive devaluations undercut the currency of the Ottomans, and loom ever closer for the American dollar. Criticism of the coup mentality is singularly ill-timed in the post-Cold War era, when the actions of Boris Yeltsin to summon 1300 Russian troops to bombard the elected deputies of the Russian Parliament in their skyscraper (the "White House") elicit the applause of his Harvard biographer.
Far from the fraudulent choice posed by Prof. Ergil, that Turkey must choose "Westernization" or ostracism, it would be better advised to cultivate the path of Pan-Turanism advanced by Enver Pasha and re-ignite the cooperation of colonized non-white nationalities as envisaged by Sultan-Galiev after 1918, with this difference--that the newly resurgent national state cooperate with the new Shanghai Cooperation Council, Pakistan, and the dynamic economies of the emerging Asian giants as they recycle petroleum income invested by Muslim states around the Persian Gulf.
The Muslim masses and secularizing elite may well discover a new Silk Road to Eurasian prosperity if they imbibe a colonic to purge themselves of the constipation of Western-style marketization and the Pentagon-Brussels axis of military bureaucracy through which illusory waves of parliamentary approval are suborned or purchased by manipulators of fiat-financed investment vehicles.
--Dr. Diogenes
A REBUTTAL
By the thinnest of margins the Constitutional Court permitted the governing Justice and Development party government to proceed with its Muslimizing programme, permitting young women to wear the jihab at universities. You note, moreover, that the party has "lost its enthusiasm" for liberalizing and democratizing Turkey in its quixotic quest for EU membership.
Predictably you condemn the Ergenekon discussants as aspiring to impose "an isolationaist dictatorial regime" upon the secular republic established by the actions of General Kemal Ataturk. The hypothetical popular demands you visualize for "liberalization and globalization" may conceivably echo the programme advocated in Langley, VA, but it is dubious if Anatolian farmers in their mosques and the urbanized Istanbul elite, meeting in coffee shops or Mariott Hotel bars, really desire to be "globalized" under the credit pump of fiat currency underlying the marketization of the Anglo-American economic model. Progressive devaluations undercut the currency of the Ottomans, and loom ever closer for the American dollar. Criticism of the coup mentality is singularly ill-timed in the post-Cold War era, when the actions of Boris Yeltsin to summon 1300 Russian troops to bombard the elected deputies of the Russian Parliament in their skyscraper (the "White House") elicit the applause of his Harvard biographer.
Far from the fraudulent choice posed by Prof. Ergil, that Turkey must choose "Westernization" or ostracism, it would be better advised to cultivate the path of Pan-Turanism advanced by Enver Pasha and re-ignite the cooperation of colonized non-white nationalities as envisaged by Sultan-Galiev after 1918, with this difference--that the newly resurgent national state cooperate with the new Shanghai Cooperation Council, Pakistan, and the dynamic economies of the emerging Asian giants as they recycle petroleum income invested by Muslim states around the Persian Gulf.
The Muslim masses and secularizing elite may well discover a new Silk Road to Eurasian prosperity if they imbibe a colonic to purge themselves of the constipation of Western-style marketization and the Pentagon-Brussels axis of military bureaucracy through which illusory waves of parliamentary approval are suborned or purchased by manipulators of fiat-financed investment vehicles.
--Dr. Diogenes
Saturday, September 20, 2008
BLACK SEA STUDIES (Take-home Exam. AD 2004)
Many observers have commented that American strategic planners have felt a pang of nostalgia for the former certitudes of the Cold War Era. With that in mind, please draft an aide-memoire interpreting Washington's criticism of the Russian tactics in Chechnya, demands for Russian forces to withdraw from Abkhazia and Moldova, and Secretary Rumsfeld's mission to Georgia as a legitimate and commendable democratic effort to restrain expanding Russian imperial power. (You may wish to include a few well-thouoght-out paragraphs clarifying that a strategic thrust to envelop Kiev in the arms of NATO is necessary to contain Russian expansionism.)
As the diplomatic service remains woefully inadequate at integrating economic pollicies into a coherent diplomatic strategy, include in your answer a symbolic application of the putative predominance of the American judicial system on a global scale. You might wish to conduct a Weberian "thought-experiment" imagining the collapse of Mubarak's regime in Egypt. Could not a Texas court be dextrously manoeuvered into placing the former president's assets into international escrow, to be awarded later to the victorious successor regime if it provides credible assurances that it will be guided by, say, the Bloomberg Financial Group, Goldman-Sachs, or the Carlyle Group?)
Please tie the economic and military-strategic paragraphs together with a patriotic hortatory injunction informing the reader that "loose nukes" in Russia constitute a global menace, whereas after a Third Democratic Revolution in Russia, a newly purified planet will labor diligently and optimistically for the new dominant congeries of trans-national corporations, troubled only temporarily and evanescently by earthquakes, tsunamis and pandemics in the best of all possible free-market business climates conducive, in the words of the Sage of Crawford, to "a better return on investment?"
5 pages maximum.
As the diplomatic service remains woefully inadequate at integrating economic pollicies into a coherent diplomatic strategy, include in your answer a symbolic application of the putative predominance of the American judicial system on a global scale. You might wish to conduct a Weberian "thought-experiment" imagining the collapse of Mubarak's regime in Egypt. Could not a Texas court be dextrously manoeuvered into placing the former president's assets into international escrow, to be awarded later to the victorious successor regime if it provides credible assurances that it will be guided by, say, the Bloomberg Financial Group, Goldman-Sachs, or the Carlyle Group?)
Please tie the economic and military-strategic paragraphs together with a patriotic hortatory injunction informing the reader that "loose nukes" in Russia constitute a global menace, whereas after a Third Democratic Revolution in Russia, a newly purified planet will labor diligently and optimistically for the new dominant congeries of trans-national corporations, troubled only temporarily and evanescently by earthquakes, tsunamis and pandemics in the best of all possible free-market business climates conducive, in the words of the Sage of Crawford, to "a better return on investment?"
5 pages maximum.
Friday, September 19, 2008
SUSPECTED SOCIOPATH (DIAGNOSIS AND PROGNOSIS)
TO: Health Care Professionals
FROM: Dr. Povanda, Psychological Practicioner
DATE:Feb. 5, 2003
SUBJECT: Suspected Sociopath
1. The subject, George B., currently occupies a responsible executive position in a large conglomorate deriving its income from two main subsidiaries. One is in the oil production and marketing sphere. The other provides armed security guards for managers appointed to supervise foreign subsidiaries under oil cartel control.
2. The subject inherited his position from his father , George H.W., after an eight year interval in which the company was administered by a straw man. Ab initio George B. embarked on a policy of virtually unrestrained deficit spending. In this he was encouraged by his father's former comptroller, crony, and now general factotum. The company's internal script, the "Holler," has steadily fallen against both gold bullion and the new Euro. There are no appreciable signs of reversal, given the prospect of mounting deficits and the continuing prospect of of the company consuming more than it earns. The subject fired the company treasurer who, after a tour of Africa with a sexy rock star, announced his preference for a soundly-backed script (the "strong Holler"). He also took the axe to his private financial adviser, who had warned that taking over oil fields in a hostile takeover from a regional competitor would cost in excess of $200 billion US, for which the company held insufficient funds.
3. Whilst circumspect in public, the subject has frequently stated his firm is under continual threat of attack by fanatical terrorists. Last year he attacked the Afghani gas fields, removed the previous managers, and through manipulated proxies and a controlled stakeholders' assembly (the "Big Tent"), installed his own front man as manager on an ethnic reservation (Chief Hamid the Bold). For the last fifteen months he has manifested the behavior of a typical stalker, pursuing the once formidable but now superannuated manager of a semi-ruined regional oil competitor, either because he fears the old-line owner has weaponized his employees, or entertains malevolent thoughts in secret, or is dodging an international audit, or represents in his abhorrent person the quintessence of human evil. His company has continued to seek and sign secret undertakings to divide the opponent's property among the most slavish of his subsidized adherents ("lynching by the willing").
4. The subject frequently manifests inconsistent ultra-nationalistic and ultra-conservative convictions. He recently visited a sectarian Southern university where Blancos and Negros among the disparate nationalities in his employ were (until his visit) forbidden to date. He has stated orally that he favors diversity in the workplace, yet his company recently filed suit to terminate affirmative actions programs for minority nationalities. He is a stong public proponent of the so-called "right-to-life" ideology. He has forbiden the company clinic to distribute birth control implements or medication. He has refused to pay dues to an international organization on the East Coast because it distributes birth control information which might facilitate abortions in overpopulated China. On M.L. King's memorial weekend, he issued a proclamation fervently reaffirming the "sanctity" of life. Not ten days had passed before he announced an eleemosynary gift to a distant African town, to subsidize the distribution of drugs against AIDS and condoms (perhaps to restrict the reproduction of Negros).
5. He has undertaken the largest company reorganization in 40 years to unify, strengthen and coordinate (Gleichschaltung) the security guard and to restrict access to company property. He has begun interrogating, registering and fingerprinting foreign workers and even visitors to company grounds. He has complained that open parklands on his northern boundary are open to visitors, residents, immigrants, terrorists, and moose alike, and urged that his property line be secured by armed patrols.
6. Each time the possibility of a workers' action arises, he employs legal subterfuge to postpone the action ad infinitum. The leader of the company union has acquiesced, postponed union elections for two years, and disappeared from the public eye. Further to his ostensibly religious ends, the subject has advocated "faith-based employment" and introduced company chaplains (C-in-C's) into his basement command bunker. He has not shrunk from distributing photos that subliminally suggest that he is the Son of God.
7. His chief operating officer, one Dick "Torquemada" Cheney, scion of an old Boston family, exercises predominant planning functions and implements executive functions far exceeding his statuatory authority. He once chaired a search committee to select a deputy chairman which astonishingly chose himself. This eminence gris acts as a virtual recluse in an undisclosed location. George B. is a trained broadcaster with cultivated forensic skills. This cultivated ability is displayed, however, only on formal or "set piece" occasions. When forced to improvise, he is remarkably tongue-tied. Consequently he dodges the press at every opportunity, enjoys minimal contact with elected worker representatives, none with Negro organizations, and even shuns unchaperoned contact with his own company specialists. It is conceivable that his immediate entourage, inherited (or self-selected) from his father's administration, understand the limitations of his abilities. They have apparently formed an "iron ring" to insulate their employer of record from unrehearsed public intercourse. Flora, his wife, is further suspected of exercising domestic disciplinary authority over her wealthy but unstable husband. George B. continues to conduct company business with foreign clients at hole-in-corner locations, without competent experts present, at a mesquite-overgrown Texas spread or at a gated reclusive lodge in Maryland's Catatonic Mountains. His press spokesman announces George's unilateral decisions before a compliant press assembly so often that he is often (if mistakenly) assumed to be the Acting Company President. His personal secretary, Sissy Nice, a former California road-house waitress at "The Farm" restaurant not far from sophisticated San Francisco, is more adept at entertaining foreign male executives than in administering, advising, or restraining her employer. (She reserves her dominatrix tendencies for regaling competitors.)
8. In sum, because of his persistent aggressive and violence-prone advocacy ("Keep on killin' 'em! We'll kill 'em all!") , duplicity in pronouncements and policies, excessive secretiveness and extravagant spending habits--the heir to a rich oil dynasty, trained in manners at exclusive Ivy League colleges, he has never acknowledged the requirements of fiscal discipline--George B., a recovering alcoholic, is to be remanded to the Guantanamo facility for involuntary treatment as a "sociopathic personality."
Bazarov-Nosferato Psychological Clinic
Rapallo, Germany
NB--The original clippings from academic studies are no longer accessible. Psychologists in attendance are urged to consult the literature, in which the dividing line between "sociopath" and "entrepeneur" is distinctly blurred.
FROM: Dr. Povanda, Psychological Practicioner
DATE:Feb. 5, 2003
SUBJECT: Suspected Sociopath
1. The subject, George B., currently occupies a responsible executive position in a large conglomorate deriving its income from two main subsidiaries. One is in the oil production and marketing sphere. The other provides armed security guards for managers appointed to supervise foreign subsidiaries under oil cartel control.
2. The subject inherited his position from his father , George H.W., after an eight year interval in which the company was administered by a straw man. Ab initio George B. embarked on a policy of virtually unrestrained deficit spending. In this he was encouraged by his father's former comptroller, crony, and now general factotum. The company's internal script, the "Holler," has steadily fallen against both gold bullion and the new Euro. There are no appreciable signs of reversal, given the prospect of mounting deficits and the continuing prospect of of the company consuming more than it earns. The subject fired the company treasurer who, after a tour of Africa with a sexy rock star, announced his preference for a soundly-backed script (the "strong Holler"). He also took the axe to his private financial adviser, who had warned that taking over oil fields in a hostile takeover from a regional competitor would cost in excess of $200 billion US, for which the company held insufficient funds.
3. Whilst circumspect in public, the subject has frequently stated his firm is under continual threat of attack by fanatical terrorists. Last year he attacked the Afghani gas fields, removed the previous managers, and through manipulated proxies and a controlled stakeholders' assembly (the "Big Tent"), installed his own front man as manager on an ethnic reservation (Chief Hamid the Bold). For the last fifteen months he has manifested the behavior of a typical stalker, pursuing the once formidable but now superannuated manager of a semi-ruined regional oil competitor, either because he fears the old-line owner has weaponized his employees, or entertains malevolent thoughts in secret, or is dodging an international audit, or represents in his abhorrent person the quintessence of human evil. His company has continued to seek and sign secret undertakings to divide the opponent's property among the most slavish of his subsidized adherents ("lynching by the willing").
4. The subject frequently manifests inconsistent ultra-nationalistic and ultra-conservative convictions. He recently visited a sectarian Southern university where Blancos and Negros among the disparate nationalities in his employ were (until his visit) forbidden to date. He has stated orally that he favors diversity in the workplace, yet his company recently filed suit to terminate affirmative actions programs for minority nationalities. He is a stong public proponent of the so-called "right-to-life" ideology. He has forbiden the company clinic to distribute birth control implements or medication. He has refused to pay dues to an international organization on the East Coast because it distributes birth control information which might facilitate abortions in overpopulated China. On M.L. King's memorial weekend, he issued a proclamation fervently reaffirming the "sanctity" of life. Not ten days had passed before he announced an eleemosynary gift to a distant African town, to subsidize the distribution of drugs against AIDS and condoms (perhaps to restrict the reproduction of Negros).
5. He has undertaken the largest company reorganization in 40 years to unify, strengthen and coordinate (Gleichschaltung) the security guard and to restrict access to company property. He has begun interrogating, registering and fingerprinting foreign workers and even visitors to company grounds. He has complained that open parklands on his northern boundary are open to visitors, residents, immigrants, terrorists, and moose alike, and urged that his property line be secured by armed patrols.
6. Each time the possibility of a workers' action arises, he employs legal subterfuge to postpone the action ad infinitum. The leader of the company union has acquiesced, postponed union elections for two years, and disappeared from the public eye. Further to his ostensibly religious ends, the subject has advocated "faith-based employment" and introduced company chaplains (C-in-C's) into his basement command bunker. He has not shrunk from distributing photos that subliminally suggest that he is the Son of God.
7. His chief operating officer, one Dick "Torquemada" Cheney, scion of an old Boston family, exercises predominant planning functions and implements executive functions far exceeding his statuatory authority. He once chaired a search committee to select a deputy chairman which astonishingly chose himself. This eminence gris acts as a virtual recluse in an undisclosed location. George B. is a trained broadcaster with cultivated forensic skills. This cultivated ability is displayed, however, only on formal or "set piece" occasions. When forced to improvise, he is remarkably tongue-tied. Consequently he dodges the press at every opportunity, enjoys minimal contact with elected worker representatives, none with Negro organizations, and even shuns unchaperoned contact with his own company specialists. It is conceivable that his immediate entourage, inherited (or self-selected) from his father's administration, understand the limitations of his abilities. They have apparently formed an "iron ring" to insulate their employer of record from unrehearsed public intercourse. Flora, his wife, is further suspected of exercising domestic disciplinary authority over her wealthy but unstable husband. George B. continues to conduct company business with foreign clients at hole-in-corner locations, without competent experts present, at a mesquite-overgrown Texas spread or at a gated reclusive lodge in Maryland's Catatonic Mountains. His press spokesman announces George's unilateral decisions before a compliant press assembly so often that he is often (if mistakenly) assumed to be the Acting Company President. His personal secretary, Sissy Nice, a former California road-house waitress at "The Farm" restaurant not far from sophisticated San Francisco, is more adept at entertaining foreign male executives than in administering, advising, or restraining her employer. (She reserves her dominatrix tendencies for regaling competitors.)
8. In sum, because of his persistent aggressive and violence-prone advocacy ("Keep on killin' 'em! We'll kill 'em all!") , duplicity in pronouncements and policies, excessive secretiveness and extravagant spending habits--the heir to a rich oil dynasty, trained in manners at exclusive Ivy League colleges, he has never acknowledged the requirements of fiscal discipline--George B., a recovering alcoholic, is to be remanded to the Guantanamo facility for involuntary treatment as a "sociopathic personality."
Bazarov-Nosferato Psychological Clinic
Rapallo, Germany
NB--The original clippings from academic studies are no longer accessible. Psychologists in attendance are urged to consult the literature, in which the dividing line between "sociopath" and "entrepeneur" is distinctly blurred.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
REVIEW. AMERICAN INTERVENTION IN SIBERIA
Robert J. Maddox. THE UNKNOWN WAR WITH RUSSIA: WILSON'S SIBERIAN INTERVENTION. pp. ix, 156. San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1977. $9.95.
This little book is ambitious in attempting to debunk Woodrow Wilson's gilded image in foreign affairs. Professor Maddox has brought new evidence to light, organized his material carefully, and laid out common-sense conclusions (one suspects in a Puritan spirit) in plain language. I think this essay will enjoy greater significance as a milestone in research into the American presidency than as a gravestone over Wilson's reputation. That may well be Maddox's goal and, if he has intervened in the dispute over the Wilson legacy with goals so limited, he may legitimately claim to have scored some points in a fight with no knock-downs.
Granted that Wilson's first reaction to Bol'shevik success was one of antipathy, one must next inquire what policy measures embodied this antipathy. The record, as Professor Maddox presents it, is tantallizingly suggestive. During those halycon days in the transition between two epochs, Wilson and his advisors "...kneew little more than what appeared in the press" before the first sketchy reports from the American embassy arrived. An entire Cabinet meeting on November 9 was devoted to Russia, following which, according to the semi-official New York Times, the Cabined adopted a wait-and-see attitude. No official record of that meeting has seen the light of day. Yet Secretary of State Lansing (1864-1928) speculated on the same day that some "strongman" might emerge who would unify the nation. On November 12, in a public address, the President characterized the new Russian leaders as "idle dreamers." This is at least a shockingly casual comment from a head of government if that government had genuinely adopted a temporizing policy a mere three days before. Recalling that the last period of Wilsonian "watchful waiting" led to the intervention in Mexico, it seems at least arguable that the Washington government (1) had better sources of information than Maddox credits them with; (2) put forward the "wait-and-see" story as a laissez-entendre through the New York Times; and (3) quite possibly resolved in Cabinet on November 9 to do whatever appeared feasible to facilitate the emergence of a government that could preserve democracy and continue the war.
As Maddox notes, "Decisions made behind the scenes strongly suggest that President Wilson opposed the Bol'sheviks from the outset...." The concatenation of events alone is indicative. On November 11, four days after the Bol'shevik coup, two days after a Cabinet meeting withoug surviving notes, and one day before the President's slighting reference to "idle dreamers," the Russian Ambassador announced that he would not recognize the Bol'shevik regime--but would continue to represent "Russia" until a legal successor regime appeared! It would of course be impossible for a diplomat without credentials to occupy and administer an embassy complex without the tacit support of the host country. Maddox characterized this situation as "an item of diplomatic curiosa," but it seems to signal clearly that the Administration was already parti pris in the Russian political struggle.
"Provocative" is the only word to describe the evidence Maddox has selected to illustrate the leverage the Administration exerted on this new fulcrum. The Russian embassy's assets, valued at more that fifty-six million dollars (deposited at Citibank) were expended to arm both Whites and Czechs with the active assistance of United States government representatives. Twice the State Department interceded to induce the bank to defer collecting obligations, previously floated on the money market, which would have severely reduced the embassy's ability to execute contracts. One of the ancillary conclusions Professor Maddox does not draw is that if the Soviet government consented to make a token payment on the imperial bonds repudiated by Lenin (1870-1924), it would be symbolically subsidizing intervention! This is heady stuff indeed.
When Wilson did decide to send troops to Siberia, in uneasy collabortion with the Japanese in July, 1918, N.D. Baker, the Secretary of War who had previously opposed the decision, in effect took himself out of the chain of command by handing General Graves the President's aide-memoire without any specific military instructions. Graves adhered scrupulously to the injunction to avoid siding in Russian internal politics. Thereby he gave offense to every other armed force in Siberia. Further, he acurately predicted Admiral Kolchak's downfall as Supreme Ruler in Omsk. In Maddox's view, the military were the most objective observers of the alien Russian scene, wheres American diplomats' views were colored by their close associations with various representatives of Russian social opinion. Is there a moral here?
To conclude, what is presented as a study in intervention takes on the appearance of a Puritan homily on the sins of the imperial and liberal presidency. This interpretation could be innocently misleading. It suggests a perception of Wilson as a liberal Prometheus whose hisstorical reputation is ravaged by the claws of Professor Maddox. But in ranging hinmself among the opponents of Bol'shevism Wilson would have been lost among a large majority of Russians; far from appearing heroic, he adopted the policy of the average man. The problems he faced in trying to "reconcile the American people to the need for intervention..." flowed from the weakness of his position rather than its strength. This is the opposite of the situation in a truly imperial state in which quod principi placet leges habet virorum. Yet to condemn intervention as a "total failure" appears overly narrow and hence overly harsh.
The prosaic truth is that geography, circumstances, political institutions, and military capacity dealt Wilson a weak hand. The titular head of a second-class power adopted a strategy of no trump--with the usual results. But he eschewed overcommitment and maintained acceptable relations with the first-class powers while Congressional opposition deterred him from an improvident squandering of resources of the kind that destroyed the myth of the later imperial presidency. It could have been worse. Miliary intervention in foreign politics, concealed by domestic subterfuge, is not a practice to be recommended to democratic governments.
(Columbia University) Published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.
This little book is ambitious in attempting to debunk Woodrow Wilson's gilded image in foreign affairs. Professor Maddox has brought new evidence to light, organized his material carefully, and laid out common-sense conclusions (one suspects in a Puritan spirit) in plain language. I think this essay will enjoy greater significance as a milestone in research into the American presidency than as a gravestone over Wilson's reputation. That may well be Maddox's goal and, if he has intervened in the dispute over the Wilson legacy with goals so limited, he may legitimately claim to have scored some points in a fight with no knock-downs.
Granted that Wilson's first reaction to Bol'shevik success was one of antipathy, one must next inquire what policy measures embodied this antipathy. The record, as Professor Maddox presents it, is tantallizingly suggestive. During those halycon days in the transition between two epochs, Wilson and his advisors "...kneew little more than what appeared in the press" before the first sketchy reports from the American embassy arrived. An entire Cabinet meeting on November 9 was devoted to Russia, following which, according to the semi-official New York Times, the Cabined adopted a wait-and-see attitude. No official record of that meeting has seen the light of day. Yet Secretary of State Lansing (1864-1928) speculated on the same day that some "strongman" might emerge who would unify the nation. On November 12, in a public address, the President characterized the new Russian leaders as "idle dreamers." This is at least a shockingly casual comment from a head of government if that government had genuinely adopted a temporizing policy a mere three days before. Recalling that the last period of Wilsonian "watchful waiting" led to the intervention in Mexico, it seems at least arguable that the Washington government (1) had better sources of information than Maddox credits them with; (2) put forward the "wait-and-see" story as a laissez-entendre through the New York Times; and (3) quite possibly resolved in Cabinet on November 9 to do whatever appeared feasible to facilitate the emergence of a government that could preserve democracy and continue the war.
As Maddox notes, "Decisions made behind the scenes strongly suggest that President Wilson opposed the Bol'sheviks from the outset...." The concatenation of events alone is indicative. On November 11, four days after the Bol'shevik coup, two days after a Cabinet meeting withoug surviving notes, and one day before the President's slighting reference to "idle dreamers," the Russian Ambassador announced that he would not recognize the Bol'shevik regime--but would continue to represent "Russia" until a legal successor regime appeared! It would of course be impossible for a diplomat without credentials to occupy and administer an embassy complex without the tacit support of the host country. Maddox characterized this situation as "an item of diplomatic curiosa," but it seems to signal clearly that the Administration was already parti pris in the Russian political struggle.
"Provocative" is the only word to describe the evidence Maddox has selected to illustrate the leverage the Administration exerted on this new fulcrum. The Russian embassy's assets, valued at more that fifty-six million dollars (deposited at Citibank) were expended to arm both Whites and Czechs with the active assistance of United States government representatives. Twice the State Department interceded to induce the bank to defer collecting obligations, previously floated on the money market, which would have severely reduced the embassy's ability to execute contracts. One of the ancillary conclusions Professor Maddox does not draw is that if the Soviet government consented to make a token payment on the imperial bonds repudiated by Lenin (1870-1924), it would be symbolically subsidizing intervention! This is heady stuff indeed.
When Wilson did decide to send troops to Siberia, in uneasy collabortion with the Japanese in July, 1918, N.D. Baker, the Secretary of War who had previously opposed the decision, in effect took himself out of the chain of command by handing General Graves the President's aide-memoire without any specific military instructions. Graves adhered scrupulously to the injunction to avoid siding in Russian internal politics. Thereby he gave offense to every other armed force in Siberia. Further, he acurately predicted Admiral Kolchak's downfall as Supreme Ruler in Omsk. In Maddox's view, the military were the most objective observers of the alien Russian scene, wheres American diplomats' views were colored by their close associations with various representatives of Russian social opinion. Is there a moral here?
To conclude, what is presented as a study in intervention takes on the appearance of a Puritan homily on the sins of the imperial and liberal presidency. This interpretation could be innocently misleading. It suggests a perception of Wilson as a liberal Prometheus whose hisstorical reputation is ravaged by the claws of Professor Maddox. But in ranging hinmself among the opponents of Bol'shevism Wilson would have been lost among a large majority of Russians; far from appearing heroic, he adopted the policy of the average man. The problems he faced in trying to "reconcile the American people to the need for intervention..." flowed from the weakness of his position rather than its strength. This is the opposite of the situation in a truly imperial state in which quod principi placet leges habet virorum. Yet to condemn intervention as a "total failure" appears overly narrow and hence overly harsh.
The prosaic truth is that geography, circumstances, political institutions, and military capacity dealt Wilson a weak hand. The titular head of a second-class power adopted a strategy of no trump--with the usual results. But he eschewed overcommitment and maintained acceptable relations with the first-class powers while Congressional opposition deterred him from an improvident squandering of resources of the kind that destroyed the myth of the later imperial presidency. It could have been worse. Miliary intervention in foreign politics, concealed by domestic subterfuge, is not a practice to be recommended to democratic governments.
(Columbia University) Published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.
Monday, September 15, 2008
AMERICANS AND EURASIA (Review)
James C. Thomson, Jr. Peter W. Stanley and John Curtis Perry, Sentimental Imperialism: The American Experience in East Asia. New York: Harper & Row, c. 1981. 323 pp.
The genre of this volume is difficult to define. Written in the collaborative mode by three well-connected educators (from Harvard, Carleton College in Minnesota and Tufts, respectively), it lacks bibliography, footnotes and illustrations. The four maps are poorly reproduced and are of marginal utility. The editorial decision to maintain the Wade-Giles system of transliteration is, on the other hand, highly commendable. The prose is consistent in a style recognizable as "formally Washingtonian:" bureaucratic, academic and liberal. The volume is intended, apparently, for readers with little or partial previous knowledge of the area.
The authors have attempted to delineate a contrast among American experiences with China, The Philippines and Japan. Beginning with China, the study is clear as regards China's Canton System of regulating foreign trade, the role of the Opium Wars (1840-42) and the outline of the "treaty system" emerging from the Treaty of Nanking (1842). Fluctuations in regional currencies and the price of silver are noted and the incresed role of the comprador (a Chinese llicensed broker employed by a foreign trading company is outlined. The summary of the American "Open Door" policy (1899) has obviously benefitted from previous scholarly reinteerpretation. The development of the May 4th movement, stemming fronm China's rejection of the Versailles Treaty, is traced from its original emphasis on individual emancipation to an emphasis on strengthening the state. On the other hand, the ideology of the Taiping Rebellion is virtually ignored, Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of Nationalism, Democracy and Socialism are not satisfactorily amplified, and neither the Japanese Black Dragon Society nor Chiang Kai-shek's relationship to it are mentioned. Also ignored is M.M. Borodin (Gruzenberg), the former Chicago schoolteacher and later Comintern representative, whom Dr. Sun Apotheosized as the "Lafayette of the Chinese revolution."
While Protestant missionary activity was only marginally effective in converting the Chinese, it enjoyed greater success in establishing a network of training institutions in education and medicine. It is curious to read that the Rockefeller Foundation recommended an ambitious new program to exploit China's "plasticity" by undertaking a massive program to raise the living standards of rural China in 1934 (p. 186) while Chiang's New Life movement of the same year, modelled on the YMCA and the protestant churches, was executed ",,,with fascism as its covert sponsor and enforcer.:" (p. 182). Missing in action is the wartime American liason with Mao Tse-tung (code-named "Dixie Mission"); unpersoned and presumably not rehabilitated are President Liu Shao-chi and Mao's once-designated successor, Gen. Lin Pao. While Maoism is not defined, the Great Helmsman is commemorated on only a few pages more than Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R.-WI), whose influence on world events was significantly less. Pursuit of the mythical question "Who lost China?" suggests that the responsible corps of American China specialists is still deeply defensive and has not yet regained a desirable degree of self-confidence and impartiality.
The Philippines offer a case study of forty years of American imperial administration. Conquered by Spain in the 18th century, the peoples of the archipeligo lived in barangay's or extended kinship units, without a national state as such. Following the Spanish defeat by the Vermont-born Commodore Dewey in 1898, Filipinos led by Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964) rose in insurrection against both Spain and the United States. Annexation was nearly defeated in the U.S. Senate. Inexplicably, the authors do not refer to the quotable Sen. Albert J. Beveridge, the influlential William Randolph Hearst, the Protestant interest in Christianizing the "little brown brother," or the enlisted man's variant, "Civilize 'em with a Krag!" (referring to the .30/40 repeating rifle, purchased from Norway, US Army standard issue 1894-1903). Despite this inauspicious beginning, the civil administration of William Howard Taft and his "policy of attraction" in The Philippines signified an alliance between American imperial power and native collaborators among the local elites. The "imperialism of suasion" developed into a bulwark protecting class interest. The personalism of social relationships within the barangay was destroyed during the economic "rationalization" of the 1920's and 1930's. The Japanese invaders of 1941 found fewer collaborators (except the independence-minded Aguinaldo), and those were resisted by the Hukbalahap, part of which later developed into a Communist-led anti-landlord uprising until defeated by President Ramon Magsaysay in the 1950's. His successor, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law in 1972. In the opinion of the present authors, "...Eight decades of collaboration have been tried and found wanting."
Rejecting not only alliances but commercial intercourse (save with the Dutch and Chinese),, Tokugawa Japan enforced social tranquillity through a policy of "centralized feudalism /sic/." The less populous but more industrialized United States compelled the insular Japanese into a "treaty system" in 1858, following the naval mission of Commodore Mathew Perry in 1853. The Emperor Meiji was restored to full autority over the Tokugawa and other clans in 1868 in Japan's response to the perceived Western threat. Subsequent Westernization of the "military-industrial complex" was capitalized domestically. Influenced by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, among others, the modernizing Meiji leadership returned in force to Korea by 1876, defeated the reformed Chinese military in 1894-5, and contributed nearly half the forces sent to rebuff the Boxer uprising in 1899. Japan next defeated Russia in 1904-05, agreeing to a relatively modest settlement at the Treaty of Portsmouth (NH) for which President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize. Following Secretary Hay's Open Door notes, the United States attempted to act as balance-maker between Japan and China in the expectancy that Japan would pursue its expansionist aims in northeastern Asia rather than among the Pacific islands. Basic American military strategy (Plan Orange) of 1907 and after envisaged a defensive posture in the Pacific. During the Wilson era the realism of Theodore Roosevelt and Secrtary Elihu Root was replaced by a "...new sense of the universal applicability of American values." While the value of Japanese exports fell 50% during 1929-31, expansion into Manchuria (1931) and China's Yangtse Valley (1937) under various Pan Asian slogans significantly underestimated Chinese nationalism. Associating itself with the Anticomintern Pact (1936) and the Tripartite Alliance (1940), Japan became loosely associated in American public opinion with European Fascism. President Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary Cordell Hull believed in "collective security" (pace Maxim Liltvinov) and directed stiffening American resistence to Japan in her role of German ally. No mention is made of the Japanese and Allied interventions in Siberia (1917-22), which included the Americans, or the forces urging Japan into war against the Soviet Union in 1939. The authors' opinion that the Soviets were "...still too weak to challenge the Japanese" may disturb the spirit in Valhalla of Lieutenant-General Georgii Zhukov, whose tank-led army exacted some 50,000 Japanese casualties at the battle of Khalkin Gol' on the Mongolian frontier in August, 1939.
Political and social reforms were undertaken during the American occupation of Japan (1945-52, while ambitious economic reforms were projected but subsequently curtailed. Since 1945, the authors conclude, the United States has enjoyed better relations with its former enemy, Japan, than with its former ally, China., or former colony, The Philippines. The Japanese Wirtschaftwunder is remarked on and while the aulhors comment on the Japanese "vulnerability complex" and its nearly total dependence on imported oil, they do not associate these phenomena with political friability in Japan, Inc. where "...the same conservative party always wins a plurality." The contrast in conclusions relative to American coopertion with the Japanese and Philippine elites is not explained. Someday, somewhere, an independent institute or journal to foster integrated studies of modern Eurasia might be welcomed.
Publhed in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in Philadelphia in the Spring of 1983. Insignificant rhetorical modifications have been introduced in this version.
The genre of this volume is difficult to define. Written in the collaborative mode by three well-connected educators (from Harvard, Carleton College in Minnesota and Tufts, respectively), it lacks bibliography, footnotes and illustrations. The four maps are poorly reproduced and are of marginal utility. The editorial decision to maintain the Wade-Giles system of transliteration is, on the other hand, highly commendable. The prose is consistent in a style recognizable as "formally Washingtonian:" bureaucratic, academic and liberal. The volume is intended, apparently, for readers with little or partial previous knowledge of the area.
The authors have attempted to delineate a contrast among American experiences with China, The Philippines and Japan. Beginning with China, the study is clear as regards China's Canton System of regulating foreign trade, the role of the Opium Wars (1840-42) and the outline of the "treaty system" emerging from the Treaty of Nanking (1842). Fluctuations in regional currencies and the price of silver are noted and the incresed role of the comprador (a Chinese llicensed broker employed by a foreign trading company is outlined. The summary of the American "Open Door" policy (1899) has obviously benefitted from previous scholarly reinteerpretation. The development of the May 4th movement, stemming fronm China's rejection of the Versailles Treaty, is traced from its original emphasis on individual emancipation to an emphasis on strengthening the state. On the other hand, the ideology of the Taiping Rebellion is virtually ignored, Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of Nationalism, Democracy and Socialism are not satisfactorily amplified, and neither the Japanese Black Dragon Society nor Chiang Kai-shek's relationship to it are mentioned. Also ignored is M.M. Borodin (Gruzenberg), the former Chicago schoolteacher and later Comintern representative, whom Dr. Sun Apotheosized as the "Lafayette of the Chinese revolution."
While Protestant missionary activity was only marginally effective in converting the Chinese, it enjoyed greater success in establishing a network of training institutions in education and medicine. It is curious to read that the Rockefeller Foundation recommended an ambitious new program to exploit China's "plasticity" by undertaking a massive program to raise the living standards of rural China in 1934 (p. 186) while Chiang's New Life movement of the same year, modelled on the YMCA and the protestant churches, was executed ",,,with fascism as its covert sponsor and enforcer.:" (p. 182). Missing in action is the wartime American liason with Mao Tse-tung (code-named "Dixie Mission"); unpersoned and presumably not rehabilitated are President Liu Shao-chi and Mao's once-designated successor, Gen. Lin Pao. While Maoism is not defined, the Great Helmsman is commemorated on only a few pages more than Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R.-WI), whose influence on world events was significantly less. Pursuit of the mythical question "Who lost China?" suggests that the responsible corps of American China specialists is still deeply defensive and has not yet regained a desirable degree of self-confidence and impartiality.
The Philippines offer a case study of forty years of American imperial administration. Conquered by Spain in the 18th century, the peoples of the archipeligo lived in barangay's or extended kinship units, without a national state as such. Following the Spanish defeat by the Vermont-born Commodore Dewey in 1898, Filipinos led by Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964) rose in insurrection against both Spain and the United States. Annexation was nearly defeated in the U.S. Senate. Inexplicably, the authors do not refer to the quotable Sen. Albert J. Beveridge, the influlential William Randolph Hearst, the Protestant interest in Christianizing the "little brown brother," or the enlisted man's variant, "Civilize 'em with a Krag!" (referring to the .30/40 repeating rifle, purchased from Norway, US Army standard issue 1894-1903). Despite this inauspicious beginning, the civil administration of William Howard Taft and his "policy of attraction" in The Philippines signified an alliance between American imperial power and native collaborators among the local elites. The "imperialism of suasion" developed into a bulwark protecting class interest. The personalism of social relationships within the barangay was destroyed during the economic "rationalization" of the 1920's and 1930's. The Japanese invaders of 1941 found fewer collaborators (except the independence-minded Aguinaldo), and those were resisted by the Hukbalahap, part of which later developed into a Communist-led anti-landlord uprising until defeated by President Ramon Magsaysay in the 1950's. His successor, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law in 1972. In the opinion of the present authors, "...Eight decades of collaboration have been tried and found wanting."
Rejecting not only alliances but commercial intercourse (save with the Dutch and Chinese),, Tokugawa Japan enforced social tranquillity through a policy of "centralized feudalism /sic/." The less populous but more industrialized United States compelled the insular Japanese into a "treaty system" in 1858, following the naval mission of Commodore Mathew Perry in 1853. The Emperor Meiji was restored to full autority over the Tokugawa and other clans in 1868 in Japan's response to the perceived Western threat. Subsequent Westernization of the "military-industrial complex" was capitalized domestically. Influenced by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, among others, the modernizing Meiji leadership returned in force to Korea by 1876, defeated the reformed Chinese military in 1894-5, and contributed nearly half the forces sent to rebuff the Boxer uprising in 1899. Japan next defeated Russia in 1904-05, agreeing to a relatively modest settlement at the Treaty of Portsmouth (NH) for which President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize. Following Secretary Hay's Open Door notes, the United States attempted to act as balance-maker between Japan and China in the expectancy that Japan would pursue its expansionist aims in northeastern Asia rather than among the Pacific islands. Basic American military strategy (Plan Orange) of 1907 and after envisaged a defensive posture in the Pacific. During the Wilson era the realism of Theodore Roosevelt and Secrtary Elihu Root was replaced by a "...new sense of the universal applicability of American values." While the value of Japanese exports fell 50% during 1929-31, expansion into Manchuria (1931) and China's Yangtse Valley (1937) under various Pan Asian slogans significantly underestimated Chinese nationalism. Associating itself with the Anticomintern Pact (1936) and the Tripartite Alliance (1940), Japan became loosely associated in American public opinion with European Fascism. President Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary Cordell Hull believed in "collective security" (pace Maxim Liltvinov) and directed stiffening American resistence to Japan in her role of German ally. No mention is made of the Japanese and Allied interventions in Siberia (1917-22), which included the Americans, or the forces urging Japan into war against the Soviet Union in 1939. The authors' opinion that the Soviets were "...still too weak to challenge the Japanese" may disturb the spirit in Valhalla of Lieutenant-General Georgii Zhukov, whose tank-led army exacted some 50,000 Japanese casualties at the battle of Khalkin Gol' on the Mongolian frontier in August, 1939.
Political and social reforms were undertaken during the American occupation of Japan (1945-52, while ambitious economic reforms were projected but subsequently curtailed. Since 1945, the authors conclude, the United States has enjoyed better relations with its former enemy, Japan, than with its former ally, China., or former colony, The Philippines. The Japanese Wirtschaftwunder is remarked on and while the aulhors comment on the Japanese "vulnerability complex" and its nearly total dependence on imported oil, they do not associate these phenomena with political friability in Japan, Inc. where "...the same conservative party always wins a plurality." The contrast in conclusions relative to American coopertion with the Japanese and Philippine elites is not explained. Someday, somewhere, an independent institute or journal to foster integrated studies of modern Eurasia might be welcomed.
Publhed in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in Philadelphia in the Spring of 1983. Insignificant rhetorical modifications have been introduced in this version.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
REVIEW, JEANNE KIRKPATRICK, THE REAGAN PHENOMENON
Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick. THE REAGAN PHENOMENON, AND OTHER SPEECHES ON FOREIGN POLICY. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, c. 1983. xv +230 pp.
In late mediaeval times a unique form of "how to do it" literature known as the "mirror of princes" literature arose in Europe. Holding up examples of virtue and vice, pious clerks hoped to inspire the virtuous prince to rule justly and in a Christian spirit in order to attain good fortune on earth and fitting disposition after death. One of the later practicioners was Niccolo Machievelli, secretary to the Florentine Republic in Italy, whose splendidly condensed job-seeking tract THE PRINCE redirected a formerly pietistic genre into realistic or amoral politics with a strong undercurrent of nationalism. Guided, as it were, by the Italian precedent, Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, the present US ambassador to the United Nations, has published some selected addresses on the present Administration's UN policies and the significence of the Reagan victory of 1980 as her contribution to a "mirror for reps" literature.
In six subdivisions of addresses to variegated bodies, the virtues and vices of Mrs. Kirkpatrick and the current Administration's foreign policy are luminously mirrored. Some sixty pages in Parts 3 and 4 are selected from speeches treating Israel's Drang nach Osten and the not-so-splendid isolation America enjoys within the UN. Some fifty pages in Part 5 are titled, with questionable understatement, "Some Troublesome Problems of Foreign Policy" such as most of Asia, Africa and Central America. These proportions are instructive and may suggest inter alia that a mote in the State Department's eye may prevent it from seeing the (falling) beams all around it.
Perhaps, too, an element of Machiavellian realism may have intertwined with other motives in issuing this collection. But not too much, for the Ambassador formally abjures rationalism in foreign policy and advocates "taking the cure" of history, which at her hands teaches that the liberties we are privileged to enjoy as putative victors in the Revolution and as descendents of Englishmen are sufficiently protected in the wise arrangement of offices provided in the Constitution and "...not by the Bill or Rights." (p. 44) O tempora! O Watergate!
It is not surprising that her address to the Natinal Urban League on "Goals in Africa" appears not to have touched the normal concerns of that body. The term "supply-side" is not in her vocabulary, but she finds "The case of Sri Lanka is particularly interesting..." (p. 24) The line separating neo-realism from neo-Phiilstinism is a thin one and at times Mrs. Kirkpatrick's formulations seem too close to that line for comfort. But her problems with a human rights formula stem largely from the Administration's commitment to throw out former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski while keeping the bath water, i.e., a tepid human rights pollicy that is less zealous and more manageable. Driving in the fast lane with one or two wheels skittering off the track, Jeanne the K nevertheless zooms to the finish line under the yellow-and white checkered flag of Christendom with a proposal to encourage the Brezhnev regime to withdraw from Afghanistan, factual rebuttals to the Sandinista spokesmen for Nicaragua and a heartfelt repudiation of Kampuchea's former leader, Pol Pot. And the Bill of Rights is suddenly (without being identified as such) fundamental once more (p.62).
It is bodacious to assert that the election of Ronald Reagan marked a watershed in American political life. (When has a recent Presidential election NOT been so characterized?) An excess of reductionism may be seen in her condensation of the twenty years from Truman's Point Four to the Tet offensive (1948-68) as the Cold War era. The decade from 1968 to about 1980, seen through these Reaganite goggles, is characterized as the interlude of detente, opening with the turgid rise of the New Left and detumescing during the flaccid presidency of Jimmy Carter. The Third Period, like the Third Rome, promises to a true believer's eyes to stand forever--"a fourth there shall not be"--but this is holding up a mirror to prince to show them in court regalia rather than as they actually, warts and wattles, are.
In the realistic spirit of Machiavelli, Mrs. Kirkpatrick decries the illusion that possession of armaments is eo ipso an incitement to violence. Indeed, she could point at MiG-23's in Cuba which can deliver nuclear devices, the airframe toggles that could carry them, and a Soviet brigade that guards them, but forbears for some reason to do so. Her conviction that peace and liberal democracy rests on American power is firmly expressed (p. 14).
Poised midway between Kissinger and Brzezinski, Mrs. Kirkpatrick may be characterized in Continental erms as a Liberal-Conservative. She is a better rhetorical driver than a mechanic of ideas: it has been a painstaking and sometimes painful exercise for her to tune her philosophcal engine to run without embarassing ideological backfires. As a political scientist, she demonstrates her forte to be analysis and presentation. Her addresses may be commended for their lucidity. It is liberalism in the traditional sense that underlies her most atttractive prose. This is seen at its best in her reflections on"The Reagan Phenomenon an the Liberal Tradition" in Rome. (How much more persuasive she could be staging "Hamlet" without Reagan as the Prince!) her tribute to the Italian political tradition from Marsilius of Padua in the 14th century (too radical, perhaps, for John Paul II) to Gaetano Mosca in the 20th century (but why not Vilfredo Pareto?) is intelligent and informed. A liberal commitment shines through her persistence in reminding audiences that words make a difference--as they do, if we are to communicate rationally, and if Humanidad is to be a criterion of civilized life. Any speaker who can deliver a readable commencement address deserves to be heard in policy council as well as in public advocacy. (Where ARE those speeches on Argentina?)
If the CIA should incur an expedient vacancy before the Orwellian year of 1984, Mrs. Kirkpatrick might approach the Great Communicator with the words of Portia in The Merchant of Venice:
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But that she may learn: happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed.
Tempered, qualified and humane CIA directors are precious few, and Mrs. Kirkpatrick is one of the few intellectuals in the Reagan Cabinet who, despite her understandable confusion in domestic politics, is apparently capable of looking into the mirror of princes and taking a long view.
Review commissioned by the Baltimore Sun, which declined to publish it. The Sun sent a $15.00 kill fee.
In late mediaeval times a unique form of "how to do it" literature known as the "mirror of princes" literature arose in Europe. Holding up examples of virtue and vice, pious clerks hoped to inspire the virtuous prince to rule justly and in a Christian spirit in order to attain good fortune on earth and fitting disposition after death. One of the later practicioners was Niccolo Machievelli, secretary to the Florentine Republic in Italy, whose splendidly condensed job-seeking tract THE PRINCE redirected a formerly pietistic genre into realistic or amoral politics with a strong undercurrent of nationalism. Guided, as it were, by the Italian precedent, Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, the present US ambassador to the United Nations, has published some selected addresses on the present Administration's UN policies and the significence of the Reagan victory of 1980 as her contribution to a "mirror for reps" literature.
In six subdivisions of addresses to variegated bodies, the virtues and vices of Mrs. Kirkpatrick and the current Administration's foreign policy are luminously mirrored. Some sixty pages in Parts 3 and 4 are selected from speeches treating Israel's Drang nach Osten and the not-so-splendid isolation America enjoys within the UN. Some fifty pages in Part 5 are titled, with questionable understatement, "Some Troublesome Problems of Foreign Policy" such as most of Asia, Africa and Central America. These proportions are instructive and may suggest inter alia that a mote in the State Department's eye may prevent it from seeing the (falling) beams all around it.
Perhaps, too, an element of Machiavellian realism may have intertwined with other motives in issuing this collection. But not too much, for the Ambassador formally abjures rationalism in foreign policy and advocates "taking the cure" of history, which at her hands teaches that the liberties we are privileged to enjoy as putative victors in the Revolution and as descendents of Englishmen are sufficiently protected in the wise arrangement of offices provided in the Constitution and "...not by the Bill or Rights." (p. 44) O tempora! O Watergate!
It is not surprising that her address to the Natinal Urban League on "Goals in Africa" appears not to have touched the normal concerns of that body. The term "supply-side" is not in her vocabulary, but she finds "The case of Sri Lanka is particularly interesting..." (p. 24) The line separating neo-realism from neo-Phiilstinism is a thin one and at times Mrs. Kirkpatrick's formulations seem too close to that line for comfort. But her problems with a human rights formula stem largely from the Administration's commitment to throw out former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski while keeping the bath water, i.e., a tepid human rights pollicy that is less zealous and more manageable. Driving in the fast lane with one or two wheels skittering off the track, Jeanne the K nevertheless zooms to the finish line under the yellow-and white checkered flag of Christendom with a proposal to encourage the Brezhnev regime to withdraw from Afghanistan, factual rebuttals to the Sandinista spokesmen for Nicaragua and a heartfelt repudiation of Kampuchea's former leader, Pol Pot. And the Bill of Rights is suddenly (without being identified as such) fundamental once more (p.62).
It is bodacious to assert that the election of Ronald Reagan marked a watershed in American political life. (When has a recent Presidential election NOT been so characterized?) An excess of reductionism may be seen in her condensation of the twenty years from Truman's Point Four to the Tet offensive (1948-68) as the Cold War era. The decade from 1968 to about 1980, seen through these Reaganite goggles, is characterized as the interlude of detente, opening with the turgid rise of the New Left and detumescing during the flaccid presidency of Jimmy Carter. The Third Period, like the Third Rome, promises to a true believer's eyes to stand forever--"a fourth there shall not be"--but this is holding up a mirror to prince to show them in court regalia rather than as they actually, warts and wattles, are.
In the realistic spirit of Machiavelli, Mrs. Kirkpatrick decries the illusion that possession of armaments is eo ipso an incitement to violence. Indeed, she could point at MiG-23's in Cuba which can deliver nuclear devices, the airframe toggles that could carry them, and a Soviet brigade that guards them, but forbears for some reason to do so. Her conviction that peace and liberal democracy rests on American power is firmly expressed (p. 14).
Poised midway between Kissinger and Brzezinski, Mrs. Kirkpatrick may be characterized in Continental erms as a Liberal-Conservative. She is a better rhetorical driver than a mechanic of ideas: it has been a painstaking and sometimes painful exercise for her to tune her philosophcal engine to run without embarassing ideological backfires. As a political scientist, she demonstrates her forte to be analysis and presentation. Her addresses may be commended for their lucidity. It is liberalism in the traditional sense that underlies her most atttractive prose. This is seen at its best in her reflections on"The Reagan Phenomenon an the Liberal Tradition" in Rome. (How much more persuasive she could be staging "Hamlet" without Reagan as the Prince!) her tribute to the Italian political tradition from Marsilius of Padua in the 14th century (too radical, perhaps, for John Paul II) to Gaetano Mosca in the 20th century (but why not Vilfredo Pareto?) is intelligent and informed. A liberal commitment shines through her persistence in reminding audiences that words make a difference--as they do, if we are to communicate rationally, and if Humanidad is to be a criterion of civilized life. Any speaker who can deliver a readable commencement address deserves to be heard in policy council as well as in public advocacy. (Where ARE those speeches on Argentina?)
If the CIA should incur an expedient vacancy before the Orwellian year of 1984, Mrs. Kirkpatrick might approach the Great Communicator with the words of Portia in The Merchant of Venice:
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But that she may learn: happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed.
Tempered, qualified and humane CIA directors are precious few, and Mrs. Kirkpatrick is one of the few intellectuals in the Reagan Cabinet who, despite her understandable confusion in domestic politics, is apparently capable of looking into the mirror of princes and taking a long view.
Review commissioned by the Baltimore Sun, which declined to publish it. The Sun sent a $15.00 kill fee.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
REVIEW, T. NAKAMURA, THE POSTWAR JAPANESE ECONOMY (1981)
Takafusa Nakamura. The Postwar Japanese Economy: Its Development and Structure. Translated by Jacquelinle Kaminski. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, c. 1981.
Professor Takafusa Nakamura's newly-translated interpretation of the Japanese economy gives an insider's viewpoint that no available Western interpretations can rival. Academics may label the profusely documented study as revisionist. Lay readers who are prudent enough to skip over the infrequent algebraic formulas and who do not have the time to invest in analyzing 128 statistical tables will find the text more than sufficient to provide a solidly-grounded framework for interpreting the postwar Japanese economic phenomenon.
Formerly director of research at Japan's Economic Planning Agency, the author has divided his subject, like Caesar's Gaul, in partes tres. The first part treats the 1930's and 1940's. The second part analyzes the mechanisms of rapid growth prevailing from the Korean War (1950-53) to the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and the ensuing oil crisis. Professor Nakamura describes in his third section the challenge of maintaining stable growth and furthering social consolidation for the immediate future.
One of the author's most striking arguments, not often discussed in English, is that the mechanisms responsible for Japan's current economic success were improvised during the 1930's in order to manage the China Incident and to prepare for what the Army thought would be an attack on the Soviet Union. By 1939-40, full-scale price, wage and profit controls were erected over the entire economy, as well as resource allocation mechanisms (rationing) for scarce commodities such as rice and steel. Control associations were established in designated key industries by 1941. In 1944 the Bank of Japan was directed to provide unimpeded funding to the munitions industry. The role of the present-day Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) can be traced back to the wartime controls of the Commerce and Munitions Ministries. Under the subsequent American Occupation, wartime "patriotic associations" were miraculoously reborn as vertically-organized company unions offering lifetime employment ant total job security. The contrast between wartime controls and the more classical, free-market enterprise economy from the Meji Restoration to the 1920's is hinted at, but not explained in detail.
During the Occupation, 14 of the great cartels (zaibatsu), which in toto disposed of 40% of all Japanese stocks, were formally dissolved. Land reform reduced tenant farming from 46% to 11% of the available arable land. Organized unions rose from zero to 60% of the labor force of big companies in 1948, accompanied by mass dismissal of employees implicated in strikes orchestrated by the left wing of the Socialist party. Occupation authorities also vigorously championed the conversion of industrial fuel from native coal to imported oil.
While the Five Year Plan adopted in 1948 aimed at restoring living standards to the level of 1934, the yen, under American pressure, underwent a forced deflation to a 360:1 exchange rate. But official expectation of a long and painful recovery period were made obsolete by the Korean War, when US special procurements and military expenditures were treated, for bookkeeping ppurposes, as an "export." Guided by a continuum of bureaucrats trained in applying wartime controls, buoyed up by an undervalued currency, fueled by cheap Arab oil and protectd domestically by patriotic company unions, the Japanese economy took off like a Zero.
But on closer examination today, Japanese commercial practices leave the companies exceptionally vulnerable to fluctuations in the export market. A third of Japanese trade is now with the United States, making Japanese companies dependent on the American business cycle. The consequences of this dependence are magnified by the extraordinarily low equity rationm now estimated at 25% or less. Stratospheric indebtedness in an era affected by US bubble-level interest rates further increases Japanese sensitivity to the external economic environment. Export to the United States is a key variable; access to secure Middle Eastern oil at stable prices is another.
The Japanese national economy is so sharply stratified between the great combines and smaller businesses, labor and agriculture, that the term "dual structure" is commonly employed. (This phenomenon is treated in terms of the US economy by Professor Robert Averitt of Smith College, whose 1968 book The Dual Economy was recently hailed in Boston as an "underground classic.") More than 95% of the part-time labor force are women who serve as a disposable marginal economic reserve. Smaller businesses hire and lay off the bulk of the labor force and depend on the great combines through subcontracting arrangements (again, a practice developed in wartime). As the Japanese economy has prospered, the subcontracting practice has expanded overseas to South Korea and Taiwan.
Once the panic attendant on the oil crisis of 1973 subsided and the lesser economic shock of an upward revaluation of the yen was absorbed, Japan entered a period of readjustment in the 1970's which Nakamura hopes will be an era of "stable growth." But the current international payments deficit and declining export opportunities coupled with a volatile oil procurement situation suggest that the economic weather may be clouded. US policy planners would be well advised to exercise restraint in addressing their own self-induced fiscal and oil pricing problems, without seeking a short-term melioration by diverting public attention to the Japanese economy as a convenient scapegoat.
Business strategists who can appreciate a penetrating, honest and surprisingly frank study of a unique economic mechanism will find no better model than The Postwar Japanese Economy. It is a world-class performance.
Submitted to The Asia Mail in Alexandria, VA, in November, 1982. The journal terminated its publication before the review could be printed. No kill fee was offered.
Professor Takafusa Nakamura's newly-translated interpretation of the Japanese economy gives an insider's viewpoint that no available Western interpretations can rival. Academics may label the profusely documented study as revisionist. Lay readers who are prudent enough to skip over the infrequent algebraic formulas and who do not have the time to invest in analyzing 128 statistical tables will find the text more than sufficient to provide a solidly-grounded framework for interpreting the postwar Japanese economic phenomenon.
Formerly director of research at Japan's Economic Planning Agency, the author has divided his subject, like Caesar's Gaul, in partes tres. The first part treats the 1930's and 1940's. The second part analyzes the mechanisms of rapid growth prevailing from the Korean War (1950-53) to the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and the ensuing oil crisis. Professor Nakamura describes in his third section the challenge of maintaining stable growth and furthering social consolidation for the immediate future.
One of the author's most striking arguments, not often discussed in English, is that the mechanisms responsible for Japan's current economic success were improvised during the 1930's in order to manage the China Incident and to prepare for what the Army thought would be an attack on the Soviet Union. By 1939-40, full-scale price, wage and profit controls were erected over the entire economy, as well as resource allocation mechanisms (rationing) for scarce commodities such as rice and steel. Control associations were established in designated key industries by 1941. In 1944 the Bank of Japan was directed to provide unimpeded funding to the munitions industry. The role of the present-day Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) can be traced back to the wartime controls of the Commerce and Munitions Ministries. Under the subsequent American Occupation, wartime "patriotic associations" were miraculoously reborn as vertically-organized company unions offering lifetime employment ant total job security. The contrast between wartime controls and the more classical, free-market enterprise economy from the Meji Restoration to the 1920's is hinted at, but not explained in detail.
During the Occupation, 14 of the great cartels (zaibatsu), which in toto disposed of 40% of all Japanese stocks, were formally dissolved. Land reform reduced tenant farming from 46% to 11% of the available arable land. Organized unions rose from zero to 60% of the labor force of big companies in 1948, accompanied by mass dismissal of employees implicated in strikes orchestrated by the left wing of the Socialist party. Occupation authorities also vigorously championed the conversion of industrial fuel from native coal to imported oil.
While the Five Year Plan adopted in 1948 aimed at restoring living standards to the level of 1934, the yen, under American pressure, underwent a forced deflation to a 360:1 exchange rate. But official expectation of a long and painful recovery period were made obsolete by the Korean War, when US special procurements and military expenditures were treated, for bookkeeping ppurposes, as an "export." Guided by a continuum of bureaucrats trained in applying wartime controls, buoyed up by an undervalued currency, fueled by cheap Arab oil and protectd domestically by patriotic company unions, the Japanese economy took off like a Zero.
But on closer examination today, Japanese commercial practices leave the companies exceptionally vulnerable to fluctuations in the export market. A third of Japanese trade is now with the United States, making Japanese companies dependent on the American business cycle. The consequences of this dependence are magnified by the extraordinarily low equity rationm now estimated at 25% or less. Stratospheric indebtedness in an era affected by US bubble-level interest rates further increases Japanese sensitivity to the external economic environment. Export to the United States is a key variable; access to secure Middle Eastern oil at stable prices is another.
The Japanese national economy is so sharply stratified between the great combines and smaller businesses, labor and agriculture, that the term "dual structure" is commonly employed. (This phenomenon is treated in terms of the US economy by Professor Robert Averitt of Smith College, whose 1968 book The Dual Economy was recently hailed in Boston as an "underground classic.") More than 95% of the part-time labor force are women who serve as a disposable marginal economic reserve. Smaller businesses hire and lay off the bulk of the labor force and depend on the great combines through subcontracting arrangements (again, a practice developed in wartime). As the Japanese economy has prospered, the subcontracting practice has expanded overseas to South Korea and Taiwan.
Once the panic attendant on the oil crisis of 1973 subsided and the lesser economic shock of an upward revaluation of the yen was absorbed, Japan entered a period of readjustment in the 1970's which Nakamura hopes will be an era of "stable growth." But the current international payments deficit and declining export opportunities coupled with a volatile oil procurement situation suggest that the economic weather may be clouded. US policy planners would be well advised to exercise restraint in addressing their own self-induced fiscal and oil pricing problems, without seeking a short-term melioration by diverting public attention to the Japanese economy as a convenient scapegoat.
Business strategists who can appreciate a penetrating, honest and surprisingly frank study of a unique economic mechanism will find no better model than The Postwar Japanese Economy. It is a world-class performance.
Submitted to The Asia Mail in Alexandria, VA, in November, 1982. The journal terminated its publication before the review could be printed. No kill fee was offered.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
THE BUSH FAMILY AND NAZI GERMANY
The Bush family played a central role in the financing and arming of Adolf Hitler before he assumed power in Germany. It helped to build up the armaments factories of the Nazi war machine. In the first years of the war the Bush family profited from slave labor in the mineral mines of Auschwitz. It helped develop the theory of "racial superiority." It united the Bush family with Nazi Germany. --by Peter Mertens, 3 October, 2003
Part I. How Steel Baron Thyssen and Bush's Grandfather made Hitler Great
At the end of the First World War, August Thyssen, the greatest millionaire entrepeneur in Germany, saw his steel empire in danger. In the "neutral" Netherlands he opened the Bank of Shipping and Trading in Rotterdam. Thus he could channel his war booty from the August Thyssen Bank in Berliln in timely fashion despite the claims for damage /i.e., reparations/ of the Versailles Treaty. Old August gave 100 million dollars and his industrial empire in the Ruhr region to his son Fritz. They scored in 1923 with the ban on Adolf Hitler, the man who could rescue German industry from the insurgent worker class. The steel baron met Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff and channelled 100,000 gold marks as a contribution to the early NSDAP.
But Hitler's party found far more funding necessary to defeat the Communist movement. The war profits in Rotterdam were insufficient. And thus Thyssen wanted to establish an American bank as well. In 1922 he met Averell Harriman, the head of the investment firm W.A. Harriman and Co., in Berlin. Harriman and Thyssen agreed to establish a bank for Thyssen in New York. Business friends of Harriman would act as the directors, together with Thyssen's agent H.J. Kouvenhoven who moved to the United States, according to an official investigation report in 1942.
German Armament Manufacturers Appeal to the Bush Family
So after Berlin and Rotterdam, Thyssen achieved a foothold in the United States. In early 1924 Kouvenhoven, Director of the Bank of Shipping and Trading, travelled to New York where he, together with Averell Harriman and George "Bert" Walker of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), agreed to establish on Broadway the same bank at the very same address as Harriman and Co. Behind the scenery the Union Banking Corporation was the property of the Rotterdamse Bank, which was in its turn the property of Fritz Thyssen. On January 10, 1925, the August Thyssen firms won a loan of 12 million dollars from another American bank, Dillon, Read and Co. Dillon was an old friend of Sam Bush, the great-grandfather of the current American president. His bank was used by Standard Oil, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and IIT to finance Hitler. The German steel industry, led by Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick, combined to form the United Steel Works with American dollars. "There was a division of labor: Thyssen's own intimate knowledge of politics and related matters was led by the Walker-Bush organization; the United Steel Works, on the contrary, carried on its bank functions through Dillon Read."
On 1 May 1926 George Walker decided to give the vice-presidency of Harriman and Co. to his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, Jr. In 1931 Harriman and Co. merged with a British investment company, Brown Brothers . Harriman and Co. acquired a significent portion of a Polish mining company, the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation. Two-thirds of the corporation became the property of Friedrich Flick, a member of Heinrich Himmler's circle of friends. He used a part of his profits to finance the terrorist Schutzstaffel (SS).
Prescott Bush assumed the responsibility of supervising the United Steelworks of Thyssen and Flick, which continued to finance Hitler until he came to power. In 1932 Thyssen organized a gathering with Hitler in the Park Hotel in Duesseldorf, where he persuated the great industrial big-shots from the Ruhr region to support the Hitler's line. The steel magnates represented the pulsing heart of German war industry: United Steel Works produced 50.8% of the iron, 41.4% of steel plates, 35% of explosives and 22.1% of the steel wire of all Nazi Germany.
Great-grandfather and grandfather Bush had a great ride. They invested in Nazi Germany through Brown Brothers and Harriman, and transferred the armaments profits back into the United States through the UBC bank of Thyssen. In 1934, the profits attained hundreds of millions which also were transmitted to New York through Rotterdam. In the meantime Prescott Bush became managing director of UBC. "The Bush family know very well that Brown Brothers was a gold canal to Nazi Germany and that Union Bank was a secret pipeline to bring Nazi funds through The Netherlands to America again," wrote John Loftus, former prosecutor of the US Department for Nazi War Crimes.
Part II. Slave Labor in the Polish Mines for Prescott Bush
Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation was established in the Polish city of Oswiecim, one of the richest mineral regions in Poland. In 1934 the Polish government accused the company of Flick and Bush of fraud, fictitious accouonting and tax evasion. Great-grandfather Bush concluded a compromise that year with the Polish government. But Consolidated Steel continued to ship the minerals out of Poland with which the Panzers, aircraft and explosives were prepared which were dropped on the same Poles five years later.
It was precisely in Oswiecim that Hitler erected the concentration camp in 1939 that would become known by the German name for the little town, Auschwitz. After the end of 1941 the concentration camp was also supplied with slave labor under Himmler's SS. The "healthy" prisoners worked as slaves in the mines and factories of I.G. Farben and Consolidated Steel. During the war, Thyssen and Flick sold Consolidated Steel completely to UBC. The company was rechristened as the Silesian American Corporation and came under the total control of Harriman and manager Prescott Bush. Grandfather Bush and Harriman pocketed the blood-money from thousands of slaves that worked in the mines of Auschwitz.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 the American government enacted the Trading with the Enemy Act, the law that prohibited trafficking with the foe. On Oct. 20, 1942, all the components of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those of Harriman and Prescott Bush. The government asserted that Bush's bank "...was holding the profits of the Thyssen family and property of the members of a certain enemy nation." Harriman and Bush were indicted as collaborators. A month later, the American government also took over the Silesian American corporation. But the corporation continued to operate and Prescott Bush exercised his functions until 1943, thanks to the protective hand of the lawyer Allen Dulles, the man who later directed the CIA. On the death of Fritz Thyssen in 1951, the shareholders in Brown Brothers Harriman got their blood money back. Prescott Bush received 1.3 million dollars for his portion of UBC and in the same year he helped his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, to invest in the petroleum sector also. With this money George Bush senior directed the Bush-Overby Development Company, active in the oil business and oil patents. And two years later he created the Zapata Offshore Oil Company, the firm that drilled the first oil wells off the coast of Kuwait, and later, as the Pennzoil Company, owned undertakings in Qatar and Egypt. With the blood-money from the Nazis, the Bush family entered the petroleum sector, the royal palace in Kuwait, and the first Gulf War against Iraq.
--The Truth
Popular Edition for The Netherlands
Monday, 6 June 2005.
A lengthier treatment of the same subject may be found in Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, "How Bush's Grandfather helped Hitler's Rise to Power," in The Guardian for Saturday, 25 September 2004. (8 pages)
The Zapata Corporation is the subject of an 8-page entry in Wikipedia.
Part I. How Steel Baron Thyssen and Bush's Grandfather made Hitler Great
At the end of the First World War, August Thyssen, the greatest millionaire entrepeneur in Germany, saw his steel empire in danger. In the "neutral" Netherlands he opened the Bank of Shipping and Trading in Rotterdam. Thus he could channel his war booty from the August Thyssen Bank in Berliln in timely fashion despite the claims for damage /i.e., reparations/ of the Versailles Treaty. Old August gave 100 million dollars and his industrial empire in the Ruhr region to his son Fritz. They scored in 1923 with the ban on Adolf Hitler, the man who could rescue German industry from the insurgent worker class. The steel baron met Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff and channelled 100,000 gold marks as a contribution to the early NSDAP.
But Hitler's party found far more funding necessary to defeat the Communist movement. The war profits in Rotterdam were insufficient. And thus Thyssen wanted to establish an American bank as well. In 1922 he met Averell Harriman, the head of the investment firm W.A. Harriman and Co., in Berlin. Harriman and Thyssen agreed to establish a bank for Thyssen in New York. Business friends of Harriman would act as the directors, together with Thyssen's agent H.J. Kouvenhoven who moved to the United States, according to an official investigation report in 1942.
German Armament Manufacturers Appeal to the Bush Family
So after Berlin and Rotterdam, Thyssen achieved a foothold in the United States. In early 1924 Kouvenhoven, Director of the Bank of Shipping and Trading, travelled to New York where he, together with Averell Harriman and George "Bert" Walker of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), agreed to establish on Broadway the same bank at the very same address as Harriman and Co. Behind the scenery the Union Banking Corporation was the property of the Rotterdamse Bank, which was in its turn the property of Fritz Thyssen. On January 10, 1925, the August Thyssen firms won a loan of 12 million dollars from another American bank, Dillon, Read and Co. Dillon was an old friend of Sam Bush, the great-grandfather of the current American president. His bank was used by Standard Oil, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and IIT to finance Hitler. The German steel industry, led by Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick, combined to form the United Steel Works with American dollars. "There was a division of labor: Thyssen's own intimate knowledge of politics and related matters was led by the Walker-Bush organization; the United Steel Works, on the contrary, carried on its bank functions through Dillon Read."
On 1 May 1926 George Walker decided to give the vice-presidency of Harriman and Co. to his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, Jr. In 1931 Harriman and Co. merged with a British investment company, Brown Brothers . Harriman and Co. acquired a significent portion of a Polish mining company, the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation. Two-thirds of the corporation became the property of Friedrich Flick, a member of Heinrich Himmler's circle of friends. He used a part of his profits to finance the terrorist Schutzstaffel (SS).
Prescott Bush assumed the responsibility of supervising the United Steelworks of Thyssen and Flick, which continued to finance Hitler until he came to power. In 1932 Thyssen organized a gathering with Hitler in the Park Hotel in Duesseldorf, where he persuated the great industrial big-shots from the Ruhr region to support the Hitler's line. The steel magnates represented the pulsing heart of German war industry: United Steel Works produced 50.8% of the iron, 41.4% of steel plates, 35% of explosives and 22.1% of the steel wire of all Nazi Germany.
Great-grandfather and grandfather Bush had a great ride. They invested in Nazi Germany through Brown Brothers and Harriman, and transferred the armaments profits back into the United States through the UBC bank of Thyssen. In 1934, the profits attained hundreds of millions which also were transmitted to New York through Rotterdam. In the meantime Prescott Bush became managing director of UBC. "The Bush family know very well that Brown Brothers was a gold canal to Nazi Germany and that Union Bank was a secret pipeline to bring Nazi funds through The Netherlands to America again," wrote John Loftus, former prosecutor of the US Department for Nazi War Crimes.
Part II. Slave Labor in the Polish Mines for Prescott Bush
Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation was established in the Polish city of Oswiecim, one of the richest mineral regions in Poland. In 1934 the Polish government accused the company of Flick and Bush of fraud, fictitious accouonting and tax evasion. Great-grandfather Bush concluded a compromise that year with the Polish government. But Consolidated Steel continued to ship the minerals out of Poland with which the Panzers, aircraft and explosives were prepared which were dropped on the same Poles five years later.
It was precisely in Oswiecim that Hitler erected the concentration camp in 1939 that would become known by the German name for the little town, Auschwitz. After the end of 1941 the concentration camp was also supplied with slave labor under Himmler's SS. The "healthy" prisoners worked as slaves in the mines and factories of I.G. Farben and Consolidated Steel. During the war, Thyssen and Flick sold Consolidated Steel completely to UBC. The company was rechristened as the Silesian American Corporation and came under the total control of Harriman and manager Prescott Bush. Grandfather Bush and Harriman pocketed the blood-money from thousands of slaves that worked in the mines of Auschwitz.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 the American government enacted the Trading with the Enemy Act, the law that prohibited trafficking with the foe. On Oct. 20, 1942, all the components of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those of Harriman and Prescott Bush. The government asserted that Bush's bank "...was holding the profits of the Thyssen family and property of the members of a certain enemy nation." Harriman and Bush were indicted as collaborators. A month later, the American government also took over the Silesian American corporation. But the corporation continued to operate and Prescott Bush exercised his functions until 1943, thanks to the protective hand of the lawyer Allen Dulles, the man who later directed the CIA. On the death of Fritz Thyssen in 1951, the shareholders in Brown Brothers Harriman got their blood money back. Prescott Bush received 1.3 million dollars for his portion of UBC and in the same year he helped his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, to invest in the petroleum sector also. With this money George Bush senior directed the Bush-Overby Development Company, active in the oil business and oil patents. And two years later he created the Zapata Offshore Oil Company, the firm that drilled the first oil wells off the coast of Kuwait, and later, as the Pennzoil Company, owned undertakings in Qatar and Egypt. With the blood-money from the Nazis, the Bush family entered the petroleum sector, the royal palace in Kuwait, and the first Gulf War against Iraq.
--The Truth
Popular Edition for The Netherlands
Monday, 6 June 2005.
A lengthier treatment of the same subject may be found in Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, "How Bush's Grandfather helped Hitler's Rise to Power," in The Guardian for Saturday, 25 September 2004. (8 pages)
The Zapata Corporation is the subject of an 8-page entry in Wikipedia.
Friday, August 29, 2008
YELTSIN THE DANCING BEAR
Timothy J. Colton. Yeltsin. A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
"The bitter truth is better than the sweet lie."--Boris N. Yeltsin
On April 23, 2007, Boris Yeltsin, first president of the ethnic Russia that was born following international Caesarian midwifery, died. One year later Timothy J. Colton has fathered a 550 page biography, dedicated to the conservative publicist Samuel L. Huntington. It was published by a subsidiary of the Perseus publishing consortium headed by David Steinberg, which had previously purchased the Harvard Business School Press in 2005.
The final two years of Yeltsin's second term were endured in a kind of agony, both political and physical. He underwent nine hospitalizations from November, 1996 to December, 1999. Professor Colton writes, "...he was not dying, was not a shut-in, and had not lost cognitive capacity." Just as clearly, he was not wholly functional. His final presidential years closely mimicked the declining years of Leonid Brezhnev, for his motorcade always included an ambulance. How and when did this one strong physique succumb to the burdens of office, and what was the state of the nation upon his hasty retirement on December 31, 1999?
Raised in the Ural mountain chain, as Colton's impressive collection of family photos illustrates, young Boris Nikolaevich graduated from the Ural State University in 1955 with a reputation as a hooligan and an instigator. But he received immediate employment by the construction department of the Sverdlovsk municipality. He became a Party member in 1961. After meeting Brezhnev in 1976 he became one of the youngest regional First Secretaries, managing Sverdlovsk until 1984. He brought a local quarrel to the attention of Yuri Andropov, then chief of the KGB. The Defense Ministry made him a Colonel in 1978. Colton writes, "Yeltsin's rise was meritocratic, made without the windfall of a well-connected parent, spouse or friend." This assertion may be regarded as questionable, for the author often, although not always, appears to accept sycophantic memoirs at face value. After a subordinate committed suicide and secret documents were lost, Yeltsin was elected to the CPSU Central Committee. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin in 1981, Then, in a sudden concession to free-marketeers, he opposed imposing price controls on selected foodstuffs. In this rising period of his career, he could knock back three tumblers of vodka without visible aftereffects.
Yeltsin's meteoric ascent, in the manner of a typical Party protege, was not unaccompanied by temporary missteps. Yuri Andropov, the KGB leader kept alive on American dialysis machines, nominated Yeltsin to the construction (or reconstruction) department of the CPSU in 1984. Thereafter Gorbachev and Yeltsin operated as a smychka, two hunting dogs linked in tandem by a horizontal harness, unique to rural Russia. Forty years after Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, Yeltsin began to specialize in capital investment, and on December 25, 1985, he advanced to the position of First Secretary of the Moscow Central Committee. According to the pious formulation of Colton,"/Moscow/ stood for all that was amiss with Communism and for its potential for redemption through reform." For the next two years Yeltsin conducted an unremitting purge of the Moscow apparatus, acting an an exemplary "udarnik," or "hitter," in a manner consistent with Bolshevik tradition. In 1987 he was interviewed by Diane Sawyer of CBS , achieving thereby a sort of imprimatur from an arm of the American news mechanism. In the summer of 1988 Yeltsin wrangled a mandate from the Karelian Republic, Andropov's former political base, to appear at the 19th CPSU Party Conference. But in October, 1987, he attacked Gorbachev before a television audience, asserting that the Russian nation was losing faith in the Party, and offered to resign his seat in the Politburo. Afterward, he stabbed his stomach with a pair of office scissors. Following subsequent acrimonious controversy, he was voted off the Politburo.
Nevertheless, he rebounded quickly. After a flying visit to London to be welcomed by Margaret Thatcher, Yeltsin spearheaded an ostensibly populist campaign against the ruling Communist Party, and harvested 50% of the ballots to become speaker of the Supreme Soviet. His goals were to withdraw Soviet troops from bases abroad, to decolonize Russia's overland conquest of national minorities, and to foster the marketization of Soviet state assets. His radical program elicited 54% of the ballots cast by an enthusiastic electorate for the presidency. In June, 1989, the Russian Parliament declared Russia's "sovreignty," seceding (on paper) from the all-embracing USSR. Colton suggests a motive for Western support when he writes, "...Russia's mammoth reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals looked increasingly like a pot of gold...", while conceding that Yeltsin's concept of global economics was "sketchy' and "wacky."
During August 19-21, self-selected Party and Army elements walked through an ostensible cooup, taking Gorbachev prisoner, but the troops melted away as did Kornilov's attack on Kerensky's Provisional Government in August, 1917. George H.W. Bush ordered secret signal intelligence to be communicated to Boris Nikolaevich. Yeltsin, the Colonel, climbed on a convenient tank to read a ghost-written appeal to the public, a la Lenin, rejecting isolation from the (mythical) "world community." His bold appearance constituted a televised coup de theatre. Subsequently the Ukrainian regime resolved to separate from Russia, and in 1990 he signed a ten-year treaty of cooperation with the now-disgraced Leonid Kravchuk. Following Lenin's precedent of 1922, Russia, Ukraine and Belorus signed a treaty making the three Slavic republis the core group of a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). After declaring that dismemberment was a political error, President Gorbachev retired, as Yeltsin's decolonization drive stalled. With the enthusiastic support of Western financial interests, Yeltsin next pursued the course of "creative destruction" attributed to Joseph Schumpeter, an emigre economist at Harvard, with all the resources of his prodigious energy.
As the former Soviet military forces withdrew from the periphery, trading space for time, Yeltsin began his assault on the regulated economic system. He resisted subsidizing regional economic structures with revenues from the center, thus negating the equivalent of regional equalization payments by which Ottawa subsidizes weaker provincial economies. The result was chaos, scarcely concealed by the impsition of martial law in Chechnya. Consumer prices rose 300%, the GDP fell 96% and inflation attained the unheard-of level of 2,520%. Correspondingly, Yeltsin's popularity fell from 40% in 1991 to 20% in 1992 and 17% in 1993. These figures make manifest the contradiction between claims of "populism" and "democratization" and actual public sendiment. In practice the touted reform process had a greater similiarity to a Hollywood reality show extolling "virtual democracy."
Nevertheless, Colton's terse summary of the Yeltsin style of implementing irregular reforms, fostering a fractious administrative mechanism and leaping to unpredictable decisions must be credited. In desperation Yeltsin turned to a veteran Soviet administrator, Victor Chernomyrdin, the former Soviet Minister for Gas (1985-89), to regularize and rationalize his tempestuous and convulsive assaults on the previous socialist "normalcy." The Consttutional Court prohibited the persecution of former Party members. Motivated by a spontaneous "truth and reconciliation" sentiment, some 4.2 millin Soviet citizens were exonerated, or posthumously rehabilitated, from frudulent accusations. As did the Castro government in Havana, Yeltsin attempted overtures to Russian exile communities, but without offering financial compensation. The KGB was not abolished as the imperial Okhrana had been, but was trimmed down into a leaner, meaner government organ and rechristened the Federal Security Bureau (FSB). Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose. It was, however, significant that on two counts Yeltsin deviated from Western advice. He did not form a mass party around a personality cult, as de Gaulle had done, and he refrained from inundating his bewildered public with a tsunami of electronic propaganda, as the Fuehrer and the Duce had done. It is unquestionable, as Colton writes, that Yeltsin combined ideological eclecticism with a fascination for history. And he was made sufficiently aware of the potential dangers in following European precedents to renounce that path.
Subsequently he abandoned his administrative metier to become an energetic partisan for enforcing a tectonic shift in Russian economic structures. In the ensuing earthquake, to Western applause from financially interested Western investors, state property was sold off at fire-sale prices to speculators who had amassed government-issued purchase vouchers. Petroleum reserves were offered as collatoral for bank loans. This collateral was swiftly auctioned off, and just as swiftly purchased by the auctioneers themselves. In short, the Yeltsin re-structuring (or right perestroika) implemented the counsel of the right Communist Nikolai Bukharin who, imitating the counterrevolutionary French leader Adolphe Thiers, once wrote in Pravda, "Enrichez-vous!" Throughout this convulsive period violent crime doubled, the newly wealthy evaded taxes, and the government was too bankrupt to pay the military rankers.
This reviewer must dissent from Colton's regret that a new security architecture for Europe and Asia did not suck Russia into an elephantine NATO bureaucracy extending from the English Channel to the Yellow Sea. It is illogical to celebrate the disintegration of a traditional overland empire in Chapter 8, if it be Turkish, only to advocated a grossly expanded empire of the same genre, if it be controlled by Anglo-Saxons. In this regard the author's objectivity and sense of proportion may justly be challenged.
After two yers of economic maladministration and administrative muddle, 617 deputies in the Supreme Soviet voted to impeach the President, but fell short of a two-thirds majority. En revanche, Yeltsin abolished the Supreme Soviet on September 21, 1993, and replaced it with a two-house legislature, following the American model. Colton pussyfoots around this executive coup, characterizing it as merely of "debatable legality" and partaking of "extraconstiitutionality." Early in October the "superpresident" ordered 1300 soldiers to attack the Parliament skyscraper ( or so-called "White House") in a dramatic televised Putsch. He then introduced a cumersome constitution of 137 articles. Colton approvingly salutes this political solution achieved through "partially democratic means." Yeltin himself, in rhetoric resembling Mussolini's, thundered to the quailing public, "...Do you want to bet only or mostly on a parliament? If you did, within a half-year, if not sooner, people would demand a dictator." One could only imagine how history would have changed, if King Charles I had had the benefit of Yeltsin's speechwriters! But despite the frightening rhetoric , the elected deputies voted amnesty for their former leaders, and Yeltsin, perhaps responding to undocumented hints from former Party apparatchiki, did not venture to counter their defiance. As a "legitimized" democratic despot he proceeded to rule by decree, issuing above twenty decrees per month, while the impotent parliamentary body adopted only 6 laws throughout all of 1994.
Although the "hitter" (udarnik) with the bullyingmicrophone had hoped to retire after one term because of health considerations,he was impelled by the pressures of incumbancy to reconsider, despite his near total lack of public approval. In February, 1996, he betook himself and an entourage of 70 to the World Economc Forum in Davos, Switzerland. On March 19 he launched a new publicity campaign, appealing to three separate privileged castes: the military, the clergy, and the corporate elite, in a Third World pattern more familiarly exemplified in Latin America. Through his campaign, guided by an American advertising firm, Yeltsin overcame the handicap of his single-digit popularity. His ambitions were furthered by a windfall investment of $10 billion from the IMF, and the World Bank gilded his lily with another $500 million. Inhis campaign swings, Yeltsin distributed bouquets and benefits like a Canadian prime minister campaigning through French Quebec, even allocating a generous contribution to a Muslim cultural center. The German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, offered him political asyllum if he lost. Through foreign gold and advertising guile he raised his vote total to 35% in the first round of balloting, and strenuously levered himself up to 54% to defeat the Communist candidate, who had increased his own popularity from 32% to 41%. This rebound, however, was to be short-lived. As Colton writes, "Yeltsin had rejuvenated himself politically just as he was failing corporeally."
He endured a fourth heart attack in August, and in September had his heart function improved by an operation to attach five grafts to his weakened heart muscle. The Russian surgical procedure was observed by a celebrated American heart specialist from Houston, Texas, the homeland of America's oil elite. IBy May he had recuperated sufficiently to journey to Paris, where he signed a diplomatic capitulation agreeing to NATO's long-planned Drang nach Osten. As his health failed, so did his intermittent administrative hammer blows. Because the treasury had been scraped clean (perhaps to increase his vote total), the total arrears of unpaid wages and old age pensions rose to $8 billion in 1998. In May, 1997, he was compelled par la force des choses to sign a treaty with Chechen authorities, promising to withdraw Russian troops from te Caucasian Muslim republic. And in the same tempestuous month he fired both the Defense Minister and the Chief of the General Staff, ostensibly because they demurred from his public commitment to end conscription. (It still exists.) Finally, having triumphed with Western financial assistance over the vanquished state ideology (vae victis!) he commenced to lament the want of a unifying "national idea" or "national ideology." (The latter appears still to represent a condition sine qua non for state ideological specialists.)
Yeltsin's decllining health required hospitalization on eight separate occasions between November, 1996 and December, 1999. As he became progressively separated from administrative responsibilities, cabined discipline disintegrated as ever more caustic press criticism echoed an earlier characterization of Yeltsin's family association withthe emergent business elite as constituting a "collective Rasputin." In August, 1996, Chernomyrdin was confirmed again by the Duma, only to be dumped by the following year. His replacement lasted from April to August, before he was replaced by Evgenii Primakov, the former KGB chief , professional diplomat, and fluent Arab speaker. Another KGB veteran was embedded as chief of the Kremlin administration. A former director of the new FSB was nmed as first deputy prime minister in a chess player's move to conceal the forthcoming nomination of Vladimir Putin as prime minister. The actor-president, Boris Yeltsin, executed a carefully scripted retirement on December 31, 1999. It coud be argued that while Yeltsin menaced or enthralled the inexperienced voting public like a dancing bear at the Moscow Circus, the responsibilities for actual executive implementation remained firmly in the hands of experienced Soviet apparatchiki like Chernomyrdin and Primakov, with the ostensibly disgraced Mikhail Gorbachev arguably active behind the scenes.
The catastrophic financial collapse of 1997 brought with it yet another request from the Parliament for Yeltsin to resign. The exchange value of the ruble-to-dollar ratio fell from 6:1 to 21:1, and inflation rose 40% throughout his last year in office. An unpredictable rise in oil prices rescued corporate Russia, but not the ordinary Russian family. "And this all was accomplished," Colton enthuses," in the new, post-communist economy."
Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin projected a larger-than-life image. Permitting neither smoking nor swearing, he presented nearly as abstemious a private image as Adolf Hitler. But his immoderate inebriation before 1996 attractd freqent criticism. Further, it was observed that he exhibited suicidal behabior, and one one occasion opened his veins to share his blood with that of a bodyguard in an ancient pagan gesture. (Colton does not remind his readers that the Russian word for the numeral "one" is "odin".) Colton describes Yeltsin's administrative style as "arrythmic," oscillating between aggressive activism and somnolent acquiescence, more or less like a bicycle racer after testosterone injections. Gorbachev commented that Yeltsin fitted better into a Sturm und Drang atmosphere than seated behind a bureacratic desk. Indeed, the irregularity of his manner finally stimulated some of his emboldened underlings to write an acidulous rebuke, known to their initimates as the "Letter of the Aides to the Sutan." As in previous epochs, the Russian intelligentsia fell back to deploy Russia's most powerful civic weapon--satire. One television network prominently featured a puppet show in which the obese and unstable presidential figure was known as "Boriska," or "Dirty Little Boris." Verbal orders were given priority over written procedures. Colton attributes this practice to Soviet tradition, but the practice of oral "guidance" to interpret (or frustrate) written orders exists throughout the American military, and was even adopted by Japanese banks during the American Occupation ("window guidance"). The charisma of the "superpresident" was so pronouonced that persons in his immediate vicinity felt themselves ensnared in a personal electronic field.
But this phenomenon, however magnified, is typical of the leadership cult of traditional Russian male culture. Further, the President's Club of political insiders, influence peddlers, business elites and family members meeting at an expanded sportsmen's club might legitimately be viewed as a twentieth century derivative of Peter the Great's "All-Russian Congregation of Fools, Rogues and Drunkards," with its ritual catechism commencing with the query, "Do you drink?" If Professor Colton had imbibed a sympthetic appreciation of Russian cultural patterns, he might have commented on the similarity.
In sum, Colton's biography displays both large merits and, regrettably, significent blemishes. The Harvard professor deserves applause for undertaking so swiftly to complete so daunting a task. He is to be commended for recommending that Russian academics follow his lead in cultivating the plants in their biographical gardens. Colton's garden is very generously manured with documentation, indeed.
On the other hand, the reviewer must note several large debits. To rely on pop social psychology to define Yeltsin as an "event-shaping man" is superficial at best--not the conclusion, which is correct, but the pop author from whom this categorization is derived. Comparing Yeltsin the expansive Slavic drunk with the constipated German cleric Martin Luther is staggering in its chutzpah. Moreover, the cognoscenti will note several significant lacunae. It is inexcusable to ignore the fate of Marshal Sergei Akhromayev, close to Western military leaders such as Admiral William Crowe, Jr. Akhromayev allegedly committed suicide in his Kremlin office after the dramatic failure of the televised coup of August, 1991. The second is the downing of Korean Air Line Flight 007, resulting in the death of Congresman Larry McDonald (R-VA), a founder of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society , and a critic of the Rockefeller family, whom he accused of participating in secret negotiations with the Russians behind the back of the Washington authorities. Similarly ignored in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, authored by Richard Perle, that linked American trade concessions to Jewish emigration. Colton similarly ignores the the Harvard connection to Moscow, evidenced by the repeated participation of West-oriented Russian politicians such as Gregorii Yavlinskii and Yegor Gaidar at the Russian Center 's public seminars, often chaired by Professor Marshall Goldman, his predecessor as director. Nor does he cite any of Professor Goldman's broadcasts from Russia on National Public Radio for some twenty years. Neither does he refer to any of the rich European journalistic commentary or the memoirs of non-English-speaking eyewitnesses. To a bemused public raised on tales of unremitting hostility between the KGB and FBI, it may come as a surprise to learn that throughout the Cold War, the call-sign for the FBI short-wave station in Washington was KGB 793. It is hard to pass this off as an accidental oversight. Finally, Colton demonstrates insufficient familiarity with the permanence of Muslim civilization throughout the Central Asian successor republics, symbolized in the career of the Cechen leader Imam Shamil' (1797-1877) who died in Mecca.
Although Colton half-heartedly criticizes Yeltsin's "borderline demagogy," he appears oblivious to the impression created by his own practice of rejoicing in an extended concatenation of pejorative asides directed at individuals who did not, to his taste, demonstrate sufficient subservience to the personality and policies of the putative "superpresident." These individuals, numbered among a "piebald field" of the unfortunate defeated, are portrayed variously as indulging in "finger-pointing," acting "brazenly," mouthing "claptrap," manifestly "featherbrained," whose activities "fizzle" in the pursuit of "faddish populism" espoused by "eggheads" who "generate hoopla" from thir position in the "spongy middle" typically inhabited by "queasy intellectuals" who sometimes dispense "socialistic proclivities" among "refactory subordinates" whose oppositional activities are doomed to "crash and burn" after "a kick in the groin." The acidity of an academic martinet does little to reinforce any confidence in the writer's ability to reach a balanced judgment. A more sophisticated conclusion regarding the relationship between the "superpresident" and the "superparty" of professional apparatchiki will recall the image of the smychka, for such a constellation of political forces is reminiscent of a now-forgotten political formula describing the contrasting roles of Marshal Petain and General de Gaulle during the Vichy period, when one theory alleged that Petain was the shield and de Gaulle the sword of the French nation under Nazi occupation. Les bouts se touchent.
In conclusion, Colton's assiduous perseverance has produced a very big volume that would achieve wider circulation if it were, like the baby in front of King Solomon, divided in two. For while the Cambridge academic may well proclaim with the poet, "I have erected a monument higher than Alexander's spire," the mountainous documentation relating to narrow political manoeuvering within the fluctuating inner circle would better be separated out for a series of articles in specialized journals. The life of Yeltsin as an individual would better be sundered from the existing text and presented to a general readership in stripped-down chronological order. Surgical deconstruction is necessary because the paragraphs of sperrogatory political detail obscure the development and Lebensweg of the chief subject.
Of Professor Colton's devotion to his sweet mythos there can be no question, for he may be trusted, like faithful Ruslan of the novel, to guide future scholars to a golden horde of documentation that should be employed in a less partisan manner to anchor Yeltsin more firmly in the course of broader historical processes, and to depict Russia not as a mere component elements in Harvard's Weltanschauung of wealth but to resore it to its actual role in the European association of nations.
Commissioned by the Christian Science Monitor for publication in May, 2008.
Rejected by the Christian Science Monitor because the review significantly exceeded the Monitor's 800 word limit.
The writer received a "kill fee."
"The bitter truth is better than the sweet lie."--Boris N. Yeltsin
On April 23, 2007, Boris Yeltsin, first president of the ethnic Russia that was born following international Caesarian midwifery, died. One year later Timothy J. Colton has fathered a 550 page biography, dedicated to the conservative publicist Samuel L. Huntington. It was published by a subsidiary of the Perseus publishing consortium headed by David Steinberg, which had previously purchased the Harvard Business School Press in 2005.
The final two years of Yeltsin's second term were endured in a kind of agony, both political and physical. He underwent nine hospitalizations from November, 1996 to December, 1999. Professor Colton writes, "...he was not dying, was not a shut-in, and had not lost cognitive capacity." Just as clearly, he was not wholly functional. His final presidential years closely mimicked the declining years of Leonid Brezhnev, for his motorcade always included an ambulance. How and when did this one strong physique succumb to the burdens of office, and what was the state of the nation upon his hasty retirement on December 31, 1999?
Raised in the Ural mountain chain, as Colton's impressive collection of family photos illustrates, young Boris Nikolaevich graduated from the Ural State University in 1955 with a reputation as a hooligan and an instigator. But he received immediate employment by the construction department of the Sverdlovsk municipality. He became a Party member in 1961. After meeting Brezhnev in 1976 he became one of the youngest regional First Secretaries, managing Sverdlovsk until 1984. He brought a local quarrel to the attention of Yuri Andropov, then chief of the KGB. The Defense Ministry made him a Colonel in 1978. Colton writes, "Yeltsin's rise was meritocratic, made without the windfall of a well-connected parent, spouse or friend." This assertion may be regarded as questionable, for the author often, although not always, appears to accept sycophantic memoirs at face value. After a subordinate committed suicide and secret documents were lost, Yeltsin was elected to the CPSU Central Committee. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin in 1981, Then, in a sudden concession to free-marketeers, he opposed imposing price controls on selected foodstuffs. In this rising period of his career, he could knock back three tumblers of vodka without visible aftereffects.
Yeltsin's meteoric ascent, in the manner of a typical Party protege, was not unaccompanied by temporary missteps. Yuri Andropov, the KGB leader kept alive on American dialysis machines, nominated Yeltsin to the construction (or reconstruction) department of the CPSU in 1984. Thereafter Gorbachev and Yeltsin operated as a smychka, two hunting dogs linked in tandem by a horizontal harness, unique to rural Russia. Forty years after Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, Yeltsin began to specialize in capital investment, and on December 25, 1985, he advanced to the position of First Secretary of the Moscow Central Committee. According to the pious formulation of Colton,"/Moscow/ stood for all that was amiss with Communism and for its potential for redemption through reform." For the next two years Yeltsin conducted an unremitting purge of the Moscow apparatus, acting an an exemplary "udarnik," or "hitter," in a manner consistent with Bolshevik tradition. In 1987 he was interviewed by Diane Sawyer of CBS , achieving thereby a sort of imprimatur from an arm of the American news mechanism. In the summer of 1988 Yeltsin wrangled a mandate from the Karelian Republic, Andropov's former political base, to appear at the 19th CPSU Party Conference. But in October, 1987, he attacked Gorbachev before a television audience, asserting that the Russian nation was losing faith in the Party, and offered to resign his seat in the Politburo. Afterward, he stabbed his stomach with a pair of office scissors. Following subsequent acrimonious controversy, he was voted off the Politburo.
Nevertheless, he rebounded quickly. After a flying visit to London to be welcomed by Margaret Thatcher, Yeltsin spearheaded an ostensibly populist campaign against the ruling Communist Party, and harvested 50% of the ballots to become speaker of the Supreme Soviet. His goals were to withdraw Soviet troops from bases abroad, to decolonize Russia's overland conquest of national minorities, and to foster the marketization of Soviet state assets. His radical program elicited 54% of the ballots cast by an enthusiastic electorate for the presidency. In June, 1989, the Russian Parliament declared Russia's "sovreignty," seceding (on paper) from the all-embracing USSR. Colton suggests a motive for Western support when he writes, "...Russia's mammoth reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals looked increasingly like a pot of gold...", while conceding that Yeltsin's concept of global economics was "sketchy' and "wacky."
During August 19-21, self-selected Party and Army elements walked through an ostensible cooup, taking Gorbachev prisoner, but the troops melted away as did Kornilov's attack on Kerensky's Provisional Government in August, 1917. George H.W. Bush ordered secret signal intelligence to be communicated to Boris Nikolaevich. Yeltsin, the Colonel, climbed on a convenient tank to read a ghost-written appeal to the public, a la Lenin, rejecting isolation from the (mythical) "world community." His bold appearance constituted a televised coup de theatre. Subsequently the Ukrainian regime resolved to separate from Russia, and in 1990 he signed a ten-year treaty of cooperation with the now-disgraced Leonid Kravchuk. Following Lenin's precedent of 1922, Russia, Ukraine and Belorus signed a treaty making the three Slavic republis the core group of a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). After declaring that dismemberment was a political error, President Gorbachev retired, as Yeltsin's decolonization drive stalled. With the enthusiastic support of Western financial interests, Yeltsin next pursued the course of "creative destruction" attributed to Joseph Schumpeter, an emigre economist at Harvard, with all the resources of his prodigious energy.
As the former Soviet military forces withdrew from the periphery, trading space for time, Yeltsin began his assault on the regulated economic system. He resisted subsidizing regional economic structures with revenues from the center, thus negating the equivalent of regional equalization payments by which Ottawa subsidizes weaker provincial economies. The result was chaos, scarcely concealed by the impsition of martial law in Chechnya. Consumer prices rose 300%, the GDP fell 96% and inflation attained the unheard-of level of 2,520%. Correspondingly, Yeltsin's popularity fell from 40% in 1991 to 20% in 1992 and 17% in 1993. These figures make manifest the contradiction between claims of "populism" and "democratization" and actual public sendiment. In practice the touted reform process had a greater similiarity to a Hollywood reality show extolling "virtual democracy."
Nevertheless, Colton's terse summary of the Yeltsin style of implementing irregular reforms, fostering a fractious administrative mechanism and leaping to unpredictable decisions must be credited. In desperation Yeltsin turned to a veteran Soviet administrator, Victor Chernomyrdin, the former Soviet Minister for Gas (1985-89), to regularize and rationalize his tempestuous and convulsive assaults on the previous socialist "normalcy." The Consttutional Court prohibited the persecution of former Party members. Motivated by a spontaneous "truth and reconciliation" sentiment, some 4.2 millin Soviet citizens were exonerated, or posthumously rehabilitated, from frudulent accusations. As did the Castro government in Havana, Yeltsin attempted overtures to Russian exile communities, but without offering financial compensation. The KGB was not abolished as the imperial Okhrana had been, but was trimmed down into a leaner, meaner government organ and rechristened the Federal Security Bureau (FSB). Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose. It was, however, significant that on two counts Yeltsin deviated from Western advice. He did not form a mass party around a personality cult, as de Gaulle had done, and he refrained from inundating his bewildered public with a tsunami of electronic propaganda, as the Fuehrer and the Duce had done. It is unquestionable, as Colton writes, that Yeltsin combined ideological eclecticism with a fascination for history. And he was made sufficiently aware of the potential dangers in following European precedents to renounce that path.
Subsequently he abandoned his administrative metier to become an energetic partisan for enforcing a tectonic shift in Russian economic structures. In the ensuing earthquake, to Western applause from financially interested Western investors, state property was sold off at fire-sale prices to speculators who had amassed government-issued purchase vouchers. Petroleum reserves were offered as collatoral for bank loans. This collateral was swiftly auctioned off, and just as swiftly purchased by the auctioneers themselves. In short, the Yeltsin re-structuring (or right perestroika) implemented the counsel of the right Communist Nikolai Bukharin who, imitating the counterrevolutionary French leader Adolphe Thiers, once wrote in Pravda, "Enrichez-vous!" Throughout this convulsive period violent crime doubled, the newly wealthy evaded taxes, and the government was too bankrupt to pay the military rankers.
This reviewer must dissent from Colton's regret that a new security architecture for Europe and Asia did not suck Russia into an elephantine NATO bureaucracy extending from the English Channel to the Yellow Sea. It is illogical to celebrate the disintegration of a traditional overland empire in Chapter 8, if it be Turkish, only to advocated a grossly expanded empire of the same genre, if it be controlled by Anglo-Saxons. In this regard the author's objectivity and sense of proportion may justly be challenged.
After two yers of economic maladministration and administrative muddle, 617 deputies in the Supreme Soviet voted to impeach the President, but fell short of a two-thirds majority. En revanche, Yeltsin abolished the Supreme Soviet on September 21, 1993, and replaced it with a two-house legislature, following the American model. Colton pussyfoots around this executive coup, characterizing it as merely of "debatable legality" and partaking of "extraconstiitutionality." Early in October the "superpresident" ordered 1300 soldiers to attack the Parliament skyscraper ( or so-called "White House") in a dramatic televised Putsch. He then introduced a cumersome constitution of 137 articles. Colton approvingly salutes this political solution achieved through "partially democratic means." Yeltin himself, in rhetoric resembling Mussolini's, thundered to the quailing public, "...Do you want to bet only or mostly on a parliament? If you did, within a half-year, if not sooner, people would demand a dictator." One could only imagine how history would have changed, if King Charles I had had the benefit of Yeltsin's speechwriters! But despite the frightening rhetoric , the elected deputies voted amnesty for their former leaders, and Yeltsin, perhaps responding to undocumented hints from former Party apparatchiki, did not venture to counter their defiance. As a "legitimized" democratic despot he proceeded to rule by decree, issuing above twenty decrees per month, while the impotent parliamentary body adopted only 6 laws throughout all of 1994.
Although the "hitter" (udarnik) with the bullyingmicrophone had hoped to retire after one term because of health considerations,he was impelled by the pressures of incumbancy to reconsider, despite his near total lack of public approval. In February, 1996, he betook himself and an entourage of 70 to the World Economc Forum in Davos, Switzerland. On March 19 he launched a new publicity campaign, appealing to three separate privileged castes: the military, the clergy, and the corporate elite, in a Third World pattern more familiarly exemplified in Latin America. Through his campaign, guided by an American advertising firm, Yeltsin overcame the handicap of his single-digit popularity. His ambitions were furthered by a windfall investment of $10 billion from the IMF, and the World Bank gilded his lily with another $500 million. Inhis campaign swings, Yeltsin distributed bouquets and benefits like a Canadian prime minister campaigning through French Quebec, even allocating a generous contribution to a Muslim cultural center. The German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, offered him political asyllum if he lost. Through foreign gold and advertising guile he raised his vote total to 35% in the first round of balloting, and strenuously levered himself up to 54% to defeat the Communist candidate, who had increased his own popularity from 32% to 41%. This rebound, however, was to be short-lived. As Colton writes, "Yeltsin had rejuvenated himself politically just as he was failing corporeally."
He endured a fourth heart attack in August, and in September had his heart function improved by an operation to attach five grafts to his weakened heart muscle. The Russian surgical procedure was observed by a celebrated American heart specialist from Houston, Texas, the homeland of America's oil elite. IBy May he had recuperated sufficiently to journey to Paris, where he signed a diplomatic capitulation agreeing to NATO's long-planned Drang nach Osten. As his health failed, so did his intermittent administrative hammer blows. Because the treasury had been scraped clean (perhaps to increase his vote total), the total arrears of unpaid wages and old age pensions rose to $8 billion in 1998. In May, 1997, he was compelled par la force des choses to sign a treaty with Chechen authorities, promising to withdraw Russian troops from te Caucasian Muslim republic. And in the same tempestuous month he fired both the Defense Minister and the Chief of the General Staff, ostensibly because they demurred from his public commitment to end conscription. (It still exists.) Finally, having triumphed with Western financial assistance over the vanquished state ideology (vae victis!) he commenced to lament the want of a unifying "national idea" or "national ideology." (The latter appears still to represent a condition sine qua non for state ideological specialists.)
Yeltsin's decllining health required hospitalization on eight separate occasions between November, 1996 and December, 1999. As he became progressively separated from administrative responsibilities, cabined discipline disintegrated as ever more caustic press criticism echoed an earlier characterization of Yeltsin's family association withthe emergent business elite as constituting a "collective Rasputin." In August, 1996, Chernomyrdin was confirmed again by the Duma, only to be dumped by the following year. His replacement lasted from April to August, before he was replaced by Evgenii Primakov, the former KGB chief , professional diplomat, and fluent Arab speaker. Another KGB veteran was embedded as chief of the Kremlin administration. A former director of the new FSB was nmed as first deputy prime minister in a chess player's move to conceal the forthcoming nomination of Vladimir Putin as prime minister. The actor-president, Boris Yeltsin, executed a carefully scripted retirement on December 31, 1999. It coud be argued that while Yeltsin menaced or enthralled the inexperienced voting public like a dancing bear at the Moscow Circus, the responsibilities for actual executive implementation remained firmly in the hands of experienced Soviet apparatchiki like Chernomyrdin and Primakov, with the ostensibly disgraced Mikhail Gorbachev arguably active behind the scenes.
The catastrophic financial collapse of 1997 brought with it yet another request from the Parliament for Yeltsin to resign. The exchange value of the ruble-to-dollar ratio fell from 6:1 to 21:1, and inflation rose 40% throughout his last year in office. An unpredictable rise in oil prices rescued corporate Russia, but not the ordinary Russian family. "And this all was accomplished," Colton enthuses," in the new, post-communist economy."
Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin projected a larger-than-life image. Permitting neither smoking nor swearing, he presented nearly as abstemious a private image as Adolf Hitler. But his immoderate inebriation before 1996 attractd freqent criticism. Further, it was observed that he exhibited suicidal behabior, and one one occasion opened his veins to share his blood with that of a bodyguard in an ancient pagan gesture. (Colton does not remind his readers that the Russian word for the numeral "one" is "odin".) Colton describes Yeltsin's administrative style as "arrythmic," oscillating between aggressive activism and somnolent acquiescence, more or less like a bicycle racer after testosterone injections. Gorbachev commented that Yeltsin fitted better into a Sturm und Drang atmosphere than seated behind a bureacratic desk. Indeed, the irregularity of his manner finally stimulated some of his emboldened underlings to write an acidulous rebuke, known to their initimates as the "Letter of the Aides to the Sutan." As in previous epochs, the Russian intelligentsia fell back to deploy Russia's most powerful civic weapon--satire. One television network prominently featured a puppet show in which the obese and unstable presidential figure was known as "Boriska," or "Dirty Little Boris." Verbal orders were given priority over written procedures. Colton attributes this practice to Soviet tradition, but the practice of oral "guidance" to interpret (or frustrate) written orders exists throughout the American military, and was even adopted by Japanese banks during the American Occupation ("window guidance"). The charisma of the "superpresident" was so pronouonced that persons in his immediate vicinity felt themselves ensnared in a personal electronic field.
But this phenomenon, however magnified, is typical of the leadership cult of traditional Russian male culture. Further, the President's Club of political insiders, influence peddlers, business elites and family members meeting at an expanded sportsmen's club might legitimately be viewed as a twentieth century derivative of Peter the Great's "All-Russian Congregation of Fools, Rogues and Drunkards," with its ritual catechism commencing with the query, "Do you drink?" If Professor Colton had imbibed a sympthetic appreciation of Russian cultural patterns, he might have commented on the similarity.
In sum, Colton's biography displays both large merits and, regrettably, significent blemishes. The Harvard professor deserves applause for undertaking so swiftly to complete so daunting a task. He is to be commended for recommending that Russian academics follow his lead in cultivating the plants in their biographical gardens. Colton's garden is very generously manured with documentation, indeed.
On the other hand, the reviewer must note several large debits. To rely on pop social psychology to define Yeltsin as an "event-shaping man" is superficial at best--not the conclusion, which is correct, but the pop author from whom this categorization is derived. Comparing Yeltsin the expansive Slavic drunk with the constipated German cleric Martin Luther is staggering in its chutzpah. Moreover, the cognoscenti will note several significant lacunae. It is inexcusable to ignore the fate of Marshal Sergei Akhromayev, close to Western military leaders such as Admiral William Crowe, Jr. Akhromayev allegedly committed suicide in his Kremlin office after the dramatic failure of the televised coup of August, 1991. The second is the downing of Korean Air Line Flight 007, resulting in the death of Congresman Larry McDonald (R-VA), a founder of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society , and a critic of the Rockefeller family, whom he accused of participating in secret negotiations with the Russians behind the back of the Washington authorities. Similarly ignored in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, authored by Richard Perle, that linked American trade concessions to Jewish emigration. Colton similarly ignores the the Harvard connection to Moscow, evidenced by the repeated participation of West-oriented Russian politicians such as Gregorii Yavlinskii and Yegor Gaidar at the Russian Center 's public seminars, often chaired by Professor Marshall Goldman, his predecessor as director. Nor does he cite any of Professor Goldman's broadcasts from Russia on National Public Radio for some twenty years. Neither does he refer to any of the rich European journalistic commentary or the memoirs of non-English-speaking eyewitnesses. To a bemused public raised on tales of unremitting hostility between the KGB and FBI, it may come as a surprise to learn that throughout the Cold War, the call-sign for the FBI short-wave station in Washington was KGB 793. It is hard to pass this off as an accidental oversight. Finally, Colton demonstrates insufficient familiarity with the permanence of Muslim civilization throughout the Central Asian successor republics, symbolized in the career of the Cechen leader Imam Shamil' (1797-1877) who died in Mecca.
Although Colton half-heartedly criticizes Yeltsin's "borderline demagogy," he appears oblivious to the impression created by his own practice of rejoicing in an extended concatenation of pejorative asides directed at individuals who did not, to his taste, demonstrate sufficient subservience to the personality and policies of the putative "superpresident." These individuals, numbered among a "piebald field" of the unfortunate defeated, are portrayed variously as indulging in "finger-pointing," acting "brazenly," mouthing "claptrap," manifestly "featherbrained," whose activities "fizzle" in the pursuit of "faddish populism" espoused by "eggheads" who "generate hoopla" from thir position in the "spongy middle" typically inhabited by "queasy intellectuals" who sometimes dispense "socialistic proclivities" among "refactory subordinates" whose oppositional activities are doomed to "crash and burn" after "a kick in the groin." The acidity of an academic martinet does little to reinforce any confidence in the writer's ability to reach a balanced judgment. A more sophisticated conclusion regarding the relationship between the "superpresident" and the "superparty" of professional apparatchiki will recall the image of the smychka, for such a constellation of political forces is reminiscent of a now-forgotten political formula describing the contrasting roles of Marshal Petain and General de Gaulle during the Vichy period, when one theory alleged that Petain was the shield and de Gaulle the sword of the French nation under Nazi occupation. Les bouts se touchent.
In conclusion, Colton's assiduous perseverance has produced a very big volume that would achieve wider circulation if it were, like the baby in front of King Solomon, divided in two. For while the Cambridge academic may well proclaim with the poet, "I have erected a monument higher than Alexander's spire," the mountainous documentation relating to narrow political manoeuvering within the fluctuating inner circle would better be separated out for a series of articles in specialized journals. The life of Yeltsin as an individual would better be sundered from the existing text and presented to a general readership in stripped-down chronological order. Surgical deconstruction is necessary because the paragraphs of sperrogatory political detail obscure the development and Lebensweg of the chief subject.
Of Professor Colton's devotion to his sweet mythos there can be no question, for he may be trusted, like faithful Ruslan of the novel, to guide future scholars to a golden horde of documentation that should be employed in a less partisan manner to anchor Yeltsin more firmly in the course of broader historical processes, and to depict Russia not as a mere component elements in Harvard's Weltanschauung of wealth but to resore it to its actual role in the European association of nations.
Commissioned by the Christian Science Monitor for publication in May, 2008.
Rejected by the Christian Science Monitor because the review significantly exceeded the Monitor's 800 word limit.
The writer received a "kill fee."
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