Often in the chronicles of human endeavor, what appears a great beginning, or at least a revival, in a political or ideological movement, in reality represents its final, decadent stage.  Some fireworks burn brightest as they die,  Thus it was that the flourishing anarchist movement during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, while viewed at the time as a powerful breakthrough for a phenomenon that defined itself in terms baffling to most today, as "libertarian communism," stood at the conclusion of radical labor's intervention in history. 

There are many more such examples, both in totalitarianism and in more benevolent chapters of the modern epic.  From the Parisian insurrection of 1968 to the riots in Athens today, the same judgment appears appropriate:  notwithstanding the frenetic acclamation of superficial commentators, these are better seen as concluding rather than inaugural moments.  In my view, the same could be said of the Islamofascist offensive embodied in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. I believe the horror of that day represented Saudi Wahhabism in extremis, rather than the commencement of a victorious worldwide jihad, just as Hitler's temporary victories in Europe in 1939-41 preceded the eventual collapse, rather than the triumph, of Nazi imperialism.

Of no 20^th century event does the coincidence of spectacle with decline seem more obvious, in retrospect, than the Cuban Revolution of 1959.   The pathetic story of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's fall from revolutionary hero in 1960 to scrounging vagabond liquidated in Bolivia in 1967 was, at the time, perceived by only a few observers in the international radical milieu as a sign that the wave of protest culminating in France six months afterward would close, rather than open, a cycle.

Guevara has returned to prominence as a symbol of the left, displayed on tee shirts and other ephemera, including a brand of cigarettes in Holland.  With that result, the appearance of Steven Soderbergh's bloated two-part film Che, totaling four hours of incident and detail incomprehensible to anybody who is not Cuban or a specialist in the annals of Castroism, comes as no surprise.  But as with the revolution itself, and the subsequent squalid defeat of Guevara's Bolivian campaign, what we see on the screen must stand as a stillborn exercise in nostalgia, rather than evidence of a Castroite resurrection.  

In addition, this cinematic monstrosity signifies the end of Soderbergh's credibility as a film director.   While the Georgia-born cinéaste has been hailed absurdly as a protean figure excelling in all aspects of movie-making, his career has slid since he displayed a clever perceptiveness about sexual deceit in sex, lies, and videotape (1989).  His Erin Brockovich and Traffic, released in 2000, were competent but effective more for their messages - the virtue of protest against corporate corruption in the first case, the power of corruption represented by the drug trade, in the second - than for their cinematic verve.  Traffic, for its part, was marred by unconvincing family entanglements attached to the character of a high government official, played by Michael Douglas.

Soderbergh's obsessions, focused on improbable narrative convolutions that hardly rise to the level of "plot twists," obscure gadgets, and shallow characterizations, have made his later pictures unattractive, when not incomprehensible, to critics and viewers alike.  With the Ocean's 11-12-13 franchise, his flaws were aggravated to a point where the last two films became caricatural.  The blank stupidity of employing the actress Julia Roberts to play a woman pretending to be the actress Julia Roberts, in Ocean's 12, was hard to exceed, although the same film was weighed down (physically no less than psychologically) by the enormously (in every sense) untalented Catherine Zeta-Jones, who had brought nothing but bulk to Traffic. 

In Ocean's 13, Soderbergh outdid his previous artistic failures by humiliating Al Pacino, making him a simulacrum of the suave outlaw roles in some of which he had excelled (see the Godfather trilogy and Carlito's Way, not the ludicrous Scarface).   Ocean's 13 similarly degraded Ellen Barkin, who once joined Pacino in lighting up the classic Sea of Love. And those were but two imbecilities in a movie filled with such tidbits.  Formerly, such film fumbles were usually blamed by the prevalence in Hollywood of a then-common variant of "p.c.": Peruvian cocaine.  In the case of Che, however, the drug at fault is obviously the more familiar political correctness.

Andy Garcia, an underrated and underutilized star who, with obvious justification, trudged through the Ocean's franchise as if his only concern might have been to collect his check, is a Cuban-American and pronounced anti-Castro patriot, so that his inveiglement into the Che disaster was doubtless impossible to imagine.  But a Cuban-born star with a thorough knowledge of the events in Cuba and Bolivia in the 1950s and 1960s could not have saved this latest debacle.  Not even Benicio del Toro, a good choice for a Guevara impersonation, could effect such a rescue.  

Soderbergh's Che appears more a pseudo-documentary than a dramatic film, an effect heightened by the film's dialogue being almost entirely in Spanish.  Yet it is a pseudo-doc with a considerable difference, in that notwithstanding its enervating length, Soderbergh's Che ignores, without exception, the entire backstory of the events it portrays.  The origin of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship is never explained; nor is the July 26, 1953 failed coup attempt by Castro, centered on an assault at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, for which the July 26 Movement (M-26-J) was named.  Among Cubans and foreign experts, the latter gap may be easily explained; how to account for the fact that Batista, universally portrayed by Castrophiles as a monster, was satisfied to see the defiant captive Castro sentenced to no more than 15 years in prison, of which he served only two before he was released in a Batista amnesty?  How, we may ask, does this compare with the dozens of executions carried out after Castro's takeover?  Similarly, the training of Guevara as a medical doctor is unaddressed, although it is doubtful that many spectators of this film will ask how a physician, who has taken the Hippocratic oath to preserve life, could have ordered so many of the mentioned shootings.

The background of Guevara as an anti-American radical in the Guatemalan events of 1954 is also overlooked.  Add to this a silence about the history of the Directorio Revolucionario, the main alternative armed oppositional group to Castro's M-26-J.  Throughout the film, in addition to its near-exclusive Spanish dialogue, groups and names are mentioned without any effort to flesh them out.  A "Faustino" appears and denounces the PSP or Popular Socialist party, as the Cuban Communist party then styled itself, as Stalinists.  His full name, Faustino Pérez, is unmentioned, along with his cooptation into the Cuban Communist leadership.  Nor, of course, is the rich experience of the Cuban Stalinist apparatus as partners of Batista, whom they supported as the Nicaraguan Stalinists once backed Anastasio Somoza, discussed.   A "Rolando" is given orders, and is identified in the credits, printed in a separate pamphlet, as Rolando Cubela; Cubela's later turn against Castro, imprisonment in a plot to kill the dictator, and eventual exile, are deemed unworthy of mention. 

Similarly, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, a Spanish-born anti-Stalinist revolutionary who distinguished himself as a fighter in Cuba, is casually smeared, without further elucidation (Gutiérrez Menoyo also turned against Castro.)  As in the Ocean's franchise, Soderbergh remains fascinated with gimmicks rather than personalities.  He spends more time in the first half of the film recording the wrecking of apartment walls to gain a tactical position during the climactic battle of Santa Clara than with the crisis of the Batista regime caused by the same battle.       

In its second-half treatment of Guevara's Bolivian misadventure, context is even more important, and further absent.  Whatever one's view of the Bolivian Communist Party as a Soviet and Cuban tool, Guevara's delusions about life in the highland nation were absurd.  Bolivia's marginalized indigenous majority and history of Trotskyist trade-unionism, rather than pro-Soviet leftism or Castro-style socialist caudillismo, had nothing in common with the population in Cuba or its history.  Guevara emerged on the altiplano more as a subimperialist emissary of neighboring Argentina's Peronism than as an authentic social revolutionary, and left no visible influence in Bolivian political life.  Among the many phantom names that passes through this film like water in a sieve is that of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentine associate of Guevara who began his political career in a Peronist group with fascist tendencies.  This fact was revealed in a 1997 Guevara biography by Jon Lee Anderson, pretentiously credited as the film's Chief Consultant, but apparently ignored. 

Guevara was obviously a heedless risk-taker, as shown by the cigar- and pipe-smoking habits he maintained even though he was asthmatic.  Nobody has ever, it seems, asked what kind of person, especially one trained as a doctor, would so indulge himself. At the time of his death, few might have imagined the glamorous Guevara going to Bolivia to commit "revolutionary suicide" - a planetary equivalent of the "suicide by cop" in which insane individuals wave guns at the police.  But some in the Castroite milieu of the time, which existed in the U.S. no less than elsewhere, and of which I was then still a member, suspected that Guevara had become an uncomfortable presence for Castro.  

I remember vividly the rainy day in San Francisco, in October 1967, when the death of Guevara produced headlines in the local dailies.  We feared Guevara had been encouraged to leave Cuba and immolate himself in a faroff place, surrounded by people who did not understand or sympathize with him, with the complicity of Bolivian Stalinists.  In addition, much has been revealed since Guevara's death about Tamara Bunke, known as "Tania," the German-Argentine who accompanied him to Bolivia and was also killed there.  Bunke was a KGB/Stasi agent assigned to monitor Guevara's Bolivian operations.  All such perspective is missing from Soderbergh's film. 

The only thing more tedious about this film than its artistic and historic nullity was the juvenile reaction to it visible among the recusant leftists, many of them resembling escapees from an asylum, who crowded into its showing in Manhattan, giggling and cheering at predictable war scenes, like children at a Star Wars performance.  The film should be called Castro's 12, because like an Ocean's franchise product, it is all bogus aesthetics and no content - as well as in recollection of the 12 survivors, including Castro and Guevara, of the doomed Cuban revolutionary mission of 1956, in the yacht Granma.  These personages leap into the camera's eye and depart from it much as do the associates of George Clooney in the Ocean's series - but such may be the fate of any film roles created by Soderbergh.

In real history, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, notwithstanding their political faults, along with Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Ben Bella in North Africa, erupted into global attention as youthful idols.  The leadership of the leading nations then remained in the superannuated hands of men like Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan, DeGaulle, and Mao.  In this regard, the Cuban revolutionaries, in particular, and as I have written elsewhere, had more in common with Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley than with Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. 

But Guevara himself, as a doctor who embraced terrorism, may better be compared with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician who became second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, as well as the notorious Stalinist assassin and medical anthropologist, Mark Zborowski; Radovan Karadžić, the government psychiatrist who became infamous as a terror leader in the Balkan wars of the 1990s and now faces trial at The Hague, and even Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi death-camp doctor (see Scientific Training and Radical Islam, published by the Center for Islamic Pluralism).  This is the aspect of the Guevara legacy that most needs examination, and is most lacking from Soderbergh's overblown homage to a revolution that led to tragedy and disillusion, even before the Bolivian fiasco that ended Guevara's life.

One of the few certainties of the 20th century was that the apostles of Marxist materialism and the adherents of Muslim theocracy were mortal enemies. In Afghanistan, they went to war. But that was the 20th century.

The terms Left and Right were coined in 1789 to describe seating arrangements for the National Assembly during the early stages of the French Revolution. Those seated to the podium's right wanted to preserve parts of the past; those on the left hoped, in the name of progress, to invent a new future. But the maneuverings of politics soon muddied the initial transparency of these terms into an enduring illegibility. The ideas of the bloody minded right-wing reactionary Joseph de Maistre, the intellectual arch-enemy of the Revolution, for instance, became an inspiration for the early socialists-and so it has gone ever since.

The flamboyant French litterateur Bernard-Henri Lévy, widely known in Paris as BHL, acknowledges the problem. In his new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, he writes that 'the famous split between Left and Right that has structured French politics . . . has become harder and harder to believe in.' That is because, to his dismay, much of the Left, cuckolded by history, no longer believes in progress or modernity. He describes the contemporary Left, with its signature scowl of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-liberalism, as 'that great backward falling corpse which the worms have already started to chew.' The corpse is what he confusingly calls 'the right-wing left'

Despite his disdain for much of the current Left, and despite the fact that many of those closest to his point of view in France endorsed the presidential candidacy of the 'right-wing' flag bearer Nicolas Sarkozy, a personal friend, Lévy refused to abandon the Socialist ticket. His dilemma, he told Sarkozy, was that no matter how much he liked, respected, and even agreed with the French president, he couldn't support him because 'the Left is my family.' Lévy's new book is an effort-part memoir, part essay, part polemic-to explain the nature of those family ties.

Continue reading...

Greetings from Barcelona where there is now a Passeig Andreu Nin (Passeig being Catalan for Paseo).  It is quite an impressive item, especially since it is the location of what I believe to be the most overwhelming, overbearing, over-the-top shopping center in the history of commerce.  It is called Heron City for reasons I cannot fathom.  One could only believe in such a thing if one saw it for itself.  A bowling alley with an internet rank, at which I am now writing, is only one feature.  The rest is simply... staggeringly vulgar and crazy in the way only the Spanish can do such things.

One imagines Luis Buñuel creating such a monstrosity in a movie.  Andreu Nin, the ex-anarchist, martyr to Stalinism, Catalan literary critic, is now a beloved figure, his name decorating something that really looks like it was designed on LSD.

Of course the consolation is always that of normality.  Now that the anti-Stalinists have won the battle of historical memory in Spain it probably makes perfect sense to have a place like this on a street named for Nin.  It shows that Nin is simply part of the mental landscape of the Catalans, as he always was.  Of course there are still no streets in Barcelona named for Dolores Ibarruri, Milton Wolff, or the International Brigades.

It makes me think of a giant golf course in Beverly Hills on Leon Trotsky Boulevard.  One could even invent all sorts of extreme variations on the principle; a TV game show called NKVD For a Day in which down at the heels movie stars dress up as Yezhov... The Karl Marx lapdance bar... Lenin cough drops... Kropotkin cupcakes... Emma Goldman toothpaste...

Who knows what would have happened if the Via Laietana in Barcelona were to have kept its name as the Via Durruti?  There might now be the Via Durruti auto agency selling BMWs.

Of course there are other examples of how these things work.  In Uzbekistan they are so proud of the famous Islamic thinker Ibn Sino (known as Ibn Sina or Avicenna in the West) that one does see the Ibn Sino gas station, Ibn Sino t-shirt shop, etc.  And in Kazakhstan they have the Alfarabi meat market, etc.   Of course Western Europe is awash with images of the gentle physician and executioner Che Guevara, so that in Holland one can buy Che Guevara cigar cutters, ashtrays, t-shirts, backpacks, etc.   

I was in the North African section of Marseilles over the weekend and went into an Islamist bookshop.  Piles of books by Ibn Abd Al Wahhab alongside Che Guevara bookbags!

Barcelona has changed a lot and I must say, mainly not for the better.  Most of the old working class bars have disappeared.  Everything is designed for a Woody Allen film now.  The former Barri Xines or Barrio Chino (also known as El Raval), the shabby neighborhood on the lower side of the Rambles, was completely rehabilitated during the Olympics and is now squeaky clean, but has somewhat been consigned to the Muslim immigrants, including a lot of Pakistanis which is not surprising considering Pakistanis go where there is commerce, not hard labor, and in Catalunya hard labor would be done by Africans.  Very different from Marseille in that in the Raval immigrants and their businesses are present but there are apparently no Islamic bookshops -- maybe because there is so little radical literature in Spanish.

Some of the surviving nice snackbars do a kind of weird double business with their locals coming in and competing for space with tourists asking idiotic questions about tapas... I always tell them to try the blood sausage, which is really a sin, but I know it will make them suffer intestinally... which they deserve.

The Barcelona bookstores have taken a dive in quality.  The old days when they were filled with fabulous academic works on Judaism and Islam have ended.  It´s all bestsellers now -- except that the Catalans remain obsessed with their history before and during the civil war and there are a lot of extremely interesting new books on aspects of the 1930s that never saw light of day in the past.  I suspect this is part of the rather suspect revival of recriminations over the civil war by the Zapatero crowd.  Since Zapatero wants to dig up all the dead from the civil war the Catalans are going to lead the pack by getting a lot of new stuff in print, which in principle is fine. I bought enough books that I have to send them to DC by UPS tomorrow, but they are mostly about Catalan history, not about Islam or Judaism which is what I really wanted.   Maybe the Madrid bookstores will be better -- I´ll go there Wednesday, but I am not optimistic.  A lot of books I used to see all over the place are now probably only available from second hand dealers.   Since I personally donated 100+ Spanish academic books on Sephardic subjects to the University of Sarajevo I might now have to go back and ask them to let me copy some of them.

There is an old child's joke that goes like this. "Rabbi David, Rabbi David, why does the dog wag his tail?" "Because, my child, the dog is bigger than his tail. If the tail was bigger, perhaps the tail would wag the dog."

The tail-wagging-the-dog inversion is an ancient staple of comedy. It is an equally ancient staple of political theory, starting with Aristotle's warning that wealth-seeking in the service of the household is a positive good, but where the household is devoted to wealth-seeking it has become corrupt. Aristotle was pointing to one of the biggest, most important questions about tail-dog relations in the West: what is the relationship between our politics and our economics? The different answers to this basic question are the real differences between McCain and Obama.

Marx argued that the answer was simple: our political values are merely temporary expressions of economic imperatives, and will give way as economic interests evolve. Marx also saw capitalism as inherently unstable. Capitalist markets, he said, would lead to an endless and amplifying series of boom-and-bust cycles, and at the same time the working class would be ever-more exploited by a dominant class. The combination of instability and resentment would lead to the proletarian revolution, most likely in Germany, later in the United States.

Marx was wrong, of course. The western democracies defied Marx's logic by a decidedly unMarxian choice of priorities: politics over economics. We intervened in our respective economies with government regulation, and social welfare programs, and publicly funded higher education, and the political empowerment of labor -- in ways ranging from American trade unions to the Scandinavian Fordist model - and created something new, a working middle class. We modified political arrangements to ensure representation for economically disempowered groups. And we intervened in the system of corporate capitalism to stabilize markets and tame, if not end, the boom-and-bust cycle of bubbles and depressions that had marked the century leading up to 1929. For a while, in other words, the world was not divided between working poor and capitalist rich.

One of the reasons Marx got his story wrong is the he did not sufficiently recognize that capitalism was evolving. New forms of corporate capitalism led to new forms of government-economy relations. That's the genius of capitalism, what Joseph Schumpeter called its capacity for "creative destruction"; old forms are pushed out as new ones come in.

But capitalism can also lead to a less creative form of destruction, when social relations are sacrificed to pure economic interests. Both state socialism and unfettered capitalism share this weakness: giving economic systems priority over political values creates terrible cognitive dissonance. In their personal lives we tell people - especially young people - to value loyalty and stability, kindness and empathy, respect and cooperation. Then we tell them exactly the opposite about their economic lives: that they should expect to have ten different jobs in their career, to always be negotiating, to be perpetually on the job market, to rely on nothing, commit to nothing, and expect no more than the market demands in return for their efforts. The interventions in western economies in the 20th century did more than tame the excesses of the markets, they opened the space for civil society and communality to flourish. Richard Sennett, among others, has recorded the decline in our understanding of the profoundly important relationship between political values, economic intervention, and social capital.

The current crisis involves confronting another new form of capitalism, finance capitalism. It is remarkable how little McCain and Palin seem to understand this basic point. Palin gave a speech recently in which she spoke about small towns as the "real" America. The speech got some attention for its negative implication - what parts of America are anti-American? - but there was another line in that speech that was actually more interesting. Speaking of small town America, Palin spoke of "those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food..." Factory workers, teachers, and farmers sounds like a description of the American workforce circa 1930.

Finance capitalism is a new, emergent form that supplements and, in places, supplants market and corporate capitalism. As a new form, finance capitalism has not yet matured. Specifically, we have not yet worked out an approach to the Marxian equation of economy and politics in this new context. When McCain bellows that Obama's plans are "socialism," and when Palin (probably unknowingly) quotes Reagan's declaration that the adoption of Medicare will be the end of American freedom, they are not just engaging in the classic pastime of Red-baiting. They are also reflecting a near-total lack of appreciation for the fact that new economic forms require new political approaches, not to create new value commitments but in order to preserve the old ones.

Doing the same thing in the face of changed conditions is one form of radicalism; adjusting measures to suit new conditions is essential to intelligent conservatism. The "freedom" of individual workers to negotiate the terms of their employment may have made sense in the context of cottage industries of the 17th century; it took on an entirely different, more sinister meaning in the context of early 20th century industrial capitalism. The "freedom" of patients and doctors to negotiate their relationship takes on a whole different cast in the face of HMOs and a giant health insurance industry bent on maximizing profits by minimizing costs. And the "freedom" to keep what you earn has to be reconsidered when "earning" means something unrelated to old ideas of productive work and "keeping" your money means being left to the mercy of economic predators. (Government, remember, was invented in the first instance to protect us from one another.)

So the basic question is both profoundly simple and hugely complex. The hugely complex dimension is, "Once we decide what we are after, here, how do we achieve it?" There won't be a single, magic wand-style solution. Like the relation between labor and industrial capital, or the relationships in international trade, or the systems of international finance, new arrangements will emerge piecemeal and take different forms in different places. But the profoundly simple question comes first. Confronted by the recognition of a new, explosively creative form of capitalism, do we declare once again that our economics serves our political ideals, or do we embrace the idea that concepts like "freedom" and "democracy" are only worthwhile because they create profits? Between our economic and our political values, which is the tail and which is the dog?

[Cross-posted from The Huffington Post]

If there was any Jew whose legacy confuses us, it's Karl Marx. On the one hand, his thoughts led to the largest political movement in history and changed the world. How's that for a nice young Jewish boy from Trier? On the other hand, his writings led to dozens of totalitarian dictatorships, state-sponsored murder of tens of millions of people, and economic catastrophe for hundreds of millions. The shonde!

You can give your guilt complex a nap on this one. Marx wasn't even a lapsed Jew. He was a lapsed Christian. His father converted to Christianity to advance his career. Young Karl disavowed all religions and would later rant against them, especially Judaism. In fact, he is better remembered as one of the world's most accomplished anti-semites. His famous "On the Jewish Question" called for an end to the emancipation of the Jews because they were enslaved by a harsher taskmaster than the German state: their own religion. He referred to money as the real God of the Old Testament. And, probably not coincidentally, he was frequently in debt to Jewish moneylenders.

Therefore, Karl Marx only counts as a Jew on the slimmest of halachic opinions. And if there was an expulsion process for the Tribe, he would probably be first on the list. His hatred of Jews arose more from his own confusion about his heritage, and his inability to repay his debts, than from a legitimate concern for the human race.

This isn't meant to be a "Who Is a Jew" exercise, though. Something more important is at stake. Right-wingers throughout the world often equate Marx' supposed Judaism with a solid link between the religion and communism. There isn't. Marx borrowed nothing from the Jewish tradition to formulate his ideals. In fact, the concept of social classes is very much woven throughout the Torah and Talmud. A rich man should be Karl Marx: He's got the nosehonored, it's written, because he has received the blessing of wealth from God. A midrashic quotation even claims that God hasn't performed any open miracles since the sojourn in the desert because he's too busy being entertained by the rising and falling of human beings along the "ladders of wealth". Apparently the Forbes 400 is delivered up there.

Marx took his brand of ideology from the roiling cauldron of German intellectual thought of the mid Nineteenth Century. His only nod to Judaism was to denounce it. So the next time you're at a party and a suburban socialist mentions how Marx was a progressive Jew, please correct that person. The God of the Torah wasn't money, as Marx claimed, but He also most definitively was not a communist. And Karl Marx most certainly wasn't Jewish.

Sam Jaffe, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Business Success, has spent the last week guest-blogging on Jewcy with fellow co-author Rabbi Levi Brackman. This is his parting post. Want more? Buy the book!

The recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life told us what we already knew: America is becoming more and more religious. The draw of a spiritual life is growing in all sectors, and apparently all over the world—even in the officially atheist China. Christians in China: no longer in hiding(I guess this is another case of "atheists" who believe in God). The Chicago Tribune has a fascinating article on the rise of Christianity in China, that mentions some of the reasons that people are coming to church: 

Many of the church's new adherents profess a common belief that 30 years of ungoverned capitalism, amid the fading of communist ideology, has opened a yawning spiritual gap.

A public debate in China over ethics in business has bloomed in recent years from an unlikely source: the same unsafe products that have bedeviled U.S. consumers. In the most infamous case, 13 Chinese babies died and 200 were sickened in 2004 when a manufacturer skimped on the ingredients in infant milk. The case became a symbol of an economy so out of control that people could no longer trust their countrymen to adhere to the most basic ethical standards.

Later in the article, a Chinese professor is quoted saying that he thinks Christianity may be what helps Communism to survive in China.

And in the States, though evangelical Christianity continues to attract hordes of worshippers to mega-churches every week, the quest for spirituality leads in all directions. The Atlanta Journal Constitution covers the trend of black Americans converting into Judaism. Many of these converts feel they are “coming home”: 

That's how Sivan Ariel sees her experience. Born to a Catholic family in the Virgin Islands, Ariel now believes her biracial grandmother practiced Jewish customs she learned from her mother.
"She would always talk about the laws of God" and the Exodus story, Ariel said. Her grandmother would light white candles, which now remind Ariel of those lit on the Sabbath.
"She was the only person I knew that actually did that, so I wondered if it was actually witchcraft," Ariel said with a chuckle.

Ariel left Catholicism when she moved to Atlanta for college and joined a Pentecostal church for a while. But she never felt comfortable there, and she began a spiritual search that led her to convert to Judaism.
…
Ariel, referring to her experience and those of other black Jews, said, "Some of us know beyond a shadow of a doubt we're here because we're home."

Rabbi Norry called this an "unprecedented time" of interest in Judaism.

"Business is booming," he said. "On any given Shabbos, there's 10 non-Jews at our service, visiting or studying to be Jewish."

Still, he asks every convert: "Why would you ever want to be Jewish? Don't you know how many people hate us?"

The black converts respond differently, he said. They look at him as if to say: "Welcome to my world."

People seek religion for a variety of diverse reasons.  How the spread of Christianity might influence the nation of China, and how the growing number of black Jews might ultimately influence Judaism remains to be seen.

The Devil's in the details: David BerlinskiFile this in the Shit Where You Eat Department. My other digital stomping ground, Pajamas Media, has run a rather silly piece by one of the cleverer sophists of the Intelligent Design movement (do I mean to say 'moment'?), David Berlinski. A trained mathematician with a doctorate from Princeton and author of the just published The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, Berlinski is a high-profile member of the Discovery Institute, a religious think tank that sets upon Darwin's theory the way lions used to set upon Christians, and whose primus inter pares David Klinghoffer has had multiple outpourings in these pages, most recently comparing evolutionism to Nazism.

Slate's inestimable David Engber recently profiled Berlinski in a series of pieces about the conspiracy-mongering paranoids of pseudoscience:

Berlinski's radical and often wrong-headed skepticism represents an ascendant style in the popular debate over American science: Like the recent crop of global-warming skeptics, AIDS denialists, and biotech activists, Berlinski uses doubt as a weapon against the academy—he's more concerned with what we don't know than what we do. He uses uncertainty to challenge the scientific consensus; he points to the evidence that isn't there and seeks out the things that can't be proved. In its extreme and ideological form, this contrarian approach to science can turn into a form of paranoia—a state of permanent suspicion and outrage. But Berlinski is hardly a victim of the style. He's merely its most methodical practitioner.

What distinguished Berlinski from the pack is that he is not a believer himself; only an enemy of what he sees as belief's arrogant opponents. As one of his book jackets says, his ambition is to "turn the scientific community's cherished skepticism back on itself." He doubts the Big Bang could account for the origins of the universe, and he is unimpressed with the fossil record as a document of man's development into the lowly, febrile creature you see in the mirror each morning. So Berlinski is more of a fellow traveler and jujitsu artist of Intelligent Design than a true keeper of the flame.

I should add that my friend and fellow Nabokovian Ron Rosenbaum, who is the kind of literary journalist I want to be when I grow up, has called Berlinski "that rara avis, a True Skeptic, one of the most provocative—and courageous—of contemporary writers and thinkers. To me, Mr. Berlinski is a genuine intellectual hero." Now Ron has met the man in the flesh and so may have glimpsed a gem-like flame I keep missing in my investigations of Berlinski's scholarship. I should also admit that I'm capable of little commentary on advanced calculus beyond the Barbie-like assertion that it's "hard," but I do know something about logic and the fashioning of an intellectual argument. I can also affirm that Steven Pinker, one of Berlinski's foils, is not a fraud, nor does he present his theses as "dogmatically established, beyond the purview of doubt." Pinker recognizes that science still has much more to learn than it has to teach, but, unlike Berlinski, he does not believe existing epistemological lacunae are sufficient explanations for the existence of the divine.

Insane moral equivalence seems to be a trademark characteristic of this latest Great Awakening of cranks and fantasists, and Berlinski provides a good example at Pajamas, likening atheist scientists to Soviet commissars:

The commissars having vacated the scene, it is the scientific community that has acquired their authority. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Weinberg, Vic Stenger, Sam Harris, and most recently the mathematician John Paulos, have had a look around: They haven’t seen a thing. No one could have seen less.

It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.

This comes as a kind of evidence against interest throat-clearing before introducing a supposed snatch of "gotchas" in the new Ben Stein-produced documentary Expelled, which is to Intelligent Design what Michael Moore was to Saddam Hussein, and which makes much the same case as Berlinski does here -- that practitioners of junk science have been hounded like Zionist-Trotskyist-CIA-deviationists out of the workers' paradise of the scientific community. Did you know that if asked Richard Dawkins can't certify for 100% certain that there is not a prime mover in the universe? Q.E.D. there is one.

I'm not sure if Berlinski knows less about science or about Communism, but I certainly know more about the latter than he, so let's begin there.

It is of course untrue to say that the Soviet citizenry believed the Politburo to be "infallible;" it had been indoctrinated to believe that under Marxism-Leninism the Party itself was infallible and greater than any one man or collection of men. The Russian word for this was Partiinost, and it is why high-ranking Communists were routinely purged without any threat posed to the larger totalitarian system that produced and replaced them as interchangeably as cogs. One might make the case that Stalin was, in the popular imagination, an unerring supreme leader, but that historical observation comes at the expense of religion, not materialism. Indeed, many scholars of Russian political history have traced Stalin's personality cult back to the time of Golden Horde. The autocratic political imprint left by the Mongolian conquerors of infant Russia was then fused with Byzantine Caesaropapism, which is why the czars were not just secular heads of state, but godheads anointed and certified by the Eastern Orthodox Church. (As Peter the Great was given to remark when told Russia needed a holy Patriarch, Russia already had one -- himself.)

As for classical Marxism, apart from being so greatly at odds with the messianic or ecclesiastical tradition, it was, as the French philosopher Raymond Aron once put it, a "Christian heresy;" a political movement that foreordained Providence on earth, where class took the place of sin. An apter comparison for Berlinski to have made, then, would be between the Soviet commissars and the clerisy during the Inquisition, both in terms of the brutal methods of interrogation employed and the interrogators' core objectives. (Dr. Dawkins's very participation in a shambolic documentary like Expelled is proof of his willingness confront and challenge adversarial thinking, a willingness which the commissars and the priestly agents of Torquemada were not known for sharing.)

Communism, it must also be said, was not favorably disposed to the kind of science understood and practiced by the atheists Berlinski cites. One need only look at Lysenkoism or some of Stalin's sillier linguistic theories to see how vulgarized and ideologized science was in the former Soviet Union -- the Baconian method of inquiry and trial and error never had a fighting chance. Nor would anyone trained even at the elementary level in the philosophical underpinnings of that method fail to spot the problem with a question like this:

"[W]hat reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?"

One can't prove a negative proposition, and the burden of providing evidence still falls to Berlinski and his contrarian cohort. Why should we suppose God does exist? Mention of the awe and mystery of the universe only begs the question.

As for Albert Einstein, he was once asked if he believed in the divine and replied, "I believe in Spinoza's god," which is as polite an admission of atheism as anyone has ever given. Unless of course believers wouldn't mind replacing "God" with the word "Nature" as the great Jewish sage was tellingly given to do -- after being excommunicated by a rather commissar-like Dutch rabbinate.

Related in Jewcy: Philosopher and biologist Sahotra Sarkar explains that "'Intelligent Design' Creationism is an Immoral Fraud."

Greetings From Moldova: where Jesus was a communist carpenter Greetings from Moldova! You know, the former Soviet state bordered by Ukraine and Romania, whose special characteristics include being the poorest nation in Europe, as well as the first former Soviet state to elect a Communist as its president! It's hard to believe that a country where 98% of the population weighs in as Eastern Orthodox voted President Vladimir Voronin -- a Communist -- into office, but they did, and now priests, nuns, and assorted other believers are being intimidated and harassed by secret police.

Meanwhile, Christians in India aren't faring much better, what with increasing attacks by fundamentalist, nationalist religious groups such as radical Hindus and "anti-Christian fanatics."

And here in the U.S., a Burmese Christian refugee who gained asylum this past August is settling into his new life on the East Coast, while religious persecution in his homeland continues on.

Over at Salon.com, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg -- who is either a demagogue or historian depending on your politics -- associates liberalism with Nazism, suggesting that "this organic food movement, the whole-grain bread operation" is "as fascist as death camps and yellow stars."Red Commie Oppression: Would Jonah really turn her down?

He also says that Hillary Clinton is a dystopian Big Mother: "[T]he vision of the Huxleyian Brave New World future is one where everyone's happy... That's the fascism in Hillary Clinton's vision. It's not the Orwellian stamping on a human face thing, it's hugs and kisses and taking care of boo-boos. ... [A]n unwanted hug is still oppressive if you can't escape from it."

Escape from Hillary's embrace? Isn't that what Bill has tried to accomplish for the last 26 years?

Why we need a left

In my first two posts of this series, I tried to defend opponents of violent jihadism and supporters of the Iraq war from the charge that they had abandoned the values of the left and indeed attempted to make a case that tackling Islamofascism and tyranny are on the contrary, authentic leftist positions to take.

 

I promised that my next post would look at the broader issue of why a left is still necessary. Clearly this is a topic more suited for a lengthy polemical book than a blog post (Yes, I am open to offers….) so what follows is a brief and simplified attempt to make the case that in the modern world, the values of the left remain absolutely essential if the combination of chaos and dynamism that prevails is to meet with a progressive response.

 

The first thing that has to be said in any attempt to state the case for the left in 2007 is – forget the far left. Leninism is dead, Trotskyism is dead, Stalinism is dead, Maoism is dead, the concept of ‘socialist revolution’ is dead and the idea of a planned socialist economy is dead. And to that one should add a long overdue – thankfully.

Millions of people were murdered, perished or were incarcerated as a result of ‘socialist experiments’ in the last century. Millions more had their lives and their family’s lives wrecked by communist dictatorships and in countries now described as ‘formerly communist states’ the impact of over four decades of totalitarianism are still felt.

 

That tiny minority of oddballs who continue to believe in the ‘dictatorship of the proleteriat’ and other euphemisms for state terror should be as unacceptable to democrats as far right-wing opponents of liberal democracy – what is amazing is that they are still regarded as acceptable leaders for ‘peace movements’ and labour movement organisations.

 

But, of course, while Marxist inspired revolutionary socialism was a horrendous catastrophe, social democracy (or democratic socialism if you prefer) came out of the last century with a pretty good balance sheet. Western European welfare states were inspired by and largely created by the social-democratic parties of the labour movement. The health care systems, the universal education systems, the progressive housing solutions, the victories in terms of wages and work conditions for millions of European workers are a credit to the social democratic project. It was never plain-sailing of course and there were times when the tide turned against social democracy (the era of Kohl-Reagan-Thatcher) and there were times when one wondered if anything would remain of the core aims of social-democracy (the era of the third-way).

But on the whole, social-democrats can be justly proud of the achievements of their parties in the past century. In countries where social democracy took root, real acute poverty is a thing of the past even though great inequalities of wealth remain. Likewise the values of social liberalism also can look back on great progress – great steps forward have been made in gender equality, gay rights, racial equality and religious freedom.

Together social-democracy and social-liberalism have improved the lot of millions of people and won real and lasting victories – if one steps away from the disasters of revolutionary socialism, reject it utterly, then the left has actually enjoyed enormous success – successes which of course need to be defended, expanded and improved upon. But while social democracy in Europe has been able to make headway in the main goal of taking the benefits of a capitalist economy and using the state to more broadly distribute the resources available and has, through regulation and intervention, been able to force capitalists to pay better wages and offer better working conditions, on a global scale poverty remains at an intolerable level with millions living in starvation conditions.

And while liberal democracy reigns across the continent of Europe – no longer restricted only to the western half – large parts of the world remain in the grip of tyrannies or face threats from violent totalitarian movements. It is no coincidence that many of those parts of the world where poverty remains acute are also countries where democracy has yet to be able to take root. And there, surely, lays the answer to what the purpose of a modern left should surely be – defending and expanding on the gains of the victories of social democracy in the west, tackling the scar of global poverty and pushing for the expansion of democracy internationally. In an era of rapid globalisation, the moment seems perfect for the western left to make a real effort to globalise its values.

Yet at the same time, when one reads the debates over the past decade, a lack of confidence in the core values of both liberalism and social democracy emerges which hinders the ability of the democratic left to take on the tasks facing it. Cynicism about the value of democracy as opposed to an enthusiasm to spread it globally and cultural relativism rather than international solidarity risk making the left into a club of parochial critics. An unwillingness to tackle economic questions and a Luddite anti-globalisation stance rather than a concerted effort to create a social-democratic world, leave the left looking like a snooty western elite who wash their hands with some charity rather than address the need to shift globalisation in a progressive direction aimed at eliminating poverty.

 

The democratic left has much to be proud of (including its opposition to the anti-democratic left) but it must leave behind the cynicism and nihilism that has infected it in the past decade or so and confidently take on a new role as champions of a progressive globalisation and the internationalisation of democracy. In my final part of this series I will sketch out some rough ideas for how that might start to take shape.

Yesterday, some Jewcy readers observed that Brendan O'Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked and recent contributor here, began his journalistic career at a magazine named Living Marxism. Living Marxism was the organ of Britain's Revolutionary Communist Party, which held positions with which most Jewcers would not agree. Our would-be comrade commissars proclaim that O'Neill must be exiled from Jewcy.

Michael Kinsley says that the digital age is a propitious time to be a cranky libertarian, but it's also springtime for leftist factionalism. On the web, every clique can sanctify its own luminoso blogrollo, forever excommunicating deviationists for doctrinal unorthodoxies, past affiliations, refusals to pronounce some shibboleth of our corner of the internet.

Not here. Take the stultifying provincialism of left politics, amplify it with the Circle Jerk culture of the blogosphere, and you have something of a Jewcy nightmare: a hothouse of unchallenged ideology and lazy self-congratulation that looks like everything Jewcy was born to combat. Neither the Jewish community nor the left need help making themselves sclerotic, conformist, or irrelevant. The promise of the internet, for us, is its capacity to smash those tendencies, rather than reinforce them.

This isn't just about this specific issue: about Brendan O'Neill, the RCP, Living Marxist, or the Oxford Union debate. It's about what breadth of views can be accommodated in Jewcy, and who gets to contribute. We agree that there are borders to the pale, and some people are beyond those borders. But we're also aware of all the barriers that stand in the way of productive communication between people with well-entrenched and opposing positions: a reluctance or flat-out unwillingness to process evidence contradictory to one’s own point of view, an application of nearly impossible standards of evidence for opposing points but a knee-jerk acceptance of supporting points, a presumption of one's own intellectual bravery and integrity and an assumption that the opposition is weak or foolish or venal or lazy, et cetera. These, too, are things we want to overcome, rather than reinforce.

So defining Jewcy's boundaries will be an ongoing process. We'll discuss them. But we won't define them by pronouncing takfir on anyone who joined an organization with which Jewcy itself would not wish to partner.

Meanwhile, Kvetcher, nee David Kelsey, has taken Jewcy to task for our handling of the Oxford Union kerfuffle.

Jewcy chose a symbol of November 9th Society to represent the debate, even though the November 9th Society is a hardline neo-Nazi party that is quite critical of the British National Party for being mere "conservatives on steroids." That Jewcy chose their logo (replete with swastika, of course) to represent Nick Griffin is as risible as it is shrill.

Continue reading...

For some time now, I have been a member-in-good-standing of the Facebook group: "Che Guevara is a PENDEJO." Here is the group's description:

For anyone out there who's sick of seeing Che Guevara shirts being worn by idealistic college students and/or simply hates Che Guevara or any other communists for that matter.

We also invite anyone who's sick of hearing "naw man, you got it all wrong, Castro was an asshole but Che had the right idea."

If you're slightly amused by the irony of a Marxist t-shirt being sold and worn in a capitalist system, feel free to join as well.

I was immediately reminded of my association in this august body upon reading Robert Scheer's latest in The Nation (which has a thing for Cuban commies), offering a critical appraisal of Guevara's ideology (apparently it was more sophisticated than "Murdering the bourgeosie," as I had always assumed it to be) and explaining how his CIA-orchestrated assassination has actually proven fortuitous for the left because it turned him into a martyr for the new generation of Latin American leftist leaders to extol. This sentence is emblematic:

Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging bureaucracy.

You gotta hand it to Scheer: "Restless" is a pretty good euphemism for "killing people with whom you disagree." Even better is Scheer's whitewashing Guevara's capricious violence as some sort of response to the ineffectiveness of the new Cuban revolutionary government's "emerging bureaucracy." Che's actually a do-it-yourself anti-statist conservative!

One can excuse certain elements of the Left's embrace of totalitarian murderers like Che Guevara because these sorts of folks have always had a hard time coming to grips with thugs preaching a "progressive" ethos. Bashing the Left for loving Che is nothing new. But more troubling among the apologists for Guevara (and the Cuban revolution, more generally) is the lack of acknowledgment of what the Cuban Communists did to homosexuals--that other, oppressed minority which supposedly owes its salvation to the Left, along with the "working classes."

In 1960, just a year after coming to power, Guevara's glorious revolution established forced labor camps (actual gulags, not the fake one of Amnesty International's imagination) for any and all assortment of undesirables. This is how Alvaro Vargas Losa tells it (his article is entitled, by the way, "The Killing Machine," which confirms Scheer's impression that Guevara was indeed just "restless" with the ineffectiveness of the Cuban government's ability to violently suppress dissent):

This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros’s wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.

The Communist Cuban regime's treatment of homosexuals was most famously recounted in Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls, the film version of which cast Johnny Depp as a transvestite who smuggled Arenas's prison diaries off the island via his amazingly stretchable...well, you get the picture.

Scheer offers a few drips and drabs of qualified criticism about Che's legacy. "Fortunately," he writes, Latin America's new crop of leftist thugs "differ from Che in preferring the ballot to the gun," (just wait until Hugo Chavez loses an election). But you know the left is lost when it is still able to glorify and explain away the crimes of a murderer of homosexuals.

When I saw the headline of this Times piece -- "A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini" -- I thought it was another example of late-breaking news coverage from the paper that first informed us about a week ago of the "ironic" hipsters who've carved out a niche for themselves in Williamsburg. Then I read this:

Ms. Guevara and her family, too, have tried to stop the marketing of Che’s image in ways that they find abhorrent. She says they have reached out to lawyers in New York, whom she would not identify, to pursue companies the family thinks are misusing the image, not to sue them for damages, but to ask them to stop.

 

Communists who sue for copyright infringement. What's next?

Ms. Guevara travels the world speaking at conferences dealing with Che. At one in Italy, she learned after signing T-shirts for some young people that they were Fascists. “They knew nothing about him,” she said with a sigh.

Gotcha. 

It was on a trip a few years ago to that mecca of petit bourgeois decadence, Las Vegas, that I devoured Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left.  This book is now widely considered the definitive text on the various trotskisant movements (or "groupuscules") that peppered the Gotham cityscape in the twenties and thirties. Mostly Jewish, with as much a tropism for literature as for politics, these sons and daughters of immigrants started out as revolutionaries and wound up anti-Communists, either of a liberal or conservative stripe. (Wald deftly showed that the was as nerve-racking as it was satisfying, especially for latterday patrons of the establishment who traffick in selective memories about the old days and bygone struggles, who took what position when, who did what to whom.) 

A number of these complicated and dynamic figures are now forgotten: If Herbert Solow can't earn a place at the table for being the leading American Trotskyist before World War II, then he at least deserves recognition as the man who helped nurture the critical talents of one Lionel Trilling. Others are famous for their continuing influence (Norman Podhoretz is an advisor to Rudy Giuliani) and their semi-permanent positions on the mastheads of great, or once-great, journals of opinion like Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary and Dissent. On the whole, they're all defined more according to their ex-identities, those idealistic and embarrassing vestiges of a radical past which they've spent the second and third acts of their distinctively American lives repudiating. As Irving Kristol once put it, "As long as I can remember, I've been a 'neo' something. I was a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neocon. Eventually I'll just be a 'neo.'"

Wald has since altered his focus to account for some of the lesser -- or at least less acknowledged -- revolutionaries of yesterday who left us enduring ruins and monuments of their time. Most of these were Stalinists, strict CP men who wrote forgettably because in the eyes of the Party, they were themselves forgettable: mere individuals being ground through the cogs of history.

Installment one began in 2002 with Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Now Wald has published the follow-up volume, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, which is well-reviewed by J. Hoberman in The Nation:

Exiles's major tour de force is the chapter "Inventing Mike Gold," a startling rehabilitation of the Communist Party's leading literary hack (and hatchet man), remembered today largely for his contribution to the mythology of the Lower East Side, Jews Without Money (1930), one of the few proletarian novels to earn a spot in the academic canon. Wald downplays Gold's greatest hit to present him as a lapsed romantic Modernist, linking him to Walt Whitman and even the Beats. (One of the book's more fascinating secondary narratives recounts the way Whitman, the American poet most admired by leftists, was transformed into a Popular Front icon. In Gold's 1935 "Ode to Walt Whitman," Wald notes, the poet "is likened to a reborn Christ, to the spirit of communism, to nature, and to Bolshevism...serv[ing] as the multipurpose icon of Gold's multiethnic cultural mosaic.")

Wald by no means ignores Gold's work. Still, cognizant of (if not necessarily endorsing) Kempton's contempt for talent sacrificed on the altar of social revolution, he is almost always more interested in the drama of lives than those of literature, mapping a "humanscape" populated by writers committed to political commitment. Thus, Exiles's cover features Gold in action, addressing a 1930 May Day rally. The denizens of Waldsville are often quite colorful. Exiles featured such rare birds as the forgotten Woody Guthrie analogue Donald Lee West, as well as Communist poet Joy Davidman, who was married to "radical folksinger" William Lindsay Gresham before she decamped to England to change the life of C.S. Lewis. Trinity, which is more concerned with prose than poetry, devotes half a chapter to Lauren Gilfillan, whose precocious (and once-celebrated) nonfiction novel--a firsthand account of the Great Coal Strike of 1931 called I Went to Pit College--although more straightforward (and ironic), prefigures by several years the art reportage of the James Agee-Walker Evans classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

It might interest you to know that Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, wrote her graduate thesis on Gold, further fueling speculation about her intellectual kinship with Paul Wolfowitz and the left-to-right school of U.S. foreign policy.

It might also interest you to know that Gold actually was not so cut-and-dry an apparatchik as he's made out to be here.

After a notorious Leavisite dust-up with Thornton Wilder -- whose ecclesiastic death-wish unsettled plenty of non-Reds, too -- about the shaky relationship between art and ideology, Gold wrote a vigorous defense in The New Republic of Jews Without Money, which, admittedly, was a journeyman's attempt at what James T. Farrell would later accomplish with his brilliant Studs Lonigan trilogy, the Irish-American working class epic of the forties. Gold’s book, in an interesting turn of events, had been attacked from the left by Melvin Levy, in full prolier-than-thou mode for what Levy saw as too minimalist a depiction of alienated factory life in New York. 

Gold responded, “It is difficult to write proletarian literature in this country because all the critics are bourgeois. If a Thornton Wilder writes books in praise of the Catholic theology, or if a Robinson Jeffers preaches universal pessimism and mass-suicide, that is art. But if a revolutionary writer, even by implication, shows the social ideas that are stirring in the heart of the working class, he is called a propagandist. [Let] us not fear to be crude or propagandistic. We are going somewhere. The rest of literature is sinking into the arms of Catholicism, and death.”

George Orwell, surveying the wreckage of T.S. Eliot's talent twenty or so years after the publication of "The Waste Land," noted that “It would be putting it too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist Party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines.”

And no less of a critic than Edmund Wilson commented on the Gold-Levy affair that "it has now become plain that the economic crisis is to be accompanied by a literary one.” What Wilson saw in proletarian literature -- John Dos Passos representing the highwater mark -- was that it was the only of several utopias hitched to the stream train of the future rather than to the wagons of the past:

Most Americans of the type of Dos Passos and Eliot—that is, sensitive and widely read literary people—have some such agreeable fantasy in which they can allow their minds to take refuge from the perplexities and oppressions about them. In the case of H.L. Mencken, it is a sort of German university town, where people drink a great deal of beer and devour a great many books, and where they respect the local nobility—if only the Germany of the Empire had not been destroyed by war! In the case of certain American writers from the top layer of the old South, it is the old-fashioned Southern plantation, where men are high-spirited and punctilious and women gracious and lovely, where affectionate and loyal Negroes are happy to keep in their place—if only the feudal South had not perished in 1865! With Ezra Pound, it is a medieval Provence, where poor but accomplished troubadours enjoy the favors of noble ladies—if only the troubadours were not deader than Provencal! With Dos Passos, it is an army of workers, disinterested, industrious and sturdy, but full of the good-fellowship and gaiety in which the Webster Hall balls nowadays are usually so dismally lacking—if only the American workers were not preoccupied with buying Ford cars and radios, instead of organizing themselves to overthrow the civilization of the bourgeoisie! And in T.S. Eliot’s case, it is a world of seventeenth-century churchmen, who combine the most scrupulous conscience with the ability to write good prose—if it were only not so difficult nowadays for men who are capable of becoming good writers to accept the Apostolic Succession!

[Note: This is the first in a four-part series on the state of the left. --ed]

I suspect it might be men in particular who have a problem about leaving behind the passions of our youth. We can't let go of our favourite bands from our teens, we still take an odd pleasure in eating the candy we enjoyed as a kid, we have ever-lasting soft spots for those early girlfriends and spend an inordinate amount of time watching and talking about games.

But when it comes to politics, surely a grown up affair, we really should be able to cast off much more easily our youthful attachments, shouldn't we? Yet, when it comes to ideology and allegiance, it is hard to throw out every little pamphlet from the wardrobe. If you were a teenage Trot, a youthful commie, or an adolescent anarchist, you have probably found yourself caught in the trap – the past six years have been hard for anyone who still identifies themselves as a lefty but maintains a commitment to the core principles that were supposed to bind all the 57 varieties of leftism. Yet you can't get let go.

I'm addressing this to the kind of readers who, perhaps with a background in Marxism, or socialism or social-democracy or serious liberalism, have found themselves shuffling away from the ANSWER-led anti-war demonstrations, raising eyebrows at people buying the latest Chomsky Self-Help Guide for Lefties, shaking their head at those who have failed to take clear sides in the conflict against Islamism and sighing when hearing those who have allowed their opposition to the Iraq war to lead them to ignoring the need for solidarity with Iraqi democrats.

I'm talking about the kind of people who found much to appreciate in Paul Berman's thoughtful and informative Terror and Liberalism or in the more strident arguments of Christopher Hitchens about the struggle against Islamism and the bankruptcy of the anti-war movement. I am talking about those of you who get labelled 'neo-con' by old comrades and aren't really sure whether to simply embrace the presumed insult or to fire back with a list of their leftist credentials.

Because the dissenting voices that have emerged on the left in the past five or six years have been fairly confident in asserting that, despite supporting 'Bush's wars', despite finding Paul Wolfowitz closer to their own views on foreign affairs than John Kerry, despite finding more to nod along to in Commentary than the magazines of the left, they are still the torch-bearers of real leftism and it is the rest of the left who have sold out.

Why do we bother? Are we just clinging to an identity from our youth and denying that old line that "If you aren't a socialist at 18 you haven't got a heart but if you are a socialist at 40 you haven't got a brain"? Are we just trying to deny that we are following the classic path of moving rightward, drifting into conservatism as we mature? Or are we actually on to something, are we really witnessing the separation of the left into two new camps – 'the anti-imperialists' who put the blame for all the world's ills at the door of western democracies and we, the 'anti-fascists' who despite our criticisms of capitalism, recognise the need to take sides against tyranny, theocracy and terror?

In the coming weeks I want to make the case for the re-affirmation of liberal left principles against the crude anti-imperialism (in hard and soft version) that has come to dominate the voice of the radical left. To argue why, despite our embarrassment at those who claim to be the authentic voice of radicalism, it is really the Eustonite, the Bermanite, the Hitchensian, left that is the true torch-carrier of our youthful idealism. I want to argue that there is, in fact, nothing 'right-wing' about opposing tyranny, terrorism and fascism and nothing 'left-wing' about making excuses for tyrants. That it is an agenda of social solidarity and liberalism that has the best chance of defeating reaction across the globe and not isolationism, thoughtless militarism or free-market evangelism. I will make the case that here is nothing in opposing injustice abroad that stops us from making the case for a liberal-left agenda at home.

In short, I will argue that not only is it still possible to be a lefty but that, rather, it is more essential than ever.

[Read part two here.]

Sam Tanenhaus has a brilliant essay in this week's New Republic (not yet available online) about the slow, sad decline of American conservatism as a philosophy. If Andrew Sullivan wonders why his book The Conservative Soul caused an ocean of yawns on the right when it debuted months ago, it's because our body politic has had little need for the Oakeshottian dichotomy between enterprise and civil associations. (Andrew's native Tories evidently have little need for one these days, too.)

Conservatism as a galvanizing movement has always been one of negation rather than positive assertion. Leo Strauss, discoursing on the favored twin in Isaiah Berlin's Gemini category of liberties, referred to "negative liberty" -- the blessed absence of state compulsion -- as "liberty with a minus sign." American conservatism has always been ideology with a minus sign. The cold war gave it its reason for being; it was religious in both the literal and metaphoric senses of the term, with the god-fearing waging their "twilight struggle" against the godless. As Tanenhaus writes, American triumphalism, which was postwar conservatism avant la lettre, was a "purifying doctrine" pitted against the "Soviets' derived from Marx by way of Lenin," yet it consisted of... "what exactly?" Nothing. It didn't need to consist of anything beyond a transcendent and apocalyptic repudiation of "Marx by way of Lenin."

So if George Bush has failed to take up the mantle of Whittaker Chambers -- correctly if conveniently identified by Tanenhaus, Chambers' biographer, as the founder of American conservatism -- it is because Bush has failed to understand the true menace of Islamism the way Chambers did that of Communism. (That not many Republican strategists were once Kalashkinov-toting jihadists who eventually saw the light may delay further the necessary comprehension.)

I'm not sure I buy Tanenhaus's thesis that conservatism is on the wane, but I do agree that Chambers is still worth taking seriously if for no other reason than those farcical defenders of Alger Hiss continue to view him as a threat. Here's a post I wrote a few months ago about tragic Baltimore bullfrog of the twentieth century:

 

"I have sometimes been asked at this point: What went on in the minds of those Americans, all highly educated men, that made it possible for them to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized, expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore, ultimately the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as a problem of conscience, but as a problem of operations. Making due allowance for the differences of intelligence, nerve, background and political development among the individual men involved... the answer to the question must still be: no problem of conscience was then involved. For the Communists, the problem of conscience had been settled long before, at the moment when they accepted the program and discipline of the Communist Party." -- Whittaker Chambers, Witness

I shall never forget the feeling of a missed opportunity when I began my first job out of college at the Queens Museum of Art. A few months before my hire, Alger Hiss's son had been invited to speak at the museum about how his poor, beloved papa was turned into a falsely accused victim of a national bugbear responsible for the insidious advent of Joseph McCarthy and the age of the "loyalty oath." It's easy to trick yourself out as a martyr -- or, in Hiss, Jr.'s case, a vicarious one -- when every schoolchild has been taught that America's relationship to Communism was nothing more than a series of reactionary witch-hunts. There was no real threat to national security, Communists did not infiltrate the State Department. And if you need moral surety on this question, just look who interrogated Hiss -- Richard Nixon.

Political myths die hard. We now know the following about Hiss: He was a spy attached to the Washington "Ware group," who copied sensitive State Department documents and passed them along to Moscow. (His typewriter was matched with the ink on the documents, microfilms of which were buried for years in a pumpkin on Chambers' Maryland farm.) Though never a CP member (that wouldn't have looked good on his government job application), Hiss volunteered his automobile for above-ground Party use, despite being told that this was irregular and dangerous -- an underground agent was not supposed to let anything that could be traced back to him come out in the open and tinctured Red. Hiss was just that eager to advance the struggle. He also thought Franklin Roosevelt, whom he publicly adulated, was a craven bourgeois guilty of resuscitating capitalism just as the revolution looked to be imminent. Whittaker Chambers, who endured no small amount of obloquy and was the target of decades-long character assassination, was telling the truth. Richard Nixon was right.

Continue reading...

• Classroom mindfulness
• Fatah coup?
• YouTube on your $500 phone
• Shimon Peres and a convicted spy
• Communist chic in Berlin hotel
  

Democratiya's summer issue is out, and it's required reading. Here is Nick Cohen reviewing a new collection of Orwell's journalism:

When the Poles rose up on the orders of the exiled government in London to throw the Germans out and stop the Soviet Union taking the city [Orwell] protested 'against the mean and cowardly attitude' of the liberal press, which urged that they should be left to die.

What I am concerned with is the attitude of the British intelligentsia, who cannot raise between them one single voice to question what they believe to be Russian policy, no matter what turn it takes, and in this case have had the unheard-of meanness to hint that our bombers ought not to be sent to the aid of our comrades fighting in Warsaw. The enormous majority of left-wingers who swallow the policy put out by the News Chronicle, etc., know no more about Poland than I do. All they know is that the Russians object to the London Government and have set up a rival organization, and so far as they are concerned that settles the matter. If tomorrow Stalin were to drop the Committee of Liberation and recognize the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock after him like a troop of parrots. Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not 'Is this policy right or wrong?' but 'This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?' And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power.

Today, you don't here a single voice raised in protest about what al Qaeda is doing to Iraq or against the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world. If anything the duplicity is worse than during Stalinism. Then, leftish intellectuals could pretend to themselves that the Soviet Union was progressive and at some level shared their values. By contrast, Islamism makes no secret of its contempt for the Left and for liberalism or its appropriation of Nazi conspiracy theory. From the Iranian Revolution onwards, the first task of radical Islam has been to persecute Muslim socialists, liberals and freethinkers.

 

My Anglophilia knows no bounds. One of the reasons I assiduously follow the political spats on the other side of the Atlantic is because they're so much more candid about ideological differences than what passes for partisan debate or controversy over here. You will still find the odd editor of a liberal broadsheet in London going moist in the orbs to remember the glory years of Leonid Brezhnev, or to recall how Stalin and Mao's nationalist pas de deux might have ended more amicably if it weren't for the machinations of Tito. These are old feuds that should be bygones, and they scarcely resonant with, say, the AARP readership of The Nation, a greybeard demographic that preoccupies itself more with the revisionist innocence of Alger Hiss, meaning it still denies that he was a fellow traveler and Soviet spy.

I've had my problems with Robert Service in the past, chiefly because I thought his Stalin biography was mediocre where it was orthodox and bad where it was heterodox.  But look at what happens when a scholar of Russian history writes a book called Comrades! that attempts to trace the lineaments common to all Communist regimes in the 20th century. Look at what idiot Kremlin lickspittles at the Guardian go and do to him:

All this I mentioned repeatedly in my book, but it was not quite what one reviewer, the Guardian's Seumas Milne, wanted. He denied that I stated that communist leaders unleashed a drive towards industrial and cultural modernisation. Next, he alleged that I followed a "neoconservative" agenda. He also maintained that the so-called "revisionist" school of Soviet history was not getting a fair wind in the western media.

His Stalinoid form and content of argument involved deliberate misrepresentation. It would seem that Milne and his like consider it fair game to denounce anybody who comes to a considered anti-communist standpoint as a neocon. This is a shoddy way to handle a serious political discussion. If this farrago had not come from the editor of the comment pages of one of our national newspapers, it would not be worth bothering about. What is more, Milne is typical of a more general trend that retains a nostalgia for communism, and it is a trend that ought to be repudiated.

There's barely even a conventional school of Soviet history in the western media since most of the stuff we know about the USSR comes from evidence that has only just been released and siphoned through. 

What a shame Service didn't go on record one way or the other about the Iraq war. Then Milne and his Hundred Acre Wood of Red hacks would have had easier epithets to hurl at him. 

I want badly to say that this essay almost redeems him for his silliness about Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

When I met von Donnersmarck in Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy, and economics in the mid-1990s, I discussed my reservations with him. While fiercely defending the basic historical accuracy of the film, he immediately agreed that some details were deliberately altered for dramatic effect. Thus, he explained, if he had shown the Stasi cadets in uniform, no ordinary cinemagoer would have identified with them. But because he shows them (inaccurately) in student-type civilian dress and has one of them (implausibly) ask a naive question to the effect of "isn't bullying people in interrogations wrong?," the viewer can identify with them and is drawn into the story. He argued that in a movie the reality has always to be verdichtet, a word which means thickened, concentrated, intensified, but carries a verbal association with Dichtung, meaning poetry or, more broadly, fiction. Hence the elevated language ("I beg you, I beseech you"—ich flehe dich an—says the playwright at one point, asking his girlfriend not to submit again to the minister's piggish lechery). Hence the luxuriant palette of rich greens, browns, and subtle grays in which the whole movie is shot, and the frankly operatic staging of Christa's death.

During a subsequent question-and-answer session in an Oxford cinema the director mentioned, in separate answers, two films that he admired: Claude Lanzmann's harrowing Holocaust documentary, Shoah, and Anthony Minghella's version of The Talented Mr. Ripley—a thriller involving murder and stolen identity—which he singled out because "it doesn't bore me, and for that I'm very grateful." In The Lives of Others, Shoah meets The Talented Mr. Ripley. Von Donnersmarck does care about the historical facts, but he's even more concerned not to bore us. And for that we are grateful. It is just because he is not an East German survivor but a fresh, cosmopolitan child of the Americanized West, a privileged Wessi down to the carefully unbuttoned tips of his pink button-down shirt, fluent in American-accented English and the universal language of Hollywood, that he is able to translate the East German experience into an idiom that catches the imagination of the world.

A brief note about the Stasi agent's quick conversion into a "good man." It wasn't necessary all that quick. Just because the clipped, gray automaton we're introduced to at the beginning of the film indicates Wiesler was still the perfect surveillance agent doesn't mean he hadn't had doubts about his profession or his state before eavesdropping on a charismatic intellectual and his beautiful actress girlfriend.

The point conveyed by the best fictional anatomies of totalitarian societies is that even the oppressors harbor a latent, or incipient, sympathy with those they oppress. When O'Brien tells Winston Smith of the life Winston and Julia will be forced to lead in the underground -- a life that would in all probability end in early death -- is there not a slight vicarious thrill in his forecast of their martyrdom?

The very psychology that enabled regimes of terror in the twentieth century was also responsible for their downfall. A two-hour time window may have required the filmmaker to speed up the process in his characters some, but the essential truth of his film remains in tact.

The Stasi on Our Minds - The New York Review of Books

As a political system, let alone one thought to be on the winning side of history, Communism is dead. However, what made it so appealing in the 20th century is well worth studying today, when messianism and the mad pursuits of foreordained utopias are still with us. Robert Service's new history of Communism, Comrades!, is said to one of the best single volume histories of the subject:

Eschewing the usual convoluted language of Marxist debates, he provides a gripping account of communism's intellectual origins, pedigree and impact. Concluding that Marx and his followers “were not the fundamental rethinkers of the contemporary world”—he accords that honour to Albert Einstein, Max Weber and others—Mr Service turns from ideas to their practical application.

He argues that one can indeed trace a single unified history of communism, namely by following the rise and spread of the “truly innovative” Russian model. Through numerous country studies, the author concludes that all durable regimes had essential coercive characteristics in common. They centralised power, eliminated rival parties, attacked religion, established secret police forces and sent dissenters to labour camps. He compares communists both to fascists, with whom he sees ideological differences but practical similarities, and to early Christians. Like the latter, he says, communists enjoyed a feeling of certainty blessed by omniscience, with the deity in their case being “the march of history”.

What makes Russia innovative is that for centuries it cultivated the two main characteristics of Soviet Communism: autocracy and statism. Russia never reall had a "feudal" period in the proper economic sense of the word: under a unique, Asiatic configuration, the state was the sole owner of land, and the tsar simply doled out real estate to the aristocracy, which was little more than a bonded military class (known as pomestchiki) before the reforms inaugurated by Peter the Great. A country where peasants would actually elect to become slaves in order to avoid paying taxes is one that seems tailor-made for totalitarianism. The Russian paradox is that the grey, uniform masses are periodically galvanized into violent upheavals and revolutions by an intelligentsia comprised of young radicals, whom you can now see flitting across the stage at Lincoln Center in Tom Stoppard's magnetic play The Coast of Utopia. Alexander Herzen may have been the most humane and liberal of the Russian thinkers, but he still believed that the motherland already enjoyed a kind of populist communism in the obshchina-based agrarian society. Herzen's hope was that Russia could skip mercantilism and bourgeois capitalism altogether and arrive at socialism without the pettifogging political economy outlined by Marx and Engels. Herzen's inchoate social theory, based on the observations made of Russia by a Prussian sociologist, motivated the next generation of intelligents into adopting a more cohesive revolutionary plan, one that, through all its violent fits and dynamic mutations, culminated in 1917.

Because it's Friday and even this is better than Spider-Man 3:

Stalin: Why doesn't he scare you like Hitler?Were you aware of this?

There's a hot new TV show-- in Russia-- about the life of Josef Stalin. It's called Stalin Live!

Jazz hands!!!!

For real, yo.

The show's structural device is an elderly Stalin, in the last weeks of his life, recalling episodes in his younger days, most presenting him in a favorable light.

For Stalin admirers, of whom there are many in Russia, the series is an entertaining and educational look at the man who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower. To critics, it is a dangerous distortion of history that threatens to misinform a younger generation about a leader responsible for the deaths of millions of people, and reinforce a trend toward greater authoritarianism in politics.

And evidently a huge number of Russians basically agree with actor David Giorgobiani, who had this to say:

Many more years have to pass before we can make an unbiased judgment on that great man," he said. "One hundred years from now, no one will pay attention to the fact that so many people perished and the costs were so terribly high. But everyone will remember that such a great country was saved.

Umm... okay.As a Jewish woman, and someone who grew up in a red diaper, in years when Russian Jews were still trying to get out of the USSR in floods, I've thought a lot about the relationship between Stalinist Communism and anti-Semitism. I learned as a kid about the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and about Stalin's treatment of the Trotskyites. Not to mention all the purges, starting with that of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. There is no question but that Stalin was an anti-Semite, a violent tormenter of Jews.

So how do I feel about this TV show?

It horrifies me. And I don't understand why we haven't heard much about it!!! Why isn’t the Jewish press freaking out???If a widely-distributed German TV show were being made about the military and economic successes of Hitler, leaving out his bloodlust and total lack of respect for human life… you can bet your sweet asses we'd be screaming our heads off. Why aren't we screaming our heads off?

And what does this all say about the new Russia and Judaism?

All one needs to know about the goggle-eyed gulag lover:

This perversity—and he was perverse, whether he realized it or not—made him the most conspicuous single example in the 20^th century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization.

To this I might add that Nabokov had existentialism pegged in his review of La Nausée. It was "a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy and... for every so-called 'existentialist' one finds quite a few 'suctorialists.'"

Sometimes you could actually hear the slurping as a fitting physical concomitant of existentialist thought.

It's become the work of a moment to dismiss horrible political thinkers of the 20th century as good-for-nothing cranks, tout court. Just when you think a totalitarian style and substance have merged seamlessly into one pleasing, repulsive whole, you find, damn it, that there is a tiny germ of redemption in those you'd quite like there not to be. Ezra Pound was a fascist and a bigot and a lousy poet and an even lousier translator, but he knew talent when he saw it as an editor, which is T.S. Eliot appears in more anthologies and critical journals today. Pablo Neruda wrote odes to Stalin ("the sun and the moon") and predicted, upon the tyrant's death, that all would be well with the Soviet experiment because "Malenkov would finish [his] work." Still, Czeslaw Milosz was generous enough to say that Neruda knew the plight of impoverished Chileans better than most, and if his death galvanized a public opposition to Augusto Pinochet, then perhaps the Latin was not so easily consigned to the dustbin of history, after all.

Sartre's an altogether trickier customer for the simple fact that we already have his more salubrious twin in the postwar French tradition: Camus. This is the Hobsbawm/Orwell split in terms of continental heroism. You want glamour? Check out the bookjacket photo of the author of L'etranger: that trench coat, those dark-circles under the eyes, that cigarette dangling from the lips. (Clive James said he got into the business of writing just so he could one day embody this incandescent cool.) You want moral courage and honesty? Camus said he opposed French imperialism in his homeland of Algeria, but that wasn't enough to make him forget about his beloved mama when the NLF took to the streets.... You want resistance? Combat did more to excise the intellectual rot of Nazism than all of Sartre's go-nowhere colloquies in the "underground." And when it came time to say goodbye to all that and repudiate Stalinism for what it was, Camus witnessed for the virtues of humane liberalism, prefiguring the next wave of great anti-ideology philosophes like Raymond Aron and, yes, Bernard Henri-Levy.

No Exit was a groundless fear of a debased and compromised mind: the exit was merely another man.

Michael Totten interviews the hard-leftist opposition to Ahmadinejad, et. al (Hat tip: Sully):

“Some of the Communists in Iran were a part of the 1979 revolution,” I said. “Were you a part of that revolution?”

“Yes,” Kamal said. “We were. We were supported by people who were workers and poor people. You should remember that the Komalah Party was the first party that brought women equality. Komalah still wants women to have the same rights that men do.”

“How long did your Party have good relations with the government after the revolution?” I said.

I’m not sure if he dodged my question or if it was lost in translation.

“We have 3,000 martyrs,” he said. “We have hope and we have struggled for many years. We have activities everywhere.”

Would you like human rights and democracy with that?: Chinese president Hu JintaoToday China passed it first law establishing property rights, an act free marketeers are hailing as a decisive shift away from the kind of corporate fascism that has governed the Asian tiger's bogus brand of socialism for the past 25 years. However, as the Wall Street Journal econ blog The Informed Reader points out:

“[t]he new law is mainly aimed at reassuring the fast-growing middle class that their assets are secure. Its ratification, expected later this month, would give private property the same legal protection as state property. Until now, state and local officials have been able to seize businesses and land for housing and factory construction in return for little or no compensation, moves that have led to widespread protests."

And R.J. Elliott at The China Analyst says:

Far from helping the poor in rural China enforcing Property Rights will give legality to any land grab that has previously occured by Chinese Party Officials. This in a sense is setting in stone previous corrupt behaviour making a small number of individuals very rich.

In his masterpiece Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman explains the torturous process of the Baconian method it affects the life and work of his protagonist, the Soviet physicist Viktor Shtrum.

The laboratory experiments had been intended to confirm the predictions of the theory. They had failed to do this. The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. A theory that had been elaborated on the basis of decades of work by many researchers, a theory that had then explained many things in subsequent experimental results, seemed quite unshakeable. Repetition of the experiments had shown again and again that the deflections of charged particles in interaction with the nucleus still failed to correspond with what the theory predicted. Even the most generous allowance for the inaccuracy of the experiments, for the imperfection of the measuring apparatus and the emulsions used to photograph the fission of the nuclei, could in no way account for such large discrepancies.

Realizing that there could be no doubt as to the accuracy of the results, Viktor had then attempted to patch up the theory. He had postulated various arbitrary hypotheses that would reconcile the new experimental data with the theory. Everything he had done had been based on one fundamental belief: that, since the theory was itself deduced from experimental data, it was impossible for an experiment to contradict it.

An enormous amount of labour was expended in an attempt to reconcile the new data with the theory. Nevertheless, the patched-up theory still failed to account for new contradictions in the results form the laboratory. The theory remained as powerless as ever, though it still seemed unthinkable to reject it.

Although he doesn't go into much detail, it's clear Grossman's hero is helping to speed along the development of the Soviet atom bomb. (At one decisive point, when it looks as if the black marias are en route to haul him away to jail, Shtrum is saved by the personal intervention of Stalin himself. Even as a Jew, this doctor was too indispensable to a more exigent "plot" to be purged under the spate of postwar anti-Semitic hysteria.)

However, notice how craftily in the above paragraphs Grossman metaphorically anatomizes the mentality of Communism! The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. All the improvisational skill in the world can't save a debased theory.

Had this extraordinary Russian novelist been less brave in other parts of Life and Fate (probably the only book ever to get "arrested" for its "individualism" -- read "excellence"), he might have well smuggled in this coded criticism of ideology and gotten away with it. At the very least, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera would have been proud.

If the absurdities of the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of science hadn't been so harmful and blood-soaked, they'd have been hilarious. Stalin ruled as a kind of armchair white-coat over a vast matrix of scholarship and laboratory research that might otherwise have yielded a few lasting monuments to a particularly dark era in Russian history. Instead, he celebrated crackpots, killed the real talent, and then -- because such is the caprice of despots everywhere -- "rehabilitated" the slain victims and proceeded to lock up all the old crackpots. Stalin took this tack with linguistics, believe it or not. (Hold your cheap Chomsky jokes, please.) Having bought into the charlatan N. Marr's theory that the totality of the Russian language emanated from exactly four sounds -- “rosh,” “sal, ” “ber,” and “yon" -- Stalin eventually decided that, no, that probably wasn't right after all. (His epiphany did not coincide with lending credence or stays of execution to Marr's sane antagonists, who'd gone out of their way to debunk such patent nonsense in the 30's.) Then Stalin wrote a book on "Marxist" linguistics, showed Marr to be the fool everyone knew he was, and all was right again with the dialectical Force.

A new book's come out about the Georgian monster's intellectual depredations on the scientific community. Although Communism is dead, we really must continue to hear about such totalitarian manipulations of falsifiable data, since creationism and "Intelligent Design" are still very much en vogue; the former apparently now influences paleontology.

Much has already been written about some of the most egregious cases of ideology run amok. Among the most famous is the "biological war" that was waged by pseudo-biologist Trofim Lysenko just after World War II. His condemnation of the "bourgeois" nature of the chromosome had a devastating impact not only on this science but on Soviet agriculture more broadly. So what was Stalin's motivation in supporting this semi-literate homegrown agronomist who tried to kill contemporary genetics? It would be too easy to attribute it to the conceptual contradiction between Marxism's unspecified environmental, evolutionary beliefs and Western-oriented genetics, which was based on the fundamentals of molecular biology. Stalin, Pollock shows us, never bought Lysenko's arguments on the "class nature" of this science. In the margins of a draft speech by the biologist, Stalin scoffed: "Ha-Ha-Ha!!! And what about Mathematics? And Darwinism?" Rather, Stalin and the Party's support for Lysenko was the outgrowth of the desperation that had set in once it was clear that collectivization had failed to transform Soviet agriculture. Stalin counted on Lysenko to provide practical, indeed miraculous, results for the food supply. This gamble, however, assured that vast armies of serious scientists would perish and that Soviet biology would be damaged for generations.

Interesting about that note, though I dare say it's doesn't prove Stalin was any more astute about distinguishing between ideological claptrap and empiricism. Rather, it shows the coarse and derisive schoolboy mind that laughed its way through everything -- politics, industry, war, central planning, terror, mass murder.

I wasn't a fan of Robert Service's biography of the Kremlin mountaineer, but one passage from that volume is worth reprinting to underscore the preceding point:

“Having recently re-read Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, [Stalin] was convinced that space and time were absolute, unchallengeable concepts in all human endeavours…. Einsteinian physics were therefore to be regarded as a bourgeois mystification. The problem was that such physics were crucial to the completion of the A-bomb project. Beria, caught between wanting to appear as Stalin’s ideological apostle and wishing to produce an A-bomb for him, decided he needed clearance from the Boss for Soviet physicists to use Einstein’s equations. Stalin, ever the pragmatist in matters of power, gave his jovial assent: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’”

So. Stalin considers Einsteinian physics "bourgeois mystification," but he's also in a hurry to impress Truman with Soviet atom-splitting. It's a nervous roll of the dice. Heads, we get a bomb. Tails, bourgeois mystification, and we shoot the scientists.

And you thought Steven Pinker had it rough defending Larry Summers.

CONTEXT - This Week in Arts and Ideas from The Moscow Times

Robert ConquestWe all have our favorites, and mine is only hindered by specificity of subject:

You cannot when dealing with Toynbee,
Just pay him back in his own coin be-
Cause talking such piss
Would seem rather a miss;
So how would a kick in the groin be?

Or how about this one, a fair bit more "accessible" (assuming most people don't remember Philip Toynbee):

When Gaugin was visiting Fiji,
He remarked, "Things are different here, e.g.,
While Tahitian skin calls for tan spread on thin,
You can splotch it on here with a squeegee."

As Hitch makes plain in this remarkable portrait of Robert Conquest, the above limericks constitute the non-ribald in what is otherwise a catalog of filthy genius. Imagine being a world-famous historian, a man who cannot walk down the street today in Moscow without being recognized and adulated by people my age, with always a classic verse, if not one of your own composition, at the ready. To be alternatingly droll or "offensive" with the uses of rhyme and meter, and to know when to occasion either effect, is a rare talent in a full-time poet, let alone someone tasked with pealing back the vestments of Soviet communism and getting everything more or less right.

A history here, an anthology of poems there, an assortment of limericks, a memoir, a lineup of contributions to learned journals and--I forgot to mention--a festschrift of essays in his honor to be edited by the Hungarian-born scholar Paul Hollander. This seems enough to be going on with. Meanwhile, his other great work on the Ukrainian terror-famine of the 1930s, "Harvest of Sorrow," is being produced and distributed, with no profit going to the author, by a Ukrainian charity associated with President Viktor Yushchenko. Is it sweet to be so vindicated? As always, I have to crane slightly to hear the whispery answer. "There was a magazine in Russia called Neva, which found its circulation went up from 100,000 to a million when it serialized 'The Great Terror.' And I later found that at the very last plenum of the Soviet Communist Party, just before the U.S.S.R. dissolved, a Stalinist hack called Alexander Chakovsky had described me as 'anti-Sovietchik No. 1.' I must say I was rather proud of that."

I had the honor of meeting the bete noir of the Politburo in Stanford last summer. I asked him to tell me about the time he fired a shot at a barn inhabited by Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. "I was backpacking through Catalonia then, and met a few rather nice Anarchists in a village tavern. I told them I was a good rifleman at university and they gave me one of their guns, which had been malfunctioning. So I cleaned it for them." And why it took Kingsley Amis so short a time to write his own memoirs: "Because he made it all up."

You can forget about the anemic and self-congratulatory attempts on these shores to try and "reclaim" conservatism from the dread pirates neocon. The cool English empiricism that is the envy of so many Burke nostalgics may just be stranded in the last century, when classical education was mandatory and a catholicity of interest and learning not nearly so noteworthy as it is now. Consider this paragraph and try to come up with a contemporary historian who might have written it:

To read some writers, one would think that the nineteenth century consisted largely of the Peterloo Massacre, the Todpuddle Martyrs and Bloody Sunday. All were exceptional rather than typical events, and even if they were not, they would contrast pretty markedly with experience in, for example, France. Six were killed in the Peterloo rioting; none of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, though they were all disgracefully victimized and "transported," was actually martyred in the normal sense; while Blood Sunday produced precisely one death, an accidental one. Indeed, the use of such a term for such an event shows a remarkable scraping of the barrel by those determined to find British parallels to Continental shenanigans. The total death toll in civil disturbances in Britain over half a century can hardly be much over a a hundred, or, to put it another way, the equivalent of a single busy afternoon on a Paris barricade.

Or this recounted exchange from the same volume, Reflections on a Ravaged Century:

A Russian in [St. Petersburg] once said to the present writer, in late Soviet times:

"Our roads our bad."
"...Yes. Why is that?"
"It's our weather - an isotherm runs down the Finnish border."
"And seriously?"
"They were built by the state."
"Yes, but we have roads in England which were built by the Roman state nearly two thousand years ago, and some of them are still sound."
"Ah, but then the centurion would check that the six layers of stone had been laid down. Here, the inspector asks the foreman if they have been laid down and is answered with a bottle of vodka."

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

Dear President Ahmadinejad, Your recently arrived letter to “the American People” will get sympathy juices going among some of our journalists and politicians. You invoke honored buzzwords such as “human dignity” and “compassion,” and you talk about “respect for the rights of the human being.” In so doing you link yourself to nice people everywhere. You are distinguished from nice people, however, by your apparent intent to develop atomic weapons for

Secret Agent Monsignor: Stanislaw WieglusThe history of Catholic opposition to Communism has been greatly exaggerated. "How many divisions has the pope," Stalin, in one of his frequent fits of hubrisitic stupidity, once remarked, thus arming half a century's worth of cold warriors -- and the now the mournful obituarists of Pope John Paul II -- with their favorite irony. Never mind that Communism had begun rotting from within well before the Georgian monster regurgitated a small fraction of the blood he'd sucked out of Russia and Eastern Europe. The best leftist response to the triumphalist credit still being awarded to les clercs for bringing down the Berlin Wall came from the brilliant Marxist historian Perry Anderson, who, tweaking Timothy Garton Ash, asked, "How many masses has Kremlin?"

Graham Greene split his loyalties between Rome and Moscow and may have once been approached by a charismatic whorehouse-frequenting KGB agent in Estonia to do some "dry work" in England and elsewhere. The same liturgical socialism infected, to varying degree, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, who remains fond enough of the totalitarian mindset to place the crown of thorns upon the heads of Al-Qaeda and compare suicide bombers to Rosa Luxemburg in the pages of the Guardian.

I bring this up because it appears that Holy Mother Church is intent on replaying a miniature in-house version of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The divine election of a pope who was once a member of the Nazi Youth was first; now comes the news that the Archbishop of Warsaw was an informant for Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (S.B.), Poland's Communist secret police apparat:

Archbishop Wielgus acknowledged today that in 1978, he signed a cooperation statement with the secret police — under pressure, he said, from a “brutal intelligence officer” — when he was seeking permission to travel to Munich, Germany. He insisted that the only cooperation he ever gave was to inform the secret police of his agenda during foreign academic meetings and to promise not to take part in anti-Communist activities.

“That was my moment of weakness,” he wrote in his statement today.

The documents published by Rzeczpospolita and other newspapers suggest a much greater role for Father Wielgus. They indicated that he was recruited by the S.B. more than a decade earlier — in 1967, when he was a philosophy student at the University of Lublin in eastern Poland. It cited other documents in which the S.B. claimed Father Wielgus gave them information about activities at the university, where he later taught medieval philosophy.

The newspapers claimed that some of the documents refer to Father Wielgus by the code names Grey, Adam and Adam Wysocki. They said he received training from the S.B. and was rewarded for his collaboration with a grant to study in Munich.

Whoops.