Books
This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.
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Reviews
Larry DeWitt: Review of Lew Daly's God and the Welfare State (MIT Press, 2006)
Brian Flanagan: Review of Daniel Farber's Lincoln's Constitution
Lloyd Billingsley: Review of David Halberstam's: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
Larry DeWitt: Review of Lew Daly's God and the Welfare State (MIT Press, 2006)
Source: Special for HNN (10-31-07)
[Larry DeWitt is a doctoral student in public policy history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the principal editor of Social Security: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008).]
The reformers of the Progressive Era and New Deal were motivated and guided in part by the reformist impulses of those Christians identified with the Social Gospel tradition. A good example of this was Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, and a principal political architect of the Social Security Act of 1935. In addition to being a labor legislation reformer, a consumer advocate, and a settlement house reformer, Perkins was motivated by her deep Social Gospel convictions. (Harry Hopkins is another example of a prominent New Dealer who could be counted among the Social Gospel's adherents.)
While the Social Gospel was a Protestant movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was, in a broader sense, a prominent part of much of modern Judeo-Christian social reform philosophy—shared beyond its Protestant practitioners. The Social Gospel tradition, in this context, was the simple insight that by joining forces with the secular state, and crafting state-based programs, the religiously-motivated reformers could give concrete embodiment to their moral values and their aspirations for a better world.
But the Social Gospel has fallen on hard times as of late. Most of the Christian-reformist action in recent years has been from the other end of the pew—from the moralistic evangelicals whose impulse is not to the social justice reforms of the Social Gospel, but rather, to moral reforms of what they view as a decadent culture. Hence, the need felt in some quarters to restore this missing tradition of religious-based social welfare reform. The Bush claim to be a “compassionate conservative” seemed to some to portend a renewal of the Social Gospel tradition, but the type of reform sponsored by the Bush Administration turned out to be something very different.
The Conservative Counter-Reformation
What Lew Daly has written about is the Bush Administration's faith-based initiative, and how radically it differs from more recent ideas of the relationship of church and welfare state. Daly—-who is a former pastor and a policy advocate, not a historian-—has managed to write a serviceable summary history of the Bush initiative in the first two-thirds of his book and a much less satisfactory policy prescription in the final third. It turns out that the faith-based initiative formally announced by President Bush in early 2001 was not just a give-away to an important voting constituency in the Republican coalition. It was an elaborate, historically grounded, theoretically rationalized, alternative model of the relationship of the church to the welfare state. It was a counter-Reformation in national social policy.
The advocates behind the initiative grounded their approach in two old theological ideas—the Dutch Calvinist idea of sphere sovereignty and the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity—each of which was part of a 19th century movement to which the faith-based initiative looks for conceptual validation. Sphere sovereignty is the idea—promoted by Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper and his Anti-Revolutionary Party—that the proper source of sovereignty in such spheres as education and social welfare lies with religious institutions, not with the state. The concept of subsidiarity emerged from the efforts of the Catholic Church to clarify the obligations of religious charity. In his 1891 papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII put the church on record as engaged on issues of economic and social justice. Liberal Catholics generally take Rerum Novarum to be their inspiration. But it was Pope Pius XI in a 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, who articulated the conditions on the Church=s engagement with the state. Pius emphasized the concept of subsidiarity, by which he argued that the church, being more proximate to the people and more intimately involved in their welfare, had first call on responsibility for their social welfare. So the central idea here—of what I would call the Christian Revivalists—is that the church must reacquire its ancient power and authority over matters of social welfare.
Beginning in the late 1980s, a small core group of religiously motivated movement conservatives began formulating an alternative philosophy of social welfare, using these two earlier theological movements as their models and the sources of their rationalizing principles. By the time of the 1996 welfare reform debate, they were already exerting influence on policymakers. These activist scholars managed to get then-Senator John Ashcroft to insert a provision in the 1996 legislation authorizing “charitable choice,” which was the term of art at the foundation of what would become the faith-based initiative. Charitable choice permitted religious institutions to provide government-funded social welfare services without adopting secular principles of equal access or non-discrimination.
While Governor of Texas, George W. Bush sponsored the preparation of a 1996 report entitled Faith in Action, which was the state version of what Bush would federalize once he entered the White House. In the words of the report, Governor Bush's vision was that: “We must move beyond ‘devolution’ merely parsing duties between different levels of government and embrace genuine reform . . . . We must think anew about the relationship between government and non-government, and, ultimately, vest power beyond government back to individuals and social institutions.”
Bush's first major speech of his 2000 presidential campaign was entitled “The Duty of Hope” and its theme was his faith-based agenda. Once Bush assumed the presidency, this agenda was put vigorously into motion. Bush issued two quick executive orders: the first creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and the second institutionalizing the policy shift by creating satellite offices in each of the five major domestic cabinet agencies responsible for social programs. More executive orders followed, inserting faith-based offices in other federal agencies.
As soon as Bush's faith-based initiative was announced in January 2001, conservatives rallied around the philosophical ideas on which it was based. George Will was quick to editorialize about the virtues of the concept of subsidiarity, and even Senator Jesse Helms called for reconfiguring the system of foreign aid based on his understanding of subsidiarity. Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation announced he supported subsidiarity as a guiding principle and John DiIulio, the born-again Catholic who Bush tapped to be the first head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said that the Administration's initiative was a “blue-print for applied subsidiarity.” Bush adviser Charles Colson saw the faith-based initiative as the triumph of the Calvinist view of sphere sovereignty.
What is particularly interesting about the Christian Revivalists is that they are not strict representatives of the more familiar cohorts of the Republican coalition. They are not even “values voters” per se. Daly's key insight is that these members of the Republican coalition—despite being Christian conservatives—are not principally concerned about social values issues. For the advocates behind the faith-based initiative, the purpose is to shift power from the state to the religious sector. It is not really about moral values as much as it is about the locus of political power. The faith-based initiative is after something quite different than a mere improvement in the moral climate.
Daly is calling attention to a counter-revolution in the ideals of Christian charity. No longer do religiously motivated reformers appeal to the ideals of the Social Gospel to inform their efforts. Now Christian reform—under the helpful policies of the Bush Administration—harkens back to 19th century revivalist movements. Those 19th century movements sought to prevent the enlargement of the state at the expense of the church. Now that this enlargement is essentially a fiat accompli, the modern Christian Revivalists want to restore the balance between church and state to something closer to that which prevailed before the Progressive Era.
Daly's Third Way
This book is too short, in crucial ways. For one thing, it lacks a convincing historical grounding in the Social Gospel tradition and its role in this history. But the biggest shortcoming of the book is that Daly's alternative “model” for religious-inspired reform is little more than the repeated observation that the teachings of the scriptures requires Christians and Jews to confront economic inequality by a direct moral condemnation of the institutions of wealth and privilege that embody those inequalities. Daly is not antithetical to the secular welfare state; nor is he necessarily opposed to church-based charity assuming a larger role in social welfare. But he wants to insist that whoever takes up this responsibility must do so in a way that effectively reduces the vast and rising economic inequalities in American society.
The core difference between Daly and the Christian Revivalists is that he sees the attack on institutions of political and economic power as part of Christian teaching, while the Revivalists effectively immunize these institutions from criticism by shifting responsibility for the problems of economic injustice to the churches and to private charity. In this way economic inequalities become not matters of public policy but matters of the relationship of the individual to a religious tradition.
But this kind of moral exhortation has proven to be of little practical effect, without some way to institutionalize the sentiments behind it. The genius of the Social Gospel reformers of the Progressive and New Deal eras was that they formed a partnership with the secular state in creating institutions which partially embodied their ideals. Daly seems bent on returning to an even older tradition of moral exhorters, who want to shame us into desired social change. Daly seems not to have learned the key lesson of the Social Gospel partners in the creation of the welfare state. Daly's efforts—although admirable enough—strike me as a pretty good reminder of the value of the idea of the modern secular welfare state and the need for it.
Daly’s book is, however, a reminder of how much is really at stake in the move of government policy toward faith-based initiatives. This slim, small-format, book can be read in an afternoon's sitting. It is certainly worth that much of our time.
Mark Weisenmiller: Review of David A. Nichols's A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Movement
Source: Special for HNN (10-22-07)
[Mark Weisenmiller is a Florida-based reporter for Inter Press Service and The Economist.]
For decades, the pereception has existed that former President Dwight Eisenhower was slow---or even purposefully hesitant---about helping to bring about civil rights legislation in the United States during the 1950's. He was essentially a late 19th century-born latent racist presiding over a 1950's America which yearned for civil rights, argue his critics.
Such a theory may finally end with the publication this year of A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The tome was written by David A. Nichols, a former professor and academic dean at Southwestern University in Kansas.
Nichols did much spadework in going through the massive archives of the Eisenhower Presidential Library to find documents about the topic of civil rights. Some of these papers have never before been made public.
One could claim that Nichols simply combed and picked through old documents to find information that would support his basic premise of the book---that Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States, was a sort of veiled civil rights activist, trying to use his numerous Presidential powers to bring about, as the title of the book states, "a matter of justice."
Yet such a claim would mean that the book would be a valentine. Not so, for Nichols shows us a rapidly aging conservative man, somewhat set in his ways, trying to learn and deal with the concept of civil rights on the job, so to speak.
Not only that, but Nichols dares to push his pro-Ike, pro-civil rights philosophy even further in A Matter of Justice. That is, he argues that President Eisenhower was more progressive on civil rights than Democratic politicians President Harry S. Truman from Missouri, Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas.
When Nichols tries to emphasize the above-paragraphs points, the overall power of the book is weak. It was Truman who ordered the desegregation of U.S. military forces in 1948. It was Kennedy who did notable pro-civil rights work while he served on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee. Most of all, it was the political wheeling and dealing of Lyndon Johnson to cajole his fellow senators to vote for Ike's numerous pieces of civil rights legislation that helped lurch the U.S. into the civil rights era. There is no way that such legislation would have passed in the Senate without Johnson's hard work for Ike on this matter, especially as Johnson had to battle Richard Russell, the pro-segregationist senator from Georgia.
Again, all of this is the weakest part of the book. Happy to report is the fact that the rest of the tome is quite informative and very well researched. Regarding the literary template of the book, Nichols wisely divides each chapter into sections where a reader can stop reading, for whatever reason(s); this device by Nichols subconsciously indicates that this relentlessly serious subject can be tiring for some folks and that some readers may simply have to stop at some point, to let the wave of historical facts that Nichols presents settle into their minds.
Nichols makes four main points about President Eisenhower:
1) He introduced and goaded through Congress the first notable piece of civil rights legislation in 82 years.
2) Ike completed the integration of the U.S. military, which began with President Truman's 1948 proclamation.
3) It was Ike who helped to bring about the desegregation of the nation's capital, Washington D.C.
4) He made strategic judicial appointments that greatly helped advance the ethical, legal, and moral backing of civil rights, long after he retired to his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Points One and Two have been written about and will be passed over here. Rather, it is Items Three and Four which particularly interested this reviewer.
"Dwight Eisenhower wanted to make the District of Columbia ' the showpiece of the nation ' in terms of racial integration," writes Nichols. " ' Home rule'---the proposal to grant residents and their officers greater authority over the district's own governance---would be important in fulfilling this pledge." The sparkplug for all of this was a January 22, 1953 (two days after Ike's inauguration) decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to uphold a Washingotn D.C. restaurant owner's refusal of service to four black people.
The (then) new president ordered U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. "to seize control of the district's appeal to the Supreme Court." For a man who had been President for less than one week, this was an incredibly bold tactic. Brownell, himself, argued the case on behalf of the president before the U.S. Supreme Court.
"The Attorney General argued to the Court that the January 22 Appeals Court ruling had generated ' doubts and uncertainity' concerning whether Congress could legally delegate home rule powers to the district. Brownell asked the Supreme Court to decide the Thompson appeal [as it was known] before the end of the judicial term in June, so that the home rule legislation pending in Congress would not be jeopardized," explains Nichols.
On June 8, 1953, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Brownell and Eisenhower. "The power of Congress to grant self-government ot the District of Columbia would seem to be as great as its authority to do so in the case of territories," wrote Associate Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote the decision for the majority. That was the beginning of the desegregation of the District of Columbia.
Appointing judges, to all levels of the judicial system, is one of a president's most important duties and for some reason, or reasons, Republican presidents in the 20th century had a history of bungling this job. Ike's Vice President Richard Nixon, who later was elected the 37th President of the U.S., went through hell on Earth trying to get his judicial appointees approved by Congress. Things weren't better on this subject a decade later for President Ronald Reagan.
The exception to the above is Dwight Eisenhower and the reason is that he worked closely with Brownell in evaluating the positives and negatives of judicial nominees. Together, they appointed five pro-civil rights justices to the Supreme Court---the most famous being Chief Justice Earl Warren---and perhaps more importantly, numerous pro-civil rights judges to lower courts positions.
In his final State of the Union Address, delivered on January 12, 1961, President Eisenhower noted, "This pioneering work in civil rights must go on. Not only because discrimination is morally wrong, but also because its impact is more than national---it is worldwide." From his home in Gettysburg, Ike quietly (never publicly) disagreed with President Kennedy's slooooow movement to formally backing civil rights. Ike also thought that Senator Barry Goldwater's viewpoints on civil rights were atrocious.
As he lay slowly dying in Walter Reed Hospital in December, 1968 (he died in May of 1969), Eisenhower recommended that President-elect Nixon nominate Brownell to be the new Chief Justice of the U.S. (Warren had sent his resignation to President Lyndon Johnson in June, 1986, citing his age and health as reasons for his retirement). Nixon refused, instead appointing Warren E. Burger to the post. For the last time in his life, Dwight Eisenhower's offering to help his country was ignored.
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: Books For The Beijing Bound
Source: http://www.outlookindia.com (10-15-07)
[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, a frequent contributor to newspapers (such as the Los Angeles Times) and magazines (such as Newsweek International), and the author, most recently, of China’s Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times (2007).]
For years now, intellectually curious people who are about to head off to China—and happen to know that I teach and write about that country for a living—have occasionally asked me a variation of the same question: "Can you point me toward a good book to read in advance or take along on the trip, which will offer a perspective different from both that offered by a standard guidebook and that given by reports in the mainstream media?" And with the Beijing Olympics drawing near and interest in China rising for other reasons, the frequency with which I get asked this sort of question has picked up. Sometimes now the people doing the asking aren’t even planning to go to the PRC, but just want to know more about the place.
I’ve always liked to be asked the question, since it gives me the opportunity to steer people toward a piece of reportage, a memoir, a work of analysis, or a novel that has the potential to counteract simplistic and misleading ideas about China. And at the moment, I’ve got a special reason to welcome the "what should I read" question. It gives me a chance to answer: "Why China’s Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times, of course." (That’s my latest book. It’s also my first that is playful and footnote free enough to have the potential to divert a China-bound traveler who isn’t an academic, and is short enough that someone going from Chicago to Shanghai or Bombay to Beijing could not just start but also finish it while en route.) But I don’t actually give that response, since it feels tacky to flog my own wares. Instead, I suggest a recent book I like by someone else. Oracle Bones, for example, an insightful and elegantly written book by Peter Hessler, which is part memoir, part work of analysis.
Coming up with books to suggest isn’t hard these days, since many accessible and interesting ones about China have come out recently—though some fall pray to simplistically romanticizing or (as is especially common just now) demonizing the PRC, which immediately disqualifies them from being worth recommending in my eyes. What’s tough at the moment (even tougher than resisting the temptation to plug my own book) is settling on just one book by someone else to recommend. As good as Oracle Bones is, for instance, when I’ve suggested it, I’ve sometimes immediately regretted that I didn’t tell the person instead to read journalist and oral historian Sang Ye’s China Candid, a wonderful collection of interviews with Chinese from widely varied walks of life. So, now I’ve decided that it’s silly to limit myself to just one book when dealing with a country as big, interesting, important, multifaceted, and misunderstood by outsiders as China. Surely, it makes sense to offer up a few books. Or better yet, take things further, in honor of the upcoming Olympics (for which athletes are training so intensely), and develop a twelve-step reading program. This is what I’ve done, organizing my scheme around a dozen titles that will help anyone serious about preparing to watch the Games (up close or on television) get in shape mentally. I’ve even put these readings into a month-by-month training plan that is outlined below. (I’m aware that most people will skip a month or two or even nearly all of the "assignments," yet I remain convinced that, even so, just as occasional visitors to a gym still see improvements in their health, the program will benefit these slackers.)
The books have been chosen with an eye toward liveliness, links of some sort to Beijing as a city or the Olympics as an event, and also stylistic and topical variety (just as athletes find it important to cross train, shifting gears periodically in any reading program is a good thing). A few are by academics. For example, I start things off with Jonathan Spence’s 1999 biography Mao Zedong, a life story of the founder of the PRC that is not just more sophisticated and less sensationalistic than the recent best-seller about the same figure by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, but also much shorter and far more fluidly written. Some of the readings are by journalists. May’s reading, for instance, is Ian Johnson’s carefully researched Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China, which includes a moving account of Beijing residents being forced to give up their old homes to make way for urban development projects. And one’s a mystery set in Beijing, The Pool of Unease, by BBC journalist-turned-novelist Catherine Sampson. This seemed natural to throw in, both for the sake of bringing an additional genre into the mix and because my own reading en route to China is often a whodunit.
October 2007
Spence’s Mao Zedong (Penguin, 1999) is doubly appropriate to read this month. It is natural to begin things with a book on the past (Mao lived from 1893 to 1976), and in China the first day in October is when ceremonies are held to commemorate the moment in 1949 when Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic. Spence manages to give us a thoroughly human as opposed to demonic Mao (early chapters even quote from some of the love letters the future leader wrote in his youth) who accomplished important things. But he does not minimize the venality of Mao’s actions at certain moments (such as his ordering brutal purges of rivals). Nor does Spence gloss over the horrific consequences of some of the campaigns Mao launched late in life, such as the ill-conceived Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s (that was responsible for an astronomical number of famine deaths) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
November 2007
Since Spence provides us with an essentially top-down introduction to China’s Communist era, structured around one unique and uniquely powerful individual, it is useful to turn next to a work that foregrounds the experiences of ordinary people: China Candid: The People of the People’s Republic (University of California Press, 2006). The work of a Chinese writer now based in Australia, who publishes under the pen name of Sang Ye, this book introduces readers to a Beijing student who relocated to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (and much to the dismay of his friends and relatives still does not want to return to the city), a woman who works for a bureau of consumer affairs, an executioner, a prostitute, a fiercely nationalistic hacker, and many other colorful characters. By turns moving, depressing, disturbing and funny, their interviews with Sang Ye are presented with the questions edited out, so that readers feel as though they are being talked to directly. With the Olympics approaching, the chapter that makes don’t miss reading is "Unlevel Playing Field: Confessions of an Elite Athlete," a no holds barred indictment, by an insider, of the Chinese sports establishment.
December 2007
The end of the year is always a time for backward-looking assessments of the recent past.
This makes it fitting for this month’s reading to be historian Timothy Cheek’s Living with Reform: China since 1989 (Palgrave, 2007). This short overview of China since Mao’s day carries forward up to the present the history lesson begun by Spence. (Don’t be misled by the reference to 1989 in the title, as Cheek has plenty to say about the period between Mao’s death and the protests of that year.) In addition, since Cheek pays as much attention to social and cultural issues, ranging from the changing role of women in Reform era China to new belief systems, as he does to high politics, the book also helps place into context the individual life stories at the heart of Sang Ye’s book.
January 2008
Since 2008 seems likely to be remembered, at least in China, as Beijing’s year, it makes sense to start it off with a reading focusing exclusively on the city. And, fortunately, a sweeping survey of the city’s past that is scholarly yet readable has just appeared: Lillian M. Li, Alison J. Dray-Novey and Halli Kong’s Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City (Palgrave, 2007). This book, which comes with a generous number of photographs and footnotes that point readers who want to know more about particular periods to the best specialized studies, is an ideal choice for January reading.
February 2008
Li and company approach history via a straightforward narrative, but this month’s selection, Oracle Bones: A Journey between China’s Past and Present (Harper Collins, 2006), continually moves back and forth from the country’s rapidly changing current state to its distant past, as Hessler recounts his growing fascination with the earliest evidence of Chinese writing and the scholars who study these inscriptions. The book is liberally sprinkled with extended quotations from the author’s conversations with and letters from people he has gotten to know in China. Gracefully written and thoughtful, it seems particularly appropriate to read this month because of its fine chapter on what it was like to be a Westerner in Beijing in February 2001, when the capital was striving to win the right to host the 2008 Games.
March 2008
With the Olympics less than six months away, a book focusing on Chinese sports is called for, and, luckily, just such a work is due out in February: Susan Brownell’s Beijing’s Games (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). This promises to be a very special collection of essays by an anthropologist who is uniquely qualified to weigh in on the topic of the Games. She has done well over a decade of ethnographic work on sports in the PRC (beginning with the dissertation research that led to 1995’s University Chicago Press book, Training the Body for China, her first major publication) and has worked closely with the IOC and the Chinese representative to that body (whose life history she translated into English). In addition, she has the rare distinction for a foreigner of having competed successfully in a Chinese track meet, earning fame in 1986 as "the American girl who won glory for Beijing University." Though I haven’t read her new book, which will deal with everything from the links between sports and nationalism to recurring patterns in Western coverage of Chinese athletics, I’ve seen and been impressed by early versions of some of the pieces it will contain.
And if it is like her first book, it will not just be based on solid research but also written clearly and with verve.
April 2008
While Brownell’s book will prepare readers for the athletic side of the Olympics, the reading for this month, art historian Wu Hung’s Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (University of Chicago Press and Reaktion Books, 2005), will prepare them for the opening and closing ceremonies. This is because the author—using an experimental format that shifts between scholarly analysis and digressions into his own memories of going to and watching events held in Tiananmen Square—has very interesting things to say about the state-sponsored spectacles of the past, such as National Day parades, that are sure to influence the 2008 summer ceremonies. He also, not surprisingly, deals with Beijing’s largest gathering area as the site of protests. And this makes the book an ideal reading for April, since some of the most important Tiananmen protests have taken place in that month, which was both the time of year when a series of large 1976 demonstrations took place and when the 1989 upheaval that ended with the June 4th Massacre began.
May 2008
This month’s selection also has an art history angle: Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: The Posters of the Cultural Revolution (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). It is a lavishly illustrated volume edited by historian Harriet Evans (who contributes a chapter on representations of women in propaganda of the Maoist era) and media studies specialist Stephanie Donald (whose chapter looks at portrayals of children). Much as China has changed since Mao’s death, there are some aspects of the visual culture of that time that endure, just as the posters of the 1960s and 1970s (which as shown in this book were widely varied in style and tone) often reworked genres and themes inherited from the pre-Communist past. This means that the book retains a contemporary relevance, helping readers decode the symbolism of current propaganda drives, state-sponsored spectacles, and sometimes even Chinese advertising. Containing essays by prominent scholars in different disciplines (including literary specialist Chen Xiaomei, who writes here of growing up surrounded by the images displayed and analyzed in the book) and a chapter by a longtime China correspondent (the Guardian’s John Gittings), Picturing Power is a fitting reading for May, since many say that the Cultural Revolution began with speeches Mao gave during that month in 1966 (though, like so many things about the upheaval, when exactly it started and ended continues to be a matter of debate).
June 2008
This month will see the arrival of the nineteenth anniversary of the June 4th Massacre, and hence is an appropriate one in which to read Wall Street Journal reporter Ian Johnson’s Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China (Pantheon, 2004). The book does not provide a new account of the 1989 protests, but it does offer a superb, textured analysis of sources of discontent and patterns of state repression (including efforts to quash the Falun Gong sect) of the 1990s and early twenty-first century.
(Readers looking for a new account of the 1989 protests should turn instead to another excellent recent book by an American journalist, John Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China—a publication that could easily have been included in this program, but which I passed over mainly because, the short section on the Massacre aside, it focuses largely on Nanjing rather than Beijing.)
July 2008
To get up-to-speed on a variety of issues not yet covered during the final run-up to the Games, it makes sense to read something that deals with a broad range of topics. My choice is a volume edited by historians Timothy Weston and Lionel Jensen, China’s Transformations: The Stories Beyond the Headlines (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007)—though lively alternatives for those who want to stick with reportage after reading Wild Grass, would be Duncan Hewitt’s Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China (Chatto and Windus, 2007) and Rob Gifford’s China Road (Random House, 2007). Most of the contributors to China’s Transformations are academics who know how to write for a broad audience, but there are also two chapters by journalists and one on the politics of the internet by human rights activist Xiao Qiang. The topics covered range from pollution, to popular nationalism, to the differences between what "Chinese food" is and means in China as opposed to in foreign lands—a subject that might well intrigue those planning soon to set off for a stay in the country.
For the Plane
As noted above, my favored in-flight books tend to be mysteries, so I’m recommending Sampson’s The Pool of Unease (Macmillan, 2007)—and slipping it in here to also nicely bring the total number of books up to an even dozen. Some readers may feel that, at a few points, loose ends either get tied up a bit too quickly or are left dangling too long, but the writing is lively throughout, the characters memorable, and Sampson has created a storyline that allows her to deal with several important issues—and deal with them deftly.
While never forgetting the goal of entertaining her readers, for example, she gives them a valuable sense of the complicated nature of police corruption in the PRC, the tensions caused by the growing divide between those being raised swiftly and those being left behind by China’s economic boom, and the ethical dilemmas faced by foreign reporters who are protected in ways that their sources are not in a one-party state. And the book’s main narrative device—alternating between first-person chapters by British reporter Robyn Ballantyne, heroine of two previous crime novels, and third-person chapters that focus on a Chinese private eye, whom readers may hope shows up in future mysteries in the series—works wonderfully. There are evocative descriptions of both gritty parts of Beijing that most tourists won’t see and Chinese luxury hotels and villas, which can seem surreal located as they are in what is in many ways still a developing country. A final plus—or minus—is that, for those about to be jet-lagged, the book conveys all too well the difficulty that the heroine has adjusting to the time change during her first trip to China.
August 2008
When finally in Beijing (or sitting down to watching portrayals of that city on television during its Olympic moment), a wrap-up reading is required that will give observers yet another novel perspective on China’s past and present and also help them better appreciate a key tourist site that they are likely to visit (or see lots of shots on their living room screen). Luckily, just such a program-closing book is scheduled to appear early in the coming year: Australian Sinologist Geremie Barmé’s The Forbidden City (Profile Books, 2008). It will be part of Profile’s excellent "Wonders of the World" series, which has established a reputation for providing erudite yet lively overviews of the creation and shifting meanings over time of renowned buildings. And based on the previous writings of the author, who has proved himself not just deeply knowledgeable about many aspects of both China’s history and the country’s current cultural scene but also one of the wittiest Sinologists around, The Forbidden City should give readers a richly textured and engaging account of a site that—like the country it is sometimes used to represent—has gone through astounding metamorphoses in recent times.
Brian Flanagan: Review of Daniel Farber's Lincoln's Constitution
Source: H-Civil War (10-18-07)
Daniel Farber. Lincoln's Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ix + 240 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-23793-0.
Reviewed by: Brian Flanagan, Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, Grand Valley State University
Examples abound in history, of leaders who have taken on dictatorial powers at the expense of constitutional order--Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar in classical Rome; Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Hideki Tojo, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini in modern Europe and Asia. It would come as a shock to the sensibilities of most Americans who revere their sixteenth president that Abraham Lincoln is often placed in the company of such leaders. As we approach the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, it is important to remember that throughout the Civil War he took actions that were viewed by many of his contemporaries--and are still viewed by many scholars--as beyond the limits of _ordinary_ presidential authority, as perhaps dictatorial.
In 1861, after the South's attack on Fort Sumter, newly-inaugurated President Lincoln opted for several counter-offensives that fell squarely within Article I of the United States Constitution, describing the national legislature's authority--not the president's. He blockaded Southern ports (effectively declaring a state of war); suspended _habeas corpus_ between Washington D.C. and Philadelphia, and eventually across the North; expanded the regular army and navy; and ordered the U.S. Treasury to advance two million dollars to a private firm in New York for discretionary use on war supplies. Later he instituted military trials across North and South to dispense justice and ignored a Supreme Court directive challenging his authority to suspend the writ. Even the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln himself admitted, would have been beyond his authority in peacetime. But 1861-65 was a time of rebellion--of Civil War--in the United States. How does this _extraordinary_ circumstance change the legal implications of Lincoln's actions?
Enter Daniel Farber.
Farber's book, _Lincoln's Constitution_, could justifiably be re-titled "Lincoln's Constitutionality"(at the expense of the author’s double entendre): it is more correctly characterized as an assessment of the legality of Lincoln's presidency than as an analysis of his interpretation (or reinterpretation) of the U.S. Constitution. In fact, this is one notable limit to Farber's legal history of the executive administration of the Civil War. He does not consider, as Garry Wills has, the significance of the Gettysburg Address in changing the Constitution by cleansing it of "that legal compromise" over the issue of slavery and by appealing instead to its "spirit," its moral root in the Declaration of Independence.[1] Except in passing, he does not consider, as David Herbert Donald has, Lincoln's Whig understanding of the Constitution that actually _weakened_ the executive branch in relation to Congress and the cabinet, even if in war decisions it tended toward John Quincy Adams's expansive view that, "by the laws of war an invaded country has all its laws and municipal institutions swept by the board, and martial law takes the place of them.... Whether the war be civil, servile, or foreign ... the military authority takes for the time the place of all municipal institutions, slavery among the rest."[2]
Farber’s analysis of Lincoln's abidance by constitutional law, congressional statute, presidential precedent, and Supreme Court ruling is exhaustive. With the possible exception of J.G. Randall, no scholar to date has made as thorough a study of Lincoln's war measures in light of American law. More limited analyses have stopped at the (accurate) assertion that Lincoln himself never claimed his sweeping use of power was ordinarily legal. In essence, he went stovepipe hat in hand to a special session of Congress to ask ratification of his otherwise extralegal usurpation of congressional authority:
"These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and a public necessity; trusting, then as now, that Congress would readily ratify them. It is believed that nothing has been done beyond the constitutional competency of Congress."[3]
More limited analyses have pointed to Congress's August 1861 ratification of Lincoln's actions, the Supreme Court's March 1863 _Prize Cases_ decision upholding the legality of his early war measures, and Congress's 1863 Habeas Corpus Indemnity Act, which retroactively authorized all arrests and seizures made under authority of the president.
More limited analyses have gone back further to emphasize the 1787 Constitutional Convention's decision to replace Congress's authority to "make" war with its authority to "declare" war, leaving it to the president to repel sudden attacks. Much more limited analyses have claimed broad, inherent, executive war powers--out of reach of the legislative and judicial branches--and other exclusively presidential prerogatives deduced from Article II clauses of the United States Constitution. These analyses have used the uncharacteristic claim of a preeminent constructionist, Thomas Jefferson, that jeopardizing the nation's "very high interests ... by scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself ... thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."[4] Or they have used Lincoln's refrain defending suspension of the writ, "[A]re all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?"[5] Together, these arguments can be used to make a strong case for the constitutionality of Lincoln's war measures, and all are assessed by Farber--most of them in one chapter.
But it is important--especially as debates persist today over the balance between national security and individual rights, presidential and congressional authority, national and state sovereignty--to remember that Lincoln's presidency was extraordinary in our history. It is important, as we read presidential historian Michael Beschloss trumpeting the supreme value of presidential courage, to look closer at Lincoln's actions and understand where at crucial moments he probably overstepped his authority--even if he has been vindicated by history.[6] It is important, as Lincoln scholar Vernon Orville Burton pins the roots of an "imperial presidency" in the sixteenth president's "cavalier" approach to civil liberties, to recognize where the president was squarely within his legal bounds and where he showed great restraint.[7]
For this, we can return to Daniel Farber's legal history of Lincoln's war decisions. Farber, the Sho Sato Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and McKnight Presidential Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, has given us a disciplined and fair look at the sixteenth president’s most controversial decisions. Farber considers a wide range of arguments both defending and condemning Lincoln: from his pre-presidential conclusion that secession was indeed illegal--that the federal government had authority to coerce state governments into recognizing the supreme law of the land--to his exercise of powers ordinarily reserved by Congress, to his administration's infringements on individual liberties in North and South. The author is decisive where possible but allows uncertainty to remain where it must--particularly on constitutional questions of "original intent" that the framers themselves debated until their deaths.
Farber's conclusions, overall, are favorable to Lincoln's legacy. With the exception of some prominent freedom of speech infringements and cases of unjustified abridgement of individual rights in the North, most of what Lincoln did was strictly constitutional, falling within explicit presidential or congressional authority. It is a vital distinction, of course, that Lincoln's use of congressional powers--though probably necessary and in line with the "classic liberal view of emergency power"--were "approved and in all respects legalized and made valid" by Congress (p. 194). "Nowhere was there any thought," writes Farber, "that necessity alone gave the president an exemption from the legal consequences of violating statutory or constitutional requirements. Lincoln does not seem to have claimed such legal authority" (p. 195). Instead, Lincoln was retroactively granted executive and legislative prerogative to deal with the consequences of rebellion in the South.
Such being the case, Abraham Lincoln's accusers turn out to be right. In the classical Roman sense, he may accurately be called a dictator--a _praetor maximus_--vested temporarily with extraordinary power to deal with crisis. It is lucky, Farber reminds us, that at the crucial moment a man of "unshakable determination, combined with a shrewd sense of reality" was available to lead (p. 199).
Notes
[1]. Garry Wills, _Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 38.
[2]. Adams, Charles Francis. "The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters." _American Historical Review_ 6, no. 2 (1901): 233.
[3]. Lincoln's Special Session Message, July 4, 1861, _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_ (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 7: 3225.
[4]. Thomas Jefferson to John B. Colvin, September 20, 1810, _Works of Thomas Jefferson_. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1905), 11: 146.
[5]. Lincoln's Special Session Message, July 4, 1861, _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_ (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 7: 3226.
[6]. Michael Beschloss, _Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America_, 1789-1989 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), ix.
[7]. Vernon Orville Burton, _The Age of Lincoln_ (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 225.
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Lloyd Billingsley: Review of David Halberstam's: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
Source: FrontpageMag.com (10-15-07)
[Lloyd Billingsley is the author of From Mainline to Sideline, the Social Witness of the National Council of Churches, and Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.]
In June, 1950, Syngman Rhee, the militant leader of South Korea, and his imperialistic American capitalist allies, decided to invade the peaceful socialist land of North Korea. That's just about how it went down according to I.F. Stone, author of Hidden History of the Korean War, still taken seriously by people who read the Nation. How much of a propaganda gambit that book actually was will emerge in The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam.
Korea gets billed as America's "first Vietnam," about which Halberstam wrote about in The Best and the Brightest. The jacket of Halberstam's current book calls the Korean conflict "another dark corner in our history," the default position for any American conflict against Communism. That will come as no surprise in a publishing industry that can refer to George Orwell as the author of Animal House. None of that for David Halberstam, who understands that from the beginning this conflict was a Stalinist crusade.
"From the time he was first installed in Pyongyang by the Soviets in 1945," Halberstam writes, "Kim Il Sung, the North Korean leader, had been obsessed with the need to attack the South and unite Korea. He was single-minded on the subject, constantly bringing it up with the one man who could give him permission, the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin." Likewise, "There was, however, only one person who could give the green light for the invasion – Stalin himself." As for Kim Il Sung, whom General Douglas MacArthur called "Kim Buck Tooth," he was the Soviets' Manchurian candidate.
Halberstam traces his service in the Soviet army in a secret battalion, the Eighty-Eighth Special Independent Sniper Brigade. Kim Il Sung "was in all ways a Soviet soldier and a de facto Soviet citizen." Further,
"In the end he managed to create one of the most tightly controlled, durable and draconian societies – one of the most truly Stalinist societies – in the world. If Joseph Stalin had been born in Korea and had come to power there in the same era, he would have ruled almost exactly like Kim Il Sung and survived just as Kim did, till death did him part." (original emphasis)
Stalin and Kim Il Sung are not the sort of people to whom one should send mixed signals, which the United States did, according to Halberstam. In January, 1949,
Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave speech seeming to signal that Korea was not part of America's Asian defense perimeter. The author does a good job of showing the chaos in Washington when the Stalinist forces invaded on June 25, 1950, and the hard questions American policy makers faced. Was this part of larger plan of Soviet aggression, perhaps in Europe? On the day of the invasion, president Truman said, "There's no telling what they'll do if we don't put up a fight now."
America did put up a fight, here charted in detail, much of it unpleasant. Fighting Stalinist forces on the far side of the world, during the coldest winter in 100 years, with Communist China joining the fray, is not an easy matter. The conflict abounded in what Clausewitz called friction. Bloggers and television news, particularly CNN, would have had a field day. The troops often lacked ammunition and even sleeping bags. They took horrendous casualties but Halberstam gives readers many closeups of their courage. U.S. forces in Korea did not always have the right tools for the job, but they prevented Kim Il Sung from turning South Korea into another Stalinist colony.
The maps will prove helpful for the specialist and the author even includes a glossary of military terms. These will provide useful for journalists whose reporting seems governed by ignorance of the U.S. military and contempt for what it does. For his part, Halberstam shows a lapse of his own.
He describes Syngman Rhee and others as "virulent" anti-communists. That comes straight out of the leftist lexicon, and is unworthy of such a distinguished author, who never seems to encounter virulent pro-communists or even virulent communists. Fortunately, he does understand the dynamic behind the Korean conflict.
"The Communists were men of faith," the author explains, "politics and war having been entwined together into what was virtually a religious fervor, a certainty on their part that they were a force of destiny." Change the tense and you've got it.
The Korean War did not end. Rather, there was only a cease-fire, still in effect. South Korea, Japan and the United States, among others, now face the Kim Jong Il, who starves and imprisons the people. For that story, readers should consult The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps, by David Hawk.
Like his father, Kim Jong Il is a Communist man of faith, certain that he is a force of destiny. He deploys a huge army and aspires to fire nuclear missiles. Clearly there will be trouble. David Halberstam won't be around to see it because he died last April in a car accident. But The Coldest Winter will help those who must deal with the most Stalinist society in the world.
Lee P. Ruddin: Review of T.C.F. Hopkins's Empires, Wars and Battles: The Middle East from Antiquity to the Rise of the New World (Forge Books, 2007)
Source: Special for HNN (10-14-07)
A grandiose project if ever there was one: cataloguing Middle Eastern history, from ancient to early modern, in just over two hundred and fifty pages. So, does T.C.F. Hopkins, a pseudonym for a popular fantasy/horror writer Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, fit the billing? In a word: no. For we have Alexander and Co., but no Brits, with the author concluding hastily in the late 17th century.
Events post-September 11 have taken on a Middle Eastern dimension—underscoring the urgency to comprehend the history of this cradle of civilization. Hence we need only reference President Bush, whom on April 10, 2003, in a television address, acknowledged that the Iraqi people are “the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.” For all the opinions voiced concerning the horrors of Hussein or the annihilation Ahmadinejad intends for the West, commentators, more often than not, are an historical ignoramus when it comes to your Suleiman and Mehmed II. This is not the book to fill that vacuum.
Those readers searching for an instant informational download need only reference one of Hopkins’ “blocks”: “The Ancient World,” “The Roman Period,” “Byzantine and Islam,” “The Rise of the Ottoman Empire,” and “The Ottoman Century and Beyond.” Conversely, this is not the most reader-friendly text; the chapters would have been best divided into parts with chapters contained therein. No longer would the reader feel overwhelmed after such realignment. The downside of this laudable fast-paced narrative—omissions aside—is an endless stream of historical occurrences which reads rather like a laundry list. All this makes for a slow, and at times, tortuous read. The less said about the maps the better.
The opening “block” reads rather like a poor imitation—and needless to say, less authoritative—Understanding Iraq: The Whole Sweep of Iraqi History from Genghis Khan’s Mongols to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the American Occupation, by William R. Polk. Yet we must remember that Hopkins is not catering to the same scholarly audience as is Polk (for she is simply not of a comparable academic standing). Still, the book is not wasted on those movie-cum-medieval buff’s that have recently taken in screenings of Gladiator, Troy, Alexander and Kingdom of Heaven, not to mention the small-screen docudrama, Rome.
The third “block” apportions too little ink to the Crusades: being simultaneously rich, yet restrained. For those interested in further reading, David Nicolle’s recently-released double-volume: Crusader Warfare: Byzantium, Western Europe and the Battle of the Holy Land (v.1) and Crusader Warfare Volume II: Muslims, Mongols and the Struggle Against the Crusades (v.2) is obligatory. British historian, Jonathan Riley-Smith—arguably the world’s most influential crusades historian—is always worth a read.
Despite Hopkins's claim that Empires, Wars and Battles serves as a companion to Confrontation at Lepanto, the dust-jacket, revealing the book’s sub-sub-title: “The Ancient Roots of Modern Conflicts in the Middle East,” reads as if the author endeavours to link historical events with the present, thus subscribing to History Today’s masthead: “What Happened Then Matters Now.” Lamentably, there is only one sentence or two here and there which duly fits the bill (and not as exclusive to the Middle East as to the rest of the globe).
Nonetheless, two stand out for comment. Events in Afghanistan and Iraq indubitably shape the author’s hand. Hopkins's analysis is so crisp that all the reader need substitute is Jalal al Din for Osama Bin Laden and the Mongols for U.S. and Coalition forces to contemporize early-13th-century events. Attention policymakers and commentators in favour of a precipitative withdrawal from Iraq (up to and including the Greater Middle East): read your Roman history! For such a strategy is doomed to fail, leading not only to a deterioration of the hegemon’s authority but an array of client governments without fundamental support, creating a hot-bed of fundamentalism and insurrection.
In short, do not be fooled by the title. Those with a hunger for blood ‘n’ guts wishing to add to their collection of sword-and-shield epics look elsewhere; for Hopkins's hardback reads more like booty ‘n’ goods than blood ‘n’ guts. An unnoteworthy title if ever there was one. This is most definitely not a must.
The Romans, French and British—notwithstanding the Mongols and Ottomans—all reported their victories in the region pithily (to quote Julius Caesar): “Veni, Vedi, Vici”—I came, I saw, I conquered. In this instance, however, T.C.F. Hopkins came, scribbled, and crashed.
Lee Harris: Review of Barry Rubin's The Truth about Syria
Source: Hoover Institution's Policy Review (10-10-07)
[Lee Harris is the author, most recently, of The Suicide of Reason (Basic Books).]
Barry Rubin.The Truth about Syria. Palgrave Macmillan. 304 pages. $24.95
“The age of illusions is over,” the historian Walter Laqueur wrote recently, referring to the illusions the West continues to entertain about the confrontation with radical Islam. Needless to say, Laqueur did not mean that we in the West no longer have any illusions on this subject; those still abound. He meant, rather, that we can no longer afford to harbor them and that the time has come to shed them. Yet human beings have great difficulty in freeing themselves from illusions — even quite dangerous ones — as long as they offer comfort and provide peace of mind. The best place to start the freeing process is by heeding those who are willing to tell us disturbing truths. Barry Rubin, the distinguished scholar of the Middle East, falls into this tiny minority. His brilliant and provocative new book, The Truth about Syria, not only challenges the illusions of those naturally inclined to prefer lovely daydream over harsh reality; it also challenges the illusions of those in the West who, by their own definition, are hard-nosed realists and wily pragmatists.
Consider the case of the Iraq Study Group and its recommendation that the United States engage Syria in an attempt to bring stability and peace to post-Saddam Iraq. The authors of the report included James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger, each of whom had served as Secretary of State during the administration of George H.W. Bush. Both are generally known for being tough pragmatists, the kind of men one bets would be good poker players even among the toughest competitors in the game. Indeed, the members of the Study Group might be said to represent our contemporary version of the famous “wise men” who guided us through the Cold War with signal success; and if we were still in the midst of the Cold War, we could perhaps sleep more easily at night knowing that the fate of the West was in such shrewd and prudent hands. But today the challenge is radically different. We are not confronting another great superpower in the poker-like game called the balance of power, and even our wisest wise men have yet to grasp that they are currently playing a game about whose rules they have no clue.
In The Truth about Syria, Rubin attempts to grasp the nature of the rules by which our opponents are playing. The critical importance of this task cannot be overestimated. In geopolitics, as in poker, the party playing a game whose rules he does not fully understand will be at a distinct disadvantage. A novice at poker who thinks diamonds beat spades will be led sooner or later into making a disastrous mistake. The novice player may learn from his mistakes, but only because he is prepared to recognize that he hasn’t quite grasped the rules. Our “wise men” of today have not yet recognized that they are playing a game at which they are not even novices — a game the other party has invented and, worse, rigged in its own favor.
Rubin’s fascinating and often mordant book aims to overcome the cognitive asymmetry between West and anti-West by presenting an objective analysis of the very different rules by which our geopolitical opponents are operating, and to make it clear to the Western reader why they have different rules from us. It is not because they are ignorant of our rules, and need only to be enlightened about them. They are perfectly aware how our rules work, as Rubin insists. Indeed, it is through their intimate familiarity with our rules that they have been able repeatedly to predict how we will react to their moves — an ability that has allowed them to outwit and outfox us over and over again.
Such a situation might be dubbed cognitively asymmetrical, on the analogy of asymmetrical warfare. A grandmaster in chess playing against a patzer is an example of cognitive asymmetry; so too is a poker sharp playing against an amateur whose face reveals his hand. In both cases, the master player can see what his amateurish opponent will do next, but the amateurish opponent cannot see what the master player has up his sleeves. Hence the master player always holds the advantage. The amateur may begin with a much bigger bank, and hold better cards than the master player, but he is always bound to lose in the long run.
This advantage will be especially great if the master player has the virtue that the Arabs call sumud — steadfastness: the patience to wait as long as it takes to wear down his opponent until he is ready to abandon the game. Sumud yields policymaking in terms of generations and even centuries, whereas Western foreign policy, like Western culture in general, is always looking for a quick fix. We want to make a deal now, and we will settle for less; they want exactly what they want, and they are willing to wait the time it takes to get it, which turns out to be exactly the amount of time it takes for their opponents to throw up their hands in despair.
Taken together, sumud and the cognitive asymmetry between Syria and the West explain one of the central paradoxes of Rubin’s book: How can an economically stagnant and militarily weak nation like Syria get away with murder, both figuratively and literally?
In February 2005, Syria masterminded the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, former Prime Minister of neighboring Lebanon — not just the murder of a single individual, but, in effect, an attack on a sovereign nation. In 2006, Syria provided rockets and other arms to Hezbollah to aid it in its war with Israel. After the American and allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, Rubin writes that “from the U.S. standpoint, Syria took the enemy side by smuggling military equipment into Iraq (including night-vision goggles) and letting wanted Iraqi officials, millions of dollars of Saddam’s money, and possibly some equipment for the production of weapons of mass destruction cross the border into safe haven in Syria. In addition, after the defeat of the Saddam regime, an insurgency began that depended largely on Syria as a rear area. Pro-Saddam officials there used smuggled money to finance and direct a war against coalition forces as well as the Shia-Kurdish majority. Terrorists from abroad or Syrians themselves were trained, armed, and dispatched into Iraq.”
How did America respond to Syria’s sponsorship of terrorists who killed hundreds of American soldiers and thousand of Iraqis? In 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to confront Syrian President Bashar Assad. Assad had already lied to Powell once, in 2001, telling him that Syria had cut off the Iraqi oil pipeline. Powell later saw that he had been hoodwinked. On the airplane taking him to his 2003 visit, the secretary of state “insisted . . . that he . . . would not be fooled again. Shortly after he landed, however, Bashar again sold him the same old swampland by falsely telling Powell that the terrorist offices in Damascus had already been closed down, good news that the secretary of state announced to the American reporters accompanying him. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent, in the most humiliating way for Powell, that he had been taken in once more. Reporters simply telephoned the offices of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and found that they were still open for business as usual.” In short, as Rubin trenchantly puts it, “Syria was making a fool out of the U.S. government and the Bush administration was helping it to do so.”
Our “wise men” of today have not yet recognized that they are playing a game at which they are not even novices — a game the other party has invented and, worse, rigged in its own favor.
Rubin offers another striking example of this cognitive asymmetry. In September 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker made a trip to Syria to visit its president (and Bashar’s father), Hafiz al-Assad. Baker had prepared his case well. He presented detailed evidence that Syria had been sponsoring quite an impressive list of terrorist activities by means of surrogate agencies. Syria had denied all involvement with terrorism, and Baker was, in effect, calling Hafiz’ bluff. By Baker’s own standards it was a tough act, like that of a criminal investigator who spreads out on a table the hard and irrefutable evidence he has gathered against a suspect, and says: Deny that! Yet his confrontation with Assad had no effect. Or, rather, it had an effect, but one that Baker did not see coming. After the meeting, Rubin writes, “Hafiz did take action: He had the three Jordanian agents who supplied the information tracked down and killed.” The upshot was that “Syria kept on fomenting terrorism; and the United States did very little in retaliation.” Baker had thought he and Hafiz Assad were playing by the same rule book. They weren’t. But Hafiz had the immense advantage of knowing this, which Baker did not.
“But it gets even better,” Rubin says. “Precisely sixteen years later, after his betrayal by Hafiz, the White House asked Baker to recommend what policy the United States should take on Iraq and the Middle East in general. In explaining why he favored dialogue with Syria, Baker recalled the ‘success’ of his 1990 talks with Hafiz in supposedly getting Syria to stop sponsoring terrorism, ignoring the fact that it had continued to do so during that entire period.” In short, the recommendations to engage Syria offered by the Iraq Study Group were not made by men who lacked experience with Syria; they were made by men who simply had not learned from the experience they had. Their inability to acknowledge the rules by which Syria plays has led them repeatedly to believe that Syria is playing by their rules. Unable to put themselves into the position of the Syrian regime, they fail to see the logic and cogency of its behavior — behavior that in Western eyes so often seems infantile, counterproductive, or just plain irrational.
What makes The Truth about Syria invaluable is Rubin’s insider’s perspective on the Syrian regime: He is able to grasp Syria from the Syrian point of view, and to see our side from their side. This is not to say he is an admirer of the regime; on the contrary — he looks upon Syria as one of a “new breed of dictatorships” that “jeopardize the hope for a better future not only for the West but also for those unfortunate enough to live under their rule.” But Rubin is able to put himself inside the minds of those who have led the Syrian regime for the past three decades. Like a novelist, he knows how to bring his characters to life, to see the world as they see it, and feel it as they feel it. There are no cardboard villains in his book; cardboard villains can teach us nothing about the true nature of evil — only living characters can. Rubin brings Syria to life for us, and in so doing makes it absolutely clear why there can be no hope for reform of the Syrian regime and why no trust can be placed in it by the West.
Ironically, it is only by a genuinely sympathetic comprehension that we in the West can recognize why Syria must behave as a destabilizing force in the region and the world. Rubin offers us the tools for just such an understanding. To begin with, he says, the present regime cannot initiate genuine reform because it would not survive genuine reform. During the Cold War, as an ally and client of the ussr, Syria watched as the Soviet Union’s attempts to make reforms proved to be its own undoing. From this the Syrian regime concluded that it could not risk weakening itself by internal reforms. Yet this posed a serious domestic problem. Without improving the economic and political status of its people, how could Syria hope to survive in an age in which people want more, not less, prosperity and freedom? The solution to this problem lay literally next door. The threat of Israel had to become the focus of the Syrian people. If Israel didn’t exist, the old saying goes, it would have to be invented — and by the Arabs. The conflict with Zionism trumped the need for reform. When a nation is at war, when it is struggling for its own survival against a treacherous enemy, what could be more frivolous than seeking a higher gnp or asking for freedom of the press? Furthermore, in a state of war people need leaders who are strong, cunning, even brutal. In the epochal war with Zionism and its American ally, dictatorship is necessary, even if it must be handed down from father to son, as occurred in 2000 with the death of Hafiz and the assumption of his office by his son Bashar — a system Rubin refers to as “Dictator and Son, Inc.”
Rubin recounts that when power passed from father to son “Western observers thought Bashar was a jolly good fellow. . . . Officials and journalists who met him concluded that he was intelligent — which was true — but also that he was forward-looking and knowledgeable about Western ideas, which was false. In short, they were taken in completely. . . . Without doing anything; he was regarded with expectation and hope, another edition of the endless exercise of wishful thinking with which many in the West view the Middle East.” After all, Bashar was known to surf the Internet — and for many observers, that was enough to make him one of us.
Despite his seductive façade of Westernized modernity, it was Bashar who predicted “that Bush would fail in Iraq because he ‘does not understand that for Arabs honor is more important than anything else, even food.’” Rubin notes caustically that “Bashar’s dinner table is not noticeably bare because of this sense of priorities,” and then goes straight to what is perhaps the most unpleasant truth of all about Syria. Despite his flight of rhetoric, Bashar “is also correct and comprehends his people far better than do American policymakers. This passionate search for pride and revenge means that material benefits — high living standards, more rights, security from violence — can be trumped by religious and patriotic appeals.”
In order to survive, the regime is forced to keep up the state-of-war mentality, the thirst for revenge, the refusal to compromise with Israel or the West.
It is Bashar’s insight that permits us to grasp the great paradox of Syria: how a regime that has been such a marked failure when judged by the standards of the West can still manage to be “wildly popular at home and relatively influential abroad.” In order to survive, the regime is forced to keep up the state-of-war mentality, the thirst for revenge, the refusal to compromise with Israel or the West. But a regime that can be sustained only under these terms has no incentive to seek compromise, adjustments, or peace in the region. When you must have enemies, you will do whatever you need to do to keep them enemies. Thus the nature of the regime itself commits it to a pattern of intransigence, interference, and truculence. If it began playing by Western rules, it would cease to exist. As Rubin points out, collapse of the regime would not only leave its members without power and wealth; it might also leave them dangling from the wrong end of a rope — the fate of Saddam Hussein.
This, however, brings us to another paradox. Today, as Rubin points out, there are many in Syria who would normally be expected to oppose the regime. Yet they do not. On the contrary, they are its reluctant supporters. Their number includes businessmen, intellectuals, and other moderates, and the reason why they champion the current Syrian regime is because they are afraid of what might replace it if it were to collapse. Here, once again, Rubin is unflinchingly honest. He quotes at length the telling remarks of Muhammad Aziz Shukri of the University of Damascus: “The young in Syria, who have been exposed to the empty slogans of the Ba’ath Party, feel lost and without a path and this pushes them into the arms of fundamentalist Islam. Elections would create a confrontation between the Ba’ath Party and Islamic circles in Syria and one must ask what the result would be and what would happen afterwards.” The same situation, after all, led to a bloody civil war in Algeria, which could easily happen in Syria — a dire premonition that explains why even those who would normally wish for a more liberal government are terrified of rocking the boat. “An Islamist regime would mean a dim future for Syrian intellectuals, the sizable Christian minority, and more modern-oriented women, as well as an even more turbulent Middle East.” Small wonder a man like Shukri “would choose Bashar over some Syrian version of bin Laden or Khomeini.”
Writing in the midst of America’s unpopular occupation of Iraq, Rubin has no illusions about the possibility of “a regime change” in Syria imposed by the United States and its allies. No leader in the West wants another Iraq on his hands — one debacle per generation is enough. Furthermore, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was not “wildly popular” at home, the way, he says, that of Syria is. In Iraq, the Shi’ites and Kurds could be counted upon to support the removal of Saddam Hussein, even if they did not always support those who brought it about. But the same situation does not hold in Syria. Any attempt at regime change would simply confirm the Sorelian myth from which the Ba’athist regime still draws its enthusiastic support: It would prove that the U.S. and the West posed an existential threat to the Arab world, and that the regime’s doctrine of the permanent state of war was sound and realistic policy. In short, regime change in Syria would backfire far worse than it has in Iraq — and that is in no one’s interest, especially not the West’s.
In consequence, the West, strangely enough, finds itself very much in the position of those moderates like Muhammad Aziz Shukri. Yes, we know that the Syrian regime runs counter to the economic and political interests of the people of Syria. We know that the old secular Ba’athist spirit is dead and that there is virtually no chance of its revival. We know that even if it could be revived, it would lie like a dead weight upon the nation. Originally inspired by Stalinism, the Ba’ath party can no longer afford even to maintain its secular militancy. Where once the Ba’athists had gone into the streets and ripped the veils from the faces of pious Muslim females, “in 2003, the Syrian government changed regulations to let soldiers pray while on army bases, a step that could increase Islamist influence in the military, and allow women students to wear head scarves in the schools,” a practice which had earlier been forbidden. Indeed, as Rubin says, “the Syrian regime is no longer a secular government fighting Islamism but rather the main Arab state promoting it. The dictatorship shed its leftism in the 1970s and its secularism under Bashar.” But if the dictatorship has moved to accommodate Islamism due to popular pressure, what forces could resist such pressure in a genuinely popular democracy? For many Syrian moderates, the Western push for democracy seems more like an invitation to a beheading than the march of progress.
In the nineteenth century, advanced liberal societies like England and France were determined to support the decrepit and crumbling Ottoman Empire against the Russians, leading to the Crimean War. Their support did not arise out of any deep admiration for the liberal institutions of the Ottoman Empire, since it had none. Instead, their support was based on a frank fear of what would happen if the Ottoman Empire collapsed. “Better the devil you know” was the maxim adopted in this case; and those who seek at all cost to keep the world stable invariably follow this maxim, even if it means defending the indefensible. Syria under Hafiz, secular and opposed to Islamism, could plausibly be defended on this principle in a world in which the threat of radical Islam was causing increasing uncertainty, unpredictability, and plain old havoc in the region and around the globe. But Syria under Bashar can no longer even qualify to be the devil we know. It has become the devil we don’t know.
Rubin is deeply aware of the challenge facing the West today from the uncertain future of the Middle East, but he approaches it with a cautious and long-term optimism. Unlike the pessimists who feel that the Middle East will succumb to Islamism, Rubin points to the various factors that work in the opposite direction. Old-fashioned Arab nationalism is still a force to be reckoned with. Demagogues like Bashar might well prove cunning enough to manipulate Islamist sentiments for their own purposes without losing basic control over their societies. The militaries of various Muslim nations are still largely committed to secular nationalism, and have shown that that they are willing to use their might to keep Islamists out of power. Nor should we forget about the quasi-Westernized nations like Jordan and Kuwait. In short, while the Islamists may grab the headlines and absorb the attention of the West at the present moment, Rubin points to other deep historical and structural forces at work that many observers in the West tend to ignore.
Though not a pessimist, Rubin is equally opposed to the “quick-fix” optimism that prevails among Western leaders. That optimism may come in different forms, from the promotion of peace accords to the initiation of regime change. What they have in common is that they are looking for a miraculous transformation of the region in the blink of an eye. The West, typically, likes to solve problems swiftly and decisively. Once it settles an issue, it wants that issue to stay settled. But, as Rubin tells us, that is not how the problems of the Middle East can be solved. He wants the West to think in terms of 50 years, not the next presidential election cycle. He wants the West to relinquish the dangerous and often counterproductive search for a quick fix and to acquire the virtue of sumud, or steadfastness, in its approach to the region. Finally, Rubin is searching for a long-term consensus in the West that will focus on the genuine challenge facing us in the Middle East. The worst thing that the West can do in the face of threat of Islamism is to degenerate into the insanity of partisan politics.
For many Syrian moderates, the Western push for democracy seems more like an invitation to a beheading than the march of progress.
Barry Rubin’s book does not pretend to offer us a crystal-ball into the future; but it is absolutely indispensable reading for those who wish to break out of the self-defeating cycle that he dubs our “endless exercise in wishful thinking.” For those who agree with Walter Laqueur that the age of illusions is gone, it is a must read. The Truth about Syria may not set us free; but it can spare us from repeating the errors of the past, and that would be a good start for those in the West who appear to have lost the life-saving capacity to learn from their mistakes.
Robin O'Sullivan: Review of American Wilderness: A New History, ed. Michael Lewis (Oxford University Press)
Source: H-Net (10-2-07)
Michael Lewis, ed. _American Wilderness: A New History_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. viii + 290 pp. Recommended readings, index. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-517415-1 $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-517414-4.
Reviewed for H-Environment by Robin O'Sullivan, Department of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Ever since Roderick Nash published _Wilderness and the American Mind_ in 1967, historians have been augmenting, disputing, and grappling with his influential analysis. Nash documented a cultural evolution from distaste for wilderness in the Judeo-Christian belief system to an appreciation of wilderness that commenced among urban elites. Nash also highlighted stark contrasts between the preservation movement's valuation of scenic vistas for recreation and the conservation movement's valuation of resources for the "greatest good." This dichotomy was epitomized by the battle between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot over Hetch Hetchy Valley in the early twentieth century. In later editions, Nash professed his unabashed fondness for wilderness and urged fellow enthusiasts to continue fighting to safeguard it.[1]
Environmental justice activists in the 1980s unveiled more sinister, imperialistic aspects of the American "wilderness cult." A postcolonial backlash against impositions of U.S. style wilderness preservation in the third world indicated the frequency with which indigenous peoples were expelled from their land and denied access to supplies as national parks were fenced off. Critics also noted the extent to which industrial capitalist nations publicly professed the value of pristine wilderness reserves, but selfishly and voraciously exploited supplies of natural resources.
In the 1990s, explorations of wilderness as both an ontological and epistemological construction led to different interpretations. Greater recognition of nature-culture hybrids displaced ideals of "pure" wilderness; the focus on a stewardship ethic enlarged assumptions that domination over "evil" wilderness reigned supreme in the Christian heritage; and similarities between preservation and conservation were revealed. In _The Great New Wilderness Debate_ (1998), scholars found value in both traditional and revisionist interpretations of wilderness history.[2]
Despite being ambitiously titled with respect to its novelty, _American Wilderness: A New History_ covers much familiar ground of recurring debates. Major themes in this collection of essays include conflicts between preservation efforts and indigenous people; philosophical roots of major wilderness advocacy organizations; and analyses of social conditions that have shaped American wilderness thought and practices. New emphases include the links between wilderness and nationalism; and suggestions that wilderness is a key not just to U.S. history but also to the global history of modernity. The book is valuable for both its synthesis and innovation.
Michael Lewis, in the introduction, notes the contradictory ways in which Americans have simultaneously romanticized and abused wilderness. He refers to a "national schizophrenia," epitomized by citizens who passionately oppose oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, yet brashly drive hundreds of miles in gas-chugging vehicles to hike in national parks. Despite its high standards of wilderness legislation, the United States has experienced a net loss of wild areas. Vacations may be based on wilderness excursions, but daily life is filled with environmental degradation.
Melanie Perreault's chapter describes European encounters with an environment that had already been significantly transformed by natives, yet appeared to them as a "blank slate." In early seventeenth-century colonies, such asVirginia, Massachusetts, and Canada, fences and farms were welcomed as aesthetically pleasing replacements for the barren, desolate wilderness. Perreault asserts that domestic animals heralded a symbolic end to wilderness during the contact period.
Mark Stoll's chapter avows that part of the Puritan legacy was a spiritualized wilderness tradition, characterized by reverence for nature. To some Christians, the American wilderness seemed to offer a chance to live in a second Eden. Although the Puritans believed they had been charged with subduing the earth, the Bible also offered the paradigm of wilderness as a refuge for God's chosen people. In the early nineteenth century, wilderness served as the New England diaspora. Stoll finds remnants of Puritan-style wilderness spirituality in the work of Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson, and other noteworthy environmental figures.
Steven Stoll indicates the extent to which agricultural expansion came at the expense of both wilderness and American Indians in his chapter, "Farm against Forest." As farmers continually sought new territory, they served as the shock troops of environmental transformation. Most Romantic thinkers found positive qualities in the domesticated countryside. Thomas Cole's 1847 painting, "Home in the Woods," presented a counternarrative, in which families maintaining a wilderness existence still lived a civilized, stable life. It was the totalizing grid of the U.S. land survey, however, that symbolically ratified the agrarian errand into the wilderness.
Bradley Dean and Angela Miller both address literary and artistic manifestations of Romanticism. Dean focuses on the inspiration Henry David Thoreau found at Mount Katahdin and his definition of wilderness as unexplored, unknown territory. Miller provides examples of several Hudson River School painters whose landscapes conveyed the ideals of wilderness as an untouched, nonhuman source of moral authority. Further illustrating the consequences of viewing wilderness as unspoiled terrain, Benjamin Johnson discusses how conflicts between wilderness advocates and local people over subsistence practices left a legacy of hostility to wilderness in many rural communities.
Chapters helping to re-write conventional wilderness history include Char Miller's, which outlines the common ground shared by Muir and Pinchot, and Kimberly Jarvis's, which shows the critical role women played in the conservation movement. Although gender politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries linked wilderness and masculinity, women were foot soldiers and "municipal housekeepers" in the nationalistic zeal to save manhood by saving wilderness.
The difference between Progressive Era wilderness politics and the "modern wilderness idea" that developed during the interwar years was, according to Paul Sutter, based on the growth of automobile ownership and road development. Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall formed the Wilderness Society to oppose recreational trends in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike earlier campaigners, they did not juxtapose nature preservation with economic progress. In his chapter on "Loving the Wild in Postwar America," however, Mark Harvey records how recreational wilderness users led the march towards the 1964 Wilderness Act. Popular magazines, films, recreational equipment companies, nature writers, and environmental organizations elevated the status of wilderness into a high moral cause deserving federal protection.
Michael Lewis's chapter discloses the uncertain relationship between science and wilderness that has existed since Aldo Leopold added ecology to the intellectual traditions he inherited from Muir and Pinchot. As many assumptions of ecological studies--such as the timeless "balance of nature"--have been overturned since the 1940s, conservation biology and restoration ecology have emerged. Conservation biologists argue that removing human pressures will allow nature to manage itself. Restoration ecologists counter that humans can and must manage nature. Both subfields are successors to Leopold's notion of "intelligent tinkering."
Christopher Conte concentrates on the internationalization of the American wilderness model. Conte relies on the example of struggles around the Amani Nature Reserve, established in 1997 by the Tanzania government to protect biologically rich forests. The rigid preservationist model overlooks the extent to which indigenous peoples have seen domestication in the same places where colonial states have imposed their visions of wildness. Conflicts over access to forests that stem from the U.S. national park archetype illustrate the need for community-based conservation projects.
James Morton Turner's chapter details modern wilderness politics from the 1960s to 1990s. Among the most contentious issues have been the bitter political stand-off in the 1970s, that culminated in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, and opposition to greater restrictions on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) wilderness lands, that was led by the Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use movement in the 1980s. In the ensuing decade, violence in response to environmental policies came both from opponents and radical supporters of wilderness legislation.
Donald Worster's epilogue ties protection of wild nature to modern liberal, democratic ideals held by "ordinary people." He shows that defense of wilderness has been most successful in nations that support democratic principles, human rights, and freedom of speech--e.g., Costa Rica, Panama, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Scotland. In these countries, wilderness is perceived as a place of freedom, worthy of respect. In more authoritarian nations, Worster contends, wilderness is a threat to dictatorial control. He optimistically believes that there is plenty of wild nature left for liberal democracies to protect.
From clear-cutting in old growth forests to backcountry camping in isolated mountain ranges, people have imagined and interacted with "wilderness" in multiple ways. Imperialism, capitalism, religion, science, and other ideological imperatives have shaped perspectives on the environment. _American Wilderness: A New History_ successfully draws together essays that explore the paradoxes and controversies that continue to plague this mercurial concept.
Notes
[1]. Roderick Nash, _Wilderness and the American Mind_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
[2]. J. Baird Callicott and M. P. Nelson, eds., _The Great New Wilderness Debate_ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).
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