---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW<h-review@...> Date: Fri, Oct 2, 2020 at 12:55 AM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Buddhism]: Segall on Helderman, 'Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion' To: <h-review@...> Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Ira Helderman. Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist
Traditions, and Defining Religion. Chapel Hill University of North
Carolina Press, 2019. 328 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN
978-1-4696-4852-1; $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-4851-4.
Reviewed by Seth Zuiho Segall (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-Buddhism (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Ben Van Overmeire
William James may have been the first psychologist to take an
interest in Buddhism, but he certainly was not the last. In
_Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and
Defining Religion_, psychotherapist and religious studies scholar Ira
Helderman explores the history and current status of the ongoing
relationship between the American psychotherapeutic community and
Buddhist traditions--at least the Buddhist traditions as transmitted
by Asian modernizers and as practiced within predominantly
European-descent Buddhist "convert" communities. His approach is
based both on a participant-observer ethnological analysis (he
attends professional psychological conferences devoted to Buddhist
themes and interviews presenters and attendees) and on textual
analyses of the writings of major figures, living and historical, who
have played key roles in the unfolding relationship between Buddhism
and Western psychology.
His is not a straightforward story either of the secularization,
subversion, and cultural appropriation of Buddhist tradition by
therapists, or of the stealth transmission of Buddhist ideas into
American culture. As Helderman points out, "psychotherapy" and
"Buddhism" are socially constructed categories and, therefore, are
not entities that can engage in dialogue. There are only individual
clinicians making pragmatic decisions about how to treat individual
clients while negotiating the boundaries set by organizations and
agencies that police their profession and responding to the
influences of multiple impinging historical and cultural forces and
professional imperatives. These clinicians often occupy multiple and
somewhat conflicting roles as scientists, healers, and religious
practitioners. They need to negotiate a variety of socially
constructed categories that necessarily inform their decisions,
including the definitional categories of religion, secularity,
spirituality, science, medicine, and therapy, and what the
relationship between these categories ought to be. They also need to
consider the essential aims of both therapy and Buddhist
practice--whether they are consonant or disparate--and their
relationship to more broadly construed conceptions of "wellness" and
"the good life."
Helderman defines six major approaches clinicians take with regard to
Buddhism: therapizing, filtering, translating, personalizing,
adopting, and integrating. In the chapters that follow the
introductory chapters, Helderman examines each of these approaches
and the work of psychotherapists who typify each approach. At the
same time, he is clear that these approaches are not pure types and
that the clinicians he reads and talks to often adopt multiple and,
at times, conflicting approaches, sometimes emphasizing different
approaches depending on the audience they are addressing. Therapizing
means explicating Buddhism in the language of psychological
discourse, as when Franz Alexander explicates the goal of Buddhist
practice as a narcissistic rechanneling of libidinal energies away
from the external world and onto the self. Filtering involves picking
and choosing Buddhist ideas according to how consonant they are with
modern Western science. Therapizers and filterers both view
psychology and science as the final arbiters of truth. Translating
involves restating Buddhist practices in biomedical terms, as when
meditation is described as "attentional training practice" or "the
relaxation response." Personalizing involves a private personal
commitment to Buddhism, while keeping it in a separate silo from
one's clinical practice. Adopting means reformulating psychotherapy
in Buddhist terms. Adopters see Buddhism as the final arbiter of
truth. Finally, integrating involves finding ways Buddhist and
psychotherapeutic ideas can mutually assimilate and accommodate to
each other, where neither is seen as being necessarily privileged
over the other. As Helderman reviews these approaches, he explores
the work of such clinicians and theorists as Carl Jung, Franz
Alexander, Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Jon Kabat-Zinn,
Jeffrey Rubin, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Barry Magid, Steve Hayes, Mark
Epstein, Marsha Linehan, Paul Cooper, Harvey Aronson, Paul Fulton,
Jack Engler, Jack Kornfeld, Joseph Loizzo, Pilar Jennings, Jan
Surrey, Jeremy Safran, Christopher Germer, Gay Watson, Karen Kissel
Wegela, Ken Wilber, and others.
Many of the clinicians described are unhappy with the conventional
boundaries of what constitutes religion and what constitutes
secularity. They often try to redefine the terms or blur their
boundaries, but their influence is inescapable. Helderman explains
this is the case because of the pervasive influence of training and
certification authorities, third-party payors, hospital accreditation
organizations, first amendment considerations, and malpractice case
law; the long cultural history of how ideas are transmitted to us;
clinicians' self-identifications with their own therapeutic lineages
and the internalization of their norms; and religious scholars'
critiques, which, for clinicians, often help define the authenticity
of their understandings of Buddhist teachings. Helderman argues that
the boundaries clinicians redraw between what is religious, secular,
spiritual, medical, and psychotherapeutic are inherently unstable and
riddled with internal inconsistencies, and thus subject to constant
critique and revision.
Helderman views clinicians' relationship with Buddhism against the
larger background of what Eugene Taylor has called psychology's
"shadow culture" (_Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in
America _[1999]). While American psychology is often trifurcated into
the three twentieth-century mainstreams of psychoanalysis,
behaviorism, and humanistic psychology, Taylor described a "fourth
stream" of alternative healing methods from Swedenborgianism,
homeopathy, mesmerism, Christian Science, and New Thought, down to
today's mindfulness. Taylor described how this fourth stream
periodically emerges, is repressed, and then makes an inevitable
return because the division between scientific/medical and
religious/spiritual aspects of healing is always unstable. Are
Buddhist-oriented psychologists mixing science and religion? Or if
psychotherapy is a substitute for the religious dimension of life in
a secularized age, are therapists really mixing two different types
of spiritual traditions? Psychotherapists have always occupied a kind
of liminal space between science, art, medicine, and spirituality,
and Buddhism--or at least Western Buddhist modernism--can be seen as
the newest import into this space.
Helderman is primarily a religious studies scholar, and he makes good
use of both religious studies broadly considered and modern Buddhist
scholarship in particular. One theme he revisits a number of times is
the degree to which modern Western psychotherapists' usage and
understanding of Buddhism can be compared to the process of
sinicization and the way the medieval Chinese understood and made
sense of Buddhism. This is, of course, a claim that Buddhist-oriented
psychologists make themselves in order to help legitimate their work.
Is Buddhism, like the fabled Ship of Theseus, something that
undergoes constant transformation yet remains, somehow, the same
ship, or at some point is it no longer Buddhism? Are karma,
reincarnation, merit-making, and celestial bodhisattvas necessary
parts of any Buddhism, or can a Buddhism without them still be a
Buddhism? Who gets to decide whether something is still a form of
Buddhism, or whether it is crypto-Buddhism or simply New Age
nonsense? These are questions Helderman raises, presenting arguments
on both sides, but leaves essentially unresolved. Helderman
emphasizes that these questions are not mere idle questions. There is
something important at stake here. At the heart of these disputes is
a clinician struggling with how best to help a seriously disturbed
patient who has not been helped by the usual and customary
therapeutic measures--a therapist who, in the midst of uncertainty
and controversy, must make a decision about whether and how to make
use of something he learned at a conference, in a zendo, or from a
book that he thinks might be helpful but is not sure will be
universally applauded. Helderman thinks we ought to have some real
sympathy for this clinician, but he also thinks that in order to do
their work well, clinicians need to formulate and clarify their own
considered answers as to what is health and well-being, what kind of
endeavor therapy is, and to what degree religion can and ought to be
included in this mix.
Helderman has written a book that is admirable in terms of its
comprehensiveness, depth, and nuance. The clinicians included in this
study are a good representation of thought leaders--psychoanalytic,
cognitive-behavioral, and humanistic/transpersonal--in the field. His
historical coverage of seminal figures, such as Jung, Alexander,
Maslow, and Fromm, is excellent. He makes good use of the work of
contemporary Buddhist scholars, such as Stephen Bokenkamp, José
Cabezón, Francisca Cho, Rupert Gethin, Jay Garfield, Luis Gomez,
Janet Gyatso, Donald Lopez Jr., David McMahan, John McRae, Ann Gleig,
Robert Campany, and Robert Sharf, among many others, as well as
scholars of contemporary religion and spirituality. Helderman's book
is the most accurate, complete, and in-depth exploration of how
Western psychotherapists therapize, filter, translate, personalize,
adopt, and integrate Buddhism into their theories, lives, and
practices yet written, and is likely to remain a classic for years to
come. It has implications not only for how clinicians construe their
practice but also in understanding the largest vector for either
(depending on one's viewpoint) the transmission of Buddhism into
American culture or its secularization and diminishment.
Citation: Seth Zuiho Segall. Review of Helderman, Ira, _Prescribing
the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining
Religion_. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55545
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
Shapiro’s writing on Shakespeare remains fascinating and insightful, but Julius Caesar in the age of Trump reveals the weaknesses of a liberal perspective, argues Dominic Alexander
James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America (Faber and Faber 2020), 310pp.
The widespread admiration for Shakespeare in so many parts of the world remains a surprising phenomenon for a playwright whose language is now difficult even for native speakers. His ubiquity can be partly explained through the inheritance of imperial culture in many countries, but if there is an understandable wish in post-colonial Africa to replace him with African authors in education systems, he was at the same time popular with Mandela and other prisoners in Robben Island. The fact that Shakespeare has been used by those resisting colonial rule just as easily as those imposing it, is not even a recent paradox.
James Shapiro notes that early in the history of the United States, ‘it seemed improbable that Americans would adopt England’s national poet as their own,’ given not just significant anti-British feeling, but the anti-theatrical Puritanism of the north-eastern states (pp.1-2). The lazy answer to this would be to point to the playwright’s genius, but without denying that the term is appropriate, it does not answer the question.
Shapiro has written a number of brilliant and highly readable books on Shakespeare which do go some way to explaining his wide and continuing popularity. In 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), he showed the importance of the writer’s historical context in a decade of crisis, marked by emerging social contradictions that could not be resolved. Part of Shakespeare’s genius lay in his ability to voice competing agendas and visions of the world, treading many fine lines between pleasing and offending the authorities and different layers of the populace alike. It is surely the multiplicity of possible views, and the studied ambiguities in many of the conflicts in his plays, that lend them to being used on different sides of so many serious social and political divisions.
Relatedly, Shapiro has thoroughly disposed of the elitist theories that seek to attribute authorship of Shakespeare’s plays to someone of higher birth in Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010). Only an artist from the margins, or outside the elite, is likely to have the socially amphibious kind of insight Shakespeare had for his own society. However, while there is a context of a historical popular radicalism in his works, which is analysed by Chris Fitter in Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (2010), the plays were written, after all, to please the ruling class, and can be easily grist to many conservative and reactionary perspectives.
Common ground?
It is the contradictions and ambiguities of the use of Shakespeare by Americans across the history of the United States that Shapiro has taken as his subject in his most recent book, Shakespeare in a Divided America. Shapiro is a very fine and perceptive writer, and much of this book is therefore as fascinating and fresh as his earlier books, but here the framing of the argument presents some political problems. His opening contention is that the United States has been deeply divided from the beginning, but that ‘Shakespeare’s plays remain common ground, one of the few places where Americas can meet and air their disparate views’ (p.1).
Yet, the conclusion of the book is that in Trump’s America, this is no longer the case, and that a dialogue through Shakespeare’s characters and words is no longer possible in the face of the relentless lies and inflammatory rhetoric of the right-wing media machine. Without disputing the appalling nature of Fox News or Breitbart, or any of the rest, the conclusion seems to beg many questions, and even the very purpose of what is, otherwise, a valuable book. A commentary on the historical use of Shakespeare is one thing, but it is not clear that it bears the political weight Shapiro wants, in the end, to put on it.
To begin with, however, the sheer interest of the material needs some acknowledgment. Shapiro is able to use Americans’ use of and thoughts on Shakespeare to illuminate their thinking. The plays, he argues, help ‘clarify what was happening at this moment’ as they ‘forced to the surface the cultural tensions and shifts that otherwise prove so difficult to identify and might otherwise have remained submerged’ (p.55). Throughout the essays that compose this book, Shapiro seems adept at choosing precisely those episodes for which this holds true.
Racism and sexism
The ex-President, John Quincy Adams, is exposed by his forthright literary outburst about Othello in 1836. This politician, who had taken a ‘moderate’ position on slavery and abolition, turns out to have brooded on the play since his youth, feeling that Desdemona got what she deserved for disobeying her father, and marrying a black man. Adams’s racism and his deeply held horror of ‘amalgamation’ only fully come to light with this article. His private venting about Othello and Desdemona:
‘uncharacteristically elaborated on in print, seems to have allowed Adams to cling to a position short of genuine freedom and equality for former slaves … Shakespeare licensed Adams to say what he otherwise was too inhibited or careful to say – or say so honestly’ (p.44).
The whole context of this apparently minor moment is used skilfully to show much about the ways in which patriarchal and white-supremacist concerns and fears worked so closely together in the minds of leading Americans even outside the slave states themselves.
The intersections of race and sex repeat themselves over and again across these essays, always with illuminating detail, as well as with sometimes surprising uses of Shakespeare in political culture. The growth of a new American imperialism through the Mexican-American war, which brought the huge territory of Texas into the United States, provoked an opponent of annexation to quote from King John, of all plays, in criticism of the easy warmongering of politicians: ‘Here’s a large mouth, indeed / That spits forth Death and mountains, rocks and seas’ (p.52).
The growth of the ideology of ‘manifest destiny’ in the drive to the West, caused a problem for Americans with what was then, and apparently remains, one of the country’s favourite plays, Romeo and Juliet. The aggressive racism of the new imperialism required a brash and brutish masculinity, but Romeo was problematically ‘the most feminine’ of Shakespeare’s male heroes, in one British critic’s worried words. So, in America, ‘male actors found the role unplayable’ (p.57). It was in this context that a woman, Charlotte Cushman, pulled off a career playing Romeo herself, not only to acceptance but to some acclaim. This moment, superficially one of possibility for female actors, becomes a rather more contradictory one. Cushman had to be extremely discrete about her romantic relationships with women.
It was after the Second World War that it seems there was briefly some room for Shakespeare to be used in more progressive ways. The original musical production of Kiss Me Kate, based of course on The Taming of the Shrew, counterposed a ‘backstage’ story with a ‘frontstage’ production of the Shakespeare play. The misogyny of the original text was undermined and questioned by the behind-the-scenes drama, and while the ‘frontstage’ characters were all white, the ‘backstage’ drama was racially mixed. This original production was in 1948, but by the time it became a film in 1953, America was a very different place. The window for some progressive subversion had definitely closed. The film concludes with a very conservative view about women’s proper obedience to their husbands, and, unlike the preceding musical production, had an all-white cast (p.198).
All of this, and much more, is well worth exploring, but nowhere in Shapiro’s analysis is there much of a sense that the right, when making use of Shakespeare, was ever in any way being in a dialogue with any other political point of view about the world. This framing around the idea that Shakespeare has provided a divided America with a common language therefore seems rather to clash with the analysis at work in the rest of the book. There are some signs of a progressive Shakespeare, even occasionally in the nineteenth century, but perhaps most strongly from the era of the civil-rights movement, such that The Tempestcould be staged with an anti-colonial spirit (p.148). Otherwise, there is little sense that any of the material is in itself much suited to the expression of a left-wing American politics.
Tyrants and the people
These lacunae cast a worrying shadow over the introduction and conclusion which discuss a 2017 production of Julius Caesar in a New York theatre, where Caesar was portrayed quite clearly as Trump. The production certainly did not deserve the astonishingly vitriolic attacks upon it, as its staging in no way endorsed even a presumptively anti-Trump audience’s wish-fulfilment fantasy about the president’s fate. It was meant to unsettle such an audience, rather than coddle them. Shapiro was connected to the production, and it is not possible to be other than sympathetic to the victims of the media stoked rage.
Yet, for all the production’s measured intentions, there is a problem with this play, and its use in such an outright political context. Julius Caesar is, arguably, in part a play about the deleterious role the crowd can play in politics, and it develops in a way that can easily be taken as quite unsympathetic to the mass of people.1 The people are, after all, the supporters of a tyrant who suppresses not democratic rights, but the freedom of aristocrats and their republic. The tragic hero of the play is Brutus, a virtuous senator who conspires to assassinate Caesar in order to save the republic from this military leader who is seen as a friend of the common people of Rome. The logic of the play would seem to play directly into the hands of the false populism of the right, which, while defending ultra-elite interests, pretends it is defending the people against a liberal establishment. Not that many of Trump’s supporters necessarily would care about this, but the issue lies not so much there, as with the limitations of liberalism.
This whole approach does not seem to be an adequate re-interpretation of the play even if it is ‘about the dangers of fascism with [an] equal insistence on the limits and cluelessness of liberalism,’ in an example of a 1937 production by Orson Welles, which made the rise of fascism an American, not merely a foreign, problem (p.12). It is certainly right, as Welles had it, to say of the mob in Julius Caesar, that it is the same one ‘that hangs and burns negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany’ (p.12). The problem is that in the play, the virtuous side remains the aristocratic republic; there is no other alternative to fascism on offer.
Shapiro certainly highlights the continuity in American history of the racist and nationalist tendency that thinks itself anti-elitist. A particularly interesting essay centres on a major riot in 1849, over an exclusive opera house through which New York’s elite sought to distance itself from unruly, popular theatre goers. The riot took form on the occasion of a rivalry between two Shakespearean actors, one introspective and British, and the other representing a certain sort of robust ‘American’ manliness.
The New York crowd, however, had a range of targets: ‘Amalgamation, abolition [of slavery], and a performance of Macbeth by a British actor were all part of the same elitist worldview that had to be forcefully rejected’ (p.62). Shades of the Trumpism to come are certainly meant to be perceived here, but Shapiro notes a similar constellation of ideas a few decades earlier in the nature of ‘Jacksonian democracy’, which he defines (very helpfully) as ‘anti-elitist, racist, manly, expansionist, nationalist, in favour of limited regulation and a more powerful presidency, and mostly good for white men’ (p.62).
The problem in this manifestation of plebeian discontent is clear enough, but if the solution does not go further than to decry the bigotries of the racist populace, which is so prone to falling for tyrants in the Roman Republic just as in the modern American one, then there is an impasse. The logic here does not favour a progressive alternative. Shapiro does see the underlying issue. He points out that the opera house riot of 1849, ‘brought into sharp relief the growing problem of income inequality in an America that preferred the fiction that it was still a classless society’ (p.104). In Europe, the years 1848-9 saw a revolutionary wave in which fledgling working-class socialist politics exploded into view. At this time, however, the American ruling class was in a confident mood; a conservative (‘Whig’) newspaper commented on the fact that soldiers fired on the rioters in defence of the wealthy opera-house audience, that this occasion was:
‘an excellent advertisement to the capitalists of the old world, that they might send their property to New York and rely upon the certainty that it would be safe from the clutches of red republicanism, or chartists or communionists of any description’ (p.104).
Today’s ruling classes, in the United States and elsewhere, are much less confident, and riven by intractable contradictions. The reactionary and racist base for a Trump is a present danger in many nations. Yet, the liberal response is far too often to perceive as a danger any sort of challenge to the status quo of the last four decades, refusing to recognise that the central issue is the ‘problem of income inequality,’ which has become such a chasm. Either the privilege and power of Brutus and his aristocratic conspirators are fundamentally challenged, or the cruder examples of ruling power will triumph (the historical Julius Caesar’s own literary capacity was quite rudimentary, which is why his self-aggrandising screeds have been introductory level Latin for school children for many centuries).
What is needed, of course, is a revival of a movement of revolutionary communionists, of some description, that can challenge the racist, nationalist solution to the despair of these times. It seems unlikely that the route there can be found in a new interpretation of Julius Caesar. For all his greatness, perhaps sometimes, Shakespeare is just not the answer.
1 See Markku Peltonen, ‘Popularity and the Art of Rhetoric: Julius Caesar in Context,’ in Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History, ed. Chris Fitter (OUP 2017), pp.163-79; p.177.
By Curtis Price Posted on September 30th, 2020 Below is an account of police brutality written on Facebook by “R,” a white female rural-dwelling acquaintance of mine from a small town in Northern A…
Local leaders of the right-wing group Proud Boys in
Salt Lake City held a joint news conference with a
local Black Lives Matter leader on Wednesday to
correct the record and “denounce White supremacy”
after President Trump mentioned them during
Tuesday’s first presidential debate.
How predictable that the shitty Reunification Church newspaper
would print such an article. Here's Wiki on Gavin McIness, the guy
who started Proud Boys:
McInnes has been accused
of racism[87][88]and of
promotingwhite supremacistrhetoric.[13]He has made
alleged racial slurs againstSusan RiceandJada Pinkett Smithpersonally,[89][90]and more widely
againstPalestiniansandAsians.[91][92]In September
2004, he told a reporter for theChicago Readerat
a party that he "wanted to fuck the shit out of [a young Asian
lady] until she started talking." The reporter, Liz Armstrong,
wrote: "He went on to posit that since Asians' eyes don't work so
good in terms of facial expressions they have no choice but to
emote with their mouths."[93]
McInnes has said that
there is a "mass conformity that black people push on each other",[94]and in 2018, he
said there was significant "black violence" in the United States,
with 8,000 cases a year of black-on-black murder.[95]He has been
quoted as saying that New Jersey U.S. SenatorCory Booker, who is black, is "kind of
likeSambo."[96]
Local leaders of the right-wing group Proud Boys in Salt Lake City held a joint news conference with a local Black Lives Matter leader on Wednesday to correct the record and “denounce White supremacy” after President Trump mentioned them during Tuesday’s first
presidential debate.
Clearly, this is what Cedrick-Michael Simmons is saying. I think
Louis is failing to understand Simmons' argument in exactly the
same way that Ciccariello-Maher failed to understand the Fields
sisters' argument.
I am really not familiar with Fields or
"Racecraft" so I was probably wrong to line her up on the same
side as Reed. I do know Reed, however, and consider him to be a
right-leaning social democrat despite his reputation as
America's leading Black Marxist. I'll have a piece in tomorrow's
CounterPunch dealing with him and Walter Benn Michaels's latest
idiocy.
This is the same mistake that George Ciccariello-Maher made in his response to Barbara and Karen Fields' piece in Jacobin about the Philando Castile killing.
Ciccariello-Maher completely fails to understand the Fields sisters' argument. They are NOT saying Jeronimo Yanez didn't commit a racist act of violent aggression when he killed Philando Castile. They are clear that he did. Their point is that formulations like "Castile was killed because of his skin color" mystify the causal relationships involved. They shift blame from the aggressor (Yanez) and his racist action (killing Castile) onto a physical property of the victim (his skin color). Similarly, saying that the Holocaust happened because of the Jewishness of Jewish people would shift blame from the aggressor (the Nazis) and their racist action (genocidal mass murder) onto the identity of the victims (their Jewishness). The fact that the racist aggressors' ideology includes false beliefs about a victims' characteristics doesn't mean that those characteristics are the *cause* of the aggression. The aggressors' ideology and actions are the cause.
Clearly, this is what Cedrick-Michael Simmons is saying. I think Louis is failing to understand Simmons' argument in exactly the same way that Ciccariello-Maher failed to understand the Fields sisters' argument.
Also, as Adolph Reed pointed out on Louis' blog recently, there is something arrogant about white Marxists lecturing black Marxists about their supposed failure to understand racism. First Louis did it with Reed and Johnson, and now he's doing it with the Fields sisters and Simmons. Instead of attacking them, I suggest reading their work more carefully.
The current special issue of Monthly Review on China 2020 takes on a special significance due to the growing conflict between the United States and China, making critical Marxist analysis in this area all the more important. Here, it is significant that the historical bases of China’s development and the growing U.S.-China conflict can be found, as they developed over the last decade or so, in the articles listed above, which, together with the present special issue, provide a comprehensive view of the political economy of contemporary China and its wider global relations.
On July 12, 2020, John Bellamy Foster participated in the closing session of the Main Forum of the Seventh South-South Forum on Sustainability: Climate Change, Global Crisis, and Community Regeneration. The conference/webinar was organized by Lau Kin Chi and Sit Tsui through Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Foster and Wang Hui, professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing and one of the leading critical Marxist thinkers in China (named as one of the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy in 2008), were the two principal presenters in the session, along with a number of discussants. The public session was preceded by an extensive prediscussion between Wang and Foster on July 3. (The Review of the Month for the September 2020 issue of Monthly Review, “The Renewal of the Socialist Ideal,” was based on Foster’s presentation to the closing Main Forum session.)
Recognition of the full scope of Wang Hui’s remarkable contributions to socialist thought is a concrete way in which to gain a sense of the startling development of critical Marxism in China since the 1990s. Wang received his PhD in 1988 and was present in Tiananmen Square in 1989—after which he was sent to Shanglou, Shaanxi, for reeducation (not reeducation through labor) for one year, during which he became more acutely aware of the conditions of the peasantry (Wang Hui, “After the Party: An Interview,” Open Democracy, January 13, 2014). He focused much of his original literary research on the Chinese revolutionary writer and poet Lu Xun (1881–1936) and the 1919 May Fourth Movement. During the 1990s, at a time when questions of class and capitalism were effectively excluded from intellectual discussion, along with social history, Wang focused on intellectual history, examining the role of modernity in Chinese history and its encounter with the West, eventually exploring intellectual development during the entire Qing Dynasty. His many works include his four-volume The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (not yet translated into English). The range of analysis in his works is enormous, encompassing literature, philosophy, politics, history, and economics. Central to Wang’s analysis has been a conception of the revolutionary party in the Chinese context, in which he has drawn on Antonio Gramsci’s The Modern Prince and the analysis of people’s war as a political phenomenon. From 1995 to 2007, he was coeditor of Dushu, a prominent Chinese intellectual journal.
In the late 1990s, Wang Hui emerged as a strong critic of liberals (and neoliberals) and of the ideological role of neoclassical economics, which was establishing itself as the dominant intellectual tradition in China at the time. In 1995, in response to one of the first articles on globalization in China, which had viewed it favorably, Wang wrote a short critical response in Dushu, relying on the ideas of Samir Amin, whom he had heard speak in Denmark the year before. At around the same time, the journal Strategy and Management brought out a critical article on globalization. These interventions set off the debate on globalization in China, with the critical Marxist view attaining greater prominence after the Great Financial Crisis emerging in the United States in 2007–09, which quickly expanded to the entire globe (Wang Hui, “Fire at the Castle Gate,” New Left Review 6 [November–December 2000]: 86, 95). Wang was to become close friends with Amin, introducing his talk at Tsinghua University in Beijing on May 7, 2018 (Samir Amin, “Marx and Living Marxism Are More Relevant Than Ever Today,” Tsinghua University, Beijing, May 7, 2018).
Much of Wang Hui’s work in the last decade has been directed at a critique of neoclassical/neoliberal economic ideology, accompanied by an exploration of China’s revolutionary history and its implications for the present. He has written extensively on V. I. Lenin and Mao Zedong and the Russian and Chinese revolutions. A central concern is to ascertain the “weak links” in the present world order that point to the possibility of new revolutionary breakthroughs. His work has also focused on issues of substantive equality, democracy in social organization (as opposed to formal politics), and ecological sustainability. Many of the younger Chinese scholars appearing in this and other issues of Monthly Review have been deeply influenced by his ideas, which are emblematic of critical Marxism today. (See Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century [London: Verso, 2016], 37, 136–40, 227–61, 286–95; Wang Hui, “The Economy of Rising China,” Reading the China Dream [blog] [written in 2010]; Wang Hui, “Revolutionary Personality,” Reading the China Dream [blog] [originally published in Chinese on April 21, 2020].)
Another major development in critical Marxist thought in China and its connections with Western Marxism is the emergence of the World Association of Marxian Political Economy, chaired by MR author Cheng Enfu, editor-in-chief along with two others, including another MR author, Tony Andréani, of the important Chinese-based academic journal International Critical Thought. The editorial board of International Critical Thought includes MR authors Riccardo Bellofiore, Patrick Bond, Alexander V. Buzgalin, Al Campbell, David Kotz, and Leo Panitch. In this and other respects, we can point to growing intellectual interchange between Chinese Marxists and Marxists elsewhere in the world, a product of both the deepening crises and the newly emerging possibilities of our time.
The history of capitalism has been punctuated by periodic struggles for hegemony over the world economy, leading to a centuries-long series of world wars.1 In the twenty-first century, all signs are pointing to another such period of hegemonic struggle, this time between the United States and China, although complicated in this case by the unique, indeterminate aspects of the post-revolutionary Chinese social formation, which is neither entirely capitalist nor entirely socialist. In the words of the influential president of the Council of Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, a key architect of the “Imperial America” strategy of the George W. Bush administration, writing in August 2020, the “chances of a second cold war [with China] are far higher than they were just months ago. Even worse, the chances of an actual war…are also greater.” Nor is there any real doubt in Haass’s mind about the cause, which he refers to as the inevitable “friction between established and rising powers.”2 The current U.S. trade war against China is explicitly designed to compel the multinational corporations in the triad of the United States/Canada, Europe, and Japan to remove the key production links in their global commodity chains from China and relocate them in low-wage countries subject to the dominant imperial sphere, such as India and Mexico, in an attempt to weaken China and reestablish unrivaled U.S. hegemony over the world economy.3
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, voicing the current sentiments of the U.S. ruling class, referred in July 2020 to “the Chinese Communist Party’s [CCP] designs for hegemony” over the world economy, replacing the American Century with a “Chinese Century.” In the face of China’s rapid rise and what Pompeo calls “the China threat,” Washington and its allies are promoting what in foreign policy circles is called a hybrid war strategy of political, ideological, technological, and financial interventions, as well as stepped up military pressures, designed to slow down or even altogether halt China’s advance and to subordinate it once again to hegemonic U.S. power.4 U.S. criticisms of China have accelerated since the advent of COVID-19, with Donald Trump referring repeatedly to the “China virus,” with the general support of the media, a propaganda move that has succeeded in generating unfavorable views toward China among almost three quarters of the U.S. population.5
Rather than relying merely on one wing of the U.S. ruling class, this belligerent anti-China stance has now been adopted by both parties within the political duopoly. It is supported by numerous U.S. multinational corporations and wealthy interests that fear the consequences for their own global economic positions of waning U.S. imperial dominance associated with China’s rise. Many firms, confronted by high tariffs and growing economic uncertainty, are now seeking to relocate their production away from China.6 Naturally, some major multinational corporations, particularly in the high-tech sector, are concerned about the loss of access to the massive, lucrative Chinese market. Still, if there is any substantial sector of U.S. capital that opposes the current New Cold War against China, they have so far remained silent.
This general strategic shift away from China, designed to weaken it in order to restore U.S. unipolar dominance in the world economy, is coupled with one of the biggest U.S. military buildups in history, with the Trump administration requesting a $705 billion “defense” budget for the fiscal year 2021, directed explicitly against China and Russia.7Washington’s focus on China is ideologically justified by the latter’s attempts to dominate the South China Sea (within its regional sphere of interest). But it has its deeper roots in what figures like Peter Navarro, in charge of U.S. trade policy in the Trump administration, openly refers to as coming hegemonic wars with China.8 In this context, attempts are being made by Washington to bring India firmly into a new Indo-Pacific alliance as a way of militarily constraining China.9
This shift in imperial grand strategy on the part of the U.S. hegemon is due to China’s spectacular economic leap forward—an economy growing at 6 percent annually doubles in size about every twelve years, while an economy growing at 2 percent doubles in size approximately every thirty-five years. Additionally, there are recent indications (see the lead article in this issue by Zhiming Long, Zhixuan Feng, Bangxi Li, and Rémy Herrera, “The U.S.-China Trade War”) that China has succeeded in diminishing the level of imperial rent that the West has continually exacted from it as the price of its growth, while simultaneously breaking through the technological monopoly of Western corporations. China has therefore emerged as a seemingly unstoppable economic superpower, now the second largest economy in the world, even if in many ways it is still a relatively poor country measured in income per capita.
How vulnerable is Beijing to the actions of the triad led by Washington? A strategy of so-called “containment,” or isolation of China, as in the Cold War years of the twentieth century, is no longer possible as Chinese production is integral to the entire global economy. As Pompeo says, “this isn’t about containment.… Communist China is already within our [economic] borders.” Rather, he indicates, the U.S. strategy is to defeat China in the New Cold War by breaking the hold of the CCP, which has been critical to China’s advance. Hence, Washington’s attacks on the Chinese economy are couched primarily as attacks on the CCP. The goal is to damage the Party’s credibility, exploiting its external and internal contradictions and weakening the Chinese state. This would allow the United States and global monopoly-finance capital to move in with the support of internal Chinese interests and restructure China’s state and economy in such a way as to ensure continuing U.S. (and Western) dominance—in a variation of the dismantling of the Soviet Union.10
Nevertheless, China presents enormous external and internal barriers standing in the way of this new imperial strategy. It is connected in a weblike fashion to the entire capitalist world economy. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative is expanding China’s global geopolitical position in ways that appear irreversible. Much, however, still depends on whether China in the future pursues a horizontal or a hierarchical-imperialist mode in relating to the countries of the Global South.
Even more important than external geopolitical relations in determining China’s future is the internal legacy of the Chinese revolution. The CCP retains strong support from the Chinese population. Moreover, despite the development of the various integuments of capital in China, a number of key strategic-economic variables, related to socialism, free it in part from the “antagonistic centrifugality” that accounts for capitalism’s “uncontrollability” as a system of social metabolic reproduction.11 The noncapitalist sector of the Chinese economy includes not just a large sector of state ownership, but also both state control of finance through state-owned banks and the continuing absence of the private ownership of land.
Substantial state ownership of basic infrastructure and finance has allowed for the continuation of economic planning in key areas, associated with a much higher rate of investment. At the same time, state ownership of banks has been the basis of China’s control of its currency and its ability to defend itself against the financial hegemony of the dollar (see Sit Tsui, Erebus Wong, Lau Kin Chi, and Wen Tiejun, “Toward Delinking,” in this issue).12 As Samir Amin argued shortly before his death, for China to remove state control of bank finance would be for it to disarm economically, simply handing over to the imperial center of world capital the very weapon with which the Chinese development model would be destroyed.13
Social ownership of land in China, which in the countryside is still partly managed collectively by village communities—though the current situation, following the introduction of the household responsibility system beginning in 1979, is a far cry from the earlier communal production—has contributed to the success of Chinese peasant agriculture, allowing it today to produce the food for 22 percent of the world’s populationon on 6 percent of the world’s arable land. Socialist land tenure is also the crucial context in which a renewed grassroots rural reconstruction movement is developing. The rural reconstruction movement (see the following papers on Chinese rural society in this issue, Lau Kin Chi, “Revisiting Collectivism and Rural Governance in China” and Sit Tsui and Yan Xiaohui, “Negotiating Debt”) is made possible by the noncapitalist foundations of much of rural Chinese society, leading to continuing popular struggle to secure collective needs. This has been strengthened since 2017 with the government’s rural revitalization strategy. Whatever claim China has to moving forward on its goal to forge an “ecological civilization” starts with such rural revitalization.
What then is the strategy of the Chinese leadership itself in this overall historical context today? Definite conclusions are not possible at this point. In the past, both collective land ownership and state ownership of the means of production, particularly major banks, have come under attack from the state and private interests, but ultimately have been defended. The Chinese economy is characterized to a considerable extent by widening inequality and growing financialization. It includes an enormous private sector in which migrant workers are exploited often at very extreme levels, as parts of global commodity chains linked to the Global North via multinational corporations. Ironically, it is China’s pivotal role in the global labor arbitrage benefiting generalized monopoly capital that is now under attack from capital in the center of the system, due to the threat this now represents to U.S. hegemony, forcing China to seek an alternative path.14
In this rapidly changing global situation, Chinese President Xi Jinping has recently emphasized the importance of reviving the role of Marxian political economy in China and the rejection of the neoliberal extremes of neoclassical economics in conjunction with the reassertion of the importance of state property and rural revitalization within the overall economy.15 All the signs are that China is seeking to defend the strategic noncapitalist elements of its system as a response to the growing hostility of imperial capital at the center of the world economy. China’s answer to COVID-19, employing the model of “peoples’ revolutionary war” as a way of encouraging the self-organization of the population in its localities, has been a resounding success, pointing to the internal solidity of the polity and the potential revolutionary protagonism of its people.16
In this complex context, the key element, we believe, is understanding China’s dynamic reality through critical Marxist analysis, and the recognition of the “mere possibility” in “historical time” of renewed radical, egalitarian change.17
Notes
↩ See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37–46.
↩ Richard N. Haass, “To the Brink with China,” Council on Foreign Relations, August 13, 2020. After acknowledging the struggle for hegemony, Haass repeats various U.S. ideological complaints about China as the reason for growing tensions in line with U.S. establishment views. But he leaves no doubt as to the primacy of the hegemonic struggle itself. For Haass’s role as a theorist of U.S. imperial hegemony, see John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 97–99, 115–16.
↩ Two-thirds of 160 CEOs of multinational corporations surveyed in March 2020 in the United States indicated that they had already moved, were planning to move, or were considering moving their commodity chain operations out of China. Shefali Kapadia, “From Section 301 to COVID-19,” Supply Chain Dive, March 31, 2019.
↩ Navarro’s political-economic stance, which emphasized the inevitability of hegemonic conflict with China and the need for the United States to strike first, was the very reason he was brought into the Trump administration. See John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 84–85.
↩ The Research Unit on Political Economy, “India, COVID-19, the United States, and China.” If there has been a major foreign policy dispute between the Democrats and the Trump Republicans, it has been over the Trump administration’s promotion of a detente with Russia to enable a full-scale New Cold War on China. The Democrats, however, refused to agree to a detente with Russia, forcing the Republicans to follow along, but the Democrats have eagerly jumped on the Trump administration’s New Cold War with China. The result is that the United States is now engaged in a Sino-Russian Cold War, spanning much of Eurasia. This will continue no matter which party occupies the White House.
↩ Pompeo, “Communist China and the Free World’s Future.”
↩ Samir Amin, “Marx and Living Marxism Are More Relevant than Ever,” Youtube video, 1:03:52, address at Tsinghua University, Beijing on May 7, 2018, posted by Global University for Sustainability, February 3, 2019.
↩ On the extreme exploitation of Chinese migrant labor in China through subcontractors to multinational corporations primarily based in the triad, see John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 165–80; John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 21-24..
↩ Wang Hui, “Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory: Commemorating Lenin’s 150th Birthday,” Reading the China Dream (blog), April 21, 2020. There is no doubt, as Wang Hui indicates, that local officials in Wuhan initially tried to suppress the first signs of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic, but the response of the CCP nationally was rapid and the unleashing of a bottom-up peoples’ war strategy was enormously effective.
↩ On the concept of the “merely possible,” see Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 231–32. On the notion of “historical time,” see István Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 50–55, 366–80.
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW<h-review@...> Date: Thu, Oct 1, 2020 at 4:33 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Africa]: Rich on Schmidt, 'Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror' To: <h-review@...> Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Elizabeth Schmidt. Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold
War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror. Athens
Ohio University Press, 2018. xxiv + 462 pp. $36.95 (paper), ISBN
978-0-89680-321-3.
Reviewed by Jeremy M. Rich (Marywood University)
Published on H-Africa (October, 2020)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut
_Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War_ is a
well-organized, easy-to-read survey of a very complicated field of
literature. This book is clearly aimed at undergraduates in African
history and politics courses, even though Elizabeth Schmidt does
provide an overarching framework for understanding the causes and
consequences of foreign involvement in African countries since 1989.
This is not meant to be a major theoretical contribution to
international relations in Africa after the Cold War. Rather than
provide detailed studies based on fieldwork, Schmidt sets up each
chapter by describing the evolution and rationales of foreign
intervention in countries from Somalia to Côte d'Ivoire and the
Democratic Republic of Congo. Readers with no background in African
politics will be able to easily follow the discussion. Each chapter
includes a short bibliographic section that covers a select range of
scholarship.
Three points undergird Schmidt's overarching argument that,
ultimately, foreign military intervention in Africa "often did more
harm than good" (p. 8). First, neoliberal economic policies that
imposed austerity on African governments increased the likelihood of
armed conflict, which in turn led to selective interventions by
foreign regimes. Second, the US military presence expanded after the
attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terror. This
led to US alliances with numerous authoritarian African states. Last
(and a bit less coherently), Schmidt notes how the United States was
hardly alone in foreign interventions in Africa. The United Nations,
European governments, the People's Republic of China, and prominent
African states like Nigeria all led or at least supported military
actions in Africa. With so many stakeholders crowding the scene,
Schmidt's streamlined approach tends to deal with this last point in
more of a scattered way. Admittedly, the diverse number of
international actors makes any effort to generalize about their goals
and their results hard to sum up in a survey.
Chapters 2 and 3 situate Schmidt's later case studies in a broader
discussion of African and international relations after 1989. She
argues that two dominant paradigms shaped Western interventions:
responsibility to protect followed by the war on terror. Specialists
will not really find much new here, as the analysis does not really
bring out debates within the scholarly literature. Again, this is a
survey for students and readers not at all familiar with African
politics. Likewise, the individual case studies are squarely aimed at
introducing readers to major events and policies related to foreign
intervention in countries such as Somalia, Libya, the Democratic
Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone The analysis in the
case studies is sound but relatively brief. This approach certainly
would have value in the classroom, especially as comparable works
often are so bogged down with detail that an inexperienced reader
would have a hard time following the main points (such as Paul
Nugent's now dated 2004 survey, _Africa Since Independence_).
One must credit the author for correctly identifying the general
results of President Donald Trump's disdain and disinterest in
African countries, despite having only the first year of his
administration to use as evidence. Perhaps the only issue that I
think deserved a bit more attention is the paradox that human rights
served as a justification for foreign military interventions by the
United States and European countries, even as major international
countries largely ignored African human rights activists who
contested the legitimacy of various elections, such as in Gabon and
Togo. The decline of humanitarian justifications for military
intervention might signal a broader trend in which the pretext of
human rights to legitimize interventions may have ultimately run its
course after Libya in 2011 and Mali in 2013. Trump's administration
thus may ultimately serve to further dismantle the already fraying
responsibility to protect model of foreign intervention. US Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo's more recent contention (after this book was
published) that human rights need to be narrowed down to meet US
concerns (primarily on religious freedom) also fits with the general
decline of human rights in foreign policy toward Africa.
From the vantage point of late 2020, it is striking how a number of
countries covered in individual topics already would require updating
even though the book itself only came out two years ago. The Egyptian
intervention in the Libyan civil war, increased European and US
military efforts in Niger, and new Russian efforts to build a
presence in francophone African countries (most notably the Central
African Republic) all are further complications to Schmidt's survey.
Any survey is bound to miss certain important issues, especially one
spanning such a broad range. While Schmidt's précis of US foreign
policy from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama is sound as a whole, one
could well argue that mid-level State Department officials and
occasional interventions by some US congressional officials (such as
the conservative US senator Jim Inhofe) also have shaped US foreign
policy, especially in countries where the paradigm of the war on
terror is not particularly apt. Another issue would be the internal
divisions within various UN peacekeeping operations. However, the
author's careful condensation of various interventions undoubtedly
meant that sacrifices had to be made to not overly clutter the sharp
overviews of each particular conflict.
The clear and succinct presentation of major factors driving foreign
intervention is very accessible to nonspecialists. The bibliographic
sections offer readers a chance to access more detailed studies.
There is no expectation that prior knowledge of different theoretical
approaches is required. This study would need complementary readings
for a class, particularly on topics such as Chinese foreign policy
and the varied topics in United Nations peacekeeping missions.
Likewise, the lack of an expansive central argument means instructors
would have to cover rival theoretical approaches separately. Despite
these issues, it is refreshing to have a textbook on the market that
is clearly designed for teaching undergraduates about foreign
intervention in Africa.
Citation: Jeremy M. Rich. Review of Schmidt, Elizabeth, _Foreign
Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty,
Responsibility, and the War on Terror_. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55626
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: October 1, 2020 at 1:09:47 PM EDT To: h-review@... Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Subject:H-Net Review [H-War]: Zellers on Macgregor, 'Margin of Victory: Five Battles That Changed the Face of Modern War' Reply-To: h-review@...
Douglas Macgregor. Margin of Victory: Five Battles That Changed the Face of Modern War. Annapolis Naval Institute Press, 2016. Maps, figures, tables. xvi + 268 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-61251-996-8.
Reviewed by Bruce Zellers (Greenhills School) Published on H-War (October, 2020) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
While retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor sees this work as an essay on behalf of military preparedness, many readers will see it as two slightly different books within the same cover. The first offers straightforward, relatively brief accounts of five twentieth-century battles that many readers will know little about; the final chapter, on the other hand, is a critique of contemporary American defense policy and an argument for preparing for the next big war. Macgregor's theme appears early. He writes that "this book argues that the United States ... does not have to march into hell, as many of the great powers whose stories are recounted in this book did." He tells readers that "each chapter is a clarion call for the United States to recognize that wars are decided in the decades before they begin" (p. 1). He also notes, quite correctly, that "strategy, technology, and military organization continually interact ... in the broader context of national culture, history, and human capital to produce success or failure" (p. 4). These topics undoubtedly deserve our careful consideration, but they constitute a large agenda for a relatively thin volume.
The word "eccentric" best describes the longest portion of the book. The subtitle tells us that Macgregor is going to explore "five battles that changed the face of modern war"; Robert Citino of the Army War College reinforces this in the foreword, noting that each battle "was a turning point in the history of the twentieth century" (p. xi). Such characterizations are hard to justify. The Battle of Mons, for instance, brought the defeat of a few thousand British regulars engaged against the Germans for a few hours in August 1914--it presented no real innovations and certainly was not a turning point in the Great War. The Battle of Shanghai in 1937 and the defeat of Germany's Army Group Center in 1944 did not change the course of World War II. The Yom Kippur War in 1973, perhaps better known than the first three, did not resolve the Arab-Israeli confrontation. Finally, we are presented with the tale of a single American regiment in the First Gulf War; this seems odd in the context, until we realize that the author participated in it. All five stories possess intrinsic interest; each is effectively told. However, they do not match the book's big claims; none of these battles was game-changing. Readers wanting an introduction to truly decisive twentieth-century battles should look to Drew Middleton's _Crossroads of Modern Warfare: Sixteen Twentieth-Century Battles That Shaped Contemporary History_ (1973). Middleton presents sixteen truly key engagements: here is the Battle of the Marne rather than Mons, Midway, Stalingrad, and later Dien Bien Phu and Tet. These have a far better claim to the term "decisive." And Middleton writes with verve.
The larger analysis of social and political settings is cursory, limited by space and by sources. For instance, we learn that Sir Richard Haldane, British secretary of state for war prior to 1914, had made efforts prior to World War I to convert the army to "a more lethal professional military establishment" influenced less by an officer class of "gifted amateurs," but the book tells us little about what was actually done, nor does it plumb the larger sociocultural question we are expecting (pp. 9, 11). Oddly, at the outbreak of the war, many of Haldane's plans were jettisoned. The same pattern of limited discussion and limited analysis appears in all five battle stories; there are some interesting details (the German reliance on horses even in 1944?) but hardly deep, detailed cultural analysis. Two additional sources might have improved this situation. It is surprising that Alan Millett and Williamson Murray's three-volume _Military Effectiveness_ (2010) is not in the bibliography, since the essays look at many relevant issues, including the question of national political effectiveness. The absence of Peter Paret's _The Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age_ (1986) is similarly noteworthy.
The last chapter on the margin of victory brings the author's main concerns into focus. Macgregor is convinced that a nation-endangering "war of decision is coming" (pp. 3, 193). The task, as he sees it, is to develop a "new margin of victory" (p. 194). However, there are many impediments to creating this "margin." He complains that the current officer corps is not up to the task; past errors, especially in the Middle East, have gone unacknowledged. In addition, American political and military leaders are "too confident of ... [their] military superiority and ... [too] contemptuous" of the military capabilities of other nations (p. 189). He argues that current defense policy is burdened by wasteful spending and "excessive redundancy in capability," both driven by intra-service competition (p. 192). The army, his own service, especially worries him. He states that we need "powerful forces in being," and this "ground maneuver force" must have a "mix of capabilities" and must have the ability to be "deploy[ed] quickly and be strategically decisive in joint operations" (pp. 179, 185). "Light" marine forces cannot fulfill this mission (pp. 190-91). Thus, what he takes to be the current policy of "shrinking the ... mobile armored force" and reducing the capability of "expeditionary" forces is deeply problematic (pp. 191, 180). So is our propensity to deploy troops in "purely local conflicts" or on ideological crusades; instead, the one truly critical mission is to prevent "any bloc or empire from dominating the great Eur-Asian landmass" (pp. 177-78). Russia and China are the existential threats and should be the focus of our concerns.
Interestingly, Macgregor says little about the potential impact of newer technologies on this future battlefield. Could precision weapons and artificial intelligence make "expeditionary forces" and "armored forces" helpless and useless? Could the decisive encounter be over in minutes, when our power grid and financial system are shut down--simultaneously? The most curious feature of his final chapter--and its most problematic quality--is the underlying conviction that the next war will duplicate World War II: masses of men and machines maneuvering, on the steppes of western Russia. This scenario may entertain digital war gamers, but it smacks of that oldest of military fallacies: preparing intellectually and materially to refight the last war. Or, perhaps in this case, his last battle: Desert Storm.
Citation: Bruce Zellers. Review of Macgregor, Douglas, _Margin of Victory: Five Battles That Changed the Face of Modern War_. H-War, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54538
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: October 1, 2020 at 1:09:02 PM EDT To: h-review@... Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Subject:H-Net Review [H-War]: Hoehne on Rein, 'The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War Regiment on the Great Plains' Reply-To: h-review@...
Christopher M. Rein. The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War Regiment on the Great Plains. Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. 288 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8061-6481-6.
Reviewed by Patrick Hoehne (University of Nebraska) Published on H-War (October, 2020) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
_The Second Colorado Cavalry_, written by Christopher Rein, chronicles the Second Colorado's service throughout New Mexico, Indian Territory, Missouri, and Kansas from 1861 through 1865. Rather than depicting the regiment as an isolated unit stationed along the western edge of a massive North-South conflict, Rein argues that the Second Colorado Cavalry provides an important lens through which to view the linkages between the Civil War and the western expansion of the American empire.
A closer examination of the service of the Second Colorado Cavalry, Rein argues, muddles the distinctions between the Civil War and the conquest of the American West. In doing so, Rein joins a cadre of historians like Heather Cox Richardson, Megan Kate Nelson, and Thomas Cutrer who have written on the Civil War West. The Second Colorado performed the arduous and dangerous work of combatting Confederate guerilla forces, cultivating skill at exerting control through intelligence collection and rapid, mobile response. The unit would later apply that experience against Native Americans along the Santa Fe Trail, operating as effective and seasoned agents of empire in unceded territories.
Relying on official records, diaries, and the unit's newspaper, Rein tracks the service of the Second Colorado chronologically, following the regiment's movements throughout the Great Plains. Chapter 1 examines the history of the Colorado Territory and explores the backgrounds of the men and women who would eventually serve with the Second Colorado. Initially organized as an infantry regiment, the unit generally attracted enlistment from miners and farmers who had failed to make their fortunes during the 1859 gold rush. Chapter 2 follows the unit to New Mexico, where the Coloradans partook in a campaign to repulse a Texan invasion designed to expand the Confederacy into the Southwest. In chapter 3, Rein documents the Second Colorado's last year as an infantry regiment, 1863. The unit moved into Indian Territory, where it would see action at the Battle of Honey Springs, fighting alongside the First Kansas Colored Infantry and allied Native Americans. Chapter 4 sees the Second Colorado deployed to the "Burned District" along the Kansas-Missouri border, an area wracked by bloody guerilla warfare. Transitioning to a cavalry regiment, the Second Colorado emerged from 1864 as a skilled and aggressive guerilla-hunting unit. Chapter 5 details the Second Colorado Calvary's move to Kansas. There, in the wake of the infamous Sand Creek Massacre, the regiment applied the lessons learned in Missouri to conflict with Native Americans.
One of the greatest strengths of _The Second Colorado Cavalry _stems from the work's depiction of the regiment's evolution as guerilla-hunting unit. Many of the Second Colorado's soldiers were themselves no strangers to extralegal violence, with some having experienced the turbulence of Bleeding Kansas while others encountered vigilantism through the extrajudicial "miners' courts." The soldiers were comfortable enough with vigilantism that when Pvt. Charles Lockman killed Pvt. John Groce in 1864, the men organized their own hasty trial and lynched Lockman, in flagrant violation of military regulation (p. 37). This attitude towards violence served the Second Colorado well as the unit adjusted its tactics to "bushwhack the bushwhackers" (p. 135). Confederate guerillas had long used disguise and aggressive, often merciless violence against the Union's forces and supporters. The Second Colorado's willingness and ability to adopt tactics similar to their irregular opponents enabled the regiment to mount an effective and feared campaign against the guerillas. As Rein argues, the "exterminationist logic" of the guerilla-hunters would translate easily to the campaigns against Native Americans in the subsequent months and years (p. 143).
There are minor flaws in the book, such as the sometimes unnecessary connections to contemporary warfighting, as is the case when Rein attempts to characterize the Second Colorado as a "kind of forerunner to modern United Nations 'peacekeepers'" (p. 122). A handful of similar instances can be found throughout the text, which encourage readers to draw unhelpful or potentially misleading parallels between the combat experience of the Civil War and the present. Still, such instances are relatively rare, and do not do too much to detract from the larger narrative or argument.
_The Second Colorado Cavalry _is a compelling, readable, and useful history. The work should be of great interest to scholars and members of the general reading public interested in the histories of the Civil War and American West. The book is of particular benefit to those interested in the Civil War's guerilla warfare, and in the connected violence against Native Americans that followed. Far from an inconsequential unit stationed in a remote region, Rein makes a successful case that the Second Colorado Cavalry possesses a significance worth revisiting.
Citation: Patrick Hoehne. Review of Rein, Christopher M., _The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War Regiment on the Great Plains_. H-War, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55179
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: October 1, 2020 at 1:07:41 PM EDT To: h-review@... Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Subject:H-Net Review [H-War]: Daniels on Deane Jr., 'Lessons in Leadership: My Life in the US Army from World War II to Vietnam' Reply-To: h-review@...
John R. Deane Jr. Lessons in Leadership: My Life in the US Army from World War II to Vietnam. Edited by Jack C. Mason. American Warrior Series. Lexington University Press of Kentucky, 2018. 304 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8131-7494-5.
Reviewed by Benjamin Daniels (American Military University) Published on H-War (October, 2020) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
_Lessons in Leadership: My Life in the US Army from World War II to Vietnam_ by Retired General John R. Deane Jr. offers the aspiring military or corporate leader an allegory for leadership as told through Deane's life. While Deane's life experience is certainly storied and fanciful--spanning some of the most crucial moments in recent military history--readers should not expect a cleanly written categorical approach to developing leadership, rather they should approach Deane's work conversationally. Jack C. Mason's stylistic choice of blending biography with leadership asides is jarring in some places, but it succeeds in demystifying the military jargon to make the work more accessible to corporate-level readers. Using first-hand accounts from the eyewitness, paired with historically contextual asides, Mason effectively presents a biography of Deane's life while letting some of the more important lessons go by unnoticed.
_Lessons in Leadership_ begins with a foreword written by the work's editor, Mason. Early, Mason establishes that Deane was a man who "stood out among the rest" and at ninety-three was still a "commanding presence in the room," which Deane used effectively to "draw you in, and with his sharp wit and humor, he knew how to spin a tale" (p. viii). This brings the reader to a place of "faux reverence" much like how a master of ceremonies recounts the accolades and breadth of experience before the announcement of a keynote speaker. Deane's--or rather Mason's--work compiles "written notes, and collected stories, and interviews over the years [of Deane's life] for the purpose of documenting his career" (p. ix). This is both helpful and hurtful in the retelling of a fascinating life. Some of the transitions and recollections are odd and feel largely out of place, detouring into digressions only to leap back onto the main road without warning.
Conceptually, the allegorical approach can be effective in recounting the life of a historical figure. But _Lessons in Leadership _could have greatly benefited from a higher level of organization and categorization. The heart of the book seems split between self-improvement and autobiography. This stems from a misleading title creating disjointed expectations and a fundamental lack of categorizing lessons for dissemination. The question becomes, is this a book filled with vignettes of leadership that are organized for easy digestion by corporate leaders? Or is it an autobiography in which the reader must determine for themselves the valuable takeaways? This determination is left in the hands of the readers, which causes inconsistencies in the reception of the intended lessons.
This is not to say that _Lessons in Leadership _is an ineffective book. On the contrary, how the story is told beckons the reader into self-reflection and self-improvement. The work could be read as a biography of a man who served the United States faithfully for ninety-plus years, or it can be examined critically as a case study in leading with confidence: for instance, General Deane's confrontation on the Berlin Wall while leading the Second Battle Group, Sixth infantry Regiment. During a patrol, Deane encountered an East German water tank that was firing a "high-velocity spray" across the wall to frighten the Western soldiers (p. 103). Deane--determined to give no ground--stood in defiance against the cannon and did not waver when the East Germans sprayed all around his tank forming a "perfect 'V' right where [he] was standing" (p. 105). This show of daring leadership in the face of a potential international incident is one example where Mason asks the reader to extract the lessons on their own.
There are however a few salient points that can be extracted from Deane's work: stay sharp, surround yourself with good people, evaluate all avenues of approach, and stay engaged. These four pillars gird the framework in which Deane's story is told. If the reader can overlook the occasional awkwardness in wording and transitions, they will be better equipped to develop themselves into more effective leaders that can pierce through the monotony of life and inspire those around them. _Lessons in Leadership _is an allegorical approach to an autobiography that hinders the delivery in several places. However, it is an easily accessible book that will serve to enhance the underlying leadership qualities in most people.
Citation: Benjamin Daniels. Review of Deane Jr., John R., _Lessons in Leadership: My Life in the US Army from World War II to Vietnam_. H-War, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55538
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
You "thought it relevant." La de da. Zerzan is not a Marxist. You're IMO recruiting for a homicidal crackpot whose ideology is a contrarian distraction like the spewings of the late Lyndon LaRouche, only crazier. Why don't you strike up a correspondence with Ted Kaczynski? I understand he's in need of one since Zerzan went too far even for him.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi
calls for justice in the rape case, in Uttar Pradesh. But after years of
rampant sexual violence, prosecutions remain rare.
The physical voter suppression is starting already. Trump can walk back his support for the Proud Boys all he likes (or pretends to do) but the effect will remain. It will mean all the violent militia type groups and individuals will be inclined to show up as "poll watchers". The Republicans can then disavow those activities, but they have created the conditions for this, and not just in recent months but over years. That is to be expected. The real disgrace is the completely silent passivity of the union leadership, who should be mobilizing the membership to counter these terrorist thugs. And socialists should be organizing an insurgency inside the unions to try to bring that about. Here's the full article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/us/trump-election-poll-watchers.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage "The group of Trump campaign officials came carrying cellphone cameras and a determination to help the president’s re-election efforts in Philadelphia. But they were asked to leave the city’s newly opened satellite election offices on Tuesday after being told local election laws did not permit them to monitor voters coming to request and complete absentee ballots.
On social media and right-wing news sites and in the presidential debate on Tuesday night, President Trump and his campaign quickly suggested nefarious intent in the actions of local election officials, with the president claiming during the debate that “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and urging his supporters everywhere to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
The baseless descriptions of the voting process in Philadelphia were the latest broad-brush attempt by the Trump campaign to undermine confidence in this year’s election, a message delivered with an ominous edge at the debate when he advised an extremist group, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by” in his remarks about the election.
The calls for his followers to monitor voting activity are clear. What’s less apparent is how the Trump campaign wants this to play out.
Mr. Trump and his campaign often seem to be working on two tracks, one seemingly an amped-up version of mostly familiar election procedures like poll watching, the other something of a more perilous nature for a democracy.
In the first, Justin Clark, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, told a conservative group this year of plans to “leverage about 50,000 volunteers all the way through, from early vote through Election Day, to be able to watch the polls.” The head of the party in Philadelphia said Wednesday that there would be multiple poll watchers at every site in the city, which would mean at least 1,600 Republican watchers in Philadelphia alone.
Thea McDonald, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said the operation was needed because “Democrats have proven their lack of trustworthiness time and again this election cycle.” She added, “President Trump’s volunteer poll watchers will be trained to ensure all rules are applied equally, all valid ballots are counted, and all Democrat rule-breaking is called out.”
In recent weeks, the Trump campaign has distributed carefully lawyered training videos to prospective poll watchers around the country describing what they can and can’t do while monitoring the voting process, imploring them to be courteous to “even our Democrat friends.” The poll watchers will challenge ballots and the eligibility of voters, but they are not supposed to interact with voters themselves.
Voting rights groups fear that effort could veer toward voter intimidation. But the question is how far Mr. Trump’s supporters will take the exhortations to protect a vote the president has relentlessly, and baselessly, described as being at risk of widespread fraud.
The Republican National Committee has been allowed to participate in poll watching only because the courts in 2018 lifted a consent decree that had barred them from doing so for three and a half decades, after the party undertook an operation to intimidate New Jersey voters in 1981.
Now, poll watchers are being instructed in specific detail. In Michigan, for instance, they are being told to record when any paper jams occur, while those in Arizona are being given a detailed breakdown of the state’s voter identification requirements.
But while the official poll watchers are being schooled in legal procedures, Mr. Trump and some of his closest surrogates, including his longtime confidant Roger J. Stone Jr. and his son Donald Trump Jr., have recently floated conspiracy theories that also sound like calls to arms.
During a recent appearance on “The Alex Jones Show,” a far-right radio program that peddles conspiracy theories, Mr. Stone said that ballots in Nevada should be seized by federal marshals, claiming that “they are already corrupted” and that Mr. Trump should consider nationalizing the state police. Mr. Stone, a felon whose sentence was commuted this year by the president, has ties to the Proud Boys.
In a video imploring Trump supporters to join a poll-watching brigade called “Army for Trump,” Donald Trump Jr. made similarly evidence-free claims of fraud.
“The radical left are laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father, President Donald Trump,” the younger Mr. Trump says on the video, posted on Twitter.
ImageA group of Trump supporters chanting “four more years” disrupted early voting in Fairfax, Va., this month. A group of Trump supporters chanting “four more years” disrupted early voting in Fairfax, Va., this month.Credit...Kenny Holston for The New York Times Even as President Trump failed to condemn violent white supremacists during the debate, his own Homeland Security analysts asserted in a threat assessment that such extremists represent the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland through 2021,” according to a September draft of the assessment obtained by The New York Times.
The assessment said that “open-air, publicly accessible parts of physical election infrastructure,” including polling places and voter registration events, could be “flash points for potential violence.”
Many have been aghast at the president’s tactics. Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron D. Ford, a Democrat, tweeted Tuesday that telling supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully” amounted to intimidation. “FYI — voter intimidation is illegal in Nevada,” he wrote. “Believe me when I say it: You do it, and you will be prosecuted.”
Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, said Mr. Trump and Republicans “continue to engage in these voter suppression efforts because they know if we have a free and fair election they will lose.”
And Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a retired elections lawyer for Republicans, said Mr. Trump’s debate comments went “several degrees farther than his campaign and the R.N.C. have gone in describing their Election Day operations plans,” adding that the remarks placed “his campaign’s and the R.N.C.’s lawyers in the position of having to answer how they plan to instruct their massive 50,000-person army of poll watchers to act on Election Day.”
While Mr. Trump and his allies give license to election discord, official party poll watchers are required to view training videos that define their legal parameters, which state election laws tightly limit.
Both parties recruit volunteer poll watchers, a process Republicans previously led at the state level amid the consent decree. In a new video tailored for Pennsylvania, prospective poll watchers are told they must wear identification and remain outside an enclosed space designated for voting. Questions must be directed to a party hotline or elections personnel, not voters.
But such legal niceties are already falling away as early voting begins. Mr. Trump and members of his family tweeted allegations against Philadelphia, and right-wing news outlets amplified the message of poll watchers being “barred” from early voting.
“As you know today, there was a big problem,” Mr. Trump said during Tuesday’s debate. “In Philadelphia, they went in to watch, they were called poll watchers, a very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out, they weren’t allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things.”
But city officials said they were enforcing the law and would continue to do so.
“We have law enforcement officers, we have protocols in place to make sure all the voters are safe,” said Omar Sabir, a Democratic city commissioner in Philadelphia. “Don’t let anything or anyone intimidate you from exercising your right to vote.”
Additionally, Mr. Sabir noted, the seven locations in Philadelphia were satellite election offices where voters could request, fill out and submit absentee ballots; they were not official polling locations and therefore not open to poll watchers.
Those viewed as violating the rules and decorum that poll watchers must follow will be removed, said Nick Custodio, a deputy commissioner in Philadelphia.
“Watchers on Election Day are there to observe, and a lot of them will check tally sheets or which voters have shown up to vote so far, but they can’t be intimidating people,” Mr. Custodio said.
Martina White, chair of the Philadelphia County Republicans, said names were still being gathered to submit for certification amid a huge poll-watching effort. She disagreed with barring poll watchers from satellite election offices, saying there should be “oversight of what transpires in there, just like a poll watcher would on Election Day, as people are casting votes.”
The activity in Philadelphia came 10 days after Trump supporters chanting “four more years” disrupted early voting in Fairfax, Va., at one point forming a line that voters had to walk around outside the site.
The Republican establishment has ample reason to want to avoid accusations of voter intimidation. In the early 1980s, after the party sent hired workers sporting armbands reading “National Ballot Security Task Force” into Black and Latino precincts in New Jersey to challenge voters’ eligibility, it operated under an increasingly strict federal consent decree that eventually barred it from conducting or advising on any sort of “ballot security” activities — even by unpaid volunteers.
Richard L. Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, said that because of the president’s influence, the Republican National Committee was at risk of being associated with the same kind of behavior that led to the consent decree. He noted that the 2017 federal court ruling lifting the consent decree stated in a footnote that Mr. Trump had clearly encouraged voter suppression during the 2016 presidential campaign, but that his behavior could not be tied to the national party.
Now, however, he effectively controls the party.
“While I was worried about Trump norm-breaking in 2016, it is far worse for a sitting president to be undermining the integrity of the election,” Dr. Hasen said. “Whether Trump means the things he says or not, he’s convincing his most ardent supporters that the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”
He added, “That’s profoundly destabilizing and scary.”'
--
“Science and socialism go hand-in-hand.” Felicity Dowling Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
A Prosecutor’s Backstage Tour of the Mueller Investigation
By Jennifer Szalai
NY Times, Sept. 21, 2020
Where Law Ends
Inside the Mueller Investigation
By Andrew Weissmann
402 pages. Random House. $30.
There’s something
refreshing about an author who harbors no illusions about his
own book — especially when that book is about the current
occupant of the White House, whose chaotic energy has spawned a
booming industry of insider accounts and cris de coeur.
Andrew Weissmann, who served as one of Robert Mueller’s top
lawyers in the special counsel’s investigation into the 2016
election, knows that his new memoir, “Where Law Ends,” won’t
destroy “the machinery of information that separates fact from
fiction,” but he wants to enter his experience into the
historical record. “If the special counsel’s office did not
write our own story, it would be written for us by outsiders who
did not know what had occurred,” Weissmann explains in his
introduction.
What follows, though, doesn’t exactly burnish the legacy of the
special counsel’s office, and I have to imagine that this book
will probably strike the famously tight-lipped Mueller as an act
of betrayal. Weissmann’s portrait of his boss is admiring,
affectionate and utterly devastating. Mueller enters the
narrative like the ideal boss: no-nonsense, unfailingly honest
and also prone to quirks like a penchant for hazelnut decaf
sweetened with a glug of Bailey’s-flavored nonalcoholic creamer.
By the end of the book, Mueller seems trapped by his
old-fashioned establishmentarian instincts, so worried about
overstepping his role that he erred on the side of
“understepping it,” Weissmann writes, issuing a “mealy-mouthed”
report that showed the president had obstructed justice while
refusing to say as much.
Mueller’s fundamental flaw, Weissmann says, was a persistent
faith in a Justice Department headed by his old friend William
Barr. The Mueller team had meticulously laid out their findings
in their 448-page, antiseptically worded report, only to be
“blindsided” by Barr’s four-page self-styled summary, which
Weissmann depicts as a nakedly cynical distortion of the truth:
“We had just been played by the attorney general.”
Weissmann’s previous experience prosecuting financial chicanery
(Enron) and organized crime (John Gotti, known as “the Teflon
Don”) proved to be useful. Mueller appointed him the head of
Team M — as in Team Manafort, tasked with investigating the
political consultant who served as the Trump campaign’s chairman
during the summer of 2016. A good part of the book is devoted to
showing how Weissmann and his colleagues built their case
against Paul Manafort for violating lobbying and financial laws;
Manafort, who had extensive experience with pro-Kremlin forces
in Ukraine, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison
(and recently released to home confinement, because of the
pandemic).
Team M got people to flip on one another, working its way up the
chain of command. A big break came when a hapless millennial who
was hired by Manafort as an all-purpose errand boy revealed that
Manafort had passed down his old devices and computers,
instructing him to wipe them before using them — something this
particular employee didn’t always take the time to do.
Manafort is depicted in this book as lying to everyone — even
trying to orchestrate an elaborate kickback scheme so that he
could offer to work for the Trump campaign for free while
siphoning money from a pro-Trump PAC. Weissmann and his team
puzzled over why Manafort kept hiding this particular instance
of chicanery after admitting to others, thereby jeopardizing his
own plea deal. The probable reason, it turns out, was tweeting
them in the face: Trump, who Weissmann says wasn’t especially
fond of Manafort, had taken to social media to issue public
declarations of sympathy for “Paul Manafort and his wonderful
family. Such respect for a brave man.” If Manafort was
ultimately angling for a presidential pardon, the president
would undoubtedly be incensed to learn that Manafort had been
cooking up a scheme to get paid behind Trump’s back.
“Mobsters used the threat of ‘whacking’ potential cooperators to
keep everyone in line,” Weissmann writes. “The president had the
power to pardon to reward those who stayed loyal.” It’s a
startling analogy that Weissmann delivers in his
characteristically muted, matter-of-fact style. Unlike the other
Trump books that get hyped as “explosive,” this one lays out its
case so patiently that its conclusions arrive not with a bang
but with a snap — the click of an indictment falling into place.
Yet the president isn’t the main subject of this book’s
investigation — that evidence was already compiled in the
Mueller report. What Weissmann’s book provides is the inside
story of how the country’s institutions have so far failed, he
says, to hold a “lawless White House” to account. Weissmann
describes two factions on the Mueller team — those who tried to
push for a tougher approach, and others like Mueller’s deputy,
Aaron Zebley, who could be cautious to the point of rank
timidity. On the subject of Russian interference in the 2016
election, Mueller’s team had found communications among
professional trolls, employed by the Kremlin, crowing about
their celebrations after Trump won. Zebley insisted they omit
such evidence from their final report, Weissmann says, for fear
that it was “too salacious.”
But we live in salacious times, and Weissmann’s book is a
fascinating document — a candid mea culpa, a riveting true-crime
story, that’s nonetheless presented in the measured prose of
someone who remains a stalwart institutionalist. The title of
the book comes from a quote by John Locke — “Wherever law ends,
tyranny begins” — and Weissmann’s suggested solutions reflect
his own faith in the perfectibility of institutions. He proposes
granting the power to appoint a special counsel to the director
of national intelligence — a pretty idea that isn’t entirely
explicable, considering that the director of national
intelligence is a cabinet-level official who reports to the
president.
Weissmann reserves his most scathing words for Attorney General
Barr, someone whom Weissmann used to respect, but who now gets
pride of place in the same “gaggle of presidential defenders and
conspirators” that includes Trump’s “attorney/fixer” Rudy
Giuliani. Here Weissmann delivers the kind of forceful, ringing
indictment that Mueller’s report did not; Barr, he says, is one
of the “old white men who’ve participated in, or condoned,
improper or illegal conduct by the White House.”
Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933), who was 29 when he was tortured to death by the Tokkō, the “special” or political branch of the Tokyo police. His 1929 novel Kanikôsen became the classic exemplar of 1920s Japanese “proletarian realism”. (The term was coined by Kurahara Korehito in a seminal essay from 1928 called “The Road to Proletarian Realism”.) Variously translated as The Cannery Boat (1933), The Factory Ship (1973) and, most recently, as The Crab Cannery Ship (2013), and banned as soon as it was published, Kobayashi’s novel described the brutality and dehumanization typical of maritime wage labor in the Okhotsk Sea (crabs were a major source of foreign exchange for Japan’s imperial economy) and the resistance that Japanese seafarers mounted to their peculiarly harsh subjection to capital. (The novel was based on events that had occurred recently.) It also denounced the imperial system that sustained this sector of industry.
In the aftermath of the 2007 financial crash the novel became a bestseller, with close to 700,000 copies selling in a single year (2008)! (See the first link below.)
In a direct response to Itagaki Takao’s more overtly modernist “machine realism” (the machine as the true subject of modernity), Kobayashi would claim in 1931, “Only from the class perspective of the proletariat, can the machine reveal its true essence”. The crab ships were factories on the sea, and Kobayashi saw them as microcosms of capitalism, underscoring the despotic social relations at work in industrialized fishing (as early as 1929!). But he also wished to underscore the colonizing tendencies of capital, and used the example of Japan’s own expansion in Sakhalin.
From 1930 on Kobayashi was repeatedly arrested and even charged with treason. Officially, he became a member of the Japanese Communist Party only in October 1931 after it had been outlawed and become a banned organization. Wikipedia tells us that on 20 February, 1933, he went to Akasaka “to meet with a fellow Communist Party member, who turned out to be a Tokkō spy who had infiltrated the party. The Tokkō were lying in wait for him, and although he tried to escape, he was captured, arrested” and tortured to death.
France’s Colonial Legacy Is Being Judged in Trial
Over African Art
Activists are being tried in Paris
over the attempted theft of an African artwork from the Quai
Branly Museum, which they say was a protest of colonial-era
practices.
“No
one has sought to find out what harm has been done to
Africa,” Mwazulu Diyabanza, an activist, said in court
on Wednesday. He and four associates are on trial in
the attempted theft of an African object from the Quai
Branly Museum.Credit...Thibault
Camus/Associated Press
PARIS
— Wearing a long, white tunic with the names of two African
ethnic groups written on it, the defendant stepped forward
to the bar, took a breath, and launched into a plea.
“No
one has sought to find out what harm has been done to
Africa,” said the defendant, Mwazulu Diyabanza, a Congo-born
41-year-old activist and spokesman for a Pan-African
movement that denounces colonialism and cultural
expropriation.
Mr.
Diyabanza, along with four associates, stood accused of
attempting to steal a 19th-century African funeral pole from
the Quai Branly Museum in Paris in mid-June, as part of an
action toprotest colonial-era cultural theft and seek
reparations.
But it was Wednesday’s
emotionally charged trial that gave real resonance to Mr.
Diyabanza’s struggle, as a symbolic defendant was called to
the stand: France, and its colonial track record.
The
presiding judge in charge of the case acknowledged the two
trials: One, judging the group, four men and a woman, on a
charge of attempted theft for which they could face up to 10
years in prison and fines of about $173,000.
“And
another trial, that of the history of Europe, of France with
Africa, the trial of colonialism, the trial of the
misappropriation of the cultural heritage of nations,” the
judge told the court, adding that such was a “citizen’s
trial, not a judicial one.”
The
political and historical ramifications were hard to avoid.
France’s
vast trove of African heritage — it is estimated that some
90,000 sub-Saharan African cultural objects are held in
French museums — was largely acquired under colonial times,
and many of these artworks were looted or acquired under
dubious circumstances. That has put France at the center of
a debate on the restitution of colonial-era holdings to
their countries of origin.
“Our act aimed to erase the
acts of indignity and disrespect of those who plundered our
homes,” Mr. Diyabanza said.
Image
A
report identified about 46,000 objects at the Quai
Branly Museum that would qualify for restitution.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
The
restitution debate came to a head in France when President
Emmanuel Macron promised in 2017 to give back much of
Africa’s heritage held by French museums. He later
commissioned areportthat identified about
two-thirds of the 70,000 objects at the Quai Branly Museum
as qualifying for restitution.
But
in the two years following the report, only 27 restitutions
have been announced and only one object,a traditional sword, has been returned — to Senegal,
in November 2019. The remaining 26 treasures that were
designated for restitution, to Benin, are still in the Quai
Branly Museum.
And
the bill supporting these exceptional, or case-by-case,
restitutions has yet to be voted on.
Calvin
Job, the lawyer for three of the defendants, said in court
that the bill, by focusing on exceptional rather than
regular restitutions, reflected “a desire not to settle the
issue.”
“We
should enshrine the principle of restitution in the code of
law,” Mr. Job said.
Given
what they perceive as hurdles, activists from Mr.
Diyabanza’s Pan-African movement have staged operations
similar to that in Paris at African art museums in the
Southern French city of Marseille and in Berg en Dal, in the
Netherlands.
At times, these actions have
epitomized growing identity-related claims, coming from
French citizens of African descent living in a country wherea racial awakening has started to take placein
recent months.
“We
have young people who have an identity problem,” Mr. Job
said in an interview, “who, faced with a lack of action, a
lack of political will, have found it legitimate to do the
work that others don’t.”
Speaking
to the judge, Julie Djaka, a 34-year-old defendant who grew
up in a Congolese family, said: “For you, these are works.
For us, these are entities, ritual objects that maintained
the order at home, in our villages in Africa, that enabled
us to do justice.”
Marie-Cécile
Zinsou, the president of the Zinsou Art Foundation in Benin
and the daughter of a former prime minister of Benin, said
that, although she did not share the activists’ methods, she
understands “why they exist.” “We cannot be ignored and
looked upon down all the time,” she said.
“In
France, there’s a post-colonial view on the African
continent,” Ms. Zinsou added, saying that some prominent
French cultural figures still doubted that African countries
could preserve artworks.
Such
grievances on France’s post-colonial legacy were in full
play on Wednesday at the trial as a small crowd of about 50
people, most Pan-African movement activists, were barred
from entering the courtroom by the police because of
concerns about the coronavirus and because some feared that
their presence could disrupt the trial.
Activists shouted “band of
thieves” and “slavers” at the police officers cordoning off
the entrance to the courtroom and they chanted, “Give us
back our artwork!”
Prosecutors
on Wednesday asked that a fine of 1,000 euros, or about
$1,200, be levied against Mr. Diyabanza and a suspended €500
fine be levied against his associates. A verdict is expected
on Oct. 14.
Activists
in front of the courtroom on Wednesday welcomed the
recommended sentences, which they found modest, as a
collective victory.
“We
all are defendants here; all of us should normally be at the
stand today,” said Laetitia Babin, a 45-year-old social
worker born in Congo, who had arrived from Belgium in the
morning to attend the trial.
“It’s not up to them to
decide how artworks are returned to us, it’s up to us,” she
said.
