Tony Judt: Reappraisals

Tony Judt: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008, Penguin Books)

Another collection of essays written between 1994 and 2006, mostly book reviews, on scattered subjects, mostly 20th century history, mostly European, by the author of the monumental Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Judt was born in London in 1948. He is Jewish; at one point he explains that his family was involved in the Bund, so he grew up Leftist, Marxist, and Anti-Communist. That may also have given him some distance from Zionism, although he mentions that he went to Israel to help out just before the 1967 war, and that he spent some time on a kibbutz. Two essays are more or less critical of Israel, the later essay much more so. He clearly has a great fondness for Anti-Communist intellectuals, with very sympathetic essays here Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers. Several more essays contrast European and American takes on history, especially regarding the sense of social bonds and security nets. Extensive quotes follow.

Introduction: The World We Have Lost: This is similar, but nowhere near identical, to an essay Judt published in New York Review of Books close to the publication date of this book ("What Have We Learned, If Anything?"). I've already excerpted and commented on a number of quotes from that essay.

(p. 19)

But of all our contemporary illusions, the most dangerous is the one that underpins and accounts for all the others. And that is the idea that we live in a time without precedent: that what is happening to us is new and irreversible and that the past has nothing to teach us . . . except when it comes to ransacking it for serviceable precedents. To take but one example: Only a quite astonishing indifference to the past could lead an American secretary of state to discourage outside efforts to end Israel's calamitous 2006 war in Lebanon (itself an ill-fated replay of an equally calamitous invasion twenty-five years before) by describing the unfolding disaster as "the birth-pangs of a new Middle East." The modern history of the Middle East is drenched in the blood of serial political miscarriages. The last thing the region needs is yet another incompetent foreign midwife.

Such foolhardiness is perhaps easier to sell in a country like the United States -- which venerates its own past but pays the history of the rest of humankind insufficient attention -- than in Europe, where the cost of past mistakes and the visible evidence of their consequences were until recently quite hard to miss. But even in Europe a younger generation of citizens and politicians is increasingly oblivious to history: Ironically, this is especially the case in the former Communist lands of Central Europe, where "building capitalism" and "getting rich" are the new collective goals, while democracy is taken for granted and even regarded in some quarters as an impediment.

(p. 20)

It was Keynes, too, who anticipated and helped prepare for the "craving for security" that Europeans would feel after three decades of war and economic collapse. As I have suggested above, it was in large measure thanks to the precautionary services and safety nets incorporated into their postwar systems of governance that the citizens of the advanced countries lost the gnawing sentiment of insecurity and fear which had dominated political life between 1914 and 1945.

Until now. For there are reasons to believe that this may be about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one's daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.

Part One: The Heart of Darkness

Arthur Koestler, the Exemplary Individual: 2000, New Republic, review of David Cesarini, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind.

(p. 26)

For Marxism, too, had been a leap of faith, a device for unraveling and decoding the skein of social experience. Its "science" consisted in interpreting all external political or social data according to a grid of suspicion: Things are not what they seem. They reveal their true meaning only when decoded in accordance with the knowledge of the initiated -- at which point they make complete sense and everything falls into place in a universal scheme. Upon abandoning Marxism, Koestler simply sought out alternative ways with which to demystify appearances, to eliminate randomness, and to embrace deeper truths. To a Western audience, or to anyone who approached Marxism from a less holistically predisposed environment, his trajectory appeared curious; but seen from his birthplace it has a certain coherence. In the distinctive fin-de-siècle manner of his Central European contemporaries, Koestler was always a "modern."

The Elementary Truths of Primo Levi: 1999, New York Review of Books, review of Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist.

Levi was born in Turin in 1919, in the apartment he lived in for most of his life, dying there in April 1987, with the significant exception of 20 months in 1944-45 (p. 45)

Levi, who declared his Jewish identity, was sent to the transit camp at Fossoli di Carpi and thence, on February 22, 1944, he was transported to Auschwitz with 649 other Jews, of whom 23 would survive. Upon arrival Levi was stamped number 174517 and selected for Auschwitz III-Monowitz, where he worked at the synthetic rubber plant owned by I. G. Farben and operated for them by the SS. He stayed at Auschwitz until the camp was abandoned by the Germans in January 1945 and liberated by the advancing Red Army on January 27. For the next nine months he was swept from Katowice, in Galicia, through Belorussia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and finally home to Turin in a picaresque, involuntary odyssey described in La tregua (The Reawakening).

(p. 54)

As a survivor, Levi's trajectory was quite representative. At first, people didn't want to listen to him -- Italians "felt purified by the great wave of the anti-Fascist crusade, by participation in the Resistance and its victorious outcome." Giuliana Tedeschi, another Italian survivor of Auschwitz, had a comparable experience: "I encountered people who didn't want to know anything, because the Italians, too, had suffered after all, even those who didn't go to the camps. . . . They used to say, 'For heaven's sake, it's all over,' and so I remained quiet for a long time." In 1955 Levi noted that it had become "indelicate" to speak of the camps -- "One risks being accused of setting up as a victim, or of indecent exposure." Thus was confirmed the terrible, anticipatory dream of the victims, during and after the camps: that no one would listen, and if they listened they wouldn't believe.

The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber: 1996, New Republic, on a recently republished three-volume autobiography of Sperber.

(p. 67)

[Sperber's] descriptions of the years between his arrival in Berlin and the rise of Hitler are among the best in his memoirs, full of acute observation of the Communist world and powerful first-person accounts of encounters with Nazis. Like Arthur Koestler, Hans Sahl, and other contemporaries, Sperber was immunized against later ideological illusion by firsthand experience of the disastrous mistakes of the German Communists in the face of Nazism -- although he also claims that observation of courageous German working-class demonstrators in January 1933, misled and then abandoned by their party leaders, kept him committed to the cause of working people for the rest of his life, despite the glaring unreality of Communist paeans to proletarian strength and unity.

Hannah Arendt and Evil: 1995, New York Review of Books, reviewing a new collection of Arendt's essays and her recently published correspondence with Mary McCarthy.

(pp. 81-82)

Arendt made things worse for herself by inserting her controversial but brief comments on this subject into a text that not only introduced the notion of "banality" -- such that Jews seemed to become "responsible," Germans merely "banal" -- but also criticized Israel for having staged a "show trial" and chosen to emphasize "crimes against the Jewish people" instead of "crimes against humanity." The irony is that the Eichmann trial was a show trial -- much as the ore recent Barbie and Touvier trials in France were show trials, not in the sense of being rigged but in their primarily pedagogical function. The guilt of the accused in all these cases was never in question. Ben-Gurion was less interested in establishing Eichmann's responsibility, or even in exacting revenge, than in educating a new generation about the past sufferings of the Jews, and thereby further strengthening the foundations of the still fragile Jewish state.

Part Two: The Politics of Intellectual Engagement

Albert Camus: "The best man in France": 1994, New York Review of Books, review of Camus's posthumous novel, Le premier homme.

(pp. 96-97)

Worst of all, for Camus and his audience, was the dilemma posed by the tragedy of French Algeria. Like most intellectuals of his generation, Camus was bitterly critical of French policy; he condemned the use of torture and terror in the government's "dirty war" against the Arab nationalists, and he had been a vocal and well-informed critic of colonial discrimination against the indigenous Arab population ever since the thirties (at a time when many of the Parisian intellectuals who would later distinguish themselves in the anticolonial struggle knew little and cared less about the condition and needs of France's overseas subjects). But Camus was born in Algeria, the son of impoverished European immigrants. He grew up in Algiers and drew on his experiences there for much of his best work. Unable to imagine an Algeria without Europeans, or to imagine indigenous Europeans of his milieu torn from their roots, he struggled to describe a middle way; in his words, "Une grande, une éclatante réparation doit être faite  . . . au peuple Arab. Mais par la France toute entière et non avec le sang des Français d'Algérie." As France and Algeria alike grew ever more polarized over the issue, Camus's search for a liberal compromise came to seem forlorn and irrelevant. He withdrew into silence.

(p. 98)

Camus's rejection of violence, of terror in all its forms, reduced him to impotent silence at the height of the Algerian civil war and rendered him inaccessible to the generation that followed. But by the late seventies, with nothing but blood and ashes to show for their support of revolutionary repression in Europe, in China, in Cuba, and in Cambodia, French thinkers had swung around to a point of view remarkably close to that of Camus -- though usually without acknowledgment; It was one thing to repeat Camus's warning that "il est des moyens qui ne s'excusent pas," quite another to admit he had been correct all along.

Elucubrations: The "Marxism" of Louis Althusser: 1994, New Republic, review of Althusser's memoirs.

A little personal intro (p. 106)

I was brought up a Marxist. Nowadays that is not much of a boast, but it had its advantages. Parents and grandparents were imbued with all of the assumptions and some of the faith that shaped the European Socialist movement in its heyday. Coming from that branch of East European Jewry that had embraced social democracy and the Bund (the Jewish Labor organization of early-twentieth-century Russia and Poland), my own family was viscerally anti-Communist. In its eyes, Bolshevism was not only a dictatorship, it was also -- and this, too, was a serious charge -- a travesty of Marxism. By the time I went to university, I had been thoroughly inoculated with all the classical nineteenth-century texts; and as a result I was immune to the wide-eyed enthusiasm with which Marxist revelations were greeted by those of my freshman peers who were discovering them for the first time.

(pp. 110-111)

By the end of the seventies however, Althusser's star was on the wane. He had been absent during the events of May 1968, and had showed little interest in the political developments of that year. His only direct comment on the "failed revolution" of 1968 was characteristic and revealing: "When revolt ends in defeat without the workers being massacred it is not necessarily a good thing for the working class which has no martyrs to mourn or commemorate." [ . . . ] Had matters been left there, Althusser could have looked forward to a peaceful and obscure old age, a curious relic of a bizarre but forgotten era.

But then, on November 16, 1980, he murdered his wife Hélène in their apartment at the École Normale. Or, as the jacket copy of The New Press's translation of his memoir coyly puts it, "while massaging his wife's neck [he] discovered he had strangled her." (To be fair, this is how Althusser himself explained the event; but it is curious to find the claim reproduced unattributed on the book.) Althusser was examined by doctors, found to be mentally unfit to stand trial, and locked away in a psychiatric hospital. Three years later he was released and spent his last years in a dreary flat in north Paris, emerging occasionally to startle passers-by with "Je suis le grand Althusser!" It was in these years that he drafted two versions of an autobiography. They were found after his death in 1990 and first published in French, as a single book, in 1992.

Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism: 2003, New York Review of Books, review of Hobsbawm's autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life.

(p. 116)

Eric Hobsbawm is the best-known historian in the world. The Age of Extremes (published in 1994) was translated into dozens of languages, from Chinese to Czech. His memoirs were a best seller in New Delhi; in parts of South America -- Brazil especially -- he is a cultural folk hero. His fame is well deserved. He controls vast continents of information with confident ease -- his Cambridge college supervisor, after telling me once that Eric Hobsbawm was the cleverest undergraduate he had ever taught, added: "Of course, you couldn't say I taught him -- he was unteachable. Eric already knew everything."

The review concentrates almost exclusively on Hobsbawm's lifelong Communist Party membership -- never, for instance, mentioning his sideline as a jazz critic, or for that matter his major historical works. (p. 126)

If the Left is to recover that self-confidence and get up off its knees, we must stop telling reassuring stories about the past. Pace Hobsbawm, who blandly denies it, there was a "fundamental affinity" between extremes of left and right in the twentieth century, self-evident to anyone who experienced them. Millions of well-meaning Western progressives sold their souls to an oriental despot -- "The ludicrous surprise," wrote Raymond Aron in 1950, "is that the European Left has taken a pyramid builder for its God." The values and institutions that have mattererd to the Left -- from equality before the law to the provision of public services as a matter of right -- and that are now under assault -- owed nothing to Communism. Seventy years of "real existing Socialism" contributed nothing to the sum of human welfare. Nothing.

Goodbye to All That? Leszek Kolakowski and the Marxist Legacy: 2006, New York Review of Books, on a one-volume reprint of Kolakowski's Main Currents in Marxism.

(pp. 132-133)

Kolakowski's thesis, driven through 1,200 pages of exposition, is straightforward and unambiguous. Marxism, in his view, should be taken seriously: not for its propositions about class struggle (which were sometimes true but never news); nor for its promise of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and a proletarian-led transition to socialism (which failed entirely as prediction); but because Marxism delivered a unique -- and truly original -- blend of Promethean Romantic illusion and uncompromising historical determinism.

The attraction of Marxism thus understood is obvious. It offered an explanation of how the world works -- the economic analysis of capitalism and of social class relations. It proposed a way in which the world ought to work -- an ethics of human relations as suggested in Marx's youthful, idealistic speculations (and in György Lukács's interpretation of him, with which Kolakowski, for all his disdain for Lukács's own compromised career, largely concurs). And it announced incontrovertible grounds for believing that things will work that way in the future, thanks to a set of assertions about historical necessity derived by Marx's Russian disciples from his (and Engels's) own writings. This combination of economic description, moral prescription, and political prediction proved intensely seductive -- and serviceable.

(pp. 138-139)

The second source of Marxism's appeal is that Marx and his Communist progeny were not a historical aberration, Clio's genetic error. The Marxist project, like the older Socialist dream which it displaced and absorbed, was one strand in the great progressive narrative of our time: It shares with classical liberalism, its antithetical historical twin, that narrative's optimistic, rationalistic account of modern society and its possibilities. Marxism's distinctive twist -- the assertion that the good society to come would be a classless, post-capitalist product of economic processes and social upheaval -- was already hard to credit by 1920. But social movements deriving from the initial Marxian analytical impulse continued for many decades to talk and behave as though they still believed in the transformative project.

Thus, to take an example: The German Social Democratic Party effectively abandoned "revolution" well before World War I; but only in 1959, at the Congress of Bad Godesberg, did it officially lift the mortgage of Marxist theory that lay upon its language and goals. In the intervening years, and indeed for some time afterward, German Social Democrats -- like British Labourites, Italian Socialists, and many others -- continued to speak and write of class conflict, the struggle against capitalism, and so forth: as though, notwithstanding their mild and reformist daily practice, they were still living out the grand Romantic narrative of Marxism. As recently as May 1981, following François Mitterand's election to the presidency, eminently respectable French Socialist politicians -- who would not have described themselves as "Marxist," much less "Communist" -- talked excitedly of a revolutionary "grand soir" and the coming transition to socialism, as though they were back in 1936, or even 1848.

Marxism, in short, was the deep "structure" of much progressive politics. Marxist language, or a language parasitic upon Marxist categories, gave form and an implicit coherence to many kinds of modern political protest: from social democracy to radical feminism. In this sense Merleau-Ponty was correct: The loss of Marxism as a way of relating critically to the present really has left an empty space. With Marxism have gone not just dysfunctional Communist regimes and their deluded foreign apologists but also the whole schema of assumptions, categories, and explanations created over the past 150 years that we had come to think of as "the Left." Anyone who has observed the confusion of the political Left in North America or Europe over the past twenty years and asked themselves "But what does it stand for? What does it want?" will appreciate the point.

(p. 141)

In short, the world appears to be entering upon a new cycle, one with which our nineteenth-century forebears were familiar but of which we in the West have no recent experience. In the coming years, as visible disparities of wealth increase and struggles over the terms of trade, the location of employment, and the control of scarce natural resources all become more acute, we are likely to hear more, not less, about inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation -- at home but especially abroad. And thus, as we lose sight of Communism (already in Eastern Europe you have to be thirty-five years old to have any adult memory of a Communist regime), the moral appeal of some refurbished version of Marxism is likely to grow.

If that sounds crazy, remember this: The attraction of one or another version of Marxism to intellectuals and radical politicians in Latin America, for example, or in the Middle East, never really faded; as a plausible account of local experience Marxism in such places retains much of its appeal, just as it does to contemporary antiglobalizers everywhere. The latter see in the tensions and shortcomings of today's international capitalist economy precisely the same injustices and opportunities that led observers of the first economic "globalization" of the 1890s to apply Marx's critique of capitalism to new theories of "imperialism."

And since no one else seems to have anything very convincing to offer by way of a strategy for rectifying the inequities of modern capitalism, the field is once again left to those with the tidiest story to tell and the angriest prescription to offer. Recall Heine's prophetic observations about Marx and his friends at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, in the high years of Victorian growth and prosperity: "These revolutionary doctors and their pitilessly determined disciples are the only men in Germany who have any life; and it is to them, I fear, that the future belongs."

A "Pope of Ideas"? John Paul II and the Modern World: 1996, New York Review of Books, review of Carl Bernstein/Marco Politi, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time.

(p. 156-157)

All these habits of mind have now come together in the pope's crusade for "family values" in general and against abortion in particular. Here, too, the pope has the makings of a case -- you don't have to be a conservative Catholic to worry about the texture of family life today, or to recognize that abortion or genetic engineering raises troubling ethical questions. But a genuine papal concern for our moral condition in these matters is vitiated for many by the insensitive way in which absolute authority is invoked in what are truly contested and painful debates. For this pope, marriage is not just a sacrament but a vocation. Condoms are not a "lesser evil" (an option with respectable antecedents in Christian theology) but forbidden. Abortion is a "holocaust." Men and, especially, women who slip from the path of righteousness stand utterly condemned -- the Bishop of Lowicz in Poland, Monsignor Alojzy Orszulik, announced in September of this year that anyone in his diocese "guilty of the crime of abortion" would be excommunicated. Karol Wojtyla has turned his back not only on "modernity" and on compassion, but even on the recommendations of a 1966 Vatican commission on contraception, which gingerly suggested that there was nothing in the scriptures to justify root-and-branch condemnation of birth control.

The pope's obsession with sex -- a subject on which he has written much, and in considerable graphic detail -- curiously mirrors the concerns of those Americans whose culture he so scorns. And just as the abortion issue distorts large tracts of U.S. public life, so Wojtyla's fixation has damaged both his image and his impact elsewhere, notably in South America. His reiterated condemnation of the abuse of private property, and his reassertion of the natural right of all to share in the use and benefit of worldly resources, has raised hopes that this pope would be a resolute foe of what a British Conservative prime minister once called "the unacceptable face of capitalism." It was anticipated that even if he was not himself a committed proponent of social reform he would be consistently sympathetic to the victims of social and political repression. In a speech in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979 he reiterated the demands of the 1969 Medellin Conference, notably a "preferential love for the poor." In recent speeches in El Salvador and in France he has placed a growing emphasis on his opposition to wars and conflicts of all kinds, civil and international, and only this year he visited the tomb of Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop killed during Mass in 1980 by a rightist death squad.

But the same Archbishop Romero, a year before his death, had expressed private disappointment at the pope's lack of sympathy for the work of the Church in Latin dictatorships -- "He recommended great balance and prudence, especially when denouncing specific situations. . . . I left, pleased by the meeting, but worried to see how much the negative reports of my pastoral work had influenced him." By the end of the eighties the view seems to have become widespread among disappointed audiences and priests in Central and South America that papal sympathies for the victims of political repression were more easily aroused in the countries of Communist Europe.

(p. 159)

It has become commonplace to compare Karol Wojtyla, in the twilight of his reign, to Pius IX, the liberal cardinal who ascended to the papacy in 1846 at the young age of fifty-four. Disillusioned with liberalism after the experience of the revolutions of 1848, he retreated into deep conservatism and promulgated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Mary in 1854 and the doctrine of Papal Infallibility at the Vatican Council of 1869-70. In his Syllabus of Errors of 1864 he listed eighty errors of modernity, the last of which reads "that the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation." By the end of his papacy, which lasted over thirty years, Pio Nono had made the Catholic Church synonymous with obscurantism and reaction.

Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitanism: 2004, written as an introduction to Said's posthumous essay collection, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (2004, Pantheon); also appeared in The Nation.

(p. 166)

In consequence, as Said tellingly observed just a few months before his death, "I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country." That, of course, is the characteristic condition of the rootless cosmopolitan. It is not very comfortable or safe to be without a country to love: It can bring down upon your head the anxious hostility of those for whom such rootlessness suggests a corrosive independence of spirit. But it is liberating: The world you look out upon may not be as reassuring as the vista enjoyed by patriots and nationalists, but you see farther. As Said wrote in 1993, "I have no patience with the position that 'we' should only or mainly be concerned with what is 'ours.'"

(p. 167)

Indeed, Said was above all concerned with addressing and excoriating his fellow Arabs. It is the ruling Arab regimes, especially that of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, that come in for the strongest criticism here: for their cupidity, their corruption, their malevolence and incredulity. This may seem almost unfair -- it is, after all, the U.S. that has effective power, and Israel that was and is wreaking havoc among Edward Said's fellow Palestinians -- but Said seems to have felt it important to tell the truth to and about his own people, rather than risk indulging "the fawning elasticity with regard to one's own side that has disfigured the history of intellectuals since time immemorial" (December 2000).

(pp. 175-176)

That is why Edward Said insists in these essays upon the need for Palestinians to bring their case to the American public rather than just, as he puts it, imploring the American president to "give" them a state. American public opinion matters, and Said despaired of the uninformed anti-Americanism of Arab intellectuals and students: "It is not acceptable to sit in Beirut or Cairo meeting halls and denounce American imperialism (or Zionist colonialism for that matter) without a whit of understanding that these are complex societies not always truly represented by their governments' stupid or cruel policies." But as an American he was frustrated above all at his own country's political myopia: Only America can break the murderous deadlock in the Middle East, but "what the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy."

Part Three: Lost in Transition: Places and Memories

The Catastrophe: The Fall of France, 1940: 2001, New York Review of Books, a review of Ernest May's Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France.

(pp. 190-191)

This asymmetrical treatment sets the scene for a narrative in which the German victory is a surprise and the French defeat a chapter of accidents. But it misses much of the relevant story. Why, after all, were most French generals such bunglers? Why, for example, did Gamelin restore normal leave for the French army on May 7, 1940 -- a transcendently incompetent move? Why did Huntziger refuse air cover to his troops at Sedan, leaving an open target for the morale-destroying attacks of the Stukas? If good generals could have done better by their country, it is their absence that needs explaining.

A clue is to be found in a September 1940 photograph of the council of ministers at Vichy. There sits General Huntziger, two places away from Pétain and wearing the same self-satisfied look as his master. Three months after the worst defeat in French history, the men directly responsible for it were comfortably ensconced in a regime that their defeat helped to install. General Maxime Weygand, who replaced Gamelin in command for the last days of the debacle, was the first minister of national defense at Vichy. His primary concern in the waning hours of the battle was not the German army but a possible Communist uprising in Paris upon the heels of a defeat. Such men maynot have expected to lose the war, but they resigned themselves to defeat all the quicker because they did not regard the Germans as the greatest threat.

Weygand, like Pétain, was old enough to remember the Paris Commune of 1871, and it haunted his generation of reactionary and monarchist officers. The France that they were sworn to defend did not, in their eyes, include the political Left, successors of the Communards whose martyrdom was commemorated in eastern Paris every spring. Even Gamelin, an apolitical general by prevailing French standards, was not immune. As early as May 16, with the battle not yet lost, he was preparing his excuses. The army, he told the politicians, had collapsed because of Communist penetration.

(p. 192)

If Ernest May believes that France in May 1940 was a nation resolute, united, and in a condition to face the German threat, he is deeply mistaken.

The Communists had not forgiven Blum for his failure to intervene on behalf of the Spanish loyalists in 1936; for his insistence on compromise in the Popular Front legislation of that year; and perhaps above all for his success in preserving the French Socialist Party following the schism with the Communists in December 1920. In December 1940, they approached the Vichy authorities with an informal offer to testify against Blum at his forthcoming show trial. (Fortunately for the French Communist Party's future standing, their proposal was ignored.) The unions were still seething in resentment at Daladier's November 1938 laws abrogating the labor reforms of 1936. Anti-Fascism, which might once have been an effective motive for unity, had been undermined and corroded by successive governments' obsession with not alienating Mussolini, to whom France continued to look for support until the very eve of defeat. The army was riddled with conspirators -- May makes no mention of the Cagoule, the shadowy officers' plot scotched by Interior Minister Marx Dormoy (for which he was later murdered by the Vichy Milice). Anti-foreign and anti-Communist legislation was in place by September 1939, long before Pétain came to office.

À la recherche du temps perdu: France and Its Pasts: 1998, New York Review of Books, a review of Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire.

(pp. 199-200)

To understand [Pierre] Nora's approach, and the cultural significance of the huge three-part, seven-volume, 5,600-page collective work on Les Lieux de mémoire that he edited over the course of the years 1984-92, we must return to France and to its unique experience. France is not only the oldest national state in Europe, with an unbroken history of central government, language, and public administration dating back at least to the twelfth century; it was also, of all the countries of Western Europe, the one which had changed the least until very recently. The landscape of France, the rural community and its way of life, the occupations and routines of daily existence in provincial towns and villages had been less disrupted by industry, modern communications, or social and demographic change than was the case in Britain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, or any other comparable Western state.

Similarly, the political structure of the country -- its forms of national and provincial administration, relations between center and locality, the hierarchy of legal, fiscal, cultural, and pedagogic authority reaching down from Paris to the smallest hamlet -- had altered remarkably little over the centuries. The political form of Old Regime France was destroyed in the Revolution, of course. But its authoritarian content and style were faithfully reproduced by the imperial and republican heirs to the Bourbon monarchy, from Robespierre and Napoléon Bonaparte to Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterand.

(p. 201)

A Socialist president was elected by popular suffrage in 1981 and proceeded in less than two years to abandon all the tenets of traditional socialism, notably the promise of a grand soir of onetime revolutionary transformation that had marked the Left since 1792 and that had, in part, helped to propel him into power. The Right was no longer bound together by the person and aura of Charles de Gaulle, who had died in 1970, and the fundamental measure of political conservatism in France -- the propensity of conservative voters to be practicing Catholics -- was undermined by the collapse of public religious observance as the churches of village and small-town France lost their parishioners in the rush to the metropolitan centers. By the early eighties the ancient foundations of French public life appeared to be crumbling away.

The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain's "Heritage": 2001, New York Review of Books, written "in the immediate wake of Tony Blair's second general election victory." Judt adds, "Since then, Blair's trajectory, culminating in his shared responsibility for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and his embarrassingly protracted 'cérémonie des adieux,' has given me no cause to revise my low estimate of the man and his 'legacy.'"

(pp. 219-220)

In the spring of 2001, during a BBC radio discussion of the forthcoming British general election, a young journalist voiced her frustration. "Don't you agree," she asked her fellow panelists, "that there's no real choice? Tony Blair believes in privatization, just like Mrs. Thatcher." "Not quite," replied Charles Moore, editor of the (Conservative) Daily Telegraph. "Margaret Thatcher believed in privatization. Tony Blair just likes rich people." That is indeed so, and although Moore's witticism doesn't really address the question, it points, perhaps inadvertently, to something seriously amiss in England today.

Two weeks after that exchange Blair and his New Labour Party duly won the British general election, overwhelming the hapless William Hague and his moribund Conservatives by a sweeping majority. He could hardly acknowledge it, but this famous victory, like much else in Blair's glittering political career, was only possible thanks to a threefold inheritance from Mrs. (now Lady) Thatcher. First, she "normalized" the radical dismantling of the public sector in industry and services and its replacement with the "privatized" Britain whose praises Blair enthusiastically sings. Second, and in the process, she destroyed the old Labour Party and facilitated the task of those who fought to reform it: Blair had merely to reap the reward of their work. Third, her asperity and her intolerance of dissent and disagreement have fractured her own party and rendered it unelectable.

(pp. 221-222)

There is a superficial patina of prosperity about contemporary London, a glitzy, high-tech energy that makes other European capitals feel a bit dowdy and middle-aged, just as Tony Blair seems fresh and forward-looking when contrasted with some of his continental counterparts. But the gloss is two centimeters deep. The contrast between private affluence and public squalor is actually greater than at any time I can remember. As for the often repeated assertion that what has made London (and by extension Britain) great again has been the rise of private initiative and the reduction of a debilitating dependence on the state, this is just cant. Londoners today, like everyone else in Britain, may be employed in the private sector, but they are as dependent on the state as ever.

In an economy shaped by relatively low wages for all but a few, and quite high fixed costs for everyone, they rely on the government for their education, their health, their transportation, their civic facilities and amenities. Even their "private-sector" job itself is frequently underwritten by state assistance in the form of tax indulgences or direct subsidy. And in an age of job insecurity, a very large number of people have at some time or another had occasion to draw unemployment assistance. This is a truth hidden from Londoners: partly by Blairite rhetoric and partly by the ultravisible but quite unrepresentative world of the city financial institutions. But it is a lot clearer once you go north of the capital.

Of the ten administrative regions of England, only three (London, the South East, and East Anglia) reach or exceed the national average wealth per capita. All the rest are poorer, some far, far poorer. The North East of England in 2000 had a gross domestic product her head just 60 percent that of London. After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist countries, Great Britain is the largest current beneficiary of European Union structural funds -- which is a way of saying that parts of Britain are among the most deprived regions of the EU.

(pp. 225-227)

But whereas state-run railways in continental Europe have since been the object of solicitous government attention and high levels of long-term public investment, in Britain nationalization was treated (by Left and Right alike) as the end of the story rather than the beginning. Long before Mrs. Thatcher, British governments and civil servants regarded trains as an annoying budgetary item to be rationalized and reduced at every opportunity. Lines were closed, investment held to a minimum, fares pushed as high as the market would bear. As a result, in its last year of existence, 1996, British Rail boasted the lowest public subsidy for a railway in Europe. In that year the French were planning for their railways an investment rate of £21 per head of population; the Italians £33; the British just £9.

Even so, the then-Conservative government chose to privatize British Rail. They were encouraged by the prospect of a quick profit from the sale of public assets into private ownership; but their chief motive was Prime Minister John Major's need to be seen to be privatizing something -- Mrs. Thatcher had by then sold off just about everything else, and privatization was the Conservative Party's sole and only program. The integrated network was sold off in parts: train routes to train-operating companies, rolling stock to other companies, rails and stations to a new company called Railtrack.

The outcome has been a chronicle of disasters foretold. The theory was that train companies would compete over established routes, driving efficiency up and prices down. But trains are not buses. A train route, like a train schedule, is a natural monopoly. Private train companies were, in practice, being granted a free run at a captive market. Meanwhile the logic of the market was applied no less wrongheadedly to maintenance. Railtrack was divested of all repair and maintenance tasks (and thousands of experienced engineers lost their jobs). These were contracted out to private companies, who in turn subcontracted to unskilled casual labor for track repairs and inspection.

Everyone had an interest in cutting corners and postponing unprofitable or labor-intensive work. Railtrack spent money on spiffing up stations -- which all could see -- and neglected rail replacement. The company was contractually obliged to compensate train companies if track work delayed their trains, so ti discouraged inspectors from making trouble or undertaking "nonessential" repairs. Train companies, in turn, rewrote their schedules to avoid being penalized for failure to conform to a timetable. Within a few years it was obvious that the free market, far from reducing inefficiencies, had made the railways worse than ever. [ . . . ]

Britain's privatized railways are a cruel joke. Train users pay the highest fares in Europe for some of the worst (and as it turns out, most dangerous) trains in the Western world -- and now, as taxpayers, they are paying out almost as large an annual subsidy as they were when the state owned the system. This might be more tolerable were it not for the widespread British awareness of developments overseas. You can now travel by train from Paris to Marseille in great comfort and just over three hours. The same distance in Britain (from London to, say, Pitlochry in Scotland) will take at least double the time and cost twice as much. There have been only four derailments on France's peerless TGVs since they entered service in 1981; there were thirty-three deaths on the railways in Britain in 1999 alone.

Railways are a public service. That is why the French invest in them so heavily (as do the Germans, Italians, and Spanish). They treat the huge subsidy given their train system as an investment in the national and local economies, the environment, health, tourism, and social mobility. To some English observers and a few French critics too, these subsidies represent unforgivably huge losses -- difficult to quantify because buried in national accounts, but a significant drag on the national budget. Most French don't see it this way, however: For them railways are not a business but a service that the state provides for its citizens at collective expense. Any given train, route, or facility may not turn a profit, but the loss is offset by countervailing indirect benefits. To treat trains like a firm, best run by entrepreneurs whose shareholders expect a cash return on their investment, is to misunderstand their very nature.

The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters: 1999, New York Review of Books.

(pp. 243-244)

In the absence of government oversight, the striking incidence of high-level corruption and graft is no surprise (Baudelaire again: "La Belgique est sans vie, mais non sans corruption"). Belgium has become sadly notorious as a playground for sophisticated white-collar criminals, in and out of government. At the end of the 1980s, the Belgian government contracted to purchase forty-six military helicopters from the Italian firm Agusta and to give the French company Dassault the job of refitting its F-16 aircraft; competing bidders for the contracts were frozen out. It later emerged that the Parti Socialiste (in government at the time) had done very nicely from kickbacks on both deals. One leading Socialist politician who knew too much, André Cools, was killed in a parking lot in Liège in 1991; another, Étienne Mange, was arrested in 1995; and a third, Willy Claes, a former prime minister of Belgium, sometime (1994-95) secretary general of NATO and foreign minister when the deals were made, was found guilty in September 1998 of taking bribes. A former army general closely involved in the affair, Jacques Lefebvre, died in mysterious circumstances in March 1995.

Romania between History and Europe: 2001, New York Review of Books.

(pp. 251-252)

By every measure, Romania is almost at the bottom of the European heap (above only Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine). The Romanian economy, defined by per capita gross domestic product, ranked eighty-seventh in the world in 1998, below Namibia and just above Paraguay (Hungary ranked fifty-eighth). Life expectancy is lower in Romania than anywhere else in Central or Southeastern Europe: For men it is just sixty-six years, less than it was in 1989 and ten years short of the EU average. It is estimated that two out of five Romanians live on less than $30 per month (contrast, e.g., Peru, where the minimum monthly wage today is $40). By all conventional measures, Romania is now best compared to regions of the former Soviet Union (except the Baltics, which are well ahead) and has even been overtaken by Bulgaria. According to The Economist's survey for the year 2000, the "quality of life" in Romania ranks somewhere between Libya and Lebanon. The European Union has tacitly acknowledge as much: The Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament lists Romania as last among EU-candidate countries, and slipping fast.

(pp. 253-254)

Communism was an ecological disaster everywhere, but in Romania its mess has proven harder to clean up. In the industrial towns of Transylvania -- in places like Hunedoara or Baia Mare, where a recent leak from the Aural gold mine into the Tisza River poisoned part of the mid-Danubian ecosystem -- you can taste the poison in the air you breathe, as I found on a recent visit there. The environmental catastrophe is probably comparable in degree to parts of eastern Germany or northern Bohemia, but in Romania its extent is greater: Whole tracts of the country are infested with bloated, rusting steel mills, abandoned petrochemical refineries, and decaying cement works. Privatization of uneconomic state enterprises is made much harder in Romania in part because the old Communist rulers have succeeded in selling the best businesses to themselves, but also because the cost of cleaning up polluted water and contaminated soil is prohibitive and off-putting to the few foreign companies who express an initial interest.

(pp. 254-255)

Romania was formally neutral in the early stages of World War II; but under the military dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu the country aligned itself with Hitler in November 1940 and joined enthusiastically in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, contributing and losing more troops than any of Germany's other European allies. In May 1946, with Romania firmly under Soviet tutelage, Antonescu was tried and executed as a war criminal. He has now been resurrected in some circles in post-Communist Romania as a national hero: Statues have been erected and memorial plaques inaugurated in his honor. Many people feel uneasy about this, but few pay much attention to what would, almost anywhere else, be Antonescu's most embarrassing claim to fame: His contribution to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

The conventional Romanian position has long been that, whatever his other sins, Antonescu saved Romania's Jews. And it is true that of the 441,000 Jews listed in the April 1942 census, the overwhelming majority survived, thanks to Antonescu's belated realization that Hitler would lose the war and his consequent rescinding of plans to deport them to extermination camps. But that does not include the hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Bessarabia and Bukovina, Romanian territories humiliatingly ceded to Stalin in June 1940 and triumphantly reoccupied by Romanian (and German) troops after June 22, 1941. Here the Romanians collaborated with the Germans and outdid them in deporting, torturing, and murdering all Jews under their control. It was Romanian soldiers who burned alive nineteen thousand Jews in Odessa in October 1941; who shot a further sixteen thousand in ditches at nearby Dalnick; and who so sadistically mistreated Jews being transported east across the Dniester River that even the Germans complained.

By the end of the war the Romanian state had killed or deported over half the total Jewish population under its jurisdiction. This was deliberate policy. In March 1943 Antonescu declared: "The operation should be continued. However difficult this might be under present circumstances, we have to achieve total Romanianization. We will have to complete this by the time the war ends." It was Antonescu who permitted the pogrom in Iasi (the capital of Moldavia, in the country's northeast) on June 29 and 30, 1941, where at least seven thousand Jews were murdered. It was Antonescu who ordered in July 1941 that fifty "Jewish Communists" be exterminated for every Romanian soldier killed by partisans. And it was unoccupied Romania that alone matched the Nazis step for step in the Final Solution, from legal definitions through extortion and deportation to mass extermination.

(pp. 259-260)

National Communism ("he may be a Commie but he's our Commie") paid off for Ceausescu, and not just because he hobnobbed with Richard Nixon and the Queen of England. Romania was the firs Warsaw Pact state to enter GATT (in 1971), the World Bank, and the IMF (1972), to get European Community trading preferences (1973) and U.S. most-favored-nation status (1975). Western approval undercut Romanian domestic opposition, such as it was. No U.S. president demanded that Ceausescu "let Romania be Romania."

Even if a Romanian Solidarity movement had arisen, it is unlikely that it would have received any Western support. Because the Romanian leader was happy to criticize the Russians and send his gymnasts to the Los Angeles Olympics, the Americans and others said nothing about his domestic crimes (at least until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, after which the West had no use for an anti-Soviet maverick dictator). Indeed, when in the early eighties Ceausescu decided to pay down Romania's huge foreign debts by squeezing domestic consumption, the IMF could not praise him enough.

The Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceausescu's freedom of maneuver. To increase the population -- a traditional Romanianist obsession -- in 1966 he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearing age were introduced to prevent abortions, which were permitted, if at all, only in the presence of a party representative. Doctors in districts with a declining birth rate had their salaries cut.

The population did not increase, but the death rate from abortions far exceeded that of any other European country: As the only available form of birth control, illegal abortions were widely performed, often under the most appalling and dangerous conditions. In twenty-three years the 1966 law resulted int he deaths of at least ten thousand women. The real infant mortality rate was so high that after 1985 births were not officially recorded until a child had survived to its fourth week -- the apotheosis of Communist control of knowledge. By the time Ceausescu was overthrown, the death rate of newborn babies was twenty-five per thousand and there were upward of 100,000 institutionalized children -- a figure that has remained steady to the present. At the end of the twentieth century, in the eastern department of Constanta, abandoned, malnourished, diseased children absorb 25 percent of the budget.

The setting for this national tragedy was an economy that was deliberately turned backward into destitution. To pay off Western creditors, Ceausescu obliged his subjects to export every available domestically produced commodity. Romanians were forced to use 40-watt-bulbs at home so that energy could be exported to Italy and Germany. Meat, sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and much more were rationed. Fixed quotas were introduced for obligatory public labor on Sundays and holidays (the corvée, as it was known in ancien régime France). Gasoline usage was cut to the minimum and a program of horse-breeding to substitute for motorized vehicles was introduced in 1986.

Dark Victory: Israel's Six-Day War: 2002, New Republic, a review of Michael Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.

(pp. 279-281)

The ironic outcome is that whereas American official rapport for Israel in June 1967 had actually been rather lukewarm -- Washington feared alienating moderate Arab opinion -- the two countries did draw much closer thereafter. Israel was now a force to be reckoned with, a potential ally in an unstable region; and whereas in June 1967 Johnson's advisers had warned him against committing America openly to the Zionist cause, future administrations would have no such anxieties. With Arab states increasingly hostile, the United States had less to lose. France, meanwhile, released from the embarrassment of its imbroglio in Algeria, turned its back on the Jewish state ("un peuple sûr de lui et dominateur," in De Gaulle's notorious phrase) and made the strategic decision to rebuild its bridges to the Arab world.

International public opinion also began to shift. Before the war, in Europe as well as the United States, only the Far Right and the Far Left were avowedly anti-Israel. Progressives and conservatives alike were sympathetic to Israel, the underdog seemingly threatened with imminent extinction. In some circles comparisons were drawn with the Civil War in Spain just thirty years earlier, with Israel cast as the legitimate republic besieged by aggressive dictators. Throughout Western Europe and North America, in South Africa and Australia, a significant effort was mounted from May 1967 to send volunteers to help Israel, to replace in the fields the men called up to fight.

I played a very minor role in these events, returning in my own case from the United Kingdom to Israel on the last commercial flight to land there before the outbreak of hostilities. Consequently, I met a lot of these volunteers, in Europe and then in Israel. There were many non-Jews among them, and most would have classed themselves as politically "left." With the trial of Eichmann and the Frankfurt trials of concentration camp personnel a very recent memory, defending Israel became a minor international cause.

According to Abba Eban, speaking in the aftermath of victory, "Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world." I am not sure that this was so. Israel was certainly respected in a new way. But the scale of its triumph actually precipitated a falling-away of support. Some might plausibly attribute this to the world's preference for the Jew as victim -- and there was indeed a certain post-June discomfort among some of Israel's overseas sympathizers at the apparent ease with which their cause had triumphed, as though its legitimacy were thereby called retrospectively into question.

But there was more to it than that. The European Old Left had always thought of Israel, with its long-established Labor leaders, its disproportionately large public sector, and its communitarian experiments, as "one of us." In the rapidly shifting political and ideological currents of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, Israel was something of an anomaly. The New Left, from Berlin to Berkeley, was concerned less with exploited workers and more with the victims of colonialism and racism. The goal was no longer the emancipation of the proletariat; it was rather the liberation of the third-world peasantry and what were not yet called "people of color." Kibbutzim retained a certain romantic aura for a few more years, but for hard-nosed Western radicals they were just collective farms and as such a mere variant of the discredited Soviet model. In defeating the Arab armies and occupying Arab land, Israel had drawn attention to itself in ways calculated to encourage New Left antipathy, at just the moment when hitherto disparate radical constituencies -- Ulster Catholics, Basque nationalists, Palestinian exiles, German extra-Parliamentarians, and many others -- were finding common cause. [ . . . ]

In a variety of ways, then, the international context after 1967 turned increasingly unfavorable for Israel, despite its dramatic victory and because of it. Yet the most important change of all, the transformation that would color all of Israel's dealing with the rest of the world, took place in the country itself. Relieved of any serious threat, ostensibly sufficient unto themselves, Israelis became complacent. The attitude of Yael Dayan, addressing her diary as the war ended, is quite typical: "The new reality in the Middle East presented Israel as the strongest element, and as such it can talk a different language and had to be talked to differently." The prickly insecurity that characterized the country in its first two decades changed to a self-satisfied arrogance.

(pp. 282-283)

The demography of Israel was altered in other ways, too. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Jews in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere were subjected to persecution and discrimination, and the rate of Jewish immigration to Israel from Arab lands rose sharply. Hitherto it had been mostly confined to Jews expelled or fleeing from the newly independent states of the Magreb; these continued to come, either directly or via France, but they were no longer a small minority of the overall population. These new Israelis not only did not share the political and cultural background of the earlier European immigrants. They had strong and distinctly unfriendly opinions about Arabs. After all, relations between Jews and Arabs in the places they had come from were often based on little more than mutual contempt. When the old Labor parties predictably failed to attract their support (or did not even bother to try), they turned to the erstwhile revisionists, whose chauvinist prejudices they could appreciate. The rise to power of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and their successors was literally unimaginable before June 1967. Now it became possible and even inexorable.

This was the irony of the victory of 1967: It was the only war Israel ever won that gave the country a real chance to shape the Middle East to everyone's advantage, its own above all -- but the very scale of the victory somehow robbed the country's leaders of imagination and initiative. The "overblown confidence" (in Oren's apt phrase) after June 1967 led to the initial disasters of the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when, unable to imagine that Arab military planning was as good as their own intelligence suggested, the Israeli general staff was caught napping. That same misplaced confidence led Israel's politicians to let policy drift in the course of the 1970s, at a time when the initiative was still very much in their hands.

(p. 284)

Short of forcibly expunging the Arab presence from every inch of soil currently controlled by Israel, the dilemma facing Israel today is the same as it was in June 1967, when the aging David Ben-Gurion advised his fellow countrymen against remaining in the conquered territories. A historic victory can wreak almost as much havoc as a historic defeat. In Abba Eban's words, "The exercise of permanent rule over a foreign nation can only be defended by an ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness that are incompatible with the ethical legacy of prophetic Judaism and classical Zionism." The risk that Israel runs today is that for many of its most vocal defenders, Zionism has become just such an "ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness" and not much more. Israel's brilliant victory of June 1967, already a classic in the annals of preemptive warfare, has borne bitter fruits for the losers and the winners alike.

The Country That Wouldn't Grow Up: 2006, Ha'aretz.

(pp. 286-287)

But the state of Israel remains curiously (and among Western-style democracies, uniquely) immature. The social transformations of the country -- and its many economic achievements -- have not brought the political wisdom that usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one "understands" it and everyone is "against" it; full of wounded amour propre, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting -- that it can do as it wishes; that its actions carry no consequences; and that it is immortal. Appropriately enough, this country that has somehow failed to grow up was until very recently still in the hands of a generation of men who were already prominent in its public affairs forty years ago: an Israeli Rip van Winkle who fell asleep in, say, 1967 would be surprised indeed to awake in 2006 and find Shimon Peres and General Ariel Sharon still hovering over the affairs of the country -- the latter albeit only in spirit.

(pp. 287-289)

Why should embattled Israel even acknowledge such foreign criticism, much less act upon it? They -- gentiles, Muslims, Lefties -- have reasons of their own for disliking Israel. They -- Europeans, Arabs, Fascists -- have always singled out Israel for special criticism. Their motives are timeless. They haven't changed. Why should Israel change?

But they have changed. And it is this change -- which has passed largely unrecognized within Israel -- to which I want to draw attention here. Before 1967 the state of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated: certainly not in the West. [ . . . ]

I remember well, in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War -- and how little attention anyone paid either tot he condition of the Palestinians or to Israel's earlier collusion with France and Britain in the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. In politics and in policymaking circles only old-fashioned conservative Arabists expressed any criticism of the Jewish state; even neo-Fascists rather favored Zionism, on traditional anti-Semitic grounds. [ . . . ]

But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that Israel's victory in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakbar: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and put them on display to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations," the Wall: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer terminal or a satellite dish -- which means that Israel's behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel. Until very recently the carefully burnished image of an ultramodern society -- built by survivors and pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats -- still held sway over international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.

Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated, and stateless. In itself this unsought distinction does little to advance the Palestinian case (any more than it ever helped Jews); but it has redefined Israel forever. It has become commonplace to compare Israel to an occupying colonizer, at worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans. In this capacity Israel elicits scant sympathy even when its own citizens suffer: dead Israelis -- like the occasional assassinated South African white in the apartheid era, or British colonists hacked to death by native insurgents -- are typically perceived abroad not as the victims of terrorism but as the collateral damage of their own government's mistaken policies.

Such comparisons are lethal to Israel's moral credibility. [ . . . ] [T]oday the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture.

(pp. 290-291)

The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess, but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized -- but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" -- it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts; the occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation; and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.

(p. 292)

The fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to engineer a sea change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S. It is becoming clear to prominent thinkers across the political spectrum -- from erstwhile neoconservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama to hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer -- that in recent years the United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international political influence and an unprecedented degradation of its moral image. The country's foreign undertakings have been self-defeating and even irrational. There is going to be a long work of repair ahead, above all in Washington's dealings with economically and strategically vital communities and regions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And this reconstruction of the country's foreign image and influence cannot hope to succeed while its foreign policy is tied by an umbilical cord to the needs and interests (if that is what they are) of one small Middle Eastern country of very little relevance to America's long-term concerns -- a country that is, in the words of the Mersheimer/Walt essay, a strategic burden: "a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states."

Part Four: The American (Half-) Century

An American Tragedy? The Case of Whittaker Chambers: 1997, New Republic, a review of Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography.

(p. 312)

Chambers's tragedy was that his years in the entrails of the Communist movement were the high point of his life. He remained obsessed with the 1930s, he saw his own and humanity's history through the prism of the choices and the commitments of that decade, and he was crucified for that obsession by generations to come. He really did feel a duty to bear witness, but he suffered deeply for the pain and the publicity that he brought upon himself, his family, and his former friends. Tanenhaus shows just how greatly Chambers agonized over whether to tell what he knew, and it is hard to resist the thought that there is an element of Shakespearean tragedy in this otherwise unremarkable man trapped in an unforgiving era.

The Crisis: Kennedy, Krushchev, and Cuba: 1998, New York Review of Books.

(p. 321)

A year later, by the time of the Cuban crisis, the Soviet Union was at a seventeen-to-one disadvantage in intercontinental missiles.

Krushchev knew this, and he knew that the Americans knew it. In John Gaddis's words, he "Understood more clearly than Kennedy that the West was winning the cold war." The Soviet resumption of atmospheric testing in August 1961 -- followed by the U.S. decision to follow suit in April 1962 -- did nothing to allay Krushchev's sense of military inferiority (to which should be added his domestic agricultural failures and the chorus of Chinese attacks on Soviet "revisionism"). The temptation to place medium-range missiles (with which the Soviet Union was well supplied) just off the Florida coast seemed irresistible. After all, the U.S. had bases all around the frontiers of the USSR. As Krushchev complained to U.S. Ambassador Thompson in April 1961, "The USA . . . believes that it has the right to put military bases along the borders of the USSR" -- and a few Soviet missiles up against America's borders would serve it right. "The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you."

Several pages here quote from The Kennedy Tapes, particularly interesting in terms of who's gung ho for war -- the military service chiefs ("with General LeMay's remarks bordering on insolence"), with Gen. Maxwell Taylor backing off a bit; Dean Acheson, Douglas Dillon; Senators Richard Russell and William Fulbright; McGeorge Bundy (who asked hard questions about risks and went for them anyway) -- and who wasn't -- professional diplomats, like Llewellyn Thompson; Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara; Lyndon Johnson; George Ball; and after initial temper tantrums, Robert Kennedy. Then there was JFK (pp. 336-337)

John F. Kennedy's position is more troubling. His own posturing, no less than that of Krushchev, got the U.S. into its Cuban imbroglio in the first place, and it was in large measure Kennedy's need to seem strong, his concern for "credibility," that fueled the rhetoric swirling around Washington in the autumn of 1962. He was a young president, under great pressure to do the "right" thing, possessing imperfect information about a possible threat to his country's security, and advised by a mixed group of men (many of them older and more experienced) who had in common only their frequently reiterated awareness that this was a major crisis and that the fate of the world hung upon their decisions.

And yet, The Kennedy Tapes reveal a remarkable coolness in John Kennedy, a willingness and a capacity to listen, question, absorb, weigh, and finally adjudicate in extraordinary circumstances. At each turn in the proceedings, Kennedy chose the most moderate available option, sometimes against the specialized advice pressing in upon him. Instead of an invasion he favored an air strike on missile bases; instead of a blanket air strike he favored selective strikes only; he insisted that no strikes, however selective, should happen until warning had been given. He opted for a naval blockade over immediate military action, and a partial naval quarantine over a blanket blockade on all shipping.

It was at Kennedy's insistence that an innocuous ship of non-Soviet registry was targeted for a symbolic exercise of the quarantine, and he pressed his staff to obtain all possible legal and international support in advance of even that limited action. He ignored suggestions that the U.S. might take advantage of the quarantine to seize Soviet ships carrying missiles in order to learn more about the Soviet weapons program. He rebuffed all pressure to respond aggressively when Captain Rudolf Anderson's U-2 was shot down over Cuba on October 27, and repeatedly postponed the confidential deadline after which the countdown to U.S. military intervention would begin. He welcomed the opportunity to use the Jupiter missiles in Turkey as a secret bargaining ploy and even authorized his secretary of state to have the United Nations urge him publicly to accept such a trade if all else failed. And just to be sure that there were no mistakes, on October 27 he instructed that those same Jupiter missiles be defused so that if he had to authorize air strikes on Cuba, and the Soviets responded by an attack on the Turkish missile sites, there would be minimal risk of further escalation.

Each of these decisions was taken in the face of criticism from some quarter among his advisers and generals -- according to George Ball the defusing of the Jupiters was ordered "much to the disgust of those eager for dramatic action." With hindsight we can see that Kennedy managed to obtain the best possible outcome in the circumstances. He was not just lucky, either, pace Acheson -- he was consistent. [ . . . ]

Of course Kennedy's motives were never unmixed, and, like any politician, he sought to turn his management of the affair into a political asset. He presented himself, and his colleagues and admirers presented him, as the man who "face down" the Soviets, who drew a line in the sand, who won the first phase of the cold war; in Dean Rusk's words, spoken on Thursday, October 25, when the Soviet ships turned back, "We [were] eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow just blinked."

The Illusionist: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy: 1998, New York Review of Books, review of William Bundy, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency.

(pp. 349-350)

In order to keep direct control over everything in this way, Nixon and Kissinger did not just deceive others as to their actions; they were also, Bundy suggests, less effective than they might have been even in matters that interested them. As for places and problems in which they had no sustained interest, or about which they knew very little, the outcomes were disastrous. They were blindsided, for example, by the oil crisis of 1973-74 because, Bundy writes, neither man grasped the connection between domestic demand, U.S. domestic oil production, and the changing terms of trade in international energy (the U.S. share of world oil production fell from 64 percent in 1948 to 22 percent by 1972, even as U.S. domestic usage steadily rose). Oil -- like trade, or small, peripheral countries -- did not figure in their view of what counted or how the world worked, and they were consistently ineffectual or wrong, through either inaction or badly conceived policy, when faced with such matters.

Whose Story Is It? The Cold War in Retrospect: 2006, New York Review of Books, review of John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History.

(pp. 368-369)

The cold war, in Gaddis's account, was both inevitable and necessary. The Soviet empire and its allies could not be rolled back, but they had to be contained. The resulting standoff lasted forty years. A lot of time and money was spent on nuclear weapons and the cautious new strategic thinking to which they gave rise. Partly for this reason, there were no major wars (though there were a number of nerve-wracking confrontations). In the end -- thanks to greater resources, a vastly more attractive political and economic model, and the initiative of a few good men (and one good woman) -- the right side won. Since then, new complications have arisen, but we can at least be grateful to have said goodbye to all that.

(pp. 369-370)

Until the fall of the Soviet Union, such unbalanced accounts were the norm. Little reliable information was available about Soviet thinking. Political observers were thus reduced either to "Kremlinology" -- scouring speeches, newspaper editorials, and podium lineups -- or else to deducing Communist behavior from Marxist principles. But as Gaddis himself has demonstrated elsewhere, we now know quite a lot about the thinking behind Soviet policies -- rather more, in fact, than we do about some Western undertakings, thanks to the opening of Communist archives. So if The Cold War: A New History is so heavily weighted toward an American perspective, this cannot be an effect of unbalanced sources.

It turns out to be the product of a decidedly partial viewpoint. Gaddis is an unapologetic triumphalist. America won the cold war because Americans deserved to win it. Unlike the Russians, they were "impatient with hierarchy, at least with flexibility, and profoundly distrustful of the notion that theory should determine practice rather than the other way around."

(pp. 371-372)

As a result, this is a book whose silences are especially suggestive. The "third world" in particular comes up short. How we look at international history is always in some measure a function of where we stand. But it takes a uniquely parochial perspective -- and one ill-becoming someone described by Michael Beschloss in the New York Times Book Review as "a scholar of extraordinary gifts" offering "his long-awaited retrospective verdict on the cold war" -- to publish a history of the cold war containing not even an index entry for Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, Grenada, or El Salvador, nor to speak of Mozambique, the Congo, or Indonesia. Major events in Iran -- where the CIA's 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq is still held against the U.S. -- and Guatemala (where the U.S. toppled Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán on June 27, 1954, precipitating decades of armed and bloody conflict) each receive passing acknowledgments from Gaddis, summarized thus: "The consequences, in both regions, proved costly."

Indeed so. But those costs are never analyzed, much less incorporated into the author's evaluation of the cold war as a whole. For Gaddis, as for so many American politicians and statesmen, the "third world" was a sideshow, albeit one in which hundreds of thousands of the performers got killed. And he seems to believe that whatever unfortunate developments took place in the course of these peripheral scuffles, they were confined to the cold war's early years. Later, things improved: "The 1970s were not the 1950s." Well, yes they were -- in El Salvador, for example, not to mention Chile. But this sort of tunnel vision, tipping most of the world offstage and focusing exclusively upon Great Power confrontations in Europe or East Asia, is the price Gaddis pays for placing himself firmly in Washington, D.C., when "thinking" the cold war. For the other superpower saw the cold war very differently.

Seen from Moscow, the cold war was in very substantial measure about the non-European world. While President Kennedy and his advisers worried in October 1962 that Nikita Krushchev's Cuban missiles were a diversionary prelude to an attack on Berlin, the Soviet leadership (who were irritated by their East German clients and really didn't care much about Berlin except as a diplomatic pawn) dreamed of a revolutionary front in Latin America. "For a quarter of a century," one expert writes, "the KGB, unlike the CIA, believed that the Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold War." In pursuit of local influence on the African continent, Moscow fueled a huge arms boom there from the early seventies through the onset of perestroika. Indeed, it is precisely those African countries most corrupted by the "proxy" wars of the later cold war that were to become the "failed states" of our own time -- one of a number of ways in which the cold war and the post-cold war eras are intimately intertwined, although you would not learn this from Gaddis.

(pp. 373-375)

Gaddis pays more attention to the nations within the Soviet bloc itself.But what he has to say about them, though well intentioned, inspires little confidence. Václav Havel is described as "the most influential chronicler of his generation's disillusionment with communism." But Havel suffered no such disillusionment: He never was a Communist. The rather isolated son of a wealthy family, dispossessed and discriminated against by the Communist authorities, Václav Havel took no part in his contemporaries' flirtation with Marxism. [ . . . ] A more influential and representative chronicler of his generation's lost illusions and post-Communist trajectory would be Havel's Polish fellow dissident Adam Michnik, or even the Hungarian economist János Kornai. But neither is mentioned by Gaddis. [ . . . ]

And indeed, when it comes to Eastern Europe under Communism, Gaddis does little more than hastily recycle received wisdom. In a work of 333 pages, Tito's break with Stalin gets just one paragraph; the Hungarian revolution of 1956 merits a mere twenty-seven lines (whereas page after page is devoted to Watergate); meanwhile, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan ("one of its [the U.S.'s] sharpest strategists ever") are credited at some length with bringing down Communism. As for Mikhail Gorbachev, Gaddis's account of him gives the Reagan administration full credit for many of Gorbachev's own opinions, ideas, and achievements -- as well it might, since in this section of the book Gaddis is paraphrasing and citing Secretary of State George Shultz's memoirs. Here and elsewhere, as the Communist regimes fall like bowling pins and the U.S. emerges resplendent, vindicated and victorious, The Cold War: A New History reads like the ventriloquized autobiography of an Olympic champion.

(pp. 375-376)

Had Gaddis thought more about spies and spying, he might have avoided one particularly revealing error that highlights his self-confinement within the straitjacket of American domestic experience. Although there is only one mention in his book of McCarthyism, Gaddis uses that occasion to write that "it was not at all clear that the western democracies themselves could retain the tolerance for dissent and the respect for civil liberties that distinguished them from the dictators." But Senator Joseph McCarthy was an American original. There was no McCarthyism in Britain, or France, or Norway, or Italy, or the Netherlands. Numerous victims of McCarthyism -- whether actors, singers, musicians, playwrights, trade unionists, or history professors -- came to live in Western Europe in these years and flourished there. Tolerance and civil liberties were not under threat in all "the western democracies." They were under threat in the United States. There is a difference.

During the first decade of the cold war, espionage, subversion, and Communist takeovers in distant lands were perceived by many in the U.S. as a direct challenge to the "American Way of Life"; Senator McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the Republican Party were able to exploit the security issue in cold war America by pointing to real spies (Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs) as well as imagined ones. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, Klaus Fuchs, George Blake, Guy Burgess, Donald McLean, Anthony Blunt, and above all Kim Philby betrayed their country, their colleagues, and hundreds of their fellow agents. Between them they did far more damage to Western interests than any American spy until Aldrich Ames. Yet the serial revelation of their treason -- beginning with the arrest of Fuchs in 1950 -- aroused remarkably little public anxiety. It certainly never provoked in Britain collective paranoia and political conformism on the scale that seized the U.S. in these same years.

(pp. 378-381)

The cold war may have begun, in a formal sense, in the late 1940s, but its intensity and its longevity only make sense if we understand that it had far older sources. The confrontation between Leninist Communism and the Western democracies dates to 1919; and in countries where Communism struck root in the local labor movement and among the intellectual elite (notably Czechoslovakia, France, and India) it is more coherently thought of as having a domestic history that extends from World War I into the 1980s. In the Soviet Union itself the basic strategies to be deployed in relations with "bourgeois democracies" were forged not in the 1940s but in the 1920s.

Thus détente, which John Gaddis misleadingly presents as an innovation of the seventies -- a response to the generational revolts and democratic movements of the previous decade -- in fact had its origins in the "wars of position" in which Soviet leaders ever since Lenin saw themselves as engaging against the more powerful West: sometimes taking a conciliatory line (e.g., between 1921 and 1926, during the Popular Fronts of 1934 to 1939, and again at points in the later fifties and early seventies), sometimes presenting an uncompromising "front" -- as in the so-called Third Period between 1927 and 1934 and again during the frosty "Two Cultures" standoff between 1947 and 1953. Moreover, détente, too, has its paradoxes: An externally conciliatory Soviet position was often accompanied by (and helped camouflage) the reimposition of domestic repression, as during the Popular Front years or during the antidissident crackdown of the early 1970s.

To ignore the prehistory of cold war politics in this way is to miss some of the most interesting aspects of the story. But perhaps the most revealing of all Gaddis's omissions is his refusal to make the link between the cold war and what has happened since. He is quite explicit about this: "Nor does [this] book attempt to locate roots, within the Cold War, of such post-Cold War phenomena as globalization, ethnic cleansing, religious extremism, terrorism or the information revolution." But with the partial exception of the information revolution, these, pace Gaddis, are not "post-Cold War phenomena." Under the guise of proxy confrontations from Central America to Indonesia, both "pacification" and ethnic cleansing -- not to speak of religious struggles -- were a continuous accompaniment to the cold war. The mass killings of hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Guatemala are just two egregious examples among many. And no one who knew anything about (or had merely lived in) the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, India, Colombia, Algeria, or anywhere in the Middle East could for one minute suppose that "terrorism" was a "post-Cold War phenomenon."

On the contrary: Far from "settl[ing] fundamental issues once and for all," as Gaddis would have us believe, the cold war has an intimate, unfinished relationship with the world it left behind: whether for the vanquished Russians, whose troubled postimperial frontier zones from Afghanistan and Chechnya to Armenia, Abkhazia, and Modova are the unhappy heirs to Stalinist ethnic cleansing and Moscow's heedless exploitation of local interest and divisions; or for the victorious Americans, whose unconstrained military monopoly ought to have made of the U.S. a universally welcome international policeman but which is instead -- thanks to cold war memories as well as the Bush administration's mistakes -- the source of an unprecedented level of popular anti-Americanism.

Indeed, the errors of America's own post-cold war governments have deep pre-1989 roots. The military buildup and rhetorical overkill of the cold war had their uses in the strategic game playing of those decades and in the need to repress (or reassure) client states and their constituencies. In Washington during the early cold war, influential men talked loudly of bringing democracy and freedom to Eastern Europe. But when the crunch came, in November 1956, they did nothing (and had never intended to do anything, though they neglected to explain this in advance to Hungary's doomed insurgents). Today things are very different. Big promises of support for democracy and liberty are no longer constrained by risk of nuclear war or even of a Great Power confrontation; but the habit is still with us. During the cold war, however, we were -- on the whole -- "against" something, reacting to a challenge. Now we are proactive, we are "for" something: an inherently more adventurous and risky position, however vague our objective.

If Gaddis does not pursue these thoughts it is probably because he is not much troubled by them. To judge from what he has to say about the past, he is unlikely to lose sleep over presidential abuses of power in the present or future. Indeed, Gaddis admonishes Americans for placing restrictions on their elected rulers. [ . . . ] Retrospectively frustrated by such constraints, Gaddis admires the boldness and vision of President George W. Bush. A keen supporter of the recent Iraq war, Gaddis in 2004 even published a guide for the use of American policymakers, showing how preemptive and preventive war making has an honorable place in American history and is to be encouraged -- where appropriate -- as part of an ongoing project of benevolent interventionism.

The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America: 2006, London Review of Books.

(pp. 385-386)

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary USA can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the sixties generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security. The signatories of the New York Times advertisement [from 1988: Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Irving Howe, etc.] were born, in most cases, many years earlier, their political opinions shaped by the thirties above all. Their commitments were the product of experience and adversity and made of sterner stuff. The disappearance of the liberal center in American politics is also a direct outcome of the deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic politics liberals once believed in the provision of welfare, good government, and social justice. In foreign affairs they had a long-standing commitment to international law, negotiation, and the importance of moral example. Today a spreading me-first consensus has replaced vigorous public debate in both arenas. And like their political counterparts, the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.

This process was well under way before September 11, 2001 -- and in domestic affairs at least, Bill Clinton and his calculated policy "triangulations" must carry some responsibility for the evisceration of liberal politics. But since then the moral and intellectual arteries of the American body politic have hardened further. Magazines and newspapers of the mainstream liberal center -- e.g., the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times itself -- fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America's liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause.

By which Judt means support for the War on Terror. He samples them in subsequent paragraphs: Paul Berman, Peter Beinart, Christopher Hitchens (a liberal?), Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick, Thomas Friedman, Jacob Weisberg, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Walzer; he adds some Europeans: Adam Michnik, Oriana Fallaci, Václav Havel, André Glucksmann. In the afterword, Judt notes that he got a lot of flack "from leftist intellectuals who felt underappreciated in their continued opposition to President Bush"; he responded: "I had restricted my discussion to intellectuals with significant public influence or readership, i.e., those who mattered." Seems to me that he's confusing effect with cause here, and that he's conflating two separate problems: the overall decline in the liberal intelligentsia in the US -- which I suspect is less a real numerical decline than an estrangement from power as political bases have been increasingly captured by relative conservatives -- and the long-term split within liberal ranks between hawks and doves, which was at least as prominent during the 1960s as today -- and which in both cases trended antiwar as the initial flush of belligerence turned sour. What certainly is true from 2001-03 is that any liberal so inclined had little or no trouble finding a soapbox to promote the war from.

(pp. 387-388)

Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he "didn't realize" (!) how detrimental American actions would be to "the struggle" but insists notwithstanding that anyone who won't stand up to "Global Jihad" just isn't a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, in the Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq war of failing "to take the wider global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously at all." The only people qualified to speak in this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of -- indeed because of -- your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: "You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong."

(p. 391)

This blind spot obscures and risks polluting and obliterating every traditional liberal concern and inhibition. How else can one explain the appalling cover illustration of the New Republic of August 7, 2006: a lurid depiction of Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah in the anti-Semitic style of Der Stürmer crossed with more than a touch of the "Dirty Jap" cartoons of World War II? How else is one to account for the convoluted, sophistic defense by Leon Wieseltier in the same journal of the killing of Arab children in Q'ana ("These are not tender times")? But the blind spot is not just ethical, it is also political: If American liberals "didn't realize" just why their war in Iraq would have the predictable effect of promoting terrorism, benefiting the Iranian ayatollahs, and turning Iraq into Lebanon, then we should not expect them to understand (or care) that Israel's brutal overreaction risks turning Lebanon into Iraq.

The Good Society: Europe vs. America: 2006, New York Review of Books.

(p. 404)

Tony Blair is a political tactician with a lucrative little sideline in made-to-measure moralizing. But his international adventures, the invasion of Iraq in particular, have alienated Britain from many of its fellow EU members without gaining any influence over Washington, where the British prime minister's visits have been exercises in futility and humiliation. Yes, in certain respects the UK today has real affinities with America: The scale of poverty in Britain, and the income gap between rich and poor, has grown steadily since the 1970s and is closer to that of the U.S. than anything found in Western Europe. British hourly productivity is well below most Western European rates. However, New Labour was supposed to combine the best of the European social model and American entrepreneurship: Garton Ash himself concedes it has not quite managed this.

(p. 405)

Moreover, the common European-American values upon which Timothy Garton Ash's argument rests may not be quite as common as he suggests. In its widespread religiosity and the place of God in its public affairs, its suspicion of dissent, its fear of foreign influence, its unfamiliarity with alien lands, and its reliance upon military strength when dealing with them, the U.S. does indeed have much in commonwith other countries; but none of them is in Europe. When the international treaty to ban land mines was passed by the UN in 1997 by a vote of 142-0, the U.S. abstained; in company with Russia and a handful of other countries we have still not ratified it. The U.S. is one of only two states (the other is Somalia) that have failed to ratify the 1989 Convention on Children's Rights. Our opposition to the international Biological Weapons Convention is shared by China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Cuba, and Iran.

Abolition of the death penalty is a condition for EU membership, whereas the U.S. currently executes prisoners on a scale matched only in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Congo. American opposition to an International Criminal Court has been supported in the UN and elsewhere by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Israel, and Egypt. The American doctrine of "preventive war" now finds its fraternal counterpart in Muscovite talk of "preventive counterrevolution." And as for the United Nations itself, the jewel in the crown of international agencies set in place after World War II by an earlie rgeneration of American leaders: As I write (2005), a scurrilous, high-decibel campaign is being mounted form Washington to bring down Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, and cripple his institution.

Envoi: The Social Question Redivivus: 1997, Foreign Affairs.

(pp. 414-415)

But even if global market forces worked as advertised, they could not forcibly transform Europe's public policy, because its dilemmas are not essentially economic. There are now more than eighteen million officially unemployed people in the European Union. Yet finding jobs for them is not the most serious social question in Europe today -- and if jobs were found by significant reductions in wages and benefits, the better to compete with the costs of jobs in other places, the real problems would worsen. Seventeen percent of the present population of the EU lives below the official poverty line (defined as an income less than 50 percent of the average in a person's country of residence). Significantly, the highest level of official poverty, after Portugal, is in Great Britain, where 22 percent of the population -- over 14 million people -- lives below the poverty line; yet Britain has the best record on job creation in the EU in the past half-decade.

The social crisis, then, concerns not so much unemployment as what the French call the "excluded." This term describes people who, having left the full-time workforce, or never having joined it, are in a certain sense only partly members of the national community. It is not their material poverty, but the way in which they exist outside the conventional channels of employment or security, and with little prospect of reentering these channels or benefiting from the social liaisons that accompany them, that distinguishes them from even the poorest among the unskilled workforce in the industrial economy. Such people -- whether single parents, part-time or short-term workers, immigrants, unskilled adolescents, or prematurely and forcibly retired manual workers -- cannot live decently, participate in the culture of their local or national community, or offer their children prospects better than their own.

Their living and working conditions preclude attention to anything beyond survival, and they are, or ought to be, a standing remonstrance to the affluence of their "included" fellows. In France, where there are 3.5 million officially unemployed and a further 4 million in precarious work, fully 30 percent of the active population are exclus. The figures are significantly lower only in Scandinavia, where the welfare systems of better days are still substantially in place, albeit trimmed. Under any present version of the neoliberal project -- budget cuts, deregulation, etc. -- the numbers of the precarious, the excluded, and the poor (disproportionately present in communities of recent immigrant origin) are likely to increase, because work is disappearing in precisely the places, and at the occupations and skill levels, where most of the vulnerable population of Europe is now concentrated and will remain for the next generation.

(pp. 417-418)

In late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain, the visible havoc wreaked on the land and the people by unrestricted economic forces was noted, regretted, and opposed by poets and radicals from Oliver Goldsmith to William Cobbett. The problem of the excluded -- landless laborers, pauperized weavers, unemployed bricklayers, homeless children -- was attacked in various ways, culminating in the New Poor Law of 1834, which introduced the workhouse and the principle of least eligibility, whereby relief for the unemployed and indigent was to be inferior in quality and quantity to the lowest prevailing wages and conditions of employment, a model of welfare "reform" to which President Bill Clinton's recent legislation is directly, if perhaps unknowingly, indebted. The conventional arguments against state intervention were widely rehearsed: The free workings of the economy would eventually address the distortions attendant on agriculture enclosure or mechanization: the regulation of working hours or conditions would render firms uncompetitive; labor should be free to come and go, like capital; the "undeserving" poor (those who refused available work) should be penalized, etc.

But after a brush with revolt during the economic depression of the 1840s, British governments adjusted their sights and enacted a series of reforms driven in equal measure by ethical sensibilities and political prudence. By the later years of the century the erstwhile minimalist British state had set upper limits on working hours in factories, a minimum age for child employment, and regulations concerning conditions of work in a variety of industries. The vote had been granted to a majority of adult males, and the labor and political organizations that the working population had struggled to establish had been legalized -- so that in time they ceased to be disruptive to the workings of capitalism and became effective sources of social integration and political stability. The result was not planned, but it is incontrovertible: British capitalism thrived not in spite of regulatory mechanisms but because of them.

posted 2008-08-06

Tony Judt: What Have We Learned, If Anything? A non-review essay in the May 1, 2008 New York Review of Books. I suspect it's actually a piece in Judt's new essay collection, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008, Penguin Books). The whole essay is worth reading, but several paragraphs stand out.

After talking about the tendency to remember the century either as triumph or tragedy (p. 16):

The expansion of communication offers a case in point. Until the last decades of the twentieth century most people in the world had limited access to information; but -- thanks to national education, state-controlled radio and television, and a common print culture -- within any one state or nation or community people were all likely to know many of the same things. Today, the opposite applies. Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data. But in the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the fragmented information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our forebears.

All of this is surely true -- and it has disturbing implications for the future of democratic governance. Nevertheless, disruptive change, even global transformation, is not in itself unprecedented. The economic "globalization" of the late nineteenth century was no less turbulent, except that its implications were initially felt and understood by far fewer people. What is significant about the present age of transformations is the unique insouciance with which we have abandoned not merely the practices of the past but their very memory. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.

For me, the most glaring example of what has been hastily forgotten is class struggle and the inherent limits of capitalism, which have quickly been swept under the rug with the failure of the Soviet Union.

But Judt is thinking more of war (p. 18):

War was not just a catastrophe in its own right; it brought other horrors in its wake. World War I led to an unprecedented militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a cult of death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the ground for the political disasters that followed. States and societies seized during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The very structures of civilized life -- regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges -- disappeared or else took on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading source of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors, colleagues, community, or leaders, collapsed. Behavior that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances -- theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of their suffering -- became not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself. Dissent or opposition was stifled by universal fear.

War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War -- total war -- has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. The first primitive concentration camps were set up by the British during the Boer War of 1899-1902. Without World War I there would have been no Armenian genocide and it is highly unlikely that either communism or fascism would have seized hold of modern states. Without World War II there would have been no Holocaust. Absent the forcible involvement of Cambodia in the Vietnam War, we would never have heard of Pol Pot. As for the brutalizing effect of war on ordinary soldiers themselves, this of course has been copiously documented.

Next paragraph opens a new section (p. 18)

The United States avoided almost all of that. Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat. Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.

This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May-June 1940. In the US Army's costliest engagement of the century -- the Ardennes offensive of December 1944-January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge") -- 19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

Judt doesn't mention this, but that number is significantly less (but on the same order of magnitude) as 9/11. That may help explain the shock of the 9/11 attacks, although I suspect that the blow that actually mattered was to the ego of the world's sole so-called superpower. Judt continues (p. 18)

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand -- in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies -- seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

In conclusion (p. 20)

Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again -- or perhaps for the first time -- how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?

There's an old saying about those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. The corollary is that they'll be blindsided and dumbstruck by it. I remember Vietnam way too well. While I feel bad about those 58,195 names on the wall (some of whom I knew) and about the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotions who were killed and maimed, the most sinister and pervasive effect of the war was the wedge that it drove between people revulsed by it, like me, and those who even today continue to justify and rationalize it. With so many bad things that have happened to America traceable back to Vietnam, you'd think we'd start to learn from the experience. Rather, all I see is effort not just to forget but to backtrack into misrepresentation and ignorance.

posted 2008-04-18