Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Jim Yardley: China's Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change
Katia Bachko: Déjà Vu All Over Again ... Olympics coverage in 1980 and now
Mark Z. Barabak: Obama, McCain Find Race Issue Isn't Easily Discarded
John Pilger: The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century
Marcus Warren: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Communism’s deadliest foe
Ruth Marcus: The Even-handedness in Professor Obama's Law Exams
Michael Scammell: Russia's literary light who illuminated dark world of Soviet regime
Juliet Eilperin and Jonathan Weisman: Race Proves to Be Unwelcome but Persistent Issue
Richard Byrne: The Selling of the President 1968 remains a vital cultural and historical document
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Jim Yardley: China's Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change
Source: International Herald Tribune (8-7-08)
As Beijing was starting construction on its main Olympic stadiums four years ago, China's vice president and leading political fixer, Zeng Qinghong, warned the 70 million members of the ruling Communist Party that the party itself could use some reconstruction.
Zeng argued that the "painful lessons" from the collapse of other Communist parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could not be ignored. He said China's cadres needed to "wake up" and realize that "a party's status as a party in power does not necessarily last as long as the party does."
Zeng, who is now retired, was alluding to the pressures of economic liberalization, political stagnation and globalization that many analysts have argued would ultimately topple one-party rule in China. The Olympics also posed a pressure point, as some analysts wondered whether the expectations and international scrutiny brought by the Games might help crack open another authoritarian political system - as happened in Seoul in 1988.
But if the Olympics have presented unmistakable challenges and crises, the Communist Party has proved resilient. Public appetite for reform has not waned, but the short-term byproduct of the Olympics has been an upsurge in Chinese patriotism that bolstered the party against international criticism after its crackdown on Tibetan protesters in March and the controversy over the international Olympic torch relay.
Economic and social change is so rapid in China that the Communist Party is sometimes depicted as an overwhelmed caretaker. But in the seven years since Beijing was awarded the Games, the party has adapted and navigated its way forward, loosening its grip on elements of society even as it crushes, or co-opts, threats to its hold on political power.
The party has absorbed entrepreneurs, urban professionals and university students into an elite class that is invested in the political status quo, if not necessarily enthralled with it. Private capitalists may be symbols of a changing China. But the party has clung tenaciously to the most profitable pillar industries and the financial system, and it is not always easy to distinguish the biggest private companies from their state-run counterparts in China's hybrid economy.
Faced with public anger over corruption, Chinese officials are now required to attend annual training sessions in a nationwide, if not always successful, program to raise competency and promote accountability. And if officials long since abandoned Maoist-style thought control, the propaganda machine can still stir up nationalist passions or shut them off, depending on the party's priorities. It relentlessly positions the party as the guardian of national pride, proving adept at the task even in the more freewheeling era of the Internet.
"This is a very reflective party," said David Shambaugh, a political scientist at George Washington University. "They are adaptive, reflective and open, within limits. But survival is the bottom line. And they see survival as an outcome of adaptation."
The ultimate question is whether adaptation alone is enough. Many analysts say the lack of democratic reform is constraining China's economic efficiency and that reforms are needed to confront issues like stark inequality and environmental degradation. Thousands of protests erupt every year over illegal land seizures and official corruption.
The Tibet crisis revealed Chinese nationalism as a major political force, even as it exposed unresolved domestic issues about freedom of religion and minority rights. To some analysts, the harsh official response to Tibet revealed an insecure, defensive leadership.
"The party doesn't have self-confidence in its legitimacy," said Zhang Xianyang, a liberal political analyst in Beijing. "So the government overreacts in the face of social turbulence. I think the regime is not as strong as outsiders and the common people think. But they are not as weak as they feel themselves."
For the Communist Party, China's selection in July 2001 as host of the 2008 Olympics was a political and historic coup: a gift they could deliver to a thrilled citizenry and a new focal point, seven years in the distant future, which could be used to rally national pride.
Inside the party, leaders were intently focused on the viability of their system. The party faced no organized opposition; none is allowed. But the leadership, fretting about historical trends, had commissioned exhaustive autopsies of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. By June 2001, a month before the Olympic announcement, the Communist Party's Central Committee organization department, which oversees party promotions and training, published a blunt report that revealed deep public anger and recommended "system reforms" to address official corruption and incompetence.
China's economy was soaring, and the country was preparing to join the World Trade Organization. But if free trade could help China's exports, the party report also warned that deeper integration into the world economy "may bring growing dangers and pressures, and it can be predicted that in the ensuing period the number" of public protests "may jump, severely harming social stability."
The dismantling of the planned economy had already presented an ideological challenge: What to do about the emerging class of capitalists who were rapidly accruing wealth? Admitting capitalists struck old-guard Marxists as apostasy, but it made smart politics for a party leery of any group emerging as a rival for power. Less than two weeks before the Olympic announcement, former President Jiang Zemin chose the party's 80th anniversary to declare that capitalists should be invited to join its ranks...
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Katia Bachko: Déjà Vu All Over Again ... Olympics coverage in 1980 and now
Source: Columbia Journalism Review (8-6-08)
[Katia Bachko is a writer, editor, reporter and reader based in New York City.]
The year was 1980, and the United States was boycotting the Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Correspondents from the USSR filed stories about the difficulty getting press accreditation, government restrictions on the media, the plight of the local populace and the removal of political dissidents from the cities.
Fast forward 28 years, and dispatches from Beijing ring all too familiar. Here are a few excerpts from articles published in 1980s and their modern counterparts. Meanwhile, fighting in Afghanistan continues.
Communism Can Control the Weather?
Then: Right now the entire village is swept by steady, daily rain. But officials insist even the weather will clear for the games.—Christian Science Monitor, July 15, 1980
Now: But Chinese officials downplayed the forecast and said the games must go on. “Before and immediately after August 8, we will not see persistent heavy rainfall,” said Wang Jianjie, deputy director of the meteorological bureau.—New York Post, August 4, 2008
Locals won’t attend the games
Then: Most will be unable to buy tickets to the Games or to the large program of cultural events planned for Olympic visitors. Although the U.S.-led boycott has cut heavily into the number of Western visitors, thousands of foreigners will still be pouring into the city.—Associated Press, July 14, 1980
Now: I recently asked a good friend, a 60-year-old Beijing chef, if she was looking forward to the Olympics. As we walked down a back alley after a trip to the market, she told me that she did not have tickets to any of the events, and that she did not know anyone who does.
“The Olympics and the lao bai xin” — the common folk — “are two separate things,” she replied. “I’m not concerned with the Olympics. I’m more worried about where I’m going to get my oil, rice, meat and vegetables.”—The New York Times, August 4, 2008
Protestors and other undesirables are removed
Then:About 50 dissident activists, including Dr. Andrei Sakharov, have been arrested, exiled, tried, imprisoned, or otherwise removed from the streets of the five games cities since last November. KGB agents make it clear dissidents may not remain in Moscow during the games.— Christian Science Monitor, July 16, 1980
Now:It is common for Chinese authorities to chase out petitioners during key events, such as the Communist Party congresses, but the intensity of the current effort is unprecedented, petitioners say.
“They are cracking down on us more than ever before. They regard us as enemies who will disrupt the stability of the country,” said Li Li, 44, from Shanxi, who has been petitioning for seven years over her husband’s firing from a management job at a steel plant. —Los Angeles Times, August 5, 2008
Increased police and military presence
Then: The huge members of police, Army, and KGB officials in Moscow is one of the phenomena of the games so far. They are ensuring priority for games traffic and isolating local people from tourists.
Some Soviet sources believe the normal number of uniformed police in Moscow is about 80,000 (1 for every 100 people.) The number seems to have tripled, putting the number of uniformed personnel at 240,000, excluding Army and KGB.—Christian Science Monitor, July 14, 1980
Now:China has laid on massive security for the games that kick off Aug. 8, as much to prevent protests by political or religious dissidents as to stop crime and terrorism. A 100,000-strong force of police and special forces are safeguarding venues.
Hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents have also been formed into voluntary security patrols.
In addition, a force of 34,000 soldiers has been positioned in Beijing and other cities such as Shanghai that are hosting Olympic events, Senior Col. Tian Yixiang, of the Olympics security command center, told reporters. —Associated Press, August 1, 2008...
Asra Q. Nomani: You Still Can't Write About Muhammad
Source: WSJ (8-6-08)
[Ms. Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the author of "Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam"]
Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha's life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of "The Jewel of Medina" -- a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet's harem.
It's not going to happen: In May, Random House abruptly called off publication of the book. The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.
Random House feared the book would become a new "Satanic Verses," the Salman Rushdie novel of 1988 that led to death threats, riots and the murder of the book's Japanese translator, among other horrors. In an interview about Ms. Jones's novel, Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said that it "disturbs us that we feel we cannot publish it right now." He said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."
After consulting security experts and Islam scholars, Mr. Perry said the company decided "to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel."
This saga upsets me as a Muslim -- and as a writer who believes that fiction can bring Islamic history to life in a uniquely captivating and humanizing way. "I'm devastated," Ms. Jones told me after the book got spiked, adding, "I wanted to honor Aisha and all the wives of Muhammad by giving voice to them, remarkable women whose crucial roles in the shaping of Islam have so often been ignored -- silenced -- by historians." Last month, Ms. Jones signed a termination agreement with Random House, so her literary agent could shop the book to other publishers...
...On a May 21 conference call, Random House executive Elizabeth McGuire told the author and her agent that the publishing house had decided to indefinitely postpone publication of the novel for "fear of a possible terrorist threat from extremist Muslims" and concern for "the safety and security of the Random House building and employees."
All this saddens me. Literature moves civilizations forward, and Islam is no exception. There is in fact a tradition of historical fiction in Islam, including such works as "The Adventures of Amir Hamza," an epic on the life of Muhammad's uncle. Last year a 948-page English translation was published, ironically, by Random House. And, for all those who believe the life of the prophet Muhammad can't include stories of lust, anger and doubt, we need only read the Quran (18:110) where, it's said, God instructed Muhammad to tell others: "I am only a mortal like you."
Mark Z. Barabak: Obama, McCain Find Race Issue Isn't Easily Discarded
Source: LAT (8-6-08)
Race has bedeviled this country from the start, when the Founding Fathers ducked the slavery issue for fear of killing the nation in its cradle.
Obviously, much has changed. For one thing, Americans are seriously weighing the prospect of elevating a black man to the White House in November.
But as this past week's debate over "the race card" illustrates, there is still no subject in American politics as fraught as the color of a candidate's skin.
Angered by remarks Barack Obama made to an audience in rural Missouri, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is white, accused the Illinois senator, who is black, of using race as wedge to win support.
Democrats accused McCain of cynically turning things on their head; by crying foul, they claimed, McCain managed to put race front and center just as he was stepping up his personal attacks on Obama.
Both candidates stand to gain -- and lose -- from the testy back-and-forth, underscoring just how incendiary, and complex, racial politics remain more than 200 years after vexing the first set of American politicians.
"It is not to Barack Obama's advantage to make this a big issue," said Dan T. Carter, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, who has written extensively about race and politics. At the same time, McCain cannot afford to be seen as exploiting racial tensions for political gain, Carter said: "It is simply not acceptable to the majority of people, including many of those who may be sympathetic."
That may explain why the candidates acted the way they did: Obama ignoring McCain and leaving his initial response to aides -- who quickly shifted the subject to the economy and foreign policy -- and McCain portraying himself as the victim of a rhetorical mugging...
Sidney Blumenthal: The Strange Death of Republican America
Source: Huffington Post (8-5-08)
On July 29, President George W. Bush appeared at the Lincoln Electric Company in Euclid, Ohio, where he spoke about energy and then asked the audience for questions. The opportunity for people in a small town in the Midwest to pose a question directly to the president of the United States is a rare one, possibly a once in a lifetime experience. "And now I'd like to answer some questions, if you have any," said Bush. But his request was returned with silence. Bush filled the air with an awkward joke: "After seven-and-a-half years, if I can't figure out how to dodge them, I shouldn't..." The audience tittered nervously. Bush continued, "If you don't have any questions, I can tell you a lot of interesting stories." The crowd laughed again, but no one raised a hand. "Okay," said Bush, "I'll tell you a story."
Despite the daily tracking polls and the back-and-forth of the candidates, the underlying story of the 2008 presidential campaign remains the Bush presidency and how it brought about the end of the long era of Republican political dominance that began in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon. That story is the subject of my new book, "The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party."
Bush has the lowest sustained popularity among modern presidents. The Republican Party has fallen farther behind the Democratic Party in party identification and favorable ratings than it has in decades. Democrats are poised to make dramatic gains in their numbers in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The previously little-known Senator Barack Obama could have vaulted to become the presumptive Democratic nominee only as a response to Bush. Senator John McCain's emergence at the presumptive Republican nominee is also one of Bush's consequences. Without the crackup of the conservative movement and the fragmentation of the Republican primary field, McCain would not have had his opening. His candidacy is as much a manifestation of the shattering of the Republican phalanx as Obama's. Whatever the outcome of their contest, the party as it was is over. Today no one can even envision when the Republicans will control the presidency and both houses of the Congress as they did just two years ago.
Bush's decline is an end to more than family dynasty; it is an end of political empire. Bush, "The Decider," was the implementer of complementary radical plans for an imperial presidency and a one-party government to be ruled for generations by Republicans.
Dick Cheney, whose Secret Service code name when he was President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, "Backseat," suggested his invisible influence, was the originator of the imperial presidency. It was a overarching idea he took from the Nixon White House, when he was then counselor Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, and elaborated as vice president into a doctrine of an unaccountable and unfettered "unitary executive" that had the right unto itself even to order torture.
Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, whom he has called "The Architect" and "Turdblossom," was the designer of the grand realignment that would lock in Republican control for time immemorial.
But Bush's fiascos, from Gulf to shining Gulf, from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to FEMA in New Orleans, were the culmination of Republican ideology and have unraveled Republican strengths built up over 40 years. I explain the scope of Bush's damage to his party in a talk on July 31 at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., which can be viewed here.
Though the Republican era is drawing to an end, a new Democratic one is not inevitable. Its dawning would require not only winning the White House and the Congress but also governing together successfully, which has not been possible since Lyndon Johnson was president.
In the meantime, the growing intensity of the day-to-day campaign has turned the focus away from the Bush presidency. Bush has achieved the weird effect of being the incumbent, still responsible, and increasingly ignored as somehow irrelevant. The silence that greeted Bush in Euclid, Ohio is symptomatic of his fading while still being present. Dominating politics just a short time ago, his elusiveness can only work to the advantage of the Republicans. If the Democratic campaign allows him to escape from being in the picture it will have forgotten a cardinal law of politics that voters can be led into the future only by making the election a referendum on the past.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Hillel Italie: Solzhenitsyn Changed Story of Soviet Union
Source: Moscow Times (8-6-08)
[Hillel Italie is AP National Writer.]
The legacy of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn serves as a reminder that books can matter as much as life and death.
Solzhenitsyn never stood before a tank in Tiananmen Square, but novels such as "Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle" landed like roadblocks before Soviet might, their power confirmed and magnified by his government's determination to stop them.
"Writers are a problem, they are a great problem, thank God," said Jason Epstein, a longtime editor at Random House who worked with Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and others. "Without them, we would be lost."
Solzhenitsyn's works, many set in Stalinist prison camps, were documents of persecution; his life was an example. Few writers, in any century, so painfully lived through and recorded the events of his time. A front-line artillery captain in World War II, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin and served seven years in a labor camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia.
A change in leadership -- the 1964 ousting of Nikita Khrushchev -- again made him an enemy. When his epic study of the Soviet prison system, "The Gulag Archipelago," was published, he was arrested and deported. "Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it," he once wrote. "Mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East."
Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer whose work challenged the apartheid regime, said Solzhenitsyn's death was a "tremendous loss" to literature. "But one can only be glad that there is this marvelous array of work," she said. "The work remains for our times and all times. He was quite extraordinary in bringing to us so many examples of the confusion and pain in the world that we still see today and is very apposite in the early 21st century."
The end of the Cold War means that we may never go back to a time when one writer's fate could set off the superpowers. But the world remains alive with Solzhenitsyns, from Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, put on trial in Turkey for referring to the mass slaughter of Armenians, to Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in 2006...
George Walden: How Chairman Mao led China to humiliation
Source: Times (8-6-08)
[George Walden's book China: A Wolf in the World? is published this month.]
The small dramas of the Olympics are tending to overshadow the historic event they symbolise: China's emergence from Maoist autarky and austerity to a great power, active in the world. How did we get here, in three short decades?
Everyone knows about the 1962 Cuba crisis, but it was another near-nuclear war seven years later that did more to change the world, as I have particular reason to remember. In the spring of 1969, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, I was strolling along the hutongs (city lanes) of Beijing, a six-foot, long-nosed imperialist trying to look inconspicuous at a time of raging chauvinism. I was there to check out reports the British mission had received that the Chinese were building a network of shelters and tunnels, Vietnam-style, against a possible Soviet attack. Peering into courtyards I found that, sure enough, they were.
Tensions with Moscow had been high ever since the launch of the Cultural Revolution three years earlier. “The New Disciples of Goebbels” was a typical headline on one of the many anti-Soviet articles in The People's Daily, and Pravda was hitting back in style. To outsiders it all seemed to be so much ideological steam - till the lid blew off.
Suddenly the Sino-Soviet frontier, the longest in the world, erupted in clashes on Damansky island, a disputed stretch of the Ussuri river. According to newly released Russian military reports, 61 Soviet soldiers died in a Chinese ambush, and their corpses were mutilated. The Russians hit back so hard that, in the words of Robert Gates, CIA Director at the time, from American satellite pictures the Chinese side of the river bank was pockmarked like a moonscape.
It is a measure of the fury that the Russians felt towards Mao that Soviet reinforcements (we later learnt) had been armed with tactical nuclear weapons. And that was not all. “How would the United States react if the Soviets solved one nuclear proliferation problem by attacking China's nuclear weapon facilities?” The question was put over lunch by a Soviet GRU (military intelligence) operative to a senior American official in Washington.
The installations in question were in China's northwestern Xinjiang province, handily close to the Soviet frontier. Ironically it was Nikita Khrushchev - the biggest Russian villain in the Cultural Revolutionary canon - who had somewhat thoughtlessly supplied Mao with a nuclear capability in 1957.
Henry Kissinger took the Soviet inquiry seriously. For all the attractions of seeing China's nuclear potential eliminated (China had exploded her first device in 1964), he and President Nixon concluded that the risks of escalating nuclear exchanges outweighed the gains, and declined to give Moscow the nod. In the face of the overwhelming Soviet response Mao in any case backed down, leaving some of his Politburo members concerned about his handling of the crisis, and many a Russian general dismayed, one suspects, by the loss of a chance to hit China where it would hurt.
Still, Mao had received a reality check. “Paper tigers,” he had called nuclear weapons, but the risk of seeing his own tiger go up in flames helped to persuade him to back off smartly.
A Sino-Russian war with a nuclear dimension was averted, but the aftermath was momentous. When Zhou Enlai confirmed two years later that the Chinese were ready to welcome Richard Nixon in Beijing, the White House believed that it was fear of a Russo-American accommodation that was driving China. “They're scared of the Russians. That's got to be it,” Nixon told Kissinger. And he was right...
John Pilger: The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century
Source: Guardian (8-6-08)
[John Pilger has been a war correspondent, film-maker and author.]
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
Jon Meacham: The South Just Ain't That Different Anymore
Source: Newsweek (8-5-08)
In a self-interview entitled "Questions They Never Asked Me," Walker Percy once unleashed the frustrations of years of sitting for interviews, particularly with journalists from outside his native South. "Of all the things I'm fed up with, I think I'm fed up most with hearing about the New South," Percy wrote. Why is that? he asked himself. "I would dearly love never to hear the New South mentioned again … If there is anything more boring than the questions asked about the South, it is the answers Southerners give. If I hear one more Northerner ask about good ol' boys and one more Southerner give an answer, I'm moving to Manaus, Brazil, to join the South Carolinians who emigrated after Appomattox and whose descendants now speak no English and have such names as Senhor Carlos Calhoun."
Though I have never weighed fleeing to Brazil, I am a Southerner who sympathizes with Percy's complaint. To its natives, the South can seem the center of the universe, an American Rome to the rest of the country's barbarous provinces. To non-Southerners, the region is, depending on one's mood, a romantic republic of columned porches or a redoubt of redneck reaction. Neither the South's self-referential view of itself nor the outsiders' competing caricatures is especially useful. The internal impression is vain and precious, the external ones overly simplified and incomplete.
At the heart of conversations about the culture and politics of the South is the question that has launched untold numbers of dissertations: Is the South really different, and if so, how? The usual answer—yes, it is, sort of—includes the proposition that Southerners have a special sense of history and of tragedy. Does Boston or Lake Forest strike anyone as a wild-and-woolly, here-today-gone-tomorrow, throw-custom-to-the-wind kind of place? Yes, the South is said to be the only region of the country to have lost a war, which presumably heightens one's sense of the fragility of life, though how we factor our performance in Vietnam into that chestnut mystifies me. Percy's "New South" watchers have long noted the influx of outsiders to major hubs such as northern Virginia (for government and tech), Charlotte (for banking) and Atlanta (for everything), but even most of the region's natives now have no firsthand experience of the defiance of the 1950s and '60s. Majorities of the populations in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia were not born until the year Reagan first took office. They are a wholly new generation.
There is no question about the significance of the past in a place that has been so decisively and so brutally shaped by slavery and Jim Crow, but other regions were complicit in both evils. Racism is hardly an exclusively Southern phenomenon; it is a national one. The same is true of redemption. The South, then, while more overtly culturally conservative than many other states, is not another country. It does no good to look down on it or dismiss it. Such condescension may feel good in the short run, but it is as self-defeating as old-style Southern slurs about godless, greedy Yankees or pointy-headed liberals.
The American South, to borrow a phrase from the caricature cupboard, just ain't that different anymore. It was once, but the Civil War is the exception that proves the rule that the South tends not to contradict but to exemplify, if sometimes in an exaggerated way, what much of the nation thinks and feels. Understanding America's politics, then, requires understanding the South's—which is one reason why declaring the 2008 presidential election over is to make the same mistake the hotheads at the barbecue in "Gone With the Wind" did when they thought they could whip the Union forces in short order.
I have been in the South for the past month, occasionally talking politics, and have heard much more about Iraq and the price of gasoline than I have about Obama's race or John McCain's age. Though this is necessarily anecdotal, my sense is that many whites who have been skeptical of Democrats since the civil-rights era are not going to make a reflexive choice in November but will—like many other Americans—carefully weigh Obama against McCain...
Monday, August 4, 2008
James Rainey: Obama's Crime? Acting Too Presidential
Source: LAT (8-4-08)
America, meet Barack The Arrogant.
Did you hear, this guy's already talking about redecorating the Lincoln Bedroom? Or that a few weeks back, he stood behind a podium bearing a faux presidential seal? The young upstart from Illinois has even got his minions planning a White House transition!
We have reporters, columnists and TV talking heads to thank for exposing these outrageous displays. So apparently the verdict is in: Sen. Barack Obama, too confident to govern.
It all would be quite funny if many people didn't seem to be inhaling this multimedia stink bomb as if it were fragrant truth.
I've spent a few days on the campaign trail with Obama and know people who've traveled with him for months. I wouldn't argue that portrayals of the candidate as occasionally aloof, or a little professorial, are imagined.
But it's a long ways from, in the words of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, acting like "the presumptuous nominee" whose "biggest challenger may not be Republican John McCain but rather his own hubris."
Milbank, who is often wickedly revealing, last week seemed mostly wicked as he turned benign campaign tableau -- an Obama motorcade, a talk with the Treasury secretary, a "pep rally" with congressional Democrats -- into evidence that Obama thinks he's already the winner.
Milbank at least leavened his thesis with humor, unlike others piling on the campaign to turn Barack into Slick Barry.
Fox News host Sean Hannity told viewers last week how "presumptuous" Obama had become. Proof: The candidate told congressional Democrats that the world had been waiting for his hopeful message and that to some he had become a symbol of a "return to our best traditions."
That may not be humble pie, but doesn't even come close to breaking the narcissism barrier. Don't our politicians routinely boast about how essential they are to the republic?...
David Lightman: It's Not About Experience, Experts Say
Source: McClatchy-Tribune (8-4-08)
Many undecided voters have a common concern when they size up Barack Obama: his inexperience.
"I have nothing against Obama. I just think John McCain has more experience," said Steve Viernacki, an Ashley, Pa., restaurant owner.
Experts say that such worries are overblown.
"Experience matters, but its importance is terribly overstated," said historian Robert Dallek, the author of recent books about Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
Presidents with sterling resumes often have turned out to be busts, usually because they lacked the key quality a good president needs: sound judgment.
"John Quincy Adams understood the world, but he didn't have a political gene in his makeup," Richard Norton Smith, a presidential scholar at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., said of the nation's sixth president, who isn't remembered as successful.
Yet presidents with far lesser credentials have triumphed. John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he took office in 1961, four years younger than Obama. Kennedy's early years were rocky, Dallek said, but "he was a quick learner" and his third and final year as president was masterful.
Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has been a U.S. senator for 3 1/2 years, but since the 110th Congress began in January 2007, he's missed about 45 percent of all votes while running for president. He's never chaired a major committee.
McCain, 71, the presumptive Republican nominee, was a member of the House of Representatives from 1983 to 1987, and has been a senator ever since. He's chaired Senate committees and authored several major bills, notably the 2002 campaign-finance overhaul.
Not accurate predictors
Experts agreed that none of these experiences — or a lack of them — is an accurate predictor of either man's likely White House performance.
"The presidency has too many moving pieces. Trying to gauge whether experience matters really eludes measurement," said Carl Pinkele, a presidential expert at Ohio Wesleyan University, in Delaware, Ohio.
Scholars suggest two yardsticks — executive background and foreign policy expertise — but they also find both flawed.
Herbert Hoover was the widely admired U.S. food administrator in World War I, presidential adviser at the Versailles Conference and secretary of commerce in the 1920s.
"Yet his management of the economy was a disaster," Dallek said of Hoover's one-term presidency, which began months before the Great Depression.
Jimmy Carter also brought a management background, taking office in 1977 after one term as the governor of Georgia and more than 20 years running his family business. But "he was then universally criticized for being a micromanager in the White House," said John Baick, an associate professor of history at Western New England College, in Springfield, Mass.
President George W. Bush has a master of business administration degree from Harvard University, served nearly two terms as the governor of Texas and surrounded himself in the White House with experienced advisers. But after 7 1/2 years in power he holds a dismal public-approval rating rooted largely in the Iraq war and the staggering economy.
Foreign policy also has proved to be an unreliable barometer.
Two presidents regarded as among the nation's weakest — John Quincy Adams and James Buchanan — had extensive diplomatic resumes. Adams held several diplomatic posts, was the secretary of state under President James Monroe and negotiated an end to the War of 1812. But he met difficulty when he tried to improve the economy with a road- and canal-building program and high tariffs, and he was trounced when he sought re-election in 1828.
Buchanan, who served as James Polk's secretary of state in the 1840s, spent the three years before his 1856 election as minister to Great Britain.
Yet "he's quite possibly the worst president in American history, because of his inability to effectively manage Southern secession and the slavery issue," said Chris Dolan, a professor of political science at Lebanon Valley College, in Annville, Pa.
Similarly, Bush's father had been the U.S. envoy to China, United Nations ambassador, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and vice president for eight years.
But he was seen as an ineffective manager of the nation's economy, and the nation spurned his 1992 re-election bid, giving him the lowest popular-vote total of any incumbent president in 80 years.
What matters more than experience, scholars said, is an ability to hone and trust one's instincts.
Dallek and Smith pointed to Kennedy as a key modern example of a president who came to trust his judgment.
The young president made a series of highly public missteps in his early years in power, notably the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the May 1961 summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who found Kennedy weak.
The Berlin Wall went up three months later, followed by the Soviet effort to build missile bases in Cuba.
Kennedy would rebound, starting with his deft handling of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, which defused the most dangerous moment of the Cold War.
Smith also pointed to a two-day period in June 1963 as a key turning point. On June 10, Kennedy announced new talks on a nuclear test-ban treaty and called for an end to the Cold War. He'd sign the ratified pact in October...
Marcus Warren: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Communism’s deadliest foe
Source: Telegraph (8-4-08)
[Marcus Warren is the Editor of Telegraph.co.uk and a former Moscow correspondent who covered Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia from exile in 1994.]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn did more to demolish the moral and intellectual case for Communism than any of its critics, writer or statesman, poet or legislator of the world, acknowledged or not.
Of course, the tyrants and grey bureaucrats who actually tried to turn Marxism into a working polity contributed as much if not even more to the destruction of the system they ruled over.
But those figures who are usually proclaimed winners of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and Baroness Thatcher among them, built their victory on the foundations of his life story and testimony from the Gulag.
He transformed a then obscure acronym (standing for “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies”) into a one-word symbol of Soviet brutality which resonated across the world, not least in his own country.
And he managed this at a crucial point in the 20th century. In Russia itself the extremes of Stalin’s terror were an ugly memory, but one in danger of being suppressed once and for all amidst the atmosphere of fear cultivated under Brezhnev. The Russian people themselves seemed resigned to a life of misery and lies.
At the same time the West was pursuing something called détente (appeasement to some) in its relations with the Kremlin. The Left, emboldened by America’s defeat in Vietnam and student ferment, was convinced anew that history was on its side.
Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”, when finally published in 1973, undermined any claims to moral superiority Communism had over its enemies. And it did so in devastating fashion.
Where “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” his first portrayal of life in the camps, was a miniature and avoided judgment, “Gulag Archipelago” was a three-volume denunciation of Stalin’s system and the ideology that powered it. It was a masterpiece of literary endeavour, language and polemic. Once read, it destroyed any argument for accommodation with the Soviet Union beyond that of realpolitik. That was all that remained until Mikhail Gorbachev ended the need for even that by presiding over the country’s collapse...
Ruth Marcus: The Even-handedness in Professor Obama's Law Exams
Source: Washington Post (8-4-08)
How would candidate Obama answer professor Obama's exams? During his years teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Barack Obama favored take-home tests touching on some of the scorchingly hot-button legal issues of the day: gay rights, reproductive freedom, affirmative action and racial profiling.
These exams, unearthed by The New York Times' resourceful Jodi Kantor, are edgy versions of the classic law school 'issue spotter.' Can a state university's law review expand its affirmative action program to include special treatment for gay students as well as racial minorities? Does a man have any right to stop his ex-wife from using their frozen embryos to try to get pregnant? Can parents whose daughter is in a vegetative state be prohibited from trying to clone her?
To read Obama's exams is to get a glimpse of the supple intelligence he would bring to the presidency and to be impressed by his lawyerly capacity – perhaps even compulsion – to see the other side's argument and mine the weaknesses of his own case.
But it is also a reminder of Obama's essential elusiveness, and how little we understand about how the candidate himself would resolve these thorny problems.
For example, one 2003 question describes the state of 'Nirvana,' where a gay couple, Richard and Michael, want a child. Would Nirvana's laws prohibiting gays from paying surrogate mothers or adopting children, Obama asked, violate the constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process?
It's easy to imagine President Obama wrestling with a real-world version of professor Obama's hypothetical. Obama has said that he does not support same-sex marriage. But his exam question involves the same issues that the California Supreme Court addressed in overturning the state's same-sex marriage ban. If the Constitution protects Richard and Michael's effort to have a child, would it similarly protect their right to marry?
In the model answers he provided for students after another exam, Obama refers to 'some persuasive arguments' that homosexuality should be covered by the Equal Protection Clause. How does that square with his opposition to same-sex marriage? Are civil unions a separate-but-equal substitute?
To take a 1997 question, should 'Splitsville,' a city plagued by residential segregation and failing schools, be permitted to create an all-black, all-male career academy, or is the 'Ujamaa School' unlawful discrimination?
Even if constitutional, Obama asked, 'is it good public policy? Put somewhat differently, in light of ... the history of race and gender discrimination in America, is the Ujamaa School a worthy attempt to promote long-term equality, or ... a dangerous betrayal of the American ideal?'...
William Harrison: The other Solzhenitsyn
Source: Guardian (8-4-08)
[William Harrison is a writer and journalist based in Moscow.]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's anti-Sovietism was heroic and influential, but its other side became clearer upon the Union's collapse.
The death of the literary colossus and anti-Soviet dissident has, quite rightly, been greeted with an outpouring of praise for his principled and brave unmasking of the horrors of the Soviet regime. His literary achievements, closely connected with his dissident activities, have also justifiably received much attention.
But there is another side to Solzhenitsyn – one which most obituaries have mentioned only in passing, if at all. Solzhenitsyn's analysis of Soviet communism was based on the notion that the Bolsheviks imposed a totalitarian system on Russia that had no basis in Russian history or character. He laid the blame on Marx and Engels and the Bolsheviks.
Russian culture, he argued, and particularly that of the Russian Orthodox Church, was suppressed in favour of atheist Soviet culture. Persona non grata in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn lived in exile in the US from 1974, but found western culture equally to his distaste.
His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism.
The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Solzhenitsyn hoped, as he wrote in a Russian newspaper at the time, would lead to the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in which this alternative culture would flourish.
On returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn opposed the excesses that went with the introduction of capitalism in Russia during the 1990s. In addition, he vociferously opposed Ukrainian independence. But the rise of Putin and the resurgence of nationalism, and the notion of Russia as "unique" and "different" from western liberal culture, gave new currency to his views. Recently, he claimed in an article in a pro-Kremlin newspaper, which was reprinted widely in the west, that to call the 1932-33 Holodomor genocide in Ukraine was a "loopy fable" made up by Ukrainian nationalists and picked up on by anti-Russian westerners. This article came at the same time as the State Duma's ruling to the same effect.
His article contained no serious historical analysis. Holodomor, in fact, coincided with an attack on Ukrainian culture and nationalism, which were considered a threat by Soviet leaders in Moscow. They were frightened of the Ukrainian national movement, terrified of many in the country's desire for independence, and acted to bring it into line. "If we lose Ukraine," Lenin had said, "we lose our head." They, like Solzhenitsyn, considered Ukraine a part of their empire.
The parallels with contemporary Russian leaders' attitudes are striking, and Solzhenitsyn's pan-Slavism, alongside his powerful dissident credentials, made him an ideal ally for those who continue to seek to restrict Ukrainian independence. Ironically – disturbingly, in fact – the self-same unmasker of Stalinist terror with its sacrifice of human lives to a future ideal exhibited a desire to ignore people's desires (Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence in 1991) in favour of an equally fictitious ideal.
Solzhenitsyn's importance as the writer who stripped bare the Soviet regime to reveal its true essence cannot be underestimated. His writings inspired people throughout the Soviet Union and the world with their unflinching revelations. But his credentials as a historian are dubious to say the least, and the fantastical, backward-looking political idealism that led him to support Putin's project is a dangerous relic. Like many of those disillusioned with western liberalism, in Russia and the west, he fancied that "Putin's path" provided an alternative. The reality of this "alternative", involving, for example, the pilfering of resources by Kremlin-backed "businessmen" and the silencing of the media by censorship and killing, is less than promising.
Donald Rayfield: Solzhenitsyn's literary legacy
Source: Guardian (8-4-08)
[Donald Rayfield is emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University, London.]
Solzhenitsyn's literary career spans more than 60 years, from verse he composed and memorised in prison and the camps before Stalin's death, to the handful of short stories and novellas (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matriona's Yard) of the 1960s which propelled him to fame, together with Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation, and the major novels, In the First Circle and Cancer Ward (both 1968), composed simultaneously with the monumental historical documentation of Stalin's political penal system The Gulag Archipelago (1973-8).
After his deportation, by the more consistently intolerant Brezhnev, to Frankfurt and then the USA in 1974, he continued for 15 years writing a massive cycle of historical novels, Red Wheel, of which the first, August 1914 (1971), is perhaps the only one that more than a handful of readers have ploughed through. Returning to Russia in 1994, at first to loud acclaim, he became more of a political pamphleteer, the only significant work being his controversial two volumes about the Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together (2001-2).
A literary assessment of Solzhenitsyn's life work will be selective and sometimes harsh. The short stories and novellas of the 1960s are written very powerfully, combining personal witness with forthright clarity. Their bias is as much against the intellectuals who collaborated (even if they too paid for it) with the system, as against totalitarianism itself, and an underlying Christian asceticism informs them. They will last as examples of the most courageous prose ever published in the USSR. The novel (published abroad) In the First Circle deals with awkward intellectual dissidents very like the author, faced with the moral quandary of helping the authorities devise more effective means of oppression, or going to probable death in the camps. Its tour de force is in the best tradition of Tolstoy, a portrait of the tyrant, Stalin, as an inadequate psychopathic bully. Cancer Ward has a solitary hero defeating cancer just as he survives repression: an ode, like A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, to the innate vitality of the Russian. The novels' weaknesses lie in their lack of subtlety, particularly in dealing with the female characters; their strength in the simplicity of their allegory. One deals with stoicism, classical and genuine, the other with the totalitarian world as a hospital from which very few, including the doctors, will come out alive.
Certainly the volumes of The Gulag Archipelago will stand out as a unique and badly needed monument to Stalinism, compiled from thousands of accounts of how victims (but not their relatives) perished and survived over more than 30 years of horrific oppression. The stories of Varlam Shalamov, based on decades in the Kolyma camps, may be more honest (and depressing) still because they lack Solzhenitsyn's insistence on Christian hope and the work ethic. But Gulag Archipelago remains a towering achievement, and its composition a Herculean task that no other single person could have undertaken.
Abroad, Solzhenitsyn appeared to stop developing, or even observing. The historical cycle Red Wheel is, even to admirers almost unreadable in its mass of detail and its tendency to rant, not narrate. Solzhenitsyn's political views, scattered in hundreds of newspaper articles, are naive, offensive and often ignorant. After 1974 he came to despise the west as much as he hated Stalinism and almost turned into a Russian chauvinist and admirer of Putin. One exception is his study of the Jews, Two Hundred Years Together, where despite trying to blame others, such as Moldavians, for the pogroms, he made a brave, competent and very readable attempt to tackle a theme too sensitive for most Russian writers. It will remain a canonical text until someone even more self-assured braves the prejudices of Russian anti-Semites, Jews and communists.
Solzhenitsyn's verse and drama will always remain secondary to his prose. His memoirs, notably A Calf Butted an Oak (1975 and 1996), are a valuable document of his battle with the Soviet authorities after Khrushchev's fall, but are marred by a cantankerous refusal to acknowledge others' good deeds and motives.
Solzhenitsyn's influence will lie exclusively in his moral courage, which inspired younger dissidents to carry on the struggle, both in literature and in the defence of human rights. As a writer, Solzhenitsyn was wholly locked into 19th century traditions, particularly the forthright, lapidary, moralising style of Lev Tolstoy. He also used the Russian classical tradition of testing among modern characters in a closed space the tenets of philosophy, and finding them wanting. His mix of fiction and history in The Red Wheel is derived from Tolstoy's War and Peace. Even his Gulag Archipelago has its literary roots not in 20th century prison literature, but in Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead. In purely literary terms, then, Solzhenitsyn is a teacher without disciples.
Michael Scammell: Russia's literary light who illuminated dark world of Soviet regime
Source: Guardian (8-4-08)
[Michael Scammell has translated the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among many others. In 1985, Scammell's biography of Solzhenitsyn won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and an English PEN Center prize.]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has died aged 89, was a prolific novelist and memoirist, whose life's work, in the best traditions of Russian literature, transcended the realm of pure letters. He was a moral and spiritual leader, whose books were noted as much for their ethical dimension as for their aesthetic qualities. Between 1968 and 1976, he was a towering figure in the twin worlds of literature and politics, expressing the pain of his long-suffering people and single-handedly challenging the autocratic government of one of the world's two superpowers.
Solzhenitsyn's moral authority was not easily earned. It was the fruit, in part, of bitter personal experience in Stalin's labour camps. But the lessons he drew from his experience, and the manner in which he voiced the sufferings of three generations of Soviet victims in powerful novels such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle that secured for him the role of conscience of the nation.
Later, he showed unmatched physical and moral courage in writing and publishing his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago, a torrential narrative mixing history, politics, autobiography, documentary, corrosive personal comment and philosophical speculation into one of the most extraordinary epics of 20th-century literature...
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Juliet Eilperin and Jonathan Weisman: Race Proves to Be Unwelcome but Persistent Issue
Source: Washington Post (8-2-08)
Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama tried yesterday to step back from a divisive debate over race, with each candidate denying that he was the first to inject the issue into the campaign.
Nonetheless, the candidates and campaigns battled throughout the day over the issue and over which side was engaged in "low road" politics, an indication that race is likely to remain a major point of contention in what is becoming an increasingly bitter contest.
For Obama, the argument was an unwelcome distraction that could complicate his efforts to win over voters who may be skeptical of a relative newcomer with an atypical background. It also pulled the focus away from his efforts to stress bread-and-butter economic issues. For McCain, any hint of racist tactics would hurt his efforts with the moderates and independents he needs to win in November.
Yesterday showed how hard it will be for both to avoid the issue now that it has burst into the public sphere. Obama was heckled in St. Petersburg by black nationalists who accused him of not doing enough for the African American community. In Florida's Panhandle, McCain faced a barrage of questions from reporters and asserted that he is not running a negative campaign "in the slightest," even as his aides launched their latest online attack ad mocking Obama as a candidate with a messiah complex.
"I don't think it's negative. I think we're drawing differences between us," McCain said, adding that Obama "brought up the issue of race," and, "I responded to it. Because I'm disappointed, and I don't want that issue to be part of this campaign."
In response to questions about his recent attacks against Obama, McCain said he has been waging "a very respectful campaign." McCain has compared Obama to celebrities such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, said he is willing to lose a war to win a campaign, said he would rather play basketball than visit wounded troops, and, on Thursday, accused him of playing "the race card" and playing it "from the bottom of the deck."
McCain, who defended himself against tough policy questions from African Americans yesterday at the National Urban League's annual meeting in Orlando, suggested the media should "move on" from the issue of race because Obama had "retracted" his allegations that he and other Republicans were using his appearance to intimidate voters.
But while Obama has toned down some of the language that the McCain campaign criticized, he did not retract his allegations or back away from his contention that Republicans were trying to scare voters about him. Obama and his aides yesterday faulted McCain for not working hard enough to quash state Republican attacks based on race, saying the candidate was merely stating the obvious when he told Missouri voters Wednesday that some of his opponents were insinuating that he does not fit the mold of a traditional presidential candidate.
"I was in Union, Missouri, which is 98 percent white -- a rural, conservative [community], and what I said was what I think everybody knows, which is that I don't look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates," Obama told the St. Petersburg Times. "I think that what people are really concerned about, what they're looking for, is fundamental change on the economy, things that are going to help their families live out the American dream. There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race in this. What this has become, I think, is a typical pattern from the McCain campaign, whether it's Paris Hilton or Britney or this phony allegation that I wouldn't visit troops. They seem to be focused on a negative campaign; what I think our campaign wants to do is focus on the issues that matter to American families."
The Obama campaign could produce no evidence that McCain's campaign was responsible for any attack that directly cited his race or his name. Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), an Obama adviser, said the candidate probably regretted evoking McCain's name when he talked about Republican scare tactics.
But adviser Anita Dunn said Obama was more than justified in lodging accusations Wednesday that prompted McCain campaign manager Rick Davis to say Obama had "played the race card." The North Carolina Republican Party has already used inflammatory images of Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and the Tennessee Republican Party mocked Obama's middle name, Hussein. Although McCain decried those efforts, Dunn said it was hardly the full-throated, angry denunciation McCain has shown himself capable of, she said.
"The McCain campaign has clearly made the decision that there really is not a road too low for them to travel," she said.
Ralph Peters: American Calcutta
Source: New York Post (8-2-08)
ONE of the best ways to see a city's bones is to take a long jog in the hour before dawn. That's what I did in San Francisco this week.
The city reminded me of Calcutta.
By day, the camouflage of color and crowds makes the multitudes of homeless less apparent. At the chilly end of the night, though, they lie strewn on the sidewalks like plague victims, wrapped in filthy blankets and abandoned.
New Yorkers have no idea how bad a homeless crisis can be.
I didn't even run in the rougher sections, where old garbage fills the alleys and druggies prowl. My course ran from the slopes of Nob Hill, south of Union Square, down to the Embarcadero, up to North Beach and back. That's the better part of downtown.
My new symbol of San Francisco is a man with ulcerous calves exposed, head and torso thrust into a cardboard box in front of a Prada boutique.
What I saw as I sidestepped bodies wasn't just the failure of social policies, but a collective flight from responsibility. Shrugging our shoulders and declaiming The homeless deserve the right to make their own choices! just lets us all off the hook.
I refuse to romanticize the homeless - unlike those who live in San Francisco's multimillion-dollar Victorians and idealize the homeless from a distance, then cross the street to avoid giving a deranged beggar a quarter.
When it comes to the capable-but-unwilling homeless, John Stuart Mill's rule applies: The individual is entitled to the maximum individual freedom compatible with the freedom and well being of others. As long as he or she poses no criminal, health or aggravated-nuisance threats, the rest of us just have to suck it up.
My problem lies in our moral cowardice regarding those who aren't capable of making sane decisions. When we write off a man or woman who is clearly disturbed, incapable of basic sanitary practices and living at a level below that we accord our pets, we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back for giving him or her a handout now and then.
We're avoiding the hard moral choices, the questions whose best answers still leave us uneasy: We worry more about stray dogs and cats than we do about stray humans...
David Brooks: Missing Dean Acheson
Source: IHT (8-1-08)
[David Brooks is a Canadian-American political and cultural commentator.]
We Americans are about to enter our 19th consecutive year of Truman-envy. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, people have looked at the way Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and others created forward-looking global institutions after World War II, and they've asked: Why can't we rally that kind of international cooperation to confront terrorism, global warming, nuclear proliferation and the rest of today's problems?
The answer is that, in the late 1940s, global power was concentrated. The victory over fascism meant the mantle of global leadership rested firmly on the Atlantic alliance. The United States accounted for roughly half of world economic output. Within the United States, power was wielded by a small, bipartisan, permanent governing class - men like Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, John McCloy and Robert Lovett.
Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.
This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem.
This week, for the first time since World War II, an effort to liberalize global trade failed. The Doha round collapsed, despite broad international support, because India's Congress Party did not want to offend small farmers in the run up to the next elections. Chinese leaders dug in on behalf of cotton and rice producers.
In a de-centered world, all it takes is a few well-placed parochial interests to bring a vast global process tumbling down.
And the Doha failure comes amid a decade of globosclerosis. The world has failed to effectively end genocide in Darfur. Chinese and Russian vetoes foiled efforts to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe. The world has failed to implement effective measures to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions. The world has failed to embrace a collective approach to global warming. Europe's drive toward political union has stalled...
Richard Byrne: The Selling of the President 1968 remains a vital cultural and historical document
Source: American Prospect (8-1-08)
[Richard Byrne is a journalist who lives in Washington, D.C. He blogs at Balkans via Bohemia.]
The original dust jacket of Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 has Richard Nixon's face emblazoned on a package of cigarettes.
To value that image at a thousand words is parsimonious. It elicits a multiplicity of responses to Nixon and to his 1968 campaign: clever, slick, amoral, dangerous, familiar, branded, and addictive. (Yes, addictive. How long was Nixon in American political life?)
In sum, Richard Nixon was very, very bad for America -- and some very skilled men persuaded voters to buy him anyway.
As an eight-year-old caught up in Watergate in the summer of 1974, that dust jacket induced me to pluck The Selling of the President 1968 from my parents' bookshelf. I didn't understand everything McGinniss was peddling on that first read, of course, but his brisk, energetic prose did let me get at some of what the book was about even then.
It has become fashionable to dismiss The Selling of the President 1968 as a shallow and cynical book written in the breezy New Journalism of its moment. In the November 2006 issue of Smithsonian magazine, Jonathan Yardley took just this tack, arguing that the book's pivotal role in stoking American political cynicism "helps explain why the book remains in print today, for the truth is that otherwise it doesn't hold up very well."
Yardley's right about one thing. The book's strengths do not lie in its analysis. The book's second chapter -- which functions as the literary equivalent of the journalistic "nut graf" -- is rife with glib formulations. Politics is a "con." The voter is a "willing victim" of advertising persuasion.
Yet there's much that's incorrect and ungenerous in Yardley's assessment. It seems almost absurd to assert that the work of a 26-year-old journalist, written in a few months directly after the 1968 election, had as much of a catalytic effect on public cynicism as the events of that tumultuous year and the campaigns themselves.
More ungenerous, however, is to assert that the book's continued longevity is rooted largely in that cynicism. Whatever its deficiencies, The Selling of the President 1968 remains a vital cultural and historical document -- and a playbook of sorts with lessons for our current presidential campaigns...
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