Patton Oswalt - Christmas Shoes

800 Words: Jewish Intolerance Part III

No religion or culture is more beholden to history than Judaism. Is there any way to prevent that?

…Nostalgia is huge in the Jewish religion – not as huge as for Christians or Muslims, but huge nevertheless. Two-thousand years after we lost it, we’re all still paying lip service to the fact that our most cherished goal is to slaughter goats on the world’s most prized piece of real estate. Our religion would have us believe that this is what our ancestors endured two-thousand of persecution to accomplish. If that is the case, I’m getting my circumcision reversed tomorrow.

The great strength and weakness of Jewish communities is that they are intractably slow in adapting to new circumstances. Even the Catholic Church changes faster. The centuries pass, empires rise and fall; but Orthodox Jews still chant the same prayers, circumcise every male child, don’t eat pork, refuse to mix linen and wool in their clothes, and segregate women from men. It is the Jewish mentality to find what works, and then to dig our fingernails into that solution as far into posterity as they go. There will be female priests in the Catholic Church long before there are female Orthodox Rabbis.

It is a mentality that goes nearly as far into the more recent branches of Judaism as it does into orthodoxy. However far Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, or Assimilationist Jews rise, the mentality seems to stay the same. History goes on, the debates within a society rage, but to a certain extent – it’s other people’s problem. I believe that there’s a part of every Jewish person which feels this way, and Jewish people who are particularly committed to another movement do so in part as a rebellion against their Jewish background; which like Chinese civilization, sees the concerns of the moment as the blink of an eye within time’s larger span.

In civilization after civilization, when things are at their best, we Jews begin to enter a state of denial; and the denial only increases in intensity as the years go on. Rather than accept that things are not as good as they once were, we try to maintain them precisely as they were long past when it was possible. At the end of the last century, many Jews seemed to believe that the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz-Josef II, and his beneficent tolerance of Jews, would live forever. But World War I, ended the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the 20’s, many Jews believed that the Weimar Republic could last – they even believed it would return after Hitler was elected Chancellor. By the 30’s, many Jews still believed that Stalin and the Soviet Union would be the savior of the Jewish people – much good that did us.

In all those cases, many Jews believed in the permanence of their position well past the point that they went down with the countries who housed them. By the time most Jews realized there was no place for them in Central or Eastern Europe, it was too late to save themselves. The Jews with enough foresight to emigrate to Israel and America survived. They too believe in the permanence of their well-being in these states. For nearly a hundred years, they’ve been right. But for how much longer will they be?

In 2012, we are faced – as always – with a Jewish state on the perpetual verge of extinction – encircled on all sides by hostile, dangerous enemies and ruled by a right-wing government who believes that enough displays of force will intimidate their enemies into preventing attacks. America is still the greatest shelter the Jewish people have ever had, yet America is changing more quickly than we can imagine. We no longer live in the mid-20^th century, and the certainties of that era have long since ended. Yet many Jews act as though our good treatment will be permanent.

Perhaps there’s good reason to feel this way.  America’s not going anywhere any time soon, and Israel is perhaps the one country in the world to maintain a boom economy through the Great Recession. Nevertheless, America, Israel, and their relationships are changing.

Even in the worst possible situation - even if the Tea Party is able to dictate terms to America’s government, even if America’s entire middle class is obliterated, even if all of America's works are privately owned by Chinese investors – America’s Jews will be just fine. For better or worse, it’s true that a disproportionate number of Jews make upper class incomes (the average Jewish household makes $50,000 a year, $8,000 more than the average US household) – but if the Middle Class vanishes, Jewish charities will ensure that other Jews are relatively well provided for in comparison to other Americans. Like in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the income of the wealthy will not be threatened, and Jews will continue to contribute disproportionately to American society – perhaps more than ever. Meanwhile, Israel will remain, as ever, industrious and innovative. And while the average income in the rest of the world plummets, Israel will continue to thrive. And because Israel thrives, wealthy people will invest more and more money into Israel. And thus would likely begin anew all the conspiracy theories about Jewish control, corruption, and conspiracy. We know how that ends…

I have no idea how far in the future the next atrocity against the Jewish people will occur. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that another such atrocity will most definitely happen. And Jews will unwittingly do everything within their power to speed up the process. Every Jew should read Amos Elon’s unforgettable book about the Jews of Germany: The Pity of It All. Towards the end, Elon discusses how German Jews were the last people to maintain their belief in the Weimar Republic. Even during the Great Depression as Nazis were assassinating hundreds of political figures, Jews believed that Nazism was no more a threat to Germany than Communism, and if Jews simply refused to take a side and pay no heed to prevailing winds, this too would pass.

American Jews are well-known for their liberalism, but reports of Jewish liberalism were always a bit exaggerated. Ronald Reagan got 39% of the Jewish vote to Jimmy Carter’s 45 in 1980. Dwight Eisenhower (no friend of Israel) got 40% of the Jewish vote against Adlai Stevenson’s 60 in 1956. Jews have always been sensitive (some – not me, would say oversensitive) about shifts to anti-semitism, and most Jews have always been wary of any extreme belief. Sometimes, this charge against extremism comes at the worst moments. Running the centrist Americans Elect movement to provide a moderate alternative in this election was Peter Ackerman – chairman of Rockport Capital, former head of Freedom House and founder of the International Center on Violent Conflict . Its principal donor was Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks. Its primary voice in the press was Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Well-known Jews all, but they founded this movement at the very moment when it was clear that centrism was no longer a legitimate option for America in the foreseeable future. America had just elected a Democratic president whose entire campaign was founded on a message of unity, and the overtures to unify government were completely re-buffed by Republicans. Democrats are now the American party of the center as well as the left, yet many Jews persist in the thought that bipartisanship is still an option.

While assimilated American Jews embrace the left, the Orthodox community goes further and further into the arms of America’s Religious Right. The Religious Right not only believes in the bellicose policies of the Israeli right wing, they actively encourage it and wish Israel were moreso. But what happens if conservative religious people in America become destitute and their leaders require a scapegoat to explain why? What happens if Arab countries embrace democracy and are no longer threats to America? What happens if a significant portion of American Christians end up working for Israeli corporations without American government guaranteeing them a living wage? Will there be any reason for this alliance to continue?

Those Jews who wish to maintain some semblance of religion are caught in the middle. Taking a stand with one or the other is equated in their minds with taking a stand on Judaism between orthodoxy and non-belief. And just as it happened before, and just as it will one day happen again, Jews will long for a solution that does not exist until after it’s too late. I guarantee you, Jews will be the last ethnic group still looking back to the wonderful days of bipartisanship when every other group’s abandoned it for an entire lifetime. Just as Jews are to parties, no group has a longer track record to being late to historical realizations than the Jewish people. 

800 Words: Jewish Intolerance - Part II

II.

And yet Judaism still remains. Why? Because Judaism is the purest religion of all.

“The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innvation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made… Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities… Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.”

-          Ralph Waldo Emerson

For everything there is a season, and a 
time for every matter under heaven: 
a time to be born, and a time to die; 
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 
a time to kill, and a time to heal; 
a time to break down, and a time to build up; 
a time to weep, and a time to laugh; 
a time to mourn, and a time to dance. . . .

-          Ecclesiastes 3:1-4

Both Christianity and Islam seek to dominate history – their religions are grounded in the belief that the world will only become a great place when the dominion of Christ or Muhammed is total. Judaism does not seek to dominate history; Judaism seeks to be immune from it. At the heart of Judaism is a superbly ironic paradox:  Our religion is very strict in its guidelines to its adherents, but it does so because it sees the world as a place in need of accommodation. It is profitless to chase the wind, and Judaism therefore instructs its followers conduct themselves strictly so that they may blow with it. So let it never be said that religion does not blow.

It is because the world is not an accommodating place that Jews bend over backwards to accommodate it. But occasionally the world becomes an accommodating place, and when it does, no civilization is less equipped to deal with acceptance from the world than Jews. Judaism is a prescription for how to deal with a world that is adverse to it, and at the historical moments when Judaism is on the verge of mainstream acceptance, Jews inevitably (and entirely unwittingly) seem to shoot the gift-horse in the mouth.

No religion puts greater stress on rationalism. No religion puts greater faith in the resolution of conflict through discussion. No religion puts greater emphasis on education, reason, and empiricism. It is a survival kit for how to be a light unto nations when the world goes dark. But what about when some of the world is ruled by light? However dim?

All religions are, in a sense, a belief in a higher power. When you surrender your will to a man upstairs, all the theological talk about free will is at best a weakened brew. Once God is in the driver’s seat, you’ve surrendered a large part of your will for the security that comes with knowing your place in the universe. Those of us without that security must doubt our place in the universe, and that is far too scary a proposition for many people.

The truth is that Judaism doesn’t provide much comfort for those who want to know what happens to us after we die. There is no real hell in Judaism, just a very brief purgatory that’s inevitably over within a year (hence why mourners say Kaddish for eleven months). There is no canonical text about what happens in the afterlife, only Rabbinical speculation. The afterlife is of very little concern to Jews. What is of concern is how to conduct ourselves in our own lives.

The genius of the Jewish religion is to provide a series of laws so inconsequential, so obsessive, so controlling, that its adherents don’t have the time or mental effort to concern themselves with anything but their proper observance. Judaism prospers through the eons because it is probably the ultimate surrendering of free will which mankind has yet conceived. It takes for granted that people’s vices are so overwhelming that they cannot be trusted to control themselves. Instead, Judaism directs their observers’ vices – their insecurity, their vanity, their desire for control – into finding the proper observance for every possible hypothetical to which Judaism’s 613 laws pertain.

When I call it the ‘ultimate surrendering of free will,’ I don’t necessarily mean it as a bad thing – perhaps it’s even a good one. Judaism does not require the surrender of free will in the same way that Fascism or Communism or Radical Islam does. There is no authority so final in our religion that a particular interpretation must be considered final. Every observant Jew is a partner in this social compact, which means that two-thousand years of Jewish willpower has gone into debate over precisely how we will surrender our wills to God. No religion takes theology more seriously than Judaism, and the debate of precisely how we surrender our free will is continually evolving and takes on new meanings for every generation through the millennia. In this way, Judaism is much like capitalism or republican governance – in which people’s vices are turned on themselves so that they may become virtues. But if a republic or capitalist society does this to a certain extent, then Judaism – by virtue of being a religion – does the same to the nth degree.

And this leads us to a second Jewish paradox that’s just as inexplicable. When Jews are first accepted into society, they quickly establish themselves as a yeast (to use a Hitchens metaphor) that enables a society to rise up and achieve its greater potential  – intellectual potential, economic potential, and yes, moral potential. With the help of a Jewish population, all societies will inevitably become more diverse and more tolerant simply by welcoming Jews into their population. But these societies also attach themselves to a culture that promotes learning and industry.

 And yet, it’s precisely because Jews have been such a vital part in the success of so many societies that they’re inevitably blamed when those same societies experience failure. When a society rejects its Jews, it rejects tolerance, it rejects open exchange, it rejects learning, and it rejects industry. It openly embraces irrational superstition over rational tolerance (and let’s be clear, rational intolerance is just as bad…), and once irrationality is embraced, it’s not too long before mass murder and a culture of death begin to seem like better ideas than they once were.  One could make a great argument for the fact that there is a direct correlation between the health of a society and their treatment of Jews. When the society begins to rot and human life is cheap, so is the opinion in which Jews are held. And we Jews, allegedly intelligent enough to control the world by private conspiracy, are completely powerless every time the world gets volatile. Judaism survives from age to age because it seeks to be immune from history. But the price for the survival is that no religion, and no culture, is more beholden to history than Judaism. 

800 Words: Facebook Likes

In the world of stalking, facebook pages tell you disappointingly little. If you don’t already know the person, it tells you very little at all and very little worth knowing. The best you can do is process the data to say ‘this person seems interesting’ or ‘God, I hope I don’t get to know that person any better…’90% of the time, a person’s facebook posts feel like TMI. If a person you don’t know lists an interesting little tidbit, it’s not uncommon to think to yourself ‘that pretentious little _____’ or ‘why is this person bothering me with this information?’ (And I say this knowing that there are few worse offenders...) When you don’t know other people, you don’t feel as though you’re stalking them, you feel as though they’re stalking you with their information. It’s only when you do know the other person that facebook pages get interesting.

On the page, everybody is dull. A random collection of facts about a person, even a collection of status updates, tells you very little about the person. And anyone whose status updates are particularly self-revealing is a person you want to know less: ‘Aaargh! I hate the world. Especially my sister! Yes you’re an ugly whore who slept with my fiancée!!!!’ To a limit, it’s entertaining to read those sorts of update. Anybody who uses facebook to spill their guts to the world clearly needs their internet liscence revoked (is it better to do that on a blog?...)

But when you know the person, and you see the patterns of their allegiances and the passions they broadcast, the life story falls into place. Like any good detective, you begin piecing together the other person’s biography – not only their talents, but also what’s close to their hearts, what they believe in, and how they came to be the person you now know.

There are lots of people who don’t post on facebook. Though there are some exceptions to this rule, these people generally go by the name ‘fulfilled people’ – those mythical creatures whose lives are blissfully self-contained that they need nothing more than they already have. They have no need to broadcast its contents to anyone outside their immediate contacts. I’ve gone back and forth in my life between being green with envious lust for these people, and simply wanting to kill them. But one day I woke up and realized something truly important for the cause of my own happiness: ‘happy’ people like them are generally incredibly boring. Their focus is so self-contained, their need to experience the world outside theirs so miniscule, that they’re utterly disconnected from reality. They know as well as we do, if they experienced even a modicum of time outside of the sealed world in which they’re comfortable, they’d be as miserable as the rest of us. These people don’t need to be killed, they need to be defeated; and they need to be defeated before they kill the rest of us. Nobody in the world was a nicer guy than Robespierre (I’ve got to stop comparing everything to totalitarian dictators…).

It’s likely that all happy people are happy in the same way, whereas all interesting people are interesting in different ways. Is being interesting mutually exclusive from being happy? Probably not, but a large part of a person being interesting implies that there were setbacks on the path to self-creation. And there is nothing in life more unfortunate than the fact that the frustrations and drama of life is what makes it interesting.

But through those frustrations, whatever they may be, we pick up our habits, our interests, our tics and quirks – and when we do, we pick up those habits which make us more vulnerable. Nobody will get made fun of if they like Mumford and Sons or Dave Matthews Band (at least in a white area), but anybody who admits to preferring Beethoven or Bing Crosby to either is likely to be misunderstood, and therefore at some point in their lives they’ll be ostracized for it - which in turn creates more frustration, and hopefully makes us more interesting still. Not so interesting that we become disgruntled postal workers who shoot everybody but interesting enough that we find worthy outlets for our efforts.

(does that cliché work anymore?)

And once we find worthy outlets for our efforts, we can hopefully find friends who appreciate them. But this is the paradox at the heart of friendship: the reason friendship is so important is that any effort worth making is guaranteed to be misunderstood. It’s very easy for people to bond over a liking of The Beatles or a Spielberg movie  – they’re safe, they’re things everybody knows. To take one example, it’s both more worthwhile and far less easy for friends to discuss a book that only other one person you know has read, and your interpretations of it are very different, and you gravitate towards such obscure fare because you’re both deeply unsatisfied with a culture in which everyone seems so similar to begin with. Before long, you’re reading your dissatisfaction into the other person.  Both of you may hate the conformity of the culture you’re trying to rebel against, but if you’re not careful, you begin to read into that other person all the reasons why a culture more sympathetic to you does not exist, and this person becomes a shorthand for why the world is not more like the way you see it.  

Among those in my closest group of friends, there are two that strike me right now – too different to realize how similar they are. Like me, though differently to each other as much as to me, their lives are defined by an encyclopedic musical obsession. They know each other and we all went to college together, yet unlike mine with them (for once), their friendship seems to be defined by a long series of misunderstandings. Both are roughly my age and both, in their way, are New Yorkers to the marrow. One is the New York of the mid-century; growing up in New Jersey having his kishkes filled with high-prestige music, theater, and galleries in the city. The other is the New York of the late century; having grown up a fixture in artfilm theaters, small music venues, and independent record stores. The former’s music Likes feel like an honor roll of great musicians with a vast public, the latter an honor roll of great hermetic musicians of whom most of you will have never heard. In their way, their misunderstandings are the misunderstandings of an entire city put into the sometimes intersecting mid-Atlantic young adulthoods of our exceedingly weird social circles. One grew up in the New Jersey of urban flight, the other grew up in the New York City of urban decay. One is Manhattan, the other is Brooklyn. One is the optimism of the early 60’s, the other is the realism of the 70’s. One is Frank Sinatra, the other Woody Allen. I often wonder to myself if they’d be almost precisely the other person if they’d lived each other’s lives. And I sometimes wonder if they do too.

There are a number of people over the years with whom I’ve had similar long-term experiences and could draw similar parallels. No doubt I will before too long given my track record of self-revelation on this thing. The point remains that senseless irritation between even the best people is inevitable, and happens for the simple reason that the issues about which they’re passionate really do matter. When people throw their curiosity overboard, they become boring people. It is only people who wear their enthusiasms on their sleeves who inspire real affection, and therefore inspire real misunderstandings. It is only boring people who don’t have to live in fear of being misunderstood.

Facebook is a somewhat useless tool for people whom you don’t know. But for friends, it’s incredibly useful. You look at the shorthand things they put up on their respective walls, you take the things you already know about them, and by piecing all that information together, you peel another layer of the onion.  

Friday Playlist: Late Randy Newman

To paraphrase Bill Murray: There are two types of people in this world, those who love Randy Newman, and those who hate him (What About Bob?...underrated movie everybody should watch). Those of us who love Randy Newman should rise up and kill the other type. If the lyrics are completely made up on the spot with no effort put into them, how can they be so spot-on so often? How are the arrangements not just so stunningly complex (and not just for a usual singer/songwriter album), but also beautiful? Leonard Cohen is life in an ashram, Johnny Cash is life in a dive bar, Bob Dylan is life on the open American road. Randy Newman is life. Life as it happens, life as it is, life in all its chaos; random, sentimental and sadistic, real and surreal, funny and sad, political and personal, abstract and direct, deep and cheap. Life.



We're not even getting into Randy Newman's musical: Faust. But just look at the original cast:

• Devil: Randy Newman
• Lord: James Taylor
• Henry Faust: Don Henley
• Angel Rick: Elton John
• Margaret: Linda Ronstadt
• Martha: Bonnie Raitt

...Somehow, the idea of James Taylor as the Lord makes you understand why the Devil wants to rebel...

My Country (LastFM)

Losing You

A Few Words In Defense of Our Country

Shame

A Piece of the Pie

Every Time It Rains (Joe Cocker cover)

Korean Parents

I Miss You

The Great Nations of Europe

Feels Like Home

The World Isn't Fair

Better off Dead

Going Home (Last FM)

I'm Dreaming of a White President

When I'm Gone

And of course...how could we leave out this?:

A Letter To My Rabbi

Dear Rabbi ________,

I'm sure you're extremely busy right now. But I do want to write you to say that while I was very moved by your second day Rosh Hashana Sermon (minus the first five minutes...I had to listen from outside), I have to take very real issue with one of your sentiments. One that I think may compromise how you're remembered by your congregants and their children. I agree with you that we live in a time of excess and extremes. But I see the extremes as coming from one side of America, not the other. And I think in ten years you may have no choice but to come around to that point of view as well. 

I'm not a typical educated member of my generation. I consider myself a liberal, but I'm not a member of the left. I consider myself in the center, and it's because I'm in the center that I see liberal democrats as the only possible option. I realize that this is in part a generational perception, but please consider how my generation grew up. When we were in high school, we watched as Newt Gingrich insisted on shutting down the government rather than compromise on the Federal Budget. We watched as President Clinton was impeached for perjury after lying on an inconsequential issue that he should never have been made to testify about in the first place. Our first voting election was decided by the Supreme Court on partisan lines to stop a recount after the very real possibility of election fraud in Florida. We were just college students when 9/11 occurred, and we later heard from Richard Clarke that George Bush did not take the threat seriously enough to take very simple measures to prevent it. We were of draft age when the Iraq War happened, a war of choice for which we all eventually learned there was no discernible objective. We experienced a second election in which there was a possibility of election fraud in Ohio that was never pursued. It is entirely possible that in a century, historians will look at the 2000's and say that it was an era that was ruled by a Coup d'etat. 

Were I of your generation, I'd have looked at the riots of the sixties, the rise of Goldwater and Reagan on one hand and the rise of McGovern and Jesse Jackson on the other and concluded that moderation was the only sensible option. But I'm not of your generation, and it's because I believe in moderation that I have to place blame and say that there is no moral equivalence between the Republicans and Democrats. To say otherwise is just as untrue as to say that there is moral equivalence between the Palestinian government and the Israeli one. 

There is no extreme left in this country that bears mentioning. There is a single socialist senator (Bernie Sanders), there's no talk of nationalizing industries, no serious talk of allying with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad against their antagonists, no talk of raising taxes for the rich beyond 35% of their income (compare that to the 1950's, when there was a marginal tax rate on the rich of 94%, and this was during the Eisenhower administration!). Real leftist figures like Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich are marginal figures in the Democratic Party, whereas Paul Ryan is the vice-presidential nominee for the Republicans. Every time a leader of your generation laments that there is a decline in bipartisanship and says that both sides are equally responsible, you are aiding and abetting the decline of Democracy in America. 

I know that your advocacy of bipartisanship and reservations about Obama are in large part due to Israel. But Obama realizes one thing that Bush never did, which is that if Israel is to survive into the 22nd century, it must be saved from itself. The Israeli Knesset is for all intents and purposes a right-wing supermajority, and the only thing preventing them from launching full-scale attacks on the Iranian nuclear program is Obama. To attack Iran or anywhere else in the current political climate would be to invite a potential apocalypse on Israel. Any chance the Arab Spring has of working would immediately be crushed and Radical Islamists who preach the destruction of Israel would sail into victory, each of which might try to build a similar nuclear program. Even if Iran doesn't build a bomb, they can simply order one from Pakistan, and if Pakistan has a radical Islamist government, they'll be more than happy to provide whatever amount of nuclear weapons Iran would like to have. We probably disagree about Obama's position on the settlements - I don't think he believes for a moment that peace will be achieved if only Israel withdraws from them. But in order to appease these very volatile places, he has to say he does. I'm not a dove because I don't take the threat of Israeli security seriously, I'm a dove because I think hawks don't take the threat to Israeli security seriously enough. 

Many people of your generation lament that the American idyll of the mid-20th century is no longer there. But my generation never knew that world. We have to deal with the reality of a world we'll be living in for the next half-century. And for the moment, the reality is that there is one party that is the party of democracy, and one party that is the party of authoritarianism and corruption. Liberals want a partner in peace, but there is no partner in peace.

Shana Tova to you and your family, I know your Yom Kippur sermons will be just as wonderful,

Evan Tucker

800 Words: Jewish Intolerance (Part I)

It will surprise me if I ever develop the patience to read more than a page of Spinoza’s Ethics at a time. I know that many people think of Spinoza as the most powerful thinker of the modern age, I know that he is the most important Jewish philosopher of all time, I know that he is even the first secular Jew. But his writing is perhaps the greatest insomnia cure I’ve ever found. Spinoza’s Ethics is an agonizingly slow slog through a thought puzzle that reads like the world’s most tedious legal brief. His conclusions are cold and disquieting, and if the world is truly the way Spinoza imagines it – I don’t want to know. He puts me to sleep within two-thirds of a page – believe me, I’ve tested this (ok…maybe not).

I’m not the most well-read philosophy student, but I have a bias against the work of any thinker who didn’t take the time to make his work readable. If the thought is too complex to be properly understood by all but the most fanatical admirer, it dismisses everybody who might look at it critically. Life’s too short to waste on books we don’t like, so such thinkers automatically become boosted by supporters who can allege that their critics haven’t read the work close enough to understand it– they’re probably right about those critics, but the admirers are probably wrong too. Most writers who hide behind an excess of difficulty probably have a reason for doing so. Nevertheless, among philosophers I’ll probably never read, I have a soft spot for Spinoza.

Bento de Espinoza was the son of a Portuguese immigrant who fled to the “New Jerusalem” of 17^th century Amsterdam. The Baroque Amsterdam of Rembrandt was the freest center of Jewish practice, learning, and tolerance since Medieval Spain. Unfortunately, even in this liberal environment, the New Jerusalem turned out to be a little too much like the old, and the murderous spirit of Samuel and Herod was enlivened anew. Fifteen years before the Amsterdam Synagogue excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, the community had driven another free thinker named Uriel da Costa to suicide after burning his books, fining him into penury and excommunicating him. And there were apparently many more such incidents in Jewish Amsterdam.

What is still little known about the Spinoza affair is that the excommunication (or Cherem) was the final option they chose to silence him after many were tried. First they tried to convert him, then to threaten him, then to bribe him, one member of the community even tried to murder him. When all these attempts to bring him back to orthodoxy failed, they issued an edict that is much more readable than anything in Spinoza:

The Lords of the ma'amad (judgement), having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavord by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of the matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the presence of the honorable chachamin (wise men), they have decided, with their consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of all the Holy Congregation, in front of these holy Scrolls with the six-hundred-and-thirteen precepts which are written therein, with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the boys, and with all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who cleave unto the Lord God are all alive this day. We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells (cubits) of him, or read anything composed or written by him.

All Spinoza wanted to do was to live a life of serious contemplation and publish his harmless beliefs. When his father died, he said Kaddish for the prescribed eleven months. When his sister disputed his claim to inheritance, he renounced it. And just as our ancestors once put Zecharia to death, and all the unnumbered unnamed prophets in the time of Elijah, we once more sent one of the best of us into a life of isolation, without enjoyment or honor; a Jew among Jews. And just as so many Jews have since the beginning of recorded history, Spinoza’s isolation spurred him to more intense study, deeper perception, and more extraordinary achievement.

We Jews are people, no better or worse than others, and when given the reins of power can display all the same symptoms of intolerance, authoritarianism, and inhumanity. Just because someone does the right thing by us does not mean that we will do the right thing by others. Just as sufferers of imperialism and racism sometimes exhibit all the same traits of their captors when finally achieving their independence, we can exhibit all the same traits after being liberated from death camps, pogroms, and lack of sovereignty. It’s in no way a result of the special suffering we’ve undergone, it’s a question of being human and adjusting to the uncertainty of new circumstances. We’re no better or worse in this regard than any other civilization and I suppose a point can legitimately be made that it’s remarkable how little wrong we’ve committed considering what was perpetrated against us. The consequences of freedom are always complex, and within every group of people there are authoritarians and democrats, true leaders and demagogues, strong people who keep their humanity in the face of the temptation to forswear it, and weak ones who renounce it at the first opportunity.

The only difference is that Jews have so seldom been granted their autonomy that the suffering which Jewish rule inflicted is much more highlighted. Compared to those who suffered under the thumb of English history, or Catholic history, there are far fewer sufferers under Jews. We Jews are sufferers, not sufferees. And since we are so, the reaction to seeing Jews persecuting others is forever disproportionate. A small but well-known community who suffered at the hands of nearly every major world civilization will always be foremost in the mind of civilization’s descendents; the image of oppressive Jews is therefore more visceral in the minds of Europeans than the image of oppressive Koreans or even Saudi Arabians. So if those descendents want nothing so much as to redress the wrongs of their ancestors, they will forever see Jews as their biggest impediment.

Of all the world’s major religions, Judaism is the most human. It accepts the limitations of human folly, and it makes barely any attempt to change people’s nature. Rather than change it, Judaism attempts to contain human nature to its most rigid possible form. That Judaism has preserved itself in spite of so many wrongs committed against it is testament to how successful it’s been at domesticating the human beast. Rather than telling its adherents that it’s best to renounce sex, Judaism advises sex at the proper times. Rather than telling its adherents that it’s best to embrace poverty, Judaism puts emphasis on charity and lets its people keep a majority of the wealth for themselves (hence the stereotype…). Rather than telling its adherents that it’s best to renounce anger, Judaism has a huge maze of laws so that all wrongs can be redressed. Indeed, Judaism is thick with laws and commentary for every conceivable practical question. And in cases when these questions cannot be resolved clearly, orthodox Jews have maintained rabbinical courts for two-thousand years in which scholars can determine the proper outcome.  Judaism has survived through so many adverse circumstances through the millennia because it is the world’s most practical religion. But it is not inherently superb at tolerating disagreement. In a religion where commentary and debate is so well-prized, somebody needs to be right.

Judaism’s emphasis on law and custom preserved it for two-thousand years of exile. It protected Jews from the worst excesses of all civilizations, and while other civilizations lost their bearings in the chaos of history, no contingency has ever happened in Jewish history for which Jews were not fully prepared to preserve themselves. The pre-war European culture has all but disappeared, but the Jewish culture they tried to wipe out still thrives elsewhere.

The fundamental difference between Judaism and other cultures is not a question of belief, or even moderation, it is a question of preparedness. The rabbinical sages of the Roman era realized that they needed to build a boat that would not break through any storm, and so they created a religion of laws that could be kept in any place, through any circumstance. Wherever Jews found themselves, they were instantly identifiable, with a common language and common customs for food, dress, and ritual.  Wherever Jews went, they were at home with other Jews, and never at home in the Gentile world. As a result, Jews were discriminated against, Jews were ostracized, Jews were even killed, yet throughout it all, the community never broke. Judaism did not last because God protected us. We lasted because we found an indestructible formula.

But the indestructible nature of our religion comes at a terrible price. This religion of the downcast is built for survival in a perpetual disaster mode.  And during those rare periods when we stumble on success, Judaism finds a way to snatch disaster from the jaws of prosperity. The formula which provides Jews with a blueprint for stratospheric success in cultures where they’re accepted also prove a formula for catostrophic downfall. All privileged Jews have to make a choice; between a religion with hundreds of pointless laws and a history of persecution or a life among the majority, free from the ties that bind them to their constricting, dangerous roots. Whatever one believes about Jewish assimilation, it’s not hard to see why privileged Jews assimilate.

And as more Jews assimilate, the remaining Jews have less and less in common with their neighbors. As they were when they first entered America, or Germany, or Holland, or Spain, they are viewed once again as provincial outsiders, sponges capable of contributing nothing to society except decay. The Jewish, once the prized engine in the rise of so many civilizations, invariably become perceived as the stumbling block that prevents their nations from achieving their full greatness. And they therefore must be removed from society by any means necessary: discrimination,  persecution, exile, even death. And in their zeal to rid their countries of this ‘leach’ there is no difference between the Jew who wants to assimilate and the Jew who wants to remain Jewish. When taken to the meat grinder, all Jews become the same. Whereas all these societies once prided themselves on their liberalness, their tolerance, and their diversity; they come to pride themselves on their purity and each longs to rid the world of the Jewish pestilence.

And still, Judaism will remain. 

Shana Tova und a Gut Yor

800 Words: The Evil Fantasy of Gotterdammerung

(Yes, that’s THE Christopher Lee singing Hagen’s Watch. Not very well…but I suppose that’s the point.)

The first time I watched Gotterdammerung all the way through was during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college – a videocassette in the American University library of the Met’s recently retired production from the late 80’s. Parts were unspeakably dull and stupid, and yet the parts that weren’t…

(Matti Salminen shows how it’s done)

I awoke that night bathed in a cold sweat, with the image of Hagen burned into my retina and his calls of ‘Hoi-ho’ playing over and over in my head for the rest of the night. Hagen is the modern era’s answer to Edmund from King Lear but with no Edgar to counterbalance his evil. He is the black soul which brings The Ring to its apocalyptic conclusion, and perhaps the most perfect incarnation of evil which any stage has yet seen. Never in my life before or since did music scald my ears so intensely. It can be tremendously hard to be drawn into the world of Wagner, but once you are, no music is made to relinquish its hold with more difficulty. If Bach is the angel of music, showing a world untroubled by doubts of the world’s ultimate goodness – with a musical hierarchy in which tonic chords reign over the Western scale like a perfect kingdom; then Wagner is the devil – worming ever deeper questions of doubt into our heads with nothing but the dissonant chaos and diminished chords for company. Bach builds the world for us, Wagner destroys it.

Allegedly, The Ring is four operas. That is simply not true – The Ring is two. One is a mammoth five act monsterpiece which even has a two hour prologue, the other is everything after that. One day, I’d like to see a production that stages Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, and the first two acts of Siegfried as a single opera, and then treats Siegfried’s last act and Gotterdammerung as the same (good luck finding the singers…). Wagner began work on the music to The Ring in 1853, by 1858 he’d written Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, and the first two acts of Siegfried. He then broke off to write Tristan und Isolde – the opera that truly shattered every preconceived notion of harmony that began with Bach; and then wrote the five hour comedy, Die Meistersinger, perhaps as a way of lightening up…

The first 2 2/3^rds operas of The Ring are an opera of a demonic genius just beginning to find his footing. The musical material is so rigidly over-controlled that momentum is senselessly dissipated from measure to measure just so Wagner can fit in yet another leitmotif (theme signifying a character or idea) into his score. His first ascent to complete The Ring Cycle is as much theory as music – in which Wagner has a scheme which he adheres to so completely that coma inducing music stands next to some of the most exciting music ever written – and when the exciting bits occur, you’re so grateful for them that they appear all the more exciting in the midst of so much boring bombast. And yet it is also a well-managed journey, a dark comedy that brings us over the course of three days from a primordial beginnings of Das Rheingold to the dark woefulness of Die Walkure’s opening to the light-hearted joyfulness of Siegfried in the forest.

(The Forest Murmurs with which Wagner set down The Ring for a time...)

After Act II of Siegfried, The Ring begins its descent back into darkness – perhaps Wagner was not ready for such a tortured psychic journey. By the time he got around to finishing Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, Wagner was an utterly different composer who’d written Tristan und Isolde, to this day the most harmonically tortured musical journey ever written in which the resolution of an endless series of diminished chords is held just beyond our reach for four hours.

But whereas the diminished chords of Tristan signal the presence of larger-than-life love, lust, and longing, the diminished chords of Gotterdammerung testify to a larger-than-life presence of agonizing doubt, of an infinite spiritual void, of evil reigning triumphant – and the only catharsis remaining possible is through the destruction of the world. Were Satan to speak through music, he would speak through the nebulous key regions of Gotterdammerung.


(The Vengeance Trio)

Unfortunately, Wagner still had to contend with the flawed rigidity of his scheme – so neither the remainder of Siegfried or of Gotterdammerung can be as consistently compelling as either Tristan or Die Meistersinger. But perhaps this is all part of Wagner’s master plan. Whereas with extremely few exceptions, the first six acts of The Ring are all dialogue – a pointless conversation about some stupid Ring and how it’s making everybody batsh-t even though it disappears for four-and-a-half acts; scantly few traditional opera numbers like arias and duets, instead only the talk that exists between them. But beginning in final four acts of the Ring, we feel the air of another planet. Entirely new musical themes are introduced, characters sing real arias and duets, there’s even a chorus (all male though…). Some of the themes may be the same, but the final third of The Ring is a completely different composition.

Or is it? Perhaps the claustrophobic, captive air which we breathe through the first two-thirds of The Ring is deliberate. For all the association of Wagner with bombast, Wagner is bombastic in a completely different way than he’s alleged. Much of Wagner’s music is deafeningly quiet, with nothing but ominous sounds emitting from the orchestra which accompany quiet dialogue that is unspeakably – perhaps deliberately – dull for an hour-long stretch. Whether Wagner intended it this way or not, it creates an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia for which the only release is the violence of Wagner’s louder passages. As The Ring progresses, these releases grow more and more frequent, more and more frenzied, more violent, darker – as though we’re pushed ever further to a kind of ecstatic despair for which destruction is the only release.


(Again, the immolation scene that wraps things up)

(Still more…much more…as this develops through the next few days)

Robert Frost Reads: Birches

a wonderful document from my country's greatest poet...really...

800 Words & Friday Playlist: The Fantasy World of Wagner’s Ring Part 1

(If I told you that this music is about planning a wedding, would you believe me?)

I still don’t get it. No matter how much I vow to stay away from Wagner, no matter how bored I am by him, I keep coming back for more. Wagner wrote 10 major operas, most of which are over four hours long, and less than 25% of the music from which I find a pleasurable experience to listen to. We all have the experience of music, or movies, or books, or whatever else; that you realize is inestimably great, and yet we don’t like it. Many people feel that way about classical music itself. And yet more than any cultural milestone for which I have little sympathy: I find myself unable to tear myself away from Wagner, even as I find the whole spectacle somewhat unbearable. This is music that attracts me and repulses me simultaneously. I once wrote a dialogue between me and Wagner in which I portrayed him as a pimp with feather cap and full-on ghetto speak. It was hardly in good taste, but I enjoyed myself, and I preferred it to a lot of other things I’ve written.

But even as I’m repulsed, I can’t escape the feeling that so many people I know would take to Wagner much better than I ever did. Wagner is the ultimate fantasy literature. Anyone infatuated by Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, or Marvel Comics, or even Disney movies, can take to Wagner like fish to water. He is grandfather of them all. The Brothers Grimm may be the originators of modern fantasy literature, but Wagner takes fantasy literature to an un-toppable zenith. Wagner’s world of fantasy literature mapped on a scale so massive that even Game of Thrones looks as though it’s written under a microscope. In its musical way, there is no world of fantasy so detailed, so intricate and complex, or so inspiring as the world Wagner created. Lord of the Rings and Star Wars may have inspired generations of nerds to dress up, but Wagner’s dress up games inspired whole countries, whole regimes, whole eras. We are a visual culture, not an aural one. So the musical intricacies of Wagner's world have fallen on nearly deaf ears. But were the ears of all the DC comic fans better developed, they would fall on Wagner like a pack of vultures. 

And yet it has all the same problems which all the aforementioned cultural milestones do. Wagner deals in archetype, not characters: health against sickliness, freshness against rot, morality against decadence, good against evil. And yet his greatest paradox of all is that in creating an art which tries to espouse all that is good and true in the world, he created one of the world’s most decadent cultural bodies of work – four-to-five hour operas of unsurpassable demands, volume, complexity, and expense. Over and over again, Wagner’s libretti (texts) espouse the message that the highest honor of all is to die in the service of a cause greater than the self – if love you feel for your deceased boyfriend, or your god, or for the balance of nature, is fervent enough, then you will die in a blaze of ecstasy to be at one with them; free from life’s stifling compromises and sacrifices. For those who take this message seriously (and many people once did), it is a disgusting, demonic rendering of how life ought to be lived.

Wagner wrote his own texts, and they are as amazingly dull as the speech of any dictator. Like nearly all opera texts, they can’t be taken seriously as anything but allegory. Whether the opera is L’Incoronazione di Poppea, or Tamerlano, or The Magic Flute, or Nabucco, or Salome, so many operas are as much a comment on the events of their day as they are representations of myth and literature. If composers of previous centuries set their operas in the present day and critiqued current events, they would be thrown in prison. But because composers set operas in the distant past, they could stage events that closely resembled events of the present day, and trust that the audience was intelligent enough to make the connection.

But Wagner’s operas take allegory to still another level. Like Greek Drama, we’re supposed to view these events at such a distance that we can’t possibly see ourselves in these characters. The characters here are absolutely not human in the way which we are. Wagner lovers always talk about how Wagner is such a masterful psychologist – that’s bollocks. Wagner doesn’t understand psychology, because that would imply an understanding of three-dimensional human beings. What Wagner understands is moods. No matter what the idea he’s trying to represent, he finds the absolutely perfect music for it. So whether it’s the music for a mood of evil, or of love, or of legally binding treaties, he finds music that rings in our ears as the perfect music to capture precisely what he means. Each theme has a motif, just a few notes long with a few harmonies underneath, and it’s perfect. Every time an idea needs to be represented, he simply takes the motif and uses it as he sees fit.

(Brunnhilde’s Immolation Scene and the conclusion to the Ring. Turn on the Closed Captioning.)

The Great Moments of the Ring:

Siegfried’s Funeral March (Sir Georg Solti would be amazing in a fight...)

The Ride of the Valkyries (see it in its actual operatic context)

Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla (with subtitles, pretty much the whole plot of the Ring Cycle can be understood in this excerpt…music’s pretty good too)

Das Rheingold Prelude (a full hundred years before Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, we get four minutes of uninterrupted E-Flat Major)

Descent of the Gods into Nibelheim (for sheer awe-inspiring theatrical effects in music, I don’t think Wagner ever topped this musical transition, which ends with the music of roughly a dozen anvils)

Die Walkure Prelude (tying Beethoven’s record for the most visceral thunderstorm in music)

Die Walkure Act 1 Scene 3: (Much is made about how the first act of Die Walkure is one of the glories of Wagner. The truth is that it’s dreadfully dull until Siegmund and Sieglinde are alone, at which point it gets incredibly fucked up when they realize that they’re twin brother and sister, fall in love, elope, and conceive Siegfried, the hero that will redeem the world. The music of this scene, however, is quite beautiful and often incredibly exciting.)

Die Walkure end of Act II (Most of Act II of Die Walkure is a dreadful bore, with the god Wotan arguing over the finer points of how to punish incest with his wife Fricka and daughter Brunhilde. Nevertheless, the end of the act is very exciting…believe me, we deserve it.)

Wotan’s Farewell (Between the Ride of the Valkyries and Wotan’s Farewell, Act III of Die Walkure is unlistenable. If Wagner had made act three a stich of merely those two scenes, it would be a masterpiece.)

Siegfried’s forging song (Siegfried is both the worst and the best of the Ring operas. None of the operas has more spectacularly cinematic scenes with music that makes John Williams sound like John Tesh, and none has duller valleys. Act I is the nadir of the Ring; a dull, dull series of exchanges between an annoying dwarf – who is allegedly an anti-semitic caricature – a bratty teenager, and a homeless dude who’s actually a god in disguise. But the final scene is far better than the rest, in which we finally get some memorable music as Siegfried forges the magical sword that no other person can.)

Siegfried and Fafner: (The hero kills the dragon, a scene that is made utterly cliché by now in every b-movie ever made. But if you want an example of how Wagner inflamed the world, look no further than this scene.)

Siegfried Finale: (The moment when Brunnhilde awakens is, for me, one of the most magical moments in all of opera. Never mind all the dull, annoying things that have happened already. When you see and hear Brunhilde awaken, everything else is forgiven – this isn’t quite the best example…I can’t find a good cut of it. But would that all fairy tales were accompanied by music like this.)

Gotterdammerung Love Duet (And if that weren’t enough, there’s another melting love duet in Gotterdammerung. It is the last time the lovers are in uncomplicated circumstances. Immediately followed by…)

Siegfried’s Rhine Journey (Siegfried crosses the Rhine in search of new adventures…it doesn’t really end well for him, but Wagner gets some epic music out of it.)

More on Wagner next week in our ‘Brief History of Why Jewish Music Sucks’ (which will probably take ten years to complete…)

800 Words: I Love Being Wrong

The above statement may strike people who know me as a shock, or perhaps an outright lie. I’ve debated and argued with far too many people over the years to give much evidence of its truth. And in one way, it’s certainly false; I don’t much like being proven wrong by others – few if any people do. But in most ways, the above statement is absolutely true. I’ve learned to love it, I had to. Because over the years I’ve noticed that I eventually think that nine out of every ten things I once believed are wrong – and then the new things I believe are wrong too. People evolve, and whether in matters of politics, culture, people, science, or workaday banalities, you’d better be willing to change your mind at the drop of a coin if you want to stay in touch with reality.

 Some people believe that doubt is a cancer of the mind, ruining all that is good and true in the world and undermining the dogmas they cling to as the only way of making sense of our crazy world. They cling to a set of beliefs and values as the rest of us do a favorite shirt. These people believe that consistency is a virtue – I think it shows an extreme lack of thought. If you don’t reconsider your beliefs, if they don’t evolve from year to year, if you’re the exact same person you were five years ago, you’re not only boring, you’re probably a dangerous person who makes the world a worse place to live for those of us trying to live in the real world.

It takes an enormous amount of repression to stay consistent in the face of a world that’s always turning. As the paradoxical argument goes (best summed up in the Pixar movie, Ratatouille), you can’t change nature, but nature is change. It’s the paradox at the heart of human nature – we all try to change ourselves and others, only to find that we are all precisely the same people we were before the change. And yet, at the very same time, we are completely different people for having undergone such strenuous efforts to change. From year to year, month to month, day to day, hour to hour, etc., we are completely different people than we were before, and yet the more we try to control the difference, the more those differences run away from us. Life is what happens to us when we’re busy making other plans, …said some guy with sunglasses (more or less),

It was an enormously educational experience to re-read that Hopkins paper I posted yesterday. I probably hadn’t looked at it in four years. Looking at it now, aside from some glaringly obvious typos, I suddenly realize that I no longer quite believe some of the things I wrote. I’m not sure I believed some of them then.

I was a freshly new poli-sci grad student with visitor status, hoping against hope that I could either get the kind of professorial recommendation that could get me into a second-rate PhD program or at least a master’s program in international relations. As a graduate from a second-rate music school, there was no way I could have ever gotten into Hopkins on my own merits. But I was at the height of my political passions – having spent more time thinking about politics at American University than I ever did about music. For people whose passion is politics, there is not a single school in America that provides a better environment – AU lived and breathed politics the way state schools breathed sports. In the years after 9/11, it was absolutely impossible not to be caught in the sweep of people’s passions – and passionate discussions were happening everywhere you turned, from drunken debates at parties on the grandest philosophical first principles to cafeteria talk on the extreme minutia of polling numbers which people discussed the way University of Maryland sports nerds discuss shooting percentages. It was a grand, grand time.

After four years at AU, a year in Israel, and far too many Christopher Hitchens articles resounding in my head, I managed to convince Hopkins to take me as a poli-sci student on visitor status – determined to make up for my lack of education by sheer dint of effort and a surfeit of classroom bluster. For the first two months, I was probably an embarrassment – constantly condemning realism in American foreign policy while not realizing that my main professor was a realist in the Brent Scowcroft mode (so that’s why that other kid was suppressing giggles…). I hardly understood or made my way through the articles I was assigned, and I all too quickly realized I had neither the talent nor the desire for typical academic work – reading and writing obscure, jargon-filled, theoretical articles in political journals which told you absolutely nothing about the history or the practice of international affairs and everything about how the English language can be mauled. After a few weeks, I just decided to fake my way through the class discussions, and suddenly the professor found my contributions to class discussion much more valuable.

But that year at Hopkins did provide me with one crucial political insight. After five years of listening to Republicans from my uncle to college drinking buddies yammer in my ear about the importance of deposing dictators in the Middle East, I saw the entire world from a nearly neoconservative point of view – or at least a Tony Blairite liberal hawk one (and I was on the hawkish end of liberal hawk). I was always an economic and social liberal, and rarely ever wavered on those points. But on foreign policy, I’d become nearly as hawkish as people came.  To me, there was little if any difference between people who subscribed to moveon.org and the Henry Kissinger realists; both of them were obstacles to liberal democracy who subscribed to the racist notion that Arabs are not ready for it and should not be encouraged to embrace it by all means at our disposal.

But there was one circle in this circular logic I could not square. Why had the Palestinians elected Hamas in their first reasonably free legislative election? Columnists and friends on the left would have me believe that they’d done it because the radical Islamic party Hamas was the only competent party in Palestine – a fact whose truth was demonstrated by the secularist Fatah party producing two competing party lists and two more secessionist party lists. But it still troubled me greatly that faced with the prospect of democracy and freedom, a plurality of Palestinians would willingly choose to elect a party whose entire ethos is grounded in an unmoderated political Islam which would almost guarantee the end of any prospect for democracy to burgeon.

My professors were almost all realists; real realists, who were nearly as hard-bitten, almost authoritarian, in their views as their students were leftist. They’d grown up in the Cold War era, and saw it as a given that alliances with dictatorships were absolutely necessary to keep the balance of power. The moment I was moved to an argument like theirs was the moment I started tabulating the political murders committed by various dictators – 11-21 million under Hitler, 20-62 million under Stalin, 40-over 100 million under Mao, and a similarly large proportion of population under less powerful dictators like Pol Pot, Saddam, Suharto, Seko, and Idi Amin. If you actually care about the world, a mere list of these death tolls is enough to make you wretch – and that doesn’t even begin to account for how these people were killed, or how many were imprisoned, displaced, maimed, driven insane, and raped. It’s very hard to get worked up over far away dictatorships that kill mere thousands of people, or even authoritarians in your own country, when you realize that whole civilizations can be wiped out in the span of a few years. Compared to the aforementioned murderers, Pinochet and Mubarak were downright principled and Rick Santorum is St. Rick of the Gay Pride. As I think any rational person can see, I was forced to conclude that yes, some dictators are worse, much worse, than others. The United States is blamed for making these sorts of ‘lesser evil’ decisions to assist a dictator in coming to power so that a worse one may not, and sometimes deservedly so. Certainly in the cases of Suharto in Indonesia and Seko in the Congo, virtually any communist government would have been preferable to the apocalyptic bloodbaths which followed.

The problem with neoconservatism is not that neoconservatives don’t take the threat of totalitarianism too seriously, it’s that they don’t take it seriously enough. To policy-makers in the Bush administration, any country whose government is possessed of an over-arching ideology with a predisposition to violence (that isn’t neoconservatism) is totalitarian ipso-facto. It helped their case that Saddam was a truly totalitarian dictator (though less than he once was), but to think that a country could embrace democracy without first having a reliable rule of law, a functional and uncorrupted civil service, and economic security, is beyond ludicrous – it’s downright dangerous. It left (and still leaves) open an invitation for a leader even more bloody-minded than Saddam to impose his rule.  

But looking at that paper now, I see I went too far in the other direction. The realist jargon term ‘national interest’ is sprayed all around that piece – never mind that no two realists seem to agree on what’s in the ‘national interest.’ I don’t know if I meant that it doesn’t matter whether self-interest is an amoral question or if the morality of doing something in the ‘national interest’ is implied, but either way, it does not sit well with me now. Doing the right thing is what’s important, far more important than any national interest, and I’m sure I believed that then as well as now. Clearly, I was either trying to impress my professor or misstating my case.  

I still think Jimmy Carter was a terrible president whose abandonment of the Sha had dire consequences that were utterly predictable*. I still think Pinochet, bloody as he was, was far from the worst option (try to imagine how easily a Latin-American civil war could have spread around the world… it’s not hard…), but there’s one sentence that particularly jars me:

In the case of 1970’s Chile, we find an example in which Kirkpatrick is proven correct in her assertion that support for right-wing autocracy is sometimes very necessary due to very real threats of communist infiltration.

I could point to a number of instances like this in the paper, but this was the first sentence I wrote in the “Chile from Allende to Pinochet” section. Well…yes, I suppose that in the beginning it was necessary to support Pinochet’s coup. But the brutality was also completely preventable, and neither Nixon nor Ford did much to prevent it – not even when an exiled Chilean Statesman was assassinated in Washington DC.

But at the same time, Communist infiltration is a very dire thing  – even if it’s danger was co-opted by all sorts of right-wing demagogues for their own purposes. What I deliberately left out of this paper is that, on the whole, Communist dictatorships were at very least a little bloodier, more repressive, more disgusting regimes to live under than non-Communist ones, just not nearly to the extent which Jeane Kirkpatrick claimed. To give just the most obvious example, many people on the left like to argue that Chiang Kai-Shek was just as bloody a dictator as Mao. To be sure, Chiang was a foul, foul murderer; his forces killed approximately 4 million Chinese people, but they did so in wartime. Upon winning the Chinese Civil War, Mao Tse-Tun’s reign saw the political murder of at least 40 million people (perhaps three times as many) – and that was during peace time.

The world is what it is, and whether the subject is politics, philosophy, culture, the people around us, or everyday chores, it’s up to us to understand the world if we can. It’s entirely possible that my view of the world will change yet again as time goes on. As far as politics goes, I was a leftist in high school, a liberal hawk in college, a liberal realist in graduate school, and (hopefully) a liberal in adulthood. I’m pretty sure I thought of myself as a liberal the whole time, but my beliefs were always changing: I evolved, perhaps for better fitness, perhaps for worse. But either way, I’ve tried to go from year to year with a better understanding of things than I had before.

*Let us pray that Obama’s abandonment of Mubarak doesn’t have the same consequences, I believe Obama did the right thing, but the jury is very much still out. Nevertheless, it should occur to us all that if an Ayatollah-like figure is about to take over Egypt, he’d have appeared by now. 

800 Words: That Paper from Yesterday, Better Formatted (let's try this again)

Here it is again...sans footnotes and hopefully formatted better.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick: The Masquerade of Conservative Idealism as Realism  

  An essay by Evan Tucker

“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him.  Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too.  The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses.  Because they had no ideology.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago#

I.

      Introduction

There are, however, systemic differences between traditional and revolutionary autocracies that have a predictable effect on their degree of repressiveness.  Generally speaking, traditional autocrats tolerate social inequities, brutality, and poverty, whereas revolutionary autocracies create them.

Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources, which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty.  But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos.  They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.  Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who growing up in the society, learn to cope.  .  .  . Such societies create no refugees.

Precisely the opposite is true of revolutionary Communist regimes.  They create refugees by the millions because they claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee in the remarkable expectation that their attitudes, values, and goals will “fit” better in a foreign country than in their native land.#

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick's essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," is generally regarded as one of the most influential articles of the post-World War II era.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that "Dictatorships and Double Standards," and particularly the excerpt quoted above, caused a revolution in American policy.  The change in policy advocated by Kirkpatrick and followed by the Reagan administration came to be commonly known as the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine.”  Whatever objections one might have to Kirkpatrick's scholarly analysis, it cannot be denied that the blueprint for the policy of the Reagan administration, which many believe defeated Soviet Communism, was hers.  As analysis, it was not without some insight, though it was quite flawed.  As an outline for future Reagan policy, however, it proved to be effective beyond anyone’s expectations.  Very few, if any, people believed that the Soviet Union could be completely defeated by a more aggressive tactic.  Her goal was most likely a neo-Dullesian gradual rollback of Soviet territory that would incrementally add up to substantial gains in the American sphere of influence over a long period of time.  However, the thought that a policy like the Kirkpatrick Doctrine would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Empire was virtually unthinkable in 1979 when she wrote “Dictatorships and Double Standards.”

            The bulk of "Dictatorships and Double Standards" was a stinging polemic against the Carter Administration.  Kirkpatrick correctly demonstrated how Carter's lack of understanding about the nature of unpleasant alliances led him to disastrous choices in foreign policy.#  The Carter administration made the mistake, in the cases of both Iran and Nicaragua, of encouraging the fall of the Shah and the Somoza family, assuming that the advocates of liberal democracy in those countries had enough influence to wrest control of the countries from potential autocrats unfriendly to the United States.  Instead of supporting those two "moderate autocrats, friendly to American interests," the Carter administration "actively collaborated" in tossing them aside and replacing them "with less friendly autocrats of the "extremist persuasion.”#   What Carter failed to understand was the famed dictum, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."  In the conduct of foreign affairs, alliances with distasteful regimes are sometimes necessary in support of vital national interests.   As Winston Churchill once said in relation to Stalin, "If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”#  Sometimes the exigencies of foreign policy make it necessary to form temporary alliances with unattractive partners because the threat of the main enemy takes precedence.  As Roosevelt is reputed to have said in a perhaps apocryphal story about various dictators (the story is sometimes told regarding Duvalier of Haiti or about Somoza of Nicaragua), “He may be a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch.”#  Both Churchill and Roosevelt understood how foreign policy works.  Unfortunately, Carter did not.  

            There can be no doubt of the resounding success that “Dictatorships and Double Standards” had as a polemic.  If Kirkpatrick had limited her article to this kind of "realistic" criticism of the Carter administration, her argument would have been unassailable.  But Kirkpatrick went further than merely criticizing the Carter administration for its lack of realism.  She contrasted the "revolutionary autocracies," predominantly of the communist type, that the United States had to oppose in the most forceful way, with the right wing dictatorships, which she felt were worthy of American support, despite how repulsive those regimes were and how uncomfortable it might make Americans feel to have their government supporting them.   

It is at this point in her argument that Kirkpatrick's article ceases to be merely an effective polemic against liberal idealism in the handling of foreign policy and begins to substitute a new kind of conservative idealism disguised as realism that had its own dangerous implications for the conduct of foreign affairs.  The seemingly inexorable logic of her analysis is quite seductive, but the problems begin with the way she used the word "totalitarianism."  In “Reflections on Totalitarianism” she defined the word with only two specific criteria, the first being that totalitarianism "conceives the ultimate purposes of the individual as identical with those of the state (or race, or class)," and the second being that totalitarianism "conceives coercion as an instrument for the achievement of these ends.”#   This definition was so general that any state possessed of a total ideology and using even nominal coercion to enforce its beliefs would then be considered “totalitarian.”  Kirkpatrick pushed this reasoning a step too far when she implied that there is no distinction between communist dictatorships and totalitarian ones.  Such a distinction is necessary, and to imply that it does not fails to recognize the nuances involved.  The communist dictatorship of Stalin was both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the regimes of Khrushchev and Brezhnev.  Once the distinctions are blurred between communism and totalitarianism, all communist governments are ipso facto "totalitarian," regardless of the extent to which they pursue genuinely totalitarian policies. 

Other scholars and policy makers defined "totalitarianism" differently, each with their own criteria.   Therefore, countries that would be defined as "totalitarian" by one thinker would not necessarily be thought of as totalitarian by another.  For example, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich, writing in the 1950's, but before the full extent of Khrushchev's reforms were appreciated, and before Khruschev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was widely disseminated, defined a totalitarian government as one that is in possession of six properties: 1) a total ideology, 2) a single party, 3) a terrorist police, 4) a monopoly on mass communication, 5) a monopoly on weapons, 6) a command economy.#   However, there are a great many communist governments of both the past and present that fall well short of this definition.  Communist China from Deng Xiaoping onward has undergone a metamorphosis into perhaps the most aggressively capitalist economy in the world.   The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 would not have been possible with a complete monopoly on weapons.   The Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia obviously had no monopoly on communication during the Prague Spring of 1968.  It is arguable that Poland had a second political party in the Solidarity movement during the last stages of Communist Poland's existence, and certainly the Polish Catholic Church had the ability to disseminate an alternate ideology through the Church’s own media that competed with those of the state and communist party.

Hannah Arendt's definition of “totalitarianism” as “the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible,” – one of many definitions she provides -- clearly implies that at a certain point, communist governments were no longer totalitarian.#  The United States coexisted easily with Mao after Nixon's opening to China in 1973 (arguably after Mao was no longer completely in control) and uneasily with Soviet Russia after Stalin’s death in 1953.  When it suited the United States, alliances were made with all kinds of Communist governments. Even within the Iron Curtain, there were governments such as that of Tito's Yugoslavia and Ceausescu’s Rumania with which the United States saw fit to ally or at least to encourage becoming more independent of their Soviet hegemons.  Furthermore, there are examples of the United States' coexisting with governments that fit Brzezinski/Friedrich's definition of totalitarianism far better than the Soviet Union did after Khrushchev's famous 1956 speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.   Over the years, the US has been on favorable terms, or at least sought to do business with Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Suharto’s Indonesia, Baathist Iraq, and even Kim Jung Il's North Korea.  With the most brutal and repressive societies on earth, the United States has often seen fit to negotiate and form alliances if the US felt that doing so served its interests.  When strategic interests seem to compete with the concern for human rights, the US has rarely shown any compunction about placing strategic interests first. 

Even though Kirkpatrick's use of the word, "totalitarian," seems overly promiscuous and designed primarily to appeal to a right wing constituency (such as the readers of Commentary magazine),  Kirkpatrick's analysis would seem, at least at first glance, to be remarkably prescient about the nature of authoritarian governments.  Her prognostication was, however, much less remarkable with regard to the governments she deemed “totalitarian,” many of which made their transitions to democracy, or at least to capitalism, far more easily than she had predicted when she wrote that "[traditional autocracies] are more susceptible of liberalization."#  

   

But her prescience about the governments she deemed “authoritarian” was, in a sense, exceptional.  Kirkpatrick had the foresight to realize that so many of the seemingly permanent dictatorships of Latin America, Africa and East Asia were merely transitory and would go the way of all flesh just as the dictatorship of Greece did in 1974.  The economic freedom that the strongmen leading these countries allowed perhaps facilitated a smooth transition to democratic governance.  Or perhaps the strengthening of capitalism through years of stability encouraged the creation of a middle class that was one of democracy's prerequisites. In case after case-- Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, etc.--the transition from autocracy to democracy was incredibly uneventful in comparison to the violent revolutionary events that some might have predicted would be necessary to overthrow an entrenched dictatorship.  But even though Kirkpatrick might have been quite correct in predicting that these dictatorships would ultimately pass away and often be replaced  by democracies,  there is no way of knowing how necessary it was to have dictators in these countries with the bankrolled support of the United States.  Was it possible in any of these countries to have democratic governments, even leftist/Marxist ones, that were free from the influence and control of the Soviet Union?  And if American support were absolutely necessary in some places, the question remains, where?   Would it have been possible to turn potential world leaders such as Allende, Sukarno, Bhutto, Mossadegh, into figures like Tito and Ceausescu, who were at very least amenable to US influence and not categorical supporters of the USSR?  Or would the damage to the economy that such leftists would cause by their support of socialism and nationalization be so disruptive that their control of the economy would ultimately delay the passage into a free political society?  

Kirkpatrick's insight, however qualified, about the transitional nature of right-wing authoritarian governments was not matched by an understanding of what would happen to the "revolutionary autocracies" that she identified as the main objects of American opposition.  Though Kirkpatrick seemed prescient about the transitional nature of  “traditional”  right-wing autocracies, she did not seem to foresee that communist governments were about to disappear as well.  Even before Kirkpatrick penned “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” there were examples in Europe such as Hungary in the 50's, Czechoslovakia in the 60's, and Poland in the 70's, which showed very promising signs of being able to transition to democracy, and all that prevented them from doing so was the iron fist of Soviet occupation.  The obviousness of their readiness for such a transition was borne out almost immediately after the fall of Soviet communism.  In retrospect, one must ask if the same forces that brought down so many right-wing "traditional authoritarian" governments did not also overthrow the communist puppets of Eastern Europe, Soviet Communism, and ultimately the communist governments of East Asia as well.  China and Vietnam are today communist in name only.  China as ever inches towards the potential for political reform, and its rapid strides in capitalistic economic development is likely to lead either to a need for political modernization or greater repression.  Communism remains the governing philosophy of North Korea and Cuba, but one cannot but wonder if these two last bastions of the old type of communism (and totalitarianism in the case of North Korea) are not in their last stages as well.  

Furthermore, Kirkpatrick's argument about the objectionable nature of communist totalitarianism because of the refugee problems that its "revolutionary" nature creates is also problematic.   The “refugees by the millions” do not always seem to be created by domestic regimes;  they are often created by war.  Refugees from Hungary in 1956 and Afghanistan in 1980 were fleeing a foreign occupation, not oppression from within.   Moreover, communist regimes do not have a monopoly on creating refugee problems.  The refugee crises of the Congo, of Sudan, and of Haiti were hardly created by communism.#           

“Dictatorships and Double Standards” is an article that allegedly argues a case for greater realism in foreign policy.   And yet the notions Kirkpatrick espoused are not always reality.  On the one hand, she had the foresight to realize that many authoritarian governments were transient and would disappear when a country's wealth would allow them to cast repression aside.   On the other hand, she did not see that the case was the same in many communist countries.  She blurred the distinctions between “totalitarianism” and “communism,” and she neglected the United States' history of being able to negotiate at suitable times with many of the world's worst regimes.  What Kirkpatrick argued is not the case for realism.   In her analysis, there is little room for the nuances and ambiguities which realism must permit.  It is the case for a hard-liner's idealism that imagines the United States in perpetual conflict with a force that allows no room for compromise.   As the foundation principle, it was certainly effective in that the policies that grew out of her analysis contributed to the Soviet Empire's collapse.  But inspiring effective policy is not the same as nuanced analysis.  As analysis, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” is insightful, but simplistic. Within its simplicity, the analysis contains insights that may have eluded other more nuanced thinkers.  However, the simplicity of Kirkpatrick's analysis causes “Dictatorships and Double Standards” to obscure more knowledge of the world than it elucidates.

                II.

Misdefinitions and Misapplications

Totalitarian practices derive from a variety of utopianism which (1) conceives the ultimate purposes of the individual as identical with those of the state (or race or class), and (2) conceives coercion as an instrument for the achievement of these ends.  Totalitarian utopians attribute no independent or intrinsic value or reality to individuals.  Presons matter only as examples and members of a collectivity.#

Kirkpatrick's definitions of “traditional” and “revolutionary autocrats” are not distinct enough from one another to create separate categories.   As we will see below, in some cases all that separates the practices of a “traditional autocracy” from a “revolutionary” one is that the traditional autocracy supports US foreign policy;  revolutionary autocracy opposes it.   As we shall see later, the objective differences between those governments Kirkpatrick would label “authoritarian” and those she would label “totalitarian” are often far too minute for the regimes to be placed in separate categories the way she does.

It is highly probable Hitler and Stalin both articulated the purpose of a totalitarian government better than any student essay could.  Hitler repeated many times that “The state is only the means to an end.   The end is: Conservation of race.”#  If one were to substitute “conservation of race” with “empowerment of the worker,” the statement could apply just as easily to communism.  Stalin once made a similar statement: “We are in favor of the state dying out, and at the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat which represents the most powerful and mighty authority of all forms of State, which have existed up to the present day.  The highest possible development of the power of the state with the object of preparing the conditions for the dying out of the State;  that is the Marxist    formula.” #

  It is just as difficult to imagine nearly any of the bureaucratic communist dictators of the 70’s or 80’s making statements like those above as it would be to imagine most right-wing dictators doing the same.  In an authoritarian regime, the state is an end in itself.  It would have been treasonous to suggest even in most communist states that there is a higher purpose to which the state is accountable.  But in a totalitarian regime, the state is ultimately accountable to its ideology and all means are implemented in the service of enforcing such an ideology.  

When Kirkpatrick speaks about traditional and revolutionary authoritarian governments, perhaps she had in mind the distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” governments.   To put the distinction with the greatest possible simplicity: an “authoritarian” government aspires to power, whereas a “totalitarian” government aspires to control.  For an authoritarian government to aspire to power means that if the regime perceives an opportunity for the consolidation of its power, or the reduction of opposition to it by granting certain limited freedoms, it will not hesitate to do so.   On the other hand, for a totalitarian government to aspire to control means something much more specific.  Opportunities for relative gain mean very little to a government only concerned with absolute control.  When a government's primary aspiration is to implement an ideology, it requires an apparatus that can maintain a level of control close to absolute over its citizens.  Relaxation of state control for gain is an oxymoron because there is no relative gain when the goal is absolute control.#  

Ironically, one of the best descriptions of what distinguishes a totalitarian government from an authoritarian one comes from Kirkpatrick herself when she writes that totalitarianism "conceives the ultimate purposes of the individual as identical with those of the state (or race or class).”# This quote demonstrates the distinction extremely well because however ruthlessly an authoritarian state may govern, it is still merely authoritarian so long as it does not view its citizens as individuals barred from having basic motivations apart from those that are permitted by the state.   The difference between the two systems is the difference between the possibility of private ownership or independent media, and the impossibility of the same.  Granted, a totalitarian state may allow for some of the trappings of liberalism.  Hitler allowed for private property and decentralized industry, and even the bloodiest communist regimes allowed for private property, though they never allowed private control over the “means of production.”  But those who owned property or businesses privately knew that they had to follow the very precise requirements of the state or else their private holdings would be repossessed, effectively making their holdings operate as though they were the property of the state.  

From such small freedoms as an authoritarian state allows might spring larger ones.  The difference between the ability and inability to liberalize from within is one of the clearest distinctions between “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” government.   A totalitarian state by Brzezinski's and Friedrich's definition has means at its disposal for control that far outstrip the means of many later communist governments.  Therefore, there were many times in different communist countries when the state did not possess the means to stop large advances of liberalization from within, and in some cases the Soviet Union had no choice but to allow its satellites to liberalize their systems over a period of time.  

Moreover, the creation of a distinction between “traditional autocrat” and “revolutionary autocrat” is a construct belonging solely to Kirkpatrick in the sense that she uses both.  One of the most significant differences between the two is found in Kirkpatrick's famous dictum from "Dictatorships and Double Standards," that "traditional autocrats tolerate social inequities, brutality, and poverty, whereas revolutionary autocrats create them.”# The most important reason for repeating her famous phrase is to note that the statement is fraught with strange semantic contortions and inaccuracies belying Kirkpatrick’s motivation to whitewash America’s allies into colors more acceptable to her readers.  Precisely what does it mean that traditional autocrats "tolerate brutality?"   Toleration implies a lack of direct responsibility for such brutality.  When anywhere between 9,000 and 30,000 Argentines disappeared in the mid-1970’s as a result of the “National Reorganization Process” of General Videla and his successors#, could this ever be called merely “tolerating brutality?”  Or did autocrats like Videla and Galtieri create and order the brutality which characterized their regimes?  One must also ask to what extent social inequities were created by "revolutionary autocrats" in Eastern Europe and to what extent the inequities were inherited from as much as 1000 years of a rural, pre-capitalist mentality that did not encourage private enterprise and disdained all commercial enterprise as something fit only for the Jewish minority.   There is no doubt that "revolutionary autocracy" did more than its part to complicate poverty and to create problems of social inequality.   But to say that revolutionary autocrats "create" such conditions sounds as though they did not exist beforehand.  Surely communist policies increased levels of poverty within their countries, but to say that communist countries "create" poverty is a rhetorical sleight of hand.  Similarly, when poverty levels initially increase due to the deregulation often implemented by traditional authoritarian states or by the removal of state subsidies, is that mere toleration of poverty or is it the creation of new economic disruption by state policy?   Furthermore, a “revolutionary autocracy” is in itself an unsound concept because some “traditional autocracies” came to power by way of revolution, and at least one came to power through traditional means:  Hitler would have not become Der Fuhrer if he had not first won the largest plurality of the vote in relatively free elections and then been appointed Chancellor by democratically elected President Hindenburg.  

The purpose of mentioning these semantic inconsistencies is to demonstrate that the distinction between revolutionary and traditional autocracies is confused at its source.   By rough tabulations, Nazi Germany can be said to be responsible for than 20,946,000 deaths,  Communist China for 53,879,000 deaths, and the Soviet Union responsible for no less than 61,911,000 deaths.#  And surely there have been right-wing authoritarian governments-- non-dominated by total ideology and allied to the United States-- that were so coercive in their methods that they could only be seen as totalitarian.  Surely the anti-PKI massacres of Suharto (300,000 to a million killed) and then the unprovoked slaughter of one-third of the population of East Timor (200,000 killed) must count as acts that could only be perpetrated by a regime that approaches totalitarianism in its methods.#  In addition, surely the anti-Kurdish attacks of Saddam Hussein combined with the pre-emptive war on Iran in the 1980’s (total of approximately 800,000 killed, not to forget his Kurdish and Shiite massacres in the 1990’s that killed between 90,000 and 230,000) would count as practices very near to totalitarian in their brutality.# There are truly enormous distinctions that must be made between the regimes that produced such foully high death-tolls and merely despotic regimes that caused profoundly high levels of misery and murder, but not democide.

Thus not only did Kirkpatrick misdefine the distinctions between autocratic and totalitarian governments that would cause one type to be more susceptible to liberalization than the other, but she even misapplied her own definitions as well.   There were some states which Kirkpatrick would term “traditional autocracies” simply because they did not subscribe to an overtly “total ideology.” And yet these states were in such complete control of their citizens that only the term “totalitarian” could apply. 

Similarly, there were many communist states which Kirkpatrick would term “revolutionary autocracies” and therefore consider them “totalitarian.”  And yet these states fell short of possessing the controls necessary to refer to them as “totalitarian” according to Brzezinski/Friedrich’s definition.  Perhaps those autocratic governments which fall short of the standard set by Brzezinski and Friedrich may be considered "mere" autocracies.   The difference in degree between the two is not a matter of having some means at the government's disposal to implement a total ideology, it is a matter of possessing all possible means to control their citizens.  Once again, Jeane Kirkpatrick provides fodder for her prosecution: “A totalitarian regime is distinguished by its rulers’ determination to transform society, culture, and personality through the use of coercive state power.  Non-totalitarian systems – whether autocracies or democracies – do not use power for such broad purposes.”#  When a totalitarian government relinquishes possession of the means to control its citizens totally, it ceases by definition to be totalitarian.  There is too much that separates the communism of Dubcek and the communism of Stalin to group them together.  And there is too little that separates many “revolutionary autocracies” from “traditional autocracies” to separate them into categories.  Surely the Czechoslovakia of Dubcek, the Poland of Gierek and the Hungary of Nagy and Kadar were far closer to authoritarian regimes in their levels of oppression than they were to truly totalitarian governments like Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Maoist China.   

There are many dictators whom Kirkpatrick would have branded "revolutionary autocrats" due to the nature of the "total ideology" to which the autocrats subscribed.   As was stated in the introduction, Kirkpatrick's definition of “totalitarian” ultimately means that any state based upon a “total ideology” and possessing “coercive means” is therefore totalitarian.   This is an unsound syllogism designed to demonstrate that all communist states are inherently totalitarian by virtue of their ideology and would make no distinction in degree between communism under Stalin and under Khrushchev.    Kirkpatrick explains why she believes that no distinction is necessary in her essay “Reflections on Totalitarianism:”

It has been argued that ubiquitous terror is a necessary characteristic of totalitarianism (as in Stalinist Russia, the Nazi regime, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution) and that the decline of terror signals the end of the totalitarian regime.   But if a chief task of the totalitarian is to translate ideology into culture, then one would expect the role of coercion in the cultural sphere to decline with time as habit, socialization, and the succession of generations result in progressive internalization of the new ways of thinking and valuing and in progressive conformity to new modes of behavior.   As new norms are internalized, new beliefs accepted, new habits established, the need to coerce conformity through crash "thought reform" programs and punishment of dissenters should decline.#

In other words, the behaviors of communism are so indoctrinated into the populace that after a period of terror and coercion, the culture becomes so accustomed to communist methods that the extreme forms of totalitarian control are no longer necessary and coercion can be relaxed.  Kirkpatrick assumes prima facie that the highest goal of totalitarianism is to transform ideology into culture, and therefore the level of coercion subsides as the culture takes root.   However, this assumption is a fallacy.  Whereas the culture of a populace is an abstract notion, always changing as the needs and desires of people change, ideology is concrete, dogmatic and unmovable.  It is impossible to impose an ideology on a culture because an ever-metamorphosing populace will always find ways to resist ideology.  Therefore, the only way to impose an unchanging ideology upon an ever-evolving culture is by way of ubiquitous terror that designates certain people within the culture as “enemies” of the ideology to be blamed for why the end of implementing an ideology has not been achieved.  Therefore, all-encompassing terror is an absolute necessity in a truly totalitarian regime and “the decline of terror” is a telltale sign that a totalitarian regime is at its end.   History has proven that when terror declines within the totalitarian state past a certain level, the entropy of state-run monopolies soon follows.  

What distinguishes a totalitarian dictatorship from an authoritarian one is much more than mere ideology and the continual maintenance of power.  A totalitarian dictatorship must put its total ideology to the service of an enterprise that aspires to the domination and control of its citizens.  One must admit that total ideology predisposes regimes to totalitarian rule.   Total ideology is essential to the existence of totalitarian government and serves as an indicator of the possibility of totalitarian rule's existence.    But one must also admit that not all governments with total ideologies are inherently totalitarian.

Many governments subscribing to a total ideology lack the means to institute coercion on a scale of total domination.  Total ideology need not entail a monopoly on coercive means, which is why the second criteria for Kirkpatrick's definition of totalitarianism as conceiving coercion as an instrument for the achievement of these ends of total ideology is quite unconvincing.   It is not enough to conceive or even possess coercive means to achieve the ends of a total ideology;  one must possess means for coercion as the modus operandi in the implementation of a total ideology. 

The defining characteristic of the totalitarian state is not its total ideology, but the sum total of the actions perpetrated in the name of total ideology's justification.   Many states that possessed total ideologies were not capable of total coercion at many points in their history.  In the wake of Imre Nagy’s Revolution of 1956, Janos Kadar’s new government judged that the Hungarian population was so hostile that trying to impose total control might instigate nationalistic and religious attacks on Soviet occupation.  Therefore, Kadar and his Soviet masters decided to moderately liberalize the country.  In November, 1956, Kadar introduced a fifteen point plan to reestablish stability in Hungary that allowed farmers to keep privatized plots and even permitted for general criticism of the Hungarian government.#   “Anyone not against us is with us,” Kadar said. #  As this evidence displays, countries governed by total ideologies may still fall well short of the accepted definitions of “totalitarian” government.  

Because Kirkpatrick misdefined and misapplied the definitions of “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” states, she failed to realize that neither totalitarian nor authoritarian states could stay as they were permanently for a variety of reasons.  Kirkpatrick's foresight was clear enough to allow for the eventual transition of “traditional authoritarian” states like Argentina, Brazil, South Korea and Malaysia, but in the cases of left-wing authoritarian states like the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, her foresight was lacking.  Many states within the Soviet bloc found the transition to western-style government relatively easy because their leaders were unable to contain ever larger degrees of freedom in the media and political assembly.  All across the Eastern Bloc, radio stations like Voice of America and the BBC could be heard.  Extensive social contacts with the west existed, and intellectual and social exchanges could not be contained.  Soviet occupation could suppress ideological deviation as it did in Budapest in ’56 and Prague in ’68, but it could not prevent ideological deviation from forming.   

         

III.

      Traditional Autocracy  

Since many traditional autocracies permit limited contestation and participation, it is not impossible that U.S.  policy could effectively encourage this process of liberalization and democratization, provided that the effort is not made at a time when the incumbent government is fighting for its life against violent adversaries, and that proposed reforms are aimed at producing gradual change rather than perfect democracy overnight.  To accomplish this, policymakers are needed who understand how actual democracies have come into being.  History is a better guide than good intentions.#

It is certainly true that governments fighting for their lives cannot concern themselves with liberalizing reforms.  But threats to existence cannot be made into excuses to perpetuate dictatorships, either.  Surely there were regimes that remained as authoritarian as ever in spite of lacking an existential threat.  In retrospect, we see that the authoritarian regimes of Argentina, Brazil and Chile were eventually much more threatened by the rise of democracy than by the possibility of a Marxist Revolution.  But certainly Kirkpatrick was right that the support in those authoritarian regimes for capitalist economic reforms helped create the social structure necessary for liberal democracy to emerge.

What Kirkpatrick realized in an incomplete form was that if political circumstances are correct – that is, if a country is at peace or without overt international pressure, if the economy is sufficiently developed, if there are sufficient international contacts and information about the outside world – then moves in the direction of liberalization will probably happen to most states, just as moves in the direction of authoritarianism will happen under other circumstances. Without a state of war or international pressure, without considerable international isolation, without full control of all the media and public information, and probably without grinding individual poverty, it is almost impossible for an authoritarian regime to keep absolute and unchanging control over its populace indefinitely.  Depending upon circumstances, authoritarian regimes are likely to move in the direction of liberal democracy as they did in Greece, Mexico or South Korea, or they are likely to give way to even bloodier authoritarian regimes as they did in Cuba or Iran.  Kirkpatrick took the American government to task for being foolish enough to encourage rebel forces in both Nicaragua and Iran because the US believed the rebels had liberal democrats within their ranks.  She was certainly correct that such encouragement was futile. America did so only to find out that the American government, along with Iranian and Nicaraguan liberals, was ultimately duped by the more radical insurgents into permitting an even more authoritarian regime.  

However, Kirkpatrick carried her conclusions too far.  Kirkpatrick assumed that the lesson learned from the experiences of Nicaragua and Iran was to always support “traditional” authoritarian regimes congenial to US interests because the alternative would in all probability be more authoritarian and less sympathetic to the US.  But Kirkpatrick’s assumption is ultimately incorrect.  In order to expand their base of power and court popularity with their citizenry, authoritarian regimes often allow for decentralization of economic power and sometimes even decentralization of the media.  Once such power is decentralized, it is only a matter of time before the populace demands the limitation of governmental power as well.

Such a transition need not necessarily mean a sudden abdication of autocrats to give way to a liberal or social democracy.  A sudden transition such as that which happened with the fall of the USSR would predictably lead to a power vacuum that would be filled by another authoritarian leader.   But a gradual transition with a gradual abdication of centralized power such as that which happened in Pinochet’s Chile or in Franco’s Spain is likely to leave in its place a liberal democracy with healthy apparatus such as an independent media and a privatized industry.  Authoritarian regimes uncooperative with the demand for political reform risk not only a popular uprising they are powerless to stop without the help of more powerful countries, but also the seizure of power from them by even more autocratic regimes.  

It is not in the greatest interests of America to assist in the continual maintenance of sympathetic “traditional” authoritarian regimes for fear of regimes that are bloodier and unsympathetic to the US.  Rather, it is in America’s interest to apply as much delicate pressure as possible to authoritarian regimes to gradually institute economic, financial, social, and eventually political reform when authoritarian countries are stable enough in other regards to withstand a change in their systems of government.  Such pressure was eventually applied in the cases of Chile, the Philippines, and South Korea.  In each case, the end results – the gradual transition to democracy – were incontrovertibly successful, though far too late to prevent many unnecessary deaths.  One must at least wonder if such transitions would have happened without the application of such pressure, thereby making all three countries susceptible to still worse authoritarian regimes than those of Pinochet, Marcos and Chun Doo-hwan.  

The transition to democracy is a process that is undertaken successfully when a state is already well-ordered enough to withstand the pressures of a new system.  In the cases of Iraq under American occupation, Russia under Yeltsin, and Pakistan under Bhutto, transitions to democracy were hampered by the absence of stability.  The stability of a nation will allow for political freedom;  the reciprocal is not the case.  As the occupation of Iraq has shown beyond a doubt, political freedom is no guarantor of political or economic stability.  If the forces of economic productivity and rule of law which enable democracy to exist are too weak to withstand the pressures of a process as unstable as democracy, the result is invariably a power vacuum that can collapse the democratic system in its infancy.  Such a vacuum can be filled either by civil war or by an autocrat.

  One must at least give Kirkpatrick credit for the assertion that “it is not impossible that U.S.  policy could effectively encourage this process of liberalization and democratization, provided that the effort is not made at a time when the incumbent government is fighting for its life against violent adversaries. . .”#  This statement is eminently correct.  However, one must wonder if Kirkpatrick, given her support of Galtieri in the Falkland Islands conflict, had thought through the implications of her statement.  What is the dividing line between an authoritarian government that is “fighting for its life against violent adversaries” and an authoritarian government that merely exists for the sake of preserving itself and enriching its leaders?  Surely the government of Generalissimo Franco was not fighting for its life against violent and particularly communist adversaries for the entirety of its thirty-nine year existence.  Surely there were some authoritarian governments that were hampered by their longevity.  Once an authoritarian government that allows for economic prosperity achieves a certain level of it, the government impedes the possibility for growth in the prosperity of its citizenry by not reforming politically.  In each of the cases below, it is the very lack of political reform in authoritarian regimes that inhibits the maintenance of economic stability.  In the cases of Pinochet and Suharto, economic stability was achieved long before any political stability accompanied.  In both cases, economic security increased demands within the populace for political reform.  When both autocrats refused such reforms, many of their citizens rose up against them.  Such uprisings ruin investors’ confidence in their countries, a situation which leads them to pull out their funds and lighten their investments.  Therefore, without political reform to follow economic stability, economies will destabilize.  In such cases, the only options are political reform and liberalization to accompany economic stability or a return to economic instability in order to maintain political centralization.     

Indeed, perhaps the very acts of American support for many “traditional autocrats” in the fight against communism was not entirely necessary to begin with.  To varying degrees, one must concede the possibility in cases like those of Chile under Allende, Iran under Mossadegh, and Indonesia under Sukarno that these leaders’ unwillingness to commit fully to communist rule would have sufficed for conditional American cooperation.  But after careful reflection on this proposition, we must conclude that it is ultimately unconvincing.  Kirkpatrick was eminently correct in her insistence that a lack of support for an authoritarian regime that is allied to the US’s national interests and that is under existential threat could give way to a still-worse regime whose interests are hostile to the United States.   But Kirkpatrick was not correct in regard to the proportion of threats.  Surely not every threat to an authoritarian regime is an existential one.  And surely in many such cases when the United States willingly encouraged the most brutal actions of its authoritarian allies, such actions were counter-productive not only to American standing, but to the very allies whose governments the US was trying to sustain.  

When Kirkpatrick writes that “no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans, than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances,”# she is absolutely correct that this belief is a naïve, mistaken one.  Authoritarian regimes exist because the political and economic checks and balances of power do not exist to create conditions that allow democracy to thrive.  What exists in its place is the ability of more stable countries to limit the excesses of authoritarian regimes, and over a period of generations, to act as facilitators to the eventual emergence of democracy.  In unstable conditions, autocracy is almost inevitable.  In the cases of non-aligned autocracies, there is far less ability to influence and temper the governments’ behaviors.  In the cases of autocracies that align themselves with the interests of the United States, the US can indeed have a beneficial influence that seeks to moderate the behavior of such nations.  Therefore, when dissent is met with excessive force by autocracies allied with the United States, the US is often correctly blamed for its failure to control brutality.    

In the cases of Allende, Mossadegh and Sukarno, all three leaders created the conditions guaranteeing that authoritarian regimes (in the cases of Mossadegh and Sukarno,”worse” authoritarian regimes) would follow all of them in their respective countries.  Each of them removed the necessary political and economic checks on executive power that moderate authoritarianism.  The question that arises in each case would then be to ask what sort of authoritarian regime would ensue.  Would it be a communist or a military regime?  In each case, it seems highly possible, if not downright probable, that Soviet domination would have followed their deaths (in the cases of Mossadegh and Sukarno) or would have overwhelmed the leftist regime that encouraged the communist faction (Allende).  In those cases, Kirkpatrick is proven at least partially correct in her assertion that we have to be almost unconditional in our support of right wing “traditional authoritarian” movements because the alternative is invariably communism. 

Once it is decided to interpret the military coups of these countries as having been grounded in a very real possibility of Soviet domination, the question is if all the suppression done by the Pinochets and Suhartos of this world in the name of anti-communism was justified.  In the case of Pinochet the answer is “no” because the survival of “traditional authoritarian” regimes is so often dependent on the financial support of more powerful countries like the US and then, the US can often dictate many terms of how these regimes are run.  In the case of Suharto, the answer is “absolutely not” because the Suharto regime was so clearly as vile as any conceivable outcome of the battle between the Indonesian military and the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia, the Indonesian Communist Party).  In the case of Mossadegh's Iran, the answer is “maybe.”  While Mossadegh’s actions were clearly self-destructive and short-sided, they were enabled by British reactionaries who refused to give up the final vestiges of the British Empire’s spoils of Persia.

  Chile from Allende to Pinochet

In the case of 1970’s Chile, we find an example in which Kirkpatrick is proven correct in her assertion that support for right-wing autocracy is sometimes very necessary due to very real threats of communist infiltration.  And yet the instance of ‘70’s Chile also proves Kirkpatrick incorrect because autocratic repression cannot be justified beyond the extent that it provides greater stability to its citizens than it would otherwise.  In the case of Chile there are two questions to be considered:  How necessary was it to forcibly remove Salvador Allende (1908-1973, President of Chile, 1970-1973) from power?  And how necessary was American support for the practices of the junta which followed?

The first question can simply be answered with the phrase “quite necessary.”  Salvador Allende  might or might not have been the Soviet informant from the 50’s onward,  operating under the code name LEADER, that he was alleged to have been in an uncorroborated document from the Mitrokhin archive.# But there is little doubt that without Allende, the conditions that brought about the Pinochet junta would never have occurred.  Chile’s own parliament would have agreed with this assertion when it passed a resolution calling for the forcible removal of President Allende in 1973 by a vote of 81 to 47.#  The economic counter-attack instigated by the Nixon administration was not at all necessary because Allende’s policies would have done enough damage by themselves.  By nationalizing the copper and banking industries all at once, Allende not only barred foreign investors from those particular industries, but also scared off investors in other industries as well.  By defaulting on debts to international creditors at the same time that he nationalized healthcare and education, Allende spent massive amounts of money that he did not have on social programs, thereby plunging the country into a level of hyper-inflation (800% annual inflation over the Allende presidency according to TIME, June 16, 1975),# virtually unseen in a modern state since the days of Germany under the Weimar Republic.  As a result, the prices of virtually all basic necessities went up severely.

In such conditions, a societal upheaval cannot help but be created from which virulent authoritarianism is often the natural consequence.  In such chaos, the possibilities for either civil war or authoritarian government were almost inevitable.  To his credit, Allende rarely, if ever, operated outside of his constitutional parameters, but his attempts to limit the power of the legislative branch through constitutional referendums and his efforts to intimidate his political enemies by bringing ever more members of the military into his cabinet were a prescription for political pandemonium.  It is conceivable that before long, Allende would have seized dictatorial powers and ruled by decree, as many members of the Chilean legislature suspected he was about to do.  Moreover, it was every bit as conceivable that he would have been replaced by someone to his left as to his right.  The hard-line communists who committed thousands of illegal seizures of land under Allende’s nose were, towards the end, as willing to agitate against Allende for not using force against those who opposed his policies or not implementing nationalization quickly enough as the hard right was.  There is, of course, the small chance that Allende would have been amenable to rolling back his sweeping reforms in exchange for financial aid, but it is highly doubtful that a politician as ideologically-committed to Marxist doctrine as Allende demonstrably was would have abandoned his policies for the sake of reaching a compromise and restoring political stability.  

To say that the deposing of a Marxist regime is necessary is certainly not the same as justifying all means that are used to depose such a regime.  In the case of Operation Condor, the end certainly did not justify a means that ultimately killed 50,000, caused another 30,000 to disappear forever, and incarcerated another 400,000 all over Latin America.#  Operation Condor, beginning in 1973, was a co-operative agreement of the leaders of the secret police of the countries of southern South America (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chile) to share security information, to assassinate leftist leaders, to intimidate trade unions interested in leftist politics, and in other ways, to destabilize the socialist and communist movements of Latin America. This plan became a program of cooperation among the military and right wing dictatorships of Latin America to fight Marxist influence by imitating many of the conspiratorial and totalitarian methods that were routinely adopted by a Marxist movements and communist states.  It is at least arguable that not even a Latin America successfully overrun by Marxism would have been as efficient in terrorizing its citizens as was this joint program of rightist autocracies, aided and abetted by American support.  While the extent of American participation in Operation Condor is not yet fully known, it is clear that communication among the intelligence services of the participating Latin American countries, Chile among them, was facilitated by an American installation coordinated from Panama.

It was in such a climate that Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006, President of Chile, 1973-1990) and three other generals launched their military coup d’etat.  For all the horror of the Pinochet era, it cannot be doubted that Pinochet was far from the worst of all possible outcomes for Chile in the aftermath of Allende.  Pinochet supporters and apologists perhaps credibly make the argument that the ruthless torture and murder of many suspected Allende followers in the days following the coup d’etat might have prevented a civil war on a scale similar to Spain’s in the 1930’s.  They also credibly advance the argument that in Pinochet’s place could have been a left-wing authoritarian who would have modeled himself on Castro, with far worse consequences for America’s foreign policy in Latin America.  But such hypothetical scenarios do not negate Pinochet’s very real abuses of power.#  Pinochet has been the subject of considerable and virtually universal condemnation for his abuses of power. “The violent coup that left [Allende] dead and Chile’s long-standing democratic institutions destroyed truly shocked the world.  The Pinochet regime’s dictatorial bent, and abysmal human rights record quickly became a universal political and humanitarian issue.”#   But the vicious nature of the Pinochet regime and the violent nature of Allende’s overthrow does not change the fact that  it was Allende who created the atmosphere which gave birth to the Pinochet junta.

The United States certainly had no reason to aid and abet Allende’s misrule, but the question remains to what degree the United States had legitimate reason to plan his overthrow or to aid and abet the Pinochet junta.  The United States may be exonerated from blame for its desire to unseat a radical Marxist president who plunged his country into economic ruin and came perilously close to inviting communist domination and even for planning and evaluating contingencies in case of a coup against the Allende regime.  However, the United States almost certainly deserves condemnation for the events following September 15, 1970 when President Nixon ordered C.I.A. Director Richard Helms to initiate a covert overthrow of the Allende regime when it was in its infancy and its nature was not yet determined, the so-called Project FUBELT.  Nor can the United States be excused for its almost unconditional support of the methods and tactics of authoritarian dictator Augusto Pinochet.#  If Pinochet had simply limited his targets to members of leftist parties with histories of agitation, the United States might have been justified in its support of the Pinochet junta and its policies.  But the United States gave its support not only for the suppression of Marxist agitators, but also lent its support to the oppression of non-agitators and the legitimate democratic opposition as well.  

There can be little doubt that in the financial circumstances created by the Allende government, a democratic Chile was impossible in the short run.  What was possible was an authoritarian government that did not place brutality at quite so high a priority.  At the time, the Chilean junta had staged the bloodiest coup d’etat in the history of Latin America.  Its enemies were not as precisely targeted as the junta wanted the world to believe.   There is also little doubt that the Nixon and Ford administrations could have brought much greater pressure to bear on the Pinochet government to curb its worst excesses and elected not to do so.  Even when Allende officials were assassinated on American soil, as Orlando Letelier was, Chile escaped with very moderate censure (a purely symbolic slap on the wrist in the form of a ban on the buying of American arms).  Ironically, the embargos on aid which Nixon had previously placed made no difference to Allende’s Chile, which would undoubtedly have collapsed with or without American aid.  But even a threatened ban on aid to Pinochet’s Chile or a cut in trade would have ended the worst excesses of the junta very quickly.  

The Pinochet junta operated under the pretext of restoring Chile to democracy.  By the early 1980’s, Pinochet had, over a ten year period, restored economic vitality in Chile by reliance on market forces and by the encouragement of industry and exports that should have lead to economic conditions favorable to a restoration of democracy.  However, in the later years of Pinochet’s regime, the Chilean economy experienced renewed problems.  The Pinochet government had utterly exhausted its usefulness and became a liability to Chile’s economic prosperity.  If Pinochet had resigned in the early ‘80s when the Chilean economy looked to bring renewed prosperity to the country rather than in 1990 when predictably forced out by a plebiscite, he would have been remembered as a brutal, but, necessary authoritarian who had restored Chile to economic health.  But Pinochet, like most dictators who worship power, had no interest in stepping down from office.  Many critics would point to his alleged poisoning of centrist former President Eduardo Frei in 1982 as proof of his complete lust for power.#  The consequence of the renewed inflationary pressure at the end of the Pinochet presidency (30% a year#), was a loss of political popularity for Pinochet along with a marked increase in Marxist agitation.  In 1988, Pinochet asked the country for an extension of his presidency for an additional eight year term.  Under the provisions of Pinochet’s own 1980 Constitution a referendum was submitted to the electorate with a simple choice`-- Si or No. Pinochet lost this plebiscite, with approximately 55% voting  No#.  In 1989, Pinochet’s government supervised a multi-party election without Pinochet on the ballot. With the proviso that Pinochet was given the position of senator for life so that he could avoid any further prosecution for abuses of power, corruption, and political assassination, Pinochet left the presidency in 1990.

Iran from Razmara to Mossadegh

Iran under Mohammed Mossadegh (1882-1967, Prime Minister of Iran, 1951-1953) provides an interesting counterpoint to Kirkpatrick’s justification for traditional autocracy.  In the case of Iran under Mossadegh, Kirkpatrick was again absolutely correct that a right-wing autocrat was needed to replace Mossadegh in order to prevent a communist takeover of Iran after Mossadegh’s retirement or death.  America found the autocrat that it needed to protect Iran from falling into the hands of the communists in the person of the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (1918-1980; Shah of Iran, 1941-1979). The Shah never ran Iran completely by himself, particularly in the beginning when he was perceived by the world at large as little more than a figurehead and dandy.  But he provided the personality around which pro-Western opponents of communism could galvanize.  However, what a theorist like Kirkpatrick could never have accounted for is that it was Western imperialism, avarice, and unnecessary meddling that made a left-wing nationalist like Mossadegh possible.  If America had forced Britain to allow Iranian oil to be nationalized during the rule of Razmara in the year before Mossadegh came to power, Iranian pride would not have been wounded and Iran would not have turned to Mossadegh in its desperation.

Once again, in the case of Iran under Mohammed Mossadegh, two questions must be raised:  Could the rise of Mossadegh have been prevented if Britain had relinquished its colonial interests in Iran sooner rather than later?  And was an uprising against Mossadegh justified?

In Mohammed Mossadegh, we find yet another leftist ruler against whom an uprising was completely justifiable.  But it was Western incompetence that made such a dictator possible.  If Britain had realized that its colonial interests were no longer viable and if the United States had sooner pressured Britain into finally relinquishing its dreams of imperial domination, the rise of a strongman like Mossadegh would have been utterly impossible.

In March, 1951, then-Prime Minister of Iran, General Haj-Ali Razmara, (1902-1951, Prime Minister 1950-1951) was assassinated by a Muslim extremist who was unhappy with the General’s plan for accommodation with Britain vis a vis the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.  Razmara was attempting to increase Iran’s take of the revenues, but was willing to settle for less than what the Saudis had gotten in a similar deal, and agreed to continued British participation in the running of the company. The Iranians were perhaps not sophisticated, but they certainly were not stupid and realized that the British were cheating them. This was not simply a matter of money;  it was more importantly a matter of national honor.

The US Ambassador to Iran, Henry F. Grady, undiplomatically resigned his office in Teheran and on returning home, he candidly “laid [the blame for America’s problems with Iran] at the feet of [Secretary of State] Mr. Acheson.” # The State Department was overly indulgent of their British allies and their old colonial attitudes.  “Had Britain and the U.S. backed [General Ali] Razmara, the former Iranian Prime Minister who was a friend of the West and who was fighting the nationalization movement, this present situation would not have developed,” Grady commented to a reporter for TIME magazine. “Nor would Razmara have been assassinated.’” #

But the British persisted in holding onto their financial interests in the lands of former client states like Iran well past the point where a compromise that respected Iran’s national dignity could have been beneficial to both sides.  In 1951, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was handling most of Iranian oil.  As the majority partner, the British government decided how much revenue it would give back to the Iranian government.  The British government profited more from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in just taxes than the Iranian government received from any and every source of income it had.#  All this was done in spite of the fact that the International Court at The Hague had ruled in favor of Iran’s nationalization of its oil.  Had the British offered Razmara a deal that was as favorable to Iran as the deals they gave to the Saudis or the Egyptians, Iranian pride may not have been insulted, and Ramzara would perhaps have survived and even remade his country into an ally of the Western democracies.  Razmara’s apparent lack of militancy on this issue led to his assassination by the Fadayan-e Islam, a nationalist-Muslim-terrorist organization.  Had the British not reacted to the court decision in favor of nationalization by a blockade against Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, Ramzara might have been able to continue in office, and in turn, would have prevented the rise of the ultra-nationalist Mossadegh.  

In April of that year, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh was voted in as Prime Minister by a vote of 79 to 12 in the Iranian Parliament.  One of his first actions was to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.  Rather than accept a negotiated deal with the British as Razmara had preferred, Mossadegh was committed to unilaterally nationalizing Iranian oil.  So committed was Mossadegh to nationalizing the oil industry that he expelled all British technicians without which it was impossible to produce Iranian oil in the same quantities.  In response, the British established a blockade of the Persian Gulf to prohibit Iran from exporting its oil.  They also withdrew all of their trained technicians from the country, both actions paralyzing the Iranian oil industry.   An economic stalemate ensued:  Mossadegh’s government did not allow British involvement in its oil industry and Britain would not allow oil to leave Iran. As a result of Mossadegh’s intransigence, the Iranian government lost all oil payments.  In such an anti-imperialist climate, the Tudeh (Communist) Party found it easy to make gains in an election.  The Tudeh claimed that only communism with its support from the neighboring Soviet Union could effectively deal with the unbridled ambitions of Iran’s imperialist enemies.

In September 1952, after a series of not very half-hearted offers, the British finally made an offer so serious that would easily have been enough to placate Iranian pride had it been made to a pro-western prime minister like Razmara. Unfortunately, it came a year too late to keep Razmara in power.  The offer contained the following provisions:

1.  The British informally would accept Iran's oil nationalization.

2.  Negotiations between Britain and Iran on the sale and distribution of Iran's oil.

3.  British would buy all oil then stored in Iranian tanks – $20 to $30 million worth, in spite of British claims that the oil rightfully belonged to Britain.

4.  Britain would lift the ban on exports to Iran, and the unfreezing of Iranian sterling holdings in the Commonwealth.

5.  The issue of compensation Iranians owed to the British for the Anglo-Iranian Oil holdings would be submitted to the International Court at The Hague, along with the matter of whether past British operations in Iran were legal.

6.  The United States of America would provide Iran with a $10 million bonus,  contingent on Iranian acceptance of the deal.#

Unfortunately, Razmara was not the Prime Minister to whom this offer was made.  Instead, Mohammed Mossadegh was by then not only the Prime Minister, but also the autocratic ruler of Iran.  The Shah at first attempted to wrest control away when Mossadegh insisted upon control of the army only to find that Mossadegh’s dismissal provoked a popular uprising.   Mossadegh was recalled and the Shah was forced into a temporary exile.  The source of Mossadegh’s power was that his extreme nationalism had such popular appeal in the streets of Teheran.  Were he to have cooperated with the British and Americans, he would have lost his appeal to Iranians and in his place would have come either political Islam represented by men such as Ayatollah Kashani or the Tudeh (Communist) party, both of which were biding their time because the 73-year-old Mossadegh could not last forever.

By the end of Mossadegh’s reign, the only ideological force not alienated by him was that of the communists.  It should be mentioned that Mossadegh himself was no communist – he was an ultra-nationalist who opposed the USSR on matters of Iranian interest, as he did on the matter of the USSR’s attempt to seize complete control of the Caspian Sea.  But it is reasonable to believe that a communist regime might have easily succeeded Mossadegh because everyone else had been defeated.  For the moment, other than the Shah himself, there were no eminent pro-Western political figures to take the place of General Razmara.  In 1952, Mossadegh asked for another year of dictatorial powers.  Mossadegh’s previous ally, Ayatollah Kashani, the Speaker of the Majles (lower house of Parliament) and the preeminent Islamic politician, attempted to block his request.  For his action, Kashani was forced to leave the Majles.  Mossadegh even said in an interview that he expected that  he would be succeeded by a communist government.#  In the time leading up to Mossadegh’s downfall on August 19, 1953 the communists were very supportive of his anti-Western stance.  Since it is doubtful that Mossadegh was ever going to operate under conditions favorable to Western powers, the Tudeh Party would likely have continued to operate with Mossadegh’s favor.  If Mossadegh had continued in power unimpeded by a C.I.A. inspired coup d’etat, it is highly likely that he would have at least been succeeded by communist rulers, thereby establishing a communist presence in an area of extreme strategic importance.

By attempting to depose the Shah, Mossadegh had furthered his political isolation, already a factor because of the economic crisis Iran was facing.  Mossadegh’s inability to break the British blockade and sell oil was counted as a strike against him in a country that was desperately poor and counted on its oil revenue to support its very weak peasant economy.  Without oil income, inflation was a continual concern in his country - at the time of the coup against him, the Iranian rial had fallen to 118 to the US dollar#.  With the stalemate between the British and the Mossadegh government continuing to ruin the Iranian economy, thereby making the threat of a communist takeover an ever more real possibility, the government of the United States in the person of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stepped in to break the impasse. Dulles ordered his brother, Director of the C.I.A. Allen Welsh Dulles, to engineer a political crisis that would be resolved by a military coup.  When the Shah fled the country in accordance with his role in the C.I.A. plot, “Operation Ajax,” Mossadegh had, in effect, instigated an anti-monarchist revolt which technically legitimated a counter-coup by military forces loyal to the Shah.  From Rome, the Shah was able to issue an order deposing Mossadegh and confer political power on Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, the former interior minister and Mossadegh opponent, who was able to find enough support in the military to organize a military coup d’etat.

In place of Mossadeq and his Tudeh allies, the C.I.A. brought back the Shah. The British strengthened the Shah’s hand by offering the kind of oil deal that they should have offered Razmara in the first place.  The lifting of the blockade, the increase in revenue from the new arrangement with the British government and the British Petroleum Company, the return of economic stability to Iran, and the satisfaction of the perceived insult by the UK to the people and government of Iran, the Shah re-commenced his reign with a strong political hand. The Shah began an autocratic-nationalist rule that was certainly not extreme by the standards of Pinochet and his military allies in southern South America, but his monarchy certainly cannot be described as a liberal parliamentary regime.  The Shah banned the Tudeh Party and political dissidents were repressed by the SAVAK, the Shah’s political police.  The later political problems of the Shah were not caused by his extreme cruelty, but rather by his attempts to be a kind of enlightened despot who would unilaterally try to bring Iran into the twentieth century by backing suffrage for women and other kinds of women’s rights, interfering with the power and influence of the Shiite clergy, sponsoring land reform and other economic innovations, and even supporting some kind of political and economic accommodation with Israel.  

An attempt to remake Iran into a progressive country with global political aspirations was extremely ambitious and should probably not have been attempted without considerable domestic political support, but the Shah had ruined his ability to build up that kind of support by disdaining democracy, which perhaps could have been effectively managed.  Instead the Shah followed the same autocratic style that worked very well earlier for his regime, but was clearly outdated as Iran became wealthier, more educated, and included many more sophisticated, informed, and wealthy citizens. That was certainly a terrible fault of the Shah’s regime, and he paid for this fault terribly.  But the crucial point to account for is that the autocracy was established initially with the complicity and sponsorship of the United States government to counter not an incipient democracy, as is often alleged, but a chaotic situation that was destined to result in a communist takeover in a critical part of the world with results that could very well have been catastrophic for the foreign policy interests of the United States.

Indonesia from Sukarno to Suharto

Indonesia is a superb example of Kirkpatrick’s theory working in reverse: an authoritarian with definite communist sympathies deposed by a right-wing dictator friendly to the West and far closer to totalitarianism in his methods.  There is little doubt that the Sukarno (1901-1970; President of Indonesia, 1949-1967) regime was perpetually on the verge of collapse throughout its duration.  In addition to right-wing military men like Suharto and Nasution waiting for Sukarno’s collapse, the PKI (the Indonesian Communist party) waited as well to be Sukarno’s successor.  As with Pinochet and the Shah, one must at least ask the question if Suharto’s brutality prevented a civil war between the rival factions who expected to benefit from Sukarno’s downfall.  

The answer for Suharto unfortunately must be the same as the answer for Pinochet: an extremely qualified “yes.” Sukarno’s interpretation of non-alignment was in effect an alliance with an enormous communist party which had already attempted to depose his government and a rejection of Western interference that was often desperately needed.  The intentions of the Suharto coup were undoubtedly dubious at best.  But whatever damning accusations one can make against the Suharto regime in terms of its venality or its lack of concern for its citizens, several incontrovertible facts remain in its favor:  Under Sukarno, the Communist PKI grew under Sukarno to be 3 million strong, a larger Communist party than that of any Communist country outside of Russia and China#.  Moreover, the PKI had already attempted a coup d’etat in 1948, yet Sukarno felt threatened enough by them to keep them in his Cabinet.  Secondly, Sukarno had launched a preemptive war Malaysia in 1963, claiming that Malaysia was a mere vestige of British imperialism nearby.  Thirdly, Sukarno had rejected aid from the United States when the price of rice was so unaffordable to the average Indonesian that widespread famine resulted.   Fourthly, Sukarno’s opposition to imperialism made him reject any influence of Western governments that might have helped him better manage the Indonesian economy which had increasing difficulty in providing even basic sustenance for its burgeoning population.  In other words, Sukarno might have claimed to be non-aligned, but he clearly leaned to the East, giving Suharto cause for a coup.

In 1949, Indonesia finally achieved full independence from the Dutch and established a functioning parliamentary state with Sukarno given the figurehead title of President.  However, Sukarno was able to achieve real power in the Indonesian government through a system he devised which he entitled “Guided Democracy.”  According to Sukarno, Western Democracy was not commensurate with Indonesian “values.”  Therefore, a system was needed where the pre-eminent groups of Indonesia - the Communists, the Nationalists and the Islamists – would deliberate under the “guidance” of their president.  Under such a system, the president could always “guide” national discussions to achieve the national consensus he desired.  The system allowed Sukarno to stay in power for nearly 20 years until he was deposed by Suharto in 1965-66, who turned out to be far more authoritarian in his methods than Sukarno ever was.

The circumstances that create the necessity of a coup d’etat do not justify all methods of implementing a coup.  In every conceivable way, Suharto was a more brutal authoritarian than Sukarno.  At times, his authoritarian rule verged on the totalitarian.  And yet by Kirkpatrick’s standards, Sukarno would have been considered a “revolutionary autocrat” while Suharto would have been considered the “traditional autocrat.”  Sukarno was unquestionably a strongman who did not allow for parliamentary procedure, but he nevertheless allowed for political parties and assembly.  Suharto banned the Communist Party outright and forced all other parties to consolidate under the auspices of three state-approved parties.  Sukarno declared a preemptive war on Malaysia, while Suharto not only annexed East Timor, but, in the process of resisting East Timorese independence, caused the deaths of approximately 200,000 inhabitants, roughly 1/3rd of East Timor’s population#.  Just in the coup itself that replaced Sukarno with Suharto, varying estimates put the deaths incurred in the anti-PKI massacres at anywhere between 78,000 and 2 million.#  

In such a case, one must ask if there was anything that could have been done to prevent the coup d’etat from being so bloody.  The CIA has admitted to involvement in Indonesia from at least 1958 when the Agency backed an abortive coup d’etat against Sukarno.#  Upon achieving power, Suharto immediately took steps to earn the West’s favor by severing relations with China and encouraging foreign investment.   Would the threat of partial economic sanctions or divestment have been enough to have brought about changes in the way Suharto conducted his regime?  

In order to answer this question properly, perhaps the Brzezinski/Friedrich criteria for a totalitarian state should be applied to Suharto’s Indonesia.  The Suharto regime was astonishingly close to fulfilling the requirements for a “totalitarian state.”  Suharto certainly allowed for private investment and ownership.  But Suharto’s army successfully maintained a steady monopoly on weapons, crushing civil unrest in its path as it did to the Aceh province in 1976.  Of the three parties allowed by the Suharto regime, only Suharto’s own Golkar party was allowed to swell in membership, while the other two were restricted to very low numbers.  As of 1992, Suharto’s intelligence organization (KOPKAMTIB) was monitoring approximately 1.4 million suspected PKI sympathizers#.  However, passing four of the six criteria would not merit consideration of the Suharto regime as anything more than a particularly brutal authoritarian state were it not for the presence of a total ideology.

In 1967, Suharto instituted what was called ‘The New Order.’  ‘The New Order’ was a  program of rigorously applied authoritarian practices that resulted in the imprisonment of approximately one and a half million suspected Communists sympathizers, the oppression of Indonesia’s Chinese minority through banning of its culture and often much more lethal measures, and imperial expansion into neighboring islands like East Timor#.  Surely, there is little in Pinochet’s Chile that compares.  “The New Order” had the three features of a total ideology

1. 1. 1. Using the Chinese ethnic minority and Communism as scapegoats for all of Indonesia’s ills, “The New Order” found the enemies that a total ideology requires to sustain itself. 

1. 1. 2.

1. Indonesia’s expansion into East Timor, along with its suppression of the Aceh province and the underhanded annexation of western New Guinea, amounted to a partial achievement of the objective which Suharto called “Indonesia Raya” (Greater Indonesia).  Through the actions listed above, it becomes plainly clear that Suharto’s goals included imperial expansion into neighboring territories where the native population had little if any desire to consider itself Indonesian.  

1. 3.

1. Suharto’s regime placed a near-theological faith in capitalism that resembled Communism’s faith in socialism at its most ideological.  Under Suharto, capitalism was not only the means to enhance his regime’s base of power and stability, it was also the means by which Indonesia was supposed to be eternally liberated from Chinese influence and oppression.  

It is generally held that total ideology requires a vision of an ideal society, a scapegoat to blame for the failure to reach the ideal, and a means by which the ideal is achieved.  On all three counts, Suharto’s Indonesia meets the criteria and therefore it is conceivable that the country was gripped by a total ideology.  This would mean that Indonesia under Suharto would count as meeting five of the six standards required for a totalitarian state.  In such a case, it is highly improbable that even economic sanctions or divestment would have changed Indonesia’s methods.  The only method to change such a state would be a change in regime, a change that took place thirty-three years later, and it is certainly unclear that economic sanctions or divestment would have sped up the process of regime change to any great degree.  

Instead, all that could have been done was to do everything within the power of the West to cooperate with Sukarno to prevent the eventuality of Suharto’s Indonesia Raya.  Of course, the United States and the C.I.A. probably could not have completely anticipated all the terrible things that Suharto would eventually accomplish.  It is certainly possible that Sukarno would have been more willing to accept the aid his country desperately needed and that the United States offerred if the United States had not previously attempted to instigate a coup d’etat.  Sukarno was unquestionably a strongman, but his version of “Guided Democracy” was certainly successful in the way it enabled Sukarno to maintain power for nearly 20 years.  Before 1966, both the left and the right had attempted a coup d’etat against Sukarno, yet neither side was successful.  In truth, there is ample evidence listed above to demonstrate that Sukarno was neither pro-capitalist nor pro-communist, he was pro-Sukarno.  If the United States had cooperated with Sukarno in maintaining his delicate balance of power, perhaps Sukarno would have looked more favorably upon US influence and been more amenable to curtailing the influence of the PKI.  For in retrospect, absolutely anything should have been tried to prevent the rise of a semi-totalitarian like Suharto, including cooperation with a PKI-lead Indonesia.

 

IV.

                     Revolutionary Autocrats

Kirkpatrick’s greatest failure was her inability to understand the real subtleties of relationships between communist countries as they were.  To Kirkpatrick, the countries governed by communist regimes were mere cogs in the wheel of a monolithic structure unaffected by the historic alliances, ethnic conflicts, and national hostilities which affect the sweep of history.  But communist countries were in fact like all other countries in the subtleties of historical dynamics that dictate the ways they relate to one another and to the outside world.  Those living within communist countries were not inhuman specimens whose nature had changed by living under Soviet oppression; they were human beings with the same kinds of historic national aspirations and the same kinds of historic hostilities as those on the other side of the Iron Curtain.  

Stalin’s death in 1953 had left the entire Soviet sphere in a state of flux.  Within the countries whose control he had acquired at Yalta and afterwards, he lacked the time to go about organizing a purge of “traitors” that was on the same level as the “Great Terrors” he had organized within the Soviet Union itself.   With the demise of Stalin, many of the countries that had recently been forced to accept communism found it impossible to apply the “proper” principles of totalitarianism to the same extent that the paranoid Stalin had demonstrated over the course of the many purges he had conducted.  Therefore, seeds of rebellion that from the totalitarian point of view should have been snuffed out before they ever had a chance to take root, were permitted to sprout.  

The USSR, particularly under Khrushchev, had two basic choices from which it could operate.  One was to attempt a Stalinist “cleansing” of the territories so that none would dare to oppose the will of the Soviets.  The other was to form an implicit social contract with the citizens who lived in these countries.  Hard-line Soviet-appointed leaders such as Poland’s Bierut and later Gomulka (who was at first appeared to be relatively liberal), Hungary’s Rakosi and Czechoslovakia’s Novotny, demonstrated clearly to the Soviets that attempts to clamp down on the people in the manner of Stalinism would only further incite rebellion among populations already hostile to Russian-dominated communism.#  

However, the replacements to the first generation of Soviet satellite leaders--Gierek in Poland, Nagy in Hungary, and Dubcek in Czechoslovakia--proved in each case that the populace of their respective countries would not simply be satisfied with reforms on a small scale.  In all three cases, the relaxing of the party’s coercive grip led to large-scale calls for Western-style liberalization and democratization.  The relative freedom which each of these leaders allowed was enough to whet the appetites of many citizens for greater freedom.  

Perhaps it should have occurred to Kirkpatrick to perceive Gierek, Nagy, and Dubcek as the indicators of communism’s weakness and ultimate demise.  In all three countries, the Soviet Union could not hope to permanently suppress a hostile and rebellious population.  Therefore the Kremlin replaced these “liberals” and installed in all three countries a new pragmatic leadership in the hope that small scale accommodation and liberalization would make a modified form of Soviet communism acceptable to a hostile population.  Perhaps in all three cases, the model should have pointed to the same end result that occurred much later in the Soviet Union itself under Mikhail Gorbachev.  If Stalin and earlier Stalinists had been in power, they would have argued strenuously that when communist systems try to gradually liberalize themselves, the end result would be the collapse of the system more often than successful creation of a more liberal form of communism.

In this regard, let us consider the case of Poland and its historic relationship to Russia.  Communism in Poland was clearly a system imposed on a country that had always been unwilling to accept it.  As a whole, the country was extraordinarily devout in its Roman Catholicism.  A country as resolute in its Catholic piety as Poland would never have installed a system that either hailed from an historically Orthodox country or proclaimed atheism as its core principle unless the system was imposed by force.  The Soviet Union had always been hated by the Poles, if for no other reason than that it was perceived as a Russian (and often as a Jewish) invention.  Unlike other Slavic peoples such as the Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Macedonians, and occasionally even the Czechs, Poland never looked to Russia as a Slavic “big brother.”  Since the Middle Ages, Poles had identified themselves as a Western peoples by dint of their religion and looked accordingly to the West for guidance, protection and orientation.  

In the eighteenth century, Poland had been partitioned by the Russians (along with their Prussian and Austrian accomplices) no less than three times.  In the nineteenth century, Poland was in a continual state of rebellion against their Czarist overlords.  In the twentieth century, Poles viewed Russians as having attempted yet again to overthrow their post-World War One independence when the Red Army reached the outskirts of Warsaw in 1920.# From the Polish perspective, Marshal Pilsudski magnificent victory over the Reds not only restored Polish independence, but saved Western Civilization from the onslaught of communism,# much as Sobieski’s victory over the Turks in the outskirts of Vienna in 1683 had saved Western Civilization from the Mohammedan Turks.  But Poland’s independence was short-lived.  In 1939, the Germans and Russians once again conspired to wipe Poland off the map in what amounted to Poland’s fourth partition.  Perhaps all that allowed Poland to re-emerge after the war as even a nominally independent country was Hitler’s surprise betrayal of Stalin in the form of the 1941 invasion.  But even with Poland’s re-established independence, it was much reduced in size on its eastern border and completely under Soviet domination.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

From the Polish nationalist perspective, communism was imposed on an unwilling country by force, and force was all that kept communism in power.  Obviously, the Communist Party of Poland worked long and hard to try to convince Poland that her nationalist perspective needed to be re-interpreted and that the dominance of the Soviet Communist Party was just the aid of a fraternal socialist system that, by virtue of its previous establishment as the first successful communist revolution, was entitled to some say in the Polish state of affairs.  However, few people, and least of all the Soviet leaders in the Kremlin, were under any illusions that the Polish masses accepted a pro-Soviet or a pro-Russian re-interpretation of Poland’s history.  Poland had always looked westward in its orientation, and by the end of the twentieth century looking west meant preferring democracy and capitalism.

For Polish nationalists, the great event of the second half of the twentieth century was the election in 1978 of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the Archbishop of Cracow, as Pope John Paul II.  Poland was arguably the most Catholic country in Europe, one where the Church historically was closely associated with Polish national identity (in opposition to the neighboring Protestants of East Germany and to the Orthodox of White Russia and the Ukraine). The election of a Polish pope galvanized Poland’s political hostility to its imposed communist economic and political system as nothing else could.  Although John Paul was not usually a direct player in the events that led to the overthrow of communism in Poland, his presence in Rome as the Polish Catholic and nationalist symbol of opposition to the Soviet Union and communism was undoubtedly one of the necessary factors that made the overthrow of communism possible.#                                                                                      

It is clear that for reasons cultural, economic, historical and religious, Poland was continually struggling from underneath the yoke of Russian oppression despite being nominally ruled by the local Polish Communist Party.  According to Kirkpatrick’s thinking, such struggles would have ceased with the institutionalization of communist rule because Soviet bloc countries had been so indoctrinated that there was no chance of a Soviet bloc country instituting a large-scale rebellion which the Soviet system could not put down.  But the Soviet system had eroded well past the point that it could manage rebellion.  Stalin had shown that autocracy on such a massive scale may only thrive with totalitarianism.  By the end of the Brezhnev regime, on through the chairmanships of Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was no longer even recognizable as a shadow of the totalitarian state that it had been under Stalin.# Poland’s ability to stand up to Soviet threats, its ability to ward off a Soviet intervention because the cost to the Soviet Union would be too high, would have been unimaginable under Stalin. And Poland’s communist party was not quite the same pliant puppet of the CPSU that it had been earlier under Gomułka, completely willing to place the will of the Soviets above even the determined will of the Polish people.  General Wojciech Jaruzelski might have been a devoted and committed communist, but he still was enough of a nationalist not to want to sacrifice Poland to an intervention by the armed might of the Soviet Union.#  In a sense, General Jaruzelski had saved Poland from the power of the Soviet Army much as Marshall Pilsudski had about sixty years earlier.  “But Jaruzelski was no Pilsudski, however, for the former always regarded national independence as the only real end and national dignity as the only acceptable means.  Pilsudski, with typical bluntness, once explained that he had become a revolutionary because he refused ‘to live in the toilet’ of Russian domination; Jaruzelski spent his life as a latrine orderly.”#

 As Poland’s communist apparatus ossified with time, it could no longer command the population to comply with the dictates of the party in order to comply with the exigencies of the communist style planned economy.  Popular pressure forced the country to relinquish control of its command economy and its monopoly on the media and all communication.  And as this Soviet Bloc country lost control of the apparatus that allowed it to possess total control, it became as ripe for a transition to democracy as much as any “traditional autocracy.”

Kirkpatrick was extraordinarily perceptive in her realization that many traditional autocracies create the conditions of their own demise.  What she did not realize is that traditional autocracy can come in left-wing form as well as right wing form.  The same forces of entropy that allowed for the dissolution of authoritarian apparatus in so many parts of Southern Europe, Latin America and East Asia allowed for a similar dissolution in Eastern Europe of authoritarianism as well.  If one submits Poland to the test of Brzezinski/Friedrich, one quickly finds the Polish communist system wanting in its ability to be considered totalitarian: the Polish Catholic Church and Solidarity destroyed Poland’s monopoly on the press, challenged the one party system, made way for a competing ideology, and forced Poland to borrow money from western capitalist banks.  However brutal it was, Poland from Gomulka to Jaruzelski was far from a Stalinist type totalitarian state.  Poland was in many ways a typical authoritarian state of the late 20th century, concerned primarily with protecting its only its monopoly on power, that ultimately succombed as so many dictatorships of both the left and right did simultaneously.  

IV.

             Conclusion

Perhaps it is equally important to critique Kirkpatrick’s argument from the standpoint of political theory as it to do so from the standpoint of history.  While Kirkpatrick’s ideas were sound as political propaganda, they were quite unsound from the point of view of political science.  There are untold numbers of examples from the conduct of states in the world at large that disprove her theory – only a select few of many are listed above.  But the ironclad test to which Kirkpatrick’s argument must be subjected is to find out whether her argument holds up as political theory.

The way in which one may critique Kirkpatrick’s ideas as theory is to compare them to another theory.  This paper has already shown that Kirkpatrick’s theory of totalitarianism would not hold up under the stringent standards of either Friedrich/Brzezinski or Arendt.  However, Kirkpatrick’s argument over what constitutes the difference between autocracy and totalitarianism would also not hold up when subjected to a more generalized political theory by a theorist roughly her contemporary:  Isaiah Berlin.

According to Isaiah Berlin, liberty in its most general sense can be divided into two categories: positive liberty and negative liberty.  The meaning of positive liberty is the freedom to achieve potential.  Positive liberty implies not only that a person is free to be all that he can be, but that a person is able to discover what he is capable of.  

“The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master.  “I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself,” he explained, “not on external forces of whatever kind.  I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s acts of will.  I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside.  I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, …that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them….I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by reference to my own ideas and purposes.”#

Berlin’s basic critique of positive liberty is that it is the driving force that often leads individuals to assume that the potential which they choose to achieve is not only their own individual potential, but should be the individual potential of others.  Thus, the individual may see himself as knowing what is best for other members of society better than they themselves do.  While such paternalism can be benevolent, it can also be a destructive:  it is often the motive that puts the individual at the service of “a social ‘whole,’ of which the individual is an element or aspect:  a tribe, a race, a Church, a State, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn.”#  Therefore, the “whole” (which Arendt would term the “masses”) would claim to speak for what choices are best for those individuals under its purview better than the individual would.  The “whole” may even claim that individuals in truth seek what they appear to resist.  In the name of individuals’ “true” wishes, they may be coerced in any way which the “whole” deems necessary. The state is organized to act as the political manifestation of the whole. When a state founded upon positive liberty decides that citizens are acting to achieve their potentials differently from the way the “whole” thinks they should, the state then becomes free to coerce its citizens towards the wishes of the “whole,” whether or not the individual agrees with those goals.#

Conversely, the meaning of negative liberty is the ability of individuals to be free from coercion.  In Berlin’s own words:

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity.  Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others.  If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as having been coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.  .  . Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.#  

Negative liberty implies that a person is free when he can do what he wants without interference by others.  “The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom” is how Berlin put it.#  However, absolute negative liberty would create an anarchic situation in which there would be no barriers to prevent people’s interfering with each other in the pursuit of their own goals:  all races would be to the swiftest and all battles to the strongest.  Therefore, free action has barriers placed in its way by laws. Berlin lauds negative liberty as a concept that ultimately leads to the practice of democracy and liberalism.#  

      That negative liberty is not an absolute goal should be a given.  There is always a certain amount of positive liberty that will be necessary in order to live under any government, regardless of how liberal.  However, positive liberty is only necessary in the individual sense, and in the collective sense it ought to be reviled.  When positive liberty is used in the collective sense, it becomes an excuse to coerce individuals who do not meet the arbitrary requirements of a collective.  A person who causes another person to do something against his will becomes a force for positive liberty because the person is in effect forcing the other person to become the “do-er” of an action against his will.  Therefore, he ought to be prevented from doing so.

Using Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty helps to expose the fundamental flaws in the thinking of both Jimmy Carter and Jeane Kirkpatrick.   In both cases, history will show them to have colossally misunderstood negative liberty.  To President Carter, the appearance of negative liberty is to be welcomed at all times and cultivated unquestioningly.  A president more wary of the application of negative liberty would not have supported liberal democrats in Nicaragua and Iran at the expense of our more stable allies, the Shah and the Somozas.  A president more attuned to the fragility of negative liberty would have perceived that liberals in both countries were dupes of stronger Marxist and Islamist forces whose relative strength in opposition to the liberals would never have allowed for a notable expansion of negative liberty.  Those liberals should have understood that once the extremists had used the liberals to get rid of the conservative autocratic status quo, they would then get rid of the liberals as well.  Both Iran and Nicaragua were applications of negative liberty too absolute to be effective, and the stronger forces of Marxism and Islamism took hold in both places.

To Ambassador Kirkpatrick, the appearance of negative liberty was to be viewed as a matter for undue caution.  Rather than welcome its appearance, Kirkpatrick generally viewed it as something of which we should be suspicious.  To Kirkpatrick, negative liberty was a luxury that ought to be willingly surrendered to whatever extent she deemed necessary in the face of a foe that would force people to surrender negative liberty to an even greater extent.

In fact, Kirkpatrick’s beliefs, when taken to their logical extreme, would lead to authoritarianism.  What hard-line conservatives like Kirkpatrick never understood is that no state is capable of successfully attaining the absolute goals to which positive liberty aspires.  Kirkpatrick displayed her misunderstanding of that fact when she wrote that “As new norms are internalized, new beliefs accepted, new habits established, the need to coerce conformity through crash ‘thought reform’ programs and punishment of dissenters (in totalitarian countries) should decline."#   

This quote displays that Kirkpatrick mistakenly believed, as so many conservatives did, that the Soviet Union had succeeded in its goal of changing human nature.  Therefore she also mistakenly believed that the absolute goals of positive liberty could be realized.  The Soviet Union collapsed because it was incapable of realizing its goal of a worker’s paradise, and therefore it imploded from within, toppled by the very people whose lives their ideology sought to improve.  

The Soviet Union was supposed to continue indefinitely in the worldview of Kirkpatrick, or, at least, its imminent demise was completely unexpected in contrast to the demise of contemporaneous authoritarian regimes whose replacement by more democratic capitalist forms of political and economic organization she completely foresaw.  According to her, the seeming decrease of coercion in, for example, the Brezhnev and Khrushchev regimes as compared to that of Stalin was not due to the entropy of the system, but to the Soviet Union’s complete success in normalizing and regularizing the communist revolution.  Kirkpatrick believed that the after 70 years the communist party so completely institutionalized its own rule that it no longer needed to use brute force to maintain its stability.  Obviously she was completely wrong in her assessment, but it is in this belief that one ultimately sees Kirkpatrick for what she is: a believer in positive liberty as a force for collective good.

Kirkpatrick’s belief in positive liberty is manifest in her sense that the Soviet Union was an implacable enemy that could continue indefinitely because its society succeeded in its goal of changing human nature.  If she believed that the Soviet Union was successful in changing human nature, then it stands to reason that she believed human nature itself to be changeable.  The belief in the ability to change human nature, to free humanity from the limitations that make perfection unattainable, is the telltale sign of a positive libertarian.  

In the fight against communism, Kirkpatrick did not fight on principle against positive liberty.  She rather fought against a type of positive liberty she thought to be inferior to the brand of positive liberty which she believed in.  Because she thought that communism was a foe which needed to be opposed indefinitely, she believed that negative liberty was for an indefinite time period a luxury that must be surrendered for the sake of fighting it.  While she claimed that “traditional autocrats” only need to be supported in case of existential threats, her true belief was that right-wing dictators must be supported absolutely.  The specter of an ever-potential communist revolution or coup d’etat was continually an existential threat to every country that had communists.  It was not simply a matter of supporting right-wing dictators in their fights against communism; it was a matter of supporting right-wing dictators in any fight the dictators chose to fight because a loss incurred the potential of a communist government that would never leave.  Therefore, the actions of an authoritarian government that happened to be anti-communist were always justifiable because to flag in one’s support would incur the possibility of capitulation to the communists.

History ultimately proved Jeane J. Kirkpatrick quite wrong in her assessment.  Communism was no more or less successful in changing human nature than any other form of positive liberty before or since – in other words, not successful at all.  In the wake of its futile attempts to bend human nature into contortions impossible to hold, its failed social and economic experiments have left untold devastation.   

As a thinker Kirkpatrick had two great strengths and two great weaknesses.  Her great strengths laid in her ability to realize the devastation which communism wrought and to realize that authoritarianism in government can give way to democracy.  Yet within these strengths lie her weaknesses:  her perception of communism’s devastation blinded her to the potential for democratic transition in the communist world, and this lack of foresight about the future downfall of communism blinded her to the devastation that so many authoritarian regimes caused.  By going to such lengths to oppose communism so totally, Kirkpatrick and those who held her worldview came to resemble the communists ever so slightly in their pursuit of absolutes.      

However, what ultimately distinguishes the attitude of Jeane Kirkpatrick and those conservatives who think as she did about communism is the counterintuitive way in which they always read signals in order to fit their theories.  To Kirkpatrick, the relative relaxation of Soviet grip upon the lives of its citizens was not a sign that communism was weakening;  it was in fact a sign that communism was gaining strength.  Soviet oppression was relatively less common in later years because the Soviet Union had triumphed in its attempt to break its citizens of habits which human nature had formed.  Rather than seeing the Soviet Union as a decadent and weakening empire, she willed herself to see an empire that was strengthened by conditions that others would read as weakness.  

A belief in the invincibility of the Soviet Union and the Soviet system flew in the face of empirical evidence and can almost be regarded as a religious belief based upon faith.  It is the mirror image of the same kind of religious belief based upon absolute faith in Marxism, rather than a reliance on skepticism and empiricism, that made the communist system possible.  It should also come as no surprise that this interpretation of facts to fit an opinion is precisely what led Kirkpatrick to believe that support of allies, regardless of their practices, must be unconditional and undirected.  As it was to Dulles, Goldwater, Chambers and Burnham before Kirkpatrick, all that was important was to beat the enemy.  It was immaterial to question whether the price of victory by any means was worth the sacrifice.  What a country becomes in the process of vanquishing its enemy was considered trivial compared to the tragedy a country would undergo if it were vanquished by the enemy. But such an unreflective attitude as expressed by Kirkpatrick and other conservatives is not realistic.  It is a form of conservative idealism that imagines all actions to be justified in the pursuit of the enemy’s defeat.  In this regard, Kirkpatrick is just one eminence in a continuing tradition of conservative ideologues that seek to justify excessive brutality by exaggerating the strength of the enemy.  To be sure, the ideology of Kirkpatrick was nowhere near as potent as the ideology of communism was, but the two resemble each other more than either would have liked to admit.  

Works Cited:

BOOKS and Articles

1. Arendt, Hannah.  Origins of Totalitarianism.  New York, Schocken Books, 1951
2. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Liberty: Incorpoating Four Essays on Liberty, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Pp. 166-217.
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