Tag Archives: george orwell

Clever Girl! (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

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“He does not so much split his infinitives as disembowel them.” (Rebecca West on Dr. Lionel Tayler, The Clarion, 1913) 

CONSIDER THIS INTERACTION recorded by Ian Parker about the late Christopher Hitchens in The New Yorker:

And then the young doctor to [Hitchens’] left made a passing but sympathetic remark about Howard Dean, the 2004 Presidential candidate; she said that he had been unfairly treated in the American media. Hitchens, in the clear, helpful voice one might use to give street directions, replied that Dean was “a raving nut bag,” and then corrected himself: “A raving, sinister, demagogic nut bag.” He said, “I and a few other people saw he should be destroyed.” He noted that, in 2003, Dean had given a speech at an abortion-rights gathering in which he recalled being visited, as a doctor, by a twelve-year-old who was pregnant by her father. (“You explain that to the American people who think that parental notification is a good idea,” Dean said, to applause.) Dean appeared not to have referred the alleged rape to the police; he also, when pressed, admitted that the story was not, in all details, true. For Hitchens, this established that Dean was a “pathological liar.”

“All politicians lie!” the women said.

“He’s a doctor,” Hitchens said.

“But he’s a politician.”

“No, excuse me,” Hitchens said. His tone tightened, and his mouth shrunk like a sea anemone poked with a stick; the Hitchens face can, at moments of dialectical urgency, or when seen in an unkindly lit Fox News studio, transform from roguish to sour. (Hitchens’s friend Martin Amis, the novelist, has chided Hitchens for “doing that horrible thing with your lips.”) “Fine,” Hitchens said. “Now that I know that, to you, medical ethics are nothing, you’ve told me all I need to know. I’m not trying to persuade you. Do you think I care whether you agree with me? No. I’m telling you why I disagree with you. That I do care about. I have no further interest in any of your opinions. There’s nothing you wouldn’t make an excuse for.”

“That’s wrong!” they said.

“You know what? I wouldn’t want you on my side.” His tone was businesslike; the laughing protests died away. “I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud, and you say, ‘That’s O.K.’ Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I’m telling you what I think are standards, and you say, ‘What standards? It’s fine, he’s against the Iraq war.’ Fuck. Off. You’re MoveOn.org. ‘Any liar will do. He’s anti-Bush, he can say what he likes.’ Fuck off. You think a doctor can lie in front of an audience of women on a major question, and claim to have suppressed evidence on rape and incest and then to have said he made it up?”

“But Christopher . . .”

“Save it, sweetie, for someone who cares. It will not be me. You love it, you suck on it. I now know what your standards are, and now you know what mine are, and that’s all the difference—I hope—in the world.”

This is very confusing.  When Hitchens died ten years ago, his many friends heaped praise on the pyre.  So where in this boorish altercation is that “fine, funny orator,” “quietly self-parodying,” (Ian Parker)?  Is this an example of the “master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark” (William Grimes)? What happened to the “brilliant speaker and debater,” “in conversation incomparably interesting and engaging” (James Fenton)?  Did I miss the “elegance, wit, and brilliance” (Victor Navasky)?  The “mischievous laugh,” “mock outrage,” “devilishly clever,” “devastatingly pointed phrase,” “…striving for some conversational prize in erudition” (Meryl Gordon) must have passed over my head.   Did the transcriber fail to underline that this exchange was uttered in “that insouciantly charming tone of his” (Fred Kaplan)?  Were these women unaware that he was “the thinking woman’s crumpet” (Joanna Cole)?  Is this some hidden example of his “intense personal generosity and kindness” (Hussein Ibish)?  Did he pick a fight with two young women in the absence of “starting fights with God, assuming there is one, which he doesn’t” (Alexander Chancellor)?

I cannot see any of that.  What I see is a mean drunk, the fuel for which has been amply and admiringly documented; a wolfish domesticate.  The misogyny is plain on the surface: The need to dominate, the dismissiveness triggered by disagreement, the sexist apodo, the abrupt fellatory vulgarism.  The constellation of logical fallacies (I count six) that must have been learned while studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Balliol College of Oxford University in the late 1960s.

New Yorker illustration by Ralph Steadman

Reading Christopher Hitchens after this very unnerving dust-up it is impossible not to see his sexism everywhere.  Visiting Afghanistan in 2004, he is “obsessed with women” which manifests itself in the actually common and prosaic revulsion that consumes Europeans confronting the veil.  “My sex obsession got the better of me again” meeting a female Afghan doctor who survived detention under the Taliban to become the only woman candidate for the presidency of Afghanistan.  He “made bold to inquire” about “a headscarf that didn’t seem all that comfortable”: “How long have you been wearing that?  Have you always worn one?”  He writes:

Her downcast-eyed yet stirring reply was that, in her days as a medical student, she had worn what she liked.  This was a nervous compromise.  Even her revolutionary candidacy was, in a sense, being conducted with male permission.

This would be very funny – “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad” (Mark Twain) – but for the wager Hitchens solemnly places at the very top: “the future of democracy may be at stake.”  These are abstract stakes for him but very much not so for the woman sitting in front of him.

Back in the gender-liberated citadel of American democracy he crumpets on. Asked “what’s it like to be a minority of one,” when it comes to his ill-considered stance on invading Iraq, he responds, “It washes off me like jizz off a porn star’s face.”  To his wife: “Darling, you would be so much more convincing if you were dressed.”  About Ann Coulter: “If I can’t fuck up Ann Coulter before lunch, then I shouldn’t be in this business.”  In Vanity Fair he wrote a thoroughly unnecessary and unconvincing paean to head and its alleged American character.  His opening salvo, as it were, was a complete misread of Lolita as an erotic novel – his commonplace error compounded by a shuddering appropriation of the world’s most famous book depicting child rape to rhapsodize about oral sex.  He stumbles forward (“Stay with me,” he begs the reader.  “I’ve done the hard thinking for you.”).  Rhetorically he asks why Nabokov refused to apply the English translation of souffler as if there were some profound Platonic form to be elided from the text.  In reality, the answer is easily available given Lolita’s colorful publication history: even when self-scrubbed of explicit descriptions of sexual acts, the first edition had to be printed by a French pornographer rather than an English or American publisher.  Hitchens considers the virtues of the gay hummer – he partially admits to such activity in English boarding school – which is not a very brave or original argument to make in 2006.

Hitchens was at least as famous for his enemies as for his friendships.  He emigrated to the United States in 1982 and quickly ingratiated himself with the ruling class of Washington, D.C.  It is telling that most of those who wrote eulogies for Slate’s Hitchens tribute tell banal anecdotes rather than assess the character of the man.  This suggests to me that Hitchens didn’t have friends so much as potential adversaries.  As Meryl Gordon describes him, in “Washington society these days, he’s like a gunslinger with an itchy trigger finger.”  In other words, a very dangerous man.  In his career he managed to estrange Eric Alterman, Colin Robinson, Alexander Cockbridge, Michael Kinsley, his own brother Peter (for four years), his first wife (until after the baby), and most famously, Sidney Blumenthal.  In most of these cases the split was the result of personal or political differences, which means Hitchens was willing to abandon friends and family over his opinions.  That is the very essence of the fanatic whom Hitchens insisted he hated.

Never mind. Hitchens was an acolyte of George Orwell, who like Hitchens was not a uniquely gifted or capable writer. Still, profundity can emerge from prose but only if the source itself is pure. Orwell’s canny judgment – of the reality in front of him and its moral implications – distinguished him among his generation.  It also separates Hitchens most starkly from his hero.  Hitchens was wrong about almost everything he ever wrote about.  Orwell was right about fascism and communism at the same time.  He was right about socialism.  He was right about the Soviet Union.  By contrast Hitchens was wrong about communism, Trotsky, Iraq (twice!), “Islamofascism,” Mother Teresa, Paris Hilton, female humor, and atheism.  On those subjects where he coincided with historical judgment, he was late to join an already crowded field.  So he discovered The Clintons were corrupt the year after the president was impeached.  Henry Kissinger was deemed a war criminal 26 years after the end of the Vietnam War.  George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were good men and very smart.  In other words, all of his opinions about important public subjects were wrong, tardy, or commonplace.  And this is because instead of being a moralist, which is the role of a great writer like Orwell, Hitchens was mercenary.  He had no moral core beyond the fight itself.  He was a pugilist.  Fighting was all he knew how to do, and if he was not fighting, the vacuum was plain.  And like a boxer taking too many roundhouses to the skull, the constant fight did not improve his judgment.

Still, I continue to search for this reputed rhetorician, the “easiest job in journalism” (June Thomas), “who didn’t need much editing” (Jonathan Karp), the sharp insight, cutting moral judgment, or mordant summary that define a keen observer and vital journalist.  Or at least that is what very many other writers publishing in legacy media insist is there.  What I find instead is slack prose, literary cliché, and astonishing ignorance.  While Hitchens accurately if obviously describes Kabul in 2004 as “battered and filthy” he also reads too much meaning in a restaurant sign titled “Shame,” ignorant of the anglicization of the Dari word for “dinner”.  He cites “David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia” for no apparent purpose, in addition to Harry Flashman and Rudyard Kipling, the default settings to any discussion of colonialism.  What on earth does this mean: “A Kuwaiti woman, who hadn’t wanted to dismount from the bus, found her privacy and modesty invaded by a small lad who nevertheless proffered a sharp knife.” In 1992, he asked the president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ilija Izetbegovic – while under active mortar fire – his opinion on the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie issued in 1988.

To borrow a phrase, I now know what his standards are and that’s all the difference in the world.

It was this Christopher Hitchens who was asked, for reasons unknown, to write an introduction to the 2007 Penguin single-volume edition of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.  All the precipitate pugilism, simmering misogyny, masculine toxicity, and inattention are manifest here.  On the surface, at least, it appears that he knows what he is doing, which is a hachet job disguised as an encomium.  By treating a clear superior as an equal, he boosts himself up a notch by taking her down.  But given his record outlined above, I cannot confidently say that’s what he meant to do.

I will give Hitchens one point: he was right about Bosnia and the whole of Yugoslavia during the 1990s.  And he was courageous, at least, visiting the country during the war in addition to Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Romania in 1989.  He wrote compellingly, if not originally, about the siege of Sarajevo as early as 1992.  But while his reportage crossed the conventional wisdom in Washington and Brussels, he reported what better observers than he – Samantha Power, Christiane Amanpour, Pierre Hazan, Roy Gutman, among many others – were seeing at the same time.  And then he made his career-ending error, also quite common among ex-leftist interventionists, by extrapolating what should have been done in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and Rwanda (in the last country a fait accompli by the time he writes about it) to Iraq in 2003.  Here again his judgment is not just poor but unoriginal.

By contrast Rebecca West, like Orwell, did not lack for good judgment in anything other than her personal life.  She was right about feminism, suffrage, socialism, fascism and communism (at the same time), Yugoslavia, Germany, Italy, World War II, the meaning of treason, and Margaret Thatcher.  Unlike Hitchens, her astute observation came from a moral core.  While he kept looking for the fight and adapting his sophistry to the argument, she argued for what she truly believed in. She was also intensely loyal to friends, even those (like H.G. Wells and her own sisters) with whom she had difficult relationships over the course of her tumultuous life.

In his introduction, Hitchens logs a small handful of the standard panegyrics to build rapport with the reader and establish that West is worth his time.  From this low mezzanine he slowly descends into his very English oblique reproach.  While no author is beyond scrutiny – although, ironically, Hitchens’ literary estate does not apparently believe that – introductory writers do not normally disparage their subjects.  Whether Hitchens saw this opportunity or not, he took to it with his patent combination of latent misogyny and misapprehension as amply documented above.

One of the strange and irrelevant strands Hitchens picks up stems from his hackneyed student days as a “Baillol Bolshevik” at Oxford. That is when he realized Joseph Stalin’s genocidal paranoia was no longer socially acceptable in polite company. So he shifted allegiance to the original communist martyr, Leon Trotsky, who did not live long enough to direct the repressive and failed political and economic experiment of the Soviet Union.  Like a tic from the old days, he lays Stalinist sympathies at West’s feet.  This is bizarre and untrue. Hitchens quotes a vague reference to Soviet agriculture policy to pin on West support for its murderous collectivization. Additionally, he rather specifically notes “her complete failure to anticipate the rise of Yugoslav communism during the Second World War.” This is nonsense. Following her British Council visit in 1936, as part of the official report to her sponsors she warned that Yugoslavia risked being “overrun either by Germany or, under Russian direction, by communism; which would destroy its character, blot out its inheritance from Byzantium.” West in fact denounced Stalin, the Soviet Union, and communism. More importantly, she helped regime apostates like Emma Goldman, who came to England following her departure from the Soviet Union and her deportation from the United States.

Hitchens continues to descend.  He attacks West’s work as “not history.  It is not even journalism.  It is passion.”  Elsewhere, he accuses her of “gushing” romantically about the peoples of the region.  While there is certainly an argument to be made about Orientalism and the Western Gaze, he does not make it here.  And in any event, Hitchens might know more about gushing passion than he would let on.  As his friend Martin Amis wrote about him (while he was still alive):  “Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars.  Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly.”  Gushing indeed.

Hitchens takes as easy bait West’s preoccupation with sex and gender.  He luridly focuses on West’s use of “impotent,” a word that appears very rarely in the book.  He revels in her account of the homespun trousers of Macedonian Albanian men adorned with exaggerated representations of the male member.  His sexism then precipitates.  He gleefully touts West’s “ability to detect a pure bitch at twenty paces” in her criticism of Austrian Archduchess Sophie.  “Against this woman,” he writes, West “deploys a rhetorical skill that is perhaps too little associated with feminism”.  With the viscera of modifiers slip-sliding across the butcher’s table it is not precisely clear exactly what he means.  In any event he appears to be set off by West’s ultimate cut: “[Sophie] was also a great slut”.  I will skip the etymology of this term but it is likely it meant something completely different in 1941 than Hitchens thought it did in 2007. All of this was purely unnecessary, the result of scratching at some subdural burr. I would not dare to suggest it has anything to do with his mother abandoning his father and committing suicide with her lover in Athens in 1973.

Hitchens’ creepiness extends and pervades.  He blames West, as did so many men during the 1990s, for influencing Western inaction in Yugoslavia. He blasts her sincere defense of English-ness, a plaint she also shares with Orwell.  This, Hitchens argues, “must count as one of the most halting and apologetic proclamations of patriotism ever uttered.” This is extremely hard to take given his own, very English, overreliance on modifier mash-ups, meandering subordinate clauses, and maddening imprecision. He states “the book fails certain tests as a history, and even as a travelogue, and …it has little predictive value…and it shows some ‘unreliable narrator’ characteristics.”   “[W]hy should it remain a classic?” he asks rhetorically.  His own “tentatively offer[ed]” (halting?) response is that Rebecca West is very very smart, and she “makes a sincere and admirable effort,” and that she “understands that there are things worth fighting for, and dying for, and killing for.”  In other words: clever girl!  But it is hard to stomach that epithet as applied by a dilettante who was neither.

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Russia and the Information Purification Directives

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What we are witnessing in Russia and parts of Ukraine has been unprecedented since the consolidation of control after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 , (I hesitate with this historical analogy) the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the occupation of Eastern Europe after World War II: the systematic centralization of the means of communication and the destruction of independent news media and civil society.

This has been long in coming as the Kremlin and its allies have steadily co-opted the press, attacked independent journalists, consolidated control of the Internet, unified all organized “political” parties, brought petty prosecution against non-governmental organizations, harassed independent political actors, and persecuted those few remaining who dare raise their voice against the now-raging retrograde, unilithic nationalism sweeping over the country.

Taking all these actions together is a kind of inverted information warfare — a war on information, a purging of all wrongthink, of anything that doesn’t resolutely advance the official ideology of the Center. It’s important to remember the point to this war on information, which is to reinforce political control in the Kremlin. While the state has the means to do this, it is not an expression or exercise of genuine political power — it is a substitute, in the form of brute control, for it.

Observing these actions and watching their culmination, it was impossible, strangely, not to remember the brilliant advertisement for Macintosh broadcast in 1984 (see above). It’s worth quoting the ad’s copy in full (which can be found here, penned by Steve Hayden) which is chilling both in its pitch-perfect mimicry of totalitarian language and for its weird anticipation of the course of current events. We can almost imagine some crude translation of a transcript from a bug on Kremlin walls recording a recent conversation taking place therein:

“My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today we celebrate the first, glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth! We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion! We shall prevail!”

Of course, for the advertisement this was meant as an allegorical assault on the great IBM/Microsoft monopoly, but the “Information Purification Directive” could easily be a real mandate from the Duma — the assault on any source of information that does not conform to the Center’s dictation of Truth. “Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion.” This sounds like the pablum that authoritarian and totalitarian governments feed their people: don’t think, we’ll do that for you; the people of so-called free countries are enslaved and overwhelmed by the chaos and disorder of “freedom”. Forfeit the freedom of thought and moral action to us, the state, and in exchange we will take care of you.

While no doubt not all Russians are falling for this line again — let us remember, as even those who live and work in these countries have forgotten, that part of information monopoly is the absence of opposition and alternative narratives — it is amazing (though according to Czeslaw Milosz it should hardly be surprising) how many are signing up for it. See this video posted by Radio Free Europe where a Russian “journalist” — in fact, a paid stooge of the Kremlin, given that virtually all communications in the country are now controlled by state — equates all journalism to propaganda. It is an appalling prostitution of the human mind.

Many observers continue to insist that Vladmir Putin is concerned with international opinion, the position of Russia as a global actor, and the greater glory of his country. This is exactly inverted. His only concern is with Russian domestic opinion, which is the tiger he must ride lest it devour him. Consequently, the only way to change the course of events in Russia and Ukraine is to alter domestic Russian public opinion. (It is no coincidence that the Ukrainian separatists attacked TV stations to broadcast Russian state channels.) This is the challenge facing both the local opposition and anyone trying to help them — the ability to develop alternative narratives, communicate and organize — because all the available means to do so have been coopted and corrupted.

I’m not so naive to suggest this quarter-century-old advertisement provides a realistic model for political development in repressive states. But in its own strange way it goes some of the way to understand the challenge.

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American Republic, Now Available from Amazon

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I’m pleased to announce that my book, American Republic: Essays on the Nature of Politics, is now available in Kindle and paperback from Amazon.com.

American Republic includes the original book, plus three essays that first appeared on this site: “The Plastics and the Political,” “Faith, Politics and ‘The West Wing,'” and “Democracy and Political Language”. 

The Kindle format retails at $6.95 and the paperback is also available for $12.99.

The paperback is also available direct through the publisher, and we hope to have it available through Barnes and Noble and in other book stores soon.

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In Egypt, Force v. Power (II)

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(KHALED DESOUKI AFP/Getty Images via Globalpost.com)

It’s been sickening listening to usually sensible and decent people try to justify the ugly ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected head of state. Watch David Brooks, for example, speaking on PBS’ Newshour, contort himself into a principle for the outcome of a wholly unprincipled thing happening to somebody he hates:

I used to think, if we just have elections, that the elections will have a moderating effect on governments.

Even if you take radicals, especially throughout the Middle East, you take radicals, they have to pay attention to public opinion. They have to pick up the trash. They have to fix the potholes. The act of governing will moderate them. And, therefore, we just should insist on election after election and we should respect the results of every election.

I think the evidence from the Muslim Brotherhood, at least, is that if you have got a group which is really a radical, almost religious totalitarian group, the elections will not have a moderating influence. They will take advantage of elections in essence to end democracy.

And I think that is what they were slowly doing. They were undermining democracy to make democracy impossible. It was a self-negating election. And so I think what the coup people did was legitimate. And what all those millions of people on the street did is legitimate.

A friend of mine, Jeffrey Goldberg, had a good line. May be bad short term for democracy, good long term for progress.

I quote him at length to avoid any reductionism. Brooks sounds peculiarly like an early agitator for Communism, from which many of his friends on the neoconservative right crawled, placing any violent or repressive means at the disposition of the all-important End. Who cares if democracy is harmed, when progress – Communism’s ultimate end for all humanity! – is achieved? (To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs!) And what good is democracy, anyway, if elections are “self-negating”? (Can’t we just throw the people out and elect a new one?)

It only gets worse. Jeremy Pressman writes that a military government may be better at “protecting minority rights, creating space for genuine and lasting political competition, and, more broadly, helping Egypt move forward.” Progress again! Couldn’t the army and police do that under a democratically elected president? Never mind that the army ultimately chooses whose rights, whose space, and which direction forward, because it controls the state. There is no real politics without moral choice, because there is no real choice out of the barrel of a gun. The concept of the benign dictatorship is a venal lie that refuses to die in the craniums of people smart enough to know better.

Joshua Keating and Ozan Varol seriously consider a “democratic coup d’etat,” as if that makes a lick of sense. Can you have an “authoritarian election”? “Totalitarian freedoms”? “Transparent censorship”?

It doesn’t take much to see all these observers’ frightening lack of faith in, and understanding of, politics and political process independent of democratic mechanisms. Even taking Brooks’ argument at face value – that Morsi was dismantling the very democracy that had elevated him to power – the protests against his rule indicated Egypt was a midpoint of the drama, not at its climax. And for anyone who would argue against this point, and to say that Egypt is better off now under military rule, we need look no farther than Turkey, where a political opposition movement has flourished against a similarly pugnacious president. The difference there is the army has, after 100 years, finally removed itself to the sidelines. While contentious and occasionally violent, Turkey’s protests have left far fewer people dead as a result. And Turkey’s democracy is still intact.

It is incredible that Brooks failed to acknowledge the inseparable actions of the Egyptian army in the coup. It was not the “people” who deposed the president, but the armed forces. Morsi is still being held incommunicado, now charged with espionage and murder. It is compelling indeed that hundreds of thousands of people took to Tahrir Square in Cairo and elsewhere to protest against the President and the ruling Muslim Brotherhood. This is as it should be in an open, free and political society. Of course we and President Morsi should take a petition signed by 22 million seriously. But now that movement and those millions have been denied their right to rein in the president on their own, by their own power, because the army has subsumed them by brute force.

Worse for the future of Egypt, this establishes a very ominous precedent, one Turkey took nearly a century to overcome: the ultimate arbiter of political rule is now the army. Having sat out the 2011 revolution and then forcefully deposed Morsi early this month, the army is effectively Egypt’s Pharaoh-maker. This is indisputably bad for Egyptian democracy and Egyptian politics, because the army may always have its metal-jacketed finger on the country’s political balance.

And it demonstrates to the Muslim Brotherhood – those whom Brooks despises so much – what they and their allies must do now. No longer content to build a true political power base in Egypt’s neighborhoods and quartiers and mosques and prisons and schools, they realize they must infiltrate the army, too. All over the Middle East, the like-minded are taking their lesson.

This is a terrible development. Because after decades of preaching the benefits of democracy, which includes the rule of law and democratic control of the armed forces, Egypt – with the tacit consent of the West – has cynically conceded that force can trump power. But that only means as long as those men with guns hold the future of political control in their hands along with their weapons, politics will be inseparably defined with violence, and bloodshed, and heartache.

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Politics, Propaganda and Pornography on the Web in China

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China Daily front from May 2012

A recent New York Review of Books post by Perry Link is worth reading to learn the lengths and depths to which the Chinese government will go to control content and opinion on the Internet in that country.  China has learned to embrace the Internet in some ways, recognizing that the government in some sense can’t live without it and can’t deprive the people of it. But the central authorities view the Internet in much the same way that the Nazis and Soviets viewed the emerging art and technology of the movies in the 1930s: as a powerful tool to augment propaganda, which is, in the mordant definition of Hitler message man Joseph Goebbels, “a means to state control”.

Link is drawing attention to the work of his colleague Xiao Qing at the University of California, who has received, archived and catalogued thousands of “directives” from China’s propaganda officials to central and regional news and Internet officials to play up, play down, censor, muzzle, close comment, applaud or condemn various bits of information that are vacuumed up in the social space of the Chinese Intranet. It is impossible to read these directives and not think of Winston Smith, alone at his cubicle next to the memory hole, carrying out similar directives in the Ministry of Truth. Indeed, Xiao calls his unofficial repository the Ministry of Truth. He provides an extraordinary glimpse inside perhaps the largest and most sophisticated propaganda machinery in the world.

Link, an academic and translator of Charter 08 into English, provides some additional insights based on a conference that Xiao hosted last month in Berkeley that included several additional scholars who helped analyze his archives. The insights they brought are additionally worth reading, if for no other reason than it is an additional reminder that we do not bring every perspective required to this material. Perhaps the most important insight rendered is this:

“One of the principal aims of the government directives is to prevent unapproved groups from organizing through the Internet (noted as “incitement,” “gatherings,” etc.); some of the scholars argued that this goal is even more fundamental than prevention of negative comment about the Party.”

That is, among the government’s top priorities in Internet control is not censorship for its own sake but to break up any nascent attempts at independent organization, which is the true and ultimate threat to the government’s control. Information, opinion and communication do not undermine the government on their own, but by how they help individuals understand, come together, and take collective action. No wonder, as Link notes, the government has lumped “political speech” in the same web category as pornography as “unhealthful to society”.

Another chilling observation in the age of the NSA revelations relates to the activity of Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency. In a country where all media is state-controlled, Xinhua is effectively an open-source intelligence agency. The Internet has changed that, Link notes. Ten years ago, Xinhua’s mission, in part, was to report to China’s leadership on its own population. In the Internet era, it no longer needs to do that – the people are in effect reporting on themselves through social media, chat rooms, comment boxes and microblogs. The government only needs to read them to understand their subjects.

That’s a Thought Police even Orwell didn’t imagine.

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An Intellectual Assault on Joseph Nye: Part One

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Joseph Nye’s theory and advocacy of “soft power,” articulated in the early 1990s and developed during the last 15 years, have been a touchstone for virtually anyone studying or writing about international relations. It’s been impossible, particularly, to write about public diplomacy without having to throw it obligatorily into the custom-made “soft power” box that Nye built. In summary, Nye believes the fundamental aspects of effective power are changing; that this has become more “soft” in recent decades; and for the United States to remain dominant in global affairs it must adapt to wielding this “soft power” more effectively.

I’ve long found Nye’s theory troublesome but it took me some time to understand why. I don’t think he understands power, force and coercion and the nuance of their employment in foreign affairs. The strange dichotomy of “soft power” versus “hard power” long bothered me because it seemed to try to articulate something very complex by using mutually complementary contrasts, like trying to describe a Picasso using only “light blue” and “dark blue”.

What follows is the first in a series of assaults on Nye’s theory. By assault I mean I intend to take territory and to replace what I hope to destroy in the process.

I’ll start from a position of strength: Nye’s theory fails at the level of language. Briefly put, the “soft power/hard power” paradigm clutters more than it clarifies. In an attempt to provide a simple differentiating factor between aspects of national power, Nye has only blurred important distinctions beyond measure.

The absurdity of Nye’s apparent dichotomy is inherent in the words he applies, which pairs opposing modifiers to the same underlying object; specifically, he discusses power which may be “hard” or “soft”. To give a sense of what I mean, we may as well be using “More Power” and “Not-Power” or “Less Power” for all the additional clarity his distinction brings. There is a whiff of Orwellian Newspeak to this. Orwell’s 1984 philologist Syme would have liked “soft power”: Why try to articulate or describe this in more precise language when “power” and a modifier (“smart” comes to mind) serve the purpose just as well? The result, as Orwell has argued elsewhere, defeats complex thought.

This is no post-modern critique. It demonstrates at a practical level the problem of the language involved. What should bring more clarity makes this subject more obscure because it begs the question of what, exactly, power is (a specific point I hope to bring up in a later post). And in this case – which damns Nye the most in my eyes – he is willing to acknowledge that “hard power” is the equivalent of force but then won’t simply use the term, which is much more precise and accurate. But also inconvenient. When is hard power not force? When it’s paired with soft power. Which in turn is what, exactly?

In short, Nye’s language obfuscates. It refuses to name what we are really talking about, which is power and force. When we use language like this, it is far more clear what we are discussing. True power is not attractive, as Nye posits, it is conductive, and can for example include a wide array of (painful) economic and diplomatic tools. The full array of national power includes the organized, destructive and denying tools of military and paramilitary violence. Force can be coercive, punitive and destructive – aspects Nye strangely ignores in his description of power.

And that explains the false comfort we find in “soft power,” which as we will see here is not very soft at all. Nye makes quite a case for attracting and convincing countries, but that is simply another way of talking about diplomacy. Nations talking to one another can come to agreements based on mutual interests or previously unknown commonalities. In addition to forgetting this plain fact of international political history, Nye ignores the nuanced realities of foreign relations, which can also resemble parliamentary “horse-trading” — the barter in trade of deals that have been the staple of international diplomacy for centuries. (Most countries today see America’s ability to give away something for nothing as idiocy, not benevolence. The rest of the world simply can’t afford that kind of charity without an explicit quid pro quo.)

But beyond that we are talking about coercive if nominally peaceful means, non-violent tools that are powerful nonetheless. Coercion short of force can be almost as destructive as warfare and certainly as disruptive. We need look no further than the collapsing economies of the European Union and the power of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund (for some) and the stronger economies (Germany foremost) have to wield over them to reform. This is simple power and there is nothing soft about it for the people living under it.

Nye has carved out an advantage for himself, of course, by wrapping up virtually every non-military aspect of national power in the non-threatening mien of “soft power”. But enlarging the basket and giving it an anodyne label should make us all the more suspicious. Because it is the difference among the tools in the various baskets, and the consequences of using them – or not using them – that has real effects for real people. And perhaps Nye, as well as his defenders and detractors, have forgotten that those real people are the ultimate source of power in political life.

I would replace Nye’s soft power language with this: there is only power – the full combined measure of a nation to act on the world — and force is a subset of national power; we have alternative tools of national power that are no less coercive but less destructive such as trade barriers, economic countermeasures, and sanctions. These are rightly labeled power because some countries have greater power (and more tools) than others. We have means to induce, cajole and convince without coercion and these are called diplomacy, public diplomacy, communications and (sometimes) propaganda.

There is nothing to be gainsaid from simplifying to the point of simple-mindedness. That is what, in part, Nye has done. We can use language to describe, accurately and with precision, exactly what power and force are and can do among nations.

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What If Propaganda Were Cool?

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A recent article in The New Republic about the motivational art by Hugh Macleod commissioned for tech start-ups demonstrates an almost-antidote to its more buttoned-down corporate counterparts that are so often and easily parodied. Macleod’s back-of-the-business-card doodles can be a bracing anti-boardroom aesthetic, like this one done for Microsoft.

But it’s hard not to look at Macleod’s drawings and sloganeering and wonder whether, the bold snark aside, his work is much different in outcome from the bland aphoristics he so effortlessly departs from. Indeed, there’s a kind of bullying to some of these, a hipper-than-thou aspect to the work ethic that makes the demand on workers in a startup environment all the more invidious.

I bring this up because of my familiarity with propaganda, particularly when it comes to motivating the labor force. In the absence of rational market motivators (that is, salaries and other negotiable, fungible or tangible aspects, especially in Communist states), the employer must rely on other factors.   

In North Korea, for example, citizens work five days a week and “volunteer” most of the other two days. Officially closed to the outside, the country is awash in motivational slogans common to autarkic economies, where the only means to drive the labor force are mass organization, the threat of punishment, and hortatory sloganeering (“Carrying on despite the hardships!”).Here is an example of a North Korean propaganda display as recreated by the French-Canadian artist Guy Delisle, who worked in the country during the mid part of the last decade. You can find it in his book Pyongyang.  It reads “Forging Ahead into the 21st Century!”:

To demonstrate my concern about Macleod’s illustrations, I’ve taken one of his drawings and slogans commissioned for the Texas-based cloud computing firm Rackspace and repurposed it. Originally this simply reads “Fanatical Support!” in English (probably for Rackspace’s tech support unit, an otherwise laudable trait to encourage, I admit). I ran the words through Google Translator into Korean and placed them in the same place next to the original drawing (my apologies to Korean readers for any inelegancies in the translation or layout). I think this demonstrates the peculiarity of the doodle:

Seen through this prism, Macleod’s drawings and slogans begin to take on a more sinister light.

Here again I have taken only minor liberties with another one of Macleod’s commissioned posters. Originally done for HP’s cybersecurity division, I cut away the reference to HP and repurposed it for a fictional Thought Police division in a modern Oceania from George Orwell’s 1984, complete with universal resource locator (don’t try to click on it, it won’t work). The drawing and the rest of the text are original:

I’ll link here some additional Macleod posters that follow in this disturbing vein. But now, all images and text are original, no changes have been made. Imagine this one with a Thought Police shield emblazoned on it:

Or this one from the Ministry of Plenty:

I found this last poster particularly disturbing. I could only recall the slogan greeting inmates at the Vorkuta labor camp in Siberia, which reads, “Labor in the USSR is a matter of honor, glory, pride and heroism.” Nothing about a salary or a decent standard of living. (Of course, it was the gulag.) Macleod is trying to suggest that the reader is working towards some higher purpose, which is often the case in a start-up culture. But so was the entire socialist experiment. Nonetheless, Macleod’s line could easily have been put in the mouth of some bluntly honest zek 70 years ago. So could this, maybe:

What makes motivation posters in the standard vein so annoying is their unironic tone. For a lot of people, work is a chore, and only the paycheck makes up for it. That is, when you think about it, the genius of the market system. When you think about that a little deeper, asking anything more from people less than freely given is exploitative. The Soviets finally understood this when, after about a generation of exploiting their workers for the greater glory of Socialism, the workers realized a better life was not waiting for them and the entire economy more or less came to a halt. (“They pretend to pay us,” a common joke went at the time, “and we pretend to work.”)

In the end there really isn’t much difference between the various forms of motivational art, whether they’re for blunt propaganda purposes or the hipper profit motive. Unless, of course, they’re tied to something real, tangible, and achievable. (Lexus’ internal motto was “Beat Benz,” and they very nearly did.) Since that real thing is in the future, it’s not always clear whether you’re being hoodwinked or properly led.  It’s up to your judgment to determine whether forgoing something real in the here and now – like a paycheck – is worth the effort for a something greater at a later time – like fantastically lucrative stock options. At some basic level, that’s the nature of risk. But it’s an unnerving prospect nonetheless. Not all start-ups become Facebook. Many become Pets.com.

But my larger point here is about the uneasy relationship between politics and art. Motivation art, like propaganda, demands something from its viewers. It’s easy to forget that for a few decades, at least, socialism and its associated arts were considered the vanguard – purposefully forging new men and new societies – by both those in the Communist bloc and left-leaning intellectuals in the West.  Today we can smirk at the crude propaganda of North Korea, Cuba or Iran. But what if they weren’t so crude? What if their propaganda were as winky and fun as a Super Bowl advertisement? Would we be able to tell the difference?

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George Orwell, Down the Rabbit Hole

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George Orwell, BBC writer and broadcaster, and world-class word-wrestler. (BBC)

George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is one of those classics of letters that bears repeated reading throughout life. It remains a hectoring challenge to anyone who tries to write, as Orwell did, always wrestling with a deceptively simple language to articulate what we want it to say.

I first read his essay, as nearly everyone who has did, in undergraduate school and promptly forgot it amid a flood of impressions.  I returned to it much later later to find his blunt advice and weird prophesy calling out like one of those burned-out stars that still shines like a beacon across the eons.

And of course, like any thoughtful piece of writing that gives back over the course of a life (The Gettysburg Address and The Great Gatsby come to mind), I came back to this article after working in public diplomacy during wartime and found it to be a nuanced source of interest and inspiration.

Orwell is often quoted from this article that “[p]olitical language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The ellipsis is critical (it’s always quoted with the ellipsis) — he attacks across the spectrum, from Conservatives and Anarchists.  The edit takes quite a bit of the sting out of the quote. And the quote itself hurts much more when removed from the context of the essay, which is his most practical manual for good, clear, political writing.

This is interesting because for a few years Orwell was what might be pejoratively called a propagandist — he wrote (and wrote well by all accounts) for the BBC during World War II, when the broadcasting arm of the British empire had a specifically political purpose in mobilizing and energizing the colonies to protect the crown from fascism. Orwell did not particularly dislike this mission (although he did hate phrases like “not particularly dislike”), but he was utterly dispirited by the waste, bureaucracy, and the “trash” and “bile” broadcast each day.

In other words, he thought the BBC could propagandize better, and this essay was in part an attempt to understand why political language was so imbecilic, dull, flat and dim. “Politics and the English Language” was one of his first comprehensive examinations of and remedies for this problem.

In fact “Politics” was part of a less-known series of articles Orwell wrote following the war, all on a theme: the nexus of language, politics, democracy and freedom.  “Propaganda and Demotic Speech” (1944) is perhaps the best known after “Politics,” but then come “Politics vs. Literature” (1946), “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), and “Writers and Leviathan” (1948). These all lead, in most scholars’ understanding, to Animal Farm and 1984, and particularly Orwell’s extraordinary development of Newspeak. But taken together, they also are an expansive exploration of the relationship between politics and language and, more specifically, how we use language (specifically English), to communicate political ideas.

Orwell thought we used English badly. (“Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble,” he wrote.) After some thought and reading, I decided to take issue with his conclusion.  I believe that the language itself is the problem regarding its carrying capacity for political ideas. Due to theoretical constructs built up for too long in the past we lack the vocabulary to express basic political concepts. Those ideas that we can express invariably come out in the cliches that Orwell despised.

The only remedy is what I have been doing on this site: to develop and substitute a new conceptual vocabulary to describe political ideas, experiences and realities.  The following essay, “Democracy and Political Language,” is an homage to Orwell and another effort to expand that vocabulary.

I will attack one cliche at a time, but it feels at time as though I am brandishing a sword (or pen) at a waterfall.  Fortunately we also have a mighty shield — Orwell’s own words. He struggled himself with the cliches he hated, wrestled the words to say what he thought. And that in turn shaped how he thought:  “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”  Surely, I’m on to something.

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American Republic – A Theory and Defense of Politics

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(“Flag” by Isabelle de Borchgrave. Photo by the author)

Following years working or covering politics at one level or another I began to read political theory and political philosophy to try to build a theoretical foundation for my practical experience. I had long been frustrated by the expanding gulf between my subjective understanding of politics and the popular (and elite) narrative of what politics is and what at its base drives political dynamics. Unfortunately as I went back further — The Politics, The Republic — I came to understand that the gulf began with the beginning of the Canon. The architects of Western political philosophy did not respect, and therefore did not care to understand, politics for itself.

I am not the first to assert this. Pascal’s blythe Pensées dismiss the ancients, but Hannah Arendt deliberately sequences the intellectual DNA from Plato to Marx to the apolitics imposed by Communist regimes.  She then attempted in her lecture Was ist Politik? (translated and published recently as “An Introduction Into Politics” in The Promise of Politics) to fill the vacuum of understanding about the fundamental nature of politics. But this will likely remain tangential to her larger corpus of work. And it was only a small piece of work against a gigantic, established body that needed debunking.

Taking inspiration from her, from J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors, In Defense of Politics by Bernard Crick (not incidentally a George Orwell biographer), I wrote my own treatise to define (and confine) politics and the political experience. American Republic is the result. It is short in length, terse in language, but even after additional years working at the international level (I completed the manuscript in 2007) continues to reflect my understanding and experience.

I have added to this very modest theory of politics because, in part, the corpus is so small, so little populated by those with the real-world subjective experiences of men and women in politics, and continues to be dominated by the pessimistic, the cynical, and the small. Even other works — such as Max Weber’s Vocation lecture that gave us the inimitable analogy of politics as the “strong and slow boring of hard boards” — remain ultimately cynical and detached from the real work of politics.

For politics is (as I noted in an earlier post), in the words of Vaclav Havel, “the art of the impossible.”  Arendt eerily presaged these words a generation before him, using the words “miracle” and “improbable” to describe what politics could achieve.  Politics allows for collective moral action and only through politics can the great progress of the ages be accomplished. Without politics human beings inhabit a great moral waste. Civilization as we comprehend it could not exist without politics.  I hope this small work advances this understanding.

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