The Radical War Against Liberal History
Posted: 07 Aug 2010 04:26 PM PDT
By Barry Rubin
The history of Western civilization, democracy, and capitalism is one of success, the greatest civilizational achievement in world history. All of its problems, shortcomings, and injustices should be discussed fully but the priority should be on explaining how the system's was able to overcome these things while other systems have done either far worse or collapsed in catastrophe.
In his little book, “England in the Nineteenth Century,” first published in 1950, the historian David Thomson wrote the following passage, discussing an 1816 report on London:
“Hardships began to be talked about only when they are no longer taken for granted:….Sweated labor and cellar dwellings were not invented by the men who made the industrial revolution: they were discovered by them, discussed by them, and in the end partially remedied by them.”
This was once a standard approach in the great historical works. Past centuries saw tremendous poverty and suffering, usually due to natural conditions, enhanced by human nature. But in Western democratic states leaders, citizens, and systems strove to make things better and eventually succeeded in doing so. As people saw the possibility of improvement in their lives due to democracy, education, growing wealth, and technological advances, they sought to achieve more though, of course, change was also limited by resources and the nature of society.
The liberal school of history understood this progress and extolled the democracy and Western civilization that made it possible. It well understood that dictatorships, ideological extremism, those who promised utopia or who wanted to go too far and too fast threatened to wreck the very mechanism that made possible a better, freer life. It also comprehended that greed had to be restrained and power balanced, as in the need to manage both the tremendous wealth concentrated during the industrialization process, the ambitions of individuals or institutions, and the excessive control governmental institutions might wield.
True, it was well understood, as Thomson and many other historians showed, that the concentration of land ownership in England and the industrialization process worsened the situation of many people during a historical period, but it also made possible their improvement through increased production of food and goods. Similarly, the shortcomings of capitalism were noted yet so was the indispensibility of a reasonably regulated system of free enterprise. As Winston Churchill put it, there were many terrible things about the system but it was better than any other that might be devised.
And so, it was precisely those "dark satanic mills" that eventually produced the highest living standards for the most people ever seen on this planet.
Thomson, for example, does not stint on discussing the suffering, injustice, and conflict involved. A few pages earlier in his book, he quotes the reformer William Cobbett who wrote of the new social problems in the early nineteenth century:
“Talk of serfs! Are there any of these, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who…are compelled to work fourteen hours a day, in a heat of eight-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out of a window o the factory!”
Still, the lesson is that the system established—political democracy, capitalism with limited state regulation, a culture based on individual rights—was capable of constant improvement while keeping out changes that would have destroyed all of the good things it offered. Trade unions evolved not to promote revolution but to secure the workers' reasonable share in the products of their labor.
Victorian England, the very place where Karl Marx saw only a dead end leading to revolution, instead provided scientific progress, rising living standards, expanding liberties and their extension to an ever larger proportion of the population, freedoms, integration into a single society yet with freedom for pluralism, and a wonderfully productive culture.
Thus, historians generally saw an ever-improving civilization and were proud of that fact. They did not need to hide the problems—like slavery in the United States—because they could record how those problems were resolved over time. This is what we have always called liberal history.
Like so many things, however, the intellectually barbarous era we live in today has turned history on its head, attacked liberal history, and replaced it with radical history. The emphasis is not on how solving problems proved the system's validity but on the existence of problems showing the system's evil and hypocrisy. Rather than endorsing Enlightenment values and Western civilization, the theme is to prove that these things should be destroyed. Instead of stressing a workable society, the emphasis is on the endless spending of resources beyond the society's capability. Rather than equal opportunity, the complaint is the failure to achieve identical results regardless of merit, labor, or productivity.
Thus, history becomes portrayed as a series of Western crimes—imperialism, sexism, class exploitation, racism—which are matters of permanent shame. Marxism or neo-Marxism has become the mainstream approach, an ideology aimed at revolutionizing society rather than studying it. (Though some great historians did employ this approach in a scholarly manner, I’m referring to Eugene Genovese and not the hack Howard Zinn.)
Rather than show how well the society has worked, history becomes a tool for discrediting it, covering it in crime, and thus (not unintentionally) showing that it is unworthy of continued existence.
There are four other aspects in which history has been distorted and turned upside down in this battle.
One of them is the search for the single discrediting action or quote, or deed taken out of the context of the times in order to besmirch and discredit the heroes of the past. Rather than producing a balanced picture (mostly good, some bad) the goal is to delegitimize them--and thus their work and the country as a whole--completely. This technique has been applied to such as George Washington (slave owner) Andrew Jackson (mistreating Native Americans) to Mark Twain (something he said that might be purposefully misconstrued as racism) or Franklin D. Roosevelt (internment of Japanese). Thus, American history is turned into a series of evils and much is left out, including their criticisms of injustices and attempts to resolve them.
Second, there is the throwing out of the main narrative of historical developments for the sake of studying aspects of it. While it is certainly true that the history of various races, women, and workers, for example, was neglected in the past, there has been more than fifty years of rectification going on in that regard. The story of the United States should be kept in proportion.
The fact is, however, that Marx was wrong and therein sits the key to understanding. Marx believed that Western democratic capitalism was on a dead-end street. He “scientifically ” proved that capitalism could never improve the lot of the workers to the point where they could enjoy high living standards, the very goods that they produced.
That flaw explains precisely why Communism failed and socialism mellowed in the West, and why the radicals of today had to dump class and move on to gender and race. Yet on both of these issues, once society had ripened, the West adapted with remarkable ease. The time it took to go from thinking it would be ridiculous to have a female or African-American president to the overwhelming majority of Americans accepting the idea was about three decades. And this transition happened with incredibly little violence or conflict. Yet supposedly this story proves that American society is evil?
With so much progress here, the radicals have to once again move on (gender has been pretty much abandoned politically by them though race is still a mainstay) to advocate the existence of the nation-state as evil and to extol its destruction by unlimited immigration (in practice, even if illegal), multiculturalism, and a passionate endorsement of even the most regressive and repressive Third World revolutionaries.
Herein is a delicious irony: those who denounce the Western past as having accepted racism, religious obscurantism, slavery, oppression of women, and murderous denial of rights are the same people who advocate these things in the present! They back precisely the same things once known as racism—non-Europeans were said to be incapable of democracy and unsuited for liberty--under the guise of multiculturalism!
The liberal Victorians, whatever their shortcomings, advocated the spread of Enlightenment and progress, while the progressives of today cheer the maintenance and reinforcement of feudalism and the triumph of oppressive traditionalism as supposedly respect for the (presumably never-changing) culture of others! It is as if someone toured the South in the 1850s and then justified that institution by saying that it was, after all, the local culture and Northerners had no right to reject it.
Third, is the academic sin of historicism, reading the present into the past and failing to understand the past on its own terms. The past, in William Shakespeare’s memorable phrase, truly is another country. What often happens today, however, is the transformation of difficult and complex issues into conspiracies in which a vicious ruling class seeks to keep down the masses.
One aspect of this is the demand that the past conform to the present. A good example of this is the ludicrous decision of a federal judge in California claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, designed to protect the rights of former slaves, made any ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. Whatever one thinks of the contemporary issue, this is a travesty in terms of interpreting the past.
Another example is the idea that the Federal government's powers are unlimited, that the Executive Branch can create legislation, or that new rights can be created and then read into the Constitution.
Finally, there is the fascinating, dangerous, and counterproductive act of burying the truly bad examples of the past, sometimes because those who created disasters had good intentions, often because those very cases show the mistakes being made by radicals at present.
A good example in the United States is the story of post-Civil War Reconstruction. In truth, and there is massive documentation, the imposed governments on the Southern states engaged in such excesses of corruption, overspending, incompetence, and arrogant disregard for their citizens as to fail. The result was disastrous for all concerned.
If the terror of the Klu Klux Klan and white supremacy succeeded in setting back the cause of equal rights by about 90 years (1877 to 1965) the mistakes of the Radical Republicans and Carpetbaggers were critical to that outcome through discrediting themselves and ensuring a mass base for their opponents. The radicals of today would do well to consider these lessons. If the post-Civil War era had been conducted better, racial equality would have come to America a century earlier.
Critical lessons can also be learned from foreign examples. The French (26 years of war, 56 years of restoration of the old order) and Russian (70 years of bloody tyranny) revolutions were catastrophes, despite the humanitarian-sounding rhetoric that emerged from them. There is no better way to teach the virtues of the Western democratic, free enterprise plus reasonable regulation, individual rights system than to see where the alternatives led. Yet while the sins of Western capitalism (or fascism, which is essentially used as a stick to beat the status quo, not the threat of radical statist ideologies) are taught manifold times, the far worse and more massive crimes of Communist statism are hidden from the students’ view.
One might add the distortion of Third World history into a near-exclusive blame on colonialism for the problems that exist today. It is doing those countries no favors by disregarding their social and political problems that ensure they fall behind. Western modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s showed how countries needed to change in order to succeed. In contrast, radical slogans ensure that the wrong policies will be followed, preach demagogic hatred that produces violence, and guarantees the continued oppression of tens of millions of people.
How ironic that the forces portraying themselves as progressive have become the reactionaries of our time, the worst threat and enemy of liberalism.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Liberalism and its Values Must Get Their Due
The Radical War Against Liberal History
Posted: 07 Aug 2010 04:26 PM PDT
By Barry Rubin
The history of Western civilization, democracy, and capitalism is one of success, the greatest civilizational achievement in world history. All of its problems, shortcomings, and injustices should be discussed fully but the priority should be on explaining how the system's was able to overcome these things while other systems have done either far worse or collapsed in catastrophe.
In his little book, “England in the Nineteenth Century,” first published in 1950, the historian David Thomson wrote the following passage, discussing an 1816 report on London:
“Hardships began to be talked about only when they are no longer taken for granted:….Sweated labor and cellar dwellings were not invented by the men who made the industrial revolution: they were discovered by them, discussed by them, and in the end partially remedied by them.”
This was once a standard approach in the great historical works. Past centuries saw tremendous poverty and suffering, usually due to natural conditions, enhanced by human nature. But in Western democratic states leaders, citizens, and systems strove to make things better and eventually succeeded in doing so. As people saw the possibility of improvement in their lives due to democracy, education, growing wealth, and technological advances, they sought to achieve more though, of course, change was also limited by resources and the nature of society.
The liberal school of history understood this progress and extolled the democracy and Western civilization that made it possible. It well understood that dictatorships, ideological extremism, those who promised utopia or who wanted to go too far and too fast threatened to wreck the very mechanism that made possible a better, freer life. It also comprehended that greed had to be restrained and power balanced, as in the need to manage both the tremendous wealth concentrated during the industrialization process, the ambitions of individuals or institutions, and the excessive control governmental institutions might wield.
True, it was well understood, as Thomson and many other historians showed, that the concentration of land ownership in England and the industrialization process worsened the situation of many people during a historical period, but it also made possible their improvement through increased production of food and goods. Similarly, the shortcomings of capitalism were noted yet so was the indispensibility of a reasonably regulated system of free enterprise. As Winston Churchill put it, there were many terrible things about the system but it was better than any other that might be devised.
And so, it was precisely those "dark satanic mills" that eventually produced the highest living standards for the most people ever seen on this planet.
Thomson, for example, does not stint on discussing the suffering, injustice, and conflict involved. A few pages earlier in his book, he quotes the reformer William Cobbett who wrote of the new social problems in the early nineteenth century:
“Talk of serfs! Are there any of these, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who…are compelled to work fourteen hours a day, in a heat of eight-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out of a window o the factory!”
Still, the lesson is that the system established—political democracy, capitalism with limited state regulation, a culture based on individual rights—was capable of constant improvement while keeping out changes that would have destroyed all of the good things it offered. Trade unions evolved not to promote revolution but to secure the workers' reasonable share in the products of their labor.
Victorian England, the very place where Karl Marx saw only a dead end leading to revolution, instead provided scientific progress, rising living standards, expanding liberties and their extension to an ever larger proportion of the population, freedoms, integration into a single society yet with freedom for pluralism, and a wonderfully productive culture.
Thus, historians generally saw an ever-improving civilization and were proud of that fact. They did not need to hide the problems—like slavery in the United States—because they could record how those problems were resolved over time. This is what we have always called liberal history.
Like so many things, however, the intellectually barbarous era we live in today has turned history on its head, attacked liberal history, and replaced it with radical history. The emphasis is not on how solving problems proved the system's validity but on the existence of problems showing the system's evil and hypocrisy. Rather than endorsing Enlightenment values and Western civilization, the theme is to prove that these things should be destroyed. Instead of stressing a workable society, the emphasis is on the endless spending of resources beyond the society's capability. Rather than equal opportunity, the complaint is the failure to achieve identical results regardless of merit, labor, or productivity.
Thus, history becomes portrayed as a series of Western crimes—imperialism, sexism, class exploitation, racism—which are matters of permanent shame. Marxism or neo-Marxism has become the mainstream approach, an ideology aimed at revolutionizing society rather than studying it. (Though some great historians did employ this approach in a scholarly manner, I’m referring to Eugene Genovese and not the hack Howard Zinn.)
Rather than show how well the society has worked, history becomes a tool for discrediting it, covering it in crime, and thus (not unintentionally) showing that it is unworthy of continued existence.
There are four other aspects in which history has been distorted and turned upside down in this battle.
One of them is the search for the single discrediting action or quote, or deed taken out of the context of the times in order to besmirch and discredit the heroes of the past. Rather than producing a balanced picture (mostly good, some bad) the goal is to delegitimize them--and thus their work and the country as a whole--completely. This technique has been applied to such as George Washington (slave owner) Andrew Jackson (mistreating Native Americans) to Mark Twain (something he said that might be purposefully misconstrued as racism) or Franklin D. Roosevelt (internment of Japanese). Thus, American history is turned into a series of evils and much is left out, including their criticisms of injustices and attempts to resolve them.
Second, there is the throwing out of the main narrative of historical developments for the sake of studying aspects of it. While it is certainly true that the history of various races, women, and workers, for example, was neglected in the past, there has been more than fifty years of rectification going on in that regard. The story of the United States should be kept in proportion.
The fact is, however, that Marx was wrong and therein sits the key to understanding. Marx believed that Western democratic capitalism was on a dead-end street. He “scientifically ” proved that capitalism could never improve the lot of the workers to the point where they could enjoy high living standards, the very goods that they produced.
That flaw explains precisely why Communism failed and socialism mellowed in the West, and why the radicals of today had to dump class and move on to gender and race. Yet on both of these issues, once society had ripened, the West adapted with remarkable ease. The time it took to go from thinking it would be ridiculous to have a female or African-American president to the overwhelming majority of Americans accepting the idea was about three decades. And this transition happened with incredibly little violence or conflict. Yet supposedly this story proves that American society is evil?
With so much progress here, the radicals have to once again move on (gender has been pretty much abandoned politically by them though race is still a mainstay) to advocate the existence of the nation-state as evil and to extol its destruction by unlimited immigration (in practice, even if illegal), multiculturalism, and a passionate endorsement of even the most regressive and repressive Third World revolutionaries.
Herein is a delicious irony: those who denounce the Western past as having accepted racism, religious obscurantism, slavery, oppression of women, and murderous denial of rights are the same people who advocate these things in the present! They back precisely the same things once known as racism—non-Europeans were said to be incapable of democracy and unsuited for liberty--under the guise of multiculturalism!
The liberal Victorians, whatever their shortcomings, advocated the spread of Enlightenment and progress, while the progressives of today cheer the maintenance and reinforcement of feudalism and the triumph of oppressive traditionalism as supposedly respect for the (presumably never-changing) culture of others! It is as if someone toured the South in the 1850s and then justified that institution by saying that it was, after all, the local culture and Northerners had no right to reject it.
Third, is the academic sin of historicism, reading the present into the past and failing to understand the past on its own terms. The past, in William Shakespeare’s memorable phrase, truly is another country. What often happens today, however, is the transformation of difficult and complex issues into conspiracies in which a vicious ruling class seeks to keep down the masses.
One aspect of this is the demand that the past conform to the present. A good example of this is the ludicrous decision of a federal judge in California claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, designed to protect the rights of former slaves, made any ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. Whatever one thinks of the contemporary issue, this is a travesty in terms of interpreting the past.
Another example is the idea that the Federal government's powers are unlimited, that the Executive Branch can create legislation, or that new rights can be created and then read into the Constitution.
Finally, there is the fascinating, dangerous, and counterproductive act of burying the truly bad examples of the past, sometimes because those who created disasters had good intentions, often because those very cases show the mistakes being made by radicals at present.
A good example in the United States is the story of post-Civil War Reconstruction. In truth, and there is massive documentation, the imposed governments on the Southern states engaged in such excesses of corruption, overspending, incompetence, and arrogant disregard for their citizens as to fail. The result was disastrous for all concerned.
If the terror of the Klu Klux Klan and white supremacy succeeded in setting back the cause of equal rights by about 90 years (1877 to 1965) the mistakes of the Radical Republicans and Carpetbaggers were critical to that outcome through discrediting themselves and ensuring a mass base for their opponents. The radicals of today would do well to consider these lessons. If the post-Civil War era had been conducted better, racial equality would have come to America a century earlier.
Critical lessons can also be learned from foreign examples. The French (26 years of war, 56 years of restoration of the old order) and Russian (70 years of bloody tyranny) revolutions were catastrophes, despite the humanitarian-sounding rhetoric that emerged from them. There is no better way to teach the virtues of the Western democratic, free enterprise plus reasonable regulation, individual rights system than to see where the alternatives led. Yet while the sins of Western capitalism (or fascism, which is essentially used as a stick to beat the status quo, not the threat of radical statist ideologies) are taught manifold times, the far worse and more massive crimes of Communist statism are hidden from the students’ view.
One might add the distortion of Third World history into a near-exclusive blame on colonialism for the problems that exist today. It is doing those countries no favors by disregarding their social and political problems that ensure they fall behind. Western modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s showed how countries needed to change in order to succeed. In contrast, radical slogans ensure that the wrong policies will be followed, preach demagogic hatred that produces violence, and guarantees the continued oppression of tens of millions of people.
How ironic that the forces portraying themselves as progressive have become the reactionaries of our time, the worst threat and enemy of liberalism.
Posted: 07 Aug 2010 04:26 PM PDT
By Barry Rubin
The history of Western civilization, democracy, and capitalism is one of success, the greatest civilizational achievement in world history. All of its problems, shortcomings, and injustices should be discussed fully but the priority should be on explaining how the system's was able to overcome these things while other systems have done either far worse or collapsed in catastrophe.
In his little book, “England in the Nineteenth Century,” first published in 1950, the historian David Thomson wrote the following passage, discussing an 1816 report on London:
“Hardships began to be talked about only when they are no longer taken for granted:….Sweated labor and cellar dwellings were not invented by the men who made the industrial revolution: they were discovered by them, discussed by them, and in the end partially remedied by them.”
This was once a standard approach in the great historical works. Past centuries saw tremendous poverty and suffering, usually due to natural conditions, enhanced by human nature. But in Western democratic states leaders, citizens, and systems strove to make things better and eventually succeeded in doing so. As people saw the possibility of improvement in their lives due to democracy, education, growing wealth, and technological advances, they sought to achieve more though, of course, change was also limited by resources and the nature of society.
The liberal school of history understood this progress and extolled the democracy and Western civilization that made it possible. It well understood that dictatorships, ideological extremism, those who promised utopia or who wanted to go too far and too fast threatened to wreck the very mechanism that made possible a better, freer life. It also comprehended that greed had to be restrained and power balanced, as in the need to manage both the tremendous wealth concentrated during the industrialization process, the ambitions of individuals or institutions, and the excessive control governmental institutions might wield.
True, it was well understood, as Thomson and many other historians showed, that the concentration of land ownership in England and the industrialization process worsened the situation of many people during a historical period, but it also made possible their improvement through increased production of food and goods. Similarly, the shortcomings of capitalism were noted yet so was the indispensibility of a reasonably regulated system of free enterprise. As Winston Churchill put it, there were many terrible things about the system but it was better than any other that might be devised.
And so, it was precisely those "dark satanic mills" that eventually produced the highest living standards for the most people ever seen on this planet.
Thomson, for example, does not stint on discussing the suffering, injustice, and conflict involved. A few pages earlier in his book, he quotes the reformer William Cobbett who wrote of the new social problems in the early nineteenth century:
“Talk of serfs! Are there any of these, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who…are compelled to work fourteen hours a day, in a heat of eight-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out of a window o the factory!”
Still, the lesson is that the system established—political democracy, capitalism with limited state regulation, a culture based on individual rights—was capable of constant improvement while keeping out changes that would have destroyed all of the good things it offered. Trade unions evolved not to promote revolution but to secure the workers' reasonable share in the products of their labor.
Victorian England, the very place where Karl Marx saw only a dead end leading to revolution, instead provided scientific progress, rising living standards, expanding liberties and their extension to an ever larger proportion of the population, freedoms, integration into a single society yet with freedom for pluralism, and a wonderfully productive culture.
Thus, historians generally saw an ever-improving civilization and were proud of that fact. They did not need to hide the problems—like slavery in the United States—because they could record how those problems were resolved over time. This is what we have always called liberal history.
Like so many things, however, the intellectually barbarous era we live in today has turned history on its head, attacked liberal history, and replaced it with radical history. The emphasis is not on how solving problems proved the system's validity but on the existence of problems showing the system's evil and hypocrisy. Rather than endorsing Enlightenment values and Western civilization, the theme is to prove that these things should be destroyed. Instead of stressing a workable society, the emphasis is on the endless spending of resources beyond the society's capability. Rather than equal opportunity, the complaint is the failure to achieve identical results regardless of merit, labor, or productivity.
Thus, history becomes portrayed as a series of Western crimes—imperialism, sexism, class exploitation, racism—which are matters of permanent shame. Marxism or neo-Marxism has become the mainstream approach, an ideology aimed at revolutionizing society rather than studying it. (Though some great historians did employ this approach in a scholarly manner, I’m referring to Eugene Genovese and not the hack Howard Zinn.)
Rather than show how well the society has worked, history becomes a tool for discrediting it, covering it in crime, and thus (not unintentionally) showing that it is unworthy of continued existence.
There are four other aspects in which history has been distorted and turned upside down in this battle.
One of them is the search for the single discrediting action or quote, or deed taken out of the context of the times in order to besmirch and discredit the heroes of the past. Rather than producing a balanced picture (mostly good, some bad) the goal is to delegitimize them--and thus their work and the country as a whole--completely. This technique has been applied to such as George Washington (slave owner) Andrew Jackson (mistreating Native Americans) to Mark Twain (something he said that might be purposefully misconstrued as racism) or Franklin D. Roosevelt (internment of Japanese). Thus, American history is turned into a series of evils and much is left out, including their criticisms of injustices and attempts to resolve them.
Second, there is the throwing out of the main narrative of historical developments for the sake of studying aspects of it. While it is certainly true that the history of various races, women, and workers, for example, was neglected in the past, there has been more than fifty years of rectification going on in that regard. The story of the United States should be kept in proportion.
The fact is, however, that Marx was wrong and therein sits the key to understanding. Marx believed that Western democratic capitalism was on a dead-end street. He “scientifically ” proved that capitalism could never improve the lot of the workers to the point where they could enjoy high living standards, the very goods that they produced.
That flaw explains precisely why Communism failed and socialism mellowed in the West, and why the radicals of today had to dump class and move on to gender and race. Yet on both of these issues, once society had ripened, the West adapted with remarkable ease. The time it took to go from thinking it would be ridiculous to have a female or African-American president to the overwhelming majority of Americans accepting the idea was about three decades. And this transition happened with incredibly little violence or conflict. Yet supposedly this story proves that American society is evil?
With so much progress here, the radicals have to once again move on (gender has been pretty much abandoned politically by them though race is still a mainstay) to advocate the existence of the nation-state as evil and to extol its destruction by unlimited immigration (in practice, even if illegal), multiculturalism, and a passionate endorsement of even the most regressive and repressive Third World revolutionaries.
Herein is a delicious irony: those who denounce the Western past as having accepted racism, religious obscurantism, slavery, oppression of women, and murderous denial of rights are the same people who advocate these things in the present! They back precisely the same things once known as racism—non-Europeans were said to be incapable of democracy and unsuited for liberty--under the guise of multiculturalism!
The liberal Victorians, whatever their shortcomings, advocated the spread of Enlightenment and progress, while the progressives of today cheer the maintenance and reinforcement of feudalism and the triumph of oppressive traditionalism as supposedly respect for the (presumably never-changing) culture of others! It is as if someone toured the South in the 1850s and then justified that institution by saying that it was, after all, the local culture and Northerners had no right to reject it.
Third, is the academic sin of historicism, reading the present into the past and failing to understand the past on its own terms. The past, in William Shakespeare’s memorable phrase, truly is another country. What often happens today, however, is the transformation of difficult and complex issues into conspiracies in which a vicious ruling class seeks to keep down the masses.
One aspect of this is the demand that the past conform to the present. A good example of this is the ludicrous decision of a federal judge in California claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, designed to protect the rights of former slaves, made any ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. Whatever one thinks of the contemporary issue, this is a travesty in terms of interpreting the past.
Another example is the idea that the Federal government's powers are unlimited, that the Executive Branch can create legislation, or that new rights can be created and then read into the Constitution.
Finally, there is the fascinating, dangerous, and counterproductive act of burying the truly bad examples of the past, sometimes because those who created disasters had good intentions, often because those very cases show the mistakes being made by radicals at present.
A good example in the United States is the story of post-Civil War Reconstruction. In truth, and there is massive documentation, the imposed governments on the Southern states engaged in such excesses of corruption, overspending, incompetence, and arrogant disregard for their citizens as to fail. The result was disastrous for all concerned.
If the terror of the Klu Klux Klan and white supremacy succeeded in setting back the cause of equal rights by about 90 years (1877 to 1965) the mistakes of the Radical Republicans and Carpetbaggers were critical to that outcome through discrediting themselves and ensuring a mass base for their opponents. The radicals of today would do well to consider these lessons. If the post-Civil War era had been conducted better, racial equality would have come to America a century earlier.
Critical lessons can also be learned from foreign examples. The French (26 years of war, 56 years of restoration of the old order) and Russian (70 years of bloody tyranny) revolutions were catastrophes, despite the humanitarian-sounding rhetoric that emerged from them. There is no better way to teach the virtues of the Western democratic, free enterprise plus reasonable regulation, individual rights system than to see where the alternatives led. Yet while the sins of Western capitalism (or fascism, which is essentially used as a stick to beat the status quo, not the threat of radical statist ideologies) are taught manifold times, the far worse and more massive crimes of Communist statism are hidden from the students’ view.
One might add the distortion of Third World history into a near-exclusive blame on colonialism for the problems that exist today. It is doing those countries no favors by disregarding their social and political problems that ensure they fall behind. Western modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s showed how countries needed to change in order to succeed. In contrast, radical slogans ensure that the wrong policies will be followed, preach demagogic hatred that produces violence, and guarantees the continued oppression of tens of millions of people.
How ironic that the forces portraying themselves as progressive have become the reactionaries of our time, the worst threat and enemy of liberalism.
Race is Not the Issue as Between Israel and the Palestinians
The False Issue of "Race" in the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Posted: 06 Aug 2010 03:01 PM PDT
By Barry Rubin
As the waitress whose family had come from Ethiopia put the pizza on the table at the Tel Aviv restaurant, I contemplated the ridiculous misuse of "race" as a factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Regardless of skin color, we belong not only to the same country by way of citizenship but also to the same nation and people in a very profound way that isn't true for countries that are merely geographical entities.
Among the scores of ridiculous things said, thought, and written about the Arab-Israeli conflict, the pretense that it has something to do with "race" ranks high among them. This has been interjected for two reasons. First, this is a blatant attempt to demonize and delegitimize Israel.
Second, as part of that point but also due to trends in Western intellectual discussions, there is a conflation of nationality and race. Often, there is an attempt nowadays to portray any form of nationalism in the West as racist, though this is never applied to Third World nationalists situations. Neither the internal conflicts in Iraq (among Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds) nor in Lebanon (among numerous groups) are about race but rather arise from national, ethnic, and religious (sometimes all rolled up into one) conflicts.
One of the most basic lessons in looking at foreign or international affairs is to understand that countries just don't think alike about issues. America, and in a different way Europe, has been obsessed with race. That doesn't mean everyone else is racially oriented. Israelis don't think about skin color as such and are well aware that Jews, while having a common ancestry, have been affected by many cultures and societies.
With intermarriage rates between Jews whose ancestors came from Europe and those who came from the Middle East approaching half in Israel today, there is no way to classify people. In fact, Israelis are far less interested than other countries about people's ancestral travels.
Moreover, what does one say about such "darker-skinned" Israelis as my Hungarian-Yemenite colleague or my Syrian-origin pianist neighbor (whose wife is from Poland by way of Argentina? There is absolutely no issue involved here. And many Israelis of European origin are not exactly "white" in their appearance.
Indeed, Israel has more "blacks" among its Jews (from Ethiopia) than do the Palestinians by far. Israeli media never use racial stereotypes or epithets while Arab and Palestinian media have had numerous racist remarks and cartoons about such American leaders as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and now even Barack Obama. In a recent radio interview one of the leaders of the Islamist movement in Israel, in other words from the Arab minority here, said that it was a disgrace that a black Israeli soldier could ask for the identity document of an Arab Muslim. Yet such racism from the Arab/Palestinian side is ignored in the Western media.
While there have been some incidents in reaction to the arrival of Jews from Ethiopia, these have been few and universally rejected. Moreover, Israel has given refuge to the American "Black Hebrew" movement when it easily could have deported them.
It is officially estimated that at least 19 asylum seekers have been shot dead by Egyptian forces in Sinai. To my knowledge no one in this category has ever been injured in Israel.
I have had friends, mostly Filipinos, who were illegal workers (they overstayed work permits) deported from Israel and they simply accepted it and were soon working in another country. None of them bears any grudge against Israel, quite the contrary they could serve as citizen ambassadors on its behalf. None of them ever reported a single case of "racial" mistreatment and I don't believe there has ever been--and workers' advocacy groups have never reported--a racial assault or even insult on any foreign worker in Israel. The problem, of course, is that there is at times terrible economic exploitation by unscrupulous employers, which is in no way atypical in the world today.
The Israel-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts are in no way "racial." National identity is something quite different from "race" generally. Israelis and Arabs are not easily distinguished by skin color, though of course there are exceptions.I was in an Israeli government agency meeting a high-ranking official whose skin shade was darker than that of Barack Obama. This was only something I noted because I was planning to write the article you are reading now.
I arrived at the meeting mentioned above by taking a cab from my neighborhood taxi stand. I gave the address and the driver went back to speaking on his mobile phone in Arabic, which is the only reason I realized he was an Israeli Arab. I couldn't tell just by looking at him.
The attempt by anti-Israel slanderers to inject a racial aspect is ludicrously nonsensical. If you have ever travelled in Syria you would find that the average skin color of people there is lighter than that of Israelis on average. Generally speaking, there is less variation in "racial terms" between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs than there is among member states of the European Union.
It just doesn't apply to conditions here. 'While Palestinian Arabs are on average a shade or two darker than Israelis you can find wider variations within the EU member states.
But if you can label someone as a "racist" because they are engaged in a conflict with another nation or group automatically "proves" they are in the wrong. If the conflict is a national one, however, you actually have to think about it. Who's right in the following conflicts: Irish Catholics or Protestants; Basques or Spain; Bosnians or Serbs; Russians or Chechens, Somalis or Ethiopians; Iraqi Sunni, Shia, or Kurds; India or Pakistan; Azerbaijan or Armenia, and so on?
The answer cannot be deduced automatically. But label one side as racist and the discussion is over. This, then, is a trick for deceiving, not a tool for understanding.
The ridiculousness of attempts to transfer American or European situations to Israel was embodied in an American student asking an Israeli professor how many blacks were on his university's basketball team. Actually, there are many on the professional teams but they are all, of course, from the United States, though I believe one or two had converted and remained in Israel.
I don't think there's any question of the fact that there is far far more racism in Europe or in the Arabic-speaking world than in Israel--and that's an understatement.
Me:
One word: persuasive.
Posted: 06 Aug 2010 03:01 PM PDT
By Barry Rubin
As the waitress whose family had come from Ethiopia put the pizza on the table at the Tel Aviv restaurant, I contemplated the ridiculous misuse of "race" as a factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Regardless of skin color, we belong not only to the same country by way of citizenship but also to the same nation and people in a very profound way that isn't true for countries that are merely geographical entities.
Among the scores of ridiculous things said, thought, and written about the Arab-Israeli conflict, the pretense that it has something to do with "race" ranks high among them. This has been interjected for two reasons. First, this is a blatant attempt to demonize and delegitimize Israel.
Second, as part of that point but also due to trends in Western intellectual discussions, there is a conflation of nationality and race. Often, there is an attempt nowadays to portray any form of nationalism in the West as racist, though this is never applied to Third World nationalists situations. Neither the internal conflicts in Iraq (among Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds) nor in Lebanon (among numerous groups) are about race but rather arise from national, ethnic, and religious (sometimes all rolled up into one) conflicts.
One of the most basic lessons in looking at foreign or international affairs is to understand that countries just don't think alike about issues. America, and in a different way Europe, has been obsessed with race. That doesn't mean everyone else is racially oriented. Israelis don't think about skin color as such and are well aware that Jews, while having a common ancestry, have been affected by many cultures and societies.
With intermarriage rates between Jews whose ancestors came from Europe and those who came from the Middle East approaching half in Israel today, there is no way to classify people. In fact, Israelis are far less interested than other countries about people's ancestral travels.
Moreover, what does one say about such "darker-skinned" Israelis as my Hungarian-Yemenite colleague or my Syrian-origin pianist neighbor (whose wife is from Poland by way of Argentina? There is absolutely no issue involved here. And many Israelis of European origin are not exactly "white" in their appearance.
Indeed, Israel has more "blacks" among its Jews (from Ethiopia) than do the Palestinians by far. Israeli media never use racial stereotypes or epithets while Arab and Palestinian media have had numerous racist remarks and cartoons about such American leaders as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and now even Barack Obama. In a recent radio interview one of the leaders of the Islamist movement in Israel, in other words from the Arab minority here, said that it was a disgrace that a black Israeli soldier could ask for the identity document of an Arab Muslim. Yet such racism from the Arab/Palestinian side is ignored in the Western media.
While there have been some incidents in reaction to the arrival of Jews from Ethiopia, these have been few and universally rejected. Moreover, Israel has given refuge to the American "Black Hebrew" movement when it easily could have deported them.
It is officially estimated that at least 19 asylum seekers have been shot dead by Egyptian forces in Sinai. To my knowledge no one in this category has ever been injured in Israel.
I have had friends, mostly Filipinos, who were illegal workers (they overstayed work permits) deported from Israel and they simply accepted it and were soon working in another country. None of them bears any grudge against Israel, quite the contrary they could serve as citizen ambassadors on its behalf. None of them ever reported a single case of "racial" mistreatment and I don't believe there has ever been--and workers' advocacy groups have never reported--a racial assault or even insult on any foreign worker in Israel. The problem, of course, is that there is at times terrible economic exploitation by unscrupulous employers, which is in no way atypical in the world today.
The Israel-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts are in no way "racial." National identity is something quite different from "race" generally. Israelis and Arabs are not easily distinguished by skin color, though of course there are exceptions.I was in an Israeli government agency meeting a high-ranking official whose skin shade was darker than that of Barack Obama. This was only something I noted because I was planning to write the article you are reading now.
I arrived at the meeting mentioned above by taking a cab from my neighborhood taxi stand. I gave the address and the driver went back to speaking on his mobile phone in Arabic, which is the only reason I realized he was an Israeli Arab. I couldn't tell just by looking at him.
The attempt by anti-Israel slanderers to inject a racial aspect is ludicrously nonsensical. If you have ever travelled in Syria you would find that the average skin color of people there is lighter than that of Israelis on average. Generally speaking, there is less variation in "racial terms" between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs than there is among member states of the European Union.
It just doesn't apply to conditions here. 'While Palestinian Arabs are on average a shade or two darker than Israelis you can find wider variations within the EU member states.
But if you can label someone as a "racist" because they are engaged in a conflict with another nation or group automatically "proves" they are in the wrong. If the conflict is a national one, however, you actually have to think about it. Who's right in the following conflicts: Irish Catholics or Protestants; Basques or Spain; Bosnians or Serbs; Russians or Chechens, Somalis or Ethiopians; Iraqi Sunni, Shia, or Kurds; India or Pakistan; Azerbaijan or Armenia, and so on?
The answer cannot be deduced automatically. But label one side as racist and the discussion is over. This, then, is a trick for deceiving, not a tool for understanding.
The ridiculousness of attempts to transfer American or European situations to Israel was embodied in an American student asking an Israeli professor how many blacks were on his university's basketball team. Actually, there are many on the professional teams but they are all, of course, from the United States, though I believe one or two had converted and remained in Israel.
I don't think there's any question of the fact that there is far far more racism in Europe or in the Arabic-speaking world than in Israel--and that's an understatement.
Me:
One word: persuasive.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Some Reflections Afghani
Losing Faith
Leon Wieseltier August 6, 2010 | 12:00 am TNT
In the analysis of a war, the where matters as much as the why. About the reasons for our war in Afghanistan, I am still solid. I am confident that the United States has an urgent interest of national security in suppressing or destroying Al Qaeda and its various affiliates in the badlands of the Hindu Kush. I am also confident that, but for our efforts to cripple them, these forces would be further along in their murderous plans for America and Americans. I remember September 11. And I have no philosophical or political problem with our second objective in Afghanistan, the collateral humanitarianism of liberating the place from the medieval death grip of the Taliban.
But I am losing faith in our war. I am tired of hearing that failure is not an option and that we are in this to win. Failure is always an option and a war is not a football game. I am tired also of the capital’s messianic expectations of General Petraeus: The search for a miracle-worker is an admission that it will take a miracle. But what really rattles my confidence in this war is the where.
Recently I read Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual. It is a work of genuine intellectual sophistication. It describes a conflict between two forces: an insurgency—“an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government”—and a counterinsurgency—“military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency ... and sustain the established or emerging government.”
The arresting thing about this military manual is that it denies the centrality of the military means to the strategic end. “Armed Forces cannot succeed in coin [counterinsurgency] alone.” Quite the contrary. “Cultural knowledge is essential to waging a successful counterinsurgency.” And “political factors have primacy in coin.” Here is the heart of the matter: “U.S. forces committed to a coin effort are there to assist a HN [host-nation] government. The long-term goal is to leave a government able to stand by itself. In the end, the host nation has to win on its own.”
I do not doubt the wisdom of all this: the recognition of the indigenous and autonomous character of peoples, the candidly anti-imperialist spirit. (Interventionism and imperialism are decidedly not the same thing.) But these days it looks to me like a warrant not for hope but for despair. For in truth there are not two, but three, forces in this conflict: the insurgency, the counterinsurgency, and the country in which the struggle between them is taking place. As Petraeus says, what will determine the outcome is the host nation. But behold this host nation! I am losing faith in the war in Afghanistan because I am losing faith in Afghanistan. Perhaps there is good news about the HN that is not getting out, but a lot of bad news about it certainly is.
I do not see that Afghanistan is either a ready nation or a ready state. (Compared to Afghanistan, Iraq is Sausalito.) The national government in Kabul—the stipulated beneficiary of coin, in theory and in practice— is local and weak and corrupt and, in its regional strategy, cynical. The political culture of the country seems determined almost entirely by tribal, ethnic, religious, cultural, and geographical factors. The civic means recommended by our war doctrine would appear to involve nothing less than the renovation of an entire society and its encrusted patterns of power and influence.
The United States cannot accomplish this, and Afghanistan does not seem to want it accomplished. All the consensus in the world at the highest levels of American government will not alter this fact, if a fact it is. In counterinsurgency warfare, we are in their hands. It is foolhardy to make our security contingent upon the creation of a wholly new order for another people.
The bright new idea—the strange child of the cunning of Karzai and the complexity of Petraeus—is that we negotiate with the Taliban. Many knowledgeable people think that this will work. I imagine that some of the Taliban’s ranks may indeed be persuaded or bribed or protected away, but I am not inclined to give the Taliban the benefit of any doubt. They will negotiate with Kabul, and maybe even with Washington, only as a step on their march back to Kabul. Like all millenarian movements, their salvific conception of themselves demands the attainment of political power. And so I believe that the Taliban must be fought. But it must be fought by the people whom it aspires to oppress—and those people seem to want us to fight it for them.
They complain, rightly, about Bush’s indifference and Obama’s impatience, but they have not yet risen up together, in a larger union, historically, with a widespread belief in the possibility of a new Afghanistan, to stamp out the fiends in their midst. If Afghanistan has often been the graveyard of empires, it has often been also the graveyard of itself—at least from the standpoint of the liberalization that we seek as the condition of security. Are we supposed to support the Afghans or invent them?
The promotion of democracy, which deserves to be rehabilitated in American foreign policy, requires a plausible object. The pace of the “Afghanization” of the war, the dawning of self-reliance, has been discouragingly sluggish. Henry Kissinger, in a sharp dissent (perish the thought) from the president’s policy in The Washington Post last month, proposed that we conceive of our counterinsurgency not nationally but provincially, and operate not above but within the internal divisions of the country, and seek local victories that add up.
This means the abandonment of the focus on the central government that is the essence of the Petraeus doctrine. For the purpose of turning back the Taliban—but certainly not for the purpose of a democratic Afghanistan—this might work. I don’t know. But in the provinces, too, the Afghans seem narrowly self-interested and afraid. Their fear is perfectly understandable, but it is their country.
After September 11, the Bush administration adopted the “root causes” analysis of terrorism that the American right once despised, and the war in Afghanistan was the implementation of that analysis. The new coin doctrine is an amplification of it. I agree that there is the problem of terrorists and the problem of terrorism, and that the destruction of terrorists is not the destruction of terrorism. But security cannot wait upon peace, even if peace is the surest form of security.
Biden may have been correct: Our security may require no more of us than a relentless drone war, occasionally supported by special operations, against the groups and the planners who threaten us. Most of those enemies are anyway in Pakistan, and in Yemen and Somalia. Let us use force, but let us use it where it will work. I confess that such realism nauseates me, because I would be ashamed for my country to abandon the people of Afghanistan, the women especially, to their once and future theocratic hell. But if Afghanistan does not significantly resist that darkness for itself—“on its own,” in Petraeus’s haunting words—its people will vanish into it anyway. For as long as Afghanistan will be ambiguous, our war will be ambiguous.
Leon Wieseltier August 6, 2010 | 12:00 am TNT
In the analysis of a war, the where matters as much as the why. About the reasons for our war in Afghanistan, I am still solid. I am confident that the United States has an urgent interest of national security in suppressing or destroying Al Qaeda and its various affiliates in the badlands of the Hindu Kush. I am also confident that, but for our efforts to cripple them, these forces would be further along in their murderous plans for America and Americans. I remember September 11. And I have no philosophical or political problem with our second objective in Afghanistan, the collateral humanitarianism of liberating the place from the medieval death grip of the Taliban.
But I am losing faith in our war. I am tired of hearing that failure is not an option and that we are in this to win. Failure is always an option and a war is not a football game. I am tired also of the capital’s messianic expectations of General Petraeus: The search for a miracle-worker is an admission that it will take a miracle. But what really rattles my confidence in this war is the where.
Recently I read Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual. It is a work of genuine intellectual sophistication. It describes a conflict between two forces: an insurgency—“an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government”—and a counterinsurgency—“military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency ... and sustain the established or emerging government.”
The arresting thing about this military manual is that it denies the centrality of the military means to the strategic end. “Armed Forces cannot succeed in coin [counterinsurgency] alone.” Quite the contrary. “Cultural knowledge is essential to waging a successful counterinsurgency.” And “political factors have primacy in coin.” Here is the heart of the matter: “U.S. forces committed to a coin effort are there to assist a HN [host-nation] government. The long-term goal is to leave a government able to stand by itself. In the end, the host nation has to win on its own.”
I do not doubt the wisdom of all this: the recognition of the indigenous and autonomous character of peoples, the candidly anti-imperialist spirit. (Interventionism and imperialism are decidedly not the same thing.) But these days it looks to me like a warrant not for hope but for despair. For in truth there are not two, but three, forces in this conflict: the insurgency, the counterinsurgency, and the country in which the struggle between them is taking place. As Petraeus says, what will determine the outcome is the host nation. But behold this host nation! I am losing faith in the war in Afghanistan because I am losing faith in Afghanistan. Perhaps there is good news about the HN that is not getting out, but a lot of bad news about it certainly is.
I do not see that Afghanistan is either a ready nation or a ready state. (Compared to Afghanistan, Iraq is Sausalito.) The national government in Kabul—the stipulated beneficiary of coin, in theory and in practice— is local and weak and corrupt and, in its regional strategy, cynical. The political culture of the country seems determined almost entirely by tribal, ethnic, religious, cultural, and geographical factors. The civic means recommended by our war doctrine would appear to involve nothing less than the renovation of an entire society and its encrusted patterns of power and influence.
The United States cannot accomplish this, and Afghanistan does not seem to want it accomplished. All the consensus in the world at the highest levels of American government will not alter this fact, if a fact it is. In counterinsurgency warfare, we are in their hands. It is foolhardy to make our security contingent upon the creation of a wholly new order for another people.
The bright new idea—the strange child of the cunning of Karzai and the complexity of Petraeus—is that we negotiate with the Taliban. Many knowledgeable people think that this will work. I imagine that some of the Taliban’s ranks may indeed be persuaded or bribed or protected away, but I am not inclined to give the Taliban the benefit of any doubt. They will negotiate with Kabul, and maybe even with Washington, only as a step on their march back to Kabul. Like all millenarian movements, their salvific conception of themselves demands the attainment of political power. And so I believe that the Taliban must be fought. But it must be fought by the people whom it aspires to oppress—and those people seem to want us to fight it for them.
They complain, rightly, about Bush’s indifference and Obama’s impatience, but they have not yet risen up together, in a larger union, historically, with a widespread belief in the possibility of a new Afghanistan, to stamp out the fiends in their midst. If Afghanistan has often been the graveyard of empires, it has often been also the graveyard of itself—at least from the standpoint of the liberalization that we seek as the condition of security. Are we supposed to support the Afghans or invent them?
The promotion of democracy, which deserves to be rehabilitated in American foreign policy, requires a plausible object. The pace of the “Afghanization” of the war, the dawning of self-reliance, has been discouragingly sluggish. Henry Kissinger, in a sharp dissent (perish the thought) from the president’s policy in The Washington Post last month, proposed that we conceive of our counterinsurgency not nationally but provincially, and operate not above but within the internal divisions of the country, and seek local victories that add up.
This means the abandonment of the focus on the central government that is the essence of the Petraeus doctrine. For the purpose of turning back the Taliban—but certainly not for the purpose of a democratic Afghanistan—this might work. I don’t know. But in the provinces, too, the Afghans seem narrowly self-interested and afraid. Their fear is perfectly understandable, but it is their country.
After September 11, the Bush administration adopted the “root causes” analysis of terrorism that the American right once despised, and the war in Afghanistan was the implementation of that analysis. The new coin doctrine is an amplification of it. I agree that there is the problem of terrorists and the problem of terrorism, and that the destruction of terrorists is not the destruction of terrorism. But security cannot wait upon peace, even if peace is the surest form of security.
Biden may have been correct: Our security may require no more of us than a relentless drone war, occasionally supported by special operations, against the groups and the planners who threaten us. Most of those enemies are anyway in Pakistan, and in Yemen and Somalia. Let us use force, but let us use it where it will work. I confess that such realism nauseates me, because I would be ashamed for my country to abandon the people of Afghanistan, the women especially, to their once and future theocratic hell. But if Afghanistan does not significantly resist that darkness for itself—“on its own,” in Petraeus’s haunting words—its people will vanish into it anyway. For as long as Afghanistan will be ambiguous, our war will be ambiguous.
More Lightness
Pro, sort of:
Give the First Lady a Break
By Ruth Marcus
WASHINGTON -- Let's stipulate: A five-star resort on the Spanish Costa del Sol was probably not the first choice of White House spin-meisters for a mother-daughter getaway. Especially when the getaway included a posse of 40 friends of the first lady staying at the Hotel Villa Padierna, where rooms start at $330 a night, and photos of Michelle Obama strolling in Marbella wearing an off-the-shoulder number by Jean Paul Gaultier.
"The first lady is on a private trip," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. "She is a private citizen and is the mother of a daughter on a private trip. And I think I'd leave it at that."
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Ruth Marcus RealClearPolitics
Michelle Obama
He wishes.
Technically, the first lady may be a private citizen. In actuality, she isn't. She can't be; see, for example, the Secret Service contingent that accompanies her, private trip or not private trip. This is a simple fact of modern presidential family life.
So as a political matter, the trip to Spain was not a good idea. You don't need Dick Morris -- who famously polled the Clintons' vacation plans and pushed Jackson Hole over Martha's Vineyard -- to tell you it's not going to play well at a time of 9.5 percent unemployment.
But I also don't begrudge Michelle Obama the trip, and I'd just as soon not have my First Family vacations determined by focus groups. I'm a big fan of mother-daughter -- or father-daughter, for that matter -- trips. I'm a big fan of foreign travel. School's out. It can't be that the only acceptable activity in stressful economic times is a First Family stay-cation. Stick around the White House and straighten the closets, maybe repaint a bedroom?
If Michelle and Sasha had hung out at home, not one more American would have a job, not one-hundredth of a decimal point would be added to the gross domestic product. Yes, her travel required a government plane and Secret Service resources, but that would be true wherever she went. It was true when George W. Bush made 77 visits to his ranch in Crawford and spent all or part of 490 days there during his presidency, according to CBS News' Mark Knoller, official tallier of presidential downtime.
Writing in The New York Daily News, Andrea Tantaros said "Michelle Obama seems more like a modern-day Marie Antoinette ... than an average mother of two." Tantaros acknowledged that "we all need downtime -- the First Family included," but added, "it's the extravagance of Michelle Obama's trip and glitzy destination contrasted with President Obama's demonization of the rich that smacks of hypocrisy and perpetuates a disconnect between the country and its leaders."
But the president's alleged "demonization" involves bashing Wall Street titans for simultaneously crashing the economy and drawing huge bonuses; it's not their wealth per se that he sees as a problem. And, let's be serious, Michelle Obama is not going to be staying in a Motel Six anytime soon.
The Marie Antoinette reference was a nice line, but unfair. Michelle was taking her daughter on a trip, not pronouncing, "Let them eat tapas."
Con:
Michelle Obama's Lavish Spain Vacation Sparking Criticism
Lynn Sweet
While First Lady Michelle Obama continues sightseeing and shopping in southern Spain with daughter Sasha and friends as "private" tourists, questions are being raised about the cost to taxpayers and whether a lavish vacation sends the right message during tough economic times in the U.S.
Mrs. Obama also has a "public" part of the vacation, but its hardly heavy lifting and without any formal agenda. On Sunday, Mrs. Obama and 9-year-old Sasha will have lunch with King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia at their summer palace on the island of Majorca.
This trip is sparking the first controversy Mrs. Obama has faced since becoming first lady. While Mrs. Obama covers her personal expenses, taxpayers pay for security and support staffers, plus most costs associated with her Air Force plane.
CBS News has run two stories -- on its Thursday evening newscast and on Friday morning -- examining the public costs of Mrs. Obama's travels.
ABC did a piece Friday morning about Mrs. Obama and Sasha buying matching sundresses, the ritzy resort they visited, and the heavy coverage of the visit by Spanish media. NBC ran a story about the trip as well, and more network coverage is in the works.
Contributing to the developing narrative: A column by Andrea Tantaros in the Thursday New York Daily News headlined, "Material girl Michelle Obama is a modern-day Marie Antoinette on a glitzy Spanish vacation."
"It is very difficult to lead a private life when you are a public figure. No one would deny an official the need for a vacation. But the more expensive or lavish the trip, the greater the risk of criticism," Anita McBride, the chief of staff for former First Lady Laura Bush, told me.
The First Lady arrived in the Mediterranean coastal city of Marbella on Wednesday, checking in to the super-posh Villa Padierna, along with her daughter, friends, a small number of staffers -- the East Wing would not say how many -- and a security force. (Daughter Malia, 12, is at overnight camp.)
On Thursday, Mrs. Obama's entourage arrived in the historic city of Granada, also in southern Spain. According to a story in El Pais, before visiting the landmark cathedral in the city, Mrs. Obama's group stopped for ice cream, and didn't mind people snapping pictures on their cell phones. The day also included viewing a flamenco performance and in the evening a visit to the Alhambra palace.
When the trip was first announced, it was billed as "private mother-daughter trip with longtime family friends."
On Wednesday in Politics Daily, I wrote that Mrs. Obama may well take some criticism for the Spain vacation. While First Ladies always stay at high-class hotels -- security is a big part of the reason -- a five star resort on Spain's coast creates a potential perception problem. The U.S. jobless rate is still high -- 9.5 percent on Friday. And while Mrs. Obama and President Obama have tried to encourage tourism in Gulf Coast areas not impacted by the BP oil spill, she is highlighting the beauty of Spain's Mediterranean beaches before the First Family travels to Florida's Gulf Coast on Aug. 14 for a weekend stay.
During the Wednesday afternoon briefing, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about the "appearance" of Mrs. Obama's trip. "The first lady is on a private trip. She is a private citizen and is the mother of a daughter on a private trip. And I think I'd leave it at that," Gibbs said.
While the White House has emphasized that Mrs. Obama pays her personal costs, as do her friends who flew to Spain on their own, taxpayers pick up a big chunk of the tab.
According to CBS News, the tax dollar part of the vacation include an estimated $146,000 round trip cost for the U.S. Air Force 757 aircraft, not counting ground time; about $95,000 in hotel costs for an estimated 70 security -- Secret Service and military -- who get a $273 per day government per diem, plus costs for the dozen or so cars in her motorcade. I'm told that three shifts of agents are needed for a trip of this magnitude.
While the trip may not be "politically smart," said Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus on CBS, "it was not a let them eat cake moment."
The East Wing argues that Mrs. Obama is a private citizen, not an elected official, and she wants to focus on her friends and family. While taking August off, she plans to ramp up her schedule after Labor Day. I'm also told the East Wing is not going to react to these stories about Mrs. Obama's travels.
From Spain, Mrs. Obama did keep tabs on the Senate's passage of child nutrition legislation. On Thursday night, the East Wing told me, she called four senators who played a role in passing a bill that is central to her signature child anti-obesity issue, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.)
I don't think anyone is begrudging Mrs. Obama vacations or sharing with her kids and pals some incredible opportunities she has from her unique perch to see the world. Some of this just has to do with the scale of a trip without some official substance.
While former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled with Chelsea and former First Lady Laura Bush took Barbara and Jenna with her on trips, the overseas travel was in connection with "official" business that was more than lunch with royalty at their summer palace.
And it's not like Mrs. Obama is lacking a diplomatic agenda. Her April visit to Mexico City was the kick off of her "international agenda" with a focus on developing youth leadershipMrs. Bush's true personal trips were hiking vacations in national parks with female pals.
Politics Daily readers who weighed in after my Wednesday piece summed up Mrs. Obama's situation.
"redrage727" wrote, "A little restraint would be appropriate in these tough economic times. It would mean a lot to the American people who pay for all these vacations and outings and would go a long way towards better relations with the people of the U.S. "
Replied "melonart," "I believe I detect a bit of envy and jealously in the comments I am reading. I am of the opinion that a public person can't win regardless of his or her choices in their private life..they are dammed if they do and dammed if they don't. Let a mother show her daughter a bit of the world."
Me:
Politically, it's dumb, dumb, dumb!
Give the First Lady a Break
By Ruth Marcus
WASHINGTON -- Let's stipulate: A five-star resort on the Spanish Costa del Sol was probably not the first choice of White House spin-meisters for a mother-daughter getaway. Especially when the getaway included a posse of 40 friends of the first lady staying at the Hotel Villa Padierna, where rooms start at $330 a night, and photos of Michelle Obama strolling in Marbella wearing an off-the-shoulder number by Jean Paul Gaultier.
"The first lady is on a private trip," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. "She is a private citizen and is the mother of a daughter on a private trip. And I think I'd leave it at that."
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Ruth Marcus RealClearPolitics
Michelle Obama
He wishes.
Technically, the first lady may be a private citizen. In actuality, she isn't. She can't be; see, for example, the Secret Service contingent that accompanies her, private trip or not private trip. This is a simple fact of modern presidential family life.
So as a political matter, the trip to Spain was not a good idea. You don't need Dick Morris -- who famously polled the Clintons' vacation plans and pushed Jackson Hole over Martha's Vineyard -- to tell you it's not going to play well at a time of 9.5 percent unemployment.
But I also don't begrudge Michelle Obama the trip, and I'd just as soon not have my First Family vacations determined by focus groups. I'm a big fan of mother-daughter -- or father-daughter, for that matter -- trips. I'm a big fan of foreign travel. School's out. It can't be that the only acceptable activity in stressful economic times is a First Family stay-cation. Stick around the White House and straighten the closets, maybe repaint a bedroom?
If Michelle and Sasha had hung out at home, not one more American would have a job, not one-hundredth of a decimal point would be added to the gross domestic product. Yes, her travel required a government plane and Secret Service resources, but that would be true wherever she went. It was true when George W. Bush made 77 visits to his ranch in Crawford and spent all or part of 490 days there during his presidency, according to CBS News' Mark Knoller, official tallier of presidential downtime.
Writing in The New York Daily News, Andrea Tantaros said "Michelle Obama seems more like a modern-day Marie Antoinette ... than an average mother of two." Tantaros acknowledged that "we all need downtime -- the First Family included," but added, "it's the extravagance of Michelle Obama's trip and glitzy destination contrasted with President Obama's demonization of the rich that smacks of hypocrisy and perpetuates a disconnect between the country and its leaders."
But the president's alleged "demonization" involves bashing Wall Street titans for simultaneously crashing the economy and drawing huge bonuses; it's not their wealth per se that he sees as a problem. And, let's be serious, Michelle Obama is not going to be staying in a Motel Six anytime soon.
The Marie Antoinette reference was a nice line, but unfair. Michelle was taking her daughter on a trip, not pronouncing, "Let them eat tapas."
Con:
Michelle Obama's Lavish Spain Vacation Sparking Criticism
Lynn Sweet
While First Lady Michelle Obama continues sightseeing and shopping in southern Spain with daughter Sasha and friends as "private" tourists, questions are being raised about the cost to taxpayers and whether a lavish vacation sends the right message during tough economic times in the U.S.
Mrs. Obama also has a "public" part of the vacation, but its hardly heavy lifting and without any formal agenda. On Sunday, Mrs. Obama and 9-year-old Sasha will have lunch with King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia at their summer palace on the island of Majorca.
This trip is sparking the first controversy Mrs. Obama has faced since becoming first lady. While Mrs. Obama covers her personal expenses, taxpayers pay for security and support staffers, plus most costs associated with her Air Force plane.
CBS News has run two stories -- on its Thursday evening newscast and on Friday morning -- examining the public costs of Mrs. Obama's travels.
ABC did a piece Friday morning about Mrs. Obama and Sasha buying matching sundresses, the ritzy resort they visited, and the heavy coverage of the visit by Spanish media. NBC ran a story about the trip as well, and more network coverage is in the works.
Contributing to the developing narrative: A column by Andrea Tantaros in the Thursday New York Daily News headlined, "Material girl Michelle Obama is a modern-day Marie Antoinette on a glitzy Spanish vacation."
"It is very difficult to lead a private life when you are a public figure. No one would deny an official the need for a vacation. But the more expensive or lavish the trip, the greater the risk of criticism," Anita McBride, the chief of staff for former First Lady Laura Bush, told me.
The First Lady arrived in the Mediterranean coastal city of Marbella on Wednesday, checking in to the super-posh Villa Padierna, along with her daughter, friends, a small number of staffers -- the East Wing would not say how many -- and a security force. (Daughter Malia, 12, is at overnight camp.)
On Thursday, Mrs. Obama's entourage arrived in the historic city of Granada, also in southern Spain. According to a story in El Pais, before visiting the landmark cathedral in the city, Mrs. Obama's group stopped for ice cream, and didn't mind people snapping pictures on their cell phones. The day also included viewing a flamenco performance and in the evening a visit to the Alhambra palace.
When the trip was first announced, it was billed as "private mother-daughter trip with longtime family friends."
On Wednesday in Politics Daily, I wrote that Mrs. Obama may well take some criticism for the Spain vacation. While First Ladies always stay at high-class hotels -- security is a big part of the reason -- a five star resort on Spain's coast creates a potential perception problem. The U.S. jobless rate is still high -- 9.5 percent on Friday. And while Mrs. Obama and President Obama have tried to encourage tourism in Gulf Coast areas not impacted by the BP oil spill, she is highlighting the beauty of Spain's Mediterranean beaches before the First Family travels to Florida's Gulf Coast on Aug. 14 for a weekend stay.
During the Wednesday afternoon briefing, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about the "appearance" of Mrs. Obama's trip. "The first lady is on a private trip. She is a private citizen and is the mother of a daughter on a private trip. And I think I'd leave it at that," Gibbs said.
While the White House has emphasized that Mrs. Obama pays her personal costs, as do her friends who flew to Spain on their own, taxpayers pick up a big chunk of the tab.
According to CBS News, the tax dollar part of the vacation include an estimated $146,000 round trip cost for the U.S. Air Force 757 aircraft, not counting ground time; about $95,000 in hotel costs for an estimated 70 security -- Secret Service and military -- who get a $273 per day government per diem, plus costs for the dozen or so cars in her motorcade. I'm told that three shifts of agents are needed for a trip of this magnitude.
While the trip may not be "politically smart," said Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus on CBS, "it was not a let them eat cake moment."
The East Wing argues that Mrs. Obama is a private citizen, not an elected official, and she wants to focus on her friends and family. While taking August off, she plans to ramp up her schedule after Labor Day. I'm also told the East Wing is not going to react to these stories about Mrs. Obama's travels.
From Spain, Mrs. Obama did keep tabs on the Senate's passage of child nutrition legislation. On Thursday night, the East Wing told me, she called four senators who played a role in passing a bill that is central to her signature child anti-obesity issue, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.)
I don't think anyone is begrudging Mrs. Obama vacations or sharing with her kids and pals some incredible opportunities she has from her unique perch to see the world. Some of this just has to do with the scale of a trip without some official substance.
While former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled with Chelsea and former First Lady Laura Bush took Barbara and Jenna with her on trips, the overseas travel was in connection with "official" business that was more than lunch with royalty at their summer palace.
And it's not like Mrs. Obama is lacking a diplomatic agenda. Her April visit to Mexico City was the kick off of her "international agenda" with a focus on developing youth leadershipMrs. Bush's true personal trips were hiking vacations in national parks with female pals.
Politics Daily readers who weighed in after my Wednesday piece summed up Mrs. Obama's situation.
"redrage727" wrote, "A little restraint would be appropriate in these tough economic times. It would mean a lot to the American people who pay for all these vacations and outings and would go a long way towards better relations with the people of the U.S. "
Replied "melonart," "I believe I detect a bit of envy and jealously in the comments I am reading. I am of the opinion that a public person can't win regardless of his or her choices in their private life..they are dammed if they do and dammed if they don't. Let a mother show her daughter a bit of the world."
Me:
Politically, it's dumb, dumb, dumb!
Now on the Lighter Side
Con:
Martin Peretz:
Now that Tom Friedman has endorsed the construction of an Islamic center at Ground Zero no one can be against it. But since he has not even made a real argument for it, aside from recounting his experience at a Broadway jamboree in the White House where the only Muslim name was the president’s middle one, which is nothing more than a non sequitur, the column stands alone with neither evidence nor logic.
Still, everybody is for it...except Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League who are correct but had better keep quiet lest they bare the stigma of prejudice that comes from being against something whose only justification is that it has no reason.
So what is the real positive excuse for a mosque at Ground Zero? Perhaps to demonstrate that we don’t hold anything against the men who did it. Or to show that we have nothing against the culture from which they came. And nothing against the societies across all Islam which cheered the news of the three thousand dead. But, of course, these are not accurate assertions of our emotions, then or now. Even as we try to understand them we despise them. No mosque built on the ground where mothers and fathers, children and grandparents, relatives and friends and lovers were sacrificed will ever console or conciliate. At best, it will remind of the cool brutality and fierce passion that animated these ghoulish people of faith to murder on a scale so huge almost to daunt the imagination. Ironically it will backfire because it will (rightly) remind the visitors of the religious identity of the perpetrators. And, of course, the imagination was daunted only by the conscientious American decision-makers who deprived the polis of the true images of maimed bodies, broken limbs, desperate souls flying through the air perhaps to land where the kadhi will intone the principles of the Muslim faith which almost no one believes are as Barack Hussein Obama says they are.
Given the absence of a logical explanation for this mosque, the ex cathedra reason is that it is a monument to the American credo of the freedom of religion. But that is surely insincere, at least on the part of the Islamic prayer house sponsors who are more motivated to slip under the First Amendment protections here than to make them their own anywhere else. Islam in New York would have been just as free ten blocks away
In fact, the presence of an Islamic place of prayer at the sight of the human catastrophe of 9/11 will be an insult to the dead, our dead. It would be as if Japan were to erect a museum about its delicate treatment of women, and to erect that museum precisely in Nanking, China. Or Germany to establish a series of Goethe Institutes where the Vilna Ghetto and the concentration camp of Maidanek once stood. Or, for that matter, Serbia might be accommodated to construct a monument to its sufferings under the Nazis in Srebrenica where it later murdered 10,000 Bosnians.
I am as much for understanding and reconciliation as the next man. But there are dark places where the only appropriate emotions are anger and grief.
Me:
What's should be one's position on the building of this Mosque/Community Centre?
I can't see a principled reason for opposing it.
It's legality seems unimpeachable.
It's important to distinguish between Islam and Islamism, Muslims and Muslimism. That distinction goes to the 9/11 rationale for opposing it.
People may hold different judgments about the appropriateness of building the Mosque/Community Centre and may be for it or against it on that basis, but that--appropriateness-- amounts not to a principled position.
Peretz's post here does him no credit.
What's the principled argument against the project?
Martin Peretz:
Now that Tom Friedman has endorsed the construction of an Islamic center at Ground Zero no one can be against it. But since he has not even made a real argument for it, aside from recounting his experience at a Broadway jamboree in the White House where the only Muslim name was the president’s middle one, which is nothing more than a non sequitur, the column stands alone with neither evidence nor logic.
Still, everybody is for it...except Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League who are correct but had better keep quiet lest they bare the stigma of prejudice that comes from being against something whose only justification is that it has no reason.
So what is the real positive excuse for a mosque at Ground Zero? Perhaps to demonstrate that we don’t hold anything against the men who did it. Or to show that we have nothing against the culture from which they came. And nothing against the societies across all Islam which cheered the news of the three thousand dead. But, of course, these are not accurate assertions of our emotions, then or now. Even as we try to understand them we despise them. No mosque built on the ground where mothers and fathers, children and grandparents, relatives and friends and lovers were sacrificed will ever console or conciliate. At best, it will remind of the cool brutality and fierce passion that animated these ghoulish people of faith to murder on a scale so huge almost to daunt the imagination. Ironically it will backfire because it will (rightly) remind the visitors of the religious identity of the perpetrators. And, of course, the imagination was daunted only by the conscientious American decision-makers who deprived the polis of the true images of maimed bodies, broken limbs, desperate souls flying through the air perhaps to land where the kadhi will intone the principles of the Muslim faith which almost no one believes are as Barack Hussein Obama says they are.
Given the absence of a logical explanation for this mosque, the ex cathedra reason is that it is a monument to the American credo of the freedom of religion. But that is surely insincere, at least on the part of the Islamic prayer house sponsors who are more motivated to slip under the First Amendment protections here than to make them their own anywhere else. Islam in New York would have been just as free ten blocks away
In fact, the presence of an Islamic place of prayer at the sight of the human catastrophe of 9/11 will be an insult to the dead, our dead. It would be as if Japan were to erect a museum about its delicate treatment of women, and to erect that museum precisely in Nanking, China. Or Germany to establish a series of Goethe Institutes where the Vilna Ghetto and the concentration camp of Maidanek once stood. Or, for that matter, Serbia might be accommodated to construct a monument to its sufferings under the Nazis in Srebrenica where it later murdered 10,000 Bosnians.
I am as much for understanding and reconciliation as the next man. But there are dark places where the only appropriate emotions are anger and grief.
Me:
What's should be one's position on the building of this Mosque/Community Centre?
I can't see a principled reason for opposing it.
It's legality seems unimpeachable.
It's important to distinguish between Islam and Islamism, Muslims and Muslimism. That distinction goes to the 9/11 rationale for opposing it.
People may hold different judgments about the appropriateness of building the Mosque/Community Centre and may be for it or against it on that basis, but that--appropriateness-- amounts not to a principled position.
Peretz's post here does him no credit.
What's the principled argument against the project?
Monday, August 2, 2010
An Interpretation of Adele Wiseman's The Sacrifice
Adele Wiseman’s 1956 The Sacrifice (1) follows the experiences of a Jewish family which has emigrated from Ukraine and settled in Canada. The novel covers three generations, starting during the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and ending shortly after World War 11. The Sacrifice gains thematic and symbolic resonance from the Old Testament naming of its main characters Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Moses. That naming is accentuated by the withholding of their surname and by the generalizing of the setting to be a kind of every city in Canada. These characters are symbolic proportionate to their anonymity. Further, Wiseman includes certain Old Testament stories that relate to major events in the novel and seem to inform their significance. So it may be thought that the biblical story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac sheds meaning on the fictional Abraham’s slaughter of Laiah and on Isaac’s self-sacrifice to save the Torah.
Readers, therefore, may see The Sacrifice as a symbolic novel as such, as does Stanley G. Mullins in his essay Traditional Symbols in Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice. 2 Virtually by definition, Mr. Mullins’s approach deemphasizes actuality. Part of the argument in this essay is that Mullins’s kind of symbolic reading distorts meaning. For example, to see Laiah’s murder only symbolically loses sight of a deranged man committing a grotesque crime. More, such a symbolic reading may compel the conclusion that Abraham’s killing her reenacts ritual sacrifice so that Abraham cleanses himself through its purgative efficacy. But, in contrast, a literal reading of the novel that shears off symbolic meaning denudes thematic amplitude.
The argument of this essay is that a comprehensive reading of The Sacrifice depends upon understanding Wiseman’s particular distinction between what might be called the biblical or mythical world—the world with God—and what might be called the historical world—the world without God. Further, goes the argument here, Wiseman redefines ritual sacrifice historically as an inexorable law of life in the world of history.
Some of Northrop Frye’s distinctions between the “mythical mode” and the “art of verisimilitude” are pertinent to Wiseman’s distinction between myth and history. The mythical mode, Frye says, is the art of a world of total metaphor in which everything is potentially identical with everything else, as though it were all inside a single infinite body.(3) Verisimilitude, by contrast, is the art of a world of implicit simile which evokes the response, “How like that is to what we know.”(4) And while characters in the mode of myth have the greatest power of possible action, in the world of verisimilitude they are necessarily limited by actuality.(5) The Old Testament story, as retold by Abraham to his family, of Abraham’s near slaughtering of his son exemplifies the mythic mode. The story’s pinnacle, in its retelling, is the union of man with God, when everything potentially identical becomes manifestly identical: “...it is a point of mutual surrender…the completed circle…when the maker of the sacrifice and the sacrifice himself and the Demander…are poised together, and life flows into eternity, and for a moment all the three are as one”. (pp. 177-178) So, refining the argument of this essay, Wiseman uses apocalyptic meaning to limit by contrast the nature of the historical world and, again, to cast sacrifice into history as inexorable creation and destruction in human life.
Two key passages illuminate this notion of sacrifice and begin to suggest its implications. In the first, Abraham describes how as a youth he was forced to perform illegitimately the ritual slaughter. The experience rivets in him his first awareness of the mystery of life and death: “It was as though I too were sinking with the knife…as though I were somewhere between living and dying. Not until I saw that the creature was dead did I realize I was still alive.” (p.38) In the second passage, Abraham, speaking to Chaim, is poetically philosophical about death’s relation to good and evil:
…death is a seed that is sown, like life, inside of a person, and comes to fruition from within…
I think that death is sown in all of us when we are conceived, and grows within the womb of life, feeding on it until one day it bursts out. We say then that life is dead. But really death is born...
Every man carries his own death in him, but in some men death is so strong, so evil, that it must feed itself on the conquest of other lives besides its own…(pp. 143-144)
Abraham at the same time universalizes and particularizes human moral nature by rooting it in basic physical process. As every person lives and dies, so every person has innate moral and immoral tendencies. Evil springs from the impulse to death. Good springs from the impulse to life, which creates, enhances and preserves life. To be moral, one must be in awe of the mystery of life and death. That awe generates respect for life’s sanctity since death defines by tragic contrast life’s preciousness. Therefore, as the creative awareness of life’s worth is born of the experienced realization of death’s waste, good grows out of evil. This paradox goes to the meaning of sacrifice in the novel: always death and destruction accompany life and creation.
Consonant with this meaning of sacrifice, Abraham claims his ritual slaughter of the cow to be his real Bar Mitzvah instead of the ceremonial one. Although he is devout, Abraham submits to the authority of experience. For only the experience of sacrifice imparts history’s fundamental truth. Put into larger terms, Wiseman explores history’s dilemma—history as reality delimited by boundary and finite consciousness: finding meaning in a world without God as its source for values. Unlike the biblical Abraham who can speak with God and enter the divine circle of union with God, history’s finitude impales men and women on the paradox of sacrifice. As the novel’s Abraham tells Chaim, “our forefathers…made the sacrifice to renew their wonder and their fear and their belief.” (p.138)
“Mad Mountain” intensifies and expands the central theme of sacrifice. The mountain is identified with both dominant presence and frozen permanence. To Isaac, it is “…a great arrested movement, petrified in time...” (p.13) It suggests to him a constancy which contrasts with all human flux; and, ultimately, it is for him a kind of repository of all human experience: “…the city crawled about its surface in a counterpoint of life…it seemed…as though it were watching, absorbing every gesture in its static moment.” (p.13) The mountain’s two crests heighten this symbolism of it absorbing, solidifying and perpetuating all experience. They become an immutable symbolic backdrop for the flux of dualities in existence—birth and death, creation and destruction, good and evil and so on. The novel’s predominant imagery of light and dark, and vegetative birth, growth and decay expresses these dualities. Further, the folk tale of Iiog, the giant who attempts to crush the Israelites with a mountain but falls asleep and is himself crushed under its weight, is an exemplum of how the mountain’s protection and destruction are permanently buried within it.
The incapacity within history to unify or transcend the dualities of existence is implicit in the insane asylum lodged between the two crests and in the very name Mad Mountain. The implication is that what might seem to be ultimate meaning—the unification and hence transcendence of duality, the penetration of the mystery of existence—is more than sanity can bear. Thus, when Mrs. Popler’s younger daughter describes with her finger the proverbial circle of insanity to indicate the “crazy house” on the mountain, she unknowingly intimates that madness is history’s version of divine insight. Indeed, Abraham completes insanity’s circle when he murders Laiah. Rather than being encircled by a mystic union which he expects will “…enclose him in its safety, in its peace” (p.303), his madness shatters him. His subsequent wisdom through madness is divine insight in history. He exemplifies in history the superstition that the insane have been touched by God. The paradox of Abraham’s wisdom through insanity parallels the sacrificial paradox: Abraham can transmit his wisdom to Moses, but he only gains his wisdom from his madness leading to Laiah’s murder. So Abraham is left to remain on the mountain, as, in a way, the mountain itself remains separated from, but apposite to, society.
Wiseman sets the destructive side of the paradox of sacrifice by her descriptions of grinding physical decay. In contrast to the biblical Abraham and Sarah who can beget children at one hundred, the novel’s Sarah is withered and declining as it begins. Wiseman briefly but powerfully describes Old Rusen, wracked by years of sweatshop labour. And, from one perspective, the novel can be seen as the depiction of Abraham’s physical and spiritual decline, which is to say, it can be seen as a tragedy about old age. Deterioration, decline and death inexorably form an elemental part of the paradox of sacrifice.
In the novel’s rooting of human meaning and the meaning of morality in basic physical process, cancer is a symbol of malignant evil, the impulse to hurt and destroy feeding and growing on life. Abraham in his madness sees Laiah as an “invisible destroyer…malignant in his path”. (p.259) Mrs. Knopp, who suffers from cancer, repeatedly displays her malignant personality. (p. 233 particularly) While she arouses antipathy, Mrs. Popler arouses pity. Her emaciated body corresponds to her slight moral character, which is to say, her lack of moral weight. Her restlessness, imaged in the rabbit like wriggling of her nose, is of a piece with her nervous capacity to hover about, alight on, and then flit in and out of any point of view. Isaac’s heart sickness, in marked comparison, more deeply suggests his soul’s sickness, his agonizing inability to make sense of an ambiguous reality.
There is an ironic relation between Isaac’s and Mrs. Popler’s constantly shifting perspectives, with the difference between them going to the relation between awareness and morality. Isaac cannot hold any point of view. Mrs. Popler is “…able, by some marvelous act of synthesis, to hold…all points of view…no matter how contradictory.” (pp 307-308) Her ease at navigating a variable reality marks her noted lack of moral weight. And that is why, in contrast to Isaac, the ambiguities of reality do not afflict her, though she does suffer. Mrs. Popler’s self is so puny that she lives vicariously off others’ experiences and imagines threats and crises to enjoy the sense of importance she believes they imply for her: “Mrs. Popler, in sympathy, began to cry as well, tentatively at first, then with great sloppy sobs, rocking from side to side and moaning intermittently about the terrible fate of Jewry.” (pp 24-25) Contrarily, Isaac’s desperate search for meaning, to make sense of himself in the world, is a moral search. For morality is the human will dictating to itself a mode of being and acting in the world, whereby conscious effort is required to choose between various possibilities of good and evil.(6) Isaac’s search, though never resolved, marks his moral character and his ability to feel at times “…the mystery of life, its contradictions; to discover, perhaps, its possibilities…sense vaguely…that he was not here for nothing…that there was a purity somewhere…” (p. 68)
Isaac is the existential sufferer. His torment is a template of existential torment. Since there is no God for him as is there is for his father, he can find no absolute values and faces an absurd world. In contrast to Abraham’s stature, optimism, assertive self confidence and capacity to mould everything to his fixed view of the world, Isaac is sickened and perplexed by confusion, guilt and self doubt. He drives himself relentlessly in order to find a source for faith, and that drive shows in his constant reading, which in turns heightens his confusion and multiplies the questions he needs answered. His inclination to flee into books appears early, when, at one point, frightened by the realization that he alive and his brothers are dead, he buries his mind in a grammar book oblivious “…to the welcoming smile of his friend.” (pp. 15-16)
In line with the thematic connection between physical process and moral and spiritual being, Isaac lives out the paradox of sacrifice just by being alive with his brothers dead. As noted, however much existential doubts plague him, he does at times thrill at the sensation of being: “He began to experience such a feeling of aliveness himself that everything about him seemed to come alive.” (p. 141) Here, history gets closest to apocalypse. It is a matter solely of consciousness: one’s heightened sense of being bathes all things in the glow of that sensation in a kind of union of all things. But history is subject to the paradox of sacrifice. At the height of such exhilaration, Isaac’s weak heart and contingency itself subjugate him with their obtrusive limits causing him torment proportionate to his just experienced joy: “The sensation of misery, as pure and unadulterated as the unreasoning joy…doubled him over.” (p. 142) His joy is necessarily bought at the cost of his suffering. His ultimate attempt to achieve faith will cost him his life.
Isaac’s rescue of the Torah is more than just the “religious reflex” argued for by Mullins.(7) Rather, it is his culminating attempt at faith, at internalizing meaning by which he can define himself such that that meaning is taken as truth. Two important events help illuminate the motives and preoccupations causing him so to risk his life.
The first concerns his own son’s ability to jump off a world, which, in his childish imaginings, spins so quickly that it makes him dizzy. Isaac marvels at Moses’s courage, at how he can skip from thought to action, as Isaac sees it, without spoiling either. This over-interpretation, which clothes his son’s playfulness with unreal significance, shows Isaac’s inclination to over think everything, and, more exactly, shows his over thinking at the source of his own feeling that he cannot move from thought to action. Isaac contemplates a complex world, and his over thinking binds him in its straight jacket of too many alternatives, unanswered questions, logical dead ends and ultimate dissatisfaction. As Isaac asks Abraham, not expecting an answer, “Few things really matter in the way we think they do. There is always another way of seeing them…And if we can’t seem to see the same thing in the same way at different times…what is the true way of seeing it?” (p. 216)
In the second key scene, Abraham, as noted, tells his family the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. Despite some obtuse concerns which violate the spirit of the story, Isaac is profoundly moved by the vision of faith his father describes. Isaac thinks, “And yet…there’s something in the idea itself…the three of them bound together in their awful moment…” (p.179)
From these two scenes, the interpretive argument emerges that rather than a religious reflex, Isaac in trying to rescue the Torah tries to assimilate what he over thinks is his son’s capacity to move from thought to action, and by that tries to achieve the kind of faith evident in Abraham’s dutiful willingness to slay his son in sacrifice at God’s demand. But his act resolves nothing for him. It only heightens his confused fear and embitterment:
If there was…a moment of absolute truth…should not this feeling have remained with me, a new purity…Why didn’t I die then, before I had time to awake, to be afraid, to realize that I don’t want to die? (p. 212)
This interpretive argument contradicts Mullins’s view that “symbolically” Isaac finds his faith and dies in the religion of his ancestors.(8) Isaac’s rescue and death are a kind of anti sacrifice, where all is ventured and all is lost. Isaac’s death is the inhuman thematic limit of the destructive side of the paradox of sacrifice. His death is meaningless and absurdity made concrete. When Hymie Polsky reckons on his cash register the dollars and cents infeasibility of the rescue, Isaac becomes the victim of a pitch black cosmic joke.
Abraham is the central figure of The Sacrifice. He is symbolically the Jewish patriarch in recent modern history as at the time of the novel’s publication—1956. His journey from the Ukraine to his settling in Canada, seen against the background of Pogrom persecution and the slightly etched background of the Depression and World War 11, is in broad outline a central movement of nearly a century of Jewish history. Of course, though, Abraham is much more than a symbolic figure. His literal reality defies reductive symbolic significance. Wiseman gives him concrete psychological individuality coexisting with his patriarchal symbolism, which marks his richness as a literary creation. She paints a picture of a man with great physical strength and spiritual stature, sensitive gentleness and of a poetic sensibility. At first view of Abraham, evident are his commanding presence and the almost violent nature of his will. His decision to get off the train and begin to reorder his life is made with “a sudden rush of indignation” as his thoughts sweep through him angrily. He “imperatively beckons” the train conductor who likewise feels “summoned”. Yet Abraham is gently sensitive to the needs of Sarah and Isaac and tells him, “Come boy, we must wake your mother—but gently. How weary she is.” (p.6) At a point later, Ruth marvels at the gentleness “…in a man as forceful in his outward manner as Avrom.” (p.119)
Mildly against these positive traits, Abraham has a tinge of indulgent self consciousness. After one bit of poetic oratory, he pauses “to consider his words with pleasure.” (p.6) Further, his judgment is sometimes weak. He greatly respects the mediocre mind of Chaim Knopp, which, in one instance, “…riffled half-heartedly through its file on death...” (p.144) Like Othello, Abraham’s inclination to grandiloquence can blind him to humble realities. So, in contrast to his glowing accounts of his two dead sons, they, in one flashback, are in normal boyish heat over the girl next door. Abraham’s most striking characteristic is his intense religious faith, and correspondingly—since faith is the internalization of an assumption by which one defines one’s self—his absolute faith in himself. Paradoxically, as shall be seen, this strength of faith becomes an equivalent source of weakness. His single mindedness lapses into narrow mindedness. Abraham’s sense of himself becomes brittle in its absoluteness. When he condemns the brilliant student who helps Hymie Polsky cheat, and uncompromisingly condones the justice of the student’s expulsion, he betrays a lack of sympathetic judgment which in turn flows from his imperfect understanding of his own weakness.
In line with the central argument of this essay, the paradox of sacrifice in the world of history, Abraham is different from the biblical Abraham. The biblical Abraham can become one with God. The historical Abraham believes in a God he can never know, never see, never be with. Only, as will be argued, by marking this difference, can Laiah’s murder be understood to be a sacrifice. In the novel’s world of history, a world without God, a world informed by the implicit simile evoking the response “how like this is to what we know”, it is the bitterest of ironies that Isaac should die in his attempt at grasping the unquestioning singularity of his father’s faith, should die by reason of his attempt at a leap of faith.
Isaac dies fulfilling Abraham’s highest expectations for him by saving the Torah. As such, it is thematically telling that his death is the point from which Abraham’s insanity proceeds until it culminates in his slaughtering of Laiah. The weight of Isaac’s death upsets finally the equilibrium Abraham sustains between his forcefulness and his gentleness. His capacity for murder is evident when Mrs. Popler arouses his fury almost near to losing control. Mrs. Popler’s misery, however, arouses his pity and salves his fury. During his argument with Ruth, Abraham begins to fulfill his own definition of evil—one person’s death feeding on the conquest of other lives—by “…aiming words like blows, not to enlighten or to persuade, but to maim, to hurt.” (p.292) After that argument, he is struck by an unprecedented sense of his own evil, which gradually grows as extreme as his previous sense of his own absolute morality: “Never before had he felt this way, this internal accusation, that he himself was not worthy, that it had all been his fault.” (p. 292)
The dislocation of Abraham’s poetic sensibility goes with his descent into madness. His use of highly imaginative images and metaphors to apprehend reality causes him, in his madness, to sever symbol from reality and respond to symbol as reality. So he sees Laiah as the embodiment of his own evil. Any thought that Abraham’s murder of Laiah is sanctified mimics seeing Laiah through his derangement. By responding to Laiah as symbol which he takes to be reality, Abraham becomes oblivious of her actuality. Before she is murdered, Laiah contemplates the possibility of marrying Abraham. She feels long dormant emotions stirred and flowing. Most pathetically, she pleads for dignity: “ ‘Say you love me’, she urged…Above everything else she wanted now that her moment should not become absurd.” (pp. 301-302) By urging sexual union, by urging life itself, Laiah points to the life creating, life enhancing side of the paradox of sacrifice. When Abraham murders her, he inverts his insane desire to purify himself through purgative slaughter by making real in himself the evil he so intently wishes to purge.
Northrop Frye again is instructive. Frye says that in ritual we strive voluntarily to regain a lost bond with the natural cycle. The poet, in anagogic literature, unites total ritual, or unlimited social action, with total dream, or unlimited thought, into apocalypse—the world of total metaphor at one with the mind of man.(9) During the murder scene, Abraham becomes absorbed into the motions of ritual sacrifice. At first it is unconscious, as when in a flourish of professional pride, he wipes the bread knife clean of its clinging tomato seeds and unthinkingly obeys the ritual dictate that the slaughter knife be immaculate and dry. Then, consciously, he recites the blessing and feels himself being lifted out of space and time. In Frye’s terms, then, Abraham’s expectation of total dream is his expectation of “some wonderful revelation.” His attempt at total ritual is his slaughter of Laiah. Again, in Frye’s terms, Abraham is like the poet attempting to author, through his dream and action, an anagogic poem of apocalypse, his entry into the circle of divine revelation which will “enclose him in its safety, in its peace, “since, keeping to this simile, the union of ritual and dream in a form of verbal communication is myth.”(10)
But it is exactly at the point of murder, when ritual and dream should merge into myth, that history, actuality itself, takes over. Instead of ascending to union with God, Abraham understands terribly that he has killed. Instead of the mystic circle peacefully and safely enclosing him, the word “life” shrieks through his mind. Immediately after stabbing Laiah, he cradles her death in his arms. He tries to close the gaping wound in her throat, hopelessly trying to staunch the blood flow with his hand. Most pathetically, he begs her to live. But the inexorability of actuality imposes itself: death is irrevocable. Laiah’s death triggers Abraham’s perception of her life’s, life’s, preciousness. This sequence of death and consequent awareness images the essence of sacrifice, that, as argued throughout, waste and violation are necessary to the renewal of awe for the mystery of life and death, which, in turn, generates respect for the sanctity of life.
This notion of sacrifice controls the novel’s meaning. It is the reason why Abraham’s slaughter of the cow is such an intense experience for him. It is the reason why Isaac at the point of death from typhus rekindles Abraham’s love for him and inspires him to fight God for his son’s life. (p.71) It is the reason Isaac’s concern for his dying mother precedes his joyous sense of aliveness. It is the reason why the time between his discovery of his mother’s dying and the last time he has “really seen” her is “…a long stretch of time in which his relationship to her had been dimmed by his inattention.” (p. 165) It is the reason why, following Sarah’s death, Isaac resolves “never to lose another lifetime” and feels “so much more alive.” It is the reason why Isaac’s death-dealing rescue of the Torah provides “…a momentary jolt for the imaginations of a handful of people” and stimulates “…them beyond themselves.” (p. 212) It is the reason why Isaac’s resulting illness and foreboding of death intensify his desire to live and make him hungry to embrace the living presence of his family. It is the reason why the simultaneity of Ruth’s birth and her mother’s death, like Hagar’s birth in The Stone Angel, precisely images the paradox of sacrifice, and its inexorability in the world of actuality.
By the workings of the novel’s theme, sacrifice as moral meaning means good is only known by contrast with evil. Abraham’s murder of Laiah, while never assuaged, gives him experienced realization of his manifest capacity for evil: “…I have taken life…it was in me, womb of death, festering in no one else.” (p.326) It instills in him a kind of moral hindsight: “I could have blessed you and left you. I could have loved you.” (p.344) Abraham not only comes to understand his innate capacity for evil, but as symbolic patriarch in the world of history he reveals all Jews’ potential for evil. Dreiman, therefore, is incensed by the implications of the murder:
In the papers it says …as if he had discovered America, “the first time in history of the district that a Jew has committed murder”…What Jew would kill? But no. He had to go and show them that we have murderers too, just like them. (pp. 314-315)
Understanding this, is it not plausible to argue that Abraham himself is a sacrificial victim? Driven by pressures and events beyond his control in combination with his very nature, he commits a heinous crime for which he must bear the humiliation of imprisonment and a deep and heavy burden of guilt. He wishes to die but believes that God will not let him die like the innocent. (p. 344) From what he has done, is the implication, all Jews may better know their capacity for good and evil, be, accordingly, better be able to act morally, and better be able to know themselves.
As Abraham’s Bar Mitzvah is the slaughter of the cow, so Moses is born into moral awareness when he visits his grandfather on Mad Mountain. Moses learns from Abraham the nature of moral disparity, its existence in him, and thereby learns to begin to get past his own self fear, self hatred and self unknowing, which all have their source in the in the personal and social legacy of Abraham’s murder of Laiah: “It was with the strangest feeling of awakening that he saw their hands fused together—one hand, the hand of a murderer, hero, artist, the hand of a man.” (p. 345)
Along with this transmission of awareness comes the related ethic of compassion. In religious terms, to deny compassion, to harm another human being, is “to turn away God himself”. Indeed, in these terms, Abraham’s murder is an act of hubris: “I was not content to be as He willed it. I wanted more. I had to be creator and destroyer.” (p.326) For Moses, who does not believe in Abraham’s God, the religious moral of compassion still has profound application. Pity, as Aristotle says, moves one’s soul toward another, and fear, it may deduced, moves the soul inside itself. Compassion, therefore, stems the soul’s capacity to fear and feel within itself another’s suffering and thus identify with that suffering. As a result compassion is the source of identification and mutuality between people. To deny compassion is to deny one’s own humanity. This moral, the novel intimates, is the humanistic commandment the historical Moses brings to his people. From the awareness Moses absorbs from Abraham, he grows into manhood. He gets unlocked from himself. He begins to share his grandfather’s erectness and pride. At the end of The Sacrifice Moses starts to take his place among “his fellow men.”
1. Adele Wiseman, The Sacrifice, (New York: The Viking Press, 1956);
2. Stanley G. Mullins, "Traditional Symbolism in Adele Wiseman's The Sacrifice, Culture 19 (September 1958);
3. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, (New York, Antheneum, 1969), p.136;
4. Frye, p. 136;
5. Frye, pp. 135-136;
6. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, (New York: Delta, 1966) p. 18, as adapted by me;
7. Mullins;
8. Mullins;
9. Frye, p. 120;
10.Frye, p. 106.
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