The Y Files

The Y Files has moved!

2009-01-23T17:42:00.003-05:00

To mark the beginning of a new era (just kidding!), I am moving operations to WordPress. The new address for the Y Files blog is http://cathyyoung.wordpress.com, with all of the archives transferred there, so please update your bookmarks! I will also be cross-blogging at the RealClearPolitics blog. See you there!

Why Bush is not Putin

2009-01-20T04:46:00.003-05:00

Over the past several years, whenever I have written about the slow (and sometimes not so slow) destruction of freedom in Russia, my responses have invariably included comments that boiled down to, "Well, how is that different from what Bush/Cheney are doing to this country?" Here's a 2007 blogpost along the same lines. The "Bush is as bad as Putin" trope also pops up quite frequently in various forums and comments sections of websites; sometimes, the trop is, "Putin isn't nearly as bad as Bush" (see, for instance, the last comment here).

So, now that we are nearing the moment when we won't have Bush to kick around anymore, I offer you a list of a few things that would have had to happen for Bush to be remotely like Putin.

Shortly after September 11, Bush pushes through a constitutional amendment abolishing direct elections of governors and Senators, for nebulous "national security" reasons. They are now appointed by the administration.
All the news networks except for one or two small stations are taken over by Bush cronies and turned into Fox News clones.
Several politicians and journalists critical of Bush are murdered. Their killers are never found. Commenting on the murder of one journalist and speculation that she may have been killed on government orders, Bush dismissively comments, "We had no reason to kill her -- her death has done much more harm to the country than her writings."
After George Soros announces his plans to finance a movement to defeat Bush in the next election, he is jailed on trumped-up charges of tax fraud and repeatedly denied parole on technicalities. Most of his wealth is confiscated.
Due to the manipulation of election laws, after 2004 both houses of Congress are more than 70 percent Republican. Most of the remaining seats are held by the Conservative Party, the Right to Life Party, and Democrats loyal to Bush.
In 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both disqualified from running for office due to alleged irregularities in the documents they filed to be certified as candidates. Bush's handpicked successor, Dick Cheney, runs against Al Sharpton and and Ralph Nader and handily defeats them.

And that, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course, to say that Bush is better than Putin is faint praise, and besides, even an American Putin would have found his ability to wreak havoc on democracy constained by our political system. But the point isn't that Bush is so great; it's that the comparisons to Putin are so specious.

My take on the Bush legacy and the Obama transition

2009-01-20T04:41:00.001-05:00

The paradox of George W. Bush.

Some pre-inaugural thoughts

2009-01-20T04:15:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not suggesting that everyone has to join the Obama worship. Criticism, in a democracy, is a healthy thing (pardon the cliché). But some of the conservative sniping is silly or downright ridiculous (dear Lord, not the "Bill Ayers ghosted Obama's memoir!" story again), and some seems rather premature (this piece assumes that Obama will be a big-government guy, but Larry Kudlow points out that 40% of his proposed stimulus package now consists of tax cuts). Conservative guru Richard Viguerie is quoted as saying that the inauguration is no big deal: "we can be happy that we’ve taken another step in the racial progress, but I just am not about race, quite frankly." And he puts up this quote on the "news from the front" on his website. Way to win friends and influence people. Can you say "tone-deaf"?

But there's some pretty silly Obamania out there, too. See, for instance, this letter posted by Andrew Sullivan on his blog:

I remember with Bill Clinton, he had way of making people feel they were "the only person in the room:" and that they "mattered to him" as many articles during his tenure claimed. But what Obama seems to have is the ability not to appear as if he is acting, faking it. ... [H]e is not a faker, not a schmoozer, not a dolt, not a skirt-chaser, not a charlatan, etc. etc. Obama has the realness that comes from the hard psychological work that it takes to really get to know yourself and come out on the other side unafraid of whatever might come your way.

And how does the letter-writer know that? Intuition? So far, Obama has done a pretty oustanding job of being all things to most people. I would say he's a pretty impressive schmoozer all right. I'm sure he has genuine convictions, but I think he'll have to be tested much more before we can truly judge his sincerity. Sometimes, "the ability not to appear as if you're acting" is the best acting of all.

With that, of course, I wish Obama well. And frankly, whether he has that "realness" or not and whether he has completed that fearless journey of self-knowledge is not my first concern. He's been elected president, not spiritual leader; and while moral leadership is often a part of the president's role, especially in troubled times, his actual policy-shaping decisions count for more.

Russia's undead heroes

2009-01-17T21:31:00.001-05:00

My take on the "Name of Russia" contest, in The Weekly Standard.

Speak of ...

2009-01-17T00:27:00.004-05:00

... I was going to say "the devil," but then, I wouldn't want the person in question to claim I had called him the devil.

The person in question is Eric Alterman, with whom I had an infamous spat nearly four years ago after I zinged him in my Boston Globe column for suggesting that it's outrageous to expect Muslims and Arabs to pay tribute to the memory of Holocaust victims when so much of their suffering is caused by Jews. The occasion was the British Muslim Council's decision to boycott the ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz because equal time was not given to Palestinian victims of Israeli "genocide." Alterman and I had a caustic exchange on the Reason blog, Hit & Run, and Alterman also encouraged readers of his blog not only to pepper me with angry emails (about half of the ones I got were supportive), but also to call my then-editor at the Globe, Nick King. At some point, he also made the bizarre suggestion that I attacked him out of a personal vendetta because he had once defended my ex-boyfriend against unfair attacks (huh?); see more about it from John Tabin, who once greeted me at a party as "Eric Alterman's Zionist white whale." As I recall, Alterman continued to take gratuitous swipes at me and/or Nick King on his MSNBC blog for at least six months after this incident; here's a particularly bizarre one.

Well, just the other day, I was recounting this saga to some people at dinner at the NAS conference and joked about how I felt neglected after the Alterman mentions finally stopped. And, lo and behold... here is Eric Alterman in the newest issue of The Nation, describing his suffering at the hands of the "Middle East Thought Police." Sayeth Alterman:

For my own trouble, for instance, Andrew Sullivan has compared me to the authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young has accused me of blaming Hitler's victims for Palestinian misery.

Well, actually, no. I accused Alterman of suggesting that Muslims have a moral right to blame Hitler's victims for Palestinian misery. Read the exchange, and tell me if I'm wrong.

I will say that, while the Alterman blogpost on the subject was quite deserving of opprobrium, my column did contain something that I, in retrospect, regret: implying that Alterman might be properly called a self-hating Jew. I don't think it's appropriate to psychoanalyze people I don't know on the basis of their political writings. However, I do think that Alterman is effectively an enabler of anti-Semitism -- not because he is critical of Israeli policies, of course, but because he has repeatedly suggested that one can't really blame Arabs and Muslims for harboring hostility toward Jews in general because of Israeli policies -- Jews anywhere, whether or not they have any connection to Israel.

I do, by the way, think that the charge of anti-Semitism is sometimes bandied around too freely by some supporters of Israel. (See this post from 2007, and links inside.) But that's a topic for another day. I do think that what Alterman condones is anti-Semitism.

Finally: I feel somewhat guilty about making a facetious post on a topic related to the tragic events in Gaza right now. Regardless of one's opinions of the Mideast conflict in general, and Israeli action in this particular instance, any sentient person must grieve for the human suffering we are witnessing. I assure my readers that my levity is directed entirely at Alterman and his grandstanding, and is in no way meant to make light of the situation.

Feminist male-hatred and The Vagina Monologues

2009-01-15T05:45:00.006-05:00

Over on Alas, a Blog, in a thread where the comments are limited to "feminists and feminist allies," Barry Deutsch (Ampersand) deconstructs a speech by Christina Hoff Sommers, a leading critic of feminist orthodoxies (and a good friend of mine, though there are certainly times when we disagree). In particular, he takes her to task for saying that many feminists are anti-male.

Does Christina paint with too broad a brush? Quite possibly. But a couple of things about Barry's post:

(1) Barry says he hasn't seen any male-hating attitudes from feminists except for a few people on the Ms. boards way, way back. I'm guessing the late Andrea Dworkin, famous for such aperçus as, "Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman," or "Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life, but especially for women's lives...", does not qualify?

(2) Barry writes:

Unfortunately, Sommers’ treatment of the subject isn’t serious. She cites one, and only one, source to show that “the gender feminist philosophy” considers “most men… brutes”: Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues.

But The Vagina Monologues isn’t a non-fiction essay. It’s a play about women’s experiences surviving rape and abuse. That’s not the sole subject of the play, but — just after the importance of women loving their bodies — it’s the primary theme. Complaining that a play about the abuse and rape of women has too many abusive men in it is unreasonable and unfair.

There is a positive male character in The Vagina Monologues, a man who so loves vaginas that he teaches his girlfriend to love her own vagina. Sommers dismisses this character entirely, for the transparently ridiculous reason that the character is describes as being bland on first meeting (although he later proves to be an unusually great lover, because he loves women’s sex parts so much). It’s hard to respond to Sommers’ argument, because it’s not even an argument; it’s just an irrelevant statement. He is a positive character; he doesn’t mysteriously cease being a positive character because he seems bland at first, or because he loves vaginas.

In this speech, that’s Sommers’ only evidence that contemporary feminism considers most men brutes — in one popular play about rape and abuse, many but not all of the male characters are negative. I find that evidence underwhelming.

First of all, I think The Vagina Monologues is pretty important. It's frequently produced on college campuses, and is probably an important source of exposure to feminism for many young women.

Secondly, the play is supposed to be about how women feel about their bodies (and specifically, their vaginas). If its most important secondary theme is women's abuse by men, that says a lot about the play's vision of males.

Thirdly, here is the monologue about Bob. Judge for yourself if it can be considered male-positive. Bob, at best one of two "good" men in the play, has absolutely no positive characteristics, indeed no character at all, except for his love of all things vagina. The first time Bob and the narrator have sex, Bob insists on looking at her vagina first because it's "who you are," and he can evidently read her soul in it. In fact, he stares at our heroine's private parts "for almost an hour." Any non-fictional man who talked and acted this way would be a major creep who would scare the bejesus out of any non-fictional woman.

3. Barry writes:

Note what Sommers doesn’t include: A single recent quote from a feminist leader saying “most men are brutes.” If this is indeed the common viewpoint of contemporary feminism, I’d think that Sommers would be able to find a dozen such quotes easily; yet Sommers doesn’t provide even one.

That's setting the bar pretty high. Would anyone require proof of actual, overtly misogynistic statements before convicting a particular class of men of misogyny? Or would strong circumstancial evidence, such as a pattern of always presuming male guilt in any conflict between a man and a woman, be enough?

New Russian treason law opposed by Medvedev?

2009-01-15T05:07:00.002-05:00

Last month, I wrote about a proposed law in Russia that would make the definition of "treason" disturbing broad and vague, and reminiscent of Soviet-era statutes that outlawed dissent. As I explained, Russian law currently defines treason as "hostile actions intended to damage the security of the Russian Federation from foreign threats." The bill, proposed by the government (i.e. the cabinet headed by Vladimir Putin), amended that definition to include "rendering financial, material, consultative, or other assistance to a foreign state, a foreign or international organization, or representatives thereof in activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional system, its sovereignty, its territorial integrity and statehood." The definition of espionage was also broadened to include broad categories of passing potentially sensitive information to foreigners even with no intent to commit espionage, giving rise to concern that the new law would drastically inhibit scientific contacts between Russia and the West.

Well, according to a report in yesterday's Nezavisimaya Gazeta (link to Russian-language article), the draft law has run into opposition from members of parliament who are close to President Dmitry Medvedev.

NG reporter Ivan Rodin writes that on Tuesday, the State Duma Committee on Legislation shelved discussion of the draft law toughening the treason and espionage statutes:

According to NG's sources, the revision pushed by the Federal Security Service [FSB] has incurred the displeasure of the President's team. Consequently, the Duma will try to soften the new definition of "treason."
...
As late as Monday, this law was still on the agenda of the Duma Committee on Legislation. The deputies were supposed to discuss the law and recommend that the Duma vote to pass it. However, yesterday, the draft law was removed from the agenda of the committee meeting. The chairman of the Committee on Legislation, Pavel Krasheninnikov, commented on the situation very reluctantly. When the NG correspondent asked how the committee members felt about the draft law, Krasheninnikov replied, "Well, you can see it's been taken off the agenda for discussion. What does that tell you?" The NG correspondent speculated that this could only mean one thing: additional consultations were being conducted. The head of the committee nodded to confirm this supposition. However, he was unwilling to explain just what was wrong with the document. The only thing he permitted himself to say was that the draft law created too much room for interpretation of the "spy" statutes of the Criminal Code.

Krasheninnikov told NG that the bill would not be resubmitted to the committee earlier than February. Rodin also writes that another MP, Alexander Moskalets, first deputy chairman of the Duma committee on constitutional legislation, initially refused to comment on the bill because he had not read it, but upon reading it told him that "they were asking for too much":

Moskalets poitned out that even members of parliament could easily become targets of the expanded statutes. "Let's say a journalist from a Western publication wants an interview. But I have no idea to whom some of the information I give him could be passed. That means I'm supposed to just keep my mouth shut. Besides, we receive foreign delegations, and we ourselves travel abroad and maintain regular contact with our colleagues in other countries." After reading the new version of articles 275 and 276 of the Criminal Code, Moskalets was reminded not even of late Soviet legislation but of the Criminal Code of the 1920s and '30s, expanded by numerous decrees on the very same subject of treason.

Meanwhile, Duma sources pointed out to NG that it was no accident that Pavel Krasheninnikov was the one working so hard to get the definitions narrowed. He is believed to be one of the deputies closest to Dmitry Medvedev. The current President, who has declared himself a champion of the law and a defender of the rights of citizens, will have a hard time signing this legislation to make it the law of the land. But he can't refuse to sign it either, considering that it was proposed at the initiative of Vladimir Putin. For the same reason, the Duma cannot reject the bill, or make drastic changes in it. That means only one option remains to resolve this unpleasant situation: to persuade the government to resubmit the bill with some changes.

Political analyst Alexei Makarkin told Rodin that Medvedev does not want to lose his "liberal" image, but cannot veto the law because that would be "a demonstration of conflict." Thus, "changing the bill by quiet bureaucratic methods is in the interests of both sides of the power tandem."

Could this be a sign of the long-awaited fissure in the tandem? In the past two weeks, there have been several articles on reputable Russian websites claiming that there are signs of a weakening of Putin's position and of a power struggle between Kremlin factions which may result in Putin's removal. Of course, the NG article makes it clear that neither Medvedev nor the Duma can openly reject a law backed by Putin. On the other hand, if "Duma sources" -- presumably ones close to Medvedev -- are circulating the story that the measure is being rejected, albeit in a face-saving way, this could be a pretty effective strategy to embarrass Putin.

Or could it be the once-predicted "good cop, bad cop" strategy of the Putin/Medvedev team, in which Medvedev creates the appearance of liberalism by ensuring a less draconian version of a new law?

Stay tuned, as always...

Now he tells us

2009-01-14T21:08:00.005-05:00

National Review's Rich Lowry on Bush's Top 10 mistakes, and two items that drew my attention.

Not reading enough history. Bush has admirably applied himself to an extensive reading program as president, but if he had absorbed more history before taking office — particularly about military matters — he’d have had a better grounding to make important decisions.
....
Underestimating the power of explanation. By temperament and ability, Bush was more a “decider” than a “persuader.” He’s not naturally drawn to public argument, giving his administration its unfortunate (and not entirely fair) “my way or the highway” reputation at home and abroad.

I remember a different tune from Rich Lowry. Here's my take on it in my own 2002 Reason column "Intellectual Warfare":

"Maybe we don't want a presidential candidate who can pronounce Kostunica or recite the constituent parts of Yugoslavia," wrote National Review Editor Richard Lowry. ... Sometimes, especially at National Review, the animus against braininess has overlapped with a crusade for traditional manliness -- the idea being that book learning is for wimps.

Appearing on the Fox News show On the Record to discuss a recently released documentary about Bush on the campaign trail, Lowry hailed him as "a more traditional, red-blooded guy" than Al Gore: "He's tough. He's manly....He's not very reflective." To Lowry, it turns out, even familiarity with "hip" pop culture products such as Sex and the City -- a familiarity that Bush, in the documentary, appears to lack -- denotes excessive intellectualism and elitism. "Bush probably knows more about NASCAR, which is more tuned into what most Americans care about, than any of these reporters writing about him," he commented.

And from another column:

In October 2000, at a Cato Institute symposium on the presidential election, National Review Editor Rich Lowry spoke of a “war on masculinity” in America and asserted that Bush appealed to the voters because he exemplified an action-oriented, nonintellectual manly resolve.

Oh yes, that Cato symposium; I remember it well, especially Lowry's enthusiastic praise for Bush's lack of bookishness.

Now it turns out book-learnin' (and a little bit of reflectiveness) can be useful after all.

As Glenn Reynolds would put it: Heh.

The Y Files on the Top 100 Gender Studies Blogs

2009-01-14T20:39:00.002-05:00

An excellent, balanced list of gender issues blogs, with The Y Files in the "Women's Studies" category:

Freelance journalist Cathy Young posts on a number of issues, but many of her posts are related to issues of sexuality, gender and identity.

Many thanks to Christina Laun for the listing, and I intend to check out some of the other sites on the list.

NAS conference notes 3: The academy, the military, and gays

2009-01-14T19:44:00.002-05:00

A final brief report, for now, from the past weekend's NAS conference.

I missed part of the panel on the academy and the military, but caught a fascinating talk by Alan Silver, sociology professor at Columbia University, about the issue of bringing ROTC back to college campuses that currently exclude it (and the way this ties into the issue of the existing gulf between the military and academe). A major obstacle to ROTC presence at many "progressive" schools is the military policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", which bars openly gay men and women from serving. Silver conceded that in some cases, opposition to DADT is merely a pretext for general hostility to the military dating back to Vietnam; but he also argued that changing this policy, and agreeing to a measure of academic control over the programs, would bring ROTC back to the colleges and universities from which it is now banned. (ROTC presence is strongest in Southern schools.) Silver added that the military had always been a locus for asserting equality -- for black, Japanese Americans, women, Latinos, and now gays, and while the specifics are different in each case, the principle is the same. He also added that, in order to bring ROTC back to campuses and help bridge the socially harmful gulf between the military and the academy, "the military needs to overcome its own prejudices about the academy, and be willing to have ROTC chapters in an environment where some military actions are disapproved of."

During the Q & A, a middle-aged female questioner (whose name I know but won't mention) accused Silver of being willing to "concede too much," and hectored him for "talking about 'don't ask, don't tell' as if it was this terrible thing" when, in fact, there may be perfectly good reasons for barring open homosexuals from the ranks and it might be just as well to leave that decision to the military. She opined that the real problem was that in certain segments of society, "treason is celebrated," and added, addressing Silver, "Being from New York, you know this very well." (Silver chuckled and shot back, "Yes, we're a well-known nest of traitors in New York"; and later on, another audience member who took the microphone, himself a serviceman who said he had done recruiting in New York, took explicit umbrage at the idea that New Yorkers are unpatriotic.)

On "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Silver replied that "it's not a compromise, it's a question of political reality. It's impossible to bring ROTC back to campuses without these changes, and if it was brought back by fiat, it would be illegitimate." Next came the truly interesting part.

The two panelists who were actually in the military, and both had an affiliation with the notably conservative Virginia Military Institute -- Gen. Josiah Bunting, former VMI Commander, and Brigadier General Charles F. Brower, IV, Deputy Superintendent of Academics and Dean of Faculty at VMI -- commented on the issue, and both were unequivocally in favor of repealing DADT. Gen. Bunting pointed out that "the British Army has a policy of admitting gays" and discharging those who unwanted advances, and queried, "Why not do that?" Brig. Gen. Brower said that he basically agreed: "Heterosexual or homosexual, predators should be prosecuted. Treat them all equally." He added that "there are many homosexuals who are now serving honorably in the military, and anyone who thinks they aren't needs to get in touch with reality."

There has been some discussion of whether Obama will repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." At least judging by the NAS panel, such a move won't meet much opposition from the military.

There was another fascinating question from the audience about whether the disconnect between the military and large segments of American culture -- the fact that the career military is now strongly Southern and overwhelmingly politically conservative -- should create a concern about "standing armies" as understood by the Founders. (In other words, an army that does not represent the population.) It seems to me that, in this sense, the absence of ROTC from campus should be more of a concern to the liberals but to conservatives.

Your humble blogger joins the "experts" with a question to Hillary

2009-01-13T01:27:00.004-05:00

Hillary Rodham Clinton, our (presumably) next Secretary of State, is facing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. The New York Times op-ed page has put together a list of questions to Ms. Clinton from ten "experts," including Foud Ajami, Walter Russell Meade, some guy named Mikhail Saakashvili, and yours truly.

My question:

Imagine we see broad demands for truly democratic presidential and parliamentary elections in Russia. Should the United States join in these calls for new elections, despite their destabilizing potential? What should the American reaction be if the opposite scenario takes place, with Vladimir Putin returning as president in a new “election” and further tightening the authoritarian screws? How would we maintain a functional relationship with Moscow without condoning the further strangulation of democracy in Russia?

The wages of populism: Joe the Journalist

2009-01-13T00:40:00.005-05:00

If you think I'm making too big a deal out of anti-intellectualism on the right... then check out the latest from the Pajamas Media "citizen journalist," Joe "more-than-15-minutes-of-fame" The Plumber:

I'll be honest with you. I don't think journalists should be anywhere allowed war (sic). I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what's happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I think it's asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you'd go to the theater and you'd see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for them. Now everyone's got an opinion and wants to downer–and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers.

I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you're gonna sit there and say, "Well look at this atrocity," well you don't know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.

To quote the line I've paraphrased before from the Russian comedian Mikhail Zhvanetsky: "Words fail. At least, printable ones."

A very appropriate quote, actually, considering that Mr. Wurzelbacher's musings strongly remind me of Russian Putinistas who justify censorship of unpleasant news because, heck, you don't want to "downer" the public.

I know that media reporting on wars often leaves a lot to be desired. But ... well, Bill Roggio on the Weekly Standard blog pretty much says it all:

[W]hile embedded as an independent reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan several times, I have seen journalists do some appalling things. I could probably write a book about it, but honestly I'm far more interested in the war itself. Despite what I have seen, I believe the media should have access during conflicts. Shutting the media out would entirely concede the information to al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, etc. who are increasingly developing sophisticated information strategies. Yes, there is bad and slanted reporting coming out of the combat zones, but there also are good reporters out there who can get the story right. The public needs to hear these stories to understand the nature of the war.

...

The real irony here is that PJTV, a 21st Century, Internet-based news organization is sending a reporter--who doesn't want reporters to report on war--to report on a war. And apparently Joe would love to return to the days when the news was influenced by the government and seen at the theater.

Precisely.

Could this be the beginning of the end of American conservatism's fatal-attraction love affair with populism? Or am I being too optimistic again?

NAS conference notes 2: Barack Obama and the colorblind vision

2009-01-12T16:04:00.004-05:00

Remember when conservatives talked about the vision of a colorblind society and about moving past racial preferences?

In the past couple of years, this issue has been out of the limelight. Last November, a ballot measure to ban the consideration of race in public college admissions and other government operations succeeded in Nebraska but was narrowly defeated in Colorado, after a vicious smear campaign that linked the initative to the Ku Klux Klan and questioned the high salary paid to one of the leaders of the anti-preferences movement, African-American businessman Ward Connerly. Several similar measures were kept off the ballot in other states.

What now?

It's interesting that two speakers at the NAS conference who are strongly associated with the anti-preferences movement -- both decidedly right of center -- spoke of Obama and his election with unrestrained and unabashed enthusiasm. At the opening session, my good friend Abigail Thernstrom, co-author with her husband Stephan Thernstrom of the classic America in Black and White, called Obama's election "a historic turning point" and "a racial conversation-changer." She also noted that a black man's ability to win a contest for the White House came as no surprise "to those of us who have been following polling data and have long believed in the racial decency of ordinary Americans." The fact that the leader of the free world is now a black man, Thernstrom said, has to make it easier and more attractive for people to move beyond race and race consciousness -- and harder to justify preferences with arguments about the alleged intractability of racism. "The younger generation is coming of age in a racially altered world," Thernstrom said, and eventually campus politics will have to catch up.

Maybe Abby is an optimist, as someone suggested in the Q & A; to that, she replied she was cautiously optimistic. It is worth noting that Obama has suggested (in vague terms) that affirmative action should refocus on class, not race.

On Friday, one of the luncheon speakers and award recipients was Ward Connerly, the man hailed as a civil rights leader by some and derided as an "Uncle Tom" by others. At the NAS luncheon, Connerly got a standing ovation. (One of the few people who remained seated, and did not applaud, was the AAUP's Cary Nelson.)

Connerly is an amazing speaker; gracious, warm, energetic. He opened his speech by saying, "We are here in the nation's capital a few days before an event that will demonstrate something most of us in this room have always believed: that America is a fair country and that the colorblind vision works."

Connerly noted that he did not vote for Obama, but believed he deserved to win: "He ran the best campaign and made the strongest case. I accept this verdict by the American people, and I wish him success." (Here, there was a burst of applause from which about half the people in the room abstained; including, I might add, Victor Davis Hanson, who sat on the dais.) "He will be inaugurated only feet away from where Martin Luther King gave his historic 'I have a dream' speech. I am sure that the spirit of Dr. King will be smiling on him," Connerly continued, recalling King's "deep patriotism."

After discussing the recent fortunes of the civil rights initiatives, Connerly noted that "the issue is not just getting beyond racial preferences but getting beyond race. The election of Barak Obama confirms that."

I think Connerly and Thernstrom are right; and I think the kind of conservatism that has a future today is their kind. I'm an optimist, too.

(Ward Connerly photo courtesy of the American Civil Rights Institute.)

NAS conference notes 1: Culture and politics

2009-01-12T04:14:00.005-05:00

I'm back from the 13th conference of the National Association of Scholars, a 21-year-old organization dedicated to combating political indoctrination on college campuses and defending the traditional curriculum. While the NAS has no formal political affiliation, it has a decidedly right-of-center bent, and I thought the conference would offer an interesting glimpse into what conservatives and right-of-center moderates are thinking right now, just before the Obama transition. (Not to mention that NAS conferences are always fascinating and offer a welcome diversity of opinions.)

So, here's Part 1 of my observations from the weekend. The highlight of the conference, no doubt, was the debate on academic freedom between NAS president Peter Wood and American Association of University Professors president Cary Nelson. Nelson has criticized "politically correct" speech codes and asserted that he opposes "the destructive power of idenity politics"; however, he is also on record as being highly critical of the NAS's "war on political correctness," and his speech boiled down to "Sure, the NAS is right about some things, but you guys really overstate the case and despite some individual cases of PC run amuk, there is no problem of a dissent-stifling liberal orthodoxy on campus." Much of the anti-PC critique, Nelson argued, is made in "ignorance or bad faith," and is aimed at discrediting, marginalizing, and demonizing left-wing, proggressive faculty. (As an example, he cited the American Council of Trustees and Alumni 2006 report How Many Ward Churchills?; Nelson argued that Churchill, who referred to the 9/11 victims as "little Eichmanns" who had it coming to them, was actually quite atypical both because of his "over the top" rhetoric and because of the peculiarities of his fraud-laced career. True enough; but the real thrust of the ACTA report was that Churchill-type ideological extremism was far from unique.)

Nelson lost me when he asserted that, contrary to conservative critiques, women's studies is no longer a bastion of orthodoxy. The proposition that "women are universally oppressed by the patriarchy," he claimed, is no longer the dominant assumption in Women's Studies and hasn't been in nearly 20 years. That may be technically true; the problem is, to the extent that male oppression of women is no longer the sole dogma of the field, the dogma has changed only to accommodate other left-wing orthodoxies and "oppressions": for instance, any critique of the oppression of women in Muslim societies must now be mediated by the understanding that such critiques can be used as a tool of Western imperialist oppression of "brown" men. How many WoSt courses would be receptive to discussing the idea that innate sex differences may partly account for the unequal distribution of women and men in some fields?

Then again, Nelson probably thinks that's fine; indeed, he took a swipe at those who criticize women's studies for insisting that all gender differences are socially constructed -- as if they should give any weight to the patently ridiculous idea that women may innately have less aptitude for math or music! (I didn't get a chance to ask Neltson any questions during the Q & A, but I did manage to buttonhole him after the session. Is it right, I asked, to exclude from academic discourse the view that there are some biology-related cognitive and behavioral differences between men and women which may affect the gender composition of some professions? Nelson's initial response was to dismiss any possible validity of this view; finally, he grudingly conceded that it should not be suppressed, and even, in an aside, that Lawrence Summers probably should not have been fired for voicing such a view. He also noted that the AAUP had, under his leadership, criticized the disinvitation of Summers to speak at a dinner at UCLA.)

Nelson also took the NAS to task for ignoring orthodoxies that don't fit the "left-wing" mold -- for instance, sociology departments that elevate quantitative research to the point of excluding students interested in the qualitative method, or economics departments that fail to teach "very timely" skepticism toward the free market. "But the NAS ignores that and focuses on Women's Studies," declared Nelson. "You're like mullahs who condemn heresy but bow 500 times a day toward Wall Street, or the ruins of Wall Street."

Think that was snarky? Well, things got really interesting when Peter Wood took the podium and opened his speech with a brief discussion of an essay Nelson had published about an earlier NAS conference, in 1997 in New Orleans, deriding the group as a gathering of old men resentful of change and younger losers anxious to blame their failures on left-wing orthodoxy in academe, all of them consumed by bitterness and fear. (I attended that conference, which featured a great speech by Shelby Steele, and that's not how I remember it.) Wood cautioned that "behind this affable exterior, there is actually a good deal of malice." A hit, a very palpable hit, which Nelson took with a great deal of equanimity; it takes some chutzpah to accept an invitation to speak from a group you've satirized in this fashion.

During the Q & A, several people cited instances of academic orthodoxy they or members of their family had experienced personally; one of the statements, from a very passionate young woman studying at the University of Arizona, illustrates the complexity of evaluating such complaints. "Here are some of the things I've heard from my professors," she said. "The US could stop world hunger if we just spent less on defense. American soldiers are no different from terrorists and essentially pursue the same objectives. China is not a Communist country." (Is the last of these necessarily an example of left-wing propaganda, or a recognition of China's moves toward a market economy?) The young woman was also unhappy that in a journalism class, she was required to read The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times for class reports and credit, but was not allowed to substitute The Washington Times; it didn't help that she repeatedly referred to the latter as "The Washington Post" until corrected by someone from the audience. Now, I will say that depending on the type of journalism class it is, it might be quite appropriate to give only those reading assignments. But a comparative analysis of The New York Times and The Washington Times might be interesting as well.

Nelson's response to all the anecdotal material was that he couldn't comment on them without knowing all the facts. The larger issues, though, is that in all too many academic departments, there is an atmosphere in which left-of-center politics are assumed, and equated with virtue. Tthat's a problem, not just for conservatives or libertarians but for the exchange and flow of ideas. And sometimes, this orthodoxy does blow up in ugly ways -- for instance, during the Duke sexual assault hoax case, which went unmentioned at the Nelson/Wood panel.

But meanwhile, what about conservative politics? On the first day of the conference, Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution and National Review Online gave a speech about the importance of classical education, arguing that the study of Western culture and the Greeks in particular is indispensable to an understanding of the human condition and its limitations. Hanson lamented that "the general public has lots all idea of what the West is; they live in it and enjoy the benefits of its daily commerce and its consumer culture, but they don't have any notion of what its founding principles are." Hence, he noted, the widespread willingness to give credence to arguments for moral equivalency between Western democracies and totalitarian regimes.

So far, so good; and Hanson reserved some of his criticism for the right, for the rise of vocationalism and the decline of the idea that the liberal arts should give people a grounding in a common culture, shared history and literature, etc. But there is another elephant in that room: isn't any conservative effort to promote classical culture these days going to come into conflict with the rise of conservative populism, and its frequent appeal to hostility toward the educated "elites." When I asked Hanson about this, he flatly denied that such a problem existed; the real problem, he asserted, was the elites' prejudiced attitude toward Sarah Palin, as evidenced by the difference in the treatment she got compared to the coddling of Caroline Kennedy. (That's coddling?) Hanson also assured me that if he saw a real trend of anti-intellectualism among conservative commentators -- for instance, the claim that "instinct is superior to reason" -- he would oppose it and speak out against it.

A good portion of Hanson's luncheon speech the next day, when he was receiving an NAS award, was also devoted to a defense of Palin; he noted morosely that "those of us who are conservatives or moderates are somewhat bewildered by the last election," and specifically by the attacks on "'Palinism,' defined by some as 'know-nothingism' or 'anti-intellectualism.'" Hanson lamented that conservatives like David Frum, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker and others "deplored Palin's lack of knowledge of foreign affairs," and commented, "All I can say is that it's very hard to spend your life in Wasilla, be a mother of five and get to be Governor of Alaska and take on the power structure that she did." (Isn't that rather like the rationales for affirmative action?) Hanson concluded by saying that Palin represents "conservatives values lived through experience."

I have no problem with the fact that Palin had no Ivy League degree, and I certainly don't think that being a certified intellectual should be among the qualifications for political leadership. But the contradiction between conservatives' attempt to be custodians of culture and the Know-Nothing populism often spouted by Palin's champions is striking. And unless conservatives address the fact that some people in their camp contribute to hositlity toward the educated, this is not going to change.

Yes, some of the conservative hostility and suspicion toward intellectuals stems from the susceptibility of many in the intellectual class to genuinely pernicious ideas (from communism in the old days to radical race and gender theories today). But the responsibility of educated conservatives -- the kind who gravitate to NAS conferences -- should be to do what they can to ensure that the marketplace of ideas remains diverse. And when some of their political allies seem just as happy to consign the educated to "enemy territory," it's time to beat the alarm.

With intellectuals like these, there's something to be said for anti-intellectualism

2009-01-04T02:30:00.008-05:00

The annual meeting of the Modern Language Association dedicates a panel to conference sex.

Alas, with no public demonstrations of the subject at hand. Though one speaker, New York University professor Ann Pellegrini, did conduct her presentation clad in a bathrobe. (Okay, over her clothes.)

Speaker Jennifer Drouin, assistant professor of English and women’s studies at Allegheny College, discussed the fascinating subject of the varieties of conference sex, from cruising by gay male scholars at local gay bars to "'bi-curious' experimentation by 'nerdy academics trying to be more hip'" to "the 'conference sex get out of jail free' card that attendees (figuratively) trade with academic partners, permitting each to be free at their respective meetings" to monogamous sex between long-distance spouses or partners who are separated by their careers and reunite at conferences. (In the comments on the Inside Higher Ed report, a couple of people lamented the stereotyping implicit in the suggestion that only gay men pursue casual sex; Drouin helpfully explained that in her presentation, she "lamented the lack of designated cruising spaces, such as bars, bathhouses, and parks, for people other than gay men, especially the lack of cruising spaces for lesbians.")

More gems:

Milton Wendland of the University of Kansas linked the jargon and exchanges of academic papers to academic conference sex. The best papers, he said, “shock us, piss us off, connect two things” that haven’t previously been connected. “We mess around with ideas. We present work that is still germinating,” he said. So too, he said, a conference is “a place to fuck around physically,” and “not as a side activity, but as a form of work making within the space of the conference.”

At a conference, he said, “a collegial discussion of methodology becomes foreplay,” and the finger that may be moved in the air to illuminate a point during a panel presentation (he demonstrated while talking) can later become the finger touching another’s skin for the first time in the hotel room, “where we lose our cap and gown.”

For gay men like himself, Wendland said, conference sex is particularly important as an affirmation of elements of gay sexuality that some seem to want to disappear. As many gay leaders embrace gay marriage and “heteronormative values,” he said, it is important to preserve other options and other values.

Conference sex encounters become more than mere dalliance and physical release,” he said. It is a stand against the “divorcing physicality from being human, much less queer,” he said.

Meanwhile, in her speech, the bathrobe-clad Ann Pellegrini made a poignant complaint:

Academics are regularly “accused of speaking only about ourselves,” she said. “But when we venture out into public square,” and try to share both their knowledge and beliefs, “we are accused of being narcissistic” and of speaking only in “impenetrable jargon.”

Gee, I wonder why.

Another speaker, Daniel Contreras of Fordham University, wondered: "Did eight years of Bush drain away any energy we might have had for intellectual exploration?"

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up. Who needs parody?

The war in Georgia and Russian markets

2009-01-04T01:33:00.008-05:00

Daniel Larrison takes me to task for suggesting that Russia paid a price for the Georgia war in the flight of foreign capital, which predated and exacerbated the financial crisis. Says Larrison:

Capital had been “fleeing” Russia in the form of a decline in its stock market throughout 2008, long before the war in Georgia and the full outbreak of our financial crisis in September, in a more dramatic expression of the slow downward trend that our own market was showing through the first half of the year. At the time of the war in Georgia, the Russian index had already declined roughly 20% for the year, and Russia did not suffer its worst precipitous drops in its stock market until the full brunt of the financial crisis struck New York in mid-September.

It's quite true that the Russian stock market began to decline before the war in Georgia, thanks mostly to this man:

The first big drop market drop in Russia occurred in late July, when Prime Minister Putin launched a nasty verbal attack on the CEO of the Mechel steel company, Igor Zyuzin:

"We have a respected company, Mechel," Putin said in introducing his subject.

"By the way, we invited the owner and director of the company, Igor Vladimirovich Zyuzin, to today's meeting, but he suddenly got sick. Meanwhile, it is known that in the first quarter this year the company exported raw materials abroad at half the domestic, and world, price. And what about the margin tax for the government?"

He added: "Of course, sickness is sickness, but I think Igor Vladimirovich should get better as quick as possible, otherwise we'll have to send him a doctor."

As the International Herald Tribune report puts it:

On the heels of the imprisonment of one tycoon and some bare-knuckled corporate raids and renegotiations of large energy contracts under Putin, the market did not take this talk lightly.

Over all, the Russian stock market slid more than 5 percent Friday, on fears that Putin's comments might presage another attack on a company similar to the destruction of the Yukos oil company in 2004.

The remarks also coincided with the departure of the American chief executive of the British energy company BP's joint venture in Russia, which is under pressure from its Russian partners and the government, in another glum sign for investors here.

More on the BP dispute here. State thuggery is bad for business; who knew?

(Incidentally, the role of Putin's "we'll have to send him a doctor" quip in crashing the Russian stock market is so widely understood that, remarkably, even the pro-government Izvestia criticized it in a year-end roundup of the Putinisms of 2008. Izvestia also quotes a more complete version of the remark: "We'll have to send him a doctor and clean up these problems." The word Putin used, zachistit', was most commonly used with regard to "cleanup operations" against Chechen separatist fighters.)

That said: did the war in Georgia have an effect on capital flight? Well, here's what an August 19 report in the New York Times had to say:

More than $7 billion left Russia during Moscow’s military campaign in Georgia, a rate more than 10 times higher than earlier in the year and the product at least in part of fears that “certain political risks” are making the Russian Federation a less attractive place for investment, according to Russian Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin.

Kudrin must be another one of those Russia-hating neocons.

This August 22 Russian-language article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta examines the various causes of capital flight and concludes:

Before the events in South Ossetia, the capitalization of the Russian stock market was close to $1.1 trillion; now, it is below $1 trillion. Even adjusting for the exchange rate fluctuations and the general downward trend, the war-related component in the stock market drop is estimated at tens of billions of dollars.

The "greatest Russians"

2009-01-02T13:40:00.004-05:00

Back in July, I wrote for The Boston Globe about the "greatest Russian" internet/TV voting contest in Russia, and the bizarre (and alarming) emergence of Stalin and Nicholas II, Russia's last Czar, in the initial rounds of the voting.

Well, the project is now over, and Stalin is in third place. Many say the vote was rigged, to avoid making Russia look bad. (Though Stalin placing third still looks pretty bad.)

The top two winners are Alexander Nevsky, the legendary prince mainly known for defeating the Teutonic Knights in the "Battle of the Ice" in 1242 and being the hero of Sergei Eisenstein's Stalin-era patriotic movie, and Pyotr Stolypin, the reformist prime minister assassinated in 1911.

Those are rather telling selections.

Alexander Nevsky is not only a mythic figure about whom little is definitely known (it is now believed, for instance, that the grandeur of the Battle of the Ice was greatly exaggerated). He is, quite possibly, a bit worse than that: a collaborator with the Mongol-Tatar Horde that occupied Russia for over 200 years. Alexander received his principality from one of the Tatar Khans, his patron; in return, he used his army to violently suppress rebellions by Russians (in particular, in Novgorod) who refused to pay tribute to the Mongols. The "politically correct" Russian version is that he had to cut deals with the Mongols, since the Mongol force at the time was far superior to whatever the Russians could put up, and his compromises saved Russia from utter devastation. Other historians paint a darker picture, arguing that Alexander used the Tatars to gain political leverage against other Russian princes including his own brother Vladimir.

Furthermore, one reason Alexander is revered is that he reportedly refused to accept an alliance with the Catholic Church against the Mongols. In other words, Alexander Nevsky represents Russian isolationism from the West -- even at the cost of submission to dominance by an Asian power that most Russian liberals and pro-Western conservatives/centrists have always viewed as disastrous to the tradition of liberty in Russia.

That is the popularly chosen "Name of Russia."

The runner-up, Stolypin, was apparently Putin's choice according to the London Times report. He was not quite, as the Times says, "a conservative politician who opposed liberal reforms and cracked down hard on the Bolsheviks"; he certainly did crack down hard on revolutionaries of all stripes, but he was himself a reformer who hoped to modernize Russia and move it in a capitalist direction (in particular, by offering peasants personal land ownership in lieu of ownership by peasant communes, the prevailing system until then). Of the top three vote-getters, he is certainly the least objectionable; if he had not been assassinated, it's possible that the revolution of 1917 might have been averted. That said, his name is also strongly associated with political repression; the tribunals he set up do deal with perpetrators of revolutionary violence executed between 1000 and 3000 people in six months, and the hangman's noose became known as "the Stolypin necktie."

And then, of course, there's Stalin, for whom 1000 executions was all in a day's work. I exaggerate, but only slightly.

The Stalin legacy in today's Russia is a complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, Stalinism and its crimes stand officially condemned; in fact, a few months ago Medvedev laid a wreath at a memorial to the victims of Stalin's terror -- the first time a Russian head of state did so. On the other hand, there is a tendency to semi-exonerate Stalinism or at least present its legacy as mixed: terror on one side, industrialization and the victory in World War II on the other. A controversial new history textbook presents Stalin as an "effective manager" and seeks to minimize his crimes, suggesting that only those who were actually sentenced to death and executed be counted as terror victims (which would leave out the millions who died in the camps).

As for Stalin's grass-roots popularity, some argue that it is a response to the chaos of the '90s and the rampant injustices of today's Russia as well as the decline of Russian power. There is, probably, an element of that. But is is also to a great extent a creation of Putin-era state propaganda which emphasizes the importance of national greatness and Russia's imperial power (and downplays the idea, embraced by Yeltsin, that Russia's totalitarian past should be rejected and viewed as evil and shameful). The semi-exoneration of Stalin is also evident in some products of the official media -- for instance, a TV program aired last summer which attempted to challenge the belief that Stalin disastrously mishandled the war against Germany, by decimating the top command of the Soviet army, failing to prepare for the war, and ignoring reports of an approaching German invasion. The program essentially presented Stalin as a wise leader whose decisions were undercut by feckless and incompetent commanders.

The semi-exoneration of Stalin is not an exoneration of communism but of "national greatness"; it goes hand in hand with reverence toward Nicholas II and the glamorization of White Army leaders such as Alexander Kolchak, the hero of a recent blockbuster film and a 10-hour TV miniseries. One of the weirdest aspects of attitudes toward Stalin in Russia today is a belief (not very widespread but present nonetheless) that Stalin was a closet Russian Orthodox believer who destroyed the godless Communists in the purges and restored the Russian Orthodox Church (which Stalin actually did, but only under pressure when he felt that the Church would be a useful ally in mobilizing the people to fight the German invasion). In a bizarre recent incident, a priest in a Moscow church displayed an icon that depicted Stalin talking to Matryona Nikonova, a Soviet-era underground Russian Orthodox preacher who was recently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. (A totally unconfirmed legend has it that Stalin visited Matryona in 1941 and she told him that Moscow would not fall to the Nazis if he stayed in the city.) The icon was removed after complaints from parishioners and the Church has condemned it as "diabolical," but the priest still stands by it. The eccentric Russian ultra-nationalist Alexander Prokhanov recently predicted that eventually, Stalin would be canonized by the Church.

On December 5-7, Russia hosted its first-ever scholarly conference on Stalinism and Stalin's legacy. While the fact that the conference was supported by some official institutions may be put down on the "positive" side of the ledger, there are some disturbing signals as well. As Nikita Sokolov reports in Grani.ru, two high-ranking Russian academics who spoke at the conference acted more or less as Stalin apologists. One noted that many Roman emperors were also villains but they built a great empire nonetheless. Another noted the fact that Stalin's nationalities policy resulted in the survival of virtually ever small ethnic group, while in the United States it's hard to find a Native American. The minister of education defended the Stalin-whitewashing textbook on the grounds that such an approach is in demand from both instructors and students.

The day after the "Greastest Russian" vote came in, the pro-government Izvestia ran a "pro and con" feature on Stalin's third-place vote. The "pro" was contributed by the newspaper's deputy editor in chief, Elena Yampolskaya. While Yampolskaya says that she voted for no one in the contest and certainly couldn't vote for Stalin, the support for the late dictator is actually a positive sign: the people who backed him were voting against "the dictatorship of liberalism," "the terror of political correctness," and "the totalitarian power of money."

They are not choosing blood, paranoia and barbarism, not the deviltry summoned from the dark abyss. They are choosing Victory, power, indifference to monetary gain, statecraft, and imperial ambition (a phrase that is, at last, no longer considered pejorative).

Telling, indeed.

Russia: winds of change?

2009-01-02T10:19:00.004-05:00

My op-ed in today's Boston Globe. Reposted below, with a few extra lines The Globe cut for space.

______________________________________________________

A year ago, Russia was in an odd place between oppressive stagnation and a glimmer of possible change. The ruling party, United Russia, had just consolidated its hold on the parliament in a rigged election; the presidential transition was revealed as the farcical anointment of a handpicked successor to Vladimir Putin – the docile Dmitry Medvedev, who quickly promised to make Putin prime minister. Yet some Russian liberals, and sympathetic Westerners, harbored at least modest hopes that Medvedev might prove more liberal than Putin and that the division of power between president and prime minister might weaken Russia’s neo-autocracy.

Today, the winds of change in Russia are blowing again – harsh winds that may yet turn into a storm.

The liberalization from above turned out to be a non-starter, despite Medvedev’s declaration that “freedom is better than non-freedom.” Any hopes of a thaw, or a Putin-Medvedev fissure, were crushed when Medvedev’s first 100 days ended with the war in Georgia. (Whatever Georgia’s responsibility for triggering this war, it was preceded by years of provocation and manipulation by the Kremlin – intended to destabilize a government perceived as unfriendly and send an assertive message to the West.)

The surge of “patriotic” sentiment that followed Russia’s victory threatened to take the country even further down the authoritarian road. But history works in mysterious ways.

While Western sanctions in response to the war proved short-lived, Russia paid a heavy price for its victory in the flight of foreign capital – which both predated October’s financial crisis and exacerbated its effects in Russia.

The crisis revealed the clay feet of the Putin/Medvedev regime, not only showing the extent to which its relative prosperity was tried to high oil prices but also exposing the fakery of its feelgood propaganda machine. While state-controlled television news avoided the word “crisis” – except with regard to the West – Russian citizens rushed to convert rubles to dollars. Polls by the Public Opinion Fund found a sharp drop in confidence in the mainstream media. By late December, close to half of Russians said that media reports on the economy were biased and minimized economic problems; 30 percent (up from 23 percent in November) said that “journalists know the real state of the economy but are not allowed to tell the truth.”

Trust in Putin and Medvedev may suffer as well. Bizarrely, over 80 percent of those polled recently still approved Putin’s performance as prime minister – though only 43 percent thought Russia was headed in the right direction. Yet, of the 17 percent of Russians who watched Putin’s live televised question-and-answer session on December 4, fewer than half were satisfied with his answers.

The first rumblings of discontent came after the government announced a hike in custom duties on imported used cars to help Russia’s auto companies (run mostly by Putin cronies). Importing used cars from Japan is a major source of livelihood in the Far East, which responded with major protests that quickly became political. Some demonstrators openly denounced Putin, Medvedev, and United Russia; many angrily demanded television coverage. After a week of protests, a peaceful rally in Vladivostok was brutally broken up by the riot police on December 21; several journalists, too, were beaten and arrested. While television news ignored the incident, many mainstream newspapers did not. Remarkably, several local legislatures in the Far East have backed the protesters’ demands. So far, the government has refused to budge. But what will happen if the ranks of protesters swell from hundreds to hundreds of thousands?

So far, the Kremlin’s strategy for dealing with political opposition is a carrot-and-stick approach. Among the carrots: an effort to co-opt the opposition with the creation of a Kremlin-funded “liberal” party, the Right Cause, and the appointment of a prominent liberal politician, Nikita Belykh, to a governorship. The sticks include proposed legislation that would make it easier to convict dissenters of treason or espionage, at least if they have any foreign contacts, and to take such cases out of jurors’ hands. These laws have drawn objections even from the governmental Public Chamber, a monitoring body meant to function as a collective ombudsman – though whether these objections will have any effect remains doubtful.

Unlike the Communist regime, the authoritarian Russian state still has room for some legal resistance – from the independent media to pro-democracy movements to judges who refuse to convict government critics under vague “extremism” laws. These small islands of freedom face a vastly unequal battle against the forces of repression; but the outcome in this battle is more uncertain than it has been in a long time.

Looking forward to 2009

2009-01-01T15:47:00.001-05:00

2008 has not been the best year of our lives. An election that seemed to have a lot of inspiring potential -- a Republican candidate who once had solid bipartisan appeal, the first serious female presidential contender in U.S. history, a visionary candidate who also happens to be black, a female vice presidential candidate -- turned into a singularly nasty and divisive campaign. (Or does every presidential campaign these days seem nastier and more divisive than all the previous ones?) In Russia, faint hopes of a "Medvedev thaw" were buried in the wreckage of the August war with Georgia, which also pushed Russia and the U.S. close to a "new Cold War." Finally, there was the financial crisis that soon became an economic one. We may not be in for a new Great Depression, but no one doubts that tough times are ahead.

And yet, in the midst of all this, there is good news.

For instance:

(1) Back in October, I wrote:

Many people who are tired of the mudslinging can't wait for the election to be over. But Nov. 4 is unlikely to bring much relief. The dogs of war are loose, and they won't be easy to leash. If, as seems likely, Obama is elected, a large number of people on the right will see him as a stealth radical who won thanks to media bias and rampant voter fraud. If McCain pulls off a surprise upset, at least as many people on the left will blame racism, Republican dirty tricks or both—and some will regard the results as proof that the right-wing cabal behind Bush will never let go of power. Either way, a substantial minority of Americans will see themselves as living under an illegitimate and evil regime.

And that's more frightening than the economic crisis.

I'm happy to say that I seem to have been wrong. With some exceptions (Sean Hannity, and Melanie Phillips), conservatives have been remarkably willing to give Obama a chance. Obama's judiciously centrist picks have had a lot to do with this; but credit also goes to McCain's and Obama's post-election graciousness. And that's a good reason to take pride in the American political system and its ability -- sometimes -- to bring people together.

(2) While Sarah Palin's candidacy proved to be mostly a dud, it did accomplish some positive things. It remolded the conservative "base" in a more feminist direction, by giving it a heroine who was a working mother, a self-proclaimed feminist, and an unabashedly ambitious woman. It also highlighted the need for a more ideologically diverse feminism. No less a feminist than Naomi Wolf (in full throes of Palin Derangement Syndrome this past election cycle) wrote, back in 1993 in her book Fire With Fire, that feminism should discard "litmus tests" on everything from gun ownership to abortion which exclude too many women. Wolf wrote that the beliefs of conservative and Republican women who embrace "self-determination, ownership of business, and individualism" should be "respected as a right-wing version of feminism." Hear, hear.

(3) In Russia, the crisis (accompanied by the steep drop in oil prices) may accomplish what the Medvedev succession did not: weaken the authoritarian state's grip on power. More on that soon. Of course, if there is a new "Russian revolution," it may not be bloodless, and it's far from certain that it will bring the good guys to power.

Stay tuned for 2009. It could turn out to be the best of times and the worst of times. May the "best" part prevail.

Happy New Year to all.

From Russia, with nuttiness

2008-12-31T01:46:00.003-05:00

Anti-American nuttiness in Russia, a subject I have previously plumbed, is the gift that keeps on giving.

Now there's this:

For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

....
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
...

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.

That's from the December 29 Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, on the same day, the website of the pro-government Izvestia, which originally publicized Panarin's ... shall we say, fanciful claims on November 24, ran a short piece titled "Now, America also knows it's due for a collapse." While the title is somewhat sarcastic, the piece, apparently, is not. It claims that Panarin's interview sparked "a stormy discussion and many articles both in Russia and around the world," and notes that "even White House spokeswoman Dana Perino had to fend off questions about the disintegration of the USA." (According to the WSJ: "The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. 'I'll have to decline to comment,' spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.")

Izvestia goes on to say:

A heated discussion also raged on the WSJ website, in which, however, the most common arguments were along the lines of, "Those stupid Russians!" Incidentally, a similar "convenient" stance was adopted by our own "pro-Western" electronic media, which hastened to declare that "not one serious publication has given the professor's amazing forecast any attention." The WSJ, too, prefers to view everything through the lens of Russia. And doesn't bother to explain why this interview elicited a huge response in the USA, rather than here.

Panarin's view "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," the WSJ quotes TV host Vladimir Pozner as saying. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union." It would also be really good to understand where this anti-Americanism came from. Could it be due to the American position on missile defense or South Ossetia? But alas, the WSJ is not interested in digging that deep.

I'm sure it would be news to most Americans, even those who keep up with the Zeitgeist, that Panarin's ravings "elicited a huge response" in the US. (The "response" consisted of a Drudge Report headline and a flurry of blogposts, mostly in the "news of the weird" department.) And is it just me, or is Izvestia admitting, in a roundabout way, that the Russian media are trumpeting this apocalyptic nonsense as "payback" for disagreements over Georgia and missile defense systems in Eastern Europe?

In reality, the promotion of Panarin may be a kind of Freudian projection of much more plausible concerns about the disintegration of Russia (which, unlike the US, does have problems with separatism, including an ever-growing body count in the regions of the Caucasus -- Ingushetia, Dagestan, Northern Ossetia). In a recent survey by the Ekho Moskvy radio station, nearly 70% of those voting online and nearly 80% of call-in voters agreed that "Russia could suffer the same fate as the USSR." While this was not a scientific poll, it does suggest that a significant portion of the Russian public thinks the disintegration of Russia is possible.

And more from the annals of nutty Russian anti-Americanism, circa 2007: a persistent claim that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has expressed the opinion that it's unfair that Russia should have exclusive ownership of a region as rich with natural resources as Siberia. Based on a fake quote, and a 2006 interview with a retired major general of the FSB (former KGB) who claims that Russian intelligence was able to do a psychic reading of Albright's mind in 1999 (seriously) and detected a "pathological hatred of Slavs" as well as intense resentment at the fact that "Russia held the world's largest reserves of natural resources." This interview was not published in the Russian equivalent of Weekly World News but in Rossiskaya Gazeta, the official publication of the Russian government.

(To quote the Russian comedian Mikhail Zhvanetsky: Слов нет -- одни выражения. Which translates loosely into English as: "Words fail. Printable ones, at least.")

The "Albright" line about the injustice of Russia's sole ownership of Siberia has also been attributed to Condoleezza Rice. Take this December 14, 2005 report on the political analysis website Kremlin.org, about public hearings on "New federal initiatives for the modernization of Siberia":

The absence of such a [modernization] strategy at present does not allow Siberian regions to develop in a stable way and leads to stagnation, and in the long term, to the possible loss of Siberia.

This was discussed by the vice president of the Novosibirsk Chamber of Commerce, Yuri Voronov. In his words, "there is powerful pressure to take Siberia away from Russia. Even Condoleezza Rice has declared that Siberia is too big to belong to a single state."

Pretty soon, Hillary Clinton will have said it, too.

Justice, mercy, and goodwill to all men in Putinland

2008-12-27T20:46:00.002-05:00

Svetlana Bakhmina, the jailed former Yukos lawyer who has been denied early release for which she was legally eligible, and who recently gave birth to her third child (conceived during a conjugal visit), did not get the Christmas present her supporters were hoping for. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ignored pleas for a presidential pardon for Bakhmina (from dozens of prominent public figures including actors, writers, artists, TV personalities, and even ex-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev -- as well as, by now, over 91,000 ordinary men and women who have signed an online petition). The case was referred back to the Supreme Court of Mordovia, the region where Bakhmina is serving her sentence. On December 24, the court postponed its decision until January 21 because it has not had enough time to familiarize itself with her her case. (Seriously.) Fortunately, Bakhmina is at least awaiting the resolution of her case in a clinic in a Moscow suburb, rather than in the penal colony. The Yukos oil company is, of course, a longtime target of a political vendetta by the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, Yuri Budanov, the Russian officer who strangled a teenage Chechen girl to death, will be getting out on parole after about 8 years in prison. The victim's family plans to appeal this decision to the Strasbourg-based European Court on Human Rights. (Over a quarter of the court's backlog now consists of Russian cases; of the 192 complaints heard in 2007, 140 were judged valid.)

And another interesting parallel. Another YUKOS defendant, Vasily Alexanian, has been repeatedly and illegally denied bail despite suffering from AIDS and cancer, despite objections from the European Court on Human Rights. When bail was finally set, it was at the prohibitive sum of 50 million rubles, or nearly $2 million. For now, Alexanian, who is reportedly nearly blind, remains in prison -- despite the fact that, legally, the embezzlement charges against him should have been dismissed by now because the statute of limitations has expired.

Meanwhile, Eduard Ulman, a Russian officer who commanded a unit in Chechnya which opened fire on a civilian vehicle and then slaughtered all the survivors including a pregnant woman back in 2002, was released on bail along with his three codefendants. (Of course, for such cases to even come to trial in Russia is rare.) While the four men were convicted and given fairly long prison sentences in June 2007, Ulman and two others skipped bail and remain at large.

... What's that we hear about the unfairness of demonizing Putvedev's Russia?

Islam, Europe, women, sex and modernity

2008-12-27T06:58:00.003-05:00

A fascinating article in The Washington Post about a controversy in France over the annulment of a young Muslim couple's marriage, obtained by the husband on the grounds that the wife was not a virgin. After news got out that the French courts approved the annulment, political activists and commentators were incensed.

From the left and right came a barrage of criticism, suggesting that the decision had given French legal sanction to a Muslim's demand that his bride be a virgin. Elizabeth Badinter, a longtime women's rights campaigner, said she felt "shame" that such a court ruling could be handed down in France.

"This ends up simply pushing many young Muslim girls into hospitals to have their hymen reconstituted," she said.

Laurence Rossignel of the Socialist Party's secretariat for women's rights qualified the decision as "amazing."

"It violates the constitutional principles of equality between men and women and of nondiscrimination, because it cannot be rendered except against a woman," she added. "It makes a mockery of the rights of women over their own bodies and to live their sexuality freely, the way men do."

Under pressure, the Justice Ministry -- headed by Rachida Dati, the daughter of Algerian immigrants (and an unmarried mother-to-be) -- reversed the annulment, effectively remarrying the couple. They will now have to seek a divorce (complicated by the fact that the husband has remarried).

The groom's lawyer thinks the "politically correct" journalists and protesters have invaded the couple's private life to the detriment of both the man and the woman (the wife also wanted the annulment). There may be some truth to the charge that those who made the case public were more concerned with abstract women's rights and liberal values than with the welfare of this particular woman; on the other hand, there is a solid argument to be made that European law should not be enshrining the idea that a man can repudiate his wife for not being a virgin at marriage.

What I find interesting, though, is something else. This is not a conflict between Islamic and Christian culture so much as it is a conflict between traditional and modern culture. Not that long ago, virginity was as much of a requirement in a bride in European societies. There are, indeed, many people in the West (and perhaps especially in the United States) today who are nostalgic for those old-fashioned values, at least in moderate forms. I can think of quite a few American conservatives who would vehemently disagree with the notion that women have a right to "live their sexuality freely, the way men do."

Should everyone who lives in modern societies be required to assimilate to modern values? No, of course not. They should, however, be required to understand that the virtues they cherish cannot be imposed by law or by force. Though, in this case, the annulment may have been unobjectionable since the wife agreed to it.

Christmas meditations

2008-12-26T02:23:00.003-05:00

A New York Times essay offering a different take on the perennial classic It's a Wonderful Life sparks a lively discussion in the comments.

The essay argues that the small-town life Capra's hero embraces at the end is, in fact, terrifyingly and asphyxiatingly oppressive, and that the movie is all about resigning oneself to the loss of dreams, to being trapped in a life of compromise, small-mindedness and conformity. He even asserts that the "Pottersville" of the alternate reality in which Jimmy Stewart's George was never born -- filled with booze and vice -- is a lot more fun than boring New Bedford, where The Bells of St. Mary's is all that passes for entertainment.

Some commenters agree, and also point to the movie's disturbing gender ideology: without George in her life, his wife Mary (Donna Reed) has become -- the horror! -- a single, childless librarian. One poster mentions (approvingly) that Ayn Rand hated this movie because of its emphasis on self-sacrifice and the compromises of adult life. Others defend close-knit communities as well as the idea that adulthood is about accepting compromises and limits, and that life's true satisfaction comes not from chasing adolescent dreams but from family, friends, and community.

This is where I'm always reminded of a famous Niels Bohr quote:

"The opposite of a small truth is a falsehood; the opposite of a great truth is another truth."

There is a great truth in the Randian/libertarian celebration of the free individual, of the stubborn pursuit of one's dreams and visions, of the struggle against limits. There is also a great truth in the conservative/communitarian vision that emphasizes relationships and acceptance of reasonable compromises and limits. Both of these starkly different approaches to life have value -- are, in fact, necessary to a healthy culture, which needs both roots and wings. (I believe the origin of this metaphor is this quote by American motivational speaker Dennis Waitley.) So do the vast majority of individuals, even if some can be perfectly happy pursuing their individualist dreams with no human ties and some can be perfectly happy living completely for others.

Of course, each vision also has a seamy side. A lot of "autonomous individuals" who pride themselves on never compromising and never "settling" are not Randian Howard Roarks but obnoxious, egotistical jerks with a very exaggerated notion of their own talent. A lot of lives that revolve around family, community and self-sacrifice are poisoned by undercurrents of bitterness, resentments, and suppressed conflicts. And so on.

But in the spirit of the holiday, let's focus on the positives. Here's to roots and wings. And to the fact that American culture is big enough to accommodate Frank Capra and Ayn Rand.

Happy holidays to all

2008-12-26T02:11:00.008-05:00

This is the 300th post on this blog. (About time, too.)

And it's a fluffy, content-free, positive (even multiculturally positive) one.

A good sign? a bad sign? Not, one hopes, a sign of things to come.

Enjoy the season, everyone.

More Russia news: the good and the bad

2008-12-15T21:11:00.002-05:00

According to Moscow Times:

In a rare example of grassroots political power, angry protests by drivers prompted lawmakers in the far eastern Primorye region on Monday to ask the country's two leaders to delay raising import duties on foreign cars. The Primorye regional legislature, led by United Russia deputies, voted unanimously Monday to ask President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to postpone the tariffs, which take effect on Jan. 11, according to a decree signed by Putin. Thousands of drivers took to the streets in several far eastern cities and towns Sunday to protest the tariffs, blocking traffic, clashing with police, openly insulting Putin and Medvedev and even calling on Putin to resign. Putin's decree would increase the prices for imported cars by between 10 and 20 percent, a move the government has defended as a way of protecting domestic auto makers during the growing financial crisis.

According to the Russian daily Kommersant, similar though less massive protests took place in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk. In Novosibirsk, an officially sanctioned picket of 100 people on the main city square was joined by 200 cars whose drivers argued with the police and tried to block traffic. In Krasnoyarsk, a column of 300 cars sporting black ribbons drove very slowly through city streets, then parked across from the regional government headquarters and honked their horns for fives minutes. Many people who drove by also honked in support.

Slogans at the rallies -- carried by protesters on foot or displayed on the rear windows of cars -- included: "Putin, trade your Mercedes for a Volga!", "Mr. Putin, help the tycoons out of your own pocket!", and "Raise the tariffs on the actions of the Russian government."

In Vladivostok, when Mayor Alexei Pushkarev begged the protesters to disperse, saying that they had already made their point, some people in the crowd shouted, "We need Channel One so that the whole country would know about our demands: no higher tariffs and cheaper gasoline!" Indeed, none of the state-controlled TV channels have given the protests any coverage at all. The average Russian will know nothing about them, neutralizing the potentially empowering and mobilizing effect of these events.

All this happens at a time when Putin's aura as the savior of the nation may be finally wearing off. According to a new poll by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, reported in Izvestia, not only did Putin's televised Q & A with the people have a smaller audience than in previous years (17%), but only 48% of those who watched said they were satisfied with Putin's answers.

Meanwhile, there are more signs that the Kremlin is preparing to tighten its grip on dissent, or at least to give itself a weapon to squash dissent when they want to. A new law submitted to the parliament by the government would broaden the definition of treason. Existing Russian law defines treason as "hostile actions intended to damage the security of the Russian Federation against foreign threats." In the amended version, the definition of treason would include "rendering financial, material, consultative, or other assistance to a foreign state, a foreign or international organization, or representatives thereof in activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional system, its sovereignty, its territorial integrity and statehood." Many human rights activists are concerned that this signifies a de facto return to Stalinist law which made "anti-Soviet activity" a crime. Perhaps this is hyperbole, but is it too much of a stretch to think that this law could be directed against an opposition newspaper or website, or a human rights group critical of the government, which has received assistance from the USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the Soros Foundation?

Anti-American film bombs in Russia

2008-12-15T21:05:00.003-05:00

What if they made a rabidly anti-American movie in Russia that was supposed to capitalize on anti-American sentiment stirred up by the war in Georgia ... and nobody came? My article on the movie Chuzhiye (Strangers) in The New Republic online.

Demonizing the Putin regime?

2008-12-14T20:33:00.003-05:00

Sean's Russia Blog has a post (based on an article by Mark Ames) lambasting Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt of disregarding facts in a rush to conclude that the mercury poisoning in France of Karina Moskalenko, lawyer for the family of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was probably an assassination attempt linked to Russia. It now appears clear that Moskalenko's poisoning was an accident, due to the fact that the previous owner of the used car she had bought in August had broken a thermometer in it. Sean accuses WaPo of being "vociferous in painting Russian (sic) and Putin as a neo-Evil Empire" and, with Ames, laments this "incessant demonization."

Was there a rush to the judgment by the WaPo editorial page? Sounds like it. Is there a tendency, after a string of unsolved murders of Russian politicians and journalists who were on the wrong side of Putin's favor, to see the long hand of Putin behind every suspicious death or illness? I'm sure there is. To be honest, I would prefer to believe that Putin was not involved in any of those murders, if only because the thought that the de facto leader of a nuclear power with a population of nearly 150 million is capable of common, naked criminal acts of the worst kind -- not just bending the law for what he sees as the common good, but plain and simple crimes -- is a little too scary.

However, it seems to me that the Putin (now, Putin/Medvedev) regime needs no demonizing. Exhibit A: The horrific treatment of Vasily Alexanian, the terminally ill ex-Yukos lawyer who is currently in prison on charges of embezzlement (widely viewed as a tactic to pressure him into testifying against his former boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky). Alexanian has AIDS and cancer, and is reported to be virtually blind. Russian law requires him to be released due to the state of his health (and also because the statute of limitation on his alleged crimes has now expired). Yet he is still in a prison hospital, for no apparent reason than the Putin clique's maniacal vendetta against Khodorkovsky and Yukos. The latest news in his case is that the government is now willing to release him -- on 50 million rubles (about $1.6 million) bail. You can't really demonize people who do that. They've done a fine job of demonizing themselves.

Sean Guillory, who writes Sean's Russia blog, sincerely loves and cares about Russia, and that is, of course, a good thing. Unfortunately, I think this often leads him to see justify criticisms of Russia's government and society as Western maligning of Russia. In discussing the Litvinenko poisoning case two years ago, Sean lamented the Western media's readiness to paint Russia as "some sort of abnormal society." Okay, let's assume for the moment that it's not so abnormal as to have a government that poisons its critics. But is today's suppression of the opposition rallies in Moscow the mark of a "normal society"? How about the fact that none of these rallies were mentioned on the television news? How about the fact that there has been no news coverage of the massive protests in Vladivostok (not directly political, since they have to do with new tariffs on the import of used foreign cars, but still directed against the authorities)? Is that "normal"?

And something else I found jarring, reading Sean's October 23 post on the Moskalenko case:

Westerners should be more cautious in making Russia’s “fierce critics’” every word sacrosanct. We might recognize that some of these people are victims of their own paranoia and self-deluded sense of importance. They are not martyrs, saints, or saviors. No matter how much they want us to think they are.

Are all fierce critics of Putin's Russia saints or wise men and women? Of course not. (Eduard Limonov, for instance, is a nut and a narcissist.) But the dismissive tone toward people who are taking substantial personal risks in taking on a repressive machine grates. (Does Sean have any reason to believe Moskalenko has delusions of grandeur? I would say that in her case, paranoia is not an irrational reaction. Even the paranoid have enemies -- but, by the same token, even those who have real enemies are sometimes paranoid.)

I find it deeply offensive when the likes of LaRussophobe shower the mass of the Russian people with dehumanizing contempt for their submission to Putin and their indifference to human rights violations in Russia. It's easy for someone who has never lived under a dictatorship, and never endured the chaos, uncertainty, and privations that came with freedom after that dictatorship's collapse, to pass high-handed judgment on people who are grateful to have a semblance of a normal life. Easy, and frankly revolting. (Besides, how many Americans -- living in a democracy -- protested slavery or segregation?) However, it's also ... shall we say, not very attractive to heap scorn on people who are willing to do the heroic work of challenging an authoritarian state, from the comfortable perch of someone who is very unlikely to ever be in their shoes.

Russia: Freedom and thuggery

2008-12-14T14:47:00.004-05:00

A day of "Marches of Dissent" in Moscow and St. Petersburg has been marked by massive police action, including about 90 arrests in Moscow and 10 in St. Petersburg and the cordoning off of two squares by Moscow police.

According to CNN.com:

A spokesman for Moscow City Hall told Interfax [the rally organizers] had been offered places to hold a rally, "but they again deliberately staged provocations and called on their supporters to attend unauthorized events."

This is, of course, a load of B.S. The organizers of the rally, the Other Russia coalition, had legally applied for permission to hold the rally at central locations in downtown Moscow (Triumph Square and Pushkin Square). Instead, they were offered "alternate locations" in godforsaken places. For those familiar with New York geography, it would be a bit like an organization wanting to march down 5th Avenue and being offered an alternate location in Washington Heights. It should be noted that The Other Russia tried repeatedly to negotiate a compromise with City Hall, to no avail.

[More: A correction is in order. The alternate location offered to The Other Russia was Bolotnaya Square -- literally meaning "Swamp Square" -- which is, in fact, fairly close to the Kremlin. The organizers' objection to this location was that it's relatively unpopulated, away from the main flow of the crowds in downtown Moscow, and would impede their goal of "interaction with the people." Bolotnaya is more a park than a square, and serves mainly as a hangout for young people and a spot for fire shows.]

Those arrested included fifty retired generals (who had joined the protest in the vain hope that the police would not have the nerve to arrest armed force veterans) as well as Roman Dobrokhotov, the brave young man who interrupted Dmitry Medvedev's Constitution Day speech in the Kremlin the other day.

A few dozens dissenters (50 according to the Associated Press, 80 or 90 according to reports in the independent Russian media) were able to hold a brief march in an alternate Moscow location that was not disclosed in advance, blocking off Sadovaya Street for a while.

In St. Petersburg, where the city authorities allowed a rally but not a march, things went more peacefully, though harassment of opposition activists (including, in one case, a beating that left the victim hospitalized) is still reported.

It is often said that the liberal opposition in Russia has no base, and to a large extent that's probably true. Still, the government's actions show that it's afraid of the opposition broadening its influence. Those actions, moreover, are not only thuggish but dumb. Suppressing the rallies draws more attention than letting them happen unmolested.

Speaking of thuggery, a remarkable (and truly disgusting) act thereof took place on December 12 in the Moscow suburb of Khimki, where 100 to 200 opposition activists (including chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov) gathered for the founding congress of a movement called Solidarity.

According to a BBC report:

A pro-Kremlin youth movement, Young Russia, set off smoke bombs outside the conference hall. Some wore monkey masks and taunted delegates by tossing bananas at them.

But the BBC omits any mention of antoher stunt by members on one of the pro-government youth movements that specialize in harassing opposition activists: releasing live sheep, clad in shirts and caps with a Solidarity logo, outside the conference center (apparently to make the point that the conference attendees were "sheep"). Three of the sheep died for unknown reasons (perhaps due to being roughly tossed from the bus that brought them in). Eyewitnesses say several others had broken legs. A video made by opposition activist Oleg Kozlovsky captures a part of the outrageous event. (Warning: video contains brief images of dead animals.)

Will the thugs be prosecuted for animal abuse? Don't hold your breath.

More: On its website, The Young Guard claims that it was not behind the stunt with the sheep, and that it approves of the "political content" of the action but deplores animal abuse. Its site also features a video that purports to rebut allegations that the sheep were abused. Of course, this video -- apparently shot by people associated with the stunt -- shows only that some of the sheep were unharmed and in no way disproves Kozlovsky's video.

Russia: Freedom springs eternal

2008-12-13T18:31:00.004-05:00

Via Robert Amsterdam, an article from The Economist about acts of civic courage by ordinary Russians: a juror in the Anna Politkovskaya murder case going public to dispute the judge's claim that the jury has asked for the trial to be held behind closed door (causing the trial to be opened to the public and the media again), drivers in Moscow taking over a special lane reserved for high-level government officials. And there's more.

On December 5, the Basmanny district court in Moscow -- a court whose past actions have made it a synonym, among Russian dissenters, for a kangaroo court doing the government's bidding -- acquitted writer and political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky of charges of "extremism." The charges against Piontkovsky, a pro-Western, outspoken critic of the Putin regime, were based on the prosecutors' conclusion that his book Unloved Country contains incitement of ethnic hatred and "statements demeaning to Russians, Jews, and Americans." (No specific examples were given.)

Three experts from the Russian Federal Center for Expert Witnesses concluded that nothing in Piontkovsky's book could be interpreted as incitement to hatred or violence.

Said Piontkovsky (alas, Russian link only):

The FSB and the prosecutors, armed with the new law on extremism, tried to conduct a show trial and create a precedent for criminal prosecution for criticism of the government.

The highly professional conclusion of Andrei Smirnov, Olga Kukushkina and Yulia Safonova, buttressed by scholarly arguments, has knocked -- for a long time, I hope -- this "punishing sword" out of the hands of the repressive machine.

The official conclusion of these three remarkable and courageous professionals should be disseminated by the media as much as possible. It is our small Magna Carta, a charter of freedoms -- a first step toward the restoration of freedom of speech traitorously stolen from society by the KGB lieutenant colonel who fancies himself "the father of the nation."

And there's more. On December 6, the half-hour comedy show ProjectParisHilton on Russia's Channel One, in which four comedians discuss current events, included a segment on Putin's December 4 televised "question and answer session" with the people that was virtually an overt parody of the Vladimir Show, with the comedians offering to field audience questions that "Putin didn't get a chance to answer" and giving Putin-style vacuous answers. (Video to come, once I have a chance to add subtitles.)

In the meantime, another video. As Russia officially celebrated the 15th anniversary of its post-Soviet Constitution -- ironically, just as this constitution is about to be hastily amended to extend the presidential term from four years to six -- Medvedev's speech at the anniversary conference at the Kremlin was interrupted by a heckler. No less remarkably, a report on the incident was broadcast on television, though only on a local St. Petersburg channel.

Before we get all optimistic, the next day Dobrokhotov -- an activist with the opposition group "We"-- lost his job as the host of a weekly one-hour debate program on the "Moscow Speaks" radio station. The station chief claims that this was a planned layoff affecting all free-lance workers at the station. Interestingly, Dobrokhotov seems to give this explanation some credence, saying that the chief has always been candid with him in the past and that his participation in public protests has not previously affected his job. Still, the timing in suspicious at best.

On Sunday, "marches of dissent" are planned in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Stay tuned.

More about gender differences and competition

2008-12-07T06:31:00.002-05:00

One of the truisms of the neo-paleo-conventional wisdom on gender is that women are less competitive than men. They choose non-competitive activities when given a choice, and don't enjoy competition the way men do when they have to compete. They particularly don't like to compete against men.

So, is it true?

A couple of interesting studies casting doubt on this proposition:

Gender differences in preferences for competition may have a large cultural component. Among the Khasi, a matrileneal and quasi-matriarchal culture in India, women are more likely than men to select competitive tasks and environments.

Women's competition aversion may also be peculiar to activities in which men are commonly perceived to excel more than women. In other words, it may be related to "stereotype threat."

Is this the final word? Does this prove that there are no inherent differences between men and women in level of (and enjoyment of) competitiveness? No, of course not. It's just an interesting challenge to conventional wisdom.

Putvedev as Pinky and the Brain

2008-12-07T00:46:00.003-05:00

Everything you always wanted to know about the Putin/Medvedev "tandem," but were afraid to ask.

This video clip uses the Russian lyrics for the "Pinky and the Brain" theme song (yes, Pinky and the Brain has aired on Russian television). I decided to add subtitles with a back-translation of the Russian lyrics, since they differ substantially from the original and present the duo in a rather more malevolent light than the far more benign English version.

The paradoxes of gender gaps

2008-12-06T03:44:00.003-05:00

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus has an interesting column on the controversy that continues to dog former Harvard president Larry Summers.

Was Larry Summers right about women and science after all?

As the mother of two daughters, I hope not. In fact, Summers himself said in his infamous comments about intrinsic differences between the genders, "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong."

But Summers may have been on to something, recent research suggests.

Marcus then goes on to summarize the research showing that more males are clustered at the upper end of the distribution of mathematical and science ability, as well as evidence that (as Summers suggested as one of the possible explanations for the gender disperities in science and technology fields) women choose different levels of commitment to family life.

And then she ends thusly:

In short, Summers was boneheaded to say what he did. But he probably had a legitimate point -- and the continuing uproar says more about the triumph of political correctness than about Summers' supposed sexism.

How's that again?

Summers had a legitimate point, and the uproar (which, Marcus says, may have cost him the job of Secretary of the Treasury) was an expression of dogmatic ideological intolerance ... but Summers was boneheaded to say what he did?

Here's my own take on Larry Summers, from 2005.

Right now, we're in a paradoxical place when it comes to cultural attitudes toward sex differences. On the one hand, in certain still-influential feminist circles, there remains a ferocious insistence on unisex dogma, so that any discussion of possible innate sex difference -- especially in a context that seems to justify existing gender imbalances -- is seen as a shocking and punishable heresy. On the other hand, there is a pervasive "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" conventional wisdom that, nowadays, is quite acceptable in polite society (and is often accompanied by facile references to neurobiology).

As an example, I give you Sandra Tsing Loh's article in the November 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, "Should Women Rule?", which discusses several books about politics (including Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers) and a book on the biology of sex differences, The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap by Susan Pinker). On the basis of Pinker's book, Loh makes sweeping conclusions about women and power. Women, it seems, are "consensus-minded and team-oriented" and averse to compeition:

Consider this startling study done with fourth-grade Israeli schoolchildren: when boys and girls each ran alone on a track, there was no measurable speed difference by gender. But when each child was teamed with another child and asked to run again, the boys ran faster and the girls ran slower—slowest of all when running against other girls! What females love is bonding, helping, sharing, and oxytocin—that “opiatelike hormone” dubbed by one anthropologist “the elixir of contentment.” Forget all this tedious racing: what girls would really like to do is carry each other around the track—taking turns! Indeed, studies show that whereas competitive situations drive adrenaline increases in men, they drive adrenaline decreases in most women. Men associate more pleasurable feelings with competition than do women, and even “an eagerness to punish and seek revenge feels more fun.”

She then suggests that instead of trying to "rule the world," women can "change it" through grass-roots organizing -- things like protests against cuts in school funding or rallies for gun control. (I wonder if conservative causes such as opposition to abortion would pass muster?) Because, of course, men have never run grass-roots protests.

Crowding, in fact, may be more effective for women than ruling when it comes to changing the world. While at a biological disadvantage in competitions, women—who even make trips to restaurant bathrooms in pairs—are at a clear advantage when it comes to grouping together and the activities that accompany it: gossiping, sharing, bonding, assisting, scrapbooking, and building networks.

Given the apparent female neuroendocrinic aversion to competitive, winner-take-all activities like elections, unless testosterone shots become a new female norm, even democracy (thanks, Founding Fathers!), with its boastful, chest-beating campaigning, is clearly stacked against female candidates.

So, Loh concludes, let's get to work on "crowding." (Completely forgotten is her own mention, earlier in the article, of famous "dragon ladies" who could participate in ruthless competition with meanest of men: "Queen of Mean" Leona Helmsley, publishing shark Judith Regan, Vogue editor Anna Wintour.)

I'm not a dogmatic "old-school" feminist on the issue of sex differences. However, does anyone who has lived in the real world seriously believe this tripe about women's niceness? Yes, there is evidence that women are more "relationally" oriented and more attuned to the moods and feelings of other people, but as often as not this translates into using relationships and feelings to establish dominance and inflict punishment/revenge. To quote the memorable words of the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (from the 1993 book Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism): "Those who have experienced dismissal by the junior high school girls' clique could hardly, with a straight face, claim generosity and nurture as a natural attribute of women."
Even before feminism, women competed plenty in "feminine" spheres (and of conversely, of course, there was always plenty of cooperation in the "masculine" world; even war, that most masculine of spheres, is as much about brotherhood as it is about the pursuit of dominance and about dog eating dog). Today, the world is full of women who compete gleefully in sports, business, and yes, politics.

Are there real, innate psychological and intellectual differences between men and women? Most likely yes; but in most cases they are vastly attenuated by individual differences, and that is something both unisex feminists and sex-difference proponents tend to miss. Quite often, the former tend to make a pro forma nod to biology ("of course no one says men and women are exactly the same") and then go on to react with hostility and intolerance to any actual suggestion of sex differences, while the latter tend to make a pro forma nod to individual variation ("of course sex differences are not absolutes, they're just a matter of tendencies and degrees") and then go on to to make sweeping statements in which men are this and women are that.

Shameless self-promotion alert: this is where I suggest a chapter from my 1999 book Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, adapted into a Reason essay titled "Sex and Sensibility." I don't think it's particularly dated. Looking over some relevant passages from Pinker's book, I discovered an amusing coincidence: at one point, we both discuss the same study, but in a rather different vein.

Pinker:

One study showed how four- and five-year-old boys and girls were motivated by the same goal but reached it through different means. When these preschoolers needed to work together to watch a cartoon, boys used competition and physical tactics fifty times more often than girls. Meanwhile, girls used talking and turn-taking twenty times more often than boys.

Me:

In an especially intriguing experiment, preschoolers in single-sex groups of four were given a film viewer designed so that a child could watch a cartoon through an eyepiece only if two others cooperated by turning a crank and pressing a switch. There was much more playful pushing and hitting among boys. But the girls weren't shy about giving orders, using putdowns, or even blocking the viewer so that another child couldn't watch. Moreover, girl groups tended to have "a single dominant individual," while boys showed "more equal participation" in viewing. Nor did the alpha females get to the top by being nurturing: They gave commands, hit, and disrupted others' viewing much more often than other girls.

Is it really that difficult to simultaneously hold in our heads the proposition that there are real, biologically influenced behavior differences between men and women on average, and that these average differences tell us next to nothing about any given individual? Even when male and female tactics are visibly different, the differences are often of style rather than substance -- not male competition and power struggles vs. female bonding and sharing, but different ways of competing and cooperating.

By the way, I find Summers's much-maligned speech to be far less demeaning to women than Loh's musings. The idea that fewer women than men may rise to the pinnacle of some human endeavors while competing on the same terms does not, to be honest, bother me tremendously (any more than the fact that there are more males at the bottom of the pyramid). "Difference feminism," on the other hand, seems to simply take women out of the human enterprise of achievement, individual initiative and, yes, competition, and consign them to some gooey collectivity. Visions of crowding, grouping, bonding females traveling to the bathroom together and organizing into egalitarian groups for a properly feminine cause is enough to make me cheer for Margaret "The Iron Lady" Thatcher, or perhaps even Sarah "Barracuda" Palin. Let's hear it for the alpha females.

Russia/NATO update

2008-12-04T02:28:00.003-05:00

Some Russia/NATO contacts, frozen in the wake of the Georgia conflict, are now resuming. Also, much to Russia's rejoicing, Georgia and Ukraine have not received a NATO Membership Action Plan. Russia sees this as a victory. However:

[Georgian foreign minister Eka] Tkeshelashvili expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the meeting, in which ministers reconfirmed that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members of NATO and said NATO would accelerate cooperative reform programs with both countries through existing NATO commissions.

The commissions will work on annual assessments of each country’s security and political needs, and on reforms to help them on the long path of NATO membership.
Ms. Tkeshelashvili said that Georgia welcomed “a commitment to the process by which we can achieve our goal” of membership, “with maximized efforts to assist Georgia.”

The ministers decided to move ahead with that cooperation and leave to the future, “without prejudice,” decisions about whether both countries will also need to go through a formal “membership action plan,” as Germany and France now insist.

Who's blustering? Russia? Georgia? Both?

Clearly, both Georgia and Ukraine have major domestic problems that would be an obstacle to NATO membership even without concerns about antagonizing Russia. It's hard to say to what extent opposition within NATO to an immediate MAP for Georgia and Ukraine was driven by such concerns. Sure, NATO wants cooperation with Russia, but the respect Russia so craves seems elusive. I was amused by the comments of NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer:

Mr. de Hoop Scheffer, speaking in an interview after the conclusion of a two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers, said that Russia’s sense of grievance and encirclement, genuine or not, was difficult for the alliance to assuage.

“It’s not so easy to know how to approach someone, in daily life or in foreign policy, who feels themselves victimized,” he said. “I think there is no reason for Russia to feel victimized, not to be taken seriously, but if that is the perception, we have to discuss it, because I have to try to convince them that democracy and the rule of law coming closer to Russia’s borders – why should that be a problem?”

Do you get the feeling that Russia is being treated like the crazy aunt who needs to be humored because she's got a large estate and because she just might burn the place down if gets really crazy?

The NATO foreign ministers also brushed asside Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's vague proposals for a new "security architecture" in Europe (overtures which the brilliant Russian humorist Victor Shenderovich, speaking on Ekho Moskvy radio, has likened to the behavior of a problem student who is invited for a conference with faculty and administrators and, instead of being glad that he hasn't been expelled from college for bad grades and bad conduct, starts sharing his ideas about how to run the college better). And another bit of important news buried inside the Times report:

In a final communiqué, which went through 22 drafts, officials said, the foreign ministers gave their unanimous support to the planned deployment in Europe of an American missile defense system, which Washington says is aimed at Iran, not Russia. The ministers called it “a substantial contribution” to Western defense and encouraged Russia to take up American proposals for greater cooperation on missile defense.

Support from the NATO foreign ministers is important; with that, the missile defense installation can hardly be portrayed as a unilateral push by arrogant America.

Stay tuned!

When atheists attack: The "War on Christmas" redux

2008-12-03T23:41:00.002-05:00

Okay, I hate to admit it when Bill O'Reilly has a point in his latest "War on Christmas" crusade (see here, here and here on its previous installments), but this time, he does.

At issue is an atheist billboard displayed in the Washington State Capitol in Olympia, Wa. along with a "Holiday tree" and a nativity scene. (Apparently, there is no menorah this year.)

The placard, installed by local members of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, reads:

At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

More on the story here.

According to Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, and State Attorney General Rob McKenna, a Republican, it is the state's policy to allow any group to sponsor a holiday display "regardless of that individual's or group's views."

Here's the problem. The atheist display doesn't simply express the beliefs of atheists or secularists; it attacks the beliefs of the religious. Its message, except for the first line, is entirely negative, and the last line is actively insulting to believers, implying that they are hard-hearted and weak-minded.

A Christmas display on public property, paid for by the taxpayer, that explicitly attacked non-believers would be inappropriate. So is this.

Perhaps Gregoire and McKenna are right as a matter of publc policy. (Though, if all viewpoints may be represented in holiday displays in the State Capitol, where do you draw the line? Would a placard urging Jews to convert to Christianity be appropriate? How about a "God Hates Fags" placard from the abominable Fred Phelps?) However, those fine folks from the Freedom from Religion Foundation are wrong as a matter of respect, civility, and common sense. They have chosen to express their views in a manner almost calculated to cause irritation. They are also perpetuating the stereotype -- which underlies much of the hostility to atheists in America -- that an atheist is not just a non-believer but someone who actively attacks and denigrates religion.

If they truly wanted to get into the holiday spirit, how about a placard saying something like, "At this season of the Winter Solstice, those of us who do not believe in a deity celebrate the beauty of the natural world and join believers in wishing for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men." A positive message that, among other things, would have countered the widespread notion that atheists "believe in nothing."

Russian anti-Americanism, NATO expansion, and the missile shield

2008-11-23T01:23:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, my column, From Russia with loathing, on Russian anti-Americanism, ran on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

SHORTLY before the presidential election, at a discussion about Russian-American relations I attended in Cambridge, Mass., speakers from both countries voiced the hope that the election of Barack Obama would signal the renewal of a beautiful friendship. These hopes were chilled the day after Mr. Obama won. In an address to the Russian Parliament, President Dmitri Medvedev welcomed President-elect Obama with a threat to deploy Russian missiles on the Polish border if the United States put anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe. While some conciliatory signals followed, it seems clear that the Kremlin intends to keep the “new cold war” going.

Just three days before Mr. Medvedev’s speech, the state-subsidized youth movement Nashi staged a Halloween-themed rally in front of the American Embassy in Moscow. Nearly 20,000 young people held pumpkins marked with the names of “America’s victims,” among them the casualties in South Ossetia. In an amateur film shown at the rally, an actor portraying a drunken George W. Bush bragged that the United States had engineered both world wars and the rise of Hitler to expand its power.

Leonid Radzikhovsky, a Russian journalist, has said that “the existential void of our politics has been filled entirely by anti-Americanism,” and that to renounce this rhetoric “would be tantamount to destroying the foundations of the state ideology.” There is a notion, popular in Russia and among some Western analysts, that this anti-Americanism is a response to perceived threats to Russia’s security — above all, NATO expansion and missile defense in Eastern Europe. Yet top military experts like Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, a former high-level official in the Russian Defense Ministry, are convinced that neither the missile shield nor NATO expansion pose any military threat to Russia.

Russia’s post-cold war humiliation is real. But as the human rights activist Elena Bonner, widow of the great scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, told me recently: “Nobody humiliated Russia. Russia humiliated itself.”

In the post-Soviet era, many Russians are angry because their country has neither the stature nor the living standards that they believe it deserves. Polls shows that most Russians actually favor a Western way of life. Nearly two-thirds would rather live in a well-off country than in one that is poorer but more powerful and feared by others. Unfortunately, most also believe their country will not reach Western levels of well-being any time soon, if ever. As frustrations mount, it is often easier to blame an external force than the country’s own failings. It doesn’t help that the 1990s, when pro-Western attitudes were at their peak, are remembered as a time of poverty and insecurity.

The result is an inferiority complex toward the West and, in particular, the United States, as the pre-eminent Western power and cold war rival. This widespread sentiment combines admiration, envy, grievance, resentment, and craving for respect and acceptance as an equal. Most Russians viewed the recent conflict in Georgia as a victory over the Americans — a matter less of strategic self-interest than of psychological self-assertion.

In his Nov. 5 speech, President Medvedev asserted that “we have no inherent anti-Americanism.” True enough, but in recent years, anti-Americanism has been carefully cultivated by official and semi-official propaganda, especially on government-controlled television, which manipulates popular insecurities and easily slides into outright paranoia.

In 2005, Sergey Lisovsky, then the deputy chairman of the Committee on Agricultural and Food Policy of the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament, said that the avian flu was a myth created by the Americans to destroy Russia’s poultry farming industry. This year, Russian television commemorated the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, with a prime-time program promoting the conspiracy theory that the attacks were engineered by American imperialists in order to unleash war. A staggering 43 percent of Russians agreed in a poll last year that “one of the goals of the foreign policy of the United States is the total destruction of Russia.”

Today, the government may be especially anxious to ratchet up anti-Americanism in response to the election of Mr. Obama, who is likely to make it more difficult for Russia to exploit animosity toward the United States in Europe and even the Third World.

Mr. Obama and his administration need to respond with both firmness and flexibility. He should indicate that we will help the democracies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to resist Russian bullying while also making it clear that we do not seek confrontation with Russia for confrontation’s sake.

One of Mr. Obama’s top Russia advisers, Michael McFaul, has suggested offering Russia a path toward membership in NATO. The current Russian leadership would, of course, reject any such offer, because it would entail democratic reforms that Russia is not willing to undertake. But the offer would give Russian reformers a tangible goal, and make it harder to convince ordinary Russians that America will always treat Russia as the enemy.

Mr. Obama should make the offer in person, during a trip to Russia. Ronald Reagan’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1988 went a long way toward dispelling anti-American stereotypes in the minds of many Russians during the twilight of the cold war. Mr. Obama, the object of a great deal of curiosity and fascination, is one American politician who could repeat that feat.

To this, American Conservative's Daniel Larison responds:

The main claim that Lieven and I and others make that, in his words, “Russian policy at the moment is overwhelmingly a reaction to what the West is doing” is strongly disputed or simply ignored by a disturbingly large number of people in American government and media. To take one example, today Cathy Young bores us with yet another of her myopic columns disputing precisely this claim, the recognition of which is vital to correcting the errors of the last two decades. Inside government, it is more or less taken as a given that the Russians really have nothing to complain about. The administration maintains, however implausibly, that missile defense in Europe has nothing to do with Russia, NATO expansion has nothing to do with Russia, and on and on. These people are somehow unable or unwilling to comprehend that power projection and expansion of a military alliance to Russia’s doorstep will trigger and have triggered hostile reactions.

If Moscow cultivates or uses anti-American sentiment for its own purposes, which is actually beside the point, that sentiment exists and has been increased extraordinarily by what the U.S. government has done and what it proposes to do in post-Soviet space. One of the most dominant myths that prevails in America today is that anti-Americanism is merely an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one’s own society (Young recites all of this as you would expect) and has nothing or next to nothing to do with the substance of policy and the aggressive interference that the policy often represents. One of the biggest obstacles to radical change in our Russia policy is this inability or unwillingness to understand this, just as our government seems unable or unwilling to understand why anti-Americanism in Turkey of all places is at record highs. It is much more reassuring to hear that this is just something that results from the actions of a foreign government, which allows us to overlook our role in generating these resentments and reactions.

Allow me to bore you -- "you" being the "us" Mr. Larison refers to -- with a few more thoughts. First of all, I have never claimed that all anti-Americanism is "an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one's own society." I do, as a matter of fact, think that the unilateralism espoused by the Bush administration in GWB's first term was an egregiously bad idea. (In the early days of the war in Iraq, I attended a talk by Charles Krauthammer at the Manhattan Institute arguing that in our new unipolar world, the U.S. should make foreign policy decisions on its own and merely pretend to consult our allies to make them feel better. Uh-oh, I thought.) It not only caused a justified backlash, it also empowered authoritarians like Vladimir Putin to think that "might makes right" was the new American philosophy, so why not get in on the game.

Anti-Americanism in Turkey is a whole other story. It stems mostly from a controversial 2003 incident that included possible questionable activity by Turkey aimed against Iraqi Kurds, and possible mishandling of a sensitive situation by U.S. forces. The resulting bad feeling in Turkey has been further fed by the anti-American, anti-Semitic blockbuster film Valley of the Wolves Iraq, which accuses the U.S. of killing Iraqis for their organs and alleges that the human organ trade was a principal motive for the invasion of Iraq. (And you thought blood for oil was bad.) Whatever responsibility the U.S. may bear for the deterioration of the relationship, is it totally preposterous to suggest that Turkey's internal tensions between secularism and fundamentalist religion might contribute to anti-Americanism (synonymous with rejection of modernity)?

I am not an expert on Turkey. I do, however, have some modest pretensions to being an expert on Russia. And if Mr. Larison thinks I'm bound by American myopia, here's an excellent short essay on the subject straight from the horse's mouth -- or from the belly of the beast, if you will -- by Moscow writer and essayist Lev Rubinshtein.

On to the issue of alleged American threats to Russia. We have heard a lot about how Russia has every reason to feel threatened by NATO "encirclement." Not long ago, there was an interesting exchange on Ekho Moskvy radio between former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and station chief Alexei Venediktov. It started when Gorbachev mentioned Bill Clinton's push for NATO expansion as proof that a Democrat in the White House isn't necessarily better for Russia.

Venediktov: But you weren't particularly scared of NATO.
Gorbachev: What's there to be scared of?
Venediktov: I don't know, but everyone seems to be scared.
Gorbachev: Actually, the point is not that people are scared of NATO but that this raises the question: what's the agenda behind it? I think they see in the United States that the situation is such that they are losing their global dominance, it's going away. Already today, the European Union has a population of half a billion, that's more than the USA. Today the combined GDP of the EU is more than that of the USA. They're lagging behind in the newest technologies. So what's the United States' answer to this? They plunge into an arms race in the belief that only strength can save them. I think they're mistaken.

I am looking in vain for the logic here; what on earth does NATO expansion have to do with the arms race, or with the US shoring up its dominance, considering that most of the EU is part of NATO? But that aside, what I find revealing is Gorbachev's off-the-cuff response, "What's there to be scared of"?

Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin (a former top-level Soviet arms negotiator) has an interesting article on the subject (in Russian). He points out that, given Russia's nuclear potential, a military attack by NATO forces on Russia is unthinkable no matter how many of Russia's neighbors join NATO. The real danger for Russia, in Dvorkin's view, is that it may face "civilizational isolation" if it continues to refuse to democratize and modernize its society, and finds itself surrounded by neighbors integrated into the democratic capitalist West.

In this context, it is useful to recall that Russia's sharp anti-Western and anti-American turn came after the "color revolutions" of Ukraine and Georgia -- peaceful revolutions from below that brought down authoritarian regimes by challenging rigged elections. The Putinistas got a bad scare (today Kiev and Tbilisi, tomorrow Moscow...), and their response was to blame the insidious U.S. conspiracy, with George Soros and George W. Bush implicated in the same plot.

As for the missile defense shield: whether or not it's an effective defense for a missile launched by a rogue state is an issue for another day. The point is, there is simply no way that it could protect the United States from a nuclear counterstrike by Russia (and thus give the U.S. the ability to make a first strike). Russian foreign policy analyst Fyodor Lukyanov acknowledges this, but then goes to say:

The missile-defense elements planned for Poland and the Czech Republic are the third phase of what is most likely a broader U.S. strategy to build a universal missile-defense shield that covers the entire globe. After the third phase we could see the United States building a fourth, fifth and sixth phase. The only reason why Washington would push so hard for the third phase in Central Europe -- which on its own is of questionable use -- would be if that project were a stepping stone toward something much larger and strategically significant: that is, if we are talking about the construction of a global missile-defense system that could protect the United States from any threat from any corner of the world. There are serious doubts that this is technologically possible, but this could change in the future. And if it does, the strategic balance in the world would shift dramatically because it would remove the basic principle that has ensured stability in the past -- the threat of mutually assured destruction.

So the threat to Russia is something that might happen in a distant, not-yet-technologically possible future? Frankly, this sounds both paranoid and unconvincing, particularly given that the U.S. has repeatedly offered to allow Russian inspectors on the sites in Eastern Europe and proposed extensive collaboration on missile defense.

We should, absolutely, cooperate with Russia on guarantees of mutual security. But this cooperation should focus on real threats, not threats to Russia's oversized ego and to its increasingly ridiculous delusions of being a great power.

The last word on Palin. I hope.

2008-11-20T15:20:00.004-05:00

Having said some nice things about Sarah Palin when she first burst on the national political scene in a blaze of short-lived glory, I have been asked, more than once, if I've updated my view.

I have, more than once, on this blog. On top of that, here it is, my absolutely, positively (I hope) last word on Saran Palin, originally published in Newsday and then in slightly longer form on Reason.com: Ms. Wasilla goes to Washington.

By the way, my offhand remark in this article that "The notion that 'patriarchal power' exists in the United States in 2008 is only slightly less delusional than the belief, erroneously attributed to Palin, that God created the dinosaurs 5000 years ago" infuriated a blogger named Chris, who fumes:

Uh.. What? Was there a big announcement that we finally fixed sexism? Maybe it was right after we also fixed racism, which, as Cathy Young will tell you, is entirely black people’s fault these days too. Ugh. Incidentally, if Cathy Young believes patriarchal power no longer exists, what, exactly, is feminism, and what would constitute a “step forward” for it? Why is she even writing about it? It’s like she has this knee-jerk inability to admit that any institutional forces exist, and that to admit they do would be admitting some sort of personal weakness or something. It’s okay, Cathy! Institutions exist! It’s not your fault!

First of all, I find it quite amusing that Mr. Male Feminist finds it appropriate to adopt such a blatantly patronizing, smug, patting-the-little-woman-on-the-head tone toward a woman who happens to dissent from his brand of ideology. Secondly, "sexism" is not the same as "patriarchal power." Are American women (and in other areas, men) today held back by sexist cultural stereotypes, and in some cases institutional discrimination as well? Yes, they are (though I frankly doubt that institutional discrimination plays much of a role in holding women back in politics). Are American women as a group today subject to "patriarchal power," i.e. male domination and control over their lives? My answer to that is a very emphatic no.

(Oh, and my belief that "racism is black people's fault," apparently, consists of suggesting that the "culture of poverty" is partly responsible for perpetuating the problems of poor people, including those in the black community. Since I'm pretty disgusted with the right these days, I owe Chris some gratitude for reminding me why I loathe the left. Thanks, pal.)

9/11 truthers in Russia -- and Russia's own terrorist bombing conspiracy theory

2008-10-07T07:31:00.004-04:00

My Weekly Standard article on the broadcast of the 9/11 conspiracy "documentary" Zero, and the studio discussion that followed, is now up. It expands on my earlier blogpost on the topic, and is based on a viewing of the entire program rather than the last 20 minutes. The first half of the discussion was a little less skewed, but the result was still appalling. The article also includes an interesting quote from an interview (not mine) with the host of the program, Alexander Gordon, when he was asked whether its airing was connected to the deterioration in relations with the U.S.

Last night, after receiving a few emailed from truthers urging me to open my mind, I watched the BBC documentary "Conspiracy Files: The Third Tower." What never ceases to amaze me (apart from the belief that any group of people in the U.S. government would have the competence, coordination, and diabolical smarts to pull off this kind of vast conspiracy) is the sheer idiocy of truther arguments about the motives for various aspects of this conspiracy. The truthers argue that Tower 7 (which collapsed despite not being hit by a plane) was brought down by controlled demolition, with explosives planted inside. But why? Apparently because that's where the local office of the CIA was, and was that office that served as the secret control room for the 9/11 plot, and the evidence had to be destroyed. Really? Those plotters were so dumb that they had their super-secret control room in a CIA office right next to the WTC? And couldn't think of a better way to dispose of the evidence than creating a mystery explosion? If they were that dumb, how could they have possibly successfully carried history's biggest cover-up?

In my WS article, I refer to "the fairly credible allegations that the FSB, the KGB's post-Soviet heir, was involved in the 1999 apartment-building bombings in Russia that took nearly 300 lives and were blamed on Chechen terrorists, helping generate public support for the war in Chechnya." Why do I think these allegations, unlike the ones about 9/11, are fairly credible? Because I'm willing to believe that kind of thing about "them," but not about "us"? Well, no. As much as I loathe Russia's ruling clique, I'd rather not believe that they engineered terrorist acts against their own people. Because, if those are the kind of people who rule Russia, we are all less safe.

I think those allegations are vastly more credible than those of the 9/11 "truth" movement because of vast differences between the two situations.

One, the alleged FSB plot is fairly straightforward: explosives planted in apartment buildings. There are no bizarre claims of faked hijackings, nonexistent planes, passengers being taken to secret locations and murdered to supply the bodies, etc. etc.

Two, there was never an independent investigation of the bombings in Russia, only an FSB one; the State Duma voted against an investigation and ordered all documents pertaining to the case to be sealed for 75 years, and several MPs who tried to conduct an investigation of their own had an unfortunate tendency to get assassinated or meet with fatal accidents.

Three, no Chechen separatists ever claimed responsibility for the bombings. Four, at least one officer of the Russian secret services admitted to FSB involvement, though he made this statement in Chechen captivity and later claimed it was extracted under torture.

Five, and most damning, FSB agents were caught red-handed planting explosives with a timer in the basement of an apartment building in Ryazan. FSB director Niklai Patrushev claimed it was an "emergency readiness training exercise." After that, by the way, the bombings stopped.

Read the full story here.

The "space of freedom" in Russia: some good news

2008-10-06T01:03:00.008-04:00

Under the resurgent authoritarianism of the Putin/Medvedev regime, a "space of freedom" has still remained in Russia: in the print media, to some extent even on the radio (Ekho Moskvy), and of course on the Internet; in independent groups that are harassed if they get too political, but nonetheless exist. There are many reasons to fear that this space has shrunk after the Russia-Georgia war, when Russia's airwaves looked more like Soviet-style propaganda than at any time since the collapse of Communism. But, as one villainous representative of oppressive state power says to another in Russian writer Evgeny Schwartz's play The Shadow, "Sometimes, just when it looks like our victory is complete, life suddenly rears its head." And sometimes, in the most unexpected places.

Last month, Russian prosecutors, acting on a complaint from religious groups, went after the 2 x 2 television channel that specializes in "smart" cartoons, such as The Simpsons and South Park. One of the offenses named in the complaint was the South Park episode "Mr. Hankey's Christmas Special," in which characters including Satan, Hitler and an anthropomorphic turd named Mr. Hankey perform in a Christmas show. The prosecutors concluded that the episode might be "extremist" since it was demeaning to Christians and Jews.

In the meantime, 2 x 2's broadcast license expires on October 17, and there was understandable speculation that it might not be renewed. Alarm bells went off, in particular, when Pavel Tarakanov, chairman of the Duma Comittee on Youth Issues, publicly stated that if 2 x 2 lost its license, its frequency could be given to a young adults-oriented channel that would "reflect the government's position with regard to youth policy." "We need to raise a generation of 21st Century Russians who are proud of living in a civilized nation, therefore we need our own media conduit that would reach the greatest possible number of people," he told the Interfax news agency on September 23.

But suddenly, the Russian public, notoriously apathetic in the past few years, rose up in indignation. In late September, there were pickets, flash mobs, and demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg to protest the attempts to squash 2 x 2; the September 21 rally in Moscow drew about 700 people, who clashed with the police at one point. The protesters carried signs saying, "Hands off 2 x 2! We do not want censorship!" (which rhymes in Russian -- something like, "2 x 2 is here to stay -- censorship must go away!"), "Today they came for Kenny, tomorrow they'll come for you" and "Kenny lived, Kenny lives, Kenny will live!", a play on the once-ubiquitous Soviet slogan about Lenin. (Russians have not lost their knack for sharp political humor.) In just a few days, the protesters collected 34,000 signatures on petitions to keep 2 x 2 on the air.

Russian protester with a poster: "Today, they come
for Kenny; tomorrow, they'll come for you." From EJ.ru

On September 25, the Federal Competitive Bidding Commission on Television and Radio Broadcasting -- the Russian equivalent of the FCC, ironically with the Russian initials FKK -- voted unanimously to recommend that 2 x 2's license be renewed. The final decision is up to the State Committee on Communications Oversight, but it is expected to follow the FKK's recommendation. In the meantime, The Simpsons and South Park will continue to be shown on 2 x 2 except for the "offending" episodes.

The day before this decision, human rights activist Alexander Podrabinek wrote on the EJ.ru website:

Sophisticated opposition activists might wince: vulgar cartoons, ill-mannered youths, aggression in the streets. True, this is not about ideas, or compassion for people who are dying in an unjust war [in the Caucasus], or the struggle for democracy and the future of Russia. And yet these events give cause to hope that not everything is lost in this country, that not everyone in Russia is under the yoke of submission, fear and indifference. People who have nothing to do with politics have come out into the streets to defend their right: the right to watch the TV channel they love. It doesn't matter if this channel is worthy of universal love, or of the love of refined conoisseurs of quality television. Its viewers want it, and that's enough reason for it to stay on the air, no matter how revolting it might be to religious fanatics, television aesthetes, or the General Prosecutor's office.

...

Perhaps the future belongs to those who, no matter how little they care about politics, come out into the streets to defend their personal choice, their right to live without following the guidance of the authorities -- even if it's only a matter of a TV channel that shows cartoons.

By the way, Podrabinek vastly underestimates the extent to which South Park and The Simpsons are about "ideas." He's not the only one. In a verse commentary on the 2 x 2 controversy in Ogoniok magazine, the writer, poet and astute political satirist Dmitry Bykov describes the victory as a bittersweet one:

The days of liberty are now behind us,
And yet here is a fact we can't avoid:
As long as we can say, "Don't have a cow, man!",
Freedom in Russia cannot be destroyed.
...

Today, we won't be rescued from oppression
By Pushkin, Tolstoy, or a Joan of Arc;
Instead, it seems, the torch is in the hands of
The Simpsons and the kiddies of South Park.

Bykov describes 2 x 2's fare as "the usual jokes on all things excremental." The Simpsons and South Park may not be the Pushkin and Tolstoy of our day, but perhaps Bykov should try watching them. The idea of 2 x 2 as a bastion of freedom (hopefully, not the last) is not that depressing.

More: Some great photos of the 2 x 2 protests here and here.

The Palin problem

2008-09-26T19:18:00.006-04:00

While busy working on an extended piece about Russia's disgraceful prime-time TV broadcast of a program that endorses 9/11 conspiracy theories, I have been mulling of the question of what to say about Sarah Palin.

My friend Kathleen Parker says it all:

Some of the passionately feminist critics of Ms. Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Ms. Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick – what a difference a financial crisis makes – and a more complicated picture has emerged.
As we've seen and heard more from John McCain's running mate, it is increasingly clear that she is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn't know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.

Right on. More interesting thoughts from Parker here.

I have defended Palin because a lot of the attacks on her have been so vicious and unfair, and I don't just mean the "Trig is Bristol's baby" rumors. She is not a "Stepford wife" or an anti-woman tool of The Patriarchy; she is not a woman who sends the message that women can get ahead by being demure and pleasing the boys; she is not a female misogynist who devalues her own daughters and charges victims for rape kits; she does not advocate abstinence-only education in public schools (a canard repeated by Sam Harris in Newsweek). And yes, I still think she's a good feminist role model in combining career and parenthood with the help of a strong family network, not the state.

Unfortunately, it seems that Palin has also come to exemplify a far less attractive feature of pseudo-feminism: affirmative action in the worst sense of the word. And the Palin defenders are just as exasperating as the Palin-bashers. Here is, for instance, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in Newsweek:

Many are attracted to [Palin] because she embodies the values of the American West, which they find superior to the values of coastal elites. This was part of the appeal of Goldwater and Reagan—a log-splitting, range-riding conservatism that emphasizes freedom. (Palin adds moose hunting to the list.) It's not irrational or simplistic for voters to prefer candidates who reflect their deepest values.

... And Palin appeals to many voters as a pro-life symbol, with a family—including a son with Down syndrome—that exemplifies a culture of life. Elites may dismiss this as trivial or backward. But there's no deeper question of political philosophy than this: whom do we count as a member of the human family and protect as our own? Palin welcomed a disabled child—the kind of child often targeted for elimination through eugenic abortion. It's not irrational for Americans to support a candidate who is willing to protect the weak.

First of all: why was it vile for Andrew Sullivan, Cintra Wilson, and South Carolina Democratic Chairwoman Carol Fowler to suggest that one of Palin's main qualifications for the job seemed to be the fact that she didn't have an abortion, yet okay for Palin supporter Gerson to suggest the same, with a positive spin? And since when do conservatives espouse the principle that "the personal is political"?

Secondly: I remember Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was my president. And Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan (pace Michael Reagan). Here, I have to agree with Ron Reagan, lefty though he may be:

"Sarah Palin," he said, "has nothing in common with my father, a two-term governor of the largest state in the union, a man who had been in public life for decades, someone who had written, thought and spoke for decades about foreign policy issues, domestic policy issues, and on and on and on."

Check out, too, this post on the Half Sigma blog. Ronald Reagan was not an intellectual, but he had a long history of engagement with and interest in ideas on the preeminent issues of his day. So far, I see absolutely no evidence of such from Sarah Palin. Besides, they didn't call Reagan the Great Communicator for nothing.

Sarah Palin is not Harry Truman, either. Yes, like Truman, she comes from small-town America. However, by the time Truman was picked to be FDR's running mate, he had served in the U.S. Senate for ten years and had gained fame (including a spot on the cover of Time) as the founder and chairman of the Truman Committee which investigated fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the military.

Palin may yet surprise us all in her debate with Biden. But I doubt it.

There was a moment when it seemed that Palin's candidacy could be a big moment for conservative/libertarian feminism in America -- a feminism that, I strongly believe, deserves a place at the table. Instead, with every passing day so far, she becomes more and more of an embarrassment. Particularly when Camp McCain's efforts to shield her from contacts with the media and to ensure that she gets to do the veep debate under easier rules (against Joe "Foot in the Mouth" Biden, no less!) look so much like a cringeworthy display of sexist paternalism. From Xena, Warrior Princess to damsel in distress in two weeks: how pathetic is that?

Russia and 9/11 denialism

2008-09-23T21:54:00.001-04:00

In the wake of its war with Georgia, Russia (as represented by Medvedev, Putin, and the Russian foreign ministry) has repeatedly made noises about wanting nothing but friendship and partnership with the West, including the United States, and having no interest in a "new Cold War."

In light of these protestations, it's interesting to note that on September 12, Russia's state-owned Channel One broadcast the "documentary" Zero by Italian journalist Giulietto Chiesa (who served as the Moscow correspondent for the Italian Communist newspaper Unita in the 1970s) and leading French 9/11 conspirologist Thierry Meyssan, which advances the idea that the World Trade Center bombing was an inside job and that no plane ever hit the Pentagon. The broadcast, in the prime-time program ironically titled "Closed Screening," went largely unnoticed in the West except by 9/11 "truther" sites.

The showing of the film was followed by a panel discussion before a live studio audience (which included both Chiesa, who speaks Russian, and Meyssan). The host, Alexander Gordon, made no secret of his sympathy for Chiesa's viewpoint, though he politely noted that the documentary could have used more objectivity. Several other pro-"truther" panelists, including the rabidly anti-American TV host Mikhail Leontiev, spoke at length in praise of the film, complimenting its makers on their courage and insight, ridiculing the official version of the attacks as absurd (in Leontiev's words, "the ravings of a gray mare" -- a Russian colloquialism that means something like "total nonsense"). TV anchor Alexei Pushkov categorically asserted that while we cannot be sure who engineered the attacks, the idea of "19 Arabs directed by Osama bin Laden in a cave" is completely discredited. He and co-panelist Geidar Jemal, the chairman of Russia's Islamic Committee, also lamented "the death of information" in the Western media and its replacement by "manipulation" -- thankfully, with heroes like Chiesa and Meyssan on hand to resist it. Toward the end of the discussion, explicit parallels were drawn between the Western media's obedient parroting of official lies about 9/11 and their collusion in the "official version" of the Russia/Georgia war.

Giulietto Chiesa

A couple of guests briefly and sheepishly offered opposing viewpoints. Irina Zvyagelskaya, analyst at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, said that she was "unconvinced" by the film and added that if its premise was true and such a cynical act not only toward one's own citizens but also toward world opinion could have been perpetrated, "you don't want to live in this world." Gordon then sarcastically suggested that, in order to be able to go on living, she was going to "shut out" inconvenient truths such as Chiesa's film (to which Zvyagelskaya replied that she would question all versions). TV journalist Vladimir Sukhoi, former Channel One Bureau chief in the US, said -- looking visibly nervous -- that a good journalist should not pursue an agenda or "string facts onto the skewer of his theory," and criticized Chiesa for doing exactly that. His comment went unanswered. When Gordon turned to the studio audience and asked those who believed in the official "19 Arabs" version of 9/11 to raise their hands, not one hand went up.

Alexander Gordon

Toward the end, Meyssan launched into an impassioned diatribe against brutal U.S. dominance all over the world and noted that Russia, no longer weak as in 2001, was the world's last, best hope. "Who can stop this huge predator which is ravaging the planet? We expect a great deal from you, from Russia. Only you can stop all this!" he exclaimed, to raucous audience applause.

Thierry Meyssan

It is estimated that the program was watched by 30 million people.

Ironically, on the same day, at a three-hour meeting with the Valdai Club mostly made up of Western political experts, Russian President (or is it Puppet-in-Chief?) Dmitry Medvedev declared Georgia's military action against South Ossetia on August 8 to be Russia's 9/11. The similarity, apparently, is that "Russian citizens" (i.e. South Ossetians to whom Russia started issuing Russian passports a few years ago while still formally recognizing South Ossetia as Georgian territory) were attacked on August 8 just as U.S. citizens were on 9/11. On the website Grani.ru, commentator Andrei Piontkovsky caustically noted that when Russian state TV embraces the notion that 9/11 was cooked up by U.S. imperialists as a pretext for war, "our 9/11" sounds "rather ambiguous" coming from the President of Russia.

There are other dangers for Russia in peddling 9/11 conspirology for domestic consumption. Many Russians still have questions about the explosions of two Moscow apartment buildings in 1999, blamed on Chechen terrorists but viewed as an FSB inside job by a number of critics. (Unlike the 9/11 attacks, these bombings were never properly investigated.)

That aside, Condoleezza Rice might want to bring up this disgraceful broadcast -- clearly meant to fan the flames of anti-Americanism in the Russian public -- next time she has a chat with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

More Palin: The other side of the culture war

2008-09-20T15:41:00.001-04:00

Yes, more Palin. Bear with me.

We all know that there have been some very nasty attacks on Palin from some feminists, as well as a lot of condescension from the Maureen Dowd types who look down their noses at a small-town, gun-owning, Walmart-going, Bible-believing mom with five kids. But it takes two to do the culture-war tango.

For instance, in The American Spectator, one Jeffrey Lord rightly deplores the feminist attacks on Palin. Then he goes on to say:

This election is now being fought openly between, as Whittaker Chambers once described the same fight in a different era, "those who reject and those who worship God." Between those who believe "if man's mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God?" -- and America's own Joan of Arc, Sarah Palin.

If Barack Obama is an atheist, that's news to me. And I certainly hope that Palin doesn't actually see herself as Joan of Arc on a God-given crusade. (It's interesting how the left-wing caricature of Palin is barely distinguishable from the right-wing icon.)

Praising Palin's decision to keep her baby with Down's Syndrome and to encourage her pregnant 17-year-old daughter Bristol to bear her child, Lord writes:

Twice over in two now ongoing and very public situations, Sarah Palin has focused on the love of God rather than herself. To those who have vested their life and career comfortably believing there is little need for God because what of what rolls around aimlessly in their heads and those of their like-minded friends at any given moment, to those who view government and the power of the state as an object of worship, this is taken as a serious, gut-level threat. A threat to the existence of their own very carefully structured non-religious secular value system.

Glossing over Lord's apparent assumption that Palin expects to have no personal joy or satisfaction from her special-needs child or her grandchild, and that her decision was solely a sacrifice to God, this is a pretty nasty portrayal of secularists. Further down, it is compounded by nasty swipes at insufficiently masculine liberal men ("Glutted with Hollywood pâté, Al Gore would have a coronary trying to keep up with Palin, who probably wouldn't be bringing along any seriously good wine as he races through the backwoods. Once off the basketball court, Obama would be clueless on snowshoes with a gun and a charging moose").

On a less hysterical note, Jonah Goldberg in National Review defends Palin against the "she's not a real woman" attacks ... and then sneers that the same people would consider "a childless feminist who looks like a Bulgarian weightlifter in drag" a real woman. On Townhall.com, Kevin McCullough speculates that "modern feminists" hate Palin because she's a real woman:

She has a manly, and (according to several women I've overheard) handsome husband. She is content in their life together as a couple where each goes out and works hard. As a mom she is parenting her kids giving them what mothers give best, and her husband, gives what only a father can.

She's not afraid to don some lipstick and use her comely attraction to romance "her guy" one night, and turn around and beat back corruption as a fierce defender of what is right the next day.

As opposed to, say, the notoriously unwomanly Geraldine Ferraro (married mother of three) and Nancy Pelosi (a married mother of five whom a poster on Michelle Malkin's blog charmingly described the other day as "the result of mixing June Cleaver with Code Pink, Steroids and a strap on")?

And a final item, by Jim Brown at OneNewsNow:

A pro-life activist suggests one of the reasons liberals despise Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin so passionately may be because she gave birth to her son despite a diagnosis of Down syndrome.

... Mark Crutcher, the president of Life Dynamics Incorporated (LDI), notes that in America today, 90 percent of all Down syndrome children are killed in the womb.

"I wonder what the people who are doing that -- the parents who are 'choosing' to have their child executed -- what they think when they look at Sarah Palin and her family, when they see the example of that family welcoming a Down syndrome child in and loving that child. I wonder what those people think," Crutcher contends. "I also wonder whether this is where you're seeing some of this hatred and venom that's coming from the godless Left directed at [Palin]. I'm beginning to wonder if Sarah Palin isn't rubbing their noses in their own shame."

What hateful tripe. If 90 percent of people who find out they are carrying a fetus with Down's Syndrome terminate their pregnancies, there must be quite a few non-liberals among them (and even, I daresay, quite a few conservatives). And frankly, if Sarah Palin's example is going to be used as a moral club to beat those who make the choice to terminate a pregnancy under those circumstances, an angry response will be justified.

Sarah and the hypocrites

2008-09-19T15:45:00.002-04:00

So far, I've been pretty hard on feminists who have bashed Sarah Palin in often sexist terms and have refused to acknowledge that, agree or disagree with her politics, she's a great model of female achievement.But now, let's hear it for the conservatives.

Exhibit A: the silly "lipstick on a pig" controversy. Which looks particularly bad considering that conservatives have always been the ones to mock "politically correct" sensitivity to words that could be interpreted as sexist or racist slights (and, as a number of commentators have pointed out, even worse considering that Palin has decried "perceived whining" in Hillary Clinton's complaints about sexism toward her).

Here's a lame defense from David Frum:

Frum Mobilization through the inflammation of imaginary grievances is an ugly trait of modern American politics. It will only stop when it stops all around. So long as media ground rules make such mobilization profitable for Democrats, it is inevitable that Republicans will follow suit.

Aha, the familiar "they started it/everyone does it/you knock it off first" defense. Which is especially lame in this case, considering that conservatives have (almost) consistently deplored the "inflammation of imaginary grievances."

Exhibit B: Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, giving advice to Obama:

You must aim your fire at the top of the ticket, John McCain, and not at this beautiful girl, Sarah Palin, about whom you can do nothing.

Beautiful girl? Way to describe a vice presidential candidate. Later, Noonan writes that the attack on Palin "offended the American sense of fairness. And—it still lives!—gallantry."

In other words: You can't beat up on a girl, Democrats. A beautiful girl, no less.

Sexism, anyone?

(Noonan goes on, amusingly, to say that "the Democrats were up against Xena the Warrior Princess." As a Xena fan who sees at least some good things about Sarah Palin, I'm tickled by the Sarah/Xena comparisons. But Peggy, please. "Gallant" protection from rough treatment because you're a "beautiful girl" is the opposite of what Xena was all about.)

Exhibit C: This bizarre piece by Harvey "Mr. Manliness" Mansfield in Forbes, who contrasts Palin to the "bad" feminists who want women to be like men.

[S]he showed none of the features that betray the feminist in action. On the contrary: She spoke proudly of "my guy," grateful to the man who was hers--implying that she needed him, and that any woman needs a guy of her own. She introduced her children, especially little Trig, the one with Down's syndrome. She was displaying a mother's unconditional love, as opposed to the conditional love that insists on a "wanted" child. She did these things unapologetically, quite unafraid of seeming to be a normal, healthy sexist female: one who knows what it is to be a woman and enjoys it.

All Sarah Palin did was to claim her equal opportunity to a job once held exclusively by men. This sort of equality--the opportunity to take on public careers outside the home--is something liberals and conservatives agree on. ... Now, why could the women's movement not have taken advantage of this bipartisan agreement from the beginning? ...

An obvious difference between the women's movement and the civil rights movement is the ease with which the former triumphed. Of course there was malechauvinism at the start, but it was complacent, passive and ineffective. No man could look a woman in the eye and say "you are not equal to me" once the issue was put. There was nothing like the "massive resistance" to racial desegregation in the South; instead, there was a massive movement of women into jobs and careers.

Prof. Mansfield doesn't tell us that he was one of the conservatives who, not that long ago, did no subscribe to this supposedly universal goal of equal opportunity in the workforce. This is what he wrote in a November 3, 1997 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

The protective element of manliness is endangered when women have equal access to jobs outside the home. Women who do not consider themselves feminist often seem unaware of what they are doing to manliness when they work to support themselves. They think only that people should be hired and promoted on merit, regardless of sex.

(The castrating harridans!)

Now, apparently Prof. Mansfield later mellowed out a bit. In his 2006 book In Defense of Manliness, he concedes that careers and equal opportunity are okay as long as appropriate sex roles are preserved in private life. Such as (he suggested in interviews) the wife earning no more than a third of the couple’s joint income and doing no less than two-thirds of the housework. (How do Sarah and Todd Palin fit into that prescription?) Even today, the kinder, gentler Mansfield notes, "You may be sure that I am not the first one to notice that feminist women are unerotic."

Now, leaving aside these particular examples of ridiculousness, there is a broader doublethink at work.

Simple question: If the Democratic veep candidate was a woman with five children, four of them minors and one of them a special-needs infant, does anyone think conservatives would be praising her as a female pioneer? Or would many of them be denouncing the selection as an example of liberal contempt for family values?

Conservative hostility or at least ambivalence toward career women, particularly career women with children, is not entirely a thing of the past. Consider, for instance, this text from It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), a leading social conservative:

Many women have told me, and surveys have shown, that they find it easier, more "professionally" gratifying, and certainly more socially affirming, to work outside the home than to give up their careers to take care of their children. ... Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism... Radical feminists have been making the pitch that justice demands that men and women be given an equal opportunity to make it to the top in the workplace.

(page 95)

Now, to be fair, the full context of these statements is that full-time mothering deserves equal respect and that "radical feminism" is to blame for the attitude that careers outside the home are "more socially affirming." (See more here.) But the passage still drips with disapproval for women who don't want to "give up their careers to take care of their children" because it's "easier" and "more 'professionally' gratifying" (note the scare quotes around "professionally"). On the previous page, Santorum scoffs that "for some parents, the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home."

Consider, too, that conserative heroine Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the famous talk radio scold, is notorious for her anti-working-mother diatribes. Interestingly, "Dr. Laura" has been one of the few "pro-family" conservatives to stick to her anti-working-mother guns in regard to the Palin nomination. In a September 4 blogpost, Sarah Palin and motherhood, she wrote:

I am extremely disappointed in the choice of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate of the Republican Party. ... I’m stunned - couldn’t the Republican Party find one competent female with adult children to run for Vice President with McCain? I realize his advisors probably didn’t want a “mature” woman, as the Democrats keep harping on his age. But really, what kind of role model is a woman whose fifth child was recently born with a serious issue, Down Syndrome, and then goes back to the job of Governor within days of the birth?

When Mom and Dad both work full-time (no matter how many folks get involvedwith the children), it becomes a somewhat chaotic situation. Certainly, if a child becomes ill and is rushed to the hospital, and you’re on the hotline with both Israel and Iran as nuclear tempers are flaring, where’s your attention going to be? Where should your attention be? Well, once you put your hand on the Bible and make that oath, your attention has to be with the government of the United States of America.

Schlessinger expressed appreciation for the fact that both Palin and her daughter carried their pregnancies to term, but then delivered an additional slap to Palin for having signed a "Family Child Care" week proclamation in April praising child care professionals.

Child-care facilities are a necessity when mothers and fathers (when they exist at all) are unwilling or incapable of caring for their offspring. Unfortunately, they have become a mainstay of the feminista mentality that nothing should stand in the way of a woman’s ambition - nothing, including her family.

Any full-time working wife and mother knows that the family takes the short end of the stick. Marriages and the welfare of children suffer when a stressed-out mother doesn’t have time to be a woman, a wife, and a hands-on Mommy.

I suspect that this preachy, sexist, treacly intolerance would have been pouring forth from many of Schlessinger's confrères had Palin with her five kids been on the other side of the political divide. "Dr. Laura," at least, is consistent. (Other than being a working mother herself.) Not like Dr. James "Focus on the Family" Dobson, who once penned a column that seems particularly amusing in light of his Palin enthusiasm -- suggesting that mothers of teenagers should not go back to work because, among other things, handling a job, teenage crises, and menopause was liable to prove too exhausting.

Is it only about abortion?

2008-09-17T18:02:00.001-04:00

("It," obviously, being many feminists' near-pathological hatred of Sarah Palin.)

Obviously, Palin's anti-abortion views (which don't allow even for the standard rape and incest exceptions) do not endear her to most feminists. And for that, I actually don't blame them. I believe the right to abortion, at least in the early stages of pregnancy, is an important and essential freedom for women.

But the reality is that party-line feminists have not been very kind to pro-choice conservative women, either. They hated Margaret Thatcher (see this 2006 column by David Boaz on the subject). In 1993, Gloria Steinem called pro-choice Republican Senate candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison a "female impersonator" and declared that "Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one." (Anticipating the feminist sexism of clearly gender-based slurs against Palin -- "It Girl," "pinup queen," etc. -- the late columnist Molly Ivins dubbed Hutchison a "Breck girl.")

One major reason for this, I think, is the one I discussed in my Wall Street Journal article. It's the belief that feminism must support not simply equal rights and opportunities for women and men, not just cultural approval for nontraditional gender roles, but extensive government programs to enable women to combine career and family. See, for the most explicit statement of this view, this article by Katherine Marsh in The New Republic:

Feminism is not just about having the opportunity to do it all. It's also about having the support to do as much as you can. This is why, in the end, feminism needs to be tied to not just an identity, but to an ideology that encourages that support.

Marsh earlier says that Palin "an incredible support system--a husband with flexible jobs rather than a competing career, a close-knit community, and a host of nearby grandparents, aunts, and uncles to lend a hand on the domestic front" -- but apparently none of that counts as "support." Only the government.

It is, in my view, exceptionally bad for feminism to argue that female equality must depend on big government and extensive government involvement in markets and social processes. First of all, such a position automatically turns all proponents of limited government against feminism, associating feminism with the "Nanny State." In a paradoxical way, it also sends the message that women's roles as the primary caregivers in the family are rooted in nature and impervious to change: the only way to lighten the domestic load on women is to get government or government-supported programs to pick up some of it, not to get men more involved. It is also worth noting that in many European countries that have generous social programs and benefits for working mothers (such as extensive paid maternity leave), women's career advancement tends to lag further behind men's than it does in the U.S. The entitlements can make women less desirable employees and turn into a society-wide "Mommy Track."

There is another, more insidious idea at work as well: the idea that conservative ideas on things like free markets, the welfare state, the environment, or gun rights are inherently "unfeminine," because "feminine" values are rooted in compassion, interdependence, peaceful resolution of conflict, caring, sharing, and so on; and that women whose political views are too individualistic, too "harsh," and insufficiently humane, are not "real women." See, for instance, this comment on the Gurdian blog in response to David Boaz:

Thatcher showed only that a woman can survive in politics if she explicitly shows to act nothing like one. I do not believe that she furthered the cause of women in politics, instead she furthered the status quo of the time, and showed that a properly 'de-gendered' woman can do what a man does. So, men can do it well, and women can do it fine too, as long as they forget about what they have in their panties.

See, too, the assumption at Jezebel.com that any pro-guns, pro-hunting female politician is merely "playing by the boys' game."

Somehow, according to some feminists, it's sexist to tell women that their job choices or family roles must be shaped by their gender -- but not sexist to tell them their politics must be shaped by their gender, even on issues that have nothing to do with gender. There would be howls of outrage if a woman with a "masculine" career was branded an unwoman -- "de-gendered," a "female impersonator." Yet it's okay, evidently, to do the same to a woman with what some considered to be "masculine" views.

Who's afraid of Sarah Palin?

2008-09-17T13:41:00.008-04:00

My interview on this topic, on Greta Van Sustern's show On the Record on Fox News, can be seen here.

For more on the topic see my articles in The Wall Street Journal, "Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin" (like Ann Althouse, I think the title is too generalizing, but I didn't write it, and I have to concede it's eye-catching) and in The Boston Globe, "A Great Moment for Women" (not too happy about that title either).

My position on Palin's candidacy, in a nuthsell (from the Globe column):

Is Palin - whose image as a tough woman has evoked comparisons to historical and fictional female fighters like Joan of Arc and Xena, Warrior Princess - a feminist hero?
To some feminists, the answer is a clear no. Novelist Jane Smiley brands her "a woman who reinforces patriarchal power rather than challenges it."
But the charge is unfair. Unlike right-wing columnist Ann Coulter, to whom Smiley compares her, Palin is not known for attacking the women's movement; she credits it with breaking down gender barriers and creating the opportunities she has enjoyed. While antiabortion, she belongs to a group called Feminists for Life.
As a social issues liberal with strong concerns about religion-based public policy, I have some serious disagreements with Palin, though it's often hard to separate the reality of her views from the caricatures painting her as a zealot. But I also believe that her candidacy is a great moment for American women.
First, more representation for feminism across the spectrum of political beliefs is a good thing. Women, like men, should be able to disagree on gun ownership, environmental policies, taxes, even abortion while agreeing on gender equity.
Second, the biggest feminist issue in America today is the career-family balance. Despite remaining discrimination, motherhood is at the core of the "glass ceiling" holding back female achievement. How inspirational, then, to see that the "mommy track" can be a road to the White House. Palin is a mother of five who resumed an intensive work schedule days after giving birth, and whose husband seems to be a full partner.
Palin's candidacy may also be a watershed moment in conservative politics. The right has long been ambivalent about working mothers; a number of conservative politicians and pundits have been given to chiding "selfish" women who pursue career ambitions after having children. Now, a mother with a high-powered career is a conservative hero, and full-time motherhood may be forever gone from the roster of "family values."

Meanwhile, Neo-neocon has an interest post on the "Palin Derangement Syndrome" that has gripped some, I repeat some feminists.

And here's a good example of this syndrome, from the Jezebel.com blog. This one actually attempts self-examination, conceding that many left-wing feminists fly into irrational fits of hatred at the mere mention of Palin and citing some rather hair-raising and stomach-turning examples of such fits (the readers obligingly provide many more in the comments section).

And the question now is why? Why does this particular pitbull in lipstick infuriate — and scare us — so viscerally? Why does her very existence make us feel — and act — so ugly? New York Times columnist Judith Warner calls Palin's nomination a "thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women," because "Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man." Palin, who obviously is incredibly ambitious, masks that ambition behind her PTA placard and "folksy" talk.

... [F]or a certain kind of feminist, Palin is a symbol for everything we hoped was not true in the world anymore. We hoped that we didn't have to hide our ambition or pretend that our goals were effortlessly achieved ... We hoped that we could be mothers without having our motherhood be our defining characteristic, as it seems to be for Palin. We hoped that we did not have to be perfect beauty queens to get to where we wanted to be in life, that our looks, good or bad, wouldn't matter.

The blogger adds that for many feminists, Palin embodies the stereotype of the "homecoming queen" from high school: "pretty and popular ... catering to the whims of boys and cheering on their hockey games." And so the idea of being bested by the "homecoming queen" in the area of achievement induces "white hot anger."

As I said on Fox, I find this description (from both Warner and the Jezebel.com blogger, Jessica) baffling. Who is this Sarah Palin they are talking about? Where does Palin "make it clear" that she is subordinate to her husband? How does she downplay her ambition or suggest that she has effortlessly achieve her goals? How is the woman who calls herself a pitbull in lipstick and talks about taking on the "old boys' network" trying to be non-threatening and non-intimidating? The real-life Sarah Palin was not a homecoming queen or a cheerleader in high school -- she was a basketball star who still proudly wears her "Sarah Barracuda" nickname from those days.

My hunch is that the real reason for PDS is the opposite, in a way, of the one given by Warner and Jezebel.com. Sarah Palin does not fit the left-wing feminist stereotypes of the conservative woman. She's very obviously not a "Stepford Wife," as the execrable Cintra Wilson calls her on Salon.com. She's not a man-pleasing cheerleader. She's not a self-effacing, non-intimidating hausfrau.

Try as they might, they simply can't fit Sarah Palin into that box. And that drives them nuts. Almost literally, in some cases.

And more PDS here: a Shakesville post asserting that Palin is a patriarchalist who cares about her sons more than her daughters.

This is not to say that conservatives don't have their own Sarah Palin-related hypocrisies. More on which later.

Putin, in Munich, with a knife

2008-09-12T00:33:00.003-04:00

And now, a relatively light interlude from Russia ... or is it?

On September 5, viewers of Russia's tamed TV were treated to the unusual spectacle of Putin being fingered as a murder suspect on live television.

Only as part of a game, of course. Specifically, a psychic named Alexander Char, appearing on a TV show called Phenomenon on the state channel Rossiya (Russia), telepathically feeding three "witnesses" randomly chosen from the audience clues to a "detective story" he had written and concealed inside a safe. Those clues were then written down with a black marker on a large board by Char's assistant Victor, also randomly selected from the audience.

Watch what happens.

The bald gentleman who strides out onto the stage asking that the name of Putin be erased is Phenomenon host and fitness guru Denis Semenikhin.

The scandalous segment was apparently disappeared in those markets where the show did not air live. Nonetheless, it quickly ended up on Russian websites and on YouTube and its Russian equivalent RuTube.

Conspiracy theories have not been far behind. Some Russian posters refuse to believe that the incident could have been a spontaneous screw-up. A hodgepodge of interesting theories is offered, apparently in earnest, by one Vadim Nikitin at russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/.

... Russia’s current media climate makes the spontaneity of what transpired on stage inconceivable.
There is no way that the show would have remained on the air for even a second longer had the management really been nervous about its proceedings. No one at home would have batted an eyelid; after all, Russian TV brims with technical difficulties.
Which leads inevitably to ask: why did it occur?
Who had written the script, and who was its real intended audience?

Why did state television consider it necessary to show the words “Knife”, “Munich” and “Putin, Vladimir” together on a blackboard for minutes of airtime, the memory of which would be reinforced further by the manufactured commotion/controversy?

The possibilities are tantalising.

1. We have a strong visual of a young girl trying unsuccessfully to erase Vladimir Putin’s name.

Was this a message to the young Medvedev? ie. “if you’re getting any ideas, drop them right now! You couldn’t rub me out, even if you tried”.

2. We have a TV presenter publicly censoring his own show, saying that Putin’s name is inappropriate and that ‘management’ are ‘getting nervous’, without any attempt to hide it.

Was this a staged show of force to the media, and the public, that the state emphatically reserves the right to control what is shown on TV?

Was it an FYI to journalists that Putin’s name is now officially out of bounds?

3. We have an undeniable reference to Hitler’s night of the long knives, the ruthless and surprise purge, on June 30th 1934, of the SA storm troopers led by Ernst Rohm.

Was it yet another signal to the West that Russia is prepared to attack Poland and the Czech Republic over the US missile defence shield?

Was it a threat to Nashi, the crypto-paramilitary youth organisation headed by Vasili Yakemenko? (That seems unlikely, as Nashi are already looking like a spent force, and Yakemenko harbours little ambition).

Was it another ’subtle’ piece of advice for Medvedev, whose personal proximity to Putin strongly parallels that of Rohm to Hitler, to remember his place?

Was it, like the Night of the Long Knives, an announcement of the return of extra-judicial killings at the highest level?

A premonition of a ruthless cabinet purge, or even Putin’s return to the presidency?

The idea that a psychic show on TV would be used to send covert messages to Medvedev, Nashi, the West, or the Russian media is rather amusing. (I'm sure Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and Condi Rice are all devout viewers of Phenomenon.) The Putinistas aren't that subtle. And if the segment was meant as a (completely unnecessary) reminder that the state controls what's shown on TV, then that lesson was not conveyed very well: the offending (incriminating?) name stayed on the slate for all to see, the show was not immediately yanked off the air, no arrests or (as far as we know) even firings followed, and the studio audience laughed. (In Stalin's day, an audience that witnessed such a sacrilege would have stampeded for the exit.)

It's tempting, actually, to scrutinize this phenomenon for evidence of a plot from the other side. Was someone sending Putin a message that his crimes are known and cannot be erased? Or that freedom of the press cannot be crushed? Consider, ladies and gentlemen, the startling elements of this mystery! For instance: The show was co-hosted by the famous spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller, who has dual Israeli-British citizenship. (Geller is seen onscreen in the full version of the clip, just prior to the "Knife -- Munich -- Putin" segment.) The Russian co-host, Semenikhin, spent several years studying and working in the United States in the 1990s. Israel, the UK and the US -- there's the unholy trinity of the Kremlin's foreign policy. To top it off, Geller informs the psychic, Alexander Char, that he looks a lot like Agatha Christie's detective, Hercule Poirot, who is Belgian. Belgium -- Brussels -- NATO, right? All of them joining forces to tell Putin to know his place.

But there's more! The "witnesses" were selected from the ranks of men in the audience named Boris (for leading Russian mystery novelist Boris Akunin) and women named Darya or Tatiana, for best-selling mystery writers Darya Dontzova and Tatiana Ustinova. Since Darya is a fairly rare name, chances are the female witness was named Tatiana. Could the ominous message to Putin be that he was being denounced as a murderer by his own late predecessor Borias Yeltsin -- whose daughter and top political aide was named Tatiana?

But wait! Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, a Georgian! Could there be a hidden meaning in that?

Yes, I'm joking, of course. A much more likely explanation is that when it comes to non-political shows, state control of Russian TV is not as absolute as some think; it could be the good old Russian tradition of absolute control made ineffective by sloppiness. Yet some intriguing questions remain. Why did the man who named Putin, and the psychic's handpicked assistant, look so mischievous? Could they have played a trick on the host?

At the end of the segment, the paper was removed from the safe and turned out to contain the words, "Vladimir committed a crime in the city of Munich, using a knife." Being a skeptic about psychics who do TV shows, and finding it rather hard to believe that Char really telepathically fed those words to the "witnesses," I'm inclined to believe that the "witnesses" were plants and the whole stunt was arranged in advance. But what, then, to make of the "Putin"? A little improvised mischief by the "witness," who was supposed to say "Vladimir" but made a slight alteration to the script? Perhaps.

The host's unseemly nervousness at the sudden appearance of Putin's name (jokes about "He Who Must Not Be Named" already proliferate on Russian blogs), and the plea to remove it, speak volumes about Russian authoritarianism. And yet the segment continued, the camera lingered repeatedly on the "Knife-Munich-Putin" on the slate, and the public laughed. A far, far cry from the communist era, indeed.

Russia readings

2008-09-11T23:05:00.003-04:00

In the April issue of Reason, I examined the question: Whither Russia after Putin. (Or should that be "Russia ~~after~~ still under Putin"? That depends on what the meaning of "after" is.) Of course, I could not have imagined that the answer to this question would be: To war with Georgia and the triumph of Putinism, a triumph that has pushed the soft-spoken Medvedev to ape Putin-speak and refer to Georgia's leadership as "morons" and "psychos", and ratcheted up the level of brazen lies and propaganda in the official Russian media to Soviet-era high watermarks.

I hope to say more on the subject soon, but for now, I offer those of you who may have missed it my article in The Weekly Standard, Don't Cry for Russia. It's a response to arguments (see here, for instance) that Russia was driven to violence by ill-treatment from the West and the United States in particular.

As Russian tanks rumble through Georgia, and Western pundits talk of the "new Cold War," one trope keeps reappearing in their discourse. Russia's newly aggressive stance, we are told, is partly our fault: After the fall of Communism, the West went out of its way to humiliate and trample Russia instead of treating it as a partner--and now, an oil-powered Russia is striking back.

"Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed," Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Barack Obama adviser, wrote in Time. "A bipolar universe gave way to a world in which the 'sole superpower' boasted about how it had 'won' the Cold War. Russia was forced to swallow the news that NATO would grant membership to former client states in Eastern Europe, along with former Soviet republics." This theme, particularly NATO expansion as an affront to Russia, has been echoed by many others, from Tom Friedman in the New York Times to Pat Buchanan in his syndicated column.

By contrast, few of the Russians who lament their country's slide into belligerent authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin blame it on "humiliation" by the West. "Russia humiliated itself," says human rights grande dame Elena Bonner, widow of the dissident and scientist Andrei Sakharov. "It spent 70-plus years building Communism, and reaped the results."

Victor Davidoff, an independent Moscow journalist and former Soviet political prisoner who became a U.S. citizen but returned to Russia in 1992, told me in an email exchange that he was "nauseated" by talk of Russia's humiliation. "How did the West humiliate Russia? Gave it money--much of which was pilfered? Sent humanitarian aid? Paid for the dismantling of missiles? Invested in Russian businesses? The Germans don't consider the Marshall Plan a humiliation; why is aid to Russia humiliating?"

Davidoff's mention of the Marshall Plan is fitting, since Samantha Power explicitly contrasts the West's treatment of post-Cold War Russia with that of post-World War II Germany: "On occasion, Western countries have consciously avoided humiliating militant powers. . . . Having neutered Germany following World War I, the Allies showed West Germany respect after World War II, investing heavily in its economy and absorbing the country into NATO."

This is a breathtaking inversion of reality. If ever a defeated power was "humiliated," it was postwar Germany--forced to endure several years of occupation, de-Nazification, a massive education campaign promoting the idea of collective German guilt for Nazi crimes, reparations to countries affected by the war, and loss of territories accompanied by the expulsion of millions of Germans. There was also the small matter of the country being split in half.

The contrast with the West's treatment of post-Communist Russia is stark indeed. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and Europe eagerly embraced Russia's young democracy. Western economic aid to Russia totaled $55 billion from 1992 to 1997 (not counting private charity). While some aid was conditioned on the continuation of market-oriented economic reforms, none of it was tied to political demands for a formal condemnation of the Soviet legacy. Russia was not required to dump the Lenin mummy from the mausoleum in Moscow, to put former party apparatchiks or KGB goons on trial, or to restrict their ability to hold government posts and run for public office. Nor was it forced to pay reparations to victims of Soviet aggression, or surrender territories such as the Kuril Islands, seized from Japan after World War II.

What about the much-maligned NATO expansion? Friedman asserts that it was particularly galling to Russians since Russia itself was disinvited from joining NATO, sending a message that it was still seen as an adversary. Ira Straus, founder of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, tells a more complex story in a paper for a 1997 George Washington University conference on Russia and NATO.

Russia first expressed cautious interest in NATO membership in 1991, when NATO was not prepared to admit any Eastern Bloc countries. By the time the admission of former Communist states was seriously considered, Boris Yeltsin's administration was already backing away from its embrace of the West, mainly as a result of pressure from the neo-Communists and nationalists who scored victories in the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections. In 1995, pro-Western foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev was replaced by Evgeny Primakov, who, Straus writes, emphasized "multipolarism" and (foreshadowing the leitmotif of the Putin-era Russian political elite) criticized "American attempts at unipolar domination of the world through NATO."

Initially, supporters of NATO expansion envisioned Russia's eventual inclusion, and Yeltsin seemed receptive to the idea. But NATO enlargement soon became a bone of contention. Straus writes that in the mid-1990s, the United States often misinterpreted Russia's opposition to the fast-track admission of smaller states into a Russia-less NATO as opposition to expansion per se. Russia in turn sent many conflicting signals. Above all, it was clearly unwilling to commit to a broad acceptance of NATO strategic policy, one of the main criteria for membership set in the organization's 1995 "Study on NATO Enlargement." This was a serious hurdle, since NATO operates by consensus, giving every member country a de facto veto over the alliance's policies.

Samantha Power dismisses Russia's inclusion in NATO's 1994 "Partnership for Peace" as "largely symbolic." Yet the partnership's framework document not only provided for extensive military cooperation but gave each member guarantees that it would be consulted by NATO about any perceived threats to its security. Straus wrote, in 1997, that Russia "held back from full participation" in the Partnership "due to domestic pressures [and] to suspicions of NATO." This was followed by the creation of the NATO-Russia Council in 2002. Its work included not only joint anti-terrorism efforts but programs that provided job training and other assistance to discharged military personnel in Russia.

Bonner believes that, far from treating Russia as an enemy out of habit, Western politicians and pundits have been too prone to "wishful thinking" in treating it as an ally in the war on terror. Says Bonner, "Russia wasn't even treated as an equal partner but a favored child who was petted and given treats."

One such treat was an invitation to join the G7 group of industrial democracies in 1998. Despite Russia's dubious qualifications for membership in a club based on such criteria as economic performance, political stability, and low level of corruption, the group became the G8. In January 2006, after Putin had crushed his independent media and political opposition, Russia actually assumed chairmanship of the G8--just as its Freedom House ranking slipped from "partly free" to "not free." (According to a December 2005 National Public Radio report, some eternal optimists hoped that giving Russia G8 leadership would encourage liberal tendencies.)

Much Western hand-wringing over Russia's wounded pride seems to accept the premise that Russia is entitled to dominate its smaller neighbors and to have its ego coddled as no other former empire has had. Such entitlement is also deeply entrenched in the mindset of many Russians. "At least they used to be afraid of us" is a sentiment I heard repeatedly on my trips to Russia in the early 1990s. Another popular phrase in those days, "za derzhavu obidno," can be roughly translated as "makes you feel bad for the country," but really means much more: derzhava has overtones of "great power" and "autocratic state"; obidno conveys shame, hurt and resentment. With such a mentality, Putin's bully rhetoric--"Russia can rise from its knees and sock it to you good and hard," he remarked in 1999--found an eager audience.

The painful humiliation of Germany after World War II had one major positive aspect: The Nazi virus was purged from the nation's system. Russia never truly confronted or rejected the evil of its Communist past. Yeltsin, to his credit, sought to do just that. He outlawed the Communist party (which successfully challenged the ban in court) and spoke of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire." This changed under Putin, whose idea of resurgent Russian pride includes celebrating Soviet-era "accomplishments" while treating the crimes as deplorable, but fundamentally no worse than the blots on any other nation's history.

The new Russia bristles at any effort to account for those crimes, be it Ukraine's attempt to have the state-engineered famine of 1932-33 recognized as genocide by the United Nations or Estonia's prosecution of veteran Communist Arnold Meri for his role in the deportation of Estonian "undesirables" in 1949. In July, the Russian foreign ministry issued a peevish protest against President Bush's Captive Nations Week proclamation that mentioned "the evils of Soviet Communism and Nazi fascism," decrying it as an attempt to "continue the Cold War." "But how can it not continue," asked Soviet-era dissident Alexander Podrabinek in an article on the EJ.ru website, "when those in charge of Russia's foreign policy openly try to whitewash Communist ideology?"

National humiliation is not a thing to wish on anyone. But perhaps, after Russia's 20th-century history, a few lessons in humility would have been useful--and well deserved.

Where I have been

2008-09-11T21:41:00.002-04:00

Obviously, not blogging, for several reasons.

Due to no longer having a regular slot at The Boston Globe, getting published now takes more time and effort. For financial reasons, I have also taken on some fairly time-consuming translating work. Between that and possibly frivolous but nonetheless satisfying fandom hobbies, I have not had much time or energy available for unpaid commentary. Until recently, I also haven't been very inspired to blog.

That may change now, with two stories in the news in which I'm keenly interested: the latest events in Russia, and the feminist firestorm around the Sarah Palin nomination for vide president. I will be posting several items this weekend. After that -- we'll see.

My apologies to the readers I've left in the lurch, particularly those who were concerned about my well-being.

The Russian "election": how it really happened

2008-03-18T13:47:00.003-04:00

There has been a lot of pundit talk on the Russian election (or, more accurate, "election"), including my own coming up in Reason Online. For now, one of the best commentaries on the subject is this video, called "Dmitry Medvedev: How It All Began," made by some Russian college students for a comedy festival and posted on YouTube. (It is a testament to the complexity of semi-authoritarian Russia in 2008 that this clip was also hosted on the website of the pro-government Izvestia a few days after election.)

The clip is from the 1971 Soviet comedy Kidnapping, Caucasian Style, in which Shurik, a nerdy Russian college student traveling in the Caucasus and researching folklore and local customs, is tricked into participating in the kidnapping of a young woman by being told that he'll be taking part in a ritual and consensual bride abduction. In the clip, "Shurik" becomes Medvedev, while the movie's three buffoonish kidnappers (1970s' Soviet comedy's "Three Stooges" Vitsyn, Morgunov and Nikulin) become the three "play candidates": the fascistic nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the communist Gennady Zyuganov, and the completely unknown "democrat" Andrei Bogdanov, widely viewed as a Kremlin puppet.

Unfortunately, YouTube clips do not easily lend themselves to editing, so my attempts to add English subtitles failed. I'm posting the video with a translation underneath, with some of the lines time-stamped to make the dialog easier to follow.

0:05: Messenger: Mr. Medvedev?
"Medvedev”: Yes, good evening.
0:18: Messenger: I have some great news for you. You said you wanted to see some ancient local rituals?
0:23: “Medvedev”: Of course, of course! It’s my dream.
0:26: Messenger: We’re going to have one in March.
“Medvedev”: Really!
0:28: Messenger: And you’ll have a chance not only to see it, but to participate.
0:31: “Medvedev”: Well, I appreciate that tremendously. What’s it called, this ritual?
Messenger: A presidential election.
0:42: “Medvedev”: Election?
0:43: Messenger: Oh, not to worry. The people want this election. The government approves too. Of course we could do it the way they do in Belarus, but custom demands that the president be elected.
0:52: “Medvedev”: Elected? Wow. That is a beautiful custom all right. Well, what’s my role?
1:00: Messenger: Collect signatures…
“Medvedev”: Signatures.
Messenger: Get nominated as a candidate…
“Medvedev”: Nominated? That’s part of the ritual too? Brilliant! Well, well -- go on!
1:10: Messenger: And then the people will elect – whom?
“Medvedev”: Putin, of course. As always.
1:14: Messenger: No, no. They’ll elect YOU. From among the other candidates.
“Medvedev”: Oh, you mean there are other candidates?
1:20: Messenger: Yes, that’s what custom requires. Speaking of which – here they are now. I’ll introduce you.
“Medvedev”: My pleasure.
1:26: Messenger: Left to right: Zhirinovsky, Zyuganov and what’s-his-name, I keep forgetting – aha, got it -- Bogdanov. Get acquainted.
1:39: “Medvedev”: Hi! I’m Dmitry. – Dima. – Dima.
“Bogdanov” [squeals]: Ouch! I’m nobody! I’m nothing!
“Medvedev”: Oh, sorry. Take a seat.
1:59: Messenger: They don’t have the slightest chance of winning. But don’t worry, they know what’s going on.
2:07: “Zyuganov”: Democrats! Scum!
“Medvedev”: What did he say?
Messenger: Oh, he says it all the time. Don’t pay any attention.
2:20: “Medvedev”: Oh, I get it – he’s a little nuts. [mumbles] The damn commie.
2:25: “Zhirinovsky”: Let’s blast -- America!
“Medvedev”: What did he say?
Messenger: He said that if you don’t run, he’ll become president. It’s a joke.
2:39: “Zhirinovsky”: Joke.
“Medvedev”: Ah – a joke. Very well. I agree.
Messenger: Excellent. The United Russia Party will be pleased.
2:49: “Medvedev”: By the way, who’s going to be Prime Minister?
Messenger: Putin. Vladimir Putin.
2:56: “Medvedev”: But – I thought Putin was leaving?
Messenger: He just loves to be in the driver’s seat.
3:08: “Medvedev”: Oh! I completely forgot. I’m busy in March. I’m sorry, but -- I can’t do it. I just can’t.
3:22: Messenger: Mr. Medvedev. Here’s the most important thing. Putin said that he really wants you and no one else to do it.
3:34: “Medvedev”: Putin told you that himself?
Messenger: Yes, he was very insistent.
3:45: “Medvedev”: All right then. Tell Putin I agree. Good-bye.
3:54: Messenger: But keep in mind – custom requires that everything must look real. Supposedly, no one knows it’s a ritual. You rivals are going to fight back. They’ll kick and scream -- maybe even bite. They’ll call fo4 monitors, they’ll shout, “I’ll complain to the U.N.!” But pay no attention. it’s all just a beautiful ancient ritual.
4:11: “Medvedev”: I understand. Don’t worry – everything is going to look real. Until the election.
Messenger: Until the election.

The O'Reilly race factor

2007-09-28T10:01:00.000-04:00

I haven't been particularly gentle to Bill O'Reilly before. While his "common man talking common sense" persona was once refreshing at times, and his refusal to toe any party line was a welcome contrast to his ideologically sturdier Fox News colleagues like Sean Hannity, his grandiosity, paranoia, and growing tendency to demonize opponents and disparage secular values have turned the culture warrior extraordinaire into self-parody. That said, I think his latest roasting by his longtime nemesis Media Matters over allegedly racist remarks about a black-owned restaurant in New York, and the ensuing brouahaha which has turned into a fairly big news story (it was on the front page of the Washington Post entertainment section yesterday), is seriously unfair.

According to the Media Matters spin, in a September 19 discussion on his radio show, O'Reilly was "surprised" to find no difference between Sylvia's, a famous black-owned restaurant in Harlem, and other New York restaurants, and even noted the fact that "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' " Other coverage has been along the same lines: "Bill O'Reilly Is Shocked That Not All Blacks Are Animals," "Bill O'Reilly Shocked that Sylvia's Harlem Restaurant is Normal," and so on.

However, if you listen to the clip and read the transcript in the Media Matters post, they don't really support that interpretation. True, O'Reilly's choice of words -- "I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City" -- was somewhat infelicitous. But in the context of the entire segment, it was not an expression of shock on O'Reilly's part so much as an expression of being struck by the contrast between this normality and the image of African-Americans in the media. The "M-Fer, I want more iced tea" remark was a reference to the image of blacks and black behavior perpetuated in the hip-hop culture.

In fact, O'Reilly opened his comments with a sympathetic discussion of the racism blacks still face:

Black people in this country understand that they've had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don't think there's a black American who hasn't had a personal insult that they've had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don't think there's one in the country. So you've got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] "You call me that, I'm gonna be more successful." OK, it depends on the personality.
So it's there. It's there, and I think it's getting better. I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They're getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They're just trying to figure it out: "Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it."
You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on The Factor a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he's made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia's, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.
And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that's really what this society's all about now here in the U.S.A. There's no difference. There's no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment -- people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you're gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin.

Later on, his guest, journalist Juan Williams, brought up the issue of gangsta rap, and the discussion continued as follows:

O'REILLY: You know, and I went to the concert by Anita Baker at Radio City Music Hall, and the crowd was 50/50, black/white, and the blacks were well-dressed. And she came out -- Anita Baker came out on the stage and said, "Look, this is a show for the family. We're not gonna have any profanity here. We're not gonna do any rapping here." The band was excellent, but they were dressed in tuxedoes, and this is what white America doesn't know, particularly people who don't have a lot of interaction with black Americans. They think that the culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris, and Snoop Dogg.
WILLIAMS: Oh, and it's just so awful. It's just so awful because, I mean, it's literally the sewer come to the surface, and now people take it that the sewer is the whole story --
O'REILLY: That's right. That's right. There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, "M-Fer, I want more iced tea."
WILLIAMS: Please --
O'REILLY: You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all.

It seems to me that O'Reilly was clearly discussing the stereotypes held by many people in "white America" and the disparity between those stereotypes and reality, not his own amazement at finding those stereotypes to be inaccurate. Sure, his remarks can be seen as somewhat condescending, as always happens when you praise people for behaving well. But racist? In fact, O'Reilly went out of his way to emphasize that "there's no difference" between the mainstream of black culture and the mainstream of white culture.

Another fact that has hardly been noted in this controversy is that Juan Williams, O'Reilly's guest and co-discussant, is a renowned black journalist who has written a great deal about issues of race. The Washington Post story did not even mention Juan Williams -- which is rather ironic, because Williams worked for the Post for 23 years, from 1976 to 1999, as editorial writer, op-ed columnnist, and White House correspondent. (Today, he is a political contributor at Fox News but also a frequent commentator on PBS and a senior national correspondent for National Public Radio.) Would Williams have played along with racist comments by O'Reilly? I doubt it. In fact, one virtually unreported fact is that he has come to O'Reilly's defense over the incident.

The Post did talk to CNN's Rick Sanchez, who has made a prime-time story of the O'Reilly race flap:

Sanchez, in a phone interview, said O'Reilly is perpetuating racism by using "the Mandingo argument" against black rappers. "The idea [is] that there's a big, bad African American out there that we all need protection from," he said. "It's a dangerous way of looking at racial relations. The African American community is extremely complex. The thinking that black culture is confined to guys sticking their underwear out is just wrong, and many African Americans resent it."

But isn't that what O'Reilly was saying, too -- if in a rather clumsy fashion? On this one, I think he's getting a bum rap -- and while I have criticized him in the past for calling Media Matters "smear merchants," I think his charge has just acquired a little more legitimacy.

Who's afraid of Ron Paul?

2007-09-05T22:38:00.000-04:00

Yes, as promised, regular blogging is resuming after Labor Day.

Starting, for now, with my non-regular contribution to The Boston Globe -- a column on the intriguing candidacy of Ron Paul.

So far in Campaign 2008, the one contender who seems to have generated the most grassroots excitement isn't really a contender at all. Ron Paul, the Republican congressman from Texas, doesn't have much chance of winning.
When the mainstream media have noticed Paul at all, they have largely treated him as a curiosity or even a nuisance: After the first Republican debate in May, a Washington Post editorial suggested that the debates would be much better if they weren't "cluttered" by such nobodies. Perhaps the most media notice he attracted was when, in the second debate, he seemed to suggest that American foreign policy was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. This comment quickly became an opportunity for patriotic point-scoring by Rudy Giuliani, and led some GOP operatives to call for Paul's exclusion from future debates.
Yet Paul has a following that no other candidate can match in sheer dedication. His impressive performance in Internet polls has been supplemented with two landslide victories in Republican straw polls - in Strafford County, N.H., (with 208 of the 288 votes) and in Alabama.
What, then, is Ron Paul all about? While his views are decidedly unorthodox for today's Republican Party, they represent a venerable, oft-forgotten Republican tradition of small government at home and noninterventionism abroad. In some ways, he is an heir to Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who ran for president in 1964. Paul, a 72-year-old physician, first ran for president in 1988 on the Libertarian Party ticket. Then, he decided to work from within the GOP. He won a House seat as a Republican in 1996, over strong opposition from the establishment.
On the campaign trail, Paul articulates a philosophy that recalls the famous dictum often attributed to Henry David Thoreau: "That government is best which governs least." "I want to be president mainly for what I don't want to do: I don't want to run your life, I don't want to run the economy, and I don't want to police the world," he told a potential supporter at the Strafford County straw poll. He wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and the income tax, to end the war in Iraq and the war on drugs, to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Education.
Unlike many libertarians, Paul is not a social-issues liberal: thus, he opposes abortion. However, he wants the issue to be decided by states, not on a federal level. And, in the first Republican debate, Paul gave the only principled libertarian response on the issue of funding for stem-cell research: "The trouble with issues like this is, in Washington we either prohibit it or subsidize it. And the market should deal with it, and the states should deal with it."
Paul's followers are a veritable rainbow coalition drawn from across the political spectrum. The most striking image from his campaign - the slogan "Revolution" with the letters "EVOL" reversed to spell "love" backward - is, to use a 1960s metaphor, more Beatles than Barry Goldwater. (The creator of this slogan, Arizona libertarian Ernie Hancock, explains in an online article that the "love" refers to love of liberty, but concedes that the visual was chosen mainly for its emotional impact.)
In a sense, Paul is the Ralph Nader of the right, attracting people who are deeply alienated by conventional politics. Inevitably, he attracts people from the lunatic fringe, such as Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists who believe the US government engineered the attacks. But it would be unfair to paint Paul as the candidate of crackpots. His message resonates with many people who don't fit into conventional categories of left and right.
In its pure form, Paul's libertarianism is not politically viable. Polls have shown that, at most, about 10 percent of Americans are in favor of reducing the scope of government, and domestic government services, to a minimum. Paul's case for noninterventionism abroad is problematic as well. He has contrasted our entanglements in Third World countries that cannot pose a military threat to the United States with the fact that "we stood up to the Soviets [who] had 40,000 nuclear weapons." But American foreign policy in the Cold War was an interventionist one, requiring massive and expensive commitments from the federal government. And there is a strong argument that, in today's globalized world, totalitarian movements rooted in religious extremism would inevitably threaten US interests and safety if left unchecked by American power.
Even if, by some miracle, Paul managed to win, it is unlikely he would be able to enact much of his libertarian agenda. But in an age of bipartisan Nanny Statism, his arguments provide a refreshing alternative, a bold and much-needed critique of a creeping loss of freedom at home and reckless adventurism abroad.

Predictably, I have received some negative emails from Ron Paul supporters, complaining that there is nothing in my column that is different from "a hundred other 'inside baseball' article about why Paul can't win." One gentleman writes:

I found your article titled "A love revolution, Goldwater-style" to be unduly biased and critical of Ron Paul. Perhaps the irony is that you write for Reason Magazine and you fail to use your reason in writing. Reason would dictate a fair consideration of the facts. I don't see you doing that. You engage in predicting the future.

To say that Ron Paul doesn't have much chance is your personal opinion but surely not representative of what is going on. Would you say the same thing about McCain, who has less cash on hand than Paul? If so, then where is that article?

Reason magazine has strong libertarian roots such that REASON is a core value of the libertarian party in addition to FREE MINDS and MARKETS. It is unbelievable that you would write such an article. I think that the article is a disgrace to the magazine. If there would be some shred of support, I would have thought it would have been from REASON. Even a magazine that stands for much of what Ron Paul talks about, abandons him for some reason? Care to explain?

If you really want free minds, you should let people make there own assessment of Ron Paul and NOT try to influence them with subtle suggestions.

Well, I would point out that my column differs from a hundred others in the mainstream media simply by taking Ron Paul's ideas seriously, even I disagree with many of them (at least in degree). I will also point out that I don't speak for Reason magazine and that Reason does not speak for the Libertarian Party or for any candidates. As for whether Paul can win, I seriously doubt I can changed anyone's mind either way. (It's also just my personal opinion that a movie called Ghost Town, a reportedly excellent indie Western scheduled for release later this year, has no chance to become the top-grossing movie of 2007). Those who prefer to be enabled in their wishful thinking are welcome to it.

I would direct my critics to the (far harsher) article by Christopher Caldwell (a libertarian-leaning conservative) in the New York Times Magazine, and specifically to this:

Paul understands that his chances of winning the presidency are infinitesimally slim. He is simultaneously planning his next Congressional race. But in Paul’s idea of politics, spreading a message has always been just as important as seizing office. “Politicians don’t amount to much,” he says, “but ideas do.”

There's one Ron Paul position that gets my vote.

Race, educational achievement, and affirmative action

2007-08-14T17:36:00.000-04:00

According to a repot in Inside Higher Ed, the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association was focused on "new reseach designed to shift the debate" on affirmative action. The main point of this shift: repealing affirmative action, the new argument goes, is unfair not simply because it results in a drop of black and Latino enrollment at the top universities, but because this drop is not related to merit.

Robert T. Teranishi, assistant professor of higher education at New York University, said that his research was designed to counter the “blaming the victim” mentality in which he said people assume black enrollment declines suggest a lack of merit by black students.
The reality, he said, is that a new form of school segregation has taken hold in which in post-affirmative action California, the best way for a black or Latino student to get into a University of California campus is to attend a “white” high school.
Teranishi’s research focuses on California high schools and the relationship between attending high schools with certain characteristics and enrolling at a University of California campus. He started by noting that while California is famous for its ethnic and racial diversity (in statewide totals), 88 percent of high schools have a racial majority of one group. Of those schools, he said, 44.7 percent have a white majority, while 43.4 percent have a black or Latino majority. But among new University of California students, 65.3 percent come from white majority schools and only 21.7 percent come from black or Latino majority schools.
From there, Teranishi presented data showing educational inequities in the different kinds of schools, such as studies showing that the greater the proportion of black and Latino students in a high school, the fewer Advanced Placement courses that are likely to be offered.
The cumulative impact of these inequities is such that minority students who are admitted to top University of California campuses are more likely to have attended white majority schools than other schools. At Berkeley, for example, 48.9 percent of the underrepresented minority students admitted attended white majority high schools, while 33.6 percent attended high schools that were black or Latino majority and 17.5 percent attended high schools without a racial majority. At the University of California at San Diego, the percentage of new black and Latino students coming from white majority high schools is 52.6 percent.
Teranishi said that such data should shake up people who think that some pure idea of merit is at play in selecting the best students for top colleges. Is it fair to tell black and Latino students, he asked, that to have a good chance at getting into UCLA or Berkeley, “they need to attend a white school"?
Walter Allen, professor of higher education at UCLA, said that what the data suggest are that admissions systems supposedly designed to favor merit are in fact systems that “protect privilege” and end up ripping off black and Latino people generally — either as would-be students or as taxpayers. “The poor folks are subsidizing the educations of wealthy people,” he said.

A few things leap out. First, the blatantly agenda-driven nature of the research, explicitly -- by the researcher's own admission -- designed to support a particular public policy goal (the defense of race-based preferences in college admissions). Second, the blatantly one-sided nature of the discussion at the conference (at least judging by Scott Jaschik's account at Inside Higher Ed, no opposing viewpoints were presented).

And thirdly, I think the esteemed sociologists have the wrong idea about opposition to preferences. Few Americans regard "merit" as a completely innate quality that exists outside any social or cultural context, and the idea of innate racial differences in intelligence is generally quite unpopular among critics of race-based preferences. Most of those critics, such as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, have stressed the need to reform K-12 education rather than try to artificially remedy the educational achievement gap by lowering college admission standards for minorities.

Teranishi's research (disputed by some people in the comments at Inside Higher Ed) is intriguing; but it hardly proves that the students who are being rejected by the top colleges are qualified for admission. The availability of advanced placement courses, and resources in general, is undoubtedly a factor; but there may be other reasons black and Latino students from majority white schools do better -- such as a school culture more supportive of scholastic achievement.

Instead of renewing the call for crude racial-preference policies, it might be worth it to look at what those majority-white schools are doing right.

My own article on racial preferences, from 2001, can be found here.

More on Hiroshima

2007-08-14T17:20:00.000-04:00

Oliver Kamm returns to the subject of Hiroshima, and kindly mentions my blogpost. He also deals with the responses from some of his critics, and provides some context for the David Henderson article which I linked as a good example of the revionist views on the bombing.

D.M. Giangreco also sends along this interesting item from American Heritage magazine on newly discovered documents shedding light on Truman's decision.

Putinjugend: More bad news from Russia

2007-08-10T20:43:00.000-04:00

I'm back for a visit to the op-ed page of the Boston Globe, with a column on "Nashi", the rather sinister youth movement on the rise in Russia.

A couple of months ago on an Internet forum I frequent, a discussion of human rights in Eastern Europe turned to the brutal suppression last May of a demonstration in Moscow protesting the city's ban on a gay pride march. Then came a remarkable response from a Russian forum participant, a 19-year-old university student from St. Petersburg: "RUSSIA THE BEST!!! AMERICA SUCKS!!!" she wrote in capital letters. "Next time write about the things that happen in your gay country, leave Russia alone!!!! Putin is the greatest president and we have the greatest history ever!"

I thought of that young woman when, shortly afterward, I read alarming reports about a new force in Russian public life: a youth movement called Nashi. The word is typically translated as "Ours," but that doesn't quite capture the nationalist, triumphalist overtones of the Russian name. "Nashi," in Russian idiom, means "Our Guys" or "Our Kind"; it's the "us" in us versus them.

"Them," for Nashi, includes everyone from Americans to former Soviet republics that bristle at Russian diktat to Russians who don't subscribe to Putin's authoritarian vision of "sovereign democracy."

Nashi was launched in the spring of 2005, largely in reaction to the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine in 2004, where young adults played a key role in the massive street protests, sit-ins, and strikes that helped pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko prevail in an election dispute. With Nashi and several smaller pro-Kremlin youth groups, the Putin regime is hoping not only to co-opt political activism among the younger generation but to use it as a club against its enemies.

And make no mistake: While ostensibly independent, Nashi is a Kremlin creation. Officially, its lavish funding comes from pro-government business owners; it is widely reported that the group also receives direct subsidies from the Kremlin. Nashi activists land coveted jobs and internships in government agencies as well as state-owned oil and gas corporations. Putin's top advisers have met frequently with the group's leaders.

Last July, its two-week training program in a camp 200 miles outside Moscow, attended by 10,000 young men and women carefully screened for ideological fitness, was capped by a video message from Putin in which the president proclaimed Nashi a part of his team. Several days earlier, he had met with a group of Nashi "commissars" at his summer residence in Zavidovo.

Nashi claims to be over 100,000 strong; according to some reports, it has a core of 10,000 activists ages 17 to 25, with another 200,000 or so who regularly attend its events.

At the core of Nashi's credo is personal loyalty to Putin, admired as the strongman who saved Russia from weakness and decline -- and venomous hate toward the opposition and its leaders, such as chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. (Posters at the Nashi summer camp depicted Kasparov and two other male opposition figures as lingerie-clad prostitutes.)

Beyond this personality cult, Nashi champions the ideology of the Putin regime, which blends elements of the Soviet legacy and that of imperial Russia. Though officially secular, the movement has a Russian Orthodox wing. It promotes conservative social values and healthy lifestyles, condemning such scourges as draft evasion, drinking, smoking, birth control, and abortion. Its leaders speak of "freedom" as essential to the Russian people -- but what they mean is freedom from outside interference and infringements on Russia's sovereignty.

Propaganda is not the only weapon in Nashi's arsenal. The movement offers paramilitary training that prepares members for breaking up opposition rallies (under the guise of combating "fascism") and intimidating those who run afoul of the Putin regime. Last year, when the governor of the Perm region recklessly allowed a member of an opposition party to attend a youth conference, Nashi protesters picketed his offices until he apologized.

In April, the group's protests against the Estonian government's decision to relocate a memorial to Soviet soldiers turned violent: Hundreds of Nashi goons besieged the Estonian embassy in Moscow, unmolested by the police as they threw rocks, blocked traffic, and tore down the Estonian flag.

Some have compared Nashi to the Komsomol, the Soviet-era Communist Youth League. But in a way, Nashi is much more frightening. By the 1960s, the Komsomol was largely devoid of genuine ideological zeal, unless you count rote recitation of party slogans. Membership in the organization, while not mandatory, was practically universal, and joining it at 14 was largely a formality. Even Komsomol activists, with few exceptions, were interested in career advancement, not political causes. Today's Nashi undoubtedly have their share of cynical careerists, but they also include a large number of true believers.

Perhaps more aptly, some Russian liberals refer to Nashi as "Putinjugend." The movement's brownshirt tactics certain evoke shades of Hitler Youth, as does the emphasis on physical fitness, clean living, and procreation for the Motherland. (At the Nashi summer camp, sex was encouraged as an answer to Russia's demographic crisis, and 40 couples were married.) While the Nashi platform condemns ethnic bigotry, there is little doubt that if the Kremlin decided to single out an ethnic or religious minority as "the enemy," Nashi would fall into lockstep.

I don't know if the young Russian woman who posted that angry message on the Internet forum was a member of Nashi; but she certainly had the slogans and the mindset. If so, she speaks for a large segment of Russia's new generation: a generation that is being taught to see national greatness in a bully state that inspires fear abroad and tramples the individual at home.

Many links on Nashi can be found here. By the way, for a charming Orwellian touch, Nashi's full name is, "The democratic anti-fascist youth movement Nashi." Fascist, in Nashi parlance, equals anyone critical of Putin.

I wondered how long after the appearance of my column it would take for someone to ask why I'm not being equally critical of the College Republicans. Not long at all. The analogy comes from paleocon Daniel Larison, who thinks that "a bully state that inspires fear abroad and tramples the individual at home" describes the U.S. government as much as the Putin regime. We'll talk when George Soros (like Mikhail Khodorkovsky) is in jail on trumped-up charges of financial wrongdoing and when every news channel on American TV is reduced to an obedient mouthpiece of the government. I could list a few more "whens" here, but that's an issue I'll address in a separate post soon. (For the record, I'm not a fan of the Bush administration's record on civil liberties; but I'm also not a fan of facile comparisons to Putin's Russia.) Larison also asks what makes Nashi so important:

Putin theoretically has at his disposal the entire military, intelligence and internal security apparatus of the Russian government, so how on earth could a band of occasionally thuggish nationalist youths be of greater concern to someone who opposes Putin?
If you want to get exercised about the treatment of Estonia (whose own government’s removal of a Soviet war memorial started the whole fracas), you might focus on the massive cyber-war waged against E-stonia rather than the bussed-in protesters who threw rocks at an embassy. But there’s no anti-Nazi cachet in that. Drawing attention to Russian cyber-warfare would emphasise that these are not just some dusty bunch of old commie-Nazis, but represent something different. Writing an article about “Putin’s young brownshirts” is much catchier, because it allows the audience to avoid thinking.

I'm not sure why the two are mutually exclusive; I have, in fact, written about Russian cyber-warfare. As for why Nashi merits attention: in the past 15 years, Russia has developed at least something of a civil society that could, theoretically, serve as a buffer against the power of the state apparatus (at least as long as Russia has elections). Groups like Nashi are one of the ways in which this civil society is being co-opted and turned into an instrument of the state; especially dangerous in this case, because it's young people, traditionally a group associated with anti-authoritarianism, rebelliousness, and the demand for freedom, who are being co-opted in this way.

Larison also trots out the idea (which has cropped up elsewhere, from paleocons and liberals alike), that Russia's turn to authoritarianism is partly the fault of U.S. policies intended to "humiliate" post-Cold War Russia, and invites me to criticize those policies. I'd love to know what this "humiliation" consisted of; if there's anything to criticize about our Russia policy, it's the insistence on treating Russia as an ally and a democracy when it's obviously neither. But that's a discussion for another day. Whatever the cause of Russia's authoritarian slide, the emergence of a state-blessed cultish youth movement whose members are all too willing to serve as goon squads for the government is a new landmark in that slide.

More Beauchamp

2007-08-07T07:10:00.000-04:00

According to Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard, Beauchamp has recanted.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp--author of the much-disputed "Shock Troops" article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous "Baghdad Diarist" columns--signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods--fabrications containing only "a smidgen of truth," in the words of our source.

Goldfarb also quotes this statement from Major Steven F. Lamb, the deputy Public Affairs Officer for Multi National Division-Baghdad:

An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by PVT Beauchamp were found to be false. His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims.

Could the Army investigation be a means of sweeping embarrassing facts under the rug? Sure. Could the military pressure a private into recanting a true story? Sure -- though Beuchamp, at present, has enough visibility to be more protected from retaliation than the typical soldier. Be as it may, if the story recantation story pans out, it will no doubt breathe a new life into the story.

Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein responds to my earlier post on the topic, and specifically to this part:

[W]hile I think the story of the boy who had his tongue cut out raises further doubts about Beauchamp’s credibility, it also points to the aburdity of claims that TNR editors were eager to publish Beauchamp because his writings put U.S. troops in Iraq in a bad light. (Unless, of course, one wants to claim that TNR and Beauchamp cleverly conspired to ensure that his first diarist piece focused on atrocity by the insurgents in order to avert suspicion of anti-Americanism — which is probably not too paranoid for a few websites.)

Asks Jeff:

Consider: is it really “paranoid” to suggest that a writer working to establish credibility would be careful to describe the barbarism of “both sides” (and aren’t we always told that what separates “us” from “them” is that we do not behave like them, making the subsequent barbarism of the American troops reported in Beauchamp’s follow-up pieces all the more pointedly ironic)?
In fact, isn’t it that juxtaposition itself that gives the pieces their pointedness and, to some, their poignancy?
The idea that war turns us into what we are fighting is the “literary” conceit being serviced by Beauchamp’s collection of essays — and in the aggregate, his pieces are, in my reading, intended to supply this practiced layer to the anti-war narrative embraced both by Foer and (if we can believe his other writings, or view his political affiliations as “significant” with respect to his literary output) Beauchamp.

Sorry -- I find it hard to believe that Beauchamp sought "juxtaposition" between an essay published in February and an essay published in July. People weren't reading his essays in a collection of books, they were reading them in a weekly magazine, and except for a handful who were paying special attention to the "Baghdad Diarist," I doubt that most even remembered that the "Shock Troops" article was written by the same guy who wrote about the insurgents cutting out a kid's tongue. If Beauchamp wanted "juxtaposition" between the atrocities of the insurgents and the dehumanization of U.S. soldiers to the point of becoming "just like the enemy," surely he would have made it in one article, not two different essays separated by months. Besides, especially compared to an atrocity like cutting off a child's tongue, the behavior Beauchamp imputes to U.S. soldiers hardly qualifies as "barbaric."

Meanwhile, in the comments, "Jeffersonian," who says he is a longtime fan of mine and defends me against some of the more spirited comments from his fellow posters, accuses me of being "disingenuous" in this case:

TNR obviously knew what Beauchamp was going to write before he did, given the nature of his oeuvre. Of the tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq, they just happened across this guy? ... TNR picked STB for a reason, and it wasn’t because of his purple prose.

I appreciate the fan support, of course; but does "Jeffersonian" really believe that when TNR picked up Beauchamp's first Diarist piece about the Iraqi boy mutilated by insurgents for talking to Americans, Franklin Foer knew in advance that Beauchamp would follow up with a piece chronicling bad behavior by American soldiers and that's the only reason he decided to publish Beauchamp? Sorry, but that is paranoid, and it's also the kind of demonization of "the other side" that I find so frustrating in political discourse.

As I recall, Beauchamp was recommended to TNR by his fiancee Elspeth Reeve, a staffer at the magazine. It's not as if the magazine went looking for a soldier to write "Diarist" pieces. I do think that, to a large extent, Beauchamp was given a platform because he was someone the TNR editors saw as "one of us": a guy with a background in creative writing and journalism, as well as a Howard Dean supporter. I think it's also fair to say that the first Diarist piece, while not negative toward American troops in Iraq, showed them as mired in bleak and awful futility: at the end, Beauchamp reflects on his feelings of helplessness at his inability to protect the boy. So in that sense, it certainly fits into the current world-view at TNR. On the other hand, it could also be read as implying that if we withdraw from Iraq, we will leave the population in the hands of people who cut out children's tongues to make a point.

Finally, I'm not sure why some of Jeff's commenters think I'm helping "close ranks" in defense of TNR, or wondering what my reaction will be "if Beauchamp’s recantation is acknowledged and TNR still holds the articles as representative of the magazine’s journalism." Where exactly is my defense of TNR? I said I believed that Beauchamp is a fabulist or at least a partial fabulist, and that TNR is wrong to stand by him. Nor did I ever say the story didn't matter; I specifically said does, because I think journalistic integrity, particularly in reporting from a war zone, is important. I think they're guilty of shoddy journalism, but not of trying to undermine the war. As far as I know, no anti-war blogs picked up Thomas's piece or tried to trumpet his allegations before conservative blogs drew attention to the piece.

This is not to say that Beauchamp's stories should have been left unchallenged -- only to say that, even unchallenged, they would have been unlikely to have much tangible effect, good or bad.

Update, August 9: TNR denies Beauchamp's recantation. The Weekly Standard stands by its story. The Army says its investigation has showed Beauchamp's stories to be false. In the end, everyone will probably stick by their opinion.

Hiroshima, moral purity and moral blindness

2007-08-06T22:57:00.000-04:00

A thoughtful, poignant post by Shaun Mullen at The Moderate Voice (and in a longer version on his own blog, Kiko's House) reminded me that today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Mullen opens with a heartbreaking image of human suffering -- the death of a three-year-old boy who was outside riding his tricycle when the bomb hit. Then, he examines the arguments made in favor of Harry Truman's decision to approve the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (avoiding the huge losses of both American and Japanese lives that would have inevitably resulted from a mainland invasion, freeing millions of people under Japanese occupation as well as hundreds of thousands of POWs in danger of death), as well as the arguments against it. He concludes:

[I]n my humble view, President Truman made the right decision in 1945 under circumstances so extraordinary that it is difficult to imagine them being replicated at some future time. I pray that I am not wrong.

Oliver Kamm, British commentator and liberal hawk, has a piece making the same argument in The Guardian, challenging the "alternative history" which claims that Japan was already on the brink of surrender and the nuclear bombs were dropped in order to intimidate Stalin's Soviet Union. Writes Kamm:

Contrary to popular myth, there is no documentary evidence that his military commanders advised him the bomb was unnecessary for Japan was about to surrender. As the historian Wilson Miscamble puts it, Truman "hoped that the bombs would end the war and secure peace with the fewest American casualties, and so they did. Surely he took the action any American president would have undertaken." Recent Japanese scholarship provides support for this position. Sadao Asada, of Doshisha University, Kyoto, has concluded from analysis of Japanese primary sources that the two bombs enabled the "peace party" within Japan's cabinet to prevail.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire - and for Japan itself. One of Japan's highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

Here, I will say that my knowledge of World War II is limited. I don't know who is factually correct about the situation in the Pacific theater at the end of the war. (The revisionist case is made here by the Hoover Institution's David Henderson.) The argument that the primary goal of dropping the bombs was to intimidate the Soviets doesn't make much sense to me, given that after the war ended we allowed the Soviet Union to keep all of Eastern Europe, half of Germany, and the Baltics as part of its empire. If Truman mainly wanted leverage against the Soviets, he didn't make much use of it. Some argue that alternative means of forcing a surrender, such as dropping the bomb on a military target first, could have worked. Others dispute that. I don't know the answer.

On a purely instinctive level, I am of course appalled by justifications for the killing of about 150,000 civilians, many of them children. One cannot, if one is a normal person, justify such an act without doing violence to one's moral sense. But are there times when the unspeakable is the lesser of two evils? Obviously, arguments that noble ends can justify terrible means can lead to some pretty dark places, and such arguments have also served countless tyrants and dictatorships as excuses for barbarism. The danger of becoming "as bad as the enemy" is real.

But the view that all use of terrible means is equal represents the opposite extreme: it is a kind of moral laziness that abdicates critical distinctions and context. Assassinating Hitler with a car bomb in the middle of World War II, even if the bomb also kills some innocents, is not morally equivalent to assassinating Martin Luther King. When some have the will to do evil things -- enslavement, mass murder -- there is generally no way to stop them except by force, and when one chooses to use force, terrible choices must sometimes be made. What if the only way you can stop a death squad is to destroy the camp that serves as its base, and you know that some members of this death squad have children living in this camp? (Neo-neocon has an interesting post on the subject from two years ago.)

I don't dispute that even necessary violence, particularly when it kills innocents, damages the soul. I will even agree that we should all find it a little harder to live with ourselves when we pause to think that the victory over evil in World War II was bought with the lives of so many innocents, not only at Hiroshima but also in Dresden or in Tokyo, where the men, women and children killed by "conventional" firebombing were as dead as the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (I also agree that it's a sign of moral progress that such wanton slaughter of civilians is now considered off-limits as a war tactic, at least by civilized nations). Nonetheless, it was as clearcut a victory over evil as there has ever been in history.

And that's why what truly shocked me was the responses to Oliver Kamm on the Guardian website. Not all the responses, to be sure; but many of the anti-Kamm posts were truly striking in their venom and their strident moral equivalency:

The funny thing is, Oliver Kamm demonstrates what Noam Chomsky said years ago about war crimes; war crimes are defined by the victors of the war and not be (sic) any objective standard.
You could argue, that Kamm is supporting terrorism: as several posters has pointed out, with the kind of logic he espouses, Al Qaeda is perfectly entitled to target civilians in order to end the WOT.
What a disgusting article. For me, the dropping of an atomic bomb on any town anywhere is entirely despicable. In my opinion it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that whilst Americans may be lovely people when they are getting their way, they will stoop to any depths to ensure their personal gain in the face of opposition. They will also, always hide behind "holier than thou" reasons for their contemptible behaviour.
Do you believe that what you wrote actually justify intentional killing of babies, women and old folks? If so, what is wrong with Taliban killings of Korean hostages? They just want to save their own people at the moment in Afghanistan prisons.
Yes, of course, Oliver, nuclear bombs save lives, so let's offer our unique form of salvation to the Iranians. Zonist (sic) and neo-con interests and oil have nothing to do with it.
Only idiots, cretins and evil people try to rationalize dead babies. There is no cause worth this evil. If we use evil to defeat evil, we ourselves have become evil.
Wow. Americans are just shocking in their denial. By this sick logic the jihadis are completely justified when they attack American civilians in massive acts of terror - which I might add are mere blips in comparison to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We live in a sick culture, where 60 years have passed, and there isnt even a shred of shame with regards to this heinous crime. For the sake of our species - Boycott America.
this is a truly disgusting article by a truly disgusting war monger who has now become famous for constantly suggesting war and violence against brown, black and yellow people - Lebanon, Iraq and now a justification of nuclear weapons against Japanese,
next we will get an Oliver Kamm article that says drop a nuke on Bahghdad for the sake of the Iraqis and to save American casualities,
what is the different between Oliver Kamm and the guys with long beards who glorify jihad and say things like drop drop drop the bomb?
"Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome."
The other side also did similar terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome which became war crimes.
It is the winner who decides what is or is not a war crime.
Apologists for Western war crimes are two a penny. But why would such a person imagine they were left wing?
Most people can justify anything, even killing millions of humanbeings as long as they are not among the killed.It is sad to read such an article in the Guardian
America has ever been a psychopathic bully ever since it's first days and the genocide against the indiginous Americans. Why all these attempts to justify what was clearly a war crime greater than all others?
The demand of unconditional surrender is in itself a war crime. It convinced the Germans (the generals not least)that they would have to fight to the last man, since no mercy could be expected from the Allies. Germany was to be destroyed rather than merely conquered. The same with Japan.
The US has never learned the lesson of treating one's enemies with grace and magnanimity once those enemies have lost--it is always vindictive, always demands unconditional surrender, complete acquiescence to US subjugation. The US and will destroy an entire country in order to prove a point instead of giving in to one very small, insignificant condition.

What is completely absent from these comments (and many others like them) is any awareness of things like the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March, or even the Holocaust for that matter; or of the fact that America's supposed determination to "destroy" and crush her enemies manifested itself in rebuilding postwar Germany and leaving Japan with a political system that allowed it to prosper and become a strong economic rival to America herself. (There is also very little awareness that tens of thousands of German civilians died in British bombing raids.) A few commenters suggest that America should have allowed the Soviets to end the war by invading Japan, blithely unaware of the hell on earth that would have awaited the Japanese under Soviet occupation. This isn't mere ignorance; it's a profound conviction that only evil done by the West, and above all by "psychopathic bully" America, truly matters. Meanwhile, posters who point out Japanese atrocities in World War II are rebuffed with accusations of "the implicitly racist overtone [of] recounting the endless 'savagery' of the Japanese."

When anti-Americanism becomes so extreme that it turns the U.S. into the bad guy of World War II, that's truly frightening and depressing. Even one poster highly critical of American foreign policy today was moved to point out:

Now I don't think I've ever posted anything in the defence of the United States, but there is a time for everything. The naivety of certain comments above is astonishing.
It is not racist to state that Japan during the 1940s was in the grip of a pseudo-religious nationalistic fever and would have fought to that last man rather than allow foreigners to invade their land. The inhumanity of the Japanese regime was akin to Nazi Germany. Had the situation been reversed and the Japanese had the bomb, there would not be a hamlet left standing in the United States.
It is difficult to imagine given the current American tendency of mindless warmongering, but there was a time when the US fought a just war, and there was unfortunately no alternative way of ending it to save hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives.

Many of the Guardian posters were convinced that the real purpose behind Kamm's defense of Hiroshima was to defend the use of nuclear weapons against Iran or Iraq today. I don't know what Kamm thinks on the subject, but I do know that Shaun Mullen thinks it would be insane to use nukes in the War on Terror. So, the argument that the U.S. was justified in dropping the bombs in 1945 is not necessarily, folks, a transparent rationalization for incinerating Baghdad or Tehran in 2007.

As for whether the bombing was indeed the least evil of all available options: again, I don't know. I'm sure there is room for legitimate debate on this issue. But that debate is almost entirely drowned out by hate and self-righteousness. The insistense on moral purity has turned to moral blindness.

L'affaire Beauchamp: The sound of many knees jerking

2007-08-04T08:54:00.000-04:00

The Scott Thomas Beauchamp brouhaha is a proverbial tempest in a teapot. The claims Beauchamp made (as the barely pseudonymous "Scott Thomas") in his "Baghdad Diarist" New Republic article about American soldiers behaving badly are fairly trivial; the war in Iraq does not stand or fall on their truthfulness. Nonetheless, the blogosphere's reaction to the story has been sharply divided along pro-war and anti-war lines almost from the start, and this across-the-board knee-jerk response is, perhaps, the most interesting (if depressing) aspect of the entire affair.

Right meme: it's a liberal media conspiracy to besmirch the war effort by encouraging a leftist literary poseur to publish fictional or embellished stories painting soldiers as depraved sociopaths. Left meme: it's a right-wing cyber-lynching of a soldier telling the ugly truth about the war. TNR's announcement that it has confirmed the story to its satisfaction has not changed any minds.

There is no question that some of the right-wing rhetoric directed at Beauchamp and at TNR was indeed shockingly ugly, violent, and paranoid (Beauchamp was a leftist mole who had deliberately infiltrated the military in order to destroy it from within!). But the defense of Beauchamp from the anti-war camp seems misguided.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Factually, the critics have the point that the incident of mocking an injured woman occurred in Kuwait, not Iraq. And, unless more facts emerge, that's it.

But the location is not a triviality in this instance. Beauchamp's piece opened with a shocking tale of how he and a buddy publicly mocked a woman on their base in Iraq -- a woman whom, he wrote, he saw at almost every meal in the chow hall -- whose face was badly disfigured by an IED. After three soldiers told TNR fact-checkers that they did remember a loud conversation in which the woman was mocked within her hearing range, but it happened at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, prior to the unit's arrival in Iraq, Beauchamp acknowledged the error. But was it an error? After all, with the correct location, the anecdote would not have fit into Beauchamp's narrative. His point was that war messes up one's moral compass, including his own. In this case, logic is on the side of The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb when he writes:

TNR says in this new statement that “Shock Troops” “was about the morally and emotionally distorting effects of war.” But now we find out that Beauchamp hadn’t even gotten to Iraq when this incident allegedly took place.

For an analogy: Suppose a conservative magazine ran an article about the baneful effects of same-sex marriage on general attitudes toward matrimony. Suppose it opened with an account of a conversation overheard by the author on a college campus in Massachusetts, a few weeks after that state's Supreme Court ruled that same-sex unions must be legalized, in which several college students favorably discussed polygamy and group marriage. Suppose some questions were raised about the accuracy of that account, and then it turned out that the conversation did take place -- only it was a month before the same-sex marriage ruling and it happened not in Massachusetts but in Virginia. Would anyone consider that a trivial error?

Shakespeare's Sister (Melissa McEwen) also thinks that Beauchamp deserves credit for coming clean about his error; but I'm not sure there's much virtue in that, considering that three soldiers had already told TNR's fact-checkers the incident had taken place on the base in Kuwait.

As for the other incidents chronicled by Beauchamp: Ace of Spades does a pretty convincing job of "fisking" the one in which a soldier wore a piece of a skull on his head. It's clear that Beauchamp did not entirely make up the story; whether he considerably embellished it is a different matter. The final anecdote, about a soldier who ran over stray dogs with his Bradley fighting vehicle for a hobby, is confirmed inasmuch as it is in fact possible to target a dog with a Bradley; but the part about the dog being neatly severed in half with such a hit still seems highly dubious.

And then there is the curious matter of Beauchamp's first diarist piece, "War Bonds" (subscribers only). In it, Beauchamp tells the horrifying tale of chatting with a friendly Iraqi boy while changing a flat tire, only to find out the next day that the boy, who called himself "James Bond," had his tongue cut out by insurgents for talking to Americans. Some critics have focused on the improbability of Beauchamp's claim that he was changing a tire in a "dark brown river of sewage." But there are bigger problems with the story than that. How about, for instance, the fact that Beauchamp and the boy engage in pleasant chit-chat while standing in reeking excremental fluids that, according to the writer, swallow up the boy's lower torso -- and no mention is made of what, surely, had to be a suffocating stench?

Then, we get to Beauchamp's account of what happened next. A private from his unit who had patrolled the same neighborhood brings him the news:

"... That James Bond kid you were telling me about--did he run around in an Adidas hat?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Those fuckers cut off his tongue."

"What? Who?"

"Shia militia, the police, I don't know. Apparently he had been talking to too many Americans."

"No fucking way."

"Yeah. Fuck them, man. I hate when this shit happens to kids."

We didn't go back to Little Venice for a raid or patrol or mission of any type for quite some time--maybe a month or two. But when we did eventually go back, I didn't have to look very hard to find Ali. He was mixed in with the throng of children who waded up to our convoy screaming for us to throw them chocolate or soccer balls. Of course, he wasn't screaming, but he was smiling and his hands were outstretched to catch whatever a soldier with a generous streak might be kind enough to throw athim. I wanted to yell, "Hey, James Bond! I hope you get to California!"--but I didn't. I just watched him scramble for the soccer ball that went bobbing away toward an alley and out of my field of vision.

Now, I know that life in a war zone does strange things to people. Still, a boy is horribly mutilated by insurgents for talking to Americans ... and a month or two later he is back on the same streets, hanging around Americans and waiting for handouts, smiling happily and sprinting after a soccer ball? He is not shunned by other kids, if only for fear of further retaliation? His family has not thought to keep him off the streets, or maybe try to get out of that neighborhood altogether? None of it rings true -- though I'm certainly not denying that the insurgents could have done such a thing. I also wonder if it's odd that no one else has reported on this incident. While there are plenty of horrible things happening in Iraq right now, a child having his tongue cut out is an incident that would stand out even against this grimmest of backdrops; and besides, this is exactly the kind of thing the U.S. military would publicize as an example of the barbarism we're up against.

Of course, no one questioned that story because no one has a political or emotional stake in disproving atrocities by insurgents. But it does, for the reasons listed above, get a pretty strong reading from my B.S. detector. It would be interesting to see a follow-up investigation, though I'm not holding my breath.

So yes, I think there are good reasons to question Beauchamp's accuracy, and neither TNR nor liberal bloggers are doing themselves any favors by coming uncritically to his defense. But conservative bloggers aren't covering themselves in glory either when they stridenly insist that TNR gave Beauchamp a platform in a nefarious plot to smear and slander the troops. TNR is not some far-left rag that revels in spitting on American soldiers; it is a centrist magazine that initially supported the war in Iraq. Indeed, while I think the story of the boy who had his tongue cut out raises further doubts about Beauchamp's credibility, it also points to the aburdity of claims that TNR editors were eager to publish Beauchamp because his writings put U.S. troops in Iraq in a bad light. (Unless, of course, one wants to claim that TNR and Beauchamp cleverly conspired to ensure that his first diarist piece focused on atrocity by the insurgents in order to avert suspicion of anti-Americanism -- which is probably not too paranoid for a few websites.) I think Beauchamp wanted to write gritty, vivid, human-interest-rich accounts of the horrors of war, and TNR wanted to publish them.

On the other hand, I think it's not entirely accurate to claim that Beauchamp's piece had no larger implications beyond "some soldiers are jerks." His whole point was that war turns good, caring people (such as, he modestly suggests, himself) into the kind of people who would mock disfigured women, desecrate human remains, and run over dogs for sport.

At the same time, if Beauchamp and his editors at TNR truly wanted to slander the troops, you'd think they would come up with something more damning and more significant than boorishness, macabre humor, and animal cruelty. These claims are so insignificant that it's doubtful anyone had noticed them at all if the right-wing blogosphere hadn't made a fuss about it. (I can't see The Associated Press or Reuters running a news story headlined, "Serviceman makes shocking claims about U.S. abuses in Iraq: Soldiers mocked disfigured woman, ran over dogs.") John Cole points out an amusing contradiction in a post by Matt Sanchez, saying that the soldiers on Beauchamp's base have never heard of the "Baghdad Diarist" saga -- and, three paraphraphs later, that this saga is "taken so personally" because of all the soldiers who have died in Iraq. One irony of this affair is that many conservative bloggers make it sound as if the reputation of American troops in Iraq would indeed be compromised if Beauchamp's account were corroborated.

I also think Andrew Sullivan probably has a point when he speculates that one reason for the Beauchamp brouhaha is that, unable to discredit the real bad news coming from Iraq, war supporters have targeted the Beauchamp story as a weak link. There are also far too many on the right who do not want to hear, or to accept, any bad news about the conduct or the morale of American troops. Yet we know that the bad news is out there -- even in a Pentagon report, issued last May, which found that fewer than half of the soldiers and Marines believed that Iraqi non-combatants should be treated with "dignity and respect," that most would not report a team member for mistreating civilians, and 10 percent (not an insignificant number) admitted to such mistreatment themselves. One might add, too, that if conservatives want to get indignant at those who suggest that morally degenerate behavior is fairly "normal" for American soldiers in Iraq, they should have directed some of their ire at Rush Limbaugh when he suggested that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was just a way for American soliders to "blow off some steam" after being shot at every day.

But none of that changes the fact that a magazine like TNR (whose current issue, by the way, features a magnificent, poignant selection of photos from Iraq by freelance photographer Ashley Gilbertson) owes its readers real accuracy, not just a "close enough." Truth in journalism matters; that's why the Beauchamp saga is not entirely trivial. And even those who are rightly disgusted by the hysteria about "slandering the troops" should not overlook this fact. In the end, Beauchamp and his persecutors may well deserve each other.

Blogging update: Still here!

2007-08-03T03:52:00.000-04:00

For anyone still checking this page: Yes, I've been very bad about blogging. The reason I never announced my hiatus is that I never really planned to take one. In the past few months, I've found myself looking for new career directions after the end of my Boston Globe column; for this and many other reasons, the blogging fell by the wayside.

Now, I'm back with a spiffy new template, and I plan to resume blogging on a regular basis after Labor Day, with light blogging until then as the spirit moves me.

My apologies, and sincere gratitude, to all who have continued, patiently, to wait for updates.

The Duke Three: No angels = rapists?

2007-02-23T11:45:00.000-05:00

A reader's tip directs me to this mini-rant by the ex-Edwards-blogmaster Amanda Marcotte (the gift that keeps on giving), in a comments thread on her blog where someone brought out false accusations of rape and specifically the Duke case:

People who continue to wax on about the Duke rape case: People don’t respond because you’re right. (sic) They don’t respond because they know from experience that anyone who defends men who write thing like this:

tommrow night, after tonights show, ive decided to have some strippers over to edens 2c. all are welcome.. however there will be no nudity. i plan on killing the bitches as soon as the walk in and proceding to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.. all besides arch and tack please respond

Hates women and would defend a rapist who was caught in the act on videotape. No one talks to you because you are rape-loving scum. If you think otherwise, you are mistaken. Your beloved boys who scream “nigger” at black women and joke about killing and raping them may escape the worst charges, but they are not angels. You know it, we know it. That you defend them makes you such lowly, sleazy scum that it’s no wonder no one talks to you. They’re afraid by acknowledging you, they will catch the evil. Know this. Absorb it. Hope you enjoy sleeping at night, you sick, hateful bastards.

I'm not sure this hate-filled outburst, which borders on the deranged, deserves a response; I can only marvel that someone capable of producing such a screed can be considered a legitimate voice in the blogosphere. I will, however, point out that "defending" the Duke lacrosse players in this contex hardly means defending them as models of virtue and sterling moral character. It means, simply, arguing that they are probably innocent of charges of rape and sexual assault. And it is deeply ironic that the same feminists who quite rightly insist that a woman's character flaws should not be used against her in a rape case when she is the victim hold a completely different standard for a man when he is the acccused. We've been told again and again that a woman who has been raped shouldn't have to be an angel to deserve sympathy and support. Apparently, a man who has been false accused of rape should be.

Let's, for a moment, put the shoe on the other foot. Let's say that a woman going through a contentiuos divorce says she has been brutally beaten and raped by her estranged husband. Then it turns out that a few days earlier, she had regaled friends with a "humorous" fantasy of tying said estranged husband to a chair and castrating him with a rusty knife. (Jokes about genital mutilation as punishment for male misbehavior are not uncommon in female repertoire; Katie Kouric actually made such a joke on the air, on The Today Show, in 1997.)

Let's even say the woman's email also expressed the not-so-humorous hope that, in the absence of opportunities to fulfil her castration fantasy, she would be able to make the bastard suffer in court. Admittedly, such an email would raise serious questions about the woman's motive to lie, but let's say that the physical evidence strongly supported her claims (and that a co-worker of the husband's had heard him confess). Wouldn't Marcotte be the first to defend this woman against anyone who tried to discredit her charges or to suggest that she was asking for it? And can you imagine a prominent male blogger ranting that anyone who would defend the author of such an email is a man-hating bitch who ought to be shunned by decent people everywhere?

(Ed.: In the comments, Revenant correctly points out that the author of the offending email, Ryan McFaden, is not one of the men accused of rape. So actually, the analogy would be more accurate if the email had been sent not by the victim herself, but by her best friend.)

But of course, we're not supposed to put the shoe on the other foot because to do that is to ignore the inequality and system oppression of women and blah dee blah dee blah. (And I can't think of too many arguments that are actually more offensive to women than this blatant call for a double standard based on female "powerlessness.")

The email is disgusting, and the guy who sent it sounds like a nasty jerk. But frankly, I find Marcotte's invective against people who dare to side with men (apparently) falsely accused of rape -- even nasty jerks falsely accused of rape -- far more revolting and far scarier than that email.

Marcotte is not alone to use the "no angels" trope. See this post on the Feminist Law Professors' blog, titled "Not Innocent" and arguing that regardless of the legal outcome, the lacrosse players are at least guilty of racism and sexism. See also K.C. Johnson's dissection of her post.

More: In the comments, colagirl asks:

Suppose Marcotte were to be falsely accused of murdering a white male Republican. Should people then rush to condemn her because of the hateful rhetoric she has spoken about them on her blog? Or argue that anyone who would defend her would "defend a woman caught murdering a Republican man on videotape"?

Excellent question.

And now, the other foot

2007-02-22T23:15:00.000-05:00

The other day when I wrote about the Liberal Avenger comment alteration brouhaha, I was frankly disappointed by the eagerness of some on the left to dismiss this behavior (and to dismiss its "victim", Carlito, as a "troll" when his behavior on the thread in question seemed much less trollish than that of the regulars). Equally irksome, however, is stuff like this, in response to my post:

LA's attitude is apparently that it's all no big deal and we shouldn't be dinging them/him/her for it. Typical way left lying bastard thinking.

Or this:

A normal, sane, mature person would ask why the editor was even editing someone else's words except to correct formatting or to censor profanity. A typical left-liberal on the other hand, finds it entirely acceptable to edit a "wingnut's" words to sound "more intelligent," which is to say, more agreeable with the left-liberal's beliefs. Then, when all else fails, the left-liberal shouts indignantly about how they should be regarded as the hero of their own catastrophe. ...
Not every leftist is like this, but then not every Nazi had a stomach for genocide.

The generalizations about "typcial" leftists and liberals wouuld be bad enough even without the Nazi analogy.

Meanwhile, a blogger who goes by Daffyd uses the Liberal Avenger's comment alteration to argue that the hateful, ugly, misogynistic emails and blog comments directed at Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen (the feminist bloggers briefly hired by the John Edwards campaign) may well be fakes and that Patterico was too hasty and credulous in expressing regret over this outpouring of vileness from the (frings of the) right. Then, Daffyd goes on to explicitly admit to a double standard:

And given the demonstrated penchant on the part of both women to invent straw-man attacks, demonize Republicans and the religious, and the unhealthy fascination of both women with the sexual organs... I'm simply not willing to extend them the same benefit of the doubt I give, e.g., Michelle Malkin.

(Malkin also claims to have received obscene, threatening e-mails from lefties; but in Malkin's case, since she has shown herself throughout her career to be sane, rational, and honest, even when we disagree, I believe her.)

Of course, we all know that Michelle Malkin would never invent straw men, or demonize liberals or secularists. (What an unhealthy fascination with the sexual organs has to do with inventing hate mail, I have no idea; for the record, I have no idea whether McEwen actually has such a fascination.) For examples of Malkin's sanity, honesty, and rationality, see here, or here, or here, or here. See here for Malkin's relentless flogging of the tissue of lies that was the "Save Terri Schiavo" campaign. For a final touch, see this June 2005 post about the Terri Schiavo autopsy: Malkin accuses the "mainstream media" of distorting the autopsy report by pointing out that the autopsy found no signs of trauma before Schiavo's collapse in 1990, yet neglecting to mention the report's statement that no such signs could have been found after all this time. (At issue are the completely unfounded allegations that Terri's husband Michael Schiavo may have put his wife in a coma by choking her.) But Malkin herself leaves out a highly relevant passage in the report immediately before the one she quotes: "No trauma was noted on any of the numerous physical exams or radiographs performed on Mrs. Schiavo on the day of, in the days after, or in the months after her initial collapse." In this manner, the insinuations that maybe there's something to that abuse/murder story after all are kept alive.

Why am I dredging up a 19-month-old post? Simply to point out that anyone who fulminates at The Liberal Avenger and the ex-Edwards bloggers while giving Malkin props for honesty, sanity, and rationality is so partisan, it's not even funny. True, Malkin has never tampered with a comment on her blog (she has none), but neither have McEwen or Marcotte (who do have them). And there is simply no reason I can see, other than partisanship, to believe her claims of having received vile, bigoted hate mail while disbelieving theirs.

Unfortunately, this kind of partisanship is pretty much the order of the day in the blogosphere.

The Liberal Avenger non-scandal, cont'd

2007-02-16T17:31:00.000-05:00

Pandagon co-blogger Ilyka Damen responds to my post on The Liberal Avenger's now-admitted alteration of a comment on his blog with sophomoric sarcasm, or actually, more like junior high school sarcasm ("I am astonished that such deceit could be countenanced anywhere, let alone on the internet. Goodness gracious! Where’s the integrity?"). To the extent that Damen and her supportive commenters make actual points, they are as follows:

1. Everyone knows that blogmasters have the ability to edit comments, so what's the big deal.

The big deal is that we trust them not to do so, at least not in a malicious manner, and if that trust is broken, the result (not to sound like a broken record) will be to damage the exchange of ideas in the blogosphere. Newspaper can easily alter a letter to the editor in a way that makes the letter-writer look like a jackass, but we trust them not to do it. (Edits for spelling, grammar, or space are a different matter.) To use an analogy from a different sphere of life: everyone knows that the cook or the waiter at a restaurant has the ability to spit in your food. However, we trust them not to do it. And I would assume that if a cook or a waiter actually got caught spitting in a customer's food, initially denied it, then admitted it and justified it on the grounds that s/he thought the customer was acting obnoxiously, people would be strongly discouraged from attending said restaurant unless the offending cook/waiter was fired.

Also mentioned in the thread was some bloggers' practice of inserting their own editorial remarks in comments by their posters -- for instance, in response to a point made by the poster. But these editorial remarks are always identified as such; typically, they are bracketed and italicized. There is simply no comparison.

2. There was no harm done because anyone reading the comment would have known that it was edited and that Carlito did not actually casually admit to an incestuous affair with his sister. Liberal Avenger's prank was no different than commenters on left-wing blogs spoof-posting as "Ann Althouse."

Yes, I assume any sane reader would have known that Carlito's tale of sibling sex was not true, but they could have easily thought that Carlito was a troll making an extremely tacky joke, or (since the incest story was supposedly meant to demonstrate why abortion is sometimes necessary) ridiculing his pro-choice opponents by painting them as sister-humping perverts.

The "Ann Althouse" comments are pretty juvenile, but they are obvious spoofs, not alterations of actual posts by Ann Althouse. (The names used are often variations such as "Althoos.") Do the people at Pandagon see no difference? When Hustler ran the infamous Campari parody ad in which Jerry Falwell described having drunken sex with his mother in an outhouse, that was political satire protected by the First Amendment (and in fact the ad carried a parody disclaimer in small print). Would anyone find it funny, or ethical, for a liberal editor at a newspaper or magazine to take an actual interview with Falwell and spike it with a similar "confession"? I have a sinking feeling that the people at Pandagon would, because, after all, Falwell is one of those subhuman "wingnuts" toward whom anything goes.

3. There was no harm done because the altered post was deleted in a few hours, and it's "wingnuts" like Patterico and yours truly who are keeping the text of the altered post on the Internet. (The Liberal Avenger webmaster even says that we should apologize to Carlito.)

Nice try. If Carlito asks me to remove this post, I will. By the way, according to Patterico, the edited comment was removed only after he emailed Liberal Avenger about it.

Meanwhile, over on Patterico's blog, Liberal Avenger offers this defense:

What sort of penance do you folks think I should do?
Would you like me to apologize to Jamail Hussein on your collective behalf for destroying his life in a war zone?
Maybe you guys could pass a plate to raise some money for one of the firebombed-yet-not-actually-destroyed mosques in Baghdad, and I could deliver it on your behalf and help them rebuild?

Because, obviously, the war in Iraq has so much to do with altering comments on a blog.

Several people have told me that this story is a non-scandal because who cares about small fry like The Liberal Avenger. There is some truth to that, but I still believe this incident raises some important questions about blog ethics. It also highlights the all-too-widespread tendency in the blogosphere (not limited to any political persuasion) to dehumanize opponents.

More: Another left-wing blogger, Thers of Whiskey Fire, chimes in with an "oh, get over it" admonishment:

The reason it is not a "blogosphere scandal" is that nothing that ever happens or has ever happened or ever will happen in a blog comments section is worth getting upset about for more than two minutes.

After all, Thers remind us, there are people dying in Iraq.

This is from the same person who, less than a week ago, devoted his only post for the day to Ann Althouse attributing a negative blogpost about her to the wrong blogger, and then being mean and rude to said blogger in her comments section when he showed up to expose her error. Something tells me that post took more than two minutes to compose, especially since it even includes a YouTube video clip for humorous effect.

And this is from the crowd which thinks that if some of Michelle Malkin's blogposts are written by her husband, that's very serious business indeed.

Imagine that, in a discussion related to rape, Ann Althouse altered the post of a commenter she found annoying and added the following:

Of course, rape isn't always a totally bad thing. When I was a college student at the age of 19, a bunch of guys at a frat party got me drunk and then took turns raping me for 10 hours straight... [lurid, obscene description of various sexual acts follows] I kept saying "no" and "stop" the whole time, but damn it felt good -- I never had so many multiple orgasms in my life! I still get horny every time I think about it.

Suppose that, caught in the act by a left-wing blog, Althouse brazenly denied altering the comment, then admitted it and said that her earlier denials were just meant to tease the moonbats, and added that the reason she altered the comment was that the commenter was spouting predictable leftist crap. Suppose, too, that it came to light that the commenter was particularly upset by the alteration because she was in fact raped in college, and that after finding this out Althouse still refused to apologize and told her critics to "stop taking themselves so seriously."

The same people who are now willing to give Liberal Avenger a pass would be calling for her head. And that's pathetic.

PandaGate postscript

2007-02-16T08:11:00.000-05:00

I wasn't going to devote any more blogspace to Pandagon blogger Amanda Marcotte's brief tenure as blogmaster for the Edwards campaign, but Marcotte's self-pitying and self-serving Salon.com confessional inspired me again. Predictably, Marcotte portrays herself as a victim of sexism and "pure misogynist emotion," and her downfall as a frightening message to young feminists. (Maybe the lesson to young feminists is to avoid hate speech posing as feminism.) Reading her lament, I was reminded of an icon created by LiveJournal blogger mcity, in this thread last September, to poke fun at Marcotte's buddy and Pandagon regular ginmar. Since the icon is too small to have a visual effect in a blogpost, I took the liberty of recreating it in larger size with full credit to its author. I think it's perfect for the occasion.

Marcotte has had some unpleasant experiences these past couple of weeks, and it would be ungracious to mock her if she didn't make herself such an inviting target. But she loses what sympathy one might have by refusing to take responsibility for her extremism. For instance, here is her explanation of the dust-up over the Duke post:

I announced that I was taking the job on Jan. 30, and the same week, I noticed a small flare-up of oddly aggressive and misogynistic comments in my moderation queue over a short, irritated post I wrote about the coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape case on CNN. I assumed that some anti-feminist blogger had linked me and so, in frustration, I went and rewrote my by-then week-old post to mock the commenters by spelling out my views in childish, easy-to-understand language.

Really? Here is the original comment, about being stuck at the airport:

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will — not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

And the rewrite:

Since people are determined to make hay over this quick shot of a post, I’m deleting it and here’s my official stance. The prosecution in the Duke case fumbled the ball. The prosecutor was too eager to get a speedy case and make a name for himself. That is my final word.

So the second version of the post spells out the views expressed in the first one in "childish, easy-to-understand language"? Seems to me that Marcotte's stance in the original post is much more accurately summed up as: "Anyone who thinks that the Duke lacrosse players may be innocent, and is concerned about their ordeal if they are falsely accused, must be an evil racist and misogynist who believes white boys are entitled to rape black women." Evidently, Marcotte translates her own posts as creatively as she does those of others.

On another topic, Marcotte sarcastically notes in the Salon.com piece:

Also, shockingly for a would-be Democratic staffer, I had often said negative things about Republicans on my blog.

I will leave it to the reader to determine whether "saying negative things about Republicans" even begins to describe this response from Marcotte to Patterico on her blog.

Speaking of which: Patterico, agree with him or not, is a class act. See his post on the resignation of the second Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan:

As for the Shakespeare’s Sister blogger: I have a very vague memory of her piling on me once, but it’s a memory so distant that it means nothing to me now. [UPDATE: Apparently I’m wrong about this, as she notes in the comments.] Other than that, I know nothing about her other than that she once used the term “Christofascists” — which, by itself, is (I think) a completely insufficient reason for anyone to oppose her working for Edwards. Maybe there was more, but I haven’t seen it.
I think it’s a shame that she’s not working for him, and a bigger shame that so many people apparently sent her ugly e-mails and comments. I do in fact denounce anything like that without hesitation, and I am going to send her a friendly e-mail of condolence. I have no idea how it will be received, but hopefully it will help, in some small way, to counterbalance the ugliness she has faced.

By the way, for examples of such ugliness, one need only look at the comments thread on McEwan's post announcing her resignation: for instance, here and here. The woman-hating jerks who spew this vileness are not only disgusting human beings who take pleasure in hurting others; they also also a gift to the equally hateful radical feminists who are always looking for proof that misogyny permeates attitudes toward women in America. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of men, liberal or conservative, would be appalled by such vulgar invective.

I've criticized Shakespeare's Sister before, and may do so again. But her commentary contributes to civil discourse and exchange of ideas in the blogosphere; and in that, she is the opposite of Marcotte. I join Patterico in expressing my sympathy to Melissa McEwan. I am not suffciently familiar with her writings to judge whether or not the Edwards campaign made a good deicision in hiring her; but I do know that the verbal abuse she has endured is repulsive, and is truly an embarrassment to the right.

With avengers like these...

2007-02-15T16:00:00.000-05:00

Patterico covers what should be a blogosphere scandal but isn't, for some reason.

A few days ago, a conservative commenter who uses the handle "Carlito" got involved in a debate about abortion on the Liberal Avenger blog. He then contacted Patterico, on whose blog he is a regular poster (as "carlitos"), to say that one of his comments on Liberal Avenger, in this thread, was altered (by someone with admin privileges on the blog) to include this lurid passage:

Still, there are some valid and acceptable reasons to have abortions - reasons I think we can all agree with. For example, when my sister and I were in Junior high school we used to experiment sexually - you know, the usual stuff that horny, young brothers and sisters do: rimming, finger-fucking, dry humping, etc. We practically spent the entire summer between 7th and 8th grade in bed - it was great. Of course, by the end of the summer my sister was pregnant. Given our age and maturity levels, we knew she had to get an abortion. Fortunately at that time our state still recognized women’s health as an important social service and access to safe, inexpensive abortions was easy. To this day I wonder what our lives would have been like had my sister carried our baby to term.

After Patterico emailed Liberal Avenger to ask him about this, the comment disappeared completely. However, a screenshot of it was preserved, and Patterico posted it on his blog on February 13 at 6:51 a.m.

Liberal Avenger responded (February 13, 11:03 a.m.):

I don’t know what the big deal is. The comment appears to be gone. I never saw it. I have no reason to believe that it ever existed in the first place. Patterico’s screenshot is meaningless as by its very existence it had to have been manipulated by Photoshop. I’m not saying that he made it up, but I’m saying that in order for somebody to take a screenshot and crop/reduce it to post on their blog it has to be pulled into Photoshop or another image editing practice. Once that happens, the content of that image belongs to Patterico - not me. I’ve learned this through the course of reading countless shrill wingnut blog posts about image manipulation over the past year.
Further, Patterico edits peoples’ comments all of the time. Usually he adds his own comment italicized in brackets and signs them with a “-P,” but not every time. How do we know which comments have been “tuned” (as he likes to call it) on his site vs. which ones are “virgin?” The fact that he engages in that practice makes everything that appears on his site suspect.
Now I’m not saying that he edited the comment in question here. I’m merely pointing out the fact that:
1. Patterico is notorious for editing comments
2. Patterico manipulated an image of a screenshot of this thread
3. Patterico has a motive for doing this and stirring up trouble
Don’t believe everything you read, kids.
I’m closing this thread to commenting. Patterico - shame on you!

On Patterico's site, Liberal Avenger posted:

Yeah, I’m not too concerned about carlitos suing me because of something Patterico made up.

A few hours later, Patterico posted a full screenshot of the altered comment (which he had previously cropped for size).

Liberal Avenger then admitted in Patterico's thread that he had personally altered Carlito's comment, and offered a charming defense:

carlito wasn’t interested in rational debate.
The comment in question as originally written by him was an elitist swipe at poor/minority women. It was yet another bogus collection of facts and innuendo to support the racist/classist opinion that most women seeking abortions use abortion as a casual means of birth control. His argument consisted of several variations on the old “the bitch had an abortion because she didn’t want pregnancy to interfere with her fabulous ski vacation” canard.

Actually, Carlito had posted information from this birth control website about women's reasons for having abortions. He also says that he actually made fun of the "ski trip" rationale. But let's say, for argument's sake, that Carlito's comment was a collection of putrid ideological clichés. Does that really make Liberal Avenger's "prank" okay? Would it be okay for, say, Jeff Goldstein to edit a comment by a poster spouting clichés about The Evil Patriarchy to include a lurid description of her secret fantasy of being dominated by a big, hairy, musclebound, hung-like-a-horse male chauvinist?

Even more charmingly, Liberal Avenger now claims (February 14, 5:37 a.m.) that he was just kidding when he said that the edited comment may never have existed:

It’s hilarious that they can’t tell when they’re being teased.
I can’t imagine that anybody here on this blog really believed that I was really accusing Patterico of editing that guy’s comment on this site - or that I was really accusing him of creating a dummy screenshot in Photoshop. They believed it all, however, which is even funnier than the idea that “carlitos” would have actually confessed to diddling his sister in the first place.
There are a bunch of wingnuts out there who’ve been taking themselves just a tiny, tiny bit too seriously of late.

Well, if there was any trace of humor in Avenger's "Patterico -- shame on you!" February 13 post, I certainly couldn't see it.

There's another, ghoulish twist to this story. In his follow-up post, Patterico revealed that the rewritten comment was especially disturbing to Carlito because his only sister died several years ago. Admittedly, Liberal Avenger was unaware of this fact when he altered Carlito's post. However, he is aware of it now, and he has yet to offer an apology. Instead, he and his left-wing friends continue to treat this as a big joke on his blog, and he continues to tell Patterico and his commenters to "stop taking yourselves so seriously."

Also in Patterico's comments thread is this contribution from "Alpha Factor":

You guys are so fucking pathetic. For years you’ve made paper-thin campaign rhetoric and smear-tactics your bread&butter. Where do I start…? Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Tom DeLay, the Swift Boat pukes, or the mere insinuation that there’s something wrong with being a West Coast Liberal a la Nancy Pelosi?
And now, when you’re on the receiving end… You start whining that it isn’t “rational.” Somehow, I don’t feel sorry for you. Liberals offer plenty of rational and reasoned sentiment. It’s just that since your positions are messed-up, the only way you can trade blows is by name-calling: ergo, your bread&butter.

This kind of "they started it!" kindergarten logic is fairly common on the left these days. (It can also be found on the right.) And, as this debacle makes clear, it can easily become a justification for atrocious behavior.

It's a shame, really, because I have encountered Liberal Avenger quite a few times on Eric Muller's Is That Legal blog and elsewhere -- he first came to my attention in debates over Michelle Malkin's odious book In Defense of Internment -- and have generally found him to be a reasonable and interesting commenter. I'm saddened and disappointed that he has both compromised his integrity -- first with the alteration of Carlito's comment, then with the attempted cover-up -- and played into the worst right-wing stereotypes of liberals as intolerant of conservative dissent. With avengers like these, liberals don't need enemies.

Liberal Avenger's "prank" is not only juvenile, unethical, and offensive; it is also dangerous to blog discourse. If people know that a blog administrator can tamper with comments at will, it could have a truly chilling effect on speech in the blogosphere. Any blogger, liberal or conservative, should take this very seriously indeed.

Shorter version cross-posted at Hit & Run.

PandaGate and anti-male bigotry

2007-02-15T02:14:00.000-05:00

I'm coming a little late to the farewell party for Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte as blog coordinator for the Edwards campaign. Now, Marcotte's sister-in-arms, Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister, has stepped down as well. Over on the New York Times political blog, The Caucus, Katie Philips avers that she takes no sides in the matter but sounds quite sympathetic to the two beleaguered bloggers:

Well, both women — whose feminist writings were deemed anti-Catholic by Mr. Donohue and at times offensive by others and many not (sic) — at first allowed Mr. Edwards’s campaign to publish statements by them saying their personal views or past writings would not color their work on the campaign. And they both asserted they were not denigrating any faith or any person of faith.
That didn’t stop conservative bloggers from flogging the issue. And that didn’t stop bloggers on all sides from posturing on one side or the other. And it didn’t stop even our readers from objecting on one side or the other, sometimes to the point where we couldn’t publish their obscene remarks.
The epilogue to this? I’m not sure. Some will indeed claim victory; some will counsel that political campaigns have to vet and vet and vet any staff; others will feel doomed in defeat of what was seen as an arm around new — especially rare female — voices in the blogosphere by politicians.

That's some convoluted prose, but is Philips saying that Marcotte and McEwan's assertion that they weren't denigrating faith should have been sufficient to shut up the bloggers and others? Besides, deploring "obscene remarks" and incivility in the blogosphere -- as Philips does in her post -- is richly ironic in a discussion of Amanda Marcotte, who once penned a post-Katrina Pandagon post titled, "Dear racist fucks who complained about the looting..."

Some, such as my Reason colleague David Weigel, are concerned that the Marcotte/McEwan brouhaha may backfire against all bloggers who "dared not to write like a political hack all the time." I think the worry is misplaced; outspoken bloggers have nothing to fear unless they aspire to actually become paid political hacks. (Andrew Sullivan has a good comment on this, adding that he finds "the whole idea of bloggers as an integral part of political campaigns a little creepy.") What I find more troubling is that the criticism of Marcotte has focused so much on her swipes at Catholicism and Christianity in general, and so little on her brand of feminism -- a cult of female victimhood rife with militant anti-male bigotry.

A number of publications have quoted her sarcastic comment on the Duke alleged sexual assault case: "Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair." But it's hard to appreciate the full flavor of that comment without its full context:

Naturally, my flight out of Atlanta has been delayed. Let’s hope it takes off when they say it will so I don’t miss my connecting flight home.
In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out.
Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?
So unfair.

This is the post that Marcotte scrubbed from her blog after it attracted unwanted attention in the wake of her new job with the Edwards campaign. It seems she also deleted some of her comments in the thread, preserved here. Even with Marcotte's posts gone, the thread remains quite revealing: Marcotte's like-minded regulars (particularly ginmar) verbally assault, insult, and mock anyone who dares question what one commenter called their "apparent religious belief in the guilt of anyone accused of a specific crime, regardless of circumstances." (That's exactly what it is.) At one point, responding to a feminist blogger who says she is a survivor of sexual assault herself but questions the guilt of the accused Duke lacrosse players and is concerned about fair treatment for them, ginmar offers this gem:

Natalia, I don’t think anybody cares if you’re a rape victim and you toe the party line when it comes to “But what about the menz!”

(Yes, I know that ginmar is not Amanda Marcotte, but ideologically they're pretty much peas in a pod.)

As one commenter in the thread wryly noted,

I do not think that a malevolent knuckle-dragging reactionary seeking to promote a Limbaughesque, strawman vision of feminism could have penned a more effective weapon than this thread.

A sampling of Marcotte's other posts on the Duke case can be found on this page. Anyone who questions the guilt of the accused players, in her book, is a "rape apologist." In this post, she fumes:

Kathleen Parker has been writing about almost nothing else, but instead building a long case that unless the victim is 9 years old and a virgin and white and blonde and her attacker kills her and he mutiliates her body, then rape isn’t so much a crime as a feminist plot to put all men in jail so that we can, I don’t know, wear sweatpants more or something.

Here are three Kathleen Parker columns on the case, discussing the "rush to judgment" in the Duke case and the hasty presumption of guilt toward the players. In the last of these columns, Parker actually expresses concern that the alleged victim may be seen as less deserving because she's not a paragon of chastity:

A disturbing portion of the American public -- at least judging from my mail and some commentators -- doesn't believe the Duke stripper deserves our sympathy or even our suspension of judgment. She's a stripper after all. A radio interviewer put it to me just that way.
I'm sorry, but I can't go there. A woman raped is a woman raped, no matter what her ill-chosen profession.

Marcotte's crude "satire" is far worse than a caricature of Parker's views. A caricature is an exaggeration of truth. Marcotte's summary of Parker's position is an outright, slanderous lie.

I should add here that I have been on the receiving end of the Marcotte method of polemics myself. On July 25, 2005, Marcotte made a post at Pandagon titled, Cathy Young to battered wives–”Stop hitting yourself!” This in reference to my Boston Globe column on the Violence Against Women Act. Marcotte quotes this paragraph as "the most putrid part of the op-ed":

In fact, some aspects of the act promote covert gender bias. For instance, the legislation requires states and jurisdictions eligible for federal domestic violence grants not only to encourage arrests in domestic assault cases, but also to ‘’discourage dual arrest of the offender and the victim.” This provision is based on the false belief that in cases of mutual violence, one can nearly always draw a clear line between the aggressor and the victim striking back in self-defense. While the language is ostensibly gender-neutral, the assumption is that the aggressor is male; the feminist groups which pushed for this clause made no secret of the fact that its goal was to curb arrests of women.

Marcotte's translation:

Won’t someone have sympathy for the wife-beaters? My god, do you know how hard it is to bruise your knuckles on someone’s face and then see that person being treated like a victim or something by those man-hating cops and EMS workers? And some victims actually fight back, which is class A man-hating behavior. So, women, if someone starts hitting you, don’t flail or scratch and bite to try to get him off you. Just take it and hope that he doesn’t kill you or else you’re just as guilty as he is.

Since Marcotte includes the full text of my actual words in her post before proceeding with her bizarre reading of them, I have to conclude that she's not a liar; she's delusional.

Marcotte also weighs in with a comment about the same Globe column here at Feministing:

She is an apologist for abusers, as long as they are male. She has written articles complaining that men are arrested when they commit violence she finds to be acceptable methods of fighting/control of their women. Basically, if it doesn't leave a bruise or if he doesn't ball his fist, she thinks the government should stay out of it.
While she tolerates a certain amount of violence from men, however, there is no amount of violence for women that she will tolerate for any reason. In this article, for instance, she calls for arresting women who act in self-defense, even if it's just flailing around to escape someone who is beating them.

Presumably, Marcotte refers to this 1998 article in Reason discussing overzealous domestic violence prosecutions -- for instance, in cases where the "assault" consisted of a man grabbing a woman's arm during an argument, or where the man physically restrained a woman who was violently lashing out at him, or where the couple was involved in a mutual scuffle. Actually, in my book Ceasefire on page 132, I discuss the fact that women have been targets of overzealous "zero tolerance" domestic policies as well (e.g., a Milwaukee case in which a middle-aged woman with a heart condition was jailed for slapping her teenage son). Where Marcotte gets the idea that I think battered women should be prosecuted for "flailing around to escape someone who is beating them," I don't know. Somewhere off the planet, probably. Ultimately, whehter she is delusional or a liar doesn't matter; the effect is the same.

And finally, best for last: an October 19, 2006 post in which Marcotte explains that there's no such thing as man-hating feminists. She's particularly unhappy with the "made-up word 'misandry.'" (Actually, the word "misandry," or "hatred of males," appears in the Webster's Encyclopaedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language [1996] and its origins are traced to 1945-50. That patriarchal conspiracy sure is insidious!) Sayeth Marcotte:

This is a word that was made up by men on a victim trip because they don’t get to abuse and oppress women as much as they’d really like to, and it’s an attempt to pretend there’s a tradition of man-hating so severe it deserves a word of its own. It just doesn’t seem fair that there’s an actual word for woman-hating just because misogyny is a very real thing.
I agree. I wish misogyny wasn’t a social problem that required a name of its own. As it stands, of course, attempts to create a false equivalence are about the worst sort of victim tripping imaginable. It wasn’t the girls that were sent out of the room so boys could be raped and killed in recent school shootings.

Marcotte, I assume, is referring to these two cases that took place last fall. The horrific actions of two severely disturbed men become her paradigm for male attitudes toward women in our society. (Was serial killer John Wayne Gacy a self-hating misandrist male because he killed only boys?)

Marcotte also notes that the Dixie Chicks' song Goodbye Earl, about a woman who kills her abusive husband with help from her best friend, is often accused of "man-hating" when it's really "wife-beater-hating": the only way it can be seen as anti-male, she reasons, if you think all men are batterers. Fair enough, but would feminists see misogyny in angry male songs about unfaithful or gold-digging girlfriends? Sure they would, as this Pandagon commenter points out (though the same commenter also thinks that "'Goodbye Earl' isn’t problematic is because we live in a profoundly patriarchal/kyriarchal society," dontch'a know). And, considering the lyrics say, "Wanda looked all around this town and all she found was Earl," I don't think it's all that far-fetched to suggest that the song contains some negative stereotyping of men.

Marcotte's conclusion:

The phrase “man-hater” is more an insult to men than to feminists. Anyone who uses it generally means that the person thus accused is a rapist-hater, abuser-hater, sexist-hater. And when you call someone a “man-hater” who is actually hating on sexists, abusers, and rapists, you imply all men are these things. And they are not. So who are really the man-haters when that phrase is being wielded? It’s not the feminists; it’s the men implying that hating rape or hating abuse is the same thing as hating men.

Or maybe the person using the phrase "man-hater" means that the person thus accused is ready to presume any man to be a rapist or abuser at the drop of an accusation, no matter how non-existent the evidence. For a stark demonstration of such bigotry, look no further than the Marcotte/ginmar lynch-mob mentality in the Duke case.

(Shorter version cross-posted at Hit & Run.)

Lee Goldberg's war on fanfic

2007-02-07T20:03:00.000-05:00

The February edition of Reason has my column on fan fiction, "The Fan Fiction Phenomena: What Faust, Hamlet, and Xena the Warrior Princess have in common," in which I discuss fan-written stories based on television, film, and book characters. (As I mention in the column, I myself have been writing Xena: Warrior Princess fanfic for the past six years.) I also discuss some of the critiques directed at fan fiction. One of those critics, writer Lee Goldberg, now argues on his blog that I misrepresented his position.

Here's what I wrote in my column (for context, I give the full paragraph):

The concerns that anti-fanfic hard-liners express about the appropriation of their characters are understandable. But Hobb’s idea that readers may mistake Robin Hobb fan fiction for her own work borders on the paranoid, and some arguments advanced by fanfic’s foes make little sense. Thus Hobb exempts from her scorn professionally written Star Trek novels licensed by the copyright owner—even though the license comes from the corporation, not the creators of the characters. (Corporate-licensed works are also hobbled by content restrictions that favor blandness.) The vehemently anti-fanfic writer Lee Goldberg, who blogs at leegoldberg.com, is the author of several authorized novels based on the TV shows Monk and Diagnosis Murder—a contradiction he defends on the grounds that he does it only for the money.

Says Goldberg:

I have written extensively on my blog about fanfiction, particularly my view that the practice of publishing it in print and on the Internet infringes on the original author's creative rights (not to mention the trademark and copyright issues). I've argued that fanfiction writers should get the permission of the author or rights holder before distributing their work. If the original author or rights holder has no problem with fanfiction based on their work, then I don't either. I have also said that licensed tie-in fiction, which I have written, differs significantly on ethical and legal grounds from fanfiction because it is done with the consent, participation and supervision of the original author or rights holder. At no point have I *ever* expressed the views that she incorrectly (and I have to assume deliberately) attributed to me.

Now, I assume the views I have allegedly misattritubed to Goldberg are, (1) that he is vehemently anti-fanfic, and (2) that he has defended his authorship of tie-in novels on the grounds that he only writes them for the money.

On the first count, I think that a read-through of Goldberg's blogposts on fanfic will suffice to prove my case. While Goldberg does in fact state in a number of posts that in his opinion, fan fiction violates copyright and intellectual property, he devotes far more space to jeering at the moral degeneracy and weirdness of fanficcers, focusing on such fringe phenomena as kiddie porn fanfic, a fan who surfs the Web searching for masturbation fic, male pregnancy fanfic, one fan's fantasies about Roy Orbison and cling-wrap, real-person slashfic in which actors, singers, and other celebrities are depicted in homoerotic sexual situations, and the like. (By the way, it's hard not to notice that Goldberg seems especially incensed by gay-themed fanfiction.) He constantly engages in gross generalization; a post about a self-professed Harry Potter smut aficionada is entitled "The Fanfic Mind." If Goldberg has ever said anything positive about fanfic writers in fandoms where the copyright holders and creators have explicitly allowed and even encouraged fan fiction -- such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter -- I have found no evidence of that on his blog. I have, however, found such statements as:

Money and copyright aside, what an incredible waste of creativity. Why toil on characters you don't own in a world that's not your own? It's not even literary masturbation. It's more like the literary equivalent of having sex with an inflatable woman who looks like Halle Berry.

In another post, mocking an email correspondent who asks him for a link to some fanfic he has mentioned, Goldberg says that it's "sort of like asking a Jew to direct you to some really rocking anti-Semitic screeds." Wow, Mr. Goldberg. Tell us how you really feel.

It was not my intent in my column to extensively discuss Lee Goldberg's views on fan fiction, or the debate about fanfic and copyright/intellectual property laws (an issue I briefly mentioned in my discussion of fantasy writer Robin Hobb's attack on fan fiction). I would say, however, that "vehemently anti-fanfic" sums up Goldberg's stance pretty well.

Now, on to the second part. Did Goldberg ever defend his tie-in novels on the grounds that he only writes them for the money? Sure he did, on the very same blog where he now claims to have been misrepresented. In fact, he devoted an entire post to this point on June 16, 2005:

[S]omeone asked what the difference is between someone who writes tie-ins and someone who writes fanfic... beyond the fact that tie-ins are written with the consent of the author/right's (sic) holder.
There's a big difference.
I was hired to write DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MONK novels. It's something I am being paid to do. It's not like I woke up one morning with a burning desire to write DIAGNOSIS MURDER novels, wrote one up, and sent it off to a publisher (or, as a fanficcer would do, posted it on the web). The publisher came to me and asked me to write them.
I would never write a book using someone else's characters unless I was hired to do so. It would never even occur to me because the characters aren't mine.
Given a choice, I would only write novels and TV shows of my own creation. But I have to make a living and I take the work that comes my way...and that includes writing-for-hire, whether it's on someone else's TV show or original tie-in novels based on characters I didn't create. Ultimately, however, what motivates me as a writer is to express myself...not the work of someone else.
That's the big difference between me and a fanficcer.
Given a choice, fanficcers "write" fanfic.

(The numerous italics are all in the original.)

More recently, Goldberg returns to this theme in a September 20, 2006 post, "Am I a Fanficcer?" While he does stress that his TV show-based novels are published with the consent and involvement of the owners, the "I'm only in it for the money" defense rears its head again:

What I do isn't comparable to fanfiction -- which is using someone else's work without their consent or involvement and distributing on the Internet. I don't do it as my personal artistic expression -- it's a job, one that I do to the best of my ability.
Like a fanficcer, I am writing about characters I didn't create and that are not my own. But, as I said before, unless approached to do so, I would have absolutely no interest or desire to write about someone else's characters. Why? Because...and let me repeat this... the characters aren't mine. I didn't create them. They don't belong to me. I much prefer to write totally original work and if I could make my living only doing that, I would.

In fairness to Goldberg, I should have said that he defends his tie-in novels partly on the grounds that he only writes them for the money. I singled out this argument because I found it particularly bizarre -- it's the first time I have seen paid hackwork held up as morally superior to an unpaid labor of love -- and because I had already mentioned the "fanfic is intellectual theft" argument in my comments on Robin Hobb. If that gave a misleading impression of Goldberg's views on fanfic, I will readily offer my apologies. However, I certainly did not put any argument in Goldberg's mouth that he did not repeatedly make on his blog.

Since we're on the subject, I will answer a question Goldberg poses in his September 20 post:

What I have yet to see any fanficcer explain why they won't to ask the creator or rights holder for permission before posting and distributing their work. Or why fanficcers adamantly refuse to follow the expressed wishes of creator/rights holders (for example, Rowling has approved fanfiction based on Harry Potter as long as it's not sexually explicit...but that hasn't stopped thousands of people from writing and posting Potter slash, disrespecting her and her wishes ).
I know the answer, of course. Fanficcers are terrified of officially being told NO... and identifying themselves in case they decide to blithely violate the author's wishes anyway.

On the second point: I and most other fanfic writers and readers strongly disapprove of Harry Potter (or any other) fanfic featuring underage characters in sexual situations. I also personally believe that the wishes of any writer who has asked people not to write fan fiction based on his or her work -- or has set specific guidelines for such fan fiction, like Rowling or Anne McCaffrey -- should be respected. (Since a pro-Goldberg blogger indicts me for "absconding with characters" created by others, I will mention that the producers of Xena actually hired one of my fellow intellectual thieves, fanfic writer Melissa "Missy" Good, to write scripts for the show.)

On the first point, I can only say: Is Goldberg kidding? He knows perfectly well that his "ask for permission first" requirement would mean the end of fan fiction, and NOT because copyright owners would say no. Would original fiction writers be willing to spend hours every day answering emails asking them if it's okay to post a fanfiction based on their work? With movie- and television-based fanfiction, the situation would be far more complicated. Does Goldberg expect studios to hire a staff just to field requests for permission to post a fanfic? And to whom should the request be directed anyway? The corporation? The creator of the characters? What if the characters have multiple creators? (In the case of Xena: Warrior Princess, it was apparently unclear at one point who owned the rights to the characters, holding up a possible big-screen movie project.)

Furthermore, both writers and studios or other corporations which have no objection to fanfiction based on their characters and settings may well be skittish about actively granting their permission for the publication of specific stories. "Authorized" stories would appear to have the writer's or owner's imprimatur. Moreover, the writers or the studio personnel would have either to read the stories submitted -- which would be not only incredibly time-consuming but legally problematic -- or to authorize them unread.

I do think that it would be an ideal resolution to the legal dilemma of fan-created works if the authors or creators/copyright holders were to state upfront that they do not object to non-commercial fan endeavors -- be it fiction, art, or music videos -- and, if they wish, to stipulate rules by which they want the writers and artists to abide. (Or, if they do object, to issue a "no fanfic" directive. The vast majority of fans will respect it, for both ethical and legal reasons.) In the absence of such explicit statements, given that the widespread existence of fan fiction is by now no secret to anyone, I think that silence may be presumed to equal consent.

Finally, since we're on the topic of misrepresentation: In a post on October 12, 2006, Goldberg suggests, on the basis of a New York Times profile of fanfic writer-turned-pro Naomi Novik, that Novik has revised her previously "liberal" views on fanfic and copyright now that she is a commercially published author herself. As some of his commenters point out, Novik has in fact specifically said that this is not so. Goldberg has yet to issue a retraction in the body of his post or even to acknowledge his error in the comments, despite having posted in the comments thread several times.