My Country at War

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My country has just gone through a war. This was not the kind of war where (on the Israeli side) there are very many casualties; let alone one in which it is a question of life and death. Nevertheless it was war. So let me try to tell my readers a little about the way an ordinary citizen experienced it.

Israelis have always been a nation of news junkies. As one would expect, during wartime this is even more the case. Many people checked the news several times an hour. Almost everybody did so several times a day. The media dealt with little else. Modern war is enormously wasteful in terms of ammunition and the present one is no exception. But compared to the number of images displayed, words uttered, and ink spilt, that of bullets, shells and missiles fired was as nothing.

Many of the images, words and ink were occasioned by the rockets. There is no defense against the short-range mortar shells and they have caused quite some casualties. That apart, though, the alarm system functioned very well. Depending on how far from the Gaza Strip one lives or works, the time one has to seek shelter varied from about thirty seconds to a couple of minutes. Israeli houses built after 1991 are obliged by law to provide a so-called mamad, a room made of reinforced concrete and provided with a heavy steel window. People, presumably the majority, who inhabit older structures had to be content with strairwells etc. Drivers caught on the road were told to “stop safely” on the shoulders (which quite some roads do not have). Though doing so was against the regulations, many used the opportunity to get out of their cars and watch the show in the sky. How typical.

As I have written before, the combination of effective civil defense and the by now famous Iron Dome system explains the small number of civilian casualties. In fact more people were killed and injured while rushing to shelter than by the rockets themselves. The impact varied with distance. Most heavily hit were the twenty or so kibbutzim along the border. They became ghost villages, deserted by practically all their inhabitants except for a handful of caretakers. Towns within a 25-mile range of the border, such as Ashkelon, were targeted sufficiently heavily to make normal life all but impossible and force the evacuation of children. Elsewhere the impact was sporadic, even negligible. Further to the north there was hardly any impact at all.

Each night the Army spokesperson announced the number of soldiers who had died that day. It has long been the Israeli method not to release names until the families are informed. Informing them is the task of so-called Hiob Patrols. Though their composition varies, normally they consist of an officer, a physician and a rabbi. They receive special training for the job. Seen from the outside the system seems as well-thought out and as humane as it can be made. What it feels like from the inside only those who participate in it or receive the news it brings know.

Each day there were funerals, a few of civilians, the majority of soldiers. Most dead soldiers were young, even very young. War has always been, and still remains, what the Germans call Kindermord. How does one describe the pain? The military funerals followed the normal rules, more or less. However, ceremonial has never been the strength of the Israeli army or, for that matter, the rather undisciplined character of the people in which it is rooted. During previous conflicts TV used to show the dead soldiers’ comrades crying like babies over the graves. This time they did not do so. Good.

In much of the country life was and remains far quieter than usual. There was less traffic. Normally driving from Jerusalem to Mevasseret Zion (the town where I live, some four miles away) can take half an hour and more. During the war one could cover the road in a few minutes. Supermarkets, restaurants, movie houses and hotels were half empty. Nor is it only Jewish facilities that suffered. A town like Abu Gosh, a mile away, which in ordinary days makes it living by catering to Jerusalemites on Saturdays when their own everything is closed, was also hard hit. Safety considerations forced the cancellation of many cultural events. Almost every day one heard of some foreign artist or group that decided to skip.

Crime seemed to go down. The number of patients visiting doctors definitely went down. War has a way of making people forget many minor and some major problems. By way of compensation, quite some cars suddenly sprouted flags. Normally they are limited to the days before Independence Day. One saw signs carrying slogans such as “Mevasseret Zion hugs its solders” and the like.

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Intolerance, even fanaticism, was and remains in the air. Some self-appointed vigilantes tried to shut up their less hawkish opponents. More than one person who dared say anything against the Israeli Operation, or in favor of the Palestinians, was disciplined and fired. Considering that it is the first duty of universities to protect freedom of speech, one of the ugliest incidents took place at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. When a faculty member dared say that he was sorry not only for Israeli children but for the Palestinian ones as well, he was formally reprimanded by the dean. To be fair, a kindergarten mistress who wrote “death to the Arabs” on Facebook is also supposed to be tried for incitement.

Here and there words turned into violence as Jews attacked Arabs and Arabs, Jews. Thank goodness, though, the number and scope of such incidents has been limited. Furthermore the situation is better than in Gaza where there has never been any form of democracy and where Hamas simply executes whoever dares protest against it.

What will the outcome be? Here I can only repeat what I have been saying ever since the war broke out. The war will end with a triumph for Hamas. Not in a military sense, but in the sense that they will be able to push through some of their political demands. To this I would add, as I wrote last week, that such an outcome would not necessarily be bad either for Israel or for the Middle East. Eventually it might lead, if not to peace then at any rate to calm.

A final word. Since 1990 or so Israel’s feminist lobby has become one of the most virulent on earth. Probably this is not unconnected with the fact that, while the country still has its problems, the days when it fought for its existence against overwhelming odds are long gone. The Israeli army in peacetime is 25-30 percent female. Since there are few female reservists and few of them are ever called up, in wartime the figure goes down very sharply.

Nobody doubts that female soldiers do their jobs properly. Still the war caused attention to be focused almost entirely on the fighting formations, and rightly so. It is they who suffer casualties and deserve to be celebrated. As the fact that no female Israeli soldier so far has been killed shows, where there were bullets there were no women and where there were women there were no bullets. As a result the feminist “discourse,” consisting of endless complaints about everybody and everything, suddenly became muted.

Unfortunately it won’t last.

 

 

Stuck in Gaza

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The good news is that, here in Mevasseret Zion not far from Jerusalem, things have been less exciting than during the first week of Operation “Firm Rock.” The same applies to many other Israeli cities located relatively far away from Gaza. Possibly this is due to the fact that Hamas has a problem with its long-range rockets which, owing to their size, are harder to conceal and take longer to launch. The bad news is that elsewhere, and especially in the Israeli districts that surround the Gaza Strip, the rockets keep falling. Thus it would appear that the struggle, which has now lasted for two weeks, is far from over.

In this situation it is interesting to take a fresh look at what Clausewitz—I assume readers of this website will know who he was—has to say about wars of this kind. As I have written elsewhere, most of On War is couched in terms of the classic division of labor between the government that directs, the armed forces that fight, kill and die, and the people who pay and suffer. Still the maestro did include a short chapter—five pages out of over five hundred—dealing with what he calls “the People in Arms,” (Volksbewaffnung), AKA terrorism, AKA guerrilla, AKA insurgency, AKA asymmetric war. Drawing upon the wars in Russia, which he witnessed in person, and in Spain, which he did not, he lists the following as “the only conditions under which a general uprising can be effective:”

  1. The war must be fought in the interior of the country.
  2. It must not be decided by a single stroke.
  3. The theater of operations must be fairly large.
  4. The national character must be suited to that kind of war.
  5. The country must be rough and inaccessible, because of mountains, or forests, marshes, or the local methods of cultivation.

To which one might add:

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  1. A country that borders on another from which the terrorists/guerrillas/insurgents can be resupplied and which will afford them refuge when they need it.

To what extent does the war Hamas is waging against Israel meet these conditions, and what are its prospects of gaining a victory? To answer this question it is perhaps best to change the order in which Clausewitz proceeds. Let us start with condition No. 2 as the most obvious of all. Elsewhere in On War Clausewitz says, quite rightly, that war consists of the interaction between the belligerents. A war that is decided by a single stroke to which the opponent has no answer is, by this interpretation, not a war at all. So weak is Hamas that, starting on the first day of the war, it and the people of Gaza whom it claims to represent have been taking roughly a hundred casualties for every one the Israelis suffered. Nevertheless, of the latter ending the struggle by a single blow there can be no question.

For as long as guerrilla and its relatives have existed, one very important way of making sure the struggle cannot be decided by a single stroke is to rely on No. 6. Alas for Hamas, in this respect its situation is well-nigh hopeless. The sea- and land routes to and from Gaza are blocked by the Israeli navy and army respectively. The Egyptians, who police their own border with Gaza, do the rest. Only the fact that the Israelis allow 200 or so truckloads per day to cross keeps Hamas and the population of Gaza going. Israel has even deployed a field hospital where the sick and wounded of the other side can be treated. But for these and similar measures hunger and disease would have spread very quickly. The probable outcome would have been the disintegration of Hamas rule and the creation of chaotic conditions like those prevailing in large parts of Iraq.

All this enhances the importance of proposition No. 4 (the role played by national character.) As both the history of the Arab-Israeli wars and the two Gulf Wars have shown, Arabs are not very good at waging modern conventional war against similar opponents. The question why this is so deserves to be considered in depth but is beyond the scope of the present article. Arabs have, however, done much better in waging guerrilla struggles. Even without considering wars such as the one in Yemen (1962-70), during which they chased away the British, they have forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon and the Americans, from Iraq.

Whatever else may be said about the current war in Gaza, so far Hamas troops—not the leaders, who hide in bunkers deep underground—have been fighting courageously in spite of the overwhelming odds they face. Here and there, as in their attempts to penetrate Israel either by sea or by way of tunnels that pass under the border, their courage has been well-nigh suicidal. In part because the Israelis, who have good cause to worry about international reaction, do their best not to inflict too many civilian casualties, the population of Gaza has also been holding up well. Judging by events so far, if a ceasefire is finally established it will not be because the population forced Hamas to accept it.

“The theater of operations must be fairly large,” reads proposition No. 3. Generally speaking, that is true. A large territory will make it hard for the counterinsurgent to focus on one point while affording the insurgents many opportunities to escape, disperse, and hide. But by no stretch of the imagination can the Gaza Strip, 32 miles long and just 6.8 wide, be considered “large.” In the entire Strip, there is probably not a single target the Israelis, had they wanted to and been prepared to take the necessary casualties, could not have reached in an hour or less. To say nothing of the ever-present fighter-bombers and drones that can reach those targets in minutes if not in seconds. That is why, in Operation Firm Rock, proposition No. 2—regarding the inaccessibility of the country in which the guerrillas must operate—is as important as it is. Though in this case it is urban terrain and its plentiful civilians, not “mountains, or forests, marshes, or the local methods of cultivation,” which obstruct the Israelis.

Considering these factors, which side is more likely to win? In the absence of a ceasefire, the outcome is likely to be a struggle of attrition from which the side with the last ounce of willpower will emerge triumphant.

Yet there remains one very important point Clausewitz does not mention. Henry Kissinger, with Vietnam in mind, once said that the counterinsurgent, as long as he does not win, loses. The insurgent, as long as he does not lose, wins. Even if—which, at the moment, seems unlikely—Israel succeeds in forcing the other side to accept a ceasefire based on a return to the status quo ante, Hamas leaders will be able to claim that taking on the worst its enemy can do, standing like a firm rock, and surviving represents a triumph which will enable them to look into the future with some confidence.

And in making this claim they will not be very wrong.

The Fall and Rise of History

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I well remember the time when I fell in love with history. This was 1956 and I was ten years old, living with my parents in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv. While rummaging in a storage room, I came across a book with the title (in Dutch), World-History in a Nutshell. Greatly impressed by the story of the small, but brave, ancient Greek people fighting and defeating the far more numerous Persian army, I quickly read it from cover to cover. Much later I learnt that the volume was part of a series issued by the Dutch ministry of education and updated every few years. To the best of my memory the one in my hands did mention World War I but not Hitler; hence it must have dated to the 1920s when my parents went to school.

It was World-History in a Nutshell and the wonderful tales it contained that made me decide I wanted to study history. In 1964 this wish took me to the Hebrew University where I started thinking seriously about what I was trying to do. From beginning to end, my aim was always to understand what happened and why it happened. Though it took me a long time to realize the fact, in doing so I, like countless other modern historians, was following in the footsteps of the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

Hegel’s most important propositions, as I came to understand them, could be summed up as follows. First, the past had a real, objective existence. It was, so to speak, solidified present, more or less covered by the sands of time; which meant that, given sufficient effort was devoted to removing the sand, “the truth” about it could be discovered. Second, in the main it consisted not of the more or less accidental, more or less cranky deeds of individuals but was pushed ever-onward by vast, mostly anonymous, spiritual, economic—this was Marx’s particular contribution—social and technological forces none could control. Men and women were carried along by it like corks floating on a stream; now using it to swim in the right direction, now vainly trying to resist it and being overwhelmed by it. Third, the past mattered. It was only by studying the past that both individuals and groups of every kind could gain an understanding as to who they were, where they had come from, and where they wanted to go and might be going.

Starting around the time of Hegel’s death, these assumptions were widely shared. All three of the most important ideologies of the period 1830-1945, i.e. liberalism, socialism/communism and fascism subscribed to it. None more so than Winston Churchill, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Adolf Hitler. The last-named once said that a person who did not know history was like a person without a face. As religion declined in front of secularism history, with Hegel as its high priest, became the source of truth, no less.

To be sure, there were always those who cast doubt on the enterprise. Whether seriously and out of ignorance, as when Henry Ford famously said that history was bunk; or only half-so, as in Walter Sellar’s hilariously funny 1931 best-seller, 1066 and All That. The outcome was a vast outpouring of written works—later, movies as well—and an ever greater increase in the number of students both in- and outside academia.

At the time I took on my studies in 1960s, few people doubted that finding out the historical truth was an important objective in itself. Then, around 1970, things started changing. This time the herald of change was a Frenchman, Michel Foucault (1926-84). The way Foucault saw it, post Hegelian historians—and, looming behind them, his own countryman Rene Descartes—were wrong. Contrary to their delusions, such thing as an objective fact, event, process or text did not exist. Rather, each person interpreted—“read” was the term Foucault’s followers invented for this—each text, process, event and fact in his or own way. Assuming, that is, that these things had any kind of objective existence at all and were not imposed on history ex post facto. The choice of interpretation was determined by each person’s experience and personality; in reality, therefore, the number of possible interpretations was infinite. If, as sometimes happened, this interpretation or that was widely accepted, then this fact only showed that it suited the psychological needs of many people, not that it was more “correct” than any others.

Since then this view has been eating up the study of history like a worm eating up an apple from within. Previously people had written learned tomes about, say, Greek antiquity; how it came into being, what its main characteristics were, how it unfolded, expanded, passed away, and so on. Now they did the same about the way historians had “discovered” or “invented” that antiquity. The same applies to “the middle ages,” “the renaissance,” “the enlightenment,” “the industrial revolution,” and so on and so on. This came dangerously close to saying that history was but a fairy tale and any attempt to write about it was not “science” but fiction—good or bad.

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The implications of this view were tremendous. If all the study of history was capable of yielding was some kind of subjective tale, then of what use could it be in establishing “the truth”? And if it could not help in establishing “the truth,” then what could be the purpose of engaging in it? And how about the remaining social sciences such as political science, international relations, sociology, and so on? Weren’t they, too, based on the assumption that an “objective” past did exist and could be used to understand the present?

For a century and a half it had been assumed that a firm grasp of these subjects would qualify those who had it for many kinds of work not only in academia but in both the public and the private sphere. Now, increasingly degrees in these fields were seen as useless. The more useless they appeared to be, the less capable they were of providing their owners with a reasonable income as well as an acceptable position in society. The less capable they were of providing their owners with an acceptable position in society and a reasonable income, the smaller their perceived uselessness.

And so began the decline of the humanities and many of the social sciences that we see all around us. The lives of an entire generation of young academics have been blighted, given that nobody any more is interested in whatever they may have to say. Finding work outside the universities is even harder; instead of degrees, prospective employers demand “experience” above everything else.

Does that mean that books and movies that deal with the past will soon disappear? Of course not. Rather, it means that the purpose of reading those works has shifted. Instead of analyzing underlying factors and trying to extract “lessons,” people started looking for stories with heroes and villains in them. Instead of looking for the general picture they took an interest in the details; often, needless to say, the juicier the better. Instead of asking, “how we got to where we are now,” they wanted to know what life in the past had felt like. Nowhere was this more true than in my own field, military history. The reason, presumably, being that the vast majority of people in advanced countries no longer had any personal experience of warfare.

Where the demand exists supply will follow. Contrary to the situation as it existed a few decades ago, the most important historians writing today are not academics. They are popular writers, with his difference that the adjective “popular” is now as likely to be used in a complimentary way as in a derogatory one. By and large they do not reflect on underlying theoretical principles, create frameworks, or provide deep analysis. Yet from Antony Beevor in Stalingrad through Max Hastings in Catastrophe to Keith Lowe in Savage Continent, they have a vivid sense for detail and know how to spin a tale. Those tales may be useless in the classroom—having tried to use them there, I know. Yet judging by sales they seem to be filling the psychological needs of many people.

The king is dead; long live the king.    

Under Fire

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My wife and I live on our own in a townhouse a few miles west of Jerusalem, within range of the rockets from Gaza. Several times over the last few days the alarm was sounded. We react by leaving the living room, which has glass doors facing the garden. Should a rocket explode nearby, then flying shards will cut us to ribbons. So we move into the stairwell which, made of reinforced concrete, offers good protection. We are lucky to have it, for my wife has just had her knee operated on and could not run if her life depended on it. I suppose something similar would apply to hundreds of thousands of others both in Israel and in Gaza. We wait until the sirens stop wailing—a hateful sound—and we have heard a few booms. Then we check, on the news, whether the booms originated in rockets being intercepted by Iron Dome or in such as have not been intercepted hitting the earth. A few telephone calls to or from our children, and everything returns to normal until the next time.

And so it goes. One gets up each morning, sees that the surroundings look much as usual, heaves a sigh of relief, and prepares for the coming day. Yet for several days now, much of Israel has been under fire. That is especially true of the southern part of the country. Over there ranges are short and incoming rockets smaller, harder to intercept, and much more numerous. There are several dozen wounded—most of them hurt not by incoming rockets but while in a hurry to find shelter. As of the evening of Tuesday, 19 July, following eight days of fighting, just one Israeli, a civilian, has been killed by Hamas fire.

Several factors explain the low number of casualties. First, the rockets coming from Gaza are enormously inaccurate. They hit targets, if they do, almost at random. Second, the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system works better than anyone had expected. The system has the inestimable advantage in that it can calculate the places where the rockets will land. Consequently it only goes into action against those—approximately one in five or six—that are clearly about to hit an inhabited area. The outcome is vast savings; in some cases, realizing that the incoming rockets are not going to hit anybody or anything, the authorities do not even bother to sound the alarm. Third, civil defense seems to be working well; people obey instructions and are, in any case, getting used to this kind of thing. Fourth, as always in war, one needs luck.

In turn, the small number of casualties and the limited amount of damage inflicted has enabled the government of Israel to keep the lid on its own actions in the face of extremist demands. Fewer than two hundred people in Gaza, about a hundred of them civilians, have been killed. Given how densely populated the Strip is, and that the Israelis claim to attack several hundred targets each day, that is a surprisingly low number. It suggests a degree of control and precision never before attained or maintained in any war in history. But while the Israelis have been extremely effective in avoiding collateral deaths, the impact of their strikes against Hamas’ short-range rockets in particular is limited. Many targets known to harbor military installations but located in or under hospitals and schools have not been attacked at all. Others were hit and destroyed, but only after IDF operatives called their inhabitants or used a small missile to warn them and order them to get out. Strangest of all, throughout this about 200 trucks keep crossing from Israel into Gaza every day. They carry food, fuel, and medicines without which the Strip could not survive for long.

But Israel’s lucky run will not last forever. Sooner or later, a Hamas rocket that for one reason or another has not been intercepted is bound to hit a real target in Israel and cause real damage. Imagine a school or kindergarten being hit, resulting in numerous deaths. In that case public pressure on the government and the Israel Defense Forces “to do something” will mount until it becomes intolerable.

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What can the IDF do? Not much, it would seem. It can give up some restraints and kill more—far more—people in Gaza in the hope of terrorizing Hamas into surrender. However, such a solution, if that is the proper term, will not necessarily yield results while certainly drawing the ire of much of the world. It can send in ground troops to tackle the kind of targets, such as tunnls, that cannot be reached from the air. However, doing so will almost certainly lead to just the kind of friendly casualties that the IDF, by striking from the air, has sought to avoid.

Whether a ground operation can kill or capture sufficient Hamas members to break the backbone of the organization is also doubtful. Even supposing it can do so, the outcome may well be the kind of political vacuum in which other, perhaps more extreme, organizations such as the Islamic Jihad will flourish. Either way, how long will such an operation last? And how are the forces ever going to withdraw, given the likelihood that, by doing so, they will only be preparing for the next round?

And so the most likely outcome is a struggle of attrition. It may last for weeks, perhaps more. Humanitarian efforts to help the population of Gaza, however well meant, may just prolong the agony. In such a struggle the stakes would hardly be symmetrical. On one hand there are the inhabitants of Gaza. Increasingly they have their lives turned upside down by the constant alarms, strikes, and people who are wounded or killed. On the other are those of Israel who, though their lives have also been affected, have so far remained remarkably calm and resilient under fire. Though some areas are badly affected, the Israeli economy has also been holding up well.

Perhaps because the number of Gazans killed and wounded is fairly small, international reaction, which is always hostile to Israel, has been relatively muted. One reason for this appears to be that no outsiders have what it takes to push either side towards a ceasefire. In a struggle of attrition it is the last ounce of willpower on both sides that will decide the issue. So far, it does not seem that the willpower in question has been exhausted on either side.

Why American Kids Kill

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American kids keep killing each other, their teachers, and any other adults who happen to be present when they go berserk. Since December 2012 alone there have been some 74 school shootings, more than two a month on the average. Each time something of the kind happens the media go even more berserk than the children themselves. So far neither metal detectors at the gates nor armed guards in the corridors seem to have made much of a difference. Proposals for dealing with the problem have ranged from providing teachers with handguns to covering students with bullet-proof blankets.

As a foreigner who has spent some years in the U.S while his children went to school there, and who has written a book (in Russian) about the U.S, I may be in a better position than many others to shed some light on this question. Here, then, are my observations.

* Owing to the way the healthcare system is constructed, American infants are more likely than some others to die during their early months or years. For many years now, even the States that do best in this respect tend to lag behind many other developed countries, including some that are much poorer. Though America’s fertility rate may be the highest among developed countries, its kids are skimped on before they are born as well as immediately after birth. Arguably the fact that the problem affects lower-class socio-economic families much more than it does those above them only makes things worse.

* Compared to many other developed countries, America spends relatively little of its public wealth on raising its children. Family payments, measured in absolute numbers, are lower than in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the U.K. They are also much lower than the OECD average. Relative to the earned incomes of employed single mothers, the overall value of cash transfers per family is low and declining. As a result, the percentage of children who live in poverty is higher than in most other developed countries.

* As if to make up for these shortcomings, American parents, and society in general, are extremely demanding on their children. At school they are supposed to get straight A’s. At home they are supposed to perform “chores,” meaning unpleasant tasks adults do not want to do. In addition they have to excel at sports—the reason being that, doing so, they may be able to get through college with the aid of scholarships and thus save their parents tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. I personally knew some perfectly nice middle-class parents who more or less compelled their teenage daughter have an operation on her knees, which were hurting, so she could to go on playing basketball. If all this were not enough, during their vacations they are expected to hold a job—the kind of job, needless to say, that pays so little that nobody else would want it—so as to cover at least part of their expenses.

The outcome is that many teenagers are busier, and enjoy less leisure, than in any of the many other countries I have visited or in which I have lived. Talking to some of them, I never understood how they managed it. Inevitably, some fail to do so. All this is done in the name of teaching children how to cope with “life”—yet judging by the results, it is often counter-productive.

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* Even as they encourage their children to grow up in a competitive world, American parents and society in general put them under any number of restrictions. If American adults are greedy for an endless supply of high-quality goods and services, then the American Psychological Association will commission a study on the effect of advertising on children with the goal of making them less so. If many Americans swear, then an American seven year old will be punished by his school principal for telling a classmate that his mother was gay, as indeed she was. If Americans supposedly smoke too much, then American youths up to age 21 are forbidden to smoke and may, indeed, be sent to jail for buying a pack of cigarettes. If not enough Americans join the Armed Forces so they can be sent to get killed in useless wars on the other side of the world, then any school that receives federal money must admit Pentagon recruiters and must provide those recruiters with students’ contact addresses even without their knowledge, or that of their parents. Ironically this requirement, which was enacted in 2001, was part of a law known as “no child left behind.

If American adults like to drink while riding in stretch limousines, then out of fear that kids may do the same they are prohibited from using those limousines for their coming-out parties and must content themselves by being bused instead. If over sixty percent of American adults are overweight, then one can be certain that their children, far fewer of whom are, will be made to pay the price by having sweets, snacks, candy and various soft drinks banned from their schools’ vending machines. The list is endless.

Thus children are caught in a vise. From the moment of birth on, they are taught they must grow up so as to make their way in society. But that very society also puts them under endless prohibitions and, claiming that they “cannot handle it” (whatever “it” may be) infantilizes them. As one American told me, that explains why American children are so keen on sport. It is the only adult activity on which they are allowed to engage.

* Finally, American parents, and society in general, have never learnt how to spare the rod. I well remember how, on first visiting the home of a prominent and extremely well educated lawyer, I was told that his two sons had been “grounded” for quarrelling and would not be allowed to leave their room for a couple of days. I well remember how my son, then thirteen years old and following his first day at an American school, came home with a fifty-page booklet listing all the things he was prohibited from doing and the punishments attached to each; and yet, as he said between tears, he had done nothing wrong yet! Worse still, with computers around no offense committed by a child, however trivial, is ever left unregistered or forgotten. It is as if the term “forgiveness” did not exist.

Some parents go so far as to send their rebellions children to a kind of bootcamp where they are supposed to learn what is what. Others even allow those children to be kidnapped by personnel who work for the firms that operate the camps and take them there by force. Others still consult doctors who then prescribe Prozac, Ritalin and other chemical compounds to keep the children quiet. Wherever one goes one hears the advice, “talk to your children.” But how can American parents, especially busy career mothers who often work as hard as fathers and are always desperately trying to juggle career and housework, ever find the time and energy to do so the way it should be done? Instead, all they seem to do is nag their offspring about homework.

As the Roman philosopher Seneca used to say, repeated punishment crushes the spirit of some of those subject to it. At the same time it stirs up hatred among all the rest. Is it any wonder that some children, caught in an impossible world, take up a gun and kill everybody they meet?

Where the Dog is Buried

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Vast traffic jams on the way from Domododevo airport to central Moscow, so that travelling 35 kilometers takes two and a half hours. Almost all the cars one sees are foreign made (though some may be locally assembled): Fords, Toyotas, Opels, Audis, and all the rest. A very occasional Volga and an occasional Lada. The latter is the offspring of the Fiat 124 and thus based on technology that is fifty years old.

The historic center of Moscow is also jammed. How anybody can ever find a parking place there is a mystery, given that there are no parking houses as in any Western city.

The hotel, the Akvarel, is a small one located in a small mew a few hundred yards from the Red Square and the Kremlin. I would give it three stars, though the tourist guide says it has four. The staff speak reasonable English and are quite helpful. The room is clean and in good repair. Only the breakfast is not as good as one would expect from a place that comes at $ 250 a night.

Not far away there is a small park. Walking there in the evening, I watched the members of an amateur folk-dancing club, men and women (more women than men, so that some of them were left without partners) being put through their paces. Very relaxed and very cheerful. Seeing me watch them, they invite me to join. But alas, with my three left legs I am no dancer…

Right next door is a pedestrian shopping street with some of the most renowned brand names in the world. Louis Vuiton. Tagheur. Cartier. Van Cleef and Arpels. And others such. Some of the shops are closed.

With my friend Marina, whom I met during my last visit, I visit the Historic Museum. It has a show dealing with the way Lenin and Stalin were presented to the Soviet public. Lenin’s coat and hat, Stalin’s uniform and boots. Photographs of their families. Paintings, statues, all in strict conformity with “socialist realism.” Movies of the two men’s funerals. Nikita Khruschev standing on Lenin’s grave reading an obituary to Stalin; a mere three years later, in his Secret Speech, he was to tear his former master to pieces. Yet the cult of personality did not die at once. Marina tells me that, aged 17, she and her classmates wept at Brezhnev’s death. Stalin at least is occasionally shown with something like the hint of a smile. Lenin is always seriousness itself, looking as if he would swallow all capitalists alive if he only could.

The strangest part of the exhibition consists of the objects the two leaders were presented by ordinary people. Pictures made of all kinds of improbable materials: shells, grain, various kinds of rope, and what not. We know that Hitler, accompanied by his chief architect Albert Speer, used to go over the mountains of gifts he received and make fun of them. How did Lenin and Stalin react?

In the evening I lecture to about 120 young students. The location: a cavernous, altogether bare concrete building that I am told used to serve as a warehouse for the post office. Nowadays it is populated, rather thinly, by young people who sit at tables or on arms chairs that look and feel as if they were made of rags. Each and every one of them has a laptop or handheld computer. The subject: The Rise and Decline of the State, a book of mine that has been translated into Russian and enjoys some success there.

I speak in English with the help of a simultaneous translator. He must be doing a good job, for the lecture goes on longer than planned and nobody leaves. Then question after question after question. These students are marvelous; very well educated, inquisitive, and polite. Above all, while they have heard of political correctness, that blight which is destroying free thought in the West, they do not subscribe to its tenets. One can talk to them without having to worry that they will take offense at every word. No speaker could wish for a better audience.

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Yet talking to people, one quickly realizes that this is a society under pressure. In less than 48 hours, at least two people told me their business was suffering from the sanctions lately imposed by the West following the annexation of the Crimea. One of them runs a Russian Formula 1 racing team—he tells me they were doing not at all badly—but has now been brought to a halt by the lack of imported spare parts. The other is a lawyer who specializes in foreign investment of which, at the moment, there is none. Both men are still fairly optimistic about the future. However, supposing the sanctions last one would not be surprised if they turned bitter—at the West, at Putin, or both.

More information comes from the Moscow Times, an English-language daily that is mildly critical of Putin but obviously does not dare go too far in saying so. I learn that the economy is in a mess. Production is declining. Capital is leaving the country in spite of all attempts to prevent it from doing so. The number of entrepreneurs is falling. A survey shows that the middle classes are quite happy with their lot. But the institute which did the polling admits that a growing number of them are state employees rather than independents.

Facing international pressure, the state is trying to retrench. It has compelled foreign credit card companies to set up local subsidiaries’ presumably with the intention of enabling them to take over one day. It is putting pressure on people not to seek medical treatment abroad for themselves and their children, a measure that may result in some of them being condemned to death. There is talk of making those with dual nationalities declare their foreign passports, though how and whether this can be enforced is another question. The annexation of the Crimea has badly hurt the tourist industry there; so the authorities call upon people head south for their vacations.

The problems also have an international side. Still judging by the Times, the Russians deeply resent their exclusion from the G-8, now the G-7. President Putin’s visit to Normandy to commemorate the battle that took place there sixty years ago only goes so far to make up for this. By way of compensation, Moscow is seeking closer ties with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Pyongyang, and, which is much more important, Beijing.

Yet things are no longer what they were. Starting in the mid-18th century, in their relations with China the Russians were always the stronger party and called the shots. During the 19th century this led to the annexation by Russia of huge pieces of China. The same situation prevailed from the October Revolution until about 1990.

Since then, given the disintegration of the Soviet Union and China’s prodigious growth, the tables have been turned. Now China is the colossus, Russia very much the junior partner with a much smaller GDP and industrial base. Indeed I have heard Russia called, not without reason, a Saudi Arabia with an arms industry.

And that is where the dog is buried, as we Israelis say. Why has Russia, a large, old country blessed with endless natural resources and a people as capable as any on earth, never succeeded in developing a civil society independent of the state? Why are all quality consumer goods, from clothes to laptops, made abroad? Why has nobody ever seen any Russian consumer goods being put on display and sold in any country outside Russia? Why is the state as powerful, and often as dictatorial as it is? Is the state preventing the growth of civil society, or is there something in the national character that obstructs the creation of such a society and allows the state to become what it is? These are questions to which only you, my Russian friends, can provide an answer.

Until you do, the dog will remain buried.

The First Casualty—But Not the Last

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The first casualty of war, it has been said, is always the truth. At no time was this more true that in the Ukraine right now. In the eastern districts of the country a civil war has broken out. Stories and images that deal with it, many of them of dubious origins and contradictory, are being flashed around the world. The one certain thing is that Ukrainian government troops are involved, not too successfully if one judges by the number of helicopters that have been shot down (assuming the reports are true). Whom they are fighting is anything but clear. Judging by media reports there is more than one “separatist” militia. That in fact, is what one would expect in such a situation. But just how they differ and how they relate to each other may be unclear not only to the outside world but even to many of their own leaders.

Nor does the confusion end at this point. Russian volunteers may, or may not, be taking part in the fighting. Russia may, or may not, have withdrawn its troops from Ukraine’s frontiers (even if it did, it could easily put them back). It may or may not be providing the “separatists” with weapons and other equipment. The head of the CIA may or may not have visited Kiev. If he did, then presumably in an attempt to find out what kind of assistance the U.S can provide to the government there. “Heavily armed” American mercenaries may or may not be assisting the Ukrainian troops. Chechenian militias are said to have entered the Ukraine, presumably in an attempt to avenge themselves on the Russians who brutally suppressed their own country’s bid for independence. Yet war is an expensive business. Supposing the story is true, who pays the militiamen is another mystery—is it Iran, is it Saudi Arabia?

With the situation as confused as it is, making predictions is extremely difficult. Still, a few things may perhaps be said. First, unless some miracle happens, this is going to be a long and bloody war. There will be no end to civilian casualties, rapes, destruction, economic deprivation, and, perhaps, ethnic cleansing. Second, the war will be fought primarily on the ground rather than at sea—given the geographical facts, that is a matter of course—and in the air. One may also safely predict that the newfangled forms of war which so preoccupy American analysts in particular, such as space war and cyberwar, will only play a very minor role, if any.

Two recent examples, Syria and the former Yugoslavia, provide useful analogies. The Syrian Civil War has now lasted for over three years. As in the Ukraine, the beginnings were small. Since then the number of dead is said to have risen to 160,000, though in truth nobody knows. On one side are President Assad’s armed forces which get their equipment and perhaps other things from Moscow and Tehran. At one point they were assisted by Hezbollah troops coming from Lebanon, though whether the latter are still involved on any scale is not clear. Arrayed against them are any number of militias, some “liberal”—supposing that term can be applied to any Arab group or country—others Islamic. The latter are joined by volunteers originating not only in the Arab world but in Islamic communities resident in various Western countries. British Moslems, or Moslem Brits, are said to have a particularly ferocious reputation. Many militiamen—there seem to be practically no women among the fighters—keep butchering each other even as they clash with Assad’s army. All are said to be assisted by Saudi money and American weapons reaching them by way of Jordan. How it will end, if it will end, only Allah knows.

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Another close analogy is the war in the former Yugoslavia. The war there has often been presented as if it were a question of nation—Serbs, Croats, Christian Bosnians, Moslem Bosnians, and others—fighting nation. It was that, of course, but just like the Syrian civil war it was many other things as well. Local politicians, many of them veterans of Tito’s Communist regime, fought other local politicians. Private armies fought other private armies. Gangs fought other gangs. Many did so with a strong admixture of criminal elements with no other objective in mind than to enrich themselves by murder, kidnapping, ransom, robbery, and smuggling. Most wars are supposed to be directed from the top down; it is governments which give the orders, armies that fight, kill and die, and civilian population that pay and suffer. Not so these two. To use a useful phrase coined by a British veteran of another such war, the one in Afghanistan, they were driven, to a considerable extent, from the ground up.

Bristling with atrocities as they did and do, both wars cast doubt on the idea that the better angels are on the march. Both were and are catastrophic to the countries in which they were fought. In the end, the Yugoslav war was resolved without spilling over into other countries. In spite of some attacks by anti-Assad forces on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, so far the same applies to Syria. It is here that the situation in the Ukraine may develop in a different way. Should ethnic Russians in the Ukraine start dying in large numbers, then Mr. Putin may have no choice but to intervene even against his will. His forces, which are far stronger than any the Ukraine can mount, should be able to overrun the disputed provinces in a matter of weeks, perhaps less. The question is, what comes next? If they succeed in imposing peace and setting up some puppet government, well and good. If not, then just as the War in Afghanistan helped bring about the collapse of the former Soviet Union so the one in the Ukraine may bring about that of the Russian Federation.

That Federation in turn already contains about 32 million non-Russian people not all of whom are happy to be governed from Moscow. Should some of them try to use the opportunity to liberate themselves, then the first casualty would hardly be the last. In this connection it is worth recalling that rarely has an empire collapsed without massive bloodshed. However much many people in Moscow may detest Mr. Gorbachev, the former Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party, his ability to avoid such bloodshed is one achievement history will remember him for.

The question is, will Mr. Putin be able to follow in his footsteps?  

Slithering into War

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As the centennial of the outbreak of World War I approaches, a deluge of new publications seeks to commemorate it and to re-interpret it. Among the best of the lot is Christopher  Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York, Harper, 2014). That is why I have chosen to discuss it here.

The war itself broke out on 31 July. As one would imagine, the search for its origins began right away. Assuming, of course, that the accusations which the various future belligerent started throwing at each other during the preceding weeks should not be seen as part of that search or, at any rate, as preparation for it. At first it was a question of pointing fingers at personalities, be it Serb Prime Minister Nikola Pasič, or Austrian Chief of Staff Konrad von Hoeztendorf, or the Russian Tsar, or French prime minister René Viviani, or British foreign minister Edward Grey, or the German Kaiser, or whoever. Very quickly, however, the hunt expanded to include not only persons but entire peoples. Not just Pasič but all, or at any rate most, Serbs were bad people always ready to throw bombs so to undermine the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the name of irredentism. Not just Hoetzendorf, but many of the ruling circles in Vienna demanded war in the hope of saving the empire from disintegration. Not just the Tsar but many of his people entertained pan-Slavic dreams of expansion, mostly at the expense of Austria-Hungary. Not just Viviani, but the entire French people formed an arrogant nation used to exercise hegemony over the continent and unable to resign itself to its loss. Not just Grey, but the British people as a whole were hypocritical warmongers determined to hold on to their commercial superiority. Not just the Kaiser, but all Germans were power-drunk militarists. The list goes on and on.

It was this version of events, directed against the losers, which underlay the famous decision postwar decision to saddle Germany with “war guilt,” an innovation in international law that had few predecessors during the previous quarter millennium or so. As one would expect, time caused the debate to change its shape. It was not this or that country but their commons scourge, arms-manufacturers and capitalists in general, who were to blame, claimed Marxists. It was not this or that ruler or people but all those bad Europeans, claimed some American historians. It was not this or that country but the treaty-system as a whole others said. It was not so much the treaties as the railway timetables of the various general staffs, which forced them to act precipitously so as to avoid defeat, claimed other historians still.

The outbreak of World War II, and Germany’s role in it, caused some historians to go back to blaming the Kaiser and his associates. Nobody more so than Fritz Fischer in World Power or Decline, the original German version of which was first published in 1961. Clark’s work is not specifically directed against any of these interpretations. Nevertheless, in passing he makes short shrift of them. The railway system is barely mentioned. The treaties, he shows, were not automatic but left their signatories with plenty of room for maneuver. Those who allowed the continent to slither into war were rulers, diplomats, and top-ranking soldiers, not the owners of large industrial corporations. The last-named were never even asked for their opinions. Given that economics only came to be considered as part of war during the interwar era, that is not surprising.

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More significant still, none of those who ruled the most important powers wanted war—at any rate a general war among the great powers. His occasional bellicose talk notwithstanding, that even applied to the Kaiser. As one of his courtiers was to write later on: His Imperial Majesty liked wargames much better than he liked war itself. What really happened was quite different. Though decision-makers might not be interested in a general war, quite a few of them were prepared to risk a more limited one. In doing so, the model they had in front of their eyes was, naturally enough, the limited “cabinet wars” of the nineteenth century. Serbia, provided only it could obtain Russian and perhaps French support, was quite ready to fight Austria. Certain governing circles in Austria were quite ready, indeed eager, to go to war against Serbia if only they could be certain that Germany would support them and thereby neutralize the Russians. The Russians were ready to support Serbia against Austria but hoped to do so without causing Germany to join the fray against them. The French hoped for a chance to recover Alsace-Lorraine but looked forward to doing so without setting off a general conflagration. More than one leading German thought Russia’s growing power called for a preemptive war. However, and as Austrian foreign minister Berchtold saw clearly enough, almost to the end people in Berlin hoped to wage it without dragging in France, let alone Britain.

In other words, in almost all capitals it was a question, not of unchaining a general conflict but of taking what was seen as a calculated risk. In the event, the calculations failed. A European war, later known as the Great War, later still as World War I, was the result. Needless to say, such calculations have always formed the very stuff of which power-politics are made. In many cases they continue to do so still. Are we, then, to conclude that sooner or later they are certain to fail again? One of those who thought so was the noted English historian A. J. P. Taylor (1906-1990). Having spent much of his career studying the numerous diplomatic “crises” that dotted the decades before 1914, almost to the end of his life he remained convinced that, sooner or later, another such crisis would lead to World War III. A quarter-century after Taylor’s death, there is no point in trying to deny the logic of his argument. Among those who echo it is Christopher Coker in his forthcoming book, The Improbable War.

However, there is one critical difference: the world which Taylor, Clark, and so many others describe was a pre-nuclear one. In such a world, whatever fate might await the defeated, there would no question of annihilating most, or even a great part, of the population of the loser. The winner, on his part, might expect to prosper. The introduction and proliferation of nuclear weapons has changed the equation. As a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin kindly reminded us just a few weeks ago, with those monsters about another war might very well turn the countries involved, both winners and losers, into radioactive deserts. Judging by the fact that no two nuclear countries have fought each other directly and in earnest since 1945, there is some reason to believe that rulers and commanders are aware of the Damocles’ sword hanging over their collective heads. It seems to have made them much more cautious than they used to be.

It may or may not be true, as some believe, that “the better angels of our nature” are taking over and are responsible for what is sometimes known as “the long peace” which, among the great powers at any rate, has prevailed from 1945 on. Supposing it is, it would represent very good news indeed. Yet even so I propose that a considerable number of H-bombs be kept in reserve ready to deliver a second strike, as nuclear strategists say. Just to make sure that, should the better angels in our dear leaders’ nature fall asleep or go on strike, there will still be fear to keep them from each other’s throats.

Witch-hunts

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There used to be a time when inquisitors and others hunted for witches—incidentally, by no means female ones only. In some countries, and at some times, as many men were caught in the dragnet as women.

To contemporaries, men and women, witches were real. Both the learned and the unlearned firmly believed in their existence. Those who tried witches were invariably men; however, women could and did participated in the hunts. Motivated by the desire to settle accounts with their neighbors, at some times and places they formed the majority of the accusers. Midwives and other women who assisted during or after child delivery were particularly at risk. And no wonder, given how prevalent the death of children and mothers was. More witches were executed in England under Queen Elizabeth I, and in France during the regency of Catherine dei Medici, than at any other time.

Many of the witches’ alleged crimes were strange indeed. They mounted broomsticks and flew out at night to meet the devil, it was said. They associated with him, danced with him, worshiped him, kissed his ass, and had sex with him, it was said. Some “experts”—then as now, there were many such, some official, others self-appointed—maintained that the devil had a forked penis. This enabled him to commit fornication and sodomy at the same time. In return for selling their souls and bodies witches of both sexes received powers ordinary humans did not possess. They used them to kill or maim people and livestock, destroy crops, bring on draughts, and much more. From lightning to plague, hardly any natural phenomenon that could not be, and occasionally was, attributed to witchcraft.

How tolerably normal, tolerably sane people could believe such things is a mystery. Worse still, when confronted with facts that might have undermined their beliefs, they clung to them with all their might. Witches were supposed to leave their home at night. When a husband, to protect his wife, claimed that she had never left their bed, he was told that it was only her image, placed there by the devil, which had stayed whereas her real essence had flown away. Judges who acquitted witches were regarded with suspicion as having been influenced by them and might be accused of being witches themselves. Those, and there were always some, who did not believe in witchcraft stood in grave danger of being accused themselves. Perhaps a clue of sorts may be found in the fact that those who prosecuted and condemned witches were entitled to a share of their victims’ property. The entire episode, which peaked between about 1500 and 1700, remains as a monument to human folly, credulity, cruelty, and, in not a few cases, greed.

And today? All over the “advanced” world, not a day passes without many cases of “sexual child abuse” being “discovered.” Informers, some official, others self-appointed, put on disguises and spend days and nights exposing “pedophiles.” The latter are supposed to form entire societies—“rings” is the current term for this—using all kinds of secret methods to communicate with each other. Once discovered they are denounced, brought to trial, condemned, and punished. If and when released from prison they are treated like wild beasts unfit for human society.

Some—nobody knows how many—of the cases are probably genuine in the sense that they involve physical attacks by adults against children too small to understand, say no, and resist. That they should be punished with the full rigor of the law hardly requires saying. But a great many others are much less clear cut. They were created by society which, in a strange return to supposedly out of date, Victorian values, insists that sex is the most dangerous thing in the world. So dangerous that people under such and such an age “cannot handle it” and are faced with all kinds of terrible consequences if they engage in it, or witness it, even out of their own free will.

Never mind that, from the recently deceased writer Garcia Marquez down, the world is full of lads who were initiated into sex at an early age and, decades later, still look at the experience as a blessing. Never mind that, at a time when many countries are raising or thinking of raising the age of consent, the age at which owing to improved nutrition, young women start menstruating as well as wearing push-up bras and lipstick is steadily declining.

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Never mind, too, that cyberspace, the media, the movies, and society in general are all so saturated with sex as to make it impossible even for the most unknowing child to avoid it and, in many cases, see what it is all about. Not seldom it is the most “liberated” people who are most opposed to children, their own and others, learning about sex at “too early” an age.

As during the period of the great witch hunts, some denunciations are motivated by greed and anger. I personally have heard urchins, perhaps 9-10 years old, threatening an adult who was trying to prevent them from committing some mischief that, if he persisted, they would accuse him of sexual child abuse.

Nor does persecution, official and unofficial, cease at this point. Anyone who dares look at an image of a naked child, let alone draw one and show it in public, is in danger. By that standard countless artists of all ages should have been proscribed; luckily for Leonardo and Michelangelo, they died before the onset of our “enlightened” age. Fathers during or after divorce proceedings are in danger, given that mothers sometimes use “sexual abuse” as a way to prevent them from seeing their offspring and, if possible, punish them. Those who try to instruct children any number of fields that involve physical contact—swimming, say, or wrestling—are in danger, given that any accidental touch may and sometimes is interpreted as “sexual abuse.” But that is not all; I know a case when a mother, a photographer by trade, took pictures of her children in their bath. The shop which developed the film called in the police, which in turn called in the “social services” which promptly took the children away. Recovering them took months as well as a small fortune in lawyers’ fees—to say nothing about the traumatic effect on the children themselves.  

To repeat, many of those involved in witch-hunting were able to derive financial advantage from their work. This may not be the case in the same form today. Nevertheless, it remains true that lawyers, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists who work on these cases before or after they come to trial benefit from them in all kinds of ways. Furthermore, those found guilty of sexual child abuse are often required to pay compensation. Would it be rash to say that, since the victims are too young to control their own finances, often those who benefit are their adult guardians?

Worst of all, the witch-hunt may very well be counterproductive. Throughout history, young people often had sex with each other or with adults without, as far as can be seen, suffering any negative consequences. The same is true in many present-day “developing” countries where the age of consent is low. I have yet to see a study which shows that mental disease is more prevalent among their citizens than elsewhere; judging by the number of mental health workers per capita, indeed, the opposite may be the case. Presenting sex as a dangerous thing with incalculable psychological consequences from which it is hard if not impossible to recover, society may do the young more harm than good. In some cases it may turn them into mental cripples.

At all times and ages, the need to “protect” the young has often served to cover some of the worst crimes of all. Ask Socrates who was executed for “corrupting” the youth of Athens. Could history be repeating itself?

Feeling Embarrassed? Bring Your Dick

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photo-originalGoogle News, 26.3.2014. A businesswoman is sitting at the table with some “dudes.” She feels they devalue her work, her skills, and herself merely because she is a woman. She loses confidence; what to do? Holly Wilson, a sculptor from Mustang, Oklahoma, thinks she has the answer. She has created a miniature penis, one-and a half inches long, and available in either bronze or silver. A woman who purchases it will be able to take it along to meetings. At the appropriate moment she can fumble in her pocket or handbag, put the tiny marvel on the table, and show it to her male business partners; after which, it is hoped, business can really get under way.

Ms. Wilson is hardly the only emancipated woman who hopes for a penis that will somehow empower her. Take Naomi Wolf, a self-declared “power feminist” writer who advised candidate Al Gore during the 2000 U.S presidential campaign. In Fire by Fire (1993) she explains how delighted she was by some ads she saw showing “phallic objects… emerg[ing]… from women’s [emphasis in the original] groins.” In the 1997 movie GI Jane the lead character, acted by Demmi More, demands that a U.S Army male instructor “suck her dick” (which, of course, she doesn’t have). The grand-priestess of modern feminism, Betty Friedan, in her 1981 book The Second Stage expressed her confidence that women would soon be able to join men in the “ballfield” where important political economic and social issues are decided. The list goes on and on.

The words of these and other leading feminist seem to belie the claim, made by Kate Millett and others, that penis envy is a lie invented by Freud specifically in order to keep women in their proper place. Freud himself first mentioned the term in a 1908 essay called “On the Sexual Theories of Children.” Later his followers picked it up and started strewing it over their own works like sequins over a dress. Yet the precise origin and significance of the phenomenon has always been in doubt. Karen Horney (1885-1952), one of Freud’s more important female students, believed that the penis merely acted as the symbol for all the advantages, real or imagined, men enjoy in society. Wrong, said another female disciple of the master, Jeanne Lampl de Groot (1895-1987). “The absence of a penis cannot be regarded as a matter of secondary and trifling significance for the little girl, as Karen Horney [thinks]… The material,” meaning her own clinical experiences and that of others brought to her attention, proved that “penis envy is a central point.” It is “from this point that the development into normal femininity begins”. Woman’s “wish for a penis is the consequence of a biological datum that underlies her psychic reaction of feeling inferior and is ‘rock bottom.’”

Many of these debates took place at Freud’s famous analytical seminars, held every Wednesday evening at his home. Another female analyst who participated in some of them was Helene Deutsch (1884-1982). Deutsch, one of the first women to receive a medical degree from any Austrian university, rightly considered herself, “a leader in female emancipation.” In 1925 she became the first member of Freud’s circle to publish a paper specifically dealing with the psychology of women, shocking Freud who himself had yet to produce anything of the kind. None of this prevented her from embracing the theory of the biological origin of penis envy heart and soul. The clitoris, she explained was but “an inadequate substitute” for the male organ. In 1935 Deutsch fled Germany for the U.S. Beautiful and very hard-working, she became a highly successful therapist, teacher and lecturer. In 1944-45 she published her two-volume work, The Psychology of Women. It turned her into the world’s foremost authority on the subject, a position she continued to hold for about three decades.

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While psychoanalytical opinion remains divided, a look at the world around us may help resolve the riddle. Indeed one could argue that the whole of modern feminism itself is nothing but the most gigantic, best-organized, exercise in penis-envy ever. If men wear trousers, women must do the same. If men spend most of their lives slaving away in factories and offices, then unless women share their fate and find jobs they consider themselves only half-human. If men undertake years of intensive training and embark on hazardous journeys to the moon and back, women must join them there. If men hit each other half to death in sports such as boxing, women too must enter the rink. If men join the military, travel to some war in some godforsaken country halfway around the world to fight and die there, then so must women. If men enjoy one-night stands then so, some recent psychologists claim, must women.

Not only is the list of examples endless, but it and continues to expand almost day by day. Judging by them, women’s—especially feminist women seeking “emancipation”—jealousy of men knows no bounds. Were Lampl de Groot and Deutsch right in claiming that it is rooted in biology? Or is the penis simply a symbol for the advantages men enjoy in society, as Horney claimed? Like most attempts to separate nature from nurture, the question does not seem to admit a final answer. But does it really matter? Perhaps the real clue to understanding the relationship between men and women is contained in the following sentence, uttered by God when he drove the first couple out of paradise. “Unto your man shall be your passion,” He told Eve; “and he shall govern you.”

So it has been, so it remains, and so, presumably, it will always be.