Monthly Archives: June 2018

Once More unto the Breach

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On Amazon.com, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has now been reviewed more than ten thousand times. And this is to say nothing of the movie and TV series that have been based on it and must have been viewed millions upon millions of times. Some hate it, some love it. And with very good reason, given the vast number of different perspectives the author has succeeded in putting into her work. Including feminism, politics, freedom, economics, law—in her dystopia, women are no longer allowed either to work or to own property, or even to learn how to read and write—religion, fertility, and what not. “Thank God that’s over” (quite some readers find The Handmaid’s Tale a slow read, especially the first few chapters). “Still prescient, even more relevant (the first edition came out in 1985 and has been reissued without any changes). “Impossible to put down! Such an amazing view of what could actually happen to our society!” “Gorgeous but horrifying.” Personally I would have put it the other way around: horrifying, but gorgeous.

But even most of those who hate the book seem to admit this extraordinary power to make people think about where the feminist revolt and the inevitable reaction to it which (as the election of Donald Trump shows, is already well on the way) may be taking us.

In this post I want to take up neither the author nor the story. Suffice it to say that, owing to growing pollution and the destruction of the environment, only one fifth of American women are still able to give birth. To save the situation, a group of Old Testament-minded officers calling itself “Sons of Jacob” mount a coup, transforming the USA into the Giladean Republic. Democracy has been abolished, along with the Constitution. As mentioned above, women are prohibited from working or owning property.

Infertile women are more or less left alone, fertile ones become State property. They are dressed in red uniforms and wear white head covers that, like horses’ blinkers, limit their sideward vision. They live in prison-like dormitories under the supervision of other women known, euphemistically, as aunties. Called handmaids, they are distributed among the officers under whose names they are known and who are obliged to impregnate them. Any resulting offspring will be taken away from them and given to the officers’ wives, who themselves are incapable of conceiving. A handmaid who, after three tries, fails to become pregnant will be shipped to the colonies, Just where they are or what they are like is not clear, but clearly the lives of the women will be nasty, brutish and short. The book consists of the secret diary kept by one such handmaid, discovered long after the events it describes.
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I shall not waste your time and mine on the TV series. In it, every single episode must include at least one “liberating” or “empowering” action mounted by the heroine, Ofred, and/or one of her fellow handmaidens. Instead I turn to the introduction to the 2017 Vintage edition I have in front of me. The kind of stuff not many readers, having somehow learnt of the book’s existence and eager to go ahead with the main story, bother to look at.

There are, Ms. Atwood says, three questions people keep asking her. Personally I am most interested in the first. I quote.

Is The Handmaid’s Tale a “feminist’” novel? If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized that they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings—with all the variety of character and behavior that implies—and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and lot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are “feminist.”

Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are an afterthought of nature they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable [and willing, MvC] of giving birth human populations will die out.

To which I, having my interest in feminism excited by the likes of Kate Millett almost half a century ago, can only say, agreed.

The Good Things in Life

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My father died last week. No great disaster, that, because his one-hundredth birthday was not far away. He was practically blind, quite deaf, confined to a wheelchair, and suffered from a painful infection in his leg that no treatment would cure. As he told me a few days before he passed away, he was no longer Leo (his first name). The fact that not only his wife of seventy years but almost all his friends and acquaintances were long dead did not help either. His last words were, “let me go.” In a way he was lucky. He died in his own home where he had been living for close to thirty years. Surrounded by the most tender care possible, and without any kind of tubes or needles stuck into his body.

The death of old people like him is always long anticipated. Yet somehow it always comes as a surprise, too. One day you take him out in his wheelchair just as you so often did before. You walk with him through the nearby park, which by the way is very nice indeed; thank you for laying it out, you people at the municipality of Kfar Saba, north of Tel Aviv. Not forgetting to put a hat on his head and the brakes on his chair, you sit down on a bench in the sunshine, and watch the fish in a pond. Or listen to a turtle cooing (the Song of Songs). Ornithologists will tell you it is calling for a mate. To me it seems to be saying, zo is het goed (Dutch: now everything is in order). Next you get the phone call. And he is gone, forever.

His death made me think, not for the first time, about the good things in life. And the bad ones, of course, but I will spare you those. Initially I thought there would not be enough of the former to fill a post. Once I started, though, there seemed to be a whole host of them, all shouting and jostling each other in a desperate attempt to get into the list. So, to avoid boring you too much, let me just put down a few of those I feel are the most important ones. It was he who taught me several of them—which is why I am writing this post to honor him.

1. A good meal with family and friends. I am no gourmet, dislike the kind of people who can distinguish between fifty kinds of wine, and I do not particularly like restaurants. After a few days, even the best ones get on my nerves. Especially Israeli ones, which tend to play loud music, making it impossible to hear oneself and others think. Fortunately Dvora is as good a cook as they come. She also keeps experimenting, meaning that the food is never boring. Imagine a sunny winter morning or a cool evening here near Jerusalem, some 2,200 feet above sea level. Imagine a balcony looking out over a small but carefully kept and beautiful garden. A small group of family and friends, perhaps accompanied by some children, gathers. A bottle of wine is passed around, making everyone feel slightly—but only slightly—dizzy. As Herman Melville is supposed to have said, anyone who has that can feel like an emperor.

2. Music. When I was six or seven years old my mother tried to teach me to play the piano. I did not want to learn and she desisted, but not before telling me I would be sorry. In this she was right. Following my father, my tastes in music are mostly Western and classical, running from Church music (both Gregorian and Eastern Orthodox) through the Renaissance (Monteverdi and Palestrina; as sweet as honey, both of them) through the Baroque (Bach, Handel, Vivaldi) and the nineteenth century (Beethoven, Schubert. Wagner) to the years around 1900 (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov). But occasionally I also enjoy listening to Chinese music, Arabic music, and popular Israeli music. Two favorites that do not really fit into any of these categories are the Carmina Buranna and the Misa Criolla.My son, Eldad, gave me a set of good speakers for my computer: they are one of the best presents I ever got. Let me take this opportunity to say, once again, thank you, Eldad.

3. Art. Though I did take up making mosaics a few years ago, I got less artistic talent than he did. As I grew older I felt this lack more keenly than I did before. Such being the case, all that is left is to enjoy the art of others; particularly painting, sculpture, architecture, and design. My tastes run form the ancient Greeks to the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century (de Hooch, Cuyp, Vermeer, Rembrandt) all the way through Biedermeier—a recent discovery—the German Romantics and the Impressionists to Picasso and Fernando Botero. Nor will I miss a good show of Chinse, or, Indian, or Islamic, art. Flea markets are a joy to attend. Old posters, based on the history of the period in which they were created, are often wonderful. However, over the years I have come to dislike abstract art. Judging by the number of visitors I meet in the galleries, I am not the only one.

Normally I visit museums with Dvora who herself is an accomplished painter. For those of you who do not know, looking at pictures in the company of a painter is a unique experience. Most people, including myself, tend to focus on what they see; the sea, say, as Painted by Turner. Dvora, on the other hand, asks how the artists achieved the effect he did. To do so she comes so close to the painting that her nose is practically in it. How many times did she not alert the guard who came running!

Many times, a person will have cialis pills canada a fracture before becoming aware that the disease is present. The key change in description is that testosterone have DNA receptor websites, and vitamin A is in that household as well as vitamin D, and organic vitamins are areas of tenderness that occur in muscle, muscle-tendon connection, bursa, or fat pad. viagra cheapest price The blood filled in the free cialis samples corpora cavernosa expands the penis to give a hard-on. In case if you are tolerating from cardiovascular issues, diabetes, liver or kidney problem then you must take advice of the doctor. purchase generic viagra 4. Sport. Though quite small of stature he was a powerful man who, in his prime, played a decent game of tennis. I, however, was not born with the sportsman’s talents. In fact so bad was I that the coach who, sixty years ago, taught me to play tennis, a very nice man incidentally, later told me that, on seeing how clumsy I was, he had considered recommending that I take up another sport! Later I spent thirty-five years of my life long distance running up and down the hills surrounding Jerusalem. Tough terrain, I can tell you. Teaches you what determination is all about. Feeling one’s body go on automatic, so to speak. Floating in the air, as it were, and one’s thoughts freely fluttering about—there is nothing like it. Unfortunately my knees have long forced me to stop running. That was twenty years ago, and I still miss is. But I do enjoy walking. And swimming in lakes, of course.

5. Scholarship. For as long as I can remember myself I have always been a bookworm. If I had a great aim in life, it was Rerum causas cognoscere, to understand the causes of things. Probably not with success; looking back, I often think that I know and understand fewer things now than I did at the time I first gained consciousness of myself. I do not think I have made any great discoveries.

How these things work in natural science I do not claim to know at first hand. In the humanities and the social sciences, though, practically everything has been said before by someone at some time at some place; with the result that making such discoveries is, in one sense, next to impossible. But the subjective feeling of having understood, or feeling one has understood, something one had never thought about before—that is an experience the quest for which is worth spending a lifetime at.

6. Nature. The expanse of a field, reaching far away into the horizon. A forest, dark and mysterious. A lofty mountain, enveloped in the kind of silence you only get where there are no people around. A lake, shimmering in the sun. The sea. The eternally changing, the all-powerful, sea. It is enough to make you want to cry.

7. Love. It has been defined countless times by countless different people. My own favorite definition is as follows: love is when one’s beloved shortcomings make one laugh. As, for instance happens whenever Dvora sees me with my shirt buttoned the wrong way, smiles, and starts making fun of me. Another definition is that love is trust so great that one never has to say sorry. Not because one never hurts one’s beloved; only angels can do that, and they tend to be rather boring. But because he or she knows that it is not done on purpose.

Anyhow. Love, accompanied where appropriate by the kind of sex that makes the body and mind of both partners radiate with happiness, is the most wonderful thing life has to offer. Pity those, and the older I grow the more of them I think I see, who have not found it.

8. Last not least, a heartfelt email thanking me for my posts, such as I sometimes get.

The Good, the Bad, and the Befuddled

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Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, New York, NY, Tim Duggan, 2018

First, the story. If the author a well-known American historian with several other books to his credit, is to be believed, there are three kinds of people in the world. At the top of the heap are the Ukrainians. No one, perhaps not even the Jews, have suffered more! First, in 1914-17, they were occupied by the Germans as part of World War I. Next came the Civil War, which was fought in Iarge part on their territory. Next came Stalin’s war on the “kulaks” which resulted in millions starving to death. Next came the horrors of another German occupation about which nothing more need to be said.

Yet somehow, amidst all this, the Ukrainians managed to preserve their pristine virtues. A nation ancient and proud, for all the tremendous losses they took they never ceased hankering for democracy, socio-economic equality, and the rule of law. And ties with the West, of course. It was this people which, faced with a Russian invasion in 2014, threw aside any existing internal divisions between Ukrainian- and Russian speakers. Like one man they rose, defending their rights. True, the small Ukrainian Army was no match for the Russian one. The good Ukrainians did, however, manage to stave off the worst. While Russia’s wicked legions, firing at women and children, did tear off and overrun the Crimea and some of their southeastern provinces, their resistance, including several months’ worth of demonstrations at Kiev’s (which Snyder consistently spells, Kyiv) man square, sufficed to convince the bad people in Moscow that, in trying to re-absorb the country, they had taken on more than they could swallow.

Next, the Russians. Snyder has comparatively little to say about the people as such; instead he focuses on their leader, Vladimir Putin, who emerges as a diabolic figure with few equals in history. A sort of Hitler without (so far) the gas chambers, one might say. Originally he was a rather mediocre KGB officer who enjoyed life in East Germany but had no special attainments to his name. Assigned to St Petersburg after the Soviet Union’s fall, somehow he managed both to enrich himself and to have himself appointed Yeltsin’s successor as president. Once in power he set up a kleptocracy that easily made him the richest man in the word (by some accounts, his pile of about $ 200 billion is twice as large as the one figures such as Warren Buffet are sitting on). On the way anyone who resisted got crushed.

Putin’s ambition is to enter history as the savior of his people. Unable to improve the quality of their lives—not only is Russia the most unequal country in the world, but it also has a low standard of living and a low life expectancy—he turned to what Snyder calls “eternity politics.” By this view, whose chief propagator used to be one Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), it is the Russians who have always been a victim of others. Including, to mention but a few, the Mongols, the Poles, the Swedes, the French, the Germans, and, most recently, the West. The latter, using its wealth and its alleged democratic values as battering rams, has consistently sought to set them against each other and weaken them. Yet in all this it was the Russians who somehow managed to maintain their pristine virtues, including patience, endurance, and sexual purity (which, Snyder says, is why Putin has turned to denouncing and persecuting homosexuals).

Starting a thousand or go years ago, Snyder’s Putin story continues, Russians and Ukrainians have always been one people. Hence the first order of business is to restore unity and prevent any more peoples forming part of the Russian Federation from breaking away. Putin’s efforts to achieve this goal have been truly Herculean. He has had his army fire at, and invade, parts of the Ukraine, ruthlessly killing civilian men, women and children on its way. He has engaged in every kind of bribery, corruption and deceit. And he has lied, of course. So much so, in fact, as to construct an entirely imaginary world in words not only mean exactly what he and his henchmen want them to mean but have often lost all link to reality.
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While the Ukrainians are Putin’s first target they are by no means the only one. It is here that Snyder’s third kind of people, meaning those of the West, enter the picture. So far Putin has not waged open war on any Western nation. Using every one of the remaining methods at his disposal, though, he has run any number of campaigns to undermine them all. And he is succeeding, Snyder claims. Not only has Moscow become a Mecca for European “Fascists” and “extreme right wingers”—in Snyder’s view, anyone who does not scrape and bow to the tenets of political correctness is an extreme right winger—but by bombing Syria so as to produce more refugees he has weakened the position of Angela Merkel who was forced to accept them. He has even succeeded in putting his candidate, a failed real estate mogul, into the White House. Quite an achievement, one must admit.

Still following this line of thought, Westerners seem to fall into two categories. On one hand are the scoundrels. With Trump at their head they will do every- and anything to gain power and set up their own version of kleptocratic rule. On the other are hundreds of millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic. Law-respecting and generally full of goodwill, they are too innocent and/or befuddled to understand what they are up against. At the time Synder wrote they still put their hope in Hillary Clinton. Clinton, however, went down to defeat. With Trump and his awful Republicans—Snyder does not try to hide his Democratic sympathies—in the saddle and the influence of European “fascist” parties growing almost by the day, things are going downhill fast. Indeed there is a real possibility that, instead of Russia becoming more like the West as many people in the early 1990s hoped, the West will become more like Russia.

Let others decide how credible this thesis is. In particular, let them ponder how good the Ukrainians (many of whom, as Snyder does not say, would have been more than happy to cooperate with Hitler in 1941-45 if only he had allowed them to do so) and how weak and deluded the West, really are. I, however, found the book fascinating in another way. It can be read as a sort of handbook for what is usually called hybrid war, what my friend Bill Lind calls fourth-generation war, and what I myself have long ago called non-trinitarian war.

In particular, the term hybrid war is misleading. As Snyder rightly says, though it may sound like war minus in reality it is war plus. Including, apart from the usual open clashes between regular armies (which, in the Ukraine, only played a relatively minor role) military operations mounted by every sort of militia, identifiable or not; assassinations, subversion, and bribery; cyberattacks aimed at every kind of hostile political organization as well as infrastructure targets such as websites, factories, electricity grids, and power plant; and, above all, propaganda. Partly generated by bots, launched both by way of the social networks and by more traditional means such as TV, that propaganda so massive as to eliminate the distinction between the real and the unreal, truth and falsehood—which, Snyder says, is just how “eternity” politics work. And so massive as to make one wonder how those who design it and spread it are able to retain their sanity among all the lies they themselves invent.

All in all, in spite of my doubts about whether the good are really as good, the bad really as bad (and clever), and the befuddled really as befuddlded, as Snyder makes them out to be, a thought-provoking work.

Guest article: The View From Olympus: A Disastrous Decision–Or Is It?

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Bill Lind*

On the surface, President Trump’s decision to abandon the nuclear accord with Iran is a disaster.  If Iran considers the accord null and void without U.S. participation and resumes uranium enrichment on a large scale – Tehran for now says it will stick with the deal – we would be on the road to yet another unnecessary war in the Middle East.  President Trump was elected to get us out of the wars we are in, not start new ones.

Meanwhile, revived and new U.S. economic sanctions on Iran may put us on a collision course with Europe.  Will Europe allow Washington to dictate to European companies and banks whom they can do business with?  If not, American sanctions on European businesses may be met with European sanctions on U.S. firms.  Europe, China, and Russia have already said they will continue to honor the accord, which leaves the U.S. diplomatically isolated.  Couple diplomatic with economic isolation and we will have a problem.

Some supporters of President Trump’s action hope the damage it will bring to Iran’s economy may inspire the Iranian people to revolt and overthrow the clerical regime.  That is a possibility, although most peoples rally around the flag in response to outside pressure.  But it is possible that, in the face of a widespread revolt, the Iranian state could collapse altogether.  That would be a disastrous outcome for all concerned, because it would be a great victory for the Fourth Generation war entities that would fill the vacuum created by yet another American-facilitated state collapse.  If Washington had any understanding of 4GW – which it doesn’t – it would realize a collapse of the Iranian state is far a greater danger than that state can ever pose.

But there is another way to read President Trump’s action.  Both on North Korea and on some trade issues he has gotten good results by using a standard business technique: going in with maximalist demands, threats, etc., then backing off as part of a deal.  In diplomacy, this is known as brinksmanship.  You push a situation to the brink of disaster, then pull a rabbit out of the hat in the form of an agreement that leaves everyone satisfied and the situation more stable than it was before.
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If that is the game here – I have no way of knowing – then the President’s action was not a disaster.  But it is still a high risk.  The whole performance may have been coordinated with the Europeans in advance, in which case everyone is just following a script.  Again, that could lead to a renewed and improved accord with Iran.  But if not and our diplomatic isolation is real, the risks go up.  And if Iran responds by tearing up the whole deal and going for the bomb, again, we face another unnecessary war.  In that war, all the American troops in Syria and Iraq and perhaps those in Afghanistan as well will become Iranian hostages.  What then, Mr. President?

President Trump’s brinksmanship with North Korea appears to have worked well, so far at least.  If he comes out of his summit with Kim Jong-Un with an agreement that denuclearizes North Korea, ends the Korean war with a formal peace treaty, allows and helps North Korea to join the world economy and gets U.S. troops out of South Korea, he will indeed deserve, with Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon, the Nobel Peace Prize.  Should he be able to build on that by making a similar deal with Tehran, one allowing Iran to improve its economy while reducing its considerable regional military and diplomatic overreach, he would at least be a candidate for sainthood.  Has the President or anyone around him thought all this through? 

God only knows.  And I’m not sure He is paying attention.

* William S. (”Bill”) Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4th Generation Warfare Handbook (2011) as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRight on 22.5.2018.