The Peace of Crows: The Anti-Interventionist Left on Syria

By BRETT WARNKE

The hardest part of writing a post about the anti-interventionist left is you have to listen to their faulty reasoning and endure the righteous crowing in which they advocate nothing.  For years I have attended schools where left-isolationism is accepted, sat in editorial rooms where this trash is flung around, and I have to say it stinks.  It is backward, do-nothing, lazy, complacent, in most cases negligent and almost always reactionary.  The entire “antiwar” agenda is a nullity, a hole in the air a noisy gimmick.  I was an intern at The Nation magazine, America’s oldest weekly, a magazine I still read and admire.  But most of the interns were not animated by foreign policy and neither were the working journalists.  The truth is that the magazine and the left in general are much more interested in income inequality at home, chats about minorities, condemning “Islamophobia,” and pushing a “domestic agenda” whatever that turns out to be.  But since Assad’s chemical attacks on Syria (notice that the liberals and left are still referring to this crime as ‘alleged’) the left’s most vocal mouthpieces have proven themselves not just negligible—because they cannot even debate evidence anymore—but absurd.  I do not say ‘marginal,’ because radical or extreme opinions can sometimes vivify a dead debate or illuminate the shadows cast by journalistic obfuscation. But since September 11, what has become known as the ‘antiwar left’ basically continued their commitment to doing nothing—nothing—about atrocities abroad and repeating anti-imperialist platitudes no matter the context. 

Like pull-string puppets you can predict the recipe of Tariq Ali or Chris Hedges or Amy Goodman or Chris Hedges interview before the first question is uttered. The Independent’s eminent Robert Fisk may throw a little history in the mix (he styles himself as a historian and his gassy volumes are pretty good reading) or he’ll add a bloody flourish from one of his war stories that, I exaggerate only a little, blame the United States for everything wrong in the Middle East.  To this faction of the leftist intelligentsia, behind every news story is a trapdoor to the empire where secret levers are controlled by the military-industrial complex and greedy corporations.  Anyone on the left in favor of humanitarian intervention is stamped a hated ‘liberal hawk.’  And on the right, the Jews, Israel’s fifth column, that pestiferous ‘neocon cabal’ we hear so much about are plotting a fearful return!   

The sad old street rebel, Tariq Ali, who spent the second Iraq war in turtleneck after turtleneck encouraging ‘the Iraqi resistance’ to fight on is still consistently wrong about everything.  (Less than a week ago, from Britain, he predicted the U.K. would back Obama’s decision for retaliatory strike against Assad.)  In 2005 he spoke out against elections in Iraq and did his best to muddy the reputation of Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish socialist, and first president in the post-Saddam era.[1]  Interviewers are often flummoxed by Ali when he insists the “West is trying to take Syria over” or talks unironically of the West “recolonizing” the Middle East.  Often relegated to anti-American networks like Putin’s echo-chamber, RT: Russia Today, no matter the question—about Syrian refugees, the goings on in the Civil War, whatever—Ali begins waffling on about the American empire[2].  One wonders how he could order coffee without screaming about neoliberalism’s effect on bean markets.  

On Democracy Now! during a recent debate over intervention in Syria Ali attempted to equate the use of white phosphorous in Fallujah (the U.S. used the substance to flush insurgents out of spider holes) as equivalent to Assad’s deployment of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus.  “No red lines were drawn then,” he hissed, “except the red lines of Iraqi blood.”  He then called the notion that Assad actually committed the chemical attack “slightly incredible.”  No distinctions were made between strikes and an invasion, ground troops or a no-fly zones.  Why bother? To Ali there is “war” (with the US always the aggressor) and not war, the proper state of the world without the influence of America’s militaristic hegemony.  Which inspires the question, what would an Ali solution look like?  A negotiated political settlement that would leave Assad in power.

Chris Hedges, notable only for giving interviewers his resume only slightly more than the unbearable Reza Aslan, was actually a New York Times reporter.  (So was the eminent Jayson Blair, by the way.)  Recently, when asked about Syria, like most in the isolationist wing of the left, he changed the subject: 

I believe that, you know, one of the primary lessons of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. But there has to be an active campaign of genocide. So we are culpable by not intervening during the genocide in Rwanda, in Cambodia, when Saddam Hussein was wiping out the Kurds in northern Iraq. But to respond after that genocide is complete as a kind of punishment is for me very shortsighted, because it essentially involves the United States not in an act of preventing an ongoing or current act of genocide, but in essence taking sides in this civil war. 

Reread that if you can stomach it:  a country cannot prevent genocide, it must wait for it to occur.  Luckily, in Libya, NATO and President Obama refused this option and identified Qadaffi’s intention to wipe out Benghazi as an unpalatable option.  With Qadaffi gone and a Libya slowly, painfully piecing itself together after a civil war everyone can now admit that Benghazi was saved from bloody destruction.  But ask an antiwar leftist about the campaign. All you will get is misdirection about guns in Chad, arms in Mali, and Islamists everywhere on the march because of past U.S. policy.  (Islamists are those, by the way, whom they never want to fight.  Islamists U.S. policy created and incubated.  Islamists with legitimate grievances about American foreign policy.)  Hedges went on to say, “I think morally the United States has no case to make unless they were actively stopping a delivery system of these chemical agents, i.e. intercepting the planes that were dropping them or, if they used artillery shells, which is what Saddam Hussein had, you know, the 155 howitzers or the units that were delivering those shells.”  Again, with full knowledge of horrors to come, the world’s superpower must sit back and do nothing, calmly allowing people to be mowed down.  And this is the man who paints himself as the moral conscience of a mainstream media gone wrong, the radical reporter who finally saw socialist revelation!

 Yet, beware, reader, The United States, in the anti-interventionist’s mind is trying to be “the world’s policeman.”  (What policeman by the way prevents genocide? Responds to chemical attacks with military assaults?  Seeks international mediation and coalition for humanitarian action?  No matter the cliché remains.)  But when such a trite argument falters, Hedges will argue that the U.S. has no credibility to do, well, anything.  Ever.  Why?  Because Indians were mistreated by Andrew Jackson.  Or slavery was baked into the Constitution.  Or the CIA toppled Arbenz in Guatemala.  Or any other excuse to confound the news of the day with historical clippings of state crime.  This is not a new tactic, it is part of the Zinn-Chomskian worldview that America can never, or at least has never, intervened as a moral actor.  The republic’s history is simply one long nightmare of state crimes and injustices.  If excerpting history won’t work Hedges and Co. will move to conspiracy:  Behind every foreign policy action are the corporate puppeteers!  Hedges has said that Halliburton and Raytheon and Boeing are not just profiting from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (which is true) they are “fueling these conflicts” as a “sort of unseen engine behind a lot of this.”  One can, as Senator McCain and Niall Ferguson have done, criticize President Obama for fiddling while Syria burned, a moderate vague domestic agenda his true aim.  But to argue that responding to Assad’s chemical attacks is a corporate plot is slanderous, lazy, boring, and entirely without merit or evidence.

The most serious of the anti-interventionist faction is Amy Goodman, the breathless anchor of the independent news broadcast Democracy Now! who, having seen America green light Suharto’s slaughter in East Timor first-hand as a reporter, believes in Martin Luther King’s labeling of the U.S. as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  If Goodman is a true journalist and not sloppy like Hedges or as wrong-headed as Tariq Ali, she is guilty of peddling fantasies as if they were policy suggestions and then getting self-righteous when the world operates in reality.  The Nation, whose reporters frequently appear on Goodman’s show, recently produced an editorial with suggestions similar to Goodman’s regarding Syria.  They are, as well as being horribly constructed sentences, utterly fantastical: 

[President Obama] should re-engage Russia and China—and, through them, Iran—to restrain Assad, while using Washington’s considerable influence with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to restrain their military support for the rebels—especially for jihadi extremists. (The recent agreement between Russia and the United States to hold an international conference on Syria is a hopeful move in that direction.) And Obama should restrain Israel from provoking war with Hezbollah.”

              Sure.  Perhaps he could also get on that matter of stopping the oceans from rising while he’s at it.

On Chris Hayes’s show Goodman argued that America needed to “wage peace” after Assad’s chemical attacks.  She then firmly stated that all could be solved if Obama just sat down with Putin for a chat, give diplomacy a chance and all that.  Interestingly, Goodman finds time in nearly every discussion of Syria to refer to the “alleged chemical attack” or mention an “attack on Syria” (rather than the Assad regime or its military) and repeatedly invokes the Reagan administration’s possession of “firm evidence” of Iraqi chemical attacks on Iran. Again, this is intended to defang any attempt at responding to Assad’s crimes and constructing an equivalency between the deliberate murder of civilians and U.S. foreign policy. But, if after suffering through the anti-imperialist soliloquies of her program’s “experts,” it is nice to hear Goodman admit that Iraq had chemical weapons and used them.  She has spent a decade repeating that Americans were lied into the “war on Iraq” with false evidence. 

                The most notorious fool and liar and loudmouth in the anti-interventionist quarter is the Oscar-winning filmmaker, Michael Moore, famous for a “documentary” that could expire a fleet of fact-checkers.  In a jabbering, disgraceful video message to Syria Moore reveals himself to be not only indecent and cold but utterly ignorant of what is happening in the country’s civil war.  Moore speaks directly to Assad.  He does not like the way Assad is running Syria.  “I want you to stop right now,” he commands, even urging Assad to step down “like the Botha regime in South Africa” who “won a Nobel Prize for it.” (It was de Klerk.)  But fear not Syrians!  “Be brave!  Don’t give up!  Every dictator has gone down in flames…” he says ignoring the 20^th century.  And then the great filmmaker proceeds to lecture Syria on America’s Revolution:  “Sometime freedom isn’t something that is handed to you on a silver platter…sometimes people have to give up their lives.”[3]  

                Moore is soulless clown, of course.  But his argument that some people have to die so that regime change can be “organic” is the story of the anti-interventionist left.  A faction whose isolationism and condemnation of America has prevented it from supporting virtually any military activity abroad even when children are gassed on city streets or aggressive nationalists absorb territory in Europe.  The left’s great hope, the United Nations, gives cover for their do-nothing policies because the institution is a crippled ruin. Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Iraq.  How many horrors will a bodybag-left allow before it tempers its sole message of anti-imperialism?  One could call such an ideology pacifism if there was not so much awe in their talk of the “Iraqi resistance” and the like. They would have peace at any price as long as America stayed home.  Perhaps they’ll get their peace.  But it will be the peace of crows sitting atop a bare tree above another mass grave.

[1] http://www.isreview.org/issues/42/Arnove_Ali.shtml

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZAdoLueRSY

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqMDGCyYKr

If Assad’s victims wore hoodies, then would liberals care?

By BRETT WARNKE

Alan Grayson, a lover of the camera’s gaze since President Obama’s push for a military response to Assad’s chemical attack in Syria, also made the media rounds after Traavyon Martin was gunned down.   When the seventeen-year old was shot by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, Grayson argued that “We need to cherish our differences.”  Grayson was appalled at Zimmerman’s nonchalance when he seemed to glide into the police station after the killing as if “nothing had happened.”

                Yet, as millions have fled Syria—3/4 of them women and children—more than 100,000 people have been killed, and chemical weapons were used on a suburban population outside Damascus, Grayson’s comments have been insouciant where the victims are concerned.  He said that despite the high casualties America needed to learn the principle to “Mind your own business.”  And later said in response to the growing proxy war in Syria that he agreed with Sarah Palin’s statement that the United States should “let Allah sort it out” commenting, “I think this is one of those extraordinarily rare occasions when I think I’m in agreement with Sarah Palin.” 

                Grayson also argued that “you take the perpetrators to the International Court in the Hague.  You don’t bomb them.”  But as Slate reported on Sept. 5 Syria is not a state party to the ICC and prosecutors cannot, even if he is deposed, have proper jurisdiction over his regime’s crimes. 

                The congressman has opposed a military strike, calling it “expensive,” but has also ignored the differences between rebels by sweeping them into a “jihadist” camp that equates opposition with Assad to Islamism.  He said, “"It's clear that what we're seeing here is, first of all, civil war, and secondly a situation that's evolving into a death match... between radical, fundamentalist, hateful Shiite Muslims and radical, fundamentalist, hateful Sunni Muslims who are, in fact, historically both our enemies.”  Yet the estimates for Grayson’s claim are very different.  Opposition to Assad includes many secular, moderate, and non-Islamist forces who have been fighting against Assad since the rebellion began almost two years ago.  Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the issue saying that of the 70,000-100,000 “oppositionists” 15 percent to 20 percent were “bad guys” or extremists.    

                Grayson has called for humanitarian money for the region but did not sponsor legislation, specify how much, detail what it should be used for, or comment beyond the desire to do “something.”  As the Washington Post, the BBC, and others have extensively reported, the Assad regime is not just killing children it is targeting them.  Navi Pillay, UN Rights Commissioner has stated that Assad’s forces have gone out of their way to target the opposition’s youth,” They’ve gone for the children—for whatever purposes—in large numbers.  Hundreds detained and tortured…it’s just horrendous.”  She continued saying, “Children shot in the knees, held together with adults in really inhuman conditions, denied medical treatment for their injuries, either held as hostages or as sources of information.” 

Grayson who calls himself on his website “a Congressman with guts” has called the Syrian situation a “tragedy,” but it should be remembered what the term means.  A tragedy is not merely a sad event.  It is when a character’s strongest traits—his personal gifts to the world—hold within that person a contradiction, the flaw, that inevitably produces his destruction.  For a representative who spoke so early and passionately about the death of one child in Florida, it could also be called ‘tragic’ that he speaks with such indifference about the thousands of deaths outside his district.  It begs the question, if Assad’s victims wore hoodies, would liberals like Grayson take a second look?

Gary, Indiana Mayor Gets Graduation Wrong

Can I admit that I was disappointed—even angered—with Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson’s graduation address to my former students at Gary Lighthouse College Prep Academy.  True, it was nice to have the mayor visit.  Many thanks.  It was also nice to see a graduating class where 100% of students were admitted to some type of continuing education.  Their parents’ inestimable pride should not be diminished by this letter; it is merely a criticism of a certain kind of rhetoric that has been smuggled into the discourse of public education in African-American communities. 

                Mayor Freeman’s speech was extraordinarily underwhelming because its theme was a tired self-help narrative that I’ve heard a lot in my years as a public school teacher.  It could have been given by Ronald Reagan, though the old fraud usually doused his rhetoric with a racist flourish like his ‘welfare queens’ bit.  

            Today, one walks through the halls of public schools today and there is always the obligatory picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. in every school.  Yet, the administrators today talk the language of Booker T. Washington.  “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps…” “Your success or failure is on you…” etc.  Frankly, I’m tired of hearing it, especially from educated middle class black politicians whose job is not to tell my students to work harder as individuals but to reveal avenues for collective public action. 

Instead, I wish the mayor could have reminded Gary’s students of their collective disenfranchisement from middle-class white Indiana, or specify the political and economic policies that have destroyed their community and marginalized their families from the middle classes that long ago abandoned the city.  It is always the same in black schools these days:  persistence, hard work, moral living, and self-improvement.  These are the middle class values fired at these kids  Do white affluent schools get this kind of piffle?  Certainly not.  Black kids need to work hard, white kids need to ‘network’ and ‘give back’ voluntarily. 

In Mayor Freeman-Wilson’s example she argued that the students should not point a finger at anyone because when one does so there are “three more pointing back at you.”  Well, let me ask you some questions that (I believe) answer themselves:  Are there no individuals to whom one could point a finger and blame for Gary’s plight?  Are there no policies that could use some illumination, ones that have caused systemic unemployment, collapsing infrastructure, wage depression, white flight, and the proliferation of violence?  Frankly, I think many more fingers should be pointed and the judge’s gavel should drop after decades of scandal, corruption, abuse, and neglect in Gary.  I want my students to point fingers.  Point them at the educators who fail you!  Point them at the politicians who neglect you!  Point them at the tax neglectful rich and economists who are consistently wrong!  Point them at the employers who reduce your wages, reduce your benefits, fight the bills that would guarantee your families getting health care! 

We live in a time where not one person was fired for the economic catastrophe of 2008 but my students--90% of whom receive free and reduced lunch--get ‘the accountability’ lecture.  Not one banker, loan shark, or lobbyist went to prison for (effectively) taking the African-American working class back years in economic development. 

I’m pointing at you, Ms. Mayor:  Just because you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps does not mean we need a lecture, we need policies that cultivate talent and bring us closer to justice.  And while we wait, it doesn't hurt to point out the people and policies who obstruct, delay, and are dead wrong.

Seneca, Selma, Stonewall, and ________

WEEKEND EDITION JANUARY 25-27, 2013

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Seneca, Selma, Stonewall, and ________

Obama Silent on Labor

by BRETT WARNKE

Women.  Gays.  African-Americans.  All are groups whose historical and contemporary injustices have mobilized America’s liberal base.  President Obama offered acknowledgement in his second inaugural and even a few historical allusions, mentioning “Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall”—the sites of a women’s rights convention, a racist murder and civil rights march, and a police raid of a gay establishment.

But who was missing from this glittering multicultural mosaic of tolerance?

Ever-neglected labor, of course.  Yes, those door-knocking, winter-braving workers who brought us Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, 80,000 volunteer shifts in Ohio and 2 million voter contacts in the state where 60% of union households voted for Obama.  (Nationally, 58% of voters from union households backed Obama.)

Despite the 2012 actions of labor in states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Nevada, Obama chose not mention the historical setbacks of American labor or to acknowledge their efforts on his behalf.  Why didn’t he mention, say, the recent Illinois Caterpillar strike which resulted in a defeat with far-reaching concessions including a wage freeze and an increase in worker health care costs?  Are not wage-depression, out-sourcing, and corporate-strong arming the unaddressed issues of this generation?  Or if Caterpillar’s small failed strike was unimportant to Obama or irrelevant to his administration’s narrative, why not mention the Chicago teacher’s strike–a victory for workers (in his home state) that challenges the extremes of education “reformers”?

Perhaps, in some twisted Washington conference room, such shout-outs are bad politics.  But isn’t the least the President could do is mention the history of those working people who have stood up to entrenched power for over a hundred and fifty years?  If one is so desperate for cheap alliteration why not present “Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall, and San Joaquin” (1933)?  Or how about Santa Clara Valley (1933)?  Or the San Francisco Waterfront (1934)?  How’s about the Streetcar Strikes (1900/1907/1908)?  The Steel Strikes (1919/1946/1959)?  TheSavannah dockworkers Strike (1866)?

More people died in these events and dozens of actions like them.  And these strikes were certainly more dramatic than Seneca Falls and included a more diverse population of classes and races.

So why the neglect?

It’s not as if labor couldn’t use specific legislation, political encouragement, or even a public wink or backslap.  Organized Labor recently spent $20 million in Michigan to insert collective bargaining in the state’s constitution, only to receive “right to work.”  And the President has urged 2013 action on TPP.  This corporate beloved agreement is a mechanism to undertake politically unpopular “free trade” measures that grant new rights and privileges to companies and constrain regulators; measures that, according to Public Citizen’s Lori Walluch, “limit the regulation of financial services, land use, food safety, natural resources, energy, tobacco, healthcare, and more.”

The President’s neglect results from Obama’s acceptance of income inequality, his commitment to the discredited technocratic “consensus,” and timidity at facing down and welcoming the hatred of America’s corporate class.  The President has been quite clear:  A second term will consist of voting reforms, immigration, implementing the affordable care act, and if you’re still awake, perhaps we’ll discuss school uniforms before the 2016 debates.

After Obama’s win, AFL-CIO’s President Richard Trumka asserted in a hopeful tone that the President will back a bill supporting “card-check,” a provision that would make it easier for unions to organize by abolishing the secret ballot.  It is apparently Obama’s stealth labor item.  But with a Republican House occupied as it is with bilious rowdies like the Gohmert and Bachmann quarter, how far will such legislation journey?  And if it takes the midterm election to shave away some of the reactionary deadwood, can Obama accomplish “card-check” with his possible Democratic successors—their beady-eyes locked on 2016—dashing about for unlimited corporate coin?

Brett Warnke is a free-lancer who recently finished an internship at The Nation and can be reached at brettwarnke@gmail.com

Broken Promise

Broken Promise

By Brett Warnke

What Matt Damon’s film Promised Land gets wrong is not the existent dangers of hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking.”  The film stubs its toe against the real if neglected drama of how to address the problem of dirty energy extraction, even leaving out the most important agent in the growing political fight:  us. 

                The film, set in rural Pennsylvania, has Matt Damon as the public face of natural gas, Steve Butler.  He’s savvy, clean-cut, always on the prowl for a new client with available land.  In his own mind he’s “wised up” to a new and profitable growth industry that will blow life into the deteriorating regions of small town America.  He loves his job; he’s providing a service.  Butler is joined in this fight by Sue Thomasan (Frances McDormand), an effective but cynical corporate soldier that joins him in rolling across the green pastures in gas station threads, searching for more signatures in a town where local officials have itching palms and local farmers are hard up. 

                The closing of a Caterpillar plant in Butler’s Iowa hometown looms like an axe over his character.  (However, the film’s writers might have included recent details about a very real blow to manufacturing labor.  This summer’s failed strike at a Joliet Caterpillar plant lasted 3-1/2 months with workers conceding to frozen wages and low pay for new employees.  But this would have necessitated the use of the dreaded word “union.”) 

“Take the money and run” has become Butler’s pessimistic credo.  But Hal Holbrook, a local skeptic and one-time academic counters Butler arguing, “But where would we all go?”  And in Holbrook’s sharp riposte exists the thematic problem of Promised Land:  Is the answer to the issue of fracking fight or flight?  Should the inhabitants of small towns join together as a community and together, publically act to stop the system in its current inefficient and dangerous form?  Or should citizens passively, ignore environmental  concerns as inconclusive and property rights as absolute?  Instead of addressing this question, Promised Land deals with the corporate man Butler’s individual moral quandary.  While this is admittedly convincing on Damon’s part—Butler’s moral evolution is effectively slow and tortuous—if this is an effort at a political film or social criticism through drama, it fails. 

If anything, the history of 20^th century America showed us that it is not simply disclosures of corporate swindle that change the course of history.  Nor is it merely the bleating mea culpas of those who profited and then recanted from their sinister employers—what could be called “The David Stockman syndrome.”  Real change comes from the social movements and activists and local advocates who fight for it.  Yet all of these are neglected in Promised Land. 

                While the film does have an environmentalist character, the very real push for environmental justice is unaddressed.  Look at the non-violent protests seeking to stop the Tar Sands pipeline.   Look at the actions of students and environmentalists and local communities in Appalachia, profiled so well in Deep Down: A Story of Coal Country and The Last Mountain, in efforts to preserve mountains from profit-driven destructive removal.  Yet, the only meaningful resistance to fracking in Damon’s film comes from an individual within a corporation, not from the communities and activists whose fates are moored to the future of natural gas. 

This thematic problem was one of the problems of what has to be called “The Republican movie” The Blind Side.  In that film, the problems facing a black youth—mass incarceration of his peers, appalling poverty, racism, low-performing schools—are immaterial or at least undramatic to that film’s writers.  What is more dramatic, and apparently a better solution than addressing social ills, is the charity of white rich individuals personified by Sandra Bullock and family.  Damon’s much better but flawed film is laudable for addressing fracking.  For energy-thirsty America and the hard-hit areas of the northeast any discussion of the issue is important.  But failing to address real social change agents and ignoring growing local movements for environmental justice who face down filthy and aggressive corporate power gives audiences less than we deserve.  A missed opportunity on a promising story.      

     

The Taste of Ashes

Review of Marci Shore's “The Taste of Ashes”

By Brett Warnke

Publication, January 2013

Crown Publishers, New York, 384 pp

  

It was a specialist of the Enlightenment, academic Victor Klemperer, who wrote the greatest diaries to emerge from wartime Germany.  Later, after surviving fascist roundups and the firestorm of Dresden Klemperer settled in East Germany and titled his postwar diaries “The Lesser Evil.”  By 1956 his hopes dried: “I have lost all belief that I might have an effect.  All belief in right or left.  I live and die as a lonely literary journalist.”  The arc of Klemperer’s postwar story paralleled those of other European intellectuals:  individual tragedy followed by animated delusions and crushed hopes. Marci Shore’s new book The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe is a personal literary examination of a region’s intellectual history and her experience studying its ideological collisions.

Professor Shore, a translator and Yale academic, is the author of Caviar and Ashes:  A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.  The two histories—many of whose characters remain constant—should be read together as they cover a small and curious world of human effort and thought.  Caviar was a penetrating history of a generation’s coming of age between the twin fires of totalitarianism.  In The Taste of Ashes Shore investigates Eastern Europe’s secret police files, she plumbs the files at Stanford’s The Hoover Institution, and interviews survivors, dissidents, and thinkers to explore the intellectual landscape of a world transformed by totalitarianism.  Shore describes her life as a young researcher in post-Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, all the while scribbling notes in cafes and parlors while moving from deep in the past or grappling contemporary politics.  Part memoir and part history, The Taste of Ashes deftly summarizes events for a popular audience—from the horror of the wartime ghettos, the Jewish Flying University, to the recent surge in death camp as tourism—while plunging into the ideological dilemmas that twisted so many fates. 

The book is rich in personalities:  lyrical poets, journalists, futurists, bundists, Zionists, and Communists.  Writers like Vladimir Mayakovsky, the beautiful and manic Russian poet who, after growing disillusioned who wrote that “the loveboat has crashed against the everyday.”  And like Aleksnder Wat, the futurist, Soviet inmate, and writer who saw his poems as “the casting of a beam of light on things dark by their nature.”  Both these writers were suicides and they weren’t alone.  While too numerous to mention, other self-slaughters include the poet and revolutionary Andrei Sobol, novelist Tadeusz Borowski, the poet Sergei Yesinin, and Trotsky’s daughter, Znaida Bronstein.  Others, even more various, were dispatched in intermittent terrors and purges.  In reading one of Shore’s books, one never knows if a character will make it to the next page alive.  Yet while including dozens of thinkers—many of whom do live natural life cycles and were beautifully profiled in her previous book—Shore renders these complex (and sometimes  narcissistic) personalities so vividly and writes so movingly about their literary production that the reader seems not only to acknowledge but understand the decisions these writers made, however ideological or destructive.    

The Taste of Ashes stitches the recent post-communist history to the tapestry of the avant garde.  Like Weimar, the years between the war were unsteady, filled with reaction, but also shot through with promise before the war and the “frozen years” under Communism.  It is not only the stories of men like Adolf Berman (a Zionist and writer) and his sibling Jakub Berman (an ally of Stalin who oversaw Poland’s security apparatus), two brothers whose paths diverged on the matter of the unquestionable party line from Moscow.  Instead, this book handles themes such as the guilt of writing and the difficulty of writing history as an outsider.  What is it like to be a historian, a speaker of Yiddish, Czech, and Polish, who criticizes choices made during a different zeitgeist?  In one episode, after a lecture, Shore recounts meeting a woman unhappy with her comments:  “You, a young person from another continent,” the woman said.  “You’re unable to understand Poland.”

But anxiety about her “otherness,” is belied by a tireless pursuit:  The writing of history, the disclosure of the past as it was lived by those who shaped its path.  In one instance, she walks through “bleak and beautiful” Warsaw so overcome by the history of the ghetto and the Polish uprising that she vomits.  She was, in her wandering around that somber city, looking for a way to “enter the war.”  She also discovers that the tight-knit authors who produce the literature of the “New Man” were not simply created by blind belief.  “These postwar relationships were epilogues to prewar relationships,” she writes.  “And if I wanted to understand the convergence of the war and Stalinism, I would have to go back in time, to the decades between the two world wars.”

A recurrent setting in her earlier book is Café Ziemianska, a coffee and wine fuel stop for Polish writers, avant gardists, and the political left.  Whereas the country’s interwar prisons served as universities for communists, so did the café.  The intellectual ferment in places like Ziemianska was real and definite at the close of the First World War, a conflict that changed everything.  The café was a place to debate the evolving possibilities; a place to face the new realities of radicalism and reaction, of utopianism and catastrophism. 

“Everything was now possible, a dizzying endlessness of possibilities,” she writes.  “It was a time when the boundaries between Marxism in theory and communism in practice were not clear, when both meant revolution, and revolution meant consummation, an escape from nothingness.  Crusty apparatchiks—balding or otherwise—had not yet appeared, nor had anyone glimpsed ominous specters of show trials; for many Polish literati of the 1920s, communism was cosmopolitan, avant garde, sexy.” 

Shore is dazzled by the liveliness of the political discourse in this period during which—more than ever—ideas were precise and alive.  And she reveals the tragedy of communists who, having been the most vibrant and optimistic fighters against fascism and for survival in the death camps, became the most ruthless rulers while in power. 

What Shore captures the cruel paradox of Stalinist communism—which imposed itself in Eastern Europe by military occupation and collaboration—an intellectual’s choice of Marxism was in effect an eradication of subjectivity.  To choose was to occlude the possibility of future choices.  So many succumbed to this sinister bargain and were crushed by its terms, but in the opening of Czechoslovakia’s communism, it was not only the opportunists and the careerists who joined the Party but, as Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera pointed out, “the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half.”  The writers in Eastern Europe who “saw hell twice,” as one deftly put it, will be held accountable for intellectual decisions included what to write and not write.  As the great Tony Judt pointed out in Past Imperfect, about communism’s fellow travelers who hitched themselves to the “locomotive of history,” the intellectual is condemned to choose and very often does make the wrong choice.  True, it is not difficult today to indict Stalinist writers like Wanda Wasilewska whose version of socialist realism is as reviled as passionately by thinkers today as it was lauded by the authorities of yesterday’s “people’s democracies.”  But we are not outside history and Shore includes today’s academic controversies:  What about contemporary intellectuals in Eastern Europe who, as Fear and Neighbors author Jan Gross points out, fail to write the inconvenient past of Polish anti-Semitic postwar pogroms? 

Summoning up the specters of the past can haunt the solitary researcher with painful personal truths.  At one point, Shore is reading author Bruno Jasienski’s NKVD file, one filled during The Great Terror of 1937.  Inside she finds a smashed fly, a fitting symbol for the those “engineers of human souls” who perished in Stalin’s many purges.  Inevitably, she considers the prospect of her own interrogation.  How would she fare under the secret police’s brutal tactics and beneath their bright lights?  “I… had no confidence that I would have behaved well.  On the contrary—I suspected I would have been a coward,” she writes.  But Shore is too sharp a historian to romanticize writers like Jasienski.  While he serialized (the recently reissued) I Burn Paris in 1928, Jasienski was a man complicit in the enthusiasms of his time.  “He was perhaps not quite so innocent as his twenty first-century fans made him appear,” she writes.  “During the Stalinist years he more than once played the role of accuser.” 

            Shore’s book flitters between the hopes and pessimism of people caught in the little cage of Eastern Europe.  Each seems to hold their own experiences, their own truths, but the conclusion is clear:  For most of the idealists to come out of the war, most met a terrible end.  Contingency or determinism?  Order or chaos?  Simplifications, to be sure but part of enduring debates as real and relevant as the battles over religion.  Or as the Bundist leader of the 1943 Ghetto Uprising Mark Edelman cynically asks “And where was God?  He was there, but on their side.”  There is no grace in Shore’s conclusion.  No morals or new ideology waiting to be picked up in the street.  But she does declare what she found in the ashes: 

[P]athological narcissism was not only something one reveled in but above all something one truly suffered from; that absolute subjectivity brought absolute anguish; that radical nihilism and radical contingency were psychically unbearable.  I learned that the nobelest of motives could lead to the bases of outcomes, that actions inevitably had consequences in excess of their intent.  I learned that I could not write a book with a satisfying conclusion, for the lives of the intriguing protagonists were breathtaking catastrophes.  I learned that the past could not be made okay.

For the dissidents who challenged the bankruptcy that communism became, many of whom were removed from the war by a generation, 1989 was a fittingly ironic end. An illegitimate authoritarianism was toppled by its own internal contradictions, by writers and artists and by an exploited working class.  But for those who remained, 1989 was the sum of all fears.  For those who had gone to the firing squads with the name “Stalin” on their lips, 1989 was a return to history.  After the Frankenstein of capitalism revealed itself in the 1930s and Communism ran out of road in the 1980s, for those caught between the two fires of totalitarianism, what was left to believe in?  For men like Czech playwright and president, Vaclav Havel, life’s most precious and guiding principle was “living in truth.”  And for other thinkers like Adam Michnik and Janos Kis it was the importance of self-limitation and non-violence as a means to radically transform politics.  In these decades after communism, Shore’s book is a necessary creation—a personal memoir, filled with interviews and a history that glows with humanity and shows a new generation the stories of totalitarianism.  By sifting through these ashes with her, from the fragments and glowing embers, we feel and taste what occurred and what remains.  The difficulty for a historian, as Havel points out, is that the dead end logic of communism was that the story had already ended.  After Stalin’s death, few believed in the ossified system, but the historicist logic remained a part of state ideology: 

Public life ceases to be an arena where different more or less autonomous agents square off, and becomes no more than the manifestation and fulfillment of the truth and the will of this single agent.  In a world governed by this principle, there is no room for mystery; ownership of complete truth means that everything is known ahead of time.  Where everything is known ahead of time, the story has nothing to grow out of.  Obviously, the totalitarian system is in essence (and in principle) directed against the story. 

    

The corollary is that the story is then an attack upon totalitarianism.  The inclusion of one character’s story, Jarmila, a transgender dissident who renames herself “Todd James” is masterful.  Jarmila, who immigrates to Vermont and converts to Orthodox Judaism, stands in for personal challenges during transition, the struggle with questions of identity, the frustrations of memory, and the weight of the past.  But Jamila’s struggles, while individual, are not atypical.  And, as if to parallel this struggle, the opening of Eastern Europe has thawed dormant difficulties of identity and religion—persistent sticking points. 

Like Klemperer, closing his life in cynical resignation, so many of Shore’s characters give in to private and public despair.  The taste of ashes is the flavor of despair.  After all, the story of Eastern Europe is a tragedy, not a morality tale.  Shore concludes with a powerful interview.  Slawomir Sierakowski, a philosopher whose work challenges western culture’s dilemma of relativism and fragmentation.  While a neo-Marxist, he’s not one who would have argued that the gulag was just a “tax paid” for the glories of socialism.  He’s a serious thinker.  One whom Shore quotes in a fittingly dark and timely observation:  “In today’s world we know more and more but we don’t use our knowledge to get together and change the world,” he says.  “We use it so that each of us, individually, can adapt to this imperfect world.  That we can get together and change this imperfect world almost no one believes.”   

     

Supermajority to the Rescue? California’s Democrats win a complex victory while opposition inflates expectations

By BRETT WARNKE

California liberals had hoped new supermajorities in both legislative chambers bring in changes to the trend of austerity that has monopolized conversations in Washington.  But the fiscal situation will loom heavy over their governance while political success came from factors other than rising liberalism.  And the growing fad of “fiscal accountability” will no doubt be used as a bludgeon against progressives who push for new or restored spending. 

Political shifts toward Democrats and demographic changes are rapidly underway at a time of great social hardship for most Californians, 6 million of whom live in poverty.  That’s 1 in 6.  Over the last twenty years the income for the top 1% of Californians has increased by 50%, that’s an average of nearly $1.2 million a year.  Meanwhile, income for the middle fifth has fallen by 15%.  Despite these numbers, the cuts to public programs that support the poor will come.  What happened in 2012?  And more importantly, can the new supermajority accomplish much considering California’s deep budget affliction? 

The 2012 state election was historic:  The new class is marked by the highest number (39) of freshman legislators since 1966 and because Democrats won a 2/3 supermajority, allowing them to pass tax increases without Republican support.  Many of the incoming Democrats come from swing districts and 10 incumbents lost, 7 in districts that had been heavily redrawn.  It is the first time either party has obtained the super-majority since the 2/3 threshold was established in 1978 and the second Democratic super-majority, the first one since 1883. 

Tenoch Flores from the California Democratic Party argues that the vote was a referendum on the Republican Party. 

“Democrats achieved a two-thirds majority by out-organizing Republicans and effectively making the case to voters that Democrats are better prepared to lead,” he said.   

But California underwent political changes that made the Democratic supermajority possible.  .  First, the supermajority was helped by term limits and a non-partisan redistricting plan that made districts more competitive.  In 2010, the state began using districts drawn by an independent commission instead of the legislature.  This reshaped the districts and reshuffled the political scene by increasing competition. 

California’s voters did pass Prop 30—a tax increase assumed in the budget that Democratic candidates supported and high Democratic turnout supported.  But it doesn’t add funds.  The state has already, under a Democratic governor, reduced spending in most areas including health and social service, universities, community colleges, the courts, and state administration.  Prop 30 simply prevented further cuts. 

UCLA Professor Daniel B. Mitchell is skeptical that the new super-majority will usher in a restoration of funding support or new programs. 

“Governor Brown doesn’t think so,” Mitchell said.  “Although technically a 2/3 vote could override a gubernatorial veto of more taxes that is very unlikely to occur.  Some of the Democrats that were added to get to 2/3 come from swing districts.  They aren’t going to vote for more taxes.” 

Many of the seats won by Democrats were not in comfortably liberal areas.  Instead, they ushered in moderate to conservative “valley Democrats.”  Also both parties will be looking ahead to the 2014 races which appear more Republican-friendly, whereas the fall 2012 fell in more favorable Democratic territory.  And while historic, Democrats should not get too overconfident.  Roughly 1/3 of the races were decided by less than 10 points. 

The second argument for Democratic success was the new “blanket primary” or “top-two primary” which allows all candidates to run in a single primary regardless of their affiliation and the top two candidates who receive the most votes advance for a runoff, even if they are from the same party.  Previously, voters had to vote to the party to which they were registered and candidates of that party now made infamous by the Sherman vs. Berman Democratic face-off in the 30^th district.  Yet, most incumbents won reelection in nearly the same numbers as before. 

“Under the new top-two primary and new legislative districts, those Democrats have to be careful not to lose voter support.  And even those in districts that are solidly Democratic under top-two have to pay attention to minority Republican in their districts.  That wasn’t the case under the old primary system,” Mitchell said.  

Thirdly, Governor Brown seems to have succeeded in getting more young voters to the polls by threatening to cut $500 million from higher education, which would have brought tuition increases.  Voters between 18 and 29 made up 28% of the electorate, an increase of 7% from 2008 and 13% from 1996 levels. 

Interestingly though, while appearing more Democratic with population swelling in the Bay area and southern California, the state’s voters are increasingly independent.  While Democrats once possessed 60% of registered voters, their numbers have dropped to 44%.  True, 38 of 53 House of Represenative seats are Democrats and while the party won their super-majority by remarkable wins in the 20 contested seats, 2014 races are more Republican-friendly and special elections in 2013 may open as members seek other elected offices before their legislative terms expire. 

Republicans, though, are taking a breath after devastating losses.  They have little power in government and one likely path will follow the McConnell opposition in the wake of a 2008 sweep—oppose everything and see what happens.  Currently, there are 400,000 fewer Republicans than eight years ago despite 1.6 million more voters; today, less than 30 percent of the state’s registered voters call themselves Republicans.  Steven Smith of the Labor Federation argues that Republicans are down but not gone.  “Everything the legislature does moving forward is going to be under the microscope and the Republicans are going to relentlessly attack the supermajority does,” he said.  “It is the only weapon left in their arsenal, try and publically attack them.  They don’t have much sway in the legislature anymore,” Smith said. 

Eric McGee, a policy fellow at the Public Policy Institute who studies policy and elections described in a web video the future prospects for incumbents and how future races in California will depend on a revision to a term limits law.  “Previously, there was no reason to contest a sitting assembly member or state senator since he/she would be forced to retire anyway,” he said. 

“Now, any new legislator can potentially serve longer.   Six years longer for the assembly and four years for the senate.  This might encourage potential challengers to throw their hat into the ring rather than wait as long as a decade for their next chance.  In fact, this logic already applies to congress relations where there have never been term limits.  But where competitive seats will most likely nurture the hopes of enterprising politicians in particular parts of the state.  In uncompetitive states, the top-two primary gives candidates a second chance to knock off the incumbent in the general election, even if they don’t win the first time” McGee said. 

A fourth factor in the victory is California’s rapidly changing demographics.  In 2012, the Democrats’ younger and Latino constituents went to the polls--1/3 of races were decided by less than 10 points.  And while once a bastion of the right wing—being the incubator for Nixon and Reagan—in the last twenty years California has become more reliably Democratic on the electoral map.  Part of the change has been an increase in diversity:  In 2010, 40% of the state’s population was White while Hispanics totaled 38%.  In thirty years, Asian-Americans, 73% of whom voted for Obama in the 2012 national election, climbed from 5% to nearly 13% of California’s population.  

The next chapter for Democrats will be the difficulties of governing with consistently bleak estimates for California’s budget.  Democratic spokesman Flores believes able governance will ensure reelection in 2014.

“2012 was the year voters decided they had enough of the Republican Party's slash and burn philosophy. In 2013, it's going to be up to Democrats to demonstrate that we can in fact govern responsibly and effectively and we intend to do so,” Flores said. 

The new legislature and Governor Jerry Brown will need to tackle a $1.9 billion budget problem in order to pass a balanced budget by June 2013 for the next fiscal year.   And while it is a “dramatically smaller budget problem” than the state has faced since the financial crisis, according to the Legislative Analysis Office (LAO), it produces a crisis of expectations for Democrats.  With little stimulus to the states, the financial institutions, households, and businesses have been forced to “deleverage” which requires saving and reducing consumption and further slowing hopes for recovery.

 According to the LAO report, the projected national recovery period is “much longer than for the prior recessions” because of the overall unwillingness to lend (and as a result) inability to spend.   According to Professor Raphael J. Sonenshein, executive director at the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles for California, a lot depends on the national recovery. 

“That recovery has another year or two to do,” he said.  “California will come out of it slowly when business conditions improve and there is less spending on catastrophic economic things.  My guess is that the state has another rough year to go, at least.” 

Democrats then will be in an unenviable position:  They will have to continue to cut while increasing taxes.  The conservative media is banking on either overreach or under-delivering on Democratic promises.  The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is revving up expectations, in an editorial the paper argued that “the silver lining here is that Americans will be able to see the modern liberal-union state in all its raw ambition.” 

But despite the bugaboo of redistributive liberalism, there are few funds to fight over or be “ambitious” with, even with recent reductions in the state’s $2 billion prison payroll.  Governor Brown’s harsh cuts left prisons unable to adequately care for and supervise thousands of California prisoners and, overall, the combined number of federal, state, and local government jobs in California has declined—down 1.7 percent from one year ago. The bulk of the decrease is attributable to a drop of 35,000 jobs in local government educational services.

Eventually, according to Mitchell, “payroll taxes will have to go up since the state’s unemployment insurance fund is in trouble due to high unemployment.”  But Sonenshein, believes otherwise. 

“[Tax increases] are not an easy sell,” he said.  “If I’m a politician who wants to get reelected, I can’t be a lockstep voter.  I don’t see an appetite from the leadership to get tax increases.  Swing voters won’t matter for general policy.  There may be legislation where Republicans and moderates ally with the governor.”

Competence, according to Sonenshein, will be the measure of the next two years of the Democratic supermajority.  “2/3 or not, getting through this crisis would be a victory.  When you get this much power the question is:  Can you use it to govern effectively?  Getting a budget that adds up would be a pretty good achievement,” he said. 

Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tempe of the state senate says he wants to use the Democrats’ new supermajorities in the Legislature to reform the state’s taxation system and the initiative process.  Given the budget woes, according to Sonenshein, even safe liberals who are eager to restore funding after years of deep cuts will need to lower expectations and temper their rhetoric. 

“It’s just too risky,” he said.  “They’re not done cutting.  They’re not done cutting and they don’t want to raise expectations.  The metaphor I like to think about this is:  The patient didn’t die but he’s not yet out of surgery.”   

  Steven Smith, of the Labor Federation, argued in similar terms.  “Prop 30 helped stop the bleeding, but it doesn’t put the state on a path of fiscal solvency,” he said. 

One alternative to difficult tax increases is identifying additional revenue sources.  Several such sources include corporate tax breaks whose intended purpose is creating jobs.  The Labor Federation favors identifying and pushing legislators to eliminate them.  

Such tax breaks lack transparency and accountability and were often inserted at the eleventh hour in bills order to get Republican votes.   Also, the breaks often lead to big companies cutting hire wage jobs and moving to another part of the state to get a higher tax break and lower wages. 

“This is a lose/lose situation when we are subsidizing the loss of high-wage jobs,” Smith said.  “We don’t want to eliminate every tax break.  We want to put it to the jobs test:  If they’re not creating jobs, we need to eliminate them.” 

Labor hopes to re-tool other breaks like the Change of Ownership because it costs the state money and puts some companies at a competitive disadvantage to others.  

“We enter this next year with eyes wide open about the challenges,” Smith said.  “It isn’t like all of a sudden the sky opens up and we’ve got a perfect situation to pass priorities that have been reduced in recent years,” he said. 

Smith believes the labor coalition will not squabble over the spoils of victory—not just because there are few spoils—but because of Speaker John A. Perez and pro tempe Steinberg’s efforts at uniting a labor-activist coalition around voter priorities.  If successful, California may produce a useful model for governance maintained by a liberal-leaning environmental, labor, health and human service, and non-profit group coalition.  If unsuccessful, it will likely be a tale of underperformance, disorganization, and a failure of these constituencies to organize the public or pressure leaders who were elected for more rather than less government action.    

“There is going to be cooperation between the legislature, the governor and the constituencies,” Smith said.  “This will be done incrementally and it’s necessary to start that way because we are in a challenging budget situation, though, that doesn’t mean you can’t be thinking long-term about making those investments that I think we all agree need to be made,” he said.