The question came about 5 minutes into utterly trivial ‘Salt.’ Americans grovel before a larval Counter-Intelligence State (a term the deservedly respected, former DIA veteran John Dziak so aptly used for the Soviet Union). America’s tolerance for militarization and threat-addiction is so high now it shrugs off formerly toxic-level dosages without notice. So why can’t it make a good spy movie?
On Andy Grove, Mercantilist Schwerpunkts And Free Trade Kool Aid
If one is serious about re-industrializing the United States to create high wage manufacturing jobs, one probably should shun hapless pundits and other ideological purveyors. To be fair the braying comes from all sides: ‘Free Markets’ cant or the tiresome “What Would Hamilton Do Today”? As par for the course, the most visible ‘experts’ provided to us on the cable news wall often can’t read a spreadsheet, think EBITDA is a new social networking site, haven’t actually worked for an industrial company or consistently met a payroll.
Economic development requires a more serious mind. But then, one could say the same about war. And look at that.
Even more than killing dark people, a sustained development concept in Bubble-addicted America is particularly challenging. Americans expect to earn inflated income by performing essentially meaningless and frivolous output. Haven’t we essentially outsourced the wars, too?
Andy Grove laments the decline of the hi-tech industry’s domestic manufacturing. He’s right that it is essentially now a (temporary) branding and marketing channel for Asian manufacturers. “Made in China, Designed By Apple In California”. Our friend comment shared this link from Grove on point: Sadly, one has to ask: where precisely have you been for the last 30 years, Andy? (Let’s overlook the Intel billions invested in India, Malaysia and China along the way.)
Americans we will assert seem generally uninterested in development matters, especially historical economic development. So it’s important to put forth first principles to frame a conversation. Say a president visits a failed state like Michigan. He declares ‘new manufacturing jobs in America’ [cue ritual applause] will come. But before that can happen, we should be clear on what’s the goal of American economic activity? To promote *consumer* welfare measured in the here and now? Or to develop a social and economic infrastructure that maximizes *societal* welfare in the medium to long term? An infrastructure to enable other economic and social expenditures (military, standard of living, life expectancy, etc.)?
The first is America 1960-2010; ‘consumer welfare’ is the metric. The second? Delayed consumption, lower standards of living and capital accumulation for the future. How one answers these questions determines divergent paths.
For statesmen or serious students of Great Power history (this excludes by definition march of trumpets Boys Life ‘history’ ala Victor Davis Hanson et. al.), there are 4 essential, successful modern development models: (a) the British until 1870s (the end of the mercantalist First Empire and commingling with ‘Wealth of Nations’ and ‘White Man’s Burden’ era); (b) the Germans from 1870-1914; (c) the American from 1880s-1960s; (d) the Soviets 1917-1970s; (e) Japan from 1945-1991; (f) the Four Tigers (copying Japan); and (g) China (1980s-today). The latter three are essentially variations on the Japanese dual economy mercantalist approach. (The BRICs are more notional, still in China’s shadow).
Mercy, Mercy, Don’t You Wish Sometimes Your Heart Was Made Of Stone?
It’s easy to forget the reality of human capacity for great evil in our meme-drenched, A.D.D. ‘culture’ [sic]. The only difference today and 1999 and sock puppets? ‘Brandistas’ are the new celebrities. Pepsi is hiring ‘social networking’ brand gunslingers to make things like Quaker Oats cereal ‘vital to the conversation’ by glomming on a social website or game ‘experience.’ To oat meal?
Contrary to Chuck Todd’s anxious, sleepless worries, the NYT’s claim the Internet makes America dumb is wrong. Internet gadgets don’t make Americans stupid. They just expose and *validate* the always present American thirst for passive consumption of frivolity. (And media types, you especially).
Contemporary Israel’s tragic emulation of its forebearers’ Greatest Enemy over the past decades becomes even more unintelligible in this milieu. The barrage of ‘defensive actions’, new settlements, protest images, tweets, yelling on TV perfect for today’s collective miasma. Understanding and knowledge that Israel’s security is perversely undermined buried. That Israel undermines American strategic interest in the region not even in the mix (although Petraeus got about 15 minutes raising it months ago).
So it is, too, with Helen Thomas’ remarks about the origins of the Zionist movement in Europe and how Ashkenazi Jews helped establish the State of Israel (we’ll lump in some Sephardic as well there). Instead, Colbert cajoles Helen Thomas to eat 50 hamburgers. No adult analysis of what really happened to Jews in Europe, Western, Central, Eastern and the former Soviet Union. Just celebration of the faux pas.
Timothy Snyder offers an antidote in The New York Review of Books, writing on Christopher R. Browning’s Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi-Slave Labor Camp. What history tells us if we will listen is that even today the real scale of anti-Semetic eliminationism is carefully buried. Here, Synder describes Browning’s exhaustive interviews with almost 300 Jewish survivors from the town Wierzbnik. From there, Synder weaves in the bloody, murderous and tragically duplicitous relationship among Polish nationalist forces, widespread anti-Semitism and initial Jewish cooperation with German occupiers against Polish nationalists for revenge.
It’s heartbreaking reading. Trebly so because this so-called ‘micro history’ of Wierzbnik is so common throughout Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, France – in short anywhere even faintly associated with ‘Western Civilization.’ (We’ll exclude Poland and the East from the full Enlightenment). The native population in almost all these Nazi-occupied territories featured political factions and leaders as indifferent to or as dedicated to the genocide as the tightest of Himmler’s SS circles (a secret he unleashed on the whole Nazi Party at Poznan in 1943 in a ‘we are all in this together and the boats are burned’ speech, a speech Speer spent the rest of his life trying to pretend he never heard).
We’ve never embraced Daniel Goldhagens ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ completely from the last decade. His thesis that ordinary Germans knew and approved of genocide because of centuries of viral preparation is we think factually untrue regarding deeper history. He also misrepresents in convenient ways what happened 1933-1945. Even so, the German genocide against the Jews was initially popular with many in occupied lands from Brest to Tula. Empirically undeniable. It’s also true that there was great heroism and self-sacrifice for and by Jews. In the case of Poland, Snyder argues persuasively that the Home Army featured anti-Semitic elements, practiced anti-Semitic policies and came very late to the game realizing the genocide meant more than a political morsel to feed London and Washington.
Said in such broad sweeping language, it’s almost anodyne to the subject. So we’ll close with Synder’s heart wrenching reality check:
By the time the Red Army finally reached Warsaw in January 1945, the Wierzbnik Jews, Łódz´ Jews, and other Jews were being marched from Auschwitz to labor camps in Germany, where they would remain until the end of the war. This ordeal was deadlier for the Wierzbnik Jews than Starachowice [and arms factory town – LS ] and Auschwitz; hundreds died in a matter of a few months. After the Red Army took Berlin in May, Polish- Jewish survivors found their way to displaced-persons camps in Germany. A few dozen Wierzbnik Jews were able to return to Poland and their hometown, where they were greeted with ugly threats from the Poles who had stolen their houses. In June a few returning Wierzbnik Jews were murdered by Poles. One Jew was beheaded. In Poland as a whole, hundreds of Jews were murdered by Poles in the months after the war was over . . .
Snyder concludes with a palette of grey, trying to show the Polish Home Army wasn’t truly anti-semetic. It is a complex historical record. He also knows complete rehabilitation via white wash has been tried, worn out and now pointless:
Though the record of the Home Army toward Jews is ambivalent, the dark legend must be abandoned. Important as Jewish testimonial material is to the history of the Holocaust, the recollections of Jews who spent years in camps cannot serve as the basis for historical reckonings with the Home Army. If its history were to be written from Jewish perspectives, these would have to include those of people such as Chaja and Estera Borenstein, who volunteered as nurses at the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising, or Marian Mendenholc, who died trying to rescue Polish comrades right at its very end. It would have to allow for the experiences of Jews such as Stanisław Aronson. Fighting in the most celebrated unit of the Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising, Aronson stormed Umschlagplatz, from which he himself had been deported to Treblinka two years before. Then he and his Polish comrades liberated a concentration camp on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, and freed several hundred Jews.
One town in Poland. Helen Thomas’s off the cuff comments – however ill-considered and born of frustration – deserve rebuke. But not by Colbert’s hamburgers. With the historical truth of ‘back there’ and evil. True, the Israelis, AIPAC, ADL and the gang devalued that coin through too frequent recourse. Helen Thomas, however, likely would still be sitting front row if she simply asked what was the legal basis for the Gaza blockade and what makes it different from other historical ghettoes.
The Conservative Movement Elites Pine For Thermidor
How odd to see the Movement Establishment fragment so. Some dig in for their Stand against the tea bagger sans culottes. Just a year ago *they* were Jacobins. Now they are bewildered, revealed wearing Versailles finery, muttering about the divine right of Original Direct Mailers. Others want to throw down their handkerchiefs and join the ‘rabble’ (at the front, naturally).
CPAC 2010 — to switch revolutionary references — also reminds one of Stalin’s victory against his internal opposition 1924-1937. Recall he maneuvered first against Trotsky from the right and then against Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin from the left. How? Stalin was an organization man. He knew he had to destroy the Old Bolshevik Guard who controlled the Party. They remembered Lenin and more importantly knew the truth about Stalin and his marginal achievements before, during and after 1917. One of Stalin’s weapons? Open Party membership flood gates to the vast masses. He overwhelmed and diluted the Old Bolsheviks until they were nothing. And the new Party owed Stalin personally everything.
We know the analogy is a caricature. The Movement Establishment’s not there yet. And more importantly, there is no single malevolent will orchestrating events. The sua sponte dilution still wreaks havoc. Some ‘Left’ [sic] and progressive blogs noticed the unusually large youth contingent. It’s true. It’s also more than twenty somethings on a ‘most excellent’ road trip. This wave of new cohorts destabilized CPAC’s club psychology and sensibilities. We’ve attended CPAC on and off since Reagan’s early years. The Movement Establishment is rocked on its heels. Values wedge entrepreneurs suffered unheard of irrelevance and the indignity of an openly gay presence. The Movement Establishment’s gagged silence provoked bitter recriminations among many CPAC old timers. Only one obscure figure really ranted, and then unwisely before a Ron Paul audience. (Talk about not knowing his demographic).
Paul’s ‘f u’ straw poll win underscores the Movement Establishment’s dismay. CPAC hijacked from within. They may not quite feel Zinoviev and Kamenev’s bewilderment at their expulsion from the CPSU. After all, it’s still their institutions the party crashers want to join. But the uncertainty is real. Even as some like Newt try to ride the tiger for all it’s worth others want to put the rabble in their place.
Some conservatives we know point to the pre-CPAC ‘Mount Vernon’ kumbaya manifesto, seeking to paper over differences in the anti-Obama factions. The scrap of paper/html code refers in part to a more sane, rational conservatism. This, we are told, shows conservatives can be content to participate in liberal democratic pluralism. It’s doomed.
Upon reflection we think our earlier seemingly flippant comparison of the tea partiers to punk rock does apply. A Movement dedicated to nihilism and social destruction find themselves as out of touch, self-indulgent, insufficiently radical or nihilist. They are now, to quote Dr. Evil, ‘the Diet Coke of nihilsm.’ Spitting indeed. Amid all his incoherence, that was Beck’s clarion call. If the tea partiers are to be more than punk’s flash in the pan they will need that single will (or collectively single) to put their dilution to practical political effect.
Some famous Movement figures say to us quietly they wait for their own Thermidor. Even as they hedge bets and praise the new era. A time for ‘reaction’ to tamp down, er . . . Reaction. It’s a 360 degree firefight. All still despise the James Bakers, the GHWB’s ‘we have mortgages, not ideologies’ RINOs (and one supposes Carly’s FCINOs). If history is any guide, their Thermidor is still a ways off. Radicalism must overreach its climax. CPAC 2010 suggests we’re not even close. And who in the Movement Establishment has the spine to act in any event?
The Democrats deservedly face a political nightmare of their own making. Their problems are so much more pervasive and systemic than the Movement schism (so far). Americans are being treated to the spectacle of two disintegrating political forces grasping for power. But there is one difference. One of them is totally energized, consciously craving power for an admittedly incoherent, eliminationist, zero-sum Manichean agenda. The other? They’re playing badminton waiting for a third party referee.
‘How’s that bi-partisanshipy thing working out for ya, Mr. President?’