Eric Idle. Always Look at the Bright Side of Life.

It is unfair for anyone to have as much fun in a lifetime without being executed.
................................................................................................................................
Seriously, for a coke-sniffing comedian in the 1970s who married a Playboy model, a daughter of a cab driver from Chicago, he is so level-headed and well balanced that it is almost unbearable.

Samantha Power, The education of an idealist

I acknowledge that I read this book with a revulsion, probably unparalleled since I had to research Goebbels' speeches for my essays. This revulsion was amplified by the recognition that people totally devoid of any sense of humanity or remorse can demonstrate significant intellect and/or unusual strength of character. They even can be doting parents and trusted friends. Not all of them are bumbling idiots or psychopaths. [1] This obviously reflected on the tone and substance of my review.

Correct name of this book should be "Whore of the Empire" as a pun on "Putain de la Republique", French memoirs of a lobbyist, a former swimsuit model who lubricated passage of legislation in the French Assemblee National in more ways than one. About as idealistic as Kissinger, Samantha Power is a model of a ruthless social climber, though some of this climbing had necessarily to be horizontal.

Disclaimer: the text in italics below is not supported by any facts. It is a pure conjecture by the author. Judging by baroque whimsy and "low cunning" (expression borrowed from Tywin Lannister) of this project, it was probably concocted by Robert Gates who cooked up many things, among them to christen (pun intended) rebellion against Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as "jihad". It helped hasten the downfall of the Soviet Empire but also gave birth to Sunny fundamentalism and, ultimately, to the 9/11 tragedy and to the spread of jihadist plague we currently observe. 

Probably, to circumscribe the interest of high-ranking diplomats, military officers and CIA officials in a local talent, from some time on, they were accompanied by attractive female company usually under the guise of "war correspondents". While I have no proof of that, the story of Paula Broadwell, meteoric rise of Fiona Hill--from a daughter of a Scotch miner to Harvard and then to the pinnacle of Department of State--and a cryptic remark of a well-informed correspondent of the New Yorker that whatever foreign policy knowledge Samantha Power have had, she acquired from the wife of Richard Holbrook (obviously, Morton Abramowitz was her mentor in other things) provide enough clues for me. How else an academically challenged daughter of alcoholic immigrant father and stepdaughter of another alcoholic bum achieved a meteoric career, through the series of appointments, to assure which for his offspring, even a Chairman of some Senate Committee would have to apply all his influence? 

Samantha Power was an architect of "Arab Spring" in the Obama Administration, i.e. overthrow of the remaining secular regimes in the Middle East generously financed by Saudi Arabia. It turned Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen  into bloodbaths--and was only stopped in Egypt by the military dictatorship and in Syria--by the Russian aid. Of all that, Samantha Power feels no remorse. Libyan fiasco, except the laments for the deaths of the US Ambassador and accompanying CIA operatives--luckily she does not call them "diplomats" or "defense contractors" as is the present habit of NYT and CNN at Benghazi--takes exactly two paragraphs. The fate of tens of thousands of Libyans killed after the violent overthrow of Khaddaffi cannot interest her less. And yet, she pushes all the right buttons with women's rights. How much they benefited in Libya from its partition by the tribal militias, in Syria--from occupation by An Nusra and ISIS? In Egypt with overthrow of Mubarak and his replacement by Islamic Brotherhood's proteges of Samantha?  Her cynicism and imperviousness to human suffering matches her younger mentor, Holbrook.

Among other proponents of her UN nomination was another humanist and children-lover, Derschowitz [2] and all the usual bunch: McCain--never saw the war he didn't want to fight, his equally belligerent girlfriends Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham and smaller fish, like Max Boot. 

What is also amazing is given that tongue of the Bard is her native language, Yale and Harvard education and her jobs as a correspondent and at the State Department, how limited her vocabulary is, how uninventive the syntax and how frequently she resorts to f-word. Her social station, as Trumps' went through the roof, but her manners in the UN and capacity for expressive thought remained at the level of "alpha girl" of a provincial middle school.

[1] I take my observation that SP is not a psychopath back. She was appointed as a head of USAid by President Biden and voila--there is a civil war in Ethiopia between Tigre and Amhari. Her political mentor Holbrook--a certifiable psychopath--taught her (according to "New Yorker") to instigate a civil unrest and then use "human rights" as a pretext to intervene. I suppose that the sexual mentoring went the other way around.

P.S. It is an interesting question for a psychopathologist: why powerful ex-whores become pious and bloodthirsty--Empress Theodora, Dowager Empress Cixi come to mind. And powerless--like Aileen Wuornos? A riddle to me. 

[2] "What is the difference between pedagogy and pedophilia? Pedophiles, unlike pedagogues really love children". 

 

No-drama 'Bama

Steven Pinker. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress

      Steven Pinker calls his values of New York-Boston-Montreal intellectual "enlightened" and dismisses everything else as irrational, parochial and provincial. Though the book puts forward some occasional sane ideas on climate and nuclear energy but, otherwise, it is Fukuyama-light. For instance, he castigates as unenlightened and irrational people clinging to the old notions of the home country and patriotism and calls their views a reactionary romanticism. Did it ever occur to him that in the twentieth century, there were two utopian projects: one succeeding beyond wildest expectations, the other spectacularly failed? State of Israel pursued its state nationalism single-minded (some would say, ruthlessly) and triumphed. Soviet Union began with denial of the ethnic and national boundaries and practiced an early version of affirmative action in the form of the "national cadres" and perished. Nor it can be explained by "Communism". Chinese and Vietnamese leaders combined single-party rule with unabashed nationalism and traditional Confucian values and they are doing very well, thank you.

      Especially entertaining is his glorification of the "color revolutions" in Georgia and Kyrgizstan. In Kyrgizstan, a club-armed tribal mob ransacked government buildings and installed their ringleader as the new leader of the country. After a year or two of bloody mess, the Russian Army installed more pliable leader and nobody heard of Kyrgizstan ever since. Another perfect idea of enlightened values was Mikheil Saakashvili's coup in Georgia. While the crime wave under his predecessor Shevardnadze was out of control, Mikheil brought it down by the age-honored enterprises of police torture and death squads. His memory is so revered that now he is an exile from the country he once ruled as "democratically elected" president.

       Methodologically, he correctly ridicules derivation of casual connections from mere statistics but then uses this method throughout his book for good and bad measure. Not that some of his conjectures are unsympathetic to this author: a secular decline of violence and warfare, and the growth in public welfare. But the grave deficiencies of his book cannot allow calling him an oracle of rational, enlightened values, just an outspoken hack in service of neocon agenda carefully stripped of the US messianic agitprop.

Cathal J. Nolan. Allure of Battle.

The best book on warfare I have seen for a long time. Though heavily drawing on J. F. C. Fuller in structure and method, it relinquishes its romantic enchantment with Frederick the Great, Napoleon, his unabashed racism ("brutes" and "asiatics") and adds some fresh material. I am willing to excuse his forgetfulness that the capital of Russian Empire was St. Petersburg, not Moscow, and his totally uncritical opinions on Anglo-Saxon (UK and US) commanders and their methods of warfare. The latter probably appeared to placate the neocon Party cells now existing in any major publishing house, US or British. After all, the words like SNAFU, JANFU and FUBAR did not appear in the US Army/Navy WWII jargon out of nowhere.

But his brilliant insights, for instance, that Frederick the Great, though a great battle commander, achieved what he did mostly through careful diplomacy, smart war propaganda--British  broadsheets touted his "invincibility" and whitewashed his defeats--and a sheer luck of the death of the Russian Empress Elizabeth and chaos of an interregnum uncovers careful thinking and desire to avoid stereotypes, no matter how entrenched.  In fact, Frederick was the one who invented modern total war fought not only on the battlefield, but simultaneously on economic, diplomatic and propaganda fronts. Again, Nolan completely glosses over British defection of Frederick after their colonial designs on the French were fulfilled, the one he himself nicknamed "Perfidy of Albion". What was considered a clever exercise of Realpolitik, not only costed British its American colonies but also made Pitt unable to resist Russian, Prussian and Austrian expansion at the expense of Turkey and Poland. Cathal Nolan's book is highly recommended as an antidote to haphazardly researched and poisonously opinionated books, which are advertised through all search engines, first and foremost, on Amazon.

D. Acemoglu, J. Robinson. The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty.

The book demonstrates how shallow political science thinking became in a post-neocon era. The authors could not but understand that their previous "Why Nations Fail" with its universal emphasis on institutions was simply counterfactual. But their new idea of the "Chained Leviathan" is only markedly better. As for "...Nations...", in 1914 the state with the most admirable and efficient institutions was Prussia, then the part of the German Empire. By 1918 it was no more. By 1945 even its territory was absorbed by its neighbors. In 1917, the Russian Empire, probably the worst governed of all Great Powers with the exception of Turkey and, may be, Austro-Hungary, disintegrated completely. Who could have thought that in short four years it will reincarnate itself as the Soviet Union and become a leading political actor for the 70 years thereafter?
       Certainly, the authors' new concept of Chained Leviathan (i.e. the efficient state whose goals are supported by the public) is more nuanced. But it is supported by specious and, sometimes, erroneous historical parallels. As statisticians know, if you pile up the number of explanatory variables, eventually you would find dependencies where none are present.
        The weakest point of their hypothesis, glorifying Anglo-Saxon societies beyond measure, as the pursuers of optimum between power of the people and power of the state, is the ignorance of demographic, religious but above all, local factors of the societal development. First, their story of "liberal capitalism under strong institutions" completely ignores the role of slavery in the US and colonial empire(s) of the UK in the economic well-being of the metropolises. The relationships between slaves, plantation owners, Northern factory owners and bankers were anything but liberal and voluntary. Similarly, the policies of the British Empire were military extortion of India and military extermination in Australia and New Zealand. Second, while they connect political and economic systems of Italian city-states with the Renaissance, their model miserably fails to explain why the most efficient for the time power-sharing systems of Northern Italy, Flanders, Burgundia and Lotharingia disappeared from the face of Europe. Nor Switzerland was ever the cradle of innovation. The obvious reason for the failure of Northern European princelings was vulnerability of their territory, strong rapacious neighbors and the weakness of central power not allowing creation of large standing armies.
           Closer to author's own home, in XV-XVII centuries, three powers were vying for the unification of the Eastern Slavic lands--Ottoman Turkey, Poland and Russia. Why Russia with much less efficient government and much less public participation succeeded where Poland failed? Part of this author's answer is that the most populous and economically significant territories of Turkey and Poland had the populations, which did not share the religious zeal of their overlords. The majority of Balkan subjects of the Sultan were Greek Orthodox and the majority of Ukrainians and White Russians detested Catholic religion of their Polish masters. Lithuania, nominally co-equal participant in the Polish Commonwealth, was the last European nation to accept Christianity. Vice versa, Russian elites shared Eastern Orthodoxy with their subjects and, following the Mongols, were pretty negligent concerning religious beliefs of the conquered peoples and servants of the State alike.
          Finally, not all oppression comes from the central governments and cannot be equalized with the government interference into private lives. The Chinese do not elect their government, but its interference in the lives of its citizens is nothing compared to Holland, Scandinavia and Switzerland. There are coercive institutions other than the Leviathan modeled by Hobbes after compact England. In many states, citizens view strong and absolutist central power not as the oppressor but as the most efficient protector against arbitrary rule by the local strongmen. It is very influential motive of the Russian history but the Spanish Empire, its successor Latin America and medieval France are the common examples. In XX Century America whatever legal protections blacks had in the South were
emanating not from their representatives, which they had none, but from the federal powers dominated by white Northerners, whom they did not elect and who ran roughshod over local laws.
         Once you impose all caveats and exemptions, the concept of the Chained Leviathan becomes the concept of the Beached Leviathan.

Simon Winder. Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

Simon Winder does not belong to English academia, so the book is accurate and lively. French direct  incitement of and participation in Belgium's 1830 revolution and secession from Kingdom of the Netherlands is glossed over. His tempo of  meth head machine gunner putting entire European history of 1000 years, since the Treaty of Verdun between Charlemagne's heirs (843) into 500 pages makes appreciation of the book difficult.

S. Kotkin. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1928-1941.

I would be unfair to proclaim that the book is useless. Its absurd convention to render names of the Soviet leaders according to the post-Soviet nationalist orthographies of their ethnic groups makes it almost impenetrable for a junior American scholar but for me it is but a minor impediment.

The strongest feature of this book is its "Comments" section, which lists hundreds and hundreds of sources. Some of them are of dubious veracity, some of them are unadulterated propaganda but many are accurate and/or accurately reflect perceptions and designs of the contemporaries.

The weakest is as always the author's concept as "Stalin as a Demiurge", dictated by the orders of the Party Committee of the Hoover Institution, so that his personal history is non-distinguishable from the history of the USSR. But even in this department he is lacking. The three most significant events of the Soviet history of the period were:

                       1. Industrialization;
                       2. Collectivization of agriculture, called by some wiseacres a Second Serfdom
                      (by Bolsheviks), abbreviated as VKP(b), i.e. then Russian abbreviation for the    Communist Party;
                       3. The Great Purges (1937-1938)

       But there is next to nothing about these issues, in particular, the second, which was repeatedly recognized by Stalin as his main "achievement". Concerning industrialization, he only mentions massive purchases of the Western equipment financed by merciless exploitation of practically enserfed peasantry. But if massive purchases of foreign equipment was the only reason for emergence of the USSR as a major industrial power, what in the world could prevent interwar China and Turkey, not to speak of Japan and Italy, which had much less restrictions in what they could buy and from whom, to simulate this experience? Japan before the war could have modernized its Navy, but its aviation designs largely remained in the late 1930s throughout the war and it could not produce a qualified battle tank.

        Similarly clueless is his treatment of the Great Purges. Naming Stalin "cruel dictator" or "tyrant" every other page does not explain anything. How could anyone emerge, from an obscure Party apparatchik into an all-powerful dictator in the span of six years, and then as a demigod in the span of another six years? Kotkin correctly mentions that his line did not command a majority in Politburo even during collectivization, yet it was his vision of the country, which always prevailed in the end.

         The largest emphasis according to the overall direction of the book is dedicated to the border wars with Japan (1930-1939) and Winter War with Finland (1939-1940). His explanation of the reasons for both wars is surprisingly lucid given his complete confusion with respect to almost everything else, especially military matters and economics (see above). Even his description of the Polish Government of "Sanitation period" as "a nasty regime squeezed between two nastiest" is apt. But this can only be explained that, unlike American neocon agitprop, Finnish nationalist agitprop required to be followed by the Hoover Party Committee is not as counterfactual and stupid.

Edward Judge and John A. Langdon, A Hard and Bitter Peace: A Global History of Cold War

Professors Judge and Langdon wrote a book, which slightly deviates from the neocon orthodoxy--American foreign policy is not depicted as a continuous thread of victories--and its motives are not described exclusively in terms of "promotion of liberty and democracy". Thus, Ed Judge teaches in Le Moyne College, Syracuse--not in Harvard, or Yale. You cannot find it in normal Google or Amazon searches, instead typing "Cold War in Asia" or "Cold War, Global", you will be directed to the usual neocon agitprop. I cannot even say whether this book is especially good, or bad, because local "Barnes & Noble" where I browse books that my limited budget and even more limited living space would not allow, already sold the only copy. But my limited browsing established that at least some Cold War conflicts are discussed in terms of Realpolitik, i.e. without obsessive desire to point at a moral lesson.

What Happened to American Century? Foreign Affairs, July/August 2019

Neocon editors of the "Foreign Affairs" obsessively repeat that United States are still No. 1. Did anybody need this reminder in the sixties during proclamation of the JFK's "New Frontier" or Johnson's "Great Society"? Equally obsessive is the neocon assurance on almost every page that Russia is an insignificant state, soon to disappear. Especially vitriolic are Alina Polyakova and that constant racist fixture of "Foreign Affairs", AEI's Daniel Eberstadt. If Russia's is currently so insignificant and its inevitable demise is true, why speak of it so much? Three out of 15 long reads dedicated to Russia directly and at least two--Rose and Zakaria touching Russia in every elliptical moment--suggest unhealthy obsession in their world perception. Neocon preoccupation with Russia can only be explained that they are locked in a time warp infinitely re-playing World War II on the side of the Nazis and their Eastern European supplicants so lionized by the current American media.

Shame on you, people!

Bookstores, online and otherwise, proudly display Mueller Report with the preface of Alan Dershowitz. While his reputation as a star lawyer, unlike reputations of Francis F. and Niall F. as social scientists is solid, to me it is like issuing a collection of poetry with a preface of Charlie Manson, or a book on childhood psychology edited by J. W. Gacy, though the latter obviously knew a lot about the subject.

Unstoppable President Robot Chicken 

Lenin's revenge

Vladimir Lenin to cement his leadership role in the Communist Party (RSDRP(b)--Russia's Social Democratic Party--Bolshevik) had to write treatises on Marxist theory. This was not an innovation--for instance, Napoleon III, the Little, had to issue artillery manual to hide in the mantle of his uncle, Napoleon I, the Great. But Lenin's 1914 opus, Imperialism as the Highest and the Final Stage of Capitalism, was shamefully kowtowed by the college teachers of Marxism-Leninism in my youth. The reason was obvious--his treatise, largely plagiarized from Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941)--contained very specific predictions, which turned  spectacularly wrong. First, that in the coming epoch, financial capital will acquire higher and higher role and replace the industrial capital in the future societies. Second that because of easy transfer of financial assets in relation to industrial assets, the capital transfers will dwarf the commerce in goods and services. Third that this will result in expansion of colonial policies. Finally, the continuous colonial expansion will lead to incessant wars by the imperialist powers.

In the 1960s all this seemed entirely absurd. Industrial giants, like Boeing, Ford or General Motors, towered over meager servants of the American industry such as Mellon Bank or Chase Chemical. International commerce exceeded international investment multiple times. Former colonies acquired independence every other day. Finally, most Western powers seem to lose completely their appetite for military adventures and when they did, as in Vietnam, they failed miserably. 

This became clear even in 1920-1930s when the most dynamic of the Western societies did not have colonies (USA and Germany) and their banks evolved from the masters of the economy in Wilhelmine Germany or Robber-Baron age in the US into "home banks" for the industries, like Mellon for the US Steel or Dresdner and Schaffhausen? for Thyssen and Stinnes' empires. To remedy the situation--when the Marxist literature still had to be read by aspiring Party functionaries--Nicolai Bukharin and Eugene Varga produced theory of "State-Monopolistic Capitalism". In the State-Monopolistic Capitalism framework, the future capitalist state instead of pursuing laissez-faire policies will interfere more and more in economy with the goal of its stabilization, primarily on the side of national monopolies. Bukharin was shot in 1939?, Varga was demoted from all party posts in 1947 because his theory suggested continuing vitality of capitalism, which did not sound good on the outset of the Cold War. Yet, probably because he predicted the success of the New Deal, in the face of Komintern dogma of the impending "General crisis (doom) of capitalism", he was sufficiently valued by Stalin to exterminate him outright. 

Unlike the Lenin-Hilferding work, which was glossed over and forgotten, the theory of State-Monopolistic Capitalism, became the centerpiece of Soviet Political Economy even after the demise of its founders. In particular, it fit very well with the Eisenhower's notion of Military-Industrial Complex and the realities of the Cold War. Only with perestroika when laissez-faire doctrines shoved by Reagan propaganda started to reach the Eastern Bloc in earnest, the Bukharin-Varga theories lost their attraction. Soft voices of the Soviet economists who grew up in Marxist schools and who suggested that Reagan-era policies were hardly a realization of dreams of J.-B. Say and von Hayek, were drowned by the victorious new orthodoxy. By the early 1990s, Czech researchers who were suspect in Keynesian sympathies, were as thoroughly purged from academia as their 1960s predecessors questioning Marxism-Leninism.

But, currently, the old predictions came back with the vengeance. Capital flows have exceeded transfers of goods and services between the nations. Compensation of the managers of hedge funds exceeds dozens of times the compensation of CEOs of the largest industrial and service companies. The largest financial institutions, particularly the ones created by Soros and Paul Singer, even conduct their own foreign policy. United States and its allies are engaged in continuous colonial warfare--directly, such as Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq, only from the air as in Libya and former Yugoslavia, or by weapons and money transfers (e.g. South Sudan but also in myriad other places).

Not that the State-Monopolistic Capitalism theory of Bukharin and Varga did not find its own revenge. Currently, most of the growth of the market capitalization of the large companies in the USA comes to the virtual monopolies, so tightly related to the intelligence community that, for a while, the notion of "Intelligence-Industrial Complex" by the analogy of the "Military Industrial Complex" of Eisenhower appeared in the media. Of course, they did not like it and it disappeared without a trace.

Microsoft, which absorbed Skype, Google, partnering with Linkedin, Amazon and ubiquitous Facebook are the giant vacuum cleaners obtaining terabytes of private information. CNN, CNBC and Fox conduct 24-7 broadcast on TV screens all over the world, the first two mostly aligned with US Government propaganda and "Fox" dancing to the tune of one man, Prince Ruprecht of Murdoch. In the case of CNN former heads of intelligence, such as Brennan, or Clapper, or their "pocket congressmen"--Adam Schiff, or Mike Rogers--and a clutter of smaller spooks became a sad fixture of any international commentary. Not to speak of the cottage industry of the "think tanks", which used to be like RAND in its best years, intellectual brain trusts, but now became partisan establishments, whose purpose is to justify immature ideas of their founders and sponsors, many former government officials or senators/congressmen themselves, with "scientific" data and research.

Recently, the tentacles of the "Collusion of the power of the militaristic state with that of the capitalist monopolies"--that is how the ancient Marxists characterized their State-Monopolistic Capitalism--reached to specific companies. Direct attacks on Russia's Kaspersky and Rusal--none have anything to do with the Russian military, Ukraine or Crimea--and China's ZTE and Huawei had the only purpose of stifling technological development of the possible competitors. But the heaviest blow fell on Bombardier and Embraer--the flagships of high-tech industries of Canada and Brazil, respectively, which are the allies of the US but do not have the benefit of the state support enjoyed by Russian and Chinese companies--and the Deutsche Bank.

In early 1980s, when the Soviet Union--with Afghanistan occupied and Polish rebellion subsiding-- seemingly was at zenith of its power, I suggested that the superpower with such degree of provincialism, self-deception, dysfunction and narcissistic view of themselves by the elite cannot stand, no matter how many tanks and MIRVs it has in its arsenal. Of course, I was considered a harmless nut by some of my pals and, probably and luckily, by the KGB. But USSR was gone in a decade. American institutions are more robust that Soviet Union's ever were but does this mean that they can suffer infinite amount of wrecking? I don't think so. 

Peter Frankopan. Silk Roads.

A positive jacket review by Niall Ferguson cautioned me that the book must be like much of his own--an undergraduate hackwork hastily scavenged from the World Wide Web and the media headlines--and my intuition proved entirely right. But as it the case with Harvard, students do not go to Oxford where Peter Frankopan is a history professor, to study anything--they go there to know the right people.

One of the hallmarks of a poorly executed or plagiarized undergraduate coursework is a display of contradictory statements lifted from disparate sources without any comment or discussion. In the case of Frankopan,  these statements literally stand next to each other. In one paragraph, he cites Secretary  Pompeo promising to starve Iranians into submission, in another--Pompeo claiming that the USA is not the enemy of Iranian people--only its elite.