Paul Lendvai, One Day that Shook Communist World, The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and its Legacy, Princeton UP 2008

Impenetrability of Hungarian language makes it nearly impossible for the outsider to study the 1956 revolution objectively. The book by Lendvai is quite interesting but I cannot understand how accurate it is. Largest contribution of his study seems to be his nuanced assessment of Janoscz Kadar, a leader installed by the Soviets during the coup. First, unlike most other emigre studies, Lendvai senses that his participation was much, much more active than simply being a Soviet puppet. In particular, he blames Nagy's execution squarely on Kadar and his influence. "Kadarism," i.e. an attempt to balance socialism, nationalism, preservation of independent statehood and the demands by his Soviet overlords is an interesting phenomenon and Lendvai pioneers objective research here. Many other Eastern Bloc leaders (Dubchek, Egon Krenz, Gomulka, Kania, Yaruzelski) tried to follow in his footsteps but none succeeded to the degree Kadar did. The book speaks very little of internecine struggles within the revolutionary camp and glosses over the Oct. 30 massacre at the Communist Party Headquarters and other atrocities of the rebels.Internal factionalism seems to be the major cause of the failure of the rebellion. E.g. Hungarian service of Radio Free Europe, probably packed by ex-Nazies, by its broadcasts tried to undermine Nagy's regime, i.e. the core of the resistance, which it considered "red." Moreover, after the failure of the rebellion they continued to lie that the resistance was still active in the mountains and some duped refugees returned to continue armed struggle only to be shot or sent to the camps. Hungarian army was surprisingly passive in the event of the Soviet invasion, especially the Air Force. This author thinks that the peasant soldiery had little good to expect from the rebels promising bloody vengeance to the occupiers of landlords' estates-- a unique feature of this Revolution was extremely violent, conservative, pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic sloganeering of its organizers-- and the Air Force was mostly Soviet-trained. Only few higher officers mostly associated with the previous Horthy regime (Maliter, Kiraly) were active in the revolution. According to Lendvai, the most active combat detachments were worker-student guards, yet, their organizer Dudas (probably, a Romanian Jew) was twice arrested by right wingers during this period. The overall toll of victims is such: several tens shot by the Soviet-organized tribunals, ~700 Soviet soldiers and 1000-2000 rebels killed in the storming of Budapest, unnamed number of the Communist Party, secret police members and Soviet advisers massacred by the rebels, 41,000 participants were imprisoned (28,000 in labor camps) and uncertain number escaped abroad (from low 15,000 in Lendvai to accepted 100-200,000, though the difference may be that Lendvai counted only the active participants in the rebellion, not the general refugees). My verdict: failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 still is not sufficiently clarified in its political, military and humanitarian aspects but Lendvai's book is a good start.

Why democracy is incompatible with an Islamic state?

Let me state that my provocative title does not mean that democratic form of government cannot exist in a country with the Muslim majority. What I point out is that what is called "democracy" by the dictionaries can only exist in the Western paradigm of the "nation-state," which started to emerge in the Early Modern Europe.

Namely, the nation-state, an outgrowth of the national monarchy, is the Hobbesian Leviathan, which has two following distinct features. First, it possesses monopoly on violence, i.e. all violence unless performed by the state army or police is prohibited and is punishable according to the legal code. Second, there is a fiscal monopoly so well written into the sixteenth amendment to the US Constitution. Government alone has the right to extract money (taxes) without voluntary consent and equivalent promise in goods and/or services. All private extractions are called stealing or robbery dependent on the situation. Part of the fiscal arrangement is that government pays salary to its own officials rather than allows them to collect fees directly from the population. The opposite situation is called "corruption" or "graft" and is prosecuted.

I remind the reader that nothing of a kind existed in the European Middle Ages. Ordeals, i.e. judicial combat between litigating parties, vendettas and private warfare of the feudal lords were the norm. Equally true was the payment of the dues and tithes to the lord of the manor, the Church and upkeep of the public officials.

To establish the Leviathan, the Early Modern European Governments, not without a few civil wars along the road, developed a compromise with the populace, which was to
be entitled to certain modicum of control over these two monopolies through their elected representatives or supposedly impartial mediators called judges. The mechanisms of this control got codified (except for Britain) and received the name of "electoral democracy."

None of that could be ever imagined in the dualistic system of Sharia Law. In theory, the ruler is supposed to wage the perpetual war, jihad, against the enemies of Islam. However, he has few other societal functions beyond raising resources for fighting with the infidels. Internal administration of the Islamic state is theoretically in the hands of two groups of people, qadi(s), who interpret Sharia and Adath, the local customs as allowed by Islam, and imams, spiritual and cultural leaders of the village communities and tribes. There is no European Leviathan; the right of the Western parliaments to legislate, e.g. marital affairs or school curricula, would be as alien to Ibn Haldoun as the dictates of the PTA on the circle of friends of her daughter would seem strange for American soccer mom. When Soviet or American occupation troops established puppet legislatures in Afghanistan, they viewed them as they would view their own deliberative bodies.
Even if the elections-- as in Soviet Union, or American-occupied Iraq-- were fictions, the legislatures were assumed to be legitimate bodies of political elites. But for the local population their "delegates" were not delegated any powers, which
the population itself was forbidden to exercise from now on. It does not mean they are not taken seriously by the Muslim tribesmen. American soccer moms take school coaches very seriously, they want them to be proficient in their sports, not to molest children and otherwise to be good role models for their offspring. Yet, they do not perceive in this situation a delegation of parental power any more than the Afghanis and Iraqis accord political power to their "elected representatives." Equally impossible is to expect a creation of modern army in a state permeated by the Sharia ideology because the power structure of the Middle Eastern armies is not a functional hierarchy but repeats to a large extent distribution of power between tribal and party groups in the larger society.

All that is not being said to bolster the claims of Western superiority. The society
based on the above principles was better organized and generally wealthier than
the states of the medieval Europe. It did not suffer from stultifying bureaucracy and oppression of contemporary China and the Byzantium. Moreover, typical "western" societies had their own pangs of achieving modernity. For instance, Napoleonic system relatively painlessly replaced multiple local authority of the landowner, parish priest, member of parliament, etc. with a single figure of prefect personifying French state in its entirety. When there were attempts to copy this system in a newly unified Italy, simple subjects of Victor Emmanuel could not accept it, especially in the agrarian South. The tag of war between Leviathan of the modern nation-state and the overlapping authorities of the Church, landowners, mafia, military aristocracy,
businessmen civil servants and party bosses, each with his own claims on spoils and goodies to pass around, continued at least until late 1980s (some think it is still there). Russian Empire, only by the end of the XIX century, established pretty effective domination over alternative centers of military and fiscal power in the Central Russia. Yet, when confronted with reality of pogroms in the Southern Russia, imperial officials demonstrated to the European dignitaries a genuine incomprehension that the state was required to stop what they perceived as intercommunal violence. It is easy to blame that on antisemitism but imperial bureaucrats were equally at loss dealing with depredations of Russian settlers in Siberia with respect to indigenous peoples and were hardly more "backward" in that than their American, Canadian and Australian counterparts. In large chunks of Siberia before the Bolshevik coup it was still a powerful owner of a gold mine or a fur-trading outpost who performed local administrative functions instead of the government. In the 1990s this arrangement re-emerged in the phenomenon of the "oligarchs" but, contrary to the popular lore, they were not creations of emerging capitalism but a throwback to premodern statehood.

One concludes that the Sharia state was far from unique and represented natural, for the medieval economy, compromise between the central and local powers. It is futile to impose the instruments of the industrial-era governance such as "free and fair" elections, professional civil services and technocratic armies on the societies, which never were Leviathans in the first place when the Western Leviathan is itself under attack from the powers of multinational corporations and institutionalized cronyism of the elites of the American South. Otherwise, one needs to imitate the methods of dealing with coranic scholars and village elders employed by Ataturk, Saddam Hussein or Nasser and Assad. Besides poor moral choices, these methods are difficult to implement in the era of Kalashnikovs, Stingers, cell phones and the Internet.

Fareed Zakaria, The post-American world, W. W. Norton, 2008

Fareed Zakaria, The post-American World, 2008, CB 161.Z34

In his book, Fareed Zakaria, one of the remaining intellectually sound members of US international relations elite, explains why the United States will retain global hegemony in the world, which seem to reject US hegemony while trying to imitate American practices and institutions.

His argument is based on the fact that the US still possess the most instruments of hard and soft power in comparison with other states and blocks. This thesis is quite convincing on its own. Yet, it would be useful, if the author actually visits United States. The USA, which he describes is a sort of Beltway fantasy world created by Ivy League graduates, to which few Americans are admitted or even heard of, the world of elite schools, hedge funds and think tanks. It will be also valuable, if he studies European history on his own, rather than from hearing neocon tales of his Harvard pal Joseph Joffe. In particular, his explanations on what went wrong with the British Empire are factually incorrect and economically incompetent.

The leading factor, determining the rise and fall of the states, in my view, namely, the intellectual capacity of governing elites he omits entirely. I remember that in 1970s, USSR achieved strategic parity with the United States, and the war became unlikely. Sheer size of the Soviet Empire guaranteed its survival, or so it was thought. The life was austere but it slowly improved and was better, anyway, than any living Russian could remember and definitely superior to that in Maoist China.

Western Europe was far from being a facade of capitalist utopia, the myth, which emerged a decade later. At the time Italy was considered ungovernable and swamped with crime and terrorism, UK's economic malaise was reckoned to reduce it to the Third World status, Spain and Portugal were only emerging from the horrors of Franco and Salazar era with significant plurality of Spaniards and majority of Portuguese being simply illiterate.

Opposition to Communist regime was tiny, disjointed and suppressed. Yet, any attentive observer saw the rot, which paralyzed ruling elite and the populace. The essence of this rot was that informal structures of cronies and patronage were quickly supplanting Communist officialdom. Stalin, a tribal-minded Georgian, knew that it would undermine his vision and he organized purges once in 5-6 years to uproot these networks by murder and mutual betrayal.

In the new Guilded Age the same thing happens in the US: elections and party machines are losing in importance to cronyism and patronage, the closeness to Bush and Cheney families, plug-in to "Old Boys" network of Southern politicians and uber-lobbyists, such as Jack Abramoff [1]. Certainly, the Tammany Hall, Boston brahmins, Daley machine in Chicago or Louisiana morass existed before, but these networks were local in nature and they did not touch national security. Before the Civil War and between two world wars, the Army probably had its own unconstitutional hierarchies but these did not involve political agendas, only promotion within services, and were quickly undermined by the events.

The present-day American Empire, a.k.a. The New World Order, despite all its military might and technical-scientific supremacy--the latter much reduced from the 20-50 years ago--is not sustainable. Like the Soviet Empire of old, it offers little to imitation and wonder, but its military prowess. As the world becomes more globalized, its elites become more and more parochial in their outlook, forever trapped in the glory of the Confederate South, and newly proletarianized masses (in Roman, not in Marxian sense) share neither goals, nor premises of these elites. As America becomes more multicolored and multicultured, its elite--the Cabinet, the Congress, the media tycoons--look as if they all descended from the same city in Yoknapatawpha County. Behind the glistening facade described by Zakaria and the "Economist," American Empire is a rotten edifice and instead of the recipes of maintaining it, the best minds of the establishment, like Zakaria, will be prudent to imagine the world without it. This does not mean that the United States will disappear. Vice versa, withdrawal from the Empire may initiate glorious "Golden Years" of American polity rather than its traumatic collapse.

To read a footnote, please go to the comment #1

Sonke Neitzel. Tapping Hitler's Generals, transcripts of secret converstations, 1942-1945.

Sonke, Neitzel. Tapping Hitler's Generals, transcripts of secret conversations, 1942-1945.

Translated by G. Brooks, Introduction by I. Kershaw. Frontline Books, MBI Publishing, St. Paul, 2007.

The myth of the Wehrmacht non-involvement in Nazi brutalities was started to be
invented long before the end of the war. The transcripts show that the generals
were very well informed about mass executions of the Jews, as well as the
treatment of POWs, such as summary executions of commanders, political officers
(a.k.a. commissars) and pretty much starving and exposure of the rest to the elements. Their general resentment of the SS, of which they made much after the war, was concerned not with its policies of extermination but with conventional inter-service rivalry.

My conclusion: Interesting book for the period historians. Of limited interest to anybody else.

Uri Bar-Noi. The Cold War and Soviet Mistrust of Churchill's Pursuit of Detente, 1951-1955.

Uri Bar-Noi, The Cold War and Soviet Mistrust of Churchill's Pursuit of Detente.

DA47.65.B37 2008, Sussex Academic Press, Brighton

The book's title and introduction belie its own thoroughly researched story,
namely, that the post-War Britain was in no position to act as interlocutor
between the USSR and the USA. Furthermore, the British elite did not share
Churchill's attempts at Realpolitik.

My conclusion: The study of so far unknown chapter of the Cold War. A for historical research, C- for the inclusion into the broader Cold War context.