Month: February 2023

Categories
Uncategorised

Turkey’s Statequake

HATAY, TURKEY - FEBRUARY 07: Smoke billows from Iskenderun Port fire as people walk past collapsed buildings on February 07, 2023 in Iskenderun, Turkey. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit near Gaziantep, Turkey, in the early hours of Monday, followed by another 7.5-magnitude tremor just after midday. The quakes caused widespread destruction in southern Turkey and northern Syria and were felt in nearby countries. (Photo by Burak Kara/Getty Images)

On 6 February, southern Turkey and northern Syria were shaken by two massive earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.8 and 7.7 respectively. At the time of writing, the death toll has climbed to over 47,000, with more than 110,000 buildings either destroyed or damaged beyond repair. For Turkey, this represents the worst natural disaster in modern history. The scale of state failure, however, has been just as striking.

Erdoğan’s regime frequently boasts of having overseen a massive construction boom, in which airports, bridges, metros, highways and innumerable housing units were built – supposedly in accordance with new regulations drawn up after an earthquake shook the city of Izmit in 1999. But it is now clear that those building laws were paper tigers. Erdoğan has asserted that virtually all the buildings that collapsed this month were built before the millennium, but satellite images and first-hand reporting appear to belie this claim. In the city centre of Kahramanmaraş, the worst affected province in the country, almost 60% of the population live in buildings constructed after 2001. Luxury developments – which were supposed to be entirely earthquake-secure – have been reduced to rubble. Key infrastructure, such as the Hatay airport and highways crucial for disaster relief – as well as schools, hospitals and municipality buildings – have been destroyed or rendered temporarily unusable. Prosecutors are currently investigating more than 430 people, including developers and engineers, over their role in the disaster. Over 130 are already in prison. Some were taken into custody at airports as they tried to flee the country.

As with the price shocks Turkey has experienced in recent years, the government is trying to blame this disaster on ‘evil businessmen’. Yet the state itself is also culpable. Regulations were not sufficiently enforced, and many building projects were able to circumvent them through the AKP’s construction ‘amnesties’ – which allowed proprietors and developers to escape any possible charges by paying a small sum. The government’s own figures suggest that around 50% of Turkey’s building stock are non-compliant with contemporary regulations. Nobody knows what became of the taxes – totalling approximately $38 billion – intended to make buildings earthquake-resistant. When asked about the the money, Erdoğan refused to give any details and snapped that it was used ‘where it was needed’.

In short, the imbrication of the state with rentier capital was a major factor in the fallout of the earthquake. As scientists and architects have pointed out, it is perfectly possible to construct buildings that can withstand earthquakes of this magnitude. Yet there was apparently no will to do so, despite repeated warnings from the Chamber of Geology Engineers and other prominent researchers. Islamist-inflected hostility to science is an element here: the mayor of Kahramanmaraş reportedly told the head of the Chamber that he does not believe in the discipline of paleoseismology.

With earthquakes, the first 48 hours are crucial – survival rates drop rapidly thereafter. Yet the state failed spectacularly to organize emergency relief in the immediate aftermath. Independent reports note that, during the first day, there was almost a complete absence of official relief efforts on the ground. In cities such as Antakya, it took a full three days until disaster management was fully operational – and even then, it was limited to urban centres as opposed to the peripheries or villages. The reason for the incompetence is clear. It was not the cold weather, as Erdoğan claimed, but the fatal combination of neoliberal orthodoxy and the authoritarian degradation of public institutions.

In recent years, all aspects of disaster management in Turkey have been centralized within one body, AFAD (Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency), which has been left with very limited resources after successive rounds of austerity. The organization was also restructured to promote AKP militants, chosen for their loyalty rather than their professional qualifications. When disaster struck, the person tasked with directly overseeing the intervention was a cleric, while the head of AFAD was a former governor. Neither had experience of disaster management. The incompetence was such that the government asked the previous, more experienced, chief of AFAD to take control in the Adana region. Anonymous sources from inside AFAD confirm that the first 24 hours in particular saw a complete lack of coordination, with senior AKP loyalists not wanting to go out into the streets for fear of a public backlash over their sluggish response. The AFAD is not only hamstrung by its lack of expertise, staff and equipment; its officials are also reluctant to take initiative due to their deference to Erdoğan. The decision was made, for example, to refrain from sufficiently mobilizing the armed forces, for fear that this would damage the government’s legitimacy.

The contrast with the response to the 1999 earthquake is stark. Back then, the scale of the devastation was likewise the product of state failure and the neoliberalized construction industry. Yet in its aftermath, civil society and state institutions – including the army – responded rapidly; the media was free enough to hold the government to account; and the actions of the executive were criticized by ministers as well as a parliamentary inquiry. Today, however, Turkey’s authoritarian settlement precludes even the slightest self-criticism. The iron fist of the state is being used to suppress independent reporting, with threats of retribution levelled at critical journalists. As with the Covid-19 pandemic, regime propaganda insists that the state response is beyond reproach. We are told that the destruction is ‘part of destiny’s plan’, and that no politician could prevent it.

Where the state has failed to intervene, however, ordinary people have done their best to fill the gaps. An astonishing wave of solidarity has swept across the country and the diaspora, with Turks volunteering in large numbers and sending money and equipment to the disaster area. Trucks loaded with desperately needed aid are constantly arriving in the province. Donations to independent bodies and political organizations have skyrocketed, reflecting the growing distrust in state institutions. For many, it feels like the spirit of the 2013 Gezi protests has been revived. The ‘other Turkey’, forever latent behind Erdoğan’s chaotic fiefdom, has become visible once again. While the government has made half-hearted efforts to restrict these grassroots relief efforts, it has refrained from stamping them out entirely.

Weakened by this calamity, the regime is trying to regain the initiative and reduce the political fallout through a theatrical display of national unity: ‘we’re all in this together’. So far, it is unclear whether his public-relations campaign will save Erdoğan’s regency, or whether, as Henri Barkey predicts, he will soon be submerged beneath a ‘tsunami of discontent’. In the end, only decisive political action can channel the current discontent to bring about his downfall.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘Turkey at the Crossroads?’, NLR 127

Categories
Uncategorised

The Other Stuff

Dénouements characterized by misery and impotence seem predetermined in George Saunders’s early work, and tend to enhance the stories, liberating his satirical instincts. The hapless protagonists in Pastoralia (2000), still the finest of his short story collections, are locked into destructive narratives, played out in pasteurized corporate spaces, Gethsemanes and bleak visions of the future, yet the stories are ludic, full of slants and opposing charges, snapping turns and comedic innovations. By the time of In Persuasion Nation (2006), this brutality had acquired, in many places, an overtly political edge. In an interview from 2009, Saunders explained that he couldn’t help but write ‘what was really in my mind and heart’, and, after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, ‘what was in my mind and heart was, I guess, more linearly related to what was in the news.’ The strongest stories in In Persuasion Nation are narratives of paranoia. Saunders conceived ‘Adams’ as an allegory for the Iraq war (its title is an anagram), which then evolved into something more opaque and absurdist. ‘The Red Bow’ opens after a child has been killed by a rabid dog. The family want to alchemize their terrible grief into vengeance, so set about destroying any other infected dogs, then the ‘Suspected Infected’, and, finally, every animal in the neighbourhood. ‘Anyone objects,’ the bereaved mother orders, ‘kill them too.’

Obama’s election saw Saunders predicting a corresponding shift in his fiction. ‘Relieved’ that the levers of power were in safer hands, Saunders’s imagination could ‘shift back to being concerned with what I think of as general human foibles, instead of particular temporal human foibles’ (he confessed he was ‘kind of sick of politics’, ‘sick of all this right vs. left fighting’). This set the stage for the more sentimental mode of Tenth of December (2013), which won the Folio Prize, as well as his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which was awarded the Booker. Though still shot through with characters who experience terrible things, who frequently do terrible things, the grim trajectories of his early-career stories gave way, not to happy endings exactly, but more hopeful ones: finales in which feelings ‘expand’, ‘extend’, ‘encompass’, passing across the boundaries of flesh, evoking the possibility of togetherness. At the end of Lincoln in the Bardo, Abraham Lincoln’s personal sorrow at the death of his young son ‘extended to all in an instant’, for he saw ‘we were all suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering’.

Such sentimentalism is less in evidence in Saunders’s latest collection, Liberation Day (2022), his first in ten years. As a voice issuing from a beam of light has it: ‘You are trapped in you’. The words sound a bleak rebuke to the eponymous Mom in ‘A Mom of Bold Action’ when she tries, and fails, to imagine forging a connection with a man whom her husband recently beat up (they mistakenly believed he’d knocked over their child). It is a sad reminder of our ineluctable separateness from one another, containing no salve or analgesic in its assessment of the world’s current state, which Saunders has always thought fiction best placed to lay bare. Saunders is known for his interest in dystopias, nineteenth-century American history and the commodification of everyday life, and his taste for weird, inventive deployments of voice and quirky pyrotechnics (speaking beams of light, for example). But the concern that compels him, and makes his writing compelling, is the timeless quandary compacted in the beam’s utterance: the problem of what, if anything, we can really know of other people.

In the title essay of his first nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone (2007), Saunders suggested that the marathon process of revision to which he subjects his stories is designed both to increase their complexity and to hone their morally improving function: to ‘make us humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know’. A good story, he continues, allows us to ‘imagine them as being, essentially, like us’. By deepening and expanding the sympathetic imagination, stories can offer a kind of tutelage in the art of compassion. The fact we cannot read one anothers’ minds or live in one anothers’ bodies is a condition that storytellers of Saunders’s persuasion interpret as a summons or cue, deploying narrative to lessen our and others’ fundamental solitude, or at least to school us in living with it more humanely. Even though his oeuvre may be peopled with cruel and violent characters – rapists, child-beaters and modern-day slavers – often destined for failure or humiliation, we always feel, beneath the surface, the beat of a firmly ethical pulse, an underground stream of empathy, and we rarely doubt the essential niceness and kindly designs of their creator.

Indeed, these days Saunders may be nearly as well-known for his kindly designs as for his creations. An approachably eloquent spokesperson for fiction – he has taught on the creative writing MFA programme at Syracuse for over twenty years, and has written extensively about the art of short story writing in The Braindead Megaphone (2007), A Swim in a Pond in The Rain (2021), and latterly on his Substack ‘Story Club’ – Saunders has over the last decade achieved a degree of celebrity and influence that transcends literary culture. With his faultless public persona (avuncular, gracious, generous, Buddhist) and highly developed sense of the moral possibilities of storytelling, Saunders today verges on a kind of all-purpose sage (in 2013 he made TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, while his filmed commencement speech on kindness at Syracuse the same year has reached hundreds of thousands of viewers).

Yet the twin aims of Saunders’s tireless revising – to achieve complexity and promote sympathy – can seem, from a certain angle, if not incompatible then at least vying aspirations. Doesn’t coaxing us to ‘imagine them as being, essentially, like us’ risk dissolving complexity by implying we are all, at bottom, the same? (It is not, one might object, a requirement of empathy – the ability to understand and appreciate the feelings of another – that we assimilate our identities.) In the course of Saunders’s career, it has sometimes seemed that his most successful fictions are those that outrun any morally instructive designs, scotching our expectations. If Tenth of December and Lincoln in the Bardo represent a period in which Saunders’ ethical intentions for fiction and the work itself were most closely aligned, their best moments nevertheless fight against simplification. (Saunders himself has expressed a preference for work that outstrips the author’s intentions. An allegorical story, for example, must exceed its initial premise, otherwise it’s just ‘a self-reifying scale model’: ‘snore’.)

*

In Liberation Day, one detects renewed scepticism about the possibility of bridging our apartness. Complexity for the most part trumps moral clarity, yielding some of the most interesting and probing stories Saunders has ever written, as well as a few of the least. The return to the mood of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (2000) is not difficult to parse; all but one story in Liberation Day were published after Trump’s election. Saunders found, once again, that he could no longer turn away from the ‘ugliness and sordidness’ of US politics. Surveying an acrimoniously polarized America, the stories in Liberation Day do not end with gushing passages where characters reflect on their shared suffering, but slink back in on themselves, back to the nuclear family, back to the prescribed societal order, without redemption or heroism.

Liberation Day’s title story is arguably the most layered that Saunders has written. As in ‘The Semplica-Girl Diaries’ from Tenth of December, in which wealthy suburbanites have immigrant women strung up as decorations in their front yards, individuals, driven ‘by hardship’, ‘consent’ (a term problematized at a critical juncture) to have their memories erased and become ‘Speakers’. ‘Pinioned’ to the walls of mansions, the Speakers entertain the owners and their guests with theatrical monologues and musical performances of historical battles. One is the Battle of Little Big Horn, when several thousand indigenous Plains Indians were ambushed by a cavalcade of the United States Army, and defeated them. The son of one rich family chastises his father for the Speakers’s production ‘badly neglecting the Indigenous perspective’ (the politically engaged, but often naïve, young person is a new character on the margins in Liberation Day). The Plains Indians’ ‘stunning victory is mere prelude; the colossus that is the white nation, galvanized by this humiliation, will soon enact a merciless revenge’. The story ends with a crackerjack set piece: the intrusion, during the play’s intermission, of young radicals arriving to liberate the Speakers. But while the Semplica-Girls made their getaway, this is not a collection in which power structures are overturned. The gear shift is more subtle, a liberation of mind rather than body. The Speakers, now cognizant of their captive state, are no longer able to perform with the innocence they had previously, but nor can they break out from their servitude.

The other story in Liberation Day that feels new is the strange, affecting ‘Sparrow’. It is delivered from a perspective Saunders has not attempted before: a first person that disperses into a chorus – residents of a small town who witness a quiet story of ordinary love from a sceptical distance. It stands out for its unusual stillness, its lack of gimmickry or violence. Rather, the tension that moves it onwards is drawn from the gap between the chorus’s cynical attitude to the couple and the genuine reciprocity in their developing romance, which we come to understand only by the lightest of authorial touches.

But despite the welcome return of the darkness of early collections, the overall quality of Liberation Day is more mixed, with the most overtly political narratives distinctly clunkier than previous ones. ‘Love Letter’, among the weaker stories, is an epistolary narrative in which a man responds to his grandson’s request for help after one of his friends has been arrested. The grandfather advises him to step back and ‘think as they do’ – ‘they’ being the authoritarian government run by the son of a ‘clownish figure’ – a realpolitik variation on what Saunders once described as the moral purpose of stories (to ‘imagine them as being, essentially, like us’). The grandfather would rather look back nostalgically to times like ‘that day when all of us hiked out at Point Lobos’, believing ‘the other stuff’ – politics – ‘is only real to the extent that it interferes with those moments.’ The reader of course is not expected to ally herself with the grandfather, but at such moments politics can seem like an interference in Saunders’s fiction, too.

A few stories are essentially bleaker revivals of conceits found in previous collections. In ‘Ghoul’, a dictatorial management team encourages those working at a Hieronymus Bosch-esque hallucination of a medieval theme park to inform on one another if they ever step out of character. But while the protagonist in Saunders’s early theme park re-enactment story, ‘Pastoralia’, repeatedly chooses not to inform on his cave-mate (it’s a Prehistoric Man re-enactment), in ‘Ghoul’, ratting colleagues out is already unquestioned practice. ‘We pass our days enacting insane rituals of denial!’ cries out one worker, and is immediately kicked to death by his colleagues. ‘Elliott Spencer’ recycles material, too. Homeless people are taken to a facility where their memories and faculties of speech are wiped in order that they might re-learn language, and a worldview with it, from scratch – according to a very specific agenda. Once they can speak again, the subjects are taken to protests and instructed to stand on one side of a divide manned by a sea of police so as to ‘bellow’ phrases like ‘Bastards, Turds, Creeps, Idiots’ at those on the other side (who are later revealed to be ‘union-organizer folks’ some weeks, other times ‘unarmed middle school teachers’). It is an undemanding allegory, which closely echoes a scene from Trump rallies Saunders described in a feature for the New Yorker in 2016: ‘Trump supporters flow out of the Convention Center like a red-white-and-blue river, along hostile riverbanks made of protesters, who have situated themselves so as to be maximally irritating.’

Since Pastoralia, Saunders has regularly dramatized his concern with the efficacy of empathy by way of dual perspective narratives, a close third that flips between two protagonists every few paragraphs. Like ‘Adams’ (In Persuasion Nation), ‘A Thing at Work’ is a study of escalation. Gen and Brenda are feuding colleagues; each has some leverage. Gen knows Brenda has been stealing coffee pods from the break room. Brenda knows Gen is using company money to finance an affair. Gen’s primary concern is that she will be perceived as ‘the snob who enjoyed good wines and custom mustards and kicking the white-trash lady when she was down’. As a low-paid employee on the brink of destitution, Brenda stands to lose everything if Gen reveals her secret. The overall effect is unsatisfying, the story’s form mapping too neatly onto its primary argument – that we fail to understand one another’s interior lives, especially across class lines.

*

The wish to circumvent the fact that ‘You are trapped in you’ perhaps explains why Saunders’s work features so many ghosts – discarnate forms that can traverse otherwise uncrossable boundaries. The ghosts in Lincoln in the Bardo enter into one another to discover unique but comparable and lovable souls. In ‘commcomm’ (In Persuasion Nation), as two characters progress towards an afterlife the narrator can only describe as ‘Nothing-Is-Excluded’, they ‘grow in size, in love’, the distinctions between them vanishing (a version of this sentiment ends up in Saunders’s 2013 commencement address: ‘my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE’).

David Foster Wallace ascribed to literature a similarly compassionate, connective function (around the time that Infinite Jest came out in 1996, Wallace reportedly pronounced Saunders, whose first collection had also just appeared, the most exciting writer in America). For Wallace great literature has the capacity to make one feel ‘unalone’. When I read that statement as an undergraduate, I copied it down as fact. Now I understand it as closer to a plea. In Wallace’s devastating short story ‘Good Old Neon’ (Oblivion, 2004), death is also imagined as a route out of our failures to understand one another. A man commits suicide and discovers life had been like trying to see one another through keyholes. After death, the doors are unlocked and ‘every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible’.

There are no more ghosts in Liberation Day, and the afterlife offers little salvation or release. In ‘Mother’s Day’, after a life spent being mistreated by an alcoholic, philandering husband, and neglecting her own children, Alma dies of a heart attack. She arrives in a bardo-like realm where she is allowed to choose who she wants to be now. Would she like to return to a younger version of herself? When she was a child? Even earlier: a foetal state? She declines each possibility – ‘As long as she was Alma, she’d be mad.’ The only way to free herself, Alma realizes, is by becoming nothing at all.

Read on: Anahid Nersessian, ‘For Love of Beauty?’, NLR 133/134.

Categories
Uncategorised

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

In the late 1960s, Seymour Hersh established himself as one of America’s most courageous investigative journalists, exposing covert US chemical and biological weapons programmes and uncovering the massacre of civilians in Mỹ Lai. He went on to work for the New Yorker and New York Times, breaking stories on the CIA’s domestic spying operations, the Watergate scandal, and the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. His 1991 book The Samson Option detailed the secret methods by which Israel acquired its nuclear arsenal. Over the past decade, essays for the London Review of Books have examined US involvement in the Middle East: challenging the official account of Bin Laden’s killing and highlighting fractures within the American security state over the Syrian war.

Hersh’s latest article ‘How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline’, was published on Substack last week. Citing a source with direct knowledge of the operation, it claims that US Navy divers – acting on orders from the Biden administration – used remotely triggered explosives to destroy the natural gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany. If this is true, the attack – targeting the crucial energy infrastructure of an ally – would constitute a major violation of sovereignty, if not an outright act of war. It would also mean that the US government is culpable for a major environmental catastrophe: the release of 300,000 tonnes of methane into the atmosphere – perhaps the largest leak in history.

The White House initially described the Nord Stream explosion as an ‘act of sabotage’, with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm suggesting that Putin was responsible. Her claim was echoed by a chorus of European leaders, intensifying the demand for further escalation in Ukraine. Yet, by the end of 2022, Western officials conceded there was no evidence that Russia had detonated its own pipeline, nor was there any plausible motive for it to do so.

Since the appearance of Hersh’s story, the Kremlin has appealed for an international investigation into the attack, while Washington has dismissed his narrative as ‘utterly false and complete fiction’. Earlier this week, Hersh spoke to NLR editor Alexander Zevin about the possible rationale for the Nord Stream operation, the conflict within the Biden administration over the war in Ukraine, and the current state of the American media landscape.

*

Alexander Zevin: Your most recent story describes the alleged US operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines last September. In the final line of the piece, you quote your source as saying that the only flaw in Biden’s plan was ‘the decision to do it’. Can you talk a bit about why you think this decision was ultimately made? Wouldn’t the risk of detection outweigh the potential benefits?

Seymour Hersh: The chronology here is quite simple. Before the Russian invasion, Jake Sullivan convened an interagency group with all the usual people: NSA, CIA, State Department, Justice, Treasury people, Joint Chiefs. And my perception is that they wanted to come up with options to forestall Putin and Russia. So this team was created and they asked themselves, Do we want to pursue a reversible or an irreversible course of action? Sanctions are reversible, whereas kinetic operations – attacks on infrastructure and the like – are not.

On January 26th 2022, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said in a press conference that, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 ‘will not move forward’ if Russia invades Ukraine. Which suggests that, by then, the administration was using the pipeline as a threat to make Putin think twice. Putin is, of course, picking up an incredible amount of money from the parent company Nord Stream AG, 51% of which is owned by his allies at Gazprom, with the remaining 49% shared between four different European companies which control downstream sales of the gas. So there’s a clear reason for targeting the pipeline.

The US then goes to the Norwegians, who end up playing a very important role in figuring out how to execute the plan. To plant the explosives, they needed to send Navy divers down 260 feet, with a complicated mixture of helium and nitrogen and oxygen, and bring them back up fast. This is a difficult manoeuvre, particularly when they’re releasing what’s probably the largest load of C4 ever dropped in the ocean: I mean, huge enough to take down a downtown building practically. And they had to do all this in two hours, taking care to avoid detection.

The Navy found the time to carry out the operation during an upcoming NATO Baltic exercise, and they were going to do it in early June, but instead they got waved off. The team is waved off, the sailors are waved off, and they’re told that the president wants the capability to do it at will. At that point, I have a feeling there was a lot of tension inside the interagency group – a sense of, what is this all about? Why destroy a pipeline that’s basically shut down anyway, after all the sanctions? Well, I think the Biden administration overruled these concerns for a couple of reasons. By September, even though the American press wasn’t telling you this, everybody I knew on the inside, and I know some people on the inside on this stuff, was saying the war is going to be a disaster. Of course, the Russians underestimated the strength of the Ukrainian resistance and their forces were pushed back, but the press greatly exaggerated the extent of their losses. The longer-term outlook for Ukraine was always bleak – partly because it’s still an extremely corrupt country where Western aid is often misused. So I think Biden had a tactical interest in destroying the pipeline, because this would prevent Germany from changing its mind when the going got tough and withdrawing its support for Ukraine. If there was a cold spell in November or December, that could’ve halted the Ukrainian counter-offensive and put pressure on Germany to lower gas prices by opening up the line. So that might have been one of the administration’s most immediate fears.

But there’s also a long history of American hostility towards this pipeline, stretching back to Bush and Cheney, who saw it as a strategic weapon that Russia could use to keep Germany and Western Europe from supporting NATO. Biden’s thinking was very much in line with this. Now, I don’t know if he wants a war with Russia. I don’t know if he wants a war with China. I don’t know what he wants. But it’s scary as hell, because maybe he doesn’t even know.

AZ: How do you square the overt statements or threats about Nord Stream – made by Biden, Nuland and Blinken – with the apparent need for utmost secrecy?   

SH: That would be a striking contrast if these American officials had a slightly higher IQ. But you know, Nuland is not a rocket scientist. She tends to blurt things out – like just a couple of weeks ago at the Senate hearing, where she commented to everyone’s favourite Senator from Texas that the administration was gratified that Nord Stream 2 was now ‘a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea’. And Biden of course does it too. On February 7th 2022 he met with Olaf Scholz at the White House, and at the press conference afterward he said ‘If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’ If I were in the German Bundestag, I would want to have a public hearing and ask the Scholz government what they knew about the American plan, given that these remarks were being made back in January and February.

AZ: In many of your stories, one of the reasons sources are willing to speak up is that there are conflicts and disputes within the state apparatus.  This was the case in some of your reporting on Syria from 2014, where military leaders clashed with the White House over its ‘red lines’ and the wisdom of bombing the country, given the risks this entailed of setting up a direct clash with the Russians. What is your sense of the potential internal sources of conflict over the Nord Stream operation – or the policy of military escalation in Ukraine generally?  

SH: There can’t have been much happiness about popping it off in late September. I mean, what’s the political goal? Was it strategic for negotiations or is it just to keep Germany and Western Europe in thrall to America? At some point, for economic reasons, Scholz may well have said: I’m out of the game – Ukraine can have a couple more German tanks, but I’m opening up the gas because I’ve got to keep my people warm and keep businesses going. But by putting an end to Nord Stream, Biden took that option off the table. And at that point, if you were a rational person working within the US state, you would say to yourself, this guy has made a choice that’s going to really hurt him in the long run. This kind of action might make it impossible for America to maintain its influence in Western Europe. Because with energy prices skyrocketing, and with little being done to ameliorate the decline in living standards, you’re going to see the far right gaining popularity across various countries.

The US is still sending liquefied natural gas to its European allies, but is charging three to four times more for it. So the president’s basically made a toss, you know, between severing the Germany–Russia link and losing political support for America and some of the states we most value. That would give any rational person in the intelligence community pause for thought. But, obviously, the story shows there were lots of people in that world who believed that developing the capability to destroy the pipelines would be useful to send a message to Putin. Certainly he knew that the US was discussing these options, and he probably knew about the training that was going on in the Baltic. We can’t be certain of this, but it’s hard to do something on that scale in the Baltic Sea without being noticed. Which also makes it unlikely that Sweden and Denmark were completely innocent.

AZ: Can I get your perspective on how the media landscape has changed since you broke a story like Mỹ Lai – or even since the 2000s, when you wrote several major investigative pieces about the War on Terror. Whether you published with a wire service as in Mỹ Lai, or in the Times, New Yorker or LRB, these stories were picked up, heaping pressure on the authorities to do more than issue a bland denial. But so far there has been a cordon sanitaire around this Nord Stream report, at least in the mainstream press. What’s changed?

SH: In 2007 I published a piece called ‘The Redirection’, about how the US had sided with the Sunnis against the Shias in the Middle East. That was very widely circulated. Reporters ambushed the White House spokesperson at the press briefing and asked ‘Is Hersh’s story true? Will you deny it?’ Years later people were still writing to me about it. A few of my New Yorker and New York Times articles had a similar reach – although of course I couldn’t get a paper to take the Mỹ Lai story, which is why I brought it to the Dispatch News Service.

But now you’re talking to a guy who recently learned second-hand about something called Substack and decided to publish there. I mean, we’re very adaptable in this industry. If the big boys want to cosy up to the state, if their idea of an ‘exclusive source’ is a presidential spokesman who whispers something to them after a press conference, then they can continue publishing in their outlets and real investigative journalism can happen elsewhere. These major outlets have run some of the dumbest stories I’ve ever seen in recent years. Back in 2021 there was one about Putin offering bounties to Afghan militants to kill US soldiers during the occupation. And more recently we’ve heard that he’s on steroids, that he has leprosy, that he has various kinds of cancer. You know, just crazy stuff.

So the only thing I can say about what’s changed is, this time I didn’t think of butting my head up against the system. I just went to this new platform and I’m told that the story has had over a million hits already: more than any other post – although the only mainstream media figure who’s called me up about it so far is Tucker Carlson. Self-publishing is terrifying for me, because I come from a very different world. In the old days of the New Yorker, the fact-checking was rigorous, really tough, and that was a great lesson for me. I was hired by the great New Yorker editor William Shawn five minutes after I walked into their offices off the street, and I worked there for two years before eventually leaving to go to the New York Times. Not many people would’ve made that change in the early seventies, since working at the New Yorker was supposed to be the best job in the world. But at the Times, there was a little period of heaven when Nixon was on the rocks, and I had the freedom to write stories that they would run. But by the time Ford got in it was back to the same old shit, so I had to get out of there.

Read on: Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire is available from Verso.

Categories
Uncategorised

Selective History

Between the UK parliamentary elections of June 2017 and December 2019, the Labour Party’s position on Brexit faltered, leading to a catastrophic result at the polls. Having initially supported the outcome of the EU plebiscite, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership came under immense pressure from pro-Remain factions within the party to rally behind the call for a second referendum, a so-called People’s Vote, which, its proponents hoped, would reverse the 2016 result. Key to the disastrous volte face was a network of campaigners, activists and politicians, the left-wing flank of which was largely clustered around the group Another Europe Is Possible. AEIP’s national organizer, Michael Chessum, has now produced a personal account – titled This Is Only the Beginning: The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to The Fall of Corbyn – of these decisive years in the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party, placing them in a wider narrative of the development of the British left since 2010.

Born in 1989, Chessum has, over the past decade, established himself as one of Britain’s foremost professional activists. As a paid student union officer at University College London during the nationwide protests against the Cameron government’s plans to triple university fees and scrap education bursaries for teenagers, he played a leading role in the UCL student occupation and co-founded the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC). But while other figures in that occupation – Ash Sarkar, Owen Jones and Aaron Bastani among them – began to devote their energies to building left-wing media organizations, Chessum continued to concentrate his efforts on activism. Having joined Labour in 2012, he was elected to the first steering committee of Momentum. The following year he became a full-time organizer for AEIP. During his student years, Chessum developed a working relationship with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL), a tiny Trotskyist party best known for its defence of Israel against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, to whom he has remained close ever since. It is a revealing connection, but one he plays down the book, stressing that ‘of all the national-level spokespeople for the student movement of 2010’ he was ‘in a minority, and maybe a minority of one, in at no point joining a Trotskyist organization’.

In This Is Only the Beginning, Chessum recounts the changing orientation of left-wing youth politics in Britain, from horizontalist social movements organized to fight Cameron-era public sector cuts to the electoral machine of Momentum, a left-wing campaign group intended to bolster and organize Corbyn’s support base within and beyond the Labour Party. Chessum splits the previous decade into two dominant forms of political activity: 2010–15 was the heyday of the social movements, led mostly by student activists who later took up positions as journalists, paid university sabbatical officers and campaigners; during 2015–19, however, the youth wing of the autonomous British left joined the Labour Party and its affiliated institutions (notably, Young Labour) and began to professionalize.

While avowedly a partial account, the book relies heavily on interviews as well as personal recollection. These are most productive when Chessum has the courage to listen to those with different perspectives, such as Momentum founder Jon Lansman and former Unite chief of staff Andrew Murray. More often, though, he quotes personal friends who are often operators in the AWL and other sects – sometimes declaring their factional allegiance, sometimes not.

The book is premised on two interdependent theses: first, that ‘Corbynism’ was the product of social-movement politics outside the Labour Party; second, that its decline was set in motion by its drift away from those same social movements. It is this latter argument that its account of the 2015–19 period is principally constructed to support. ‘The new Labour left’, Chessum argues, ‘seemed curiously allergic to devolving power to their own activists and failed to democratize the party during their time in office.’ Through the centralization of Momentum and the control-freakery of a parliamentary office dominated by Corbyn’s key adviser Len McCluskey, Chessum argues that the party under Corbyn became ‘a left-wing version of New Labour.’

Chessum thus makes little attempt to tell the story of the significant events of the early years of Corbyn’s leadership – for instance, the discrediting of the anti-war movement as Britain prepared to bomb Syria in 2015, the ‘chicken coup’ and the retreat of party democracy just after the 2016 conference, and the anti-union laws and seminal trade disputes of the same year (which hampered the capacity of supportive unions, other than Unite, to engage with the project). The 2017 election is described as ‘a moment of intoxication from which the leadership never really came down’, but there is little attempt to analyse the lessons – good or bad – of that extraordinary result.

Instead, his is a tale focused solely on the organizational evolution of Momentum and the fallout of the Brexit referendum. On the former, Chessum offers a valid assessment of the leadership’s failure to support mandatory re-selection of MPs. On the latter, he clings to his interpretation of the People’s Vote campaign as an expression of the social-movement politics that brought Corbyn to power and were, in his view, subsequently undermined by the combined bureaucracies of the party and trade-union movement. After a detailed and rather self-pitying account of the Brexit motions at the 2018 Labour conference – which resulted in a position he accurately describes as a ‘fudge’ – Chessum’s only regret is that he compromised too much with the leadership. Ceding any terrain to elements of the party that advocated respecting the referendum result was, he says, ‘probably the greatest political mistake I have ever made’. Here, he fails to perceive even in hindsight what others saw clearly at the time: that opposition to Brexit had been hijacked by the Labour right, who were cynically using it claw their way back to power.

If Chessum’s strategic prescriptions facilitated the campaign against Corbynism, is his analytical account of the past decade any more convincing? He differentiates his book from other ‘court histories’ of the Corbyn project, stressing that ‘the new British left was not built by professionals, politicians and bureaucrats’. Yet his assessment – that it was built by mass social movements alone – is wildly off the mark. For Chessum, organized elements of the Labour left were completely irrelevant until Corbyn was catapulted to the leadership by extra-parliamentary forces. But Corbyn would never have reached the ballot were it not for organizations such as the Socialist Campaign Group, an assemblage of left-wing Labour MPs, who persistently put forward left leadership candidates in the face of certain defeat during the New Labour period. In fact, the ‘court histories’ Chessum dismisses – including personal memoirs such as Len McCluskey’s Always Red (2022) – demonstrate a far better understanding of the circumstances which allowed Corbyn to scale the heights of the party. Chessum is keen to emphasize the role that student-movement activists went on to play in the Labour left, but his own examples show that few of them were instrumental in Corbyn’s election, and mostly joined after the success of his leadership bid. The bureaucrats he castigates for seizing control of a people-powered movement were not singularly responsible for bringing Corbyn to the helm, but the leader would have failed at the first hurdle were it not for their work.

As the book progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the author experienced the trajectory of the Corbyn project as a series of personal affronts and not simply political setbacks. When, in 2017, he lost a fight within Momentum, he did so having ‘built friendships with its staff and volunteers who had, apparently, engineered the abolition of my role and of the organization’s democracy behind my back’. By 2019, he had ‘stopped attending my local Labour left group because the atmosphere had become so toxic, and my position on Brexit made me a figure of genuine hate’.

Who can blame him? Yet, more than three years on, readers might reasonably expect a little more reflection from the author on his own part in the disaster. Chessum’s account of the 2015–2020 period is hopelessly distorted by both his vanity and his stubborn refusal to engage with the real reasons for the defeat: among them, the Labour leadership’s capitulation to a disingenuous lobby of Europhilic Blairites, who – abetted by Chessum himself – helped to anathematize the party in dozens of electorally crucial constituencies. His telling of the five years prior to Corbynism reads like a sentimental – if not uncritical – tribute to an era in which he was, briefly, the media spokesman for a radical yet unsuccessful extra-parliamentary left movement among British students. Conversely, the work of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and affiliated unions over the same period, which secured the selection of left MPs and rebuilt the left’s base in Young Labour, is airbrushed from history.

What, finally, are we to make of the claim lodged within the title? This is Only the Beginning has been marketed as a manifesto for the future as well as a reckoning with the past, but Chessum’s resentful tone and self-exculpatory motivations prevent it from being either. Chessum argues for a ‘regrouping of a left which is up to the task of transforming politics’, but his subsequent suggestions are as self-serving as his history is self-aggrandizing. ‘What is needed now is a campaign against amnesia, not just with an attempt to teach and share history – essential though this is – but by rebuilding a space for ideological traditions and collective memory in a practical sense’, he argues. Further still, Labour must split, with proportional representation providing the potential of left electoral success unhampered by establishment centrism. Yet, much as he repeatedly calls for movements to be ‘outward facing’, Chessum’s focus is fixed firmly to what existing activists must do: an insularity that is not altogether surprising, since Chessum’s broader political outlook has been shaped by navel-gazing grouplets with equally inflated perceptions of their own significance. There is precious little about building a programme that can resonate across the politically dispossessed working class, many of whom voted for Brexit and will now be failed once again by both its right-wing champions and a left that has branded them bigots.

Throughout This Is Only the Beginning, Chessum constructs a strange antimony between movement politics and bureaucratism. This dichotomy grossly disfigures the reality of the 2015–20 period, in which a core group of veteran socialist MPs and activists, accustomed to a position of toothless protest, was thrust suddenly into leadership of the national opposition and forced to harness what remained of a demoralized network of social movements to rapidly build an electoral base. This recasting of history, and his own role within it, allows the author to misrepresent his single-minded pursuit of an anti-Brexit Labour position as an assertion of movement-power against party-power.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this distortion is intended to burnish Chessum’s own image, especially given the self-regarding tone with which he describes key moments in the decade (in Spring of 2015, he watched Corbyn’s leadership take shape from Athens ‘in between covering the Greek left’s ill-fated confrontation with the Eurogroup for the New Statesman and being teargassed in Syntagma Square’; in September, despite only recently wondering whether ‘remaining in Labour is a good use of anyone’s time’, he returned to Britain graciously having decided he would ‘climb [Momentum’s] structures and build for it a democratic youth organization’). Selective deployment of the truth unfortunately colours Chessum’s general approach to his subject. The result is a book that at best reads as a litany of CV points from a mediocre career in politics, and at worst whitewashes its author’s full-throated participation in one of the most significant causes of the Corbyn movement’s downfall.

Read on: Daniel Finn, ‘Crosscurrents’, NLR 118.

Categories
Uncategorised

Sleepwalking Elites

President Joe Biden departs, followed by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz after a news conference in the East Room of the White House, Monday, Feb. 7, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

When I studied modern history and the wars of the eighteenth century at school, it seemed absurd to me that hundreds of thousands of people had died for some remote fortress or a handful of small villages. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) concluded with the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt, in which the towns of Breisach and Kehl on the Rhine and Pinerolo in Piedmont changed hands. In that war, between 700,000 and 1.2 million people died, out of a European population around 120 million including Russia. Scaled up to the current population, the equivalent death-toll would be between 4.2 and 7.2 million.

Ten years ago, nobody could have imagined that Europe would risk such a catastrophe for the sake of the Donbass – a region that few of us would have been able to locate on a map. But now this is a plausible outcome of the constantly escalating conflict in Ukraine. Below is a list, compiled by the State Department, of weapons systems, munitions, drones, missiles, etc. given by the United States to Ukraine over the course of the war. I provide it not out of fastidiousness, but to highlight the cumulative effect of arms shipment after arms shipment:

  • Over 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft systems;
  • Over 8,500 Javelin anti-armor systems;
  • Over 50,000 other anti-armor systems and munitions;
  • Over 700 Switchblade Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • 160 155mm Howitzers and up to 1,094,000 155mm artillery rounds;
  • Over 5,800 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds;
  • 10,200 155mm rounds of Remote Anti-Armor Mine (RAAM) Systems;
  • 100,000 rounds of 125mm tank ammunition;
  • 45,000 152mm artillery rounds;
  • 20,000 122mm artillery rounds;
  • 50,000 122mm GRAD rockets;
  • 72 105mm Howitzers and 370,000 105mm artillery rounds;
  • 298 Tactical Vehicles to tow weapons;
  • 34 Tactical Vehicles to recover equipment;
  • 30 ammunition support vehicles;
  • 38 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and ammunition;
  • 30 120mm mortar systems and approximately 166,000 120mm mortar rounds;
  • 10 82mm mortar systems;
  • 10 60mm mortar systems;
  • 2,590 Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles;
  • 545,000 rounds of 25mm ammunition;
  • 120mm ammunition;
  • Ten Command Post vehicles;
  • One Patriot air defense battery and munitions;
  • Eight National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) and munitions;
  • Missiles for HAWK air defense systems;
  • RIM-7 missiles for air defense;
  • 12 Avenger air defense systems;
  • High-speed Anti-radiation missiles (HARMs);
  • Precision aerial munitions;
  • 4,000 Zuni aircraft rockets;
  • 20 Mi-17 helicopters;
  • 31 Abrams tanks;
  • 45 T-72B tanks;
  • 109 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles;
  • Over 1,700 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs);
  • Over 100 light tactical vehicles;
  • 44 trucks and 88 trailers to transport heavy equipment;
  • 90 Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers;
  • 300 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers;
  • 250 M1117 Armored Security Vehicles;
  • 580 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs);
  • Six armored utility trucks;
  • Mine clearing equipment and systems;
  • Over 13,000 grenade launchers and small arms;
  • Over 111,000,000 rounds of small arms ammunition;
  • Over 75,000 sets of body armor and helmets;
  • Approximately 1,800 Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • Laser-guided rocket systems;
  • Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • 15 Scan Eagle Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • Two radars for Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • Unmanned Coastal Defense Vessels;
  • Over 50 counter-artillery radars;
  • Four counter-mortar radars;
  • 20 multi-mission radars;
  • Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems and equipment;
  • Counter air defense capability;
  • Ten air surveillance radars;
  • Two harpoon coastal defense systems;
  • 58 coastal and riverine patrol boats;
  • M18A1 Claymore anti-personnel munitions;
  • C-4 explosives, demolition munitions, and demolition equipment for obstacle clearing;
  • Obstacle emplacement equipment;
  • Tactical secure communications systems;
  • Four satellite communications antennas;
  • SATCOM terminals and services;
  • Thousands of night vision devices, surveillance systems, thermal imagery systems, optics, and laser rangefinders;
  • Commercial satellite imagery services;
  • Explosive ordnance disposal equipment and protective gear;
  • Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear protective equipment;
  • 100 armored medical treatment vehicles;
  • Over 350 generators;
  • Medical supplies to include first aid kits, bandages, monitors, and other equipment;
  • Electronic jamming equipment;
  • Field equipment, cold weather gear, and spare parts;
  • Funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment.

The State Department goes on to say that

As of 9 September 2022, nearly 50 Allies and partner countries have provided security assistance to Ukraine. Among their many contributions, Allies and partners have delivered 10 long-range Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 178 long-range artillery systems, nearly 100,000 rounds of long-range artillery ammunition, nearly 250,000 anti-tank munitions, 359 tanks, 629 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), 8,214 short-range air defense missiles, and 88 lethal UAVs.  Since February 24, Allies and partners worldwide have provided or committed over $13 billion in security assistance.

Some may notice that the list doesn’t specify exactly how many ‘Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems’ have been provided, nor does it provide any precise information on the quantity of several other pieces of military equipment (this is still a great improvement in transparency compared to European states, though, who routinely invoke ‘security concerns’ to dismiss questions about the weapons they’re sending to Kiev). We can see that the 31 Abrams tanks, object of much discussion, aren’t in fact the first tanks sent to Ukraine; 41 recycled ex-Soviet T-72Bs had already been sent, along with 1,700 Humvees and 109 Bradley Fighting Vehicles (not to mention naval drones).

Faced with this avalanche of armaments, we might ask why nobody is talking about the profits of the defence industry. In the past, arms dealers would have at least been denounced for harvesting the spoils of war. Today, the Financial Times merely complains that US suppliers are reaching the limits of their productive capacities and would struggle to meet demand if another front was to open. An incredible torpor has taken hold of Western public opinion. ‘Peace-washing’ is the foreign-policy hawk’s new pastime: accelerating the war through the ever-increasing provision of weapons is seen as the best way to accelerate peace – because, in the absence of those arms, Russia would supposedly invade the Baltic states, followed by Poland and Finland. Bombs and tanks are seen as essential to curb a dreaded Muscovite imperialism, even though the repeated failure of Russian offensives has undermined any notion of its might, and Russia’s GDP – along with its industrial capacities – remains inferior to that of semi-peripheral countries like Italy.

What seems to have come back into fashion, at least in the US, is the military-Keynesianism Michael Klare has taught us so much about: the revival of the economy through war. But compared to the military-Keynesianism of the 1960s – Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’, financed at least in part by the productive boom generated by the Vietnam War – what’s underway today has a more archaic flavour. It evokes the first two years of WWI, those months in which the US officially sat on the fence, furnishing the arsenals of the European powers locked in battle against the central powers (Germany, the Habsburg Empire, and later the Ottoman Empire), and witnessed the evisceration of the planetary supremacy of the British Navy, before intervening once the enemy was practically exhausted (even though earlier involvement may have spared them the Russian Revolution).

Much like today, the US extracted profit from a war fought on a faraway continent (a situation that was to recur with the European and Asian theatres of WWII). Then, as now, there’s something particularly vile – if you’ll permit the term – about the US telling its proxy warriors: we must be united in the defence of democracy and freedom against authoritarianism; we’ll arm you, but you do the dying. Oh, and your country will be pulverised in the process. (‘Armiamoci e partite’ was a popular early twentieth-century riposte to such militarism.)

The similarities don’t stop there. The strongest resemblance between past and present lies in the elite somnambulism bringing us to the brink of world war and nuclear holocaust. I’m referring here to a work – often cited but rarely read – by the Australian historian Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2013). The most charitable way to explain Joe Biden’s assertion that sending tanks to Ukraine ‘is not an offensive threat to Russia’, is that he’s become a Clarkian sleepwalker. Either that, or he is just brazenly, criminally reckless. Of course, the function of the media should be to underscore the potential consequences of such actions; but even the most respectable publications are currently engaged in out-hawking one another. On 30 January, Foreign Affairs published what looked like a promising article by Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, entitled ‘How To Get A Breakthrough In Ukraine’. The subtitle, ‘The Case Against Incrementalism’, was even more encouraging. Was this, at last, an argument against escalation from a uniquely cool-headed outlet? Forget it. McFaul’s point was that US should halt the gradual provision of arms and instead unload a massive amount of cutting-edge weaponry on Ukraine in the hope of securing a crushing victory. While conceding that ‘there are risks to providing more and better weapons’, he noted that these were outweighed by the ‘risks of not doing so’.

What are the risks of escalation? Last May, I wrote for Sidecar that

contrary to what common sense would dictate, the stalling of Putin’s military advance has actually undermined the hopes for peace. The Kremlin could never expose itself to Russian public opinion and sit down for talks without having achieved any of its war aims, for that would highlight the failure of its offensive. And NATO, for its part, has no interest in de-escalating the conflict. It will not spare Russia from punishment, either for its atrocities in Bucha or its insubordination before the US hegemon . . . As Russia comes unstuck in Ukraine, its enemies are no longer compelled to negotiate; they therefore become more intransigent and change the negotiating terms, leading Russia to intensify its efforts, and so on. The first victim of this cycle is the Ukrainian people. The outcome of stalling negotiations is the shelling of more cities and the death of more civilians. The West will continue to trumpet its values over their corpses (unless it decides to intervene directly and trigger a nuclear war). To paraphrase an old saying: it’s easy to play the hero when someone else’s neck is on the line.

Compared to the spring of last year, the current situation is infinitely worse. Positions are even more entrenched. For Putin the war has become a matter of life and death, with Russia’s very existence on the line. The proof of this lies in the position taken up by the ECR Group, the conservative bloc in the European Parliament, which claimed in a statement on 31 January that the only possible outcome of the war was Russia’s break-up into different states:

It is naive to think that the Russian Federation can remain within the same constitutional and territorial framework. Taking into account the national and ethnic map of the territories of the Russian Federation, we should discuss the prospects for the creation of free and independent states in the post-Russian space, as well as the prospects for their stability and prosperity.

The more likely this result, the more dangerous the ‘Russian bear’ will become (how expressive are these ancient stereotypes!). The US, meanwhile, is growing increasingly belligerent – not only towards Moscow, but towards Beijing. Let’s not forget that Washington has initiated a de facto technological world war on China – with the head of the US Air Mobility Command, Miki Minihan, predicting an all-out war in 2025.

Numbed by relentless propaganda, public opinion finds itself in a state of political catalepsy. Everyone since Dr Johnson has repeated the axiom that truth is the first casualty of war, but few have stopped to ask which truths are being killed in this war. The Russians have surely been asked to swallow many lies. But what fables have we been told? For months, we heard that the Russians had bombarded a nuclear plant occupied by the Russian army: that is, that they had attacked themselves. It was also suggested that they blew up their own gas pipeline last September. Only the Russians bomb infrastructure and civilians, force young men into battle and censor the realities of war – never our side. Once it was usual to discuss the role of ‘embedded’ correspondents on the frontlines. Now we unflinchingly accept their recruitment, replete with helmets and bulletproof vests.

As I’ll never tire of saying: in war, the law of the excluded middle does not apply. It’s simply not the case that if one side is wrong, the other must be right; the negation of a falsehood is not by definition true. Everyone can be in the wrong, everyone can be lying. NATO’s aggression and expansionism doesn’t turn Putin into an innocent little lamb. And Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict. In today’s world, we rely on elites – technocrats, the ‘cognitive aristocracy’ – to pilot us through perilous waters with their superior wisdom. But what does this stratum of decision-makers really know? Judging from the shipwreck they’re heading towards at top speed, the answer is: not much.

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘Five Wars in One’, NLR 137.

Categories
Uncategorised

Zeno’s Return

Zeno Cosini has difficulty lying, though not for lack of trying. Over and over, he tries to fib, but his inventions have a funny way of hardening into realities. He proposes to a woman as a desperate joke – only to end up marrying her. He tells a friend that his daughter is ill to escape a dull social engagement – only to find that the girl has come down with a fever. The narrator of Italo Svevo’s modernist masterpiece is an honest man despite himself, even and especially when he is fashioning the complex and contradictory fiction of the self.

Zeno’s Conscience was published in 1923, when selves were forged on Freudian’s fainting sofas. Accordingly, it takes the form of journal entries that its narrator maintains at the behest of his psychoanalyst. The disgruntled doctor introduces his client’s confessions by noting that he is publishing them ‘in revenge’; Zeno has betrayed him, he tells us, by abandoning analysis. But the patient persists with one aspect of his treatment, even when he no longer has any hope of being healed: like a true incurable, he goes on writing, scribbling the last sections of Zeno’s Conscience long after he accepted the intransigence of his Oedipus complex and his fears of castration. As it turns out, his graphomania persists even when his native novel is over: A Very Old Man, newly translated by Felicia Randall and published by New York Review Classics last year, contains a new store of Zeno’s post-analysis reflections. Svevo intended to massage the five interlinked pieces that comprise the volume into a full-fledged sequel, but he died in 1928, before he had the chance. The texts he left behind are charming if uneven, not quite stories so much as sketches that pick up where the first book left off.

Zeno’s Conscience begins with Zeno’s childhood recollections and weaves, with non-linear and free-associative good humor, to 1916, when he is well on his way to middle age. Its setting is Trieste, the initially Austro-Hungarian and subsequently Italian city where Zeno leads an outwardly comfortable (if inwardly overwrought) life. His journal is a witty record of his central biographical episodes: the death of his father, his unexpectedly affectionate marriage to the sister of the woman he thought he loved, his long-standing affair with a talentless singer, and the business that he and his brother-in-law jointly mismanage into bankruptcy.

Yet the drama and delight of Zeno’s Conscience are generated less by these bourgeois staples than by the narrator’s gift for creating problems for himself. Zeno is addicted to various fictions, foremost among them the fiction of his own frailty. As he describes his hypochondria, ‘Disease is a conviction, and I was born with that conviction’. Near the end of the first book, he is thrilled to receive a provisional diagnosis of diabetes, which at last confirms his conception of himself as an invalid; when further testing reveals that he is not diabetic after all, he remains unwilling to accept the sunny news. Perhaps Zeno’s real affliction is the highly modern malady of excessive self-awareness: ‘health doesn’t analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves’, he meditates at one point. Or perhaps he suffers from the degenerative disease of life itself. ‘Unlike other sicknesses’, he writes in the last section Zeno’s Conscience, ‘life is always fatal. It doesn’t tolerate therapies’. 

Another of Zeno’s most cherished fictions is that of his own resolve. The word ‘resolution’ occurs more than twenty times in William Weaver’s nimble translation of Zeno’s Conscience and six times in Randall’s A Very Old Man. (Twice, these resolutions are ‘ironclad’.) But Zeno is not capable of honouring a single one of these commitments, the ironclad ones least of all. In university, he resolves to dedicate himself to chemistry, then law, but cannot commit to a field and goes on switching back and forth; later, he resolves to leave his mistress but cannot bring himself to give her up, and the affair comes to an end only when she runs off with her music teacher. Perhaps Zeno’s most hilariously inefficacious resolutions concern his smoking habit. He is forever lighting last cigarettes, vowing over and over to quit for good. ‘In my desire to quit smoking altogether, I had never even considered the possibility of smoking less’, he explains, affably unreasonable as ever. He even visits a doctor who locks him in a room – and immediately bribes the attendant on guard to sneak him contraband cigarettes, then to free him. Why does he insist on going to the clinic, only to clamber out the window at the first opportunity? Perhaps the best answer is only the comic spectacle of his consistent inconsistency.

* * *

In A Very Old Man, Zeno is still the same cheerfully inconstant specimen, only now he is ‘very old’. The book opens in 1928, twelve years after the first set of journal entries ended and eight years after Trieste has been incorporated into Italy. Its contents are evidently unfinished drafts, riddled with redundant chunks of exposition and chronological discrepancies. Sometimes Zeno is sixty-one, sometimes sixty-three, sometimes seventy. His daughter, Antonia, is now a full-blown adult, and his son, Alfio, has soured into a moody teenager. Both characters are older than they have any right to be, given that the latter was a baby and the former a young child when Zeno’s Conscience ended. But these are quibbles, inimical to Zeno’s own eccentric logic. He has always been an unreliable narrator, and even if the ages are wrong, the emotional dynamics are right. What matters is that neither sibling has grown into a very likeable person.

Antonia is a bore, drunk on her own righteousness.  ‘I like to think she inherited the virtue from her mother and the exaggeration from me’, Zeno jokes.  Her husband, Valentino, is a stuffy businessman who dies of ‘premature aging’. The couple’s seven-year-old child, Umbertino, is the most redeeming consequence of their otherwise tedious union, and Zeno delights in his morning walks with his tirelessly curious grandson. Alfio, for his part, has become even more intolerable than his sister. An aspiring artist of staggering self-importance and enormous fragility, he is slow to compromise and quick to take offense. Zeno makes several concessions – he buys two of the boy’s paintings and even talks himself into admiring one of them – before wounding his son, perhaps irreparably, by mocking modern art at lunch.

Has Zeno matured now that he is a ‘very old man’? Not a whit, of course. True to form, he has not even managed to quit smoking. If Valentino died of premature aging, then Zeno survives by clinging to endless adolescence. He reports that ‘there is one great difference between the state of mind in which I told my life the first time, and this one. My situation has grown simpler. I continue to struggle between past and present, but hope doesn’t try to come into it, that anxious hope that belongs to the future.’ But he is for the most part the same loveable neurotic. He still laughs at his own pathologies – ‘I’m unable to quit smoking because my determination collapses when the news is good, when it’s bad, and when there’s no news at all’, he tells a friend – and he still relishes every sign of sickness.  

And he is still the same master of rationalization: he claims he is keeping the deleterious effects of aging at bay by demonstrating to nature that he remains fit for procreation, that is, by having an affair with a younger woman. ‘Let’s face it’, he writes, ‘Mother Nature is maniacal: she has a mania for reproduction. She’ll keep an organism alive so long as there’s hope it will reproduce. Then she kills it, in many and varied ways….I wanted to trick Mother nature and make her think I was still fit for reproduction, so I found myself a mistress’. He assures us that ‘it wasn’t lechery. I was thinking about death’. He does not especially care for his new lover, a cigarette vendor who has undoubtedly sold him many last smokes, but he knows that to give up on mischief is to give up on vivacity altogether.

Most importantly, the very old man is still a fabulist, and his lies still have marvellous staying power. To save face in front of staid Valentino, he pretends he has concluded a business deal that he is then obligated to go out and conclude. As ever, his circumstances clash with his imaginings – and as ever, it is reality that ultimately gives way and transforms.

* * *

Almost all of Svevo’s central characters resemble Zeno in leading double lives: lives of the imagination that contrast sharply with their lives at the office. In public, they are businessmen; in private, they are artists. ‘His official career was a quite subordinate post in an insurance society….His other career was literary’, Svevo writes of the protagonist of his second novel, As a Man Grows Older. In his gem of a novella, A Perfect Hoax, Mario is another aging writer with an office job who prides himself on the novel he wrote forty years prior. Still, Mario’s decades of inactivity are ‘full of dreams and void of any troublesome experience’, for he persists in regarding himself as ‘destined for glory’. It is this unflagging hope, so easily exploitable, that is the basis of the ‘perfect hoax’ of the title. When Mario’s malicious friend tells him that a major publisher wishes to reissue his book for the German-language market, he is eager to believe the lie.

But in Svevo’s own case, the fiction came true – though for many years, he resembled his obscure characters. Half-Italian and half-German-Jewish Aron Ettore Schmitz was working as a bank clerk in Trieste when he self-published his first novel, A Life, under the curious pseudonym ‘Italo Svevo’ (literally, ‘the Italian Swabian’). The book was roundly ignored. Schmitz continued working in the office, married, and became a partner in his father-in-law’s firm, which manufactured maritime paint. When he came out with the quietly harrowing As a Man Grows Older, it, too, was received with indifference. Schmitz had long retired Italo Svevo when he engaged a young English tutor in preparation for a business trip to England. The tutor was also a writer, and the two men grew close, meeting several times a week and exchanging works in progress. In 1926, when Schmitz sent his friend the manuscript of Zeno’s Conscience, his former tutor championed the text among his literary contacts in Paris.

The tutor was none other than James Joyce, and his circle was soon hailing Zeno’s creator as ‘the Italian Proust’. At last, Schmitz and Svevo converged. Until his death in 1928, Svevo watched his pseudonym subsume his humdrum identity. In exactly the sort of jolting twist that occurs so often in his novels, the old man’s fantasies crystallized into fact.

* * *

In A Perfect Hoax, the aging writer Mario is the victim of a ruse – and yet at least one part of it comes true. There may be no publisher set on resurrecting Mario’s forgotten novel, but the money he invests in expectation of an advance grows in value, until at last he finds himself enriched by a fake deal. More importantly, it emerges that Mario’s attachment to his art is too robust to be undermined by mockery or lack of recognition. For years, he has diverted himself by writing short fables, and in the wake of his humiliation, he discovers that it is not the idea of writing but writing itself that attracts him. The fables are ‘quite pure, not sullied by the hoax’. What begins as a fraud transforms into a premonition. He is the great writer he at first just imagined he was.

In Zeno’s case, the same structure recurs. He sets his heart on marrying the beautiful Ada, with whom he is painfully in love, and when she rejects him, he asks for the hand of her equally beautiful sister, Alberta; when she, too, turns him down, he proposes to plain, kindly Augusta. She initially replies, ‘you’re joking’, but she is soon coaxed into accepting. The real joke is on Zeno, not only because he has to follow through with the wedding, but because the ensuing union is so improbably happy. Ada is right to remark, ‘never did a man who thought he was acting hastily behave more wisely than you’.

Augusta is the right choice largely because she perceives from the first that Zeno’s fabrications are more important than any accurate reports could be. When he entertains the family with outrageous tall tales, his future bride understands at once that his stories are ‘more precious’ by virtue of their falsity. ‘As I had invented them’, Zeno explains, ‘they were more mine than if fate visited them upon me’. In A Very Old Man, he affirms her preference for fiction once again.  ‘The only thing that matters in life is collecting one’s thoughts’, he writes.

When everybody else understands this as clearly as I do, they will all write. Life will be literaturized. Half of humanity will devote itself to reading and studying what the other half has put down. And contemplation will take up as much time as possible – time to be subtracted from horrid real life. If one part of humanity rebels and refuses to read the lucubrations of the other part, so much the better. Each person will read himself. And whether each life becomes clearer or murkier, it will evolve, correct, crystallize.

He prizes his earlier journals because ‘the part of my life described there is the only part I have lived’. There is no Zeno outside of his own exercises in self-fashioning, but by the same token, he really is the person he at first only pretended to be. There is, he knows, no other way to become someone: the only thing to do with ‘horrid real life’ is to ‘literaturize’ it.     

Appropriately enough, Zeno’s final confession in Zeno’s Conscience is that the rest of the book is untrue. He concedes that he ‘invented’ everything in his journal, but consoles us, ‘inventing is a creation, not a lie. Mine were inventions like those of a fever, which walk around the room so that you see them from every side, and then they touch you. They had the solidity, the colour, the insolence of living things’. Zeno himself ‘literaturizes’ constantly. He acts as if he were on the verge of quitting smoking because ‘the taste of a cigarette is more intense when it’s your last’, and the pretext rearranges the world until it is in fact sharper and more beautiful. A last cigarette is more potent than a normal cigarette, even if it is the first of many. When Zeno resolves to quit smoking, when he produces a second set of embellishments about his life as a very old man, when he convinces himself that his affair is an attempt to cheat nature, when Schmitz postures as Svevo – these are the special sort of lies that come to life. In a word, fictions.

Read on: Christopher Prendergast, ‘Modernism’s Nightmare’, NLR 10.

Categories
Uncategorised

Renovation in Bolivia?

The 2020 Bolivian general election marked the return of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party to government after it was deposed by a right-wing coup. Since then, the leftist administration of Luis ‘Lucho’ Arce Catacora has tried to fortify itself against another antidemocratic campaign of destabilization by projecting an image of unity and strength. Yet during Arce’s tenure, the internal components of the MAS have grown increasingly discordant – with each factional dispute amplified by a hostile media. The respective supporters of president Arce, vice-president David Choquehuanca, and former president Evo Morales have each been vying for power, attempting to outmanoeuvre their factional opponents ahead of the 2025 elections. Meanwhile, centrifugal tendencies on the right have become even more pronounced, with different currents blaming one another for the left’s ascendancy. The result is an ongoing process of fragmentation across Bolivia’s two major political blocs, neither of which is capable of articulating a coherent ideological project. The country’s historic fault-lines – separating the cities from the countryside; indigenous masses from non-indigenous elites; the south and the east from the north and the west; the media, universities and middle classes from peasant confederations and workers’ unions; agro-industrial, hydrocarbon and financial capitalists from a burgeoning informal proletariat – no longer find self-evident political articulation in two antipodal camps. Beneath the superficial split between masistas and anti-masistas lies a more complex patchwork of rivalries and power centres.

In many respects, the disunity on both sides can be traced back to the 2019 coup d’état. Morales, who was propelled to power by the revolutionary upheavals of the new millennium, had become Bolivia’s longest-serving president and was constitutionally unable to seek re-election. Yet in 2016 he attempted to override these limits through a series of legal and political manipulations. In February of that year, he held a referendum on whether to amend the constitution to allow him to campaign for a fourth term. When 51% of the electorate voted ‘No’, he ignored the results and ran for the presidency anyway, on the basis of a dubious legal verdict from the country’s highest electoral tribunal. This fiasco became a call to arms among middle-class rebels and regional civic committees bent on ousting the MAS.

Bolivia’s electoral system requires the leading presidential candidate to secure more than 50% of the vote, or more than 40% of the vote plus a margin of 10% over the second-place candidate, to avoid a run-off. On the evening of the general election, in late October 2019, the ‘quick count’ tally showed Morales with 45%, compared to 38% for the centre-right runner-up Carlos Mesa. Then, after an unexplained delay of 22 hours, the updated count indicated Morales enjoying a lead over Mesa in excess of 10 points, obviating the need for a second round. The late shift in votes to Morales’s advantage was plausible given the demographics of the regions where ballots were counted later in the process, but the delay between the two tallies created the impression of foul-play. Though it could not provide any evidence, the entire opposition cried fraud – as did the Organization of American States. Violent protests against Morales erupted across the country, and the far-right of the eastern lowlands, backed by the military and police, launched a soft-coup that forced his resignation. The coup was petit-bourgeois and mestizo in composition, with some plebeian layers drawn into the antimasista hysteria. Its rallying cry was one of pure negation: ‘Fuera Evo’. No positive, alternative agenda was ever advanced by its leaders. Yet there was never any doubt about whose interests they were serving: those of agro-industrial, financial and hydrocarbon capital.

The coup-plotters succeeded in installing Jeanine Áñez, an ultra-conservative Catholic senator from Beni whose party had won only 4% in the previous election. With Morales and his inner-circle exiled to Mexico and Argentina, the obvious task for Áñez was to dismantle the statist elements of the MAS era – such as the quasi nationalization of hydrocarbons – and reverse collective indigenous rights. With the popular classes caught in a momentary stupor, and left-wing forces weakened by years of clientelist integration into the state under Morales, Áñez had the tools for oligarchic restoration at her disposal. Yet her regime was undermined from the start by its own ideological and practical excesses: above all, state repression – 36 assassinated, 80 injured, hundreds detained and exiled – and bureaucratic ineptitude in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. It had no plan to assemble a viable support base or manage the country’s economic instability. Instead, its stand-out features were brutal state violence, brazen corruption, administrative incompetence and a colossal decline in living standards, as the growth rate plummeted in 2020 and more than 3 million Bolivians became unable to meet their basic nutritional needs. The government also unleashed a new, virulent wave of anti-indigenous racism in civil society, with the dog whistles of state officials providing a soundtrack.   

As such, Áñez rapidly concentrated workers and peasants into a powerful opposition force, while at the same time losing the loyalty of the petit-bourgeois layers that had originally supported the coup. Amid the ongoing economic and health crises, significant parts of the new middle-class – forged during the expansionary period under Morales – were horrified to find themselves returned to proletarian or lumpen status. At the same time, social movements and unions, which were initially slow to respond to the coup, managed to rally their forces, erecting street barricades and disrupting supply chains. By the time the general election of December 2020 rolled around, the golpistas, having failed to prevent the MAS from running, had split into three rival presidential campaigns. Carlos Mesa’s centre-right Citizen Community led the pack, followed in the distance by the right-wing extremist Luis Fernando Camacho, followed by Áñez, who saw the writing on the wall and eventually withdrew from the race.

*

All those who had participated in the disaster of the Áñez administration were duly punished by the electorate. Arce returned the MAS to office with a decisive 55% of the vote, while Mesa obtained a paltry 29%. The MAS won in five of nine departments, with a majority in both houses of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly. Elements of the ‘undecided’ middle class that had shifted right in support of the coup had now swung back behind Arce – who benefited from making the economic crisis the leitmotif of his campaign. He admitted the errors of past MAS administrations, called for a national ‘renovation’ and promised to restore stability. Nostalgia for the bonanza years during the first stretch of Morales’s rule (2006-14) was a fire easily stoked. Arce could point to his relatively orthodox reign as MAS finance minister during an era of high commodity prices, dynamic capitalist accumulation, historic profits in extractive sectors and modest improvements in the livelihood of the urban working class and peasantry. In the end, he performed better throughout the west of the country than Morales did in 2019. Even in the eastern department of Santa Cruz, where Camacho secured 45%, Arce still bested Morales’s previous vote share. Polls had indicated a modest advantage for MAS in the first round, but no one anticipated this resounding victory.

Morales was still abroad during the 2020 ballot, yet he had personally selected Arce as the candidate after David Choquehuanca had been put forward by the grassroots, including the coalition of social movements known as the Unity Pact. Morales only reluctantly agreed to include Choquehuanca on the ticket at the Unity Pact’s insistence, and the MAS campaign slogan – ‘Lucho y David, un solo corazón’ – betrayed some anxiety about the divisions developing within the party. Unlike Choquehuanca, Arce was non-indigenous, had never shown any leadership ambitions, and had no social base of his own, so his ability to fill Morales’s shoes was questionable. Yet the election results made clear that masismo could not be reduced to evismo. His victory showed that it was possible to win without the party’s historic caudillo, while demonstrating the enduring popularity of the MAS’s neodevelopmentalist plurinational model.

Arce was raised in La Paz, the son of teachers, and earned an undergraduate degree at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, specializing in accounting. During his undergraduate years he was briefly affiliated with Socialist Party-One, whose intellectual and political north star, Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, had been assassinated by the Luis García Mesa dictatorship in 1980, when Arce was 17 years old. But unlike virtually all other leading figures of the MAS, Arce has no real history of involvement in the politics of indigenous liberation, social movements or trade union struggle. After graduating, he worked at various positions in the Central Bank, taking a brief hiatus to earn a Masters in economics from Warwick University.

Arce became Morales’s first finance minister in 2006 and remained in post for almost the entirety of the Morales era, only stepping aside from 2017 to 2019 to receive treatment for a kidney cancer diagnosis. As Finance Minister, he ran a tight ship, isolating his office from social-movement pressure and adhering rigidly to low inflation targets. Christopher Sabatini, a senior research fellow at Chatham house, described him as ‘a technocratic, moderate force within the Morales government’ who ‘maintained good relations with the international financial institutions and investors.’ Even in the high-MAS era of 2006-2014, there was never a thoroughgoing transformation of the country’s productive structure, thanks in part to Arce’s caution; yet wealth was distributed to the poorest so long as commodity prices remained high.

Now, two years into Arce’s tenure, how can we characterize his record? The president fulfilled his first policy commitments immediately upon taking office, including cash transfers of $140 per month to roughly a third of the population, a symbolic tax on large domestic fortunes and investigations into the repression of the Áñez regime. Yet, on the whole, his administration is a workaday technocracy, lacking any of the transformative aspirations that the early Morales period kindled among the poor and dispossessed. As sociologist Vladimir Mendoza Manjón has noted, the prevailing view within Arce’s cabinet is that the era of transformation has come to an end. Instead, the current period demands a defensive, administrative posture: at best, the consolidation of previous gains amid more challenging material conditions. The aim is to prioritize political stability and slowly reactivate the project of neodevelopmental capitalist modernization. This is likely to be Arce’s only horizon of possibility in the absence of serious pressure from social movements – whose supporters have been isolated within the government, controlling only the ministries of Education and Rural Culture and Development. Meanwhile, the Finance Ministry remains subject to Arce’s personal oversight. Lower-level functionaries from the Morales era have been elevated, while virtually none of the old guard remains in post. Evistas are entirely absent from Arce’s inner circle. In this sense at least, the promised ‘renovation’ has begun in earnest.

The Pink Tide leader whom Arce most closely resembles is perhaps Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. Although he lacks Correa’s repressive bent when dealing with opponents to his left, Arce’s approach to statecraft is similarly top-down and economistic. It rests on socially-isolated planning, pragmatic concessions to the balance of forces (statically understood), and technical fixes to political problems. Yet Arce governs without anything approximate to Correa’s hegemony at the height of the commodities boom. Bolivia’s commodities downturn began in 2014, driven by a collapse in natural gas prices, and its economy steadily declined until 2019, before contracting dramatically – by 8.7% – in 2020. This crisis was not merely a conjunctural effect of the pandemic; it was also the result of underlying structural problems, including the end of the gas cycle. Gas rents accruing to the state were $3.5 billion in 2013, but just $1.5 billion in 2017. Structural investment problems in the gas sector have persisted from the Morales era to the present, with fiscal and commercial deficits growing in recent years. Foreign reserves reached a peak of $15 billion in 2014, but have been drawn down ever since to finance public spending commitments amid lower state revenue.

The recent dynamics of the world market have had negative consequences for Latin America and the Caribbean – but, for various reasons, Bolivia has so far been an outlier. Regionally, strong inflationary pressures, weak job growth and falling investment predominate. The Russian war on Ukraine has limited the international food supply and driven up energy prices, compounding the problems set in motion by the pandemic and the afterlife of the 2008 financial crash. As a gas exporter, however, Bolivia has benefited from higher prices, temporarily transforming its commercial deficit into a surplus. And because the country continues to produce most of its food domestically, with targeted export controls on select agricultural exports, pressures on food prices have been tempered. Together with a longstanding state subsidy for domestic gas consumption, this helps to explain why Bolivia’s 2022 inflation rate was the lowest in the region: a trend that helps to explain Arce’s relatively strong approval ratings. Over the next decade, the country’s political economy – and ecologically-inflected class struggles – will be shaped by the nascent lithium-mining industry. But as yet this process is only in its infancy, and is unlikely to play a major role in the current administration.

*

Although Arce initially pledged to serve for only one term, now there is every indication he will seek to run again in 2025, as the constitution permits. But Morales, despite having lower approval ratings than both Arce and Choquehuanca, retains a powerful capacity for social mobilization, continues to control the MAS, and is open about his plan to become its candidate in 2025. When he returned from exile in November 2020, hundreds of indigenous supporters poured onto the streets to greet him. The following year, he organized the dramatic Marcha por la Patria: a mobilization that was at once a real defence of the Arce administration against destabilization threats from the opposition, and a signal to the country – including Arce and Choquehuanca – that the former president still wields the kind of social power that is impossible to tabulate in polling data. Álvaro García Linera, who served as vice-president from 2006 to 2019, asserts that Morales remains the indispensable ‘social and political leader’ of the party, while Arce is merely the ‘political and governmental leader’. For García Linera, the MAS project demands that both statesmen triangulate with each other and with the party’s loose federation of social organizations. Between these three elements, he says, ‘there has to be an ensemble of articulations, which are not always easy.’ Out of office, Morales has readopted the militant rhetoric of his early political career; but in policy terms, it is doubtful that a new Morales government would significantly diverge from Arce’s. After all, Morales more or less handed over the economy to Arce for the duration of his time in office, and the present material situation means that implementing any left-populist inclination would be an uphill battle.

Since returning to Bolivia, Morales has worked diligently to recover his lost authority. Overriding local resistance, he has used his position as leader of the MAS to dictate the party’s lists of candidates for municipal mayors and departmental governors in regional elections. In the process, several high-profile figures have been driven out of the party – including Eva Copa, the masista president of the Senate during the Áñez government, and Rolando Cuéllar, former leader of the Eastern Bloc of the party in Santa Cruz. (Copa ran under the Jallalla party banner instead and secured an overwhelming mandate as the new mayor of El Alto.) While trying to avoid the impression of a major split with Arce himself, Morales has openly criticized some of his cabinet ministers and has made cryptic statements about an ostensive right-wing faction within the government, which Morales accuses of planning to marginalize him with the help of elements in the Armed Forces. So far, Arce has ignored such provocations – aware that, although the ex-president retains an active support base, his overall popularity has been considerably diminished. 

Choquehuanca was previously one of Morales’s closest personal confidantes and political loyalists; yet the pair are now bitterly polarized. Following the 2017 referendum defeat, Choquehuanca stressed the need for a new leader of the party – a position only he could fill. When his ambition to replace Morales became clear, he was demoted from the highest to the lowest echelons of the party: relegated from the role of foreign affairs minister to a marginal diplomatic post. Morales also moved against a number of other former allies who had rallied behind Choquehuanca’s leadership bid. Now, Choquehuanca knows that his political career is finished if Morales successfully returns to the presidency. He is desperate to prevent this outcome, whether by rallying ‘renovation’ forces to block Morales’s candidacy, or, more likely, by helping to split the party once Morales has secured the nomination.

Choquehuanca has a galvanized social base in the Aymara altiplano. He played a minor role in the 2020 election campaign, but according to Pablo Stefanoni, one of the keenest observers of Bolivian politics, his occasional interventions were decisive in securing the indigenous base of the MAS and winning back some of those who had become disillusioned with Morales. Choquehuanca is popular among the younger generation of MAS militants, and among intermediary party officials who for one or another reason have been alienated by the Morales-dominated national leadership. Choquehuanca served in Morales’s cabinet for longer than anyone except Arce. Early on, he played the role of anti-intellectual, boasting that he hadn’t read a book in sixteen years when he assumed office as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Ideologically, however, he adapted more or less fully to the pragmatism of the Morales era. If his politics diverge from those of his former boss, it is in his greater underlying sympathy for Aymara nationalism; yet, in electoral terms, this is somewhat of a liability, which restricts the core of his potential base to the western altiplano. It’s unlikely his prospective bid for the presidency will be successful. More plausibly, he may assume the role of subcomandante in any eventual split from the MAS led by Arce.

As the journalist Fernando Molina has written, Bolivian political history is rife with social fragmentation and chaotic conflict – especially following the exit of a major caudillo, when battles to succeed him flare up. The novelty of the present moment is that Morales was coercively excluded from governmental power, yet remains a crucial internal vector who defines the country’s wider sociopolitical coordinates.

*

If the MAS is thus internally divided, what of Bolivia’s right-wing opposition? The political scene under Arce is still haunted by the spectres of the 2019 coup. Dozens of ex-military officials have been imprisoned for their role in Morales’s ouster, including the heads of the Armed Forces and police. Áñez was sentenced to ten years in prison – although she was only held accountable for the events of November 2019 and not the state massacres that followed. Marco Pumari, the ex-president of the Civic Committee of the department of Potosí, is in jail awaiting trial, accused of provoking the burning and sacking of the Electoral Tribunal in Potosí in the lead up to the coup. Mesa remains judicially unscathed, although his brand of washed-out centrism has become increasingly unpopular.

Until very recently, Camacho had managed to both avoid legal charges and strengthen his position. He was elected governor of Santa Cruz in March 2021 and became the face of a growing far-right movement, which carries particular political heft in Santa Cruz, Beni, Potosí, and Tarija. A few days after Christmas, however, Camacho was finally arrested for his role in the 2019 coup. He will spend the next few months in prison in La Paz awaiting trial. Arce timed the arrest to quell criticisms from Morales that his administration was lax in its treatment of the right-wing opposition, and to take advantage of incipient fractures within the local cruceño right between traditional lowland conservatism and Camacho radicalism.

In October and November 2022, the far right launched a 36-day ‘civic strike’ over the timing of the next national census, effectively shutting down the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s economic engine. Several months prior, Arce announced that he would be delaying the census by two years due to technical incapacity. Since the last census of 2012, the populations of the department and city of Santa Cruz had grown rapidly, driven in part by significant migration from the western highlands. As a result, a new census would invariably lead to a substantial eastward shift in state resources and legislative seats. Cruceño protests erupted over the claim that the government’s delay was in fact a veiled power grab, designed to prevent resource and seat alterations that would disadvantage the ruling party in the 2025 elections.

The civic strike was organized by the Inter-Institutional Committee of Santa Cruz. Its three leading figures were Camacho, Rómulo Calvo, president of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, and Vicente Cuéllar, rector of the Autonomous University of Gabriel René Moreno. Since the early 2000s, the department of Santa Cruz has been the heart of regional autonomy struggles against centralized state power, mounting consistent challenges to Morales from the right, including strikes, mass gatherings and outbursts of violence. (The ‘civic coup’ attempt of 2008 marked the pinnacle of this trend.) This time around, enforcement of the strike in the predominantly indigenous informal markets of the city was carried out by roving motorcycle gangs armed with machetes and clubs – a signature of Camacho’s right-wing street politics – as well as coordinated assaults and robberies by the proto-fascist Cruceño Youth Union. Petty vendors opposed to the strike mounted resistance where they could, above all in the working-class municipal district of Plan 3000, leading to ferocious nightly clashes that helped weaken the strike toward the end of November. Arce has now agreed to bring the census forward to 23 March 2024, ensuring that the results will be factored into the next election.

The unrest in Santa Cruz revealed the persistent territorialized power of the extreme right in the eastern lowlands and their disquieting capacity for street violence. Yet it also exposed their inability to project national power by uniting with the country’s wider conservative forces or winning support from the state security apparatus. Despite the rhetoric of some on the left, and the deluded fantasies of some on the cruceño right, the civic mobilizations of October and November last year never threatened to develop into another full-scale coup. Business associations in Santa Cruz lent only tepid support as the civic strike wore on and Camacho’s unpredictable street politics became more of a burden than an expression of strength. The ephemeral unity that enabled the overthrow of Morales in 2019 is now a distant memory. Without the figure of Morales to provide focus and clarity, the myriad groupings that made up the golpista coalition immediately fractured, pursuing their separate, parochial priorities. With the arrest of Camacho, the cruceño elite will need to embark on an additional round of recomposition.

Yet, although the right lacks a viable national project, the masistas shouldn’t underestimate their adversaries. Their territorial power bases will allow them to launch more destabilizing actions. They have the support of domestic and international capital, and they control the media and universities. In conditions of stagnation and crisis, from which the MAS cannot easily escape, it would be unwise to assume that the petit bourgeoisie, the police and the military will continue to support the constitutional order. Their loyalties are fickle – and as they change, so will Bolivia.

Read on: Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thompson, ‘The Chequered Rainbow’, NLR 35.

Categories
Uncategorised

Highbrow’s Enemy

An enormously promising title, Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation arrives suggesting a tantalizing combination of coming-of-age movie memoir and deep dive into the spectacular films of the 1970s – Hollywood’s last golden age – via a celebrated and accomplished filmmaker with an infectious enthusiasm for the movies and a breathtaking facility with an impossible number of features, renowned and obscure. Tarantino has an encyclopedic knowledge of postwar American film history, often well-deployed in the book, and a keen eye for assessing source material. Most importantly, he understands and is able to convey what made the seventies special – and the eighties dismal: ‘After growing up in the anything-goes seventies, the eighties marked a play-it-safe decade.’ Unlike in the classic studio era, where films were subject to the draconian prohibitions of the Production Code Administration, ‘in the eighties, the restrictions Hollywood imposed on their own product were self-imposed . . . After the seventies, it seemed like film went back to the restraints of the fifties.’ In contrast, Tarantino captures the thrilling, liberating moral ambiguity that defined the New Hollywood, reminding the reader (or explaining to a younger audience raised on a steady diet of Marvel Movies and Message Movies), ‘Complex characters aren’t always sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likeable.’

Unfortunately, the literary equivalent of driving cross-country with Quentin Tarantino, whose best films include skilled sequences that force viewers to the edge of their seats, turns out to be an unpleasant prospect that few will wish to endure. Admittedly, there were reasons to be wary of climbing into the car in the first place. From a distance, on screen and off, the writer-director can give the impression of a vulgarian, with a taste for numbingly gratuitous, blood-soaked violence, and a serial weakness for that laziest and most irresponsible trope in cinema – the revenge fantasy (a genre invariably celebrated throughout this volume, with numerous entries lovingly referred to as ‘Revengeamatics’).

Such proclivities, however, turn out to be the least of this book’s problems. The Quentin Tarantino of Cinema Speculation comes across as a man of towering ego (the jacket copy describes its author as ‘possibly the most joyously infectious movie-lover alive’), modest insight and questionable taste. The self-regard is overwhelming, even by Hollywood standards. Describing his approach to filmmaking, Tarantino boasts of ‘a fearlessness that comes to me naturally.’ What begins as praise for some very fine directors takes this sudden turn: ‘But they don’t make genre films the way Jean Pierre Melville did. The way I do.’ The only thing missing from that particular reflection is Lloyd Bentsen entering the room to intone, ‘Senator, I knew Jean Pierre Melville.’ It is, regrettably, no surprise to find that the last eight lines of the book are a reminiscence of the moment he won an academy award for a film that was ‘a worldwide smash’ and include six invocations of either ‘me’ or ‘I’.  

Indeed, despite Tarantino’s zeal for the cinema of this era, his prose is a chore to read. The style is exhausting, characterized by an avalanche of obscenities which are presumably intended to seem honest and unbuckled, but which strike the reader as a tiresome affectation. Similarly disfiguring is the endless stream of unmotivated name dropping (‘The comedian Robert Wuhl once told me, “I’ve seen Bullitt four times and I couldn’t tell you what the plot is about’’’), all in the service of confidently expressed, unreflective assertions presented as gospel. This is not writing, it is talking – endless talking, and it is more than a little repetitive, as if the chapters were written individually and never intended to form a coherent whole.

It may be that there is ultimately no daylight between this writer-director of undeniably large talent, his (often-grating) public persona, and the uninterruptable know-it-all loudmouth riffing and sub-referencing revealed in these pages. Absurd as it is to invoke Gore Vidal in this context, a quote of his well describes what the reader will learn – or not learn – about Tarantino from this book: ‘I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.’ Yet I still harbour the suspicion that our narrator is actually more sophisticated than he lets on.

Cinema Speculation features chapters on films from 1968 to 1981 – the glory days of the New Hollywood – interspersed with thematic essays. There is no table of contents – and it is easy to imagine Tarantino explaining why: ‘If you’re gonna read it, who the fuck needs a fucking table of contents? Bruce Willis once told me he skipped over all that crap and just dove into the action of the fucking book.’ This disposition also likely explains the lack of a preface and acknowledgements as well. A summary overview of the chapters is nevertheless informative. The essays include a memoir of young Quentin’s voracious, very early exposure to the New Hollywood revolution, an appreciation of long-serving Los Angeles Times film critic Kevin Thomas, and a chapter that promises to express the essence of the enterprise, ‘The New Hollywood in the Seventies’. The movies selected for canonization are Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Deliverance, The Getaway, The Outfit, Sisters, Daisy Miller, Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder, Paradise Alley, Escape from Alcatraz, Hardcore, and The Funhouse.

‘Little Q Watching Big Movies’ provides a guided tour of some of the films that Tarantino saw at too young an age:  ‘In that year of 1970, I saw a lot of intense shit.’ That shit included M*A*S*H, whose seven-year-old viewer especially enjoyed the scene with Radar ‘placing the microphone under the bed as Hot Lips and Frank Burns fucked.’ More generally, he recalls, ‘some of those adult movies were fucking amazing!’ Two things emerge from this opening chapter. One is that Big Q is not much different from Little Q, who protested to his mother that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid shouldn’t have ended in a freeze frame, but instead shown the protagonists shredded to bloody ribbons. Why suggest, when you can show? ‘Despite how iconic that image has become, I still agree with me, “They should have shown it.’’ ’ Less is not more, more is more, and even more, especially if it’s blood-soaked, is even more still. The child is indeed the father of the man.

The second motif established early in the book is Tarantino’s idiosyncratic taste, expressed with little regard for logical consistency from one pronouncement to the next. He prefers, for example, the Roger Vadim clunker All the Pretty Maids in a Row – a mildly amusing curiosity at best – to John Boorman’s seminal Point Blank, which is waved off as a ‘nonentity crime film’. Ironically, All the Pretty Maids to its discredit looks like it was shot in the style of a made-for-TV movie, and is littered with small screen players – two condemnations that Tarantino erroneously hurls at Point Blank in his summary dismissal of that masterpiece. 

The ode to Kevin Thomas, a critic at the Times since 1962 who shares Tarantino’s taste for grindhouse cinema (and who has an uncommon reverence for the directing chops of breastsploitation maestro Russ Meyer), is an odd interregnum in Cinema Speculation’s narrative flow. Here the author pauses, often at length, to dump on critics he dislikes and to gripe a bit about some negative reviews. A highlight of this discussion is that it features the only potentially self-aware sentence in the entire book: when their tastes diverged, if was often due to the fact that ‘Thomas had a real distaste for mean-spirited violence.’ Speaking of a critic who gave a rave review to the generally reviled, blood-soaked Supervixens, Tarantino observes, ‘Is my taste in cinema more bloodthirsty than Kevin Thomas’? Clearly.’

‘The New Hollywood in the Seventies’ is particularly disappointing, as the title suggests it should get to the heart of what this book is all about. Instead, it is a slim and hurried rehash of material that seems scraped from Peter Biskind’s well-worn Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) and a handful of other studies name checked along the way, including James Monaco’s superb American Film Now (1979). (And probably others – you didn’t think this book would have a fucking bibliography did you?) Rather than articulating a distinct perspective, the chapter is not much more than a list of names and films – almost everybody gets their sentence. Surprisingly, Tarantino occasionally loses his bearings on what should be home turf, as when he lumps Peter Bogdanovich’s relentlessly downbeat The Last Picture Show (shot in black and white, then commercial poison) with The Sting and Star Wars – all of them dismissed as ‘cut for maximum audience enjoyment.’ Yet in what could be charitably described as something of a paradox, a few chapters later Tarantino reminds readers that Rocky is probably his all-time favorite film (though soon after he rates Rocky II even higher). It is hard to imagine a movie more purposefully, relentlessly and transparently designed to make its audience feel good. Don’t take it from me, take it from Tarantino: he ‘never . . . repeat never’ heard an audience cheer with such exuberance in a movie theater.

Of course, ‘feel good’ needs to be calibrated to taste: ‘The closest I came to an audience cheering like we did in Rocky was George Kennedy and William Devane blowing the fuck out of the killers that murdered their families.’ It is also more than passing strange that someone who incisively castigated eighties films for playing it safe would champion a movie that plays it safer than any film in the history of cinema. In any event, Stallone’s average-lug-beats-the-odds-and-gets-the-girl flick is, to say the least, an odd choice to represent the pinnacle ‘of a time when movies were fucking incredible.’ A throwback to simple times, simple stories, and pandering, spoon-fed finales, Rocky would have been just another boxing picture among many in the 1930s. Whereas for Tarantino, ‘Everything about Rocky took audiences by complete surprise.’ Another theory is that, at age thirteen, it took him by surprise.

The movie chapters are a little better – or at least more distinct – but collectively they amount to something less than a mixed bag. Things get off to an unpromising start with Bullitt, fifteen pages that are essentially a mash note to Steve McQueen, with nary a glimmer of insight into this rich and multifaceted film. The treatment of Dirty Harry, in contrast, is a pleasant surprise. In the best and most thoughtful chapter in the book, Tarantino shines, contextualizing the film in the context of director Don Siegel’s long career, and engages with uncharacteristic nuance in the debate surrounding the film’s problematic politics. Even here, though, the tendency to speak in breathless soundbites (‘If Dirty Harry were a boxer it would be Mike Tyson in his knockout prime’) derails the momentum of sustained analysis. Still, if every chapter in Cinema Speculation flashed the strengths of this one, it would be worth pushing through all the braggadocio and monologuing.

Perhaps the biggest bust in this volume is its treatment of The Getaway. A still from that production graces the cover, featuring the filmmaker’s favorites Sam Peckinpah and McQueen, so presumably Tarantino would have something to say about this one. Instead we are treated to twenty-five pages of not very much. Our raconteur picks apart a few holes in the plot, and tells us that ‘I asked Peter [Bogdanovich] what he thought about [the] novel.’ Observations about the movie, however, are limited to tossed-off remarks such as ‘It’s my feeling that Ali McGraw’s moment to moment work in this film is essential’ and ‘I used to like the ending more than I do now.’ The Getaway is no masterpiece, but it is a film worth talking about, and even taking seriously. Christina Newland, in a thoughtful, engaging and enthusiastic essay for Little White Lies, says more in a thousand words than Tarantino offers here.

Sisters provides the opportunity for an appreciation of the early films of Brian de Palma, and its long discussion of Taxi Driver knows enough to ask a key question: is this a movie about a racist or is it a racist movie? Unfortunately, yet again, over thirty pages there is not a single moment of critical acumen (nor any appreciation of the filmmaking). Instead, now too recognizably on brand, serious engagement with one of the landmarks of the New Hollywood is eschewed in favour of here’s-what-I-think-off-the-top-of-my-head. There is a time and place for such things – check out Tarantino’s brilliant revisionist interpretation (in character) of Top Gun from the 1994 movie Sleep with Me – but this isn’t it. Cinema Speculation gives the impression that any hint of visual analysis or even appreciation would fall under the category of highbrow – which, to Tarantino, is the ultimate obscenity. According to the index (yes, the book has a fucking index, probably to help people look themselves up), Alfred Hitchcock appears over twenty-five times in the text. Yet there is no engagement with the marvellous Hitchcockian flourishes that characterize some of Taxi Driver’s finest scenes. Instead, the discussion is limited to observations like ‘Travis was a fucking loon,’ and ‘no fucking way was Travis in Vietnam’ (um, okay, if you say so); and a report of the audience reaction at a favorite grindhouse cinema: ‘I dug it, they dug it, and as an audience, we dug it.’ Say what you will about these comments, but they are definitely not highbrow.

Quentin Tarantino is an accomplished filmmaker, and, necessarily, a capable artisan. One could not tell that from this book, which reads like a movie geek perhaps terrified at being seen as a movie nerd. This likely accounts for some of the odd gaps in the narrative, which runs away screaming from anything that might be remotely characterized as thoughtful. Robert Altman, whose many seventies landmarks include McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye and Nashville, is barely noted, invoked primarily as the target of ad hominem broadsides; Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View) goes unmentioned; Woody Allen’s output is reduced to a few words of high praise for the ‘early funny ones’. This list could easily be elaborated, but these examples raise a larger, more general concern.

Cinema Speculation presents itself as a celebration of ‘the most challenging movies of the greatest movie making era in the history of Hollywood.’ A sentiment that I (and many others) share. What is, finally, most bizarre about its baker’s dozen of features is not so much the idiosyncratic films included, but those that are left out. In trying to make the case that the seventies were indeed a golden age, it is unlikely that this set of movies would convince anybody of anything (although Taxi Driver soars, and you could argue the case for a couple of the others). Even Tarantino isn’t sold on some of them, largely deploying Hardcore as a vehicle to trash Paul Schrader (this is a book that pauses to settle numerous scores), and noting ‘Nothing that deep happens in Paradise Alley. It’s all surface.’ As for Fun House, Tarantino rates Hell Night from the same year as ‘far superior’. I haven’t seen Hell Night, which concerns a fraternity hazing ritual wherein four pledges are dropped off at an (apparently) abandoned mansion, but Roger Ebert’s one-star review plausibly describes it as ‘a relentlessly lackluster example of the Dead Teenager Movie.’ 

Maybe for some Hell Night is a towering achievement of the New Hollywood era, but while reading page after page about low-budget slasher flicks of modest repute, it is hard not to think of fifty treasures from that extraordinary decade left on the cutting room floor. Of course, much of this may simply boil down to questions of taste. In my view, Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of the landmarks of the seventies film – among its enormous strengths: razor-sharp dialogue, bravura location work, and the contributions of the players, including, arguably, Robert Mitchum’s greatest performance. Yates’s Mother, Juggs, & Speed, by contrast, is an unmotivated, incoherent mess, an embarrassment to its distinguished cast, and littered with car crashes about once a reel as if fearful the audience would otherwise nod off (or walk out). In Tarantino’s assessment, Eddie Coyle is ‘overrated’ and Juggs ‘underrated.’ For those who share that view, Cinema Speculation might be a book worth reading.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, Hollywood’s New Wave’, NLR 121

Categories
Uncategorised

Green Empire?

In its conviction that the climate crisis ‘changes everything’, and in its search for a historical agent capable of coupling deliverance from catastrophe with radical social transformation, left climate politics is often sustained by a residual optimism. Yet this mood is far from universal. Some commentators have suggested that, given the shortage of time and the dim prospects for seizing state power, climate saviours will have to be drawn from enemy ranks. Take Michael Klare. A longtime peace studies scholar and defence correspondent for The Nation, he is now a cheerleader for the eco-conscious vanguard forming within the United States Department of Defense (DoD). ‘As global temperatures soar and vital resources dwindle’, Klare writes, the climate-mitigation efforts of the DoD have become ‘a model for the rest of society to emulate’. Not only that; the Pentagon’s outlook on global climate politics should be seen as ‘the starting point for America’s future foreign relations’. Has it really come to this? It may be true that, in the absence of a powerful socialist-environmentalist movement, the best hope for humanity is decarbonization from above. But what role is the American imperial apparatus likely to play in this process? Can it plausibly claim to be a ‘climate leader’?

This is the question Neta Crawford takes up in The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: The Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions, published last October. Crawford was recently appointed to Oxford’s top international relations professorship, previously held by League of Nations architect Alfred Zimmern and world-order theorist Hedley Bull. As an undergraduate at Brown in the 1980s, she studied a degree of her own design, ‘The War System and Alternatives to Militarism’, while working with E.P. Thompson and Joan Scott in the peace movement. At the same time, Crawford undertook exhaustive research on Soviet materiel as part of an Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies project to compile a database of all ‘major weapons’ manufactured globally in the post-war period. Within two years of graduating, she had authored a volume which runs to more than a thousand pages, documenting the quantitative minutiae of Soviet military aircraft.

This mastery of military data would inform Crawford’s later work. Since 2011 she has served as co-director of the Costs of War project, counting the human and economic toll of Washington’s war on terror. (At its last major count, the project estimated nearly one million people killed at a cost of over $8 trillion.) Crawford is also highly regarded as an IR theorist. In her first book, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (2002), she made the case that normative beliefs are a structuring force in world politics, and that persuasive ethical arguments can therefore effect historical change. A decade later, in Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars (2013), Crawford turned her attention to the US military, charting its gradual institutionalization of a regime of non-combatant protection, yet highlighting its enduring disregard for civilian harm ‘when military necessity is understood to be high’. This intellectual background has made her especially well-placed to anatomize the climate machinations of the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War is neatly divided into four sections, starting with an impressive account of the American military’s energy history. Citing an 1855 report by the US Secretary of the Navy which stated that the ‘increase in the number of steam-ships will make further purchase of coal necessary’, Crawford unfolds the argument that the US military was a significant driver of the widespread adoption of coal followed by oil. Fossil fuel, she explains, rapidly became the energetic basis of its force posture in the mid-nineteenth century. This led to a consensus among the political and military establishment that access to coal and oil supplies was a vital strategic interest, and protecting them an overriding military objective. As David Petraeus asserted in 2011, ‘Energy is the lifeblood of our warfighting capabilities’ – a claim that Crawford verifies by tracking the century-long arc from coal-fired US victory in the Spanish–American war to the establishment of Central Command (CENTCOM) as the lynchpin of Washington’s dominance in the Persian Gulf.

In this account, the carbonization of imperial power – gunboats combusting coal before fighter jets guzzled oil – imbued American expansion with a cyclical logic, ‘where the need for refuelling to expand and protect US interests required bases over ever-larger portions of the globe, while the bases and the fuel themselves became strategic interests.’ Crawford calls this ‘the deep cycle’: a spiralling process of ‘oil demand, consumption, militarization and conflict’. In her reading, it is most notably the beliefs of military planners and foreign policy elites about coal and oil’s centrality that helped institutionalize fossil fuel demand: ‘Institutions were constructed over the last two centuries to realize decision makers’ beliefs about the role of fossil fuels in war.’ By foregrounding the ideational dimension of historical change, Crawford makes the case that fossil fuel dependence was not inevitable; it was rather a contingent choice that could yet be overturned. As she wrote in her first book, focusing on the force of argument might ‘allow us to see room for human agency within the operations of seemingly inexorable political and economic forces.’

In the next section, Crawford considers the question of climate science and US military emissions, demonstrating that the DoD has been aware of the significance of carbon emissions since the late 1950s. Navy-funded research had determined that CO2 molecules dissolved into the ocean after fewer than ten years in the atmosphere, providing the impetus for systematic measurement of atmospheric CO2 levels. The CIA kept a watchful eye on these studies, as did the White House. Nixon’s urban affairs adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, outlined his concerns about ‘the carbon dioxide problem’ in a 1969 memo sent to the president’s chief of staff, warning that the next century could be marked by catastrophic sea level rises: ‘Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter. We have no data on Seattle.’ This was something ‘that the Administration ought to get involved with’, Moynihan counselled, adding that it was ‘a natural for NATO.’

Using documents from Georgetown’s National Security Archive, declassified through freedom of information requests, Crawford goes on to explain how the Pentagon successfully lobbied for the exemption of the bulk of military emissions from the Kyoto Protocol, having convinced the Clinton White House that ‘imposing greenhouse gas emissions limitations on tactical and strategic military systems would . . . adversely impact operations and readiness.’ The legacy of this American diplomatic triumph is that in IPCC accounting, whose conventions are followed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ‘emissions from [military] activity at overseas bases and multilateral operations are excluded from national totals.’

In an effort to redress this wilful oversight, Crawford spends more than fifty pages setting out her own meticulous calculations of US military and military-industrial emissions. Her conclusion is unsurprising: that military emissions track conflict and have declined overall since the end of the Vietnam War, though they remain gargantuan. On her count, US military greenhouse gas emissions stood at just over 109 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMTCO2e) in 1975. By 2020, they had declined to 52 MMTCO2e. Energy consumed by DoD facilities has decreased by a similar magnitude over the same period, thanks to the closure of more than a thousand bases since 1991. Though direct Pentagon emissions are a very small component of the US national total (which stood at 5,222 MMTCO2e in 2020), military industrial emissions accounted for around 17% of total greenhouse emissions from industrial manufacturing in 2019, according to Crawford’s conservative estimate. 

A major polluter whose force is used to ‘protect access to Middle East oil’, the Pentagon has nevertheless devoted more thought to climate change and its consequences than most state institutions. Crawford follows this development in part three of the book, showing how the DoD has been at the forefront of conceiving climate breakdown as a major threat to American national security. What began in the 1990s with concern about battlefield efficiency and the link between environmental degradation and conflict gradually hardened over fifteen years into panic about the implications of ecological breakdown for American power. A series of military-linked reports were released in 2006-7, arguing that climate change ‘acts as a threat multiplier for instability’ which would ‘require the United States to support policies that insulate it as well as countries of strategic concern from the most severe effects’. This emergent consensus was evident in the DoD’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, which stated that ‘the Department is developing policies and plans to manage the effects of climate change on its operating environment, missions, and facilities.’ By 2019, a group of fifty-eight self-described ‘senior military and national security leaders’, led by John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, were pushing back against Trump’s attempt to use his National Security Council to subvert Pentagon and CIA climate change research programmes, writing in a letter to the president: ‘We support the science-driven patriots in our national security community who have rightly seen addressing climate change as a threat reduction issue, not a political one, since 1989.’

Crawford is broadly impressed by the Pentagon’s adaptation efforts. Yet she is also disturbed – and puzzled – by its failure to take climate mitigation more seriously or to recognize its own carbon footprint as a problem. Why are ‘some of the smartest, best-trained, and most determined people on this planet, given the resources of the richest nation on earth’ – long aware of anthropogenic warming and seeking to climate-proof their installations – so ‘strategically inflexible and blind’? For one thing, DoD leaders are surely right (on their own terms) to worry that stringent curbs on their emissions would begin to undercut American military pre-eminence. Greener equipment and weaponry can in some contexts be necessary for tactical and protective reasons, as US forces in Iraq learnt from the vulnerability of their fuel convoys to insurgent attacks. But as Crawford notes, the best that has been managed to date is the Navy running warships on a 10% beef fat, 90% petroleum mix as part of the ‘Great Green Fleet’ gimmick in 2009. It is hard, then, to envisage the Pentagon’s operations being more thoroughly decarbonized without a dramatic retrenchment. Cutting military emissions by massively downscaling the DoD’s size and operations – closing one-fifth of bases and installations, withdrawing from the Persian Gulf – is what Crawford proposes. But there is no mystery as to why the Pentagon would refuse to accept this. Generals are naturally reluctant to opt for their own liquidation. Indeed, even if the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department were to wield their power to accelerate decarbonization globally, they would struggle to build an eco-military. Unless the Pentagon can rapidly learn how to rule the skies and patrol the South China Sea propelled by biofuels rather than oil, a reconfiguration of American empire is more likely to take the form of green capital adjoined to a carbon military.

Reviewing The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, Erin Sikorsky cast aspersions on Crawford’s argument that ‘the military is more than just one entity among many that have created the systemic climate risks facing the world today’, querying the assumption that ‘the key to US decarbonization is demilitarization’. This objection is to be expected from Sikorsky – once a CIA officer, now the director of two leading military-linked climate security institutions. Yet perhaps there is a grain of truth in her criticism. For all the strengths of Crawford’s study, its fixation on military emissions can be inhibiting. Given the Pentagon’s emissions make up only around 1% of the US national total, the author’s suggestion – in the final part of the book – that the military could ‘play a major role’ in broader climate mitigation efforts by reducing its carbon footprint seems dubious.

More importantly, Crawford’s painstaking focus on quantifying the DoD’s emissions fails to capture the fundamental purpose of such energy expenditure. In excavating the American military’s energetic foundations since the nineteenth century, Crawford has, to be sure, provided us with an invaluable historical understanding of the relationship between climate change and US imperial firepower. Her concept of ‘the deep cycle’ illuminates the catalytic effects of war and the military industry on the general growth of emissions. Yet, given the specific form American power has taken since the second world war – a global empire of capital – the significant thing about military emissions is not so much their magnitude as the reason they are generated in the first place: namely, the Pentagon’s need to maintain unparalleled supremacy in order to underwrite a much wider, ecologically ruinous regime of accumulation. Washington’s role as guardian of global capital – and the military’s role as coercive guarantor of that position – is conterminous with what environmental historians call ‘the great acceleration’. The advent of the ‘Anthropocene’ and the spread of American-led transnational capitalism are intertwined. As such, the Pentagon’s deadly atmospheric legacy far outstrips the effect of its own emissions.

Crawford’s intellectual project is perhaps best understood as a progressive immanent critique of American empire, defined by intricate attention to the military as an institution – its political history, energy composition, ideologies, procedures, rules, and modes of killing. This kind of granular attention to military politics is vanishingly rare for contemporary scholars of the left, yet both its brilliance and its limitations derive from this immanent position. It is only by seeing the Pentagon as if from the inside that Crawford can produce such rich studies of its machinations. But taking the institution on its own terms can also weaken her critical perspective. In Accountability for Killing, she writes that

the US military has acted as an imperfect moral agent, and its gradual recognition of the problem of collateral damage, its initial ad hoc responses to the problem, and the gradual institutionalization of a program of civilian casualty mitigation illustrates a cycle of moral agency and a process of organizational learning. I argue that this process has been, with exceptions, mostly positive. But I also show where and how the US military could further act to reduce systemic and proportionality/double effect collateral damage.

Here, as with her suggestion that the potential for carbon and methane release caused by airstrikes should be incorporated as a consideration in targeting guidance, Crawford ends up missing the wood for the trees by focusing on – and overplaying – the Pentagon’s potential for ethical self-improvement. So too in some of her 2003-4 articles on the Bush administration, which describe the ‘best intentions’ of Washington policymakers and lament the military’s ‘unfortunate lapses’ in continually bombarding civilians. Crawford’s technocratic prescriptions are premised on a conviction that the practices of the US military, and indeed the empire more widely, are driven by normative beliefs which might be subject to change through ethical persuasion. Considering the ‘moral duties of American hegemony’ in a piece for the house journal of the US Navy, she insists that Washington ‘can in fact pursue a moral policy in Iraq and the rest of the world’, pointing to ‘the integration of ethical reasoning with prudence’ as the best path forward for its foreign policy.

This framework stems from Crawford’s first book, which recast the history of decolonization as a grand teleology of ethical argument: ‘if the roots of decolonization are in the demise of . . . slavery and forced labor, and the cause of abolition was changing normative beliefs through ethical argument, then ethical arguments are a powerful underlying cause of decolonization.’ There is an important continuity of method between this study and Crawford’s work on US empire: the Pentagon’s failure to take climate mitigation seriously is likewise attributed to ‘habits of mind’. The author’s stress on the determinant force of ethical argument, revolutions in normative beliefs and their subsequent institutionalization, helps to explain her moments of credulity about the extent to which the Pentagon can be reformed.

Green empire seems like an idea whose time has come in the West: NATO’s new security concept says it ‘should become the leading international organization when it comes to understanding and adapting to the impact of climate change on security’, while the European Greens promote retrofitting with the slogan ‘Isolate Putin. Insulate Homes.’ Crawford’s empirically rich work does much to deepen our understanding of this trend and its prehistory. But when her anatomy of the military is affixed to an analysis of the empire it shields, the strictures of the Pentagon’s role as a climate actor become clear. With the left in purgatory, it is understandable that scholars like Michael Klare should hope for Washington to take up the mantle of planetary rescue. The notion that there might be anything ethically palatable in a green American empire, though, is a delusion that must be dispensed with.

Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘Painting Nationalism Green’, NLR 124.

Categories
Uncategorised

Daney Finally Arrives

Any translation of Serge Daney is already late. Late owing to the numerous failed attempts to publish him in English; late in providing ideas which we have needed for so long. Rumour has it that the British Film Institute came close to issuing a collection thirty years ago, even circulating a manuscript with copyright logos and editors’ names attached (it began with a letter to Deleuze; no wonder the book never appeared). The fact a collection has now finally been published by Semiotext(e), a publisher better known for French theory and experimental literature, tells us something about the reason for this protracted absence, and the parochialism of those responsible for film and its histories. Yet as much as Daney’s arrival in English is late, his writing is – perhaps more than any other European film critic of the twentieth century – almost self-admonishingly up to date. It is writing that addresses the present violently, to use Gramsci’s famous phrase, in a field which is more than happy to go on pretending as if nothing has changed.

Snatches of Daney’s output have appeared infrequently in English over the years. One text will crop up in an anthology; another in a book on media or in an artist’s zine. These sightings have been recorded by Laurent Kretzschmar at sergedaney.blogspot.com, a monumental effort. There has also been one slim book-length translation, which consists of an extended interview with Daney by his former Cahiers du Cinéma co-editor Serge Toubiana, and one of his last essays, ‘The Tracking Shot in Kapo’ (envisaged as the first chapter of a planned autobiography of sorts). Many of his aphorisms have therefore already found their way into the Anglosphere, appearing like candles lighting a path to a different kind of visual history and criticism: ‘Cinema as a house for images that no longer have a home’; ‘Cinema as haunted by writing’; television as either ‘democratic project… or Police operation’. With The Cinema House & the World, 1962-1981 – the first of four volumes which will together collect the majority of his writing – English-language readers can now finally read these enigmatic lines in context. 

This first volume, translated by Christine Pichini, covers Daney’s formative period as a disciple of the nouvelle vague, his editorship of Cahiers du Cinéma from 1973, as well as his first texts for Libération, for which he left Cahiers to write full-time in 1981. Unlike his older colleagues – Rohmer, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette – Daney never turned to producing films. Instead, he led an advance of criticism beyond the theatre and the auteur onto new terrain. The political and cultural landmarks of the volume are the Algerian Revolution; the high point and subsequent split of the nouvelle vague; the failure of ’68; the ‘Red Years’ of Cahiers; the rise of New Hollywood; and Vietnam, the first televised war. The book, however, departs from strict chronology, with texts grouped loosely by theme – ‘In Film’s Wake’, ‘Elaborations’, ‘Auteur Theory’. Yet as much as these headings present Daney as a theorist, he was a critic in the best sense of the word, attentive to films in their concreteness. The collected articles typically follow the pace of new releases and festivals, with ideas evolving out of reviews, intermingled with observations about the problems of the day, and presented not as completed theorem but as the imprints of ongoing thinking. Hollywood and what Daney called ‘the Auteur Marketplace’ are treated concurrently and as imbricated phenomena; Daney’s critical attention ranges from B movies to militant documentaries to studio films, and onto televised political debates and tennis matches, without the object of inquiry ever becoming incongruent to wider problems of form and politics.

Over the course of the book, television begins to emerge as Daney’s central concern (one which will no doubt be even more extensively treated in later volumes). We await the complete set of columns from Le salaire du zappeur (‘The Wage of the Channel Hopper’), for example, during which Daney chronicled the daily output of French television. But from the earliest texts, the enduring themes of Daney’s oeuvre are present in incipient form. Apparatus (Althusser), codes (Barthes), realism (Bazin), spectacle (Debord): these are the building blocks for his mode of enquiry. Even his very first review of Hawks’s Rio Bravo, written at the age of 18 for his own short-lived magazine Visages du cinema, evinces his awareness of Hollywood’s ideological function, its synthetic imaginaries and its codes: ‘Every effort is made to show us that the Wild West is not as we imagine it to be: no longer is it a wasteland where adventurers duke it out but a calm and bourgeois town where adventurers no longer belong. The age of the pioneer has passed.’ But what age are we in now? This first text appears to us as far away in time as the Lumières were to Daney. It is reasonable to ask what reading them today might offer. We might ask: are we still the children of Coca-Cola and Marx?

For a reader who has absorbed more of film history via Pirate Bay than in the theatre, Daney offers an approach which is almost irresistible. It is a method that charts cinema, video and television as they evolve and mutate into new, intertwined forms; he responds to cinema’s end not through elegy but zealous reappraisal. Replace some of the dated terms and we’re close to what a contemporary film criticism should read like, I think: one that adapts to the changing systems of image-making (technical, but also ideological and political). Daney is a historian of the medium as it unfolds, tracing its changes and conversions as much as dispensing judgement on its products. Likely influenced by the Althusserian current of Cahiers under the editorship of Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, countless reviews return to problems of ideology. As heavy-going as this period of criticism can be to read today – Daney even joked at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1977 that he was criticised for being insufficiently Althusserian and Marxist-Leninist – Daney always interlaced this inquiry with aesthetic questions of mise en scène or camera movement, mapping political transformations onto developments of style and technique.

Time and territory emerge as central preoccupations in the collection. Timing: editing, action, history. Territory: mise en scène, empire, the state, ‘the concrete territory’ where film ‘performs its intervention’. The visual field – and its conditions of production and consumption – as described by Daney is marked by transformation and metamorphosis. From projection to broadcasting; from rebellion to institutionalisation. Daney scrutinizes such changes, tracking formal and thematic correspondences in the films he writes about: in Ici et ailleurs and Histoires d’A as much as The Blob and Jaws 2. These reviews are underwritten by a larger concern: what kind of subjects are produced or given ballast, what kind of political consciousness is enabled or foreclosed? ‘All films are militant films’ he writes bluntly at one point, a declaration that would be alien to contemporary discussion of Imperial superheroes and Monarchy dramas. For as much as he is open to the creations of studios and auteurs alike, Daney’s political commitment is never in doubt. The stakes are clear – especially during his writing in the 1970s – and there is only so much that can be brooked: ‘sometimes, the very project of a film is entirely structured by bourgeois ideology, that it never emerges from it, that it marks a territory that is entirely in the enemy’s hands from the start.’

Daney’s most arresting remarks typically arrive in unexpected asides and interjections. A review of a Roger Pic film takes a break in the second paragraph to ask of music played over the phone whilst on hold: ‘Isn’t it time we ask ourselves what we are being told with this music?’ Daney is as likely to stop to consider how cartoons effect montage (The Great Race) as he is the history of the French Communist Party (With the Blood of Others). He wonders if there is any need for, or interest in, in the production of films from military or petit-bourgeois states when ‘American soap operas or karate films seem sufficient to address the people’s imaginary’. A new favourite text of mine argues that Fassbinder can only be considered ‘the slightest bit political as a filmmaker’, not due to the widespread notion that his work is about alienation, but because he made ‘social climbing a cinematic subject worthy of attention’.

Today, the cinema of collective dreaming – a Saturday night of Modern Times and Pickpocket, sitting in an audience laughing and crying in the dark – is increasingly a specialist hobby. Daney foresaw this. In a late interview, he mentions his sadness at laughing alone in an empty theatre (‘To laugh alone, what anguish!’). I can’t help but wonder what he might have thought of online streaming; of the young falling asleep to American sitcoms. For today, Hollywood stares back at us. Attention economics and cinematography hold hands. Screens track our eyes and wrap our imaginaries in dazzling new codecs. Reading the young Daney we find the pre-history of this transformation as viewed by a critic of formidable intelligence, negotiating the admixture of technical procedures and dream-worlds we still inhabit. ‘His living room is a box in the theatre of the world’, Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935. But it was Daney who explored its implications.

While many contemporary critics retreat to ‘Bazinian’ questions, Daney offers a way to confront our present of endless slogans, crises and visual stimuli. He takes up the task of understanding what ideologies and visions are sustained, and what could be fashioned in opposition. But those moments, as Daney is quick to warn ­– to dream or gather our strength – are always too late in appearing. Writing of Thomas Harlan’s Torre Bela and Gudie Lawaetz’s May 68, Daney describes the problem of witnessing – of presenting imagery ‘as if we were there’ – and how filmmaking relates to questions of struggle: ‘the film, by its very existence, suggests that History, perhaps, has been settled, and contributes to creating a new doxa, actual conformism and the stereotypes of tomorrow.’ At Daney’s most melancholic, this is presented as a kind of tragedy: a ‘perverse dialectic of belief and exhaustion is currently the last word of the “documentary” film’. Godard, Luc Moullet and Shinsuke Ogawa are differing examples of this ‘cinema of intervention’: films always too late in arriving, always ready to provide retrospective explanations for defeat. Yet such a problem is presented as something to be constantly questioned and re-examined, so as to refuse futile daydreaming.

Daney’s arrival may be late, but his work might help us to think through such problems of history and struggle, or at least to shrug off our fantasies of permanent defeat and missed victory. ‘What are the best vectors today of righteous violence, of this power to say no, of being radical?’ By reading Daney, we might perhaps begin to recover the belief that image-making can meaningfully contribute to answering such a question. It is to this end, I hope, for which Daney has finally arrived.

Read on: Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Missing Image’, NLR 34.