James C. Scott, "Seeing Like A State" (Yale, 1998.)
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Scott's work is a meticulously-detailed analysis of the blinding effects of big-picture macro-economics. There's nothing radically new here - remember the old adage that the "slave sees the master, but the master never sees the slave." And he buttresses his standard, post-Communist negativity toward state-ism with well-chosen examples which it's hard to deny - Stalinist collectivization being a standard of this genre. I'm reminded of the old Estonian Communist who said there were "two ways to build the road to socialism: one is that of a highway that cuts straight ahead, blasting through mountains and draining swamps. The other follows the natural contours of the terrain. It might be a little devious, but it arrives at the same destination." (This man was unsurprisingly purged from the ECP in 1950 for "nationalist deviationism.") I'm reminded also of Rene Dumont's and K. S. Karol's critiques of 1960s Cuba, when Fidel was obsessed with creating a "New Man" marching "not just to socialism but communism."
Yet societies like 1920s Russia, or Cuba, or Tanzania did not have the private capitalization necessary for modern development; without the state they could not possibly have been anything other than colonial appendages of those who did. Stalin said in 1931 that an undeveloped Russia was always "beaten for its backwardness; we must catch up to the developed nations or we will be crushed." This was borne out by WW II. Even if Stalin did much "beating" of his own, the NEP-peasant society of the 1920s could not have possibly stood up to Hitler's invasion. Would a victorious Third Reich in the east have given Scott any better example? The state-minimizing model has worked best only in the Atlantic states, and with good reason: only the trans-Atlantic trade created the concentrated capital that could invest in independent development. This was not a viable path for Russia, or any Third World ex-colony.
Another point not addressed is that the masses oif eastern Europe did not joyously celebrate their alleged "emancipation" from collectivist serfdom in 1989; to the contrary, workers clung to their dinosaur factories and peasants to their collectives because these structures, no matter how resented in the past, had come to provide a social security lacking in the new free order. Even Sheila Fitzpatrick, whom Scott quotes at length, admits as much at the end of her book on "Stalin's Peasants." In my opinion, Scott spends too much time beating the dead Bolshevik horse, and his chapter on Lenin and the Vanguard Party is completely unnecessary: not only is it an overtrod path, but is as irrelevant to his thesis of state planning as a corporate boardroom. The Communist Party was never officially a state institution.
One case Scott probably dared not touch in his paradigm is American school consolidation/integration, with its centralization, massive bussing of children, and all-around disruption of community life. This surely is a pointed example of "seeing like a state;" but how to deal with those who resisted such "collectivized education" sympathetically? Looked at objectively, the outraged parent who overturned "invading" buses of black schoolchildren in Boston is morally equivalent to the revolting kulak who took up arms against Bolshevik collectivizers of his land. Scott nicely sidesteps this unprogressive example which by itself pulls much of his moral argument out from under itself. What would be Scott's answer to the general shabbiness and disfunction of the US public school system? To go back to "community education"? - which, public or private, would re-enforce all the old inequities of geography, class, and race.
To Scott's credit, he critiques the trendy neo-liberalism built around von Hayek and Friedman, and warns against private corporate equivalents of blindness. The current craze for "eminent domain" decrees that condemn small property in favor of big investors carries his analysis one step further, where the state - in that exemplary democracy, the United States - becomes as purblind as Julius Nyere when allied with corporate power.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Freedom Riders: What Color Code Was This Revolution?
Raymond Arsenault, "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice" (Oxford University Press, 2007).
In the past ten years or so we've witnessed staged "revolutions" - Orange, Green, Rose, etc. - funded around the globe by Western NGOs, toppling the chosen tyrant and installing the pro-Western liberal reformer of the moment. When it came to democratic movements within the USA, of course, the enthusiasm at home was markedly lacking. Thus, before the age of NED or Freedom House, those who challenged entrenched tyranny in America faced real risk to life and limb, with only scattered support from the media and none from either the State Department or NGO clones. Such were the Freedom Riders, who were armed with naught but the courage of their ideals, as they embarked cross-country for the lion's den to stick their heads in his jaws.
That they ultimately prevailed is a commendation of the "American Way"; but they did so only after considerable risk, repression, and one-sided bloodshed. The "flowering of democracy" in the American South was fertilized not by the blood of tyrants but those seeking freedom. Would that such cheap imitators in Serbia, Ukraine or Lebanon - basking in Western funding and media cheerleading - have had to endure a tenth of what these brave people had to risk in the US itself.
In the past ten years or so we've witnessed staged "revolutions" - Orange, Green, Rose, etc. - funded around the globe by Western NGOs, toppling the chosen tyrant and installing the pro-Western liberal reformer of the moment. When it came to democratic movements within the USA, of course, the enthusiasm at home was markedly lacking. Thus, before the age of NED or Freedom House, those who challenged entrenched tyranny in America faced real risk to life and limb, with only scattered support from the media and none from either the State Department or NGO clones. Such were the Freedom Riders, who were armed with naught but the courage of their ideals, as they embarked cross-country for the lion's den to stick their heads in his jaws.
That they ultimately prevailed is a commendation of the "American Way"; but they did so only after considerable risk, repression, and one-sided bloodshed. The "flowering of democracy" in the American South was fertilized not by the blood of tyrants but those seeking freedom. Would that such cheap imitators in Serbia, Ukraine or Lebanon - basking in Western funding and media cheerleading - have had to endure a tenth of what these brave people had to risk in the US itself.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Return to Diversity in Eastern Europe
Joseph Rothschild, "Return to Diversity: A Political History of East-Central Europe Since WW II."
It's all here: perfidious Communists, the scheming Stalin, noble-but-doomed anti-Communists, a morally confused West doing too little too late. It's all familiar ground, and leaves questions begged as much as answered.
I do not disrespect Professor Rothschild's scholarship. He is a worthy successor to Hugh Seton-Watson, his mentor. Professor Rothschild's work added new information on the course of Communist East Europe, especially in its latter phases. What is lacking is an appreciation of why the USSR moved into this region as it did, insisting on Soviet control by any means necessary.
Cold war Western historians largely slight the trauma suffered by Russia and the constituent Soviet republics during World War II, but it's hard to overstate the wanton brutality and devastation the Nazis dealt to the Eastern Front, with the help of East European Axis satellites and collaborators. It is quite understandable why Moscow would seek to ensure this never happened again, by closing off these border nations to any future aggressor. This fact, untidy as it is, receives scant attention in Professor Rothschild's work. But it is not a slight of his alone, but of the whole school of cold war historiography of which this is, admittedly, one of the better products.
Also left hanging is the question of why the Soviet Bloc is singled out as an example of cold war aggression, as opposed to U.S. manipulation of French and Italian elections, U.S. and U.K. provocation of the Greek civil war, the U.S. and U.K. creation of West Germany, and the rehabilitation of ex-Nazis and Franco's Spain. The left half of postwar Western Europe was buried as thoroughly as the right half in the East, but one process is considered necessary, the other reprehensible when done by the enemy.
As to his charges of the West's evading "its responsibility" in the East, one wonders what more could have been done than what was done. Demanding that the "captive nations go free," and saber-rattling at Moscow, only played into post-war Soviet trauma and ensured the Iron Curtain's survival for two generations.
It's all here: perfidious Communists, the scheming Stalin, noble-but-doomed anti-Communists, a morally confused West doing too little too late. It's all familiar ground, and leaves questions begged as much as answered.
I do not disrespect Professor Rothschild's scholarship. He is a worthy successor to Hugh Seton-Watson, his mentor. Professor Rothschild's work added new information on the course of Communist East Europe, especially in its latter phases. What is lacking is an appreciation of why the USSR moved into this region as it did, insisting on Soviet control by any means necessary.
Cold war Western historians largely slight the trauma suffered by Russia and the constituent Soviet republics during World War II, but it's hard to overstate the wanton brutality and devastation the Nazis dealt to the Eastern Front, with the help of East European Axis satellites and collaborators. It is quite understandable why Moscow would seek to ensure this never happened again, by closing off these border nations to any future aggressor. This fact, untidy as it is, receives scant attention in Professor Rothschild's work. But it is not a slight of his alone, but of the whole school of cold war historiography of which this is, admittedly, one of the better products.
Also left hanging is the question of why the Soviet Bloc is singled out as an example of cold war aggression, as opposed to U.S. manipulation of French and Italian elections, U.S. and U.K. provocation of the Greek civil war, the U.S. and U.K. creation of West Germany, and the rehabilitation of ex-Nazis and Franco's Spain. The left half of postwar Western Europe was buried as thoroughly as the right half in the East, but one process is considered necessary, the other reprehensible when done by the enemy.
As to his charges of the West's evading "its responsibility" in the East, one wonders what more could have been done than what was done. Demanding that the "captive nations go free," and saber-rattling at Moscow, only played into post-war Soviet trauma and ensured the Iron Curtain's survival for two generations.
Tails Do Not Wag Dogs
Paul Hockenos, "Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars" (Cornell, 2003).
Berlin-based Paul Hockenos offers an insightful review of the powerful pull of diaspora communities in North America. Loaded with cash from successful "Free World" businesses, anti-Communist nationalists with often-outdated mindsets funneled the long green into post-Tito movements that revived their long-suppressed agendas. As such they came to play - as in much of former Soviet Europe - a role out of all proportion to their numbers. In this follow-up to his excellent "Free to Hate" of a decade ago, Hockenos follows the trail - often slimy - of cash and opportunism across the Balkans.
The Berlin-based Hockenos is however not without an apparent agenda of his own. In line with German journalism as a whole Hockenos is staunchly anti-Serb, taking to task those US politicians who came under the thumb of the Serb lobby, ascribing their nuanced view of Balkan realities to this lobby. Although he is critical of Croat and Kosovar lobbying activities, these swipes are largely absent in his account of their efforts in North America.
After all is said, however, it must be remembered that tails do not wag dogs. Studies of more powerful "national" lobbyists - such as AIPAC or the Cuban-American National Foundation - show that funneling money into the right pockets does work. But at the end of the day none of these lobbies has any more power than Washington wants them to. American "equivocating" in Bosnia is demonstrable proof that Hockenos laments, though it's still hard to see how a NATO ground war in Bosnia could have "done anything" but produce a proto-Iraq.
In general, however, this is still an interesting look at the blinkered complacency of emigre communities and their oft-disastrous input into devastating, rather than liberating, their ancestral homelands.
Berlin-based Paul Hockenos offers an insightful review of the powerful pull of diaspora communities in North America. Loaded with cash from successful "Free World" businesses, anti-Communist nationalists with often-outdated mindsets funneled the long green into post-Tito movements that revived their long-suppressed agendas. As such they came to play - as in much of former Soviet Europe - a role out of all proportion to their numbers. In this follow-up to his excellent "Free to Hate" of a decade ago, Hockenos follows the trail - often slimy - of cash and opportunism across the Balkans.
The Berlin-based Hockenos is however not without an apparent agenda of his own. In line with German journalism as a whole Hockenos is staunchly anti-Serb, taking to task those US politicians who came under the thumb of the Serb lobby, ascribing their nuanced view of Balkan realities to this lobby. Although he is critical of Croat and Kosovar lobbying activities, these swipes are largely absent in his account of their efforts in North America.
After all is said, however, it must be remembered that tails do not wag dogs. Studies of more powerful "national" lobbyists - such as AIPAC or the Cuban-American National Foundation - show that funneling money into the right pockets does work. But at the end of the day none of these lobbies has any more power than Washington wants them to. American "equivocating" in Bosnia is demonstrable proof that Hockenos laments, though it's still hard to see how a NATO ground war in Bosnia could have "done anything" but produce a proto-Iraq.
In general, however, this is still an interesting look at the blinkered complacency of emigre communities and their oft-disastrous input into devastating, rather than liberating, their ancestral homelands.
Friday, March 7, 2008
iHugo!
Bart Jones, "!Hugo!: The Hugo Chavez Story From Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution" (Steerforth Press, 2007).
In this biography of the controversial Bolivarian president, Bart Jones gives us a sympathetic yet critical assessment of the man and the movement. Jones describes Chavez' ascent from the frontier margins of Venezuela, through his rise in the army - virtually the only route of social mobility for poor country boys like Chavez - and his political career as charismatic spokesman for the poor majority of the nation.
Jones also takes to task US policy toward Venezuela, its reflexive hostility toward Chavez and automatic suppport for his wealthy opponents. As a source of US petroleum, Venezuela's "political correctness" has been vital to Washington, and its alliance with the private property (and white) upper classes a cornerstone of "democratic partnership." In upsetting this class rule Comandante Hugo has likewise tipped the canoe of US relations. The media campaign in the US has followed this policy mandate.
Jones offers few original insights, and the material here - though full of detail - is also covered in other biographies of Chavez. Jones' contribution is at its best in highlighting the frustraton of the old ruling classes and Washington's desperate efforts to pump them up in a "color-coded revolution" that failed, and then slyly facilitating a failed coup.
Jones' book does not embrace newer developments in the Bolivarian story: definitive announcements of socialism, and Chavez' attempt to extend his presidential term beyond constitutional limits. The US press has been quick to play up this defeat, as well as his put-down by the King of Spain at the Ibero-American summit. The US media is already hoping these presage his downfall, but like the failed coup Jones outlines in great detail, never count Chavez down for the count.
In this biography of the controversial Bolivarian president, Bart Jones gives us a sympathetic yet critical assessment of the man and the movement. Jones describes Chavez' ascent from the frontier margins of Venezuela, through his rise in the army - virtually the only route of social mobility for poor country boys like Chavez - and his political career as charismatic spokesman for the poor majority of the nation.
Jones also takes to task US policy toward Venezuela, its reflexive hostility toward Chavez and automatic suppport for his wealthy opponents. As a source of US petroleum, Venezuela's "political correctness" has been vital to Washington, and its alliance with the private property (and white) upper classes a cornerstone of "democratic partnership." In upsetting this class rule Comandante Hugo has likewise tipped the canoe of US relations. The media campaign in the US has followed this policy mandate.
Jones offers few original insights, and the material here - though full of detail - is also covered in other biographies of Chavez. Jones' contribution is at its best in highlighting the frustraton of the old ruling classes and Washington's desperate efforts to pump them up in a "color-coded revolution" that failed, and then slyly facilitating a failed coup.
Jones' book does not embrace newer developments in the Bolivarian story: definitive announcements of socialism, and Chavez' attempt to extend his presidential term beyond constitutional limits. The US press has been quick to play up this defeat, as well as his put-down by the King of Spain at the Ibero-American summit. The US media is already hoping these presage his downfall, but like the failed coup Jones outlines in great detail, never count Chavez down for the count.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Pros and Contras
Timothy C. Brown, "The Real Contra War: Highlander Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua" (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); "When the AK-47s Fall Silent: Revolutionaries, Guerrillas, and the Dangers of Peace" (Hoover Institution Press, 2000).
Timothy C. Brown was the Reagan/Bush liaison with the Contra army, and in the aftermath of this proxy war brought out these two books. The first is an historical reconstruction and analysis of the Contra war in the highlands of northern Niocaragua; the second is composed of interviews with former contras.
In "The Real Contra War" Mr. Brown has done a good job bringing forth the peasant base of the Nicaraguan Contra movement, and comparing it to previous "contra" movements - the Cristeros of Mexico, the Escambritos of Cuba. I would even add my own comparison, the Antonov "green guerrillas" of Tambov, Russia, in 1920-21. Yet these movements did not grow like the Contras, nor last ten years, and the reason is obvious, although discounted in Mr. Brown's book. And that is because the original hypothesis - of being financed and controlled by the CIA and rich exiles - is still valid. Without the Somocista command structure, the money coming in from Miami and Washington, these Segovian highlanders would have been flattened like their historical predecessors and reduced to mere academic footnotes.
In "When the AK's Fall Silent", Timothy Brown lets these former contras speak in their own words. As editor/translator Brown demonstrates the dangers of taking oral history at face value. Brown waxes enthusiastically at the "revelations" of these men concerning Castro's finances in 1950's Mexico, Soviet missiles still secretly in place in Cuba after 1962, abuses by Sandinista cadres who beat peasants and question God, etc. While these citations above sound authentic, I've caught Mr. Brown's witnesses in one inaccuracy after another. To begin, claiming the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front financed the Sandinistas by the millions in the late '70s, when the FMLN was not founded until 1980 as a coalition of several groups. Another witness avers that Celia Sanchez, Fidel Castro's personal secretary, committed suicide in 1972 upon learning details of her brother's death in La Cabana prison in 1959. Celia Sanchez in fact died of cancer in 1980. Another has President Arevalo of Guatemala being overthrown by the CIA in the 1950s, when it was President Arbenz who was so "honored." This same witness also states he spent four months in Cuba in 1960, beginning in April, where he helped his father found the Committees in Defense of the Revolution - which were not established until a speech by Castro decreeing their formation in September, 1960, five months after April.
In this work, Brown clearly if unintentionally demonstrates the dangers of uncorroborated oral testimony. As such this book can be useful as a presentation of how these men think of themselves, or wish others to see them. But their testimonies are so chock full of lapses here and varnishings there that they cannot be accepted as factual reconstructions.
Timothy C. Brown was the Reagan/Bush liaison with the Contra army, and in the aftermath of this proxy war brought out these two books. The first is an historical reconstruction and analysis of the Contra war in the highlands of northern Niocaragua; the second is composed of interviews with former contras.
In "The Real Contra War" Mr. Brown has done a good job bringing forth the peasant base of the Nicaraguan Contra movement, and comparing it to previous "contra" movements - the Cristeros of Mexico, the Escambritos of Cuba. I would even add my own comparison, the Antonov "green guerrillas" of Tambov, Russia, in 1920-21. Yet these movements did not grow like the Contras, nor last ten years, and the reason is obvious, although discounted in Mr. Brown's book. And that is because the original hypothesis - of being financed and controlled by the CIA and rich exiles - is still valid. Without the Somocista command structure, the money coming in from Miami and Washington, these Segovian highlanders would have been flattened like their historical predecessors and reduced to mere academic footnotes.
In "When the AK's Fall Silent", Timothy Brown lets these former contras speak in their own words. As editor/translator Brown demonstrates the dangers of taking oral history at face value. Brown waxes enthusiastically at the "revelations" of these men concerning Castro's finances in 1950's Mexico, Soviet missiles still secretly in place in Cuba after 1962, abuses by Sandinista cadres who beat peasants and question God, etc. While these citations above sound authentic, I've caught Mr. Brown's witnesses in one inaccuracy after another. To begin, claiming the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front financed the Sandinistas by the millions in the late '70s, when the FMLN was not founded until 1980 as a coalition of several groups. Another witness avers that Celia Sanchez, Fidel Castro's personal secretary, committed suicide in 1972 upon learning details of her brother's death in La Cabana prison in 1959. Celia Sanchez in fact died of cancer in 1980. Another has President Arevalo of Guatemala being overthrown by the CIA in the 1950s, when it was President Arbenz who was so "honored." This same witness also states he spent four months in Cuba in 1960, beginning in April, where he helped his father found the Committees in Defense of the Revolution - which were not established until a speech by Castro decreeing their formation in September, 1960, five months after April.
In this work, Brown clearly if unintentionally demonstrates the dangers of uncorroborated oral testimony. As such this book can be useful as a presentation of how these men think of themselves, or wish others to see them. But their testimonies are so chock full of lapses here and varnishings there that they cannot be accepted as factual reconstructions.
Colombia: the Living Graveyard
Steven Dudley, "Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia" (Routledge, 2003).
Overall, author Dudley has done right in laying open the running sores of the Colombian civil war to public view, a generally engrossing - and gross - account of chicanery, cynicism, and atrocity.
That said, I do criticise his flawed - in my view - insistence on blaming the left for its own destruction in Colombia. At one point he writes of the "startling number of dead" the UP "put in the morgue." Yet the Union Patriotica did not torture, kill, or "disappear" these people, nor force the death squads to do so, and therein lays the book's mistaken premise.
By his own admission, Colombia has engaged in political violence against dissidents for decades, and its 1980s death squads were willing to kill virtually anyone they disliked. The UP, then, did not have to be cynically betrayed or manipulated by the FARC to earn this lethal attention - it would have come anyway, regardless of any guerrilla politics behind the scenes. The paramilitaries were out to destroy the left, and the center; the guerrilla politics upon which Dudley lavishes so much scrutiny were a secondary factor at best, and in no way confirm the Colombian military's "analysis" or strategy.
Overall, author Dudley has done right in laying open the running sores of the Colombian civil war to public view, a generally engrossing - and gross - account of chicanery, cynicism, and atrocity.
That said, I do criticise his flawed - in my view - insistence on blaming the left for its own destruction in Colombia. At one point he writes of the "startling number of dead" the UP "put in the morgue." Yet the Union Patriotica did not torture, kill, or "disappear" these people, nor force the death squads to do so, and therein lays the book's mistaken premise.
By his own admission, Colombia has engaged in political violence against dissidents for decades, and its 1980s death squads were willing to kill virtually anyone they disliked. The UP, then, did not have to be cynically betrayed or manipulated by the FARC to earn this lethal attention - it would have come anyway, regardless of any guerrilla politics behind the scenes. The paramilitaries were out to destroy the left, and the center; the guerrilla politics upon which Dudley lavishes so much scrutiny were a secondary factor at best, and in no way confirm the Colombian military's "analysis" or strategy.
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