Review of “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth (ISBN 9781400079490)
This book, written in 2004, is one of those – like The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, and It Couldn’t Happen Here – books that have had second lives following Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Philip Roth imagines an America that finally gives in to its darkest xenophobic impulses. His real-life hometown near Newark, New Jersey, experiences first one shock, then another, then another, and another, as fascism creeps into the White House under a Charles Lindbergh presidency. The story Roth tells is a slow-moving nightmare – and it really resonates because a nightmare is precisely what we are living in now.
Lindbergh, of course, really did have a real-life flirtation with Nazism, even accepting an award from Hermann Göring.
Roth’s childhood, re-imagined in terrific detail, doesn’t need to stray too far from real American history because intolerance and nativism was baked into the national cake. Rich white plantation owners gave way to automotive magnates like Henry Ford, whose Dearborn Independent featured headlines like “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” But with an epidemic of Islamophobia and Brown People Phobia today, hate-peddling billionaires like the Kochs, Mercers, and Adelsons, and modern day equivalents of the Dearborn Independent, we haven’t moved the needle a millimeter since 1920.
Much of Roth’s story is about political conflicts within his own Jewish family, which become a lens into the Jewish community of the time – or maybe the one of today. Roth’s fictional brother Sandy is a self-hating Jew, as is his fictional aunt Evelyn and her husband, Lindbergh sycophant Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf – a man who never met a Nazi he didn’t like. This brings to mind the curious relationship between the right-wing Jewish community of 2017 and the Trump Administration. Our modern day Bengelsdorfs – settler-ambassador David Friedman and “Rabbi to the Stars” Shmuley Boteach – now occupy prominent positions in and around the most xenophobic presidency of all time.
For a book designed to make you think, The Plot Against America also has one hell of a great plot. Father Coughlin, Walter Winchell, Fiorella LaGuardia and hundreds of real historical figures make believable appearances in this tale of what coulda, mighta been – could have easily been. For those who don’t know their history, there’s even a postscript that fills in some blanks.
I won’t spoil the book by giving anything away. Needless to say, the Jews of America don’t come out unscathed.
But Roth’s insights into the ease with which the United States can slide into fascism can’t be ignored. This is an argument, a though experiment even, and Roth makes his case.
Philip Roth understood in 2004 how easily, even wordlessly, a sitting president could unleash a pogrom on a helpless minority – and his choice of words gave me the chills for its accuracy and prescience:
The week after the September assault on Detroit’s Jews – which was addressed with dispatch by neither Michigan’s governor nor the city’s mayor – new violence was directed at homes, shops, and synagogues in Jewish neighborhoods in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, violence that Winchell’s enemies attributed to his deliberately challenging appearances in those cities after the cataclysm that he’d instigated in Detroit, and that Winchell himself – who, in Indianapolis, barely escaped being crushed by a paving stone hurled from a rooftop that had broken the neck of the bodyguard stationed beside him – explained by the “climate of hate” emanating from the White House.
I received “What We Do Now” as a gift for making a contribution to Democracy for America (DFA).
“What We Do Now” is 200+ pages containing 27 short essays or excerpts from speeches by a number of liberal politicians, activists and writers. They include VT Senator Bernie Sanders, who wrote about the six American banks that represent 60% of the American GDP; MA Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the importance of crafting a coherent economic message; Anthony Romero of the ACLU, on the dangers our democracy faces – all the usual suspects weighing in on all the usual issues. And I don’t mean to make light of them.
But after two months into the Trump presidency, I dare say we are already doing precisely what the roster of authors suggest – without having read them first. Most of us have already figured out the demagogue’s media tricks, as George Lakoff deconstructs them. And the fact that his own supporters will suffer the most, as Paul Krugman points out. We know what to expect economically, politically, and culturally. And we’re resisting.
Linda Sarsour’s essay was my personal favorite, followed by Alan Lichtman’s piece on rebuilding the Democratic Party. Sarsour takes just the right tone of stridency and progressive opposition. Lichtman, on the other hand, should be required reading (and re-reading) as a warning of how difficult it is going to be to convince Democratic centrists they were wrong. Lichtman betrayed the most partisan bias of any of the authors in the book and is clearly both a Clinton fan and a TPP proponent. But he mis-characterized opposition to the Trans-Pacific trade bill as the “rat-trap of protectionism” and didn’t bother to mention the corporate goodies buried in the TPP that were so problematic for progressives. On this Lichtman can’t see any difference between Trump and Sanders, and this is a form of blindness.
Thus, “What We Do Now” perfectly encapsulates ongoing conflicts and contradictions within the Democratic Party. For DFA to reward me with a book containing an essay by Bernie and another by a Hillary surrogate tells me the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is far from over.
Today’s remarks from Iowa’s unrepentant White Supremacist, Rep. Steve King, just underscores the difference between the GOP’s new proto-fascist vision for America – and the one engraved on the Statue of Liberty that celebrates a nation of immigrants.
American history is not just the stories of heroes, sinners, and survivors – or tales of presidents, generals and inventors. It is a record of the struggles of immigrants for a place at the American table. It’s also a personal story.
Almost twenty years ago I became fascinated by genealogy. My mother’s family lived in the United States long before it became a nation. They can be traced back five or six centuries to little Welsh and English villages, and somebody somewhere has a book with all the dry details of begats and property transfers, including the manumission of slaves.
My father’s family had no such privileged roots and were double – maybe even triple – immigrants. My father used to say that his g-g-g-g-grandfather was born on the sea. And, after ordering Canadian archival records, it turned out he was right. Johannes Mooß was born “auf dem Meer” (on the sea) in 1828, enroute from some German-speaking village to Nova Scotia:
I say “German-speaking” because it wasn’t until after the Napoleonic Wars that the Holy Roman Empire was finally dissolved. And it wasn’t until 1815 that the German Confederation, mainly a trade and tax agreement, united German-speaking states. And it wasn’t until 1866 when a Northern German Confederation, and then Otto von Bismarck, founded something akin to the modern state of Germany. But when Margarete Mooß arrived in Nova Scotia, the Europe she knew resembled this:
The land my ancestors arrived in was hardly modern Canada. The French had ceded territory to the English under the Treaty of Utrecht a century before, but “New France” maintained control in Upper Canada. It had been only 70 years since Le Grand Dérangement, or the Arcadian genocide – the forcible expulsion of 14,000 Arcadians from what is now Canada’s Maritime provinces, which killed 9,000 of them. Many people in New England and Louisiana know this history well because they are descendants of Acadian refugees.
Likewise, the United States of 1828 was hardly recognizable as the nation it is today. Michigan, in which my grandfather, father, and I were born, was not yet a state. Mexico owned all of California, Texas, Arizona, and the Southwest. Years later, when the United States grabbed this territory from Mexico, Mexicans suddenly became “Americans.”
We haven’t always had $40 billion walls separating us from other nations. On both my father’s father’s side and his mother’s side there are multiple connections to Canada. The borders between both nations were once as porous as sand – still are – and some of my Quebecois ancestors – the unwanted refuse of Alsace and Normandy – even made a brief appearance in Attleboro, Massachusetts before ending up in Northern Michigan.
Sometime in the mid-1800’s my father’s family migrated to Upper Canada (now Ontario). And sometime during the beginning of the 20th Century my father’s people emigrated once again – or maybe they simply sneaked across the non-existent border – and by pure luck all of us since then have been American citizens.
Fully bitten by the genealogy bug I made phone calls, sent out emails, and scoured genealogy boards. I gathered family trees from Midwestern German and French cousins, Francophone ancestors, people I’m related to in Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Ontario and British Columbia. Through marriage on my father’s side it turns out I have Chinese and Indian cousins – “India” Indian and Native American. My sister’s daughters share her background and also that of their Puerto Rican father. Several of my cousins are part Polish. A young cousin married into a Mexican-American family. My own children share all the ancestry I’ve described, plus the Lithuanian and Ukrainian heritage of my wife.
Despite all the ugliness happening right now, our histories and families are literally fusing. This is the reality of America, and its beauty.
As I’ve worked on the family trees, I’ve unearthed Ellis Island records from my wife’s grandfather and his brothers:
I found the stedtl in Lithuania the brothers came from, and a marker that identifies where all those who remained in that village, including a sister Perla, were slaughtered by Einsatzgruppen and xenophobic neighbors on September 11, 1941:
At the time the United States had immigration quotas for Jews, even though everyone knew what was happening in Europe. Today the lesson of protecting vulnerable people is one we have failed to learn.
I’ve never been able to determine where in Germany my father’s people came from, and I’ve followed many false leads. Some of them have been fascinating. Who knew that Germans were invited to live in Bessarabia (Russia) by a czarina in the early 19th century? Or that a century later they were disinvited by another czar and instantly became refugees – some fleeing to North Dakota. Who knew that other German refugees were brought to Nova Scotia to offset Catholic population?
As I’ve researched names on census rolls, cemetery lists, and ship manifests, I’ve discovered a lot about the fragile lives of immigrants of every era. Certainly some come for economic reasons. But unless you are hungry or have been made a refugee, who would choose to leave everything behind, pack a few belongings into a suitcase, and start all over again with almost nothing?
The ancestor born on the sea arrived in steerage and became an indentured servant as a boy. Pitted against citizens already established, and pitted against each other, immigrants work without savings, language, security, the support of nearby family – or much of anything – until they either become part of the fabric of a new nation. Or have to start all over again.
My own family story is nothing special. We all have a story like this. What is both amazing and shocking is that the nation’s xenophobes and racists have as little notion of who they are as of American history.
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Modern day stories of today’s immigrants are no different. Like refugees from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere, many have escaped death squads and military juntas:
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Immigrants today are just as likely to be fleeing drug cartels and pan-national gangs as those arriving a century ago were fleeing from cossacks or the Czar. Or, like the Acadians, today’s refugees may be escaping genocide:
Whatever you choose to call them – immigrants, refugees, seekers, dreamers, illegals – they’re not here to take American jobs. They’re here to survive.
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For Trump and his collection of racists and xenophobes, Syrian refugees are not victims – or people or families – but simply a danger to be contained. The most ludicrous aspect of Trump’s dehumanizing Muslim Ban is that it is Europe – not the United States – that has taken responsibility for the human tragedy that perpetual American Wars of Choice have caused.
Building a massive, shameful, wasteful wall and doubling or trebling the number of ICE agents may not be equivalent to another Kristallnacht, but from Trump and Bannon we hear strong echoes of the same fascist rhetoric.
Last October I traveled to Berlin to find out how Germans were dealing with the huge number of refugees literally washing up on European shores, and I worked with a refugee aid group. For a month I handed out shoes, clothing, and supplies to people from all over the Middle East. Many were from Aleppo, a city racked by a civil war the United States has played a major role in. Many were from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries the U.S. has been waging wars against for two decades.
This is what the cowardly 45th President of the United States is afraid of – people fleeing war zones with their children:
In Germany there is opposition to the large number of people transiting through the country, to be sure. But many Germans have been welcoming. As the sign below says: “we are all foreigners.”
And if more Americans dug into their own family trees and stories, they would recognize just how much we have in common with those we should be welcoming.
Last May China celebrated – “tried to forget” might be more accurate – the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was little more than a murderous pogrom that took place from about 1966-1976. China’s true power elites stood aside and permitted the poor and angry to deflect blame on moderates and intellectuals for all the nation’s woes. Mao Zedong claimed that “bourgeois” elements had infiltrated the Party and to make China great again it needed a good old-fashioned Stalinist purge – and a purge it got. More than 1.7 million Chinese scholars, teachers, and political moderates were murdered in a single decade.
With Mao Zedong’s encouragement, paramilitary groups called the Red Guards screamed the Mandarin equivalent of “Lock Her Up!” as they conducted kangaroo courts and – like today’s Taliban – tried to physically erase a moderate, traditional Confusian culture from Chinese history. Scholars and intellectuals were sent to the countryside for “re-education” and many never returned.
In 1969 Mao declared that the Cultural Revolution had been a success. But China had to wait for Mao’s death in 1976 to restore a measure of normalcy by arresting general Lin Biao and the “Gang of Four,” and by instituting reforms under Deng Xiaoping.
In 1981 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party declared the Cultural Revolution had been an abject failure:
… on no account should the theories and methods of the “cultural revolution” have been applied. Under socialist conditions, there is no economic or political basis for carrying out a great political revolution in which “one class overthrows another.” It decidedly could not come up with any constructive programme, but could only bring grave disorder, damage and retrogression in its train. History has shown that the “cultural revolution,” initiated by a leader labouring under a misapprehension and capitalized on by counter-revolutionary cliques, led to domestic turmoil and brought catastrophe to the Party, the state and the whole people.
Without much leadership from the Democratic Party a resistance movement has arisen. Liberals and progressives are making daily calls, attending meetings, writing letters, attending marches and rallies – all in defense of “what we once had.” The resistance is encouraging, but social and political movements cannot be based entirely on nostalgia – regardless of the Republican Party’s fleeting success with it. If we are honest, we have to recognize that the world we created is not that rosy. We can do better.
Hamid is a Pakistani novelist perhaps best known for the book (and film) The Reluctant Fundamentalist. He writes that we seek solace in nostalgia because the world is spinning so fast. We fantasize that the men and women of the past were more confident and secure in their roles and their work than we are today. We understand the technology of the age of toasters. Robotics scares the hell out of us. We watch TV and search the internet, but the fictions and connections we are really looking for are much deeper and older, more primal. Our identities are, in part and in fact, stories. And we are story tellers. Why retreat to the past, then, when we can create new stories for an even better future? Read Hamid’s complete article here.
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And – speaking of reading – people tend to read mainly what fits or confirms their pre-existing views. Democrats and Conservatives literally read different news and hear different opinions. But if you really want to know your political adversary, you need to know what goes on inside his pointy little head. There is some disagreement whether it was Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, or Mario Puzo who came up with the quote, but “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is good advice no matter who said it.
Republicans certainly understand this rule – know what the competition is up to. So even though it hurts, tune into the president’s speech tonight at https://www.whitehouse.gov/.
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Finally – speaking of rejecting nostalgia in favor of a better future – Massachusetts Senate Bill S.291 proposes banning “Indian” names as school mascots. This would cost my own town of Dartmouth a couple dollars to change. But it would finally end an insult similar to that of turning Black jockeys into lawn ornaments or reducing Native Americans to wood statuary in front of cigar shops. “Indians” are people, not mascots. If you really can’t think up a new mascot that belongs on your school’s front lawn, try a gnome, smurf, or a pink flamingo.
Some may object to this as “political correctness” – but what does this phrase really mean other than civility? It’s long overdue that this kind of unthinking insensitivity and low-grade racism ended. As the rest of the country plunges deeper into racism and xenophobia, it would be rather sweet if a few oases of sanity and kindness, like our own Bay State, shone a little light into the nation’s heart of darkness.
Regarding my summary of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” an anonymous reader wrote to correct me on the time period in which the book was written and to do a much better job of explaining Alinsky’s purpose than I did. – Thanks.
Alinsky didn’t write Rules for Radicals during the Reagan years, He published it in 1971 during the Nixon years.
I worked with Alinsky. Contrary to the likes of Gingrich, Saul was not a Marxist. He was a old-fashioned American patriot who frequently quoted the Founding Fathers.
One of Alinsky’s favorite quotes – mine too – and which he used to introduce an earlier book I also recommend entitled Reveille For Radicals, is from Thomas Paine: “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern for it, but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.”
Saul’s objective was not mere resistance. People tend to focus on Saul’s tactics but his objective – the objective of Alinsky style community organization – was participatory democracy. No less than to make US style representative democracy work the way the founders intended. Here I would recommend you go back and take a look at [the ending of]Obama’s last State of the Union.
Saul’s tactics, based in life-long experience, close observation and study under everyone from UC sociology professors to John L. Lewis and Frank Nitti – what he called called “applied social science” – were designed to involve – to enfranchise – those who were excluded from civic decision-making that effected their lives.
Alinsky used confrontation over issues important to peoples’ lives to get them involved. He started off with what he called “fast, easy victories” to give people confidence they could actually get things accomplished and to convince others to join the effort so it would be possible to take on bigger and bigger projects. In addition to political tactics Saul taught leadership skills, research skills, fund-raising skills, how to prioritize and pursue goals and how to build not only a voluntary neighborhood organization but a coalition of voluntary associations.
If everyone’s involved, all interests represented – and people are informed about available options and the implications of those options – Saul figured things would turn out at better than they would otherwise. What he called “enlightened self-interest.” An informed, involved citizenry was an article of faith with him as distinct from those who rely on demagoguery and/or ideology for their answers. Saul was a big fan of checks and balances.
The idea that an educated citizenry is essential to representative democracy is of course also basic to American style democracy as envisioned by people like Jefferson and Franklin.
Basically, Saul was a teacher – saw himself that way and saw Alinsky-style organizers that way too.
Saul taught people citizenship – how to become effectively and productively involved.
Saul believed therein lay the best available answers. The opposite of those who purposefully seek to disenlighten because an enlightened citizenry would never buy what they are trying to sell.
Newt Gingrich created the meme that Saul Alinsky was the Machiavelli behind Obama. Since then, the Right-wing blogosphere has been littered with denunciations of Alinsky. This has also resulted in a cottage industry of pamphlets, articles, and spinoffs like “Rules for Conservatives” by Michael Master, Jerome Corsi’s “Saul Alinsky: the Evil Genius behind Obama,” Will Clark’s “Obama, Hillary, Saul Alinsky and their Useful Idiots,” Richard Bledsoe’s “Can Saul Alinsky be Saved? Jesus Christ in the Obama and Post-Obama Era,” and, well, you get the idea. Not to mention Ben Carson’s claims that Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. The Right doesn’t like it when the little guy fights back.
Alinsky learned his lessons in organizing generations ago and wrote the book Rules for Radicals during the Reagan years. He knew what kind of stacked deck workers play against. And he knew full-well what effect he had on the Right – “The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.'” Well, Alinsky’s methods worked, and his enemies respected him. Despite all their venom, the Tea Party eagerly adapted Alinsky’s methods successfully. And in fact the following quotes from “Rules for Radicals” were taken from a Right-winger who studied him in depth. Alinsky saw politics precisely as the Right does – as all-out war. And in times of war one does not always take the genteel high road.
In the quotes below, it’s clear Donald Trump uses many of Alinsky’s principles, and it’s also clear how poorly most Liberals do. Alinsky’s ideas may seem alien to people unaccustomed to street fighting. But we have now entered a period where politics has got to get a little rough.
This failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience — and gives full respect to the other’s values — would have ruled out attacks on the American flag. — P. xviii
As an organizer I start where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. — P. xix
“Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!” is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. — xxi
A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change, but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution. — xxii
But the answer I gave the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: “Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing — but this only swings : people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.” — xxiii
The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins — that is, until the late evening newscast, when suddenly we are plunged into the world as it is. Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest. Two examples would be the priest who wants to be a bishop and bootlicks and politicks his way up, justifying it with the rationale, “After I get to be bishop I’ll use my office for Christian reformation,” or the businessman who reasons, “First I’ll make my million and after that I’ll go for the real things in life,” Unfortunately one changes in many ways on the road to the bishopric or the first million, and then one says, “I’ll wait until I’m a cardinal and then I can be more effective,” or “I can do a lot more after I get two million” — and so it goes. In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of “the common good” and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. — P.12-13
It is not a world of peace and beauty and dispassionate rationality, but as Henry James once wrote, “Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.” Henry James’ statement is an affirmation of that of Job: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare…” — P.14
The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced for the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not men. — P.26
One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue. — P.26
…The secretary inquired how Churchill, the leading British anti-communist, could reconcile himself to being on the same side as the Soviets. Would Churchill find it embarrassing and difficult to ask his government to support the communists? Churchill’s reply was clear and unequivocal: “Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” — P.29
The fifth rules of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa. To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis — will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means. — P.32
The seventh rule of ethics and means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success and failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. P.34
The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical. — P.35
The tenth rule of the ethics of rules and means is that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral arguments. …the essence of Lenin’s speeches during this period was “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” And it was. — P.36-37
Eight months after securing independence (from the British), the Indian National Congress outlawed passive resistance and made it a crime. It was one thing for them to use the means of passive resistance against the previous Haves, but now in power they were going to ensure that this means would not be used against them. — P.43
All effective actions require the passport of morality. — P.44
But to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory. If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead. — P.59
The organizer becomes a carrier for the contagion of curiosity, for a people asking “why” are beginning to rebel. — P.72
To realistically appraise and anticipate the probably reactions of the enemy, he must be able to identify with them, too, in his imagination and foresee their reactions to his actions. — P.74
With very rare exceptions, the right things are done for the wrong reasons. It is futile to demand that men do the right thing for the right reason — this is a fight with a windmill. — P.76
The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion. — P.96
If the organizer begins with an affirmation of love for people, he promptly turns everyone off. If, on the other hand, he begins with a denunciation of exploiting employers, slum landlords, police shakedowns, gouging merchants, he is inside their experience and they accept him. — P.98
The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” — P.100
The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. — P.116-117
THE THIRTEEN RULES – Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. …The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat. …the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. …the fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. …the sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. …the seventh rule : is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. …the eighth rule: Keep the pressure on. …the ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than : the thing itself. The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. …The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counter-side. …The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. …The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. — P.126-129
One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative. He can’t toss forever in limbo, and avoid decision. He can’t weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act. — P.134
It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes irrational anger. — P.134-135
I have on occasion remarked that I felt confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday. — P.150
For example, since the Haves publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law, and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other), they can be constantly pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations. No organizations, including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book. You can club them to death with their “book” of rules and regulations. This is what that great revolutionary, Paul of Tarsus, knew when he wrote to the Corinthians: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter killeth.” — P.152
Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our populations — with respect, understanding, and sympathy. To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized dream world but they are here and will be. — P.189
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David Frum is a prominent Neoconservative who worked for the Bush administration. Many of his foreign policy prescriptions are pretty repellent. But for Frum, as with many Neocons, Trump’s proto-fascism is so frightening that he’s offering advice to the Atlantic Monthly’s liberal readers:
“It’s possible I’m not the right person to offer the following analysis. Yet it’s also a good rule to seek wisdom wherever it may be found.”
And Frum’s counsel on strategy is pretty sound. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like Alinsky’s:
The more conservative protests are, the more radical they are. You want to scare Trump? Be orderly, polite, and visibly patriotic. Wave the flag, be more inclusive. Disinviting pro-Life women from the Women’s March may have been an error. Invite more cops and veterans. Don’t be so partisan. Be inclusive. Be dignified. Don’t let Trump set the tone.
Strategic thinking, inclusive action. The military formula is – superior force at a single point. OWS fizzled because it was diffuse. Be selective with demands that can be achieved. And go after specifics related to Trump – “Pass a law requiring the Treasury to release the President’s tax returns.” – “An independent commission to investigate Russian meddling in the US election.” – “Divest from the companies.” – Limited “asks” with broad appeal.
Protests are fun but meetings are effective. Bodies in the street represent potential power, not necessarily real power. What happens when people get on the bus and go home? In contrast, it’s the mundane day-to-day organizing that gets things done. Less hair-splitting, more organizing. Relentlessly use the kind of tactics Indivisible spells out to keep steady pressure on elected officials.
There are two thoughtful articles that express both my frustration with, and hope for, Trump voters.
The first was written the day after the election by Jamelle Bouie and the title says it all – “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter.” In a nutshell, Trump voters brought their racism, privilege, and recklessness into the voting booth, completely disregarding everything and everyone Trump – with his extreme and well-known positions – promised to harm. These voters knew full well what they were doing and they should have known better.
And it wasn’t just the racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Trump voters also chose to destroy public schools, dismantle medical care for 40 million citizens, wreck environmental protections, and they actually chose to give themselves a tax increase so that a few billionaires could pay lower taxes or none at all.
The word “idiots” doesn’t even begin to describe them. But there’s also a more charitable view.
Justin Gest writes in POLITICO (“The Two Kind of Trump Voters”) that Democrats have to make a distinction between the new crop of proto-fascists in the GOP (along with their supporters) and the other numbskulls who cast their irresponsible votes for Donald Trump.
Gest writes off those whom Bouie does – he calls them the Nationalists – but holds out hope for those he calls the Exasperated, voters who were disappointed by Democratic Neoliberalism and wanted to try something new.
These Exasperated voters also heard the same Mexican rapist rhetoric we all did, and there’s no letting them off the hook. Bouie’s arguments apply completely. They voted for Trump because their [only slightly less ideological] racism and xenophobia made anyone else’s concerns invisible and irrelevant. But they still voted to screw their neighbors.
But Gest has a point. Many of the Exasperated were once Democrats, whether Southern Democrats or Democrats from Southie. Just from the numbers we know that many of them voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but changed their minds in 2016. Gest suggests that they may be irresponsible, unreliable, and unpredictable – but they aren’t stupid. They will turn on Trump as quickly as they did on Obama if he can’t deliver. And they can smell a bullshitter a mile away.
Democracy is dirty, reckless and untidy. And so is the American electorate. But Democrats have to reach out to these Exasperated voters and – most importantly – have to offer them something new and real – and something they honestly intend to deliver.
It is one of life’s great joys to have adult children I can argue with. Smart people with the right and the obligation to keep the old man honest. The other night I was having a phone conversation with my son, who expressed his annoyance with not only right-wing flacks but with flaming liberals.
And I was included on his list.
I argued that we can’t reach agreement with the Far Right because (1) they are highly averse to facts; and that (2) most of our disagreements can’t be settled with a New England stone wall (you live your life, I’ll live mine on my side of the wall) – when the Far Right’s idea of freedom really means the right to take civil rights away from a multicultural majority. And (3) – I questioned whether, at the end of the day, any amount of polite chitchat would ever really change their commitment to taking my rights away.
My son disagreed and said – well, you have to start somewhere. You will reach some of them. And anyway – what’s the alternative, dad?
This, of course, was the grown-up way of looking at the problem. And maybe my grown up son is right. Maybe we just start where luck and serendipity take us.
* * *
Another of life’s great joys is to have second chances to spend time with your grown children. We are in South Carolina for a few weeks avoiding the New England winter, and our daughter flew down to run in a race and to visit with friends.
Yesterday we were all sunning ourselves in Waterfront Park in Charleston when a man with an NRA cap and a “Lifetime NRA member” T-shirt stopped in front of our bench and asked, “Where y’all from?” Massachusetts, we answered. “Where ’bouts in Massachusetts?” he pressed us. I replied by asking if he knew where New Bedford is. “Hell, I was BORN in New Bedford. 115 Pleasant Street. But I haven’t been back in 40 years.”
We talked about the area. He remembered random local geography and history, including Joshua Slocum, and he couldn’t remember the name of “that Portuguese sausage,” Linguica, I said. “Linguica,” he repeated with a happy grin. “Yeah, that’s really good.”
My new NRA friend stood in the sun a moment remembering New England, while I sat under one of South Carolina’s famous palmetto trees enjoying the winter warmth. Then he stepped forward and offered his hand and gave me his name, and I did the same. And we shook hands like we meant it.
I have my doubts, but my son is probably right. We have to start somewhere. And maybe the only things we will ever have in common with those of wildly different political views are things like food and warmth.
But maybe a shared appreciation for what we all bring to each other is enough to make that start.
You get these things all the time – petitions from moveon.org, credo action, change.org, your political, professional and civic organizations, the list goes on.
Safe in your chair, coffee mug in hand, you add your name, zipcode and email address, and – click – you’ve made a difference.
Both the White House and British Parliament offer citizens e-petition sites, and both are basically trash chutes into which voters throw their political engagement and minutes of their life.
The Atlantic Monthly calls the White House site a joke, while the Guardian (UK) calls the British version a farce.
Evgeny Mozorov, an American social networking skeptic, calls it Slacktivism:
‘Slacktivism’ is the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation: why bother with sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture if one can be as loud campaigning in the virtual space? Given the media’s fixation on all things digital — from blogging to social networking to Twitter — every click of your mouse is almost guaranteed to receive immediate media attention, as long as it’s geared towards the noble causes. That media attention doesn’t always translate into campaign effectiveness is only of secondary importance.
One pundit explains why online petitions are not very effective:
No. The reason is that on the internet no one knows if you’re a dog. So legislators, executives, or administrators who are being lobbied by these petitions don’t know if you are a registered voter in their district, or even if you are an American citizen. They don’t know if you are signing multiple times or if you are signing for other people. They don’t know if you’re a robot, a person, or an alien.
You should NOT be bothering with online petitions or emailing.
Engaging with politicians is also a hot topic in the Indivisible Guide. And even more effective than having to persuade out-of-touch politicians to do the right thing is to vote for those who actually reflect your values.
We all want to do the right thing, and it’s hard to turn down a friend’s request. There are also cases where petitions have made a difference. Recently I added my name to the whitehouse.gov petition calling for Trump to disclose his tax returns – simply because he said nobody cares. It may have been a futile act politically, but the mounting signatures prove him wrong.
Let your judgment be your guide. But start making those calls.
In most democracies, leaders are elected by popular vote, not some crazy slave era concoction like the Electoral College. And in most parliamentary democracies citizens don’t have to suffer incompetence and corruption without relief. In most democracies there is a provision to hold new elections on a vote of no-confidence. But in the United States we either wait four years to throw the bum out – or we can try to impeach him. There is already a campaign underway to get rid of a president who started his term in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution:
“… no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.”
Although conservatives wave away the word “emolument” as vague, it appears in Samuel Johnson’s 1775 dictionary, and still means today what it meant back then: profit; advantage. Constitutional lawyers, including Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout and others from the Brookings Institution, argue that Trump cannot continue profiting from his international “deals,” especially when he is the only president in American history to refuse to divest himself of conflicts-of-interest.
The Trump cabinet, while not yet rubber-stamped by the Republican Congress, is shaping up to be a weird assortment of billionaires, generals, scammers, ideologues, and incompetents. God help us when Rick Perry assumes control of the Dept. of Energy’s nukes. Or when Ben Carson puts up the photo of himself and Jesus in his new HUD office. Before settling down to a nap. Or when Betsy deVos becomes the homeschooling czarina. Or when Jeff Sessions dismantles programs to reign in police violence against black lives.
You think Ferguson was bad…
arsonist
While Bill Clinton was actually impeached for consentual sex with a White House intern, Republicans seem less inclined to hold Trump to the same standard – or any standard at all. Trump’s ex-wife’s divorce deposition included charges that he raped her and there is a very long list of victims of his sexual abuse, including Summer Zervos, who is suing Trump for defamation. This particular case could bring evidence, including videos, to light.
A serial misogynist and abuser and his incompetent cabinet.
Thus, it was appropriate that millions of women marched in hundreds of American cities. By one count as many as 4.6 million women in 600 cities protested the crotch-grabber-in-chief:
Pictures of the march were truly impressive. Washington DC was awash in pink. If you click on this link you can see the crowd from a drone-eye view:
And even before Trump’s inauguration, local demonstrators from the Coalition for Social Justice, the ACLU, and various unions and church groups were protesting Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s publicity-stunted proposal to use prisoners for slave labor to build Trump’s Mexican wall. A photo from Ash Street:
ash-street
* * *
In today’s local paper Robert Xifaras wrote that, in his 87 years, he has never seen so many “‘shameless deplorable unpatriotic divisive malcontents’ who have entered into a conspiracy not only to attack the legitimacy of the election, but to further espouse […] hatred.” Show some respect for the office!
Mr. Xifaras has apparently only recently started following the news since he obviously missed the Birtherism and racism that Trump had a major hand in spreading.
Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and Seasons Greetings!
Last week a friend sent me a link to a piece by Harold Pollack in The Nation which put into words what many of us have been thinking – that the time is soon coming when writing checks and signing petitions won’t be enough. Getting out into the streets and engaging in civil disobedience may be what is required, regardless of our age.
Civil disobedience is as American as Henry David Thoreau, and one could even say it’s been an American tradition since the colonies tangled with King George II. Thoreau spent his night in jail on July 23rd, 1846 when the twenty-nine year-old abolitionist walked into town to accept his punishment for withholding taxes as a protest against slavery.
Our individual actions do make a difference. Rosa Parks, through the simple act of refusing to move to the back of a bus, kicked off the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Boycott was a turning point in building the Civil Rights movement. And the Civil Rights movement, in turn, inspired activists black and white – like the future U.S. Senator from Vermont pictured above being arrested.
In the face of what’s surely coming from the Trump administration – mass deportations, targeting of Muslims, even greater violations of civil liberties – should Americans dust off this tool of protest even if it means spending a night in jail?
Funke introduces the German Extreme Right: Pegida, the NPD, and the AFD. Pegida is now also a political party and is in Denmark. The AFD cultivates the appearance of a dry, conservative economics-focused party but its base is the radical right consisting of members of the NPD (a barely-legal party that never got much traction), Pegida (primarily a hate group for xenophobes), the German “Identitäre Bewegung” (white supremacist “Identitarian movement”), and the “Institut für Staatspolitik” (the National Policy Institute, founded in 2000), which sees itself as the voice of Germany’s “New Right.”
But Germany’s New Right is not so different from the old in its connection to Nazism. In the USA Richard Spencer’s “National Policy Institute” (founded five years later) seems to be a knock-off of the Institut für Staatspolitik – and virtually every feature of German neo-Nazism exists in the United States. This is one reason I found Funke’s book so fascinating and chilling.
Funke frames the political climate in Germany. He paints a picture of alienated young Muslims sitting in chat rooms and working themselves up to acts of violence. But this is also what happens with angry white Germans. Both seek online confirmation for their beliefs and become angrier by the minute. And for the Wutbürger somebody has to pay. Germans found an example in Jörg Haider of the FPÖ in Austria, who offered simple solutions – get out of the EU; kick out foreigners; and shut the borders. Then Austria would be great. Sound famliar?
Of course real reasons are more complex. Geopolitical issues – such as Western nations destabilizing the Middle East – created refugees. The rise of ISIS was a consequence of Western nations creating failed states. The economic meltdown of 2008 wasn’t created by Syrian asylum seekers, nor was income inequality within Western nations, nor were the bankruptcies of southern European nations. Global Capitalism, globalism, and unstable markets are not a refugee issue. But simple minds cry out for simple solutions.
Funke cites Oliver Nachtwey’s book on economic decline in Germany – the end of the “German dream” that has shaken those who thought their place was secure in the modern BRD. Low-paying MacJobs are proliferating just as elsewhere in global Capitalism, and the social safety net has disappeared. People are on their own and they’re angry.
Economic inequality engenders political inequality and political instability. Funke points to Armin Schäfer’s work on participatory democracy. Das Volk may be dumb, but they’re not stupid. They know that the big decisions are not made by little people – even in a benign liberal “democracy.” Consequently voters often sit out elections. Why bother? It’s all been decided. And the press? They’re run by elites, right-populists tell voters.
Funke cites Wolfgang Streeck’s “Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” Streeck writes of the frequent crises of Capitalism, the profit-taking that occurs even when markets fail, and of the austerity programs and the sacrifices citizens must make in order to prop up the markets. The”elites,” say right-wing populists, always manage to suck money out of the system while the little guy suffers. And this is correct, although one right-wing “populist” is himself a billionaire sucking money out of the system. But the rightwing-populist cannot – and will not – repudiate Capitalism or point fingers at the real criminals. Another enemy must be found.
As the economic middle class becomes thinner and more vulnerable, the stability of the political center of the middle class becomes weaker and it can move in unexpected directions. Zick and Klein’s book “Fragile Mitte” describes this phenomenon and offers reasons for the country’s move to the right: although economically weaker, they slavishly align themselves with the ruling class.
Finally, Funke enumerates a few of the right-wing demagogues busy at work in Europe: Norbert Hofer and Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria; Marine Le Pen in France; Geerd Wilders in the Netherlands; and Nigel Farage in Britain.
Right-wing demogogues claim the EU takes jobs away from workers; that the EU imposes quotas on refugees. Globalism is your enemy, say the populists, because it imposes a second set of laws over nations, injuring sovereignty and productivity. As for NATO, only the NPD in Germany is opposed. For the AFD the Defense industry is nation and business friendly. Foreigners are the problem. Never is it global Capitalism because neo-Nazis don’t really want to fix an unjust system. They just want to be the ones to run it.
Against Human Dignity
The section describes how easily hate speech becomes acts of hate. When the far-right start calling for the expulsion of foreigners, it’s not long before supporters start fire-bombing them. The “Mitte-Studie” from the University of Leipzig showed that the middle class (AFD members especially) were increasingly likely to be hostile to foreigners and evinced anti-democratic and authoritarian attitudes. A surprising number also approved of a dictator. In the German states where right-wing parties were politically strongest there were more physical attacks.
PEGIDA – Unleashed resentment
Pegida’s first demonstration was in Dresden in October 2014, where over 10,000 people protested foreigners and the nation’s asylum laws. It was founded by Lutz Bachmann, who apparently loves Hitler, and has grown to at least 40,000 members, at one point having 200,000 Facebook page supporters. The University of Göttingen did a study of the typical Pegida member: 80% male; 70% without religion; 80% in a relationship; average income, most late thirties to fifties. 90% were unhappy with the way democracy worked. And they were angry. This is a Trump supporter.
AFD: Alternative for Germany – Populist in form, Extreme Right in substance
In the preceding chapter Funke goes through a list of Pegida organizations in each of the German states, as well as showing links to the NPD and the AFD. The AFD is a party whose platform is a bland enumeration of mostly economic policy, which seems to place it on even footing with the CDU. However, the AFD has a “wing” of extremists who regularly coordinate work with Pegida and the NPD. In many ways, they are all interchangeable.
Originally the AFD was constituted as an economic opponent of the Euro and as a political opponent of the CDU. It was formed by an economics professor, Bernd Lucke, and a former IBM (Europe) executive, Hans-Olaf Henkel. Both opposed the Euro but found the international company they were in – Marine Le Pen in France, for example – distastful.
But it wasn’t long before they were deposed (see the “Erfurt resolution” of March 2015) by extreme right-wing members Björn Höcke, André Poggenburg, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, Alexander Gauland, and Frauke Petry, who replaced “technocrats” and those “without vision” with “patriots” capable of taking the fight to the mainstream parties, the media, and “social experimentation.”
Funke footnotes a voting rights survey with figures on attacks against foreigners, mainly Muslims. On the “wahlrecht” website there is a page that shows percentages each party would get if an election were held today. In Baden-Württemberg, Saxony, Thüringen, and Sachsen-Anhalt the AFD is running second place behind the CDU. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern they lead. They are not yet ready to take on everyone and take over the government. But they’re gaining on the CDU.
Björn Höcke, one of the party leaders, is the motor driving the extreme right transformation of the AFD. Höcke has been trying to Nazi-fy the party by making it more Völkisch – a racial adjective meaning organic, tribal, and “native” in a genetic sense. Even Frauke Petry, the telegenic, well-spoken and English-fluent face of the party, has defended the use of this old Nazi adjective. It is a perfect example of a German dog whistle. The neo-Nazis for whom the party speaks know exactly what the term really means. The party is also unapologetically anti-Semitic, although it keeps trying to appeal to Zionists on the basis of shared commitment to nationalism and ethnocentrism.
Despite the many links between the AFD and the NPD and Pegida, AFD leadership has sought to keep a safe distance from more violent elements of the other two movements. In May 2016 the party passed a resolution playing down these connections. But Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the party’s “go to” man for all things anti-Islamic, condemned the move while praising Pegida: “Pegida exudes calm and discipline, equanimity and sensibility.” Tillschneider sees the AFD’s role as carrying Pegida’s protests into parliament. Alexander Gauland, another AFD leader, describes the relationship this way: the AFD and Pegida are “naturally linked.”
Funke offers many examples of fuzzy lines between the three extremist groups. Pegida and the NPD have strong relationships to resurgent Nazism and a cadre of neo-Nazi members. The AFD takes pains to distance itself from them, creating “deniability,” but the AFD’s message is still crafted to appeal to them, and AFD leadership praises their extreme brethren. The AFD also refuses to condemn violence against foreigners. Bottom line – neo-Nazism is a unified movement in Germany. Only at the top is there a thin veneer of respectability – and even that is often unmasked by leaked internal documents or YouTube videos of private meetings. Americans should recognize the frightening similarities between German and US politics.
The extreme “New Right”
As if all these angry xenophobes were not bad enough, Germany has a problem with white supremacy. The Identitarian Movement and what we call the “Alt-Right” here in the USA have found a home in Pegida and the AFD.
In 2000 Götz Kubitschek founded the “Institut für Staatspolitik,” which publishes “Sezession,” and sees itself as thinkers of the “New Right.” Both journal and founder have close relationships to all three extremist organizations as well as the Identitarian Movement. Sezession regularly attacks the “lying press” and majority-elected political “elites.” The American Alt-Right happily reproduces these materials, although Americans now have their own Kubitschek in Richard Spencer who has a similar journal. In Austria, where voters narrowly rejected an Identitarian candidate, a 2014 Sora Institute poll showed 40% think Nazis weren’t so bad and 30% liked the idea of a Führer – numbers that doubled since the 2008 economic crisis.
Kubitschek is a disciple of Armin Mohler, credited as an “early thinker” of the New Right. Mohler described himself as a fascist and deserted from the Swiss army to join the SS. He was also an admirer of Mussolini. Kubitschek is a pal of the extreme-right publisher of the short-lived Compact magazine, Jürgen Elsässer. One issue of the defunct magazine featured a roundtable with AFD members on white supremacy.
In Germany the Identitarian movement was resuscitated from outlawed French neo-Nazism, “Génération Identitaire,” which again has its American admirers. Alain de Benoist developed a racist ideology for the Nouvelle Droite (New Right) and was embraced by both German New Right and American Alt-Right. He advocates a type of Apartheid and cultural hegemony: “What the ND wants is a federal Europe, founded on the principle of subsidiarity…” This Catholic concept on the surface sounds a bit like federalism, but it really means turning your back on the rest of society. Many Catholics are appalled at the corruption of the principle, but it is part of the AFD’s platform.
Kubitschek is also knee-deep in the Identitarian movement, along with Pegida supporter Felix Menzel, editor of the “Blaue Narzisse” and whom American admirers would call a Christian Identitarian. Kubitschek has close relationships with Austrian neo-fascists and neo-Nazis. To Identitarians the problem is “population transfer.” They see themselves being replaced. The former head of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Thilo Sarrazin, had a catchy title in his book, “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (Germany does away with itself). But if the problem is “population transfer,” transfer is also the solution. Identitarians believe multiculturalism must be fought and foreigners expelled. Trump has promised the forced expulsion of 11 milllion foreigners and 53% of Israelis support the forced expulsion of Israeli Arabs. Ethnosupremacy is not just for Nazis anymore.
Limits to opposing the Right
Germany’s “liberal democracy” can’t (or won’t) fight the extreme right as it once did – despite an uptick in rightwing terror attacks. In Brandenburg rightwing groups have started doing “evening strolls” – intended to send a chilling message to immigrants. AFD parliamentarians propose the most hateful policies in the Bundesrat. Is this “democracy at work? Or”democracy doing away with itself?” And both local police and national security agencies now have extremists within their ranks. When a permanent state of emergency is declared, you can bet it won’t be by moderates.
This is a terrifying book, but at the end of the day it’s a German problem. Germans had better wake the hell up and crack down on these groups before it’s too late.
Review of “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson (ISBN 9781844670864)
Benedict Anderson writes in a florid style, using metaphors where descriptive phrases would be more useful, which often forces you to reread a long paragraph in order to find the simple idea buried within. It is quite annoying, yet Anderson’s distillation of the features of nationalism is valuable for a patient reader. That said, I don’t agree with everything he writes, as you will see.
“Imagined Communities” takes us through many phases and factors in the development of nationalist thought. Anderson makes a few initial generalizations: that nationalists insist their nations are far older than historians would agree; that nationalism is “normal”; that pan-nationalism is thought to be aberrant; that the political power of nationalism is incredibly strong when compared to its thin and flimsy philosophical foundation and its incoherence. We seem to be dealing here with something as dangerous and tantalizing as a narcotic.
Anderson’s definition of a “nation” is an “imagined political community” – not merely invented but invented out of whole cloth. Its cultural and psychological roots are a preoccupation with death and sacrifice (example: the unknown soldier). Nationalism on the surface is incredibly similar to religion: it addresses many of the same needs for belonging and individual meaning. In this Anderson takes pains to disavow a causal link, but he points out that nationalism arose just as religion was being eclipsed by secularism in the 18th century.
Looking at nationalism anthropologically, religions and nations share a sacred language (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.). The sacred language (referred to as a “truth-language”) is necessary for the transmission of sacred texts which convey foundation myths. Consequently nationalists often insist on the use of a particular language since it is central to establishing nationalist narratives and propagating them.
A king’s legitimacy stemmed directly from God. Dynastic rule was possible because one’s father or ur-father was the man God had anointed to lead his people. An easily understood reason for God’s anointing of the king was sacrifice. For example, in Judaism, the near sacrifice of Isaac was necessary to establish legitimacy for the story of biblical Israel that would follow. It involved a truth-language (Hebrew), and cosmology blending seamlessly into history. But when did Abraham actually live? The question has sent historians scrambling for answers. In later years, the story of biblical Israel would become linked to the foundation of a modern state.
Printing and the Reformation weakened “truth languages” as millions of publications were issued in German, French, English, and other “vulgar” languages. When Luther posted his theses, they were printed in German. Protestantism replaced Catholicism, German replaced Latin, and married clerics replaced a supposedly celibate hierarchy led by a Pope whose legitimacy stemmed all the way back to Saint Peter. It was quite a shakeup: language had become the central feature of nationalism, not God.
The Holy Roman Empire operated on Latin which was not only a “truth language” but a pan-national language. When the Church finally lost its absolute control over Europe, the alliances and marriages joining the royalty of diverse nations meant that the royalty did not always speak the language of its subjects. For example, the Habsburgs ruled Magyars, Croats, Slovaks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Austro-Germans; the Turks ruled over a similar polyglot empire. And both were hated by everyone – the Habsburgs for their choice of administrative language, German, and the Turks for propagating their language.
But the bourgeoisie did speak the people’s language. To this class was left the responsibility of directly managing peasants, who were happy to have their local languages elevated. Slowly, local (“national”) languages became the standard among not only serfs and middle management, but by the kings themselves.
To language were added additional trappings – flags, inherited nobility, anthems, national stories of sacrifice – all intended to create “buy in” from the serfs. And all “imagined” in the sense that they were actually of fairly recent vintage. Even in the United States, Anderson points out, this was the case. Americans may have been the riffraff of Europe, but each of the founding states had its own anthems, flags, nobility (Penns and Carrolls, for example), their genealogies and generals. A war was fought to preserve an amalgam of states which itself had only existed a couple of generations. But by the time of the Civil War an imagined nation whose legitimacy derived directly from God’s grace had to be preserved at all cost. (I find it interesting that American nationalism seems to have only partially digested European nationalism. In many parts of our country inhabitants still identify with the “Old Country” – Scots/Irish, German, Quebecois (who in turn identify with their Old Country, France), Italian, Ashkenazi Jewish communities, and others)
With the establishment of the League of Nations, the “nation-state” became the norm. Empires and dynasties were on the way out. The last European empire dissolved in 1974 with the end of Portuguese dictatorship. By the early 20th Century subjects of former empires all began wanting their own nations too. Arabia, India, Israel… But Imperialism came hand-in-hand with nationalism. By the 19th Century every self-respecting “nation” was expected to have some sort of Imperial project to despoil and pillage neighbors or the Third World.
It is impossible to be honest with one’s citizenry about the reasons for subjugating another people. And it’s impossible to be honest with those brought under the heel. Consequently, propaganda has always been a feature of the nation state. It turns out, the stories invented for legitimizing the subjugation of another people are closely related to the stories invented to establish the legitimacy of one’s own “nation.” And education fulfills this function. Schools have always been necessary for normalizing national values and propagating national myth. It is no coincidence that long after European colonists left India or the Dutch Indies the educational institutions they created still exist. At first the purpose was to instill the values of the settler state, but now the same institutions promote their own fledgling nationalism.
But the lures of nationalism don’t entirely depend on language. Toward the end of his chapter on the last waves of nation-state formation, Anderson brings up the case of Switzerland, a polyglot federation. Many historians contend that Switzerland never really became a state in any real sense before 1813, that in 1891 the Swiss were late-comers to European nationalism. And it wasn’t until this year, right on the verge of the 20th Century, that they decided to look back 600 years and declare the “real origin” of the Swiss nation as the year 1291. They had rehabilitated a long-standing “Confederation” and re-invented it as a “nation.” Schlomo Sand has an even more controversial theory about the “invention” of Israel.
The last waves of nationalism occurred in Africa and Asia. As empires struggled to educate and standardize native-staffed bureaucracies, and as global Capitalism exploited new markets, schools, the media, laws, and language began forming all the trappings of modern nation-states (it took Anderson 3 pages to say this). It wasn’t long before the natives became restless, and then not much longer until they had established their own nationalisms. The 20th Century saw a frenzy of people desperate to form themselves into nations.
* * *
The last part of the book is equally fascinating because Anderson addresses patriotism and racism, both contemporary features of nationalism – especially in the United States.
Anderson contends that patriotism is almost exclusively presented in the language of love – admittedly, love of a very narrow and inflexible sort. Individuals may not deviate from this “love” – expressed as devotion, purity of heart, willingness to sacrifice even one’s life – or they will be hated. Anderson poses the provocative question – “Can the reader think immediately of even three hymns of hate?” (apparently he had not read the third stanza of the “Star Spangled Banner”). Militarism epitomizes the ideal of willingness to sacrifice for the nation, and it shares many of the same features of religion (observe a military funeral – equal parts nationalism and God).
Because we have now encountered a state based on ideology and myth, Anderson makes the case that anti-Semitism and racism are not necessarily derived from nationalism, that their roots are actually based in class. The ruler is divine, the aristocracy well-bred and cultivated, deserving of their rights to govern serfs and peasants. All are protecting the destiny of a people.
“The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of external contaminations. […] The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class rather than nation.”
Anderson goes on to say that, because racism is class-based:
“… on the whole, racism and anti-Semitism manifest themselves not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.”
This assertion is impossible to reconcile with actual history. In Nazi Europe millions of Poles were murdered. In the Americas, colonial powers waged genocidal wars on natives across the seas. The United States is currently waging a war on Muslims half a world away. The atomic bomb was not used against Europeans but against Asians. Life is cheap when Europeans are not involved.
In the British empire Lords were the supreme aristocrats. But in the colonies, even the petit bourgeoisie scrambling for advantage or exiled, could “play aristocrat.” They could have their mansions, cooks, houseboys, and horses. And they could have their slaves. From India to the Americas, brown-skinned people were subjugated to the whims of Eurotrash. And while Anderson’s theory is that this was class-based racism, there seems to be no example of a European people that was ever forced into slavery by other Europeans. Class does not appear to me to be the main factor.
Still, here we are in the New World – New York, New Jersey, New Haven. The colonies were what Anderson calls “doubles” of the Old World. Ethnically we were British, French, German, or Spanish. But the distances between Old and New Worlds made holding together far-flung colonies impossible in the long run. When the United States finally penned a Constitution, it was truly something new – something no longer based on European history, or even its own. There was no mention of Columbus, the Mayflower, or Pilgrims – all that came later.
By the 1830’s, however, the new state was a “nation.” It had a piddling history, its genealogies, some founding myths. People were beginning to ponder what their country was and how they belonged. As always, things had to be invented, facts adjusted, to suit the story. In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, for example, Huck and Jim’s friendship is portrayed as a friendship of equals – but Jim is also a slave.
After reading Anderson’s book, I came away thinking that he had somewhat haphazardly synthesized the thinking of other authors on nationalism – Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Anthony Smith. I am particularly fascinated by how nationalism can easily supplant religion. For example, Zionism has largely eclipsed Jewish observance since the Six Day War; and while many Americans no longer take the family to church, they never fail to “support the troops.” In both societies religious militarism is a striking feature (think of the US Air Force Academy or the IDF). And in both there are problems with institutionalized racism – privilege of one ethic group and demonization of another.
But all in all, a useful book to kick off thinking about the anachronistic scourge of nationalism.
In October I will be in Berlin to see how a nation of 80 million can absorb a million refugees. By contrast, the US, a nation of 330 million, only last week reluctantly (and with much fear and whining) took its 10,000th. I will be volunteering with a German welcome organization and talking to refugees, journalists, political and social service organizations.
If you’re interested in following my trip, you can subscribe to an email distribution list here:
This is an opt-in list. You’re on it only if you want to be.
Warm regards, David
The World Refugee Crisis
September 6, 2016
Dear friends and family,
Thanks for subscribing. I leave on October 1st and will start sending you my impressions and my own photos. But if you don’t follow international news, a few facts on the world refugee crisis:
For many years the count of refugees and displaced persons numbered in the tens or twenties of millions. Not pretty numbers, but nothing like last year’s shocking 65.3 million.
Of this number, a third (21.3 million) are refugees, almost two-thirds (4.8 million) are internally displaced people (meaning they have had to flee war zones or destroyed homes within their own countries), and 3.2 million have sought asylum.
The countries with the most refugees are Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, CAR, Myanmar, Eritrea, and Colombia.
As a consequence of its darker history, Germany has a generous refugee policy. It’s not necessarily generosity of spirit, however: it’s the law. Article 16a of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) gives asylum to those who are persecuted or in danger, and they may not be put back in danger (contrast this with the United States practice of sending Mexican, Honduran and Guatemalan refugees back to gangs and death squads). The EU’s Dublin Accords also specify rights for asylum seekers, but some countries (notoriously Hungary) abuse the agreement to shunt refugees to other EU nations. Germany and Serbia now receive 75% of all Syrians fleeing Assad, ISIS, and Russian and American bombing.
Last year the uncensored images of the body of 3 year-old Aylan Kurdi appeared in the press. Aylan drowned when his family undertook a sea escape from Syria. Soon there followed images of a Hungarian camerawoman kicking a group of Syrians fleeing across a field, amid reports that not every EU nation was doing its part to provide humane care of refugees. Indiana governor (now GOP VP candidate) Mike Pence declared his state off-limits to Syrians, who he described as ISIS militants in disguise. But the United States has only taken 10,000 Syrian refugees, while Germany has been taking that number every day. There are now a million refugees living in Germany.
The world’s reaction has either been one of generosity or of callousness. Lebanon, for example, hosts the largest number of refugees per capita than any other nation on earth. The United States is at the other end of the spectrum – all the more notable because it bears a lot of responsibilty for this human misery.
So how much generosity of spirit – how much responsibility – should we Americans be showing? Will we step up to the plate and pay for what we broke? This is, after all, the “Pottery Barn rule” that Colin Powell reminded us of when we launched the war in Iraq:
“You broke it, you bought it.”
Unfortunately Americans are often predisposed to let the other guy pay for it. And the other guy in this case is Germany. But suddenly the German welcome is wearing out.
This week there was an election in a neglected region of Germany called Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (MV), a state with just over a million people – Angela Merkel’s home state. In many ways the area resembles the region in Massachusetts where I live – or it could just as easily be anywhere in the US where industry has picked up and moved away. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has plenty of natural beauty but no industry. It’s only 80 miles from Berlin, but it might as well be on the moon. Although there have been a few attempts to bring jobs to the region (a DVD plant, for example), other states generally win out when it comes to development. MV has an inferiority complex. Educational levels are low, and voters are angry. Yesterday’s state primary elections shocked everyone when a three year-old political party, Alternatives for Germany (AFD), beat Angela Merkel’s CSU in her home state. Even Americans were paying attention:
AFD waged its campaign largely on the basis of refugees – although Mecklenburg-Vorpommern actually has very few of them. And the AFD is only one of several right-wing tendencies in German politics.
This is going to be an interesting visit.
Warm regards, David
First Day
October 3, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
I arrived in Berlin late yesterday afternoon and am writing this from my Airbnb room, which is very nice. Because of a Berlin housing ordinance VRBO home and apartment rentals shorter than two months long are forbidden. With home-sharing schemes like Airbnb people renting rooms are usually reluctant to rent for more than a week. I’m caught right in the middle. On the plus side, I’ll get to see more of Berlin than if I stayed in just one place.
Today is both the Day of German Unity, a national holiday, and the first day of Rosh Hashana. Everything is closed. Tomorrow I visit a refugee assistance organization called Moabit Hilft (Moabit Helps) and the day after that I am having dinner with a member of the Masorti congregation in Orangienburg with whom I will also be volunteering on the 9th to help Syrian refugees.
This visit is a chance to see how one country is struggling with a terrible humanitarian crisis. Germany now has over a million refugees) and is struggling with its post-war identity. The history of this country is well-known, and for a long time it was a liberal democracy. But a dark new chapter is emerging — as it is all over Europe and our own country. Right-wing parties and movements like the NPD, PEGIDA, and AFD are gaining influence here, and in Angela Merkel’s home state the AFD actually won regional elections recently. All this could turn out to be either the same type of phenomenon as the Tea Party’s takeover of the Republican Party — or it may herald something much worse.
This trip is also personal for me. For those of us who have lived all over, each place and each language becomes a little part of who we are. When I was 19 I had been working a dead-end job in Philadelphia after running out of money for college, so I went to Germany on a lark. There I found a job in a furniture store and later I worked in a bank. I have returned to Germany a few times since then, but I’ve always wanted to spend more than a couple of weeks in this city where history, politics and culture converge.
I will try to write every few days. But let me hear from you as well.
Warm regards, David
First day at work
October 4, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today was my first day “on the job” at Moabit Hilft. The German is starting to come back and there was plenty to do. Moabit Hilft has two locations – a “store” on Turmstraße right next to the LaGeSo (Governmental Social Services) processing center, and a small office on Lehrter Straße where they help people use computers. I got a quick hello from the director, Christiane Beckmann, who is a force of nature when it comes to her advocacy work, and after visiting the computer training office I returned to the “store.”
Working the store is not exactly like retail. No money ever changes hands, there is no haggling, no one asks if you have a shirt in taupe. Everyone just gets whatever fits them and thanks you in the only words of German most of them know. A volunteer’s job is basically just keeping shelves and baskets from descending into chaos as a never-ending stream of people paw over the clothes, shoes, toys, and personal necessities available.
I can’t list every country our “customers” came from today, but a few who identified themselves were from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Moldavia, and the Kurdish regions of both Iraq and Syria. One young man I spent the afternoon with had left Iraq after ISIS slaughtered thousands of his neighbors. Another with both excellent English and German had come only a year before from Damascus and was already helping out as a translator.
And so many children. My young colleague taught me to pay attention to how children were dressed and to recommend clothing now that winter is on the way. One girl came in with only pajama bottoms, another three year-old wore only rubber sandals. Several boys had no jackets, not even warm sweatshirts. We didn’t let them leave until we had found something warmer than what they came in with.
It is so sobering to see people who present themselves as they arrived in Germany – in the only clothes they own, and with basically no supplies. And these are the lucky ones – people who sold everything they had to come to a country that would offer them asylum.
At the end of the day we were out of almost everything. We picked up the empty boxes outside which had previously contained toothpaste, shampoo, and sanitary napkins. After that I was glad to be able to knock off a bit early. It was a rare slow day, so I was told.
Tomorrow these amazing people will do it all over again.
Warm regards, David
one of many shelves
Settling in
October 5, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today was another day of tending the store. It was less exhausting than yesterday, but it does take the starch out of you, at least us old guys. I really admire everyone who does this year-in, year-out. Today I had more good political conversations with colleagues and some great moments with the customers. It is starting to get cold and the change in seasons is on the mind of everyone that comes in. Today a man in his 80’s came in wearing rubber sandals and it took a while to find him a pair of shoes that would fit. Then another man without shoes, and then another. We were working non-stop until 2:30 when lunch was ready.
Before I continue, I would like to personally send a message to every Republican who thinks that helping out traumatized refugees poses a threat to our national security – come here and work for a day if you can stand some fact-based research. These are just people trying to survive, not terrorists. The volunteer staff here is mostly comprised of Kurds, Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, and Iranians. It is quite a sight to find all these folks pulling together to help the other guy – literally the other guy. An Iranian helping a Iraqi. A Syrian helping a Kurd. A Kurdish Christian helping a Syrian Muslim. And, while the effort is not going as well as it could, Germans are more than doing their share by the West, helping refugees. Why aren’t Americans helping?
But as I was saying – the pay here stinks and I’m sure they’re not giving us the number of coffee breaks German law requires. But they do feed us well. This was lunch today (dessert not pictured):
Yumm!
Evening.
When it is crisp and sunny Berlin is beautiful. When it is cold and wet and grey the city – actually, any city – is cold and feels unmerciful. I was on my way to meet with Gerhard Baader, a senior member of the Masorti (Jewish) congregation in Berlin. From his emails I thought I’d be meeting a young man about forty who had his hands in various projects. I was right about everything but his age. The Jewish High Holidays will end in about a week, and there was a police presence in front of the synagogue on Orangienburg. Next door to the synagogue was a stylish restaurant, the Cafe Orange, where I met Gerhard, a man of 87 who met me in jacket and tie and left in windbreaker with his backpack to jump on a train. More on this later.
I am hoping I can get back to the synagogue next week when they do their work with refugees, and maybe I’ll throw some lint from my pocket on Yom Kippur. After I’ve done a bit more homework and put all the pieces together I will try to give you a fuller picture of this very interesting congregation and the Berlin Jewish community in general.
And then I still have to find an Iraqi bakery. But that’s a different story.
Warm regards, David
Downtime
October 6, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
My lodging in Moabit was available only a week, so today I went apartment-shopping and finally found a room in an area called Wedding. It took the better part of the morning and a bit of the afternoon, and I found myself with a little downtime at about 2:00 pm.
My friend Jim had emailed me with a suggestion to visit a gallery in Charlottenburg where two SouthCoast Massachusetts and Rhode Island artists (who are now in New York) have an exhibition, so this sounded like the right way to finish the day. My Berlin mass-transit skills have improved and I am now less likely to go the wrong way on bus and subway lines. I got to the Galerie Friedmann-Hahn in less than 30 minutes. Thanks, Google.
Galerie Friedmann-Hahn
There I found the exhibit of paintings by Anne Leone and Daniel Ludwig which Jim had told me about, and I talked a while with Maxi and Alex and an artist friend. They made me feel very welcome despite the absence of my checkbook or any sophisticated art knowledge. It was just one of those odd connections that makes the world interesting.
Berlin at Night
Dartmouth, Massachusetts is roughly 41 degrees North, while Berlin is 52 degrees North. So dark comes pretty early here after Summer has passed. By the time I got home it was already dark. I went out a little later to one of the Turkish fast-food joints that line Perlebergerstraße and had a Dürüm Döner – basically, a Turkish burrito. Only a healthy one because it’s a wrap filled with chicken, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, garlic paste, onions and peppers.
And then I walked home.
Habibi
Warm regards, David
Desperate men, heartless men, and Ampelmännchen
October 7, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
For those joining the story, I’ve been working in the “store” that Moabit Hilft runs in Moabit (in Berlin) for refugees. People have arrived from the Middle East and Central Asia with almost nothing, and desperation can make people frantic. Just a few people grabbing everything can quickly deplenish a rack of clothes. There are two ad hoc signs in the children’s section that are meant to spell out some basic rules of who can take, and how much they can take:
Signs
I had an interesting conversation with an Iraqi man today. He was a mechanical engineer from Kirkuk who had fled ISIS with his family. Their transit passes were all stamped with “Germany” as their entry point into Europe from Turkey, and the plan had been to join the rest of the wife’s family in Finland. But after eight months in barracks and gymnasia in Finland they were “deported” back to Germany, where the whole process will begin again.
In Greece approximately 20,000 refugees have been stuck on the island of Lesbos for months, their lives in a similar holding pattern. In order to transit through Europe, the refugees have to pass through the Balkans, but Macedonia and Serbia have closed their borders, and the EU and Turkey are still bickering over a deal to distribute asylum seekers.
The basic strategy is to shuffle them around until someone else takes them
A little context.
In Syria alone, a nation [once] of 22 million people, half the population has been displaced by war. Half of that half, 5.5 million, have left Syria according to UNHRC, the UN agency for refugees. Talking to a Syrian man this evening, he thought the UN’s number was conservative — that half the country was no longer there. Some refugees have fled Syria on foot — taking astounding routes. Of the 5.5 million who have fled, 2.2 million are in Turkey, many in Lebanon and Jordan, 800,000 in Germany, 30,000 in Canada, and 10,000 in the United States — the country with the most resources and the least interest in helping.
Last week, for example, the “Christian” governor of Texas turned his back on refugees by dropping out of the Federal Refugee Settlement program. There is a line from the aptly-named chapter of the Bible (Exodus) in which Jews are reminded to take care of the stranger “for we were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Governor Abbott, who is known for winning a suit to display the Ten Commandments at the Texas State Capitol and is theoretically familiar with the Old Testament, seems to want to pick and choose which biblical precepts he follows. The Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Mike Pence, just tried this stunt in Indiana — turning his back on human suffering.
But I would ask the Republicans — if individuals and religious organizations are willing to step up to human and ethical responsibilities, why shouldn’t government just get out of the way? Isn’t that the usual line from this party? For Democrats the $64,000 question is — will the next president create more refugees, or will she lead the US to do its share to take care of the ones we’ve already created?
* * *
I’ll leave you with a picture of Ampelmännchen — little traffic guy. I think he is a Berlin thing — and, like the much-reviled Trabant vehicle, he comes from former East Germany, where the street lights looked like this. Ampelmännchen was so beloved that they kept the little dude around — I’d like to think it was to say “welcome back” to the East Germans who rejoined the West.
Ampelmännchen
Warm regards, David
Moving Day, Meetup
October 8, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Saturday was moving day — from my Airbnb in Moabit to a new one in Wedding, a busy commercial district. After getting set up, I took a walk and went to a Meetup group for B1-C1 German for foreigners (the class sign below says “stay calm and learn German”).
Meetup
The teacher was a young woman from Humboldt University who is about to become a licensed teacher, and who does all the classroom things one is supposed to do with language students. My classmates were a young and interesting group of students and professionals from all over — Sicily, Ireland, Ukraine, South Korea, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, the UK and the US. As always, I represented the over-40 crowd. 50. 60….
Berlin is poised to become an even more young and cosmopolitan city because of the Brexit. With London out of the picture as Europe’s financial capital, I expect this role will quickly go to Berlin.
After class, I walked down to the corner and I saw this — the DDR’s own Trabant — a car known for its lack of power, its stinking lawnmower engine — but a cutie nonetheless. Juxtaposed with a Coca Cola sign and used as a prop for a restaurant, this says it all about Berlin’s quite literal fusion of East and West Germany. Appropriately, the Trabant sits in front of the Ost-West Cafe on Bernauer Street.
Ost-West Cafe
Bernauer Street was the street on which the Berlin Wall was built and which is known for several killings of people trying to escape from East Germany. Here is what it once looked like:
Back in the day
And here is what the same location looks like today after the Wall was torn down:
Bernauer Str. today
But there are many more walls to be torn down in this world. And certainly no more should ever be built.
Warm regards, David
US-Mexico border wallIsrael’s Wall
Sonntag
October 9, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Sunday is a sleepy day in Berlin, especially now that it’s the rainy season. Nothing besides cafes and the big megaplex movie theater on the corner are open on Sonntag. Church bells ring for sometimes fifteen minutes without stopping — such as the Evangelische (Lutheran) Kapernaum-Kirche immediately across the street from me:
From my balcony
Berliners, who normally rush around at high-speed, have no option but to slow down, meet friends, and even sleep in a bit. It truly is a day of rest.
And so I relaxed, did some laundry, read about Donald Trump’s latest hijinks, and consulted the fivethirtyeight.com poll rollup to reassure myself the nation would still be there when I got back.
And then I went out to meet and thank the journalist who put me in touch with the organization I am now volunteering with. We talked for an hour and a half about refugees, politics, German society – and sonstiges – and then she had to go pick up her daughter, and I took the U-Bahn back home.
I know Deborah won’t believe this — and that probably goes for others of you who know how I pronounce the word “nature” — but I have been walking a lot around the various neighborhoods and on my way to and from subway lines, trolley lines, schnellbahn lines, and buses. Possibly even liking it.
Berlin is densely-populated, but there is green everywhere, and only now are the leaves beginning to drop:
Leaves
I keep being impressed by all the different ethnicities and languages. For the second time in some days, I ran into people speaking Spanish on the subway. And for the second time it turned out they were from Colombia. But you regularly hear German, English, French, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Russian, More than a hundred languages in all are spoken by people here:
News rack
I won’t be up at 3AM to watch the debates, but I hope this one finally sinks Trump. And I hope you hardy Democrats will all write the winner to tell her you don’t want any more wars of choice in the Middle East.
Warm regards, David
How do you say frustration in German?
October 10, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Last week Moabit Hilft let me change my schedule to spend some time in their main office on Lehrter Strasse. Among other things, this office provides help with job and housing searches and runs German classes every evening. Where the “store” provides the basic necessities of things like toothpaste and sweaters for new arrivals, the office helps people further down the integration pipeline.
Refugees get a stipend to help with housing, but they must compete with college students and an increasingly global workforce in Berlin’s ever-shrinking housing market. Finding accommodation is not easy, even with a computer. Moabit Hilft’s clients usually come in accompanied by a translator, and they are limited by family size and subsidies to certain types of housing.
There is something called WBS (Wohnberechtigungsschein), which roughly translated means “housing voucher” for public housing. WBS housing is basically like Section 8 Housing — a certain percentage of it has to be built when complexes are developed. On the wall are some guidelines on how to calculate expenses (below). The organization that publishes this is not the German federal government, but the Lutheran Youth and Welfare Agency (more on them another day). But much of the help being given to refugees is private and not funded by taxes.
WBS
From early afternoon until about 6:30 there is a stream of people coming for help with their housing searches:
Client
One of the wrinkles is that refugees must be counseled to avoid areas where there are significant numbers of neo-Nazis. These areas strongly correlate to precincts where the AfD (Alternatives for Deutschland Party) won the biggest numbers of votes (blue sections of the map, former East Berlin):
The teacher started the class at 5:00 and – as drop-in language classes everywhere – only two students showed up on time. Twenty minutes later, four or five other students arrived and it caused some disruption. One of the early-arriving students was annoyed, and his anger only grew as the class went on. At about 15 minutes from the end of the class one of the late-arriving students interrupted the young man’s companion, and the young man began screaming and charged the late arrival. I tried to restrain him but my chair and I both ended up on the floor. Luckily, two other students successfully restrained him before he harmed the latecomer.
But it was a good example of how much frustration is building up in ad hoc housing with hardly any privacy, as these folks are stamped, fingerprinted, placed in hour-long lines, and often handled like cattle.
Warm regards, David
Mostly pictures
October 11, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today was a morning for bookstore browsing and then an afternoon in the office. I also scoped out my third neighborhood for the last ten days of my stay in Berlin. Compared with yesterday, today was pretty sedate except for losing my credit card. And so I will entertain you with some pictures I snapped – although you will probably be disappointed at the quality compared to those from the real photographer in the family.
I’m always amused by the little things, either just slightly different or totally the same as at home. I’ll leave it to you to guess which.
A prison in a residential neighborhood:
Prison
An advertising sign that let you recharge your phone:
Power
A tattoo parlor with dubious claims:
Parlor
An open house in a school for students who want to go back to college:
college
A Lutheran refuge for the homeless:
Shelter
Yuppification of a poor and working class neighborhood…
Building
… all for micro-apartment for young professionals. The sign says roughly: “I’m not commuting – I’ll be living in the thick of it.”
Micro-apartments
A gay refugee organization – who knew? – but then – of course!
Gay refugees
And today’s 5:00pm German class, who are already learning the pain of nouns with three genders and declinations of them into four cases. Which immediately reminds me of Mark Twain’s famous quote: “I’d rather decline a drink than a German noun.” Er hatte recht.
German class
And that’s it for today. Tomorrow I should have an interesting interview.
Warm regards, David
Moabit in the morning
October 12, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today I had an interesting interview, which I’ll summarize in a second post today (if time permits). But I was out taking photos in the morning on my stroll around Moabit, a city that reminds me somewhat of Oakland in its rough charm. For German readers, none of this will be very special, but for Americans the pictures may provoke a smile.
A miniature rental car (I didn’t see the driver getting out):
car2go
An Afro-German center:
Afro-German
The German version of a dollar store:
Pfennigland
When you gotta go, you gotta go:
Natur ruft
Notice anything? Let me rephrase that: notice anything missing? Hint: power lines:
Look ma! No wires!
A center to promote family values – with an unwelcome ad out front:
Family values
This is the only correct way to serve hot chocolate on a cold rainy day:
Hot cocoa
The morning headline: a small fire in the EuropaCenter had some Berliners thinking of something much more serious. But it was 10/11 and not 9/11:
10/11
Missionaries camped outside a refugee center, hoping to snatch some souls. You can see the refugee tents in the background, left:
Soul snatchers
And finally, the man who made my lunch today (yeah, I really like those Döners):
Lunch is served
Inside the restaurant a black man was bussing tables and being as helpful as he could. The hint, I think, was that he was working for a tip. When I asked him where he was from, he told me: Mozambique. We chatted in Spanish with a sprinkle of Portuguese for a while, and then I took the hint.
It’s now been 40+ degrees outside for several days, and rainy, and it’s going to be a long winter for men like this.
Warm regards, David
Small world, small goof, small delay
October 13, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
I had a post for you tonight, but I need to rewrite it for reasons tomorrow’s post will explain.
We have run out of memory to install in the donated laptops I was working on, so I have returned to the “store” to hand out clothes. This weekend I will look around for a few more sticks of memory so I can finish the project if it’s not too expensive.
My morning began with a cup of strong Arabic coffee some Syrian volunteers had made (4 giant thermoses of it), tidying up the children’s section of the store, then wandering around to talk to people. There is a room in which every sort of personal care product is handed out, including sanitary napkins. I noticed that this was the menstrual product stocked almost exclusively, and one of the women volunteers explained to me that this was done because 1) it’s safer for people who don’t know how to use tampons, and 2) most of the refugees don’t.
Sanitary
The volunteer had an unmistakable accent, and I asked her where she was from — Israel, she said. There are about 70,000 Israelis who have left the country and are now living in Berlin, she told me. Germany has a “Law of Return” of its own which grants citizenship to the grandchildren of expelled Jews. So for many young Israelis, a European passport, job opportunities, and religious freedom — or perhaps better expressed as freedom from coercive religion — make Berlin an appealing destination. A representative of the Jewish community in Berlin told me last week that 10,000 Israelis had come last month alone.
My young colleague told me she had met Jewish refugees at Moabit Hilft from Macedonia and war zones in mainly Kurdish territory. And I have been meeting Palestinians whose families, after expulsion from Israel in 1948 and later, had fled to Syria. As an ironic side-story, Jews and Palestinians are both getting it in this Syrian war.
The volunteer told me it was her obligation as a Jew to help refugees, that her grandparents had had to flee themselves. I mentioned the line — “for we were strangers in Egypt” — and she said, “Exactly.”
No human is illegal
As we chatted, I found out she belonged to Jüdische Stimme — the German sister organization of Jewish Voice for Peace. I had been wondering if I’d run into any other lefty Jews in Germany. And then she put me in touch with another one.
Later in the morning, a Dutch film crew came in and I discovered one of the filmmakers was from Guatemala. He and I were chatting about the “Mayans” in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when the mother of a volunteer jumped into our Spanish conversation. It turned out she was visiting her daughter from Queretaro, Mexico, where Deborah and I have been a few times.
The world is getting smaller all the time.
Later I tweaked the translation of a PowerPoint presentation, and then returned to my post. I enjoy talking to the children who come in. I have found that most of them speak German and can be Dolmetschers for their parents — so I ask them their age, compliment them on their German, ask them where they are from, how long they’ve been here, how they’re doing in school. They all ask for toys, and we really have only stuffed bears and sad little plastic things to give them. I may be hitting you all up for some donations. Actually, you can count on it.
After work, I was supposed to go visit the Berlin Quakers, who also do refugee work — almost. My meeting is actually next Thursday night, and I had misread my calendar. But I made it to Friedrichstraße and got a pure tourist shot of the Spree river:
Spree
This part of Berlin is rolling in dough, luxury hotels, and shi-shi restaurants. Still, in the most wealthy country in Europe there is poverty and homelessness, alcoholism and neglect a block away:
Homeless
Next week I will return to my friends, the Friends:
Quakers
Until tomorrow,
Warm regards, David
Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland (ZMD)
October 14, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Two of the reasons that brought me to Germany were refugees and the return of the German Far Right. Both issues are focused on Muslims yet Muslims themselves are often not asked for their views in the mainstream media. I’ve had a number of one-on-one conversations with refugees but I thought I’d go talk to a group that advocates for Muslims in broader German society — one that might help me understand the bigger picture.
So I made an appointment with the Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland e.V. (Central Muslim Council in Germany) and — given that Muslims have huge targets on their back — I was quite surprised to be welcomed to their offices in such a friendly fashion. But the representative I spoke to asked me to not disclose their address, publish his picture, or use any names — so for the purposes of this letter, I’m just going to call him “Bob.”
German Muslims
The Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland (ZMD) advocates for Muslims in German society. Its main office is in Köln but the press office is in Berlin. The ZMD was established in 1994 and represents 300 mosques and their local communities, and 35 associations with over 100.000 members.
Many of the Muslim communities in Germany are distinguished by national and linguistic differences, and there are many Vereine (associations) throughout. Most large urban areas like Berlin, Hamburg, and Bonn have their own community organizations. Turks, Albanians, and other ethnicities have their own associations as well.
Germany, a country with a population a quarter of the size of the United States, has 4.6 million Muslims and there are also now 600,000 Muslim refugees — about 1.9 million more Muslims than in the US. Something like 5% of all Germans are Muslim, a demographic change that began during Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (the economic miracle) of the 60’s, when millions of Turks came to Germany to work.
Although entire Anatolian villages were emptied to provide cheap labor for Germany in the Sixties, many Germans were disappointed when they didn’t all automatically rush back to Turkey. A poll by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation found 40% of Germans no longer want Muslims in the country. A Friedrich Ebert Foundation poll revealed that 56% of Germans are hostile to Islam. In Germany today there are clothing bans for Muslim women in most German states, and the community call to prayer is outlawed. And these are the legal forms of discrimination against Muslims in a country with a tax that goes to your choice of church.
Bob told me there have been over 50 attacks on mosques recently, including a bomb attack last week, 1,000 attacks on individuals (mainly women), and that Germany has an estimated 70,000 right-wing extremists who regularly target “foreigners.” Existing laws criminalizing hate crimes against Jews do not yet apply to Muslims, but Bob told me that by next year this loophole should be fixed.
ZMD is involved in outreach programs intended to both help the Muslim community and allay fears by non-Muslims. “Wir sind Paten” (with the implication of “We’ll be there for you”) is a program in different cities throughout Germany which provides volunteers to stand by refugees and Muslim newcomers — to show them the ropes and to help navigate the confusing structures of a new society. “Wir sind Paten” also creates a network of helpers who share information about cities, training, language, laws, and navigating red tape. The volunteers support not only the newcomers, but each other.
Another ZMD program is called “Safer Spaces.” This is designed to help communities spot troubled young men and intervene before they go off the rails. The vast majority of cases of radicalization have been social misfits, people who have been damaged by trauma — Einzelfälle (individual cases), Bob told me. When I mentioned the American term “lone wolf,” Bob nodded in agreement — yes, that described the Einzelfälle pretty well.
ZMD also collaborates with the Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK), an organization which shares many of the same goals with the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the US. Bob stressed that the ZMD’s core mission is pretty straightforward — to improve the lives of Muslims in Germany and to promote integration into German society.
75% of all German Muslims are Sunni, and the remainder are Alevis, Twelver Shi’a, Alawites, and Ahmadiyya, while Sufis, Ismailis, Zaydis, and Ibadis each are less than 1%. 63% of Germany’s Muslims are from Turkey and most German Muslims live in Berlin, but there are significant numbers in Saxony and other states. Berlin is interestingly also the site of Germany’s first Muslim cemetery, established in 1798. Muslims have been in Germany a long time, and they’re here to stay.
Are the various communities islands unto themselves? I wondered. Bob said, no, there was actually a lot of unity among Muslims in Germany. He said it was not uncommon for Shia and Sunni to worship together, and that being a minority (together) in Germany might even make this more likely than in the old country. After all, now everyone’s in the same boat.
Just as American Jews are largely Democrats, German Muslims are probably most at home in the SPD and the Green Party, and to a lesser extent the CDU — Angela Merkel’s party — which has now changed its slogan to “we want to know who’s entering the country.”
When I mentioned Merkel’s original phrase regarding handling refugees — wir schaffen das (we’ll manage it), Bob grinned and said, “Yeah, like Yes we can.”
To some extent, the handing of refugees has been a logistical disaster — for reasons I will explore in a later email — so implying the Chancellor’s words are mere sloganeering is rather harsh, even by Bob’s own admission. But he gave the Chancellor praise for making a moral issue a national challenge, even if her own party is not solidly behind her.
Tell me about the Far Right, I asked. The NPD and PEGIDA are basically unrepentant Neo-Nazis, he said. Bob also repeated some of the NPD’s slogans — Goodbye Ali! — Don’t touch me! — Eva and Maria instead of Shariah! Bob recalled an incident on German Unity Day in Dresden in which the ZMD’s leadership was threatened by twenty PEGIDA members, including PEGIDA’s national leader Lutz Bachmann. A neo-Nazi contingent showed up at a “unity tent” comprised of Germany’s main religions. “We had to call the police.”
In some ways, Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD) is even worse, Bob said, because the party is slick, uses telegenic speakers, and couches its xenophobia and Islamophobia in dry, economic jargon. And this is what I’ve been hearing for the last twelve days I’ve been here, from just about every person I’ve talked to.
The rise of the Far Right in Germany is a result of Germany taking its eye off the ball, my host told me. “In the old days the police would intervene immediately — with even the slightest hint of neo-Nazism. But now both politicians and police give them too much leeway. Worse, the police have been infiltrated by the Far Right.” He mentioned a case in Dresden involving a police chief. And Bob worries that the Far Right has also found its way into federal security agencies. An underground National-Socialist organization (NSU) was uncovered in 2011 — 13 years late, and the case also featured murders of witnesses and shredded evidence.
Germans once used to refer to Nächstenliebe — to love your brother as yourself. This principle is what once differentiated the German CDU — the Christian Democratic Party — from their economic policy brethren, American Republicans. But while the economics may be similar, for American Republicans Nächstenliebe is a bunch of lefty hooey.
Unfortunately this now seems to be what’s happening in Germany as well. “The lack of empathy is a real problem,” Bob told me. Discrimination is quite common against Muslims, in all same the ways it is with Blacks in America. A woman with a non-German name will be told, “This job is not right for you.” The same often applies to those with Slavic names “but they can more easily change or alter their names.” Although the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law) prohibits this type of discrimination, it has to be constantly monitored and reported. “You have to fight for the rights you already have,” Bob stressed.
History can be learned and changed. Or it will be repeated.
Warm regards, David
Formulas make bad movies in any language
October 14, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Tonight I had a notion to watch a good movie at the neighborhood theater. But the Dartmouth AMC theater at home doesn’t usually show my sort of thing, and neither did the Alhambra Cineplex in Wedding:
Alhambra Cineplex
Here’s what was playing tonight. Sad to say, but movie formulas make bad movies in any language. But it was interesting that the intended audience for many films was not assumed to all be native German speakers:
HartmannIkimizin YerineBurg SchreckensteinBir Baba Hindu
Warm regards, David
Die Liberale Synagoge
October 15, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
This morning I went to shul. Jewish readers will know at once that this means synagogue, but German readers may wonder at the similarity to the word Schule (school). In Jewish life at one time they were one in the same. As soon as I had written and expressed a desire to visit, I was invited to attend by no less than four people. There is a constant police presence at the synagogue, so I had a little trouble getting in until I showed one of the officers an email from someone he knew. Once in the building, I went through an airport-style security screening.
Police
The foundation stone for die Liberale Synagoge was laid in 1859 after it was designed by Karl Heinrich Knoblauch. After Knoblauch became sick, construction continued under the supervision of Friedrich August Stüler. When Stüler was unable to continue, the work resumed under Knoblauch’s son, Heinrich Gustav. A slew of engineers and specialists finally completed the work on November 6, 1866, and there was a face-lift in 1901. But in 1938 die Liberale Synagoge was torched by the Nazis and subsequently bombed in 1943 by the Allies. Yet somehow it was meant to survive. Renovation began in 1988 and in 1991 the work was complete.
Synagoge
The plaque on the building (in the first picture) reads:
This synagogue is 100 years old and was set on fire on the 9th of November 1938 ON KRISTALLNACHT by the Nazis. During the Second World War 1939-1945 it was destroyed by bombing in 1943. The face of this House of God should remain a site of warning and memory for all time. NEVER FORGET IT. The Board of the Jewish Congregation of Greater Berlin. September 1956.
The congregation I was visiting is the Masorti Jewish congregation on Orangienburger Straße near Tucholkystraße. Both the rabbi, Gesa Ederberg, and the hazzan (cantor), Avitall Gerstetter, are women, and both received training in the United States. The congregation is egalitarian and very welcoming. The hazzan explained to me that the return of Masorti Judaism in Germany owes a lot to their American Jewish cousins. For non-Jewish readers, Masorti Judaism preserves a lot of tradition but is not Orthodox.
My instructions were to go up the elevator and hang a left, so I followed some people who were doing just that. I introduced myself as a visitor to a couple of people, one of whom turned out to be the cantor. I was greeted by a friendly young man who offered me a Chumash (bible) in either German or English, and a Siddur (prayer book) in either language as well. The Chumash was Etz Hayim with its familiar deep red cover.
I got a little confused whenever the rabbi shot out page numbers almost simultaneously in German and English. Peeking over people’s shoulders didn’t help much either because everyone was in the zone, doing their own thing, on their own page. But they all were singing the same words, and beautifully too. I can’t recall a moment in the service where anyone merely read Hebrew. It was always sung, and by more than a few skilled singers who added harmony. The cantor also had a lovely voice. Even in the prayers that followed lunch, everything was sung — at length. It was incredibly musical, and very moving.
And although I’m not wired for prayer myself, I know that everyone in that room was doing all they could to please God.
As everywhere today, the Torah portion this morning was Ha’azinu: Deuteronomy 32:1-52. Somewhere in the middle of the portion, God seems to rather harshly command Moses to go die on the mountain he is climbing. He tells Moses he will only be able to see from afar where his efforts will eventually lead. In the rabbi’s D’var Torah (words) after the parsha (part of the reading), which she gave in German, she observed that many of us never get to see the fruition of our work — and she gave some contemporary political examples — but that we still keep at it. It’s what we do. Idealism or faith — whatever you choose to call it — can be a pretty good thing.
And then I thought of all the people who had worked at keeping this very building alive for 150 years, and all those who had kept trying to re-establish a Jewish community in Germany.
At lunch I found a table with a father who had brought his three year-old to shul. He was from Hungary, his wife from Russia. We talked for quite a while, then I said I really should go thank the rabbi for the invitation. But before he let me go he invited me to Shabbat dinner next week.
Like my lunch companion, the congregation is young, and it numbers about 200, though today the number was between 40 and 50. “Post Yom Kippur fatigue,” someone joked. An overwhelming majority are English-speaking, from the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia. But I also talked to people from France and Hungary, and I assume many more European states are represented. Germany’s “Right of Return” law for Jews has brought back the grandchildren of Holocaust victims. I asked a young ex-New Yorker who was doing a master’s degree here how she liked Berlin. “I love it, but I know it’s not like the rest of Germany.” She told me her father respected her decision to come to Berlin but he had only visited her once because Germany brings up such strong feelings for him.
And then I thought of that parsha again.
Warm regards, David
IKEA
October 16, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today I had arranged to have lunch with a man about my age from Syria and he asked me to meet him at IKEA. Who knew IKEA had a cafeteria with really inexpensive food? Getting out to Pankow took a while, undoubtedly longer than an experienced Berliner would have required. The part of Pankow I visited reminded me of Canton (MA), Warwick (RI), or King of Prussia (PA). My lunch buddy was not the only one who thought of this:
IKEA
We talked for about five hours over too many coffees, than it got late and I went my way as he queued up to pay for his kitchen gear. Getting back to the Schnellbahn took me through more industrial park, a long walk over a freeway, and then finally to the station. I was getting lost and a bit desperate when a couple who turned out to be Iranian and Palestinian took mercy on the clearly lost foreigner and walked me right to my platform.
The Iranian lady and I chatted about her sister studying in Boston, her own studies in Heidelberg, and how Heidelberg had really changed.
A lot has changed in this country of 80 million.
Warm regards, David
Alternative für Deutschland – no interviews
October 17, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
One of my goals when coming to Germany was to see where the Far Right was headed. I was advised by a number of people to avoid the NPD and PEGIDA, both of which use violence. I heeded their advice. However, I really wanted to meet with Alternative für Deutschland, the AfD. It’s a new party that popped up rather recently, in 2013, and has gotten about 12% of the vote in Berlin. Politically, it has an ultraconservative economic program, but culturally it appeals to the same neo-Nazis who fill the NPD (which is declining in political influence) and PEGIDA.
The AfD is on its way to becoming what the Republican party has already transformed into.
While the left and center parties in Germany are pretty bunt — brightly colored (i.e., multicultural), the AfD is as lily white (and old) as the Republican Party. Here, for example, is the party leadership in Berlin:
AfD Berlin
In the United States, most of the “Tea Parties” that eventually took control of the Republican Party are xenophobic and racist organizations. The NAACP did a study in 2010 which showed that six out of seven were brimming with neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. But Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks Tea Party appealed to voters more on economic terms, although Mexicans and “Welfare Queens” were soon identified as the root cause of all our economic woes.
I thought of this when I contacted the AfD. Do they deserve the benefit of the doubt if, really, they are all just free market fundamentalists like Dick Armey? Hmmm. But I also wanted to find out how their platform applied to immigrants, refugees, and Germany’s own poor — all of whom receive benefits under the Harz IV program. I wanted to know about their foreign policy (they hate the EU but love NATO). How do they really feel about multiculturalism? (One party leader said it belongs on a manure pile).
So for the last two weeks I have contacted the AfD four times for interviews — or even just a chat — anything. Recently I received an email from the Berlin office telling me they wanted me to submit questions in writing, which I then did:
From: Lydia Axtmann <…@beatrixvonstorch.de> date: 10/10/2016 9:17 AM Subject: RE: Request for an interview
Dear Mr. Ehrens,
thanks for your request for an interview with Mrs. von Storch and your interest in the AfD policy in Berlin.
Unfortunately it is very hard to make an appointment with Mrs. Storch in the next few weeks, so I suggest we prepare the appointment by clarifying some details.
For which magazine or newspaper do you work?
Which policy field are you interested in?
What will be the questions, Mrs. von Storch will have to answer.
For more information and to answer your questions, please contact me by email.
Lydia Axtmann, Ass. iur. press officer to Beatrix von Storch, MEP Abgeordnetenbüro Beatrix von Storch Zionskirchstraße 3 10119 Berlin Tel: +49 30 24 33 97 40
Accordingly, I jumped through Frau Axtmann’s hoops and put a number questions to Frau von Storch, which were all based on the party’s platform:
But I guess they didn’t like my questions All I got was a wish for a fun time in Old Germany:
From: Lydia Axtmann <…@beatrixvonstorch.de> date: 10/17/2016 11:17 AM Subject: Re: Request for an interview
Dear Mr. Ehrens,
thanks for your e-mail. Unfortunately it is not possible to meet Mrs. Storch because of other appointments she has to meet. Maybe it is possible to meet her when you are in Germany next time. We are very sorry for giving you a negative answer.
Nevertheless we hope you will enjoy your stay in Berlin.
Kind regards Lydia Axtmann
Lydia Axtmann, Ass. iur. Presse & Kommunikation Abgeordnetenbüro Beatrix von Storch Zionskirchstraße 3 10119 Berlin Tel: +49 30 24 33 97 40 Mobil: +49 170 3 55 25 67
What’s clear to me is that the AfD is good at curating its image, avoiding being seen as the same overt racists and violent thugs the other far-right groups unapologetically represent.
No, what the AfD says is that it simply has an economic platform, and if it happens to offend people — like the lazy parasites that get help from the state, or the shiftless foreigners who come here to suck jobs away from real Germans — well, screw Political Correctness! We’re just telling it like it really is.
Sound familiar?
Warm regards, David
Sounds
October 18, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Nothing new in the store. Just a steady flow of customers from morning to mid-afternoon. I thought you might like to “hear” what I hear every day – the whirr of people speaking in a dozen different languages, and the sounds of little children making the sounds that little children make everywhere…
Warm regards, David
Turmstraße
October 19, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
The LaGeSo (Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales – Department of Health and Human Services) and Moabit Hilft, where I am volunteering, both have an address on Turmstraße (tower street). The street — so says a sign as you exit the subway — is so named because you can see church towers (and also a court’s tower) all up and down the street.
Turmstrasse
Within the same complex there are a number of private organizations, and throughout Berlin there are hundreds, many of them run by either the Lutheran church which is stronger in Northern Germany, or to a lesser extent by the Catholic church. There is more than a little irony in the fact that, despite widespread xenophobia, so many Christians have stepped up to help people who are predominantly Muslims.
Several people told me of a Christian concept called Nächstenliebe — loving your neighbor as yourself. It sounded like something New Testament-y until I looked up the line in which the German word appears — only to discover it’s actually from the Torah:
You shall neither take revenge from nor bear a grudge against the members of your people; you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. (Leviticus 18:19).
And when the Torah says “I am the Lord,” it’s not just a suggestion — it’s the law.
I keep hearing about the EJF, the Evangelisches Jugend- und Fürsorgewerk (Lutheran Youth and Welfare) — and this being Northern Germany, I wanted to find out what they were up to with refugees. I wrote them several emails which were never answered, but then discovered the reason: they had moved their offices. So I tracked down and stopped by the new office one morning to see whom I might run into. A security guard told me to come back on Wednesday morning at 8:00 am and maybe someone could help. It sounded rather unlikely — but why not?
So this morning, at 8:00 am in a cold rain, I stepped into the vestibule of the EJF offices with a group of soggy refugees who were all there for social service counseling. I explained (to a different guard this time) that I was hoping to ask an administrator a few questions and — amazingly — he said, “follow me.” After about twenty minutes of being shuffled around by various staff, a young woman came out into the hall. I apologized for ambushing them and said I knew they were probably quite busy. “Yes, actually this is a really bad time,” she said like a true Berliner, “but why don’t you send me your questions and I will give them to my colleague.” So that I did, and I hope to have the responses for you soon.
The EJF was busy taking care of people who needed their time a lot more than I did.
While even fiscally-conservative Germans are doing something for refugees, our American Republicans are running away from basic human responsibility. Loving your neighbor may be the gold standard in whatever religion most of them profess, but the GOP can’t even manage the low bar when they demonize Muslims:
You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your fellow, but you shall not bear a sin on his account. (Leviticus 18:18).
Warm regards, David
Die Quäker
October 20, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Tonight I visited the Quaker Meeting in Berlin. It was even the correct night (see my post from October 13).
To get there from Wedding, you take the U6 subway and walk a bit. Easy peasey. I’m beginning to feel like I almost live here, but Saturday I have to move again — so this will mean learning another subway line.
At 6:30 pm the city is still crowded, and the subway reminds me not so much of a rat race as a stockyard:
Rush hour
After coming up from the Friedrichstraße subway I arrived at the Meeting, not far from the train station and not far from the Spree River, in a lovely courtyard. I rang the bell and the door was opened by Gisela Faust, who at 91 is old enough to remember the Nazi era, and young enough to keep up with the young Friends who participate in a bi-weekly Gesprächskreis (conversation circle).
Gisela told me that there are about 250 Quakers in all of Germany, and about 20 in Berlin. The Berlin Meeting follows devotional practices like those I have visited in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. It is distnguished by Stille Andacht (silent worship). There is a Yearly Meeting for all of Germany, a German-language Quaker magazine, and book distribution. The Meeting also hosts a wartime research archive, paid for with support from American Quakers, which helps pay the rent.
Stille Andacht
Because the Berlin Meeting welcomes visitors, I assumed tonight’s conversation would be a social or some broad ethical topic. Not quite. It actually turned out to be a Quaker study circle. After more than a year, the seven participants had made a considerable dent in a book called Quäker Glaube und Wirken (Quaker Belief and Practice) and were now at chapter 20.72 — a paragraph on conflict resolution.
Quakers in Germany have a long history and a short history. The long history dates back to the 17th Century, before many emigrated to North America. The short history goes back to World War I, when the Society of Friends, as they are formally known, were just about the only religious organization to help Germans, who like everyone else were traumatized by the war. Even a decade after the war German children were still starving, so the Quakers set up stations that fed almost a million children. From this act of kindness Quakerism again took root in Germany.
In 1938 the very same Meeting where we were sipping tea, which is only two blocks from the Friedrichstraße train station, handled last-minute emigration requests for 10,000 Jewish children to be sent to England on what were called Kindertransporte. Later, when there was not much that could be done to help Jews, Quakers hid them and some Quakers paid the ultimate price for this “crime.”
We sat around the kitchen table drinking our tea, slowly going through each paragraph. Rather than dwelling on the nature of conflict, many of the discussions were about recognizing the truth in what someone says, working to see the world through their eyes, or the impossibility of this always happening. One woman related her experience in the criminal justice system, a man discussed how difficult it was for his father to be known as the “impartial” one, one woman talked about how difficult it was to tell a suicidal co-worker that there was hope without minimizing the difficulties of recovery. Another talked about a complex child custody case, another the challenges of marriage.
Words were parsed, personal experiences shared, but then we got to a quote with a cryptic sentence: “Unless you speak the truth there will never be love.” Hmm. Maybe those Quakers knew what that meant. Things were just starting to get interesting — the quote at least demanded some attention — but, no, it was precisely 8:00 pm in Germany, and suddenly books were closed, coats pulled on, scarves wrapped around necks — and before I knew it two of my photographic subjects had escaped into the cool city night. But I did manage to get a picture of Gisela with three of the kitchen table circle before she locked up for the night (note the jackets; they too were plotting their escapes).
Quakers
Out on the street one of the young women in the group said that she had been to a Quaker meeting in Ohio. From this I gathered she had decided to be a Quaker herself, so I asked her what drew her to it.
“Oh, no. I grew up in this Meeting,” she said. “My whole family is Quaker.”
Warm regards, David
Spandau
October 21, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
On my visit to the Orangienburg synagogue I was invited to spend Friday night (erev shabbat) in Spandau with a Hungarian-Russian couple, their three year old son, a bubbe (grandmother), and an aunt. There was a lot of singing of Yiddish songs before the meal and (as had been the case in synagogue) virtually every Shabbat prayer was sung. The dinner conversation centered around the right turn of European and American politics. I had a lovely evening.
To get to Spandau my fastest option was by train:
By train
Who doesn’t love trains?
train station
Compared with the center of Berlin, Spandau has a relaxed, old-timey feeling:
Spandau
There is a lot of open space:
Spandau park
And a canal runs through the old part of town:
Spandau canal
The streets are picturesque in the same cobblestoned way that downtown New Bedford (MA) is:
Cobblestone
A quarter of Spandau is from somewhere else. Spandau is equally Slavic and Middle Eastern, many Russians live in the borough, the neighborhood Catholic church has services in Polish, and Turks have long been fixtures of the community — and now the refugees are coming. I snapped this picture of a group of young Arab men on a street corner — maybe you can make out the name…
New Jews
Warm regards, David
Moving Day (#3)
October 22, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Today I bid a fond farewell to Wedding and the U6 subway line, which has served me well in getting around the city. Sometime in the next few hours I will (hopefully) hear from my next AirBnb host and will be off — back — to Moabit. Communication is not my new host’s strong suit, so my day is kind of a mess.
Wedding
I had hoped to move into my new digs and then scoot off to a conference organized by Junge Islam Konferenz. Among other things, the morning session promised a Muslim feminist, an imam who organized an LGBTQ mosque, and a Far Right blogger with a Youtube following — all the panelists discussing the integration of Muslims into German society and the EU. It would have been really interesting:
Conference
But while all this is going on I’ll be waiting for the call that will get me into my next apartment.
Next week is my last week in Berlin. As things draw to a close I will be working a bit on a writing project, then will be traveling to Dettelbach in Franconia to visit the family of our former exchange student. Then home.
The German Book Prize was announced a few days ago, and many of the titles looked interesting, but I have probably already exceeded the weight allowance for my return flight. Since I couldn’t meet with the AfD, I settled for a book by Hajo (Hans Joachim) Funke, an expert on the extreme Right. I had actually been in contact with Lamya Kaddor and had hoped to meet her, but I’m settling for her very engaging book on German Islamophobia. A couple of plays, a book to help me remember my German grammar, and a book on Germany’s “forgotten generation” — all this should hold me for a while.
Books
Someday I hope to return to the excitement and the linguistic smorgasbord of Berlin — but as of this minute I’m really looking forward to returning to my quiet little house on the Massachusetts coast and my wonderful family and friends.
And voting.
Warm regards, David
East and West, and Sunshine
October 23, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Yesterday was a day of moving from one AirBnb to another. I checked into my new place, which is on the sixth floor of an apartment building. Looking out my window I could see people making dinner, working at their computers, having animated conversations, all of us wrapped in the anonymity of night.
Morning
I’m not a morning person — what with all that light and the cruel early hour — and when I woke up, the magic was gone. The blinking red lights from the night before were simply part of a construction crane. And it was another Sunday in Berlin — pretty much everything closed — and one either reads the paper, has friends over, goes out to eat, or goes to a museum. I chose the latter.
Daybreak
When I was in Berlin in 2014 the Stasi Museum was closed. But I decided to go there this morning. For people who don’t know what the Stasi is — it was the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst — those nice people who looked out for East Germans’ safety and well-being. Looking out for the lives of others was what they did. Similar organizations exist in every country — the NSA, FBI, GCHQ, even Germany’s present-day BND. Homeland Security.
To the Stasi we will go
East Berlin isn’t “East Berlin” anymore, but there is something spare and just a little bleaker than the rest of the city.
E Berlin
The east half bears the fingerprints of both Communism and advanced Capitalism:
Bleaker street
The Stasi museum is quite easy to get to from the subway:
Welcome to the Stasi
And I imagine it’s never looked so good:
Stasi HQ
Outside there is a display with the chronology of the rise and fall of the East German state in picture form. I snapped those. I also took photos inside the museum itself. Of those photos.
As I entered the museum, I joked with the man at the counter — Die Gedanken sind frei, aber der Eintritt nicht — thoughts are free, but not entry to the museum. He joked back — only good people with good thoughts could enter; everyone else was in deep shit.
Which was pretty much the story of East Germany.
After the war, an altruistic Soviet Union was supposed to guide East Germans in creating a worker’s paradise:
Worker’s paradise
Only it didn’t quite work out that way. No surprise: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was a dictatorship. People were miserable. The tattoo on the man’s back, for example, reads — Only when I’m dreaming am I free.
DDR misery
Within short order, East Germany became a police state. As you tour the Stasi offices, you’re shocked by how bland, bureaucratic, systematized, automated, and widespread the surveillance was. This wasn’t a spy museum with secret codes, disappearing ink, and agents in trench coats. This was the nerve center of something that put half the country under observation. For their own good.
I met a group of students from Yorkshire, England, who had come with their teachers for an enrichment program. They were shaking their heads in disbelief. I asked one of their teachers if they were equally shocked at the GCHQ and Britain’s ubiquitous CCTV cameras. He winced and said, “yeah…”
The Lives of Others
It didn’t take long for East Germany fall to pieces. In the United States we like to believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall was due to Ronald Reagan’s persistent anti-Soviet efforts — or our good old-fashioned American out-spending the Evil Empire until it went bankrupt.
But the truth is — from the very beginning East Germans wanted their freedom and organized relentlessly for it. Rallies, manifestos, citizen groups, covert groups, demonstrations, petitions, candle-light vigils — all the peaceful means at citizens’ disposal, and occasionally not-so-peaceful means. But the same thing was happening in other Soviet satellite nations, too.
Organizing
Finally the wall came down.
Wall down
A huge number of East Germans flooded into West Germany — and they were housed and fed…
Fed and housed
And Germans welcomed them… just as they have (sometimes begrudgingly) welcomed today’s refugees.
Welcomed
On my way home, I looked on my Google Maps and noticed that my apartment — at the bottom of Moabit, a block from the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station — is also within walking distance of the heart of the German government.
After an 8-minute walk I got a photo of Angela Merkel’s offices:
Angela Merkel’s Buro
This is the parliament building, three minutes from the Chancellor’s offices:
Parliament
And this is a huge government annex right next to the parliament:
Annex
As I walked up to the Reichstag, the parliament, there was music and someone was speaking. They had erected a huge display arguing that Germany doesn’t exist — it’s still in the hands of a shadowy group. Perhaps the Illuminati?
I walked toward the annex building and ran into two women about my age who were warming themselves in the first sunshine anyone has seen around here for — well, since I got here. One of them told me that anyone could exercise their Constitutional rights on the green — even the crazies. We chatted about Trump and Hillary — and she seemed worried that the American election was going to be so close, so I showed her the current polling. We talked about Angela Merkel and sunshine woman said she thought Merkel was a decent Christian and hoped Merkel would have a third term.
“Merkel and Clinton — how about that,” I said. She straightened right up: “It’s time for the women.”
Crazies
As I got ready to walk back “home” behind me I noticed a token police presence at the edge of the Reichstag.
Police
A state governs by consent of the governed. But sometimes it does without consent. And, then again, it also protects us from the crazies.
Democracy.
Warm regards, David
Goodbye for now
October 24, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
There are still about ten days before I return home, but my letters will be ending tonight for a couple of reasons.
One is that I am now in a routine of going to my volunteer job every day — catching the #123 bus and stopping at my favorite Turkish breakfast joint before arriving at the center. Nothing so interesting about that. Another is that I am donating my laptop this Wednesday, so writing long text won’t be so easy. I’ve never made the easy transition to mobile devices. Yeah, I know. That makes me old. Nolo contendere.
Besides my personal reasons for coming here, Germany is in many ways a mirror of our own nation. It has been fascinating trying to understand where things stand here in terms of politics and culture — as much as anyone, especially a foreigner, can ever hope to in a few short weeks. But all the same issues are surfacing both here and in the US, and for many of the same reasons. It has been a privilege to have had some great conversations with people who love to discuss politics as much as I do.
The Stasi Museum I visited yesterday had a rack of handouts, human rights brochures, interesting tidbits about the DDR (East Germany), and a newsletter called Der Stacheldraht (The Barbed Wire). It’s aptly named — in many ways it’s barbed and bitter, as victims of the Stasi probably have every right to be.
The brochure on life in the DDR had this tidbit:
To excape this all-pervasive political and social control, many East Germans withdrew into their private lives — so far as this was possible and tolerated… The dacha and the Trabi with a roof tent are examples in the exhibition of this withdrawal.
What was the Trabi roof tent? Someone figured out a way to stick a tent on the top of one of the ridiculously underpowered, stinking little bathtubs. Perhaps it was the East German version of Wal*Mart, NASCAR, Facebook, or Reality TV.
Trabi Dachzelt
We all have our ways of withdrawing from the world.
I never heard back from the AfD — but in the Stacheldraht newsletter I picked up, I found this:
We once heard from statesmen like De Gaulle, Adenauer, Brandt, and Kohl, to name a few, who used to described the European Union as a union of homelands, all peacefully united in their own democratic traditions. But today this sounds a whole lot different. Now we’re headed, without anyone clearly saying it, toward a European State. Those who feel things have gone too far — those who want to preserve their own national sovereignty, who want to remain Germans, Frenchmen, Danes, Italians, Greeks, etc. — are called reactionary nationalists or relics. And if they point toward the centuries-old Christian tradition to which their country belongs, or dare to call it “the dominant culture,” there’s not much more to say than that they’ve joined the ranks of cultural arsonists.
Here is a glimpse (whether we agree with it or not) of why some former citizens of East Germany (and maybe some of our own emigres) might see the EU as just another Soviet Union. Besides the loss of their German nationality within a Soviet system, the USSR/DDR also denigrated the culture and religion that many valued — including Merkel, also an East German, whose father was a minister. So in many ways the sudden and inexplicable alliance between some former Communists and the Far Right is maybe not so inexplicable after all.
Warm regards, David
Reichsburger
October 25, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
I’m sorry to annoy anyone by “un-quitting” sending you letters, but this is a correction. And maybe not auf Wiedersehen, either, because I’m doing this on an iPad.
The other day I posted a picture of a conspiracy theorist at the Reichstag (never a good combination) without realizing who and what he really was. As I was reading the newspaper today, it described a new phenomenon in Germany called the “Reichburger” — a “Citizen of the Reich” or what in the USA is called a “Sovereign citizen.” That’s what this is:
Crazies
One of these Citizens of the Reich shot a policeman in Franconia last week, and in Bavaria two policemen were fired for being involved with these groups. In Sachsen-Anhalt three policemen were also recently canned. The Berlin Police Department has circulated documents internally meant to help officers recognize other officers who many be involved.
The Berliner Zeitung says that an estimated 100 Citizens of the Reich are active in Berlin. Some are anti-Semitic. Others hold fantastic conspiracy theories, “such as, that Adolf Hitler took off with a contingent of aircraft at the end of the Second World War, heading to the Arctic, where they built the nation of ‘New Schwabenland.'”
Laughable were it not for their weapons and their hate.
Another American import to Germany is the KKK, which first appeared in the 1920’s — before Hitler took power. There are now four separate Klans here. Since 2001 they have been involved in 68 hate crimes. At least one police officer in Baden-Wuerttemberg is known to have been involved with the Klan.
The “Right Turn” in Europe and America gets more interesting by the minute.
Warm regards, David
Prison
October 29, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
I was out for a walk last night and ran into my friendly neighborhood prison. In the US, our prisons are usually way the hell out of town, where no upstanding citizens have to think about crime — and they are also difficult institutions for the families of prisoners to visit.
Moabit JVA
This one, on Alt-Moabit Strasse, is right across the street from a daycare.
That got me wondering about prisons in Germany, about the number of people incarcerated, but particularly the percentage of citizens sitting in jail. I easily found this document (in English) on the Berlin Prisons website, which describes how treatment programs are developed for inmates.
When an inmate leaves prison in Germany, they have a support system to reintegrate into society, not just $100 and a bus ticket to nowhere.
In contrast, the United States incarcerates almost 9 times more people per 100,000 than Germany, and recidivism is much higher because we never treat the causes of criminal behavior, and we actually make it more difficult for him to function in the world to which he returns:
Incarcerated
Can a nation like ours, with so many people behind bars, truly be called a democracy?
Warm regards, David
Trains to Death, or Trains to Life
October 31, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
Throughout Germany there are Stolpersteine — literally, stumble-stones. They are usually memorials to people who were hauled off to concentration camps or who died at the hands of the Nazis. One reads: “Here lived Ida Arensberg. née Benjamin – 1870 – deported 1942. Murdered in Theresienstadt on 18.9.1942.”
History is hard not to notice here.
This morning I went down to Friedrichstraße because I have worn out my shoes, and there is a Clark’s, a Timberland, a Shoe City, and a bunch of other retail shoe stores. I was not really thinking about the time change — even after specifically talking to Deborah about it the night before — but I had forgotten to change the time on my watch. For younger readers, the watch was an error-prone personal analog device that people in the 20th century once used to tell time.
So there I was, wandering around a half hour before any of the shoe stores actually opened. I ducked back into the train station to get a coffee, and there on the outside of the building I noticed a couple of historical plaques.
The very same train station — now with both a McDonald’s and a Burger King — had once been used to transport Jews to their deaths:
Trains to Death
And, as I mentioned in the letter about the Quakers, the Friedrichstraße station was also used to save the lives of about 10,000 children by sending them on Kindertransporte to England:
Trains to Life
The Germans, for all their dark history, at least look it in the eye everyday.
I wonder when the day will come that Americans will have our own Stolpersteine to acknowledge slavery, lynchings, shootings, prisons, torture, genocide, and all the wars of choice — our own dark legacy.
Warm regards, David
So it begins
November 13, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
So it begins.
Today President-elect Trump announced that he was going to follow through on his campaign pledge to round up millions of people he claims are “criminals” and deport them. We haven’t seen mass-deportations like this since the Thirties. And it wasn’t just Nazi Germany where this occurred.
The measure of any society is not how much power one group can wield against others. Only a compassionate society that cares for and respects its own citizens — and the rights of those who come to it for help — is worthy of our respect.
And when a government turns its back on the helpless, becoming a force of injustice, it is our responsibility to step forward and do what we can as individuals.
I am very grateful to Moabit Hilft in Berlin for the month I spent there meeting refugees and the people who care about them. Please consider making a contribution:
Closer to home, the New Bedford Immigrant’s Assistance Center is going to need our help from this moment forward. Those in our community who have become our friends and people we care about — they desperately need our help right now:
Review of “Listen Liberal” by Thomas Frank (ISBN 9781925228885)
This book explains when the Democratic Party decided to abandon organized labor, befriend Wall Street, and embrace the professional, instead of the working, class. It explains how Bill Clinton put a bullet in the head of an already-injured New Deal, ushered in a new era of “meritocracy” and its close friend, social and economic inequality. It explains how and why all of Obama’s “best and brightest” simply ended up doing what the Republicans had done before them. It explains why — even in Bright Blue states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts — economic inequality has not been addressed or repaired by Democrats. It takes us from Boston to Fall River, one of the poorest cities just a short ride away. It looks at the record of Duval Patrick, once an “Obama Lite” governor, one who started his professional career at Ameriquest and ended up at Bain Capital.
But Democrats can’t help it. This is who they are. Clinton the First, Clinton the Second, Obama, and many other “meritocracy” Democrats draw Frank’s scrutiny. Their friends, the Eric Schmidts, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerbergs, are their idols. Their shared values are with pharmaceutical magnates and software developers, hedge fund managers and dot.com billionaires. Long gone are Democratic friendships with captains of organized labor such as the teamsters or the teachers. Half the time Democrats at war with Labor (think Rahm Emanuel’s and Arne Duncan’s attacks on teachers). The New Democrats are nothing like FDR’s allies of the common man. Instead, they are smug, well-fed, well-educated functionaries, “gatekeepers” who serve the ruling class yet still like to think of themselves as the Democrats of their fathers’ generation — all while betraying them.
They are a separate economic class — themselves neither fish nor fowl, workers nor oligarchs. They have no idea where their allegiances lie. They think they’re voting for the common man but they live, dress, and eat better — and then they wonder why their noble gestures aren’t appreciated.
Frank concludes his book with this:
“It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health.”Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?
Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republicans is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.
Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.
What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity – to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest – once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.”
I would also add — don’t automatically give your vote to a party that hasn’t earned it.
Review of “Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Saldaña París, Christina MacSweeney (Translation) (ISBN 9781566894302)
Among Strange Victims has an unlovable protagonist who is content with his peeling walls and his boring daily rituals. He apparently told his family he was attending college but dropped out almost immediately. The description of his day is boring in the extreme, and unfortunately this does not make for good fiction. As he puts it, “one of my strengths is an ability to enjoy the most trivial situations intensely.” Sadly, most readers do not have this same strength.
Our lazy protagonist, who doesn’t even bother to identify himself at the beginning of his story, spends considerable time on a “disintegrating” bench in a gazebo, watching people. When he is not doing this he is working in a museum editing press releases and proofreading the catalog. In one chapter we learn how he goes to a cafe, has a cup of tea and returns home with the soggy tea bag, which he hangs on the wall. Gripping narrative – this is not. At about this point the reader is ready to stretch his arms a couple of thousand miles and and throttle the author.
By the time the narrator has accumulated ten teabags on his wall, still not much has happened in the story, which until now has been a tale of boredom, shirking, and masturbation. And then he decides to save the life of a hen in the vacant lot next door. He throws a table into the lot, and goes down to position it as a suitable shelter. Which is when he discovers a grisly bag full of putrefying viscera.
But now we once again enter stagnant waters when his co-worker Cecilia is sent a prank marriage proposal in his name, and she accepts. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name: Rodrigo Saldivar.
The book goes on in his way for many hundreds of thousands of keystrokes, each of them more painful than the one before. There is the mystery of a turd on his bed. Then we meet a BolaÒo type academic slumming in Mexico, an elusive and dissolute philosopher-boxer the academic is studying while living with the narrator’s mother, and a shady gringo who bought a nubile young girl whose urine is used for rituals.
In the end not much is resolved, although we do finally learn who has deposited the turd on the bed.
I am not sure if my quarrel is with the work itself or with the translation, but it is neither an easy nor a pleasant, nor a rewarding read. I have limited patience for writers who, rather than invite you into their heads and hearts, try to keep you at arm’s length or deposit turds on the pages of the book you bought from them. The book has an intellectual conceit, but it’s a rather shallow one.
BTW, if you want to see another sample of SaldaÒa ParÌs’s writing, which demonstrates more talent than this first disaster of a novel, here is a piece he wrote for Electric Literature:
Review of “Zubaida’s Window” by Iqbal Al-Qazwini (ISBN 9787774563214)
Although this book has been described (by the LA Times) as a “dirge” and as a “confusing stream of consciousness” by some Goodread-ers, I found it to be a fluid account of the days in which a woman who had seen much suffering in Iraq and lived in exile in Germany for many years is now forced to watch the final destruction of her country as the United States invades Iraq. This is a masterful account of her emotional roller-coaster ride.
Our childhoods and every state of our development are inexorably bound up with our national history. Just as we might ask: where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? Al-Qazwini recalls when young King Faisal was murdered in a coup. She recalls each member of a family that has been blown to the far corners of the earth. Her digressions into Iraqi history and all its calamity become part of Zubaida’s narrative, just as 20th Century Jewish writers have been unable to separate the Shoah from their own family stories.
One of the saddest tales in the novel is of Zubaida’s brother, who lives two hours away in Leipzig. He calls one day to tell her he is depressed and she immediately makes up an excuse to visit him. They agree to meet at the train station. However her brother never shows up and, despite going to his apartment, leaving a note and waiting weeks for a reply, Zubaida never hears from him. Perhaps he has just picked up and left Germany, she thinks. But then she reads an article about an unknown foreign man who has leapt to his death in front of a train in Leipzig. This is both the fate and the fear of the refugee: to die un-mourned either at home or in exile.
Zubaida is pulled to leave and pulled to stay in Germany. She often buys tickets to some destination, packs a suitcase and passport, but ultimately shreds the ticket and the passport remains unstamped.
But suddenly, with an empty suitcase she is in Amman, Jordan, where she is about to take the long bus ride to Baghdad. An old woman tells her how painful exile is, the cab driver inquires about her life in Europe. She recalls the sky, the warmth, radio news in Arabic, the markets, the sadness, but also the vividness of life in the Middle East. And then she closes the suitcase and is once again in her cold Berlin apartment.
Zubaida is now curled up in a ball in front of the television. The war is just a jumble of frightening images as once-powerful men take off their medals, don civilian clothes, denounce the dictator, and hop in non-military vehicles while giving CNN interviews for the last time. The dictator’s statue is destroyed at Firdaus Square, “coalition” forces have seized control, and Iraq has been subdued and destroyed.
Zubaida feels a certain kinship with her adoptive city, where dictators have fallen and the people rejoice their sudden freedom. Suddenly long-repressed memories and feelings surface and she writes non-stop for four days. But the history she has recorded feels false, manufactured, and she leaves the pages in the rain to un-write themselves, then throws all these recollections in a dustbin. As the apartment building strangely empties of its elderly residents, Zubaida is alone with her arrhythmia, having fallen into a fitful sleep.
There is a a famous folktale, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, about a pest control expert hired by the town of Hameln in Lower Saxony to deal with its rat problem. The rat catcher was known to dress all in green (or multicolors, depending on the version of the story) and had a magic flute he used to lure rats out of town and to their deaths in a nearby river.
But when the town failed to keep its end of the bargain and refused payment for his services, the Pied Piper turned his magic flute on the village children, luring them into a cave or (depending on the version of the story) into the same river where the rats had been dispatched.
The folktale seems to have been based on real-life events. In the 13th Century hundreds of children disappeared from Hameln and turned up later in other parts of Germany. The children, who saw no future for themselves in their dreary hometown, had been lured – not by a rat catcher – but by recruiters from regions in the east looking for young and healthy settlers and promising them a fresh start.
The classic attack ad and the notion of the “lesser evil” go hand-in-hand.
The American public votes largely on the basis of attack ads painting the opposing candidate as evil. When so much fear is generated that there is only one thing to do – vote for the lesser evil.
This strategy assures that third parties never take root – and that voters never get what they really want – as long as they are always voting against what they fear.
Vote for a Third Party? You’re voting for Caligula! For Hitler! The parties themselves are never held responsible for fielding terrible candidates or ignoring their base. It’s always the voter’s fault for deviating from the script, not getting with the program.
Why a huge swath of working-class voters would ever embrace a Republican billionaire is a mystery to me. People have been swayed by an ignorant huckster who speaks gibberish at a fourth grade level and is woefully unconcerned with facts, whose only talent is selling himself and nostalgia for imagined days of American Empire. His supporters wave away all his defects of character, errors of judgment, moral failures, evasions, his baldface lies. What they like about the man is that he can stand at a podium and regale them like a Goodfella at a bar. Like the gangster, they think he’s strong, got all the right connections, knows how to get the job done. They also buy the lie that the alternative is a woman whose election would spell the end of civilization as we know it. Let’s not forget – they were once close friends.
But Democrats are equally blind to venality from their Anointed One. She may not be a billionaire herself (the family business is only worth half that), but she and her husband are certainly friends with enough of them. The credulity of her supporters – that a candidate living in gold-plated luxury really cares about the little guy – is pathetic. Unlike her opponent, the Democrat actually has a record of accomplishment – much of it negative. Unnecessary wars, invasions, destabilizing other nations, drones, extrajudicial killings, a coup in Honduras, support of an Apartheid-like occupation in Israel, propping up of autocratic regimes, shady dealings through the Family Business, lies, evasions. Like their Republican brethren, Democrats shut their eyes to what they refuse to see. Sure, she’s a foreign policy disaster. But at least she’ll do something for women and appoint some great Supreme Court justices. The alternative is just a goose-step away from Hitler. So we are told.
Republicans just want to go back to the 1950’s – or possibly the 1850’s. America was once Great (those being the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency). Let’s return to that Greatness, put gays back in the closet, shut down the abortion clinics, and rededicate ourselves to killing Contras and Iranians. USA! USA! USA! For this we need god-fearing patriots who go abroad with Bibles in hand to kill heathens and come back to run the country according to a weird mix of Christian Shariah, Ayn Rand, and Austrian economists. This is the essence of the New Republican Party.
Democrats love their gay children and their brown neighbors no more or less than Republicans, but they realize that the country is changing, and you can’t step in the way of change coming at you like a freight train. This is realistic and admirable. But when it comes to American Exceptionalism, Democrats sound just like Republicans. Most believe that the U.S. should continue to build up its military and flex its superpower muscles; that the U.S. has the “right” to invade any other country at will; that we can go into Pakistan (or any other country on earth) with drones to kill terrorists – even if we kill a few civilians by accident. We’re not putting boots on the ground, after all. This kind of war doesn’t count as war. And, besides, this is our right. We are exceptional. We have to be the world’s Top Cop. There are no other choices. To do otherwise is irresponsible isolationism, shirking our responsibility, rejecting our exceptional world role.
Far from being the “responsible ones,” it was Democrats who dropped nuclear weapons on fellow human beings, Democrats who amped-up the long Viet Nam war, killing up to two million people, Democrats who overwhelmingly voted for the War on Iraq. And the Democrats of today who have expanded the number of countries with whom we are now at permanent war since taking over following the Bush administration. Sadly, when it comes to foreign policy and militarism – and spying on civilians and crackdowns on whistleblowers – there is virtually no difference between Democrats and Republicans.
If Democrats pride themselves that they are the Lesser Evil, it is only fair to ask – a lesser evil for whom? Iraqis? Afghanis? Syrians? Libyans? Palestinians? Hondurans? Innocent victims of drone attacks? Fracking opponents? Whistleblowers? Civil Libertarians?
$15 an hour and a Supreme Court Justice may not be enough to offset all this “lesser” evil.
I began this book last night and finished it this morning. Although the first person, present tense is grating for the length of an entire book, and Fair still is not fully open with himself or his readers, it was an engrossing read. My three stars reflects an average of four stars for interest yet only two for candor.
What happens to a man who goes off to war? The book certainly answers this question: nightmares, guilt, alcoholism, sometimes death – either by war or the man’s own hand.
How does a man like this reconcile his own religion with what he is ordered to do? I don’t think we ever really get an answer. In his account, Fair’s family expect him to become a pastor like his grandfather, but he is drawn to a darker, physical side, first becoming a policeman, where he learns to deploy violence against people who are always (well, at least in theory) criminals. For the longest time Fair thinks religion will save him, and the book contains a strange account of his interrogation of salafis who tell him how much like them he really is – a thread that really leads nowhere. Aside from Fair’s restlessness and his perpetual life crises, readers never really learn why he avoids the ministry, why he stubbornly clung to Presbyterianism despite it changing in front of his eyes, why he really dropped out of theological school. It wasn’t that his writing was starting to take off; it was something else, unnamed, unexamined.
And why does a man go off to war – especially when many in his family have warned him against it? Fair again avoids fully answering the reader’s questions, but we sense a tremendous restlessness in him that leads him to ignore his father’s and grandmother’s counsel. Fair is obviously a person of well above-average intelligence, and he is given to instrospection and guilt, but he shies away from truly probing the demons that still stir within him.
The book begins with a quote from Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance. Maimonides was the Arab-Jewish Talmudist who, besides being the Sultan’s physician, wrote Guide for the Perplexed and had much to say on moral conduct. Maimonides counsels the guilty party to approach his victim “again and again until he his forgiven.” Islam requires precisely the same of a wrong-doer, while in Christianity a hall pass signed by Jesus suffices. Unfortunately, all of Fair’s – and Bush and Cheney’s, and Obama’s – victims are now either dead or lost to squalid prisons in places where Americans will fear to go for a long, long time. A dark truth never acknowledged in this book is that there never will be apologies – and there never will be forgiveness for these personal and national sins.
And so in the end Fair falls back on his Christianity – or perhaps just wishful thinking. In his aunt’s words, Eric Fair ends up forgiving himself: “I am just a human kid.”
“Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” (ISBN 978-0465059997), by Martin Ford, a former software developer and entrepreneur, begins with a survey of the technology landscape – an over-clocked world where change seems to follow Moore’s Law – doubling in speed every couple of years. Ford paints a picture of the capabilities of robots and the dismal economic climate for humans that has existed since the mid-seventies: real wages are declining; wealth is being concentrated in the hands of 1% of the nation; half of all college graduates are not finding work that can use their college education; even highly-skilled professionals are being replaced by automation; the top 5% now accounting for 40% of all purchasing; and he asks whether tech firms – which pride themselves on “disruptive technology” – will disrupt the entire system. This is a great question – the entire system is indeed heading for a collapse. But Ford does not seriously explore the nature of “the system” – and he is certainly not looking for serious solutions – only bandaids.
Ford examines the “service sector” jobs left to American workers and refutes the notion that they are training grounds for young workers to learn valuable workplace skills. It turns out, actually, that 90% of fast-food workers are over 20, the average age is 35, their median hourly wage is $8.69, and most of them qualify for welfare programs costing taxpayers at least $7 billion a year. And still the fast-food chains are looking at new technology to replace half of their employees with automation. Ford writes that we can expect similar encroachments of robotics into wholesaling operations, retail, and agriculture. Yet, like men waiting for their turn in front of a firing squad, most workers today already see the writing (if not the blood) on the wall. What Ford is telling us is nothing new.
From the beginning of the computer age, even its creators foresaw the threat of human obsolescence. Norbert Wiener argued in a 1949 New York Times piece that there is theoretically no human task that a computer cannot learn and duplicate. In the Sixties, President Johnson convened a panel to write one of those government studies destined to molder in a filing cabinet – this one about the “Triple Revolution” occurring in the United States: human and civil rights; advances in weaponry; and “cybernation” or cybernetic automation. The report concluded that, without oversight and planning, the “nation will be thrown into unprecedented economic and social disorder.”
But economic planning is for Commies and sissies; and besides, the nation now had an oil crisis, stagflation, Iranian hostages, Sandinistas to fight, medical students to rescue in Granada, and corrupt ex-friends to punish in Panama. The Reagan years marked the beginning of attacks on labor, the rapid ascendency of pro-business advocacy in government – and what in retrospect was a new austerity regime being imposed on American workers. Ford lists seven trends he sees responsible for the misery of workers: stagnant (actually decreasing) wages; decreasing share of the national income by workers and increasing share by corporations (inequality); declining labor force participation (despite women being forced to augment family incomes); long-term unemployment and lack of job creation; soaring wage income inequality; declining opportunity and underemployment by college graduates; and the rise of McJobs and loss of full-time jobs with benefits.
Amazingly, Ford ascribes all these developments to technology. And he feels obliged to explicitly discount three other contributors: globalization (outsourcing and offshoring); financialization (the turn from factories to hedge funds); and politics (trickle down market fundamentalism in Congress and rabid pro-business lobbying from without).
Although Ford’s own graphs show a plunge in the percent of manufacturing jobs from a height of 32% in 1952 to a low of 8% in 2012, his discussion centers on the percentage of foreign products Americans buy from foreign corporations. He writes that the plunge in manufacturing jobs began before NAFTA and, hence, globalization was not the cause. However, labor historians might disagree with Ford. Textile workers, for example, remember the loss of their jobs to Mexico in the Fifties; and Mexicans remember the loss of these very same jobs in the Sixties to Asia. Globalization cannot be linked solely to trade agreements and Ford mistakenly labels globalization a modern phenomenon. Even the first economists, like David Ricardo, had it very much in mind.
Ford correctly nails the obsession with profit-taking and the abandonment of job and product creation. However, he writes that it is “important to realize that growth in the financial sector has been highly dependent on advancing information technology.” No doubt the hedge fund guys need their high-speed computers and trading networks. But Ford does not mention that the financial sector’s growth is largely the result of reckless deregulation and the invention of questionable financial “products” like the ones that nearly crashed the economic system in 2008 and necessitated massive taxpayer-funded bailouts. These companies, deemed “too big to fail,” were not permitted to reap what they sowed. They were hauled off the edge of the abyss, guaranteed continued rapacious profits, and their CEO’s were still remunerated handsomely despite their questionable ethics and performance. For one brief moment the curtain dropped on the wizard and those who did not avert their eyes saw how obscene profit-taking was and how income inequality is actually generated. Meanwhile, the average citizen-consumer – who represents 65% of economic growth in the United States – was left to fend for himself. The recovery plan both parties championed was not only unfair, it was irrational: it rescued the wrong people.
Ford grudgingly acknowledges the political climate that banned unions, attacked worker rights, deregulated businesses, dropped or eliminated taxes on the wealthy, sent an army of lobbyists to Washington, made sure corporate press shills printed op-eds from right-wing think tanks, and foisted all the economic risk on taxpayers and working people. Ford writes that, even in Canada where unions are healthier than in the U.S., income inequality is rising – the implication being that it’s not political. But Ford doesn’t mention the Tory government of Stephen Harper in the same breath, or the fact that some provinces of Canada (Alberta, for example) are as non-union as the American South.
Ford concludes that information technology “stands alone in terms of its exponential progress. Even in nations whose political environments are far more responsive to the welfare of average workers, the changes wrought by technology are becoming increasingly evident.” What nations is Ford referring to? Are there really any powerful First World nations that do not espouse labor-crushing austerity programs or champion trickle-down economics? The IMF, global banks, the G8, and global trade agreements have made sure the world is safe for Capitalism. Greece is not suffering because of technology.
He moves on to a discussion of comparative advantage in which businesses and nations choose to forego opportunity “X” for a more profitable one, and permit those who can do “X” more inexpensively to do so. Robots, Ford says, mean never having to say “I’m sorry, I’ll pass on that opportunity” because they can be programmed to do anything. Ford describes “long tail” distributions, which describe employee/profit relationships. In 2012 Google made $14 billion with 38,000 employees; GM made $11 billion with 840,000. His prediction is that most corporations of the future will have to look like Google, and this in turn will force people out of stable full-time jobs into the “informal economy,” the “Uber economy,” in which people pick up work where they can. Ford cites Jared Lanier, claiming this is essentially the model in the Third World, and that it is precisely what accounts for the erosion of the middle class. But Ford does not describe how a strong middle class makes a nation politically stable. He makes the throwaway point about citizens having a moral right to share in the benefits of technology – especially since much of it is funded or seeded by taxpayers. So presumably the public deserves a few more tech jobs and discounts when buying Tang.
But by all means: let’s disrupt technology but leave the system alone.
Ford loves factory tours. We are introduced to sportswriting bots, data mining apps, marketing analytics, machine learning, language translation, neural nets, genetic programming, cars that drive themselves, project and productivity management software, AI, complex modeling, smart searching, customer management, online ordering, cloud computing, specialized robotics, and programs that write symphonies. We learn that computer-delivered educational and machine-reading tests have not delivered on early expectations. Medical diagnosis, on the other hand, using massive repositories of case studies, pharmaceutical data, and symptoms, has been a useful tool in the hands of medical specialists. Ford, however, gushing over the possibilities of delivering family medicine by robot, runs off the rails when he advocates “para-medicals” – lesser-trained medical professionals, similar to paralegals, whose job it will be to run the medical robots that talk to human patients.
There is an odd tendency among humans to think up complex and stupid systems, then double down on them by devising yet more complex and stupid solutions to the systems’ shortcomings. Ford’s is one such example. Another is the predicted use of elder-care robots in Japan – because, Ford says, the Japanese are too xenophobic to hire foreigners to take care of their elderly.
Many uses of technology – like the use of IBM’s Watson to diagnose and manage types of leukemia – are lumped into robotics in Ford’s book – for example, his mention of glucose sensors for diabetics. If this is the face of robotics, then my old mercury-based thermostat is as well. Both are basically sensors linked to controllers. Google Nest and Google’s contact lens are examples of how the company is developing consumer products to enable it to creep into the lucrative medical market. These are new products and, if anything, will put people to work somewhere – likely outside the U.S. But they are, as yet, not robotic threats to human jobs.
Ford’s discussion of medical overcharging – $6,500 CT scans and $200 aspirins – does not address the issue of greed. Instead, he portrays these practices as necessary maneuvers to cope with that 5% of medical patients who, he says, account for 50% of all expenses. He teases us that AI software running on a tablet in a doctor’s hands will make diagnoses and devise more cost-effective treatments. However, who would not expect the software to cost physicians $1,000 a month and have to run on otherwise standard Android tablets, but costing $5,000 each? Gouging is so entrenched in medical software that it would surprise no one that such an exception for a single AI product would ever be made – particularly when many physicians nowadays are investors in their own labs. Ford proposes creating a single-payer health care system which can mitigate the gouging. He suggests a private management consortium modeled on the old national AT&T phone system – a sanctioned oligopoly. His ideas include auctioning off operating licenses – as if he had never heard of the problems the FCC has run into with bandwidth spectra. But my question is – why? Why is he trying to design a new health care system on the heels of the first one ever created, and one that could be dismantled after the next election? And what does all this really have to do with robotics?
Cars are another story. Self-driving vehicles are almost here, and they belong to two family trees: one is the traditional family car from Detroit, Japan, or Bavaria, plus a host of self-driving and self-parking options; the other is the Google car, a no-frills vehicle that will eventually not even have a steering wheel. Many options for these new vehicles are possible, but Ford sees, eventually, a world of commercial car fleets. For a monthly fee you would have car service, pickup and dropoff capabilities, and vehicles would cease being status objects – simply another commodity like cable TV or high speed internet. These fleets would be owned by companies like Google, Avis, Hertz and Uber. Ford slyly suggests that the changes wrought by driverless cars would be the ultimate in disruptive technology: “Imagine the uproar when Uber’s cars start arriving without drivers.” As fleets consolidate, the number of taxi drivers, muffler and brake guys, auto body shops, car dealerships, detailing shops, and car washes will shrink dramatically. As fleets of cars grow, the fleet of auto guys will fade into obscurity – only to be replaced by a much small number of highly-trained technicians in the fleet garages. Ford did not touch on some of the privacy issues of concern with cars today – particularly that cars gather tremendous amounts of personal information on their drivers and can actually be hacked during operation. Or that vehicles will no doubt also become part of our new surveillance landscape.
In fact, the privacy and civil liberties implications of robotics and automation are entirely absent from Ford’s book.
Expanding the context in which technology changes are expected to occur, Ford paints a picture of the fragility of the middle and upper-middle class – including the top 5% which constitutes an affluent upper tier, but one easily broken by the loss of two salaries. He discusses debt, education, aging, and labor force participation. The bottom line is: our national prosperity was once dependent upon a healthy middle class, and the middle class is anything but healthy nowadays. Most people already understand this.
When Ford turns his attention to the “Singularity” and the general kookiness of Ray Kurzweil, it’s initially an amusing story – until we discover that Kurzweil’s pseudo-religion of “eternal life via cybernetics” is widely supported by, and shapes, Silicon Valley. The use of new technology at micro levels – nanotechnology – will create, he writes, chemical and mechanical miracles that will prolong life and function like the alchemist’s bowl, synthesizing entire meals from amino acid glop – at least so sayeth the prophets of the future with their billions to spend experimenting on the rest of us.
In his final chapter, Martin Ford takes a stab at creating a “new paradigm” for economies in which, as Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy puts it, “the future doesn’t need us.” In this future, the highly educated are not really needed. Not surprising; they never were. Even today, between 20% and 50% of college graduates are “overeducated” for existing jobs in industrialized countries. Ford questions the conventional wisdom that throwing more vocational education at today’s burger flippers will magically create a climate for more technologically-related economic growth. He describes the job market as a huge pyramid, with the technical and business elite at the top – graduates of graduate programs – and not just people with graduate degrees, but people from prestigious universities. The kind of people whose survival would be assured by sticking them in a secure vault in a granite mountain somewhere in case of nuclear war or an asteroid. Ford laughs at the expectation of finding technical jobs for everyone. “The person who would have worked on a farm in 1900, or in a factory in 1952, is today scanning bar codes or stocking shelves at Walmart. […] So, historically, there has been a reasonable match between the types of work required by the economy and the capabilities of the available workforce. […] The conventional wisdom is that, by investing in still more education and training, we are going to somehow cram everyone into that shrinking region at the very top [of the pyramid].” Ford’s bleak prediction is like End Times: only a small multitude will be saved during the Apocalypse and make it to heaven. The rest of us are doomed.
Ford makes much – everything, actually – of the speed of technological innovation and sees this as the primary driver of the threat of the working class (or working aspirants). But technology is a very fast but relatively small wind-up mouse in a room with a huge elephant no one wants to talk about. That elephant, of course, is Capitalism. It takes 255 pages for Ford to mention the word – the economic system imposed on people in nations where technology is regularly used against them. He writes, “The progression toward ever more automation is not an artifact of ‘design philosophy’ or the personal preferences of engineers: it is fundamentally driven by capitalism. […] The only difference today is that exponential progress is pushing us toward the endgame. […] Changing that would require far more an appeal to engineers and designers: it would require modifying the basic incentives built into the market economy.”
Or – and this does not occur to Ford – changing the system.
If Capitalism is a race for market domination, then a supermarket chain cannot survive its equally technologically-savvy competitors unless it eventually replaces all its cashiers with automated checkouts. Fast food restaurants cannot survive the demand for the cheapest possible “food” unless they eventually replace their humiliatingly-attired employees with vending machines or burger-stamping robots. Mass retailers like Walmart cannot mercilessly crush their competition unless they reduce or eliminate warehouse workers, retail workers, transportation workers, and replace American seamstresses with Bangladeshi children living in shacks and working in fire traps twelve hours a day. But the need to win at all cost exacts enormous social costs – costs that, under Capitalism, businesses and their wealthy owners and investors refuse to pay. This is why, as Ford points out, Social Security is abused as a permanent safety net. This is why most Walmart and fast-food employees collect welfare benefits at a cost of billions to taxpayers – when many of these same corporations are paying no taxes at all. Ford sees the dysfunction. He just doesn’t have the stomach to really change it.
So what is Ford’s solution – since he seems to think that Capitalism is the only form of economic and social organization? A basic guarantee of income. Hand out croissants to the peasants so they won’t revolt. He cites Friedrich Hayek, the ultra conservative economist, who saw this as an interim measure – right before pulling the plug on all social support systems. Ford writes that, without doubt, conservatives are not going to like this idea. I would suggest that neither Libertarians nor Social Democrats nor even Socialists are going to like the idea very much because citizens are completely at the mercy of a government that can “giveth or taketh away” such benefits. Worse, Ford envisions a society of free agents, where everyone is scrambling to “go out and participate in the market.” He thus betrays his own Free Market fundamentalism. He’s for the Uber economy. Besides, there is, as many economists and historians have pointed out, no such thing as an entirely free market. Could I, under Ford’s scheme, found an empire like the Tata’s, or Donald Trump’s? Probably not. I’d have to be born into wealth, as in these examples, or born with a silver spoon in my mouth like Bill Gates, the Walton heirs, or Mark Zuckerberg. And if the top 1% owns 90% of the nation’s wealth, how is guaranteed income really going to help the bottom 99%? The super-rich will still have their billions and their disproportionate access to influence and politics. No, if we are being honest – a monthly allowance is really just to keep the proletariat from rioting.
I have a low tolerance for “timely,” “insightful,” and “pioneering” books on social issues that seriously pull their punches, especially when they ignore the most egregious features of the problem they are examining. “Rise of the Robots” is such a book. I am very grateful to the friend who let me read his copy – and for the fact that I did not have to buy a copy myself.
Dr. Irving Fradkin (“America can be great again,” August 12) is without doubt a beloved booster of communitarian values and I have enjoyed reading his pieces over the years. However, from time to time I have found his conventional wisdom to be less than wise.
This is one such case.
In his most recent letter Dr. Fradkin portrays the problems of our democracy as a lack of bipartisanship and suggests that tweaks to campaign finance rules can make government more democratic.
What we REALLY need is an end to corporate bribery through lobbying, PACs, and classifying corporations as humans.
Dr. Fradkin wants more people to establish scholarships for students.
What we REALLY need is free university education – such as Germany and other nations offer their citizens – if we don’t want the next several generations to be drowned in debt. Of course this requires that the states and federal government not be totally broke. Raising revenues is essential, and spending on more than the military is a choice we’ll have to make.
Dr. Fradkin wants to create jobs by reducing taxes.
Reducing taxes does not magically create jobs that can easily be outsourced to Bangladesh, Mumbai, or Taiwan. And in Bangladesh where major clothing companies sew your jeans and shirts – or in the FoxConn compounds where Apple products are made – wages are criminally low and companies need not worry much about worker safety. Places like the Marshall Islands are technically in the U.S. but workers there are not protected by the same labor laws as Americans. Are virtually slave-labor jobs in places like this going to magically migrate back to us when outsourcing is so profitable?
Even when American jobs ARE created, we are now seeing a trend toward McJobs and the Uber economy – where everyone cobbles together an existence from multiple part-time, low-paying jobs where benefits are a thing of the past. This is the Third World model, Dr. Fradkin.
And what is to ensure that the Walton (Walmart) family and the fast food purveyors – even when granted cushy tax deals – will provide a working wage for their employees? Absolutely nothing. In fact, Walmart employees have to supplement their paychecks with food stamps and Medicare – which WE, and not the Waltons, pay for. What’s good for the billionaires is not necessarily good for the average guy – and to believe that charity will be given generously and spontaneously by billionaires (trickle down economics) is more than wishful thinking. It’s delusional.
Next Dr. Fradkin suggests we go begging from billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet for matching grants to communities. In fact, Dr. Fradkin devotes a lot of time to successful begging strategies, mentioning our local success story, Dr. Irwin Jacobs, as well.
There is nothing wrong with giving back voluntarily to a community that has given you so much – don’t get me wrong. But what we REALLY need is for corporations and wealthy citizens to pay their fair share of taxes, not simply drop a few bucks in our coffee cups as they pass us begging on the street.
When the working and middle classes are not living hand to mouth – that’s when America will be great again.
I re-read Josef Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” after many years to see how it has stood up. And it does – very well. Modern critiques of the book have been harsh, but Conrad’s story turned the tables on colonial Europe, suggesting who exactly were the savages.
The story is recounted, as fin de siècle stories sometimes were, as the recollections of a narrator once-removed. The narrator recounts a tale told by a mariner named Marlow, who as a young man had been out of work for some time and had obtained work as a river pilot for a Belgian colonial enterprise.
In Part I of the story, even before Marlow enters the Congo, his first ominous brushes are with the corporation to which King Leopold had given the charter to pillage a massive part of the Dark Continent (an area 75 times as large as Belgium itself). The company Marlow visits when signing on is quartered on a street with grass growing up through the cobblestones – a spent Europe. As if a heroic journey were beginning, in Conrad’s story the building is “guarded” by two old crones who usher Marlow into a perfunctory interview, then a medical examination in which his supposed “English cranium” is measured every which way (phrenology was in vogue and it had eugenic overtones). He next visits the aunt who has secured his position for him, who gives him a lecture on how he is benefitting the savages of the Congo, doing the Lord’s work.
Then Marlow begins his month-long trip up the river, on a French steamer captained by a morose Swede who tells him the story of another Swede who has committed suicide, all along which various European colonial military forces are shooting their cannons into the brush – for no purpose other than to demonstrate colonial power – or building insane projects with slave labor, whose weak and used-up laborers are literally cast upon heaps to die. It’s not a pretty picture of European colonialism. Conrad often describes the natives as “brutes” and “cannibals” and “savages” and his use of the word “nigger” describes the collared and chained people of Africa in the 19th and early 20th centuries: still slaves, though only a legalism alters the true status of people “brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts.” In contrast, the Europeans are described as “pilgrims” – presumably on a quest supposed to be holy.
When Marlow arrives in Leopoldville, he discovers that the vessel he was hired to captain has been sunk, its bottom ripped out on a sand bar, and that he is to proceed to find Mr. Kurtz, an agent many miles inland whose franchise accounts for more than half of all the colonial spoils. Kurtz is legendary and expected to go great places on his return to Europe. And we learn what it is these colonists are up to. “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.” Marlow, in speaking to the station master, sees a portrait of a blindfolded woman holding a torch (very likely Astraea), but it appears sinister to him. It turns out to have been painted by Kurtz, who is believed to be quite the Renaissance man. It seems to at least this reader to be a warning that the practice of foisting Western ways on non-Western people is not going to end well.
Conrad briefly pulls us out of the dark midnight of Marlow’s tale described as a dream. “It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake.”
Marlow resumes his tale, remarking that the minor colonial functionaries ensured uninterrupted trade in worthless glass beads, yet the rivets that could have repaired his boat never managed to find their way to him. Marlow resolves to get them in three weeks, but all that arrives is another colonial expedition looking for more spoils. “Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” Take that, Dick Cheney. Take that, United Fruit.
In Part II, Marlow runs upriver into the “heart of darkness.” It is as if he is moving back into the time of pterodactyls, into pre-history. He considers the thin veneer of civilization that Western man has accreted and the common humanity with the “cannibals” and “savages.” He ponders the ease with which a “cannibal” with a bone through his nose can be trained to watch the pressure gauges on a steamer. On the eve of arriving at Kurtz’s station, they stop at a deserted settlement and find a sign warning them to “approach cautiously.” They stop for the night, resolved to proceed cautiously by light of day. In the morning there is a thick fog and to all the “pilgrims” their steamer is the only object left in the world, everything else “gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.” Marlow asks why the steamer’s native crew (“thirty to five” Europeans) did not eat them. And all the passengers wonder at the unseen natives on the riverbanks: “Will they attack, do you think?” The question is answered the moment the arrows start flying at the vessel and a crewman is killed.
The main narrator then interjects in a sort of flash-forward, to point out that Marlow has lied to Kurtz’s wife – women need to be shielded from the truth – the truth, Marlow believes, is that Kurtz’s bleached skull will be found with a mountain of ivory he has collected. Marlow speculates on the identity of the half-British, half-French Kurtz – mentioning a report Kurtz has written for the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.” It is a magnificent opus, Marlow believes. It suggests that savages can be elevated by the white man. Yet, at the end of the report, in unsteady handwriting, Kurtz has scrawled: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Marlow is faced with the decision to convey the report to its intended readers – or to “lose” it. Mainly he wants to preserve Kurtz’s memory, but he is undecided about the report. The fast-forward ends and finally Marlow’s steamer arrives at its destination and there he meets a young Russian who knows Kurtz.
In Part III, the Russian fills in Marlow on Kurtz and, through his binoculars, he sees Kurtz’s compound walls, surrounded by heads. Now we know the truth about the man. We meet a fierce, beautiful black woman who may have been Kurtz’s consort, and we learn that Kurtz ordered the attack on the steamer. But Kurtz is in bad shape and the natives return him to Marlow, whereupon he is loaded onto the boat and conveyed back out of the heart of darkness. On board he dies after many days, his last uttered words being “the horror, the horror.” Marlow returns to Belgium with Kurtz’s papers and the report (from which he as ripped the final scrawled page) and protectively guards Kurtz’s memory, even lying to Kurtz’s fiancee about his last words. The story returns to the prime narrator, who returns us to the story’s present – an old group of seafarers on a tranquil waterway flowing “into the heart of an immense darkness.”
I love this story because it so beautifully combines the political, the psychological, the cultural, and is written in Conrad’s beautiful language. His descriptions are always rich and thoughtful and – though European (and American) colonialism are officially gone – they linger about, continuing to wreak their horrors on the rest of the world.
This volume also contains three other stories.
“Amy Foster” – a beautifully-written tale of a Slavic shipwreck victim who marries Amy Foster.
“The Secret Sharer” – the tale of a ship’s captain who risks everything to help a murderer who steals aboard his ship.
“Youth” – a wonderful story, with surprisingly modern and very poetic language, about a young officer on board an old ship hauling coal to Bangkok.
Review of “Anarchism and Other Essays” by Emma Goldman (ISBN 9780486224848)
This is a fascinating book. As Emma Goldman painted it, Anarchism is the ultimate in Western freedom, but at its core it is humanist and not a sociopathic cult of individual advantage (Ayn Rand comes to mind) – and certainly not the cult of terror as it was commonly portrayed. Yet Goldman and her comrades never succeeded in making Anarchism attractive to the public. This was due to constant character assassination by the corporate press, infighting, and whispers that Goldman was somehow associated with several high-profile assassinations, including President McKinley’s. The Anarchists themselves were passionate orators who spoke in generalities, were fond of using literary references, and they were not shy about stating that the public they were courting could sometimes be nothing more than a stupid mob. And they were arguing against nationalism and populism at a time these were quite popular. Anarchists were feared and reviled as ISIS is today, and J. Edgar Hoover’s modern FBI was created largely out of this fear.
Anarchism and Communism were both finished off by the corporate press, intense government surveillance, zealous prosecutions, show trials, executions, Congressional hearings, and the suppression of their ideas by legal edict. In the United States we have always had freedom of the press and expression – as long as any ideas expressed are in line with capitalism and nationalist fever.
Anarchism may be dead, but Goldman’s social and political criticism is as relevant as ever. In fact, reading this volume of individual essays written almost exactly a century ago is to realize how little has changed in this nation. Is our militarism, police brutality, neglect of the poor, social inequality, gun fever, our culture of violence, or the massive prison industry anything new? Read this book and weep. It has always been thus so.
The book’s first essay, “Anarchism,” argues successfully for individual freedoms and shows that the only function of the state is to guard a monopoly on violence for the benefit of oligarchs to whom the masses have stupidly given away their rights, wealth, and lives. True. But for all the Tolstoy and Emerson she quotes, Goldman does not really offer a picture of how Anarchism would actually work in practice. In fact, she is rather cagey about committing to any depiction of a new way of organizing society, except to say that social associations would be voluntary.
“Minorities versus Majorities” puts her on firmer theoretical ground, but her views insult the public. Jimmy Carter knew the sting of a public too dumb and proud to be chastised for its greed and shortsighted thinking. Don’t mess with the mob. Instead we prefer the rouged flattery of a Reagan who capitalized on our American 20 Mule Team Borax wholesomeness, Christliness and cleanliness. Goldman shows that majorities routinely persecute minorities and, worse, usually do so in the service of privileged minorities. Goldman could not have foreseen the Hobby Lobby case, but this is a perfect contemporary example of her point. She points out that public opinion is fickle and dangerous and that it tends to reject justice in favor of stasis. Goldman says it is individuals, not the masses, who generate new ideas that change the world. The crowd “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”
“The Psychology of Political Violence” attempts to explain why lone wolves were flaunting society’s monopoly on violence and using it themselves: “The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless, monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at least as an irresponsible lunatic.” She defends the bomb-throwing lone wolves and the authors of political manifestos (like the contemporary Unabomber). She sympathizes with those driven to insane acts by a cruel society: “The indisputable fact is that homicidal outrages have, from time immemorial, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and desperate individuals, to wrongs from their fellowmen, which they felt to be intolerable.” She lists the homicidal damage by the state: victims of wars of choice, victims of industrial accident, the poor who die of hunger, victims of police and Pinkerton killings: “Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean. That so few resist is the strongest proof how terrible must be the conflict between their souls and unbearable social iniquities.” And I agree. The terror of individuals is nothing compared with the terror of any state.
“Prisons” describes the huge prison industry that existed a century ago, and the prison-industrial complex built to permit corporations to further exploit the incarcerated. Sound familiar? Goldman quotes Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde, something we would shy away from today – after all, there is no need to describe the actual human experience of being unjustly (or justly) jailed or condemned. She points out that in 1915 the U.S. was spending $6 billion a year to incarcerate people – five times the combined output of wheat and coal, and representing the greatest proportion of jailed people in the world. “Such unheard-of expenditure for the purpose of maintaining vast armies of human beings caged up like wild beasts.” Goldman points out that, whatever we are doing, it’s not working. We still have the most violent society in the world. She cites homicide rates of that time. Chicago then had 118 murders that year. London (5 times greater in population) had only 22. She points out that crime is a direct consequence of human desperation and quotes Havelock Ellis extensively. She examines the nature of crimes; from political to violent to economic, she charges society with creating the conditions for crime to flourish. Citing Quetelet, Lacassagne, and Ellis, she writes: in the end “every society has the criminals it deserves.”
“Patriotism: A menace to Liberty” cites the well-known Dr. Johnson quote describing patriotism as the “refuge of scoundrels.” Goldman describes how hyper-nationalism is nothing but a tool for encouraging a violent society to extend that violence to wars of opportunity. She cites Tolstoy’s conception of patriotism – “the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.” Goldman could not have foreseen the future when soldiers were elevated as gladiators to be publicly worshipped, thanked with several holidays a year, given preferential hiring, and granted economic, social, and even legal benefits denied others.
Goldman points out that the ruling class has its “cosmopolitan” (current word: “global”) interests, that patriotism is for chumps, for the masses. She hadn’t heard of Swiss or Cayman Island accounts but she points out that it is never the oligarchs who must sacrifice their children – they tend to get the officer positions far from the front. Quoting Carlisle: “war is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.” And then we wonder why our citizens act in greater proportion like wild beasts. Goldman speaks explicitly of the links between “militarism” and “commercialism.” In the end, she writes, war is incredibly profitable – at least for some people.
She brilliantly describes the benefits of a volunteer military (which the U.S. had at the time, just as we do today: “conscription has created in Europe a deep-seated hatred of militarism among all classes of society.” And “it is the compulsory feature of militarism which has created a tremendous anti-militarist movement, feared by the European Powers far more than anything else.” It seems when someone else is dying for questionable militaristic adventures we don’t bother to examine the reasons for it so closely. In fact, she says, capitalism is based on militarism: “The very moment the latter is undermined, capitalism will totter.” She points out that militarism is reinforced by economic security. She could not have foreseen how many men (40% from the South) signed up for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but she understood their economic motivations: “Is it not a fact that during industrial depressions there is a tremendous increase in the number of enlistments?” Goldman also could not have foreseen JROTC or the militaristic high school recruiting provisions in “No Child Left Behind,” but she wrote: “Evidently the government holds to the Jesuitical conception: ‘Give me the child mind, and I will mould the man.’ Children are trained in military tactics, the glory of military achievements extolled in the curriculum, and the youthful minds perverted to suit the government. Further, the youth of the country is appealed to in glaring posters to join the army and navy.”
The book also includes a pamphlet Goldman wrote defending the memory of Francisco Ferrer, an anti-cleric and anti-monarchist who was killed for his beliefs rather than actions by Alfonso León Fernando María Jaime Isidro Pascual Antonio de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena, otherwise known as King Alfonso XIII.
In addition to her political work, Goldman wrote literary and cultural commentary. “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism” aptly nails the stifling effects of Puritanism on American culture. “It is killing what is natural and healthy in our impulses.” The Puritan Fathers “established in the New World a reign of Puritanic tyranny and crime. […] Puritanism no longer employs the thumbscrew and lash; but it still has a most pernicious hold on the minds and feelings of the American people. […] With Puritanism as the constant check upon American life, neither truth nor sincerity is possible.” It is Puritanism, Goldman writes, that, “having suppressed the natural sex desires of the unmarried woman, […] blesses her married sister for incontinent fruitfulness in wedlock. Indeed, not merely blesses her, but forces the woman […] to bear children.” Goldman did not foresee the day when unmarried women, too, would be forced to bear children they did not want. Prostitution is “born of the hypocrisy of Puritanism.” It is the back-alley, the outlet, the furtive, the covert, the perverted expression of sexuality that, like much in this country, cannot breathe. To top it all off, she writes, the poor worker can’t even spend Sundays away from the gloom of Capitalism; he must attend church and permit himself to be lectured-to. Puritanism, in the end, contributes to stifled, miserable, unharmonious lives.
The Anarchists were among the earliest feminists. In “The Traffic in Women,” Emma Goldman describes how Capitalism and Puritanism create a culture in which women become commodities. She actually uses the word “commodity.” She also uses the phrase “double standard” when describing attitudes around sex for men and women. At first, a poor woman with no means of her own must resort to what she euphemistically calls “Mrs. Warren’s profession.” And these are working girls in every sense. “The average wage received by women is six dollars per week for forty-eight to sixty hours of work, and the majority of female wage workers face many months of idleness which leaves the average wage about $280 a year. In view of these economic horrors, is it to be wondered at that prostitution and the white slave trade have become such dominant factors?” Citing Margaret Sanger’s observations on women driven to prostitution by economic necessity, she writes: “Also it will do the maintainers of purity and morality good to learn that out of two thousand cases, 490 were married women, women who lived with their husbands. Evidently there was not much of a guaranty for their ‘safety and purity’ in the sanctity of marriage.” Goldman points out that the “sanctity of marriage” cannot survive poverty, much less natural inclinations. Much of her critique of sexual politics had its genesis in being ostracized by friends and comrades, and actually having to set up her seamstress shop (she did piece work) in a brothel, where she was treated kindly and where she began to see the women there as desperate, even moral, workers – only driven to the profession by necessity. Citing Havelock Ellis, Goldman saw the institution of marriage in a patriarchy as inherently corrupt: “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.” For women, Goldman described marriage as a “miserable institution which they can not outgrow.”
In “Woman Suffrage” Goldman turns her attention to universal suffrage, the right of women to vote. But she warns women that the vote alone will not set them free. Starting with Christianity, she writes: “Religion, especially the Christian religion, has condemned women to the life of an inferior, a slave. It has thwarted her nature and fettered her soul, yet the Christian religion has no greater supporter, none more devout, than woman.” Goldman could not predict the Palins and Bachmanns of today, so she must have had extraordinary powers of discernment. War, too, oppresses women, leaving them bereft, lonely, often without resources. Her energies are sapped and sucked by housekeeping. “Yet woman clings tenaciously to the home, to the power that holds her in bondage.” She mocks the power of the vote and asks what it has bought men: “The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and, by that right, he has forged chains about his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, in fact, of everything except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor.” She looks in several countries where women have the vote and finds individual freedoms there completely lacking. In four states which already permit women to vote, Puritanism keeps them in their place. She cites Emmeline Pankhurst on economic equality. Without economic parity there can be no equality. Why, after 100 years and thousands of observations like Goldman’s, is this still so? And then she takes on class.
“The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” was written as women’s suffrage was partly underway. It is in some ways a meditation on What’s Next? Goldman realized that emancipation would not be panacea. She predicted continuing wage inequality with men; that women now functioning independently would be afraid to “marry down” because of class concerns; that “love would rob her of her freedom and independence; […] that motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession.” Goldman somehow saw the future long before women had to discover how to “lean in” and attack “glass ceilings.” She cites a book by Laura Marholm on exceptional women of the day: Eleonora Duse; Sonya Kovalevskaia; and others. She writes that the more exceptional the woman, the more difficult it is to find a mate who will love her and awaken love in her: “In the case of the modern woman, these attributes serve as a hindrance to the complete assertion of her being.” It has taken a hundred years for some men to cherish exceptional women; but even here nothing is perfect.
“Marriage and Love” is a savage attack on the institution of marriage. “On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close inspection it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.” Ouch. “Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement. […] Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments.” Double Ouch. “Dante’s motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: ‘Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.'” Triple Ouch, anyone? She declares marriage as a failed institution; every twelvth marriage ends in divorce. She obviously didn’t see a 50% failure rate coming. “Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? […] How can such an arrangement end except in failure?”
“The Modern Drama” is Emma Goldman sticking her toe into literary criticism. She was exceptionally knowledgable of literature in French, German, Russian, English, and Yiddish and frequently cited contemporary writers in these languages. She tipped her hat to Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Andreiev, Gorki, Whitman, Chekov, Mirbeau, Zola, Maupassant, Holz, Suderman – and others. Her influences would have been chiefly European Naturalists writing fiction and drama. But Drama, the theater, was especially dear to her heart. She had nothing against propaganda and pamphleteering. She did it herself. But she especially venerated the theater as a place where people could see humanity in a mirror. She saw drama also as a way to suggest new values to society. For this reason it is not difficult to understand why she especially loved Ibsen’s plays. Much of this essay is analysis of plots; what the characters and their strivings meant to her. And, by extension, to humanity.
She was something. I would have to add her to my list of exceptional women of history I’d like to meet in a time machine. Rosa Parks, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg…
The introduction to this collection by Richard Drinnon is aptly titled “Harking Back to the Future,” which was absolutely perfect. Emma Goldman was way ahead of her times, and a century later is still way ahead of ours.
