Old Socialist attempts a reading of the 4,401 word polemic …
Here is the introduction, by Martin Ivens , to this January 20, 2023 edition of the TLS -the opening sentences tells The Reader that ’Antisemitism is still virulent in the modern world’ via political fiction writer David Baddiel, who now replaces Jonathan Freedland, as the most current political hysteric. That acts as introduction to Geoffrey Robertson’s essay, which is an extract from his book, published by TLS Books.
Headline: A town called Sue
Sub-headline: How Russian oligarchs use British courts to close down investigative journalism.
In his recent TLS book, Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel challenged the lazy, sometimes malign assumption that because many Jewish people are white, they cannot be victims of racism. Antisemitism is still virulent in the modern world. This week we publish Lawfare by Geoffrey Robertson KC, a free-speech champion who has challenged literary censorship, state secrecy and the abuse of the law of libel by the rich and infamous throughout his career. It is an unequal struggle. In Britain the defendant in a libel case must establish their innocence – a reversal of the general presumption of innocence – and the judiciary, some shining exceptions apart, are unsympathetic or inexpert. Robertson identifies a new threat – Russian oligarchs who exploit British courts to suppress investigations into their affairs and those of their master, Vladimir Putin. In London, on the eve of Russia’s war with Ukraine, Catherine Belton’s book Putin’s People “attracted a sudden blizzard of legal actions from Roman Abramovich and three other oligarchs”, writes Robertson. It would have cost Belton’s publisher, HarperCollins – which publishes TLS books – £5 million to fight a successful defence and more than twice that if it lost. The action had already cost the publisher £1.5 million in legal fees before it arrived at a confidential judicial settlement. Other works about Russia have never even reached British bookshops, as publishers have decided they cannot bear the likely legal costs. Ninety-five per cent of libel claims are won or settled on terms that required withdrawal, according to one bleak survey. Robertson argues for sweeping reforms of the laws of libel and privacy. The government concedes the injustice of the current system and promises change. Robertson, however, suspects ministerial legerdemain. Legal reforms may also restrict access to human rights legislation and impose further restraints on reporting national security issues.
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The Reader might wonder what David Baddiel’s book shares in common, with Geoffrey Robertson’s book about the menace of Russian Oligarchs? I’ve highlighted that part of the editors introduction.
Is the virtue of Geoffrey Robertson’s book excerpt that The Reader finally arrives at the bad actor Vladimir Putin, after 845 words of evocative British Legal/Political History, and a portion of John Betjeman’s poem? This was once the most prestigious Literary Review in ‘The West’, that has descended into being The British National Security State’s propaganda arm.
What might The Reader think about this books published as part of ‘The TLS Companions’ series in 1992:
Geoffrey Robertson wastes not a moment of utterly valuable propaganda time and space. He is after ‘reform’ that protects the virtuous. I’ve highlighted the last sentence of the quoted text.
Vladimir Putin gushes lies to justify his barbaric attack on Ukraine. These lies are, for people in Russia, “facts”, and his lickspittle MPs have rushed through a law to make it a crime for anyone to deny them by publishing the truth. Such censorship is anathema to a nation like Britain, which boasts of its history and tradition of “free speech”. But wait a minute. As the Privy Council (comprising English law lords) pointed out:
Free speech does not mean free speech: it means speech hedged in by all the laws against defamation, blasphemy, sedition, and so forth. It means freedom governed by law.
And governed by lawyers, who act for the very rich to wage a bloodless but nonetheless scary war, in the form of litigation, against those who attempt to criticise or expose them. “Lawfare” in this sense has come to mean the use of legal strategies to harass or intimidate publishers – to make them pay, literally, in large and unrecoverable (even if they win) legal fees, and in heavy damages and their own legal fees if they lose. This is not a new problem, but it has come into recent focus as publishers of prescient books about Putin have been frightened and deterred by lawyers acting for his oligarch friends, threatened with legal costs that can run to millions of pounds. You cannot blame lawyers for using the law. But that law is antipathetic to serious journalism and must be reformed if the Fourth Estate is to function effectively in our democracy by scrutinising the wealthy and the powerful.
Is it news to Robertson that litigation favors powerful political actors, with reservoirs of cash? This ad hoc naiveite is the self-serving pose adopted by a propagandist. I’ll quote selected portions of this rhetorical behemoth. In his way Robertson adopts the Neo-Conservative rhetorical strategy, of drowning The Reader in a toxic bath of History Made to Measure, as expressed via logorrhea. Have I engaged in reductivism? this 4, 401 word polemic demands a severe pruning!
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“Lawfare” is a weak pun, with a pejorative tinge when used by those on the receiving end of writs for libel and breach of privacy. The term originated in America in the 1950s, first used by army chiefs who objected to legal actions brought by civil liberties groups over discrimination in the military.
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The most notable victim was a distinguished journalist, Catherine Belton, author of Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West, which attracted a sudden blizzard of legal actions from Roman Abramovich and three other oligarchs, and from Rosneft, Russia’s national oil company, claiming that the book libelled them.
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This is the perennial problem of defending allegations about Russians, and wealthy claimants from the Middle East, or indeed from Britain, namely the impossibility of proving truth when it is hidden behind offshore trusts or in tax havens, or has come from sources who fear reprisals.
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They hardly needed it: over the previous few years books had gone unwritten, or had been censored or simply not published, for fear of defamation actions about statements reasonably believed to be true, but not capable of proof by evidence admissible in a British court.
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Such people are embraced by British judges. As one judge recently said of an international businessman, “his professional achievements and family wealth make him a rare member of a small elite in the world of business.
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But it is the current state of British law that allows this. Judges, not parliament, have fashioned the most recent threat to press freedom – the sprawling growth of a law against the invasion of privacy.
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Britain (to its discredit) had no protection for privacy at all until the 1998 Human Rights Act reproduced Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence”.
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The rot began, fairly precisely, in 2004–05, when both the top court in the UK (then the House of Lords Judicial Committee) and the European Court of Human Rights decided that two much-photographed women, the supermodel Naomi Campbell and Princess Caroline von Hannover of Monaco, had a reasonable expectation of privacy when they walked down a public street.
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For this incoherent reason an enforceable right of privacy over social and financial networks was soon being claimed by kleptocrats and conmen alike.
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So privacy actions proliferate, to deter or freeze investigative journalism by suppressing information that is factual.
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Any self-respecting kleptocrat with a mansion and a superyacht and a tax-avoidance scheme has a vast amount of information he or she can call on the courts to protect from exposure, unless the defending author or journalist can prove (the burden of proof, of course, being on the defendant) that publication serves an overriding public interest.
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This ruling was applied by the UK’s Supreme Court in 2022 to prevent Bloomberg from reporting a highly significant development in tackling corruption.
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But the Supreme Court merely ruled that “ZXC” had a “reasonable expectation” that investigations into his alleged corruption should be kept private. As a Supreme Court decision, the Bloomberg case carries great weight.
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What is striking is that none of the Supreme Court judges could discern any public interest in publishing the names of suspects, even though it is well known (especially in rape cases) that doing this often causes more witnesses to come forward – sometimes with evidence of other crimes, and occasionally with evidence that exonerates the suspect.
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Damages for injury to reputation tend to be more than the law awards for the loss of an arm or a leg, and more than the criminal compensation board awards to those who have suffered grievous bodily harm or rape.
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As for kleptocrats and foreigners who have been formally sanctioned by the UK government, the sanction should deprive them of the right to bring any action in England, because they no longer have a reputation here.
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In the first month of Putin’s war on Ukraine, his most odious sanctioned oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin (“Putin’s chef”), continued his libel action against Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative website Bellingcat, who had published evidence of Prigozhin’s connection with the Wagner Group, Russia’s brutal mercenaries.
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For all that Britain boasts about free speech, it has had a wretched history here – other countries do it better. American law gives much surer protection to defamatory words if they are published in good faith about public figures, and most European laws treat defamation as no big deal, providing a right of reply for those attacked or else an order for retraction, rather than heavy costs and damages.
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SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuits against public participation” – a nonsense name dreamt up by American academics. In the US more than thirty states have adopted anti-SLAPP laws, enabling judges to strike out defamation and privacy claims that abuse the legal process because their primary objective is to stop legitimate reporting.
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In England, meanwhile, the first problem was how to define a SLAPP. Raab described it as an action “where the primary objective is to harass, intimidate and financially and psychologically exhaust one’s opponent via improper means”.
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Reforms to end the unequal justice dispensed by defamation and privacy laws and lawyers are not difficult to identify, but they appear nowhere in Raab’s plans for a Bill of Rights to “strengthen protection for freedom of speech”.
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Lawfare disrupts democracy by enabling the wealthy to intimidate publishers and suppress news and opinions that the public are entitled to hear. It is, for the most part, fought below the waterline, in confidential letters between lawyers and trips to a judge in chambers behind closed doors, or in the offices of taxing masters privately assessing costs.
This Reader has to think out loud, about the revelations offered by The Labour Files – The Crisis I Al Jazeera Investigations that has been subject to a complete political blackout at The Times, The TLS and other British Corporate Media. While Geoffrey Robertson inveighs against the destructive power of Putin’s Oligarchs in Britain, the fact that that media has simply ignored the facts offered by the Al Jazeera expose, offers primary evidence, of the utter political bankruptcy the whole of that Media and Political Class!
The very thought of reading one more of Ross Douthat’s meditations, conjured in a mind packed with exhausted Aquinian Theology, tinctured in AI, unidentified flying objects, hallucinogens …
In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself writing columns that touch on the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, the mystery of unidentified flying objects haunting American skies and the enthusiasm in certain circles for taking mind-altering substances that yield a feeling, illusory or not, of contact with supernatural-seeming entities.
These are very different stories, in a way. The A.I. revolution belongs to the realm of serious and lavishly funded science. The U.F.O. phenomenon hovers on the paranormal and pseudoscientific fringe. The spiritual dimensions explored by users of drugs like DMT belong primarily to the terrain of psychology and religion — either as manifestations of some sort of Jungian unconscious or else, well, as actual spiritual dimensions.
But there is a shared spirit in these stories, a common impulse to the quests: the desire to encounter or invent some sort of nonhuman consciousness that might help us toward leaps that we can’t make on our own.
This impulse is an ancient one: The idea that one might bind a djinn, create a golem or manipulate a god or fairy to do your bidding is inscribed deep in the human imagination. Once upon a time this magician’s art seemed like a plausible rival to scientific technique, or a complementary means of mastery over nature; indeed, the scientist and the magician were often overlapping figures in the early modern imagination, blurring together in vocations like alchemy and characters like Dr. Faustus.
But I was saved by this essay at Politico by Jack Shafer, which was meant to be serious, but offered many comic moments.
Headline: Opinion | Rupert Murdoch Rides the Trump Tiger — and Gets Eaten
Sub-headline: The Dominion lawsuit has exposed the powerlessness of the Fox News titan.
An article of faith among modern media observers preaches that Rupert Murdoch can manipulate American politics in any direction he wants through the broadcasts of his lucrative media property, the Fox News Channel. This article of faith, which Democrats share with their children to give them nightmares and Republicans share with theirs as a cautionary tale, has given Murdoch king-maker status over the years as he has directed his channel to reward his supplicants and punish his enemies.
But on closer examination, and especially in light of the testimony released in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News for its coverage of the “stolen” presidential election of 2020, Murdoch isn’t always the master puppeteer he’s reputed to be. In Murdoch’s own words, delivered in Dominion suit depositions, he describes himself as frightened by the power Donald Trump holds over the Fox audience. He portrays himself, accurately in this case, as the supreme authority at his network but unable to control his prime-time anchors who endorsed Trump’s lie of a stolen election. And he regrets not interceding — which he says was within his power — to keep stolen-election fabulists like Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell from repeatedly appearing on his shows, even though some Fox executives and anchors were gagging, off-screen, on Giuliani and Powell’s wild-eyed theories.
This paragraph offers earlier comments that Jack Shafer made about the evolving Trump/Murdoch wobbly alliance:
But as I’ve written before, Murdoch has failed again and again to elect a president of his choice. In the 2016 campaign, he opposed Trump, tweeting in July 2015, a month after Trump announced, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Trump was so furious at Fox coverage at one point, and with then-host Megyn Kelly, that he retaliated by skipping the Fox primary debate. Moreover, Murdoch opposed Trump’s signature positions on immigrants, the Muslim ban and trade. Only after Trump paved a sure path to the nomination did Murdoch start sucking up to Trump, and he sucked hard.
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Some excerpts reveal Rupert Murdoch, as the hapless victim of his viewers, his ‘on air talent’ and various political actors who makeup the Trump Cadre. A selection:
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Murdoch’s fear of a Trump temper tantrum became palpable after the Capitol Hill riot, as an email exchange between Murdoch and former Republican House Speaker and Fox Corporation board member Paul D. Ryan attests. In it, Murdoch claims that Hannity, a Trump stalwart, had been “privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.” It’s obvious here that Murdoch was mapping his fear of losing viewers onto Hannity, as a single instruction to the host to tell the truth about Trump’s claims would have put things straight.
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When a former Fox executive told Murdoch in a Jan. 8, 2021, email that “Fox News needs a course correction” on Trump, Murdoch replied, “Fox News very busy pivoting. … We want to make Trump a non person.” A few days later, Murdoch expanded in another email to his son. The network was “pivoting as fast as possible” away from Trump, but after four years of conditioning its audience to worship the president, Murdoch was aware that the decondition process would be hairy. “We have to lead our viewer which is not as easy as it might seem,” Murdoch wrote.
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“Nobody wants Trump as an enemy,” Murdoch said in a deposition, still bruised from his tiger ride. “We all know that Trump has a big following. If he says, ‘Don’t watch Fox News, maybe some don’t.’”
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Murdoch’s pursuit of power and money, and his deft combination of the two, has always been a naked secret for those who care to inquire. These latest court filings only strip the top layer of epidermis from his hide and expose his venal essence. As late as Jan. 26, 2021, Murdoch was still so fearful of Trump that he had not executed the pivot and was still allowing stolen-election crackpot (and loyal Fox advertiser) Mike “MyPillow” Lindell a platform on the network’s Tucker Carlson Tonight show. Why allow it? Murdoch was asked. Presumably cashing Lindell’s fat checks in his mind’s eye, Murdoch replied, “It is not red or blue, it is green.”
Political Observer on two possible strategies of analysis.
There are two possible approaces to Mr. Stephens’ propaganda: one is to engage in a reductivism, that uses the Topic Sentences as the beginning of a critique: Stephens is enamored short sentences, that frame verbose paragraphs. The other choice is the treat this essay as what it is, propaganda, that manipulates the emotions of the reader. In sum the people Mr. Stephens comments upon are ether good or bad, this is Political Melodrama. It qualifies in the cinematic language of the beginning of Movies: when now viewed the movement of the actors is visually distorted.
The fist two comments are set pieces, to establish the moral/political superiority of Stephens. It is an Olympian View as interpreted by a Neo-Conservative, framed as giving ‘advice’ to Macron and Scholz.
To President Emmanuel Macron of France, a suggestion:
If, as a report in The Wall Street Journal suggests, you are convinced the war in Ukraine is destined for a bloody stalemate, and would like to encourage Kyiv to enter “peace talks” with Moscow that would leave Russia in possession of large tracts of conquered territory, why not lead by example? Publicly suggest the return of Alsace to Germany as evidence that you, too, believe that territorial sovereignty should be negotiable.
To Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, another suggestion:
If you’re going to dangle the prospect of closer ties between Ukraine and NATO (but not full membership) as a way of pushing Kyiv into a diplomatic settlement with Moscow, why not invite several battalions of Russian armor to the vicinity of Berlin? That would demonstrate that you, too, are willing to adjust the verdict of 1991 to mollify the Kremlin’s resentment, greed and paranoia.
If The Reader has paid attention to these set pieces, which are then the subject of a self-critique by Stephens:
These are preposterous suggestions. That’s the point. Those who now argue that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine needs to be “realistic” or “pragmatic” — that is, that he should stop short of pursuing a complete Russian withdrawal from all occupied Ukrainian territories — are proposing a solution they would never countenance for their own countries under ordinary circumstances, let alone during a struggle for national survival.
In the next paragraph The Reader confronts Stephens’ profession of faith the leadership of Joe Biden:
That’s why, as the war in Ukraine enters its second year, I feel grateful for Joe Biden. Fault him all you want on many issues, particularly his gradualist approach to arming Ukraine, but on the most consequential question of our time he has the big thing right. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased,” he said last week in Warsaw. “They must be opposed.”
That’s not a voice of fusty morality. It’s one of experience, foresight, military realism and political prudence.
The political advisors of Biden are Neo-Cons and Liberal Hawks: Victoria Nuland, Samantha Power, Wendy Sherman, Jon Finer etc. As reported in The New York Times.
Headline: Biden to Tap More Former Obama Officials for Top National Security Jobs
Sub-headline: The president-elect is turning to trusted former colleagues to manage complex negotiations with Iran and Russia.
With the Neo-Cons and Liberal Hawks as ‘advisors’ to Biden, Stephens is comfortable with his ‘leadership’. Now seems to be the moment when those once discarded, by me, Topic Sentences become a usable analytic tool ?
Experience, because the world has come to know Vladimir Putin very well over his 23 years in power. We know he does not honor the terms of any agreements to which Russia is bound, from the Cold War-era I.N.F. Treaty to the more recent Minsk agreements.
Foresight, because a negotiated settlement would create more problems than it would solve.
Military realism, because the lesson of the first year of war is that Moscow can be defeated.
As for prudence, musing openly about the need for eventual negotiations harms Ukraine’s solidarity and morale, both key factors for its survival and success.
Calls for negotiation also undermine public support for Ukraine in the United States.
President Biden likes to say that the United States will support Ukraine for as long as it takes.
The final two paragraphs of Stephens’ fevered enthusiasm for war, a fixation on combat, not born of any experience of its stark realities. At least the unapologetic hawk Joe Alsop, had an idea of what actual war was like, in WWII and Korea. Mr. Stephens is not just careless of the lives of strangers, but an un-thinking, unfeeling acolyte of Henry Kissinger, in his glory days with Nixon!
That’s why it makes no sense for the administration to slow-roll arms deliveries to Ukraine or drop heavy hints that Ukraine is unlikely ever to retake Crimea. Biden’s goal for 2023 should be clear and direct: victory for Ukraine. He can accomplish it through the rapid delivery of game-changing military equipment combined with a diplomatic offensive in which we propose Ukrainian membership in NATO if Russia doesn’t withdraw. Maybe that could even give Putin his off-ramp for surrender.
After a year of war, I’m more confident than ever that Biden will make the right choice. That’s more than can be said for Macron, Scholz and the other pale shadows of what passes for statesmanship in the free world.
Almost Marx offers a reductive selection, of a kind…
Headline: Netanyahu Is Shattering Israeli Society
Israel today is a boiler with way, way too much steam building up inside, and the bolts are about to fly off in all directions.
Israel has never experienced a Palestinian intifada, a Jewish settler intifada and an Israeli citizen judicial intifada all at once. But that’s begun to unfold since Netanyahu’s far-right government took office.
Violence between settlers and Palestinians is not new. But when it coincides with the most ultranationalist, ultra-Orthodox govern.
The new factor, though, that could really tear apart Israel’s democracy is Netanyahu’s scheme to essentially end the independence of the Israeli Supreme Court in the name of “judicial reform.”
Really? Ask yourself this question: What Israeli leader would risk a civil war at home, a breach with Jewish democrats across the world, a break with America, significant damage to Israel’s high-tech miracle — and now open talk by Israeli soldiers that they will not die to protect a dictatorship.
Netanyahu would risk all that only for something very big, very important and very personal.
In other words, none of this judicial “reform” is on the level.
That is why the protest movement against this judicial coup continues to gain strength.
In the next few weeks, if Netanyahu’s coalition passes these “new laws of dictatorship,” Barak said, they will be “canceled by the Supreme Court” as illegal.
“If the threshold is crossed,” he added, “and the laws of the dictatorship are set in motion, the responsibility will pass to us, the citizens of the country.
Finally, something else I have never seen before: A scary reality check from one of Israel’s hottest start-ups.
“We share in the grief of the families who lost their loved ones in the last day and are concerned about the rapid security deterioration on both sides.
“Wiz has been successful thanks to the exceptional ecosystem that exists in Israel, but we are now facing an existential threat.
It’s not an accident. I believe that if Ukraine were to fall to Vladimir Putin and Israel were to become a phony democracy like Hungary, the whole world would tip the wrong way.
Israel is the only real democracy with an independent judiciary in the Middle East. Ukraine is defending the European Union, a giant engine of the rule of law, free markets, human rights and democratic norms, even if not every E.U. country has fully embraced all of them. If democracy is undermined in the E.U. and Israel, democracy everywhere will be more endangered. Ukraine is defending the European Union, a giant engine of the rule of law, free markets, human rights and democratic norms, even if not every E.U. country has fully embraced all of them. If democracy is undermined in the E.U. and Israel, democracy everywhere will be more endangered.
I have been ruthless in pruning this ‘essay’. Not one political/economic/moralizing cliché left behind with the added rhetorical ballast of:
Israel is the only real democracy with an independent judiciary in the Middle East.
Ukraine is defending the European Union, a giant engine of the rule of law, free markets, human rights and democratic norms,…
The New York Times and Tom Friedman are propagandists for The American National Security State, and its fascists, ungovernable suzerain Israel.
Political Observer notes that the scolding of Olaf Schultz, is about his failure to genuflect to the American National Securest State’s imperatives. Editor @zannymb agrees.
Just three days after Russia unleashed its “special military operation” to grab Ukraine, Olaf Scholz, Germany’s freshly elected chancellor, proclaimed a moment of epochal change. The term he used in a speech to parliament on February 27th last year was Zeitenwende, a “turning in time”. The last such shift, known to Germans simply as Die Wende, was the movement of 1989-90 that reunited communist East Germany with the capitalist West.
Listeners in Germany and abroad, notably those who have long pleaded for the eu’s biggest and richest state to take its security more seriously, cheered. Not only did the dour Social Democrat, whose party has since the 1970s preached pacifying Russia, condemn its aggression and lend full support to Ukraine. Mr Scholz pledged an extra €100bn ($107bn)—double the annual defence budget—to boost Germany’s defence, as well as to push future military spending above the goal of 2% of gdp that nato members have promised since 2006, but mostly failed to sustain. He also vowed to end dependence on Russian energy.
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Briefly compare the above essay, with this portion of an April 23, 2022 Economist report:
Headline: Why Olaf Scholz hesitates to send Ukraine heavy weapons
Sub-headline: Germany has changed its defence and foreign policies, but not its mentality
On February 27th, three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Olaf Scholz delivered a speech to Germany’s parliament that astonished even his close political allies. Calling the moment a Zeitenwende (“turning point”), the German chancellor outlined the biggest strategic shift in German security, foreign and energy policy in the federal republic’s history. Earlier he had refused operating permission for Nord Stream 2, an $11bn pipeline to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany which has taken many years to build, but which allies had long warned would reinforce Germany’s dependence on the Kremlin. Now the understated chancellor, who during his first two months in office seemed to have gone into hiding, announced a startling plan. It included an increase in Germany’s defence spending from 1.5% of gdp to the nato target of 2%, the establishment of a €100bn ($110bn) special fund for the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces), and the construction of two liquefied natural gas (lng) terminals to reduce Germany’s dependence on Russian.
Mr Scholz’s new strategy raised high hopes in the western world. Yet eight weeks into the war in Ukraine these hopes are being dashed, bit by bit. Mr Scholz refuses to support calls for a German or European embargo or tariff on Russian oil and gas. Every day Germany pays Russia tens of millions of euros for fossil fuels, even as the war grinds on.
Still more damaging has been his refusal to give Ukraine heavy weapons such as tanks. Ukraine needs them more than ever thanks to the new Russian offensive in the east. Other Europeans are exasperated by German dithering. “This is costing Germany lots of political capital in the European Union and nato,” says Rafael Loss of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
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The reader need only compare these paragraphs of each ‘essay’.
February 23, 2023:
Just three days after Russia unleashed its “special military operation” to grab Ukraine, Olaf Scholz, Germany’s freshly elected chancellor, proclaimed a moment of epochal change. The term he used in a speech to parliament on February 27th last year was Zeitenwende, a “turning in time”. The last such shift, known to Germans simply as Die Wende, was the movement of 1989-90 that reunited communist East Germany with the capitalist West.
Listeners in Germany and abroad, notably those who have long pleaded for the eu’s biggest and richest state to take its security more seriously, cheered. Not only did the dour Social Democrat, whose party has since the 1970s preached pacifying Russia, condemn its aggression and lend full support to Ukraine. Mr Scholz pledged an extra €100bn ($107bn)—double the annual defence budget—to boost Germany’s defence, as well as to push future military spending above the goal of 2% of gdp that nato members have promised since 2006, but mostly failed to sustain. He also vowed to end dependence on Russian energy.
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April 23, 2022:
On february 27th, three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Olaf Scholz delivered a speech to Germany’s parliament that astonished even his close political allies. Calling the moment a Zeitenwende (“turning point”), the German chancellor outlined the biggest strategic shift in German security, foreign and energy policy in the federal republic’s history. Earlier he had refused operating permission for Nord Stream 2, an $11bn pipeline to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany which has taken many years to build, but which allies had long warned would reinforce Germany’s dependence on the Kremlin. Now the understated chancellor, who during his first two months in office seemed to have gone into hiding, announced a startling plan. It included an increase in Germany’s defence spending from 1.5% of gdp to the nato target of 2%, the establishment of a €100bn ($110bn) special fund for the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces), and the construction of two liquefied natural gas (lng terminals to reduce Germany’s dependence on Russian energy.
Hutton had upbraided Bagehot for his arrogance, while they were students together at University College but there was nothing supercilious in Bagehot’s profession of faith and Christian devotion: ‘the highest life is an imitation of Christ’s’ he had written to Hutton in their undergraduate days.
Nowhere does The Reader of encounter the American Act of War, in the destruction of Nord Stream Pipeline? In the February 23, 2023 ‘essay’ the Economist’s focus is the scolding of Olaf Scholz for his ‘unkept promises’. It is an exercise in History Made To Measure, in sum propaganda.
Seymour Hersh: The US Destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline
Not much here, but the news that Mailer was buried in his boxing gear.
I recall reading a paperback of Mailer’s ‘An American Dream’ that I purchased at a liquor store on Long Beach Blvd. in Lynwood California. Hadn’t read much American, nor other fiction- mostly out of curiosity, allied to pure ignorance of literature of any kind. I watched too much television yet, was curious about that World of Thinkers/Writers. The wife stabbing portion of the story was perplexing…
Later I read Mailer’s ‘The Armies of the Night’ and then in 1974 Mailer review of ‘Last Tango in Paris’ ,that features Pauline Kale, in the Lead Role: I was surprised at Mailer’s ability to write comic invective, at the time I found it amusing.
We know that Spengler’s thousand-year metamorphosis from Culture to Civilization is gone, way gone, and the century required for a minor art to move from commencement to decadence is off the board. Whole fashions in film are born, thrive, and die in twenty-four months. Still! It is only a half year since Pauline Kael declared to the readers of The New Yorker that the presentation of Last Tango in Paris at the New York Film Festival on October 14, 1972, was a date which “should become a landmark in movie history—comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history,” and then went on to explain that the newer work had “the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same jabbing, thrusting eroticism…. Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.” Whatever could have been shown on screen to make Kael pop open for a film? “This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made….” Could this be our own Lady Vinegar, our quintessential cruet? The first frigid of the film critics was treating us to her first public reception. Prophets of Baal, praise Kael! We had obviously no ordinary hour of cinema to contemplate.
I was at the Library over the weekend, and discovered this, at the end of one of the stacks.
I read the first chapter and skipped to the debate between Wm. F. Buckley and James Baldwin, titled ‘The Most Hated Man in America’: The Reader enters the World of the carefully refracted ‘Best Seller’, that posits the notion that Buckley and Mailer were two of the prime political actors of ‘The 60’s’. At best Buckley was a leering ‘Conservative’ gargoyle and Mailer a posturing would-be Hemingway, with a pretentious vocabulary and the mannerisms of a pugilist.
A work colleague had given me a paperback of ‘Ancient Evenings’ and I applied myself to reading it, but kept confronting Mailer’s, or his main character’s penchant for sodomy.
Political Cynic
Added February 24, 2023:
I had forgotten that I had seen Howard Hawks’ ‘Land of the Pharaohs’ script by William Faulkner, Harry Kurnitz, Jack Bloom in 1958. And had seen ‘The Egyptian’ directed by Michael Curtiz, from a script by Philip Dunne (screen play), Casey Robinson(screen play), Mika Waltari (novel) – probably at The Arden Theater in Lynwood, California, just one long block from my childhood home. Or that I had actually read portions of the novel by Waltari, as a teenager, for the sex scenes- that was a topic of discussion with my friends.
Mailer’s novel had some stiff competition from Hollywood Historical Grandiosity, pioneered by D.W. Griffith, and the windy self-advertiser Cecil B. de Mille!
The reader might wonder at the ‘sources’ of Professor Professor Mark Galeotti’s essay, those twenty books act as a preamble, after a political/psychological portrait of Putin. And his evolving ‘methodology’ for the care and maintenance of his power?
Vladimir Putin is notorious for asking Russian historians how he will be judged a hundred years hence. With his invasion of Ukraine, he has ensured that he will be assessed a failure, an example of the way hubris can devour any initial successes.
Had Putin chosen to step down at the end of his second presidential term, in 2008, it is likely he would be remembered as someone who dragged Russia back from the brink of collapse, even if often by brutal methods.
He then spent four years running the country behind his proxy-president Dmitry Medvedev before returning to the Kremlin. Had he retired after his third term in 2018, he would have left a Russia in dispute with Ukraine and the West, but in possession of Crimea. As it was, though, he was not content, and let his desperation to leave his mark on history drive him to fatal overreach.
What does this war show us about Putin? Has he changed so much from the apparently cautious and calculating figure who humbled rebellious Chechnya and defiant Georgia, and effortlessly seized Crimea?
Only in degree: Putin is still Putin, just much more so. Like so many autocrats, over time he became a caricature of himself, with any past strengths becoming weaknesses.
All of the above lacks empirical evidence, because it is based on Galeotti’s Mastery of Putinology After the introductory paragraphs Prof. Galeotti provides subject headings to frame his arguments: Yet The Critical Reader might wonder at Prof. Galeotti as a ‘Senior Associate Fellow’ at RUSI:
‘ABOUT RUSI
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) is the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank. Our mission is to inform, influence and enhance public debate to help build a safer and more stable world.
Prof. Galeotti is a Government Employee, in a not very roundabout way. So this explanation of Prof. Galeotti‘s political standing provided by The Times is incomplete, in the most self-serving way:
Professor Mark Galeotti is the author of over 20 books on Russia, most recently Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, published by Bloomsbury
So the essay that he writes is in fact propaganda, under the banner of political comment! Here are the paragraph titles provided by Galeotti: Note my reductionism of these pseudo-historical observations, for want of more apt term!
The five-day war against Georgia in 2009 was fought against a country…
The 2014 annexation of Crimea took place…
Nonetheless, this cultivated Putin’s belief that he was a geopolitical mastermind with an unstoppable army.
Egotism becomes isolation:
Putin’s system was always what I term adhocracy, shaped by the protean politics of the court, in which the favour of the monarch is the real currency of power.
In earlier years, Putin was willing to listen to alternative perspectives and keep around him those who might challenge his assumptions.
…his circle has shrunk to a handful of mini-mes … Nikolai Patrushev, … Alexander Bortnikov, … Yuri Kovalchuk…
None challenged Putin’s view that Ukraine was not a “real” country —…
Distance turns into detachment
This insulation from reality is also putting stress on his political system.
The system depended on him being the arbitrator.
Now, presumably consumed by the war, he is out of touch and not doing his job, and fierce personal and policy rows are emerging, unchecked by the boss.
… One of the most serious is between Yevgeny Prigozhin, businessman… and Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister.
After all, this model of competing initiatives has also been exported disastrously on to the battlefield.
…but there are many others, including Wagner, the paramilitary National Guard, Chechen fighters loyal to their leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, and the armies of the former “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk,…
Fighting among themselves
Sometimes they co-operate, sometimes they compete, and this can prove murderous. There have been brawls and firefights between army and Wagner troops.
…ultra-nationalist captain Igor Mangushev was killed in an ambush blamed not on the Ukrainians but on everyone from the army to the Chechens.
…the need to keep Putin happy continues…the need to keep Putin happy continues…demoted in January after just three months because he had not delivered any victories.
…Valery Gerasimov, seems to have launched the long-awaited spring offensive…
Relying on a Pyrrhic victory
Of course, it is foolish ever wholly to discount Russia’s latent strengths. Putin probably still believes he can win, if he can outlast western unity and resolve. Without the billions being spent every month to maintain the Ukrainian war effort and economy alike, Kyiv would be in a much more perilous position. It could still be that he is right.
Editor: Let me interject; this resembles Realism?
President Zelensky predicted a “big Israel” — and unlikely to be willing to accept this as a final outcome. His chances of being able to block Ukraine joining the EU or even Nato are likely minimal.
Disillusion with their leader
Even Putin’s former partisans are beginning to see that the tsar has no clothes.
Putin demands miracles and when they cannot deliver, he publicly humiliates them. Denis Manturov, the industry minister, was publicly upbraided for “fooling around” having failed to establish a domestic industry building…
The kleptocrats who backed Putin because he offered unlimited opportunities for enrichment are finding the pickings getting leaner, the competition sharper and the chances to enjoy their success limited.
Most seriously, the hawks and nationalists who used to believe in Putin are becoming disillusioned by the incompetence, corruption and indecision on show in Ukraine.
Lack of a real alternative
That said, Putin may stay in power for some time: these kinds of regimes can be hard to unseat, at least so long as the security apparatus sees no better alternative.
…and tens of thousands have been arrested, prosecuted, beaten and imprisoned for expressing their opposition.
Besides, as the West arms and funds Ukraine, Putin’s claims — that they are facing a hostile coalition that wants to see Russia humbled and even forcibly broken apart — do spark a certain grudging patriotism.
Increasingly, his strongest asset is the lack of a clear, credible alternative rather than any great enthusiasm for him.
The latest official figures have shown the budget deficit growing after oil and gas revenues nearly halved over the past year.
Who is lying to whom?
The result is a rotten state. It may look sturdy at first glance and in his delayed state of the nation address, now scheduled for Tuesday, Putin will try to put a positive gloss on the situation. However, this will be a mix of propaganda and self-deception: one Russian political commentator privately lamented: “The tragedy is that it’s impossible to tell these days when Putin is lying or when people are lying to Putin.”
…
Putin arguably dragged Russia back from near-collapse in the early 2000s, but the very characteristics that made him successful then have metastised now into weaknesses.
Putin the Terrible
…
There is a striking parallel with the very first tsar, Ivan the Terrible. The institutions of modern government in Russia began to emerge in the first half of his reign, but as he was increasingly gripped by hubris and paranoia, the latter years were soaked in blood and terror. This led to the Time of Troubles, a prolonged era of crisis and war after his death.
Although there is little likelihood of Russia breaking apart, 1990s-style chaos is not impossible. As Putin may also discover, a state-maker may prove a state-breaker, too.
For not just an alternative view, to the question of the American Proxy War in Ukraine, The Reader need only turn to Douglas Macgregor on YouTube. Whose experience, expertise and political sanity demonstrates his mastery of subject and practice!
“The coronavirus caused by far the biggest disruption in the history of American education,” Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovits wrote in The Atlantic last year.
Things have not reverted back to normal as Covid has gradually lost its grip on American life. Today’s teachers and students are living with a set of altered realities, and they may be for the rest of their lives:
The essay by Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovits is behind a Pay Wall, so unavailable to most readers. And Mr. Brooks declaims the bad news in the starkest of terms, it might even be named hysterical.
Mr. Brooks 319 word synopsis of the problems follows: I have taken liberties!
New Stanford-led research finds that 26 percent of that decline…
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the National Assessment of Educational Progress…
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Researchers calculated that the decline in math skills alone will lead to $900 billion in lower future earnings over the course of students’ lifetimes. …
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According to one preliminary estimate, 16 million students were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year…
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In New York City, about 41 percent of public school students were chronically absent that year….
Surging inequality. As Robin Lake and Travis Pillow write in a Brookings Institution article, “American students are experiencing a K-shaped recovery, in which gaps between the highest- and lowest-scoring students, already growing before the pandemic, are widening into chasms.”
This last entry might be comic, if Mr. Brooks wasn’t a War Mongering Neo-Con, anxious to burnish his non-existent notion, of caring for the welfare of any human beings , as this essay demonstrates:
‘The American Identity Crisis’ of July 15, 2021, is pure War Mongering: featuring Public Moralizing, by a man who has never served, nor fought in a War: but is utterly enthusiastic for others to make that sacrifice, to American Exceptionalism, even as it reaches the point of absolute failure.
Then came Iraq and Afghanistan, and America lost faith in itself and its global role — like a pitcher who has been shelled and no longer has confidence in his own stuff. On the left, many now reject the idea that America can be or is a global champion of democracy, and they find phrases like “the indispensable nation” or the “last best hope of the earth” ridiculous. On the right the wall-building caucus has given up on the idea that the rest of the world is even worth engaging.
Many people around the world have always resisted America’s self-appointed role as democracy’s champion. But they have also been rightly appalled when America sits back and allows genocide to engulf places like Rwanda or allows dangerous regimes to threaten the world order.
The Afghans are the latest witnesses to this reality. The American bungles in Afghanistan have been well documented. We’ve spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of our people. But the two-decade strategy of taking the fight to the terrorists, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, has meant that global terrorism is no longer seen as a major concern in daily American life. Over the past few years, a small force of American troops has helped prevent some of the worst people on earth from taking over a nation of more than 38 million — with relatively few American casualties. In 1999, no Afghan girls attended secondary school. Within four years, 6 percent were enrolled, and as of 2017 the figure had climbed to nearly 40 percent.
…
More of Mr. Brooks’ sources
as Nat Malkus pointed out in National Affairs, by 2022
National Affairs is Neo-Conservative.
This first sentence of this paragraph ‘This moment of disruption should be a moment of reinvention’ reeks not of any Neo-Conservative, except when she is attempting to misrepresent Carl Schmitt as one of their own?
This moment of disruption should be a moment of reinvention. It should be a moment when leaders rise up and say: Let’s get beyond stale debates over charters, vouchers, gender neutral bathrooms and the like. We’re going to rethink the nuts and bolts of how we teach in America.
There are no ‘stale debates’, just debates. And note the mechanistic frame of the last sentence: ‘We’re going to rethink the nuts and bolts of how we teach in America. Education is a humanist endeavor: look to Plato, Socrates, Aristotle ? It is not, nor can it ever be mechanistic- in his ideological frenzy Brooks, doesn’t loose his way, but is mired in the mechanism of his own construction!
Let me end my comment here on the question of EdChoice :
EdChoice, formerly the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, is an American education reform organization headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was founded in 1996 by economist spouses Milton and Rose D. Friedman. The organization’s mission is to advance “school choice for all children” nationwide.
School Choice = Charter Schools, as the means to destroy the very power Teachers Unions!
Political Observer comments, and quotes from McGeorge Bundy’s 1952 review of ‘God and Man at Yale’.
Some ‘highlights’ from the utterly unimpressive @RichLowry essay, on the equally unimpressive Nikki Haley:
Headline: Opinion | The Real Reason Nikki Haley May Struggle to Break Through
Sub-headline: It’s only partly about Trump.
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It’s a sign, though, that Trump doesn’t feel threatened by her candidacy that he — focused solely on Meatball Ron aka DeSanctimonious, aka Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — didn’t personally blast her upon her entry.
…
Haley isn’t the former and doesn’t look to be the latter, either. Her path has to be Trump and/or DeSantis being much weaker than they appear or blowing one another up in a GOP Ragnarök that creates an opening for her. This is going to be the hoped-for path of any number of other candidates, as well, adding yet another layer of difficulty.
She deserves to make her case, though. If fortune doesn’t always favor the bold, no one has ever won a presidential race by not entering it.
It almost makes This Reader long for the days of that sanctimonious Oil Man’s brat, Wm. F. Buckley Jr., and his scolding reactionary chatter: sounding like a Hohenzollern Prince, whose Royal Privilege is now in the past tense. For added insights as to the character of Mr. Buckley, read McGeorge Bundy’s 1952 review of ‘God and Man at Yale’ at almost four thousand words:
Almost Marx confronts a New York Times Public Intellectual!
The opening paragraphs of Mr. Friedman’s ‘almost defence’ of Netanyahu is awash in carefully laundered gush:
If you want to understand the economic riskiness and moral fraudulence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s headlong rush to ram through a total overhaul of Israel’s judicial system and put it under his thumb while he faces corruption charges, you just need to study two statistics and ask one question.
The two statistics: The Economist ranked Israel as the fourth-best-performing economy in 2022 among O.E.C.D. countries. And in 2020, Israel ranked 19th among the economies in the world, making the top 20 for the first time in its history, based on G.D.P. per capita — ahead of Canada, New Zealand and Britain.
That’s right: Israel has been enjoying a quiet economic miracle in the past few decades, and no Israeli leader deserves more credit for that than Netanyahu. During his previous 15 years as prime minister, he did a superb job, in my view, helping to transform Israel into the world’s leading start-up nation. He put in place smart economic policies to attract investors. He would go anywhere and talk to anyone (except me!) to promote the Israeli economy. And he played a key role in providing government resources so Israel’s high-tech community could forge world-leading positions in cybersecurity technologies, water conservation, solar energy and digital health.
…
The Critical Reader might look to these statistics offered by the BBC of May 24, 2021
Headline: Israel-Gaza: How much money does Israel get from the US?
Over the years, US aid has helped Israel develop one of the most advanced militaries in the world, with the funds allowing them to purchase sophisticated military equipment from the US.
For example, Israel has purchased 50 F-35 combat aircraft, which can be used for missile attacks – 27 of the aircraft have so far been delivered, costing around $100m (£70.4m) each.
Last year Israel also bought eight KC-46A Boeing ‘Pegasus’ aircrafts for an estimated $2.4bn (£1.7bn). These are capable of refuelling planes such as the F-35 in mid-air.
That America handsomely finances Israel’s Military, and as argued ’That’s right: Israel has been enjoying a quiet economic miracle’ … so this praise for the standing of Israel @TheEconomist is based , indeed, under-written by The American National Security State.
’The Economist ranked Israel as the fourth-best-performing economy in 2022 among O.E.C.D. countries.
In the face of the near final ‘evolution’ of the toxin of Zionism, Mr. Friedman, in a moment of almost political honesty, confronts the facts of Zionist Fascism? All the while, avoiding at all costs, the fact of the Genocide-On-The-Installment Plan against The Palestinians: The Reader confronts ,again, the moral/political vacuity wedded to mendacity of this propagandist !
So you cannot be surprised that many global and Israeli investors are looking at Israel today and asking this simple question: If the Israeli legal system that has gradually and collaboratively evolved over the past 75 years was so awful — so in need of emergency radical surgery overnight, without any national debate — how did it help produce and guard the Israeli economic miracle of the past 20 years that Netanyahu always, and justifiably, takes credit for and has made Israel’s middle class amazingly prosperous?
Nothing is more dangerous to Israel’s continued prosperity than Netanyahu’s inability today to give a credible answer to that simple question.
Because in the absence of a credible answer, the only thing one can believe — the only thing foreign investors increasingly believe — is that the whole process is being driven by a small group of far-right authoritarian ideologues, an extremist right-wing think tank inspired by the Federalist Society in America and a prime minister who seems so desperate to escape from his trial on 2020 charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust that he is ready to change the rules of the entire Israeli Monopoly game to secure his own get-out-of-jail-free card.
Now, that is scary.
The Reader has yet to confront the remaining 1, 038 words of this Propaganda… I’ll engage in a bit of self-serving reductionism, that might demonstrate/elucidate the dominant economic theme of this intervention. That dissolves the question of Netanyahu’s attack on the fiction of Israel’s ‘Democracy’ by way of his Economic Leadership?
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Any investor, foreign or domestic, should be worried that Netanyahu is letting the judicial extremists in his cabinet ignite a legal intifada in Israel and a Palestinian intifada in the West Bank — at the same time.
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And you want to talk about governance risks? Israel’s own president, Isaac Herzog, is publicly
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As a general rule, investors don’t like investing in countries roiled with protests and chaos.
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And that is why some have started pressing the pause button.
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“Investors are taking a step back and saying: ‘First, decide whether you are a democracy or a dictatorship, and then we’ll talk,…
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And that is also why, behind the scenes — behind their don’t-worry-be-happy public bluster — my business contacts tell me that Netanyahu and his strategic adviser Ron Dermer have been calling global corporate leaders, financiers and even economists, like Lawrence Summers, to try…
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But the more that Netanyahu and Dermer call to tell them not to worry, the more those investors worry that they have something to worry about.
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Here’s a report on Sunday from one of Israel’s leading business newspapers, The Calcalist: “An investigation by Calcalist shows that a large number of high-tech companies, whose managers are not at all involved in the protest against the judicial coup, are quietly withdrawing their companies’ cash balances from Israel.
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And on Tuesday, The Times of Israel reported that the country’s leading bankers met with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and informed him that they were seeing “early signs” that the planned radical judicial overhaul “will damage the economy and urged the coalition to adopt a compromise plan proposed by President Isaac Herzog.”
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According to Israel’s Channel 12, Uri Levin, the C.E.O. of Israel Discount Bank, one of the country’s largest, told the finance minister: “We see a tenfold increase in interest in opening savings accounts in foreign banks.
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This comes after Amir Yaron, the nonpartisan governor of the central bank of Israel, reportedly warned Netanyahu — after talking to business leaders in Davos — that “the ruling coalition’s plans to upend the judiciary could scare away investors and negatively impact the country’s credit rating,” The Times of Israel reported.
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Caution: One should have no illusions that somehow the market will save Israel’s democracy for democracy’s sake. The electronic herd of global investors has no soul. It will take money away from Israel or put money into Israel based on one criterion only: the ability to make a profit. Just ask China.
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But here is why one of Israel’s most important, veteran high-tech investors, who asked not to be identified for fear of government reprisals, is becoming so worried.
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“It is not that you will see a stampede of all the high tech running away,” he told me. “But people are very concerned that the rules of the game are being unilaterally changed.
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Foreign investors, he added, always trusted Israeli courts. If foreign companies had disagreements with the Israeli government over the firing of employees or the land authority over property or the customs authority over imports, they knew that they could go to the courts and get a fair hearing, he said.
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Also, international and Israeli investors and innovators, he said, need to decide where to register their companies — in America, Europe or Israel — and where to put their profits. If this radical judicial coup goes ahead, he added, you will see more and more companies registering abroad and moving resources abroad.
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Netanyahu thinks he can finesse all of this with investors, he said, adding, “The problem is: Suppose that he’s not right? The risks are enormous.”
The damage won’t happen overnight, but over time, he concluded: “It will be like termites eating your house. It looks great today, but it will one day suddenly collapse.”
The Reader confronts the remainder of this ‘essay’ steeped in economic imperatives: yet more evidence of Mr. Friedman’s moral/political vacuity, wedded to mendacious apologetics.
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