StephenKMackSD's Blog

The reader needn’t go any further into Mr. Barber’s review of Patrice Gueniffey’s book  Napoleon & de Gaulle to realize the political propinquity between author and reviewer:

Rather, Gueniffey is lining up with those who fret that history is no longer the cement that holds together the French nation. Today’s school textbooks, he says, “are full of holes, entire aspects of history have disappeared, as have, even more certainly, those who made or incarnated history”. He bemoans the turn in the French education system towards the history of non-European civilisations, not to mention the penchant of French intellectuals for Marxism, sociology, psychoanalysis, structuralism and other fads that denigrate the historical role of individuals.

The last sentence presents the ‘Post-Moderns’, to use a catch-phrase,  as somehow still the ‘victors’ in French intellectual life, while the history of the rise of the ‘Liberals’, in French intellectual life, is the subject explored in these books  :

‘Political Philosophy 1: Rights- The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns’ and its two successor volumes, published in France in 1984  

Ferry and Renaut’s ‘French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay in Antihumanism’ , published in France in 1985.

Intellectual History of Liberalism by Pierre Manent , published in France in 1987

The State And The Rule of Law by Blandine Kriegal ,published in France in 1989

New French Thought: Political Philosophy, Mark Lilla , Editor published in America in 1994

The phantom of ‘Post-Modernism’ whether in full dress, or in its constituent parts, still haunts the political/intellectual imaginations of  Neo-Liberal writers, historians out to cultivate the fiction of their  political/intellectual wisdom. In sum, the Post-Moderns were  a collection of intellectual charlatans. As his star faded in France Derrida…

The New York Times: The TYRANNY OF THE YALE CRITICS by Colin Campbell from February 9, 1986 

de Gaulle is then described , via a quote from ‘the leftwing theorist’ Régis Debray:

In physical appearance and character, de Gaulle formed a stark contrast to Napoleon. Exceptionally tall, aloof and filled with a sense of destiny, he was memorably described by Régis Debray, the leftwing theorist, as an “exasperating beanpole”. In his heyday, de Gaulle aroused more hatred than Napoleon did, especially on the right, elements of which never forgave him for repudiating the Vichy regime of 1940-44 and for giving up control of Algeria.

https://www.ft.com/content/ffb576be-4363-4d1f-81d1-6e283f7f7381

My remembrance of de Gaulle is watching this comic figure, to my a-historical American gaze, marching behind the parade of dignitaries, at John F. Kennedy’s State Funeral in November 1963. 

Political Observer 

After Mr. Ganesh’s July 10th’s comic meditation on Alaric the Goth and English ‘chippyness’ , that he posited ‘as potent a source of motivation as exists in life.’ , supplied by Douglas Boin’s book.

https://www.ft.com/content/43e1d489-def7-422c-a8fb-00f4d9e11db9

Mr. Ganesh drew certain lessons, on a collection of political/civic actors as diverse as Oprah, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Pierre Poujade, Richard Nixon, Mark Zuckerberg, himself,David Cameron: The driving force of these lives was/is ‘the inferiority complex’.

The reader is today confronted with Mr. Ganesh’s opening paragraph about ‘partisanship‘ and its uses:

Ferocious partisanship has its uses. If nothing else, a divided nation can console itself that no government idea goes unexamined and unopposed. Scrutiny can be all the more exacting for being born of tribal malice rather than Socratic truth-seeking. The US is riven — it has managed to politicise the workaday face-mask — but it avoids the equal and opposite danger of unreflective consensus.  

Mr. Ganesh is an adept practitioner of striking a self-serving political pose, as his July 10 essay demonstrates. An example from his latest essay of this practice:

 The US is riven — it has managed to politicise the workaday face-mask — but it avoids the equal and opposite danger of unreflective consensus. Except, that is, on the most momentous policy of the century. To be in Washington is to sense a nation sliding into open-ended conflict against China with eerily little debate.

The New Cold War is being fought, in political terms, by means of the failed Mueller Report, and the equally failed Impeachment of Trump, as maladroitly scripted by Adam Schiff, aided by his Neo-Con ‘witnesses’. The propaganda about ‘Russian Interference’ in it variously argued guises was/is the work of political fiction writers. But still, the myth of  The New Cold War’s politics dates from the 2014 Ukrainian Coup: Russian Revanchism?Ivan Katchanovski’s essay ‘The far right, the Euromaidan, and the Maidan massacre in Ukraine’ answers some vital questions about Ukraine.

file:///C:/Users/steph/Downloads/ArticleFarRighttheEuroMaidanandtheMaidanMassacreinUkraine.pdf 

And the myth of China’s ‘provocative actions in the South China Sea’, and its actions in Hong Kong, in response to the Nativist Rebellion. The answer to many questions about this ‘Democracy Movement’ are answered here, in revelatory detail.  

https://thegrayzone.com/category/hong-kong/

Why would Mr. Ganesh waste his, and the readers time, lecturing the various members of America’s Political Class? Is moralizing the sine qua non of the political Journalist? The questions abound, but look to this evocative, even sumptuous paragraph, for a possible answer to the proffered ‘un-American thing,consensus’?     

The result is that un-American thing, consensus, and it concerns not just the future but increasingly the past. Everyone now “knows” that pre-Trump Washington was a place of Whiggish credulity, forever betting on material enrichment to make of China a vast Japan or South Korea: a democracy, a friend. In this account, its admittance to the World Trade Organization was the inadvertent crowning of a rival by American enablers.

Brevity is not an integral part of the Ganesh rhetorical strategy. What rescues his essay is it’s growing cast of characters, complete with their necessary historical baggage, subject to an uncomplimentary reductivism.     

 George HW Bush, Barack Obama, ‘lost China’, Robert Taft , NATO, ‘George Kennan,  Mikes Pence,  Pompeo, Trump, McCarthyism, Harry Truman, General Douglas MacArthur   

The final paragraph present the reader with a troubling question, does Mr. Ganesh actually care about the ‘China question’, as he poses it? Or was it an opportunity to show the American reader, that he has mastered their history enough to construct a simulacrum?     

Washington now is nowhere near that level of frenzy. Even by the standards of an election year, though, the reluctance to say anything construable as “soft” is impossible to miss. America’s ultimate advantage is the raucousness of its public discourse. On the China question, it is troublingly civilised.

https://www.ft.com/content/9b7e64c9-c7c4-47b7-b038-f728bfd23e28

American Writer

Pankaj Mishra is the one reason I subscribed to this publication! Without doubt a writer always worth reading, and contemplating, in the immediate retrospect. And as recollection.

‘Cancel Culture’ is the latest political fiction, confected by an utterly corrupt class of apologist for the Present Age of Neo-Liberal collapse, exacerbated by The Pandemic. This is a strictly rhetorical battle against a ‘Mob’, as conceived by a cadre marinating in their own bad faith.   
Yesterday, I scanned Janan Ganesh’s latest essay at The Financial Times, that opens with a ‘review’ of sorts of Douglas Boin’s ‘Alaric the Goth’: reduced in the imagination of a writer facing a deadline- who re-writes this as an ancient example of the English “chippiness”. Promise?

https://www.ft.com/content/43e1d489-def7-422c-a8fb-00f4d9e11db9

 I am currently reading ‘My Struggle: Book 1’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard: his interpretation of Capote’s ‘Non-Fiction Novel’? I just ordered Mr. Mishra’s  ‘The Romantics : A Novel’ as a possible antidote to Knausgaard’s exercise in the demotic. As I read ‘My Struggle’ I just keep thinking of Proust’s ‘Overture’ to Swann’s Way. I’m experiencing a kind of nostalgia for its poetic evocation of his past, as an example of what writing can immediately present to the reader. 

Political Observer 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-14/cancel-culture-isn-t-a-mortal-threat-to-free-speech?srnd=opinion&sref=bfOwbK4O

For some reason I felt compelled the stop reading this book, last month : Chapter 6 Mysticism , Ontotheology, Anti modernism, on page 118. Even the reading of  the history of Heidegger’s thought can be a challenge to the readers patience, with his re-description of the History of Philosophy, or more accurately a re-write of that History.  Theodor Adorno offers a key critical evaluation of German existentialism in his  The Jargon of Authenticity

I’ve been reading about Heidegger since the publication of a review by Thomas Sheehan of  Richard Wolin’s ‘The Heidegger Controversy’ published  by MIT Press. In the pages of The New York Review of Books, provocatively titled ‘A Normal Nazi’

In the interim I read Empson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ :  earlier I had read Michael Wood’s ‘On Empson’ out of curiosity. Christopher Norris’ ‘William Empson And The Philosophy of Literary Criticism’  ,  ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac. I succumbed to the temptation of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle: Book One’. I just wanted to ‘taste it’! I wanted to throw it up against a wall, as he droned on about death.  Now on page 99, and his Rock Band Failure.

Yesterday, I was feeling guilty about not finishing the Young Heidegger, and that it hadn’t met my expectations, about that myth of ‘The Hidden King’, and his hold on generations of students- why not skip to page 133 and Chapter 7 ‘Demythologizing Metaphysics‘ to see if it offered more of what I actually wanted? I’d forgotten that Heidegger can exhaust my patience, so much so, that I simply have to put him and his commentators/historians down, and return at a later time.

StephenKMackSD

Andy Divine praises Justice Roberts, larded with toxic self-congratulation :

The Wisdom of the Roberts Court
…
Yes, this means that almost all employers can be legally punished if they discriminate against gay, lesbian, and trans people, but employers whose business is wrapped up in their religious values — in Catholic hospitals and schools, for example — can be exempted from these punishments if they are merely seeking to retain the religious integrity of their enterprises. I really can’t see the problem with that. As someone who is both gay and religious, I can see the merits of both. As a citizen, I hope I can see the legitimate concerns of both as well.

The fact that Trump’s own appointees ruled against him in the cases about presidential power is also worth absorbing and admiring. The left’s caricature of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh has been muddied by their actual records so far. Kavanaugh has not exactly behaved as if he is a bitter partisan on these questions. Gorsuch stuck to his legal literalism even when it conflicted with his ideological preferences. And at the same time, the large majority of cases in which the chief justice, John Roberts, has been on the winning side is impressive. He is guiding a conservative Court — not a Republican one.
…

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-covid-19-will-be-the-real-swing-voter.html

Roberts, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are playing the ‘Long Game’ ,willing to make sacrifices on the more ‘trivial’ LGBTQ issues, for the moment, as the in-order-too of an Originalist Court: that could last, if all remain in good health, at least a generation, or more. Alito and Thomas are not just along for the ride, given the possibility of a trans-generational ‘reformation’ of the Court.

The Voting Rights Act and its ‘pre-clearance clause’ was eviscerated with the aid of the fictional ‘Centrist’ Kennedy, under the rubric of ‘things have changed’ in Shelby County v Holder. 

The reader might just ask: is there any difference between a Conservative Court and a Republican Court? Was the Warren Court a Republican Court? Brown v Board answers that question! 

Political Observer

On the why of the rise of the ‘nativist government’ in Mitteleuropa read ‘Europe Since 1989’ by Phillipp Ther. Chapter 4. Getting on the Neoliberal Bandwagon and Chapter 5. Second-Wave Neoliberalism. These countries rejected any form, of what they considered to be ‘Socialism’, and as a result that Neoliberalism’s toxicity was all pervasive.  And was the political precursor of those nativist governments. Applebaum uses this occasion to advertise her book!  

I’d had a similar experience myself, in Poland a few years earlier — I’ve described what happened when a nativist government took over the country in my new book, Twilight of Democracy —

The reader has to cultivate patience when reading Applebaum, she is of the Leo Strauss School of self-serving rhetorical bloat, as a means to create an exploitable reader fatigue. That contributes to a wan acceptance, on the part of that reader’s surrender, to what was/is presented as somehow meeting argumentative standards.

After the preliminary cast of characters that  establishes a verisimilitude, she has demonstrated her mastery of the politics of her own ménage. Applebaum is a Neo-Conservative and a friend/ally of the Bush Coterie, that has now appears in the political guise of  The Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump.

A more rough hewn, as compared to a once Conservatism of a ‘genteel world’. As a person in her mid fifties, how can she ‘know’ of that world, except by study? She is not just a Political Historian, but an Historian of Sensibilities?    

These organisations moved the argument away from the rooms in Washington and into a different sphere. In doing so, they recognised a changed reality: once upon a time, conservative politics was a genteel world where well-written articles for literary magazines or editorial pages could exert great influence. At least at the high end, voters as well as politicians listened to William F Buckley in the National Review or George Will in the Washington Post. The election of 2016 proved that was no longer true. Nowadays, real politics mostly happens somewhere else: in the swamps of social media, in the great battle for attention, in advertising wars and duelling YouTube video clips.

The Lincoln Project waded into those swamps, battles, wars and duels with gusto, drawing fire. Their breakthrough moment was an advertisement on the theme of “Mourning in America” — a direct reference to the famous Ronald Reagan advertisement and slogan, “Morning in America”. The video had sad music, Americans in hospitals and an ominous voiceover: “Under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, and sicker and poorer.”

In this essay Applebaum self-presentation is that of outside commentator, when, again, she is a Fellow Traveler. 

In its defence, the Lincoln Project’s founders are all former Republican strategists, their real target is Republican voters rather than the president, and they believe that much of the language Republicans are used to hearing from their party is already overwrought. The point is to give them familiar symbols, people and stories with which they can identify, and which will persuade them to turn against the president. Outrage is a tactic needed to break through what feels like a wall of indifference, even in the news media: “It’s not just the consumers of information that are numb,” Weaver told me, “It’s also the conveyors.”  

More of Mr. Weaver: 

None of these groups are affiliated directly with the Biden campaign, and they don’t want to be. “We’re just blowing up supply lines,” says Weaver. “We’re not responsible for winning the war.”  

What reader can forget Mr. Weaver’s other self -congratulatory comment on the French Resistance and supply lines  :

“We are like the French resistance. We are blowing up the supply lines,” said John Weaver, a veteran Republican political consultant and one of the co-founders of the group, which is named after President Abraham Lincoln. 

https://www.ft.com/content/9d64b55a-0cbe-4e27-b546-6a4cf7c9345b

This followed by more of Applebaum’s jejune political observations, the reader is then  presented with this shameless political advocacy, or just call it propaganda! 

Follow @projectlincoln and @RVAT2020 if you want to watch them try.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/69d9d287-6d9c-41f4-901d-8f1a18f4b8e1

What an opening paragraph, brimming with Reagan/Thatcher nostalgia, such is the moral/political desperation of Mr. Luce for a ‘beginning’ to  his political moralizing.

It takes effort to recapture how Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s hastened the demise of the Soviet Union. Images of that triumphal moment are as fresh as yesterday. The atmospherics smell of another era. Yet it is worth the effort.

Consider the headline and sub-headline:

Headline: The humbling of the Anglo-American world

Sub-headline: Abandonment of common sense during the pandemic has damaged the US and UK national brands

Note that Mr. Luce riffs on the themes of ‘Anglo-Protestant Virtue’ of Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. But quite surprisingly, its not just the editors that use the concept of ‘brand’ , but Luce himself. After his stern admonishments to those who have failed, like the good school master of old, I found his stern scolding a bit comic. He returns to the the least compelling argument of his moralizing stance : ‘brand’. 

Corporate brands take years to build but can be broken in short order. The national brands of America and Britain are the product of centuries. Self-belief gives them a greater appetite for risk than found in non-anglophone democracies such as Germany, Spain, France, Japan or Italy. But it is producing worse outcomes. Each of the latter have living memory of defeat, occupation, revolution and failure.   

How deeply entrenched in Mr. Luce’s conceptual imagination, in fact colonized by Neo-Liberalism, and its idee fixe of ‘The Market’ as an historical singularity. That is not just a part, of an historical development of the human project, but that it is defined by the Economic Trinity of Mises,Hayek and Friedman,that the Market is the central animating force in human history! ‘Brand’ just being a part of a larger Capitalist World made up of ‘Products’. That became the center of commerce’s propaganda arm of Public Relations and Marketing, or vice versa.

The very notion that:  ‘Self-belief gives them a greater appetite for risk than found in non-anglophone democracies such as Germany, Spain, France, Japan or Italy.’ The series of Enlightenments, yes plural, that manifested itself across Europe is subsumed under the Luce Market/Brand portmanteau. The history of European Thought offers:  Germany:Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling Hegel. France:Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot. Italy: Pietro Verri,  Cesare Beccaria, Francesco Maria Pagano and Gaetano Filangieri. How do these thinkers factor into Luce’s political polemic? History Made to Measure, is propaganda. 

Let the reader come to terms with the Leader, in the pecking order of the European Settler States, as declared by Mr. Luce , with Australia, New Zealand and Canada, finishing last. Note that most celebrated American Enlightenment personages were slave-holding white men, who believed in, and practiced, their natural superiority. That notion of ‘superiority’ has become sedimented in the American Political Imagination, as Exceptionalism. 

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/d2d76a6f-27f4-4788-a901-1c7dcea4c26f

What a powerful opening paragraph , or is it just hyperbole in high gear? On first reading, approaching the breathtaking.  Bravo!  

‘ The shape, direction, and force of the next Republican vector is the next great question of political physics. Trump’s looming defeat will leave behind a low-pressure zone not seen since 1932. What will come after?’

‘Political physics’ sure to appeal to the Financial Times readers. And your examination of the ‘California Model’, sans mention of the Howard Jarvis coterie’s Prop. 13 hysterics, is a very succinct observation: on the politics of the Oakies and Arkies of its second, third generations on, whose willful forgetting of their Dust Bowl origins, and their allegiance to the self-created myth of their entrepreneurship. When, in fact, they were the indispensable sub-contractors of the Cold War Arms Manufactures. Hence the cults of both Goldwater and Reagan, while not forgetting Schwarzenegger, as another Hollywood political refugee, like George Murphy, in this state.

As a ‘Native Californian’, whose parents moved west from Minnesota and Idaho I must say you have articulated an argument, sans my critique, that is hard to gainsay!

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD 

https://www.ft.com/content/736846b8-6061-4ef1-872c-5d821fdab9bf?commentID=960b4359-35c4-4de3-acfe-37b7a9458aac

That two books on Liberalism, not ‘liberalism’ as Mr. Ganesh would have it, have escaped his attention is no surprise, it might interfere with his political yarn spinning.

Liberalism at Large:The World According to the Economist by Alexander Zevin

Liberalism:A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo

That Liberalism is toxic is not self-evident to Mr. Ganesh: he swims in its vast ocean of self-congratulation. A link to Anthony Scaramucci’s  August 22, 2019 essay as illustrative of a ‘threat to liberalism’ is vulgar political comedy.       

This paragraph offers Trump’s Populist successors: 

It is the next iteration of populism that should trouble them. Those who are expected to jostle for the Republican candidacy in 2024 are of Mr Trump’s persuasion, but not of his background. With rare exceptions — the Fox News host Tucker Carlson is one — none is a celebrity or political neophyte. They are US senators (Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley), former state governors (Nikki Haley, who once ran South Carolina), intelligence chiefs-turned-cabinet members (Mike Pompeo) and, in vice-president Mike Pence, a decade-long Congressman. Most are more culturally conservative than the president and all are better-equipped to turn their instincts into law. Even those who do not emerge as the party’s leader will help to shape the opposition to a Biden White House.

The notion that Biden will be the eventual nominee is proof that the cynical New Democrats have cast their spell on another gullible scribbler? Moving past the political chatter, the reader meets Senators Cotton and Hawley, who then take Center Stage.

The trouble starts when those with institutional knowledge embrace the same programme. And that trouble is coming. Senators Cotton and Hawley, the two youngest in that gerontocrat’s chamber, constitute the vanguard. If I say that Mr Hawley, who wishes to abolish the World Trade Organization, is the softie, you have a sense of their zeal. Mr Cotton does not want young Chinese studying hard sciences at US universities (Shakespeare is fine). Last month, he caused a rumpus at the New York Times with an incendiary column about the race protests, making a rightwing folk hero of this slightly rigid man. 

Cotton and Hawley are then subject to a trivializing characterization of ‘high-jinks’. Cotton’s essay in The New York Times: the editors of this newspaper sought out the Senator to write his essay. The Editors wouldn’t even defend their own collective  judgement, in a regretful retrospect.  

The ‘Lincoln Project’ is made up of the public relations team of  the Bush Family. Look to the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, as a clear demonstration of their collective toxic mendacity. The ‘as if’ here is that ‘we’ live in the United States of Amnesia! 

Old Socialist 

https://www.ft.com/content/736846b8-6061-4ef1-872c-5d821fdab9bf

The reader is a bit puzzled by Ferguson’s reliance on his proximity to ‘The Great Man’, he is now at The Hoover Institution, where 1929 went to live, and conservative thought flourishes, and is the author of a hagiography of Kissinger.

“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November.

The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War — between the U.S. and China — had begun. This insight wasn’t just based on interviews with elder statesmen…

After Kissinger comes his History Made to Measure of the New Cold War with China: 

What had started out in early 2018 as a trade war over tariffs and intellectual property theft had by the end of the year metamorphosed into a technology war over the global dominance of the Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. in 5G network telecommunications; an ideological confrontation in response to Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; and an escalation of old frictions over Taiwan and the South China Sea. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-05/is-the-u-s-in-a-new-cold-war-china-has-already-declared-it?sref=bfOwbK4O

Ferguson articulates The Party Line, with an assist from ‘The Great Man’ , as if he were surprised.

Nevertheless, for Kissinger, of all people, to acknowledge that we were in the opening phase of Cold War II was remarkable. 

More of that History, with a plug for his and co-author Moritz Schularick, political Disney Cartoon of Chimerica :

…

West Chimericans are wealthy and hedonistic; East Chimericans are much poorer (even adjusting on the basis of purchasing power parity, their per capita income is around 16% of that in West Chimerica). But the two halves of Chimerica are complementary. West Chimericans are experts in business administration, marketing and finance. East Chimericans specialize in engineering and manufacturing. Profligate West Chimericans cannot get enough of the gadgets mass produced in the East; they save not a penny of their income and are happy to borrow against their fancy houses. Parsimonious East Chimericans live more humbly and cautiously. They would rather save a third of their own income and lend it to the West Chimericans to fund their gadget habit — and keep East Chimericans in jobs.

Under this arrangement, East Chimericans generate massive trade surpluses which they immediately lend back to West Chimerica. By channeling all these surpluses through government hands into government paper, East Chimerica depresses the key long-term interest rate in West Chimerica. And thanks to artificially low interest rates, financial and real assets in West Chimerica and its satellites are booming.

To be sure, Chimerica is an economic but not a monetary unit: East Chimericans have the renminbi, West Chimericans the dollar. Nevertheless, the scale of the financial transactions between the two halves is comparable with the flows that traditionally have occurred within nation states rather than between them.

…

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB117063838651997830

This part so beyond what an actual academic thinker might produce, It had to have been written by Ferguson, its pop culture vernacular is the proof.

Ferguson rambles on. But Ferguson’s essay wakes, from its technocratic reverie, and comes alive.

Yet the book that has done the most to educate me about how China views America and the world today is, as I said, not a political text, but a work of science fiction. “The Dark Forest” was Liu Cixin’s 2008 sequel to the hugely successful “Three-Body Problem.” It would be hard to overstate Liu’s influence in contemporary China: He is revered by the Shenzhen and Hangzhou tech companies, and was officially endorsed as one of the faces of 21st-century Chinese creativity by none other than … Wang Huning.

“The Dark Forest,” which continues the story of the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans, introduces Liu’s three axioms of “cosmic sociology.”

First, “Survival is the primary need of civilization.” Second, “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.” Third, “chains of suspicion” and the risk of a “technological explosion” in another civilization mean that in space there can only be the law of the jungle. In the words of the book’s hero, Luo Ji:

‘The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost … trying to tread without sound … The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people … any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.’

A quick re-entry by Kissinger, Ferguson adopts the role of Mrs. Malaprop:

Kissinger is often thought of (in my view, wrongly) as the supreme American exponent of Realpolitik. But this is something much harsher than realism. This is intergalactic Darwinism. 

The ‘Yellow Peril’ makes its fated return:

Of course, you may say, it’s just sci-fi. Yes, but “The Dark Forest” gives us an insight into something we think too little about: how Xi’s China thinks. It’s not up to us whether or not we have a Cold War with China, if China has already declared Cold War on us. 

Not only are we already in the foothills of that new Cold War; those foothills are also impenetrably covered in a dark forest of China’s devising.

‘How Xi’s China thinks’ is the purist form of anthropomorphism!  

Political Observer