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Generic Cinema High and Low Then and Now
Joe Carducci
You can't watch everything. Back when everyone was obsessing over "Sex in the City" and "The Wire" I was finishing up research for my book on stuntmen and acting by watching nothing but silent films, Soviet cinema and half-hour tv westerns from the 1950s. I found you can't even watch all pre-1920 American cinema even though little survives and running times are short. Still I watched what I could until I felt I understood how the motion picture came to be, from 1890s Edison productions through the one- and two-reelers produced in New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Golden, San Antonio, San Diego, Niles, Santa Barbara and finally Hollywood.
The earliest projected films were travelogue-like "actualities." These gave way to story-films after the turn of that century. American film genres high and low formed quickly; the starter pistol for the western genre was fired by the success of the Edison Co.'s The Great Train Robbery (1903) which was shot in New Jersey. The nickelodeon boom began in 1905 and allowed the motion picture to escape game rooms and vaudeville houses for pride of place in its own venue. Francis Ford was a pioneer of the action film as early as 1908 with the first independent producer, Centaur Film Co. of Bayonne, New Jersey. In his unpublished memoir Ford described what he called a "chase picture" of the one-reel [12-14 minutes] era: "The reason for the chase amounting to about one quarter of the reel and the chase took up the remainder." (Up and Down the Ladder)
Centaur productions stressed "action, action, action" as one trade magazine put it, and the company developed the western out of the more sentimental and pastoral "Indian subject" of the day. By 1910 a full production slate for any studio delivered a minimum of one drama, one western, and one comedy each week. This first production boom allowed nickelodeons to change programs daily. The movies had no start-times or credits and there were no movie reviews, people simply watched the program until it came back 'round to the point at which they'd entered, generally just over an hour. The twenty thousand or more shorts of that era laid the foundations for film language, film genres and the movie industry we know.
The Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, and Kalem companies in New York were part of the Edison Trust establishment and they produced "uplift" fare: sentimental melodramas and short adaptations of famous novels and plays. Trust producers hoped to attract the middle class to what was initially an entertainment for the urban immigrant working class. No English was needed to understand chase pictures or slapstick comedies. D.W. Griffith at Biograph improved film grammar with his one- and then two-reeler women's pictures, melodramas, and occasional forays into the action genre. Before Griffith demonstrated what a film director was, pictures were made by technicians such as cameramen or lighting engineers and the performers were said to "pose" for these pictures. Also at Biograph Mack Sennett pioneered silent comedy. Sennett went west and ran Keystone for the New York Motion Picture Company. NYMPCo. was another important independent producer and they made their westerns under the brands "101"-Bison and Kay-Bee, where Francis Ford made his greatest films. In Chicago, the Trust producers dropped their "uplift" burden quickly. Essanay Film and The Selig Polyscope Co. made westerns and comedies; the independent producer American Film (a.k.a., The Flying "A" Film Co.) made westerns and comedies too. Lubin Manufacturing in Philadelphia was another early Trust producer of westerns and melodramas.
The rise of the western genre soon made the ability to produce realistic westerns an existential concern and this drove producers westward. Ford wrote that the western quickly evolved beyond the "Jersey westerns" with their "bob-tailed horses with English saddles." And once the Chicago companies began sending crews out to Colorado and the west Ford joined Melies-Star Films in New York -- Georges Melies France's best-known filmmaker sent his brother Gaston to represent his interests and produce films in New Jersey in 1910. Star Films was a Trust member and they soon moved to San Antonio to improve their westerns and then onto Santa Paula, Calif. If you couldn't make westerns in New Jersey any longer then you couldn't make them in the French countryside either and French producers like Pathe and Eclair followed, sending their western units to Oklahoma and points west.
By 1912 Francis Ford was directing and starring in occasional three-reel "specials" such as The Invaders which survives and at three-reels (40+ minutes) Ford was knocking on the door to the feature-length film. The weekly serial was another half-step toward feature productions and by 1913 Ford was producing and starring in those too; film scholar Robert Birchard credits him with inventing the cliffhanger ending. It is believed that John Ford joined his older brother in Hollywood in 1914 so its likely John's first work in Hollywood was on Francis' serial, Lucille Love - Girl of Mystery (1914). The breakthrough years-long success of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) set the feature film as the new production standard (John Ford claimed he was an extra in it). John was famously prickly when interviewed later in life but he was unusually effusive about his older brother's talents and influence on his own filmmaking when talking to Peter Bogdanovich in 1966. Jack credited Frank with coming up with most of the tricks considered novel in '60s films but explained: "[H]e just couldn't concentrate on one thing too long." This was Jack's explanation for how Frank could be such a powerhouse actor-director-writer-producer of the early period and then be lost in the feature era, forgotten and busted to bit parts until his death in 1953.
Feature-length film production after 1915 winnowed the many movie producers to just the sturdiest of studios. The scale necessary to absorb the heightened costs and logistics of feature production was daunting and soon the additional burden of sound recording for "talkies" reduced the number of major studios to just MGM, Warner Bros., RKO, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Columbia. Each produced many kinds of shorts and features but primarily they produced slates of low-budget or B-films within defined genres for the routine profit such films could generate. Bs were often filmed on sets built for the rare large-budget pictures studios felt called upon to make; later they were shot on-location for economy and realism. A-films and epics gambled with talent, quality, weather, health emergencies, etc., any of which might lead to throwing good money after bad on a runaway production. For an A-film to be profitable it had to last months in first-run theaters and then run another year or two in neighborhood theaters. So at MGM, Wallace Beery Bs and Laurel & Hardy shorts plus Andy Hardy or Maisie B-series built up profits that the studio gambled on Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) or Marie Antoinette (1938).
After WWII the aesthetic polarity of Hollywood began to reverse. Working women and men back from the war put a premium on realism and new independent producers fed this appetite better than the studios. That new realism is today usually termed noir. David Selznick in 1953 reportedly worried that MGM was making films "for which there was 'no longer a market.'" (The Genius of the System) It was a rare movie reviewer in the 1930s and '40s who displayed positive interest in the action genres -- Harry Potamkin and Manny Farber come to mind. Their advanced taste was soon reinforced by postwar critics' interest in European films such as the neo-realist films from Italy and French 1950s film noir and 1960s New Wave. These European films had tighter budgets and simpler logistical visual and sound designs and so their low-key realism helped recast the value of "lesser" American productions and turned Hollywood's aesthetic heirarchy upside-down. MGM's family-friendly musicals, costume dramas, and adult melodramas lost standing to RKO's crime dramas and independent producers' westerns.
We have since seen highbrow neo-genre filmmaking in the 1970s (films like The Godfather, The Hired Hand, The Long Goodbye, The Last American Hero, Chinatown, The Exorcist, Hard Times, Jaws...) blend with the action genre continnum best illustrated by Clint Eastwood's filmography. But contemporary iterations of the action genre today seem threatened by the rise of the cheapest, lowest-brow generic film. It grew from the weekly serials of the 1930s (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Secret Agent X-9...) though now they play more like series B-films only with top-heavy MGMish production values (all that CGI "realism"). Superheroes, robots, dinosaurs... the junk movies of 1930s and '40s childhoods now absurdly rule a Hollywood focused on a global audience that is less sophisticated than the American audience, immigrants included.
The modest generic action film at its best displays a low-key knowing realism about American life and in Greek terms is descended from comedy as well as tragedy. It does not pretend to world-saving all-importance as does the comics- or toy-derived A-film and so travels less well overseas. Action films now look a budget-step up from the past international co-production style of B-films by a Golden Harvest or Golan-Globus even as few now approach their high/low peaks: Death Hunt (1981) and Runaway Train (1985). Distribution to suburban drive-ins and ghetto grind-houses gave way to straight-to-video or -cable channel for the B-film. The horror genre has worked best in the pitiless economics of theatrical distribution where a $5million film might cost $30million to release and market. I've not caught up on contemporary B-films since finishing my book but recent generic contenders of varying budgets might be Drive (2011), The Grey (2011), A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014), Bone Tomahawk (2015), Sicario (2015), Hell or High Water (2016), Blood Father (2016), Get Out (2017), Wind River (2017), Hostiles (2017), Dragged Across Concrete (2018), The Mule (2018), The Invisible Man (2020)...
When serials began in 1912 they were an acclaimed motion picture breakthrough but the format itself quickly deteriorated to a marker of the poorest type of production. But the serial aspect of today's comic book A-film evidently enjoys aesthetic validation from that boom in highbrow television. The tv-beat writers lord it over film critics who find they must write seriously about men in tights. But the sequeling model for these no-longer-just-summer movies was built from "first episodes" that were actually quite spare B-film productions: Rocky (1976), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979), First Blood (1982), and The Terminator (1984). Budgets for the sequels were tripled or more and those opened much bigger to greater anticipation. Now budgets for series films start high; they are based on comic book properties instead of novels or plays or built out from existing hit series. The old idea was that the sequels would in turn yield diminishing returns and so by numbers 3 or 4 the budgets would shrink to take profit on the opening weekend for a hollowed-out franchise. The new idea seeks to maintain the value of the underlying intellectual property by continuing to spend the time and money necessary to deliver A-film series excitement. Rooting through the studio-conglomerate IP vaults and rebooting worn-out franchises is now a corporate mandate. And its potentially too expensive to kill off any character whether superhero or archvillain. This is a problem imported to cinema from episodic television -- once established, no member of the regular cast can die without the corporation foregoing possible revenue from some spin-off. On any "Mannix" episode at least the fate of the villain was at stake.
The Paramount decision of 1948 forced studios to sell their theaters and outlawed exclusive block-booking distribution deals just as television was arriving to challenge the monopoly that concerned the Supreme Court. By 1954 half the homes in America had television sets and this quickly ended saturday matinee B-western series as well as radio drama and moved Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Rex Allen, "Gunsmoke", et al. to television. And it began the shrinking of the theatrical audience in earnest. The Motion Picture Association just recently reported that in 2018 global digital revenue surpassed theatrical box-office and also that last year more Americans watched streaming content on their devices than watched television. (WSJ) Early streaming options began at Youtube and Netflix with old B-westerns and crime dramas. These also provided initial low-cost programming for early broadcast television seventy years ago, and forty years ago they got the call to provide depth to the stock of wide-buying mom-and-pop independent videoshops in the years before the consolidation into large chains led to the narrow buying of mass-market titles.
Now the streaming juggernaut can be seen as reconstituting the old in-house distribution of the major studios' theater chains or block-booking arrangements. Late last year the Justice Department rescinded the Paramount decision as an ironic rimshot to these developments. Of the remaining studios only Disney, which began self-distribution with Buena Vista in 1953, might want to own theaters since their Disney, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel productions have been most efficient at drawing large theatrical box-office returns. Disney produced six features that reached $1billion in revenue last year. (WSJ) Other studios' A-films are all the riskier for their lack of dependable B-film revenue which only streaming might deliver. But even the successful November launch of streamer Disney+ (28.6million subscribers, "The Mandalorian" series premiere) is expected to stall according to The Hollywood Reporter which last week detailed a dearth of prospective B-product and the move of some programming to Hulu to allow for "edgier" themes.
As streaming increasingly is distribution the B-film may regain its standing in Hollywood. When Netflix, and now Apple, Amazon, AT&T-Warner, NBCUniversal-Comcast and the rest become producing studios in order to fill their streaming distribution pipes we see the real world extinguishing of the Paramount decision whether Disney buys a theater chain or not. Significantly Netflix, though tempted, finally passed on wide national theatrical distribution for its prestige A-production of the auteurist B-styled gangster film, The Irishman. Two large theater chains offered to shrink their standard theatrical window from 90 days to 60 days but Netflix balked and released the film to a small number of independent theaters with just a 26-day window before making the film available to its streaming subscribers. That was a close call for generic cinema! It is an unalloyed good for action cinema high and low to be thrown directly into streaming pipelines, at least for now.
Some day it may not cost $30 million to market a small picture to movie theaters. As streaming organizes audiences it will allow a more efficient and direct form of marketing than the old big multi-media ad campaigns do today. Those costs were already derailing the last coherent version of the traditional A-film/B-film relationship when the wheels fell off at Miramax. Bob Weinstein's Dimension Films' action and horror Bs long paid for Harvey's costly and riskier Miramax A-films. Quentin Tarantino might have made more and better films for Bob; instead he warped his genre interests into long, more expensive "specials" that he only infrequently could deliver to Harvey. Netflix prefers to keep its distribution numbers untouted as they perfect data-mining for increased efficiency in marketing. Not very Hollywood of them but no doubt they are nearing a modern solution to the A/B crux -- they might dispense with the A-film gamble and produce only Bs and once made simply judge which merit a theatrical roll-out.Sometimes I fear it would be dumb luck if not all production for the streamers is episodic television or serial cinema. The streamer Quibi is even relaunching short material in a format equivalent to the one-reeler! But as long as genre features can get made cheaply and are allowed a chance to pay for the A-budget features, high and low, the market for the great American genre film can grow again despite current global market conditions. And in the long term such films might actually have a shot at again remaking that global market for the better as Jack Ford's older brother Frank's "chase pictures" once did.
(An earlier version of this Streaming... essay was published by the good folks at L.A. Beat).
(illustrations: Moving Picture World trade mag logo; Francis Ford's The Broken Coin (1915) - Frank left directing, Jack Ford in costume right of camera [photo: Robert S. Birchard collection]; Moore's Garden Theatre, Jan. 1913, Francis Ford's The Invaders (1912) [photo: David Lee Guss collection]; video-on-demand ad for Dragged Across Concrete (2018); Nov. 6, 1948 Box Office Magazine (yumpu.com); Francis Ford Studio circa 1920 (hollywoodphotographs.com).
DuPage River Quarry Pond
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| Photograph by Joe Carducci |
From the DuPage desk of Joe Carducci...
Adam Shatz in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Chester B. Himes - A Biography by Lawrence Jackson.
In his novels, Himes depicted the whole of American life as a prison inferno, a blaze of race, sex and power, where freedom could be achieved only in death, or murder. One of the most prolific American writers of his generation, as well as one of its most versatile, Himes published proletarian and prison fiction, Bildungsromans, sex romps, blistering tales of interracial manners and flamboyant detective stories set in Harlem. The odd man out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger Thomas, the murderous anti-hero of Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son; Baldwin wrote that ‘Mr Himes seems capable of some of the worst writing this side of the Atlantic.’ Jackson, whose previous book, The Indignant Generation, was a formidable history of black American writers from the Depression years to the civil rights era, writes brilliantly about Himes’s fraught relations with his black peers as they competed for what little attention the white literary world was willing to grant them, a game Himes described as a ‘mean and undermining competition with your black brothers for the favours of white folks’. It was a game he could never win. Wright, Ellison and Baldwin were all determined to write the Great American Novel, and took Dostoevsky, Malraux and James as their models. Himes was a reader of European modernism, and of Hemingway and Faulkner (‘my secret mentor’), but he mostly wrote genre fiction....
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Scott Eyman in WSJ on The Sun and Her Stars by Donna Rifkind and The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel.
She was born Salomea Sara Steuermann, which she thankfully shortened to Salka Viertel. She and Berthold, a writer and director, arrived in America early in 1928 at the bidding of the great director F.W. Murnau. Berthold had written Murnau's now-lost "Four Devils," and Murnau wanted him to write his next film, "City Girl." Berthold worked in America but never truly settled down. Salka worked but also made a home for herself.... Her own career moved into high gear after she met Greta Garbo in Lubitsch's living room. They formed abond - a friendship complicated by a deep need on Garbo's part.
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We're gonna do economic activity—without money!”: Inside the criminal glamour of the San Francisco Diggers with Kent Minault.
I remember one event on Haight Street, and this involved the Grateful Dead, I think. We had set up a street fair. Maybe it was a year after we had cleared all that traffic off the street. There was a street fair. And again Arthur Lisch had his colored chalk. We were setting up things. I was walking up and down the street. There was a string quartet playing music, and then there was somebody else playing one of those bamboo flutes, and here was a person selling these extremely imaginative color candles. So there’s all these hippie artists. People were selling clothing, artifacts, sandals, wall hangings, art and posters and things like that. And everybody was wandering around and it was this wonderful environment, where you could smell the pot and the incense, and it was filled with love, and it was the best kind of Haight-Ashbury event that you could imagine. And then I looked up and right by the Straight Theater, this big U-Haul truck backed across the street. It was filled with these enormous amplifiers. And the Grateful Dead were on the truck. And as soon as the truck were into place… CHONG! This giant chord resounded down the street. And everybody stopped what they were doing and sat down and they watched. And so all of that interaction just stopped, and they were watching one hugely amped activity. And the music was very nice, the Grateful Dead were terrific musicians, but really the life of the place just stopped with that. And I thought, Eh I think I’ll go home. Cuz it was suddenly an event for people who were fans. And what had been going on before was an event for participants.
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David Trotter in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, A Cine-Fist to the Solar Plexus.
Declaring that Strike (1925) was the first Soviet film to handle its 'revolutionary-historical' subject from the 'correct point of view' (his italics), Eisenstein laid into rival claimants to a 'materialist approach to form' such as the Cine-Eye group led by Dziga Vertov. He complained that Vertov's documentaries took from their surroundings 'the things that impress him rather than the things with which, by impressing the audience, he will plough its psyche'. Documentary just wasn't agressive enough: 'It is not a "Cine-Eye" that we need, but a "Cine-Fist".' Eisenstein's nuclear option was what he had called in seminal essays of 1923 and 1924 the 'montage of attractions'.
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Martha Bayles in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS, Dream Factory or Propaganda Machine?
According to a recent report from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), over the past year China has turned decisively away from “soft power,” which works through “attraction and persuasion,” and toward “sharp power,” which “pierces, penetrates, or perforates the political and information environments in the targeted countries,” for the purpose of “masking [China’s] policies and suppressing, to the extent possible, any voices beyond China’s borders that are critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).” Will this turn toward sharp power break up the Hollywood-China romance? The tea leaves are tricky to read. But there is a definite backstory here, which I will now chronicle through a series of dramatic episodes.
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Human Rights Watch at zerohedge.com, China's Mass Surveillance App Hacked, Code Reveals Specific Criteria for Illegal Oppression.
The platform targets 36 types of people for data collection, from those who have "collected money or materials for mosques with enthusiasm," to people who stop using smartphones.... HRW notes that "Many—perhaps all—of the mass surveillance practices described in this report appear to be contrary to Chinese law, and also violate internationally guaranteed rights to privacy, the presumption of innocence, and freedom of association and movement. "Their impact on other rights, such as freedom of expression and religion, is profound," according to the report.
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CBC News: 'China is your Daddy'.
What might otherwise be the usual mudslinging around a student election has turned into a political firestorm on a Toronto university campus, where a newly-elected student president is raising questions about the source of pro-China attacks against her. On Saturday morning, Chemi Lhamo, 22, learned she'd been elected student president at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus (UTSC). By noon, her phone was buzzing incessantly with notifications. But instead of messages of congratulations, Lhamo — a Canadian citizen of Tibetan origin — realized a photo she'd posted on Instagram for the Lunar New Year was attracting thousands of hateful comments, most rife with anti-Tibet sentiment, some threatening. "China is your daddy — you better know this," read one comment. "Ur not gonna be the president of UTSC," read another. "Even if you do, we will make sure things get done so u won't survive a day. Peace RIP." That wasn't all. A petition calling on Lhamo to step down had amassed nearly 10,000 signatures. And there was a message on the Chinese mobile service We Chat making the rounds, calling on Chinese international students to stop Lhamo from becoming president.
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Mads Frese at euobserver.com, Italy Takes China's New Silk Road to the Heart of Europe.
Italy has Europe's biggest Chinese community. Around 300,000 Chinese live in the country, many of whom are concentrated in industrial cities such as Prato near Florence or in metropolitan 'Chinatowns'. A remarkably high number of Chinese emigrants have opened their own businesses in Italy, and Chinese investments have bought power on the boards of big Italian companies. Since 2000 Italy has attracted 15bn Euro in Chinese investments - far behind the level of Chinese investment in the UK and Germany, but ahead of France and the rest of Europe.
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Ben Hall in FT, German Industry Unveils Plan to Halt the Chinese Steamroller.
German companies seem as preoccupied with state-subsidised overcapacity, forced technology transfers, closed market access, intellectual property theft and the creation of national champions as with making a mint from China’s vast middle class and dynamic businesses.“It is the result of a pretty dramatic rethink of how we see China economically,” said Thorsten Benner, of the Global Public Policy Institute think-tank in Berlin. “Until three years ago, we thought these were complementary economies. This has totally changed. With Made in China 2025 we could see that state capitalism was out to eat our lunch.”
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Kathrin Hille in FT, How Hauwei Helped Undermine Its Image.
From the 1990s, Huawei enlisted some of the most illustrious western consultants: IBM to help modernise management; Bain Capital as a partner for US acquisitions; and the Cohen Group, an advisory founded by former secretary of defence William Cohen, to help deal with US government security concerns. It also employed a vast array of global PR companies from Ogilvy to Edelman to BCW.But at crucial moments, the company did not heed their advice and even outmanoeuvred the consultants it had hired, according to former executives and external consultants. “There was always a fundamental lack of trust in non-Chinese. You offer guidance, and are regularly second-guessed,” Mr Plummer said. Two external consultants who worked for Huawei in the US and one American government official said a move by management to set up a lobbying outfit in the US in 2009 without consulting its experts on the ground did immense damage. The company, which was vying for contracts to upgrade US telecom operator Sprint’s mobile network, offered to deliver its products through an independent third party which would probe its software and hardware for security flaws and hold Huawei’s source code, the key software component, in an attempt to offer more transparency. At the same time, however, Cohen Group was discussing with the Director of National Intelligence to use such mechanisms for trusted delivery of Huawei gear that would assuage US security concerns. When Huawei announced its own structure instead — a company called Amerilink, which would be led by William Owens, a former vice-chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff — that potential deal fell apart over concerns that the new entity was not sufficiently independent.
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Henny Sender in FT, Entrepreneurs Stifled by the Dead Hand of the Chinese State.
"Everyone has to listen to the call of the party," says Chen Zhiwu of the Asia Global Institute at the Uinversity of Hong Kong, who has been warning about the ascendancy of the party and the diminution of the private sector for several years. "Today the party controls everyting. The unintended consequence is that it has given the US and others a good excuse to label all Chinese copanies as state-controlled and muddied the waters for everyone. The tortured debate over Huawei and who controls it misses the point. The national intelligence law adopted in 2017 - which underlines the obligation of Chinese citizens and organisations alike to "support, co-operate with and collaborate on national intelligence work" - makes it clear that companies must acquiesce to state demands.
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Jairaj Devadiga in WSJ, A Dearth of Data Helped Hong Kong Succeed.
Sir John Cowperthwaite was Hong Kong’s financial secretary from 1961-71 and is widely credited for the prosperity Hong Kong enjoys today. An ardent free-marketeer, Cowperthwaite believed that government should not try to manage the economy. One salient feature of Cowperthwaite’s policies: His administration didn’t collect any economic data during his tenure. Not even gross domestic product was calculated. When the American economist Milton Friedman asked why, Cowperthwaite replied that once the data were made available, officials would invariably use them to make the case for government intervention in the economy.
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WSJ: U.S. Fights Huawei on Undersea Data Grid.
Huawei Marine Networks Co., majority owned by the Chinese telecom giant, completed a 3,750-mile cable between Brazil and Cameroon in September. It recently started work on a 7,500-mile cable connecting Europe, Asia and Africa and is finishing up links across the Gulf of California in Mexico. Altogether, the company has worked on some 90 projects to build or upgrade seabed fiber-optic links, gaining fast on the three U.S., European and Japanese firms that dominate the industry. These officials say the company’s knowledge of and access to undersea cables could allow China to attach devices that divert or monitor data traffic—or, in a conflict, to sever links to entire nations. Such interference could be done remotely, via Huawei network management software and other equipment at coastal landing stations, where submarine cables join land-based networks, these officials say.
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Sunil Amrith in NYT, The Race to Dam the Himalayas.
More than 400 dams are under construction, or planned for the coming decades, in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan; at least 100 more have been proposed across the Chinese border in Tibet. If the plans come to fruition, this will be one of the world’s most heavily dammed regions. But these projects will aggravate international tensions. They carry grave ecological risks. To understand why their backers cast caution aside, it helps to look to history. When India became independent in 1947, large dams promised to even out the vagaries of a monsoon climate that provides more than two-thirds of the country’s annual rainfall. These projects held out the prospect of increasing food production in a part of the world where the memory of famine still stung and where the partition of India from Pakistan left both countries feeling they had lost valuable agricultural land. For new Asian nations, these bold engineering projects symbolized their attainment of political freedom and embrace of modernity. When he surveyed the Bhakra Nangal Dam in 1956, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, declared that “these are the new temples of India, where I worship.”
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Chun Han Wong in WSJ From Falun Gong to Xinjiang: China's Repression Maestro.
After the government outlawed the Falun Gong spiritual group in 1999, Mr. Chen participated in the crackdown as a senior Henan official, with responsibilities over the destruction of the group's pamphlets, books and CDs.... In 2009, Mr. Chen became deputy party chief of Hebei, the province that surrounds Beijing, where he encountered a ndw grid-style policing method the provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, was testing. It segmented communities into defined areas and set up comprehensive police service stations to help organize surveillance and security. Mr. Chen took that to Tibet when he became its party chief in 2011, three years after anti-Chinese riots there. He installed roughly 700 "convenience police stations." Open round the clock, they doubled as mini-community centers, with household tools and cold medications. State TV produced a 20-episode drama series to glamorize them.... Tibet had "become the world's largest prison," blanked with checkpoints and security cameras, said Dhondup Wangchen, a Tibetan filmmaker, after he complete a six-year prison term on a subversion charge. He is exiled in the U.S. Mr. Chen's strategies appeared to bring down violence and public dissent. They also won him favor in Beijing, which was looking for a harder-edged approach in Xinjiang as ethnic tensions there rose.
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Jun Mai in SCMP, From Tibet to Xinjiang, Beijing's Man for Restive Regions Chen Quanguo is the Prime Target of US Sanctions.
Chen was also quick to hitch his wagon to the president. In February 2016 when he was the party chief of Tibet, he was among the first to speak of Xi as the “core” of the party leadership, a term that elevated Xi’s status among party leaders. A month later, Tibetan delegates attending the National People’s Congress in Beijing showed up sporting lapel badges with Xi’s picture, a clear echo of the Mao Zedong era. One now retired official said the badges raised eyebrows among senior leaders including Yu Zhengsheng, then chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Yu took Chen aside and told him the gesture was inappropriate. “Chen only replied it was a spontaneous act by the delegates … but the fact is he was rewarded [for it],” said the official, who didn’t wish to be named.
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Chris Buckley in NYT, The Leaders Who Unleashed China's Mass Detention of Muslims.
By taking a harder line in Xinjiang, Mr. Xi effectively endorsed a group of Chinese scholars and officials advocating an overhaul of the party’s longstanding policies toward ethnic minorities. For decades, the party kept Uighurs, Tibetans and other groups under tight political control while allowing some room for preserving each nationality’s language, culture and religion. The mosaic approach was copied from the Soviet Union and made Xinjiang an “autonomous region,” where, in theory, Uighurs enjoyed greater rights and representation. But in the 1990s, Chinese academics advising the government began arguing that these policies had contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union by encouraging ethnic separatism. To avoid similar troubles, they argued, China should adopt measures aimed unapologetically at merging ethnic minorities into a broader national identity.
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Austin Ramzy in NYT, He Needed a Job. China Gave Him One: Locking Up His Fellow Muslims.
The businesses he started had failed, and he had a wife and two children to support. So when the authorities in China’s far western Xinjiang region offered him a job with the auxiliary police, Baimurat welcomed the good pay and benefits. For months, he stood at roadside checkpoints, looking for people on the government’s blacklist, usually from Muslim ethnic minorities. As a Kazakh Muslim himself, he sometimes felt uncomfortable about his work, but he needed the money. Then he was asked to help bring 600 handcuffed people to a new facility — and was stunned by what he saw. Officials called it a job training center, but it was basically a prison, with toilets and beds behind bars. One detainee was an acquaintance he barely recognized because he had lost so much weight. Mr. Baimurat, 39, suppressed his emotions. “There are cameras everywhere,” he recalled, “and if they see you look unhappy, you will be in trouble.”
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Olivia Utley in PROSPECT, "Prisoners Were Always Interrogated at Night".
In the next couple of months, CCTV—Chinese State TV—is set to open the world’s biggest foreign news bureau in Chiswick Park, London. The London hub will be the jewel in the crown of CCTV’s Europe expansion, occupying a 3,000 sq foot building and employing over 300 London-based writers. For demoralised and underpaid UK journalists, the jobs—which offer the opportunity to “tell China’s story well” for a hefty salary—look like glittering opportunities. One department has already had 6,000 applicants for 90 positions, and the deadline isn’t until February. So, what’s the catch? Well, it’s a big one. CCTV stands accused of assisting the Chinese police in extracting forced and falsified “confessions” in front of its TV cameras. According to Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia, there have been 45 confirmed forced televised confessions in China between 2013 and 2018—but the true figure is thought to be much, much higher. Almost all are aired before a formal conviction, violating Chinese law asserting a presumption of innocence.
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Sayragul Sauytbay in HARPERS, At the Mind's Limits.
During the day, which started at 6am and ended at midnight, inmates had to learn Chinese, sing party songs, confess their crimes and moral offenses, and recite Communist Party propaganda slogans like "Thank you to the Communist Party," "I am Chinese," and "I love Xi Jinging." We received three meals a day. All the meals included watery rice soup or vegetable soupl and a small slice of Chinese bread. Meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork. The inmates were compelled to eat it, even if they were religiously observant. Refusal brought punishment. There was no medical treatment, and they gave us pills that they told us prevented diseases, but the nurses secretly told me that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them. Some prisoners who took the pills were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and there were rumors that men became sterile. The only room that didn't have cameras was the Black Room, which was used to torture the prisoners.... The fate of the women in the camp was particularly harsh. On an everday basis the policemen took the pretty girls with them, and the girls didn't come back to the rooms all night.... They took two hundred inmates outside - men and women - and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese, she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and raped her, one after the other, in front of everyone. While they were raping her, they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their heads or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away, and we never saw them again. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.
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Ian Johnson in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS on Blood Letters - The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China.
A year later, despite the release in July of Liu Xia to Germany, one can argue that Liu is a nonperson in China—of interest only to a few thousand dissidents. One might imagine that when they die, he too will die in the public memory, commemorated only by foreign human rights groups and studied by academics interested in turn-of-the-century Chinese thought and politics. And yet memory can be miraculously persistent. This is a major theme in Blood Letters, an important new biography of Lin Zhao, the journalist who was executed fifty years ago this spring for criticizing the Communist Party’s misrule in the 1950s and 1960s. After years of imprisonment, torture, and mental deterioration, she was hauled out of the prison hospital where she had shriveled to seventy pounds, taken to a thousand-seat prison auditorium in her hospital gown, gagged with a rubber ball, sentenced to death, and shot. Her mother learned the news from a messenger; a few days later, law enforcement demanded from her five cents to cover the cost of the bullet. Sustained by her Christian faith, Lin wrote hundreds of thousands of words in prison, but all were confiscated and locked away. Yet her writings somehow survived and slowly spread, despite censorship.
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Minnie Chan in SCMP, How Tiananmen Crackdown Left a Deep Scar on China's Military Psyche.
After the bloodshed, it was the military that suggested the pro-democracy student movement be referred to not as a “counter-revolutionary rebellion” but as a time of “political turmoil”, two former PLA officers told the South China Morning Post. They said the move to tone down the language around the crackdown reflected the anxiety and shame felt by many rank-and-file officers over a fateful decision that has tainted the military’s reputation and legacy. Up to that point, the PLA had been widely respected by the Chinese public. Even during the turbulent decade of the Cultural Revolution from 1966, the military was largely uninvolved. Rather, it was instrumental in bringing an end to the chaos and setting China on the path of reform and opening up. The crackdown in 1989 was unprecedented for the PLA and dealt a crippling blow to its reputation and morale – and the question over the legitimacy of the decision to send in the tanks and open fire on the protesters remains.
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Aruna Viswanatha & Kate O'Keefe in WSJ, China Critic Called a Spy in Fight.
Strategic Vision enlisted investigators to perform the research, according to Friday's filing. The filing said investiagors determined the first 15 names proveded by Mr. Guo had been designated by the U.S. as "Records Protected" individuals, for whom certain information wasn't subject to disclosure. Such a designation is used in highly classified and access-restricted government databases, former intelligence officials said. The immigration status about such disgnees is often blocked in restricted government databases, and can suggest the person may be a foreigner who is assisting the U.S. government, experts said. Strategic Vision sia dit concluded Mr. Guo was seeking information on Chinese nationals who may have been helping the U.S. government in national-security investigations or who were involved in other sensitive matters, according to the filing. "Guo never intended to use the fruits of Strategic Vision's research against the Chinese Communist Party," the court filing said. "That is because Guo was not the dissident he claimed to be. Instead, Guo Wengui was, and is, a dissident-hunter, propagandist, and agent in the service of the People's Republic of China." Mr. Guo's lawyer, Mr. Podhaskie, denied the allegations. "Mr. Guo is the most-wanted dissident worldwide by the Chinese Communist Party and has been their most outspoken and vitriolic ciritic since his arrival in the United States," he said in his statement. The Chinese Embassy didn't respond to arequest to comment.
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Yuan Yang & Nian Liu in FT, China Hushes Up Scheme to Recruit Scientists from Overseas.
Last September, Texas Tech University warned faculty in a letter that the US Congress saw the Thousand Talents programme as “part of a broader strategy to build technological superiority” and that the State Department and Congress believed elements of the plan to be “closely allied to the Chinese military”. The letter contained a warning: that recipients of Thousand Talents awards could be barred from Department of Defense grants, and in future possibly federal research grants, a significant disincentive for researchers.Han Lifeng, the chief executive of a talent agency that has worked with about 30 “Thousand Talents” experts, has noticed the mood shift. “Technology competition between the US and China is fierce now. The US sets obstacles for scientists who want to come back, so China doesn’t mention the name ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ in documents or meetings any more.”
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Timothy Puko & Kate O'Keefe in WSJ, Agency Wants Scientists Off Foreign Payrolls.
The Energy Department's initiative takes aim at programs such as China's "Thousand Talents Plan," which pays scientists working abroad and says its mission is to gather "global wisdom." Dating to 2008, the program has brought thousands of experts from outside China to its laboratories, companies and research centers, according to a 2018 report from the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional panel. Short-term contracts provide program participants with the equivalent of roughly $74,000 in initial funding. Longer-term contracts may award more than $700,000 and other benefits such as housing and health care, according to the Thousand Talents website. Thousand Talents is just one of nearly 200 other programs like it run by the Chinese government, said James Mulvenon, who co-wrote a 2013 book called "Chinese Industrial Espionage."
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Kathrin Hille in FT, China Sets Up 'Discussions' on Taiwan's Future.
“The problem is the 20th Communist party congress in 2022. If he doesn’t show progress in his second term, some of the people he purged could use this against him.”Indeed the tone on the Chinese domestic scene on Taiwan is turning increasingly belligerent, with a senior military official threatening what he called “supporters of Taiwanese separatism” last month. “If we are forced to use force to settle the Taiwanese issue, they will be held responsible. In other words, they will inevitably be considered war criminals,” said Lieutenant General He Lei, a former regional military commander and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences.
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Amy Qin in NYT, Worries Grow in Singapore Over China's Calls to Help 'Motherland'.
China has become increasingly assertive in its efforts to appeal to the vast Chinese diaspora to serve the country’s national interests and gain influence abroad. Already, there has been evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to manipulate political activity among Chinese populations in countries like Canada, the United States and Australia. And with ethnic Chinese constituting nearly 75 percent of Singapore’s population of 5.6 million, some scholars and former diplomats worry that this island nation could be an especially tantalizing target for the Chinese government’s influence efforts.
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Mark Magnier in SCMP, Horse Trading and Arm Twisting as US Battles China Over Leadership of UN Intellectual Property Agency.
Speaking on Chinese state media last year, former head of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Wu Hongbo said he prioritised China’s interests over the UN’s. His tenure saw the president of the World Uygur Congress expelled from an indigenous rights forum. Taiwan has not been allowed to attend the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s annual assembly since a Chinese national took over the agency. And Washington worries that Zhao Houlin could nudge global 5G standards in Huawei’s favour as current head of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union. Unlike most UN agencies, almost all of Wipo’s US$800 million budget and US$99 million surplus is funded by industry, giving the agency and its director greater independence from UN member nations. The funding comes from companies that pay around US$1,000 per claim to safeguard their corporate and quasi-military secrets. Patent and trademark filings are stored on a secure Wipo server while companies decide which national jurisdictions to target. “If it had control over all the levers, China would have nominal access to all patent applications before they got published,” said James Pooley, a trade secrets lawyer and former deputy director general at Wipo who testified before Congress on malfeasance at the agency.
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Tom Hancock & Nicolle Liu in FT, Senior China Officials in Plagiarism Outcry.
China’s politicians are on paper among the world’s best educated: the elite politburo, composed of the 25 most senior Communist party officials, boasts seven doctoral graduates including Xi Jinping, the president, who obtained a law doctorate from Beijing’s Tsinghua University in 2002.But the doctoral dissertation by Chen Quanguo, a politburo member and head of the Communist party in the northwestern Xinjiang region, features dozens of paragraphs identical to earlier works that are not cited. Theses by other politburo members are not accessible on public academic databases. But an FT review of 10 doctoral theses by other Chinese officials that were available online found three cases in which extended passages were copied without citation. The revelation comes amid a public debate in China about the academic qualifications of well-connected people. Last week, Beijing Film Academy revoked a doctorate awarded to Zhai Tianlin, one of the country’s best-known actors, after finding that sections of a paper published while he was a graduate student were copied from other texts without references.
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Lucy Hornby in FT, Beijing Casts Wary Eye Over Past US Rivals Who Flattered to Deceive.
The Chinese leadership is aware of the historical warnings. For 12 years (and two stock market crashes), reformers have fretted about Japan's "lost decade" and drooping international influence. Party stalwarts including Xi Jinping are equally obsessed with the fall of the Soviet Union. In September, the Chinese party surpassed the length of time the Soviets held power. "In different ways, the USSR and Japan both stumbled when they faced the need to generate growth from more bottom-up, entrepreneurial, service- and netowrk-oriented activities," said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of research firm Gavekal Dragonomics. "Despite a strong record of bottom-up dynamism, China is now moving in a much more statist direction."
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Keith Bradsher in NYT, China Faces Expertise Gap in Trade Talks with U.S..
China is struggling to find people in Washington who can provide insight into the Trump administration’s aggressive moves on trade. One senior American trade insider tried to help — and wound up in Beijing with little to do but check out the pottery. That insider, Alan Wolff, a veteran senior adviser to the top United States trade representative and a frequent visitor to Beijing, came to China two weeks ago to speak at a conference on agricultural trade and sought to make contact with top Chinese policymakers. But they did not respond to his requests for meetings, and they said days later that they had not known who he was. Mr. Wolff, an admirer of ancient pottery, instead spent a quiet Saturday in a Beijing museum browsing 2,200-year-old bowls. As members of the Trump administration delegation arrived in Beijing on Thursday for two days of high-level talks, they sat across from Chinese officials with limited experience in trade matters.
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Kathrin Hille in FT, Taiwan's KMT Poised to End Pro-China Policy to Woo Voters.
Xi Jinping, China’s president and Communist party general secretary, has grown increasingly strident in his rhetoric on Taiwan. Senior KMT politicians said Mr Xi destroyed the 1992 consensus when he equated it last year with “One Country, Two Systems”, the model of government by which Beijing rules Hong Kong and which it wants to impose on Taiwan. Taiwanese voters have emphatically rejected this formula, under which Hong Kong enjoys some legal and political autonomy but Beijing hand picks its leader. Johnny Chiang, a KMT lawmaker and one of the candidates in Saturday’s vote, said the Communist party’s “distortion” of the “One China” formula and the Taiwanese people’s ever more sceptical view of Beijing meant his party could no longer win elections.
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Chris Buckley in NYT, Chinese Leader Is on Edge in a Year Rife with Risk.
Mr. Xi identified dangers that extended far beyond the economy, especially political risks like the party’s ability to keep young Chinese from slipping from its ideological orbit. He demanded stricter controls on the Chinese internet — which is already thoroughly censored — and more indoctrination to “ensure that the youth generation become builders and inheritors of socialism.” “Younger officials must go in guns blazing to take on these major struggles,” Mr. Xi told the officials, seated in rows like students taking notes. Yet Mr. Xi’s demands for unyielding stability could backfire, experts say, as warnings of danger around every turn could smother the initiative and flexibility that Chinese officials need to defuse long-term economic and social dangers. The demands for rigid order on so many fronts put local cadres in near impossible binds, they said: trying to prevent job losses while cutting debt and shutting inefficient “zombie” businesses; trying to buoy private investment while cracking down on pollution and bank credit; and proclaiming public confidence in the government while stifling complaints from the public. “If everything is a risk, you can end up mitigating nothing,” said Jude Blanchette, an expert on Chinese policymaking at Crumpton Group in Virginia, which advises companies on investments.
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Gordon Chang in WSJ, Xi Changed My Mind About Trump.
The world is full of “experts” who will tell you China and the U.S. are locked in a contest for dominance. Technically, that’s true. The idea that the two nations are struggling for control, however, falsely implies that America is jealously guarding its position atop the international system. That’s Beijing’s narrative. Chinese leaders disparage the U.S. by implying it is in terminal decline and accusing it of attempting to prevent China’s legitimate rise. In reality, America is preserving more than its role in the international system. It is trying to preserve the system itself—which Mr. Xi is working to overthrow by promoting imperial-era Chinese concepts. The idea that underpinned the imperial tributary system was that states near and far were obligated to acknowledge Chinese rule. Chinese emperors claimed they had the Mandate of Heaven over tianxia, or “All Under Heaven.” China repudiated tianxia in the first half of the 20th century and played it down in the second half. But in the 21st century it is making a comeback. “Tianxia is a long Chinese political tradition of practice and ideal that is being revitalized and re-energized in today’s People’s Republic,” Fei-Ling Wang, author of “The China Order: Centralia, World Empire and the Nature of Chinese Power,” told me last week. “The Chinese dream of tianxia, or the China Order, assumes a hierarchical world empire system.”
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Brian Boeck at longreads.com, Stalin's Scheherazade.
Sholokhov was compelled to immediately find a way to justify his non-negative
portrayal. “Kornilov distinguished himself on the Austrian front with acts of bravery, he was captured by the enemy and managed to escape from captivity and return to Russia. He could even be described in some sense as honorable.” “Honorable?” Stalin smiled. “A man who went against the people? Such a man could never be considered honorable.” “Subjectively speaking he was honorable. From the point of view of his class he behaved honorably. He was motivated by a strong sense of duty. He possessed an officer’s sense of honor. He risked his life to return to Russia. He loved his motherland.” These pronouncements must have intrigued Stalin. He was pondering whether ideology alone could bring cohesion to the Soviet Union. He was starting to have doubts about the mobilizational potential of proletarian internationalism for inspiring the masses to defend the country. The emotionally resonant concept of “motherland,” which had gone out of fashion with the October revolution, now intrigued him.... Sholokhov had comported himself well under Stalin’s first barrage of questions. He had passed a literary litmus test that the dictator developed during an earlier foray into the field of literary censorship. A year earlier Stalin was asked to decide whether or not to ban a play by Mikhail Bulgakov. Censors complained that it heroicized White generals who had been vanquished by the Soviet side. Although Gorky did not find it objectionable and interpreted it through a satirical lens, several major Soviet theater figures were appalled by its contents. They appealed to Stalin to suppress it. By this action they invited him to assume the role of censor of last resort. He took on the role with relish and would never relinquish it.
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Graham Farmelo in WSJ on Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder.
As she explains, the use of beauty as a proxy for truth has an impressive pedigree.... As a result of this misguided focus on beauty, Ms. Hossenfelder says, her generation of theoretical physicists has been "stunningly unsuccessful." The multiverse - the idea that our universe is only one of a vast number - is one of the fasionalbe concepts that she believes is a dud. Theoreticians found it difficult to use it to make predictions that astronomers can test. Even more disappointing for her is string theory, the most popular candidate for a unified theory of all the basic forces of nature. According to this theory, each fundamental subatomic particle corresponds to an excitation of a string, analogous to a musical note played on a guitar. The theory is mathematically gorgeous, astonishingly self-consistent and even explains why the existence of gravity is inevitable. The problem is that the theory has not yet made a single verified prediction.
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Toril Moi at thepointmag.com, Real Characters.
As a highbrow modernist, L.C. Knights heaps scorn on the popular and the middlebrow, blaming the rot of character criticism on the “growth of the popular novel, from Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë to our own Best Sellers, [which] encouraged an emotional identification of the reader with hero or heroine.” The “Best Sellers” are particularly despicable, for they appeal directly to “human sympathy and emotion,” which are utterly destructive of professional criticism, since they eradicate the critic’s “necessary aloofness from a work of art.” I read this as a reference to T.?S. Eliot’s theory of poetic impersonality: if poetry is a flight from emotion and personality, criticism must be too. Knights’s critical agenda is now clear. Against traditionalist, feminized, middlebrow sentimentality, he sets cool, modernist impersonality. Identification, emotional responses, sympathy and moralism must go, for they can only cloud the critic’s gaze. Since thinking of texts as creating an “illusion of reality” encourages these vices, it’s not just character criticism but realism itself that must go. Knights’s manifesto reads like an expression of the avant-garde aesthetic agenda of his generation. In the 1920s and 1930s, traditionalist critics attacked modernist artists and writers precisely by arguing that they were immoral, incapable of inventing emotionally satisfying plots, and failed to provide characters with which one could sympathize. (In the 1880s and 1890s similar accusations were levied against Ibsen.) No wonder Knights attacks precisely moralism, sentimentalism and empathy.
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Jon Baskin at thepointmag.com, On the Hatred of Literature.
Going back to Plato—perhaps the first hater of literature on record—philosophers and religious authorities have attacked art for the same reasons our professors taught us to deconstruct and distrust it: because it is unpredictable, unreasonable and often inconsistent with their preferred politics or morality. It was also a lesson that was destined, in the years that followed, to seep off campus. Even as New Historicism fell out of fashion in literary studies—along with the broader postmodern notion of “critique” that had produced it—the students it had trained were taking up positions in the public intellectual magazines and book reviews, where they now preside over the gradual disappearance of a distinctively literary mode of criticism: a criticism, that is, that attends to matters of form, style and character, that takes aesthetic experience seriously, and that appreciates the emotions inspired by an artwork as fully as, and as constitutive of, its politics. To the extent that this disappearance has gone unremarked, it is because the hatred of literature, though it remains almost unheard of among the general reading public, has become the default mode in the upper reaches of our literary culture. As was the case in my college survey course, the highest honors go to the most eloquent haters.
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Julian Baggini in PROSPECT, The Enduring Brilliance of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein‘s most famous and abused idea is that of the “language game.” Reacting against both dominant philosophies of language and his own earlier work, Wittgenstein came to reject the idea that words are kinds of labels for things in the world or ideas in our head, and that the meaning of sentences are therefore entirely determinable. The meaning of a word is rather “its use in the language” which is governed by rules that are neither explicit nor clear. The same word can be used to refer to two things because they have a “family resemblance,” but it might not be possible to precisely define what that resemblance is. This view of how language works anticipated the more empirical prototype theory developed in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch. Rosch argued that we learn the meanings of words by noticing how they are used, first learning their most typical usages and later their extended or metaphorical ones. Learning meanings by definitions is atypical. The family resemblance to family resemblance theory is too strong to miss. Once again, Wittgenstein cleared the path that others only later followed. Wittgenstein has also become extremely popular in theology. His ideas provide the perfect response to those who would dismiss religion as bad proto-science, a set of beliefs about the things that exist in the universe. Many theologians respond to this with Wittgenstein’s line “For a mistake, that’s too big.” Religion is rather a “form of life” to use another Wittgensteinian concept, in which the rules of the language game are different from the scientific or the historical. Statements like “God is love” or “we need saving from sin” are not like “tomato is a fruit” or “the drowning woman needs saving from the flood.” They are attempts to capture spiritual and existential realities, not describe the empirical world.
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Andrew Hussey in NEW STATESMAN, The Making of a Messiah.
Only the Zionists offered any real resistance, in his view, and he asked them to help him get to Israel. The plan was “fucked-up”, as he put it, when he got to the coast and there were no boats. Back in Bucharest, Isou hung out with his friends, visited brothels and got into fights, all the time hating the “Christians” who wanted to kill him. In a darkened cinema, he is about to make love to a “Christian” girl he has just picked up when he sees the first horrible images broadcast of the death camps in the east. He feels that he recognises himself in the piles of young corpses being swept into mass graves. “Don’t look at the Yids,” she says, pulling him back for another kiss. “They deserve it. They brought it on themselves.” It was in this time and place, that Isou had the series of revelations that would become lettrisme. The first illumination came to him on a Bucharest street on 19 March 1942 when he was 17 years old. It was clear to him that the “old civilisation” he had grown up in was now crumbling away before his eyes. He admired the surrealists because they’d had the courage to announce the “end of the Christian era”, a civilisation that he had come to believe was defined by mass murder and rape. He declared that he hated Christians, and unlike the weak-minded Zionists fleeing to Israel, he wanted revenge. He called for a “Judaism on the attack!” The question in Isou’s mind was the same question being asked then in the newly-born Israel: how to build the new world, how to found a new civilisation? In 1945, Isou escaped from Bucharest, and after a hazardous and illegal journey across the wreckage of post-war Europe, he made it to Paris. Then, for a brief moment – he was only 20 years old – he was suddenly famous, courted by Jean Cocteau and André Gide, profiled in the New York Times and interviewed on film by Orson Welles.
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Elisabeth Zerofsky in NY TIMES MAGAZINE, The Right-Wing Pundit 'Hashtag Triggering' France.
In a radio interview the week before his appearance at the Salle Gaveau, Zemmour nodded in vigorous agreement when he was asked if he was nostalgic and reactionary. These tendencies appeal to a wide-ranging, well-heeled conservative crowd but haven’t cost him the loyalty of a younger audience, who delight in the way he combines the cable-news pugnacity of Tucker Carlson with the studied contemptuousness of Christopher Hitchens. At the Salle Gaveau, I spoke with one such fan, a 27-year-old named Jacques, the founder of a successful start-up. As he saw it, 90 percent of the French media were on the left, and they hid the truth about the failure to integrate immigrants; this was readily apparent in the drug dealing and crime in the banlieues and, of course, the terror attacks of the last three years. Zemmour’s words were merely good sense. In fact, there was an adjective for the few willing to say aloud what everyone was thinking: “Zemmourrian.” “I’m not nostalgic,” Jacques said. “I think there’s a lot that’s not working in modernity. But we have to say that when you come to a country you have to integrate and assimilate.” A lawyer friend of his had recently defended an immigrant against domestic-violence charges, and his friend advised the client not to say that he thought what he did was right. But during the trial, the wife testified that her husband was angry that she went to see her friends, and so he was right to beat her. “That’s what happens when you accept all cultures and you refuse to force people to accept certain norms,” Jacques said. “We’ve really gone somewhere irrational, out of fear of shocking or provoking. But we’re creating a horrible world.”
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Philip Broughton in WSJ on Twilight of the Elites by Christophe Guilluy.
"The higher France," says Mr. Guilluy, "now lives undisturbed in the safety of its new
citadels." This class reaps all the economic benefits while, for form's sake, spouting criticism of finance, bankers and technology giants. They have it every which way, ruthless capitalists by day, yogis and locavores by night. "Cleverly disguised as hipsters, untroubled by the least moral qualm in the safety of their townhouses, today's bourgeoisie forms the bulwark of the hardest and most unpitying form of capitalism imaginable." They embrace a "declasse lifestyle, stylishly slumming it in formerly working-class neighborhoods and hanging out in bars and restaurants that still retain something of their old proletarian atmosphere."
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Victor Mallet in FT, Populism Wave Threatens to Wash Away Elite Colleges.
"There is no other country that so purposefully creates an elite and gives them a title for life... It is a very incestuous system," he said. "It is the most powerful lobby in France... It is a monopoly and no one likes to give up a monopoly." Ena was founded after the second world war in 1945 precisely to promote "social mixing" and give less privileged students the chance to win senior government posts based on their merits. But over the decades the successful applicants have increasingly been drawn from the upper classes - 70 per cent at the lates count, compared with about 45 per cent in the 1950s.
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Thierry Baudet in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, Houellebecq's Unfinished Critique of Liberal Modernity.
Now this fundamental point which Houellebecq makes time and again deserves further
reflection, because it challenges the very fun damentals of both the contemporary “Left” and the “Right.” It challenges modern anthropology as such. Both the social-dem ocratic and the liberal wing of the modern political spectrum (re spectively advocating the welfare state and the free market) wish to maximize individual autonomy. Liberalism and socialism differ when it comes to the most effective way to achieve that objective, but they do not differ in the objective itself. They are both liberation movements; they both want the complete emancipation of the indi vidual. And both base their vision of society on the (unfounded but supposedly “self-evident”) principle that every individual enjoys certain “inalienable rights,” which by definition eclipse all other claims, and to which all other ties, loyalties, and connections must ultimately be subordinated. Over time, all such institutions that the individual requires to fully actualize a meaningful existence—such as a family and a connection to generations past and future, a nation, a tradition, perhaps a church—will weaken and eventually disappear. Today, even new life (in the womb) may be extinguished to avoid disturbing the individual’s freedom. In the Netherlands (where I live), suicide is facilitated to ensure that here, too, no constraints—such as the duty to care for your parents—are placed on the indi vidual.
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Christopher Caldwell in COMMENTARY, A Bellow from France.
Houellebecq, educated at the elite National Agronomic Institute, has a mastery of, and a curiosity about, the facts of science. He delights in them. There is a fussy statisticality about his writing: "The year 1970 saw a rapid growth in erotic consumption, despite the efforts of a still-vigilant sexual repression.... Naked breasts spread rapidly on the beaches of Southern France. In the space of a few months, the number of sex shops in Paris rose from 3 to 45." This is the texture of all Houellebecq's books. They ventriloquize or parody other genres - journalism (as in this quote), science writing, encyclopedias, travel guides, marketing pitches, and history. In an age of political correctness, this distancing in time and tone allowed Houellebecq to restore to the French novel its didactic or widom-imparting function. He (or his narrator) could say such things as: "That's one of the worst things about extreme beauty in young women: Only an experienced pickup artist, cynical and without scruples, thinks himself up to the task; so it is in general the rottenest men who win the treasure of their virginity, and this marks for such girls the first stage of a permanent debasement." This is the tone of the hardboiled French fiction associated with the sensualist aristocrat Henry de Montherlant and the detective writer Georges Simenon. Until Houellebecq came along, it had been decades since anyone used it.
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Thomas Howard in WSJ on David Kertzer's The Pope Who Would Be King and John O'Malley's Vatican I.
Although hailed as a reformer at first, Pius became a firm reactionary due to his experience of the revolutions of 1848. "The Pope Who Would Be King" focuses on just three critical years of Pius's papacy: 1848-50. After revolution engulfed Rome and led to the short-lived Republic of Rome, Pius was forced to flee the city in disguise and took refuge in the Neapolitan kingdom of Ferdinand II. He returned to Rome in 1850 with the help of the French, and in the wake of these events defined the controversial teaching of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854) and issued an encyclical accompanied by the "Syllabus of Errors" (1864), a sledgehammer of anti-modern invective that insisted that the papal office stood under no compulsion to "reconcile [itself]... to progress, liberalism and modern civilization."
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Isaac Reed in HEDGEHOG REVIEW, The King's Two Bodies and the Crisis of Liberal Modernity.
For Durkheim, in the good society, every individual has two bodies. Modernity as we actually know it fails at this ambition. Modern individualism had as its accompaniment a violent series of exclusions of entire categories of persons from the dignitas of having a second body, precisely because they were denied the equality with which all people, under the republican dispensation, were supposed to be endowed—by a divine creator or, later, by dint of “human nature.” And one is thus compelled to ask, at another crisis point in the arc of modernity, whether the ethereal quality to which Durkheim referred is not itself “equality,” and thus to ask further what cultural reconfigurations will be required such that this quality of individuals is indeed given power by “society”? Certainly, we need to investigate more closely the redistribution of the sacred in the era after the King’s Two Bodies. Doing so entails an understanding of established religion as a regulator of the distribution of the sacred—after all, who can deny the importance of Christianity to the mother of all American social movements, abolitionism?—but also entails a grappling with the way in which such dispensations, repeatedly occur outside of, and exceed in their resonance, churches and congregations, even to the point of opposition to religion itself.
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James Penrose in NEW CRITERION on A New World Begins - The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy Popkin.
What started as a debate about artistic freedom, however, quickly changed direction when Georges Clemenceau rose to defend the Terror by calling it inseparable from the Revolution. “Gentlemen,” he said, “whether we want or not, whether it pleases us or shocks us, the French Revolution is a bloc . . . from which we can separate nothing.” L’affaire Thermidor, as it was called, illuminated the issue that had divided historians since the start of Revolution: were the events, as Clemenceau seemed to be saying, simply a case of “on ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs”? Or was it, as Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, and Hippolyte Taine argued, a disaster for France? Three new books make their own contributions to this perpetual debate. In grappling with the Revolution’s central paradox, how hundreds of thousands of French citizens were slaughtered in the name of “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” Jeremy D. Popkin’s A New World Begins takes a warts-and-all approach, if only to emerge, marginally, on the side of the omelet. He describes France’s appalling difficulties prior to the Revolution before moving to the idealistic, often chaotic but increasingly repressive, efforts of a series of legislative bodies that led eventually to the Convention, Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, and its lethal agent, the Revolutionary Tribunal. Although Popkin understates matters by describing atrocities like the September Massacres, the Nantes mass drownings (“vertical deportations” to use its repulsive euphemism), the Lyon cannonades, and mob killings as merely “troubling,” his account of the Terror and the rise of Napoleon is compelling reading.
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Daniel Greenfield at frontpagemag.com, I Was a Stooge for a Communist Terror Group that Murdered Americans.
"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" Bernardine Dohrn gloated at a Weathermen war council. Dohrn and other members of the leftist group understood the horrifying murders as a radical act that normalized violence. And Dohrn, a Weatherman terrorist, saw violence as an inspirational tool for shattering the norms of society. That was why the Weathermen adopted the ‘fork salute’. The horrifying reality of the sorts of people that would do that is at odds with the media’s normalization of leftist radicals as principled activists reacting to racism and the Vietnam War. The radicals are routinely humanized and their victims are forgotten. History is entombed with the dead. And so The Tablet decided to give Jonah Raskin, who had participated in the Weathermen, and later promoted the hateful works of the violent Communist terror group, a forum for his fond memories. "I could wallow in nostalgia about my days with the Weather Underground in the early 1970s: at Coney Island with Bernardine Dohrn, eating Bill Ayers’ soufflés and Jeff Jones’ homemade breads," he begins. Dohrn’s fork celebration of the murder of a pregnant woman had taken place in 1969. But surely old Nazis also have fond memories of eating soufflés and homemade breads. Himmler’s wife probably made a mean ham sandwich. And the Manson family no doubt had some great chili. But outside of Neo-Nazi publications, they don’t get the space to share fond food and murder memories. Old Communist killers and their cohort however get ample space for their horrifying nostalgia.
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Roger Kimball in NEW CRITERION, Multiculturalism and the Anti-American Revolution.
As Samuel Huntington pointed out years ago, multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization…. It is basically an anti-Western ideology.” Quite right. The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. The “sensitivity” of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness. Multiculturalism is a moral intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of nescience and blighted “good intentions.”
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Glen Loury in CHRONICLE REVIEW, 'Affirmative Action Is Not About Equality. It's About Covering Ass.
Q: What do you see as being at stake in the Harvard case filed on behalf of Asian-American applicants? A: The story of Asian-American achievement in this country is extremely powerful, and a reflection of the openness of American institutions. Many of them are second-generation immigrants. You're going to pooh-pooh that? You're not going to recognize what that says about the country? If the Harvard case gets to the Supreme Court, and I assume it will, the legal ramifications will be significant. I should say that Peter Arcidiacono, a friend at Duke, was hired by the plaintiffs to do a brief. Eight or ten economists were asked to endorse the brief, and I was one of them. What it lays out is If you're African-American and you're in the top 20 percent of the applicant pool, you have a more than 50-percent chance of getting admitted to Harvard. If you're Asian-American and in the top 20 percent, you have a 5-percent chance of getting admitted. The disparity is huge. Harvard says the disparity can be accounted for by other measures, like student personality. To which I respond: If I can see African-American applicants with relatively high test scores but poor performance on these personality measures not be admitted, and I can see Asian-American applicants with relatively low test scores but high performance on these personality measures be admitted, I'll believe Harvard.
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Samuel Abrams in WSJ, Even More Liberal Than Professors.
The 12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators makes them the most left-leaning group on campus. In previous research, I found that academic faculty report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors. Incoming first-year students, by contrast, reported less than a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives, according to a 2016 finding by the Higher Education Research Institute. It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators.
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Shelby Steele in WSJ, Why the Left Is Consumed with Hate.
How did the American left - concieved to bring more compassion and justice to the world - become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when American finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. That acceptance changed American forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy. The genius of the left in the '60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itslef with it. Thus the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. This is how the left put itself in charge of American's moral legitimacy. The left, not the right - not conservatism - would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.
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Peter Wood & David Randall in WSJ, How Bad Is the Government's Science?.
For a 2015 article in Science, independent researchers tried to replicate 100 prominent psychology studies and succeeded with only 39% of them. Further from the spotlight is a lot of equally flawed research that is often more consequential. In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 "landmark" studies in hematology and oncology. The company could only replicate six. Are doctors basing serious decisions about medican treatment on the rest?
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Frank Pasquale in AMERICAN AFFAIRS, Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem.
Friedrich von Hayek, the preeminent theorist of laissez-faire, called the "knowledge problem" an insuperable barrier to central planning. Knowledge about the price of supplies and labor, and consumers' ability and willingness to pay, is so scattered and protean that even the wisest authorities cannot access all of it. No person knows everything about how goods and services in an economy should be priced. No central decision-maker can grasp the idiosyncratic preferences, values, and purchasing power of millions of individuals. That kind of knowledge, Hayek said, is distributed. In an era of artificial intelligence and mass surveillance, however, the possibility of central planning has reemerged - this time in the form of massive firms.
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Alberto Mingardi in WSJ, What Feeds Big Government Isn't Only Ideology.
Redistribution, Jasay maintained, is "addictive." The moment government starts giving out goodies, the mechanisms undergirding society and the economy change. Corporations and interest groups have a new incentive to work to win the state's favor. So businesses tend to shift resources and attention from engineers to lawyers, from serving customers to capturing decision makers. "The greater the reach of the state, the greater is the scope for profiting from its commands," Jasay wrote.
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Benjamin Schwarz at spiked-online.com, Marxists Against Wokeness.
In their discussions of cultural life and of societal trends, the organs of American educated opinion (the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, et al.); the faculty and students at our elite prep schools, colleges, and universities; and the members of the metropolitan class who read those publications and emerge from those institutions, frequently and increasingly assert, rather than argue, a set of vaguely interlocking propositions and slogans concerning (I’ll spare the scare quotes) white privilege, social justice, systemic racism, diversity, inclusivity, microaggressions, and the intellectual and cultural heritage — irrelevant at best, baneful at worst — of dead white males. Although both the champions and critics of these propositions characterise them (and the attendant attitudinising) as ‘political’, they are nothing of the sort. They are merely gestural. Lacking subtlety and depth, they amount to the intoning of shibboleths unsupported by reasoned, detailed, systematic analysis and argument. An orthodoxy has taken hold of intellectual, cultural and academic life, an orthodoxy nurtured and protected by an overweening and aggressive sense of virtue and righteous aggrievement that permits it to go unchallenged by the scepticism and bracing scrutiny that used to characterise — in fact to define — intellectual, cultural and academic life.
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Michael Lind in WSJ, Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite.
The class divide is most visible in politics. Between 2010 and 2018, whites with a college degree fell from 40% to 29% of Republican voters; Democrats now win an overwhelming share of the country's most highly educated counties. Similarly, in predicting a vote for Brexit in the U.K. in 2016, lower educational attainment was more important than race or ethnicity. Unwilling to admit that the center-left has been largely captured by the managerial elite, many pundits and academics on the left insist that mindless bigotry, rather than class interests, explains the attraction of many working-class voters to populist parties that promise to restrict trade and immigration. But it is just a rational for workers to prefer a seller's market in labor as it is for employers to prefer a buyer's market in labor.
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Matthew Crawford in HEDGEHOG REVIEW, Privilege.
Under the ancien régime, ennobled families were granted privilege in the literal sense; that is, they answered to a different set of laws (privy: private, leges: laws). In particular, they were exempt from taxation. Making matters worse, one could buy into this arrangement through the purchase of “venal offices,” which granted one the same immunities. One might become an inspector of cheeses, for example. It really was that ridiculous. Such positions proliferated as the fiscal crisis of the 1780s deepened; the sale of offices was a way for the crown to finance its present needs through the sacrifice of future tax revenue. Those who purchased offices were entered, along with their descendants, into the lists of noble families, permanently exempt from the tax burden. Meanwhile, one of many forms of taxation that peasants were subject to was the corvée (literally, “drudgery”): The men of a village would be rounded up to perform some public works project such as the building of a road, and for whatever reason this tended to happen during the harvest, just when their labor was most needed at home. It was a bitter injustice. Obviously, the whole system of privilege was parasitical. It was also quite different from what we mean today when we speak of privilege. According to current usage, it means something like good fortune.
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Alex Perez in Tablet, Philip Roth and American Manhood.
I read Roth and Carver and the rest of the problematic male crew because, above all other contemporary classifications, I identify as a man. The fact that I was born to Cuban parents and live in a predominately Hispanic community has always been secondary to my maleness, which is why I so strongly connected and continue to connect with unabashedly masculine writers who tackle classically heterosexual male concerns. Questions of creed or color were never at the forefront for me, because to be a young man, for better or worse, is to be ruled by your manhood, which is why my main concerns as a reader and a writer have always been boyhood and manhood and all the permutations in between. It is this unabashed masculinity, and not whiteness, that my woke-reader friends find repellent, which explains their disgust at the mere mention of any of the great masculine writers. In their eyes, it is a great sin, no doubt, to be white, but to be a traditionally masculine man has seemingly trumped even whiteness as America’s greater cultural sickness. A white person afflicted by their terrible, repellent whiteness might possibly even be rehabilitated, but a masculine young man, irrespective of race, is inherently toxic.
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Christopher DeMuth in WSJ, Trump and the Revolt of the 'Somewheres'.
The most educated, articulate, mobile and networked are well-positioned to influence the administrative state and the judiciary. They focus not on their own congressmen but on the agencies, and legislators from wherever, that specialize in the issues they follow. They think that policy should be determined by reason, science and expertise rdather than legislative horse-trading and nose-counting. They themselves work in meritocracies - business, finance, the professions, universities, media and think tanks. Meritocracy, not democracy, justifies their power and the means by which they exercise it.
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Kevin Roose in NYT, The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite.
In public, many executives wring their hands over the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers. They take part in panel discussions about building “human-centered A.I.” for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — Davos-speak for the corporate adoption of machine learning and other advanced technology — and talk about the need to provide a safety net for people who lose their jobs as a result of automation. But in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.
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Steve Sailer at takimag.com, Civil Rights Gone Wrong.
This is not to imply that Caldwell wants to go back to Jim Crow, just that, much as Burke did a better job in 1790 of forecasting the course of the French Revolution, he finds that the old Southern critics of the new order foresaw the implications of the civil rights revolution more clearly than did its advocates: Those who opposed the legislation proved wiser about its consequences than those who sponsored it…. A measure that had been intended to normalize American culture and cure the gothic paranoia of the Southern racial imagination has instead wound up nationalizing Southerners’ obsession with race and violence. Thus, by 2020: In the prevailing culture, whiteness was a lower spiritual state, associated with moral unfitness and shame, and it was hereditary. Whiteness was a “bloody heirloom,” as [Ta-Nehisi] Coates wrote…. Caldwell summarizes his thesis: …what had seemed in 1964 to be merely an ambitious reform revealed itself to have been something more. The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible…. Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail.... The author notes that the two parties now consisted of the winners (Democrats) and losers (Republicans) from the new quasi-constitution imposed in the 1960s: The Democrats were the party of those who benefited: not just racial minorities but sexual minorities, immigrants, women, government employees, lawyers—and all people sophisticated enough to be in a position to design, run, or analyze new systems. This collection of minorities could, with discipline, be bundled into an electoral majority, but that was not, strictly speaking, necessary…. Sympathetic regulators, judges, and attorneys took up the task of transferring as many prerogatives as possible from the majority to various minorities. In contrast: Republicans were the party…of yesterday’s entire political spectrum, of New Deal supporters and New Deal foes….
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Sadanand Dhume in WSJ, India's Ethnic Quotas Are a Cautionary Tale.
Supporters of reservation point to the progress India has made in fighting caste discrimination. Parliament long ago outlawed discrimination against Dalits. Two of them have served as president, including the incumbent, Ram Nath Kovind. Dalit leader Mayawati has served four times as chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh. So-called upper castes have largely surrendered their grip on political power. In social terms, urbanization has dissolved much day-to-day discrimination. In a city, nobody knows the caste of the person sitting beside him on a bus or serving him at a restaurant. And Hindu temples no longer bar Dalits from entering. Yet if the goal was to erase caste divisions in public life, India has failed spectacularly. Flip open a newspaper and you’ll see analysts judging the coming elections less in terms of policies than of caste combinations. In places such as Bihar’s Patna University even dormitories are organized along caste lines—not by the administration, but by students themselves. As the joke goes, Indians don’t cast their votes. They vote their caste.
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Robert Tombs in FT, The 'Damn Fools' Got It Right on Brexit.
Project fear talked up disaster so flamboyantly that almost anything will be an anticlimax. There may be some short-term disturbance. But Brexit is economically rational. The share of Britain’s exports accounted for by the EU fell by 11 percentage points between 2006 and 2016. The EU single market gives us limited help — especially in services — and may be harming our external trade by imposing high levels of regulation and cost. A rational aim would be “frictionless trade” with as much of the world as possible, not only with the EU. Remainer predominance in business lobbies clearly did not represent either the interests or the opinions of business as a whole. As Lord Melbourne once observed, on some questions the clever fellows get it wrong and the damn fools get it right. This is one of them.
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Mary O'Grady in WSJ, The U.N. and Human Trafficking.
In a 2018 class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Miami, Dr. Matos Rodriguez and three other Cuban doctors claim that 85% of the money went to Havana via the Pan American Health Organization, or PAHO, which acted as the go-between. By gaining PAHO’s cooperation, Brazil’s then-President Dilma Rousseff was able to conceal the illegal arrangement from the Brazilian Congress, other federal institutions and the international community, the suit alleges. PAHO is a United Nations outfit, and member countries pay its annual budget, with the U.S. providing more than half. But the lawsuit claims that in its secret agreement with Cuba, the organization was also taking a 5% cut of the doctors’ salaries as they passed through Washington.
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Jose de Cordoba & Juan Montes in WSJ, Mexico's 'Crisis of Civilization': 250,000 Dead. 37,400 Missing.
Her son, who sold CDs by a gas station, was kidnapped in 2014. Three years later to the day, she and the other mothers of the search group dug up his remains. “I felt his presence,” she said, remembering the day and breaking out in tears. “I wanted to find him alive, but at least I found him.” Some 37,000 people in Mexico are categorized as “missing” by the government. The vast majority are believed to be dead, victims of the country’s spiraling violence that has claimed more than 250,000 lives since 2006. The country’s murder rate has more than doubled to 26 per 100,000 residents, five times the U.S. figure. Because the missing aren’t counted as part of the country’s official murder tally, it is likely Mexico’s rate itself is higher. The killing and the number of missing grow each year. Last year, 5,500 people disappeared, up from 3,400 in 2015. Mexico’s murders are up another 18% through September this year.
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Robin Harding in FT, Abe Attacked over Japan's 'Stealth Immigration' Policy.
Mr Tamaki’s comments add to growing controversy over immigration in Japan as policymakers have been under pressure to open up to migrants in a country that has long been homogenous and closed. The population of foreign workers in Japan has soared in recent years — up 18 per cent in 2017 to 1.28m — but the majority are students or “trainees” whose visas make it impossible to stay in the country for the long term.Mr Tamaki called for measures to provide Japanese language training, limit migration if it threatens employment for native workers and to guarantee that migrants receive the same pay and conditions as natives.“It’d be better to admit up front this is immigration, follow a sensible immigration policy, and avoid the kind of problems we’ve seen in Europe and the US,” he said.
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Filipe Fernandez-Armesto in WSJ on A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green.
Mr. Green helps us understand how the value of indigenous capital dwindled. West
Africa "lost out in the accrual of surplus value," he writes, glutted with Luandan shell-currency and Brazilian gold, while "enslaved persons became money." Instead of enriching African economies, monetization and trade favored "inequality" on local and global scales. The same processes help explain, as Mr. Green argues, the eclipse of native polities, facilitating European colonialism and even prefiguring Africans' "suspicion" of centralized states today.
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Alex Colville in SPECTATOR on The Golden Rhinoceros - Histories of the African Middle Ages by Francois-Xavier Faiuvelle.
He places the arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the story, as a rude interruption of what was in fact a golden age of African civilization. But even if Fort Jesus and other imperial relics linger on, little remains today to show what had made the Portuguese covet Mombasa so much in the first place. Long vanished are the palaces and mosques built entirely of coral which attracted merchants from across the Indian Ocean, swapping Persian spices, Venetian glass and Chinese porcelain for the gold and slaves which mysteriously arrived from the continent's interior.
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Gunther Orth at qantara.de on And God Created Fear - A Psychogram of the Arab Soul by Burkhard Hofmann.
A phenomenon that is widespread in the Gulf countries is, for example, what the author refers to as "Nanny syndrome": parents delegate the care of their small children to nannies, who themselves are suffering as a result of the separation from the children they have left behind in their native countries. This prevents them from being able to offer any emotional closeness. As a result, economic dependency generates "life-conditioning feelings of isolation in both mothers and their children on both sides of the Indian Ocean". The resulting "weak self fails when confronted with reality" in adult years. However, even in those cases where the mother is available, children often lack a close relationship with their father, either because he is rarely at home or because he has entered into a second marriage – another trauma that Hofmann frequently encounters in his patients. According to Hofmann, in many cases, the Arab father feels that his only duty as a parent is to introduce his son to the Muslim faith, thereby referring him to "the image of a distance God", only to then turn away emotionally from the child once again. In this way, a close relationship with the father remains an unfulfilled desire. In addition, the religious taboo of children rebelling against their parents ensures that those individuals who do tend to blame themselves, or to hate those who have been lucky enough to experience such affection.
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James Robins in SPECTATOR on The Thirty-Year Genocide - Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities 1894-1924.
An impenetrable cultish mythos envelops him. Even for Istanbul’s young cosmopolitans, any word against Kemal spurs a visceral reaction. Recep Erdogan, the current president, whose politics are anathema to Kemalist ideology, still has to invoke him for the purposes of propaganda. To an American intelligence officer who met the man in the fraught summer of 1921, however, Kemal was a ‘clever, ugly customer,’ with the look of ‘a very superior waiter’. It’s little wonder that an American would view Kemal in such a way. His nationalist movement was waging a quasi-guerrilla insurgency against the victors of the first world war, who sought to carve up the moribund, defeated Ottoman empire. In the process, Kemal completed what his predecessors had already begun: the definitive slaughter and removal of the empire’s remaining Christian population: Pontic and Ionian Greeks, Assyrians and, of course, Armenians. In their expansive and detailed new volume The Thirty-Year Genocide the historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi depart from well-established accounts of the Armenian genocide which often consign earlier and later frenzies of slaying to introductions and conclusions. They roll three crimes into one. First, the Hamidian Terror (1894–96) under the sclerotic rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Secondly, the obliteration carried out by the formerly liberal Committee of Union and Progress (1914–18). And finally, the Kemalist ‘cleansing’ campaigns during and after the war of independence (1919–24).
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Adam Phillips in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Confessions - A New Translations by Augustine.
The perplexities of male adolscence, its urgencies and its ecstasies, are what makes Augustine's transformation into a man of God at once so confounding and so inevitable. He knew what he was giving up, and could acknowledge how little he could know about what he was giving it up for; and it is clearly this drama of faith, its improbable necessity, that gets to him. In the secular language of appetite and gratification that... Confessions plays on, and that can make Confessions sound so contemporary, the true struggle is to find a satisfactrory object of desire: to find the right thing to want and the right way of wanting it.
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Christopher Kelly in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on The Last Pagan Emperor - Julian the Apostate and the War Against Christianity.
Above all, Julian set out to theologise paganism. He offered (to take one example) the
following explanation of the relationship between Helios and the Supreme Deity: the One who 'reveals to all existence, beauty, perfection, wholeness and irresistible power, because of the primal substance that abides in it, produced... Helios the most mighty god, proceeding from itself and in all things like unto itself.' This exegesis runs parallel to the formulations developed by three hundred Christian bishops convened, at the prompting of the emperor Constantine, in 325 at Nicea (modern Iznik, just south of Istanbul). Their propositions were crystallized in the Nicene Creed, which remains the cornerstone of Christian belief....
Obituaries of the Issue
Maceo Woods (1932-2020)
His breakthrough came in the mid-1950s with his recording of “Amazing Grace” on Vee-Jay Records, where he became a house organist. “‘Amazing Grace’ went on to become the best-selling gospel instrumental of all time, reportedly selling 200,000 copies in its first year of release,” according to Robert M. Marovich, founder of the Journal of Gospel Music, host of the WLUW radio show “Gospel Memories” and author of “A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music.” “Amazing Grace” continues to sell, as do other classics by his choir, such as “Jesus Can Work it Out,” and “Hello Sunshine.” “His music has no expiration date,” said WVON radio host Pam Morris-Walton. Pastor Woods, whose church is at 47th and Prairie, shared friendships and concert stages with legends who made Chicago a center of gospel, including the Barrett Sisters, the Caravans, the Rev. James Cleveland, the Staple Singers and Mahalia Jackson. He appeared at the Apollo Theater and Madison Square Garden.Clay Evans (1925-2019)
“When Dr. King decided to use Chicago as a northern expansion of the civil rights movement, Rev. Clay Evans had to endure some political fallout” for his support, said funeral director Spencer Leak Sr. “The word had gone out [from City Hall] that ministers should not invite Dr. King to their churches.” Rev. Evans embraced him and worked with him, and as a result, it became difficult for him to get construction work done on his church, Leak said. Code violations were alleged, and “Building permits were very difficult to obtain because of his support for Dr. King,” he said. In 1964, the pastor and Leak’s father, A.R. Leak, helped lead a march of thousands to desegregate racially divided Oak Woods Cemetery on the South Side. Over the years, countless politicians visited his church to speak to the congregation and cultivate voters. In 1995, Daley’s son, Richard M. Daley, received key support when Rev. Evans backed his mayoral reelection bid over an African American candidate, Joseph E. Gardner. “He migrated to Chicago in June 1945, at age 20, with plans to be an undertaker, but he could not afford the tuition fee to attend mortuary school,” said Marovich, author of “A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music.” “Instead, he worked at a pickle factory, as a window-washer, as a pie truck driver, then found work at the Brass Rail, a local lounge, and dreamed of a future as a big band singer.” He sang with various church choirs and wrote gospel songs, including “By and By,” a 1950s hit for the Davis Sisters, according to Marovich, host of the Gospel Memories radio show on WLUW 88.7 FM. After founding his church, Rev. Evans performed on many of his choir’s records.Steve Weber (1942-2020)
Steven P. Weber was born in Philadelphia on June 22, 1943, and grew up with his mother in Buckingham, Pa. There he met Robin Remaily, who would become a longtime member of the Holy Modal Rounders, and Michael Hurley, a singer-songwriter and illustrator who would also have a long association with the group. Information on survivors was not immediately available. “The Holy Modal Rounders … Bound to Lose,” a 2006 documentary by Sam Wainwright Douglas and Paul Lovelace, portrays Mr. Weber’s time on the West Coast, starting in the early 1970s, as being plagued by drug and alcohol abuse. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Weber said in the film, he had decided to return home to Pennsylvania after waking up to find himself cradling a half-gallon bottle of vodka. Mr. Weber and Mr. Stampfel performed in 1996 at the Bottom Line in New York, which kicked off a series of reunion appearances and led to a new album, “Too Much Fun,” in 1999. But the film captures the two men still bickering onstage and in strained rehearsals, and it ends with Mr. Weber failing to appear at a 40th-anniversary show in 2003. Mr. Stampfel said he had not spoken to him since. In “Always in Trouble,” the book about the ESP label, Mr. Weber said he had failed to appear because he had felt deceived by the filmmakers and disappointed that the film paid so little attention to the Portland incarnation of the Holy Modal Rounders that he led starting in the early 1970s. He was asked what made the Holy Modal Rounders different from other folk groups. He noted that other musicians were interested in singing about social reform. “We took more of a raucous and zany detour,” he said.
Thanks to Joseph Pope, Steve Beeho, Mark Carducci, Mike Carducci, Andy Schwartz, Roger Trilling, Jane Schuman...
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