Reviews and News:
Thomas Nagel reviews Richard English’s Does Terrorism Work? A History: “What struck me on reading this book is how delusional these movements are, how little understanding they have of the balance of forces, the motives of their opponents and the political context in which they are operating. In this respect, it is excessively charitable to describe them as rational agents. True, they are employing violent means which they believe will induce their opponents to give up, but that belief is plainly irrational, and in any event false, as shown by the results.”
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How old is young Hamlet?
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The Great Fire of London’s silver lining: “In the space of a tumultuous 12 months England endured the devastation of plague, the most humiliating of naval defeats at the hands of the Dutch, and the catastrophe of a Great Fire which transformed its capital city forever. Where there was a commonly held view, espoused by humble parish clerks and vociferous dissenters like George Fox alike, that the cataclysms revealed God’s wrathful judgment upon a sinful nation, there were others who saw in catastrophe an opportunity to build afresh: Andrew Marvell repurposed satire in his ‘Advice to a Painter’ poems; Christopher Wren reimagined the very basis of London itself.”
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The Patricia Hearst kidnapping revisited: “As almost anyone over age fifty and almost no one under age thirty will remember, on February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by a small, strange group that called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA was less an army than a club; it consisted of one black man and fewer than a dozen young white men and women; its most cogently stated aim was to bring “death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” At the time of her kidnapping, Hearst was nineteen years old. A granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the real-life Citizen Kane and founder of today’s multibillion-dollar Hearst Company, Patricia was heiress to a pedigree unique in American history. She had grown up wanting for nothing, though she was apparently an indifferent student at the series of elite girls’ schools she attended. She was, it turned out, a better student of the SLA. Just two months after vanishing, Hearst reappeared alongside her captors, heavily armed, on the security cameras of San Francisco’s Hibernia Bank.”
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Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream cities. “Like Broadacre, most of Wright’s urban ideas never moved passed the conceptual stage. Some—such as his proposed Point Park Complex in Pittsburgh and his Baghdad Civic Center designs—achieved modest recognition; others are almost unknown. In Levine’s book, they are collected and examined in a single monograph for the first time.”
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In praise of manuscripts: “In his introduction, de Hamel explains that the book was initially going to be called ‘Interviews with Manuscripts’, and compares its individual chapters to celebrity interviews. Intriguingly, only one chapter is devoted to a true celebrity, the Book of Kells, while other famous manuscripts, such as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, do not make the cut. Be that as it may, these plainspoken and even chatty ‘interviews’ are organised in straightforward chronological order, ranging across just over nine centuries, and cover manuscripts made in Italy, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Germany and England. Each chapter can naturally be read as an independent case study, but they are planned as an ensemble and cumulatively evoke a whole lost world in all its quirky particularity.”
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Essay of the Day:
In a review of Jörg Baberowski’s Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror, Gary Saul Morson examines the role that Marxism-Leninism played in the Soviet Union’s twenty million state-sanctioned murders:
“Western public opinion has never come to terms with the crimes of Communism. Every school child knows about the Holocaust, Apartheid, and American slavery, as they should. But Pol Pot’s murder of a quarter of Cambodia’s population has not dimmed academic enthusiasm for the Marxism his henchmen studied in Paris. Neither the Chinese Cultural Revolution nor the Great Purges seem to have cast a shadow on the leftists who apologized for them. Quite the contrary, university classes typically blame the Cold War on American ‘paranoia’ about communism and still picture Bolsheviks as idealists in too great a hurry. Being leftwing means never having to say you’re sorry.
“In 1997 Stéphane Courtois published (in French) The Black Book of Communism, an anthology in which experts document, country by country, how many people Marxist–Leninists killed. With suitable academic equanimity, contributors ask whether the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians, or the deportation of all Chechens to central Asia that took the lives of one person in three, qualifies as ‘genocide.’ The only sign of real emotional urgency occurs in Courtois’s introduction, which breaks intellectual taboos by drawing parallels with Nazism, questioning Socialists’ frequent alliances with Communists, and, above all, wondering why intellectuals continue to apologize for Communist murders.
“Some figures speak for themselves. The volume’s scholars estimate twenty million deaths in the ussr, sixty-five million in China, two million each in Cambodia and North Korea, 1.7 million in Mengistu’s Ethiopia and other African countries, and so on, to a total of about one hundred million. (Eerily, the chief revolutionary in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed predicts that the cost of perfect equality will be ‘a hundred million heads.’) So far as I can tell, these estimates are understatements. For example, the most authoritative study of Stalin’s war against the peasantry in the early 1930s, Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, arrives at a figure twice the one in this volume. The difference between the two estimates—the margin of error—equals the number of Jews killed by the Nazis.
“By contrast, Nazi deaths are estimated at twenty-five million. Of course numbers aren’t everything, but one might imagine that it would be reasonable to compare the two systems. In intellectual circles, however, such comparisons taint not Communists, but the person who makes them.
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“Baberowski believes that no ideas ever motivate violence. ‘To men of violence . . . ideas are only a means of legitimizing their lust for murder to those for whom violence is not a natural course of action. Neither Stalin nor Yezhov were guided by Marxism or its promises when they had people arrested, tortured, and killed. . . . It had absolutely nothing to do with the writings of European Marxism.’ For Baberowski, ideas are not just a relatively minor factor, they have ‘absolutely nothing’ to do with what happens. ‘Reasons and legitimizations play absolutely no role,’ he insists elsewhere; they are just means of coping with meaningless violence. Since these statements pertain to all violence anywhere, they cannot be derived from the evidence, but represent an advance philosophical commitment.
“Then what was the cause of all these killings? Baberowski offers several incompatible explanations, among which are Stalin’s upbringing in a culture steeped in ‘male violence’ and a celebration of ‘robber bands,’ along with an ethic of loyalty and honor resembling that of the Mafia. ‘Anyone who was disloyal forfeited his honor because disloyalty was a betrayal of the most important principle of all—the unwavering friendship between men. . . . Brotherhood and the covenant of loyalty became the ideals of the Stalinist order.’ And yet Baberowski also repeatedly insists that if there was one thing that could not be preserved under Stalinism it was loyalty. Even among Politburo members, everyone was ready to denounce his best friend. In fact, such mistrust was itself regarded as a positive good. Bukharin, Baberowski tells us, insisted that all good communists needed to denounce their neighbors. ‘We must now all become agents of the Cheka [the first name for the secret police],’ he wrote. Across the Soviet Union, school children were taught to imitate Pavel Morozov, a boy who denounced his own parents.”
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Image of the Day: Man of War
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Poem: Wendy Videlock, “Wherever There’s a Rabbit”
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