Feeding The Enemy

The American troops who landed in Russia to help reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917 did little to change history, but cast as imperialist villains, they were useful to Soviet propagandists charged with rewriting it. In “The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin,” Douglas Smith tells the remarkable tale of a different, largely forgotten yet infinitely more effective intervention.

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The importance of being Ernst

The more you study history, the less you know. Straight paths turn into labyrinths. So it is that, in the Paris journals of Ernst Jünger (now translated into English by Thomas and Abby Hansen as A German Officer in Occupied Paris), we learn that in July 1942 Jünger, who had previously swapped books with a fellow author by the name of Hitler, dropped in on a future Stalin Prize winner, one Pablo Picasso. The artist was an exile, Jünger a captain in the Wehrmacht, an occupier. The meeting passed off agreeably. Picasso declared that the two of them “would be able to negotiate peace over the course of [that] afternoon.”

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First Persons Singular

It is both satisfying and subversive that Herman Koch, the author of The Ditch, was, if not exactly expelled, at least “encouraged to leave” his Montessori school in Amsterdam. While any failed attempt at “child-centered” education will warm a chilly reactionary heart, young Koch’s inability to summon up enough self-discipline to survive indiscipline must be regarded as a disappointing rejection of the conscientiousness the Dutch have traditionally, if not always correctly, been thought to possess.

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Gray's Anatomy

The British philosopher John Gray has been on the Left, and he has been on the Right. More recently, he has settled into the role of a brilliant, provocative, and contrarian curmudgeon, known for an aphoristic style rare in a discipline where opacity is often confused with erudition.

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Confessions of a Revolutionary

Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, and the 20th century would have been a better century had it been more influential still. Yet until now, the book could only be read at one remove, in editions based on a hasty English translation of a German text presumed lost in the confusion of wartime.

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Crass Capital

In an age when cultural appropriation is “problematic,” the EU is a repeat offender. Not content with stealing a continent’s name and rewriting its history, the engineers of “ever closer union” have spent years squeezing centuries of art into a “European” (as they abuse that term) straitjacket, a maneuver anticipated by General de Gaulle during a press conference over half a century ago. Dante, Goethe, and Chateaubriand, he agreed, “belonged to Europe” insofar as they were Italian, German, and French. But they would not have done much for Europe had they lacked a nationality and written in some sort of “harmonized Esperanto or” — and here de Gaulle reinforced mockery with erudition — “Volapük.” 

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Agencies of disruption

Heidi Tworek’s shrewd, erudite and timely News from Germany is a work of historical analysis that can also be read as a corrective to the dangerous hysteria over the information games—fake news and all the rest—currently being played over the internet. The tale she tells is, in no small part, an account of how a nation that understood more clearly than most how the dissemination of news could be used as a device to project power beyond its borders tried to break its rivals’ (accidental) dominance in this area. For more than half a century, this was, argues Tworek, an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia, an obsession for “an astonishing array of German politicians, industrialists, military leaders and journalists”.

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Such, Such Were the Joys

Britain’s “public,” which is to say private, schools have been around since at least the 14th century. The controversy over their place in the country’s life sometimes seems to have been raging for almost as long, although it really only took off a couple hundred years ago, the day before yesterday in a land of ancient grievances.

“Gilded Youth,” James Brooke-Smith ’s addition to the sizeable canon of unflattering accounts of these curious establishments, has plenty of room for familiar complaints: bullying, sadism, sexual abuse, emotional repression, entrenching “the privilege of the wealthy few,” and so on. But even those exhausted with this well-worn topic may be intrigued by Mr. Brooke-Smith’s examination of the surprisingly complex history of public school dissent—there were some inmates who struck back against what they saw as asylums.

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Myths, legends & monsters

There’s a passage in Cold Calls (2005), the final volume in Christopher Logue’s magnificent and, fittingly, never-completed “account” of the Iliad, in which the British poet describes Ajax and Nestor calling on Achilles:

They find him, with guitar,

Singing of Gilgamesh.

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Bear with a sore head

Keir Giles: Moscow Rules - What Drives Russia to confront the west

Standpoint, March 28, 2019

Archangel, Russia, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

Archangel, Russia, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

The key message underlying Keir Giles’s trenchant, persuasive and alarming Moscow Rules is that the idea of Russia as a part of the European family is an illusion. In fewer than 200 pages he pulls that notion to pieces and then suggests what the West’s policy towards Moscow should look like if it is to be guided by reality rather than hopes or a pretty dream.

Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, explains how Westerners are misled by geography (a portion of Russia is, after all, in Europe), language (Russians may use the same political terminology as their counterparts in the West, but they tend to mean very different things by it), and even appearance: “[T]he majority of [Russians] are outwardly indistinguishable from white members of the Euro-Atlantic community.” The misunderstanding may be deepened by, as Giles notes, the high visibility of a “Westernised” intelligentsia, whose views are not representative of the country as a whole. And there’s something else that I’d add to the pile of deceptive resemblances: The civilisations of both Russia and the West owe much to Christianity. Even the Soviet rejection of religion (based, in no small part, on the writings of a German, which is to say, a Western, philosopher) can be reread as another of the millenarian explosions that have long scarred European history. The distance between Anabaptist Münster and revolutionary Petrograd is not so very far.

The belief, against a great deal of evidence (a good selection of it neatly sketched out in this book), in the essential similarities between Russia and the West is helped, as Giles points out, from the way that “Western minds, especially liberal educated ones, rebel against national stereotypes. The taint of orientalism causes them to reject explanations for personal or national behaviours that are based on psychological constructs or worldviews that are specific to a given people or culture. The notion that a nation will behave in a given way because that is how it has always done is a hard sell in academic circles.”

But “the taint of orientalism” is not the only reason for Western reluctance to accept Russia for what it is. Elsewhere, Giles refers to the manner in which the West “and, in particular, Western Europe, [has] moved on to a postnationalist view of international relations”. That’s true enough, but the blandness of the wording (“moved on”) understates the extent to which this shift is based on a quasi-religious faith in “progress”, rather than any understanding of human nature or, beyond a cosy corner of Europe, how much of the world actually still works.

Russia’s perception of itself is, Giles maintains, “far from unique — plenty of nations have convinced themselves of their special destiny and birthright of leadership”. But, even if the West has now adopted a different interpretation of what that means, Russia has not (and, nor, I suspect, has, China, say, or India). Russia’s claim to great power status may be considerably less convincing than it was in Soviet or imperial times, but the West still needs to deal with its consequences, which can be summarised as a demand for “respect”. In this context that is a more loaded term, as Giles warns, than the English word implies. It conveys a sense that Russia should be feared too. Russia wants to be deferred to both globally (Barack Obama’s jibe that it was a “regional power” stung) and also with regard to its supposed right to control a sphere of influence in its neighbourhood.

And the way that Russia sees itself cannot, Giles argues, be wished away, or blamed on propaganda or, for that matter, on Vladimir Putin. Putin is “enacting, rather than inventing” long-term ambitions which resonate with “ordinary” Russians in a way that should not be underestimated (Giles is clearly not optimistic that Putin’s departure would mean a change for the better). “What has changed” and “dramatically” so is Russia’s “capability to achieve these ambitions”.

That’s not a comforting thought, given Russia’s resentment over the humiliations of the 1990s, its zero sum approach to international relations (something also well covered in this book), and, if necessary, its willingness to resort to violence. The best response, Giles asserts, is to accept that there are profound differences between Russia and the West that cannot be “reset” away, and then find a method to manage them. This will have to include defining “the boundaries of acceptable behaviour” and then policing them, a task that will require the West both to stick more closely together and to increase spending on the various varieties of hard power required to back up its stance.

With President Trump still prone to thinking aloud about Nato and too many European nations still unprepared to take their own defence seriously, that may be a tall order. Under the circumstances, sending a few copies of this book to Berlin and Washington DC would be a good plan.