Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

The Greatest Danger — Joanna Macy

 

The Greatest Danger

by Joanna Macy

Yes! Magazine

 

From https://www.joannamacy.net:

Joanna Macy, Ph.D., author and teacher, is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with learnings from six decades of activism. 

Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her thirteen books, which include three volumes of poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke with translation and commentary.

As the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects, Joanna has created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.

Based in Berkeley, California, close to her children and grandchildren, Joanna has spent many years in other lands and cultures, viewing movements for social change and exploring their roots in religious thought and practice.

 

How do we live with the fact that we are destroying our world? What do we make of the loss of glaciers, the melting Arctic, island nations swamped by the sea, widening deserts, and drying farmlands?

Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.

Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response. For psychic numbing impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more crucial uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.

Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh was asked, “what do we most need to do to save our world?” His answer was this: “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.”

 

Cracking the Shell

How do we confront what we scarcely dare to think? How do we face our grief, fear, and rage without “going to pieces?”

It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and creative, not only for the person, but for the society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality.

What disintegrates in periods of rapid transformation is not the self, but its defenses and assumptions. Self-protection restricts vision and movement like a suit of armor, making it harder to adapt. Going to pieces, however uncomfortable, can open us up to new perceptions, new data, and new responses.

Speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.

In our culture, despair is feared and resisted because it represents a loss of control. We’re ashamed of it and dodge it by demanding instant solutions to problems. We seek the quick fix. This cultural habit obscures our perceptions and fosters a dangerous innocence of the real world.

Acknowledging despair, on the other hand, involves nothing more mysterious than telling the truth about what we see and know and feel is happening to our world. When corporate-controlled media keep the public in the dark, and power-holders manipulate events to create a climate of fear and obedience, truth-telling is like oxygen. It enlivens and returns us to health and vigor.

 

Belonging to All Life

Sharing what is in our heart brings a welcome shift in identity, as we recognize that the anger, grief, and fear we feel for our world are not reducible to concerns for our individual welfare or even survival. Our concerns are far larger than our own private needs and wants. Pain for the world—the outrage and the sorrow—breaks us open to a larger sense of who we are. It is a doorway to the realization of our mutual belonging in the web of life.

Many of us fear that confrontation with despair will bring loneliness and isolation. On the contrary, in letting go of old defenses, we find truer community. And in community, we learn to trust our inner responses to our world—and find our power.

You are not alone! We are part of a vast, global movement: the epochal transition from empire to Earth community. This is the Great Turning. And the excitement, the alarm, even the overwhelm we feel, are all part of our waking up to this collective adventure.

As in any true adventure, there is risk and uncertainty. Our corporate economy is destroying both itself and the natural world. Its effect on living systems is what David Korten calls the Great Unraveling. It is happening at the same time as the Great Turning, and we cannot know which way the story will end.

 

Great Uncertainty

Let’s drop the notion that we can manage our planet for our own comfort and profit—or even that we can now be its ultimate redeemers. It is a delusion. Let’s accept, in its place, the radical uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival.

In primal societies, adolescents go through rites of passage, where confronting their own mortality is a gateway to maturity. In analogous ways, climate change calls us to recognize our own mortality as a species. With the gift of uncertainty, we can grow up and accept the rights and responsibility of planetary adulthood. Then we know fully that we belong, inextricably, to the web of life, and we can serve it, and let its strength flow through us.

Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. Intention is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow. Our intention and resolve can save us from getting lost in grief.

During a recent visit to Kentucky, I learned what is happening to the landscape and culture of Appalachia: how coal companies use dynamite to pulverize everything above the underground seams of coal; how bulldozers and dragline machines 20-stories high push away the “overburden” of woodlands and top soil, filling the valleys. I saw how activists there are held steady by sheer intention. Though the nation seems oblivious to this tragedy, these men and women persist in the vision that Appalachia can, in part, be saved and that future generations may know slopes of sweet gum, sassafras, magnolia, the stirrings of bobcat and coon, and, in the hollows, the music of fiddle and fresh flowing streams. They seem to know—and, when we let down our guard, we too know—that we are living parts of the living body of Earth.

This is the gift of the Great Turning. When we open our eyes to what is happening, even when it breaks our hearts, we discover our true size; for our heart, when it breaks open, can hold the whole universe. We discover how speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity, with our neighbors and all that lives, is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.

When we stop distracting ourselves by trying to figure the chances of success or failure, our minds and hearts are liberated into the present moment. This moment then becomes alive, charged with possibilities, as we realize how lucky we are to be alive now, to take part in this planetary adventure.

 

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Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Quiet"

I read Neruda's "Keeping Quiet" to our meditation group this past Saturday morning.

It is a beautiful reflection on the deeply engaging practice of stillness.

I've been reflecting lately on a collection of related issues, including the differences and similarities of meditating alone and meditating with a group of friends; the contrasting experiences of speaking and listening to another person, in a dyad and in a group; between moving and stillness, walking and running, doing and being, indifference and engagement, coming and going, happiness* and sadness, happiness and joy**; the mysteries of living, dying and death. There is, of course, diversity in each of those variables (the last none of us know), even moment-by-moment changes in short time spans. To string such qualities of experience together as I have done here is bewildering. Counting to twelve helps, as in meditation we may count our breaths, usually one to ten—then we start over again.

 

* See Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006)

** See David Brooks, "The Difference Between Happiness and Joy," The New York Times, May 7, 2019.

 

 

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

 

                        — Pablo Neruda

 

Amos Oz dies at 79

Amos Oz, one of my favorite Israeli authors (alongside David Grossman, the poet Yehuda Amachi, A. B. Yehoshua), peace activist, memoirist, novelist extrordinaire, died yesterday in his sleep, of cancer, at his home in Tel Aviv. He was 79, just a month younger than me. I admired his writing and his activism: his tenacious devotion to a two-state solution for Jews and Palestinians in Israel. 

I think the last of his books I read was his novel Judas (2016), a complex and moving story, and before that his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), more beautifully told and different in many respects, but which I've always thought, not only in its title, a companion to my own A Love in Shadow (1978).

Emily Barton concludes her nuanced review of Oz's Judas, "The novel grapples with the humanity of Jesus; the basis of anti-Semitism in particular and prejudice in general; the hope for eventual peace in the state of Israel; love. Oz pitches the book’s heartbreak and humanism perfectly from first page to last, as befits a writer who understands how vital a political role a novelist can play."

The interview that follows—that appeared in The New York Times a couple of years ago, toward the end of Barack Obama's presidency— conveys, in Amos Oz's own words, a good deal of why I treasure his writing, and why his death saddens me. The questions are pretty standard interview-an-author style. The answers reveal a truly gifted and deeply thoughtful man.

 

 

______________________________________

 

 

Tell us about some of your favorite writers.

You see, I don’t have a bookshelf with my eternal beloved ones on it. They come and go. A few of them come more often than the others: Chekhov, Cervantes, Faulkner, Agnon, Brener, Yizhar, Alterman, Bialik, Amichai, Lampedusa’s “Il Gattopardo,” Kafka and Borges, sometimes Thomas Mann and sometimes Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

The short answer is that when a work of literature suddenly makes the very familiar unfamiliar to me, or just the opposite, when a work of literature makes the unfamiliar almost intimately familiar, I am moved (moved to tears, or smiles, or anger, or gratitude, or many other, different, kinds of excitement).

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

Omnivorous, I read everything. Anything at all. I read the user’s manual of the electric heater, I read novels that were way above my grasp, I read poetry which could only offer me the music of its language while the meaning was still far from me. I read newspapers and magazines of all sorts, leaflets, ads, political manifestoes, dirty magazines, comics. Anything at all.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

Almost every good book changes me in a small way. But I may have not gathered the courage to send an early story to a literary editor were it not for what I learned from Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” and from Agnon’s “In the Prime of Her Life” and from M. Y. Berdyczewski’s short stories. “Winesburg, Ohio” taught me that sometimes the more provincial a story is, the more universal it may become. I wrote about these early literary epiphanies in “A Tale of Love and Darkness.”

What author, living or dead, would you most like to meet, and what would you like to know?

I would very much wish to spend half an hour with Anton Chekhov. I would buy him a drink. I would not discuss literary issues with him, not even bother to interview him or ask him for some useful tips, just chat about people. Even gossip with him. I love Chekhov’s unique blend of misanthropy and compassion. (And gossip — which is a mixture of both — is, after all, a distant cousin of stories and novels, although they don’t say hello to each other in the street, as novels and stories are embarrassed by this member of their family.)

What books are currently on your night stand?

A few weeks ago a beloved friend and colleague, the Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua lost his wife to an illness. Rivka Yehoshua was a leading psychoanalyst, and both of them were close friends for more than five decades. Thirty years ago, Yehoshua published “Five Seasons,” a wonderful novel about a delicate man losing his wife in the prime of their lives. “Five Seasons” describes the first year of the protagonist’s life as a widower. I am rereading it now with awe, in tears, and with admiration. I can’t help shuddering at the thought that rather often life imitates literature.

What are a few of the last great books you read?

I read “Lenin’s Kisses,” a fierce, funny, painful and playful novel by a great Chinese writer, Yan Lianke. It is much more than just a poignant, daring political parody: It is also a subtle study of evil and stupidity, misery and compassion. I reread Anita Shapira’s biography of David Ben-Gurion rediscovering the greatness of this founding father of Israel who, as early as the beginning of the 1930s, recognized the rise of Palestinian nationalism and its fierce resentment toward Zionism, and conducted a series of painstaking meetings with Palestinian leaders, trying in vain to formulate a far-reaching compromise between two legitimate national movements, both rightly claiming the same tiny homeland.

Who are some under-appreciated or overlooked authors? Are there Israeli writers who aren’t as widely translated as they should be whom you’d recommend in particular?

Two great Israeli writers, S. Yizhar and Yehoshua Kenaz, are hardly known outside the realm of Hebrew. Yizhar’s work has an almost Joycean quality about it, while Kenaz at his heights makes you think of Marcel Proust.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

Recently, I’ve developed a growing addiction to well-written memoirs and biographies, whether they relate to artists, statesmen or failed eccentrics: “Stalin,” by Simon Sebag Montefiore; “Kafka,” by Reiner Stach; “Nikolai Gogol,” by Nabokov.

Do you have a favorite fictional hero or heroine? A favorite antihero or villain?

Don Quixote. The hero and the antihero of the first modern novel, which is also the first postmodern novel, and also the first deconstructionist novel. Don Quixote’s genes can be found in thousands and thousands of literary and cinematic figures created since. Maybe some of his genes are in every post-Quixotean human being.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? The Israeli prime minister?

Unfortunately, there are many political leaders in today’s world, including my country, who would pleasantly surprise me if they read any book at all. To President Obama I would give, as a farewell present, with admiration, my “Tale of Love and Darkness.” Prime Minister Netanyahu may perhaps benefit from reading “Richard III.”

Whom would you want to write your life story?

All my children are very fine writers. Any one of them could tell my story with the right blend of kinship, empathy and irony.

 

Christmas I: This Christmas, remember the powerless and the light-bearers

By The Editorial Board of The Washington Post

“DO NOT be afraid,” the angel tells shepherds in the Gospel of Luke. “I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people.” The good news in Scripture was, of course, the birth of Jesus and the coming of the Kingdom of God. But as the Christmas story proceeds, there is still bad news to confront. Herod, the Roman-installed king of Judea, upon hearing reports of the birth of a child whom he fears will be a potential rival for power and glory, orders the killing of all male infants from Bethlehem — an event known as the Slaughter of the Innocents.

And so, Jesus of Nazareth, by some Gospel accounts, spent his earliest years as a refugee in Egypt, where his family had fled, and did not return to Judea until Herod had died. When he began to teach and preach as a young man, he found a ready following for his message, which was one of love, humility and understanding. But it was also profoundly upsetting to the established order. The author Tod Lindberg says of Jesus’ Beatitudes (“Blessed are the meek . . . those who hunger and thirst for righteousness . . . the merciful . . . the peacemakers”) that they provide “a dizzying commentary designed to turn upside down the political and social world of the Roman Empire . . . Jesus describes those who are truly fortunate, the lucky ones of their day. But it is not emperors, conquerors, priests, and the wealthy who enjoy this favor. Rather, it is the common people, those whom earthly success has largely passed by.. . .”

The message is universal. It’s no wonder that it has resonated through much of the world, Christian and non-Christian, over two millennia. It reflects values and sentiments common to many peoples and faiths. But it also marks out a difficult and challenging path, one that has proved hard to follow for Christians (and often their institutions) and non-Christians alike. “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” is one of the most familiar of Jesus’ proclamations. But much of the world is still not free, and the truth is under mounting assault, subject to a vast new array of distortions and malevolent misuses by those who would deny its very existence.

There have been many Herods over the centuries — leaders who, out of fear, greed or lust for power, have wrought death and destruction on their own people and others. Today new Slaughters of the Innocents are looming, most ominously in the land from which one of the Three Wise Men of Christmas is said to have traveled: the nation of Yemen. Hundreds of thousands of children there are threatened with death by starvation and bombing inflicted by the neighboring kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has done all it can to stifle the horrifying reports and, of course, to silence those who say and reveal things that it cannot allow to be heard. Bringing urgent news of this kind to the world requires the work of many brave, devoted, disinterested men and women: journalists, principled government officials and judges, volunteer organizations that advance human rights and welfare, medical missionaries to the poor. It has cost a number of them their lives in numerous places, but their comrades carry on the work. In this holiday season, we remember them and the light they cast.

 

Violence and nonviolence

As readers may have noticed, I am including in Reckonings some remarks relating to a group here at The Redwoods exploring the tradition of Celtic spirituality. Here is my most current letter to participants:

 

Our meeting this coming Tuesday presents an intriguing challenge. In my view, in this singular chapter of John Philip Newell's The Rebirthing of God (Chapter 6: "Reconnecting With Nonviolence"), I find him off his feed. That is, he pays very little real attention to his subject. I have nary a passage worth quoting to you.

If I am even partially right, we nonetheless have at least one fine reason to spend a good hour together on Tuesday afternoon:

Whether or not John Philip makes a case for reconnecting with nonviolence as an important domain of spiritual development or rebirthing, do you do so?

What role has nonviolence played in your own spiritual development? Have you been committed to nonviolence in your life? If so, what role has that commitment played in strengthening your spiritual development? If not, or if less than consistently, when and why has that been so?

It is probably true that we are all generally committed to peace and averse to war: in our reconciliation of the dimensions of ourselves, in our relations with those with whom we have lived and loved, in our relations with our friends and with those we dislike, and in the attitudes with which we have responded to our nation's (and other nations') pursuit of war.

I also would bet a lot more than a plugged nickel that there is not a single one of us who has observed that commitment and that aversion without exception or qualification. We could even ask, did Jesus? See Matthew 21:12–17, Mark 11:15–19, Luke 19:45–48, and John 2:13–16. (Jesus and the moneychangers.)

What is violence, anyway? When is it justified, if at all? And if nonviolence is worthier, why some of the time but not all of the time? In self-defense and defense of those we love? To avoid a greater evil than would be served by nonviolence? For the sake of drama?

On Tuesday, come with examples you have known in heart, mind and action? If John Philip was, as I suggest, off his feed in this chapter, as he so seldom is, let's give him some help.

As ever, I look forward to our hour together.

U.S. and North Korea: the risks of war

Tensions Between the U.S. and North Korea: The Risks of War

John R. Boettiger

Mill Valley Seniors for Peace, 13 December 2017

1. I hope most of you will join me in figuratively lighting a candle of thanks and relief for the remarkable, unanticipated victory of Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate, in the special election yesterday of a Senator in Alabama. It’s related to our topic this evening in that it is a victory for sanity, for reason and good sense over bigotry and exploitation, and will reduce the GOP majority in the Senate to the narrowest of margins. Amy Sorkin writes in the current New Yorker, “In less than a year, the President, with help from the Alabama Senate candidate [Roy Moore], has so damaged the party that it may never recover.”

2. Tensions between the US and the autocratic regime of Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea are longstanding, but greater than they’ve been in a generation. NK is sometimes characterized as “the world’s most isolated country” whose people have no access to the internet or news sources other than what’s provided by their own regime. 85% of them live outside the capital city, Pyongyang, and none can enter without permission. Only its political elite and Kim Jong-Un’s most devoted followers live in the city.

3. The film is called “North Korea with Dread” – four NYT journalists were able to visit NK this fall:

4. The excellent, level-headed columnist Nicholas Kristof and three NYT colleagues. They described their visit in sobering language: “This fall, we went to North Korea on a quest to understand whether war is inevitable, whether there is a real chance that millions of people might die.” The risk of war, they believed, is greater than the public appreciates, talks between the two countries never more urgent, and they hoped on their return that this film could “serve as a call for politicians on both sides to seek exit ramps for peace.” “This is the story,” they said, “of two novice and reckless leaders—one 33 years old (Kim Jong-Un), the other 71 (Donald Trump) taking their countries toward what we fear is a needless collision.”

5. You’ll see in the very first minutes of the film a strange montage: the voice-over is Donald Trump’s extraordinary statement before the UN General Assembly earlier this fall that if North Korea continues to develop its threatening nuclear missle program the US will totally destroy North Korea; and behind the voice-over are North Korean children and adults, some sober, most laughing as if Trump’s threat is empty of substance or impossible to implement. Are they actually listening to Trump? No; more likely to Kim’s characterization of the American president as a “dotard.” At the UN, Trump derisively called Kim “rocket man,” and has even tweeted, “Little Rocket Man Won’t be Around Much Longer.”

6. At the end of last month, NK tested a ballistic missile that could reach anywhere in the continental US, including Washington and New York. It’s also tested nuclear weapons, the latest of which they characterized as a “hydrogen bomb,” a weapon that’s in any event multiple times more powerful than those used at the end of WW II against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

7. Whatever the specifics, this is clear and won’t change: North Korea is a nuclear power. The Trump Administration’s approach – a combination of threats, sanctions, demands for nuclear disarmament, and isolation hasn’t stalled the advance of its weapons programs.

8. Nicholas Kristof asks, “Are we headed toward a new Korean War?” His answer is unsettling. He says we, the American public, are “far too complacent about the possibility of a war with North Korea,” one that, he writes, “could be incomparably bloodier than any US war in my lifetime.” A million people could die the first day. International experts he’s consulted estimate the risk of war from 15 to more than 50 percent. That, he says, “should be staggering.”

9. So what can be done to reduce those risks, to increase the prospects of a more reliable peace? Are there circumstances in which Kim might be willing to negotiate a freeze on its nuclear programs? Certainly diplomacy has to be engaged more seriously than the Trump Administration has been willing so far. Kristof ends his recent column, “So let’s try talking, rather than risk the first exchange of nuclear weapons in the history of our planet.”

10. Madeline Albright, who served as Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, offered thoughtful context last week. “The fundamental problem,” she writes, “is that the North Korean leadership is convinced it requires nuclear weapons to guarantee its own survival.” They look at the fate of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar el Qaddafi. She believes we need military deterrence, yes, but also direct diplomacy, multilateral and bilateral, including a willingness to engage in direct talks. Others, like Thomas Friedman of the NYT and a recent column in the SF Chronicle by Stanford professor John Bunzel, offer another intriguing possibility: a US pledge publicly to North Korea and the entire world that the US will never be the first nation to launch a unilateral preemptive nuclear strike – a first strike - against another country.

11. North Korea is not about to give up its nuclear weapons programs, and the US government needs to abandon demands that they do so as a condition of real negotiations.

12. We need to de-escalate tensions between the two countries also because under conditions of mutual recrimination and high tension there is a real possibility of nuclear war by accident or misperception, a blunder into war, when some combination of verbal threat, practice maneuvers, and bluster becomes the real thing. If you want a hair-raising worst-case scenario, read an article last week in the Washington Post called “This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.”

13. Let’s see Kristof’s film – it’s 26 minutes long – and have some good discussion afterward. One more observation about what you’re about to see. Do you know the term “minder”? Minders are people who work for an autocratic regime and are assigned quietly to shadow visitors like Kristof and his crew, or to shadow ordinary (in these events North Korean) citizens to be sure that they stick to the party line. You’ll see minders in the film, particularly in the person of a man wearing brown clothes walking behind, listening and sometimes whispering to those on whom he’s keeping a careful eye.

"A duty to warn" and the dangerous case of Donald Trump

Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/15/duty-warn-and-dangerous-case-donald-trump) indicated a few days ago,

There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the work of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts to assess President Trump’s mental health. They had come together last March at a conference at Yale University to wrestle with two questions. One was on countless minds across the country: “What’s wrong with him?” The second was directed to their own code of ethics: “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn” if they conclude the president to be dangerously unfit for office? 

As mental health professionals, these men and women respect the long-standing “Goldwater rule” which inhibits them from diagnosing public figures whom they have not personally examined. At the same time, as explained by Dr. Bandy X Lee, who teaches law and psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, the rule does not have a countervailing rule that directs what to do when the risk of harm from remaining silent outweighs the damage that could result from speaking about a public figure — “which in this case, could even be the greatest possible harm.” It is an old and difficult moral issue that requires a great exertion of conscience. Their decision: “We respect the rule, we deem it subordinate to the single most important principle that guides our professional conduct: that we hold our responsibility to human life and well-being as paramount.”Hence, this profound, illuminating and discomforting book undertaken as “a duty to warn." 

The foreword is by one of America’s leading psychohistorians, Robert Jay Lifton. He is renowned for his studies of people under stress — for books such as Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans — Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973) and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide(1986). The Nazi Doctors was the first in-depth study of how medical professionals rationalized their participation in the Holocaust, from the early stages of the Hitler’s euthanasia project to extermination camps.

___________________

 

OK. The book will be published tomorrow. I have not seen it. I'm still cautious about the likely impact of its publication. That impact, much as I would like it otherwise, may be negligible, or nearly so. Trump's supporters remain. Still, nothing in the realm this book occupies can be wholly negligible. Trump's days as president are finite; they can be shorter or longer. Investigations gather forceful momentum. May they flourish. The analogy with Richard Nixon may yet be relevant. My suggestion is simple: Attention, please.

 The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was published last Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017, by St. Martin’s Press.

 

The Forgotten Victims of Agent Orange

The Forgotten Victims of Agent Orange

VIET THANH NGUYEN AND RICHARD HUGHES

New York Times,  September 15, 2017

Phan Thanh Hung Duc, 20, lies immobile and silent, his midsection covered haphazardly by a white shirt with an ornate Cambodian temple design. His mouth is agape and his chest thrusts upward, his hands and feet locked in gnarled deformity. He appears to be frozen in agony. He is one of the thousands of Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

Pham Thi Phuong Khanh, 21, is another such patient. She quietly pulls a towel over her face as a visitor to the Peace Village ward in Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, starts to take a picture of her enlarged, hydrocephalic head. Like Mr. Hung Duc, Ms. Khanh is believed to be a victim of Operation Ranch Hand, the United States military’s effort during the Vietnam War to deprive the enemy of cover and food by spraying defoliants.

Perhaps Ms. Khanh does not want strangers to stare at her. Perhaps she feels ashamed. But if she does feel shame, why is it that those who should do not?

The history of Agent Orange and its effects on the Vietnamese people, as well as American soldiers, should shame Americans. Fifty years ago, in 1967, the United States sprayed 5.1 million gallons of herbicides with the toxic chemical dioxin across Vietnam, a single-year record for the decade-long campaign to defoliate the countryside. It was done without regard to dioxin’s effect on human beings or its virulent and long afterlife. Agent Orange was simply one of several herbicides used, but it has become the most infamous.

Chemical companies making Agent Orange opted for maximum return despite in-house memos that a safer product could be made for a slight reduction in profits. American soldiers were among the unintended victims of this decision: Unwarned, they used the empty 55-gallon drums for makeshift showers.Over the years, there have been both American and Vietnamese plaintiffs in Agent Orange court cases in the United States. Possibly the only one that could be considered a victory for the plaintiffs was an out-of-court settlement of $180 million in the 1980s for about 50,000 American veterans. Many more never benefited from the case because their illnesses did not show up for yearsThese American veterans have fought for decades to get medical treatment and compensation for birth defects and ailments presumed to be Agent Orange-related diseases. Records from Agent Orange lawsuits indicate that both the military and the chemical companies involved were well aware, early on, of the dangers of dioxin, so much so that our government terminated the program three years before the war’s end.

 

Our government has acknowledged some of its responsibility to its veterans. In 2010, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki added three Agent Orange-related diseases to the V.A.’s compensation list, and Congress allocated $13.3 billion to cover the costs. An enterprising Senate aide slipped in $12 million for Agent Orange relief in Vietnam, only a small portion of which was for health. These disparities in funding are unconscionable, as is the American government’s illogical refusal to acknowledge that Agent Orange has caused the same damage to the Vietnamese as it has to Americans.

Pham Van Truc is another Vietnamese victim of Agent Orange. With his crippled, birdlike limbs and patches of scaly skin, he had as his only blessing, it seemed, exceptionally devoted parents who cared for him, night and day, all 20 years of his life and who were devastated when he died in March. His mother, Nguyen Thi May, 66, had pleaded for a solution to just one of Mr. Truc’s afflictions, such as testicles that had not descended or the attendant pain unrelieved by ineffective medicines.

In regards to cases like this, our government’s one concession to responsibility for the ravages of Agent Orange is environmental remediation. Over $100 million has been allocated to clean up the Da Nang airport, one of 28 “hot spots” for defoliant contamination in Vietnam.

By contrast, only $20 million has been allocated for victims.

The most common American bureaucratic excuse for this disparity is that a definitive connection between Agent Orange and the illnesses has not yet been made. But the evidence is overwhelming: Vietnamese soldiers, from both sides, with perfectly healthy children before going to fight, came home and sired offspring with deformities and horrific illnesses; villages repeatedly sprayed have exceptionally high birth-deformity rates; and our own Department of Veterans Affairs now lists 14 illnesses presumed to be related to Agent Orange.

The reason for official American reluctance is not lack of scientific evidence. The problem is the distance between American policy makers and the Vietnamese people. Vietnamese victims are too far removed from the American public, and too reminiscent of an unpopular war. Agent Orange victims are also among the most visually disturbing consequences of the Vietnam War. Few who look at photographer Philip Jones Griffiths’s powerful book of photographs “Agent Orange: ‘Collateral Damage’ in Vietnam” have the stomach to do so twice. It is easier to keep one’s distance, to not look at all.

The reason for American reluctance to look or act is not even about money, as one might suspect. A solution for the Vietnamese would cost what one congressional aide wryly referred to as “decimal dust,” or, by one estimate, $35 million a year for 10 years. Given a Vietnamese Red Cross estimate of three million victims, the amount of aid is approximately $12 a year per victim and a decade of help — merely one-fifth the time that has elapsed since Operation Ranch Hand reached its apex in 1967. Such funding would provide prostheses, wheelchairs and orthopedic surgery; speech therapy and rehabilitation; basic feeding, bathing and sleeping equipment; an enhanced case management system and medical staff training; and stipends to families providing full-time care.

That $350 million is an inconsequential amount compared to what it cost to produce, transport and deploy the herbicides in the first place. But the legacy of Agent Orange is not about science or economics. It’s about human decency. Americans created Agent Orange here in a laboratory, shipped it overseas and dumped it with abandon, where it continues to shatter thousands of people’s lives. Denying the reality of the need can only take an unacceptable toll here in the United States.

 

Theodore Roosevelt on How to Treat a President

Thanks to a good friend, Al Braidwood, I am offering the following remarks of my great-great uncle, who knew of what he spoke. We are as close as we have ever been in this country to having an authoritarian demagogue with a narcissistic personality disorder as our president. We must gather a coherent and effective party and movement to carry forward the post-inauguration marches, with far more attention to lies told and ignorance unveiled. Trump will be no push-over, and he can do a great deal of damage. But if we can get party and movement together, we can do much to moderate and stop his initiatives.

 

As Theodore Roosevelt said:

 

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.” 

 

                                                                           - Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President (1858-1919) 

 

 

Elie Wiesel, 1928-2016

This is a belated testimonial to Elie Wiesel, who died earlier this year, on 2 July 2016, thirty years after he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his extraordinary work on justice, testimony, memory, violence, oppression and persecution. On 10 December 1986, in Oslo's City Hall, Elie Wiesel spoke of the significance of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. He cast his address in the form of a dialogue with himself as a young boy, imprisoned in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, a story he told so eloquently in his autobiographical account, Night (retranslated in 2002 by his wife Marion). "The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future."

______________________

 

This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I remember: he asked his father: "Can this be true?" This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?

And now the boy is turning to me: "Tell me," he asks. "What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?"

And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Of course, since I am a Jew profoundly rooted in my peoples' memory and tradition, my first response is to Jewish fears, Jewish needs, Jewish crises. For I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people. It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab lands ... But there are others as important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much of a disgrace as Josef Biegun's imprisonment. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment.

There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism, and political persecution, writers and poets, prisoners in so many lands governed by the Left and by the Right. Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free. And then, too, there are the Palestinians to whose plight I am sensitive but whose methods I deplore. Violence and terrorism are not the answer. Something must be done about their suffering, and soon. I trust Israel, for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land.

Yes, I have faith. Faith in God and even in His creation. Without it no action would be possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all. Isn't this the meaning of Alfred Nobel's legacy? Wasn't his fear of war a shield against war?

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done. One person – a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

 

Poems of peace and war

Members of Seniors for Peace here in Mill Valley gathered yesterday to read poems about peace. I chose a poem by my close friend Richard O. Moore, from his last book of published poems, Particulars of Place (Omnidawn, 2015). The poem is called "Jackstraw," and it's part of a longer series of poems called "Scaffolds."

This morning, reviewing the poems chosen by others, I found myself immersed again in the long-admired poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, who won a Nobel Prize in 1996. I thought I was familiar with her published work, but I discovered a poem I did not know, which could well have been read yesterday. Here it is:

 

Vietnam

 

"Woman, what's your name?" "I don't know."
"How old are you? Where are you from?" "I don't know."
"Why did you dig that burrow?" "I don't know."
"How long have you been hiding?" "I don't know."
"Why did you bite my finger?" "I don't know."
"Don't you know that we won't hurt you?" "I don't know."
"Whose side are you on?" "I don't know."
"This is war, you've got to choose." "I don't know."
"Does your village still exist?" "I don't know."
"Are those your children?" "Yes."

 

 

 

June 7: the Democratic primary election in California

The California primary elections are scheduled for this coming Tuesday, June 7. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are running neck and neck. While Clinton's lock on the Democratic nomination appears assured, a loss to Sanders in California next week would be a real setback for her, particularly as she copes with renewed attention to her email travails and her need to turn her attention toward the Republican opposition.

Clinton and Sanders are statistically tied in the most recent USC/Los Angeles Times poll, but Clinton's lead with those most likely to vote (49% to Sanders' 39%) and with registered Democrats (53% to Sanders' 37%) is substantial. On the other hand, as the Los Angeles Times indicates, "Sanders benefits here from party rules that allow registered nonpartisan voters — known in California as 'no party preference' voters — to take part in the Democratic primary. Among nonpartisans who were likely to vote, he led by 48%-35%." In other words, it's a very close horse race in the final stretch.

While I have a lot of admiration for Bernie Sanders and his longtime devotion to economic justice, and I am concerned about Clinton's more hawkish views on foreign and national security policy, their differences pale when set beside the compelling need to defeat Donald Trump, whose ascent to the presidency would be catastrophic for the nation and the wider world. Clinton is the stronger, more practical and experienced Democratic candidate, more likely to extend the accomplishments of Barak Obama, the president who, on balance, I will sorely miss.

The First Presidential Flight

The First Presidential Flight

Nowadays the U.S. President has his own airplane. But for Franklin Roosevelt in 1943, flying was still a big deal.

by Tony Reichhardt , Air & Space Magazine, January 2016

FDR inflight, with TWA pilot Otis Bryan. (FDR Library)

The Casablanca Conference, held 70 years ago this week, is remembered today for the agreement by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to demand unconditional surrender from their Axis enemies. But even before the leaders sat down to talk, FDR made history. His trip across the Atlantic, in a Boeing 314 flying boat, was the first time a sitting U.S. president flew on an airplane.

Nobody was more impressed than his pilots. The flights had been planned in secrecy, and when Roosevelt and his entourage showed up at the Pan American airways base in Miami on the morning of January 11, 1943, to board the Dixie Clipper, the crew was “very much surprised to learn the identity of our guest,” recalled Pan Am pilot Howard M. Cone, Jr.  A 34-year-old veteran of transoceanic flights, Cone flew Roosevelt, advisor Harry Hopkins and several military leaders on one Clipper, while another flying boat carried the presidential staff.

Cone said the President was an “excellent passenger” and a “good air sailor” on his 15,000-mile round-trip, displaying an impressive knowledge of geography on a journey that included stops in Trinidad and Brazil. Once in Africa, Roosevelt boarded a TWA C-54 piloted by 35-year-old Captain Otis F. Bryan, who flew him from Bathurst, Gambia to Morocco. The trip back from Casablanca included a flyover of the harbor at Dakar, Senegal, at an altitude of 3,000 feet.

In a War Department press conference following their return to the States, the two airline pilots couldn’t stop effusing about their VIP passenger’s ability to “make you feel perfectly at home. We felt at ease as long as he was,” said Bryan. Roosevelt even joined in the ritual of signing “short snorters” for the crew — dollar bills autographed by all the passengers on a flight.

The President also celebrated his 61st birthday on the way back, dining on caviar, olives, celery, pickles, turkey, dressing, green peas, cake, and champagne. (Captain Cone, reported the New York Times, drank coffee instead.)

Roosevelt cuts his birthday cake, 8,000 feet above Haiti. Pan American pilot Howard Cone is at far right.

It wasn’t FDR’s first time in an airplane — in 1932 he had flown to the Democratic convention in Chicago to accept the presidential nomination. But before 1943, airplanes weren’t considered a safe form of transportation for an American president. (In fact, if the fatal crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper on February 22 had happened before Roosevelt’s flight instead of just after, the Secret Service may not have approved the Casablanca trip.)

The Scourge of Guns: NYT Front Page Editorial (first since 1920)

From Bill Moyers:

 

The New York Times is running an editorial on its front page today, the first time the paper has done so since 1920, calling for greater regulation on guns in the aftermath of a spate of mass shootings.

In a statement, NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. said this about the editors' decision:

"It has been many decades since The Times ran an editorial on Page One. We do so today to deliver a strong and visible statement of frustration and anguish about our country’s inability to come to terms with the scourge of guns. Even in this digital age, the front page remains an incredibly strong and powerful way to surface issues that demand attention. And, what issue is more important than our nation’s failure to protect its citizens?"

 

Where is the lamp beside the golden door?

A physician colleague who practices and teaches palliative care and geriatrics at Harvard Medical School, Muriel Gillick, MD, also publishes a fine short essay online once a week, under the general title, "Life in the End Zone" (http://blog.drmurielgillick.com/). Given the importance of her topic this week, and her own wise response, I am taking the liberty of reprinting her comments below. Read them alongside a New York Times graphic, "Why It Takes Two Years for Syrian Refugees to Enter the U.S."

 

Where is the lamp beside the golden door?

by Muriel Gillick, MD

22 Nov 2015

 

According to the New York Times, fewer than 2000 Syrian refugees have been accepted for resettlement to the United States. Of these, half are children and one-quarter are over age 60. So the refugee crisis, of which Syrians are a significant part, affects older people as well as the young and the middle-aged. As we hear more and more strident calls to keep out these refugees, ostensibly because they might be terrorists, when in fact they are seeking to escape from those same terrorists who roam their native lands, we would do well to remember an earlier refugee crisis. It’s a crisis I’m all too familiar with, as my parents—then ages 13 and 14—were among those who left Germany in the winter of 1939, at first merely to escape persecution, later to escape death. It would be 8 years before they finally found refuge in the United States, where they have lived productive lives for the past 68 years.

By the summer of 1942, tens of thousands of European Jews had already been rounded up by the seemingly unstoppable Germans and incarcerated in ghettoes, enslaved as forced laborers, or sent to extermination camps. Those who remained in Holland, Belgium, and France were on the run. One of the only countries to run to was Switzerland, an oasis of neutrality in war-torn Europe. But in August, the Swiss government sealed its borders to refugees, invoking the time-honored allegation that further Jewish immigration was a threat to the peace and stability of their society. In December of 1942, the government clamped down further, ordering that every refugee over the age of 16 be turned away at the border. In the coming months, the Swiss police would send about 25,000 people to almost certain death.

It was not the first time that the world had turned its back on Jewish refugees. In the summer of 1938, just days after the American Independence Day holiday, representatives from 32 countries gathered at the majestic Hotel Royale in the French lake-side resort of Evian-les-Bains to discuss the plight of the millions of European Jews who wished to immigrate to avoid discrimination, persecution, and worse. For over a week, the delegates convened to express their concern--but did nothing.

 

A few months later, on what would become known as Kristallnacht, synagogues were torched throughout Germany, Jewish businesses destroyed, and 30,000 people arrested for the crime of being Jews. In response, a democratic US Senator and a Republican representative introduced a bill that would have admitted 20,000 Jewish refugee children to the United States. But public opinion was resoundingly against immigration on the grounds that it could be harmful to American citizens, and the bill died an early death. 

 

When the United States entered the war, virtually all immigration to this country ceased. But already that fateful fall, the State Department had deliberately put barriers in the way of Jewish refugees. Even accessing the limited quotas in place as of the xenophobic Immigration Act of 1924 became increasingly difficult. Consulates abroad were instructed to “delay” and “effectively stop” the trickle of immigrants arriving in the United States by resorting to administrative devices to “postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”

 

After World War II was over, the member states of the newly established United Nations recognized the callous cruelty of their behavior towards refugees. Committed to mending their ways, they drew up the Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which asserted that everyone has the right to “seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” This was followed in 1951 with the “Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees” which defined refugees and delineated their rights. In 2001, dozens of countries reaffirmed their commitment to the rights of refugees, acknowledging that “many persons still leave their country of origin for reasons of persecution and are entitled to special protection on account of their position.”

 

In light of this history, the current attempts by state governors, including Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, to close their hearts and barricade the gates to refugees is both tragic and intolerable. We must not confuse the persecuted with their persecutors. We need to remember the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty, a gift to us from France, from the poem, “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus:

 

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

 

 

 

 

The price of fear

From a New York Times editorial yesterday:

After the attacks in Paris, the world is again challenged by fear. With every bombing, beheading and mass shooting, the dread spreads, along with the urgency of defeating this nihilism.

But no less a challenge for the civilized world is the danger of self-inflicted injury. In the reaction and overreaction to terrorism comes the risk that society will lose its way.

History is replete with examples of the power of fear and ignorance, to which even the great can fall prey. Franklin Roosevelt calmed a nation in bleakest days of the Depression, but he also signed the executive order imprisoning tens of thousands of American citizens for the crime of Japanese ancestry.

 

And an excerpt from Nicholas Kristof's column in today's Times:

Republican leaders say they simply want to tighten security to keep America safe. That’s an echo of what American officials claimed in the late 1930s and early 1940s as they blocked the entry of Jewish refugees.

Breckinridge Long, then a senior State Department official in charge of visas, warned that Nazi spies were trying to enter the U.S. as refugees. In the name of security, he established vetting rules so strict that few Jews could pass.

“We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants,” Long boasted in a 1940 memo. His callous security requirements led to the deaths of many tens of thousands of Jews.

Yes, security was a legitimate concern then, as it is now, but security must be leavened with common sense and a bit of heart.

To seek to help desperate refugees in a secure way is not naïveté. It’s not sentimentality. It’s humanity.

 

A War the West Cannot Win

A war the West cannot win

(Thanks to Bill Goodfellow for drawing my attention to this important article by Andrew Bacevich of Boston University. In too many instances - from 9/11 to now - Western response to events kin to those perpetrated tragically against Paris have been grounded in conviction that military retaliation and revenge are the preferred, indeed the only, appropriate reaction. That we have not learned better is profoundly distressing. As Bacevic concludes, "Hollande views the tragedy that has befallen Paris as a summons to yet more war. The rest of us would do well to see it as a moment to reexamine the assumptions that have enmeshed the West in a war that it cannot win and should not perpetuate.")

by Andrew J. Bacevich
November 14, 2015
Boston Globe

French President Francois Hollande’s response to Friday’s vicious terrorist attacks, now attributed to ISIS, was immediate and uncompromising. “We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless,” he vowed.

Whether France itself possesses the will or the capacity to undertake such a war is another matter. So too is the question of whether further war can provide a remedy to the problem at hand: widespread disorder roiling much of the Greater Middle East and periodically spilling into the outside world.

It’s not as if the outside world hasn’t already given pitiless war a try. The Soviet Union spent all of the 1980s attempting to pacify Afghanistan and succeeded only in killing a million or so Afghans while creating an incubator for Islamic radicalism. Beginning in 2003, the United States attempted something similar in Iraq and ended up producing similarly destabilizing results. By the time US troops withdrew in 2011, something like 200,000 Iraqis had died, most of the them civilians. Today Iraq teeters on the brink of disintegration.

Perhaps if the Russians had tried harder or the Americans had stayed longer they might have achieved a more favorable outcome. Yet that qualifies as a theoretical possibility at best. Years of fighting in Afghanistan exhausted the Soviet Union and contributed directly to its subsequent collapse. Years of fighting in Iraq used up whatever “Let’s roll!” combativeness Americans may have entertained in the wake of 9/11.

Today, notwithstanding the Obama administration’s continuing appetite for military piddling — airstrikes, commando raids, and advisory missions — few Americans retain any appetite for undertaking further large-scale hostilities in the Islamic world. Fewer still will sign up to follow President Hollande in undertaking any new crusade. Their reluctance to do so is understandable and appropriate.

The fact is that United States and its European allies, to include France, face a perplexing strategic conundrum. Collectively they find themselves locked in a protracted conflict with Islamic radicalism, with ISIS but one manifestation of a much larger phenomenon. Prospects for negotiating an end to that conflict anytime soon appear to be nil. Alas, so too do prospects of winning it.

In this conflict, the West generally appears to enjoy the advantage of clear-cut military superiority. By almost any measure, we are stronger than our adversaries. Our arsenals are bigger, our weapons more sophisticated, our generals better educated in the art of war, our fighters better trained at waging it.

Yet most of this has proven to be irrelevant. Time and again the actual employment of that ostensibly superior military might has produced results other than those intended or anticipated. Even where armed intervention has achieved a semblance of tactical success — the ousting of some unsavory dictator, for example — it has yielded neither reconciliation nor willing submission nor even sullen compliance. Instead, intervention typically serves to aggravate, inciting further resistance. Rather than putting out the fires of radicalism, we end up feeding them.

In proposing to pour yet more fuel on that fire, Hollande demonstrates a crippling absence of imagination, one that has characterized recent Western statesmanship more generally when it comes to the Islamic world. There, simply trying harder won’t suffice as a basis of policy.

It’s past time for the West, and above all for the United States as the West’s primary military power, to consider trying something different.

Rather than assuming an offensive posture, the West should revert to a defensive one. Instead of attempting to impose its will on the Greater Middle East, it should erect barriers to protect itself from the violence emanating from that quarter. Such barriers will necessarily be imperfect, but they will produce greater security at a more affordable cost than is gained by engaging in futile, open-ended armed conflicts. Rather than vainly attempting to police or control, this revised strategy should seek to contain.

Such an approach posits that, confronted with the responsibility to do so, the peoples of the Greater Middle East will prove better equipped to solve their problems than are policy makers back in Washington, London, or Paris. It rejects as presumptuous any claim that the West can untangle problems of vast historical and religious complexity to which Western folly contributed. It rests on this core principle: Do no (further) harm.

Hollande views the tragedy that has befallen Paris as a summons to yet more war. The rest of us would do well to see it as a moment to reexamine the assumptions that have enmeshed the West in a war that it cannot win and should not perpetuate.
___________________

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor emeritus at Boston University. His new book “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History’’ will appear in April 2016.

 

An anniversary to remember

It is indeed an anniversary to remember, or to learn and reflect upon for the increasing majority of people alive in the world who have not such memory at hand, since they were born well after 1945. I myself was only six years old on August 6, 1945, so my own learning was later, second hand. But I grew up in the years when the memory of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still vivid, when we learned to crouch under our desks at school (as if that would make a difference), when people built bomb shelters in their backyards, or at least did not regard such construction as unnatural.

The three paragraphs below are drawn from Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac." It occurs to me that John Hersey's Hiroshima should be in required high school curricula today as it may once have been decades ago. (The New Yorker has put on its website the full text of Hersey's book, which first appeared in the magazine.) Although "Little Boy" - what a name for an atomic bomb that crushed a city and over 100,000 of its people - was puny compared to the thermonuclear weapons that became commonplace, the dangers of nuclear proliferation and of another use of such weapons in wartime remains a danger too often unrecognized or disbelieved. Witness the current unlikelihood of Congressional approval of the deal negotiated to prevent development of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

 

Seventy years ago today, in 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The American B-29 bomber Enola Gay released the bomb, which was nicknamed "Little Boy," at 8:16 in the morning, local time. Sixty-two thousand buildings were destroyed by the blast, which was equivalent to more than 12,000 tons of TNT. Eighty thousand people were killed on impact, and 35,000 died over the next week of their injuries or radiation poisoning. Sixty thousand more died over the next year. The bomb exploded over a hospital, and 90 percent of the city's doctors were killed in the blast. It was the beginning of the end of World War II; Germany had already surrendered and Japan would follow after the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later.

A year later, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to the publication of an article by John Hersey. The article, called simply "Hiroshima," followed the lives of six survivors of the blast. The magazine's founder and editor Harold Ross wrote to E.B. White: "Hersey has written thirty thousand words on the bombing of Hiroshima [...] one hell of a story, and we are wondering what to do about it [...] [William Shawn, managing editor] wants to wake people up, and says we are the people with a chance to do it, and probably the only people that will do it, if it is done."

Hiroshima begins: "At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk."

 

And from an article in today's New York Times:

HIROSHIMA, Japan — Hiromi Hasai was being trained to make machine gun bullets when the flash from the atomic bomb that destroyed his city lit up the already bright morning sky. Just 14, he had been pulled from school a week before to help Japan’s failing war effort.

Mr. Hasai, now 84, has often talked publicly of his experiences that day, 70 years ago Thursday, when the first of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war ultimately killed more than 100,000 people. The victims included hundreds of his classmates, who were still at their school near the blast’s epicenter. The bullet factory, 10 miles out of town, was paradoxically a haven.

Yet the things that Mr. Hasai saw and felt that day are not recounted by him alone. The person who knows his story best, after Mr. Hasai himself, is Ritsuko Kinoshita, a woman 25 years his junior who is serving as his “denshosha” — the designated transmitter of his memories. It is part of an unusual and highly personal project to preserve and pass on the experiences of atomic bomb survivors, whose numbers are dwindling rapidly.

There was, of course, the second bomb, that dropped three days later, on August 9, upon the smaller city of Nagasaki. I suggest reading an article in The New Yorker, hopefully entitled "Nagasaki: The Last Bomb," by Alex Wellerstein.

 

Monument marking Ground Zero of the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki

Isaiah Berlin on Franklin D. Roosevelt

Isaiah Berlin spent most of the years of World War II in Washington, DC, at the British Embassy, writing perceptive, incisive accounts of the war and its major figures on all sides, as well as gathering friends among Washington's young and liberal elite.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. remembered him many years later, after Berlin's death in 1997: "I first encountered Isaiah in the winter of 1942–3. He was then only thirty-three years old. One was startled from the beginning by the glittering rush of words and wit, the dazzling command of ideas, the graceful and unforced erudition, the penetrating assessments of personalities, the passion for music, the talent for merriment and, most remarkable of all, the generosity of spirit that led him to treat all of us as his intellectual equals. He had the exciting quality of intensifying life so that one perceived more and thought more and understood more."

Schlesinger continued, 

"His years in Washington confirmed him in his view of the benefits of pragmatism in political affairs. He was delighted by the young men and women of the New Deal and exhilarated by the spirit and effectiveness of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s humane experimentalism. The New Deal, he later said, was ‘the most constructive compromise between individual liberty and economic security which our own time has witnessed’. He regarded FDR as ‘the most genuine and unswerving spokesman of democracy of his time, the most contemporary, the most outward-looking, the boldest, most imaginative, most large-spirited, free from the obsessions of an inner life, with an unparalleled capacity for creating confidence in the power of his insight, his foresight, and his capacity genuinely to identify himself with the ideals of humble people’. As Roger Hausheer writes in the introduction to the recently published Berlin anthology The Proper Study of Mankind, ‘Berlin has always been an enthusiastic New Dealer – a natural allegiance, surely, for an objective pluralist.’ His love and hope for America survived even the vicissitudes of the post-war years.

.......

"Isaiah was above all a most civilised man in this horribly uncivilised century – the ‘most terrible century in Western history’, he called it. Wise, brave, kind, unaffected, an exemplar of moral courage, unalterably committed to the politics of decency, he was himself a stirring prediction of what a truly civilised world might be."

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Though in the course of his war years in Washington, improbably, Berlin never saw FDR and heard him only on the radio, he later wrote of him with extraordinary insight. "He was seeking to establish new rules of social justice," and to do that "without forcing his country into some doctrinaire strait-jacket, whether of socialism or State capitalism, or the kind of new social organization which the Fascist regimes flaunted as the New Order." Roosevelt, for Berlin, was a supreme example, of "political skill - indeed virtuosity - which no American before him had ever possessed." He was, preeminently, a fox, "a magnificient virtuoso of this type, and he was the most benevolent as well as the greatest master of his craft in modern times.... He became a legendary hero - they themselves did not know quite why - to the indigent and the oppressed, far beyond the confines of the English-speaking world."

"Roosevelt's example strengthened democracy everywhere, that is to say the view that the promotion of social justice and individual liberty does not necessarily mean the end of all efficient government; that power and order are not identical with a strait-jacket of doctrine, whether economic or political; that it is possible to reconcile individual liberty - a loose texture of society - with the indispensible minimum of organizing and authority; and in this belief lies what Roosevelt's greatest predecessor once described as 'the last best hope of earth.'"*

*Berlin was referring to Abraham Lincoln's message to Congress on December 1, 1862.

 

 

A Message to the 21st Century, from Isaiah Berlin in 1994

Editor's comment —

The following brief and characteristically eloquent essay by Isaiah Berlin appears in The New York Review of Books in its issue of October 23, 2014, with this introductory note:

Twenty years ago—on November 25, 1994—Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the following “short credo” (as he called it in a letter to a friend) for the ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf.

Marking Berlin's death three years later, on 5 November 1997, The Independent wrote:

Isaiah Berlin was one of the most remarkable men of his time, and one of the leading liberal thinkers of the century. Philosopher, political theorist, historian of ideas; Russian, Englishman, Jew; essayist, critic, teacher; he was a man of formidable intellectual power with a rare gift for understanding a wide range of human motives, hopes and fears, and a prodigiously energetic capacity for enjoyment of life, of people in all their variety, of their ideas and idiosyncrasies, of literature, of music, of art. 

Fortunately, his legacy is generously gathered online in The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, in which it is well worth spending many hours, and then returning, exploring afield, and returning again.

I particularly recommend his essay on Tolstoy's view of history, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," and the excellent anthology of Berlin's essays, The Proper Study of Mankind, published the year he died. Then there are his remarkable letters, the fourth and final volume of which will be published in 2015.

"The fox knows many things," goes the old Greek adage, "but the hedgehog knows one big thing"; so too, Berlin writes, writers and thinkers may be divided into two categories, those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things (foxes) and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system (hedgehogs). Berlin's examples of hedgehogs include Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust. The foxes, those who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be reduced to a single idea, include Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac and Joyce).

As many have observed, Berlin himself, as will be clear from reading the short credo below, is decidedly in the second category. 

 

 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.

I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.

They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it. The German poet Heine, in one of his famous writings, told us not to underestimate the quiet philosopher sitting in his study; if Kant had not undone theology, he declared, Robespierre might not have cut off the head of the King of France.

He predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism—would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child’s play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.

Let me explain. If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.

The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth—however much they differed about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought over this)—were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.

This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods—but for an even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.

Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth—the noblest of aims—cannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on.

So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon some ultimate golden future?

I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so much justice for so much compassion. My point is that some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled—liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.

I am glad to note that toward the end of my long life some realization of this is beginning to dawn. Rationality, tolerance, rare enough in human history, are not despised. Liberal democracy, despite everything, despite the greatest modern scourge of fanatical, fundamentalist nationalism, is spreading. Great tyrannies are in ruins, or will be—even in China the day is not too distant. I am glad that you to whom I speak will see the twenty-first century, which I feel sure can be only a better time for mankind than my terrible century has been. I congratulate you on your good fortune; I regret that I shall not see this brighter future, which I am convinced is coming. With all the gloom that I have been spreading, I am glad to end on an optimistic note. There really are good reasons to think that it is justified.

© The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2014