Meat and Its Enemies

Alarmed by chatter that Joe Biden was plotting to take my burgers away, I hurried online for reassurance. A journalist in the Guardian wrote that this was just scaremongering and along with the Washington Post traced the burger panic back tothe Daily Mail, which had run speculation (with caveats) that “Biden’s climate plan” could limit Americans to “just one burger a MONTH.” This was based on a single academic study, but the Mail was given its opportunity by what was described in the subheadline of a recent story in Vox as a “burger-shaped hole” in the president’s climate proposals.

Read More

Good Fences, Bad Neighbor

In the aftermath of Russia’s takeover of Crimea, there were widespread fears that the Baltic states, notwithstanding their membership in NATO, might be next. As Aliide Naylor relates in The Shadow in the East, those fears have since eased, but extreme vulnerability (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia could be overrun in days) and constant low- and not-so-low-level Russian aggression against the Baltic trio continue to keep nerves on edge.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine has forced NATO to relearn the power of symbolism. Several thousand troops from other NATO allies are now present in the Baltic states at any time, a reminder that the guarantee contained in Article 5 of the NATO treaty (an attack on one NATO country is to be treated as an attack on all) also extends to the alliance’s northeastern marches. Their numbers are tiny: no more, Naylor explains, than “a tripwire, unable to resist Russia’s military might in the event of a full-scale invasion — but thus far they have served as an effective deterrent.”

Read More

Hitler Revisited

Adolf? Not again. My first reaction on learning that not one, but two, substantial new Hitler biographies were up for review was not one of unreserved joy. How much more is there to say? After all, Ian Kershaw’s two volumes from the turn of the century have stood the test of time very well. Nevertheless, as Brendan Simms, a professor in the history of international relations at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, demonstrates in the introduction to his Hitler: A Global Biography, the research grinds on. In his case, he has used a basic cradle-to-ashes format (Simms does not pretend to depict “the ‘whole’ Hitler”) as a frame on which to hang an intriguing — if not always convincing — reexamination of Hitler’s thinking.

Read More

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.” 

Read More

Boris Johnson Is Being Prosecuted over a Campaign Slogan

Britain is a country where tweeting, preaching, or posting the wrong thing can get someone in trouble with the police. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Boris Johnson, one of the most prominent of those who campaigned for the U.K. to leave the EU — and now a possible leader of the Conservative party — is facing prosecution for the official Leave campaign’s claim that the U.K. sent “the EU £350 million a week.” This was money, Vote Leave asserted, that could be used to help fund the perpetually needy National Health Service, a claim that was plastered along the side of its big red campaign bus.

Read More

Before There Was Thatcher

If you can remember the 1960s, many are said to have said, you weren’t really there. But if Britain fails to remember the 1970s, it may soon find itself in a place where it really should not want to be. Towards the end of the latter, infinitely less entertaining decade, a good number of those at the top of Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition Labour party made their political debut as members of a hard Left that was far less of a fringe than it deserved to be. They have come a long way since, but their thinking has not, and with the Conservatives being broken apart by a botched Brexit, Corbyn’s own ’70s show could be playing in Downing Street soon.

Read More

How Brexit Descended into ‘Braos’

Loosening the ties that bound the U.K. into the EU was always going to be complicated. Dropping out of Brussels’ relentless trudge towards political integration is not in itself too great a challenge, but doing so in a way that minimizes the damage to Britain’s economic access to its European markets is an entirely different matter. To Brussels, economic and political integration are inextricably intertwined. Preserving as much of the benefit of the former while escaping the latter needs patience, diplomatic savvy, a realistic understanding of the EU’s workings, and the ability to weigh the strength (or otherwise) of the U.K.’s negotiating position. Since the Brexit vote on June 23, 2016, Britain’s Conservative government has displayed no sign of any of these qualities.

Read More

A Slavic Westeros

Simon Sebag-Montefiore: The Romanovs: 1613–1918

National Review, July 11, 2016

Alexander III, St Petersburg, Russia, July 2000 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Alexander III, St Petersburg, Russia, July 2000 © Andrew Stuttaford

‘It was,” writes Simon Sebag Montefiore, “hard to be a tsar.” But there were compensations. For Alexander II (reigned 1855–81), there was Katya Dolgorukaya, three decades younger and, fretted the tsar’s doctors, such energetic entertainment that, over a century before Nelson Rockefeller’s unHappy demise, they feared for the monarch’s health. Undaunted, Alexander wrote to his “minx” suggesting “bingerle” (a much-used code word) “four times,” “on every piece of furniture . . . in every room.” His minx replied that they could take it easy for a few days if “we overtire ourselves.” Promises, promises: Within twelve hours, Katya was writing to say how she craved her emperor. By the next day: “Everything inside me trembles, I can’t wait till 4.45.”  

Montefiore, the author of The Romanovs, is a gifted, meticulous researcher (an “archive rat,” as Stalin put it), but he’s also a historian in the old, grand manner, a storyteller with a madcap vocabulary (cenobite! Sardanapalian!) and a vivid, often witty, style mercifully free of professorial jargon and ideological hectoring. Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, his two biographical studies of the Soviet tyrant, combined erudition and insight with the deployment of details that illuminated the Kremlin mountaineer to a degree that few have managed to achieve. If those details included the lurid, the grotesque, and the racy, well, Montefiore is not the first biographer to have appreciated the historical (and — unworthy thought — commercial) value of the tabloid touch. In his introduction to The Romanovs, he contrasts the glories of imperial Russia with the excesses of the family that ruled it, a contrast, he notes just a tad smugly, too much for “ascetic academic historians . . . bashfully toning down the truth.”

There’s nothing bashful about Montefiore. The Romanovs is a bodice-ripper, a body-ripper, a Slavic Westeros. And in that introduction he offers a preview: “Brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered: Here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménages à trois, and an emperor [naughty Alexander II] who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state.”

If you need to know more before hurrying to buy this book, there’s not a lot I can do for you.

But I will try.     

Montefiore’s two volumes on Stalin cover some seven decades. They are a descent into the soul of a monster and the gargoyle empire he made his own. The Romanovs has neither the same depth nor breadth nor context. There isn’t the space. In the course of some 650 pages (excluding footnotes), Montefiore romps through more than three centuries, beginning some time before the coronation of the first Romanov, Michael, in 1613 (he was never going to miss out on the picturesque opportunity presented by Ivan the Terrible’s “spasms of killing, praying, and fornication”), and ending in 1918 with the execution of the deposed Nicholas II by the Bolsheviks.

The Romanovs is a story of family, not empire. The tsars and tsarinas parade by, each deftly depicted in his or her turn. These are sketches more than portraits, although some of those featured — notably the two Greats, Peter, of course, and the unexpectedly enlightened, “regicidal, uxoricidal” Catherine — exude the epic even in outline.    

In an autocracy, the personal — in the form of the autocrat — is political. And the personal is often complicated. Interpreting Peter the Great and, by extension, his Russia, maintains Montefiore, involves understanding that brilliant barbarian’s fondness for the bizarre — naked dwarfs, sacrilegious bacchanalia, and much too much more — as well as Reform and War 101. This approach involves peering behind the malachite door too, not least when an empress was running the show. Grigory Potemkin (the subject of another fine Montefiore biography), “imaginative and visionary . . . voracious and animalistic,” was not the only imperial counselor to end up in the imperial bed. Watching disapprovingly from Prussia, Frederick the Great, a “fastidiously homoerotic warlord,” summed up the entanglement of pillow and political in a phrase that made me laugh and my editor tremble.

Those searching for a comprehensive account of the Romanovs’ vast, rapidly expanding (it advanced by an average of 55 square miles a day) realm will have to look elsewhere: “This book is not meant to be a full history of Russia.” There is plenty about palace camarillas, but rather less about how the empire grew or, for that matter, how this corrupt, chaotic patrimonial state functioned.    

That said, Montefiore begins his book by setting out some useful ground rules for making sense of Romanov rule. Yes, it was hard to be tsar, even if the nature of that challenge changed over the centuries. In the early years in particular, the sovereign had to exude “visceral, almost feral authority.” Getting it wrong — misplaying the court (an “entrepôt of power”) and the clans that prowled through it — could have the most unpleasant of consequences.

The later tsars had still less room for maneuver. They ruled over a country lurching toward the new, becoming too complex and too rich to be safe for autocracy. Romanov absolutism was reinforced by the apparatus of an emerging police state but still rested on archaic pillars — nobility, clergy, and the mystique of the crown — that stood in the way of the reforms that could have preserved the dynasty. To weaken those pillars while protecting the essence of the structure would have been a remarkable feat, and one that would have taken more imagination than Nicholas II or his father, Alexander III (reigned 1881–94), an autocrat’s autocrat, possessed, not to mention the willingness to play ball: “You tell me I must regain the confidence of the people,” grumbled Nicholas just months before he was forced into abdication. “Isn’t it rather for my people to regain my confidence?”

Yet (and Montefiore doesn’t really explain how) this “weirdly obsolete” regime endured until the second decade of the 20th century. Swatting aside notions of what more-liberal (or even not so liberal) Europeans viewed as progress and stifling the stirrings of parliamentary democracy that might have saved him, the hapless, hopelessly unimaginative Nicholas II presided, quite accidentally, over the economic boom that might have propelled Russia into modernity and over the explosion of creativity — badly undersold as a “Silver Age” — that would have continued to adorn the country as it advanced. And, who knows, if he’d been shrewd enough not to stumble into war in 1914, he might have died in his bed, not a cellar.

The ferocity (on both sides) of the 1905 revolution — the “dress rehearsal,” as Trotsky came to call it — and the unease that ran through that Silver Age were harbingers of darkness. Artists, like prophets, can be prone to anticipating an apocalypse, but there was something peculiarly morbid about the culture of early-20th-century St. Petersburg, a dazzling carnival of “wild foreboding” and desperate decadence, chimes at an ominous midnight. The poet Alexander Blok looked around him and saw “a quiet far-spreading fire” that would “consume all.” He was not to survive it.

This sense of an approaching reckoning seeps through the later stages of the book. The passing of centuries blurs the worst of the past, but as Montefiore’s narrative draws closer to modern times, the record fills out. There are more diaries and letters to bear witness: The emperors become human, their fate a matter, to the reader, of more than history’s cold accounting. Learning that yet another revolutionary gang had passed a death sentence upon him, Alexander II, the dynasty’s last best hope, wrote in 1879 that he felt “like a wolf tracked by hunters,” words that still move. The hunters caught up with him two years later.

If the tsars emerge into clearer sight, so do those who wanted to destroy them. In 1869, Sergei Nechayev wrote the Revolutionary Catechism, a paean to mass murder. It was “Leninism before Lenin” and, for that matter, ISIS before ISIS, a manifesto for the nightmares to come and a reprise of ancient millenarian dreams.

The Russian Orthodox Church may have canonized Nicholas II, but Montefiore’s description of that dull, dutiful, fatalistic, sometimes startlingly callous incompetent is measured and objective, free from the glow that his Calvary casts over the memory of the last tsar. To be sure, Citizen Romanov bore his imprisonment with a dignity that transcended its degradation, but he still found the time to study the anti-Semitic tracts that reassured him that his fall was the work of conspiracy rather than failure. In the end, he was shot, and his wife and children were butchered alongside him, “living banners,” argued Lenin, too dangerous to be allowed to survive.

Michael, the first Romanov, would have understood. In 1614, the heir to one of the last serious pretenders to his throne was hanged from the Kremlin walls. Montefiore mentions that this menace was four years old. In fact, he was three.

A Tool, Not a Fetish

In the wake of Sept. 29’s dramatic House vote, the prospects, nature, and chances for success of any revived Paulson plan were, to say the least, uncertain. What remained certain was that some sort of rescue, bailout, pick the euphemism or pejorative of your choice, was still needed, and needed quickly. That this could ever have been a matter of serious debate is remarkable. Even more remarkable is the fact that a good number of those seemingly opposed to the very idea of a plan have come from the GOP. Washington’s Republicans are supposedly the flag bearers, however tatty, torn, and stained their flag, of what little economic literacy there is within the nation’s capital. Witnessing some of their recent pronouncements, not to speak of their votes, has been a depressing exercise.

As a starting point, we need to discard the distinction so often and so misleadingly drawn between Main Street (good) and Wall Street (bad), and its close cousin, the Pollyanna chatter about the “real” economy (healthy) and the financial world (sick). In fact, Wall Street and Main Street are just different points along the same road. Those who operate within the financial markets do so in the pursuit of their own economic interests, and there are occasional, inevitable, and sometimes spectacular speculative excesses; however, those operations generally facilitate the (reasonably) efficient allocation of capital to the rest of America. It shouldn’t be necessary to remind Republican congressmen that capital is the lifeblood of any economy. It’s worth adding that if anyone really thinks the vital principle of moral hazard — the notion that rescuing failing financiers will encourage others to take excessive risks — has been junked, or that the Paulson plan would have meant that Wall Street had “gotten away” with this mess, I can probably find some Lehman stock to sell him.

And that’s why referring to that plan, an initiative designed to defend this system, as (to quote various House and Senate Republicans) “financial socialism,” “un-American,” and an example of the “Leviathan state” at work is absurd. A belief in the effectiveness of free markets is one thing. Market fundamentalism is another.

Free markets are, to steal Winston Churchill’s famous comment about democracy, the worst way of running an economy “except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Free markets work better than the alternatives because no one person, organization, or government has the smarts to allocate resources more efficiently than can the collective wisdom of the crowd. But the free market should be a tool, not a fetish, and as with all tools, there are instructions for its use. To think that it can operate in Galt’s Gulch isolation is to ignore history and psychology, and to confuse the economics of Hayek with those of Mad Max.

Free markets need a financial, legal, and regulatory structure to provide the element of trust — without which they cannot work very well, as we saw in Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic Russia. And that basic structure, experience shows us, has to come from the state. The only real question is how extensive it should be. As the failures of socialism demonstrate, too much state intervention is counterproductive. But too little can also be disastrous, especially when it comes to preserving the trust that (for example) enables banks to borrow short and lend long, thereby ensuring the free flow of funds on which the economy relies.

A breakdown in trust has been all too evident in recent months, both to those of us in the financial markets (I work in international equities, but should stress that I am writing in a purely personal capacity) and, increasingly, to those working outside them. In the more insular political arena, there seems to have been rather less understanding. When, on Sept. 23, Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.) suggested that the U.S. should make sure it has “exhausted all reasonable alternatives” before proceeding with the Paulson plan, it was impossible to avoid wondering what, at that late stage, he had in mind. And then there was the first House vote.

Whether it’s the slowdown in interbank lending, the drastic contraction in the commercial-paper market, or even the fact that in late September the U.S. Mint ran out of its one-ounce “American Buffalo” gold coins owing to a surge in investor demand, the signs of collapsing trust and mounting panic in the credit markets (gyrations in the stock market matter much less) are unmistakable — and profoundly disturbing.

And when panic takes over, it is indiscriminate. Sound institutions can fail along with those that deserve to. It’s not only exuberance that’s irrational; free markets may rely on the collective wisdom of crowds, but as Charles Mackay (the 19th-century author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) reminds us, crowds can go crazy. That’s why on some occasions the Fed has to take away the punchbowl, and on others come to the rescue.

Unfortunately, the problems this time are so great that the Fed’s interventions have not so far done the trick. At this point, government, the only institution with possibly enough resources (financial and otherwise) to halt this particular panic, has to step in with something very drastic indeed. It’s not pretty, or particularly ideologically comfortable for those of us on the right, but, like the free-market system, it’s pragmatic and, as such, thoroughly American. The Japanese delayed doing what they needed to do for years; the consequences are too well-known to need reciting here.

None of this is to claim that the original Paulson plan was perfect. It was very far from that (I’d have preferred a scheme with more direct equity investment in the troubled institutions). Equally, it must be acknowledged that the congressional Republicans’ criticisms improved the package’s terms prior to the first vote, if insufficiently to convince enough of them to vote yes. The problem is that, in the course of a panic on this scale, time is of the essence (this is not some bogus emergency on the usual Washington model). There is limited room for fine-tuning, with the markets waiting for a move.

As Rep. Henry Steagall (yes, that Steagall, and yes, he was a Democrat) wrote in 1932 about a fix proposed for an economic crisis:

Of course, it involves a departure from established policies and ideals, but we cannot stand by when a house is on fire to engage in lengthy debates over the methods to be employed in extinguishing the fire. In such a situation we instinctively seize upon and utilize whatever method is most available and offers assurance of speediest success.

No bailout, however deftly structured, offers any “assurance” of success. The situation is too treacherous for that. A bailout is a gamble, but not a stupid or extravagant one (banking crises never come cheap), and the stakes are too high to avoid it. To do little or nothing, or to rely on the free market alone, would be to display reckless optimism of the type that got us into this trouble in the first place.

The free market simply cannot do its job in a climate of rising and highly infectious financial panic, hysteria, and risk aversion. A bailout offers a chance of restoring the confidence needed for its normal operation, and with this the semblance of a normal economic cycle.

The alternative could well be systemic collapse, and it is that, not Hank Paulson, that will pave the way for Leviathan.

Cultural Suicide

Ian Buruma: Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the limits of Tolerance

National Review, December 4, 2006

theo-van-goh.jpg

It’s far too soon to know if the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic will turn out to be a warning heeded in time, or if it will prove to be just another episode in the decline of a country wrecked by the mixing of multiculturalism with mass immigration. Judging by the nature of the debate ahead of Holland’s upcoming elections, judging by the departure of parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the safer, more welcoming haven of America, and judging by this perceptive, misguided, depressing, and (sometimes unconsciously) revealing book, it will be the latter. If Murder in Amsterdam is a grim read, it’s not only because of the events its author recounts, but also because of the way he recounts them. Born in 1951, a child of the Dutch upper-middle class (“blazers and pearls and Hermès scarves”), and now a professor at Bard College, Ian Buruma is a distinguished man of letters, a gifted cultural historian, a skilled writer of impeccably refined sensibility: It’s no surprise to see his byline occasionally popping up in The New Yorker. This background makes him both one of the best possible guides to van Gogh’s murder and one of the worst.

Buruma’s Dutch upbringing and well-traveled later years have left him nicely placed to help us understand a small, clubby country that can be tricky to penetrate and even more difficult to decode. With his help, we mingle with intellectuals, with politicians, and with Muslims, young and not so young, pious and not so pious. We meet Hirsi Ali herself, and we visit van Gogh’s parents, still mourning the brilliant provocateur that was their wild, loutish, infuriating, and endearing son.

When it comes to describing the two protagonists in this terrible drama, Buruma rarely misses a trick. His vividly drawn portrait of Theo is made painful, not only by our knowledge of the slaughter to come, but also by the hideous irony that a man astute enough to realize that the old easygoing Holland was under lethal assault was too careless, too stubborn, and too confident to realize that he too was in danger. Nobody would harm him, said blithe, foolish Theo: He was just “the village idiot.” But that familiar comfortable village had been torn down, replaced by a multicultural shantytown, yet another miserable utopia in which there would be no room for rowdy jesters, rude pranksters, or free spirits of any kind.

As for van Gogh’s murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, Buruma tracks his descent from minor misfit to holy warrior step by deluded step until that murderous November morning comes to seem inevitable, ordained, as logical as the carnage that concludes a Shakespearean tragedy. But if the how is made grippingly clear, Buruma leaves the why something of a mystery. Worse still, when it comes to suggesting how such horrors can be avoided in future, the best he can come up with is a bit more appeasement (he wouldn’t use the word, of course), yet more “tolerance” and acceptance of the fact that “Islam is a European religion,” a grand-sounding observation that is as obvious as it is unhelpful.

As always seems to be the case, some of the killer’s squalid why can be explained by personal inadequacies and, almost certainly, severe psychological problems, but to dismiss Bouyeri as Lee Harvey Oswald on a prayer mat is to miss the point. Buruma knows this perfectly well. He chooses to stress the unhappiness of the “immigrant” (Bouyeri is Dutch-born) marooned in a country where he will always be considered an alien. Fair enough, but it’s only part of the story.

Buruma has far less to say about the extent to which the Dutch themselves (or, more precisely, the Dutch elite) dug van Gogh’s grave. After all, these were the people who as a result of political correctness, indifference, and complacency did nothing to combat Islamic extremism. Not only that, but they went out of their way to vilify those who were prepared to do so (check out how Pim Fortuyn and van Gogh were described both before and after their murders). These people have spent decades denigrating their own history, their own culture, and their own traditions; to them, nationalism was among the gravest of sins. No wonder Bouyeri was unimpressed.

Buruma is too smart, and too honest, an observer to ignore these issues altogether, but his reluctance to spend much time on them shows that he has not moved as far from the attitudes of bien-pensant Holland as he would like us to think. Readers will look in vain for much sympathy for the ethnic Dutch, citizens of a state turned upside down with little discussion and less consent (raising these issues was “racist,” “Islamophobic,” choose your bogeyword) — omissions that go some way toward explaining why integration has been such a failure.

It’s also pretty clear that the author of Murder in Amsterdam, like so many other secular Europeans, has little idea of quite how dangerous truly fundamentalist religion can be. It’s telling that Buruma can find time to grumble that “conservatives” have appropriated the idea of the Enlightenment as a last redoubt from which they can defend their (presumably reprehensible) values. That’s a shot that’s not only cheap but also aimed at the wrong target. Standing up for reason is too important a task to be regarded as something reserved only for Europe’s Left or, for that matter, its Right. It’s going to be hard work and, yes, it may be a little uncomfortable at times: Café debates, ecumenical babble, and generous welfare payments won’t be enough to do the trick. Voltaire would have understood this. So, I’m sure, does Buruma; he just can’t face admitting it.

Holland’s establishment consensus is so stifling that it ought to be no surprise that the most prominent dissidents have emerged from outside the mainstream: the immigrant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now in exile); the homosexual, Pim Fortuyn (murdered); and the clown, Theo van Gogh (murdered). It ought to be no surprise, but maybe to Buruma it is. To read his descriptions of all three is to detect a certain distancing, a touch of disapproval, and perhaps even a little distaste. They rocked the boat, you see, in a way that was not very Dutch, no, not at all.