A Proper Revolution?

Steve Pincus: 1688 - The First Modern Revolution

National Review, October 15, 2009

Infuriated by the high-church, high-Tory critiques of a British historian impertinent enough to suggest that the tercentenary of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not worth celebrating, Mrs. Thatcher’s then Lord Chancellor jibed that “academic historians never make their money by saying that the established truth is true.” I’m not sure what the late Baron Hailsham of St. Marylebone would have made of a new account of that same revolution by Yale professor Steve Pincus. Meticulously researched and deftly written, Pincus’s book demolishes established truths (actually untruths) about the Glorious Revolution only to cram 1688 into a corset (“the first modern revolution”) that might be meant to be sexy, but ultimately doesn’t fit. That said, this is so evidently serious a book that old Hailsham might have been not only forgiving but even, maybe, something of a fan.

The 1688 revolution was traditionally believed to derive much of its gloriousness from its absence of significant bloodshed, except in Ireland (which, revealingly, was not thought to count), a blessing usually put down to the fact that its central drama — the overthrow of James II, England’s last Roman Catholic king — was an essentially conservative affair. According to this version of events, the replacement of James with the dual monarchy of the Dutch prince William and his wife (and James’s daughter) Mary was an easy sell, a restoration as much as a revolution, intended by a good number of its supporters to return hallowed (if sometimes fictional) English liberties to their central place in a constitution threatened by the newfangled ways of a monarch in thrall to a foreign religion and, no less sinisterly, to the absolutist ideology of “Lewis XIV” (to use the contemporary, splendid, and unapologetically English spelling), the foreign tyrant who was the wretched James’s ally, mentor, and paymaster. Yes, the Glorious Revolution may have paved the way to more radical changes in the way England was run, but so far as possible (even during the tricky 1688–89 hiatus) it did so in a way that was in accord with existing law — and who could object to that?

The distinction between this happy tale and the chaos and slaughter of subsequent revolutions abroad is obvious and, for those remaining Britons who know their history, a source of pride, clinching proof of a sensible people’s innate talent for moderation. When, in a classic exposition of both this view and her indomitable tactlessness, Mrs. Thatcher took advantage of the bicentenary of the French revolution to remind Le Monde that the Glorious Revolution was an example of the way that English liberties had evolved in a process marked by “continuity, respect for law, and a sense of balance,” the Iron Lady was making the point that the French Revolution was everything that 1688 was not — and that it was all the worse for it.

Ironically, the survival of this “Whig interpretation” of (to borrow Mrs. Thatcher’s description) 1688’s “quiet revolution” has been helped by the persistent disappointment of leftist British historians that, despite a possible near miss in the 1640s, their country has never enjoyed the imagined benefits of a “proper” revolution. Lord Macaulay and Edmund Burke, the two most influential exponents of the Whig analysis, may have shaped their narratives in a manner designed to persuade their countrymen that the revolutionary upheavals then raging on the Continent (Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James the Second was published in 1848, while Burke was writing when the guillotine was at its busiest) were not the British way, but it was an approach that played into the hands of later, lesser writers only too keen to dismiss James’s dethroning as just another aristocratic putsch. The 1688 revolution was, sniffed Engels in 1892, a “comparatively puny event.”

That’s not Professor Pincus’s view. He maintains that the 1688 upheaval was not only enormously significant (which it was), but that it should be considered — dubious compliment — the first “modern revolution.” Sadly, he never quite succeeds in satisfactorily establishing what that term means, coming closest when he writes about “a structural and ideological break with the previous regime . . . and a new conception of time, a notion that they [revolutionary regimes] are beginning a new epoch in the history of the state and . . . society,” an idea of Year Zero that is, awkwardly, difficult to square with the painstaking quest for precedent that was such a feature of 1688.

These definitional problems should come as no surprise. Stripped of its already imprecise chronological sense, “modern” is in this context too vague and too broad an adjective to mean very much: Even the most archetypically “modern” revolution — the Russian, with its strong strains of murderous millennial fantasy and traditional peasant Jacquerie — came with distinctly medieval aspects.

If there’s one thing we do know about modern revolutions, it’s their tendency to extreme violence. Unfortunately, Pincus’s determination to demonstrate the modernity of 1688 occasionally appears to have led him to paint a portrait of its convulsions in colors somewhat closer to the blood-drenched hues of revolutionary France than to the discreet, largely decorous tones that this most proper of revolutions really deserves. Even if we include (as we should) the Irish campaign and the fighting in Scotland, the Glorious Revolution can be blamed for perhaps some 20,000 deaths, almost none of them in England. By contrast, the revolution that tore England apart in the 1640s cost 190,000 lives in England alone (as a percentage of the population, a total higher than that accounted for by World War I — and in Scotland and Ireland the relative toll was even worse). It was a catastrophe so terrible, and in its social implications so potentially dangerous, that it goes a long way toward explaining the restraint displayed by the revolutionaries of 1688. That earlier conflict had come close to being a “modern revolution” — and there was little appetite to repeat the experience.

Pincus makes much of the rancorous controversies, sharp ideological divisions, and (in an attempt to debunk the argument that the revolution was little more than the maneuverings of shifting aristocratic cabals) popular enthusiasms that characterized England’s politics in the aftermath of the revolution and on deep into the 1690s. He demonstrates that these struggles had revolutionary consequences. Nevertheless, those who fought in them generally did so within well-established legal and political structures. 1688 was indeed a proper revolution, but in both senses of the word.

Another element in Pincus’s definition of a modern revolution is that it typically represents a clash not between the old order and the new, but between two conflicting visions of modernity. That’s a contention that could be disputed when it comes to some of history’s later revolutions, but it works well for 1688, in particular as an explanation of why so many conservatives were prepared to throw in their lot with the revolutionaries. As Pincus shows, by 1688 James had taken England a long way down the road to Versailles. The machinery of a Continental-style centralized absolutist state was being put in place. To add insult to injury, this was linked to an aggressive recatholicizing effort (albeit often camouflaged by bogus calls for wider religious toleration) that left little doubt that James’s ultimate ambition was to impose upon England a “national” Catholicism equivalent to the Gallicanism then being preached from French pulpits. Under the circumstances, many traditionalists, however deep their philosophical (and, not infrequently, religious) scruples about turning against their lawful king, felt that their vision of England left them with no choice other than revolt or (almost as devastating to James) sullen neutrality.

But with James consigned to history by his 1690 defeat (at the Battle of the Boyne, in the Roman Catholic Ireland that was his last redoubt), what next for England? Many studies of the 1688 revolution conclude with the former king’s final flight to France and a quick canter through the Bill of Rights (sound familiar?) and the other legislation most associated with the post-revolutionary settlement. If the biggest weakness of Pincus’s book (other than sporadically subjecting 1688 to the Eisenstein treatment) is an at times elliptical approach to narrative, its biggest strength is the way that the author takes the story far deeper into the 1690s than is customarily the case. We could argue about whether, as Pincus claims, the changes seen in those years constituted a continuing revolution, but that they were revolutionary is indisputable.

While these changes bear strong hallmarks of the improvisation and desire for compromise that are a characteristic of English political history, Pincus makes a forceful case that they were more cohesive than is usually understood. They were certainly comprehensive. By 1697, England had reset its foreign policy. Equally, attitudes to political and religious freedom had been altered in ways almost unimaginable a decade or so before, and the financial system had been restructured in a manner that was a death knell to the ancient aristocratic ideal of land as the source of wealth. The bourgeois trading and manufacturing Britain that was to dominate the planet was very clearly taking shape. Perhaps the greatest pleasure to be found in reading this book, however, comes from the prominence that Pincus gives to the debates that accompanied this transformation: often overlooked and almost always fascinating discussions that, in their sophistication, breadth, depth, and cleverness, foreshadow the brilliance of the thinking that was to emerge in America during the course of the third, and most glorious, English revolution of all — the one that caught fire in 1776.

Sarko's Bite

National Review, December 15, 2008

It is a ritual as frustrating, as funny, and as familiar as Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football. A new “right wing” French president is elected, vowing reform, and American conservatives swoon. First there was Jacques Chirac. Older, sadder, and wiser folk may still recall the excited talk about his summer at Harvard, his stint as a soda jerk at Howard Johnson’s, and, naturellement, a girl from South Carolina. The Frenchman liked us! He really liked us! He wasn’t Mitterrand! No, he wasn’t, but . . .

After Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy. The new president’s first vacation was spent not on the Cote d’Azur, but in Wolfeboro, N.H. A few months later “Sarko l’Americain” addressed a joint session of Congress, spoke warmly of the American dream, and name-checked John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, and Martin Luther King. The Frenchman likes us! He really likes us! He isn’t Chirac! Sarkozy promised a more robust approach to Islamic extremism both at home and abroad and, more daring still, an assault on the regulations, overspending, taxes, and trade-union privilege that have made France so much less than she could be. America’s conservatives cheered. Fries could be French again.

That was then. Less than a year later, Sarkozy took the opportunity presented by the financial meltdown to announce, with rather too much glee, the death of laissez-faire, a declaration made all the more surprising by the fact that there is little evidence that laissez-faire had been alive in the first place. Perhaps that’s why Sarkozy is so keen to do a Van Helsing on the poor doctrine’s corpse. Like the United States and most other major nations, France has put together a massive (in its case, up to €360 billion) rescue package for its banks, but with a characteristically French twist: It is insisting that the banks that benefit from this largesse increase their lending by a designated amount (3 to 4 percent) over a given twelve-month period, a mandate almost guaranteed to wreak further financial havoc. “The state,” thundered Sarkozy, “is back.”

It had never been away. But the state’s command over the French economy will become even more wide-ranging with the establishment of a new strategic-investment fund (up to €20 billion, although larger numbers have been mentioned) to protect key companies from the unwanted attentions of wicked foreign predators. Somewhat more conventionally, the government will increase what it spends on contrats aides, which will subsidize an additional 100,000 jobs next year. With carrot comes stick: Sarkozy has cautioned companies against using the crisis as a cover for layoffs: “Those who want to play that game be warned: The government will be ruthless.” The state is indeed “back.”

So far, so French. Much more worrying is the extent to which Sarkozy’s revenant state is now looking to expand its reach internationally. Sarkozy is busy telling anyone who will listen (and quite a few who won’t) that the financial crisis has demonstrated the need to establish a “clearly identified economic government” for the eurozone. Quite what that might mean is not easy to identify, but some clues can be found in Sarkozy’s suggestion that equivalents of France’s new strategic-investment fund be set up throughout the zone. As the French president told the EU’s parliament in October, he didn’t “want European citizens to wake up” and find out that their companies had been taken over by wily “non-European” investors who had taken advantage of low share prices to snap up a few bargains. To Europe’s last serving Thatcherite, Czech president Vaclav Klaus, the thinking behind the Sarkozy scheme reeked of “old socialism.” It’s difficult to disagree.

For now the idea of constructing a Maginot Line against foreign capital has found few takers elsewhere in the EU, but an undaunted Sarkozy is taking his crusade against the supposed “dictatorship of the market” even farther afield. The French president was a key figure in pushing for the recent G-20 summit in Washington. In itself, the idea of a meeting involving more than the usual G-8 suspects was no bad thing. Financial panics recognize no borders. That said, final responsibility for managing such crises must remain at the national level for reasons of common sense, practicality, and — critically — sovereignty.

Strengthening international cooperation in this area will be a positive development, but only so long as efforts are organized multilaterally. On that basis, the G-20’s search for a closer consensus on matters such as accounting standards, clearing facilities for credit-default swaps, banks’ capital-adequacy ratios, and the role of rating agencies is something to be welcomed, not feared.

The same is true of the mooted development of an IMF-run early-warning system. Another of the summit’s themes, boosting the existing levels of cooperation between different national regulatory authorities, also makes obvious sense, as do, in theory, plans to create (pompously named) “supervisory colleges” for all major cross-border financial institutions. Staffed by regulators from the various relevant jurisdictions, these bodies would be designed to provide an additional degree of surveillance and, it is hoped (the details are tellingly scant), be in a position to head off crises before they arise. The focus of international coordination in this area would thus shift from the reactive to the proactive. These are all changes that, if sensibly handled, could be useful steps forward.

If Sarkozy gets his way, sensible is one thing they won’t be. In no small respect this is a function of his personality: restless, kinetic, opportunistic, and incapable of resisting either the temptation of la grande geste or, as he sees it, the splendor of his own genius. We are speaking, after all, of the architect of the proposed “Mediterranean Union.” (You’ve never heard of it?) In the endearingly acid words of a woman quoted in Dawn, Dusk or Night (playwright Yasmina Reza’s magnificently offbeat account of a year spent with Sarkozy on the campaign trail): “Nicolas is too high-strung. . . . He is four inches too short and that undermines his charisma on the international level. Mitterrand, you couldn’t tell he was short because he was placid, whereas Nicolas is a fox terrier running everywhere, barking.”

But it’s possible to detect patterns in all that motion, and one of them is the hyperpresident’s bathyscaphe-deep distrust of the free market. Sarkozy’s forlorn American conservative fans would have done well to read his Testimony (2006), a manifesto for the modernization of France that is, at its core, technocratic, profoundly dirigiste (“It seems to me to be perfectly reasonable . . . that a profitable company not be allowed to benefit from a cut in taxes if it does not raise salaries”), Colbertist (“It is not illegitimate for the finance minister to promote the creation of national . . . champions”), neo-protectionist (“I propose that exports from countries that do not respect environmental rules be taxed according to how much they pollute”), and, in its dismissive references to Wal-Mart’s “brutal and unacceptable” business practices, “stock market capitalism,” and “speculators and predators,” not particularly friendly to the American way of making a buck.

Strongly nationalist though he is, Sarkozy is too shrewd to believe that France can go it alone. So, like his predecessors, he tries to manipulate the EU’s structures in ways intended to produce a Europe that looks like France, a Europe where France can be France, a Europe ideally (in Sarkozy’s view) stripped of its “dogmatic commitment to competition” and what he sees as a race to the bottom in fiscal and social policy. Translation: The Irish should be forced to raise their taxes so that the French aren’t forced to cut theirs. All in the name of European unity, of course.

It’s easy to see how the economic crunch has offered France (acting in conjunction with a good number of other nations) a similar opportunity — to remake the world’s financial system in something much closer to its own image (all in the name of ending the crisis, of course), which would have the added bonus of diminishing America’s economic dominance and, with it, Washington’s power to set the global agenda.

Yes, financial reform, tougher domestic regulation, and smarter international coordination are all required, but these should be accomplished through incremental changes. There’s no need to tear up the old rulebook. Any transfers of authority to new transnational authorities should be kept to an absolute minimum, a priority that is difficult to reconcile with all the chatter (from Sarkozy and others) of a new Bretton Woods.

The French president left the G-20 summit reportedly claiming that the “animal spirits” of American capitalism had been tamed and that the days of a single currency (the dollar) are “over.” The hyperpresident has, he undoubtedly believes, got the hyperpower on the run. Rubbing yet more salt in Uncle Sam’s wounds, Sarkozy then surprised everyone (one European diplomat was reported by the International Herald Tribune as describing the announcement as “amazing”) with news that he was convening a conference in Paris (co-hosted by the inevitable Tony Blair) in early January to, in Blair’s words, “define a new model of capitalism.”

The fox terrier, it appears, does not just bark. He bites

Imagining the Chairman

Art and China's Revolution

National Review, November 3, 2008

Park Avenue, New York City, September 2008  © Andrew Stuttaford

The sculpture (by Sui Jianguo) squats, a weird piece of a whole that was never made, on a median bisecting one of the more affluent slices of Manhattan’s Park Avenue. It’s of a distinctive, very distinctive, jacket, nothing more, but it’s oddly bulky, as if the colossus who once wore it were, impossibly, somewhere within. And because the shape and the cut of that jacket are so distinctive, the onlooker is encouraged to fill it with his own image of the only individual (out of hundreds of millions once clothed in such garments) it could possibly represent.

He’s a man (“monster” is too easy an alibi for you and for me) whose deeds heaped further disgrace on an already savage century, yet who now finds himself with a place in the collective imagination that is strangely, and disquietingly, ambivalent. If, on the other hand, you’re just puzzled by the sight of an oversized piece of metal tailoring in the middle of Park Avenue, glance across at the building that houses the Asia Society. A banner emblazoned with Chairman Mao — ah, that’s whose jacket it is — flutters, advertising the society’s latest exhibition. Art and China’s Revolution is a remarkable collection (it runs until January 11) of works dating mainly from the first three decades of the People’s Republic. To see it is to be left in little doubt about the nature of the man in that jacket.

And that’s probably why the Chinese government refused to lend art to this show. The party’s authority is still meant to flow, somehow, from Mao. To admit too much of the past would be awkward. “Thirty percent wrong, 70 percent right” and leave it at that. The killer’s corpse belongs in a criminal’s grave, but rests instead, honored, cherished, embalmed in chemicals and lies, housed on a Tiananmen Square defaced by his image and wrapped in his myth. The state that Mao made has mutated in ways that the People’s Liberator would have detested, but when that increasingly prosperous people buys once-undreamt-of consumer goods they do so with currency carrying the picture of the dictator who consigned 30 million, 40 million, 50 million, who knows, of their compatriots to their deaths: blood money of a sort.

With so much cruelty to choose from, it’s difficult to identify the moment when Mao’s long despotism reached its appalling nadir, but there is something about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that makes, to use the official euphemism, its “ten-year turbulence” (roughly 1966–76) a repulsively unique period in Chinese history. Far fewer perished (perhaps somewhere between 500,000 and a million; others reckon far more) than in the course of some of Communist China’s earlier horrors, but the scale of its ambitions were more total, and their implications more sinister, than anything seen before or (outside the Khmer Rouge’s copycat Kampuchea) since. Yes, it’s true that the early years of the Soviet revolution were marked by a similar belief that the very essence of man could be refashioned, but, with the exception of the onslaught against religion, the attempts of the Bolshevik intelligentsia to turn millennial delusion into quotidian reality did not survive the ascendancy of Stalin, a cynic who saw a return to cultural conservatism as a way of buttressing his power.

The no-less-cynical Mao took the opposite tack, inciting a revolution from below (“bombard the headquarters”) to eliminate any possible opposition within a leadership increasingly concerned that the Great Helmsman was steering their regime onto the rocks. To the tough Communist apparatchiks at the top of the Chinese party, a charnel-house was, within limits, perfectly acceptable; a mad house was not. Mao appealed over their heads to the educated and semi-educated young with a manipulative rhetoric that combined a dramatic rejection of the past (destroy the “four olds”: old ideas, old culture, old habits, old customs) with the promise of permanent revolution (“to rebel is justified”) and ecstatic mayhem (“be violent”) in one intoxicating, exhilarating mix. The result was a hysterical spasm that devastated an already-ruined nation and, in its wildest extremes, looked to complete the transformation (zaosheng yundong) of the Chairman into the living god he was so clearly already becoming. Communism had, for all practical purposes, always been a religion, just never quite so openly.

Like all religions Maoism boasted an iconography, an iconography that is at the heart of the Asia Society show. We see traditional Chinese inkwork superseded by more “modern” painting in oil, its ancient subtleties replaced by the heavy (if occasionally wonderfully executed) didacticism of imported Soviet-style socialist realism. The arrival of the Cultural Revolution is summoned up by a series of fierce woodblock prints (often, interestingly, in the red, white, and black of Hitler’s swastika flag; those colors do the tyrant’s work so well), urgent, violent, inflammatory, deranged, the paper trail of a nation spinning, and being spun, into the abyss: Smash the Cultural Ministry! Smash the Dog Head of Soviet Revisionists! Smash. Struggle. Destroy. Obliterate. Even buildings were not spared: Seventy percent of Peking’s officially designated “places of historical and cultural interest” were destroyed in the frenzy.

Socialist realism meanwhile merged with, in Mao’s approving words, “revolutionary romanticism,” “red, bright, and shining” depictions of a dream world (sometimes almost literally so; check out Zheng Shengtian, Zhou Ruiwen, and Xu Junxuan’s Man’s Whole World is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of the Yangtze River), that was, in truth, nightmare, lie, and something far, far stranger still. And as the Red Guards rose and darkness fell, images of that dream, and instructions on how to dream it, were repeated again and again across all media, from paintings, posters, and photography, to opera, to song, to “loyalty dance,” to film, and, most definitely, to the exclusion of everything else. Again and again and again: On some estimates 2.2 billion “official” portraits of Mao were reproduced in one format or another during these years. The print runs of the Christ-Mao of Liu Chunhua’s Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (1969) are thought to have amounted to 900 million alone. Mao, always Mao: “The world’s red sun” was the focal point of the paintings in which he appeared, glowing with an inner light, an unmistakable hint of the divine reinforced by mists, mountaintops, and suggestions of the miraculous.

And as icons tend to do, these materials offer their viewers a glimpse of an alternative, fantastic reality, in this case a heaven right here on earth. Many are undeniably, if eerily, beautiful. To their credit, the exhibition’s curators supplement them with commentary (as well as some extraordinary, and long-hidden, photography from that era by Li Zhensheng) that leaves little room for ambiguity about what these artworks both represent and disguise. Despite this, the Asia Society’s gift shop still sells bits and pieces of Maoist junk, revolutionary tote bags, enameled portraits of the great man, and a stack of Little Red Books. That’s equivalent to selling Nazi paraphernalia at a museum show dedicated to the art of the Third Reich, but, as is generally the case when it comes to insulting the memory of the victims of Communism, few seem to care: Mao killed millions and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

The realization that those uncounted tens of millions of Chinese dead do not count for very much is reinforced by the presence in the Asia Society’s foyers of a group of Qu Guangci’s identical stainless-steel statues of Mao. Simultaneously clueless, knowing, and saturated in a borrowed pop-cultural sensibility, these works wink at atrocity. And they are not alone in doing so. They are reminders of the way that China’s younger generation of artists has appropriated Maoist imagery for its own purposes, sometimes satirical, sometimes antic, and sometimes serious, but almost always with an eye on the marketplace. That they find buyers in China is evidence of a country in denial about its past. That they find buyers in London, Paris, and New York reveals something almost as bad, a West where too many are willing to use somebody else’s revolution as a means of self-expression — at a comfortable distance, of course.

To own the latest Maoist pastiche by Wang Guangyi may merely be a matter of status, a refreshingly vulgar assertion of both wealth and (less obviously) taste. Too often, however, it is accompanied by the stale stink of radical chic, a noxious whiff of ’68 that conjures up memories of Berkeley, the Sorbonne, and Western students “carrying pictures,” as the Beatles so acidly sang, “of Chairman Mao.” But to do so was, usually, no more than exhibitionism, less gesture of support for the Cultural Revolution than fashion statement, a painless public proclamation of modish rebelliousness, trendy utopianism, and the hidden self-loathing that lurked within the notion that the West had to look beyond itself for authenticity (whatever that meant). It wasn’t about Mao. It was about “me.” And all those deaths, repressions, and wrecked lives, oh, safely offstage.

They still are.

Ride of the Regulators

National Review, November 3, 2008

Georgetown, November 2008 © Andrew Stuttaford

First fire, then brimstone, then collateralized debt obligations: Both Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Iran’s Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati (a hardliner’s hardliner) are arguing that the 2008 crash is down to the Big Fellow upstairs. Ortega reportedly maintains that the Almighty is using the chaos on Wall Street as a scourge to punish America for imposing flawed economic policies on developing countries. The ayatollah, meanwhile, insists that it is Uncle Sam’s unspecified “ugly doings” that have brought down the wrath of Allah, and with it the housing market. I’m not entirely convinced either way.

I am, however, sure that the crash is a godsend for regulators, meddlers, and big-government types of every description, nationality, and hypocrisy. Speaking on behalf of his famously clean administration, Russia’s president, Dmitri Medvedev, has called for stricter regulation of financial markets, as has the EU’s top bureaucrat (the mean-spirited might interject that the EU is about to have its accounts rejected by its auditors for the 14th consecutive year). They are joined by the green-eyeshade types at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the always-understated Nicolas Sarkozy, who pronounced: “Laissez-faire is finished.” Sacre bleu! 

Closer to depreciated home, Democratic congressman Barney Frank has blamed the crisis on a “lack of regulation,” a gap that he obviously plans to fill and more with the eager assistance of Nancy Pelosi. In the now-infamous speech she made ahead of the first, calamitous House vote on the bailout package, Pelosi claimed, ludicrously, that the source of our problems lay in the fact that there had been “no” regulation and “no” supervision. Even if we make necessary allowance for hyperbole, dishonesty, and ignorance, Speaker Pelosi’s revealing choice of adjective indicates that an extremely heavy-handed, destructive, and counter-productive regulatory regime lies ahead.

The ideological winds have shifted. With free markets generally, and Wall Street specifically, being blamed for an economic predicament that is grim and getting grimmer, it’s going to be a struggle for those of us on the right to convince the rest of the country that the solution is not a financial system micromanaged by the feds. Nevertheless, we must try.

It was too much to expect John McCain to contribute anything to this effort, and, with his diatribes against “greed and corruption” on Wall Street, he hasn’t. But if, to use a vintage insult, demonizing “banksters” is unhelpful (full disclosure: I work in the international equity markets, but I am writing here in a purely personal capacity), trying to pin the blame on the Democrats’ uncomfortably cozy relationship with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae won’t do the trick either. It is true that this unlovely couple was running amok and that the Democrats helped them do so. But the conceit that the failure to regulate them appropriately is in itself an argument against wider financial regulation is absurd. Equally, to proclaim that free markets are always their own best regulator is not only to fly in the face of history and common sense but also to ensure that the debate will be lost.

As we survey an economic landscape littered with shattered 401(k)s, broken banks, and anxious businesses, the idea of leaving the free market to clean up after itself comes perilously close to the old notion that it was sometimes necessary to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it. The free market is a very powerful engine for economic growth, the best we have, but it is that power that makes it too dangerous to be left solely to its own devices. Adam Smith certainly understood as much. To face this reality is to recognize that the sensible debate is not whether financial markets should be regulated, but how much and in what manner.

As a starting point, we must accept (as if there could now be any reasonable doubt about it) that the interconnectedness and scale of today’s markets mean that far more institutions than had been previously thought are, as the cliche goes, “too big to fail.” (I’d add that this country’s fragmented regulatory structure has now clearly shown itself too small to succeed.) Market fundamentalists will hate it, but it’s time to be honest about this. Bear Stearns was too big to fail, but so, quite possibly, was Lehman Brothers. And if an institution is indeed too big to fail, that means it is effectively underwritten by the poor conscripted taxpayer. Under the circumstances, it’s neither unreasonable nor inconsistent with free-market principle to insist that the price of that privilege (which can bring with it a competitive advantage) be a more cautious approach to risk. Not to do so would, in fact, provide a perverse incentive to do the opposite, creating the notorious “moral hazard” about which we read so much these days.

Now that they have become conventional banking companies, this more closely supervised world is where Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will, justifiably, find themselves. The question, then, is which other institutions should be brought within a tighter regulatory net. The answer is, I suspect, to be deduced from facts of size, function, and client base, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the category of “too big to fail” will include at least some money-market funds and — remembering the Long-Term Capital Management fiasco — perhaps others on the buy side.

Getting this right is crucial because the corollary is that we will then know which firms are not too big to fail, and can ensure they are allowed to carry on business with minimal government interference. Traditionally, establishing a sleep-at-night risk profile has been a matter of closer regulatory scrutiny and ever-tougher capital requirements, but in the wake of this trauma we must ask whether certain instruments are simply too complex, too leveraged, and too thinly traded to be permitted anywhere near a “too big to fail” balance sheet. I may not share Warren Buffett’s politics, but it’s impossible to deny that his 2003 warning about the dangers of derivatives (“financial weapons of mass destruction”) was, to say the least, prescient.

Yes, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is establishing a facility for the centralized trading and, critically, clearing of credit-default swaps (on some estimates a $58 trillion market, although that number may be swollen by double counting), something that, if successful, should enhance both liquidity and pricing transparency. Additionally, attempts are being made to come up with a mark-to-market rule that accurately reflects risk without triggering unnecessary disaster (although it is essential that any such change be accompanied by greater disclosure of “off balance sheet” exposure). The role of the ratings agencies is also being subjected to long-overdue reappraisal. These are all steps in the right direction, but they are no panacea. For a different approach, go to Spain. The Spanish central bank discouraged the banks it supervised from participating in the structured-credit markets. This had the virtue of simplicity and, it seems, some degree of success. It’s not a perfect precedent (some of these banks were playing around with structured-credit products), but it is a start.

Even though Spanish banks largely kept clear of America’s subprime swamp, they could not escape their own. Spain too had a real-estate bubble. Manias, like panics, are global. But we do learn from them. The Bank of Spain’s relatively tough line has its origin in a major Spanish banking crisis some three decades ago. America’s real-estate lenders are unlikely to repeat the mistakes they have made (at least on the same scale) for many years: burned fingers and all that. Lending standards have tightened and will probably stay tight for a long time. This is not to suggest that the regulation of housing finance should be left untouched. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, George Soros (I know, I know) has argued that we should look at the Danish mortgage-bond market for inspiration, and there’s something to that. There’s no space here to go into the details, but suffice it to say that the Danish system aligns, prices, and manages risk far more effectively than anything we have in the United States. It would be nice to report that, as a result, the descendants of Polonius (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”) had avoided gambling on Danish real estate. Unfortunately, they didn’t. To speculate is human.

But the housing crisis is also a cautionary tale of political mismanagement (or it would be if anyone were paying attention). While promoting a home-ownership society is a legitimate function of government (thus the tax deductibility of mortgage interest should be retained), it must be exercised openly and honestly — and it must be properly costed. The misuse of the Community Reinvestment Act and, even more, the odd, anomalous, and unhealthy existence of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (they should be broken up and privatized as soon as possible, which in current conditions may be a while) played malign parts in this whole miserable saga. They are a reminder that excess, overreach, and worse can be as much a feature of the public sector as of the private. Preventing such abuses in the coming age of regulatory fervor will be the next challenge.

A Tool, Not a Fetish

National Review, October 20, 2008

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

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.

Yelling Stop

National Review, April 25, 2005

Holland was once known for its freedom, not its fanatics. It was seen as a kindly oasis in an unkind world, famous as a fair, broadminded country, a tolerant land where anyone could speak his mind without fear of retribution or the midnight knock on the door. Not now. Not after the assassination in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an outspoken opponent of Holland’s ruling multicultural orthodoxy. That wild, extravagant aristocrat was demonized by the political establishment, denied (some say) proper police protection, and, finally, gunned down in the street. Tolerant? Not after the slaughter in Amsterdam last November of another heretic, Theo van Gogh, filmmaker, gadfly, and controversialist, shot, stabbed, and butchered like a sacrificial animal for daring to attack Muslim fundamentalism. Free? No, not really. Not anymore.

In the days after van Gogh’s murder, the Dutch government at last began to act. To lose one public figure might have been unlucky; to have lost another looked like carelessness. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, two members of parliament loathed by Holland’s Islamic extremists, were whisked off to heavily guarded safe houses. In February, the Somalian-born Hirsi Ali emerged to complain that the authorities appeared incapable of making permanent arrangements for Wilders’s and her security. It turned out that she had been camped out in a naval base. As for Wilders, a fortysomething MP from the southeast of the country, well, he had been housed in a location that could only have been picked by someone with no sense of irony or, perhaps, with too much. He’s been living in a prison: to be precise, the jail within a jail where the Lockerbie bombers once awaited their trial. Those who threaten him remain outside, free to do their worst.

Stoic Dutchman that he is, Wilders doesn’t like to grumble. “I have to make the best of it,” he told me in a recent interview. “I have a kind of living room, which is quite okay. On either side, there are the cells where the two Libyans were held. In one cell I have my clothing . . . In the other cell there is my bed.” The prison is, “of course, a terrible place,” but his hosts have done what they can. “They put some lamps in and a TV,” small consolation, I suspect, for a life under siege.

We were chatting, not in the prison, but over coffee in a small, cramped office tucked away at the end of a long corridor somewhere in the depths of the building that houses the Dutch parliament in The Hague. A number of bodyguards sat nearby. Outside, it was a bright, brisk early spring morning, freshened by a North Sea breeze, the slightly surprising quiet punctuated mainly by the cries of the occasional seagull. The Hague looked its best, the understated capital of the timeless, civilized Holland of popular imagination, souvenir shops crammed with its symbols, Delftware, windmills, tulips, clogs, and Sint-Niklaas. Inside, Wilders, symbol of Holland’s new, more uncomfortable reality, describes the way that he is now kept alive.

The death threats, which, needless to say, include that latest cliché of a resurgent barbarism, calls for his beheading, are relentless, increasing, and chilling. “I would be lying if I said I was never afraid.” In an age of freelance jihad, even those rants that consist, probably, of little more than Internet bravado have to be taken seriously as possible incitements for someone somewhere to reach for knife and gun. The result is a life under constant guard, a “crazy, tough” life, a life with little privacy and less spontaneity, a life punctuated by visits to the police “five or six times a week,” a life where Wilders, in short, no longer feels free. It is almost impossible to see friends. Dining out occasionally is “better than eating in prison every evening,” but with a number of guards in tow, it is, inevitably, a “circus,” something, he explains, smiling, that can remove the romance from an evening out with his wife. “You have to whisper, or everyone from security can hear.”

Somehow Wilders has retained his sense of humor. A wry, thoughtful, somewhat intense man, he can still manage a laugh at the absurdities of his predicament. It’s only the occasional nervous gesture or the fleeting traces of tension that sometimes cross his face that betray a hint of the appalling pressure with which he has to cope. At the same time he obviously relishes the remarkable challenge he faces in attempting to build up a new political organization (Wilders broke with his old party, the free-market VVD, in September 2004), a difficult enough task under any circumstances, let alone those under which he now has to operate. No matter: “I have a lot of adrenalin going through my veins.”

Wilders’s new political group has, he believes, “a lot of possibilities.” Like most politicians, he is ambitious, “I’m not there yet . . . but I’m on my way.” It’s clear that he has sensed that the unease now enveloping the Netherlands could be his route to the top. As we chat, he proudly prints out new poll findings showing that the “Wilders Group” could expect to win around 10 percent of seats in the Dutch parliament’s lower house.

It would be a mistake, though, to see Wilders as an opportunist cashing in on thecurrent turmoil: His opposition to Holland’s seemingly perpetual soft-left consensus, stifling corporatism, and multiculturalist muddle can be traced back at least a decade, to his time as a speechwriter for Frits Bolkestein, the then VVD leader, who was one of the first to sound the alarm over the country’s failure to integrate its Muslim minority, a minority that is now about a million strong (out of a total population of a little over 16 million). Wilders himself went on to flourish within the VVD, rising to become its foreign-affairs spokesman. His departure from the party — the catalyst was his opposition to any invitation to Turkey to join the EU — might indeed turn out to be a shrewd move, but equally it could be nothing more than a leap into the wilderness.

His background in mainstream politics means, however, that Wilders is no outsider, and thus, unlike Fortuyn or van Gogh, he is not easy to caricature as a crank, a fascist, a racist, or a joker. He’s a pro, one of the grownups, respected (if not exactly universally loved) in parliament. Yes, it’s true that, despite his extraordinary hairdo, a pompadour in Billy Idol peroxide, Wilders doesn’t have the eccentric charisma of his two murdered predecessors: He has neither the extraordinary camp élan of Fortuyn nor the bad-boy charm of van Gogh (who never stood for elective office), but he more than makes up for this with a résumé that means that he has to be taken seriously.

And that’s exactly what he wants. During the course of the interview, Wilders is at pains to distinguish himself from Jean-Marie Le Pen and others on the darker side of the European “Right.” He is, he says, simply a “Tocquevillian conservative,” but a glance at his recent manifesto (the somewhat bombastically named “Declaration of Independence”) reveals a more complex mix, an eclectic blend of small-government conservatism, Atlanticism, free-market liberalism, Euroskepticism, and populism. But, above all, Wilders will be judged by his response to Holland’s failed and feckless experiment in multiculturalism. Sometimes this is subtle: He likes to connect the dots between the increasingly intrusive federalism of the EU and the dangerous consequences of the enfeebled sense of national identity within its member states. Sometimes it is not. Wilders is unapologetic in proclaiming the superiority of Western values. He is not, as he puts it, a “cultural relativist.” In an era of PC platitudes, Wilders can be bracingly blunt: “I don’t believe in a European Islam, in a moderate Islam . . . Islam and democracy are incompatible.” He is careful, however, to draw “a distinction between the religion and the people . . . Islam and democracy are incompatible, but Muslims and democracy are compatible.” Trying to change Islam is, in his view, a hopeless task; trying to win over its followers in the Netherlands is not.

To achieve this, he is recommending a program that features carrots and, unusually for Holland, sticks. It includes a five-year moratorium on immigration from “non-Western” countries, deportation of dual nationals convicted of criminal offenses, extra public spending to aid in the assimilation process, the closing down of extremist mosques, and preventive detention of some of those in the small hard core (“a few hundred”) reasonably believed to be planning terrorist attacks. Saving lives must, Wilders believes, come ahead of extending the full protection of Dutch law to those who would overthrow it. And no, he concedes, “this is not an easy concept.” Indeed, it isn’t.

Talking to Wilders, I was left with the impression of a work in progress, of a man still trying to think through the full ramifications both of the complex and threatening situation now facing his country and of the remedies he is proposing to resolve it. He does not have all the answers, and some of those he has may well be wrong, perhaps very wrong. But to his credit, Wilders is at least asking the right questions, something that few in Holland have been brave enough to attempt before. And, no, this stubborn, determined, man is not going to give up anytime soon. “That’s what the people who threaten me want me to do.”

Queen of The Desert

Christopher Buckley: Queen of the Desert

National Review, November 8, 2004

All it takes for evil to prevail, warned Burke, is “for enough good men to do nothing.” True; but that doesn’t mean that the good men cannot occasionally relax with a good laugh or two. It might even help them, especially in a situation of the kind the West faces today: a war with an ideology so dedicated to the destruction of happiness that, in the shape of the Taliban, it made laughing too loud in public a crime. (For women, anyway.)

In Florence of Arabia, his dark, disturbing, and very funny new satire, Christopher Buckley highlights the cruelty of radical Islamism and the contradictions of America’s response to it. He does this against a backdrop not of history at its grimmest or journalism at its most intense, but of jokes, mockery, bouts of wordplay (a State Department bureaucrat is a “desk-limpet,” an Arab potentate has lips that are “oyster-moist from a life- time’s contact with the greatest delicacies the world [has] to offer”), and puns that teeter on the edge of catastrophe: The repressive Arab kingdom that is—along, naturally, with France—the main villain of this book goes by the name of Wasabia.

Wasabia is a sand-swept nightmare marked by oil wealth, joylessness, corruption, and ritualized cruelty, a tyranny where “offenses that in other religions would earn you a lecture from the rabbi, five Hail Marys from a priest, and, for Episcopalians, a plastic pink flamingo on your front lawn” are punished by “beheading, amputation, flogging, blinding, and having your tongue cut out . . . A Google search using the key phrases ‘Wasabia’ and ‘La Dolce Vita’ results in no matches.” Well, Prince Bandar, does that remind you of anywhere?

Gallows humor? Certainly. But insofar as the jihadists—with their car bombs, suicide bombs, and dreams of dirty bombs and worse—wish to shove you and me into mass graves at the earliest possible moment, a touch of Tyburn does not seem amiss. Of course, there are people who will find some of what Buckley has to say distinctly, you know, insensitive. The caliphs of multiculturalism will twitch a little, and this is not a book that will find many fans in Foggy Bottom (“the State Department’s reflexive response to any American in extremis overseas is to hand them a pamphlet—along with a list of incompetent local lawyers—and say, ‘We told you so’”).

But satire should not make comfortable reading for the subscribers to any orthodoxy. Running through this book is the clear implication that the American approach to the Middle East has not worked out quite as well as might have been hoped. And what, exactly, is the role played in Buckley’s drama by the Waldorf Group, an investment company (named, hmmm, after a New York hotel) that has danced a little too long, a little too closely, and a little too profitably with the despots of Wasabia?

But about Buckley’s heroine Florence, at least, there are no doubts. Forced out of the State Department for her unwanted imagination and initiative, she now has a new assignment: using covert funds to set up a TV station to transmit to the Arab masses. This will not, of course, be another Al-Jazeera, glossily repackaging nationalist resentments and religious prejudice 24/7, but nor will it be a source of ticky-tacky U.S. propaganda, ineffectively boasting about multicultural contentment in midwestern suburbs. Instead it will be something altogether more revolutionary, directed at the most excluded and mistreated of all the Arab masses: women. This will be Lifetime for women who really have no lives, its purpose to promote female emancipation as a counterbalance to militant Islam.

Qatar, the home of Al-Jazeera, being presumably unavailable, Florence’s TV station is hosted by the venal but fairly relaxed emirate of Matar (“pronounced, for reasons unclear, Mutter”), a state let created by Churchill at one of those colonial conferences that have done so much to make the Middle East the cheery place that it is today. “One might suspect,” writes Buckley, “that its borders had been drawn so as to deprive . . . Wasabia of access to the sea. One would be right.” The result was to leave Matar rich, permanently grateful to old Winston (spotting Matar’s Churchillian place names is one of the book’s many pleasures), and under the control of a royal family that knows how to handle its mullahs: cash, cars, and “an annual six-week paid sabbatical, which most of them chose to take in the South of France, one of Islam’s holiest sites.”

This relatively tolerant country makes an ideal base for Florence and her offbeat and entertaining team: a delightfully cynical PR man, a State Department employee so camp that he could have been pitching tents with T. E. Lawrence, and a CIA Col. Kurtz lite (a seductive— ask Florence—and effective mix of Esquire and Soldier of Fortune).

Throughout, Buckley’s lightly ironic tone only accentuates the savagery that is his main target, making it somehow all the more terrible when, as in this extract, it comes into clear, brutal focus:

The package turned out to contain a videotape. It showed Fatima buried in sand up to her neck, being stoned to death with small rocks. The tape was twenty minutes long. Everyone who watched it wept. Florence brought the tape to Laila. She could not bring herself to view it again so she left the room while Laila viewed it. She waited outside on the terrace, looking out over the Gulf in the moonlight, her skin misted by salty droplets from the fountain that spouted out the royal crest. Laila emerged, pale and shaken. Neither woman spoke. The two of them stood by the balustrade overlooking the gardens, listening to the waves lap the shore and the onshore breeze rustle the fronds of the date palms.

And then, right at the end of this book, cruel, bleak, awful reality finally comes crashing in. There, in the closing acknowledgments, Buckley pays tribute to Fern Holland, “a real-life Florence of Arabia,” who was assassinated in Iraq on March 9, 2004.

She was trying to help, and that would not do.

A Hero of Our Time: Gareth Jones, 20th-century truth-teller.

National Review, September 17, 2004

The notebooks—worn, creased, and drab, but haunting nonetheless—lay carefully set out on a table in the lobby of a New York hotel. Their pages were filled with notes, comments, and calculations, jotted and scribbled in the cursive, spiky script once a hallmark of pre-war Britain's educated classes. Their author had, it seems, wandered through a dying village deep within Stalin's gargoyle empire. "Woman came out and started crying. 'They're killing us. In my village there used to be 300 cows and now we only have 30. The horses have died. How can I feed us all?'" It was the Ukraine, March 1933, a land in the throes of a man-made famine, the latest murderous chapter in Soviet social engineering. Five, six, seven million had died, maybe more. As Khrushchev later explained, "No one was counting."

But how had these notebooks found their way to a Hilton in Manhattan? Some years ago, in a town in Wales, an old, old lady, older than the century in which she lived, was burgled. As a result, she moved out of her home. When her niece, Siriol, came to clear up whatever was left, she found a brown leather suitcase monogrammed "G.V.R.J." and, lying under a thick layer of dust, a black tin box. Inside them were papers, letters, and, yes, those notebooks ("nothing had been thrown away"), the last records of Gareth Jones—"G.V.R.J."—Siriol's "jolly," brilliant Uncle Gareth, a polyglot traveler and journalist. In 1935 he had been killed by bandits in Manchuria, or so it was said. All that was left was grief, his writings, and the memory of a talented man cut down far, far too soon.

Seven decades later, as I sat talking to Siriol Colley in that midtown hotel, looking through Jones's papers, his press clippings, even his passport, it was not difficult to get a sense of the uncle she still mourned. Welsh to his core, he was typical of those clever, energetic Celts who did so well in the British Empire, restless (all those visa stamps, Warsaw, Berlin, Riga . . .), ambitious, and enterprising. Despite his youth, Jones seemed to get everywhere, Zelig with a typewriter. On New Year's Day 1935, for instance, he was in San Simeon, Kane's Xanadu itself, side by side with William Randolph Hearst. Earlier, we find him on a plane with Hitler ("looks like a middle-class grocer"), and, why, there he is, smiling on the White House lawn in April 1931, standing just behind a hopeless, hapless Herbert Hoover.

Above all, this man who reportedly charmed his captors in Manchuria by singing them hymns, was what the Welsh call “chapel”: pious, hardworking, teetotal, a little priggish, and armed with a sense of right and wrong so fierce that it gave him the strength to report the truth of what he saw, at the cost, if need be, of his career and, some would say, his life. Jones’s politics were typically chapel too, steeped as they were in the Liberal traditions of Welsh Nonconformism. Ornery, high-minded, pacifist, egalitarian, a touch goofy, a little bit utopian, Jones was just the sort of Westerner who might have been attracted to the Soviet experiment. And so he was—initially. In a 1933 article for the London Daily Express, Jones recalled how “the idealism of the Bolsheviks impressed me . . . the courage of the Bolsheviks impressed me . . . the internationalism of the Bolsheviks impressed me,” but “then,” he added, “I went to Russia.”

And there, for Jones, everything changed. His accounts of his visits to the USSR (the first was in 1930) are a chronicle of mounting disillusion. Reading them now, particularly the occasional attempts to highlight some Soviet achievement or other, it’s easy to see that this young Welsh liberal, this believer, wanted to trust in Moscow’s promise of a radiant future, but Communist reality—dismal, savage, and hopeless—kept intruding. Unlike many who came to inspect the people’s paradise, he reported on its dark side too. For Jones, there was no choice. It was the truth, you see.

By the autumn of 1932, Jones was sounding the alarm (“Will There Be Soup?” and “Russia Famished Under the Five-Year Plan”) about the catastrophe to come: “The food is not there.” Early the next year, he returned to Moscow to check the situation for himself, took a train to the Ukraine, and then walked out into the wrecked, desperate countryside. Once back in the West, he wasted no time, not even waiting to get back home before telling an American journalist in Berlin what he had seen: Millions were dying.

Soviet denials were to be expected. That they were supported by the New York Times was not. The newspaper’s Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, reassured his readers that Jones had been exaggerating. The Welshman was, he condescended, “a man of a keen and active mind . . . but [his] judgment was somewhat hasty . . . It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkhov and found conditions sad.” Sad—not much of an adjective, really, to describe genocide.

The Times’s man, who had won a Pulitzer the previous year for “the scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity” of his reporting from the Soviet Union, did not share Jones’s sense of “impending doom.” Yes, “to put it brutally,” omelettes could not be made without breaking eggs, but there had been “no actual starvation or deaths from starvation.” Duranty came, he claimed, to this conclusion only after “exhaustive enquiries about this alleged famine situation,” but other discussions probably influenced him more. The big story in Moscow in the spring of 1933—bigger by far than the death of a few million unfortunate peasants—was the pending show trial of six British engineers. Courtroom access and other cooperation from Soviet officialdom would be essential for any foreign journalist wanting to satisfy the news desk back home. That would come at a price. The price was Jones.

Eugene Lyons, another American journalist in Moscow at the time, later explained that “throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered . . . were snowed under by our denials.” According to Lyons (not always, admittedly, the most reliable of witnesses, but the essence of his tale rings true), a deal was struck at a meeting between members of the American press corps and Konstantin Umansky, the chief Soviet censor. “There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take . . . before a formula of denial was worked out. We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in round-about phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski.” Spinning a famine was, apparently, thirsty work.

Undaunted by the attacks on his accuracy, Jones intensified his efforts. There were articles in the Daily Express, the Financial Times, the Western Mail, the London Evening Standard, the Berliner Tageblatt, as well as a lengthy letter to the Manchester Guardian in support of Malcolm Muggeridge, who had, like Jones, told the truth about the famine and, like Jones, been vilified in return (suggestions that there was starvation in the USSR were, said George Bernard Shaw, “offensive and ridiculous”). In a letter published by the New York Times in May 1933, Jones hit back at Walter Duranty. The reports of widespread famine were, he wrote, based not only on what he had seen in the villages of the Ukraine, but also on extensive conversations with other eyewitnesses, diplomats, and journalists. After a few polite remarks about Duranty’s “kindness and helpfulness,” the tone turned contemptuous. Directly quoting from Duranty’s own dispatches, Jones charged that censorship had turned some journalists into “masters of euphemism and understatement . . . [They] give ‘famine’ the polite name of ‘food shortage’ and ‘starving to death’ is softened down to read as ‘widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.’. . . Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true, but one does not need a particularly nimble brain to grasp that even in the Russian famine districts the dead are buried . . . [T]he dead animals are devoured.”

Moscow responded by barring Jones from the USSR. He was cut off for good from the site of the story he had made his own. Duranty received a rather different reward. Some months later he accompanied the Soviet foreign minister on a trip to America, a journey that was to culminate in FDR’s decision to extend diplomatic recognition to the Communist regime, a decision that was fêted, fêted in that famine year, with a celebration dinner at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel, at which Duranty was honored with cheers and a standing ovation. On Christmas Day 1933 came the greatest prize of all—an interview with Stalin himself. Well, of course. It was a reward for work well done. Duranty had, said the dictator, “done a good job in . . . reporting the USSR.”

But history had not yet finished with Gareth Jones. The young Welshman possessed, explained David Lloyd George, the former prime minister for whom Jones had, some years before, worked as an aide, “a passion for finding out what was happening in foreign lands wherever there was trouble, and in pursuit of his investigations he shrank from no risk.” So, it’s no surprise to find him in Japan in early 1935, interviewing, questioning, snooping, and perhaps attracting the sort of attention that could turn out to be fatal. By July that year he was heading through the increasing chaos of northern China toward Japanese- controlled Manchuria (Manchukuo). On July 26, Jones updated the narrative he was writing for the last time. He was, he wrote, “witnessing the changeover of a big district from China to Manchukuo. There are barbed-wire entanglements just outside the hotel. There are two roads . . . [O]ver one 200 Japanese lorries have traveled; the other is infested by bad bandits.” Two days later, the bandits struck. Jones was kidnapped. He was murdered two weeks later. It was the eve of his 30th birthday.

We will probably never know who was ultimately responsible for Jones’s death. There had been a ransom demand, and so, perhaps, this was just a kidnapping that went horribly wrong. There are, however, other possibilities. The Japanese would certainly not have welcomed a Westerner watching the takeover of yet another Chinese province, and there is some evidence that the kidnappers were under their control. It’s also intriguing to discover that one of Jones’s contacts in those final days was linked to a company now known to have been a front for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. To Lloyd George, only one thing was clear: “Gareth Jones knew too much.”

And if he knew too much, the rest of the world understood too little. For decades, like the dead whose story he told, this lost witness to a genocide seemed doomed to be forgotten, a family tragedy, a footnote, but now that’s changing. Jones is at last returning to view, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the indefatigable Siriol Colley, the author of a book about her uncle—and a second is on the way. (Colley’s son Nigel has also set up a website: www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/index.html.)

One thing, however, has not changed. On December 4 last year, not long after the Pulitzer committee decided that Duranty should retain his prize, Colley wrote to the New York Times asking whether the paper could at least issue a public apology for the way in which its Moscow correspondent had smeared Jones. She’s still waiting.