New books

A quick update: after discovering a nice little used bookshop in DUMBO today, I managed to pick up some classic texts to add to the collection, all for about $6-7 each!

“Treatise of Human Nature” by David Hume

“The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life” by Emile Durkheim

“Politics and the Novel” by Irving Howe

“The Savage Mind” by Claude Levi-Strauss

“The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon

I’ll be sure to make my way back there again.

Dissent symposium: Obama One Year In

A mini-symposium has been posted over at Dissent magazine, weighing in on the initial hopes and subsequent disappointments of Obama’s first year in office. Below are some interesting tidbits.

Michael Walzer:

“He brought with him a group of economic advisors and policy-makers who were committed to the restoration of the status quo ante—not to any radical reconstruction of the economic order. Had they been social democrats, rather than conventional liberals, they might have recognized the urgency of job creation and invested more heavily in it. But any more significant economic reconstruction was not a felt need in the country; there had been no political preparation for it; there was no movement mobilizing support for it and nothing like agreement on its necessity in Congress, not even among Democrats. The mere fact that we, on the left, wanted reconstruction is no reason to be disappointed that it didn’t happen. We are not entitled to get what we want, and we shouldn’t expect to get what we want until we convince a majority of our fellow citizens that they should want it too. And that we plainly haven’t done.“

“I am not disappointed that Obama has refused to summon up and then exploit a wave of populist fury. Populist politics is always more available to the right than to the left, and the anger it arouses tends to float freely from bankers to Jews to immigrants to “communists”—to all the standard objects of resentment. Our politics is different. We need to make the case for structural reform, build public support for it, and strengthen the intermediate associations—like unions and consumer groups—that can educate and mobilize their members.“

Todd Gitlin:

“Ideological overlap was a precondition for victory. But it was never as simple as Obama and his well-wishers said. A lot of Obama’s supporters were Progressives—not in the current sense, a euphemism for liberals, but in the original sense, from the early twentieth century. They wanted, in other words, the politics of high-minded, middle-class idealism: throw the rascals out, clean up corruption, put adversaries around the table and reason together. A lot also were populists, who combined a politics of sturdy, working-class virtue—fairness and less inequality—with a politics of resentment. Progressives are, in the main, insiders—professionals, used to being deferred to. Populists are, in the main, outsiders—amateurs, galvanized by emotional furies. “

“Obama has to play his other strong suits. He is a lucid explainer and an inspirational moralist. He needs to combine the two and go post-post-partisan. He can explain that choice to himself because he is an empiricist. (This is the upside of Progressivism.) You try an approach and you see what happens.  If playing nice doesn’t bring the necessary results, then you adjust accordingly. The way to adjust now is take a certain risk of looking like an angry black guy—but with a smile. He should welcome the hatred of the corrupt financial industry, the Republicans, and the Tea Party. “

Nelson Lichtenstein:

“The Administration/Congressional health care plan is messy and often contradictory, but in essence it also embodies a grand bargain—a sort of corporatist deal not unlike many of the great welfare state reforms we associate with the New Deal and the Great Society. No radical reform of the system is possible. There are too many institutional roadblocks, and there is too much culturally embedded fear of government, even before the “tea bag” eruption exacerbated such an impulse.“

“Of course, it is not only the particular causes that have demobilized the left; it is also all of the clever deals the Obama people struck with the banks, the wavering Democrats, and the health care interest groups that implied a promise not to mobilize left-wing opposition. This seems to have been the case in September 2009, in the wake of the tea party tantrums, when the prospect of a million person march on the Washington Mall by the left was in the offing, and the Obama people did nothing to encourage it (perhaps even urged against it).”

Defending Hannah Arendt

Despite (or because of?) her recent prominence in academia, Hannah Arendt continues to remain a polarizing figure. In the 1960s, her book Eichmann in Jerusalem was met with outrage from many  in the international Jewish community for supposedly shifting part of the blame of the Holocaust from the Nazis onto the victims themselves. Another major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, has been plagued by historians’ claims of factual inaccuracy, obliqueness, and accusations of being an outdated Cold War relic. More recently, the historian Bernard Wasserstein has come forth with the claim that a number of Arendt’s sources in that book are themselves from anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi authors such as Walter Frank and Ernst Schultze. 

Irving Horowitz recently responded to these criticisms. As he summarizes, the major accusations against her are the following:

• The success of Arendt’s earlier work is owed more to the way it locked on to mid-twentieth-century Western guilt over imperialism and the continued strengthening of the Cold War than to The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s conception of the dynamics of historical change is little more than a confused mishmash of the structural, the social-psychological, and the conspiratorial.

• Her works display a deep ignorance of political economy, diplomacy, and military strategy. Furthermore, she had little grasp or even interest in the mechanics of the political process in the states about which she wrote.

• Rather than examine hard evidence, she deals in trifles and inflates them into richly colored balloons of generalization. At a time when superior historians were rejecting and becoming disenchanted by the idea of totalitarianism, her work in this area did not explain the generalization.

• Her comparisons of Nazism and communism were sporadic and uneven, and she hardly dealt with Italian fascism as predecessor of these test cases of totalitarianism. The concept was incorporated into the vernacular of the 1960s and 1970s only because it served the useful ideological purposes of the Cold Warriors at the time.

• The burden of her later work is blaming Jewish victims rather than anti-Semitic perpetrators. In her inversion of victims and victimizers, her bile knew no ethnic boundaries or rationalizations.

• There was always a special edge to her criticism of her own Jewish people. She swallowed sometimes in whole cloth the poisonous anti-Semitism hatched in the Weimar period, much of which was shrouded in the Nazi literature of the age.

Horowitz’s response to each of these points is for the most part solid and worth reading on its own. The essay loses its steam in its last third when it switches from a more scholarly analysis of The Origins toward a more biographical and psychological explanation of Arendt’s motives for her characterization of the Jewish response to Nazism. 

As someone initially skeptical of Arendt’s work, particularly on the distinction she drew between the political and the social in her book On Revolution, I have since then developed a deeper level of appreciation for her analysis. Despite the occasional historical inaccuracy found in her work (for example, her claim about the American founders’ wish to do away with the question of sovereignty), it remains an extremely valuable point of entry for an alternate way of thinking about the political. It is precisely this concern with ‘the political’, as a value to be preserved in itself, that I think serves as a key for understanding Arendt’s entire body of work. Taken as a factual narrative, neither The Origins nor On Revolution will ever satisfy the professional historian. But it is her engagement with the creative (poietic) aspects of spontaneous human action, and the shocking manner in which it was suppressed by Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR, that reveals the true value of her thought.

Thoughts on Obama’s State of the Union

President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight went better than I expected, although that still did not salvage what has become for me a continuing cynicism about his administration. The speech (text here) was a prime example of  his considerable ability as a public speaker (for comparison, just check out Governor McDonnell’s wooden rebuttal.) Yet it also continued the same tone of bipartisanship and the pleas to put ‘politics’ aside that have largely fallen on deaf ears in the past year and a half. The result was a speech high on rhetoric and spirit, moderate on concrete future promises, and low on any ‘change we can believe in.’ (A brief fact check of some assertions can be found here.)

While he heavily front-loaded his speech with all the socially progressive measures that the administration was ready to implement–including tax credits for child care, more transparency on the part of lobbyists, and a cap on student loan payments–he saved the big news about the three year government spending freeze until almost the end. Does this freeze signal yet another reach out to Republicans? If so, it is likely to be a largely symbolic gesture, since the $250 billion that it would save over the next 10 years pales in comparison to the $9 trillion in additional deficits the government will accumulate in that time (Source: NY Times.) It is more likely that the decision for the spending freeze has more to do with the growing backlash about Treasury Secretary Geithner and the rescue of AIG. So at the moment, it (thankfully) does not seem that Obama is ready to trade in the lesser evil of Keynes for the greater evil of Hayek.

One of the most interesting and confrontational moments of the speech, which has already been widely picked up by the cable news networks, was Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited corporate funding for political candidates. With the Supreme Court’s justices looking on directly in the front row, he spoke of the considerable dangers that national and foreign corporate interests posed for politics, and urged Congress to pass new laws mitigating this decision. While one analyst on FOX news claimed that this amounted to directly trying to influence a branch of government, this confrontational approach was one of the highlights of the speech. Even though it turned out he was blatantly incorrect about the idea of foreign corporations influencing elections, it was a good move in terms of placing more accountability on the Court–the least democratic branch of government, and one whose history of recent decisions has been less than inspiring.   

Also interesting to note: the speech was permeated with a strong but subtle nationalistic undertone about America’s greatness. Of course, this has been a staple of almost every Presidential address and therefore is no surprise. On the other hand, coming out of the mouth of a supposedly ‘cosmopolitan’ President, these remarks appeared somewhat curious. A couple of times, Obama asserted that second place was not enough for the U.S., comparing the nation’s complacency with the strides made by India, Germany, and especially China. One cannot help but think that such an attempt to tap into the national spirit is precisely because of the partisan tone that Congressional discourse has taken under his presidency. As the fissures of debate increase in statist politics, so do the appeals to the abstract unity of the nation as a means of keeping things together. 

But if Obama claims that it’s no wonder there’s so much cynicism and disappointment out there, I suspect that some of it has to do with the continuing grandiose statements on his part. For example, tonight he claimed that corporations still can be counted as those institutions that reflect values such as pride in labor, giving back to one’s country, and helping one’s neighbor. Granted, this was a remark he didn’t dwell on and made in passing. But in the midst of the worst financial crisis since 1929, caused by the worst excesses of capitalism, how anyone can be expected to take it with a straight face is beyond me. 

 A final remark on the ‘populist’ note that Obama is now trying to strike. Although populist rhetoric in national politics is almost as old as the U.S. itself, in the last year we have seen it become contested territory with the rise of the teabaggers and the coming of the radical/fringe right into the public eye. This led to something of a scramble among Republicans to appropriate the movement into the party as a way of exerting more pressure on the Democrats. (On a side note, the appropriation of mass-movement and quasi-insurrectionary tactics by the right, and the practical surrender of these means by the left since the 1980s, is one of the most curious developments in American politics.) Are we now seeing the Democrats attempt to regain this territory? If so, it would be a mistake for the party to rely too much on the executive branch to connect with the people and attain progressive reform. Doing so runs the risk of becoming complacent on the more important level of grassroots activism. And as history has shown us, socially-oriented top-down reform is rarely a substitute for progressivism or democracy.

IMF Clarifies Haiti Loan

An positive update on the story about the IMF’s new $100 million loan to Haiti. Apparently now the Fund has reversed its position, stating that “the US$100 million loan does not carry any conditionality. It is an emergency loan aimed at getting the Haitian economy back to function again.” What’s more, IMF officials also say they will immediately begin working on canceling the resulting $265 million debt, effectively turning the loans into grants.

Were the Guantanamo ‘Suicides’ Really Murders?

A shocking story reported by Harpers investigates the supposed suicides of three men in custody at the detention camp in 2006.  The three men were allegedly found hanging in their cells, their arms and legs bound, rags stuffed in their mouths, and hoods on their heads. Their bodies “showed signs of torture, including hemorrhages, needle marks, and significant bruising.” Almost immediately after, the prisoners were denounced as “fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg“, even though none were charged with crimes or had any viable links to Al-Qaeda.

According to eyewitness accounts, hours earlier they could have been taken to ‘Camp No’, an undocumented compound on the outside of the camp’s perimeter, where they were tortured to death. During their autopsies, the neck organs were removed, possibly the only way to determine whether the deaths occurred as a result of asphyxiation or manual strangulation.

The coming forward of Guantanamo guards has resulted in a political cover up and a silencing campaign that possibly extends all the way up the chain of command to the White House, the CIA, and the Pentagon. After a hushed and delayed internal investigation, the Justice Department closed the case and refused to further consider the guards’ accounts. Fearing that an investigation would further implicate Bush’s Justice Department officials with war crimes, it has instead pathetically stuck to Obama’s mantra about “looking forward, not backward.”

Haiti and the IMF

It has taken no shortage of time for neoliberal reformists to call for using the Haiti earthquake as a way of imposing even further devastating financial policies on the country. As reported in The Nation, on Thursday a new $100 million loan was announced by the IMF, adding to the existing $165 million owed to it by the country. This new loan came with conditions such as “raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low.”

It has to be emphasized that Haiti’s history of poverty and destitution dates back right to its immediate post-independence years in the early 1800s. It was then that the country agreed to pay 150 million francs to the French as compensation to former slave owners who had lost their sources of income. Not doing so would have resulted in an embargo – a devastating situation for a newly independent, impoverished nation. Although about 60% of this sum was paid off by 1947, the postwar spread of neoliberal policies continued to saddle the developing country with further debt. For example, “A 2008 report from the Center for International Policypoints out that in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received.“

Although $1.2 billion in debt owed by Haiti was recently cancelled, the country still owes $891 million – accrued only from 2004 onward. Not only the earthquake but also the conditions of the ongoing financial crisis have now made the paying off of this money little more than a pipe dream.

Haiti earthquake

In light of the terrible news out of Haiti and the rising death toll, I urge anyone reading this to donate whatever you can to the relief effort.

Texting ‘HAITI’ to 90999 automatically donates $10 to the Red Cross and is a quick way to give something. Or, you can donate online at https://american.redcross.org

Alternately,  you can visit www.haitiaction.net and donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, part of a grassroots democratic movement fighting to promote issues like sustainable agriculture, support for victims of political violence, women’s and trade union organizing, human rights monitoring, and education.

UPDATE: 1/15

A long list from the Huffington Post on all the various organizations through which you can donate.

Latest Iran roundup

An illuminating, brief piece on Mousavi’s possible new strategy of fighting the Ahmadinejad government.

Another in depth article on the power struggle in the country and the prospects of an even more violent confrontation. A sample:

“First and foremost, the Green Movement must continue to act in a nonviolent manner. The call for nonviolence has angered some. Perhaps they don’t realize that the nonviolent nature of the Green Movement has been the most important reason for its success so far.

It should also be noted that there is a vast difference between self-defense — which is legitimate — and adopting violence as a tactic, which can only hurt the Green Movement. The former scenario means that the Movement defends itself — physically, if necessary — when attacked; the latter implies that the Movement goes on the offensive and employs force and violence. The two are not identical.”

A Farewell to Arms

Recently I finished reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms for the first time. For a period of about three years, while in college, I had regularly cited Hemingway as one of my favorite authors. I still admire a good deal of his work, particularly his short stories. However, this time I came away somewhat disappointed and with a better sense of his limitations as a writer.

Reading A Farewell to Arms marked a return to Hemingway after not having read him for a couple of years. His writing style is well-known for being terse and to the point, sometimes bordering on choppy. To some, this is a one of its best qualities; when it works, as it does in stories like “Hills Like White Elephants,” it really works. But when extended to a length of over 300 pages, and coupled with very little character development, Hemingway’s minimalist prose suddenly becomes repetitive and unimaginative.

One of the biggest drawbacks to this novel are the two-dimensional characters, especially the protagonist, Frederic Henry, and his love interest, Catherine Barkley. Both function as the archetypal Hemingway heroes: the stoic, detached, and masculine man; and the fawning, committed woman. Occasionally, Hemingway allows the characters room to develop past these stereotypes but these are for the most part disappointing, for they are quickly dropped and never touched upon again. Some examples include Catherine’s feelings of guilt over betraying the memory of her dead ex-fiance, or the Priest’s internal moral struggle and wavering faith, or Rinaldi’s possible slow death from syphilis.

What makes this unevenness more frustrating is that there are occasional moments of literary grandeur that show Hemingway’s rightful place in the canon of twentieth century literature. The final chapter is a masterpiece, descending into a stream of consciousness style during its most intense, ominous moments, and beautifully capturing the feelings of dread and anxiety brought about by war and personal tragedy. It is at this time that Hemingway’s prose works wonderfully, cutting away all superfluous linguistic fluff until all that remains is existence laid bare itself.

Unfortunately, these flashes of brilliance are not enough to sustain an entire novel. To that extent, For Whom the Bell Tolls is a much more balanced work, retaining Hemingway’s signature writing style but featuring a stronger plot and far better developed characters. Written when Hemingway was in his late twenties, A Farewell to Arms is clearly the work of a young author still mastering his craft.