The Real Boston Story

Now that media excitement is beginning to die down concerning the recent horrific events in Boston, it is time for more reflective analyses to take pride of place. It used to be that we could rely on the mainstream print media for at least some of this reflection. That cannot be ruled out, but it is no longer likely. Case in point: Now, more than 10 days after the finish-line bombings, I have yet to encounter a single media story or commentary that identifies the proper analog to what occurred in Boston.

In three weeks during the month of October 2002, 10 people were killed and several others seriously injured by what became known as the beltway sniper attacks. John Allen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo were responsible for this killing spree, which veritably paralyzed the Washington, DC area. The parallels between the sniper attacks of October 2002 and the bombings in Boston earlier this month are quite striking.

·      The killings were perpetrated by two relatively young males, the elder one clearly in command and the younger one compliant and mainly clueless.

·      Radical Islam had some hard-to-define, attenuated impact on the motives behind both sets of crimes, but psychopathology of one kind or another clearly had the upper hand in both cases. (I witnessed John Allen Muhammed trying to defend himself in a Montgomery County, Maryland courtroom, as he cross-examined Lee Boyd Malvo; I just happened to be in the building as part of jury duty on a completely different case, and just let myself into the room to watch. And I can tell you that Muhammed was very not normal, albeit in a contained and hence very spooky manner.)

·      Just two untrained individuals, with no military background or ties or connections of any logistical kind to any group or movement, managed to paralyze an entire major urban area of the United States.

·      Law enforcement eventually shut down the operation, and the justice system prepared to punish the evildoers, in its own peculiar and slothful way. (John Allen Muhammed was found guilty of murder in September 2003 and was sentenced to death; but the death penalty was not inflicted until more than six years later.)

Obviously, there are also some differences between the two cases. The Boston case was more concentrated in time, and if one counts the murder of Sean Collier, there were only two iterations of murderous behavior. In the DC sniper case, the trail of murder actually started elsewhere and involved more than a dozen separate incidents over a longer period.

Nevertheless, what unites the two incidents is that they involved attacks on soft targets. There was no reasonable way to protect those slain by the beltway snipers, just as there was no reasonable way to prevent what happened at the Boston Marathon. The FBI could not have prevented either tragedy, in the latter case because the law in all but extraordinary cases prevents close surveillance of a potential terrorist who has not broken any law.

Yes, the FBI had a file on the elder Tsarnaev, thanks to a Russian inquiry, but since 9/11 we have failed to face the fact that the FBI, which is and has always been part and parcel of the Justice Department, is never going to be much good at domestic counterterrorism. These guys do the best they can, but the culture of law enforcement—putting guilty people in jail after maximally non-appealable legal proceedings—runs at very different angles from the culture of preventing terror attacks, the sort of thing MI5 does in the United Kingdom. Almost no terrorists have police records before they commit murderous acts, which is why our current legal set-up is helpless to prevent atrocities like the one in Boston.

And that fact highlights, just by the way, the predictable inanity of the ACLU chastising authorities for not reading the younger Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. Under the disheveled circumstances, it was clearly the right thing to do.

Let’s quickly get past a few other silly reactions to the Boston tragedy. Restricting immigration or disrupting negotiations on immigration law reform are irrelevant. Gun control laws are also irrelevant. Just about every foreign policy consideration I can think of is irrelevant. How marginal populations in the United States become radicalized, whether it be religious radicalism or some other sort, is not completely irrelevant but it might as well be for practical purposes, given that the potential ways and means here are so utterly capacious. TSA is certainly irrelevant, and so for most part are the other mostly counterproductive forms of bureaucratized paranoia with which we have saddled ourselves over the past decade.

This doesn’t mean that radical Islamic organizations, not least what’s left of al-Qaeda, can be safely ignored. It doesn’t mean that having made our border control agencies more integrated and functional was a bad idea (though we still have a ways to go on that score). It doesn’t mean that sane immigration policy reform or better gun control laws are bad ideas. But none of this has anything to do with what happened in Boston.

After the beltway sniper affair, I was concerned that other semi-rational but not entirely dysfunctional lone-wolf terrorists might go in for copycatting. As all security experts understand, but are usually reluctant to talk about in public, it is all too easy to bomb or shoot up the ticketing and baggage retrieval areas of airports. Same goes for “big box” shopping venues, movie theaters, sports events of all kinds, houses of worship, schools, and one could go on. Back in the autumn of 2002, copycatting did not happen. I’d like to be confident, based on that non-experience, that it won’t happen again. But we don’t know that.

So what does this realization about soft-target domestic terrorism tell us?  It tells us that we cannot defend against such attacks except at disproportionate cost and by dint of entirely counterproductive methods. (Try to imagine, if you dare, TSA-type geniuses deployed at every Walmart and cineplex in the country……) It reminds us of what the strategy of terrorism has always been and still is: The use of deadly force against innocents in order to provoke authorities to be untrue to and destructive of their own principles. It is a strategy of the weak, and its success requires a sucker to conspire in his own defeat.

So what to do? Well, the first thing is to keep organized terror organizations, foreign or domestic, out of the soft-target business. To the extent that we have return addresses for such organizations via intelligence gathering and monitoring, we can do this.

Second, when such horrible acts occur, we must be stoic.  President Obama had this exactly right the other night when he said that terrorism will fail because Americans will refuse to be terrorized. Even if it’s not true, it was still the proper thing to say.

But third, for Americans to be stoic, and so to be not terrorized, the American media, and entertainment “industry” generally, must stifle its addiction to the sensationalist, the maudlin and the perverse.  It was no accident, I think, that the finish to the Boston Marathon attracted the Tsarnaevs because they knew that their evil deed would be caught on film and video, and almost instantaneously transmitted worldwide.

I confess that I don’t know how to get a pandering, irresponsible media to stop pandering and to stop being irresponsible. I do know that the incentive media exposure offers would-be terrorists is perhaps the biggest long-term problem we have when it comes to potential outbreaks of soft-target lone-wolf terrorism. The hawkers of razor blades and bad beer need for the show to go on, and what was the tragedy of the Boston Marathon from a media perspective if not an (obviously unscripted) episode of reality TV?

Pondering a 70th Anniversary

Today, April 19, marks the 70^th anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. What can one possibly say about this event that has not already been said many times over many years? What is there, if anything, that might be noteworthy about a 70^th anniversary?

Maybe there is something to say; hence this post. Forgive me please, dear reader, if you are already familiar with some of the backstory I tell below. As I grow older, I am constantly surprised by what younger people do not know, just as I am constantly surprised by what I am capable of forgetting. So I tell this backstory for more than one reason.

Let me suggest, too, that aside from Jews, and Poles and Germans, others may find this story of some interest, for embedded in the understanding of it may reside lessons that transcend any one time and place. No, no, landsmen, do not worry: I am not about to universalize the Holocaust and banalize it by so doing. But the Holocaust can’t help but universalize itself, at least at the margins, since everyone involved in it, perpetrators and victims alike, were, after all, human beings.

* * *

Back on April 8 many Jews and some others observed what is usually called Yom Ha-Shoah in Hebrew (יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה) or Holocaust Remembrance Day. There is an historical connection between what happened on April 19, 1943, in Warsaw and this relatively new marker in the Jewish calendar, and it is a connection about which few seem to be aware.

After the re-born State of Israel came into being in May 1948, a discussion ensued about how to memorialize the Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide. As is sometimes (!!!) the case when Jews discuss such things, some disagreement was in evidence. Let us briefly recall its nature.

Many standard-issue Zionists of that time, philosophically muscular to the bone, wanted no part of any memorialization. For them, the entire period of the exile, from the year 135 CE, when the Bar Kochba rebellion against Rome failed, until May 1948, was an ignominious (if also very protracted) era in Jewish history. These self-avowed secular socialists wanted to reconnect Jewish history to its glorious roots and saw the Holocaust as a shameful episode. Like lambs to the slaughter they went, these stalwart new Jews used to say, in private if not in public, and some so-called Jewish communal leaders, they charged, were complicit in the whole horrific episode. They did not fight back, and to the extent their otherworldly and superstition-based piety contributed to their passivity (a lot, most believed), then damn that piety and everything associated with it. Rabbis and anti-Semites caused each other, they believed. Commemorating the Holocaust, they feared, would contribute to the retention of the distorted “exile” values they wished to be rid of for all time.

Many religious Jews (and there were and remain more than one type) also rejected the idea of establishing a new day in the Jewish calendar for this purpose. One major figure, whose nickname was the Hazon Ish, ruled that Jews no longer had the authority to create new calendar entries. Others, the majority to be sure, reasoned that other fast days in the calendar sufficed for the purpose. Some put forth the 10^th of the Hebrew month of Tevet, whose origin has to do with the first Babylonian breech of the walls of Jerusalem in the 6^th century BCE. Others preferred to stretch still further the contents of the even more solemn fast of the 9^th of Av, which marks the destruction of both the first and second Temples, and over the years came as well to mark other catastrophes, like the massive destruction of the First Crusade period.

Between the muscular secularists and the Orthodox, however, others wished to go forward in establishing a special day of commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust. This was eventually accomplished in 1953, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and President Yitzhak Ben-Tvi signed the law establishing the day. The key was the testimony and insistence of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that there should be such a day. Their cache was powerful enough to turn the tide of debate, and it was a testimony of great insight as well as social power.

If I may summarize, the Warsaw Ghetto survivors and those who rallied to their view decried the image of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as sheep led docilely to their own slaughter. They pointed out that Jewish communities in Europe under Nazi occupation were not organized and were not armed. In every community there were Orthodox and secular and many of in-between views; not in a single national community or even a major city was there an overarching organizational structure that would have been capable of directing resistance to the German army. Jews in the various European countries under the Nazi boot had not even a common language. The further east one went, to but not so much into Russia, the more Yiddish was the language of daily use, but Dutch Jews spoke Dutch, Danish Jews Danish, French Jews French and so on.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, things were different. Jews there lived in close quarters, the population was culturally homogeneous for the most part, and the population was per force organized. They obtained weapons by various means, including from members of the Polish underground. They had heard about the Nazi intention to liquidate the Ghetto finally on the first day of Passover, the holiday that celebrates freedom, redemption and hope. They knew that Himmler had meant the liquidation to be a birthday present to Hitler. They had nothing left to lose. Under these conditions, Jews fought bravely, holding off the Germans for an entire month, and inflicting many casualties.

It was important for this distinction between the various conditions in which Jews found themselves to be made in a young Israeli state, loudly and clearly. And this caucus insisted that the name of the day be Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day—יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה—so that not only those who perished without hope of resisting, but those who fought back and the righteous gentiles who helped Jews, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, would also be included. It is a shame that so few American Jews know the actual full name, and this the nuanced meaning, of the day.

As a result of the Warsaw Ghetto survivors’ testimony, some favored establishing Yom HaShoah v’Hagvurah on the 14^th of Nisan, the day just before the first Seder, the day the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began. The Orthodox objected on two grounds, however. First, this was too onerous an obligation on a day that families were preparing diligently for the holiday—and, indeed, there is a lot to do. Second, they said, it was not permissible to establish a fast day, or even a sad or solemn day, in the month of Nisan, when we are commanded to celebrate.

So what happened? The powers-that-were decided to compromise: They established the day of commemoration on the 27^th of Nisan. Some argued that this date fell within the seven weeks of the counting of the Omer, which, with the exception of Lag B’Omer (the 33^rd day of the Omer), was a semi-mourning period anyway for traditional Jews. And 27 Nisan was set because it was eight days before Israeli Independence Day. The symbolism is fairly obvious, to some at least: Modern Israel arose from the flames of the Nazi crematoria and, as in the eight days of circumcision, an eight-count later the country re-entered its covenant with history as a free, independent and living nation.

At first at least, this compromise pleased only some. The more left-wing muscular Zionists ignored the day, just as they were left cold by the idea of establishing Yad Vashem. The haredim (ultra-Orthodox) ignored it too, and most of them still do. When the sirens sound nationwide on 27 Nisan, and every other Jew in Israel observes two minutes of silence in place, the haredim go on with their schools and business and so forth, because they do not recognize the authority of the state in such matters. They do not accept the secular-religious synthesis within Zionism brokered largely by former Chief Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook and epitomized by his characterization of the State of Israel as “the beginning of the dawn of our redemption.” This non-acceptance is why, in large part, the majority of Israelis disparages or detests the haredim,and it is why, incidentally, the unusual new Israeli coalition, which has no Orthodox party representation, looks the way it does.

Over time, all Israeli Jews but the haredim have accepted Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. This is because it’s taught in the schools and people become socialized to it that way. Those haredim who do mark the day do so as part of other, long-established fast days—their original point of view. But there are still some ultra-Orthodox who do not mark the day at all, or commemorate the Holocaust as such as a singular event. They have an argument to make on this score, and it is not an argument to be dismissed before it is honestly understood.

This argument, if I may do it justice in a very brief summary, has two main parts.

First, just as we are commanded to “blot out the memory of Amalek; do not forget” (Exodus 17 and Deuteronomy 25), we are, mutatis mutandis, commanded to blot out the memory of Hitler and the Nazis (“y’makh sh’mo”). Now, in the Biblical command there is an oft-noted paradox: Remembering to blot out a memory seems a contradiction in terms, for the act of remembering to blot out presupposes the impossibility of blotting out, doesn’t it?

Second, and you will soon see how this connects back to the first, as horrible as the Holocaust was, there have been other episodes that either seemed at the time, or actually were, just as horrible. I have already alluded to the terrible destruction of the Jewish communities in the Rhineland during the last year of the 11^th and the early years of the 12^thcenturies. The Khmelnitsky massacres of the mid-17^th century come also to mind. Back further in time, what the Romans did during and after the Bar Kochba rebellion was no picnic either; some 25-30 percent of the population was slaughtered according to most historical estimates. The point? We should not privilege one horror over others because we lack the perspective and understanding to do so. Doesn’t claiming with certainty that this one is the worst raise the bar—God forbid—for the next one? We don’t know the reasons such things happen, but appointing ourselves judges to establish singular days of commemoration suggests somehow that we do. This, the argument goes, is arrogance.

* * *

So what, then, does the tradition do with such challenges? Let’s go back to 1099 for a moment. Few Jews know this (and that includes haredim, whose approach to Judaism is studiously anti-historical, as well as poorly educated secularized Jews), but the “mourner’s kaddish”—the memorial prayer for the dead—was a post-Crusade innovation. A hasidtoday may insist that Jacob said mourner’s kaddish for his parents or for his wife, Rachel, but he didn’t. The paragraph in the Passover Hagaddah that is recited during the Seder when the door is opened for Elijah—“Pour out thy wrath upon the nations that know thee not. . . .”—was also added around the same time.

But note carefully, for this is the point: These (and other) innovations in the liturgy do not mention the Crusades or the crusaders. They encompass the events without specifying them. This solves the aforementioned paradox: It is indeed possible to blot out the specific name of evil, but still remember the need to fight evil based on past experience. One can do this by transforming the prosaic history people endure into the poetry of the soul, into the syntax of the spirit. That is how the evolving Jewish liturgy has handled tragedy without extinguishing hope. This is the way it tries to balance respect for martyrs with hope in the future. This is what defines, in my view, the genius within this tradition.

As I argued in my Jewcentricity book, the contemporary Jewish community in America has more or less failed to understand this. By indulging in the conceit of the contemporary, the Holocaust has become a form of ancestor worship for too many. As critics from Jacob Neusner to Irving Howe have complained going back now many years, semi-assimilated Jewish Americans have replaced authentic Judaism and the God at its core with a “lite” politicized version in which the State of Israel is the deity and the Holocaust its ritual liturgy. Both God and normative Judaism have been rendered completely superfluous to it. Note too that the regimen of mourning within Jewish tradition has temporal distinction and boundaries: first seven days, then thirty days, then eleven months. But it ends, and it ends because the purpose of the regimen is to assist the mourners to return to the blessings of normal, everyday life. A Holocaust cult that seems never to end is profoundly un-Jewish.

It is this unhappy reality that led me many years ago to create Garfinkle’s Rule: No one who does not participate in the building of, or in the dwelling in, a succah has any right to participate in a Holocaust remembrance event, especially one in which the Heroism part of the day’s name goes unmentioned. (I capitalize these words because it is conventional; there are no capital letters in Hebrew.) I still hold by my rule. If the joys and elations of the tradition are sacrificed to the lachrymose and the ashen, a faux-Judaism that cannot be successfully transmitted to future generations will gnaw its way into consciousness. It already has, as the inter-marriage and assimilation numbers testify.Pace the ridiculous claims of those who have argued that burgeoning anti-Semitism in America is causing assimilation, the truth is that Jews themselves are causing it pretty much all by themselves.

* * *

With this in mind, what can we say about the meaning of seventy years? An answer is on the way, but first a story.

September before last my wife and I traveled to Poland (she for the first time, me for the second) mainly for the purpose of visiting my paternal grandfather’s hometown of Suwalki (he was born there in 1872), in the far northeastern part of today’s Poland, near the Lithuanian border. Suwalki used to have a sizable and thriving Jewish community before September 1939. It was annihilated during the war almost in its entirety. Had my grandfather not left for America as a youngster, I would very probably never have been me.

Suwalki today is a pleasant enough town. But aside from the Jewish cemetery, and a single plaque on a building commemorating the birthplace of a certain person (Avraham Stern), there is no sign that Jews ever lived there, let alone did so for centuries. The old Jewish hospital, the Jewish Y, the rabbi’s house, and several other buildings in the old Jewish part of town have all been repurposed. Chances are that most of the residents of Suwalki today have never met a Jew, and do not know their town’s own rich history thanks in large part to the Communists, much assisted, of course, by the mere but relentless passage of time.

We were in Warsaw a few days, too. You can see on the sidewalks near where the Ghetto used to be memorial inscriptions testifying to its having existed. We saw a guide showing a group of Canadian Jewish tourists around, but there’s nothing to see, really, except in one’s own poorly or well-tutored imagination, as the case may be. Warsaw was all but leveled during the 1944 Uprising, as the Red Army waited knowingly, and cynically, on the far side of the Vistula for the Germans to destroy the place before their retreat.

A single Warsaw synagogue survived the war, in badly damaged condition. It has been refurbished beautifully and functions again today. When we went in a Talmud havrusa was in progress in a side room; two guys going at each other with vigor and care. But of prewar Jewish Warsaw, there is little else left. A new Jewish museum is in preparation, and when we were there large canvas-banner photographs of Jewish life before 1939 adorned the outside of the building then undergoing refurbishment. The whole idea of a Jewish museum in Warsaw fills me with equivocation, I must admit. A Jewish museum, after all, is what the Nazis planned once they had killed all the Jews. But if the Poles feel as though they want and need to do this, and have the support of Jewish groups, as they do, I’m fine with it. Their wartime suffering too was enormous, unspeakable; no avenue of healing should be off-limits to them as far as I’m concerned. Don’t forget, too, that soon after the war the Jews could rejoice in the birth of Israel, but Poles got cadres of vicious Communist thugs suppressing them for decade upon decade.

Now, finally, about the number 70: Psalm 90, characterized as a prayer of Moses, reads at verse 10 like this: “The span of our life is seventy years, or if we are strong eighty years, but the best of them is trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass and we fly away.”  Leaving aside for now the many other symbolic uses of the number 70, and of the letter “ayin” that represents it—and there are at least a dozen in the tradition—the Psalm makes the simple point that the human lifespan isn’t too far from seventy years on average. When we fly away our memories fly with them, unless we have made an effort to pass them on in one way or another.

I think it’s fair to say that the world has learned something from the war and the Holocaust. When hateful people begin referring to enemy groups as insects or clods of human feces or as sons of pigs and monkeys, we all know now, much better than we did in the 1930s, that this is part and parcel of the dehumanization that invariably precedes genocide. This is a hopeful collective memory earned from the war, and of course it applies universally.

Needless to say, there have been other, literally monumental efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, and of the heroisms great and small of World War II. But as the generation that lived during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the war flies from us with each passing day, we Jews, anyway, ought to know better than to rely on stone and glass monuments and buildings and sculptures and physical structures to preserve memory. That is not the Jewish way. Other civilizations throughout history have built great buildings—pyramids and palaces and castles and cathedrals and great walls, and some have even carved huge idols in mountainsides. Yet all of those civilizations have either perished, been layered over to oblivion, or are likely one day to be layered over. Jews instead built palaces of memory in the hearts and minds of their children using words and melodies, not bricks and stone. Jews have translated their historical experiences into ramparts of the spirit.

So the challenge is not that we will forget the Holocaust, anymore than we have forgotten the spilled blood of the First Crusade. The challenge is that we will remember it the wrong way, and so forget, and therefore lose, what is really important to us. If you want specifics here, direct your attention to how Psalm 90 continues: “Satisfy us in the morning with Your lovingkindness, that we may sing and rejoice all our days. . . . Let Your deeds be seen by your servants, and Your glory by their children. . . .”

Understand now? It’s about singing and rejoicing, and it’s about children. We have maybe seventy years, and when those years are gone no one will care how many tears we cried over our slain or how many Holocaust ceremonies we attended. We must remember our sorrows by embedding them in a tradition whose strength is that it is suffused with singing and rejoicing, a tradition that sees a child as raw material for the greatest monument anyone can build: a decent, compassionate, brave and loving human being. That, I humbly submit, is what this 70^thanniversary means, or ought to mean, not just to Jews, but, if I may be so bold, to everyone.

Hey, You’re Truly Unlimited: Didn’t You Know?

It’s both satisfying and terrifying to finish a book. It’s satisfying because it’s a little like finally getting a Haystacks Calhoun clone to remove himself from your prone chest cavity. It’s terrifying not so much because of what others may think of it—though that’s not an entirely negligible concern—but because of the fear that the book might have been lots better if you’d worked harder or had more time.  Sometimes the best sentences finally form and key data points only become available after you’ve closed up shop, and that fear tends to be sharper the more expansive and open-ended the book’s topic.

That’s certainly how I feel about my new ebook, Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What To Do About It. I’m gratified that at least some people have already expressed appreciation for what I try to do in that book—and that includes Thomas Friedman’s generous call-out in this past Sunday’s New York Times, under the somewhat improbable title “Lose-Lose vs. Win-Win-Win-Win-Win.” But I’m finding it hard to let go of the subject despite having let go of the subject (if you know what I mean), because everywhere I look, it seems, I see more grist for my recently shuttered mill.

Thank heaven, therefore, for this blog—where I have the opportunity to supplement Broken on an ad hoc basis on those occasions when I can’t bear not to, and I can do it here without leaking footnotes all over the place.

That’s exactly what I’m about to do now, but in all fairness, especially to readers who have helped me with this project along the way as it rolled out in pieces here starting last year, take a warning: Below you will encounter a long, somewhat esoteric discussion in political theory/sociology that only eventually reaches a conclusion you might (or might not) care about. That conclusion takes as its prooftext, so to speak, the new Sprint advertising campaign that most of you resident in the USA will have noticed by now: “Be Truly Unlimited.”

My argument is that “Be Truly Unlimited” is not just an ad campaign, although it obviously is that, too. Sprint is trying to sell unlimited minutes for some carefully calculated market price, and the deal appeal resides largely in its simplicity: No more counting minutes or wondering about budget thresholds breeched, no more fuss with rollovers and so on. (I’m not in a position to comment on the commercial proposition, since I’ve never owned or paid for my own cell phone.) But I think the marketing team is aiming to leverage a strengthening American meme the larger consequences of which are somewhere between capacious and portentous, depending on one’s point of view. To see that, however, you must be able to decode the glitz and glitter of our crowded semiotic environment to find the core attitudes and assumptions, some we’re self-aware of and some we’re not, beneath. So if you’re ready, warnings be damned, let’s turn over some symbolic rocks and get started.

*  *  *

It in the introduction to Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What To Do About It, I take some pains to explain why I choose a middling level of analysis, a Goldilocks level that’s neither too superficial nor too deep. I offer a teaser pointed toward deeper explanatory templates for our current difficulties, but soon leave off from them. The reason, as I explain in the book, is that deeper cultural explanations, however interesting and even true they may be, have close to zero chance to gain policy traction. They don’t speak wonk.

That said, there are a few verities about political life that simply cannot be ignored despite their falling outside the ambit of practical policy analysis. The first and most important of these is that most societies, most of the time, tend to govern themselves to one extent or another without much help from formal political structures. The glue, metaphorically speaking, that enables societies to do this is referred to as social trust, or sometimes as social capital.

All this really means—and in the book I refer to this key concept on several occasions—is that people in their communities establish over time certain reciprocal standards and expectations of conduct. These standards and expectations may be the result of a religious culture whose institutions tutor young people during their socialization to conform to behavior that is understood to be commanded from outside the human world. In such cases, moral behavior is ratified by the theotropic inclinations of human nature, in other words, by the sacred. Presumably, other forms of social authority, fully intrinsic to the community, can accomplish the same ends. Sometimes, usually in fact, both occur simultaneously, bringing about a merger encouraged by the fact that as people mature they learn to appreciate the virtues of civility, integrity, honesty, politeness and other social-guidance systems through which people reassure one another that we are allies-in-common by virtue of sharing a basic interest in the safety, security, prosperity and beauty of our surroundings. Government can encourage and structure the formation of such benign attitudes, but it usually cannot create them de novo.

The point here is that healthy societies create networks of expectations that work thanks to the magic of reciprocity, not because agents of a state constantly enforce them. Reciprocity amounts to sets of implicitly matched or parallel promises of future behavior, and it is the cumulative consequence of making and keeping such promises that is the font of any moral order. (This is something Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt well understood, but that most modern moral philosophers have managed somehow to miss, possibly because the insight  has been tarnished in their eyes by association with Abrahamic theologies.) I don’t steal your backpack and you don’t steal my wallet not just or mainly because of a worry about the police catching us in or after the act, but because we know it’s wrong, and we know at one level or another that if everyone did wrong we’d all be in a total mess, police or no.

Generally speaking, the better a society can maintain social order on its own dime, the less government, and the less coercion, is required to keep civic life clear of Hobbesean nastiness, brutishness and brevity. This observation is the source of anarchism as a political philosophy, just in case anyone is interested. At its essence, the idea is that if people can refine their behaviors sufficiently through some form or other of enlightenment, then, very much pace Hobbes, the need for government can be dispensed with altogether. I confess to a youthful infatuation with anarchism. Some decades ago I read and sometimes thrilled to Bakunin, Krapotkin, Emma Goldmann, and, closer to our own time, the irrepressible Murray Bookchin (1921-2006).

Anarchism is based on a very optimistic view of human nature, or rather of human social nature, which is why it tends to appeal to youth. It was Don Marquis who had his cockroach hero Archie say, to Mehitabel the Cat I think it was, that “an optimist is a guy without much experience.” There is nevertheless a case for such a view beyond youth, and a recent case well made is that of James C. Scott (Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton University Press, 2012)—recommended for young and old alike.

That said, I do not know of any large-scale human civilization that has not needed at least some government to establish the basic parameters for justice and economic activity, as well as for collective defense—the first and historically the most compelling and popular reason for government. But clearly, some societies are much better at creating their own internal stabilities than others. Some societies need and want less government than others. To generalize boldly (and perhaps foolishly), high-trust societies needing less government tend to be more homogeneous with respect to language, ethnicity, work profile and religious culture. In theory anyway, these are enabling but not necessarily limiting factors. Low-trust societies needing more government tend to be more diverse, more urban, more functionally specialized and complex—in a word, more modern.

In a sense, this general observation parallels that of Edmund Burke when he observed that the less discipline a person exerts on himself from within, the more discipline will need be imposed from without. What is true of individuals may also be true of entire societies. It may well be, too, as John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Translation from 18^th century to 21^st century vernaculars: A limited government devoted to liberty can only work if society’s own high-functioning moral order allows it to work by keeping expressions of liberty within certain bounds.  Or put in more common if analytically vaguer language, self-government requires civic virtue.

If that is so, it follows that even a complex and specialized modern society—if it cherishes liberty—should strive for maximum feasible anarchism, even if that ends up being far short of the utopian outcome anarchist theorists have sought. It should strive to be as much of a self-regulating social system as possible, the basis of which is, in my view, the Jeffersonian principle of subsidiarity (to which I also make reference in the book). The best way to reduce the demand for both government and coercion is to layer government, building in as best we can protective buffers between them—just as the natural world builds buffers into interdependency to reduce the dangers of systemic contamination and collapse. The fastest, most economical and most sustainable ways to solve most problems are to solve them as close to their points of origin as possible. What neighbors can handle neighbors should handle.  What local communities can handle local communities should handle. What smaller jurisdictions can handle, smaller jurisdictions should handle, and so on. That is how a federal system should work. Any so-called federal system that congenitally drives decisions up and toward the center is a federal system that is malfunctioning, just as any non-governmental organizational form that gratuitously overloads leadership is a form that is inefficient by definition.

Obviously, some standards do cry out for a one-size-fits-all, nationalized (so to speak) solution. In the book I specify a few even as I debunk presumptions to others. There are also cases where centralized economies of scale work well in organizational life, and they may be important ones. As many as there once were of such cases, they are becoming scarcer at a time when distributed systems are the bellwethers of efficiency.  All the more reason not to clutter the channels with marginal issues better handled at lower levels of governmental or social responsibility.

But again, all this depends on people being able to learn and apply standards to conduct over a wide range of interactive domains, from business to sexual proprieties to recreation to rules of the automotive road. To do that, people have always gleaned the harvest of face-to-face interactions by reading not just words but expressions and body language. The moral ballast of any society starts at the capillary level, when any two people interact. At the other end of the spectrum, therefore, as we consider a nation as a whole, we can say that no society can be more refined than the mean of individuals and families that compose it.

*   *   * 

What also follows from this is a second verity of political life, namely that the political institutions of any society emerge from that society far more than the other way around. The United States is a democracy because its founding society was egalitarian-minded, not the other way around. All of the American Founders and all of their tutors, from Locke to Montesquieu to even the great bad-boy of the time, Rousseau, understood this. The idea that a governmental form could remold or create a society after its desired image earned the derisive label “talismanic” at the hands of William Taylor Coleridge. Yes, sometimes the bully pulpit can make a difference, as the mid-20^th century American experience with desegregation shows; but even here, I think, a changing society for the most part led the government, not the other way around.

Social authoritarianism, which exists in both soft and hard, leftist and rightist versions, denies this, or at the least wants to overturn it through the force of a supposed vanguard will. Social authoritarians believe that the state can and should shape society. They want to raise our consciousness. They want to make us unselfish, or pious, or prim, or whatever the virtue d’jour happens to be. They want to squeeze our egos until they bleed compliance. Above all, they want us to conform to explicit standards regardless of any expectation of natural reciprocity. Moral obligations in this kind of command-morality world resemble Kantian categorical imperatives. Whether they want us to worship Karl Marx or the god of John Calvin makes little difference in this respect. Whether they want us to abjure private property or stigmatize tobacco smoking makes little difference, too. They want to create community, whatever its standards may be, by fiat.

Anarchism and statism are thus opposites, even though both have made and may yet again make use of similar radical methods. Anarchists want the least amount of government and the least amount of politics, while statist authoritarians want the most government and the most politics (as long as they control its vicissitudes). The utopianism of anarchism depends on human nature overcoming the distortions and barriers and bad faith accumulated in a history once described by Hegel as “a butcher’s block.” The utopianism of socialist statism depends on changing human nature from a “fallen” state to a pure one. Anarchists see true toleration, as against mere forbearance, as natural; statists do not. If you like the extension of a polarity from Western religion, anarchism is a Hebraic extremism, statism a Pauline one.

All the same, both have in common the idea that for human beings to live fulfilled lives, they must do so together, in communities. The difference between them is this: For anarchists, social trust develops naturally and organically as long as artificial hierarchies can be prevented from perverting and diminishing it; for socialists, social trust has to be imposed from the top down along explicitly devised lines. Both fear too much individualism untethered to the social commons. Both see hubris as the sin that turns the wondrous gift of individual human creativity into that which boomerangs to harm the community that ultimately nurtures us all.

*  *  *

So now, finally, let’s talk about contemporary America, and about Sprint’s new advertising campaign.  Let me continue by quoting a bit from Broken—from the aforementioned tease.

Recent widespread commercial applications of information technology extend broader trends toward the individuation of American society. The gossamer stuff from which the American dream has been spun is all about maximizing individual freedom, and about giving substance to that freedom by maximizing individual efficacy. We have willed our individualist myth into reality, for, as an old professor of mine, Erving Goffman, once put it, “Social life takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it.” Individuals in cybernetically advanced America today are autonomously powerful as never before, with worlds of information, education, training, products, social exchange and means of expression at their fingertips. But they are also apparently lonelier, less happy and more anxious as the interpersonal glue that ratifies our corner of humanity as a social species dissolves. . . . I suspect a Goethe moment at hand: We have got what we wished for as a youthful civilization, but now that we are older we are not sure what to do with a society made up of Protean individuals, or even why we wanted it in the first place.

Some few of us, anyway, are unsure. Most Americans, and most young Americans in particular, are downright enthusiastic about the I-am-an-island power they have at their disposal these days. They overwhelmingly see the upsides of the new technology insofar as education is concerned, for example, and are mostly oblivious to the tradeoffs. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean they have made a conscious choice to care less about community, or friends, or about the natural pleasures of face-to-face relations. (Thank God for sex, or the prospect of it anyway.) We are so early in this new era of mass cybernetic connectivity that no one knows how social-trust friendly or social-trust unfriendly the gadgets will ultimately turn out to be.  Look hard enough and you can see signs pointing both ways. But the fact that Sprint has chosen to mount the individuating, Protean meme and ride it all the way to the bank suggests that a tendency, at least, may already be discernable.

Why should we be concerned about this? Because if the individuating tendencies inherent in the technology are not offset by creative balances that can restock social trust, or social capital, in America, it means that we will drift ever further from an organic social equilibrium to a kind of order that needs ever more government to make it work. We will have to face what David Brooks has called “brutality cascades”, a kind of positional arms race to the bottom that ensues when it becomes difficult to impossible for standards of behavior to form out of interpersonal relationships.

Similarly and closely related, it also may mean that the social authority signals that flow from a naturally evolved social equilibrium will weaken, flattening a bit (or more than a bit) too much the bell curve of moral conformity. If that happens it will erode the constraints against extreme views and behaviors that are in every society the guardrails of civilization itself. One at least has to wonder whether that flattening hasn’t already contributed something to episodes like Buskerud, Norway, Aurora, Colorado and even Newtown, Connecticut.

Don’t misunderstand, please: I love liberty as much as the next American, and perhaps more than most. I am well aware that the concept of individualism that infuses the American ethos is the essence of Enlightenment modernity, and that it explains why both Hobbes and Locke, whatever their differences, were similarly the avatars of modern political life. I can find in my heart little enthusiasm for earlier ages suffused by superstition, smothering conformity, racist and misogynist hierarchies, stultifying fatalism and more besides. But a refined social order is nevertheless the indispensable base for individual fulfillment and dignity, no less than an infant’s willingness to roam and explore is a function of propinquity to parental security.

As Edmund Burke understood so well, tradition is not the mere accretion of habit; it is the wisdom of the ages hard accumulated, often a wisdom difficult to articulate but no less essential to basic civil order for so being. The yawning extent and accelerating trajectory of our individuation, I fear, threatens that order, threatens the natural moral balances in American society and, in their absence, lures many of us, at least, into seeking governmental solutions for everything that may displease us. (Yes, you guessed it: I suspect that American society, as more a creedal or covenantal nationalism than the bloodline forms of European nationalisms, is particularly vulnerable to the depredations of excessive individuation.) Our obsession with self-gratification, self-expression, self-fulfillment—in short with the “imperial me”—and the concomitant rejection of the old virtues (patience, humility, thrift, inter-generational responsibility) as quaint enough for museums but not much good for anything else, has made our country increasingly in need of government and at the same time increasingly ungovernable (other reasons for the latter are explored in the book).

So here I go beyond the book: Yes, globalization and automation have upset some very effective and fairly longstanding arrangements and elements of our political institutional dysfunction have made it much harder to adjust. Corruption is running rampant in a third historical wave of plutocratic assault, and it mixes in myriad ways with the dislocations of our political economy and the frailties of our political culture, making everything worse.

Above all, perhaps, never have plutocrats had it so easy, since countervailing collective action has become more difficult in an age of individuation. Where are the 21^st century populists or progressives? Where is the outrage? Do we see so little extra-parliamentary activity because things are simply not so bad (yet)? Or is it rather that the natural social platforms that serve as the basis for such political mobilization have been eviscerated by our headlong individuation? Sure, Facebook and Instant Messaging can facilitate 20-something bar-mobbing, and Twitter can help crowds gather in Midan al-Tahrir, but today’s American social environment arguably offers up to small groups of the specially interested a door flung more widely open than ever when it comes to looting the treasury of the public weal. The logic of collective action has never been less limited.

What I am suggesting is that our crisis of governance, which is reflected but only partly expressed by the mess our political class has made in Washington, is ultimately anchored in a cultural shift that is both a source for and a consequence of revolutionary technological change. Increasing numbers of young and well-educated Americans love the gadgets that help isolate them from one another because they do not wish to be obligated by civilities, do not wish to be constrained by responsibilities to others, do not wish to be limited in any way.  We are witnessing the eternal temptation to self-indulgence raised to both principle and art.

The marketeers at Sprint are clever folks; five will get you ten that they know all this. If we want to be radically free, autonomously powerful, they are eager to pose as our helpers. If we want to escape social gravity, to propel ourselves into orbit around our own egos, we can sign that cell phone contract. And, ironically enough, in all this we are encouraged because everyone else seems to be doing the same thing. This is pseudo-individualism, narcissistic faux non-conformity in a crowd.

Where will this lead, if it keeps up? Well, there’s a very old story, let me suggest, that succinctly speaks to this. It is about a certain tower in a place called Babel. Are you confused?

All I can say is that I liked Sprint’s older, Beatles-inflected advertising slogan better: “All. Together. Now.”

The Minimum Wage Explained

March 3, 2013

There is a rare gem in Sunday’s New York Times in the business section.  Former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Dr. Christina Romer, has provided a balanced, honest, accurate and concise summary of the arguments concerning the minimum wage. Given that a significant rise in the minimum wage was one of President Obama’s main initiatives in his recent State of the Union Address, this brief analysis should command a wide audience.

Two qualities of this essay particularly commend it.

First, as Dr. Romer identifies the several economic effects of the minimum wage, she takes care to estimate their relative magnitude. Yes, a rise in the minimum wage will produce unemployment, it will produce higher prices as business businesses pass higher labor costs on to consumers, and it will therefore conduce to inflation—but how much, compared to the redistributional benefits it may bring?

And second, Romer points out that there are other ways, better because more precisely targeted ways, to produce the same benefits as the minimum wage. So she puts the issue in its proper context.

If you want a quick lesson on an important, complex and often politically distorted issue, here’s your chance.

Things Get Worse.......

March 3:

The most important news of the day is arguably contained in a somewhat-buried article in the New York Times by Robert F. Worth and C.J. Chiver, entitled “Seized Chinese Weapons Raise Concerns on Iran.”  The subtitle gives a hint of one of the reasons this information is so significant:  “Capture of Vessel Off Yemen Alarms Region.”  (As if it isn’t already alarmed enough.)

And well it should be alarmed. As the article makes clear, the Iranians, via the Revolutionary Guard Corps, are accelerating the volume and sophistication of weapons supplies transferred to extent and potential proxies in the region. In the case of Yemen, that’s the Houthi rebellion. In all cases, Iran’s support is to Shi’a or Shi’a offshoot groups fighting Sunni government or groups.  The qualitative escalation is symbolized by the presence of Chinese-manufactured manpads—the QW-1M. These weapons come from a Chinese state-owned company already sanctioned by the U.S. government for illegal arms dealing.

What are Iranian and Chinese officials thinking (and let me note that in neither case can we assume a monolithic government decision system)?

Why, first, are the Iranians doing something that is clearly going to alarm and drive together Sunni countries in the region, and quicken their willingness to cooperate with the United States? Well, they may have assumed they wouldn’t get caught. There have been times in the past when they did not get caught in a timely fashion, and other times when U.S. intelligence and other decision-makers thought that following rather than outing this behavior would bring more long-term benefits.
But they got caught: On January 23 the USS Farragut, a DDG-class destroyer took down the Iranian Jeehan I of the coast Al Ghaydah, a Yemeni town almost directly north of the island of Sucotra in the Gulf of Aden.


Personal aside:  I had the honor a few years ago of shipriding the Farragut into the Atlantic Ocean for a couple of days along with a half dozen other civvies. The ship, which sails out of Mayport at Jacksonville, Florida, was on a counter-terror, counter-piracy training mission in advance of a deployment to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden. I got to watch simulated action take place, as Captain Phil Sobeck and his officers explained what was going on.  I also got to watch as a cruise missile was fired to its target at Hurlburt Field, near the Gulf Coast all the way on the other side of Florida. And I got to smell a large cloud of cordite during gunnery practice: a-yuck! Congratulations to the men and women of the Farragut, and all those who have been associated with her! The next time I wear my Farragut hat, a gift from Captain Phil, I will do so with special pride.


Note that the Iranians have plotted and implemented this escalation even as they have agreed to talks with the United States and others about their rapidly proceeding nuclear weapons program. Could today’s news possibly suggest that the Iranians have zero intentions of making a deal, and that they are using negotiations only to divide and distract the so-called international community (how hard is that, after all?), so as to buy some quiet time for themselves?

I don’t think that the prospect of getting caught seeding weapons all over the region was enough to stop the Iranians.  That is because there is a chance—a fairly good one, I’d say—that the Iranian leadership believes in the inevitability of war, whether a broad-scale Shi’a-Sunni war in the region, perhaps touched off in Syria and Lebanon between Jabhat al-Musra and Hizballah, or an attack by the United States, or both.  So why wouldn’t they position themselves for it as best they can?

Why the Chinese?  Because they’re willing, they’re discreet—and because they have the right stuff.
Speaking of the Chinese, why are they willing to do this, despite our having read them the riot act several times over this sort of behavior now going on many years?  I can think of two classes of reasons.

First, it’s free.  We complain to them in private diplomatic circles, and we toss a sanction here and there at a specific reprobate company, but we exact no real price.  Every time sanctions against Iran come around, the White House exempts China from them. Not a way to communicate a serious attitude, turning what our diplomatic folks do into what is frequently called in the State Department a “d’marchemallow.” So what’s really to stop the Chinese side from doing the deal?

Second, and much more attention arresting, the Chinese government (or at least the PLA) knows that if there is a fight one day in the Pacific—say one that starts more or less accidentally between China and Japan over some rock in the South China Sea (see the cover story of the current issue of TAI)—it would be very useful to any extended Chinese military campaign if well-armed anti-U.S. groups in the Middle East, taking their cues more or less from Iran, were capable of starting what amounts to a second front. As it is, it seems less than certain that the Obama Administration would back its Japanese ally if it got into a slapping match with China. The prospect of a second, Middle Eastern front coming into play can only make U.S. determination, and credibility, that much easier to doubt. One has to assume that both the Iranian and Chinese sides understand this.

So, important news? You bet.  Good news?  No such luck.

Hollywood Argonistes (with apologies to John Milton)

February 28, 2013

I saw Argo a few weeks before the Oscars, and I liked about 99 and 44/100 of it. Once the plot action starts, the tone, images, language and emotional pitch of the main characters all seem high-quality replicas of historical reality. Not that I have any expertise in making or evaluating film as an art form. I just know what I like and don’t like, and that mainly depends, in the case of historical fiction, on the fit between the fictive rendering and my own experience embedded in the mysterious workings of human memory.

The problem I had, and now have more than ever with the Oscars being announced, concerns the other 56/100 of one percent of the Argo movie experience.

Before the action begins the viewer is treated to a 2-3 minute potted history of post-World War II Iranian politics and U.S.-Iranian relations. As the narrator talks, vivid period photographs flash before one’s eyes. After the action is resolved, the film ends with a taped remark, running for maybe just a minute or so, from former President Carter. From the cracked voice it sounds like Carter is commenting fairly recently, perhaps after having seen a screener of the film.

These bookends to Argo compose an atrocity committed on the historical record. It’s typical Hollywood anti-establishment, mock-heroic crap. More specifically, it’s totally unreconstructed revisionist pablum that (mis)frames for the viewer what they are about to see or have just seen. Most viewers won’t remember either bookend explicitly or in any detail, so engaging is the actual movie in between. But into their heads it will have gone, and not to no effect.

For those who may not have a good grasp of the logic of anti-U.S. historical revisionism, let me spell it out for you. In the primitive, Manichean revisionist mindset there are only two sides to any conflict or situation: good guys and bad guys. The United States is always the bad guy, making anyone who is against the United States ipso facto a good guy. The way revisions logic works is that if good guys do anything good, it’s because it’s their nature to do good things—because they are good guys. But if good guys do anything bad, it’s because bad guys make them. Similarly, if bad guys do bad things, it’s because it’s their nature. If they seem to do good things, it’s only because the good guys somehow make them.

With this “logic” in hand, a revisionist can spin any historical event into one in which the United States is always at fault, and enemies of the United States are never at fault. If you understand this, you’ll understand exactly how these bookends to Argo work.  (You will also, incidentally, understand the tactical, logical innards of anything written or produced by Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky or Oliver Stone.) Thus, why did the good Iranians make hostages out of American diplomats in November 1979? Because the bad Americans made them do it, because of all the bad things we had done to them before. And why did the bad Americans pull off the Argo caper successfully? Because the good Iranians created the circumstances for their so doing—and of course the American hero succeeds not with but despite the bulk of American officialdom depicted in the movie.

Don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying that Ben Affleck knowingly lied to his audience. I’m saying that he doesn’t know any better, that he actually believes the nonsense that introduces and frames the film. He is a Hollywood type. He doesn’t know and cannot be expected to know any actual history. It’s not important to him. What is important is that he have a good storyline that appeals to the increasingly cynical, anti-Washington bias of most Americans. Well, maybe he dissimulated a little. Even he has to know, one would hope, that it was the imminent beginning of the Reagan Administration that finally sprung the hostages on January 20, 1981, the day before Reagan’s inauguration. But the name Ronald Reagan never occurs. The way things are left, Jimmy Carter gets credit for bringing the hostages home rather than blame for leaving them there so long in the first place. Well, if you’re going to lie, you might as well make it a whopper.

It is easy to lie vaguely. Indeed, the power of an historical lie rests in the juxtaposition of lots of trivial detail against a studied narrative vagueness. To explain a lie of this kind invariably takes more words than the lie itself. That is why skillful lying is so powerful: It gulls the listener by making understanding seem so easy. To unpack the lie requires more effort on the part of the listener, putting the un-packer at a distinct disadvantage. Nevertheless, I am game to do the unpacking if you are game to do the listening.

In the past, I’ve commented on President Obama’s speeches using footnotes which would pop up when you’d mouse over them on the page. This had some legibility problems online, so this time, we’ll try it a different, more standard internet way. It’s less than ideal because you’ll not get the sense of the original text as a unified whole. But for the sake of ease of reading, let’s give it a go like this: voiceover original in block quotes interspersed with my numbered comments. If you so choose, you can cut-and-paste the block quotes to reconstitute the whole on your end.

* * *

This is the Persian Empire, known today as Iran.

1. Statements do not get much more ignorant than this. Iran today is a tiny fraction of the territorial extent of three Persian empires from the past—the Achaemenid, the Sasanid and the Safavid.

For 2,500 years this land was ruled by a series of Kings, known as Shahs. In 1950, the people of Iran elected Mohammed Mossadegh, a secular democrat, as prime minister. He nationalized British and U.S. petroleum holdings, returning Iran’s oil to its people.

2. It is not possible to return something to those who never had it in the first place. The idea that Iran’s oil belonged to the Iranian people is a notion that virtually no Iranian at that point in time would have credited, except perhaps members of the Communist Tudeh Party. Iran’s oil was discovered, extracted, refined, transported and marketed by foreigners—mainly the British. Iranians could not have done these things at the time, so the money the concession paid to the government was money no Iranian would otherwise have had. What the Mossadegh government actually did was to expropriate property, mostly British, in violation of international contracts. In so doing, Mossadegh as prime minister went far beyond his constitutional authority in what was, after all, still a monarchy.

But in 1953, The U.S. and Great Britain engineered a coup d’étât that deposed Mossadegh, and installed Reza Pahlavi as Shah.

3. Here is the key lie in this passage. In the first place, the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had been Shah before the Mossadegh government. He became Shah at a young age when the Allies deposed his father, Reza Shah, during World War II. It is true that Great Britain and the United States played a role in the overthrow of Mossadegh and the return of the Shah to his Peacock Throne, but most of the damage to the Mossadegh government was done by Mossadegh and his political allies themselves. They made lots of mistakes, they alienated most of their original allies, and they contributed to a genuinely chaotic environment. It was feared both in Iran and beyond that a small but resolute group of Communists, with Soviet support, might take advantage of the situation. This was not an idle fear, given the machinations of the Soviet government in Iran directly after World War II. There is a parallel here to the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The leftist myth paints Allende as an immaculate-conception kind of hero, a political saint who could do no wrong. The truth was that he did plenty wrong. Like Mossadegh, he also alienated large swaths of his original political coalition. Had Mossadegh and Allende not been such maladroit political operators, it would not have been remotely easy to dump them, and likely not possible at all.

The young Shah was known for opulence and excess. His wife was rumored to bathe in milk, while the Shah had his lunches flown in by Concord from Paris. The people starved.

4. Even if it were true, about the milk bath and the lunches flown in from Paris, it is not as though the Shah and his wife were doing anything that the majority of Iranians did not expect them to do. They were royalty, and most people expected them to act like royalty. Nor is it true that because of the excesses of the Royal Palace the Iranian people starved. There is no evidence whatsoever of significant starvation in Iran during the Shah’s reign. There was plenty of poverty in Iran, yes, but that poverty had existed for centuries and would have existed regardless of the personal habits of the Shah and his princess.

The Shah kept power through his ruthless internal police, the SAVAK. An era of torture and fear began.

5. Another outrageous misstatement. Toward the end of the Shah’s rule, after the shocks of the oil revolution generated tremendous corruption and dislocation in the political economy, it is true that the government became fairly brutal, and the SAVAK genuinely murderous. One of the main reasons for this is that over time the reform agenda of the Shah’s regime, which included confiscating vast amounts of land both from the aristocracy and from the clergy, generated a strong backlash. More about the Shah’s reformist agenda below. The point is that no era of torture and fear began in 1953, as the statement asserts. There was always opposition to the Shah’s reformist agenda from Iran’s hidebound rentier elite, but for the most part his rule was broadly popular—until around the early 1970s.

He then began a campaign to modernize Iran, enraging a mostly traditional Shi’ite population.

6. Another whopper. As I have just said, the effort to modernize the country, known as the White Revolution, which the Shah continued from the time of his father, and which also took Mustafa Kemal in Turkey as a model, did stir up some opposition. For example, the first time that the cleric Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini—aka Ayatollah Khomeini—got arrested for involvement in a street protest, in 1964, was on the occasion of the government granting the vote to women. This was by no means unpopular at the time, except, again, to the country’s hidebound Shi’a clergy. Is Ben Affleck trying to tell us that the Shah’s extending the franchise to women was a bad idea?!  That a vast project of land reform designed to alleviate Iranian poverty was a bad idea?! If that is what Affleck believes, let him please say so directly.

In 1979 the people of Iran overthrew the Shah.

7. The “people”, generically speaking, never do anything as such. It is very romantic to make such statements, but it is sociological nonsense. Of course, no one expects an intro to a movie to be a paragon of social science virtue.  Still…  The Shah fell because he was old and sick, and most of his sagacious political advisers were no longer on the scene. He fell because he could not control the creative destruction he himself had unleashed with his reforms and his engineering of the quadrupling of oil prices; he was to a very considerable extent the victim of his own success. And he fell because his most important ally, the United States in the form of the Carter Administration, did next to nothing to prevent it.  See below.

The exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomenei returned to rule Iran.

8. True as stated but misleading all the same. Somehow the impression has grown up that once the Shah was gone or very nearly gone, the only conceivable alternative was rule by the Iranian clergy. Anyone who remembers those days knows that the matter was vastly more complicated than that. Iran had an interregnum provisional government under Abulhasan Bani-Sadr. Any number of outcomes were imaginable at that point; there was nothing inevitable about clerical rule. One distasteful but, under the circumstances, not-beyond-the-pale solution was a temporary military takeover that could calm things down and set the stage for a parliamentary republic. There is still disagreement about the true attitude of the Carter Administration toward this option, all of it rotating around the Huyser Mission.

Anyone who has never heard of General Robert E. Huyser and his mission has absolutely no business writing so much as a single sentence on this general subject. Some say President Carter instructed Huyser to prepare a coup as a last ditch option to prevent the mullahs from coming to power. Others say the reverse: that Carter instructed Huyser to make sure there would be no coup. The truth remains to be established, but with Carter’s friend and UN Ambassador Andrew Young calling Khomeini a saint, who would soon return to his monastery in Qom, I for one lean to the latter interpretation.

It descended into score-settling, death squads, and chaos.

9. “It” descended?!  What actually happened was exactly what anyone with a brain would expect to happen: The guys who won, the guys with the guns, went around the country jailing, torturing and murdering the opposition. The statement makes it seem as though everyone was equally to blame for the mayhem. The technical term for this is “bullshit”, or, better, “bullshistory.”

Dying of cancer, the Shah was given asylum in the U.S. The Iranian people took to the streets outside the U.S. Embassy, demanding that the Shah be returned, tried, and hanged.

10. Again, the Iranian people did nothing of the sort. The protests were large, drawing on a grievance culture deep within the Iranian psyche.  But the foot soldiers of the protests were members of the new clerical political movements.  This was their job. The intimation that the entire country was behind these protests, and took part in them enthusiastically, is simply false.

* * *

And here is the Jimmy Carter ending voice over:

* * *

They went in, as you know, under the guise of making a motion picture, and there was a high possibility of failure. And after it was successful, of course there was a lot of temptation to reveal all the stories, so that I could take a little bit of credit for it, since I was president. But we had to keep it secret. Tony Mendez has gone down in history, after his retirement, as one of the top fifty most important CIA operatives of all time. Eventually, we got every hostage back home safe and sound, and we upheld the integrity of our country, and we did it peacefully.

Jimmy Carter has become increasingly delusional as the years go by. Nowhere in the movie does anybody mention, nor does Carter mention it here, that there was a failed attempt to rescue the hostages by dint of military force. If that operation had not been grounded early on, there is every prospect that at least a limited fight would have taken place.  Carter’s intimation that everything he ordered throughout the ordeal was spic-and-span peaceful is a flat lie.

As for upholding the integrity of the country, this is almost too ludicrous to believe. Carter’s indecisiveness at the critical moment lead to the rise of the clerical regime in Iran. Carter’s weakness in the face of the seizure of our embassy ended up enabling a small number of Iranian radicals to essentially take the entire foreign policy of United States hostage for more than two years—and enabled Ayatollah Khomenei to claim, famously and damagingly, that United States “cannot do a damn thing.”

Now, when Carter says that he would like to have taken credit for the Argo operation, he does not directly claim credit for the return of the hostages. But he does imply it when he says “we got every hostage back home safe and sound”—and if he does not then Affleck does. This amounts to another lie.

As already noted, nowhere is there a mention anywhere in this movie, whether in its bookends or in its main section, of Ronald Reagan. During the 1980 campaign Reagan criticized Carter repeatedly for his mishandling of Iran, and he left no doubt in anyone’s mind that, if he had it in his power, he would take a very different and much more muscular approach to the problem. The public record thus far is mute about how the incoming Reagan Administration might have communicated its intent to the Iranian regime after the results of the November 1980 election were in. But the man who would become CIA Director in that new Administration, one William Joseph Casey, was hardly at a loss to know how to do such things. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that the Iranian regime took to heart whatever was communicated to it from the Reagan transition team, possibly via Swiss intermediaries, between the election and the inauguration. They were plainly afraid of Ronald Reagan, and that is the main reason they let the hostages go. Had Jimmy Carter won the election, they almost certainly would not have been released at that time.  Whatever would have become of them no one can know.

* * *

Why belabor all this?  After all, it’s just a movie, and nobody takes these things seriously, right?

Alas, that’s not so. No one takes them seriously as such, perhaps, but a lie repeated in public space often enough becomes truth through a process of lazy entertainment osmosis. Most of the people who have seen, and will now see, Argo are too young to remember what was going on back in the mid to late 1970s. Most viewers, too, know little to nothing about the history of Iran or U.S.-Iranian relations—why should they?—and so they have no basis against which to protect themselves from weapons-of-misinformation-dumps (WMD). Most important, we exaggerate the capacity of most people to distinguish between fact and representations of fact, because being able to do so is very context specific. Let me tell you a story about this.

Many years ago there was an actor named Robert Young. He was famous for being the father figure on a very popular television show called Father Knows Best. Later, he played the unimpeachably marvelous Marcus Welby, MD on another very popular television show of that name. Either toward the end of or after his Marcus Welby role, Sanka hired him to sell instant coffee in TV commercials. How did they do this? They dressed him in a doctor’s white coat, put a stethoscope around his neck, and gave him a pointer to point at some graphic purporting to show how healthy this instant coffee was for you. Now, of course, if you asked viewers outright if the guy on their TV screen was actually a medical doctor, or just an actor, most of them could probably tell you that Robert Young was just an actor. But given the associational promiscuity of the human mind, and the tendency of television as a technology to put a viewer into a semi-hypnotic trance, most of the time the question was never asked and the distinction never made. As far as I know, the commercial did exactly what the Sanka people wanted to do.

The point is that in the context of our obsessive entertainment culture, narratives about real politics tend to smuggle their way from the fanciful to the factual without most people ever bringing their critical facilities to bear on what they’re hearing. In our culture, which loves to be entertained more than anything else under the sun, the temptation to believe an easy truth is tantamount to a done deal. People associate being entertained with authenticity, with emotion, with really being alive, so that anything one learns about history, say, in the midst of an entertaining experience is given pride of place as truth. I cannot resist quoting from the late Michael Crichton’s masterful 1999 novel Timeline:

What is the dominant mode of experience at the end of the twentieth century? How do people see things, how do they expect to see things? The answer is simple. In every field, from business to politics to marketing to education, the dominant mode has become entertainment. . . .

Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren’t bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused—everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the century.

In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time is on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.

I fully expect that the result of Argo and its popularity will be to permanently deface recognition of the actual historical record when it comes to Iran and U.S.-Iranian relations from this period—and this for a relationship that has anything but run its course. If the revisionist logic is as insidiously contagious as I think it is, it stands to reason that the notion will spread that if the good Iranians want a nuclear weapon, it’s only because the bad Americans are forcing them to have one. Get the picture?

- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/2013/02/28/hollywood-argonistes-with-apologies-to-john-milton/#sthash.IP3SEssv.dpuf