280. The Return of Spiderman — in The Economist!

If a citizen of a democracy doesn't have the time or brain to figure all the ins and outs of his country's foreign policy he has to rely on a few newspapers and magazines.  And that, fellow voters, can be ticklish business.  Choose a publication that looks like it will save a busy middlebrow's time most efficiently and you discover that it's slanted, really, toward lowbrows.  With me that was Time magazine.  Pick one that seems the brainiest, and therefore least likely to slant, and you discover that its brains all slant, intellectually, one way.  With me that was the Partisan Review.  (I was equating brains with academic neutrality.  I had to age some.)

Now in old age my three-quarters of a brow counts, for the daily view, on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and, for the larger view, on The Economist, the New York Review, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker.  For fill-in and state of the controversy I count on Wikipedia, which tries harder than any of them to maintain academic neutrality.  (See its Guidelines for contributors.) 

With the conservative Journal in there you can see that I'm looking to balance the liberal Economist, particularly in foreign affairs.  But, with the Economist getting more and more emotional about Vladimir Putin that's getting harder to do.  In July they had him on the cover looking out from the middle of a spider web (see Post 253).  Now here he is as a puppet master, the strings from his fingers descending to darkly controlled agents, unseen below.  He's a man ready, as the lead editorial puts it, "to stoop to methods the West cannot emulate without sullying itself" (2/14-20).

I'm getting worked up the way Time used to work me up over the Communists allowed to spread their tentacles all over East Asia. Oh these evil people.  Oh how we need somebody to stand up to them.

But that can't be.  This is The Economist.  How can it be doing the Time magazine thing?  Wikipedia says "it targets highly educated readers."  Its own masthead puts it on the side of "intelligence" against "an unworthy ignorance."  Its brow is higher than anybody's.

278. Update on the Great Game

If you don't remember how Prof. John J. Mearshimer deplored our move to expand NATO eastward (Foreign Affairs 93:5, 2014, my Post 262) maybe you remember diplomat George Kennan's warning at the time, "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely."  I placed the move as part of "The Great Game" played by Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century and joined enthusiastically by the U. S. in the twentieth (Post 262).

Even if you have been too busy to pay close attention you probably know that the game hasn't been going too well for us.  We looked either weak or stupid after Putin did what he wanted to the country of the good man we supported [Saakashvili, of Georgia] and we looked like a mere noisemaker when he went into Crimea. 

Now it looks like our opponent is going to put some serious points on the board.  As the leaders of Germany, France, Ukraine, and Russia sat down in Minsk he still, as the NYT analysis (Andrew Higgins, 2-12-15) made clear, "held the decisive cards."  The leaders "confronted the reality that Mr. Putin held the upper hand precisely because he is prepared to use military force to get what he wants in diplomacy."

Why couldn't we see that moving NATO so close to Russia was a bad move, that it was even what Kennan called it at the time, "a tragic mistake"?  Why couldn't we listen to Kennan?  Because, I think, we were deafened by our own sounds.  Democrats wanted to make good sounds and Republicans wanted to make tough sounds.  And now here we are, reduced to a squeak.   We weren't willing to go to war.  We never were.  Putin is.  Squeak, squeak while his points go up.

The game is played in front of American voters.  An administration can't retreat in front of Republicans because that would be soft.  An administration has to go forward because of Democrats, who can't leave good people to their fate (the first moves east were made under the Carter and Clinton administrations). 

Part of the problem is that we keep getting the wrong people into the game.  Generals and Defense department types (think Rumsfeld) are not the people to play diplomacy.  Not even, if they are in the administration, to comment on it.  Their job (as in the administrative reform I dreamed of in Post 271) is to carry out what the policy-makers decide on, and give advice on capabilities. 

 But just a week ago Lt. Gen. Frederick Hodges' view of  "NATO's Russian Front" appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion pages (7-8 Feb, 15).  He "won't weigh in directly in the Washington policy debate" but Russia, he says, "has set out to redraw the boundaries of Europe."  And he won't worry about our provoking dangerous responses.  "You know, frankly, you hear this often from people in the West, 'Oh, we don't want to provoke the Russians.'  I think concern about provoking the Russians is probably misplaced.  You can't provoke them.  They're already on a path to do what they want to do."

Once again I find myself wishing that American leaders, and behind them the American people, would ask themselves the question asked in tough bars, and the sooner the better: "Are you willing to fight?"  If the answer is no you sit back and keep your mouth shut. 

262. The Use of the Word "Uneducated"

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Democracy's faith in the common man gives well-informed, carefully analyzing citizens of democracies a problem when they want to refer to poorly informed, carelessly analyzing citizens.  Ignorance and carelessness on the part of voters can be dangerous, and you want to use words that will discredit it, but you don't want to use words that discredit the common man enough to make you a danger to democracy.  The contempt in Bill Maher's "dipshits" could have made him a danger.  Slurs like his make smart "men on horseback" (macho dictators) an attractive alternative.

Thomas Jefferson freely referred to the masses of the cities of Europe as "canaille," a pack of dogs, which, if given power, would destroy "everything public and private."  Friedrich Nietzsche fought to defend himself "hand and foot" against people who confused him with the "anti-Semitic canaille" of those cities.  But no American can use "canaille" to refer to the masses in American cities.

Once Americans could get away with a term like "Know-Nothings" but not now.  We say "low-information voter," and are happy at not being thought elitists, since the opposite is only "high-information voter."

Plato's "the multitude" refers exactly to the group we are worried about, those who form opinions uncritically, but its discrediting power is lost if it's taken as mere quantification, as those who don't know Plato are likely to do.  The same with his "the many," which could be more strongly elitist, suggesting "we few," we smart ones.  "Masses" won't do since we don't have "classes."  Masses are those lumpen things that swelled up in Europe and got talked about by Karl Marx, that word-poisoner.

Set against those options, "uneducated" looks attractive, but we've got to be careful with it.  We don't want to imply a permanent condition or a kind of people.  Recognize that nobody is educated all of the time and everybody is educated some of the time.  Play safe, maybe, by using it only in combination with "in."  Poets are "uneducated in" worldly consequences. 

The Ukraine crisis gives us an excellent opportunity to see how this usage would go.  Say I sound off about the crucial issue, one way or the other ("NATO is justified in expanding to take in Ukraine." "No, no, it isn't.")  But I don't know much about the back story.  A friend directs me to two articles in the September/October issue of the periodical Foreign Affairs.

The first, by John J. Mearsheimer, is titled "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin."  It gives me the history of and reasons for Russian sensitivity to unfriendly powers on its borders, asks me to "imagine the outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico," and shows me how firmly Russian leaders expected Western diplomats to respect their concerns.

The second article, by Mary Elise Sarotte, is titled "A Broken Promise?  What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion."  It shows me that Russian expectations, at least with respect to a promise supposedly made to get Russia to approve the unification of Germany, had no reason to be so firm.  There was no promise.

After I read these articles I say that I have been "educated in the Ukraine crisis."  And I am willing to say that before reading them I was "uneducated in the Ukraine crisis."  But that makes me say that people who haven't read those articles are "uneducated."   That's too categorical, too much of a knock.  Better say that the readers are "better educated" than the non-readers.

Yes, I think we've got it, an accurate expression that preserves respect or the common man and keeps democracy safe.

Uh huh, and when SS men take over "Aryan" to justify smashing Semites' shop windows I'm going to refer to them as "less well educated" than men who have learned what "Aryan" really means?  I'm making "canaille," even "dipshits," look good.  Discrediting force must count for something in a word.

Such a problem.  The safer I make a word the more I weaken it.  But not everywhere.  How will it go in the circle of Economist, New York Review, and New Yorker readers?  Which would we rather the editors overhear (our constant hope), "Well, the Foreign Affairs editors are certainly better educated than the Economist editors," or "Well, the Economist editors have just joined the Know Nothings...or the canaille," or even, at the end, "gone dipshit"?  Remember, we're talking about that issue with spider Putin on the cover (10 July - 1 August, 2014 — see Post 253). 

I'm not sure of the discrediting force here but I feel sure the former expression, the one that makes them less well educated, will have some force on the editors, and maybe it will have enough to do some good.

Would it have enough to make up for what it fails to do in the streets, the daily media, where we so need good police work?  Have we turned our guys' billy sticks into ladies' fans?  With the SS on their rampage what would we be longing for?  "These guys are dipshits!"  Of course.  And we'd be defending, not jeopardizing, democracy.

It's easy, especially for academics, to undervalue verbal violence.  In skillful hands, in satire, in ridicule, in pointed abuse, it can substitute for physical violence, and make government crackdowns unnecessary.  "Yahoos!" says Jonathan Swift of the rabble in Houyhnhnm land.  "Yahoos!" says Whitney Balliett of the fraternity boys disrupting the jazz festival in Newport.  The sting brings order to the next jazz festival, without more constricting government orders.

253. The Case of the Transformed Leader

 
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I'm talking about public intellectual leadership, like that of Le Monde in Paris.  I thought the editors of The Economist were providing that for us.  When they decided to back the invasion of Iraq their spokesman, in the leading "leader" (editorial), stuck to what mattered in international relations.  Only once did he (or she) refer to Saddam Hussein's personal qualities ("violent and murderous") and not once did he refer to his behavior inside his country, like gassing his people.

Contrast that with the leading leader in the current Economist, urging more forceful action in the Ukraine.  It's all about Vladimir Putin — trying to get an "unwilling" world to see him "as he really is."  That is, basically, as a liar, a point reinforced by the picture of a sinister-looking, grey-faced Putin looking out from the middle of a spider web on the magazine's cover.

Yet theirs is not just a case against a person.  It ends with a recommendation for action.   America has been "talking tough but has done nothing new."  Then the rock-em, sock-em conclusion: "Bridge-building and resets will not persuade [Putin] to behave as a normal leader.  The West should impose tough sanctions now, pursue his corrupt friends and throw him out of every international talking shop that relies on telling the truth."

Which international, truth-reliant talking shops, we wonder, does The Economist have in mind?  The UN Security Council, with Colin Powell laying out the evidence for WMD?  The General Assembly, where Andrei Gromyko denied the shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba?  Or maybe just the world television theater, where Lyndon Johnson explained the aggression against us in the Tonkin Gulf? "

Suppose the Economist editors win on this issue.  Suppose they get the West to impose really severe sanctions.  And then, when they don't work, more severe sanctions, and more.  Isn't there a point where Putin will ask, "How much more have I got to lose if I just invade and take over the place?"  After he bites the bullet on lost trade he can do that so easily.  For this job he's got overwhelming military weight, his countrymen are behind him, and the battlefield is on his doorstep, not ours.

I see the Economist editors gathering in the office the next day.  They see that those responsible in our government face the choice of a backdown or World War III.  In any case, another gigantic mess — with the promise of worse in a renewal of the Cold War.  My guess is that somebody in that room will be conceiving the kind of blog post recently produced about the decision to support the Iraq invasion.  It's titled "Anniversary of a mass delusion," and the author, M. S., was apparently privy to the discussions at the New York Times when its editors decided to back the war.  His post, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/03/iraq-war,  is said by The Economist  to come from "one of our blogs."

It is so full of regret.  What they had taken as justification for war is now seen to be "all a fever dream" in the minds of "otherwise intelligent men."  The author is left with a very sad conclusion:

that all of us, including those of us considered the most responsible, well-trained and serious, are entirely capable of talking ourselves into lurid fantasies; that the actions we believe constitute difficult but necessary choices may in fact be the gestures of sleepwalkers battling phantoms.

He has in mind discussions in which the thinking looks very much like the thinking of the present Economist editors.  Just as much concentration on irrelevancies (Putin's and his country's vices), just as many ideas presented in inflammatory way (Putin in a spider web on the cover).  It's not too much of a stretch to see the editors as Cold War sleepwalkers.

I think our last thoughts, though, should be on this blogger's regret.  What he's regretting is hawkishness that's different from the hawkishness in The Economist's present leader.  In its leader on Iraq The Economist reasoned its way into a position we had to call "hawkish."  In its leader on the Ukraine the Economist argued in a way we can hardly distinguish from that of the emotional hawks writing for the newspapers we once cast aside in favor of The Economist — because it was more balanced and thoughtful, more focused on the relevant.