"Lucas is right about the return of Russian autocracy, the curtailment of the media, and the fact that the country is run by some scary people." Alexander Zaitchik in the Exile, November 19, 2007
There you have it. No ellipsis, no brackets. It's on page 3 of the review of The New Cold War. I had a suspicion that we were all on the same side on this. That if you read even the Russian press, it's saying the same thing -- it's just buried beneath obligatory pages of smoke and hot air and ad hominem attacks, possibly to throw off Putin's dogs.
Lucas has some astonishing trolls on his blog, not seen since the days of the riots, they've always reminded me of a personal coterie of ne'er-do-wells who might have gone to the same public school as Ed but who perhaps chose the wrong country (Russia) to work in while Lucas ended up making a smart choice (Baltics).
And some are Russian nationalists. To them, nothing sinister is going on. Russia is simply asserting itself just like a certain Florentine philosopher might counsel. They're like, this is our day in the sun, now. Don't rain on our polonium picnic.
I haven't read The New Cold War, and probably won't get around to reading it cover to cover for a review. In another time, I might have studied it and set off for a session of spirited Usenet debate with the trolls, but I'll leave that to others.
Other than being a well-researched work, a catalogue of the charges against Putin, it is yet unclear to me what constructive purpose the book serves. For 13 years, even under Yeltsin, I remember nothing but grim cautions about how the country is a menace. Now Russia is a rich menace. Whether we agree that it's a New Cold War or not is really a semantic issue.
I think that in many ways, the situation is inevitable. Macroeconomically, Russia is just another one of those countries that has been fattened by high oil prices and the West's softness. As for the scary people in charge, they're a product of the tradition of central autocracy and perhaps the people with the lowest political IQ/savvy in the semi-developed world. Could it really be any different? I never thought Yeltsin was any different, either, it was just easier to deal with a king figure crossed with Boffo the Clown who let his country be dismantled by oligarchs while he slept. The fact that it now has a ghoulish sober leader who probably takes radioactive supplements in the morning and has his enemies killed is so much more inconvenenient for the West.
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...it is yet unclear to me what constructive purpose the book serves. For 13 years, even under Yeltsin, I remember nothing but grim cautions about how the country is a menace...
Believe me, Kris, it's desperately needed as a clarion call to awaken the masses, at least on this side of the Pond, where those 'grim cautions' were inaudible. Here we've got this massive continent all full of chaps who've been told by all those people on the tube with lots of gorgeous hair and teeth that 'the Cold War is over and we won,' the Russkies are now laid-back and benign (albeit eccentric and bedraggled), and our allies in the 'war on turrrism.' And a certain benighted Shrub even told 'em that Putya's got soulful eyes. All the economic muscling, turning of taps and political assassinations are rather lost on the popular consciousness. I'll bet I could produce more than one mangiacake Canuck who'd tell you that Gazprom is a school dance.
Rather reminds me of the post-WW2 period, when eyewitness accounts by Baltic immigrants of the Stalinist mass deportations and overnight 'disappearances' of family members and friends met with wide-eyed incredulity, and, in at least one instance which I witnessed myself as a kid, with the question: But why didn't you CALL THE POLICE? Yassss! And this from an apparently sane, literate person with tertiary education, yet... Well, it took a while for news of the Berlin Airlift to make it over by clipper ship, and eventually, by the time of the Korean War, the North American public was being weaned from the genial Uncle Joe legend.
Today I wonder if the Euros couldn't stand a bit of re-education too. Being physically close to a menace doesn't always contribute to clarity of vision. After all, in the 1930s, everyone saw what was happening in Germany, and it was impossible not to hear that awful little man's shrieking on the radio...
Ed Lucas walks on water. Wife's ordered a copy online, and we shall ask friends to badger their public and university librarians into acquiring multi copies. Ed good. Book good. Karla love.
:)
A couple points. I do take Russia seriously -- only last April I was scurrying around thinking about converting kroons into gold. I already live in a limestone cellar, so I don't need to dig a shelter in the backyard. However --
1. Likening Russia to Nazi Germany leads inexorably to one dangerous conclusion -- that we should assemble a coalition and mount a first strike on Moscow today. Unless, that is, there is a good option that is somewhere in between that and Chamberlain-at-Munich. But I thought that was the whole point: there isn't.
2. Avoiding repeating the mistakes of the past is good. Imposing a historical model on complex new events is unwise. I see the title New Cold War as more like comfort food and marketing (besides looking good on bookshelves next to the obligatory Deadly Embrace and the Gulag Archipelago) than anything practical.
3. Even if it is a new cold war, it simply isn't a bipolar world. The real story today is ascendant China. There's no Sino-Finnish border, but that will be the true geopolitical conflict of this century, and it would likewise also not leave the Baltics standing. China is making inroads into Russia's East (or OK, perhaps Russia menaces China :)).
Reaching the masses -- it's a lost cause in the States, and executive branch has given up on pretending they need a broad imprimatur, anyway, but I guess you mean "masses" as shorthand for the public consciousness. Sure, I'd love to see people have a more sinister first association when they hear Russia, if it is justified.
Well, I still don't have my copy of NCW either. Chapters/Indigo advised by email that they'd ship 'on or before March 3'. So I'm reduced to making ancillary points based on a number of comprehensive reviews and a few quoted excerpts. Plus Edward Lucas' impressive past performance, of course.
So we're both sitting in a darkened burlesque theatre waiting for the curtain, the music's started, and you're getting up to leave, saying, "Same old, same old. I've seen it all before," and I'm saying, "Hang on, Kris, wait a minnit. The goils is gorgeous!"
From the reviews I gather that the book is no mere 'catalogue of charges,' but rather a painstaking profile of the mentality of Russia's new ruling class, in which some 78% of high state and corporate offices are filled by ostentatiously unrepentant old Chekists.
More importantly, though, Lucas addresses the 'softness' of the West which you alluded to in the final paragraph of your original posting.
As Marcus Warren of the Telegraph writes:
Indeed, the most arresting passages in the book are his pleas for moral renewal not in Russia, dismissed as a lost cause for the foreseeable future, but in the West. 'If you believe that capitalism is a system in which money matters more than freedom, you are doomed when people who don't believe in freedom attack using money,' he tells the gnomes of Zurich, Frankfurt and the City of London.
So Lucas is suggesting a moral rebuff to greed as a first line of defence. If money is the weapon, one has to respond in kind: by neutralizing that weapon by blocking questionable corporate takeovers, challenging the ethics of officials in EU countries who compromise the interests of their offices, scrutinizing all possible conflict-of-interest situations more aggressively than heretofore, etc. One simply doesn't have to bend over.
Kris wrote:
1. Likening Russia to Nazi Germany leads inexorably to one dangerous conclusion -- that we should assemble a coalition and mount a first strike on Moscow today.
Mais non! Now there's a leap of logic I can't follow. You've suddenly mutated Cassandra into Dr Strangelove before my very (large! eyes! Incroyable! Unmöglich! I'm entirely confident Ed Lucas isn't proposing nuking the venomous troll, nor was pre-emptive strike part of either NATO or US strategy during the Old Cold War. The thoroughly discredited 'Bush Doctrine' espoused that option, with disastrous consequences, even when only applied to real or imaginary villains in the Third World.
Intelligence, propaganda and money were the weapons of the Old Cold War, as they are again today. Lucas is more Cassandra than Henry Clay, more Jeremiah than Dr Strangelove.
Unless, that is, there is a good option that is somewhere in between that and Chamberlain-at-Munich. But I thought that was the whole point: there isn't.
Indeed there ARE such options. In the course of his jeremiads in the Economist and other pubs, Edward Lucas has constantly harped on the urgent need for a cohesive, integrated EU energy policy, which is an endless 'work in progress' that has been constantly sabotaged by certain EU countries cutting selfish but ultimately self-defeating side deals with Gazprom. (And then of course there's Nordstream....) Time to bite the bullet, stop sucking on Gazprom's hind teat, and to enforce some EU solidarity. Call in the sleazy EU pols who are taking both Putin's money and EU grants, beat up on them verbally and threaten to cut off their generous allowances.
Take a leaf from President Ilves' playbook on 'benign neglect' of Russia and ignore Putin's blandishments. Do not invite him to NATO summits just so he can swagger, threaten and disrupt. What's a point of having a dinner guest who has no civilized table-talk, displays execrable table manners, just squeezes out mean little farts, and frightens the children?
I like 'benign neglect,' but I like 'containment' even better. It sounds ever so much nicer than the incontinence which seems to afflict many Euro statesmen whenever Putya starts talkin' dirty...
There's no need to assemble new 'coalitions' while allowing existing ones to atrophy, unravel or be subverted. EU seems in disarray where foreign policy is concerned (to wit: the dithering over Kosovo), and NATO is disintegrating over coerced commitments to brushfire wars in remote places. And the OSCE has been totally neutralized - nay, neutered! - by Russia.
2. Avoiding repeating the mistakes of the past is good. Imposing a historical model on complex new events is unwise. I see the title New Cold War as more like comfort food and marketing (besides looking good on bookshelves next to the obligatory Deadly Embrace and the Gulag Archipelago) than anything practical.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'imposing models.' Of course history moves in wiggly lines, not straight ones. But as Arnold Toynbee said,
"History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff --well, it might as well be dead."
At the same time, every serious student of history is equally mindful of Charles Wayland Lightbody's corollary that 'there are no final value-judgements of time and history, but always new judgements...'
Point is, history can be used - though not in stereotypical or cookie-cutter mode - as a prescriptive tool. Indeed, it's the only tool we have, apart from palmistry and crystal balls, in forecasting future behaviors by nations or individuals. In daily life, we utilize stock reports, academic transcripts, curricula vitae, criminal records, batting averages, criminal profiles, etc. - all histories - as prescriptive tools to arrive at reasonable assessments of probable future performance by individuals and organizations. History can be used in a similar way to anticipate collective behaviors by nations, especially unrepentant ones demonstrably engaged in political recidivism. State structures and outward forms may vary, but human nature is a constant. We ignore history and the human nature components, taken together, at our peril.
"Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives."
-Arthur M. Schlesinger
Since you refer to Munich, Chamberlain, and all that unpleasant business, I'd like to point out that it is this very period which compels us to look more closely at our own. You see drawing the parallel as 'dangerous,' because it entails an inexorable march to war. In truth, what was seemingly inexorable in the 1930s was the backward march of the Western democracies, which emboldened Hitler, weakened his domestic opponents, and enabled him to enmesh the world in a holocaust.
In fact, there WERE non-violent options, but they weren't exercised. They're laid out in some detail in Patricia Meehan's "The Unnecessary War" (1994). Another seemingly controversial title, eh? How did Meehan, a Cambridge scholar, arrive at such a provocative title? That is how Winston Churchill, the greatest Cassandra of the 1930s, who employed in conversation with FDR as late as 1941.
Churchill did all in his power to alert the British Establishment and his many Continental contacts to the looming menace, but he was ignored. This was his 'political wilderness' phase. Out of office, he was huddled amid books and papers at his country home, Chartwell. Even as high-ranking members of the German anti-Nazi opposition wrote to him and even came to Chartwell, Churchill was sharpening his acute sense of history. At the time, he was working on a biography of his illustrious ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, who had led a large and complex European coalition against the great bully of his day, Louis XIV of France. History had always been Churchill's passion and his guiding light in affairs of state, from the time he first recited Caesar's opening from the Bella Gallica as a schoolboy at Winchester. After Sandhurst, at 19, he was posted as a subaltern in the 4th Hussars to India's Northwest Frontier. He took two works with him in his saddlebags: Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' which impacted the range of his thinking thereafter, and a copy of the King James translation of the Bible, which impacted his written and spoken prose.
Significantly, when the Gestapo arrested some of the aristocratic leaders of the German opposition, it was letters of support from Churchill found in their files which constituted the most damning evidence of their 'treason.' I know that it was the case with Ewald von Kleist...
Another book detailing all the 'lost opportunities' for stopping Hitler dead - well before the outbreak of war - are detailed in old Oxonian Giles MacDonogh's book, 'A Good German: A Biography of Adam von Trott zu Solz' (1992).
I see little reason to quibble over Lucas' title: for me, it pretty much fits the bill. Even if it were a mere catalogue of the current Kremlin regime's list of crimes and malfeasance, it would serve a considerable purpose: popular enlightenment. After all, the Solzhenitsyn work you allude to might well be a mere prop now, but it had an electrifying effect when it burst upon he world. I still remember queuing up for my copy.
Now, the 'Gulag Achipelago' really IS, in he main, a massive catalogue of Stalin's crimes, without a prescriptive thrust, but nonetheless valuable. I've been known to pull down mine every now and then to refresh my memory of the passages where Aleksandr Isayevich credits his onetime cellmate, our own Arnold Susi, with introducing him to ideas of democracy, and where he lauds the Estonians for their stalwart conduct in the camps. I do this on those increasingly rare occasions when the now gaga Aleksandr Isayevich squeezes out an embarrassing utterance redolent of the Black Hundreds and worst pan-Slavists of the 19th century -- just to remind myself of the writer he once was.
'Death Embrace?' Obligatory? But surely you jest! (Or is that: 'But, Shirley, your chest...?') Robert Mrazek's or Jackie Collins' ? Cruel of you to thrust poor Aleksandr Isayevich, even in his dotage, into such questionable company. Take him down, I implore you, dust him off, and move him to a less garish spot, preferably close to some other bearded, august Russians. ;-)
3. Even if it is a new cold war, it simply isn't a bipolar world. The real story today is ascendant China. There's no Sino-Finnish border, but that will be the true geopolitical conflict of this century, and it would likewise also not leave the Baltics standing. China is making inroads into Russia's East (or OK, perhaps Russia menaces China :)).
True enough, about polarities. Good re-assessment of that issue, even if from an arch-conservative (and perhaps of especial interest for that very reason), is Robert Kagan, "End of Dreams, Return of History"
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/8552512.html
Point is, we deal with particulars, not macro-concepts, when it comes to Russian menaces. "The real story" sounds like media jargon for 'flavor of the day'. We can't focus on what China might do at the expense of what Russia is already doing. And Edward Lucas is after all concerned with his bailiwick, Eastern Europe, and hence not addressing global concerns. Lord knows he's got a massive enough task at hand, and a good shoemaker always sticks to his last.
Personally, I don't know any Sinologists, though I've read a bit of their stuff. Frankly beats the hell out of me why we should credit guys who scour sinuses for a living with such expertise on Chinamen, anyway.
My waiter at the Mandarin just gives me this inscrutable smile when I ask him what the hell his cousins are up to, hands me couple of fortune cookies, and enigmatically says something like: "The Big Red Checkbook is now replace Mao Little Red Book." Go figure, eh? I think he's trying to tell me that his folks back home are not about to nuke their best customers, that they're preoccupied with keeping people happy with cars and fridges and TVs, and have an historic horror of internal disintegration. Better to buy up oil fields in Africa than sending lots and lots of little chaps abroad to raise hell and deplete their coffers. (Harro, Brush, you listen?)
No Sino-Finnish border, eh? Hmm... True, but there are ways. Now if the sinister enigmatic Finns were to do a craftily Finnic thing and declare war on China, say three times in a row, whilst quickly capitulating each time.... THAT WOULD mean that ... lots and lots and lots of wee yellow chaps would have to march the length and breadth of Russia six times, living off the land, munching up all the bubltchki and guzzling all the kvass... OH... sorry, I doze off there for a second. What was I saying?
Ah yes... seriously, a good piece on China is John Feffer, "Big Red Checkbook"
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/feffer
Reaching the masses -- it's a lost cause in the States, and executive branch has given up on pretending they need a broad imprimatur, anyway, but I guess you mean "masses" as shorthand for the public consciousness. Sure, I'd love to see people have a more sinister first association when they hear Russia, if it is justified.
I know what you're saying. Now when deploring the uninformed mass of people in my first post, I DID say "North" American. Who knows, perhaps not all Euros are exactly up to speed on what's happening east of the Vistula either. In any event, even if most people don't read (and they don't, clearly) a serious book impacts the public consciousness on other levels. For the more literate, there are the book reviews, and Lucas' NCW has already accrued a plethora of excellent reviews in prestigious pubs as well as online. Then there is the 'book as talking point' for all the talking heads, and these are hard to avoid, even for the most dedicated soaper-and-gameshow aficionados. Politicians, if so inclined and in need of talking points, will in turn pick up on buzz-words and key phrases from the 'talking heads.'
I am not prepared to give up on the Americans, whatever the outcome of the current election campaign. They have an impressive record of reconstituting and reinventing themselves. They are profoundly optimistic by nature. Despite ghastly and massive blunders, they are - collectively - quite sincerely benign. AND -- whatever frustration and even fury I might have felt during the Bush years -- they are quite indispensable for Western civilization as we know it.
"The United States is the best friend of the Baltics. It is a friend which does not fear Russia. Europeans are afraid."
Vytautas Landsbergis said that in Chicago in 1997, and it's still bloody well true.
So I got a couple of old cronies who are still in academic harness to place multiple orders for NCW, and my wife has an ex-student who was just made Chair of the poli-sci department at a Western Canadian university. This chap is now a fiftyish nationalistic Uke with a grizzled beard, but when he was a little kid in Toronto, my wife was the only mangiacake teacher who encouraged him to read his Taras Shevchenko translations aloud to the class, and he's never forgotten. I figure that he's now placed to order a goodly pile of Lucas' books.
So, whatever the title... Igatahes, vesi meie veskisse...
;)=
Perhaps, a la plastic.com, upmods and downmods should be introduced. In this case, +3.0 scholarly, brilliant.
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