The Year’s Reading: Non-Fiction (and a Novel), Part One
The inspiration for these posts about books that I read during 2008 was Karl Rove’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on President Bush’s reading habits, a piece that I fear I would have overlooked (being preoccupied with the Christmas season at the time) had not Richard Cohen written one of journalism’s all-time stupidest responses.
Thanks to LibraryThing, I know that I acquired just over 500 books during the year just past. Acquiring leisure to read them was beyond my abilities, but
Compared to the President, I’m a dilettantish reader, and I don’t expect anyone to be impressed by my list. I’ve compiled it for the same reason that other people keep diaries: because one dislikes seeing his own past reduced to a wisp of unreliable memory. To keep the length manageable, I’ve divided it into three parts: books related (not always closely) to current events, other non-fiction, and fiction. Part One follows:
Let’s start with a Book of the Year award. My choice goes jointly to Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and Douglas Feith’s War and Decision.
Toward Liberal Fascism I feel a degree of resentment. Way back when I was a college freshman (and young Jonah was not yet a gleam in his parents’ eyes), I encountered the literature of European fascism for the first time and was struck by its affinity with the principles of our home-grown Left. I even thought that the topic would make a great book, though I was too indolent to write it.
Contrary to what liberals who haven’t read it (and some who have read it inattentively) imagine, Liberal Fascism is only incidentally a tract for the times. Except for the last chapter (which is not much easier on the Right than the Left), it is pure intellectual history, tracing the nexus of ideas that comprise fascism (an often abused term that the author takes pains to define) – the beneficence of the state, the obsolescence of traditional institutions, the folly of individualism, the utility of war and war-like crises, the priority of racial and ethnic identity – from their roots in the French Revolution through their manifestations in the distinct but related ideologies of Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and both Presidents Roosevelt.
Through the combination of the current financial crisis (which could be aggravated, as happened in 1929, by frantic efforts to stave it off) and the election of a quasi-messianic figure to the Presidency, the ground seems to be prepared for the resurgence of more or less overtly fascist governance. It does not follow – and Mr. Goldberg does not assert – that we are on the road to dictatorship. Fascism in 21st Century America may well be mild in its methods and benign in its intent. But we will see ourselves and our future more clearly if we pay attention to where our government’s reigning philosophy comes from and whither it had led in the past.
War and Decision covers not centuries of theorizing but months of practical statecraft. The author was a key Defense Department official during the period between the 9/11 attacks and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He writes as an explicator and defender of the decisions that the Bush Administration took during that time, including but not limited to the decision to invade Iraq.
What has become the Standard Narrative tells us that Iraq was a distraction from the “real” struggle against terrorism: The Administration chose its target capriciously, then attacked it incompetently, leaving America weaker and more endangered than ever before. This concept has become so deeply embedded in public discourse that it no longer needs facts to support it. Mr. Feith is in the position of Galileo stamping his foot and shouting, “Eppur se muove!”
In vindication of his heresy, he presents an abundance of contemporary documents (many reproduced in full on his Web site) showing that the rationale for going to war with Saddam Hussein was sound, whether or not Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that the planning, while imperfect (as all plans are) got the essentials right.
War and Decision is the model of what an “insider’s account” ought to be and hardly ever is. First rate historians will consult it. Second raters will crib from Bob Woodward.
Good overall analyses of the Iraqi campaign aren’t likely to start appearing until passions have cooled and the consequences for the country have had time to develop. In the meantime, “grunt level” histories are proliferating. Two worth attending to are House to House: An Epic of Urban Warfare by David Bellavia (with John R. Bruning) and Moment of Truth in Iraq by Michael Yon.
Staff Sergeant Bellavia fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004. It was one of the toughest operations an army can undertake: an assault against an urban area held by a numerically superior, highly motivated, dug-in enemy force. The outcome was a Coalition victory, though not an easy one. The author’s descriptions of small unit fighting, in a cityscape where every house is a potential bomb, every roof a possible sniper’s perch and every third or fourth enemy a doped-up fanatic, harrow the reader with fear and wonder.
Michael Yon is an independent journalist whose reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan calls to mind the classic war correspondents of the 19th Century. Moment of Truth in Iraq is a series of from-the-scene dispatches covering the “surge”. At a time when “everyone knew” that Iraq was a lost cause, Mr. Yon told how the revamping of our counter-insurgency strategy was reversing the course of the war. Not by nature a cheerleader – he had been highly critical of pre-surge operations – he was one of the first to recognize that victory was not only possible but likely. Subsequent events have vindicated his judgement.
Iraq is only one front in a huge, vaguely contoured war. We prefer not to think of it as a pitting Christendom against dar-al-Islam, but the religious dimension is important to many of our enemies, whether or not we choose notice it.
Literature about Islam has cascaded from the presses since 9/11. Much of that writing is polemical, aimed at either condemning the religion or explaining away the psychopathic practices of certain of its devotees. Two introductory works that do neither are Islam: The Religion and the People by Bernard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill and Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices by Andrew Rippin.
Bernard Lewis has for decades been one of the leading Western scholars of the Islamic world: learned, lucid, fair-minded and, largely because of those qualities, anathema to Moslem extremists and their apologists. In this book, he and his co-author furnish a guide to Islam for readers who know little about it. Three points in particular stand out:
The book corrects the misleading analogies (“the Koran = the Bible”, “Mohammed = Christ”, “the mosque = the church”, “Sunni and Shia = Catholics and Protestants” and so forth) that make Islam seem more like Christianity and Judaism than is really the case.
It shows how classical Islam has been altered by, and has tried to adapt to, its encounter with Western modernity. Moslem culture and society once looked down on the backward “Franks”. Today that situation is reversed, and Moslems have been arguing for a couple of centuries about why they lost their preeminence and what to do about it.
It gives radical Islam its proper place in theology and history. The authors do not regard Islamofascism as either an inevitable corollary of classical Islam or an understandable reaction to “Western imperialism”. Rather, they see it as an aberrant development, or set of converging developments (Wahhabi, Salafist and Khomeinist), within Islam. The radicals are at war, the authors argue, not only with the West but also with their fellow Moslems. That thesis seems unarguable. Alas, Dr. Lewis and Mrs. Churchill have no more notion than anyone else about how to forge an alliance among the Islamofascists’ targets.
A short book cannot cover everything. This one focuses on the Middle East, which is the center but far from the whole of the “House of Islam”, and does not delve deeply into the faith's earliest history or theology. Professor Rippin offers a wider view, seeking to describe Islamic beliefs and practices over time and throughout the world. Some readers may recall that he appeared as an expert witness for the persecution in the British Columbia Human Rights Commission’s show trial of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant. That might be a reason to decline to shake his hand at a cocktail party (not really – his testimony seems to have been of more use to the defense than the plaintiffs), but one should not on that account avoid this book.
Among other matters, Muslims dispels the myth that Islam emerged in the “full light of history” and has changed little since the Seventh Century. In fact, darkness shrouds primitive Moslem theology and practice. The history of Mohammed and his first followers was written down over a century after the fact, how accurately we cannot know, but there is every reason to posit that the political and social needs of the expanding Caliphate strongly influenced the image of its religion’s earliest days.
For contemporary evidence concerning that period, one must look to non-Moslem sources. In Seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, Robert G. Hoyland collects and comments on practically every pertinent surviving document from the first century of Islam. There aren’t enough fragments to form an unambiguous mosaic, and Professor Hoyland doesn’t attempt it. He does, however, furnish much material for intelligent speculation.
A writer who did not shy from putting the pieces together was the late Marshall G. S. Hodgson, whose The Venture of Islam : Conscience and History in a World Civilization (three volumes; I’m half way through) boldly sets out to synthesize all that is worth knowing about “Islamicate” culture from its beginnings through the middle of the 20th Century. Professor Hodgson read virtually the entire corpus of significant literature written by Moslems in Arabic, Persian and Turkish – not just theological and legal writings but also history, philosophy, poetry and belles lettres, and the scope of his subject matter is as broad as its time span. He can be heavy going in places, as where he expounds his determinedly individual views on terminology and periodization, but he was a master at summarizing difficult texts and clarifying political and sectarian complexities.
But what about terrorism? It was 9/11 and the continuing attacks by al-Qa’eda and other mufsidun that sparked Western interest in the intricacies of Islam, about which most of us had previously been content to remain ignorant. The Mind of Jihad by Laurent Murawiec probes the roots of Islamofascism. As might be expected from a Frenchman with a background in anthropology who has worked for the RAND Corporation and taught philosophy in Paris, its approach is multi-layered and highly original.
On one level, M. Murawiec examines the remarkable ideological and sociological parallels between Islamic extremism’s “death cult” and medieval gnostic movements, suggesting that both share a zeal to impose Heaven on Earth (to “immanentize the eschaton”, in Eric Voegelin’s famous phrase) and a contempt for mundane human life. On another, he unearths the impetus given to the cultists by the German General Staff during World War I and Bolshevik Russia afterward. In both cases, the aid and comfort were opportunistic, but their effects have long outlived the demise of the sponsors.
There are, I realize, folks who imagine that the gravest threat to civilization comes not from Islamofascist attacks but from innocent-seeming activities that lead to Climate Change, formerly known as “Global Warming”. (Gaia’s reluctance to keep heating up on schedule inspired the new nomenclature.)
The beauty of Climate Change as a political shibboleth is that it’s a change we can’t help believing in. The earth’s climate has been unstable ever since the planet cooled enough to have a climate. The extent of the variation is vividly brought out by a pair of books: The Time Before History: 5 Million Years of Human Impact by Colin Tudge and The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian Fagan.
Both authors, Tudge at great and annoying length, seem to feel obligated to make prostrations before the gods of the current ideological market place, but their narratives lead to a heterodox conclusion: Within a few centuries, or a few millennia at most, weather patterns everywhere will be different from what they are now, no matter what we do or refrain from doing. The key to our species’ continued survival and prosperity is adaptability, which, in a technological era, depends on wealth. If we make ourselves poorer, in the hope that we will fend off one sort of climatic inconvenience, we will be less able to cope with the others that inevitably will come along.
Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley takes on immigration, the issue that has most sharply divided the American Right during the past two election cycles. Along with tolerance for pork barrel politics, it has played a key role in the abrupt decline of the Republican Party. Putting forward policies that rile Hispanics, small businessmen and free marketeers while still being too “soft” to please hard core restrictionists has cost the GOP the backing of both sides. As Abraham Lincoln advised in a different context, it is necessary to be all one thing or all the other.
Mr. Riley is a young (the youngest, I believe) member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, and the “one thing” that he advocates is the free movement of labor into and out of our country. His demolition of restrictionist myths is fact-filled and punchy. His book’s one fault is that its tone occasionally matches the stridency of opponents like Tom Tancredo and Mark Krikorian. A calm review of the evidence is more persuasive than even the most justifiable name calling.
In time for a new election season, John Fund published an updated edition of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, his warning against America’s negligently run electoral process. The 2008 Presidential result was, thankfully, outside the margin of fraud, but we weren’t so lucky everywhere (vide Minnesota). The new President is on record as denying that vote fraud exists, and a Democratic Congress is likely to make it easier rather than more difficult. A Constitutional crisis waits in the offing. When it comes, John Fund will be hailed as a prophet – alas, too late to do any good.
Ever since mainland China exchanged Maoism for a form of capitalism that Mussolini would have recognized and approved, it has impressed the world with its export prowess, dynamic cities and steady (reported) economic growth. While not many Westerners would like their own countries to imitate Peking’s policies, many see it as the Great Power of the 21st Century and urge friendly relations without judgmental harping on the deficits of liberty at home and cooperativeness abroad.
Guy Sormin, a French liberal (a category with no close U.S. counterpart), spent a year traveling around China, talking to religious and political dissenters and to the 80 percent of the population that still lives on farms. The latter have little connection with the official economy, except to export a quota of their young people to the cities, where they work under conditions of indentured servitude. In The Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century, M. Sormin recounts those conversations. He paints a sobering, though necessarily anecdotal (accurate statistical data are state secrets), picture of poverty, oppression, corruption and deceit, mostly ignored by a complaisant West that is all too willing to accept Communist Party excuses for violations of fundamental human rights. The author’s belief that democratic reform would be a sufficient, rather than merely a necessary, remedy for misgovernment may be too optimistic, but his diagnosis of the diseases that may lead Peking to catastrophe rather than globe-straddling power is acute.
A large, semi-hostile power for whom no one in the West feels much sympathy is Russia, now progressing toward Tsarism in all but name. Why the new Russia is so like the old is a question implicit in Richard Pipes’ Russian Conservatism and its Critics : A Study in Political Culture. Ostensibly the book is about the pre-communist era, specifically, about why the idea of autocracy dominated Russian political thought. The resemblance to the present is, however, unmistakable. Professor Pipes concludes that Western liberalism never made headway among the Russian elite, because, first, the rulers regarded the people as intrinsically anarchic, governable only by a strong hand, and, second, civil society never developed beyond a rudimentary level:
Liberty in the broad sense of the word as political democracy and civil rights presumes among the population a sense of mutual trust and shared interest. Where it is lacking, it is natural for people to look to the government for protection from each other, and hence to entrust it with absolute power, surrendering liberty for security. [p. 185]
Conditions are not much different under Tsar Vladimir. Communist rule, we are beginning to see, did not change the country but merely froze it in time. The fateful dilemmas of Nicholas II’s reign have yet to be resolved.
For an Orthodox Christian, a sad aspect of this continuity is the Russian Orthodox Church’s all-too-eager endorsement of authoritarian rule, which taints the promise of Christian revival. It is conceivable that the death of Patriarch Alexei II will lead to reform:
In choosing a new patriarch, the Russian Church now has an opportunity to come to grips with this past, and with other questions: nationalism, the status of minority ethnic and religious groups, secularization and consumerist materialism. Will the new patriarch lead the Church into a future of growth and spiritual renewal, or will he strike another “Faustian bargain” with autocratic leaders?
I fear that I know which of those answers has the higher odds. “Faustian” may be the wrong term, though. It implies consciousness that one is selling one’s soul to the devil. To a Church emerging from three generations of persecution, Mephistopheles may appear in the guise of a bestower of gifts.
That reflection (meant only to explain, not to justify) was prompted by two histories of the Church during the communist era: The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917-1982 by Dimitry Pospielovsky and The Russian Orthodox Church : A Contemporary History by Jane Ellis. They complement each other, the former concentrating more on ecclesiastical structures and politics, the latter on the day-to-day life of the Church (though neither ignores the other’s territory). Written in the 1980’s, before anyone knew that Soviet power would suddenly disintegrate, they detail the hardships suffered by the faithful. Even during the most lenient periods, overt Christians faced employment discrimination, religious instruction of their children was banned, priests were subjected to onerous taxes on their meager incomes, religious publications were censored, Bibles and devotional works were nearly unobtainable except as samizdat, KGB agents infiltrated the hierarchy, communist functionaries harassed parishes and prevented church repairs, and arbitrary arrest was an ever present risk. In the worst days, as when Nikita Khruschev launched a persecution of Stalinesque proportions, churches were shut down and clergy sent to Siberia.
Then came liberation, with hardly any advance notice, and with the fall of communism came an outpouring of government succor. It was natural for Church leaders to think that they were being rewarded for stalwart suffering and to feel sympathy and gratitude in return. Criticizing benefactors is difficult, even where it is a duty.
Casting light on Russia from a different direction is a new historical novel, Sashenka by Simon Montefiore, author of studies of Potemkin and Stalin.
Though I greatly like historical novels in principle, they can be irritating in practice. In an effort to ease the intellectual strain on readers, writers too often smooth off the jagged edges of the past. The characters may differ from us in names, costumes and household gadgets, but they share a 21st Century mentalité.
Sashenka is free from that fault. In three episodes, it highlights the separation between ourselves and the worlds of Russia in 1916, 1939 and 1994. St. Petersburg on the eve of revolution is nervous and frenetic. Sixteen-year-old Baroness Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin is the pampered only child of nouveaux riches Jews who hobnob with the lofty and corrupt denizens of the Imperial Court. She is also, in secret, the ardent disciple of her Bolshevik uncle She works vigorously in the revolutionary underground and immerses herself in intrigues whose repercussions do not become visible till years later.
Moscow in 1939 lives in a state of fear and falsehood. Sashenka, now a wife, mother and loyal Party propagandist, is honored with the favorable notice of the Voivode himself – and learns how dangerous it can be for the little mice to be noticed by the omnipotent lion.
Finally, in post-communist Russia, a researcher hired by one of the new breed of nouveaux riches “oligarchs” stumbles across Sashenka’s story and unravels her fate through a series of seriocomic encounters with the keepers of the Soviet Union’s written and unwritten memories.
The novel’s strength lies in its depiction of these three milieux. Plot and characters are of secondary importance. Coincidence plays a major role, albeit no greater than fits times full of arbitrary and capricious events. The characters, too, tend to be types rather than fully formed individuals, but their relative flatness renders the landscape more three dimensional.
The Soviet Union’s last great act of aggression, the one that exposed its hollow decay, was the invasion of Afghanistan. The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan by Artem Borovik is a close-up of the endgame. Mr. Borovik, then editor of a Russian weekly magazine (he died in a plane crash in 2000), describes episodes from two tours “embedded” (as we would say) with Soviet units. The two parts were written separately, and one can see the deterioration of the soldiers’ morale and effectiveness between 1987, when the war still seemed winnable, and 1989, when only a rear guard remained.
Also visible is the author’s ambivalence about the Soviet regime, which was still in power, though tottering, when he wrote. On the one hand, he realizes, at least in the later portion of the book, that the attempt to impose communism in Afghanistan was misbegotten. On the other, he detests deserters and the Western organizations that assisted them.
The Soviet-Afghan war, vicious though it was, was gentlemanly next to the horrors afflicting contemporary Africa. The title of Peter H. Eichstaedt’s book about one of the longest running contemporary wars, First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, is chilling by itself. Inspired by a one-time witch doctor turned prophet of his own syncretic animist-Christian cult, the Lord’s Resistance Army has terrorized northern Uganda and adjacent areas for more than twenty years. It fills its ranks with kidnapped pre-teens, the boys indoctrinated as savage fighters trained in the techniques of mutilation, the girls turned over to the army’s leaders as sex slaves.
A disjointed narrative and pedestrian prose drain some of the interest out of what ought to be a riveting book. Still, the numerous interviews with figures ranging from former boy soldiers to Catholic missionaries to rebel and government leaders, are informative, and the author’s adventures in the jungle have entertainment value (though not, I suspect, for those who were there). Quite bizarre is his naive faith in the International Criminal Court, which has indicted LRA head Joseph Kony and his top commanders but can do nothing to subdue them. As attentive readers will observe, such progress as has been made against the terrorists has been the result of military action, most notably the establishment of local militias. As of this writing, a joint operation by the armies of Uganda, South Sudan and the Congo is closing in on the LRA’s Congo enclave, though Kony eluded a Christmas Eve helicopter attack and his troops may be relocating into the Central African Republic.
The misery is far from over. But that always seems to be the news from Africa.
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