Robert Greene discusses Chapter 17 of The Laws of Human Nature, Seize the Historical Moment, or The Law of Generational Myopia, in this talk titled The Crisis Generation:
Robert Greene discusses the Crisis Generation
Thursday, July 16th, 2020If you find this creepy, but don’t want to say that out loud, just know that you are not alone
Tuesday, July 14th, 2020Andrew Sullivan looks at what happens when radicalism wins and then tries to destroy the legacy of the past as a whole:
One of the things you know if you were brought up as a Catholic in a Protestant country, as I was, is how the attempted extirpation of England’s historic Catholic faith was enforced not just by executions, imprisonments, and public burnings but also by the destruction of monuments, statues, artifacts, paintings, buildings, and sacred sculptures. The shift in consciousness that the religious revolution required could not be sustained by words or terror alone. The new regime — an early pre-totalitarian revolution imposed from the top down — had to remove all signs of what had come before. The items were not merely forms of idolatry in the minds of the newly austere Protestant vision; they also served to perpetuate the rule of the pope. They could be occasions for treason, heresy, and sin.
The impulse for wiping the slate clean is universal. Injustices mount; moderation seems inappropriate; radicalism wins and then tries to destroy the legacy of the past as a whole. The Taliban’s notorious destruction of the great Buddhas of Bamian in Afghanistan was a similar attempt to establish unquestioned Islamic rule. “Muslims should be proud of smashing idols. It has given praise to Allah that we have destroyed them,” Mullah Mohammed Omar explained. This was the spirit of Paris in 1789 as well. “If we love truth more than the fine arts,” the Enlightenment figure Denis Diderot remarked, “let us pray to God for some iconoclasts.” (He was also the lovely chap who insisted that “humankind will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” And in the French Revolution, of course, he almost got his way.) The Romans, for their part, eventually decided that the only way to govern Jews was to physically destroy their Temple in Jerusalem.
Iconoclasm is not just vandalism and violence. It is a very specific variety that usually signifies profound regime change. That’s why the toppling of old Soviet monoliths in the 1989 liberation of Eastern Europe was so salient. They were important symbols of that sclerotic Soviet empire’s power. And for true revolutionary potential, it’s helpful if these monuments are torn down by popular uprisings. That adds to the symbolism of a new era, even if it also adds to the chaos. That was the case in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the younger generation, egged on by the regime, went to work on any public symbols or statues they deemed problematically counterrevolutionary, creating a reign of terror that even surpassed France’s.
And Mao’s model is instructive in another way. It shows you what happens when a mob is actually quietly supported by elites, who use it to advance their own goals. The Red Guards did what they did — to their friends, and parents, and teachers — in the spirit of the Communist regime itself. They murdered and tortured, and subjected opponents to public humiliations — accompanied by the gleeful ransacking of religious and cultural sites. In their attack on the Temple of Confucius, almost 7,000 priceless artifacts were destroyed. By the end of the revolution, almost two-thirds of Beijing’s historical sites had been destroyed in a frenzy of destruction against “the four olds: old customs, old habits, old culture, and old ideas.” Mao first blessed, then reined in these vandals.
Similarly, in late-19th-century Russia, much of the intellectual elite also found themselves incapable of drawing a line when it came to revolutionary behavior — and so they tolerated violence that eventually swept everything away in terror. Even though they were the elite, the intelligentsia regarded the wealthy as the real rulers and salivated at the prospect of dethroning them. As the Russian-history professor Gary Saul Morson told The Wall Street Journal: “The idea was that since they knew the theory, they were morally superior and they should be in charge, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world when ‘practical’ people were.” Welcome to the New York Times newsroom in 2020.
Revolutionary moments also require public confessions of iniquity by those complicit in oppression. These now seem to come almost daily. I’m still marveling this week at the apology the actress Jenny Slate gave for voicing a biracial cartoon character. It’s a classic confession of counterrevolutionary error: “I acknowledge how my original reasoning was flawed and that it existed as an example of white privilege and unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy … Ending my portrayal of ‘Missy’ is one step in a life-long process of uncovering the racism in my actions.” For Slate to survive in her career, she had to go full Cersei in her walk of shame. If you find this creepy, but don’t want to say that out loud, just know that you are not alone.
There were only two centers of power in the world, and the United Nations was neither of them
Monday, July 13th, 2020
The lessons America learned from World War 2 might not have been the right lessons, as T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War):
At the end of World War II, American military policy, digesting the Japanese lessons in China, was to control air and sea lanes throughout the East but never to engage in ground hostilities on the Asian mainland.
[...]
The only war that military planners could envision was a big one between the United States and the Soviet Union.
[...]
The military continued to plan for the only kind of war they had been told to plan for: worldwide, atomic holocaust.
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They knew that military considerations, as they foresaw them, required the removal of troops from the Korean periphery, but also that the “rat leaving the sinking ship syndrome” was very prevalent in Asia.
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The pragmatists in the high echelons of foreign policy could accomplish many things by fiat or executive agreement, but they could not raise troops or money against the popular will. This was a basic weakness to the policy of containment inherent in any parliamentary democracy, and as it proved in Asia, an insurmountable one, that would recur again and again, in China, in Korea, and finally in Vietnam.
[...]
There were only two centers of power in the world, and the United Nations was neither of them.
Stalin, who had asked how many divisions the Pope had, knew exactly how many divisions the U.N. maintained: none.
Every historic decision of the Truman Cabinet was debated by Congress only after it had been made irreversible
Saturday, July 11th, 2020T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), the political situation in America after World War 2:
During the war, some members of the government had made an incalculable mistake: they had propagandized the Russians as heroic brothers-in-arms, indicated to the public that Stalin and associates were democrats at heart, and led the people to believe that Russia had fought the war from motives as pure as America’s own.
[...]
The problem was that America had fought the war — as she had most of her wars — as a crusade, while Russia had fought first for survival, then for power. Crusades are usually inconclusive; it was no accident that Russia won the peace.
[...]
The great decisions — the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine — that gave the earth a hope of eventual order were not instantly popular with the American people. There was no great attempt to sell them — it was significant that every historic decision of the Truman Cabinet was debated by Congress only after it had been made irreversible.
[...]
They began, knowingly and cunningly, to contain the spread of Communism through whatever policy, short of war, might be required. This containment was vital to American interests, but it must always be remembered that the mere mention of such a policy would have sent millions of patriotic, well-meaning American liberals into convulsions. Liberal thought, which had scented Hitler early, seemingly remained tragically blind to Communist tyranny.
Before any attack on the morality of the men who formulated the policy of Communist containment may be made, several things should be recalled: these men had no designs on the world. They had no nationalist or imperialist policies to foist on anyone; they wanted to keep order and, so far as possible, the status quo, in an era when the Soviet Government clearly desired the opposite.
[...]
Truman’s own tragedy remained that the people on whom he depended for domestic support would simply not support his foreign policy. For the policy that evolved in the 1940s was new to American thought. It was not underprivileged Democratic, nor was it business Republican. It was orderly, world-seeing, pragmatic, and conservative — but conservative in the British or ancient Roman sense, not in the American sense.
[...]
Wherever there is rule by consent of the ruled, the rulers must always be salesmen, however difficult the task.
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It would be the first war to bring down a government, to oust a party in power, not because of the actions that party had taken, but because the policy makers were never able adequately to explain those actions to a troubled and increasingly hostile public.
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They are hard to justify unless it is admitted that power, not idealism, is the dominant factor in the world, and that idealism must be backed by power.
[...]
It was hard for a nation and a people who had never accepted the idea of power, not as something immoral in itself, but as a tool to whatever ends they sought, to fight and die for limited goals. In short, it was hard to grow up.
Finland’s air force is quietly dropping the swastika
Friday, July 10th, 2020Finland’s air force has been using a swastika ever since it was founded in 1918, shortly after the country became an independent nation and before the Nazis adopted the ancient symbol and rose to power:
Until 1945 its planes bore a blue swastika on a white background — and this was not intended to show allegiance to Nazi Germany, though the two nations were aligned.
While the symbol was left off planes after World War Two, a swastika still featured in some Air Force unit emblems, unit flags and decorations — including on uniforms, a spokesperson for the Finnish air force told the BBC.
The Romantic painter went on to use a swastika as part of his designs for the insignia of the Order of the Cross of Liberty. He used a cross with much smaller hooks, so the visual similarity to Nazi symbolism is much less pronounced. It also features on the official flag of the Finnish president.
But the swastika became associated with the Finnish air force via a very different man – a Swedish nobleman called Count Eric von Rosen.
The count used the swastika as a personal good luck charm. When he gifted a plane to the nascent air force of Sweden’s newly independent neighbour in 1918 he had had a blue swastika painted on it. This Thulin Typ D was the first aircraft of the Finnish air force and subsequent planes all had his blue swastika symbol too, until 1945.
Supporters of a continued use of the symbol point out that there were no Nazis in 1918 so the air force’s use of the swastika has nothing to do with Nazism.
However, while Eric von Rosen had no Nazi associations at the time of his 1918 gift, he did subsequently become a leading figure in Sweden’s own national socialist movement in the 1930s. He was also a brother-in-law of senior German Nazi Herman Göring, and, according to Prof Teivainen, a personal friend of Hitler.
They became adept at losing company property
Thursday, July 9th, 2020In 1946, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), the newly split Korea was struggling:
At his desk one day, Fletcher heard that there was trouble in Samch’ok, on the east coast. He left his office in Seoul to investigate. At a company iron-ore mine, he found agitators were encouraging idle workers to carry away company property. He had the Korean Special Police arrest the agitators, and beat hell out of them.
Back at Seoul, there was some criticism — but nobody had a better idea.
The policy now became one of giving Korean nationals control of the company. The new executives learned some things quickly. They became adept at losing company property, mostly into their own pockets.
Meanwhile, a crisis developed with the Russians just across the border from Seoul Province. The waters that irrigated company rice paddies flowed down from the north, and suddenly the Russians dammed them off. The company agricultural adviser, PFC Peavey, was sent up north to investigate.
The Russians were not offended by negotiating with a PFC. They had political officers masquerading in low ranks in their own forces; they understood perfectly Gospodin Peavey’s desire not to appear conspicuous. They sat down with Peavey and informed him they wanted a portion of the company’s rice harvest in return for the water. Peavey argued awhile. Finally, getting nowhere, he figured, what the hell? He was due to rotate out any day and become a civilian. He agreed to everything. He returned to Seoul, and soon the water flowed south. When asked how he had outwitted the Ivans, Peavey would only smile gently. A few weeks later, he sailed for the States.
When fall came, the Russians asked for their rice. Military Government, of course, with some confusion, explained why they couldn’t have it. Next summer, the New Korea Company had a hell of a time getting water.
Basically, there were two ways to reduce abuses of power in the service
Tuesday, July 7th, 2020After World War 2 ended, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), the Doolittle Board tried to prevent future abuses of power in the service:
In making an Army of eight million men, the United States had commissioned many thousands of men who should never have risen above PFC. Some lousy things happened, particularly in the Service Forces. Officers and noncommissioned officers, in some cases, did abuse their powers.
Basically, there were two ways to reduce abuses of power in the service. One was to overhaul the officer procurement system, make damned certain that no merely average man could ever be commissioned, and have fewer officers, but better ones. The other way was to reduce the power to abuse anybody.
The Doolittle Board, probably thinking of a long period of pleasant peacetime coming up, in early 1946 chose to recommend the second.
It was a good idea, but it wouldn’t work. The company commanders in Korea watched the girls run in and out of the barracks, had men talk back to them, and didn’t know what to do about it. In fact, they weren’t sure but what the American thing to do was to ignore it, and get a girl of their own. Which many did.
What the hell, the war was over. Anybody who said a new one was brewing was definitely a goddam Fascist, or something.
Besides, contracting a venereal disease was no longer a court-martial offense. That kind of thinking had gone out with the horse, with saluting except on duty, with the idea that you should respect a sergeant.
Outside, the fresh air was worse
Sunday, July 5th, 2020After VJ-Day, American soldiers wanted to go home, and Americans wanted them to come home. This left Colonel Jones in Korea in an awkward situation, as T. R. Fehrenbach explains, in This Kind of War:
Colonel Jones received replacements, of course. He got officers from the Quartermaster Corps and the Infantry, and plenty of basic riflemen from the eighteen-year-olds just drafted, who didn’t have Skill One, even for basic riflemen. Engineers he didn’t get. Engineers, like most professional men, serve in the military only when the draft moves them.
With a Group HQ that didn’t know a crowbar from a wrecking iron, and who thought a balk was part of baseball, Colonel Jones, as part of “Blacklist Forty” (code name for Korea), reported to General Hodge in Korea.
[...]
These were days and weeks to break a career officer’s heart. The United States Army, which had been the most powerful in the world, did not melt away in an orderly fashion. It disintegrated into a disorganized mob, clamoring to go home.
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Fortunately for Jones, the Jap soldiers in Korea waiting to be sent home were willing workers.
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The Japs, now that the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was gone, were affable, smiling, professional, and entirely helpful. Jones put them to work.
[...]
Eventually, though, all the Japs had to be repatriated. They took with them, when they left, every military officer, every professional man, every engineer, bank teller, and executive in the Pusan area. They left behind a hell of a mess.
Like most Americans, Colonel Jones was not prepared to take Chosun. The appalling poverty, the dust, dirt, filth, and eternal clamor of Pusan repelled any man accustomed to the West. Orphan children, with running sores, lay in the streets. Society, with the iron Japanese hand gone, was in dissolution. Money was worthless, since the Japanese had printed billions of yen prior to the surrender and passed it out to all who wanted it. Almost all responsible Koreans, particularly the educated were — rightly — tarred with the collaborationist brush.
[...]
He never got used to the stink. Inside the city, the odors were of decaying fish, woodsmoke, garbage, and unwashed humanity. Outside, the fresh air was worse. Koreans, like most Orientals, use human fertilizer. Their fields and paddies, their whole country smells somewhat like the bathroom of a fraternity house on Sunday morning.
[...]
Clothing washed in their rivers turns a sickly brown.
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In Korea, there were no trained administrators for either government or business, regardless of their politics.
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As an engineer, he became responsible for fire fighting in Pusan, and he noticed a great number of fires were breaking out. He asked a Korean fireman about this.
“Oh, it is the different factions, setting each other’s houses afire,” the Korean answered cheerfully.
He soon learned to use Korean guards for U.S. military stores. The Koreans were desperately poor, and would steal anything, even if nailed down — nails had commercial value — but American sentries would not willingly shoot down women and boys carrying off gas cans and water buckets. Not after they had killed two or three, anyway — they lost all heart for it. But Korean guards would shoot or beat hell out of the thieves, if they caught them.
[...]
The summers were hot and dusty, or hot and rainy, with hundred-degree temperatures. The winters were Siberian. The country literally stank, except for the few months during which the ground stayed frozen.
Happy Secession Day!
Saturday, July 4th, 2020I almost forgot to wish everyone a happy Secession Day:
- The War of the American Revolution
- America’s First Propaganda Coup
- America Had a Government Before the Constitution
- A Second English Civil War
- The Lenin of the American Revolution
- What If… The USA had lost its War of Independence?
- Worst of the Old World and the New
- The American Revolution, 1763-1783
- The True History of the American Revolution (Revisited)
- Secession Day
- Empires of the Atlantic World
- How the War of Secession Came About
- True History of the American Revolution
- The Declaration of Independence
Koreans had learned the hard way that imperialism comes in many forms
Friday, July 3rd, 2020More than a million Koreans fled their homeland when the Japanese took over, T. R. Fehrenbach explains, in This Kind of War:
One refugee in the States, a Dr. Syngman Rhee, embarrassed the government. He had entered on an old Korean passport at the time of the takeover, and now in 1919 he requested a visa to visit the League of Nations, to make a protest over the treatment of his countrymen. Washington emphatically told him no, since he had no valid Japanese passport, and Washington did not want to offend its late ally, Japan. Generously, however, since Dr. Rhee had influential friends, he was allowed to remain in the United States.
In 1919, and later, the Japanese rulers of Chosun never quite dared expel the Western missionaries, probably not realizing in how little repute these emissaries were held in the Western capitals. For years the only contact the Korean people had with outside was through these missionaries. In Chosun, no anti-Western bias ever developed.
Koreans had learned the hard way that imperialism comes in many forms, and it can be black or brown or yellow, as well as white. Koreans would never afterward feel any sentimental racial cohesiveness with the rest of Asia. The Japanese occupation and policy of extirpation took care of that.
It is the nature of peoples to see the ancient foes, and to ignore those newly arising
Wednesday, July 1st, 2020T. R. Fehrenbach explains, in This Kind of War, why there were multiple Korean wars before the Korean War:
Korea, or Chosun, is a peninsula, 575 miles in length, averaging 150 miles across. It resembles in outline the state of Florida, though bigger. Along its eastern coast a giant chain of mountains thrusts violently upward; the west coast is flat and muddy, marked by estuaries and indentations. Inland the country is a series of hills, broad valleys, lowlands, and terraced rice paddies. Its rivers run south and west, and they are broad and deep.
It is a country of hills and valleys, and few roads. Most of Korea is, and always has been, remote from the world.
Chosun is a poor country, exporting only a little rice. But its population density is exceeded in Asia only by parts of India.
[...]
Neither China, nor Russia, nor whatever power is dominant in the Islands of the Rising Sun, dares ignore Korea. It is, has been, and will always be either a bridge to the Asian continent, or a stepping-stone to the islands, depending on where power is ascendant.
[...]
Manchuria is the richest area in all East Asia, with iron ores, coal, water power, food, and timber, and whoever owns Manchuria, to be secure, must also own Chosun.
[...]
It is the nature of peoples to see the ancient foes, and to ignore those newly arising. Japan defeated Russia with the moral and material aid of Great Britain and America, who had watched the Russian advance to the Pacific with unconcealed dread. Japan, with far greater ambitions than the rotting Empire of the Bear had ever entertained, now was the dominant power in East Asia, and America and Britain applauded.
They did not sense that, in time, Japan would overthrow the old order completely.
The best damn army outside the United States had no tanks
Monday, June 29th, 2020Time had said the Republic of Korea Army was the best outside the States, and what Time printed was not only true, but official. Only it wasn’t true, as T. R. Fehrenbach explains in This Kind of War:
The ROK’s had eight divisions. Except those fighting guerrillas in the South, they were armed with American M-1 rifles. The guerrilla fighters had to make do with old Jap Model 99’s. The ROK’s had machine guns, of course, and some mortars, mostly small. They had five battalions of field artillery to back up the infantry divisions, all with the old, short-range Model M-3 105mm howitzer, which the United States had junked.
[...]
The best damn army outside the United States had no tanks, no medium artillery, no 4.2-inch mortars, no recoilless rifles. They had no spare parts for their transport. They had not even one combat aircraft.
They didn’t have any of those things because the American Embassy didn’t want them to have them.
[...]
Ambassador John J. Muccio had been instructed to take no chances of the South Koreans attacking the Communists to the north.
[...]
Lynn Roberts had told Time that while the troops were excellent, the Korean officers’ corps was not so hot. After all, in only eleven months staffs and commanders could not be made and trained, starting from scratch. Lynn Roberts, a professional soldier, also knew that soldiers are only as good as their officers make them. But that kind of attitude sounded un-American and was not popular in Washington, and there was no point in playing it up.
Having no tanks is one thing. Having no anti-tank weapons is another.
He must choose a cause greater than himself
Sunday, June 28th, 2020
At the forefront of Mr. Jones are two reporters. One, Gareth Jones (British television actor James Norton), an ambitious rookie freelancer for what was then called the Manchester Guardian, is so inexperienced he forgot to bring his typewriter on the trip. The other, Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard, Wormwood), The New York Times‘ Moscow bureau chief, is fresh off a Pulitzer prize for his fawning coverage of Stalin’s command-and-control economic policies.
Jones has been told Duranty is the man to see to arrange an interview with Stalin. He explains what he wants to ask: “So how are the Soviets suddenly on a spending spree? Who’s providing the finance?” Duranty is noncommittal about the interview, but does have an answer about where the money is coming from: agricultural exports. “Grain is Stalin’s gold.” He also offers some bad news — a German reporter who’s a friend of Jones and had promised to show him around Moscow has been murdered, apparently during a mugging — almost unknown in the stringently locked-down Moscow of the 1930s, particularly in the area where journalists and other necessary foreign evils lived.
Nosing around while he waits to see what will happen with his Stalin interview, Jones learns that his German friend thought something fishy was going on in the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s breadbasket region, which had recently been placed off-limits to foreigners, and was planning to sneak in. Jones decides to do the same, arranging a tour of a German-built factory on the other side of the Ukraine from Moscow, then ditching his Soviet minder to spend a couple of days wandering alone on foot.
Even before he leaves the train, Jones has clues that something has gone deeply wrong. When he offers to buy an overcoat from a Ukrainian passenger, the man begs to be paid in bread rather than currency. When Jones pitches a gnawed apple core into a wastebasket, another man dives into the trash to retrieve it.
But nothing can prepare him for what he sees when he gets off: Stiffened corpses scattered around the train station. Corpses in empty, deserted farmhouses. Corpses stacked on carts moving along village streets. Corpses being chewed on by starving children, who afterward trill a mournful ballad: “Hunger and cold are in our house, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep and our neighbor has lost his mind and eaten his children… .”
Jones is eventually picked up by Soviet security forces and returned to Moscow, where he’s warned never to tell anybody what he’s seen. The “or else” will be the life imprisonment of half-a-dozen British phone company engineers who’ve been arrested on trumped-up spying charges. As he prepares to leave, he’s ostracized by other reporters, including the sneering Duranty. “There comes a time in every man’s life when he must choose a cause greater than himself,” Duranty lectures him with, yes, moral clarity.
Back in London, Jones discovers Duranty has filed a New York Times story dismissing him as a credulous amateur. There may be a bit of hunger in the Ukraine, Duranty writes, but absolutely no famine. And anyway, what if there was? “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”
[...]
The OGPU, as the KGB was called in the early 1930s, didn’t murder reporters who got off their leashes; it simply expelled them, forcing them to leave their posh Moscow habitat for the mean streets of the Depression back home. (The name of the murdered-reporter character, Paul Kleb, suggests he was intended as an homage to Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, a Forbes staffer who was gunned down in Moscow in 2004).
Jones didn’t pull any James Bond razzmatazz to reach the Ukraine; he simply bought a ticket to Kharkov, a city much further down the line, and got off early. He wasn’t arrested and he wasn’t threatened; he finished his reporting trip and didn’t say anything about what he’d seen until he got back to London. None of this contradicts Mr. Jones’ central thesis — that the mainstream pack of foreign correspondents in Moscow in the 1930s were a pack of mewling Stalinist whores, and that the novice Jones was a better journalist and a braver man than any of them — but it’s an unnecessary distraction.
If anything, though, Mr. Jones’ depiction of the vicious way he was treated by his colleagues is understated. The first person to reveal the mainstream journalism cabal against Jones was Eugene Lyons, the Moscow correspondent for the United Press wire service at the time Jones was there. In his 1937 book Assignment in Utopia, Lyons recounts how after Jones began writing and giving speeches about the famine, all the foreign correspondents went to a meeting with the chief Soviet censor, who ordered them to denounce the young reporter as a liar.
Lyons admits that all the correspondents knew that Jones’ stories were absolutely accurate, even though none of them had reported the famine in their own newspapers, due to “the compelling need to remain on friendly terms with the censors.” (Some of them had even discussed the details of the famine with Jones before he went on his reporting trip.) Nonetheless, Lyons wrote, they all complied, “unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. … Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstaking garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.” After the deal was done, they broke out the vodka and partied well into the night.
Lyons may have been hyping his report a bit (though it scarcely did him any credit, either as a reporter or a human being) but the deliberate slander of Jones and his stories has subsequently been investigated and verified by several historians (including S.J. Taylor in Stalin’s Apologist, her scathing biography of Duranty; Anne Applebaum in her history of Ukrainian starvation, Red Famine; and Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin).
And Duranty (who is played with a stunningly lustrous menace by Sarsgaard) was indeed the most bloodthirsty of the bunch. The line in his story about breaking eggs to make utopian socialist omelettes is dead accurate. And it apparently became a guide post for future generations of Times reporters. Herbert Matthews, whose mistaken or mendacious — take your pick — stories on Fidel Castro helped plunge Cuba into seven decades (and counting!) of miserable tyranny, would later blithely observe of Castro’s sanguinary appetite for executions, “A revolution is not a tea party.”
[...]
In recent years, the paper has been increasingly uneasy about its old reporter, even hiring a historian to evaluate his Soviet coverage. But when the historian suggested Duranty’s Pulitzer price be revoked, the Times turned self-righteous. “The notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time.
I thought of that last week when the Times editorialized in favor of pulling down Confederate statues.
What Time printed was not only true, but official
Saturday, June 27th, 2020Seventy years ago, the Americans reassured their South Korean allies that the North was settling down, as T. R. Fehrenbach explains in This Kind of War:
As Saturday waned, Major General Chae Byong Duk, Deputy Commander — under Syngman Rhee — of the Republic of Korea Armed Forces, was not content. For “Fat” Chae, five foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds, darling of the Seoul cocktail set, was not completely a fool.
For years the Communists north of the parallel had been making trouble in the South. They made rice raids across the border; they fomented disorder and subversion in the cities. They incited and supplied the rebel guerrillas in the southern mountains, doing everything in their power to destroy the Republic of Korea. They kept a third of Fat Chae’s Army tied down on constabulary work.
March, particularly, had been a bad month. But then, unaccountably, all activity had ceased. Fat Chae was worried.
Chae had talked to the Americans about it, but the Korean Military Advisory Group was not concerned. One officer told Chae that the Communists were becoming more sophisticated, settling down at last. The Americans seemed to feel that when Communists left you alone, it was all to the good. But Chae worried. He might be handier with a whiskey and soda than with command of the Army, but he was not completely a fool.
Chae had read Time, which three weeks before had printed a splendid article on the Korean Military Advisory Group and its work with the Korean Armed Forces. Like most people outside the United States, Chae Byong Duk knew that what Time printed was not only true, but official.
Seven reasons why police are disliked
Wednesday, June 24th, 2020Randall Collins casts his sociological eye at why police are disliked and finds seven reasons:
- Police are used for collecting fines for municipal budgets.
- Police are used for enforcing unpopular regulations.
- Police dislike defiance.
- Police dislike property destruction.
- Adrenaline overload and forward-panic attacks on unresisting targets.
- Police training for extreme situations.
- Racism among police.