totalitarianism today

Surfing the web with Walter Benjamin by my side.

On the phrase "racked by their labors": with the Saint-Simonians, industrial labor is seen in the light of sexual intercourse; the idea of the joy of working is patterned after an image of the pleasure of procreation. Two decades later, the relation has been reversed: the sex act itself is marked by the joylessness which oppresses the industrial worker. [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 367]
The Book Cover Archive
E-books Directory
Spring is the season for birch tree juice harvesting and drinking in Russia.
In Denmark, the price of vegetables has risen three times as much as that of a pack of cigarettes over the past 30 years.
Google News Timeline
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth. [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 400]
Start-Up Space
The Sixties through primary documents and personal narratives
Twine
Gulf War syndrome part 2, the neurological aftermath.
The passing of Pontiac.
It seems that the "Buy Iraq" conference in the UK went well-ish.
California bans texting by train operators.
NATO expels 2 Russian diplomats suspected of espionage.
Foundations with a living founder are three times more likely to expect to spend down than those whose founder is deceased, and they are almost twice as likely to be undecided. So sayeth this report.
Perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion. Right from the start, a great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of the world are found. [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 211]
World Digital Library
World Exhibition of 1851: 14,837 exhibitors; that of 1855; 80,000. [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 190]

Social "sciences" survey.

Americans are susceptible to religious "churn" - A new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that Americans change their religious affiliation early and often, and the reasons they give for changing - or leaving religion altogether - differ widely depending on the origin and destination of the convert.

Companies should aim for "discovery-driven growth" - I think the first principle is that you can't allocate growth projects to people who are already just screamingly busy. That is just dysfunctional and [those projects] won't get the attention they deserve. So the first principle is that you need some kind of dedicated resource. Now, that can be associated with an established business. It can be set somewhat aside. But in general, we found that it has to be a group -- probably a small group -- that is really just focused on the new areas. That's their main job. I think you also want to be thinking about what kind of company culture you have. Are you a top-down kind of company, where whatever the boss says goes and that's what we do? In which case, [the group] better get the boss's blessing and ... be supported by the boss and so forth. At other companies, what we found is once you have this focal group set up, they actually work best by doing a lot of coalition building and a lot of brokering with other parts of the firm. (From an interview with Rita Gunter McGrath.)

Tracking local unemployment rates - Google has a new search result that pulls out and graphs public data. Search for any state or county and the word “unemployment,” and you will see an interactive chart showing that jurisdiction’s historical unemployment rates. There are also options to compare rates in multiple regions.

2010 Side-by-side budget resolutions - See side-by-side comparisons of Congressional budget resolutions for FY 2010. Don't expect to be inspired.

Morning links.

Baudelaire would be happy to know that German brothels remain competitive during economic down-times by cutting prices.

Kurt Schwitters brought Dada to the barn, and now the barn is fair game.

Who serves in the US military? How have the demographics changed since Vietnam?

Are NATO's new members security producers or consumers? A lengthy paper from the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army College has a few answers.

A video interview with Hannah Arendt in which she discusses the nature of the American republic, the role of innocent people, Israel, and other bits. A treasure for Arendt fans.

A European debate and discussion on how the EU understands totalitarianism 20 years since its most recent failings on the continent. Camilla Andersson from the Institute for Information on the Crimes of Communism in Sweden told the hearing about public perceptions on Communism and Nazism. In a recent survey of students aged 15-20 it found that 90% had never heard of the Gulag whilst the same number were well informed about the Holocaust. In addition 40% believed that Communism had contributed to increased prosperity in the world.

Top ten list of movies about international relations, take 3.

Dan Drezner shares his "top ten list of movies about international relations", inspired by Steve Walt's list of movies that tell us something about international relations more broadly. Dan and Steve agree on Dr. Strangelove and Casablanca. Their differences are worth exploring. If forced to bring down the bar a bit, I would add three more films to either list: 

Sir! No Sir! (2005) - David Zeiger's fascinating documentary follows the forgotten anti-war activities of American GI's and military associates during the Vietnam war days. As a testament to the constraints imposed on US foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era, the film helps us understand why covert operations became a more popular means of US foreign policy during the Reagan years. It also reveals reasons for the our government's increased sensitivity to public opinion on military engagement, alas, the Achilles heel of American foreign policy.

Red Dawn (1984) - The ultimate Cold War epic. Eight all-American teenagers wage unremitting guerilla warfare against invading communist nationals. You get it all-- non-stop action, xenophobia, Red scares galore, and football champs who save the world.

Don't Drink the Water (1994) - International relations relies on the conventions and tact of foreign embassy life to keep foreign relations purring along. Or does it? Woody Allen's portrayal of an American family who gets stuck behind the Iron Curtain as part of an an international espionage incident is both humorous and nostalgic.

Discovering one's purpose in the gulag.

Relishing the last few pages of Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History, I found what could also be a statement of purpose for this blog:

If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we will not know how our world came to be the way it is.

And not only our own particular past. For if we go on forgetting half of Europe's history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century's mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian Revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different historical, philosophical, and cultural origins, every one arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been-- and will be-- repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors into "enemies", our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or poisonous weeds; our re-invention of our victims as lower, lesser, or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or explusion or death.

The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode or torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written "so that it will not happen again," as the cliche would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the "objective enemy", as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why-- and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

The Soviet Gulag Era in Pictures + Soviet gulags +  Gulag History + The Gulag + Gulag at Wikipedia

Chasing thoughts like tendrils on the nape of an elderly woman selling flowers.

There will soon be a portal for Arab media.

But there will never be anything like redemption for former National Security Chief Zbigniew Brzezinski. After being asked if he regretted arming Islamists in Afghanistan, per interview in a January 1998 issue of Le Nouvel Observateur, he replied:

Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?

The interviewer gets more specific, asking Brzezinski if he does not "regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists". His reply continues to reside with CFC's perpetually haunting the sacred ozone layer:

What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? A few crazed Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?

And there will never be a proper discourse to convey the harsh pornography of war. But there will be war correspondents, like Peter Beaumont, sitting on certain benches far from the literary avant-garde:

I am sitting with two soldiers on a base near Mosul in northern Iraq. "Don't use our real names," says DC, a handsome paratrooper from the New York suburbs, a good enough soldier, it seems, but with a troubled history that has seen him busted down from sergeant and made up again. "I don't fucking care," his friend Andy interrupts, grinning a spacey smile: "I'm so far out of my fucking bubble." I am listening to their theories of life. Mainly they involve emotionless sex and racing cars and motorbikes. They talk about how to tune the engine of a Harley, about drag bikes, crashes and the tactics for midget car racing. They tell me how fat girls are always a dead cert, and best picked up at the ice-cream counter at Wal-Mart at 2am. "Those are the ones you know who really hate themselves," says DC. About the competitions back at their home base in Texas to see who can pick up and fuck the fattest women. "We had a ton, once, in the same room," says DC, grinning. He whistles, trying to see if I am shocked. About queuing to fuck the same woman with your buddies. Rotisserie, they call it. They talk about getting wasted back home, and driving pickup trucks with oversized wheels, and fleeing from the cops. Finally, the conversation turns to Iraq and getting stoned and heading out into the Red Zone behind the sights of a big gun, weaving together the strands of sex and violence until all human life seems as consumable as different cuts of meat.

And there will be two sides to the story of torture-- there will be the side of the executioner and the side of the prisoner, the side that hurts and the side that is hurting. There will be "9 out of 10 psychologists recommending waterboarding" and there was a US government who executed Japanese soldiers found guilty of waterboarding American POWs. There will be a torture timeline and "Peikoff's ominous parallels".

There is nothing like the warm, earthen scent of wildflowers at the end of April.

The rise of state capitalism.

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs has a great piece by Ian Bremmer which describes "state capitalism" and explains why that is the best term for the particular government expansions currently taking place. Unfortunately, the article is only available to susscribers, but you can listen to an audio of the article here. Bremmer, who is President of Eurasia Group, does not make modest claims about the economic developments of the past few years. He notes that in developing countries, "the state's heavy hand in the economy is signalling a strategic rejection of the free market doctrine":

The market tide has now receded. In its place has come state capitalism, a system in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain. This trend has stoked a new global competition, not between rival political ideologies but between competing economic models. And with the injection of politics into economic decision-making, an entirely different set of winners and losers is emerging.

Bremmer distinguishes between four primary actors in state capitalism: national oil corporations, state-owned enterprises, privately-owned national champions, and sovereign wealth funds. He notes that the 13 largest oil companies in the world, as measured by their reserves, are owned and operated by governments, including Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Malaysia, and Brazil. These state-owned companies "control more than 75% of global oil reserves". In addition to oil companies, governments practicing state capitalism also make use of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which help them use the market to bolster their own political positions. SOEs allow governments to consolidate entire industrial sectors, thus obviating the need for regulation of critical industries (i.e. petrochemicals, power generation, mining, steel production, weapons, port management, telecommunications, and aviation). In some cases, the political and economic transaction costs of creating an SOE are too high. Under such circumstances, large companies that remain in private hands become "national champions", relying on government in the form of credits, contracts, and subsidies. Governments dish out the rewards because these companies are percieved as a means of competing with purely commercial foreign rivals, thereby securing a dominant role for native industry in the domestic economy and export markets. Bremmer observes that, in Russia, "any large business must have favorable relations with the state in order to succeed".

As the task of financing these companies has become more complicated, the role and significance of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) has greatly increased. As state-owned investement funds, SWFs serve as repositories for excess foreign currency earned from commodity export or manufactured goods. An SWFs portfolio often combines foreign currency, government bonds, real estate, precious metals, and direct stakes or majority ownership in a host of domestic and foreign firms. Rather than finance national champions by printing more money, thus leading to asset-devaluing inflation, governments use SWFs to maximize returns in both the economic and political arenas.

So why is Bremmer so concerned about a development policy that seems to empower national governments in developing countries? Even asking this question seems silly. One of the critical-- and critique-worthy-- features of state capitalism is this close relationship between the government of a country and its putative entrepreneurs. This client-patron relationship threatens to unravel the performance of global markets. Since commercial decisions are often left to political bureaucrats who lack experience in managing commercial operations, their decisions frequently make markets less competitive and productive. There is no way for markets to fix these irregularities when distorted by the power of political patronage and the competitive advantage offered by state subsidies. Motivations underlying investment decisions become political rather than economic. As a result, state capitalism adds costs and inefficiencies to production by injecting politics and corruption into market operations. The client-patron relationship encourages businesses to put greater stock in maintaining current regimes and backing an expanded, often dangerous perception of "national interest" and foreign policy goals.

Under state capitalism, economic entrepreneurship is replaced by political entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, one need only take a walk over to Congress to observe the tawdry power of political entrepreneurs in even the American system.

Preoccupations for your wistfully lonesome lunch hour.

SHE'S GONE by Willie Heath Neal (mp3)

"The Dictator's Handbook".

A totalitarian circus in Prague. The Cirkus totality (or Totalitarian Circus) was one of the cultural projects chosen to accompany the Czech Republic’s EU presidency. A new textbook about Central Europe’s communist past has been written, there will be a series of plays and performances staged, and a giant ‘communism timeline’ has been unveiled on Prague’s náměstí Republiky.

HATE TO SEE YA GO by Mickey Cochran (mp3) - a tune that never fails to make me smile

"The cosmonaut of the erotic future".

We seek satisfaction in the present. According to a recent paper by the British Parliamentary Office of Science and Tech,  several factors influence the extent of this bias towards the present. How does this play out in incentivizing the adoption of certain policies? The paper reviews evidence on the influence of time in decision-making, and looks at the policy implications for pensions, health and consumer affairs.

COLORSHOW by The Avett Brothers (mp3)

Europeana, a private museum experience.

Moscow contrasts.

Photo taken by Anca Cernoschi.

Three bits of bad news.

Bad news for bake sales - H.R. 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, is making its health-conscious  way through Congress. Among other highlights, it would require anyone who stores or sells any food products to a third party to register with the federal government and keep extensive records about every product bought, produced, modified, or sold. (Hat tip to the Free Liberal.)

Bad news for the sleep deprived - Paul Grenier points out that sleep deprivation standard practice in the USSR against political prisoners. "Seven to 10 days of sleep deprivation was often all it took to get prisoners to sign whatever false statement was placed before them." Under the Bush administration, sleep deprivation was apparently "authorized for up to 11 days". Anne Applebaum's excellent study of the Soviet gulag repeatedly demonstrates how sleep deprivation led to false testimonies. Grenier also observes a legal link between those classified as "enemies of the people" in the USSR and "unlawful enemy combatants" in the US-- "no legal process exists" to let someone contest this classification. In fact, the Bush administration took it to a post-Stalinist level by not even granting detainees the right to know the charges against them, much less to contest them.

Bad news for fans of sovereignty - The OECD sees a new role for itself in global tax collection. Noting that the G20, governments and financial centers around the world have pledged to open up bank records to foreign tax investigators, the OECD plans to assist in the global governmental crisis of decreased government income by helping governments collect more taxes. According to the report, "governments are looking to tax systems as a new frontier for development policies", because, " more can be done to boost development by helping developing countries collect taxes than can be achieved through foreign aid".

Links on a theme: William F. Buckley.

The thought of William F. Buckley always engages my sentimental side. Whatever one might think about his political inconsistencies, he did bring the concept of a "public intellectual" onto an American stage which remained highly skeptical valuing humans for brain rather than financial brawn. For a while, Buckley managed to make even the reactionary hysterics of the Republican party appear thoughtful. Of course, my father and I bonded over Buckley, so my sentiments are as personal as they are historical.

Who was Bill Buckley? In so many words, he was the founder of National Review in 1955, which, for an albeit brief time, hosted the most engaging conservative and libertarian minds of the 20th century. He was the host of 1429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999. He was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist.

According to author and conservative historian George H. Nash, Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century... For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure." He was the architect and missionary of fusionism, which combined libertarian economics with Republican warfare statism. He was a Republican who thought the war on drugs should end. He was an unrepentant smoker, a user of speed, a DC dandy, a lifelong bibliophile, a gentleman, a patron, a libertarian conservative, a bearer of tidings in the Golden Age of American conservatism. He was beautiful, brash, and often wrong. But he remains spectacular and one-of-a-kind.

For more, Christoper Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, will be published next month. But you can read 14 pages worth at the New York Times. + The Collected Controversies of William F. Buckley, if seediness does not repulse you. + "Thanksgiving at the Buckley's" by Buckley himself. + The complete writings of Buckley at Hillsdale College.