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Mostrando postagens com marcador Book reviews. Mostrar todas as postagens
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sexta-feira, 3 de janeiro de 2014

Um pouco da historia do neoliberalismo, Hayek, Friedman, and the others - Book review

Published by EH.Net (December 2013)

Angus Burgin:
The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. v + 303 pp. $30 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-674-05813-2.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Ross B. Emmett. James Madison College, Michigan State University.

Neo-liberalism has had several histories written recently. Daniel Stedman Jones (2012) linked the stories of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman to the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, crossing intellectual history with political history. Phil Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (2009; see also Mirowski, 2013) provided us with the account of a unitary social movement – a “thought collective” as they called it. Stedman Jones’ account fell short because he lacked a clear understanding of how ideas are translated into institutions and rules via political entrepreneurship (see Leighton and López, 2012 for one model of how political entrepreneurship works). His account both underestimated the subtleties of the ideas of theorists in their academic setting, and overestimated the role of political leaders in translating ideas into the political realities. Mirowski and Plehwe brought the social movement emerging from Mont Pelerin to life. But all too often in the essays inc!uded in their volume the ideas and actions of the individuals within the movement were evaluated solely in terms of the outcomes of the movement as a whole – outcomes that were perceived to be threats to all good things; like democracy, human welfare, freedom and the like.
Angus Burgin also sets a lofty objective; but he gives us a much more subtle and nuanced history than either of two accounts mentioned above. “The history of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) can, and to some extent should, be read as an extended plea for the relevance of the history of ideas to the history of politics” (p. 224), he tells us in his conclusion. Agreed. Yet, unlike the one-dimensional, and uni-directional, studies cited above, the historical “relationship between theory and praxis” among members of MPS that he narrates for us reveals the nuanced subtleties of “the dynamic nature of a historical transformation” (p. 224); a transformation in the way we configured the relationship between the state and markets during the latter half of the twentieth century. In Burgin’s account, living, breathing human beings communicate, argue, negotiate, pontificate, and yes, even conspire in their efforts to encourage and preserve “capitalist modes of social organization” (p. 225).
What “capitalism” meant was itself a question. Frank Knight, one of the contributors to the discussion who rightly figures in Burgin’s narrative as a key participant in the early years, never used the word “capitalism” in his little textbook The Economic Organization (2013). Yet Knight’s book did much to revitalize acceptance among the future members of MPS of the benefits of social organization via the price mechanism in an “exchange system” (Knight, 2013, p. 23-24). One of the reasons Knight (in contrast, say, to Ludwig von Mises) figures so prominently in Burgin’s account is that he could never settle on a simple account of the complex relationship among the political, social, economic, and even moral aspects of a society which decided (consciously? or simply as a result of accepting other things like the rule of law, family control of property, certain social customs, etc.) to allow markets to play a central role in social organization (see ! p. 112-122). Knight’s concerns were shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by other MPS members: Bernard de Jouvenel, Wilhelm Röpke, and Albert Hunold (who served as secretary for the Society in its early years, but eventually left it) for example. And even Hayek, whose intellectual leadership is central to Burgin’s account, reconfigured his understanding of the relation between markets, the state, and various forms of social organization several times.
If anyone is the “hero” in Burgin’s narrative, it is Milton Friedman, who took over leadership of the MPS at the moment when conflict over the relation between capitalism defined narrowly in market terms, and capitalism defined in terms of individual liberty, came to a head. It was to Friedman that Jouvenel wrote his famous letter of resignation from the Society, and it was Friedman that wrote the polemic Capitalism and Freedom (2002) that replaced Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1994) as the call-to-arms for the next generation of MPS members. Interestingly, Capitalism and Freedom was originally published in the same year that Hayek left Friedman’s lair in Chicago for retirement back on the continent, at the University of Freiburg. Capitalism and Freedom articulated a liberal social philosophy that was “less conflicted than those of the leading figures in the early Mont Pèlerin Society” (p. 177). Unlike his predecessors, who wrote general accounts of the benefits of a liberal society, “Friedman’s consistent preference for unconstrained markets combined with his methodological orientation toward empiricism to inspire him to propose an astonishing range of specific alterations to governmental practice” (p. 178). Among conservative policy-makers in America and Europe, the MPS had been held at arms-length, admired at a distance, and kept away from the practice of policy making. Friedman changed all that. His academic reputation and willingness to engage the public in their own terms “made him a formidable figure in the conservative intellectual world.” But he also possessed a toolbox equipped with novel, explicit ideas “that were clearly derived from and representative of a singular worldview” (p. 184). The combination of these qualities provided him with the means to change the public debate over markets in America, and eventually around the world.
As important as Friedman’s ideas became, and as narrowly focused on the efficiency gains from adopting market-based solutions to social problems the MPS became, there were always those who asked the Society to recall the broader dimensions of social and moral inquiry that had so animated its early members. Burgin spends the penultimate chapter of the book on this debate over the moral capital of the Society, concluding that the Friedman shift – dare I call it a version of the Samuelson’s “F-Twist” (1963)? – may have captured the spirit of an age, but it left a Society that had abandoned the very “questions of value that Hayek had established [it] to address” (p. 213).
Earlier I said that, in Burgin’s account, we see human beings communicating and acting to encourage society’s re-engagement with capitalism. And yet, as I walk away from the book, it is his account of those human beings’ thinking that most captivates me. Thinking in the midst of praxis, I’m tempted to say, because it is not thought leading to action; nor action leading to thoughts. It is both together, and more. Burgin ends by urging modern MPSers to return to the critical openness of the early MPS to engagement with a broader understanding of capitalism in all its dimensions. Can modern proponents of capitalism engage the discontent with liberalism that troubled Knight and Jouvenel, Michael Oakeshott and Röpke? “We have accepted the virtues of markets but failed to determine how to integrate them into life as we wish it to be” (p. 226).
References:
Friedman, M. (2002). Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayek, F. A. (1994). The Road to Serfdom: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Knight, F. H. (2013). The Economic Organization. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Leighton, W. and López, E. (2012). Madmen, Intellectuals and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Mirowski, P. (2013). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso.
Mirowski, P. and Plehwe, D. (Editors) (2009). The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Samuelson, P. A. (1963). “Problems of Methodology – Discussion,” American Economic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Papers and Proceedings): 231-36.
Stedman Jones, D. (2012). Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ross B. Emmett’s publications include Frank Knight and the Chicago School in American Economics, Routledge (2009).
Copyright (c) 2013 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.NetAdministrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (December 2013). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview
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Apresentação de dois dos livros citados na bibliografia no site Abebooks.com:
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Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Hardback)

Daniel Stedman Jones
(Gloucester, ., United Kingdom)
Quantity Available: 1

Book Description: Princeton University Press, United States, 2012. Hardback.
How did American and British policymakers become so enamored with free markets, deregulation, and limited government? This book - the first comprehensive transatlantic history of the rise of neoliberal politics - presents a surprising answer. Based on archival research and interviews with leading participants in the movement, "Masters of the Universe" traces the ascendancy of neoliberalism from the academy of interwar Europe to supremacy under Reagan and Thatcher and in the decades since. Daniel Stedman Jones argues that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of free-market politics. Far from being the story of the simple triumph of right-wing ideas, the neoliberal breakthrough was contingent on the economic crises of the 1970s and the acceptance of the need for new policies by the political left. "Masters of the Universe" describes neoliberalism's road to power, beginning in interwar Europe but shifting its center of gravity after 1945 to the United States, especially to Chicago and Virginia, where it acquired a simple clarity that was developed into an uncompromising political message.Neoliberalism was communicated through a transatlantic network of think tanks, businessmen, politicians, and journalists that was held together by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. After the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971, and the "stagflation" that followed, their ideas finally began to take hold as Keynesianism appeared to self-destruct. Later, after the elections of Reagan and Thatcher, a guileless faith in free markets came to dominate politics. Fascinating, important, and timely, this is a book for anyone who wants to understand the history behind the Anglo-American love affair with the free market, as well as the origins of the current economic crisis.
Mirowski, P. and Plehwe, D. (Editors) (2009). The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Book Description: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, United States, 2009. Hardback. 
What exactly is neoliberalism, and where did it come from? This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring neoliberalism's origins and growth as a political and economic movement. Although modern neoliberalism was born at the 'Colloque Walter Lippmann' in 1938, it only came into its own with the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, a partisan 'thought collective', in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1947. Its original membership was made up of transnational economists and intellectuals, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Luigi Einaudi. From this small beginning, their ideas spread throughout the world, fostering, among other things, the political platforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the Washington Consensus. "The Road from Mont Pelerin" presents the key debates and conflicts that occurred among neoliberal scholars and their political and corporate allies regarding trade unions, development economics, antitrust policies, and the influence of philanthropy.The book captures the depth and complexity of the neoliberal 'thought collective' while examining the numerous ways that neoliberal discourse has come to shape the global economy.

quarta-feira, 25 de dezembro de 2013

15 melhores livros de nao-ficcao de 2013 (nos EUA, claro) - The Christian Science Monitor

1.'The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,' by George Packer

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Is America coming undone? “New Yorker” writer George Packer explores a slow meltdown. (You can read the Monitor's full review of "The Unwinding" here.)

2.'The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,' by Doris Kearns Goodwin

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Pulitzer Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin chronicles the intense friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "The Bully Pulpit" here.)

3.'Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East,' by Scott Anderson

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Veteran war correspondent Scott Anderson traces T.E. Lawrence’s participation in the Arab Revolt (1916-18) that helped to shape today’sMiddle East. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "Lawrence in Arabia" here.)

4.'Thank You For Your Service,' by David Finkel

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Washington Post correspondent David Finkel takes a troubling look at the lives of soldiers after war. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "Thank You For Your Service" here.)

5.'The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914,' by Margaret MacMillan

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Oxford University historian Margaret MacMillan explains why Europe “walked off a cliff” in 1914. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "The War that Ended Peace" here.)

6.'Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital,' by Sheri Fink

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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheri Fink examines the panicked decisions made in New Orleans’ Memorial Hospital during hurricane Katrina. (You can see a Monitor feature on "Five Days at Memorial" here.)

7.'Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War,' by Paul Kennedy

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Yale historian Paul Kennedy profiles the engineers, scientists, technicians, and logistical experts whose innovations helped the Allies win World War II. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "Engineers of Victory" here.)

8.'Men We Reaped: A Memoir,' by Jesmyn Ward

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Award-winning novelist Jesmyn Ward tells the stories of five young African-American men – her brother included – and their lost opportunities. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "Men We Reaped" here.)

9.'The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese,' by Michael Paterniti

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This memoir/travelogue about a Spanish farmer who makes a sublime cheese is nonfiction at its best. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "The Telling Room" here.)

10.'For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey through a Chinese Prison,' by Liao Yiwu

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Poet Liao Yiwu’s account of four years spent in a Chinese prison is raw and disturbing yet also a deeply human and essential read. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "For a Song and a Hundred Songs" here.)

11.'Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing,' by Anya Von Bremzen

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Food writer Anya Von Bremzen tells the story of three generations of Soviet life through her memories at the table. You see the Monitor's full review of "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking" here.

12.'The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind – and Changed the History of Free Speech in America,' by Thomas Healy

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This stirring intellectual biography traces the evolution of US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ideas about free speech. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "The Great Dissent" here.)

13.'The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster,' by Jonathan M. Katz

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Journalist Jonathan Katz considers why well-intentioned foreigners have done so little for post-quake Haiti. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "The Big Truck That Went By" here.)

14.'Wave,' by Sonali Deraniyagala

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In her remarkable memoir, Sonali Deraniyagala writes with aching beauty of the family she lost – her husband, two young sons, and parents – in the 2004 tsunami that hit Sri Lanka. (You can see the Monitor's review of "The Wave" here.)

15.'Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,' by John Eliot Gardiner

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This well-crafted biography is enriched by the expertise and enthusiasm of John Eliot Gardiner, a conductor and music historian. (You can see the Monitor's full review of "Bach" here.)

quarta-feira, 21 de agosto de 2013

Meritocracia e mediocracia no ensino: o que dizem dados de outros paises? - The Economist

Agradeço ao Pedro Magalhães ter me chamado a atenção para esta resenha: a despeito de ser assinante da revista impressa, e de ler regularmente o site da Economist, nem sempre tenho tempo de repassar com cuidado todas as matérias relevantes. Este número atual, por sinal, estou no meio da leitura, e ainda não cheguei à parte das resenhas de livros, ao final.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Education standards

Best and brightest

Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. By Amanda Ripley.Simon and Schuster; 320 pages; $28. Buy from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk 
BAMA Companies has been making pies and biscuits in Oklahoma since the 1920s. But the company is struggling to find Okies with the skills to fill even its most basic factory jobs. Such posts require workers to think critically, yet graduates of local schools are often unable to read or do simple maths. This is why the company recently decided to open a new factory in Poland—its first in Europe. “We hear that educated people are plentiful,” explains Paula Marshall, Bama’s boss.
Poland has made some dramatic gains in education in the past decade. Before 2000 only half of the country’s rural adults would finish primary school. Yet international rankings now put the country’s students well ahead of America’s in science and maths (the strongest predictor of future earnings), even as the country spends far less per pupil. What is Poland doing right? And what is America doing wrong? Amanda Ripley, an American journalist, seeks to answer such questions in “The Smartest Kids in the World”, her fine new book about the schools that are working around the globe.
Though America’s grim education results come in for special drubbing in this book, the country is not alone in failing to teach its children how to think critically. This, at least, is the view of Andreas Schleicher, the “educational scientist” behind what is known as the Program for International Student Assessment, or the PISA test. If most exams quantify students’ ability to memorise material, this one aims to assess their effectiveness at problem-solving. Since 2000 it has been administered to millions of teenagers in more than 40 countries, with surprising results. Pupils in Finland, Korea, Japan and Canada consistently score much higher than their peers in Germany, Britain, America and France. The usual explanations for these achievements, such as wealth, privilege and race, do not apply.
To understand what is happening in these classrooms, Ms Ripley follows three American teenagers who spend a year as foreign-exchange students in Finland, Poland and South Korea. Their wide-eyed observations make for compelling reading. In each country, the Americans are startled by how hard their new peers work and how seriously they take their studies. Maths classes tend to be more sophisticated, with lessons that show the often fascinating ways that geometry, trigonometry and calculus work together in the real world. Students forego calculators, having learned how to manipulate numbers in their heads. Classrooms tend to be understated, free of the high-tech gadgetry of their schools back home. And teachers in every subject exhibit the authority of professionals held in high regard.
Ms Ripley credits Poland’s swift turnaround to Miroslaw Handke, the former minister of education. When he entered the post in 1997, Poland’s economy was growing but Poles seemed destined for the low-skilled jobs that other Europeans did not want. So he launched an epic programme of school reforms, with a new core curriculum and standardised tests. Yet his most effective change was also his wooliest: he expected the best work from all of his pupils. He decided to keep all Polish children in the same schools until they were 16, delaying the moment when some would have entered vocational tracks. Poland’s swift rise in PISA rankings is largely the result of the high scores of these supposedly non-academic children.
This is a lesson Ms Ripley sees throughout her tour of “the smart-kid countries”. Children succeed in classrooms where they are expected to succeed. Schools work best when they operate with a clarity of mission: as places to help students master complex academic material (not as sites dedicated to excellence in sport, she hastens to add). When teachers demand rigorous work, students often rise to the occasion, whereas tracking students at different cognitive levels tends to “diminish learning and boost inequality”. Low expectations are often duly rewarded.
In Helsinki Ms Ripley visits a school in a bleak part of town, where classrooms are full of refugee immigrants.“I don’t want to think about their backgrounds too much,” says their teacher, wary of letting sympathy cloud his judgment of his students’ work. “It’s your brain that counts”. She marvels at how refreshing this view is when compared with that of teachers in America, where academic mediocrity is often blamed on backgrounds and neighbourhoods. And she laments the “perverse sort of compassion” that prevents American teachers from failing bad students, not least because this sets these youths up to fail in a worse way later on.
Not every story of academic success is a happy one. In South Korea Ms Ripley finds a “culture of educational masochism”, where pupils study at all hours in the hope of securing a precious spot in one of the country’s three prestigious universities. The country may have one of the highest school-graduation rates in the world, but children appear miserable. Even so, South Korea offers some good lessons for how quickly a country can change its fate. Largely illiterate in the 1950s, it is now an “extreme meritocracy”.
America’s classrooms do not fare well in this book. Against these examples of academic achievement, the country’s expensive mistakes look all the more foolish. For example, unlike the schools in Finland, which channel more resources to the neediest kids, America funds its schools through property taxes, ensuring the most disadvantaged students are warehoused together in the worst schools.
Ms Ripley packs a startling amount of insight in this slim book. She notes that Finland, Poland and South Korea all experienced moments of crisis—economic and existential—before they buckled down and changed their stories. America, she observes, may soon reach a similar moment. She cites the World Economic Forum’s most recent ranking of global competitiveness, which placed America seventh, marking its third consecutive year of decline. Meanwhile Finland, that small, remote Nordic country with few resources, has been steadily moving up this ladder, and now sits comfortably in third place.

sábado, 4 de maio de 2013

Realidades russas, horrores sovieticos: cinco livros (WSJ)

FIVE BEST
David Satter on life in the Soviet police state
The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2013

Kolyma Tales
By Varlam Shalamov (1980)
1 The Kolyma region, the coldest area in the Northern Hemisphere, was the cruelest outpost of the Soviet Gulag. Varlam Shalamov, a young journalist, was arrested in 1937 and spent 17 years there. His short stories are the definitive chronicle of those camps. Each is devoted to a single incident told in the voice of an emotionally detached observer. On the edge of death, all human traits are lost, and everything is focused on physical survival, but this is treated by Shalamov as completely normal. In "An American Connection," a group of starving prisoners attack a barrel of grease intended for a bulldozer. They finish off half the barrel before guards arrive. In another story, two prisoners escape from a camp at night and go to a burial site, searching for a fresh corpse from which to steal the underwear. Shalamov's dispassionate narrative and his often lyrical descriptions of Siberian nature give his stories the mesmerizing quality of a message from another world. As Shalamov said: "If you don't believe it, take it as a fairy tale."

Landmarks
By Nikolai Berdyaev, et. al (1909)
2 The year was 1909. Terrorists were murdering not only czarist ministers but provincial officials and police. It was in this atmosphere that "Landmarks" was published in Moscow. The contributors, all of them Russian Orthodox believers, called on the intelligentsia to reject materialist moral relativism and return to religion as a means of grounding the individual. Their essays, with stunning foresight, described all of the characteristics of the coming Soviet state. The religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev explained the roots of its contempt for the individual. He said that the revolutionary intelligentsia hungered for a universal theory but was only prepared to accept one that justified their social aspirations. This meant the denial of man's absolute significance and the total subordination of spiritual values to social goals. Bogdan Kistyakovsky wrote that the intelligentsia's predilection for formalism and bureaucracy and its faith in the omnipotence of rules were the makings of a police state. A hundred years later these essays are still among the best arguments ever made against revolutionary fanaticism, political "correctness" and the drive to create "heaven on earth."

The Russian Tradition
By Tibor Szamuely (1974)
3 Tibor Szamuely, the nephew of a leading Hungarian communist, died in 1972 at the age of 47. In this work, completed just before his death, Szamuely explains Russia's historical development. He traces the beginning of the unlimited powers wielded by Russian rulers to Ivan IV. In 1570, Ivan sacked Novgorod, Russia's leading trading city, after inexplicably becoming doubtful of its loyalty. For sustained sadism and savagery what happened there resembles the rape of Nanking by the Japanese 400 years later, with the exception that it was carried out by the country's own ruler. Under Ivan, the only rights were those of the state. Peasants were progressively bound to the land. The Russian church accepted the fusion of political and religious authority in the person of the czar. After the fall of Byzantium, the tsars, as the heads of the only surviving Orthodox state, treated Moscow as the "Third Rome" and began to claim world-wide moral and political leadership. This claim, in turn, was supported by the Russian people, who saw in it justification for their enslaved condition. Communism was supposed to be totally new, but as Szamuely so eloquently demonstrated, it merely modernized the brutal Russian state tradition.

Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust
By Miron Dolot (1985)
4 Almost no eyewitness accounts have been left behind about the deliberate starvation of seven million people, roughly half of them Ukrainians, in the famine that followed the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. The outstanding exception is this work by the émigré Miron Dolot, a teenager during the famine, who describes in riveting prose the fate of his village in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine. To carry out collectivization, the Soviet leadership arrested village leaders and warned farmers that if they did not obey, they would be eliminated as "enemies of the people." Despite the chaos introduced into agricultural life, the quotas for grain deliveries to the state were not decreased. The farmers tried to hide food, but officials went from house to house. Roadblocks were set up, and farmers were imprisoned in their villages. They slowly died there, some convinced that their deaths were a well-deserved punishment from God for supporting the communist revolution. In March 1933, the famine reached its climax. Doors were bolted against cannibals. The frozen bodies of villagers were everywhere. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union exported 1.5 million tons of grain, enough to feed all those who perished.

The Seven Days of Creation
By Vladimir Maximov (1971)
5 In this novel about seven decades and three generations of one family, Maximov sets out to show what the Soviet experience meant for ordinary people, whose speech he had a rare gift for capturing. In one scene, Pyotr Lashkov, the patriarch of the clan and a dedicated communist in his youth, tries in vain to reach out to his long-lost alcoholic brother. "We could have managed," that brother says, "only you wouldn't let us. You nannied us to death, you and your bogeymen. . . . And when the time comes to die a man realizes he's been going arse backward all his life driven by the lot of you." Vadim Lashkov, Pyotr's grandson, the first Lashkov to revolt, is put in a mental hospital, where a fellow prisoner advises him: "If ever you think of trying to escape, the search will be thorough, very thorough. And they'll find you. They have to. Not because you're dangerous in yourself. Not at all! Simply because by now you've found out a little more than ordinary mortals are supposed to know." The tales of misguided ideas and broken fates are divided into six sections. The first six are "days of creation." Fittingly, the seventh day, "the day of resurrection and hope," is blank.

David Satter
Mr. Satter is the author of, most recently, 'It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past.'

A version of this article appeared May 4, 2013, on page C10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: David Satter.

sábado, 1 de setembro de 2012

Nossos amigos dos Brics: a Russia, em dois livros

A Russia é um país complicado, é o mínimo que se pode dizer....
Dois livros contam um pouco...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida



Comrades, Gangsters, Spies




Who is America's principal geopolitical foe? When Mitt Romney suggested recently that it was Russia, he was met with howls of high-minded derision. Didn't the presumptive Republican nominee know the Cold War was over? Wasn't he aware of all the benefits the U.S. had reaped thanks to the Obama administration's "reset" of relations with Moscow?
Mr. Romney's smug critics might laugh a bit less once they read "Deception," Edward Lucas's riveting follow-up to his prescient 2008 book on Russia, "The New Cold War." Mr. Lucas, a senior editor at the Economist and its former Moscow bureau chief, understands that even if the West has ceased to think of Russia as its enemy, the reverse has never really been true, especially among those who now govern from the Kremlin.
"The New Cold War" dealt mainly with how Vladimir Putin's Russia bullies its perceived enemies, using everything from pipelines to polonium poisoning. "Deception" has a narrower focus: the regime's aggressive use of its intelligence services to achieve ends that are malign and frequently criminal.
True, most states conduct espionage, and many of them, including the United States, collect intelligence on friend and foe alike. Yet Russia is a case apart. A country that runs spies like no other is run by a spy like no other. Mr. Putin spent the formative part of his career as a KGB counterintelligence officer in East Germany. The suspiciousness, double dealing and mania for control that went with that job have become the leitmotifs of Russian policy making today.
There is also the sheer scale of Russia's intelligence apparatus. The Russian military may be a ghost of its former self, but the old KGB—now divided among the FSB (for domestic intelligence), the SVR (for foreign intelligence) and the GRU (for military intelligence)—maintains all its prestige and lavish funding. The FSB alone, Mr. Lucas reports, employs 300,000 people, a larger force by far than the U.S. Marine Corps.

Deception

By Edward Lucas
(Walker, 372 pages, $26)
Finally, there are the purposes of the regime. Russia today does not seek to install totalitarian governments the world over or imprison its people behind another Iron Curtain. Yet a state without an ideology is also one without a scruple. Possibly the most notorious recent example here is the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer who uncovered a quarter-billion-dollar tax fraud conducted by Interior Ministry officials against the Russian state. Magnitsky wound up dying a gruesome prison death in 2009 in the custody of the very officials he had publicly accused. Yet the Putin regime's response has been to put Magnitsky's bereaved mother in the dock and launch a bald-faced diplomatic campaign to protect the officials Magnitsky accused of fraud from being sanctioned abroad.
This sort of criminality also extends beyond Russia's borders. A leaked State Department cable calls Russia a "virtual mafia state" and accuses its spies of using gangsters to smuggle guns to Kurdish rebels and advanced anti-aircraft missiles into Iran. A Spanish prosecutor cited by Mr. Lucas believes that "one cannot differentiate between the activities of the [Russian] government and OC [organized crime] groups" and fears that the gangs are gaining the upper hand over the Spanish legal system.
Or consider Anna Chapman, the notorious redhead caught and deported by the U.S. in 2010 as part of a larger Russian spy ring. With her sex-bomb looks and ditzy demeanor, Ms. Chapman (née Anna Vasilyevna Kushchenko) is easy to dismiss as sheer tabloid fodder. But Mr. Lucas's careful investigative work reveals Ms. Chapman's earlier involvement in an elaborate money-laundering scheme based in the U.K. and tied to Zimbabwe.
As it is, Ms. Chapman was perhaps the least accomplished member of a ring of "illegals" who succeeded in blending into American life—the ultimate test of successful tradecraft. More dangerous were characters such as "Donald Heathfield" (real name: Andrei Bezrukov), who passed himself off as a Massachusetts management consultant and sought to befriend such well-connected figures as Leon Fuerth, the former national security adviser to Al Gore.
That relationship never quite took, but the ingratiating Mr. Heathfield might have yet succeeded with other figures of influence had he not been unmasked. Far more damaging was the Estonian Herman Simm, who rose to top positions within his country's security apparatus and then within NATO before he was caught spying for Moscow in 2008. The information he passed along remains a closely guarded secret, but his story suggests how deeply Russia has been able to penetrate Western security establishments.
Mr. Lucas's account of his jailhouse interview with Mr. Simm is one of the highlights of "Deception," as is his meticulous reconstruction of the way the SVR recruited, ran and ultimately abandoned the Estonian. One depressing conclusion from reading "Deception" is that Russians are much better than their Western counterparts at the spy business. Another is that, even now, the West doesn't much seem to care that its secrets are being pilfered by a regime that wishes us ill.
"Chinese spies seem to attract more attention than Russian ones," Mr. Lucas writes. "Admittedly, Beijing's agencies have formidable hackers and are good at stealing military and technological secrets. But they do not murder people, rig our decision-making, or disrupt our alliances." Anyone who imagines that Mr. Obama's "reset" has done much to change that picture should read this sobering book.
Mr. Stephens writes Global View, the Journal's foreign-affairs column.
A version of this article appeared July 26, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Comrades, Gangsters, Spies.
==========


Freedom Unleashed

Delight and despair jostle in the mind when reading Leon Aron's masterly survey of the greatest period of Russian-language journalism—the heady years between the birth of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) policy in 1987 and the death of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The delight is in the intoxicating evocation of freedom unleashed. For this writer, who was there, the pleasure is particularly sharp because the book stirs many fond memories. In the words of Alexander Yakovlev, a leading reformer, it was a time when people "tore off the rusted locks of bolshevism and let truth out of an iron cage." Those who had been muzzled and misinformed for decades could suddenly find the truth and speak it.
The despair lies in what came before and afterward. The stories unearthed were of mass murder, colossal waste, vile prejudice and grotesque dishonesty. Many of those wrongs were exposed but not righted. And after 1991 the yearnings for truth and liberty fizzled away in the messy, greedy politics of the Boris Yeltsin years, and the crony capitalism of Vladimir Putin and his sinister friends that followed.
Mr. Aron is a distinguished scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a skillful polemicist. He brings this history of Russian journalism to life with a fine attention to detail and a bold narrative sweep. He and his researchers have read a colossal amount of newspapers and magazines from those years, and filleted them for the most telling phrases, anecdotes and arguments.
The title of "Roads to the Temple" alludes to movie scene that Mr. Aron describes in his introduction: In director Tengiz Abuladze's "magnificent anti-Stalinist saga" made in 1987, a work that "heralded glasnost," the final scene shows an older woman asking a passerby which street leads to a temple or church. The stranger says: "Not this one." The woman replies: "What's the use of a street if it does not lead to the temple?"

Roads to the Temple

By Leon Aron
(Yale, 483 pages, $40)
Mr. Aron notes: "All great revolutions begin with the search for streets, or roads, to the 'temple'—a kingdom of dignity, justice, goodness, fairness, equality, freedom, brotherhood." Russians began that search as the Soviet Union crumbled. Reporters fanned out across the nation, bringing back stories that exploded myths long promoted by Moscow—like the "golden childhood" supposedly enjoyed by every Soviet youth. The media told of children as young as 10 forced to work in fields for 12 hours a day; in 1986, there were "35,000 labor accidents involving children under fourteen." News stories showed harrowing conditions in orphanages. Soviet medicine was revealed as a disaster. A doctor "cried out" to a Pravda interviewer in 1987 about the lack of ultrasound equipment, shortages that led to the deaths of countless babies: "Not a single Soviet-made [ultrasound] machine in thirty years! In the era of space exploration!"
The greatest target was Stalinism—a taboo subject since the failed Khrushchev thaw of the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Even if the Soviet Union had been an economic, cultural and social success story, it could scarcely have survived the revelation that it was based on the murder by shooting and starvation of millions of innocent people, and the enslavement of tens of millions. As Mr. Aron recounts, secret archives were opened and firsthand accounts by former prisoners were aired. "In the November 27, 1988, issue of Moskovskie novosti . . . Marxist historian and former dissident Roy Medvedev for the first time in the Soviet press" estimated the number of arrested, imprisoned or executed under Stalin before 1937—"no less than" 10 million died.
Mr. Aron also captures well the sensational 1989 revelation of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact of 1939. The public emergence of the pact's details destroyed the great myth of Soviet wartime history: that Stalin's deal with Hitler was a wise tactical ruse to buy time for the Soviet war machine, when in truth it was a sincere and disastrous miscalculation. The valor of the Soviet Union's soldiers was the only aspect of the war, Mr. Aron says, that did not come "under assault by the glasnost mythslayers."
On top of all the historical truth-telling came public soul-searching about the corrosive effects of the modern Soviet system on morals and behavior. As Maya Ganina wrote inLiteraturnaya gazeta in 1988: "Let's find out at what point in our lives bribery, thievery, lies, humiliation of the powerless and servility towards the powers that be have become more than just a deviation from the norm."
Mr. Aron writes: "The most urgent concern was not the economy itself but rather what it did to the men and women who worked in it: their ideas, their views of themselves, their conscience—their 'souls.' Surrounded by waste and negligence, poverty and neglect, arbitrariness and incompetence of all-powerful bureaucracies implementing myriad irrational laws and regulation, men and women were found to have lost much of what was needed to make their country free and prosperous."
And so it proved. The journalists and commentators in the 1990s soon concluded that the country needed four huge changes, which Mr. Aron renders as debolshevization, privatization, deimperialization and demilitarization. But diagnosing the problem is not the same as curing it. Two decades later, Russia is plagued by much the same woes: arbitrary power, feeble property rights, a desire to bully its old empire, and a top-heavy and expensive military. And the Russian media today live with the sobering knowledge that several crusading reporters have been murdered in crimes that remain unsolved. Though far freer than it was in the Soviet ice age, Russian journalism lacks the sparkle, passion and integrity that it displayed in the vibrant era that Mr. Aron describes so well.
Mr. Lucas, international editor of the Economist, is the author, most recently, of "Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today" (Walker & Co).
A version of this article appeared July 3, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Freedom Unleashed.

sexta-feira, 6 de abril de 2012

O imperio em mutacao: dois livros recentes: Brzezinski e Kagan


The New York Times Book Reviews, April 5, 2012

The Big Bang

STRATEGIC VISION

America and the Crisis of Global Power
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Illustrated. 208 pp. Basic Books. $26.

THE WORLD AMERICA MADE

By Robert Kagan
149 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $21.
Last fall, television stations carried a 60-second ad for Audi’s A6 car. The opening images showed a pitted, potholed American road while the voice-over gloomily intoned, “Across the nation, over 100,000 miles of highways and bridges are in disrepair.” Fear not, said the voice; Audi’s smart gizmos would help. The spot’s message was clear: Roads in the United States are now so bad, you need a foreign car to negotiate them.
The Audi ad was seized upon as evidence of American decline, now such a regular meme that the Foreign Policy magazine Web site runs a dedicated blog, “Decline Watch.” Books have been in plentiful supply, and now come two more, helpfully approaching the subject from left and right, as if to demonstrate declinism’s bipartisan credentials.
The authors are big hitters in the geopolitics genre. Robert Kagan coined what passes for a catchphrase in the international relations field when he declared a decade ago that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” At the time, Kagan, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s State Department, was one of the leading advocates of military action against Iraq. Zbigniew Brzezinski, still best known for his service as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, has filled the three intervening decades with a throng of books on the same terrain: what America should do in the world.
As you’d expect, there are big differences between the two. Kagan barely mentions the Iraq war in “The World America Made,” and certainly feels no need to explain his past enthusiasm for a decision that many now regard as a calamity. By contrast, Brzezinski is scathing in “Strategic Vision,” judging Iraq “a costly diversion” from the fight against Al Qaeda. The war, he says, was justified by dubious claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that “evaporated altogether within a few months” and that sapped America’s international standing.
The former Carter official regards climate change as a grave global threat; the ex-Reagan appointee hardly mentions it. When Brzezinski lays out the obstacles to America’s keeping its position as international top dog, he includes ever-widening inequality between the richest and the rest — offering statistics that would fit well on an Occupy Wall Street placard — and an unsustainable financial system that benefits “greedy Wall Street speculators.” Reform is needed, he writes, not only to ensure growth but to foster the “social consensus and democratic stability” at home without which the United States cannot be a force abroad. Kagan allows that the post-2008 woes look like capitalism “discrediting itself” but confidently asserts that “the liberal economic order is in everyone’s interest” even as some ­voices, certainly outside the United States, are having severe doubts about key tenets of neoliberal economics.
The two books are different in temperament and style, too, in ways that say much about the contrast between left and right. Brzezinski’s is full of wonkish detail and some truly leaden language: “ . . . with the potential international benefits of the foregoing unfortunately vitiated by the cumulatively destructive consequences of continued and maybe even somewhat expanded. . . . ” Kagan prefers to paint with a broad brush, sprinkling a memorable metaphor here, a striking simile there. International “rules and institutions are like scaffolding around a building: they don’t hold the building up; the building holds them up” (the building being America). Where Brzezinski can be gloomy, almost channeling the spirit of Jimmy Carter’s notorious “malaise” speech when he warns of the excessive materialism and spiritual hollowness of contemporary American life, Kagan is breezier and sunnier. Reading the books side by side is to be reminded not only of Carter versus Reagan but also of Kerry versus Bush.
And yet the great surprise is how much they agree with each other, especially on what matters. They both insist that reports of America’s decline are exaggerated. Both note that the United States still accounts for a quarter of the world’s gross domestic product, a proportion that has held steady for more than 40 years. Both note America’s military strength, with a budget greater than that of all its rivals combined. As Brzezinski puts it, on every measure “America is still peerless.”
Usefully, Kagan states that much of the current decline talk is based on a “nostalgic fallacy,” imagining a golden past in which America was all but omnipotent. There never was such a time, he says, not even during those periods now remembered as the glory days of American might. Still bathing in the glow of total victory in World War II, the country watched events in China, Korea and Indochina that, Dean Acheson lamented, were “beyond the control of the . . . United States.” In 1952 Douglas MacArthur warned of “our own relative decline.” Indeed, Kagan shows that declinism is as old as America itself: in 1788, Patrick Henry was ruing the Republic’s fall from the days “when the American spirit was in its youth.” Kagan’s message is that America has been gripped by these fears before, only to bounce back: “Anyone who honestly recalls the 1970s, with Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation and the energy crisis, cannot really believe the present difficulties are unrivaled.”
Both men dismiss that other plank of declinist conventional wisdom, the assumption that China’s hot breath is on America’s neck and that it is about to take over. That’s an “overreaction,” Brzezinski writes, on a par with 1980s fears that the United States was about to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan. China is still decades behind on all the measures that count and has shown little sign of wanting to assume America’s central role. It might just be biding its time, but Kagan makes a good case that its geopolitical position is not propitious: while the United States is flanked by oceans, China is encircled by wary, watchful neighbors. It cannot so easily head out into the world to serve as a global naval power and hegemon.
The two authors agree that it’s in every­one’s interest, not just America’s, for the United States to remain dominant. Kagan frames his essay with a device borrowed from the Frank Capra classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” imagining the world if America were not there to play global superpower. He provides a compelling demonstration that whether it’s protecting the sea lanes vital for free trade or nudging societies toward democracy, the world stands a better chance with America in prime position than it would with China or Russia in the lead. Brzezinski similarly asks us to imagine the Internet if it were under the de facto stewardship of Moscow or Beijing rather than Washington.
Of the two, it is Brzezinski, predictably, who is more alert to the long history of United States intrusion abroad — including the toppling of democratic governments and the gobbling up of developing nations’ resources — that might make non-­Americans skeptical of the merits of American dominance. But both are persuasive that American mastery is better than any plausible alternative (if only because a world without any dominant power is itself implausible).
Above all, Brzezinski and Kagan unite in arguing against fatalism. American decline is not preordained, but neither is the status quo. If Americans want to remain on top, they will have to fight for that position, making some painful changes in the process (including, Brzezinski says, to a dysfunctional, paralyzed political system). But it’s worth it, chiefly because the current international order — more or less stable and free from world war for seven decades — will not maintain itself. Given what else is out there, the world still needs America.
Jonathan Freedland is an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London.