50 anos da publicação do Arquipélago do Gulag, de Alexander Soljenitsyn - Daniel J. Mahoney (Law and Liberty)

 

Enduring Truths and Progressivist Illusions

daniel j. mahoney

Law and Liberty, December 29, 2023

https://lawliberty.org/forum/enduring-truths-and-progressivist-illusions/

Solzhenitsyn’s account of applied ideology at work in the totalitarian experiment that was the Soviet Union still remains relevant to readers today.

Many thanks to Spencer A. Klavan, David P. Deavel, and Jessica Hooten Wilson for their deeply thoughtful and suggestive responses to my forum essay on Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a piece occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the publication of that great work. Together, their essays highlight important themes of that work that will resonate as long as human beings remain open to the life of the soul and are confronted, as they inevitably will be, by pernicious ideological challenges to liberty and human dignity.

Among its other contributions, David Deavel’s essay provides an illuminating reflection on the sheer scale or magnitude of Solzhenitsyn’s account of applied ideology at work in the totalitarian experiment that was the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago is indeed a massive if compellingly readable book. Deavel is exactly on the mark when he writes that the book’s “vast amount of detail is essential to the overall effect,” at once dramatic and palpable, that it has on the hearts and minds of its readers.

For example, Solzhenitsyn’s detailed accounts of a series of show trials during the Leninist and Stalinist periods of Soviet rule painstakingly showcase the utter degradation of law under Soviet rule. In doing so, they artfully illustrate the sheer “surreality” of what substitutes for law in an essentially lawless society. If Solzhenitsyn pointedly criticized the excessive legalism of the Western democracies in his 1978 Harvard Address, in The Gulag Archipelago he more fundamentally shows how lawlessness degrades the human soul and makes decent political life impossible. It is a far graver evil than small-minded legalism.

The very last lines of The Gulag Archipelago, completed in 1968 during the Brezhnev period of Soviet rule, read, “For a half century and more the enormous state has towered over us, girded with hoops of steel. The hoops are still there. There is no law.” Or as Solzhenitsyn says in an arresting chapter in the third volume of Gulag entitled “Why Did We Stand For It?”:

The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom. Nor is it the building of an ideal polity. What matter, of course, are the moral foundations of society. But that is in the long run; what about the beginning? What about the first step?

For all their limits from a “higher” point of view, rule of law and political freedom turn out to be invaluable prerequisites for allowing human beings the right to breathe freely and to live humanly tolerable lives.

Deavel is also particularly illuminating about what constitutes the “personal voice of Solzhenitsyn,” including his remarkable capacity in The Gulag Archipelago to take aim at his own personal flaws, failings, and misjudgments. As Deavel aptly puts it, “there is nothing of the moral braggart” in Solzhenitsyn’s self-presentation in the book. The Russian writer knows that he, too, could have succumbed to temptation and have become one of the dreaded bluecaps, or secret police “interrogators,” if an inner voice, the voice of conscience, had not pointed him in a very different direction. Solzhenitsyn’s eventual affirmation of the palpable reality of Divine Providence was rooted in such pitiless but humanizing self-examination. It should be noted that Solzhenitsyn’s fiercest critics, including the mendacious agents of the Soviet party-state and secret police, almost always used and abused such self-critical accounts provided by Solzhenitsyn himself in Gulag.

Let me add that Deavel’s article ends on an admirably high note. He reminds us that however valuable, even precious, they may be, “legal and political freedom” constitute “a trial of our free will just as much as bad circumstances,” such as the “gulag’s absurdities.” And Deavel helpfully recapitulates those “sparks of the spirit” I had referred to in my article: Moral judgment, humility, freedom, and free will guided by conscience that ultimately defers to the benign, if corrective, judgment of God. And I would add noble self-respect, genuine care for the health of one’s soul.

In his article, Spencer Klavan also eloquently reminds us of the peril of succumbing to false confidence in man as the measure of all things: As he notes, Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Lecture makes clear the deadly consequences for the individual soul and collective life of “forgetting God,” of succumbing to the false allure of “anthropocentricity” as Solzhenitsyn called it in the Harvard Address. When men confuse themselves for gods they become little more than beasts, as the twin totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, Nazism and communism, so vividly and chillingly illustrate. Klavan also convincingly demonstrates how the ideological Manicheanism of old persists in higher education and among demi-educated activists who now justify new slaughters and repression in the name of “decolonialization” and a fevered hatred for our rich patrimony that is Western civilization. The deepest lessons of the totalitarian episode remain unknown and unacknowledged. The age of ideology is far from over. We are not only at the risk of “forgetting” old crimes but of renewing the ideological Lie that was at their foundation.

Solzhenitsyn respected honest classical liberals who acknowledged hard truths about Communist totalitarianism.

I thank Jessica Hooten Wilson for reminding us all of the humane presence and enduring contributions of the late Edward E. Ericson, Jr., who co-edited The Solzhenitsyn Reader with me, and who in cooperation with Solzhenitsyn gave us the great gift that is the authorized abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago. That judicious version of the work makes its key insights available to the reading public in a concise 500 pages.

I welcome Wilson’s reminder that Solzhenitsyn is not only a great Russian writer but someone who belongs to “world literature” in Goethe’s noble and elevated sense of that term. Solzhenitsyn speaks to the way of the cross born by his own people in the twentieth century even as he contributes to our “universal literary inheritance.” To which one can only say “Amen.”

I would add that Solzhenitsyn not only rebuked the illusions of Russian ultra-nationalists who confused authentic patriotism with expansive empire (a point made well by Wilson) but also the small-minded Ukrainian nationalists or ultra-nationalists who continue to blame the implacable crimes of communism on ”Muscovites” or “Russians” instead of the inhuman universalist ideology that warred on the legitimate national aspirations of both Russians and Ukrainians. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in Rebuilding Russia, Communism was the common enemy of both great peoples, one that brought a murderous ideology-induced famine to the Volga region of Russia in 1921–22 that cost five million lives and an even more murderous one to the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus in 1932–33.

To these crimes, one can add the fierce and cruel repression of religion, of free intellectual life, and the independent peasantry that characterized Communist totalitarianism. These were not Russian crimes per se, Solzhenitsyn rightly insisted, but a byproduct of an ideological mentality that warred unrelentingly on free initiative and the human spirit. “As common victims of the communist-imposed collectivization forced upon us by whip and bullet, have we not been bonded by this common bloody suffering?” Solzhenitsyn asked in Rebuilding Russia. Prescient words of wisdom as two once intertwined peoples sink into fratricidal strife that deeply pained the half-Ukrainian Solzhenitsyn (on his mother’s side).

And lastly, why lament, as Wilson seems to do, that many, even most, of Solzhenitsyn’s admirers today tend to be conservative-minded? For better or worse, conservatives are more sensitive to the dangers of “forgetting God,” the evils of what the late Roger Scruton called “the culture of repudiation,” and the sheer ugliness of any identification of Evil with a capital E with specific groups that are said to be intrinsically or ontologically evil (a false and deadly identification that connects the woke with older forms of totalitarianism). To their credit, conservatives have been more openly and consistently anti-totalitarian than those on the Left.

Of course, it is a mistake to politicize Solzhenitsyn in any narrow partisan sense. He certainly has much to say to rebuke the kind of faux “conservative” who has undue confidence in modern “Progress” or the promise of an unlimited materialist cornucopia. Solzhenitsyn respected honest classical liberals who acknowledged hard truths about Communist totalitarianism. But he did not hesitate to take aim at “progressives” who felt a “kinship” with Communism, whatever its murderous pretensions and deeds. They have shown themselves to be appallingly slow to learn the most elementary truths. As Solzhenitsyn wrote about them near the end of The Gulag Archipelago:

All you freedom-loving ”left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday—but only when you yourselves hear ‘hands behind your backs there’ and step ashore on our Archipelago.

One must ask: Has all that much changed in these last fifty years regarding “progressivist” illusions regarding the totalitarian temptation?

Daniel J. Mahoney is Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, Senior Writer at Law and Liberty, and professor emeritus at Assumption University. He has written extensively on Solzhenitsyn, including The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker, which has been available in paperback from St. Augustine’s Press since 2020. He is presently completing a book entitled The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, to be published by Encounter Books.

DEC 20, 2023

Judgment and Humility, Providence and Free Will

david p. deavel

DEC 13, 2023

Our Universal Literary Inheritance

jessica hooten wilson

DEC 6, 2023

“Never Forget”

spencer a. klavan

The Limits of American Power - Leonidas Zelmanovitz (Law and Liberty)

The Limits of American Power

by leonidas zelmanovitz

Law and Liberty, December 14, 2023

https://lawliberty.org/the-limits-of-american-power/

If an American-backed world order is to continue to do good in the world, it will require the recognition of other powers' legitimate spheres of influence.

It is well accepted among foreign relations specialists that at the time of the Cold War (1945–89) we lived in a “bipolar” world, with the United States and the Soviet Union competing for global hegemony. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we lived in a “unipolar” world, with the United States as the sole superpower from 1989 to 2008 and the beginning of the Great Recession. Finally, we entered the “multipolar” world that we live in today, with three global superpowers: the United States, China, and Russia, and a number of regional powers, such as India and Iran.

To understand how global order might be maintained and a war of annihilation averted, we might recur to a neglected concept that emerged as the last multipolar era was ending: respect for great power spheres of influence.

Cold War Spheres of Influence

Many of the arrangements that brought us through the bipolar era unscathed were shaped— if not implemented—during the Second World War, out of a process of negotiation between great powers.

The composition of the Security Council of the United Nations, for instance, reflected the leading allies in WWII: the US, UK, France, the USSR, and China. The monetary arrangements agreed to at the Bretton Woods Treaty of 1944, though centered on the US dollar, were made with due consideration of the concerns of the other powers. (So much so that years later, the system crumbled because it became too onerous for the US to honor its commitments to redeem its currency in gold when asked by the central banks of other members.)

One important aspect of the international order that was shaped during WWII and helped prevent another war in Europe was the delineation of spheres of influence between the leading powers. Exhibit A is the “percentage agreement” reached between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow concerning their two countries’ respective influence in the Balkans. The partition of Germany and the acknowledgment of the Baltic States and Poland as part of the Soviet sphere of influence were also part of that, of course.

So it wasn’t simply a balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States that prevented a nuclear war: it was also an acknowledgment that each one of them was more or less free to act in its own sphere of influence without the interference of the others. The free hand the Soviets had in Eastern Europe and the many American interventions in Latin America during the Cold War attest to this reality.

The stationing of nuclear missiles in Turkey and the consequent Cuban crisis in 1962 was solved under the spheres-of-influence paradigm, even if the great powers were testing the limits of how much they could encroach upon the other’s sphere.

One of the failures of the current international arrangements is that they were designed to operate by consensus, with respect on the part of the superpowers for their respective spheres of influence. But that was not to be. The consensual approach followed during WWII was not followed by the superpowers in the following years. Nor were their respective spheres of influence as well defined around the globe as they were in Europe.

For instance, the British and French could not solve the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 on their own terms—the US would not let them do that.

The Chinese found it intolerable that after repelling the North Korean invasion, South Korea and its allies invaded the north, and came closer to the Chinese border. It was fine for North Korea to erase South Korea, but the risk of having American troops so close to Beijing was unacceptable.

Many other regional conflicts took place on the borders of ill-defined spheres of influence—the Vietnam War and the Israeli-Arab wars being two examples.

The Soviets used all the tricks in the book to check American hegemony around the world: Marxist, socialist, anti-colonial, and anti-Zionist ideologies, support for terrorism, narcotics, industrial espionage, you name it. Sure, the global communism of the Third International and its affiliates and offshoots like Forum de São Paulo are expansionist ideologies, and so it is possible that they would not succumb to realpolitik considerations and limit themselves, even if better-delineated spheres of influence were designed and the consensual arrangements among the permanent members of the UN Security Council were taken to the letter.

Alas, we will never know, since the superpowers and their clients early in the game decided simply to “contain” each other instead of finding ways to better define their respective spheres of influence.

Like all other counterfactuals, this one would be impossible to prove, but it is interesting and illuminating to speculate about what the Soviets would have bargained for in exchange for ending their support of leftist and narco guerrillas in Latin America, Palestinian terrorists, revisionist powers in the Middle East, and the enemies of the open society inside the Western intelligentsia. Would that not have been worth, say, the Dardanelles or shared control of the Persian Gulf?

Despite many setbacks, the United States “won” the Cold War, and by 1989, achieved global hegemony. Only to squander it in little more than a decade. There are many dimensions to the relative decline of American power after the Cold War, a decline which has gone hand-in-hand with the decline of American exceptionalism.

America’s Changing Position

At the end of WWII, the US was responsible for 25% of the world’s GDP and was the sole nuclear power. Its political institutions had survived the carnage and economic destruction of the last 30 years (1914–45), and there were no profound ideological differences among the people. Americans’ worldview was predominantly centrist and homogeneous.

True, the national debt held by the public had grown to more than 100% of GDP, but it gradually receded in the coming decades. It is excusable that at the peak of its power, the United States did not have much incentive to accommodate the aspirations of rising powers like China and Russia, much less anyone else.

Similarly, when the Berlin Wall fell, the US saw an opportunity to expand NATO and to integrate former satellites of the Soviet Union as part of the Western sphere of influence. The Russians did not like that, but there was little they could do since they were dealing with the fragmentation of their empire.

Nevertheless, it seems a reasonable supposition that the 1993 Budapest Memorandum, through which Ukraine gave its nuclear weapons and the Black Sea fleet up to Russia in exchange for toothless security assurances from Western allies, was an acknowledgment that Ukraine was part of the now-significantly diminished Russian sphere of influence, and that in case of war between Russia and Ukraine, the Western powers would support Ukraine with blankets and medical supplies, but nothing else. And that was what happened when Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.

By that time, however, the world was already the multipolar one we live in today. Also, in the early 2010s, fiscal considerations forced the United States to abandon the “Two war construct,” the doctrine by which the United States would define the size of its military as sufficient to wage two major wars simultaneously. It was already difficult for the United States to pursue its strategic interests in a world in which it was by far the strongest superpower, but it has become much harder now that there is at least one other superpower. If that was not bad enough, it seems that the framework of respecting the spheres of influence of the other superpowers had been thrown out of the window. This was a mistake.

As we can see from the examples mentioned above, it is much easier for the United States to pursue its national interests within its own sphere of influence when its foreign policy recognizes the spheres of the other powers. That was true when the United States was much more powerful than what it is now, and it is even more true today.

For much of the post-war period, it was convenient for the United States to maintain a military strong enough to engage in any corner of the globe unimpeded. It was much easier to protect something like freedom of navigation, for instance, by unilaterally enforcing it than by relying on the mutual interests of other powers in keeping the sea lanes open in their backyards.

The need to establish a new modus vivendi with the other powers, especially the revisionists ones of Russia and China, will only become more pressing in the future.

Still, the other superpowers (Russia, China, India, and the Europeans) do have a shared interest in the global order. That is not to say, of course, that the superpowers, including the United States, never have interests in conflict with the global order. It may well be the case that under certain circumstances, the downsides of the global order may outweigh the benefits for a given country. In those circumstances, we may expect that it will become a revisionist power, acting against the global order and not as a supporter of that order.

On the whole, however, it has been a great diplomatic blunder over the last several decades that the United States has actively pushed world powers into a revisionist position, rather than trying to reassure them that their interests can best be attained within the American-led global order.

It is possible, of course, that there is nothing the US can do to accommodate China and Russia, and the alternatives are between containment or surrender. Possible, but not likely.

It is difficult for me to believe that the Chinese government would consider it to be in their interest to confront the West if the West allowed China to control the South China Sea and to incorporate Taiwan. It is similarly difficult for me to believe that the Russian government would prefer to continue as a pariah if the West negotiated with them a new sphere of influence which included Moldova and Ukraine.

It is also difficult for me to believe that a reformed UN Security Council—in which the permanent members (perhaps expanded to include India) decide their differences by consensus—would not be preferable to bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war as more and more regional conflicts may grow out of control.

What the Future Holds

The American naval build-up in the Mediterranean immediately following the October 7 attack on Israel, has been sufficient to prevent the conflict from broadening, as much as unsavory characters from Tehran to Ankara would be tempted to do otherwise. But can we say that this deterrence power would be respected if China and Russia had decided to challenge it?

The fact that they are supporting their clients in the region, such as Iran and Syria, and trying to create as many problems as they can for the United States and its allies should not distract from the fact that they are not risking direct confrontation to keep the terrorists of Hamas in the field. Their restraint may be, in part, that Israel likely has its own nuclear weapons, and it is unclear what they would contemplate doing if their existence were to be put at risk.

What China and Russia would do if the United States decided to wage war on Iran is a different matter.

The need to establish a new modus vivendi with the other powers, especially the revisionist ones of Russia and China, will only become more pressing in the future. Despite widespread rhetorical bluster to the contrary, Russia and China are rational actors. Iran, however, may not be. If the United States must one day contain Iran militarily, which is not unlikely, an agreement with Russia, China, and India, would be required.

I don’t know what the price of that would be—it may well be too expensive. But if it is not realistically tried, we will never know.

I recently attended a lecture by Prof. John Mearsheimer. It is difficult not to appreciate his realism. Yet, cynical as I am, I am not prepared to be as cynical as he is in some of his assessments. They remind me of people who say that “judges are just politicians in robes” or that “taxes are theft.” I disagree with that. I believe that there is something we call justice and that it is something more than the residue of politics. I believe that there is a distinction between a legitimate state and a gang of stationary robbers, although both live off others. A set of moral values is what gives legitimacy to the state in its use of force, its imposition of taxes, and so forth. It is precisely that moral foundation that a group of terrorists like Hamas or a gang of common criminals like the drug dealers controlling large swaths of territory in Latin America lack.

In the same way, I understand the American-led global order as a force for good in this world. It is not perfect—nothing is perfect—but it is better than all the alternatives. Think about someone living in the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century. Would you side with Byzantium or with the invading Arabs?

However, for Byzantium to survive (another eight centuries, in fact) it was forced to regroup in Asia Minor, and retreat from Syria and the rest of the Levant, leaving behind Egypt, the most important of all Roman provinces.

The US can still do good in this world, but if it is to do so, it needs to recognize its limits, bring together its allies like Europe and India, and by maintaining imperfect but manageable spheres of influence, reach a détente with Russia and China.

Leonidas Zelmanovitz, a fellow with the Liberty Fund, holds a law degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and an economics doctorate from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain.

Na Ucrânia, faltou logística às forças russas; os ucranianos exploraram muito bem esse lado - Paul Schwennesen (Law and Liberty)

Putin calculou um breve passeio militar para invadir e ocupar toda a Ucrânia. Os soldados ficaram entregues a si mesmos. Esta a principal razão do fracasso. 

Ukraine's Saratoga?

Paul Schwennesen

Law and Liberty, October 4. 2022

https://lawliberty.org/ukraines-saratoga/?utm_source=LAL+Updates&utm_campaign=bbc3d1ea40-LAL+Updates&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_53ee3e1605-bbc3d1ea40-72437129

“An Army,” it is famously said, “marches on its stomach.” In the streets and trenches of Lyman, east of Kharkiv, the Russian army was reminded of this timeless maxim. Ukrainian forces (some of whom I know personally) “tightened the noose” around the village, controlling its supply lines, on the way to another major victory in the north. It might even have been Ukraine’s Saratoga moment—the logistical vanquishing of an overstretched invader which ultimately turns the tide of war. Unfortunately, while the moral victory is indisputable, occuring in the midst of Putin’s farcical annexation of eastern territories, an opportunity was lost for a more thumping defeat. 

Lyman, a dusty little village along the Donets River, had become something of a bastion—first for Russia’s advance and then its retreat—which makes its recapture a touchstone for northern operations and for Ukraine’s theater-wide strategy as a whole. I bought carrots from a farmer there as I left Kharkiv last time, and was stunned when it fell to the Russian advance. I’m therefore thrilled to hear of its recapture. Personal attachments aside, the Lyman operation illustrates a larger strategy of “Logistic Leapfrogging” (flanking, then cutting the supply umbilical—leaving enclaves of Russian forces isolated, demoralized, and no option but surrender). It is an investment strategy I had loudly pleaded for as I stood on the frontlines of the battle of Kyiv—a missed strategic opportunity when tens of thousands of Russian troops might have been cut off in their retreat north to Belarus. 

Freshly abandoned lines near Zurivka, east of Kharkiv in April. Flimsy shelter materials and low-quality personal gear exemplify the logistical weakness of Russian operations (Courtesy of author)

The Leapfrog strategy leverages the advantages of Ukrainian internal supply lines and is infinitely better than playing to Russian advantages in a grinding, incremental, frontal assault to recapture territory. The opportunity, I was heartened to see, presented itself again in Lyman, as Russia seems incapable or unwilling to learn from its past. The Leapfrog strategy may become an enduring theme of the entire war—for, as Napoleon adjured, “One must never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Ukraine, for its part, isn’t immune to mistakes either. It was dismaying to see Russian forces able to retreat through the supposed “encirclement” of Lyman—the crowning chance to capture possibly thousands of Russian fighters was squandered in what seems an uncoordinated rush to “take back” the city. Why could they not have waited, reinforcing supposedly “closed” escape routes with infantry? To be fair, Ukrainians cannot afford to lose manpower or materiel: it is fighting a Goliath ten times its size and feels losses disproportionately. The strain is already starting to show after months of sustained combat—soon it may quickly devolve into a crumbling capacity to resist Russian mass, regardless of how clumsily it is wielded. Just yesterday I was informed that five of my colleagues were ambushed in a building-clearing operation in newly liberated territory. In the maelstrom of machine gun fire and grenade shrapnel, all of them were wounded, two critically. The only thing that saved their lives was incoming Russian artillery “support” which caused the ambushers to scurry back to their retreating line. A lucky break at the tactical level, but this can’t go on indefinitely—Ukraine cannot long afford to put its fighting capacity into hospital bunks. 

That is why it is all the more important to continue to Leapfrog: cutting supply lines and enveloping swathes of Russians is the only way to equalize this inherently unequal campaign. Cautious flexibility, of course, is the name of the game: now that Russia’s top logistical officer, General Bulgakov, has been relieved of his post and replaced by 60-year-old Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, there is a good possibility that this strategy will require extra finesse. Mizintsev, known amongst Ukrainians as the “Butcher of Mariupol,” is likely to want to alter Bulgakov’s approach, if only to save his own neck. There is hope, however: while he is surely aware of his logistical disadvantages, if Mariupol is any indication he is unlikely to break from the basic paradigm of brute force backed by massive artillery support. Luckily, this kind of support requires thick conduits of ammunition transport which are increasingly vulnerable as Ukrainian resistance perfects techniques of light, rapid, flanking maneuvers and logistics interdiction. What’s more, Russian ammunition is not infinite. If abandoned ammunition is any indication, Russia is scraping deep into its stores of firepower:

1980’s vintage ammunition, May 2022 (Courtesy of author)

Could Ukraine’s “Saratoga moment”—cutting off an overstretched invading force from its supply lines—translate into a theater-wide strategy? Yes, and solid indications suggest that this is precisely the idea. With the success in Lyman, it is natural to suppose it will be repeated elsewhere. Crimea, for example, is a Yorktown waiting to happen: a bottled-up army, cut off from supplies of its “beans and bullets” cannot long endure. 

All of this is simply a reminder that this war has become, or more accurately has always been, a logistical one. As such, it is a race against depletion: every loss the Ukrainians incur must be offset by extracting ten times the cost to the Russian war machine. This is a desperately difficult challenge. Western support can fill the deficit to an extent, but it is not reasonable to expect it to fill the imbalance completely. The only real hope is in Ukrainian maneuverability (and patience!)—the capacity to isolate, invest, and pare off elements of the invading force that lie far ahead of its supply lines, leapfrogging and enveloping them in a trap of the Russian’s own making.

Lyman has focused international attention in much the way that Saratoga did for America’s Continental Army in 1777. In addition to a brilliant political blow to Putin’s supporters, the success helps highlight French and German reticence, goading them (for good or ill) into more meaningful involvement. Whether such involvement escalates the conflict into a low-grade nuclear slugfest, or perhaps pushes the more reluctant republics of the Russian Federation to finally make their break remains to be seen, but the fact remains: Lyman, like Saratoga, will be remembered historically as the moment the war turned.

Paul Schwennesen is completing a PhD dissertation on environmental history and Spanish conquest in the Arizona/New Mexico borderlands. He holds a Master’s degree in Government from Harvard University and degrees in History and Science from the United States Air Force Academy. He is a regular contributor to the Property and Environment Research Center and his writing has appeared at The New York Times, American Spectator, Claremont Review, and in textbooks on environmental ethics (Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill). He is the father, most importantly, of three delightful children.

China's True Elite, Book Review of Study Gods by Yi-Lin Chiang - Law and Liberty

 O autor da resenha aponta muitos erros neste livro. Ele não contou seus próprios erros na avaliação do sistema chinês. A China copia os mais avançados? Pode ser, mas qual país não o fez?

Book Review: 

China's True Elite

Reviewed

Study Gods

by Yi-Lin Chiang

 

Connection to the Communist Party is more important to success in China than test scores.

Law and Liberty, August 30, 2022

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/chinas-true-elite/?utm_source=LAL+Updates&utm_campaign=67823dfa34-LAL+Updates&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_53ee3e1605-67823dfa34-72437129

 

The Chinese elite is a fascinating subject of increasing relevance to the West. It is the window on China’s power center. A probe into this secret group that is largely out of the limelight will, however, shed a bright light on the party leadership and internal factions. Alas! The book Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition does not offer a wealth of insights but contains an abundance of errors. Worse still, the “elite” the author spent years observing and interacting with are not the actual Chinese elite.

A bird’s eye view of the book will lead us to the first major error of the book: a misjudgment of the Chinese study gods. We will then unveil the real elite that should be of concern to the West, especially at the time when China under Xi Jinping’s reign no longer hides its ambition for global dominance.

The author identified the young Chinese elite essentially as a group of “exceptionally high-performing students” dubbed “study gods” in Chinese. In the course of seven years or so, the author followed 28 study gods in Beijing, China’s capital city that possesses the best resources of all kinds. Beijing resident students have the best teachers and are required the lowest grade for admissions to the most prestigious universities in the country. The ubiquitous institutionalized inequalities in the “communist” country confer unabashed privileges and preferential treatments on rich cities. 

The author gave a detailed account of how Chinese students, especially the study gods, were treated by peers, superiors, inferiors, parents, and teachers based on their status positions. As the epithet “gods” clearly implies, those study gods assume a status very similar to that of celebrities. They are revered by classmates with lower scores, enjoy indulgence and unlimited support from parents and the school, and could even disregard or actively defy teachers who were usually uncontested authority figures for the mere “mortals” who shared their classes. In addition to study gods’ interaction with their environment, the author emphasized their guaranteed prospects to attend the most prestigious universities at home or overseas.

However, note that what the author called “the exceptionally high-performing” or “academically high achieving” Chinese study gods are merely ones who score the highest possible number on standardized examinations. What the author meant in describing how “elite students…immersed themselves in status competition” is merely a competition for the highest test score. Thus, those top scorers are not necessarily versatile students who are creative and well-read. In fact, many of them read nothing but textbooks and supplementary materials. The hierarchy system of the Chinese high school the author portrayed with wonderment is only a hollow construction built upon flimsy standardized-test scores.

I kept wondering when reading through the book why American readers would particularly be motivated to learn how privileged Chinese students play their games in their little ecosystem. Do the readers really want to know the different ways in which “(Chinese) students in different status positions navigated the status system”? Or how the status positions they acquired in high schools keep playing a role in their future lives? For instance, the author noted some study gods who later went to Western universities “considered themselves as having top status in American university” when they “continued to uphold a status system determined by test scores (or GPAs).”

I can easily imagine ordinary Chinese wouldn’t bother to learn the number of American high-school cliques, what the popular groups are, or how cheerleaders and jocks interact with the rest. So, what is the point of writing the book for Western readers?

The author repeated the point in multiple places. For instance, “I propose that elite Chinese youth are systematically successfully in the competition for global elite status by becoming ‘study gods.’” Or, “I show that by the end of high school these young men and women have learned an assortment of skills that compose a recognizable repertoire of behaviors expedient to the reproduction of elite status in global society.”

However, reality begs to differ.

There is no “an assortment of skills” to learn in order to become study gods in high schools. The one and only skill is how to achieve high marks on examinations. But academic excellence of parochial nature carries very little substantive value in the real world.

Chinese students are known for outperforming others in international academic competitions such as math. But perhaps not many people know the recipe for success is that Chinese students spend 10 years in the classroom doing nothing but being trained to perform well on standardized tests. Still, fewer know that they are trained in well-tested, extremely efficacious formulas for high scores on all sorts of tests, including GRE, TOEFL, IELTS, SAT, and the rest. However, the significance of high scores does not go too far beyond the test itself. My GRE verbal score put me in the ninety-sixth percentile but a week later after the test, I could barely recall those grandiloquent words of the lofty GRE vocabulary.

It is open knowledge, at least within China, that the Chinese education system excels in producing top scorers but not innovators or inventors. Those top scorers will be very good at learning (i.e., copying) existing technologies when entering the real world, just as their predecessors have been doing since the late sixteenth century. The young generation probably has no memory of the late Ming dynasty importing military technology from the Portuguese, the late Qing dynasty purchasing military and industrial technologies from the Western powers, or China completely depending on Soviet Russa to develop its industry from the 1940s to the 1950s. But they know very well that twenty-first-century technologies such as WeChat, Weibo, or Baidu, among many others are copies of American originals, albeit they are advanced versions.   

In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel wrote, “If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.” China will keep copying Western originals because they believe that horizontal progress alone will sustain their prosperity.

Here is a warning to dumbfounded Westerns who are so enamored of China’s economic miracle that they are convinced of the efficacy of the so-called “China model.” The Chinese formula will indeed boost SAT scores that the American elite need to go to Harvard, but it does not nurture versatile, creative, and innovative minds. The fact that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk are Westerners, not Chinese, means they grew up in Western civilization and are beneficiaries of the liberal arts education (in its traditional sense), not standardized tests.

The beating heart of education is wonder, something that the China model has already suffocated in its cradle.

In America, money purchases political power, whereas in China, it is political power that begets wealth.

The Princelings

Not only are the lives and games of the Chinese top scorers insignificant to Western readers, but they are not even the real elite.

Who are the real elite recognized by the Chinese people? The young Chinese “elite” portrayed in the book—for example, the one whose parent is a physician with a PhD—is by no means a member of the elite in the eyes of their fellow Chinese. Mao’s death put an end to ideology politics that had raged in China for almost three decades since his enthronement. Deng Xiaoping’s coming into power turned a new chapter that says “becoming rich is glorious.” Money has since become the only yardstick against which an individual is valued.

So ordinary Chinese will not consider the top global university graduates or multinational corporation employees with a starting salary of $100k as Chinese elites. Indeed, those young adults who “grew up wealthy, received a world-class education, live comfortably, and are expected to lead luxurious lifestyle” can easily travel the world with their Louis Vuitton suitcases. But what separates the rich from their neighbors is mere money. They are of the same status in front of the real elite—the Red elite.

The Chinese elite is a group of people called Princelings. They are children, grandchildren, and in-laws and relatives of high-ranking senior CCP leaders. They are the ones who wield absolute political power over the people, which makes them the proprietors of the means of production of the country. The princelings are behind every sector of Chinese economy: energy, finance, real estate, technology, healthcare, stock exchange, and manufacturing. 

In America, money purchases political power, whereas in China, it is political power that begets wealth. But wealth alone does not make one powerful. What could be a better example than Jack Ma—one of the richest men in China who controls Ant Group, the second largest financial services provider in the world—disappearing from public eyes after the government abruptly suspended the IPO of Ant Group in November 2020?

Jack Ma is a member of the richest club in China whose “membership” requires a minimum of $10 billion. They are in general businessmen, owners of the largest listed companies in the country. It seems that they are China’s capitalists. That would be a misperception. Their identity and function are—and perhaps fate will be—very similar to those of нэпман.

нэпман is a Russian term meaning zealots of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. In 1921, the Soviet government had to tentatively reform the war communist economic policy, partially recovering the market economy, at the time Russians were continuously dying of starvation. Small businesses quickly reemerged along with free exchanges. By 1927, нэпманconstituted about 2.3 percent of the whole population and 7% of the urban population. Note that just like China’s Jack Ma and his club buddies, they were not capitalists as Westerners understand the word. They were the state’s expedient solution to critical commodity deficiency and severe unemployment. Most importantly, they contributed 21% of the income tax revenue of the urban population and half of the corporate revenue nationwide. They fueled Soviet Russia’s heavy and military industries. Later when Stalin believed those (state-controlled) “capitalists” were no longer of use to him, as planned economy alone could sustain Soviet Russia, нэпман were expunged from their Motherland in the 1930s.

The Chinese нэпман must attach themselves to one or the other members of the elite to become a giant. For example, Jack Ma maintains a close relationship with Jiang Zhicheng, the grandson of Jiang Zemin who is Xi’s predecessor from 1989 to 2002 and his primary political nemesis. Jiang Zhicheng is a founding partner of Boyu Capital, a private equity firm whose portfolio features China’s major tech companies, pharmaceutical and medical equipment firms, and AI companies. It attracts worldwide investors such as U.S. Pension Funds or Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds.

Jiang Zhicheng’s father Jiang Mianheng has an even more stunning resume. Jiang Mianheng, called the “king of telecommunication” and “father of the internet,” built China’s modern-day information and communication sector and internet networks from the 1990s to the 2000s when his father was the “king” of China. What happened to Jack Ma and other similar targets in recent years is a reflection of the increasingly intense and conspicuous factional fight within the Red elite.

Mark Twain notes, “no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often.” Deng’s 1978 Reform and Opening-up policy is in essence the Chinese version of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. The circumstance of the country at the time was similar to that of Soviet Russia in the 1920s. And in the 2020s, Xi seems to do what Stalin did in the 1930s.

In 2021, Xi announced a campaign called “common prosperity” with the slogan “reasonably adjusting excess incomes,” encouraging the rich and businesses to “give back more to society.” In the meantime, almost all tech giants were fined an astronomical figure, citing anti-monopoly laws. The commerce titan Alibaba, for example, was fined a record $2.8 billion.

When Jack Ma and the like, with all the money they have, can be squashed at the whim of “Emperor Xi,” I don’t believe the Chinese study gods and the future upper class “are en route to dominating the global economy. But the industrious Chinese top scorers might gain an upper hand if American universities keep tearing up Western civilization, cooking up pseudo-social sciences such as gender studies, and training the snowflake generation in nothing but hatred for America.

Habi Zhang

 

Habi Zhang is a doctoral student in political science at Purdue University.

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Lições da Revolução Francesa - John O. McGinnis (Law and Liberty)

Lessons of the French Revolution

by John O. McGinnisLaw and Liberty, 

February 20, 2020

Other than the American Revolution, the French Revolution is the political event of modernity with the longest-lasting influence. Both revolutions created new regimes (although only America’s lasted) and advanced political ideals that still resonate around the world. It is not a surprise that famous politicians of recent times still assess an upheaval that occurred 200 years ago in a different nation than their own: “It resulted in a lot of headless corpses and a tyrant” was Margaret Thatcher’s verdict on its 200th birthday. Zhou Enlai was less certain, suggesting that even after 175 years, it was “too soon to tell” about the revolution’s ultimate significance.

Thus, it is always worth learning more about the French Revolution, and Jeremy Popkin’s The New World Begins is the most important English language history of this epochal event since Simon Schama’s Citizens appeared 30 years ago. Its fair-minded and fast-paced recounting of the events allows for a reassessment of the Revolution’s causes and of its value. Popkin provides a brilliant frame for understanding what sparked and sustained the revolt by contrasting the life of Louis XVI, the French King who lost his head, with one of his subjects, Jacques Menetra, a skilled glazier who left a full memoir of his own life in the turbulent times.

Louis XVI was not unintelligent, but his entire education and routine left him unfit to understand his nation, let alone deal shrewdly with a political cataclysm. His lessons as a youngster focused on the glorious past of his ancestors, and his routine as an adult confined his experience, giving him few opportunities to meet with people outside fawning courtiers. It is thus not surprising that Bourbons like Louis “learned nothing and forgot nothing” in Talleyrand’s well-known jibe. Incredibly, Louis XVI journeyed outside the environs of Paris only once before his failed attempt to escape abroad in 1791.

In contrast, Menetra traveled around much of France. While he was not well-educated, he was literate and skilled in creating social (not to mention sexual) networks wherever he went. The country, Popkin implies, was full of Menetras. Their collective power and intelligence overmatched a monarchy that had few reliable sources of information and a self-understanding that was at least a century out of date.

Nevertheless, I believe Popkin could have done more with his framing device by briefly juxtaposing Menetra with a skilled and propertied artisan of the American colonies just prior to their Revolution. The important contrast there is that for all his worldliness Menetra had no experience of popular government. Even those colonists who did not vote heard through newspapers about their colonial assemblies, and many Americans of Menetra’s class actually participated in governance. The representative assemblies of colonial America before its revolution thus sharply contrast with the complete absence of any popular input into government in France.

To be sure, the French monarchy was not absolutist. The most important restraints on its power were thirteen “parlements” that sat throughout the country. These were not legislatures, however, but judges, often holding hereditary office. While they sometimes opposed the King, they were nobles themselves, not republican schoolmasters educating their countrymen in the exercise of popular responsibility. When in 1789 the King summoned an Estates General, a legislative assembly composed of the three classes of nobles, religious officials, and commoners, it was the first time it had met since 1612!

As a result, people like Menetra had no sense of the give-and-take of representative government, and no appreciation of pluralism. The absence of this tradition helps explain why the Revolution, from the taking of the Bastille on, was again and again propelled by popular uprisings when part of the population either became incensed at some turn of events or was manipulated to support a faction in the National Assembly, the body that rapidly succeeded the Estates General when the commoners declared themselves a unicameral assembly. Americans were skilled at compromise because of their long experience of representation in the colonies, but the French relied on direct and violent action, being wholly unschooled in any institution of representative government.

Edmund Burke observed that French philosphes abetted the violence of the Revolution because their abstract theories did not grow organically from political experience. But France had not even fledgling democratic experience on which their political philosophers could draw. As Bernard Bailyn makes clear in his great book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, many of the English political philosophers on which the colonists relied were themselves practical statesmen, like the Earl of Shaftesbury, or at least advisors to such statesmen, like John Locke. In contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau—the patron philosopher of the Revolution—had no substantial connection to politicians. His theory of the General Will, which posits that there is a collective will for the general good that can be sharply distinguished from the view of particular groups within society, discouraged compromise because it made it easier for any faction to fancy itself the sole reflection of that general will. When American statesmen like John Adams read his works, they thought him mad.

Popkin’s narrative shows how many of the famous actors in the Revolution—from Georges Danton to Maximillian Robespierre—were borne along by the current of a people unlearned in democracy. As a result, the leaders of the Revolution had little choice but to engage in conspiracies against other factions, because they rightly feared that other factions would also seek to conspire against them, mobilizing the French street at the first opportunity. Danton still has statues in his honor in France and is often contrasted as the good revolutionary compared to the bloodthirsty Robespierre (much like Lenin was once contrasted with Stalin). But in this book, Danton comes across as just a less deft (and more corrupt) schemer in the days of the Terror. Indeed, Robespierre is shown to be more moderate than this reputation. There were politicians farther to his left who were even more eager to destroy the past, whatever the cost, particularly when it came to the Catholic Church. Robespierre tried to restrain them.

My greatest disagreement with this outstanding achievement of narrative history is the author’s ultimately positive assessment of the French Revolution. At one point he somewhat excuses the Terror, while lamenting its dreadful excesses, by noting that the Revolution could probably not have survived without it. But on balance, why was the survival of the Revolution desirable? For instance, if Louis XVI had escaped (and it was his lack of ruthlessness in refusing to leave his family behind that doomed his attempt) and had come back with an army to put down the rebellion, the world and France would likely have been better off in the short and long term. Louis XVI was more moderate than the Bourbon brothers who succeeded him after the Restoration and could well have begun the transition to a constitutional monarchy. In any event, the current of the times was such that transition would have occurred.

As it was, the immediate legacy of the revolution was a military dictatorship under Napoleon that killed millions of the French and other Europeans in wars of conquest. That dictatorship—predicted by Edmund Burke ten years earlier—was a direct reaction to the continual chaos of the Revolution. And Napoleon’s wars were a continuation of the wars of revolutionary liberation that began almost as soon as the Bastille fell.

Even in peace and even in its home country, the legacy of the revolution continues to be an unfortunate one. When democratically elected French leaders try to make needed political reforms against vested interests, like unaffordable pensions for select groups, they are generally defeated by strikes and illegal disruptions. The spirit of the Revolution lives on in France as an impediment to democratic compromise and, even more ironically, as a protector of anachronistic privilege.

John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University. His book Accelerating Democracy was published by Princeton University Press in 2012. McGinnis is also the coauthor with Mike Rappaport of Originalism and the Good Constitution published by Harvard University Press in 2013 . He is a graduate of Harvard College, Balliol College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. He has published in leading law reviews, including the Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford Law Reviews and the Yale Law Journal, and in journals of opinion, including National Affairs and National Review.