The Father of Chinese Authoritarianism Has a Message for America - Chang Che (New Yorker)

The Weekend Essay

The Father of Chinese Authoritarianism Has a Message for America Xiao Gongqin thought that, in moments of flux, a strongman could build a bridge to democracy. Now he’s not so sure. By Chang Che

 Tne New Yorker, December 21, 2024

When Russian and Chinese élites talk about history, they often mean “History”—the grand Hegelian march toward progress. Since the end of the Cold War, the East has lived with the undignified thesis, popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” that democracy had defeated the authoritarian alternatives of the twentieth century. That idea has not aged well. According to a European survey of more than two hundred countries, 2022 was the first time in two decades that closed autocracies outnumbered liberal democracies in the world. Americans have become unreliable underwriters of the international order. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has incited Europe’s largest conflict since the Second World War and China’s Xi Jinping is remaking global institutions in his own image, bereft of democratic values. When Xi visited the Kremlin in March, 2023, a little over a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told Putin that the world was changing in ways “we haven’t seen in a hundred years.” “Let’s drive those changes together,” he said. Putin, hands outstretched, nodded. “I agree.”

Read the Weekend Essay at here  

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https://www.academia.edu/126490894/The_Father_of_Chinese_Authoritarianism_Has_a_Message_for_America_By_Chang_Che_The_New_Yorker_

A New Yorker já colocou Trump na prisão; pena que não vai acontecer

 A revista preparou uma capa para o seu número de 10 de junho. Improvável que a prisão se realize, mas nada é impossível nos EUA atuais.

O que era viver numa ditadura quase perfeita: os arquivos da Stasi da DDR - Burkhard Bilger (New Yorker)

Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi

After the Berlin Wall fell, agents of East Germany’s secret police frantically tore apart their records. Archivists have spent the past thirty years trying to restore them.

By Burkhard Bilger

The New Yorker, May 27, 2024

Photograph by Ingmar Björn Nolting for The New Yorker

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, there were some two hundred thousand unofficial collaborators working for the East German security service, known as the Stasi—one spy for every fifty to sixty people in the country. Among the informants was Salomea Genin, whose family had fled Germany before the start of the Second World War, and who returned as a young woman dedicated to the Communist cause. “There is only one way to live with my life,” Genin explains to Burkhard Bilger in a captivating piece from this week’s issue. “And that’s to be open about the facts.”

Genin is not alone in wanting to face the past. In January, 1992, the newly unified government made almost the entire archive of Stasi reports available to the public, an act of radical official transparency. But there was still much that the Stasi had managed to hide. In the weeks before the Wall came down, their agents destroyed as many documents as they could—much was pulped, shredded, and burned, but between forty million and fifty-five million pages were torn up and stuffed in sacks. The Germans have spent the past thirty years trying to piece those back together, by hand. So far, less than five per cent of the torn documents have been reassembled. Now an effort is under way to automate the process, using A.I. programs and the latest digital scanners. “The Stasi files,” Bilger writes, “offer an astonishingly granular picture of life in a dictatorship—how ordinary people act under suspicious eyes.” They are “like an endless police blotter: a meticulous, bewilderingly detailed account of an entire society’s deceptions and betrayals.” As far-right and authoritarian groups are on the rise across Europe, “the files have never seemed more relevant.”

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For more: A short documentary from 2020, titled “Betrayal,” tells the story of how the flight of a spy from East Germany affected the family members he left behind.

Read the story 

New Yorker: the enduring effects of the January 6th attack against democracy in America

 A New Yorker dedica seu número do dia 6 de janeiro aos 3 anos do ataque ao Capitólio em 2021:

January 6th: Three Years Later

American Chronicles The Meaning of the January 6th Report From 2022: The congressional report establishes a historical record of a coördinated assault on democracy, and describes a way forward. By David Remnick A Reporter at Large Among the Insurrectionists From 2021: A chronicle of the assault on the Capitol, which was breached by Trump supporters who had been declaring, at rally after rally, that they would go to violent lengths to keep Donald Trump in power. By Luke Mogelson Daily Comment What Should We Call the Sixth of January? From 2021: What began as a protest, rally, and march ended as something altogether different—a day of anarchy that challenges the terminology of history. By Jill Lepore

The War in Ukraine Launches a New Battle for the Russian Soul - Masha Gessen (New Yorker)

 

The War in Ukraine Launches a New Battle for the Russian Soul

The last time people were writing in Russian so urgently was in the late nineteen-eighties, when Soviet citizens were confronted with the terror of the Stalinist past.

By Masha Gessen

The New Yorker, October 17, 2022 Issue

 

Russia says that it has expanded. On September 30th, President Vladimir Putin signed a document that ostensibly accepted four Ukrainian regions as members of the Russian Federation. The residents of those regions, Putin said in a speech, “have become our citizens forever.” He made this assertion as the Ukrainian Army was liberating territory to which Russia was laying claim. He was not just trying to snatch propaganda victory from the jaws of evident military defeat; he was laying the groundwork for fighting for those lands ever more aggressively. A week and a half earlier, he had ordered the military to draft hundreds of thousands of new soldiers, and had threatened to use nuclear weapons.

A Russia that includes parts, or all, of Ukraine and untold other lands is the Russian World, a vague and expansive idea pioneered by the self-styled philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, some of whose ideas have been adopted by the Kremlin. In August, his thirty-two-year-old daughter, Darya, also an imperialist pundit, was killed by a car bomb that may have been intended for him. Last week, the Times reported that U.S. intelligence believes a part of the Ukrainian government may have been behind the attack. If true, this suggests that the government puts strong, probably unfounded, faith in the power of the concept of the Russian World.

Putin, in his speech, described both the Russian World and the larger world as he sees it. According to him, the West destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991, but Russia came back, defiant and strong. Now the West wants to destroy Russia. “They see our thought and our philosophy as a direct threat,” he said. “That is why they target our philosophers for murder.” The ultimate goal of the West—specifically, the United States and Great Britain—is to subjugate people around the world and force them to give up traditional values, to have “ ‘parent No. 1,’ ‘parent No. 2,’ and ‘parent No. 3’ instead of mother and father (they have completely lost it!),” and to teach schoolchildren that “there are some other genders besides men and women and offer them sex-change operations.” Putin has said, repeatedly, that only Russia can save the world from this menace. This is the story of a world in which his war in Ukraine—and the draft, and even, perhaps, a nuclear strike—makes sense.

But when the world shaped by the feedback loop of propaganda collides with the world of facts on the ground, things begin to crack. On October 5th, two videos circulated widely on Russian-language social media, including in normally pro-war quarters. The videos show a crowd of men in uniform. They say that there are five hundred of them and that they were recently drafted. They complain of “animal-like” conditions, of having to buy their own food and bulletproof vests, and of a lack of organization. “We are not registered as part of any detachment,” one man says. “We have weapons, but these are not officially issued to us.” Meanwhile, some Russian television propagandists have been acknowledging Ukrainian victories, and urging Russians to prepare for a long wait before their country can attack again.

It’s too early to make assumptions about where these tiny cracks may lead. It is not too early, however, to think about what a future, militarily defeated Russia might look like. This is what Alexey Navalny, the opposition politician who has been in prison since January, 2021, has been doing. The Washington Post recently published an op-ed, smuggled out by Navalny’s legal team, in which he writes that Russia deserves to lose the war and that, once it does, it must be reconstituted as a parliamentary, rather than a Presidential, republic. This, he argues, will insure that no one person can usurp power in Russia as Putin has.

Navalny’s op-ed serves to illustrate Putin’s wisdom, of sorts—the wisdom of keeping his most important political opponent behind bars. Navalny seems to have missed a cultural turning point. In the seven and a half months since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their country. Many of them are journalists, writers, poets, or artists, and they, along with some who are still in Russia, have been producing essays, poems, Facebook posts, and podcasts trying to grapple with the condition of being citizens of a country waging a genocidal colonial war. Some of their Ukrainian counterparts have scoffed at their soul-searching. Ukrainians, indeed, have bigger and more immediate problems. But they also have certainty—they know who they are in the world, while for Russians nothing is as it once seemed to be.

One of the earliest examples of this outpouring was a poem, by the children’s-book author Alexey Oleynikov, about the incongruity of trying to flee Russia with a pet hedgehog in tow. One stanza reads, “We will not wash the shame off until our old age, until we die / There have been worse times, but there has never been a more ridiculous time.” Posted on Facebook, the poem went viral in March. May’s viral poem, by the actress and poet Zhenya Berkovich, tells of a young Russian man visited by the ghost of his grandfather, who fought in the Second World War; the ghost asks his grandson to forget him, lest the memory of his valor be used to justify the current war. This month’s viral poem, by Eli Bar-Yahalom, an Israeli Russian, is a dialogue between God and a Muscovite who hopes to return home someday. “There is no resurrecting Bucha, no raising up Irpin,” God says, referring to suburbs of Kyiv where Russians appear to have committed war crimes. There are also at least two Russian-language podcasts devoted to the issues of individual and collective responsibility for the war. And Linor Goralik, an acclaimed Russian writer born in Ukraine and living in Israel, has founded an online journal called roar (Russian Oppositional Arts Review), which has published three packed issues.

The last time people were writing in Russian so urgently was in the late nineteen-eighties. Soviet citizens back then had been confronted with their past—the Stalinist terror. That moment gave Russia, among other things, Memorial, the human-rights organization that, along with Ukrainian and Belarusian activists, won the Nobel Peace Prize last week. Now Russian citizens are being confronted with their present. The writers in exile have physically fled their country (as has much of Memorial’s leadership) and are trying to write their way to a new Russia. Their imagination extends far beyond the Russian constitution to a world that’s radically different, and better than not only Putin’s revanchist Russian World but the world we currently inhabit. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 17, 2022, issue, with the headline “Different Worlds.”

 

 

The “Shadow” of International Law: the case of Russia's war crimes - Interview of Oona Hathaway by Isaac Chotiner (New Yorker)

 Interview com a prof. Oona Hathaway , autora de um livro sobre o Pacto Briand-Kellog muito interessante.

The “Shadow” of International Law

Can accountability for Russian war crimes exist without American support?

By Isaac Chotiner

The New Yorker, April 7, 2022

“You’re seeing this reaction of the international community,” Oona Hathaway says, “because everybody realizes that their own safety and security is at risk if Ukraine falls.” 

As Russian forces have pulled back from Kyiv and its surrounding suburbs, a disturbing series of images have appeared, which seem to show the execution of civilians. In Bucha, bodies have been found with hands tied and gunshot wounds to the head. A report published by Human Rights Watch, on Sunday, documented sexual violence and alleged killings by Russian troops in other parts of the country. Earlier this week, President Biden called for the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, to face a trial for war crimes. (Satellite imagery revealed that the dead bodies in Bucha had been present for weeks, casting doubt on Russian claims that they had been placed there after Russian forces departed.) On Tuesday, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed the United Nations Security Council, and asked, “Are you ready to close the U.N.? Do you think the time of international law is gone? If the answer is no, then you need to act immediately.” (Later in the week, the New York Times posted a still frame from a video that appeared to show Ukrainian troops executing captured Russian combatants.)

To talk through what, if any, consequences the Russian leadership could face for these actions, I recently spoke by phone with Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of the school’s Center for Global Legal Challenges and the co-author, with Scott J. Shapiro, of the book “The Internationalists” She also serves on a committee that offers guidance to the State Department on international law. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different mechanisms that could be used to bring members of the Russian military to justice, how American actions have undermined the prospects for international accountability, and how international law might change after the Ukraine conflict.

What does it mean, in practice, for a big and powerful country to commit war crimes in 2022?

Well, it means that the international legal order is really under serious stress. This is, of course, not the first time that a major country has committed war crimes, even in recent years. We’ve seen war crimes taking place, for instance, in Syria, for much of the last several years. But what’s distinctive about this current moment is that we haven’t seen a fight between a major global power (here, Russia) and another state (here, Ukraine) in the last couple of decades, where the rules of the Geneva Conventions, the vast rules of international humanitarian law, are being broken on a massive scale.

We all have an idea of what war crimes are, but what is the underlying legal framework here? Is it just the Geneva Conventions, or something else?

The rules are not limited simply to the Geneva Conventions. It could also include customary international law that supplements the treaty rules in the Geneva Conventions. International humanitarian law creates a kind of foundational framework that we look to when we’re thinking about war crimes, and war crimes are any serious violation of international humanitarian law. So we look to: What does international humanitarian law provide? What does it require? What does it allow states to do? What does it prohibit states from doing? And then is there any significant violation of those rules? And, if there is, that can be a war crime.

And, in terms of enforcement mechanisms, it seems like there is the International Criminal Court, but beyond that?

There are two categories of accountability mechanisms. There are domestic courts, and there are international courts. And, generally speaking, when war crimes are committed it’s often the domestic courts that take the lead in addressing the problem. So you may remember that there were some courts-martial of U.S. soldiers for war crimes, and a few of them were pardoned by President Trump after having been convicted. And actually in Ukraine we see that the prosecutor general of the country has already opened more than two thousand investigations into possible war crimes taking place in Ukraine, and is likely to start prosecuting Russian soldiers—particularly soldiers who are currently being held as prisoners of war and may have participated in some of those war crimes and therefore can be subject to prosecution for violating international humanitarian law.

So it would be prosecutions on the domestic level for violations of international law?

Exactly. Almost every country in the world that is party to the Geneva Conventions has its own domestic statute that allows for the criminal prosecution of war crimes. So the United States has its own War Crimes Act that allows prosecution of war crimes here in the United States. And Ukraine has war crimes as part of its domestic criminal law. But that is done in the shadow of the international law, and the Geneva Conventions in fact require states that are party to the conventions to to be able to criminally prosecute violations of the conventions. So every state is actually required to have a mechanism for domestic prosecutions of war crimes.

And what happens if America or Russia just decides not to follow the Geneva Conventions? There is no enforcement mechanism for that, correct?

Yeah, other than all the enforcement mechanisms we’re seeing the world try to use against Russia. So sanctions. And, if any of those who are suspected of crimes were to travel outside Russia, they potentially could be subject to prosecution for war crimes. So there are some possible mechanisms.

Yes, this happened with Pinochet.

Yeah, and that’s an issue that can come up for a number of these folks. And then they’re also subject to prosecution in Ukraine. And Ukraine actually has a system in place for not only indicting people in absentia but potentially even trying them, although I’m not sure that that’s something the international community is going to be enthusiastic about because it’s considered to be not entirely kosher with human-rights norms. But if they were to travel to other states that have war-crimes statutes . . .

Why isn’t it considered kosher?

The idea of trying someone who isn’t present brings up concerns that he or she is not able to properly defend themselves.

Can you talk a little bit about the International Criminal Court, which Russia is not party to? How does it function?

I think the I.C.C. has a lot of potential to be useful here. You are absolutely right that neither Russia nor Ukraine is a party to the Rome Statute, which is the treaty that created the I.C.C. But back in 2014 Ukraine agreed to submit events taking place in Ukraine to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and then it renewed that and expanded it. And that submission remains in place. And so, even though Ukraine is not party to the International Criminal Court, it has submitted to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which basically means that if there are crimes committed in Ukraine that are within the scope of the crimes that can be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court, then the I.C.C. can open an investigation and in fact move forward with the prosecution, and that has happened.

So an I.C.C. prosecutor announced that he was opening an investigation. And he also announced that he’s received forty-one state referrals, which essentially indicates that the state strongly supports moving forward with an investigation. Some states have offered additional funding and assistance to the prosecutor in investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity. And now we’re hearing reports potentially of genocidal acts, as well, in Ukraine. So that is the international mechanism that is already at work with doing some of the evidence collection and doing some investigations that would be necessary in order to move forward with prosecution of these war crimes.

America has played a huge role in undermining the I.C.C. The Bush Administration would not coöperate with it. The Trump Administration sanctioned people at the I.C.C. and said that we would never send people there for trial. Beyond the morality of this, what about the practical impact? Is the I.C.C. really going to function without meaningful American support?

So it has been functioning even without strong U.S. support. It’s not perfect, but it has managed to move forward with some significant prosecutions, some of which have been with U.S. support. It’s important to note that the United States supported the referral of the situation in Sudan to the International Criminal Court, for instance. [The U.S. declined to formally support a referral, but didn’t object.]

I was referring to referrals of our own citizens.

Oh, yes, absolutely. The United States has had a very fraught relationship with the International Criminal Court from the beginning of the Bush Administration, which was shortly after the Clinton Administration signed the Rome Statute. Bush came in, and he tried to unsign the Rome Statute and then proceeded to go around the world telling countries that if they didn’t sign an agreement exempting the U.S. from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, for crimes committed on their soil, the U.S. would withdraw foreign aid from them.

So, from the beginning, the U.S. has had a pretty contentious relationship with the I.C.C. An investigation into possible war crimes in Afghanistan was the latest episode. President Trump threatened sanctions against judges and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and lawyers who were participating in assisting in the Afghan investigation.

The relationship has been interleaved with moments of attempted coöperation, though. The U.S. did accede to referring the situation in Sudan to the International Criminal Court. And during the Obama Administration there was an effort at some level of coöperation between the International Criminal Court and the U.S. Administration. But this is potentially a turning point in the relationship between the U.S. and the I.C.C., because what’s become clear is that it’s very hard to get accountability for Russia in any other way. And the International Criminal Court is the best-positioned, most legitimate institution with the capacity that’s been built up to actually investigate and prosecute these crimes. And the United States, I think, has signalled an openness to allowing the International Criminal Court to play this role, and perhaps could even support it playing that role. There was an announcement by Secretary of State Tony Blinken that the U.S. not only believed that there were war crimes being committed by Russia but was committed to supporting efforts to bring those responsible to account. And, while the I.C.C. wasn’t specifically mentioned, that was in the shadow of the moment when I.C.C. was beginning its investigation.

It just seems like the United States will never want a court with as much teeth as it could have because it could mean accountability for Americans, which I imagine even a Democratic Administration does not want. Do you think that is incorrect?

Well, I’d like to think that is incorrect. The answer to that critique is, well, if the U.S. doesn’t engage in actions that might fall within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, then it doesn’t have a problem. So, you know, if you don’t commit war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, then you’re not going to be subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. And, with the International Criminal Court,its jurisdiction is limited—it’s important to remember. So it’s limited to having jurisdiction over state parties to the I.C.C., or where crimes have been committed on the territory of the state party. So the reason that the situation in Afghanistan fell within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court was because the United States was alleged to have committed a crime on the territory of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a party to the I.C.C.

But do I think the U.S. is ever going to join the Rome Statute? Certainly not anytime soon. Maybe never. But could the U.S. find a way to get comfortable with the idea of a robust International Criminal Court to investigate these major international crimes? I think it might be able to. The way the International Criminal Court is structured is basically to say: not only does it have these limits on its jurisdiction, which are pretty significant, but it also provides an out for states that are willing to investigate the situation themselves in a serious way, or prosecute potential crimes in a serious way. That falls outside of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, because the I.C.C. has what’s called complementarity provisions, which basically mean that it doesn’t investigate a situation if a state has adequately dealt with it itself.

Yes. I just wonder whether the dissonance would be too great if America was really putting forward the idea of the importance of the court but not fully participating itself.

I think there are different kinds of participation. There is participation as a member of the court, and then there is participation supporting the work of the court by providing evidence and information the U.S. has unique access to, or by helping to apprehend those who have been indicted by the court. Would there be hypocrisy there? I mean, I think there would be an argument many would make that the U.S. should submit itself to the I.C.C. jurisdiction. Again, I don’t think that that’s ever going to be successful. But I think it would be welcomed by members of the court if the U.S. was willing to shift from animosity and trying to tear down the court to coöperative engagement, even if it’s not willing to fully submit itself to the jurisdiction of the court.

Or coöperative engagement about American allies.

Absolutely. There is a way in which we are seeing an evolution where more and more states are willing to exercise universal jurisdiction over these crimes. So even in Europe you see a number of prosecutions for crimes that have been committed not in the jurisdiction of the state that’s holding the trial but outside of that state. So Germany, for instance, recently convicted a Syrian military officer for crimes committed in the course of the Syrian war, and those were not committed in Germany, obviously. And a number of European states have similar statutes. And it could be the case that the U.S. would see that, look, with this rise of universal-jurisdiction statutes in various states, the idea of evading responsibility if there are serious allegations of a significant international crime is not very realistic. And having a host of domestic courts with different kinds of—maybe not particularly adequate—due-process protections may be worse than having a functioning, effective I.C.C. So it may be one of the things where there’s no evading some level of responsibility going forward.

What hope do you have about whether this war and the response to it could end up strengthening international law?

I want to acknowledge the fact that there have been major war crimes committed in the last many years, and Syria is the most obvious case where I think we need to engage in a little bit of introspection about why it is that all this machinery of the international system is coming into play now when we saw so little of it coming into play in the Syrian situation. And part of that was just structurally that Syria was not participating in an effort to bring itself to justice. So, you know, here we have Ukraine, which is very eager to have international-justice mechanisms come into play and prosecute these international crimes that are being committed by Russia on its territory. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that we can overstate the degree to which this is brand new, and suddenly these crimes are being committed, because a lot of crimes have been committed in the last twenty or thirty years that haven’t elicited the same kind of response.

But what I do think that we see here is a moment when a lot of what we had begun to take for granted is—suddenly, we realize—incredibly important. And we need tools to be able to enforce these rules. We have kind of taken it for granted for the past few decades that we live in a world in which a state like Russia is not going to attack and try to absorb a state like Ukraine. You know, the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force has been pretty successful in preventing interstate wars—that is, preventing wars by states against other states. There have been lots of civil wars, and a lot of failed states, and there have been a number of fights within states, but there have not been as many wars between states. And this is a bit of a wake-up call. Because, if Russia can invade Ukraine, and bring the might of a major global power to bear on it and potentially absorb it, then all bets are off. The entire foundation of the international legal system that we’ve all come to assume we can count on is suddenly up for grabs, and no longer stable in the way we all assumed that it was.

And I think part of the reason you’re seeing this reaction of the international community to this moment is precisely that everybody realizes that their own safety and security is at risk if Ukraine falls. And they might be next. And I think that’s why you suddenly see states willing to take steps that, you know, until now they have been reluctant to take in terms of supporting investigations of international courts into war crimes, and sanctioning Russia for illegal actions, and basically every international legal tool has kind of been thrown at Russia. And I think that’s because they all see themselves at risk. And I think this has the possibility of reviving a system that’s been falling aside. That is the hopeful piece of this.

I do wonder if that’s more of a European reaction, though. The system that was created—that we’ve been operating under since the Second World War—was made at a time when Western powers had lots of colonies all around the world. Do you think countries elsewhere feel that that system was working, and that you couldn’t be invaded, and so on? I think you see this in some ways with who has and hasn’t gone along and supported sanctions.

I’d point to the fact that you had a hundred and forty states in the General Assembly vote to condemn Russian aggression, and only five states, including Russia, voting against the condemnation. So it isn’t just Western Europe that is condemning the actions of the Russians. It’s countries from all around the world. And I think they do see that this is a kind of fundamental threat to their existence. Some of them do point out that the system hasn’t been working perfectly well for them, either, for a long time. And you saw a number of African countries abstaining from the General Assembly resolution. And there are a number of possible reasons for that. But one of them may be this sort of sense of, like, “Oh, now you care about international law? You know, we’ve been suffering for some time.” And I think that’s a critique the international system needs to take incredibly seriously as we think about how we move on from here.

Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.

More:UkraineRussiaVladimir PutinJoe BidenVolodymyr ZelenskyGeneva ConventionsWar Crimes

 

More on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

• How far is the West prepared to go for Ukraine?
• What a negotiated settlement might look like.
• Putin has punished his shrinking inner circle for misjudging the war.
• The Biden official who pierced Putin’s “sanction-proof” economy.
• The foreign students who saw Ukraine as a path to a better life.
• Why do so many Russians say they support the war?

John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Ukraine Crisis

A Russian Scholar on Putin’s Revisionist History

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The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize - Sunil Khilnani (New Yorker) - Review of Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of British Empire

O anti-Niall Ferguson, o historiador britânico (na verdade escocês) que, em Empire, traçou um retrato bastante elogioso do colonialismo e do imperialismo britânico no mundo. 

The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize

The world’s biggest colonial power prided itself on being a liberal democracy. Was this part of the problem?

By Sunil Khilnani

The New Yorker, March 28, 2022

  At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways—child marriage, widow immolation, headhunting. Among the edifiers was a Devonshire-born rector’s son named Henry Hugh Tudor. Hughie, as he was known to Winston Churchill and his other chums, pops up so reliably in colonial outposts with outsized body counts that his story can seem a “Where’s Waldo?” of empire.

He’s Churchill’s garrison-mate in Bangalore in 1895—a time of “messes and barbarism,” the future Prime Minister complained in a note to his mum. As the century turns, Tudor is battling Boers on the veldt; then it’s back to India, and on to occupied Egypt. Following a decorated stint as a smoke-screen artist in the trenches of the First World War, he’s in command of a gendarmerie, nicknamed Tudor’s Toughs, that opens fire in a Dublin stadium in 1920—an assault during a search for I.R.A. assassins which leaves dozens of civilians dead or wounded. Prime Minister David Lloyd George delights in rumors that Tudor’s Toughs were killing two Sinn Féinners for every murdered loyalist. Later, even the military’s chief of staff marvelled at how nonchalantly the men spoke of those killings, tallying them up as though they were runs in a cricket match; Tudor and his “scallywags” were out of control. It didn’t matter: Churchill, soon to be Secretary of State for the Colonies, had Tudor’s back.

Imperial subjects, of course, sometimes found their own solutions to such problems. A hard-line British field marshal, atop the I.R.A. hit list, was gunned down in Belgravia in 1922. Tudor, worried he would be next, made himself scarce. By the following year, he and his Irish paramilitaries were propagating their tactics for suppressing natives in the British-controlled Mandate of Palestine, Churchill having decided that the violence-prone Tudor was just the fellow to train the colonial police. A letter from Tudor to Churchill that I recently came across crystallizes all the insouciance, cynicism, greed, callousness, and errant judgment of empire. He opens by telling Churchill that he’s just commanded his troops to slaughter Adwan Bedouins who had been marching on Amman to protest high taxes levied on them by their notoriously extravagant emir. This tribe was “invariably friendly to Great Britain,” Tudor writes, a touch ruefully. But, he adds, “politics are not my affair.”

Tudor had cheery news to impart, too. Not only could the Mandate be a “wonderful tourist country,” but prospectors had discovered vast sums’ worth of potash in the Dead Sea valley. Should Britain appropriate the resources and increase the policing budget, its difficulties in the region would “smooth out,” he told Churchill, assuring him that Palestinians would be easier to pacify than the Irish: “They are a different people, and it’s unlikely that the Arab if handled firmly will ever do much more than agitate and talk.”

In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots. The actions of a few European empires have invited harsh scrutiny, too—Belgium’s conduct in Congo, France’s in Algeria, and Portugal’s in Angola and Mozambique. Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine. “Legacy of Violence” (Knopf), her astringent new history of the British Empire, brings detailed context to individual stories like Tudor’s. Visiting archives in a dozen countries over four continents, examining hundreds of oral histories, and drawing on the work of social historians and political theorists, Elkins traces the Empire’s arc across centuries and theatres of crisis. As the sole imperial power that remained a liberal democracy throughout the twentieth century, Britain claimed to be distinct from Europe’s colonial powers in its commitment to bringing rule of law, enlightened principles, and social progress to its colonies. Elkins contends that Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it.

More than half a century after the British Empire entered its endgame, historians are nowhere near a full assessment of the carnage shrouded by its preacherly cant, and, later, by administrators’ bonfires of documents as they prepared for the last boat out. The richest sense we have of the damage inflicted on colonies tends to come in regional silos. Elkins doggedly links them, moving from South Africa to India, Ireland to Palestine, and on to Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden, revealing a pattern visible only in the long view. As military and police personnel crisscrossed the Empire, spreading techniques of repression far and wide, the higher-ups rarely checked such violence. Instead, over and again, they gave it the full force of law—sustaining more brutality still.

It’s startling to recall that, not so long ago, leading historians accepted the images of empire’s end that were projected in propagandistic newsreels—governors-general in plumed helmets and starched whites inviting grateful natives to the podium. “Next to no fighting,” concluded the Cambridge historian John Gallagher, one of the Old Guard whom Elkins has in her sights. She counters that the practice of blowing Indian sepoys from cannons after the 1857 uprising, the Maxim-gun slaughter of Mahdists in the eighteen-nineties, the use of concentration camps in the Boer wars, the massacre of peaceful protesters in Amritsar, reprisal killings and the sacking of civilian property in Ireland: all this state-inflicted savagery was just the British Empire warming up. In her account, the British paramilitary cadre, many of them trained by Tudor’s Toughs, became the basis of an increasingly violent ruling culture that sought to reassert control in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Empire needed colonial resources to rebuild a depleted economy and to bulk up a waning geopolitical status.

We misunderstand the end of empire, Elkins says, because the old liberal imperial historiography focussed more on high policy—the stratagems of what Gallagher and his cohort termed the “official mind”—than on the acts of get-it-done enforcers in the field. The striking thing, she suggests, is not how much the denizens of Whitehall didn’t grasp about the retail-level mayhem but, rather, how much they did. Elkins draws on the work of Uday Singh Mehta, Karuna Mantena, and other theorists who argue that British liberalism, for all its talk of universal freedoms, served the goals of empire by rationalizing its domination of other peoples. (Colonial pupils, in their political short pants, required firm instruction before they could be awarded their liberties.) Indeed, the main reason that the British Empire was able to sustain itself for more than two centuries, she maintains, was that the British model of state violence came wrapped in this “velvet glove” of liberal reform.

Add to its longevity an unrivalled global footprint, and the British Empire’s baneful legacy may well have been deeper and more diffuse than that of any other modern state. Was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism? It’s a question that Elkins’s new book implicitly poses. And her first book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Imperial Reckoning” (2005), is a lesson in not discounting her pointed inferences too swiftly.

When the British Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James reflected, in old age, on his standard-setting account of the Haitian Revolution against the French, he chided himself for an overreliance on white witnesses. Had he worked a little harder, he believed, he might have unearthed more Haitian perspectives. A vast amount of what is understood today about the experience of colonial subjects still comes through white, Western eyes, often those of ruling administrators, missionaries, and travellers. “Imperial Reckoning” did its part to rectify that great imbalance in the historiography of the British Empire.

It probed one of the grimmest periods in British colonial history: the suppression of a nineteen-fifties uprising of a clandestine Kenyan nationalist movement, the Mau Mau, whose name subsequently became a byword for native barbarity. Elkins, working in British and Kenyan archives as a young scholar, noticed gaps in the record-keeping from this period which suggested that the British had culled the files. Some incriminating documents had survived, though, and she started gathering evidence that the British had detained far more than the eighty thousand Kenyans they had previously acknowledged, and that among the tactics the Empire used against the Mau Mau was outright torture. (“With possibly a few exceptions,” read one report she uncovered, the detainees “are of the type which understands and reacts to violence.”) Thus began what she termed an “odyssey” of research, including field work in rural Kenya—potholed roads, battered Subaru—which ultimately brought to light the harrowing accounts of some three hundred survivors of the campaign against the Mau Mau.

In “Imperial Reckoning,” Elkins moved deftly between oral and archival histories to describe a British strategy of detention, beatings, starvation, torture, forced hard labor, rape, and castration, designed to break the resistance of a people, the Kikuyu, who, having been dispossessed by the British and then, during the Second World War, enlisted to fight for them, had plenty of reason to resist. In 1957, a British colonial governor informed his superiors in London that “violent shock” was the only way to break down hard-core adherents, justifying a brutal campaign called Operation Progress. More than a million men, women, and children were forced into barbed-wire village compounds and concentration camps for reëducation in circumstances that the colony’s attorney general at the time called “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.”

When Elkins’s book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, some scholars raised an eyebrow; they suggested that she had libelled the British by printing undersubstantiated claims. Other critics questioned her tally of the Mau Mau dead and missing: up to three hundred thousand, she said, with scant evidence. But aspects of her argument were vindicated in 2011, six years after publication, when her research helped make history.

That year, London barristers representing the Kenya Human Rights Commission and seeking damages for elderly Kenyan survivors of torture introduced Elkins as an expert witness, along with the British historians David Anderson and Huw Bennett. During the discovery process, the British government was pressed to explain a memo detailing the airlift of documents from Nairobi. After decades of denial, the government acknowledged spiriting masses of files out of Kenya—and, it emerged, out of thirty-six other former colonies. The files had been stashed in a high-security storage facility, in Hanslope Park, that the Foreign Office shared with British intelligence agencies. Documents were now unearthed which confirmed key aspects of both Elkins’s account and that of the Mau Mau survivors. In a landmark reparations case, fifty-two hundred Kenyans who were brutalized during the insurrection were each awarded around thirty-eight hundred pounds, and the U.K. government publicly acknowledged using torture in controlling its empire.

“Legacy of Violence,” like Elkins’s earlier book, shuttles between horrific details and historical and thematic contexts. And it, too, relies occasionally on questionable statistics—for instance, an outdated finding that nearly two-thirds of the British public take pride in the British Empire. (By 2020, as Elkins’s own source indicates, that proportion had declined to less than a third.) Yet some of what she recounts is devastating, including the story of how British dark arts were distilled in interwar Palestine, propelling the grisliness of liberal imperialism to another level.

By the late nineteen-thirties, a revolt was under way in Palestine, ignited by radical populist movements that had sprung up in the towns and cities. Dispossessed rural Arabs flocked to these urban areas as Zionist colonies rapidly expanded to accommodate Jewish refugees from Europe. To quash the uprising, the policing apparatus that Hughie Tudor had helped build grew to twenty-five thousand men, including two Army divisions. (Tudor himself, fearful of continued I.R.A. death threats, had decided on a quieter life as a fish trader in Newfoundland.) Elkins, building on recent work by Laleh Khalili, Georgina Sinclair, and other historians, shows how imperial tactics converged in that fighting force.

From Ireland had come paramilitary techniques and the use of armored cars; from Mesopotamia, expertise in aerial bombing and the strafing of villages; from South Africa, the use of Dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects; from India, interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement; and, from the Raj’s North-West Frontier, the use of human shields to clear land mines. As one soldier recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners, “If there was any land mines it was them that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it.” Other practices seem to have been homegrown by the British in Palestine: night raids on suspect communities, oil-soaked sand stuffed down native throats, open-air cages for holding villagers, mass demolitions of houses. While perfecting such tactics on the Palestinians, Elkins suggests, officers were gaining skills that were put to use when they were later dispatched to Aden (in the south of present-day Yemen), to the Gold Coast, to Northern Rhodesia, to Kenya, and to Cyprus. Palestine was, in short, the Empire’s leading atelier of coercive repression.

To legitimate the control machine in Palestine, the British raked their empire again, this time for ways of securing legal impunity. Emergency codes were imported from Ireland, to permit collective reprisals, detention, and the destruction of property, and from India, to authorize censorship and deportation. Although military officials sought martial law in the Mandate, the Attorney and Solicitor Generals in London denied the request. They worried about the precedent of the Crown ceding power to the military, and, besides, Palestinian courts might well object that no state of war existed. A more elegant solution was to augment the power of the civilian executive. A 1937 order conferred on him the right to make whatever regulations “appear to him in his unfettered discretion to be necessary or expedient for securing the public safety, the defense of Palestine, the maintenance of public order and the suppression of mutiny, rebellion and riot, and for maintaining supplies and services essential to the life of the community.” British troops and police were thus free to operate “virtually without restraint or fear of prosecution,” Elkins writes. Just as with the repertoire of torture and suppression, these guides to imperial impunity would become models for future campaigns.

Defenders of empire like the historian Niall Ferguson insist that the rule of law proved Britain’s most important gift to its colonies when, in time, they achieved independence. In Elkins’s view, the emergency provisions that abrogated the rule of law were the vital legacy. Insecure local leaders, some handpicked in Whitehall, struggled to govern polities in which colonial policy had sharpened social divisions. To stifle political opposition, they readily turned to colonial emergency codes and legal sleights. Helping them enact the templates were “Security Liaison Officers”: M.I.5 agents, embedded in the former colonies, who would steward the incoming nationalist cadres into the methods of intelligence gathering, interrogation, and domestic security. Ghanaian leaders, shortly after their country became independent, in 1957, cribbed from British preventive-detention laws the right to detain citizens for five years without trial. In the nineteen-sixties, Malaysian officials, building on British models, enacted laws permitting suspects to be detained indefinitely. In the seventies, Indian leaders used colonial emergency powers embedded into their constitution to censor the press, jail political opposition, clear urban slums and even sterilize their residents.

But it was in post-Mandate Palestine that the legacy of imperial violence was most enduring. The British had secured their hold on the territory by issuing promissory notes to multiple claimants: Arab élites were offered the prospect of an independent kingdom or nation; Zionists, the prospect of a national home; European allies, the prospect of a carve-up. With the land thrice promised and its peoples played against one another by shifting British policies, the cycles of violence and repression ahead had been underwritten. Not long after a 1947 United Nations vote divided the Mandate into Jewish and Arab states, Israeli security forces began emulating British methods, from killing civilians to flattening whole villages. In 1952, a British-controlled concern that excavated potash and other Dead Sea minerals—the immense value of which Hughie Tudor had extolled to Churchill—passed quietly into the control of the Israeli government. In 1969, when Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir asserted that “there was no such thing as Palestinians,” she was, in a way, asserting an erasure of recognition and rights which the British Empire had set in motion half a century before.

Yet “Legacy of Violence” goes further than detailing the depravities of empire; it has a larger thesis to advance, concerning liberal imperialism’s extraordinary resilience. The test of that thesis must be its ability to explain not only how the Empire endured but also how it ended. And it’s here that Elkins’s account runs into trouble.

I grew up in the post-colonial states of Kenya, Senegal, and India, and one constant was hearing stirring stories about “fathers of the nation” on the state-run radio. Later, encountering scholarship that reflected Gallagher’s argument that decolonization was “not usually a victory won by freedom-fighters,” I came to view nationalist mythmaking with a cooler eye. A cooler eye, but never quite a cold one: Was what Gallagher had called the great, wave-tossed ship of empire really so imperturbable, I wondered, that it went down “without agony” at its own command? Did the doings of those local heroes amount to nothing?

So I sat up when Elkins, in her opening pages, says that the story of liberal imperialism is “also a story of demands from below.” One lively chapter centers on C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and other Black anti-colonial radicals of the nineteen-thirties and forties, who called out the hypocrisies of empire in lacerating prose. She also follows Cypriot activists of the nineteen-fifties as they partnered with Greek lawyers and the London-based Movement for Colonial Freedom to bring a British campaign of murder and torture to international attention. But Elkins rules that, ultimately, these and other nonviolent challenges by colonial subjects and their allies around the world “did little to alter coercion’s grip on the empire.”

Cartoon by Liza Donnelly

For her, all such efforts were bound to be impotent because she is convinced of liberal imperialism’s ability to absorb and neutralize criticism—something that more brittle ideologies like Nazi Lebensraum could not do. Britain’s colonial subjects protested, questions were raised in Parliament, inquiries were commissioned, reports were printed and shelved, and, in the end, repressive capacities emerged with tempered strength. Liberal imperialism, in Elkins’s telling, was thus a self-repairing, ever-expanding web. When her theory corners her into an account of the final unravelling of empire couched largely in terms of high-policy calculations about when to forgo power and instead pursue influence, it’s as if the ghosts of imperial history that she set out to vanquish had returned to inhabit her book.

The story of the British Empire in the twentieth century is also a story of forced retraction. Unfortunately, the forensic skill that Elkins applies to empire’s incarnadine claws is less in evidence when it comes to the nationalist tactics that, decade by decade, helped loosen their grip. As Lee Kuan Yew, who worked to throw off the British in Singapore, famously noted, one way for the weaker to defy the more powerful was to become a poisonous shrimp: “they sting.” In 1930, Gandhi launched the Salt Satyagraha with a twenty-five-day march protesting a tax imposed by the British salt monopoly—a brilliant bit of counterpropaganda theatre that goes unmentioned in this book. In the wake of that nonviolent mass mobilization, with the international press watching, the British were limited in the violence they could deploy in India.

As Elkins has it, Gandhian approaches were ineffectual because the only language empire really understood was violence. She details at length how Zionists like Menachem Begin and his Irgun, having been schooled by Tudor’s legatees in the deployment of terror, used attacks and assassinations to expel the British. Colonized peoples in Africa and elsewhere wrote off nonviolence less quickly. Regardless of how incremental or indirect the progress could seem in the moment, empire’s financial or reputational costs could still be ratcheted up beyond what was supportable.

In the late nineteen-fifties, in the southeastern African protectorate of Nyasaland (now Malawi), the Nyasaland African Congress employed tactics of noncoöperation to protest a federation established by British rulers with white-settler-dominated Southern and Northern Rhodesia. The British declared emergency rule and killed some fifty Africans—atrocities that the survivors labored to bring to the attention of the world. The British were pressured into investigating whether the emergency rule was necessary, resulting in a report by Justice Patrick Devlin. Elkins’s loyalty to her quasi-Foucauldian theory of liberal imperialism, as an all-encompassing net of power, leads her to minimize the report’s impact. But this one didn’t gather dust on a shelf. Weeks after the Devlin report arraigned the colonial government for running a “police state,” representatives of Ghana cited that stark conclusion in the U.N., as momentum gathered for a landmark resolution: a formal call for an end to colonial rule. In the next five years, the British withdrew from eleven colonies, Nyasaland among them.

Although Elkins nods from time to time at empire’s variety and “kaleidoscopic processes,” her quest for a unifying theory sends her gliding over significant distinctions in the governance of wildly different colonial territories—some crowded treaty ports, some sparse hinterlands, some with settler populations, some holdings acquired in the eighteenth century and others in the twentieth. She posits the presence of a “colonial state”—enforcer of order and dispenser of violence across the various jurisdictions of empire—and yet the capacity to deliver and control violence was hardly uniform. In the late nineteen-thirties, as the Arab revolt in the Mandate was under way, plantation and factory workers rose up in Jamaica, whose bananas and sugar were more immediately valuable than even the potash of Palestine. Initially, true to form, the British killed resisters, but when protests intensified the Empire didn’t unleash the Dobermans and quell the workers. Instead, Britain started making concessions. Six years later, the Jamaicans had gained universal suffrage, becoming one of the first British colonies to be fully enfranchised. Hughie Tudor was one face of empire; it had others.

By the time Elkins considers the case of Aden, which she identifies as the end point of her great arc of post-1945 imperial violence, she seems to have lost the energy to insert another colony into her nuance-vaporizing ideological apparatus: the port city, with its century of colonization and its final overthrow, is dispatched in a single paragraph. Perhaps theories of imperial power this grand don’t need to descend to the specific case?

Just as the nature of colonial governance varied across time and space, so did liberalism, whose “perfidiousness” is as much a bête noire of Elkins’s book as empire is. Strains of liberalism embraced or accommodated paternalism, racism, and authoritarianism, helping provide intellectual cover for unimaginable cruelty. Yet liberal philosophies also elaborated ideas of autonomy, individuality, and collective self-rule that, in turn, seeded principles about legitimacy that anti-colonial thinkers and activists enlisted to their cause. Amid colonial condescension about their peoples’ civilizational adequacy, they sought to teach their Western liberal counterparts to imagine politics in genuinely universalist terms.

In Elkins’s book, however, the contributions of intellectuals like Tagore and Yeats are notable only as “accounts of suffering and resilience,” just as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Josiah Mwangi Kariuki are valued for their “firsthand accounts of suffering.” Ingrained presumptions can be hard for even self-described “revisionist” historians of empire to shake off, and one such presumption involves the division of intellectual labor. The judgment about whose ideas and actions counted in the making of history is taken as the prerogative of the professional historian, usually Western. The primary job of colonial subjects, for these historians, is to have borne witness: their task, in Elkins’s account, is to pen “wrenching indictments” that leave “a trail of evidence” for her and her colleagues to follow.

Near the end of “Legacy of Violence,” Elkins revisits the campaign to bring justice to the Mau Mau victims in the London courts, describing a climactic moment when, after her work in the Kenyan uplands to recover the survivors’ stories, she helped expose “liberal imperialism’s underbelly” to the world. To underline what she was up against in that recovery effort, she invokes, as she often does, a line from Kenya’s first leader, Jomo Kenyatta: “Let us agree that we shall never refer to the past.” Curiously, though, she fails to acknowledge that, shortly after those words were spoken, government officials and private citizens in Kenya embarked on a decades-long effort to surmount British stonewalling and reconstruct the nation’s colonial history. Remembering wasn’t just the white man’s burden. Mau Mau veterans and former detainees, too, were piecing together their past, bridling at being cast as mere spectators to how their history was shaped. Although the movement was long banned by the government, a study by the historian Wunyabari O. Maloba noted that, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, former members were gathering evidence to counter the narratives being produced by scholars. Soon, there were nearly two hundred groups of lay historians. Assisting them were renegade British ex-colonial officers like John Nottingham, who had married the sister of a Mau Mau general, helped Kariuki write his memoir, and been working to connect movement activists to professional historians, Elkins included.

A salutary methodological precept of Elkins’s is that, because official records can’t be trusted, historical sourcing must be broad and deep. So I was surprised to see such a shrewd scholar repeatedly minimize the impact of anti-colonial thinkers and actors. As she once again evoked her “arduous” struggle in Kenya, meanwhile skating over a colonized people’s greater struggle to bring their own history to light, I found myself reminded of the stirring hero tales of my childhood—tales that, as Elkins reminds us, should not always be taken whole. Like the historians she draws on, she has added important dimension to our still partial understanding of the British Empire’s sadism and hypocrisy, joining the novelists and the dramatists who, as she says, have reminded the world “that alternative narratives lie buried beneath the rubble of power.” Yet oversimplified theories are themselves prone to bury other histories. The ungainly truth is that liberal thought has been a resource for repression and resistance alike, and theories of imperial power impatient with this ambiguity may not withstand the scrutiny they deserve. ♦

Published in the print edition of the April 4, 2022, issue, with the headline “Cruel Britannia.”