A defesa de Israel como parte da preservação dos valores e princípios civilizatórios - Gerald Baker (WSJ)

Israel’s act of gallantry

OPINION    |    FREE EXPRESSION

Israel Defends Itself—and May Save Western Civilization

 Gerald Baker 

WSJ , Sept. 30, 2024

“The equivocation of Biden, Harris and other leaders should cause us all to feel a degree of shame.

How will we ever repay the debt we owe Israel?

What the Jewish state has done in the past year—for its own defense, but in the process and not coincidentally for the security of all of us—will rank among the most important contributions to the defense of Western civilization in the past three-quarters of a century.

Having been hit with a devastating attack on its people, beyond the fetid imagining of some of the vilest antisemites, Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world. 

It has eliminated thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades. It has, with extraordinary tactical accuracy, dispatched some of the masterminds of the worst evil on the planet, including most recently Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. It has repelled and then reversed the previously inexorably advancing power of one of the world’s most terrifying autocracies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has demonstrated to all the West’s foes, including Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing, that our system of free markets and free people, and the voluntary alliance network we have constructed to defend it, generates resources and capabilities of vast technical superiority. Above all, it has provided an unexpected but crucial reminder to our enemies that there are at least some willing and able to pursue and defeat them whatever the risk to our own lives and resources. 

The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us—its nominal allies, especially in the U.S.—are “thank you” and “how can we help?”

Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of Oct. 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself,” repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.

Before Israel had even buried its dead last October and as Hamas was busy murdering its hostages, there were calls for Israel to cease fire. For a year we have heard our leaders’ “balanced” condemnations of Hamas and its terror masters on the one hand and the Jewish state on the other, a false equivalence that says more about the moral disorder in our own politics than about Israel’s motives and actions.

In Europe, they have gone even further, as usual, rewarding Hamas and Hezbollah by nominally recognizing a nonexistent Palestinian state and prosecuting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bogus war-crimes charges.

Do they not get that in the end we have to make a choice: our ally, on the front lines of defense against barbarism or our enemies, those who literally want to see us all buried? 

Fortunately for all of us, it seems Israel is prevailing despite the chorus of hecklers.

Perhaps all this sounds too blithe for skeptical readers; or at least premature given the rising expectation of a much wider conflict to come. And it is true that there has been awful loss of innocent lives in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere that undoubtedly fuels the ire of the enemy across the world. What if Mr. Netanyahu and his government’s aggressive prosecution proves a Pyrrhic victory?

But that wider conflict was perhaps always inevitable, given Iran’s stated objectives and its consistent efforts to achieve them. We can say two things tentatively about that long-feared wider confrontation. First, the strategic tactical, intelligence and technological genius Israel has demonstrated over the past year might have done so much damage to Iran’s proxy armies and their military and political leaders that they will be ill-prepared and equipped for the bigger struggle to come, and Israel—and, let’s hope, reliable allies—better placed to defeat its enemies. Second, having observed this Israeli superiority over that time and eagerness not to bring the destruction on itself a wide war would surely bring, perhaps Iran will be deterred.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few, Winston Churchill said of the men of the Royal Air Force after they had repelled Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. (Reminder to some recently confused “conservatives”: The former were the good guys; the latter the real villains.)

We should echo those words today as we watch in awe what a country smaller in area than New Jersey, with a population less than North Carolina’s and an economy smaller than that of Washington state, has done for all of us.

As Israelis solemnly mark a year since Oct. 7, we should not only redouble our expressions of sympathy and solidarity. We should show them our gratitude, and if we are willing to be really honest, acknowledge a little of our own shame.”

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Comentário PRA:

“Salvando” a civilização ocidental à custa de milhares de civis inocentes. A liderança atual de Israel se entregou à mesma fé de outrora dos conquistadores cristãos de povos supostamente adeptos do paganismo.

Não li, mas não gostei: a mentalidade censória das ditaduras: Izabella Tabarovsky sobre Pasternak e outros (WSJ)

 Vocês conhecem a origem da frase "Não li e não gostei"? Sabem de onde vem?

Pois é da campanha odiosa levada contra o escritor "soviético" Boris Pasternak, que acabava de ser contemplado com o Prêmio Nobel de Literatura, por seu famoso Doutor Jivago (publicado em italiano pela primeira vez em 1958, por ser considerado "anti-soviético" na "pátria do Socialismo") e objeto de recriminações "populares" feita pela União dos Escritores Soviéticos. 

A frase soviética era “ne chital, no osuzhdayu”— ou seja “não li, mas desaprovo”. 

Este meu blog também é cultura. Mas, leiam o artigo desta russa no Tablet, republicado no Wall Street Journal deste domingo, o jornal mais capitalista que existe.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Uma postagem antiga no Diplomatizzando, relembrada por Daniel Pinto.

domingo, 21 de junho de 2020

A mentalidade soviética nos EUA, de Pasternak a George Floyd - Izabella Tabarovsky (Wilson Center, WSJ)

The American Soviet Mentality

Collective demonization invades our culture

BY

IZABELLA TABAROVSKY

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, JUNE 15, 2020
THE AMERICAN SOVIET MENTALITY

Russians are fond of quoting Sergei Dovlatov, a dissident Soviet writer who emigrated to the United States in 1979: “We continuously curse Comrade Stalin, and, naturally, with good reason. And yet I want to ask: who wrote four million denunciations?” It wasn’t the fearsome heads of Soviet secret police who did that, he said. It was ordinary people.

Collective demonizations of prominent cultural figures were an integral part of the Soviet culture of denunciation that pervaded every workplace and apartment building. Perhaps the most famous such episode began on Oct. 23, 1958, when the Nobel committee informed Soviet writer Boris Pasternak that he had been selected for the Nobel Prize in literature—and plunged the writer’s life into hell. Ever since Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago had been first published the previous year (in Italy, since the writer could not publish it at home) the Communist Party and the Soviet literary establishment had their knives out for him. To the establishment, the Nobel Prize added insult to grave injury.

Within days, Pasternak was a target of a massive public vilification campaign. The country’s prestigious Literary Newspaper launched the assault with an article titled “Unanimous Condemnation” and an official statement by the Soviet Writers’ Union—a powerful organization whose primary function was to exercise control over its members, including by giving access to exclusive benefits and basic material necessities unavailable to ordinary citizens. The two articles expressed the union’s sense that in view of Pasternak’s hostility and slander of the Soviet people, socialism, world peace, and all progressive and revolutionary movements, he no longer deserved the proud title of Soviet Writer. The union therefore expelled him from its ranks.

A few days later, the paper dedicated an entire page to what it presented as the public outcry over Pasternak’s imputed treachery. Collected under the massive headline “Anger and Indignation: Soviet people condemn the actions of B. Pasternak” were a condemnatory editorial, a denunciation by a group of influential Moscow writers, and outraged letters that the paper claimed to have received from readers.

The campaign against Pasternak went on for months. Having played out in the central press, it moved to local outlets and jumped over into nonmedia institutions, with the writer now castigated at obligatory political meetings at factories, research institutes, universities, and collective farms. None of those who joined the chorus of condemnation, naturally, had read the novel—it would not be formally published in the USSR until 30 years later. But that did not stop them from mouthing the made-up charges leveled against the writer. It was during that campaign that the Soviet catchphrase “ne chital, no osuzhdayu”—“didn’t read, but disapprove”—was born: Pasternak’s accusers had coined it to protect themselves against suspicions of having come in contact with the seditious material. Days after accepting the Nobel Prize, Pasternak was forced to decline it. Yet demonization continued unabated.

Some of the greatest names in Soviet culture became targets of collective condemnations—composers Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev; writers Anna Akhmatova and Iosif Brodsky; and many others. Bouts of hounding could go on for months and years, destroying people’s lives, health and, undoubtedly, ability to create. (The brutal onslaught undermined Pasternak’s health. He died from lung cancer a year and a half later.) But the practice wasn’t reserved for the greats alone. Factories, universities, schools, and research institutes were all suitable venues for collectively raking over the coals a hapless, ideologically ungrounded colleague who, say, failed to show up for the “voluntary-obligatory,” as a Soviet cliché went, Saturday cleanups at a local park, or a scientist who wanted to emigrate. The system also demanded expressions of collective condemnations with regards to various political matters: machinations of imperialism and reactionary forces, Israeli aggression against peaceful Arab states, the anti-Soviet international Zionist conspiracy. It was simply part of life.

Twitter has been used as a platform for exercises in unanimous condemnation for as long as it has existed. Countless careers and lives have been ruined as outraged mobs have descended on people whose social media gaffes or old teenage behavior were held up to public scorn and judged to be deplorable and unforgivable. But it wasn’t until the past couple of weeks that the similarity of our current culture with the Soviet practice of collective hounding presented itself to me with such stark clarity. Perhaps it was the specific professions and the cultural institutions involved—and the specific acts of writers banding together to abuse and cancel their colleagues—that brought that sordid history back.

On June 3, The New York Times published an opinion piece that much of its progressive staff found offensive and dangerous. (The author, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, had called to send in the military to curb the violence and looting that accompanied the nationwide protests against the killing of George Floyd.) The targets of their unanimous condemnation, which was gleefully joined by the Twitter proletariat, which took pleasure in helping the once-august newspaper shred itself to pieces in public, were New York Times’ opinion section editor James Bennet, who had ultimate authority for publishing the piece, though he hadn’t supervised its editing, and op-ed staff editor and writer Bari Weiss (a former Tablet staffer).

Weiss had nothing to do with editing or publishing the piece. On June 4, however, she posted a Twitter thread characterizing the internal turmoil at the Times as a “civil war” between the “(mostly young) wokes” who “call themselves liberals and progressives” and the “(mostly 40+) liberals” who adhere to “the principles of civil libertarianism.” She attributed the behavior of the “wokes” to their “safetyism” worldview, in which “the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.”

It was just one journalist’s opinion, but to Weiss’ colleagues her semi-unflattering description of the split felt like an intolerable attack against the collective. Although Weiss did not name anyone in either the “woke” or the older “liberal” camp, her younger colleagues felt collectively attacked and slandered. They lashed out. Pretty soon, Weiss was trending on Twitter.

As the mob’s fury kicked into high gear, the language of collective outrage grew increasingly strident, even violent. Goldie Taylor, writer and editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, queried in a since-deleted tweet why Weiss “still got her teeth.” With heads rolling at the Times—James Bennet resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was reassigned to the newsroom—one member of the staff asked for Weiss to be fired for having bad-mouthed “her younger newsroom colleagues” and insulted “all of our foreign correspondents who have actually reported from civil wars.” (It was unclear how she did that, other than having used the phrase “civil war” as a metaphor.)

Mehdi Hasan, a columnist with the Intercept, opined to his 880,000 Twitter followers that it would be strange if Weiss retained her job now that Bennet had been removed. He suggested that her thread had “mocked” her nonwhite colleagues. (It did not.) In a follow-up tweet Hasan went further, suggesting that to defend Weiss would make one a bad anti-racist—a threat based on a deeply manipulated interpretation of Weiss’ post, yet powerful enough to stop his followers from making the mistake.

All of us who came out of the Soviet system bear scars of the practice of unanimous condemnation, whether we ourselves had been targets or participants in it or not. It is partly why Soviet immigrants are often so averse to any expressions of collectivism: We have seen its ugliest expressions in our own lives and our friends’ and families’ lives. It is impossible to read the chastising remarks of Soviet writers, for whom Pasternak had been a friend and a mentor, without a sense of deep shame. Shame over the perfidy and lack of decency on display. Shame at the misrepresentations and perversions of truth. Shame at the virtue signaling and the closing of rank. Shame over the momentary and, we now know, fleeting triumph of mediocrity over talent.

It is also impossible to read them without the nagging question: How would I have behaved in their shoes? Would I, too, have succumbed to the pressure? Would I, too, have betrayed, condemned, cast a stone? I used to feel grateful that we had left the USSR before Soviet life had put me to that test. How strange and devastating to realize that these moral tests are now before us again in America.

In a collectivist culture, one hoped-for result of group condemnations is control—both over the target of abuse and the broader society. When sufficiently broad levels of society realize that the price of nonconformity is being publicly humiliated, expelled from the community of “people of goodwill” (another Soviet cliché) and cut off from sources of income, the powers that be need to work less hard to enforce the rules.

But while the policy in the USSR was by and large set by the authorities, it would be too simplistic to imagine that those below had no choices, and didn’t often join in these rituals gladly, whether to obtain some real or imagined benefit for themselves, or to salve internal psychic wounds, or to take pleasure in the exercise of cruelty toward a person who had been declared to be a legitimate target of the collective.

According to Olga Ivinskaya, who was Pasternak’s lover and companion during those years, the party brass, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, was only partly to blame for the nonpublication of Doctor Zhivago. The literary establishment played an important role as well. Reading over her recollections of the meetings at the Writers’ Union, it is hard not to suspect that some of its members were motivated not so much by fear of reprisals or ideological fervor but by simple conformity and professional jealousy. Some, I imagine, would have only been too happy to put spokes in the wheels of a writer whose novel—banned at home, but published abroad—was being translated into dozens of languages and who had been awarded the world’s most prestigious literary prize.

For the regular people—those outside prestigious cultural institutions—participation in local versions of collective hounding was not without its benefits, either. It could be an opportunity to eliminate a personal enemy or someone who was more successful and, perhaps, occupied a position you craved. You could join in condemning a neighbor at your cramped communal flat, calculating that once she was gone, you could add some precious extra square meters to your living space.

And yet even among this dismal landscape, there were those who refused to join in this ugly rite. A few writers, for example, refused to participate in demonizing Pasternak. And is it karma or just a coincidence that most of these people—many of them dissidents, who were outside the literary establishment—remain beloved among Russian readers today, while the writings of the insiders, ones who betrayed and condemned, have been forgotten?

The mobs that perform the unanimous condemnation rituals of today do not follow orders from above. But that does not diminish their power to exert pressure on those under their influence. Those of us who came out of the collectivist Soviet culture understand these dynamics instinctively. You invoked the “didn’t read, but disapprove” mantra not only to protect yourself from suspicions about your reading choices but also to communicate an eagerness to be part of the kollektiv—no matter what destructive action was next on the kollektiv’s agenda. You preemptively surrendered your personal agency in order to be in unison with the group. And this is understandable in a way: Merging with the crowd feels much better than standing alone.

Those who remember the Soviet system understand the danger of letting the practice of collective denunciation run amok. But you don’t have to imagine an American Stalin in the White House to see where first the toleration, then the normalization, and now the legitimization and rewarding of this ugly practice is taking us.

Americans have discovered the way in which fear of collective disapproval breeds self-censorship and silence, which impoverish public life and creative work. The double life one ends up leading—one where there is a growing gap between one’s public and private selves—eventually begins to feel oppressive. For a significant portion of Soviet intelligentsia (artists, doctors, scientists), the burden of leading this double life played an important role in their deciding to emigrate.

Those who join in the hounding face their own hazards. The more loyalty you pledge to a group that expects you to participate in rituals of collective demonization, the more it will ask of you and the more you, too, will feel controlled. How much of your own autonomy as a thinking, feeling person are you willing to sacrifice to the collective? What inner compromises are you willing to make for the sake of being part of the group? Which personal relationships are you willing to give up?

From my vantage point, this cultural moment in these United States feels incredibly precarious. The practice of collective condemnation feels like an assertion of a culture that ultimately tramples on the individual and creates an oppressive society. Whether that society looks like Soviet Russia, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Castro’s Cuba, or today’s China, or something uniquely 21st-century American, the failure of institutions and individuals to stand up to mob rule is no longer an option we can afford.

Izabella Tabarovsky is a researcher with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center focusing on the politics of historical memory in the former Soviet Union.

‘Why We Fight’ Review: Give Peace a (Bigger) Chance - Book Review, by Adam Kuper (WSJ)

‘Why We Fight’ Review: Give Peace a (Bigger) Chance

An economist’s analysis of armed conflict takes lessons from game theory to discover how to head off wars before they happen.

By 

Adam Kuper 

WSJ, May 6, 2022 11:05 am ET 

On July 30, 1932, exactly 6 months before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Albert Einstein sent a despairing letter to Sigmund Freud. “Dear Professor Freud,” Einstein wrote. “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilisation as we know it.” 

Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace

Rulers and their arms-merchant cronies manipulate public opinion, Einstein reflected. But “how is it possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions?” Propaganda had to be part of any explanation. The government “has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb,” he wrote. “This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and makes its tool of them.” But as a rationalist, Einstein was still baffled. “How is it these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives?” Is it down to human nature, he wondered? Perhaps “man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction.”

In his response, Freud wrote that men, like all male animals, are programmed to settle conflicts by fighting. “Violent compulsions” may sometimes be counterbalanced by “ties of sentiment,” but only within narrow bounds. 

An economist looks at the causes of war, a mismatched pair seek the source of the Nile and an essayist considers the end. 

In “Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace,” Christopher Blattman, an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago, draws on recent economic theories to address the great questions of war and peace that have been debated for millennia.

Mr. Blattman agrees with Freud that male aggression is easily aroused and that all sorts of intergroup violence follow a similar pattern. “When I say war, I don’t just mean countries duking it out,” Mr. Blattman writes. “I mean any kind of prolonged, violent struggle between groups. That includes villages, clans, gangs, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, and nations. Wildly different as these may be, their origins have much in common.”

Mr. Blattman offers a string of anecdotes about feuding gangs in Chicago and Medellín, Colombia. But scale matters. Gang wars, punch-ups between two lots of sports fans, even medieval sieges (among the author’s other examples) are very different in many important ways from the total wars of the modern world. As Mr. Blattman observes, wars between nations are less common now than ever before precisely because the consequences are so terrifying. And there is another critical difference: National governments can, in theory, control violence within their boundaries; but there is no international government that can put an end to wars between nations.

Perhaps men are indeed easily roused to martial fervor, but it is up to the leaders of nations to make decisions about war and peace. “In my view, there are no good or bad leaders,” Mr. Blattman writes. “There are only constrained and unconstrained ones.” Democratic leaders have to take their voters into account. The media ask hard questions. The system imposes checks on executive power. And so, for nearly a century now, democracies have not gone to war against other democracies.

Autocrats, meanwhile—particularly if they run resource-rich economies— find it easier to let their soldiers and civilians bear the costs of war while they indulge their own ambitions and fantasies. Consequently, Mr. Blattman writes, “it’s the places ruled by strongmen with few checks that appear to be the most warlike with neighbors.”

Some autocrats may go to war to distract the population from more immediate concerns. Others are out for vengeance or glory, or are committed to some religious crusade. These are but a few examples of what economists call the agency problem. (You expect your agent to act in your interests, but he has interests of his own.)

As an economist, Mr. Blattman assumes that, leaving aside the occasional madman, leaders—democratically elected or otherwise—weigh their options and seek to make optimal choices. Game theory, the science of strategy, “works out how one side will behave based on what it believes its opponent will do.” Applied to the study of auctions and bargaining by John Nash, winning him a Nobel Prize in economics in 1994, game theory lays down strategies for predicting and countering your opponent’s moves in any negotiation, helping you decide when to push your luck, when to bluff and when to fold. Most leaders don’t know anything about the arcane models of economics, but experience has taught them the logic of deal-making.

Game theory assumes, among other things, that “both groups have the same information and agree on the probabilities” of outcomes. As Mr. Blattman points out, however, “the world is seldom so stable, transparent, or easy to assess.” Negotiators often operate in semidarkness, where crucial information is lacking or potentially misleading. When much is uncertain, judgments are more likely to be impulsive, directed by habit, emotion and prejudices. Confirmation bias takes over, along with other cognitive shortcuts. Groupthink rules.

To understand decision-making under these conditions, Mr. Blattman turns to the work of Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on how people make decisions in the real world. “Humans are not well described by the rational-agent model,” Mr. Kahneman observed in his 2011 bestseller, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” We are all sometimes less than rational. Every cool Dr. Jekyll is liable to turn into a hot Mr. Hyde, particularly when he is pressed for time and operating with partial and conflicting information. The slow thinker in us is logical, respectful of evidence, ready to consider objections. The fast thinker is impulsive and passionate. And, of course, the fast thinker is more likely to make a catastrophic misjudgment. 

The cause of peace is best served, Mr. Blattman concludes, through a mix of institutional constraints and slow thinking: “interdependence, checks and balances, rules and enforcement, and interventions.” Both Einstein and Freud looked forward, more in hope than expectation, to an effective role for international bodies. Mr. Blattman accepts that these institutions may have moral influence, but it is seldom decisive. Economic interdependence raises the cost of conflict and gives negotiators bargaining tools, but leaders who control oil and gas fields are largely unaccountable to their citizens. Financial punishment will sometimes bring vulnerable governments to the negotiating table, but sanctions are leaky, and it is hard to target only the right people. Mediators may build trust and facilitate discreet communication, yet they can only give a helping hand.

Almost at the very moment that “Why We Fight” was published, its conclusions were being put to a grim real-world test as Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine. Mr. Blattman’s list of war’s precipitating causes seems to fit the case well enough. The political opposition, the media—even Mr. Putin’s inner circle of generals and spooks—had been silenced. The Russian public was fed fake news. Wishful thinking took over. In thrall to a fantastic dream of a greater Russia, Mr. Putin miscalculated. He overestimated the fitness of his own armed forces and underestimated the resilience of his opponents. He was too confident that Russia’s natural resources and financial reserves would insulate his regime from sanctions. Will he now accept that he blundered, act rationally and cut his losses?

The terrible logic of war suggests that a genuine negotiation will begin only when both parties are forced to recognize that a stalemate has been reached. If Mr. Putin has to withdraw, other autocrats may rethink their options. But should he be able to claim a win, the demonstration effect could be catastrophic.

—Mr. Kuper is a fellow of the British Academy. His next book is “The Museum of Other People.”