Monthly Archives: October 2020

My Weekly Reader 30 October 2020.

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            The Twentieth Century might well be called “The Century of Monsters.”  Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong wielded absolute power over great states.[1]  They used that power to murderous ends from a combination of ideological fervor and personal pathology.  Hitler and now Stalin have been the subjects of an abundant biographies, each one seeking to understand what they did and why they did it. 

            Ronald Suny, an experienced and admired historian of the Soviet Union has added a first installment on his own biography of Stalin.[2]  It covers the years from Stalin’s 1878 birth in a remote backwater of the Tsarist Empire to the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917.  The isolated, inhuman, psychopathic dictator is hard to recognize in his greener days.  Yes, he had a drunken, violent father.  He also had a loving mother.  Yes, he grew up in poverty and a society where the central government disdained his peripheral culture.  So did many Europeans. 

            In another time and place, perhaps he would have been something different.[3]  But he was born into a Russian Empire facing grave difficulties under bad leadership.  The Tsar-Liberator Alexander II had ended serfdom on terms disadvantageous to the freed people; he had sought to reform the law courts; he had begun the process of teaching Russians how to govern themselves at the lowest levels.  For all of these reforms he had been much hated and finally murdered.  His successors had embarked on a rapid industrialization that filled cities with unhappy toilers and a growing middle class.  However, the rulers had clamped down on reforms while mercilessly hunting dissenters and fostering anti-Semitism.  Defeat by Japan in 1905 wrenched political concessions from Tsar Nicholas II.  He soon repented this weakness.  

            Stalin came of age politically in this seething cauldron of unrest.  He encountered Marxism during a brief passage through a seminary run on much the same lines as the Russian state.  He encountered Lenin in books well before he met the man who led the extreme faction of Russia’s fragmented Marxist movement.  For Lenin, Stalin organized strikes (which often turned violent), robbed banks, and did time in Siberian prison camps.  For himself, Stalin schemed against other Bolsheviks closer to the center of power.[4]  It became a life-long trait. 

            The First World War created a final crisis for the Tsarist regime.  Calling up millions of peasants for military service (along with their draft animals) created a terrible food crisis in 1915 and 1916.  Incompetent management of both the war and the economic mobilization to support it cost the government the last shreds of credibility with the mass of Russians. 

            Stalin played only a mid-rank role in the Revolution that followed.  Food riots broke out in the capital city, Saint Petersburg, in February 1917.  These triggered a revolt against the whole regime that flashed across the empire.  The first victors were the established political parties: conventional bourgeois liberal parties and the moderate wing of the Social Democratic party.  The Bolsheviks found their real base of power for the subsequent October Revolution in the industrial workers.  Only then would Lenin—and Stalin—be on the road to dictatorship. 

[1] Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini sought absolute power, but resistance from powerful forces in their own countries clapped a stopper on their tricks before they could reach the heights of their successors. 

[2] Ronald G. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (2020).  Reviewed by Joshua Rubinstein, WSJ, 29 October 2020. 

[3] Although it is hard to say what else he might have been.  A book reviewer?  “Eugen Onegin.  BAM!  BAM!”

[4] There has long been a suspicion that he worked as a police agent to thin out the competition. 

The Asian Century 9.

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            Until the middle of the Nineteenth Century, both China and Japan fended off Western imperialism in their different ways.  Then Japan abruptly shifted course to imitate some aspects of Western states in order to preserve both its political independence and cultural identity.  China lagged behind on making this necessary shift.  Ultimately, a modernizing political movement, the Kuomintang (KMT, called the Nationalists by Americans) gained a rough control over China. 

The results of historical events so briefly described proved harrowing for many millions of people.  A semi-Westernized Japan pursued empire in China and Southeast Asia, then was smashed to bits in the Second World War.  The Chinese Communists triumphed in the civil war with the Nationalists that followed the Second World War in Asia. 

Communism’s victory in China wrong-footed wartime American plans for the postwar order in East Asia.  Americans leaders (or at least Franklin D. Roosevelt) had envisioned Nationalist China as a new great power that would co-operate with Americans efforts to build a peaceful and prosperous Asia.  Instead, the Peoples’ Republic of China aligned with the Soviet Union in the Cold War.  The Korea War and the wars in Indochina followed.  Only in the 1970s did the hostility begin to decline.  Since the late 1970s, China has vigorously remodeled its economy into the second largest in the world and, more recently, sought a leading role in international affairs. 

In these efforts, many things have been bent to serve the nation’s interests.  One of those things has been History.  One aspect of China’s historical revisionism has been China’s role in the struggle against Japan.  Once upon a time, if they knew what was good for them, Chinese historians played down the role of the corrupt and incompetent Nationalist government while playing up the role of the Communists.  Now, if they know what is good for them, Chinese historians have begun to argue for the importance of China’s resistance to Japan not only for China, but for the whole world.  By resisting Japanese aggression from 1931’s Manchurian Incident to full-scale war from 1937 onward, China bought time for the Western countries to gather their wits and then their military resources.  From 1941 onward, China figured as the chief battlefield and military opponent of Japan.[1]  From this point of view, the American combined arms offensive across the Pacific and the British counter-attack in Burma were side-shows. 

In its struggle against Japan, China received little help from Western countries.  After the war, China received little for the eventual victory over Japan.  Now, suggest the Chinese historians, it is time for that bill to be paid by according China the leading role in Asia.[2] 

Probably they are taking their cue from Western historians who examined the roots of European appeasement policies in the 1930s.  Those historians have argued that not moral rot, but strategic and economic realities hampered Britain and France from making an early stand against Hitler.  They needed time to rearm or they would be defeated.  Germany’s re-militarization of the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland were all necessary sacrifices in this delaying action.[3]  The difference is that Western historians have no policy agenda. 

[1] For background, see: https://waroftheworldblog.com/2019/07/17/the-asian-century-5-17-july-2019/ 

[2] Rana Mitter, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (2020), reviewed by Howard French, WSJ, 14 October 2020. 

[3] For a counter-attack on this view, see Tim Bouverie, Appeasement (2019). 

The [Retrospective] Biden Plan for Dealing with the Coronavirus.

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            Here’s a hard truth.  According to the New York Times, “While the federal government has authority over interstate and foreign quarantine measures, states have the primary authority to impose and enforce quarantine and isolation measures within their own borders, as part of the police powers conferred to states by the 10th Amendment of the Constitution,…” According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “states and cities are responsible for announcing curfews, shelters in place, or other restrictions and safety measures.”[1]  Joe Biden’s criticism of Donald Trump’s unquestionable mishandling of the corona virus pandemic needs to be seen in this light. 

Biden: “[I]f [Trump] had listened to me and others and acted just one week earlier to deal with this virus, there’d be 36,000 fewer people dead.”[2] 

NYT: “[T]here is no record of Mr. Biden urging adoption of those measures before March 8, nor does Mr. Trump have the power to compel their nationwide enforcement.”  “[W]hile the presidential pulpit might have incentivized governors and mayors to act quicker, Mr. Trump lacks the authority to impose and enforce quarantine and isolation measures in states and cities.” 

Furthermore, Biden “did not suggest locking down cities or limiting social gatherings.” 

Biden: “Without a uniform plan and guidance from the federal government that state and local leaders can use to inform their reopening plans, this is going to continue to be worse than it would’ve been otherwise.” 

NYT: “Though they were nonbinding and criticized by some as vague, the White House did release guidelines in mid-April about “opening up American again”.”  “Of the 30 states that had planned to begin reopening in early May, most had failed to meet those guidelines.” 

            Joe Biden spent the years from 1970 to 2016 as a public employee, often an important one.  You would think that he knows the distribution of powers under the Constitution.  Or you would think that he at least reads the newspapers.  Apparently not. 

            President Trump could have done much more to encourage responsible behavior on the part of his supporters, but he did not.  That’s putting it mildly.   

State governors and city mayors deserve much of the blame or credit for their response to the coronavirus.[3]  That’s where the real authority lay. 

            Possibly another hard truth.  We’re likely to have a reliable vaccine by the end of 2020 or early 2021.  Joe Biden will be inaugurated as President pro tempore in March 2021.  A massive production effort, already under preparation, will make mass vaccination possible by Spring or early Summer 2021.  Biden will claim credit for having whipped the coronavirus. 

[1] Linda Qiu,  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/politics/trump-authority.html

[2] Linda Qiu, “Fact-Checking Biden on the Coronavirus and His Own Record,” NYT, 11 July 2020.  “A study by infectious disease modelers at Columbia University [found]… that about 36,000 deaths could have been prevented through early May had social distancing measures been enacted by March 8, rather than in mid-March.”

[3] For an example, see: https://waroftheworldblog.com/2020/04/22/chronology-of-a-tragedy/ 

My Weekly Reader 21 October 2020.

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            The Constitution reared up from a foundation of compromises.  Among these compromises was the toleration of slavery by states where it had little to no importance.  Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution required the return of any fugitive from “service or labor” to her/his master from another state into which s/he had fled.  In sum, the Union mattered more than did slavery or the enslaved people.  A law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, defined the legal mechanisms for returning fugitives.  However, as opposition to slavery increased in the North, local governments and private citizens often refused to co-operate or even obstructed the slave-catchers operating among them.  Therefore, another compromise, the Compromise of 1850, introduced a much more rigorous Fugitive Slave Act.  The new Act further inflamed Northern opinion.  

            Northern opinion divided more than this brief sketch suggests.  Anti-Black racism ran neck and neck with abolitionism in many places.  Many parts of the North valued their economic connections to the South and to slavery.[1]  Competition between political parties sometimes diverged from principled stands on issues.  All these forces came together in New York City before the Civil War.[2] 

            The city’s government dangled as a puppet of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party organization.  Tammany pols played on the hostility to Blacks felt by the (predominantly Irish) immigrants they were organizing to vote early and often.  Judges and prosecutors had often crawled out of the same swamp.  New York City policemen sometimes moon-lighted as slave-catchers.  Businessmen who wanted to accommodate Southern customers turned a blind eye to it all. 

            Slave-owners would pay rewards for the return of run-aways, so Blacks in New York—people of color in an overwhelmingly White city–were deer in the jacklights[3] of slave-catchers.  This hunt only intensified with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which offered handsome fees to both slave-catchers and the judges who approved their transfer Southward.  Lured by the money, the slave-catchers sometimes kidnapped—and judges regularly approved the transfer of—free Blacks who were knowingly misidentified as fugitives.  Applying the term not just to New York, but to the whole of the North, one historian has labeled this the “Reverse Underground Railroad.”[4] 

            Highly publicized stories of free Blacks kidnapped into slavery appalled a growing audience of Northern Whites.  Five Black boys were kidnapped from Philadelphia in 1825, then four survivors providentially returned to tell their story of the Black “Trail of Tears” that ran from the Upper South to the new cotton lands of the Southwest.  In 1853, Solomon Northup wrote of his “12 Yeas a Slave.”  Not for nothing has Elizabeth Varon called her book on the Union troops Armies of Deliverance. 

[1] Banks financed the cotton trade and its spendthrift planters; insurers and ship-owners profited from the massive cotton exports. 

[2] Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (2020), reviewed by Harold Holzer, WSJ, 19 October 2020. 

[3] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlighting 

[4] Richard Bell, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey (2019), reviewed by David S. Reynolds, WSJ, 17 October 2019.  .