Islamism vs. Islam

This is a reply to a piece by Hatem Bazian "Religious Authority, State Power and Revolution"

Religion has always been in the business of legitimating the authority of the state - be it Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or Hinduism.  The modern state is an exception - its legitimacy is manufactured by its claim to superior economic rationality - that it - its superior capacity to deliver material goods.  It has been working rather well for the advanced capitalist countries, and it worked for a while for the developmental states challenging the hegemony of the advanced capitalist states.  

However, the capacity of capitalist economies to deliver the goodies is fraught with problems of social stratification. This means that some will get them in excess, while most will suffer shortages.  This posed a serious threat to the legitimacy of secular capitalist states, exploited by various Communist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries that promised to distribute the goodies to all.  Western Europe staved off that challenge by the creation of a welfare state that combined superior economic rationality of capitalism with economic redistribution of communism.  The developmental states, otoh, failed on one or both of these fronts.  The Soviet style economy achieved redistribution but started failing behind on economic rationality.  The developmental states of the Middle East (except perhaps Turkey) failed to achieve redistribution and to achieve economic rationality on a par with advanced capitalist economies.

As a result, these developmental states lost their legitimacy.  In Eastern Europe, this was manifested by the "downfall of communism" and the implementation of Western European welfare capitalism.  In the Middle East, this loss of legitimacy of the secular developmental state was a bit more complicated.  The wholesale transfer of welfare capitalism  along Eastern European lines was not feasible, so the loss of legitimacy resulted in growing repression by secular elites to maintain their power by brute force.  This further eroded the legitimacy of these states, and the need for an alternative emerged.  That alternative was Islamism - which must NOT, and I repeat, MUST NOT be confused with Islam.  

Islamism is a form ideology that the US historian Barrington Moore called "Catonism" after the Roman politician Cato the Elder.  Catonism is an ideological reaction of elites whose traditional grip on power has been challenged by economic development and modernization.  It represents the glorification of "tradition" or rather its idealized image to counter the ideological influences of modernity.  Catonism is thus characterized by anti-intellectualism, hatred of foreigners, and the advocacy of stern "traditional" virtues. 

Islamism is a form of Catonism manufactured by state elites as an ideological weapon against their democratic opponents.  PakistaniGeneral Zia ul Haq is a good example - he restored to Islamism as an ideological weapon against his opponent Ali Bhutto.  This was a pure political move that has nothing to do with religion, tradition, culture and what not.  Zia ul Haq used religion in a way politicians use any form of knowledge or culture - for support rather than enlightenment.  This, btw, not that much different from the way Soviet leaders used Marxism or for that matter the way the Roman Emperor Constantine used Christianity.  In all instances, they selected certain traits from a certain body of theological or philosophical thought to manufacture ideology that legitimizes the power of a political elite or the state.  

It is important to note that this recourse to religion as "Catonist" ideology owes its status to political-military elites rather than to religious scholars.  The latter are basically nothing more than mouthpieces for the political-military elites that use them.  However, it also creates an opportunity for religious scholars to grab power for themselves.  This happens in situations of political vacuum, when power is "dropped on the floor" so to speak.  This happened in Iran where secular authority was undermined first by the Western powers conspiring against the Mosaddegh government and then by the downfall of the corrupt Pahlavi regime.  At that point, there was no institutional force in Iran capable of governing a state except the Islamic clergy that used this opportunity to grab the power for themselves.

The Iranian model is fundamentally not replicable in other "Islamist" states as long as secular military-political elites can maintain their grip on state power.  In those countries, Islamist scholars will either play the role of mouthpieces on the payroll of these elites, or elsewhere they will be suppressed by force if they try to pull an Iran, as it recently happened in Egypt. 

The bottom line is that Islamism and its adherents have as much to do with Islam as the Nazi Sturmabteilung have to do with Christianity.  Both are gatherings of thugs used by reactionary political forces to grab state power and destroy their liberal/democratic opposition in countries that happen to have Islamic or Christian majorities.  That is to say, this has nothing to do with religion, theology, or philosophy and everything to do with the fascist bid to grab state power.

Math and Science

Mathematics is to science what ketchup is to food - it improves the taste of otherwise unpalatable dishes, but it kills more subtle flavors of everything else. This is particularly true of social sciences, where the availability of cheap computer numerical data manipulation programs fundamentally altered not only the direction of research, but also what kinds of data are being collected.

Since qualitative data are more difficult to process by computer software, their collection often takes the back seat in favor of quantitative – or rather pseudo-quantitative - data collected by opinion surveys.  They are pseudo-quantitative, because they use numerical scales representing intensity (e.g. strongly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree not disagree, etc.), but they cannot be processed as “real” numbers. 

For “real” numbers, such as 1,2, 3, 4 etc. we can say that the difference between 1 and 2 is the same as that between 3 and 4, and that 4 is twice as big as 2.  However, when those numbers are being used as mere symbols representing multiple choices in an opinion survey, they cease to be “real” numbers.  They can be replaced with letters a,b,c,d, etc. or even pictograms representing different choices cooked up by survey designers. The reason why they are not “real” numbers but pictograms is that we cannot say that a distance between choice a and choice b (e.g. strongly agree and moderately agree) is the same as between b and c (moderately agree and neither agree nor disagree). 

Research shows that subjective perceptions of quantities themselves differ from their numerical properties.  For example, a 5 percent change in probability is perceived differently depending on the overall probability of an outcome (i.e. whether it is 10%, 50% or 90%).  When it comes to opinions and perceptions, that level of subjectivity is even higher.  For example, if I only “moderately agree” with an opinion on, say, capital punishment, it may not take much to persuade me to be an agnostic (neither agree nor disagree).  However, if I have a strong feeling (strongly agree or strongly disagree), it typically takes much more to move me into the “moderate agreement/disagreement” direction. 

Yet, assigning numbers to these options creates a false illusion that they represent numerical quantities.  More conscientious researchers may refrain from treating them like “real” numbers and limit their analysis to reporting frequency counts, but the availability of cheap data processing software make such analysis look “pedestrian” and a pressure is applied to use more “advanced” techniques.  I am speaking from experience here.  Some time ago, an anonymous peer reviewer of my paper using frequency-based contingency tables showing distributions of opinions collected in a survey called this technique “pedestrian” and suggested one based on regression.  In other words, let’s treat them as “real” numbers. This advice reminds me of the old economist joke – he could not find a can opener on an uninhabited island, so he assumed he had one. 

The problem is not limited to the assumptions about quantitative properties of the data, but the kind of research that gains dominance in social sciences with the advent of cheap computational tools.  This new research paradigm favors questions that can be answered by numerical or quasi-numerical data, because such data are easy to collect and process.  Hence the proliferation of various opinion surveys.  The idiocy of this approach lies not only in the misinterpretation of numerical data, but more importantly, in intellectual laziness is fosters.  Researchers abandon the difficult intellectual task of trying to understand how people think and under what conditions in favor of giving them simplistic multiple choice tests involving pre-fabricated opinion statements, because such simplistic multiple choice tests are easy to score and process by computers.  If this is not the proverbial drunkard’s search, I do not know what is.

Another implication of this observation is that science, or at least social science, is not progress achieved by systematic testing of scientific theories as Karl Popper believed, but rather movements between what Imre Lakatos called “scientific research programmes.”  The purpose of a scientific research programme is not theory testing, as Popper believed, but ‘problem shift” – that is, the construction of auxiliary hypotheses that render contradicting evidence irrelevant to save core assumptions of a favored theory from empirical refutation.  Problem shifts may take the form of crude “gate keeping” of the orthodoxy, for example in economics, as decried by John Kenneth Galbraith, or more subtle forms, such as changes in academic fads or the availability of new instruments of scientific research. 

The use of computer software utilizing mathematical analysis in social science represents such a problem shift due to new tools.  The problems researched and theories proposed to explain them tend to be limited to those that lend themselves to being processed by computerized tools.  This puts social science on the trajectory to become what theology was in the Middle Ages, an impressive logically coherent intellectual edifice whose empirical relevance and predictive power is on a par with that of a chimp randomly pushing computer buttons.  

Why I find many radical lefties mildly annoying, but libertarians and right wingers repulsive ...

... even if many of their ideas do not diverge that much.

So, I find many people on the left annoying.  It is not that I dislike their political position. Au contraire, while I am not a radical, I find myself much closer to the position championed by the left than that found on the center – be it demand for universal health care and public services, to the opposition to wars and the national security state, to defense of human and civil rights, to support of immigrants and gay marriages, and to the demand for a fundamental systemic change and redistribution of wealth. 

My annoyance with the lefties is more meta-cognitive (more about in a moment) than ideological.  To be more precise – lefties love abstractions.  They love systems and systemic forces while paying little or no attention to “men behind the curtain.”  For them, the world is a clockwork mechanism in which things follow a preordained order just as Leibniz claimed. Except that they put Leibniz on his head and claim that this preordained world order is evil, as it serves the interests of “world capital” (whatever that is).  And when they do not kvetch about evils of capitalism, they escape into hagiography of their patron saints (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, etc.) and interpretations of their holy scriptures as the ultimate truth about the world in which we live.   It is that copious knee-jerk recourse to scriptures and abstractions that I find irritating.

The usefulness of abstraction lies in its explanatory power - but if it obscures more than it explains - it is not only useless, but it becomes a noise making apparatus and thus it is dangerous.  A belief that there is a unified "world capital' with unified interests that are attained most of the time is the worst kind of conspiracism that there is. A claim that there is a cabal of a few hundred puppet masters secretly pulling strings more believable than this crap.

For anyone who came to any understanding how complex systems work, it is hard to avoid a conclusion how indeterminate those systems are.  That is to say, even in the ideal world of mathematics its is impossible to find *the* best solution or outcome, as many different solutions are possible.  A good view on this has been provided by Paul Ormerod in his book "The death of economics"  and also by Kenneth Arrow (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem).  So even if the "best outcome" cannot be found in the work of mathematical abstraction, one can only imagine how messy it becomes in the real world plagued not only with measurement errors, but also subjective perceptions, conflicting interests, coincidences, unpredictability, plain stupidity, inflated egos and the like.

A fear of circumstances beyond human control is as old as humanity itself.  It is the reason for magic and religion that gave an illusion of control - or at least understanding- of what is unpredictable, uncontrollable or inexplicable.  Of course, our modern "rational" world does not believe in magic anymore, so we have to invent "rational" magic and its shamans.  Hence the demand for the consultants who crunch their numbers to create an illusion that decision makes whom they serve are "rational" and "know what they are doing."  This is understandable - these managers and decision makers do not want to appear clueless and impotent to the public.

What I find surprising, though, is that the critics of these managers and decision makers not only swallow this illusion of control raw, but elevate it to even higher level by purporting its near omnipotence and infallibility - that even the managerial class itself would have problems believing.  This goes well beyond the ordinary fear of the uncontrollable.  I see two possible explanations of that - psychological and functional.

The psychological explanation is that people with high IQ often have a certain form of mental disorder manifested in the compulsive seeking of order and regularities where none exist.  This has been nicely portrayed in films like "A beautiful mind"  or "Pi" .  In this particular case the relatively high intelligence of these individuals is a disadvantage rather than advantage in the same way as a high power engine is a disadvantage in a vehicle with faulty brakes.  If I ride a 50cc moped and my brakes fail, I can still manage to avoid crashing by braking with my feet, but when I drive a 1000+ hp sportster and the brakes fail, the crash is nearly certain.  Ditto for high IQ individuals who fail to balance their System 2 rationality with System 1 sense of reality - they are lost in their own abstractions and often crash like protagonists in "A beautiful mind" and "Pi".

The functional explanation is that people who had high hopes of achieving "systemic changes" - as many lefties did - but realized that their hopes failed to materialize want to make sure that this was not due to their own faults or mistakes.  To do so, they portray their adversaries as far more powerful and in control than they actually are, to create an illusion that they were overwhelmed by a force majeure that was impossible to overcome.  It is easier to accept a failure when you believe that there was nothing that could be done to win, than when you suspect that you fucked things up by your inflexibility, dogmatism, intransigence, partisan bickering, and inability to work with others.  

Those two explanations often work in tandem.  They also point out to why so many people find it so irritating to be around many lefties - they are highly intelligent and on the correct side of the issues - but mad as hatters. 

To be sure, this infatuation with abstraction and doctrinaire inflexibility is not confined to the left.  It is also widely spread among libertarians and right wingers.  Yet, while I view doctrinaire lefties as mildly annoying I have visceral gut revulsion toward right wingers and libertarians, even if some of their claims are not that far removed from those of doctrinaire lefties.   

The reason goes beyond ideological claims or even rational and gets into the realm of meta-rationality of cognitive frameworks, of ways of processing information.  There seem to be two different such frameworks, which on the pain of great simplification I can label as core- boundary balanced, or core or boundary-centric. 

Some cognitive scientists, e.g. my former professor at Rutgers Eviatar Zerubavel  see cognition in terms of spatial relations, as ‘fields’ that have a “center’ and ‘boundaries.’ A good illustration is the concept of ‘neighborhood’ that has its geographical center and it is delineated by its boundaries on the periphery.  The “core” is the essential characteristics that objects denoted by it possess, e.g. to “be red” the light must have a wavelength of about 650 nm.  The “boundary” is the line that separates members denoted by that concept from all nonmembers, e.g. orange light that has a wavelength of about 590 nm.  I selected the color spectrum as an illustration quite deliberately, to underscore the fact that boundaries are often fuzzy and set rather arbitrarily.  All people who are not color blind are likely to agree what red and orange colors are, but you will not find such agreement to separate these colors near their boundaries. 

With that in mind, it is possible to define a concept in two fundamentally different ways – by focusing on its core features i.e. the essential characteristics that objects denoted by it possess, or by focusing on its boundaries i.e. features that separate its members from non-members.  In normal discourse you need of course both – you obviously have to know what the core features are, but you also need to be able identify the boundaries.  However, it is also possible to pay far more attention either the core or the boundary, which I believe defines different cognitive frameworks of processing information.

The cognitive framework that focuses primarily on the core i.e. the central defining attributes but also pays nontrivial attention to boundaries is a “balanced” one.  This is how the so-called normal cognition operates.  We are primarily concerned what the core attributes of a concept are, and that is why we construct definitions, but we also want to know how to separate members denoted by that concept from non-members.  That is why we devise operational rules.  However, a “balanced” framework accepts the fact that there are “borderline cases” than cannot be easily decide to be “in” or “out” and can live with this ambiguity.

In “unbalanced” frameworks, however, two things can happen.  One is excessive focus on the core features and the neglect of boundaries.  This is the way mystics and hippies see the world – everything is connected with everything else and everything falls into one gigantic category of one organic fluctuating being.  All has the same core principle, therefore all is one.  On the other extreme is the framework that excessively focuses on the boundaries while neglecting the core.  This is the nit-picking or academic hair splitting style of thinking that focuses on minute differences while forgetting profound similarities.

These cognitive frameworks also guide our political and everyday life thinking.  A good example is attitudes toward immigration.  The balanced framework is that we are a nation of immigrants and our core principle is tolerance of newcomers, but we certainly need to have some reasonable border control.  However, this border control does not need to be perfect, and we can live with this imperfection as long as our core values of tolerance are not too severely strained.  The core-centric framework focuses mainly on our core value – tolerance, and ignores the boundary issue.  These folks essentially believe that we should have open boundaries and welcome everyone who shows up.  The boundary-centric framework is its opposite – it does not care about core principles, all it cares is protection of boundaries.  Hence its propensity for building fences, "drawing lines in the sand,"  and dismay toward those who refuse to "toe the line."

Core- and boundary-focused frameworks are not necessarily mutually exclusive – certain individuals may adopt both, albeit in different situations.   But that is a subject for another discussion.  More to the point, people using any of these “unbalanced” frameworks often appear annoying to those who use different ones.  I would characterize myself as using the balanced framework, perhaps with a slight tilt toward the core-centric side.  That is perhaps why I find people with core-centric frameworks – the mystics, the hippies, the floozies, the dope-heads and the like funny, sometimes mildly annoying, but not particularly repulsive.  This also explains why I find the core-centric abstractions of many lefties – such as those that see only “world capitalism” and fail to draw boundaries between, say, a welfare state capitalism of Sweden or European Union, and the nasty neoliberal variety found in the US, funny and sometimes mildly annoying, but generally tolerable.  

It is boundary-centered people that I find repulsive and their views viscerally antithetical to mine, regardless of what they actually claim. My visceral disgust toward right wing and libertarian frames is grounded not as much in the content of their ideas, some of which may make sense, but in their boundary-centered cognitive framework that in my book is synonymous with extreme mental rigidity and doctrinaire hair splitting.  It is not rational but meta-rational, that is far more influential on what and how we think than commonly believed.

Public money private pockets

Recently the Washington Post published an article on the transit center being built in Silver Spring, MD where I live.  In short, the center is unsafe and unusable even before it opens because of shoddy design and construction.  This is of considerable interest to me for two reasons.  First, I am using public transit daily, and having to walk around a defunct transit center adds considerable inconvenience to my daily commute.  Second, that boondoggle is financed by my tax dollars.

A typical reaction of the gullible American public to this news can be summarized in one line "government failure"  and it is sheer nonsense.  Yet another example of how the American mind is inculcated with business propaganda.  

I do not think it is the local government failure.  It is the utter failure of the "public-private partnership" business model that prevails in this country.  Public money private pockets, which is a recipe for private businesses milking the taxpayer and cutting corners to boost their bottom line.  Bloomberg News had an article on this not long ago showing that comparable public projects cost about twice as much in the US than in EU where the governments have much greater capacity for designing and implementing projects themselves instead of contracting them out .  

The "defense" industry has been using this public- private partnership scheme for decades to milk the taxpayers for military gadgets, and the developers are following the suit.  Another good example is the newly opened Paint Branch High School in Montgomery County (also financed with my tax dollars) - inferior design, shabby construction, and the taxpayers footing the bill for what is labeled as "education spending."  A more appropriate way of labeling it is "corporate welfare state" in which taxpayers subsidize corporate salaries and profits.

This is not a failure of the local government.  This the failure of the economic model in which private business is a sacred cow and the government is a scapegoat for all private business failures.  As long as it so, failures like this will be a part of business landscape, private developers will laugh all the way to the bank, and the taxpayer will keep paying for it through the nose.  It also a proof that the public sector's  capacity to carry out public works itself instead of relying on private contractors will better serve public interests than the crooked public-private partnerships.  Keep this in mind next time you hear pro-business mouthpieces calling for "small government."

Pictures from a Revolution

Edited April 25, 2017

The gates of the Shanghai Conservatory opened, and the cacophony of loud noise engulfed the spectators.  A lorry moved slowly through the gate, blasting revolutionary songs  through a bullhorn installed on the driver’s cabin.  On the open platform of the lorry stood a young man dressed in the army-like uniform with a platter-size lapel pin showing the envisage of Chairman Mao.  The zeal in his eyes expressed nothing but unflinching faith in the words he was shouting through a bullhorn held in his hand.  Behind the lad stood several older men dressed in grayish uniforms, their heads bowed, and large posters pinned to their chests and backs.  “Who are they” I asked my Chinese guide.  “They are the enemies of the people” she resolutely replied.  “And what do these posters they are wearing say?” “That they followed the old path of the imperialist culture.”

Shanghai During Cultural Revolution

As it turned out, the older men were the faculty at the Shanghai Conservatory hauled away by members of the Red Guard.  Their “crime” was their teaching of classical music, which the Cultural Revolution hack propagandists labeled reactionary and imperialist.  In my two-year stay in China in my youth during the peak of the Cultural Revolution I have seen this scene repeating itself in endless iterations – Red Guard lads publicly judging, condemning and reprimanding their teachers for espousing old reactionary ideas which the Communist Party apparatchiks deemed harmful to the people.

Red Guard - as Depicted in Cultural Revolution Propaganda Poster.

These scenes, which I vividly remember even though, or perhaps because, I was unable to record for the fear of severe consequences that my parents could face for such acts of “espionage,” come to mind today when I witness political discourse in the United States today.  On the one end of the political spectrum, you have the guardians of the conservative orthodoxy and the unflinching faith in the market and "liberty."  Any opinion deemed incompatible with these dogmas are immediately attacked by these guardians in the most vicious and vile way.  No substantive arguments are being offered, invective and name calling suffice, of which "socialist" is the most serious.  This is mirrored on the other side of the spectrum, where the guardians of the liberal, or rather neoliberal, orthodoxy attack unorthodox views in an equally vile and vicious way, using terms such as "racist" or "fascist."   If you are foolish enough to engage these self-styled guardians of the orthodoxy, you are told to move to another country by the conservatives, or to grow up by the neoliberals. 

Red Guards Fighting Caricatures

Of course, this zealous defense of the orthodoxy is not new.  As HL Mencken observed:

“It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. The fundamental concept, of course, was not original. The theologians embraced it centuries ago, and continue to embrace it to this day. It appeared on the political side in the Middle Ages, and survived in Russia into our time. But it is only in the United States that it has been extended to all departments of thought. It is only here that any novel idea, in any field of human relations, carries with it a burden of obnoxiousness, and is instantly challenged as mysteriously immoral by the great masses of right-thinking men. It is only here, so far as I have been able to make out, that there is a right way and a wrong way to think about the beverages one drinks with one's meals, and the way children ought to be taught in the schools, and the manner in which foreign alliances should be negotiated, and what ought to be done about the Bolsheviki.”

What I find far more interesting, however, is that this phenomenon is spread not among people lacking  education, but among those who have college credentials.   One would think that having a college degree makes people think more critically and rationally, yet the opposite seems to be the case.  Many otherwise intelligent people turn themselves into propaganda tools of the establishment ideology, be it the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution in China or the Republican or Democratic Party lines in the United States.  Why?

Several hypotheses are possible. The first hypothesis, often heard in certain segments of the sectarian Left is the supposedly corrupting role played by the educational system itself, especially the academia.  Schools are reactionary institutions, this argument goes, whose main role is to instill ideas, attitudes and behaviors that are instrumental to the interests of the ruling class.  Therefore, graduates of the “elite” educational institutions form the phalanx defending the established status quo in cultural wars.  I find this explanation trite, boring and unconvincing.  Suffice it to say, that a mirror version of this argument is heard on the right accusing academic institutions of being bastions libertine ideas corrupting the minds of the youth.  It is clear that both arguments are caricatures of academic institutions that cannot be taken seriously.

Another possible explanation is self-selection.  It is well known that certain institutions tend to attract people exhibiting certain personalities.  Thus financial investment institutions tend to attract greedy unscrupulous bastards, religion and political parties tend to attract demagogues and shysters, the police and the military tend to attract sadistic and violent types, and so on.  By this logic, academic institutions, especially of the elite variety, tend to attract sycophants who love sucking up to authority figures, be it the faculty or rich and powerful people in the so-called real world.  While there might be some truth in this argument, it certainly does not tell the whole story.  Certainly not every elite university student is a sycophant eager to serve the rich and the powerful, and not every sycophant in the academia becomes a stooge of the regime.  I strongly suspect that most of the latter end up as middle managers meandering through the corporate landscape by keeping a low profile and sucking up to their bosses. 

The third possible explanation, which I find quite interesting, is that academic training trigger certain social role playing that often leads young people to stomping on the faces of others, seen as the enemies of “progress” or other bigger than life ideal.  This explanation was suggested by the Czech writer Milan Kundera  in his novel “The Joke” – whose protagonist was betrayed by his comrades and expelled from a university in the Communist Czechoslovakia.  A keen social observer, Kundera wonders why so many talented and intelligent youth threw their support behind the Communist regime in the post- World War 2 Czechoslovakia.  Some of them, like one of the characters in the novel who backstabs the protagonist, were opportunistic sycophants changing their faces to win the graces of powers that be.  But most other did not fit that mould. 

The reason suggested by Kundera is that education, especially university education, infuses young people with a cognitive illusion that they can achieve anything they want and change the world.  It encourages them to think that the knowledge they are acquiring uniquely positions them as agents of social change and transformation of the world of ignorance that they inherited from the past.  This is why, according to Kundera, so many bright students (the prominent Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski comes to mind ) were attracted to communist parties in the post WW2 Eastern Europe.  The ideology professed by these parties offered them a vision of a new society based on rational ideals, and an illusion that they can be agents of change implementing this new rational vision.  Given the wide-spread disillusionment with the pre-World War 2 politics and the devastation caused by the war, this was enough to attract significant following. 

One of the darker aspect of this "can reach the stars" mentality is hostility to social tethers that may hold the aspiring young star from achieving his (it is mostly males who fall for this delusion) goals.  Hence their propensity to attack the "old."   Oftentimes this hostility toward the old is manifested by the rejection of “old” aesthetic values, destruction of their cultural symbols, and espousing of the new avant garde culture.  When this is limited to the sphere of cultural representations, this can be very creative and rejuvenating.  However, when this creative zeal is manipulated by political interests to attack their enemies it becomes dangerous. 

This was certainly the case of the entrenched rear guards of the China’s Communist Party, who launched the Cultural Revolution  to purge the party reformers trying to modernize the backward rural economy.  They managed to capture and direct the zeal of millions of China’s youth to take on their teachers and prominent intellectuals who posed a threat to the ossified Party elite.  As a result, the country’s development was thrown back by decades. 

Youth for the Powers That Be.

   

Likewise, the “Reagan Revolution” in the United States unleashed a similar process, albeit far better greased than the Cultural Revolution.  The young and ambitious people that they are on the verge of creating a brave new world unlike anything before – the new economy, the new technology, the end of history as we know it.  They are the rising stars in the making of this new world order.  However, the prospect of success is threatened by the entrenched interests of the “old” as designated by the Republican Party apparatchiks – the unions, the teachers, environmentalists, labor lawyers and “liberal elites.”  

Democrats - always followers, never thought leaders - finally caught up with this trend during the 2016 presidential election.  Anyone who doubted the virtues of the glorious leader Hillary Clinton was viciously attacked as "racist", "sexist" , "brocialist" (the neoliberal version of the right wing invective 'socialist'), a Russian troll, or simply an immature and childish person who does not have enough common sense to grasp the self-evident truth of the Democrat party line.

Like in Orwell’s dystopia 1984, the Party apparatchicks designated enemies of the people, and the these otherwise smart and educated people followed the cue and led the charge against them. So here we are – intelligent, educated, and idealistic youth turning, under the watchful eye of the Party into the Hitlerjugend, Komsomol, Red Guard, Republicans or Democrats and stomping on the faces of people conveniently designated as enemies of the Party and the people. 

Back to the future of America: Permanent Cultural Revolution

Warsaw Uprising Redux

In 1994 the Baltimore Sun published an editorial commemorating the Warsaw Uprising.  The Sun piece took the standard Polish nationalist position squarely blaming the Soviet refusal to aid the Uprising for its defeat and heavy civilian losses that followed.  However, conveniently forgotten was a more nuanced view that the Soviet refusal to aid the Uprising was a result of the combination of several factors: their initial inability to continue the Belorussian Strategic Offensive against the Germans, the Polish staunch anti-Soviet stance and a refusal to make any political compromise, and the Western Allies unwillingness to provide any meaningful support to the Uprising. 

Adding this more nuanced view to the conversation was the main reason I decided to write a letter to Sun’s editor, an edited version of which was published in The Sun.  Not surprisingly, it provoked angry responses from the readers.  I was accused of many unsavory things, including harboring Communist sympathies, which ironically has some truth in it.  I use the qualifier “some” because, I usually try to take a nuanced view and abstain from radical bombast, either in favor or against. 

Since August is the month of Polish national martyrdom prominently exemplified by the Warsaw Uprising, I findit a good opportunity to post the letter I wrote some 18 years ago.

---

October 7, 1994

Editor,

The Sun

501 N. Calvert St.

Baltimore, MD 21278

Editor,

Your October 7 [1994] editorial “When Warsaw Dies Again” is high on rhetoric but thin on historical substance.  Taking a high moral ground and accusing the Soviets of betraying the Polish Resistance fighting in Warsaw is inconsistent with historical evidence.

Angered by the Western Allies position on Poland’s postwar boundaries (eventually ratified at the Yalta Conference) that shifted these boundaries westward, resulting in the loss of territories east of the Curzon line, the internally divided Polish government-in-exile in London took a radical anti-Soviet position and refused any bona fide negotiations with Stalin, even though the boundary changes resulted in a net economic gain for Poland.  While the backward semi-feudal agriculture prevailed on the eastern territories seceded to the USSR, the newly gained from Germany area was highly industrialized.  As a result, Poland’s post-war industrial infrastructure actually increased by some 50% as compared to the pre-war level.  However, the agrarian interests, dominating the Polish government-in-exile, never accepted the loss of their feudal privileges and were determined to fight for them “to the last Pole.” The nationalists, led by General Sosnkowski, the commander-in-chief of the Polish forces in exile, hoped to restore Poland’s pre-war boundaries, even if that meant fighting against both the Germans and the approaching Red Army. The plans for an uprising launched by the local Resistance forces loyal to the London government were a key element of that strategy.

The irrationality of that position can be evidenced by the following facts.

·         The Roosevelt administration clearly informed the Polish government-in-exile that the Western Allies did not intend, under any circumstances, support the planned uprising in Warsaw.  That information was never passed to the Resistance commanders in Warsaw who, to the very end, planned the Uprising on the assumption that Western aid would come.

·         Western Allies lacked the technical capability of carrying air raids over Poland on their own.  Consequently, after the Uprising broke out, they refused to send anything but largely symbolic supply missions to Warsaw.  The losses were heavy and most of the supplies were intercepted by the Germans.  General Sosnkowski, frustrated by the lack of cooperation from the Allies, ordered the Polish parachute brigade to take a kamikaze mission to Warsaw. Fortunately, his orders were ignored.

·         The Soviet government offered military assistance to the Uprising in exchange for certain political concessions; including the resignation of some of the hardline anti-Soviet cabinet members in the Polish government-in-exile.  These resignations were also demanded by the British government.  The Polish government refused the offer.

·         As the Red Army vanguards reached Warsaw suburbs, they were running out of fuel and supplies, and faced a powerful counter-offensive by the German forces.  Most sources agree that the Soviets were not capable of aiding the Resistance fighters in Warsaw, at least within the first few weeks of the Uprising.  While the Polish intelligence adequately informed London about the combat capability of the Red Army, that information was never transmitted back to the Resistance command in Warsaw.  Consequently, the order to start the Uprising relied almost exclusively on information submitted by the commanders of the Resistance combat units, who lacked skills in intelligence gathering.

These facts suggest that the responsibility for the Uprising’s defeat, and heavy “collateral damage” resulting from it, falls primarily on the Polish government-in-exile.  It is utterly naive to expect that the Soviets would aid an effort ostensibly directed against their own interests, without attaching a political price tag to their support.  Would the Kennedy administration help Fidel Castro?  However, Polish nationalists, blinded by staunch anti-Sovietism, refuse to acknowledge their own political myopia, and blame the Allies for their own mistakes.

What's So Outrageous About Pussy Riots

The sentencing of the Pussy Riot collective for an act of "hooliganism" in a Moscow church provoked a world-wide reaction.  Particularly surprising, at least to a Western observer, is not just the harshness of the sentence but also the medieval reaction of the majority of the Russian society, condemning the three women for their act.

Mark Ames is up to something when he writes:

"Part of the hostility to Pussy Riot is that they’ve become a cause-célèbre in the West. Russians have not had a very good historical experience with things the West think Russia should do, going back a few centuries — the memory of America’s support for that drunken buffoon Yeltsin while he let the country and its people sink into misery is still raw — "a painful memory" like John Turturro's character says in "Miller's Crossing," a memory woven tightly into the Russian RNA’s spool of historical grievances. And nothing triggers that reactionary Russian live-wire gene like an earful of Westerners moralizing about any topic, even the most obvious topic, even the topic where it’s 100% clear we’re on the right side for once."

However, he misses another dark aspect of the Russian soul - sexism. If the stunt in question was done by a bunch of young men, the mob's reaction would certainly be very much different.

To be sure, counter-cultural protesters receive a raw treatment from the police and mainstream society in most so-called democratic countries, including the US and Canada.   David Graeber makes a good point about it in his book "Direct Action." The reason is that such protest questions the tacit authority relations in society and this pisses a lot of people off, because it reminds them how much they suck up to authority in everyday life and call it "choice" and "freedom".  They are being spat in their faces by their bosses and the powers that be and they think it is raining, but as soon as someone unmasks those power relations for everyone to see, their self-image is shattered, they get mad and curse the messenger.

But it also matters who the messenger is, especially in predominantly "traditional" societies where stereotypical gender roles are still an integral part of the popular culture.  If the questioning of tacit authority relations that requires guts and taking personal risks is done by men - it goes with the sexist stereotype of male "bravery," fearlessness, boldness, chutzpah etc.  It is therefore more acceptable in such societies, even if it reveals some inconvenient truths.  But the situation changes dramatically if such acts are performed by women - which not only reveals some inconvenient truths but also goes against deeply embedded gender roles.  A good Russian woman is supposed to be prone, accept her fate and pray - especially in church - not to fight back.  Acting against this stereotype is not just inconvenient - it touches a raw nerve.


As Barrington Moore observed in his book "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy", to maintain traditional value systems, “human beings are punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown into concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against a wall and shot, and sometimes even taught sociology. To speak of cultural inertia is to overlook the concrete interests and privileges that are served by indoctrination, education, and the entire complicated process of transmitting culture from one generation to the next."

This is particularly evident in many countries of Asia or Africa, especially those facing the challenges of modernization. In Saudi Arabia, Iran or Pakistan they punish women for far less serious "offences" against the so-called "public morals." Going medieval and insisting on strict adherence to "tradition" or rather its caricature created for propaganda purposes seem to be a common reaction of mobs being threatened by social change.  I do not think Russia is a particularly outrageous example of this. However, Russia is not seen as a "backward third world country" but rather as a relatively modern world power.  Hence such a medieval reaction against a rather benign act of three women appears more shocking. I am pretty sure, however, that similar attitudes can be found in the so-called industrialized democracies of Western Europe or America - they just do not get as much publicity.