reviews

Review – Anderson, “The Quiet Americans”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Scott Anderson, “The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War” (2020) – God help me, I can’t remember why I put this book on my list. That makes it sound worse than it is. But I know enough about the Cold War that this was, as they say, “surplus to requirements.” That’s not to say I didn’t learn anything! But like… I’m just trying to figure out my thought process. Did LARB or somebody run a review that made it sound revelatory? Then I just unthinkingly put it on my amazon list and a gracious relative picked it up for me for Christmas? That’s the most likely etiology, here.

This book is about four spies who made the transition from the World War II era OSS to the Cold War era CIA. There’s Frank Wisner, the OG company man; Peter Sichel, Weimar refugee turned Cold War operator; Ed Lansdale, ad man turned counterinsurgency guru and the one I know the most about; and some guy I forget and haven’t got the book on me, but he was the classic “he was on the football team at an Ivy League school so let’s make him a SPY” type (just for extra pathos, he was Irish-American, not WASP like most people in that clade). They all did hella derring-do in the war, were mad that they got decommissioned and they just let the Soviets do whatever, supposedly (Lansdale, more Asia-oriented, had a more complicated mad-on about, like, corruption letting communists in the door, or something), wound up in the Company when “Dean” Dean Acheson himself tapped them for our new permanent civilian foreign intelligence service, the CIA. 

We all know what’s coming: high ideals compromised by, uhhh… and here’s the thing. The “high ideal” that Scott Anderson, a fairly standard establishment liberal journalist whose dad was an “agricultural adviser” in Asia in the sixties (read: he either was a spy, or reported to some) is anticommunism. Free the Romanians/Vietnamese/whoever from oppression! Show Stalin what’s what! Well… what they wound up doing, the stuff that would go on to reave the souls (such as they were) of our four spies, it was all pretty standard anticommunist stuff. 

I’m well aware of the idealism surrounding liberal anticommunism in the period Anderson writes about. I wrote a dissertation about it, mostly about the Kennedy era but I read plenty on the times that preceded it. I don’t think everyone involved was lying, exactly, when they thought they were liberating people. Ed Lansdale is the one I know the most about, and he was a cipher: he probably thought he was doing something good, but he only “thought,” as in “performed ratiocination,” to a very limited degree. He mostly just zoomed around doing whatever. But you know… insofar as people bound and determined to avoid thinking too hard about things can be said to have sincere values, some of these Company guys probably did.

Here’s the big question… so fucking what? Where exactly is the pathos? Lansdale was upset that when his schemes, like trying to dissuade the Vietnamese peasantry away from the National Liberation Front via tricking them with astrology (this is how actually racist he and the others were, that they thought that would work), invariably failed, that they called in the bombers to try to keep Vietnam in the “free world.” Sichel quit because his higher-ups kept parachuting Ivy League kids like the one from the Penn football team whose name I can’t remember into Poland or Ukraine or wherever, to meet up with a non-existent WWII-style “resistance” to the USSR. They all got caught, they all got killed — that’s most of the stars on the wall at Langley that every CIA movie lingers on — but the Company kept doing it, because, uhhh, it wasn’t the desk jockeys being dumped out of a plane there and who knows, it might work? 

It’s not pathos. It’s bathos and dark comedy. The Coen Brothers knew what to do with the CIA, in “Burn After Reading.” John Malkovich’s character, Ozzie Cox, actually waxes into a tape recorder for the memoirs no one asked for about how much he admired the old Cold Warriors, doing the thing back when men were men and you couldn’t get shitcanned for being a sloppy drunk, like Ozzie did (it’s a funnier scene when you know that Malkovich is something of a pretentious, right-leaning ass, too- and I think he knows it). The joke is, it was always a fucking joke. It’s a sad joke, a deadly one, a joke about missed opportunities, less for a “good” anticommunism than for a saner policy… but a joke nevertheless. 

Anderson misses the joke. The reasons I’m giving this a star rating above the threshold where a book is likely to get included in my “worst of” list at the end of the year are that Anderson is a capable writer, and I just can’t discourage baby’s first thinking that maybe Cold War anticommunism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He’s outraged, outraged! By the ways the likes of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover advance their own agendas at the expense of the noble goals of Acheson and the Company. These, along with the inevitable hubris and a bit of Silicon Valley style failed iteration, explain how the CIA erred as it did, failed as it did, became something that men like Sichel (who went on to make a fortune marketing Blue Nun- “the wine so bad it made the news!”) could no longer be proud of. Anderson occasionally points to something like “well, the US and the UK really DID delay a second front in Europe in a way that probably got millions of Soviets killed” or other elements poking a hole in Cold War mythology, with the miffed indignance of a high schooler watching his first Oliver Stone movie. Maybe… follow that train of thought? But what I do know. I don’t think I could get published in New York Times Magazine. 

But like… what did the CIA exist for other than as an extension of what the J. Edgars of the world had in mind? You can see why the Hoosier Gollum was pissed that the Ivy League boys got the assignment to extend his surveillance regime globally! He might have been better at it! In all seriousness, the dream of a meaningfully democratic anticommunist liberalism, even if you think it’s not a pipe dream at any point in history, definitely was circa 1945, after communist resistance movements just got done playing a major role in defeating fascism, and leading the fight against colonialism. There wasn’t any way to combine the disparate vagaries of the liberal anticommunist imagination at that period with anything like reality on the ground. You could, with something like Hoover’s vision of mass surveillance, manipulation of political and social structures the world over, and the occasional use of massive lethal force. And that’s what we did, the whole Cold War through. And, in a sense, it worked. As usual, Ellroy knows the score better than the liberals. 

If anyone deserves pathos, it’s the people on the receiving end, not the people doling it out but feeling bad about it. If you want to do something other than straight-up condemnation of those people, want to humanize them, the answer is obvious. As J.K. Simmons puts it at the end of “Burn After Reading,” “What did we learn? We learned not to do it again… but I’ll be fucked if I know what we did!” Put that in bronze letters on the wall at Langley, above those stars. ***

Review – Anderson, “The Quiet Americans”

Review – Elkins, “Legacy of Violence”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Caroline Elkins, “Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire” (2022) – The main thing with the British is how they’ve gotten away with it, all of it. The worst they’ve ever gotten in return for all the dirt they’ve done was some aerial bombing — by the one enemy they actually looked good next to, classic sociopath’s luck — and then spending a few decades looking a bit like a (prosperous, safe) joke-country. Defenders of the British empire like Niall Ferguson can not only acquire the kind of respectability it’d be impossible to acquire defending any other empire, but they can also pretend they’re somehow intellectual underdogs. They all act like “we already went through this,” “this” being any kind of meaningful reckoning with what empire meant, and you know that “this,” in substance, meant little Niall and undergrad Andy and hungover 10 AM history seminar (no 9s or 8s for Oxbridge boys I bet) Boris had to hear a couple of fellow students wax indignant once or twice. Man… what the Germans or the Russians wouldn’t give to have THAT have been, continue to be, their comeuppance!

Caroline Elkins pisses those people off like nobody’s business. While she builds on the work of and acknowledges many previous generations of anti-imperialists, she seems poised to be the one to lay the foundation for something like a real intellectual reckoning with what the British Empire meant. If, down the line, we flinch from Empire the way we flinch from Nazism or “actually existing Communism” — not intellectually get that it was bad, but flinch, have it built into our historical reflexes — Caroline Elkins, and this book, will probably have a lot to do with that. 

The subtitle here is “A History of the British Empire.” That is a large subject. This is a large book. Elkins, a professor at Harvard (and, I’m told, a Watertown resident! Caroline! Get at me! Let’s have beers and play keno at Mount Auburn Grill! Bring the wife and kids I learned about from the acknowledgments!), makes a number of choices here calculated to land this book with maximum impact. She tells the history of the empire through its dual experiments in violence: learning to use violence to maximum effect to maintain a world-spanning and profitable empire, and finding ways to legitimize that violence within a philosophy of liberal imperialism. 

Most of what Elkins writes about the nineteenth century lays groundwork. Liberal imperialism as a philosophy comes not handed down from a Marx figure, but as a kludge, assembled from the results of battles in parliament and the papers over what Britain’s empire meant in the nineteenth century. Edmund Burke may have led the charge against abuses by the East India Company, but his anti-imperialism wasn’t so stiff that his criticisms could not be absorbed into later iterations of imperial technique, especially once John Company had outlived its usefulness. Crises like the Great Mutiny of 1857 and the Boer Wars at the turn of the 20th century refined both the techniques and the ideologies of Empire — and later for how Elkins relates the two — into a reasonably coherent body that Elkins spends the bulk of the book examining- the British Empire of the twentieth century. 

Focusing as much as Elkins does on the twentieth century, and especially on post-WWII British imperialism, is a peculiar but considered choice. The owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk, one of the old Germans the British did their best to not think about informs us, and British imperialism took on its most articulate and fully fleshed out form as it was indisputably in decline, at the very least decline relative to other, younger global powers. More than that, focusing on twentieth century imperial conflicts forces the reader to stop thinking of the British empire as some weird old anachronism, something involving powdered wigs and wooden ships. Many of the worst crimes of the British Empire took place contemporaneously to the great ideologically-motivated crimes we are all taught to loathe, to organize our social orders around avoiding repeating. Some of them took place after a British judge sat on the bench at Nuremberg.

India, Ireland, Palestine, Kenya, Malaya… tied together more than being victimized by the same empire, but often by the same personnel. Black and Tans picked up stakes to suppress the Arab uprising against the British Mandate in Palestine, and often the Zionist revolt a decade and change later in the same place. Palestine veterans, in turn, made their way to Malaya to fight the Emergency and to Kenya to suppress the Mau Mau (the latter being the subject of Elkins’ first book). Plenty of them wound up back in Ireland to deal with The Troubles once they kicked off in the late sixties. Everywhere, these personnel, and the London-based imperial bureaucrats who deployed them, cross-pollinated techniques of repression: emergency suspension of civil liberties, economic denial often past the point of starvation, forced relocation, encouragement of ethnic and sectarian division, torture, kill squads. Everywhere, the same, shifting but essentially coherent, body of ideological techniques as well: the liberal civilizing mission and demonization of anti-imperial fighters, control of information in and out of the war zone, careful attention paid to public relations, appeals to sentimental victimhood (dead settlers, traumatized and betrayed veterans of hard wars) and erasure of the many, many more victims they themselves created. Often enough, the literal erasure, through bonfires of records when the Tommies bugged out from Nairobi, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi, Tel Aviv, of the records of what they had done.

Elkins tells it all, chapter and verse, not glosses like with the Mutiny and other nineteenth century episodes but gritty, granular examinations of the dirty wars of the fading twentieth century Empire. Just as Whigs and Tories bickered over management of the Empire at its heyday (even producing opposite condemnations, not that they ever picked up enough traction to really stop the train) but united in dedication to it, so too did Churchill’s Conservatives and Bevin’s Labour remain equally committed, for much longer than we normally associate with either party, to liberal imperialism. After all, they had to somehow recover their economic position after two devastating world wars. One of the reasons they held onto Malaya as hard as they did was that the colony’s tin and rubber production brought in dollars, the international currency that replaced the pound sterling.

But it’s not all dollars and cents (or pounds and pence or whatever made up Harry Potter ass words they use over there). And it’s not all ideology and nostalgia. One of Elkins’s strengths is the way she not only refuses to engage in boring “intentionalism vs structuralism” style debates- she treats them as though they weren’t even there, which, honestly, is one of the better ways of getting across the fundamental truth that interest and ideology mutually constitute each other. Add a third element in there, too- technique.

Let’s put cards on the table- for all the dirt they did, the British Empire didn’t do literal, Treblinka-style death camps. They routed almost the whole Kikuyu population and numerous other Kenyans besides into concentration camps, and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands (it’s hard to say with all those torched records) died there, many of them tortured to death. But they weren’t sent there specifically to die (complete with special industrial mass murder machines), as part of a specific plan to eliminate the Kikuyu from the earth.

Well… the thing with the Holocaust is it actually got a few useful things into the thick heads of the whites. It’s a good thing we memetically associate many bad things — book burnings, open embrace of war and evil, fascism, etc. — with outsized horror and avoid them, to the degree that the lesson has really stuck. So you can see why we don’t want to “relativize” these things. And I don’t think we have to relativize the Holocaust in order to get the point across that there were, are, a lot of ways to be horrific, to be mass murderers on a historical scale, to commit crimes, as the Church fathers used to say, “that cry to heaven for vengeance” (well, the Church fathers including gay stuff in that category, which doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a good turn of phrase).

But what we probably should do is recouple existential horror to a wider range of crimes. After all, as historians have been carefully pointing out, much of the Holocaust itself didn’t take place in the six death camps, but in fields and alleys all across the German war zone- the “Holocaust by bullet” in places like Babi Yar, starvation and disease in the ghettos. These things look less like some expression of unique bureaucratic-Teutonic evil and a lot more like what other empires do. It looks a lot like what the Soviet Union did around the same time, what the US did to Native Americans, and, more to the point, what the British did — what the British were doing, what they would do again — to colonial subjects.

The point isn’t that Nazis were or weren’t worse or better than British imperialists. That’s a stupid and childish way to look at it. The Nazis had a situation, the British had a situation. They had ideologies and interests that constituted each other. I would say the Nazi ideology was, in most sense, dumber than the British one, but this book also shows up just how dumb these supposedly clever British imperialists could be. In the Nazi situation, both an interest in trying to carve a continental empire out of Europe, and ideologies that both preceded that project (but were partially generated from many of the same factors that led Germans to think their empire was workable- like a certain lack of opportunities in other parts of the world to work their will) and were radicalized by it, created the horror of the Holocaust. Other situations — mostly a situation of massive but fading and endangered international strength, and much more pliable ideologies than the Nazis usually had — generated the British horrors.

I say all this as someone who is not a pacifist, who is willing to fight, to countenance and, if needs be, do hard and dark things, for freedom and for the ability of the people to thrive. But the thing with all of these crimes is how arbitrary, how pointless they were to any end other than allowing some privileged gang to thrive. Sometimes it was big gangs — the great big gang of Anglo settler culture, they just needed their “elbow room” no matter how many people had to be killed or enslaved to do it — sometimes it was little gangs, some racial or political elite. But it was never really for freedom, except in the sense that some people got the “freedom” to do what they want at the expense of vast numbers of others. The biggest mass killings you got for that happened with decolonization- Haiti, Algeria, the actual revolutionary stages in places like France, Russia, and China before their mass killings turned into ways to consolidate the power of an elite.

Maybe you’re the sort of person who flinches from a bomb in a cafe or a guillotined aristocrat in a way you don’t from starving Bengalis or a round dozen, at least, nations of this Earth plunged into endless ethnic strife by imperial endgames. Sometimes that does seem like a pretty basic divide- those who can really make themselves feel sorry for Marie Antoinette in the tumbril, but can pass over however many French kids died of diptheria and hunger to buy her jewels (to say nothing of how many were enslaved in the Indies for the same end) with an “oh, dear,” and those who have the opposite reaction. And there’s those who feel bad about both, about neither, etc., I get that. But pathos-directionality divergence does seem pretty fundamental, almost pre-political. There’s patterns — we’ve made Sad Aristocrats the basic element of real pathos from Burke’s day to Sophia Coppola’s, you need to flash kids with bloated starvation bellies to wring a dime out of most Anglos for Sad Poors and even then we can change the channel — but it does seem some people are just more receptive to one or another type of pathos than others. It’s worrisome.

Well! We’ve gone far afield. Oh well. “Legacy of Violence” is an excellent book. It is not a perfect book. The writing is sometimes a little rushed-seeming. There’s stuff to nitpick, and one thing Tories can do is pick the shit out of nits. The effort involved to make us understand the Empire in the horror that it deserves, she has to a lot of lumping. This shows up most notably in the category of Liberal Imperialism, which she clearly is trying to punt into the category of Bad Ideologies To Be Scared Of, like Fascism and, for most people, Communism. I question whether we’re not operating in enemy terrain, here- that accepting their category schema doesn’t necessarily mean accepting their categories, and trying to modify the schema is doomed to failure. But then I think… well, nothing else has worked. And Elkins is trying, and there’s at least some evidence that hammering the point home, with a lack of interest in niceties that’s less pointed and more just sheer eagerness for getting an actual point across, is exactly what we need. *****

Review – Elkins, “Legacy of Violence”

Review – Gross, Concord Histories

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Robert Gross, “The Minutemen and Their World” (1976) and “The Transcendentalists and Their World” (2021) – Forty five years is a long time in history! And let’s be real, a somewhat less long time in the rather slow-moving world of academic history. Robert Gross started “The Minutemen and Their World” near the high water mark of social history in the American academy. Minute studies of New England towns were in! It helped that we Yankees are meticulous record keepers. There’s a cruel parody of every historiographical school implicit in its work, no matter how generative. The American social historians never had that Hobsbawm-Thompson of their British counterparts/inspirations. You kind of got the idea they thought they were getting away with something. “We can… we can parse old tax records and not make a point about them but consider it ‘history from below’ because it’s not about famous people?!”

Anyhoo, Gross saw where the wind was blowing and he was writing just before the bicentennial, so he got to have his cake and eat it too. He could comb the finely-kept records of the Concord burghers, and tie it in to a larger political point, i.e., how did these people convince themselves to take on an Empire they were just recently pretty proud to be in on? 

Truth be told there’s more burgherdom than revolution — more “world” than “Minutemen” — but honestly, that’s ok. Concord was a world on the move! You might just assume it would be anyway because it was a colony, all rough and new. But it was a hundred fifty years old by 1775! It was the first Puritan settlement away from the sight of the ocean in Massachusetts. Moreover, the Puritan fathers weren’t… well, it’s complicated, and Gross doesn’t analyze it closely. The Puritans were capitalists, some of the most important proto-capitalists. But they really didn’t seem to think a lot about the potentially socially corrosive effects of capitalism, or if they did, they thought that, I don’t know, prayer and surveillance could fix it?

I was going to say the Puritans weren’t big “opportunity people,” and maybe that is right- their capitalism was the frowny Weberian kind, where you thank your stern god for his sufficiency. They were “harmony people.” They wanted everyone on the same page. They wanted to do a Heaven LARP until god pulled the plug on this whole “material reality” farce. What did that mean a century and a half on? It meant Concord didn’t know how they were going to keep sons on the farm. Land was expensive and not super great to begin with. Open lands in places we don’t think of now as “open land” — Worcester County! Vermont! — beckoned. Social control was strict in Concord and people got in big theological pissing contests. They were definitely better off than they’d likely be in Britain. But they weren’t as well off as they’d like.

A general rise of individualism connects “The Minutemen and Their World” and the book released forty five years later, “The Transcendentalists and Their World.” The Minutemen beat the British! That was unexpected! It helps that the British used relative kid gloves on them, as fellow white English-speaking Protestants. About fifty years later, Concord is going pretty well after recovering from the time of troubles around 1812, but still needs to figure out what exactly it’s for, other than a springboard to places west. Industrialization is creeping in, and going past the traditional mechanic-operator-owned shops to big mills worked by a proletariat. Lowell is in full swing and often wants to steal the courthouse — it was a good thing to have the county courthouse in your town back then — from Concord, which the townsfolk fend off with their establishment political muscle. Even as Puritanism receded, the established political powers of New England sought harmony and order over most other social considerations.

How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they’ve seen Andy? Andy Jackson, that is. Jackson never won Massachusetts, or came close (New Hampshire, on the other hand…). But Jacksonian politics shattered New England’s elite-run politics. In some places, including Concord, it took the form of Anti-Masonic politics. A lot of big shots in Concord (and elsewhere, including a certain Tennessean President) were Freemasons, so inchoate populism streamed that way (a similar dynamic prevailed with the Know-Nothings a generation later). Even where Jackson’s enemies prevailed, they had to learn to play the game on something like his terms, appealing to the populace, modifying old laws, and in general learning to act in a master-race-democracy polity rather than an (also racist) aristocratic-republican one. Say what you will, but he put himself at the head of a political shift that knew what time it was. 

What did all that mean for Concord and the Transcendentalists? Well… vibes, I guess? A general effort to figure out a society where there was — along with everything else — a pretty unprecedented degree of individual opportunity? I can hear people flinching away from that. I know! Most people didn’t have a lot of opportunity. I know that “opportunity” is one of those sacred words like “courage” (we don’t want to say Andrew Jackson had that, because it’s sacred and he was bad, but…). But… maybe it shouldn’t be? Maybe it’s purely fucking circumstantial? Maybe people shouldn’t need a fairy godmother of opportunity to bless them to have a decent life? And every other empire on earth had similar structures keeping out-groups from accessing the fairy godmother, and a smaller in-group. That’s all I’m saying about America. It figured out how to do a big in-group. Slavery and the destruction and dispossession of indigenous people was a prerequisite for it. I’m not saying it was great. 

And, in many respects, the Transcendentalists became the poets and philosophers of that society and its opportunities. There were others, and vast portions of that society — anyone south of New York, basically — had nothing good to say about Emerson, Thoreau, or their milieu. But, like Yankees playing the Jacksonian politics game, eventually, Southrons learned to play the Emersonian personhood game. Emerson, for his part, learned it by navigating between various factions in and around Concord. There’s the elitism of the high toned Whigs, but spiritualized- anyone could be a great soul, just like Jacksonian Democracy promised (to whites). Emerson’s Concord was only a few years out from the Unitarians basically hijacking the Massachusetts religious establishment, and a lot of Emerson’s idea of man’s relationship to the spiritual world came from them… but the Trinitarians (which eventually became Congregationalists), who held to something like the orthodox New England faith, showed how emotional appeals could actually touch people, in the way that chilly Unitarian reasonability couldn’t, so Emerson learned to take from that, too. He talked reform and was at least somewhat anti-slavery… but the real reform, as far as he was concerned, was realizing you are, in fact, fantastic, if only you realize it, the original notionally-progressive self-help hack. 

Honestly, I see more of this in Emerson than European romanticism, but what do I know? It surprises me that a curmudgeon like Carlyle would hang with this dude, but Emerson could be a mean prick too, and you gotta figure Carlyle wouldn’t look the gift horse of an American publicist in the mouth… people in the expanding south and west might have seen Emerson’s irreligion and light-abolitionism as a threat (you have to figure they just thought Thoreau was a piker and fake), but they embraced something of his anything goes — except politics! which are stupid — ethos, the idea that the individual is the basis of all good, not necessarily because said individual is the ol’ image-and-likeness, but not not because of that, either! Because Emerson copped more attitudes than he actually staked claims, it’s possible to integrate him into all kinds of projects of personal fulfillment. The South would soon be so thoroughly dominated by slaver politics that you couldn’t afford to praise Emerson for generations hence, but again- Jackson never got close to winning Massachusetts, either.

Like the Minutemen book, the Transcendentalists book is more “world” than the subjects, and honestly, that’s a good thing. As you can probably tell I am not a fan of the Transcendentalists. It’s hard out there, for an appreciator of New England’s intellectual heritage who doesn’t actually like a lot of New England thinkers! Gross, forty-five years into a tenured career, sees it all for the good. It probably was, for him. Anyway! This was respectable social history with a good intellectual soupçon. ****/****’

Review – Gross, Concord Histories

Review – Carlyle, “The French Revolution”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Thomas Carlyle, “The French Revolution: a History” (1837) – I don’t know, man. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of this (he said, about the book he assigned himself). Apparently this was a standard work once! It doesn’t surprise me that a round denunciation of the French Revolution would become a standard anglophone work on it- that’s still viable today. I guess I’m a little surprised that this massive, discursive mess that takes for granted a pretty substantial knowledge of the players going in was as big a deal as it was. Because Carlyle, romantic elitist sage that he was, does nothing so pedestrian as “begin at the beginning” or “explain the significance of any of the people in the narrative” or “have a written thesis.” He just blusters. He blusters learnedly, with some good turns of phrase, and an impressive ability to project his feelings (almost always disdain), but still. Shows how relatively unlearned even educated people are now! Barely anyone knows who Madame Du Barry was, or why she was important, or the Necker affair or whatever. I know the French Revolution pretty well for a nonspecialist but would still get lost sometimes.

Still and all, frustration won out over intellectual insecurity in reading this. Carlyle doesn’t argue, really, but he gets his point across- disdain, universal disdain, disdain given just enough contrast to some theoretical world of worth to even exist, an oxygen to fuel Carlyle’s smoky peat fire of secular damnation. That dingdong Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin cites Carlyle as his intellectual master and you can see why, not that that fatuous nerd would be fit to edit Carlyle’s copy on one of the Scottish prick’s bad days. Carlyle could make a point when he wanted to. He was quite explicit about what he thought about black people and slave emancipation, for instance. He used the bare minimum of wordy bush-beating that a Victorian sage could get away with there! He was pithy with Margaret Fuller when he insisted she accept the universe (his, though, it went without saying, not her Yankee vibration). 

But I notice one bunch who our enterprising Scot seemed kind of leery of, even though he blames the French Revolution and whatever came from it on them: the philosophes. I came in expecting some good, ripe Frenchie-smarty-pants punching, and I did not get it! Many lesser lights have made Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire and company rhetorical pin cushions. They’re not hard targets! But while Carlyle, in as close to a real argument as he comes, strongly implies that it was the philosophes who ushered in the “age of paper” that allowed the sans culottes to run wild and cause all the problems, he never really comes to grips with them, never gives them a real working over. Was he… scared? Did he figure that argument by implication — “we all know what was wrong with philosophy, guys” — would play better? Probably a reasonable assumption in his time and place. Who knows! Maybe I’ll read a Carlyle biography someday and find out. I hear he had a peach of a marriage! **’

Review – Carlyle, “The French Revolution”

Review – Barbet, Eridanus books

Peter BerardLeave a comment
Really, how could I resist??

Pierre Barbet, “The Napoleons of Eridanus” (1970) and “The Emperor of Eridanus” (1982) (translated from the French by Stanley Hochman) – I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but when it features robots in napoleonic garb, has that DAW yellow spine, and costs two dollars, you just pick it up. That was the situation with prolific French scifi writer Pierre Barbet’s “The Napoleons of Eridanus” (original title: “Les Grognards d’Eridane”) when I found it on some used bookstore spree or another. I was also jazzed by the back cover, calling on the war-gaming subculture — and this was the seventies, real motherfucking cardboard-pusher hours — to embrace this novel of ultra-civilized aliens recruiting Napoleonic soldiers to lead them against space invaders.

Well, I read it, and it was… fine! Not quite as fun as I was expecting. The aliens — sybaritic brains-in-robot-suits — use telepathy to smooth out most of the bumps that came after they jacked eight or so French soldiers from the retreat from Moscow. The grognards, led by Captain Bernard, stomp everyone’s ass at space war, first their hosts’ enemies, then their hosts. They’re Napoleonic badasses, they’re not gonna take orders from a bunch of robo-wusses forever. Everyone else makes war following the orders of computers, but Bernard and company have good old human initiative and brutality. They basically don’t lose, and even when one of them dies, the hosts just clone him. This is a thing you see in pulp scifi, sometimes- the ubermenschen too uber to lose a round, except maybe once, through treachery, as the climax… and they usually come back and win that round, too.

The first one was still reasonably fun. I made a classic mistake and ordered the sequel before I read the original (it was pretty cheap). I had the idea I would try to dust off my French and read the third one, which hadn’t been translated into English. Well, the second one might explain it. Published twelve years after “Les Grognards,” Barbet is really phoning it in for “L’Empereur.” Bernard’s in charge! But the whole galaxy unites against him. He gets arrogant. Rival space empire Itain uses its space navy, led by Lenson (yes, it’s that lazy), to contain him, really breaking down the metaphor because, like, it’s space… it’s mostly fleet actions? It’s just beat for beat the Napoleonic Wars in space. Bernard invades some space-Russia and it’s all over. He can’t beat the weather! His last act as space-emperor is to have the host send him and his posse back to where they were on Earth when they got picked up, and wipe their memories of the whole thing. Done and done! It was pretty lame. 

I’m still curious about Barbet. He wrote a lot! Including a story where aliens show up during the Middle Ages, only to piss off the Knights Templars so bad that the knights learn to do space stuff to convert the galaxy to Catholicism, etc. They have another involving a Carthaginian empire that left Rome in the dust, and that idea always intrigued me too. The “Cosmic Crusader” books are translated, the Carthage ones aren’t. We’ll see what I can do- when I read French, I usually wind up writing a lot of it down anyway, so maybe I can produce some “quick and dirty” translations. Stick it on the job queue! *** (Les Grognards)/* (L’Empereur)

Review – Barbet, Eridanus books

Review – Locke, Highway 59 books

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Attica Locke, “Bluebird, Bluebird” (2017) and “Heaven, My Home” (2019) (read by J.D. Jackson) – These are some good — one good, one great, I’d say — recent crime novels! Attica Locke writes novels and for tv (apparently the show “Empire”? I used to see ads for it). These are the first two of her “Highway 59” books (there aren’t any others out right now but it seems clear from the cliffhangers that she’s planning more). One of the joys of crime writing is the sense of place crime writers usually include in their books. Highway 59 runs through East Texas, and Locke incorporates the place-ness of East Texas into the books, the aesthetics but also the characters and the plots.

Locke’s protagonist is Texas Ranger Darren Mathews, a scion of a family of black rural Texas smallholders with a proud tradition of public service. Not the least of Mathews’ quandaries spans the distance between the seedy situations Mathews finds himself in and the multiple, not quite coinciding codes: that of being a “race man” and member of a family that sees itself as upholding black independence, that of being a cop (especially a Ranger- the Rangers were basically an Anglo-Texan death squad for a long time), etc. These quandaries intersect, in the time-honored crime fiction way, with the cases Ranger Mathews encounters in these two books. 

There’s an overarching case that ties into Mathews’ larger ambition as a Ranger. He wants to do in the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, the local instantiation of the hyper-violent white supremacist prison gang that began in California. That’s what he works on with the Rangers, as part of a task force. An ABT affiliate got dead after confronting an old family friend of Mathews, where Ranger Mathews tried to deescalate. We don’t know what happened to that Nazi (well, we find out at the end of the second book but I don’t need to say here, it’s pretty good), but Mathews tries to defend the family friend — another representative of the world of old-time post-Emancipation black families that managed to hold on to their piece of rural East Texas in the face of what the white world could throw at them — in a way that both challenges his commitment to the letter of the law and also opens him to manipulation by bad actors. 

Mathews has to deal with this in the context of various murders and missing persons! Apparently Texas Rangers get called in, and occasionally bureaucratically parachuted in by the state, by local sheriffs for assistance on complicated cases. So Mathews always has to deal with East Texas sheriffs, who are usually pretty sketchy. In the first book, two people, a black out-of-town lawyer and a white barmaid, both show up drowned within a few days, with evidence pointing towards having been beaten beforehand. Could it have to do with the sketchy bar full of Aryan Brotherhood types in town?? Well, yes, but it also has to do with the much nicer black-owned bar/restaurant/knick-knack shop down the road, land ownership, weird local feuds, etc. The second novel doesn’t even have “a body,” as various cops remind Mathews, as he goes looking for the missing child of an ABT bigwig and stumbles into a whole situation of real estate betrayals and old — sometimes antebellum! — grudges.

The plots may sound similar, and I guess they are, but that’s true of Chandler and Hammett as well, when you strip their books down. Locke really nails two key things for crime fiction: pacing and characterization/place-making (characterizing a place). The pacing is damn near perfect, especially in the second book, a highly satisfying “Empire Strikes Back” type of novel. The characterization brings in numerous suspects, victims, other cops, friends, family, lovers of Mathews, local randos, as well as evoking various East Texas locales, vividly but without a lot of tedious detail. 

A brief discussion of politics: the Aryan Brotherhood is an interesting bete noir for an interesting black detective at an interesting moment. If the name weren’t already taken by a law enforcement organization, “Texas Rangers” could easily enough be the name of a Lone Star State-based Nazi gang. The Rangers basically were a white supremacist gang for a long time, and still uphold a racist system even if they let people of color into their ranks. Locke is not naive about this, even if she doesn’t draw all of the conclusions some of the readers would. For their part, the Aryan Brotherhood, while an extremely violent, dangerous, and racist gang, has historically been a lot less political than one might expect from the name. They are primarily a business organization. Some of them bother with Nazi political organizing, but in general, there’s not a lot of money in it, so most don’t bother. There’s a funny, possibly apocryphal, Reddit thread by an altright murderer who got sent to prison and tried to ingratiate himself to the local AB types, but failed. The altright doofus wanted to talk race war; the AB guys wanted to lift weights and get high. I’ve heard spicy-socdem types try to pooh-pooh antifascism on the idea that if we went after “the really dangerous fascists” we’d go after AB. That is a stupid take for obvious reasons (some of the people I’ve seen making it might be reading this- sorry doggs, you did a bad take, still heart you). 

But these are very much novels of the “black lives matter” era, and the AB is inimical to black life to the point where killing a black man is said to be their initiation ritual. Locke squares the various political circles around her work by making Mathews, basically, a pretty simple dude. He wants to protect black life and uphold community values the best way he can. One of his beloved uncles was a Ranger- he became a Ranger (his other uncle, still alive and a character in the book, is a lawyer who owns him all the time for being a cop instead of following his example). The AB literally throws away black life with extreme violence for no reason, so after them he goes (plus he gets a badge, gun, and paycheck for so doing). Simple! It does look like Locke intends on complicating this equation- the second book takes place in the wake of the Trump election and even a borderline perspective-dullard (he’s not Harry Potter dull!) like Mathews is asking questions. I don’t expect him (or Locke) to go ACAB, but see these questions as an enjoyable savor for Locke’s finely crafted crime stories. Recommended! **** (Bluebird)/***** (Heaven)

Review – Locke, Highway 59 books

Review – Kiernan, Tinfoil Dossier series

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Caítlin Kiernan, Tinfoil Dossier books (2017-2020) – Horror! When it comes right down to it, a lot of the things that a lot of my friends like — not just like, define their lives by — are things I don’t like or, more often, that passed me by like a ship in the night. One of those things is horror. First, I was scared. Then, after years of reading about war, I was indifferent. I felt superior to those intrigued by — it was sometimes right to say “fans of” — mere serial killers. Their body counts were nothing next to what goes on in war, and their tedious psychological contexts always seemed dull next to what goes into war. Eventually, as my differences from others came to take on a somewhat less overweening position in my sense of self, I came to understand what my friends saw in horror movies and fiction, or at least to listen to them more. And some of them have been good enough to listen to me. In some respects, we draw similar things out of our respective generative uglinesses.

So I didn’t turn away when I started hearing about Caítlin Kiernan’s Tinfoil Dossier series. Among other recommendations, it combined what they like — horror, specifically material drawn from the Cthulhu mythos and The X-Files — and something closer to what I like: investigations, conspiracies. Cult stuff is one place where the horror kids interests and mine connect productively (not unlike antifascism as a bond between me and that other group I was always around but one of, the punks). The Tinfoil Dossier is a series of three short novels about rival conspiracies. From what one can tell, some seek to preserve the world against threats from outside of the knowable parts of space-time, some seek to hasten the end those threats can bring to human existence, others pursue obscurer ends.

I say “as far as I can tell” because Kiernan does not usually condescend to clarify. Sometimes, that frustrates me in writing, but Kiernan has the writing chops (one key- she doesn’t drag shit out, a little confusion goes a long way!) to carry it off with aplomb. You’re seldom sure who works for whom. The closest thing to a stable pole in her world is Albany (named after the city in which they’re inexplicably, but compellingly, based), the super secret Men in Black style organization that tries to prevent the end of the world and usually only just barely succeeds. Albany people, sometimes called “Agents of Dreamland,” go back and forth across the world trying to keep cultists and whackos, often with weird creepy powers, from completely destroying the world by summoning Cthulhu or implanting those zombie mushrooms in everyone or sinking the world to commune with dark sea god Dagon, on and on. 

Unlike Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, agents like The Signalman (named after his large silver pocket watch) do not, in fact, make this look good. Albany routinely manipulate what few people with “special talents” that they can find who aren’t already spoken for by an Elder God to work for them, often using blackmail, brainwashing, or addiction. And even with abilities like being able to summon “the Hound of Tindalos,” a post-Lovecraft addition to the mythos that’s a sort of messed-up energy being that comes out of angular space and turns you into blue goo, they still mess it up a lot. Terrible stuff happens to them, all the time. And they’re not even dealing with Illuminati-style organized conspiracies! Just, like, small generational cults of fishy Welsh women who, admittedly, can do some fucked up magic. Kiernan writes a good action set piece, along with the other fun aspects of her writing. My favorite is when one of the Welsh ladies summons dark cold ocean water into a private jet going over a desert. That was freaky!

Kiernan tells the stories a-chronologically. Bits and pieces of the past, near-present, and future blob in and out of the narrative according to their own logic. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything major when I say, Elder Gods or not, humanity is still fucked. The waters rise, with or without Dagon, even if the human story goes on, unpleasantly human, to the Lovecraft cultists of the world. These were fun! I will read more horror, or anyway, put horror stuff in my rotation as I have been. ****’

Review – Kiernan, Tinfoil Dossier series

Review – Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

Peter BerardLeave a comment
“Russia can have a leeeetle fascism… as a treat”

Alexander Dugin, “The Fourth Political Theory” (2009) (translated from the Russian by, like, a dozen people, who cares) – Let’s get one thing straight from the start: Vladimir Putin needs a ponderous ex-punk ex-dissident “Traditionalist” to tell him to be a prick and invade places like he needs a hot shovel. A few years back, around the time of the Trump election, US media started noticing Alexander Dugin, and some floated the idea he was “Putin’s Brain.” This is typical American provincialism, applying our situation — in this case, an extremely narrow scenario, the fact that we had a president for eight years who was so stupid that people like Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz had to do his thinking for him — blithely to very different arrangements abroad. I’m no Russia expert, but it seems supremely unlikely that the ex-KGB siloviki and the gangster oligarchs that run the show over there really care that much about what any philosopher says. Things do have a tendency to get stupider and stupider in this timeline, so maybe more Russians who count are actually listening to people like Dugin. One thing this Ukraine situation has shown us is that the delusion some of us anti-imperialist leftists held, that powers like Russia, cruel though they may be, are at least smarter and more rational than the US, doesn’t hold up as well as we’d like, so that would fit. I’m aware that Russian state media has some kind of employment situation going with Dugin. It’s the job of major state cultural/intellectual apparatus to keep a variety of pedants and ideologues on staff in case they’re handy. We’re cheap. That doesn’t mean people like him (or me, lol) really decide anything.

Dugin has been on my radar for a long time. I had actually planned on running him in the election he swept for my next “reading on the right” well before the Ukraine crisis. If you read about contemporary fascism, traditionalism, or red-brown cross-over, his name comes up a lot. This, along with his association with Russia, a country that brings out the bullshit in Anglo-American writers, means there’s a lot of dumb agendas not so much surrounding Dugin, as much as surrounding the discourse around the topics that Dugin bridges. You can find waltzing pairs of bullshit slingers along every axis touching the man: those who think he’s Putin’s brain versus those who know he isn’t; those who sound the alarm on red-brown (that’s alliances between anticapitalist leftists and fascist right-wingers, for the uninitiated) coalitions versus those who insist any mention of that is crying wolf; those who want to defend the honor of the sort of occultism/traditionalism Dugin claims versus those who think it’s all fashy rot. I do think there are rights and wrongs, here. I also think that many involved on all sides over-generalize and press their arguments further than they will go, seemingly out of spite a lot of the time.

So, let’s go to the texts, shall we? I mean the text of Dugin’s writing, and the text of his life, most of which might as well be his writings because he’s the main source of information here. The story we’re told is that Dugin came from a family reasonably high-up in the Soviet hierarchy- his dad was a general. Dugin was a rebel- maybe this is just crossing the streams of things I’ve been thinking about recently, but he does seem a bit like a classic early-Gen-X type, a rebel of the kind that valued posturing and shock over anything else (the Soviet context was different enough from the Western to seriously complicate that read, I know). He got into rock music, satanism and other aspects of the occult, and Hitler. Supposedly, he found some Julius Evola in the Lenin Library in Moscow and that was all she wrote- he was now a Radical Traditionalist. I can basically rattle off my spiel explaining what Traditionalism is (and isn’t) from memory, since my 2018 birthday lecture, in my opinion my best one. I’m sick of doing it. Just know that when guys like Dugin say tradition, they mean initiatory occult knowledge, and know that like any magician, they rely on misprision and slips to get over with audiences. This includes the verbal slip between Tradition like they mean it and tradition like we mean it, the actual traditions of actual people. 

The biggest gap I see in Dugin’s biography is that between the fall of the Soviet Union and about 1997, when he wrote his book on “geopolitics.” That’s the book that got the west’s attention, after it was adopted by the Russian military colleges as a textbook. Where did he make enough money to sit around, write, and get involved with Eduard Limonov’s Nationalist Bolsheviks? The legacy of Limonov — people whose opinions I take seriously say he was a great writer, and I intend on reading him some day — and the NatBols motivates a lot of the bullshit slinging in this story. Here, I’m more interested in the context. The Soviet Union collapsed, the economy went into freefall, everyone was scrambling, and I wonder where Dugin (and to a lesser extent Limonov and other NatBols) found material support… really, more for my own picture than because I think such support would necessarily translate into allegiance. Nice complete picture, that’s what I’m about. 

Anyway- Dugin’s thoughts on geopolitics got people’s attention. If there is any parallel between Dugin and the neocons as implied by the “Putin’s brain” thesis, it is this: both were late twentieth century ideological entrepreneurs shilling some Risk-board nonsense to fill the hole where people like them thought a sense of national mission should be. They’re both parodies of an already degraded form of thought, the two classical schools of International Relations theory. Neoconservatism is a hyper-charged, violent Liberal Internationalism; Dugin’s Eurasianism, where he calls for Russia (and maybe China, if they’re on side) to lead a solid bloc in, you guessed it, Eurasia, is a parody of foreign policy Realism. 

Dugin, for his part, follows in the long… well, post-1945 long… tradition of fascist pedants magpie-picking from amongst the few fash left standing after the big blowout for ideological inspiration. The unlettered skinhead mooks did Hitler-manquery; the ones with that critical bit of grey matter go looking for somehow who didn’t shit the bed and die in 1945. That’s how Evola got a postwar rep- he was still alive, because nobody trusted him with anything important. That’s why you still see Strasserites, despite Strasser being as scabrously anti-semitic as the Fuhrer who offed him, because he, being dead, wasn’t so thoroughly associated with ignominous defeat. Figures like Mosely and Yawkey were, ironically, protected by the rules of liberal democracies, and they have their little followings. Dugin is an Evola disciple but for his geopolitics, he borrows heavily from Karl Haushofer, a German practitioner of the school of “geopolitics” that came about in the early twentieth century. Like a lot of haut-bourgeois thought, geopolitics is a way of thinking about something real — the way geography influences, sometimes determines, politics — without taking most of the realities on board. Geopolitics is high-flown, if taken seriously it’s high stakes, and just bullshit enough for someone to be able to say anything at all they want under its auspices (dialectics has sometimes played a similar role, if you think I can’t pick on Marxists too!). It’s perfect for an ideological hustler like Dugin.

Because that’s what the Fourth Political Theory is- a hustle. Dugin, above all else, is a performer. Take a look at his videos. Big old gray beard, English pronunciation and cadences somewhere between Zizek and a Bond villain. I could, potentially, see his geopolitical and “Eurasianist” stuff having something closer to meaningful content (that’s saying a lot, for a field and an ideology I hold in low regard). But what you see in this, his effort to encapsulate his broader political ideas, is a transparent snow job resting on sleight of arthritic hand. 

Dugin’s theory is the Fourth theory, you see, because there were already three: Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism. Fourth theory is none of the above, he’ll have you know, regardless of how Fascist it looks (or its fond words for the worst parts of the Communist legacy)! The three previous theories were all modern, in that they believed in progress. The Fourth theory is both pre- AND post-modern, and doesn’t! But it still partakes of a dialectic, because Liberalism’s victory ushered in postmodernism, which the Fourth theory would take advantage of to be Liberalism’s eventual gravedigger. Fourth theory is related to conservatism, Dugin tells us, especially traditionalism, your Evolas and your De Maistres (the latter not a formal Traditionalist but a believer in similar ideas). But it’s smarter, cooler, newer. 

Here’s a good tell: Dugin claims to have made a workable politics out of the thought of Heidegger. I’m actually of two minds about this. On the one hand, I actually rather appreciate the cheek of someone willing to take this awful wizard-gnome and his pronouncements as something so mundane as a political program. No seminar table intimidation for old Doogs! On the other, even I know claiming to wield “dasein” like a fucking… ruler, or wrench, or pointer, is definitely not what the old fucker had in mind and points to the larger incoherence of the whole project. The whole point of Heidegger is to be anti-programmatic. Dugin says he is too- he, like his co-thinker and fellow half-smart Eurotrash Guillaume Faye, insists he is ultimately a radical pragmatist, concerned with what works. Then goes on to make a program of it. To affirm a programmatic — which is not to say well-considered — list of goals, most of which conform to what his idea of what a Russian meathead wants out of life: more power for Russia, no gay pride parades, etc. 

You see the same thing with his definition of postmodern… and of most other things. More than anything I’ve read in theory, or heard from a professor, what the whole thing reminds me of is the calvinball discursive games assorted half-read kids (invariably boys) have tried to get me to play with them. “How do we know X ACTUALLY isn’t Y??” And, invariably, you could see what they were driving at. At the very least, they were trying to get social points over you, prove you wrong or insufficiently broad-minded somehow. Usually, they had some bigger point, at least bolstering some kind of ethos. Dugin is doing the same thing. He wants something just as slippery and open-ended as any college sophomore philosophy major. It’s just more violent (he soft-sells the violence and racism, but given how prominent a place “ethnocentrism” plays in his system…). 

Ultimately, stupid and pointless though this book was, it was a reasonably smart read to undertake. Coming in 2009, this is a pretty good sample of the kind of competitive scrabbling for position you saw various far-right ideological entrepreneurs engage in as it became good and clear that the End of History was ending. Dugin had some advantages and some disadvantages, and they tended to run along parallel lines. He’s clearly better-read than a lot of his rivals and co-thinkers. Richard Spencer always came off like a grad student who didn’t do the reading and was trying to get by in colloquium with bluster; Dugin did some of the reading but “realized” no one cared, it’s all just symbols and branding anyway. But, he’s also Russian, and so has a more limited audience… but, he’s Russian, so has a smaller pond to try to dominate. I kind of thought I’d rate this one higher, but the book gets repetitive and his act gets old. When I came to give a “bullshit” tag in my shelving system, I couldn’t actually make myself call it “fascist bullshit.” It is that. But more than that, it’s “post-bullshit,” my category for books that take the category confusions and other lacunae of theory to smuggle nonsense and, often enough, the lies of the powerful into print. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dugin’s patrons in the Russian ruling class reach more for ideological explanations ala this book as the Ukraine situation sucks more and more, for them and for the world. I’m not looking forward to it. *’

Review – Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

Review – Kunzru, “Red Pill”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Hari Kunzru, “Red Pill” (2020) (narrated by the author) – Well, well! This one inspired many thoughts and feelings in me. More of them, written down, are derogatory-sounding than this book deserves. In that respect it reminds me of another, somewhat similar book, Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School.” Maybe I don’t have it in me to straightforwardly praise contemporary literary fiction (maybe I just don’t have practice!). In particular, anything that treads the waters of “what the fuck is happening/rise of fascism” is going to bring up a lot of weird stuff for most anyone who reads them, especially if they don’t follow some predictable line (“love wins”).

I thought, maybe four fifths through listening to this book, that maybe Kunzru was verging towards a predictable line, after all. But I guess I should say what happens in this book a little before going into that! We’ve got an unnamed narrator, a South Asian British man living in Brooklyn, early middle age, wife and kid, a freelance writer of cultural criticism, maybe a cut above the NPR type, call it the N+1 type, and let’s go ahead and call our narrator “Hari.” Hari is feeling weltschmerz but wins a fellowship to do some study in Germany. Off he goes, promising his wife that he’ll return with a book manuscript on “the poetic I” and a head free of angst. 

Well, naturally, the fellowship is not all it seems. It was founded by some ex-Wehrmacht Christian Democrat industrialist with funny ideas, that entail Hari having to do a bunch of shit he’d rather not: work in an open plan office and eat meals with fellow fellows, most notably an obnoxious evopsych professor. I gotta say, it’s pretty funny that Hari’s nightmare is basically what office workers like me take for granted: a cubicle, supervision, meals eaten with people not your choosing (I will say my employer isn’t so bad about the latter). Does Kunzru get that? Probably, though whether he “groks” it… 

Anyway! Things get increasingly sinister. Among other things, the fellowship center is smack in the middle of the Berlin neighborhood of Wannsee. Wannsee, of course, is best known for the Wannsee Conference, called by Reinhard Heydrich to plan the logistics of the “final solution.” It was also a sort of fashionable vacation spot (back then, any crappy old lake — like the “see” in Wannsee — a short-ish distance from a city was a destination) for romantic poets like Heinrich von Kleist, a spicy type Hari is studying for his project. Von Kleist shot a lady friend and then himself around the lake. Bad vibes! Hari walks around and around the lake. It’s winter in Berlin. His book isn’t getting anywhere.

Where can Hari take refuge other than in streaming TV? He obsessively watches a cop show — I imagine it being a lot like “The Shield” except maybe with Dolph Lundgren in the main role — marked by extreme violence and occasional apostrophes to the viewership in the form of speeches Hari realizes are drawn from reactionary philosophers of the past: Emil Cioran, Joseph de Maistre, the like. It’s all stuff about how life is a pointless bloodbath, etc etc. 

Things really take a turn, as they so often do, when the internet goes down. Hari tries to get it fixed but the IT guy is probably in the altright and they’re probably also watching all the fellows when they sleep (or is Hari having a breakdown?). Plus also those dang German ordoliberals with their ironclad fellowship contract are probably cutting off his internet because they can see he’s not doing enough work! Fuck!! He’s gotta get to the bottom of this!

Hari does not for a good gentleman detective make. He tries to get one of the cleaning ladies to tell him stuff. She tells him a long story about how she was a punk in East Germany, was stalked and mind-fucked by a stasi officer into being an informant on the scene, and also had a very shitty post-reunification life, as did most of the people involved in her story. All that, and she doesn’t drop any useful hints! She just gets mad at Hari! Can it get any worse?

A cool black gay guy at the fellowship invites Hari out to a charity gala for refugees and things can, indeed, get worse. Hari, disgusted by the money and obviously fake concern on display, tries to help out a refugee and his daughter who he sees on the street and botches the approach. He goes back to the gala and meets Anton, the dude who makes the cop show, and asks him about all the weird quotes. 

Insofar as all the dread Kunzru builds up has a payoff, it is in the antagonism between Hari and Anton. Anton is a Nazi, or anyway, a nihilist who sees that the premises of Nazism and reactionary ideology more generally is the way towards his preferred social order- the strong ruling over the weak, and getting to caper and shout and be worshipped while doing so (you get the impression, in this book and elsewhere, that it’s the capering these people really want, and I guess a redefinition of “strength” and the ruling privileges that go with it towards parameters more amenable to themselves). And — and here it’s worth noting that while this book was published in 2020, it takes place in 2015 and 2016, the lead up to Trump’s win in the election — he owns Hari pretty good. Invites him out with his Nazi pals, makes fun of him, doesn’t leave many holes that someone of Hari’s intellectual background can exploit (I saw plenty — he’s a precious little fellow, Anton, with his undercut and his elaborate joke of going to a kebab place and not eating, and anything precious is delicate — but of course my circumstances are different). Then Anton and a Nazi friend show up at the fellowship center, do some Nazi troll shit, and get Hari booted! 

The dynamic, here, is that Hari is the sort of ineffectual left-leaning intellectual, pondering poetry in abstruse little journals, that right-wing man’s men who don’t care about anything, man, can walk right over. Well- that is, certainly, a thing in the world! One of the feelings I felt while reading this is a familiar one I’ve never put a name to (perhaps the Germans have a word). It’s a feeling of almost seeing my perspective in someone else, or my circumstances, but also missing it by a mile. I’m a leftist intellectual worried about a rising tide of reactionary violence as crises converge. But like… I also don’t fetishize my own helplessness, as Hari does, as a fair few leftists and liberals I know have, and do. I don’t “forget about” fascists, the way “sensible” liberals and moderates would have me do- there, Hari and I agree. But my version of living my values entails being able to do something about them in the world, as best one can.

The world — the pre-1945 world, the world of the Cold War, the prefiguring of the crises of the 21st century that the altright represents — crashes in on Hari, in a personal and offensive way. To Kunzru’s credit, he does not linger long on the Brooklyn world that tears like tissue paper once Hari is expected to work under normal circumstances and then meets a troll. He doesn’t wallow in its fecklessness, just let’s a few features — Hari’s wife’s work for the Hillary Clinton campaign, a few cultural markers, mostly Hari’s utter inability to cope — do the work for him. Interestingly, he doesn’t altogether crumble in the face of the world… or, well, maybe he does. In all likelihood he has a paranoid break with reality. He becomes obsessed with Anton, stalks his online circle (how many of which are just Anton-bots, replicating his posts?), and basically comes to conceive, saying outright at least once, that Anton is the Moriarty to Hari’s Holmes. He thinks Anton leaves breadcrumb clues to find Anton on an island off the coast of Scotland. Hari acts weird there, with a knife, and gets arrested. His wife and brother find him, put him on a plane back home, have him committed for a while, and then he returns home to a tentative, painful peace. Then Trump gets elected!

When I say that Hari doesn’t completely come undone, I mean that at least he does something. He doesn’t do something smart. But given that the failure mode that defined his existence so far was inaction, going to confront the symbol he created for the dread he felt — a dread I hold he is right to feel — seems… like a step in the right direction? I don’t know, isn’t facing fear a good thing? 

And that’s what I mean when I say, way back in the second paragraph of this review, that Kunzru seemed to veer towards a conventional conclusion about the conflicts that characterize our time. He doesn’t do a “love overcomes” thing. He comes close to doing a “paying attention and trying to fight emerging fascism will drive you mad, so, don’t” thing. As it happens, I think the last fifth or so of the book, where Trump wins the election and it becomes clear that the forces of conventional liberal reasoning — mostly represented by women who call Hari crazy, like his wife and his psychiatrist — can’t keep the wolf from the door, takes us away from this conclusion. Maybe it’s just me being politically happy with that, but I do think it shows some artistry on Kunzru’s part. Of course, a Brooklyn intellectual, confronted (away from home and what community he has and in a bad way emotionally) with fascism, would do some dumb bullshit like construe that the fascist set an elaborate online trap for him, and try to confront the fascist, in the trap, like a dumb movie. Hari’s subject is literally “the poetic I!” Individualism is his whole thing.

It’s not a just so story- Hari doesn’t, say, join any kind of community defense effort or something, which he dismisses with lines like “I was learning poetry when I should have (he doesn’t actually mean this) learned to field strip an AR-15” etc. He’s not any better off for his brush with fascism. That reads true, as well, and in keeping with the general sense of contemporary dread that Kunzru shares with Roberto Bolaño, Michel Houellebecq, and, well, the news and the internet. Nobody learns anything. Nobody’s capable of learning anything, and it’s too late if they are. 

Kunzru deserves to be in Bolaño’s company, and that of the early, compelling Houellebecq, in terms of crafting an intelligent, readable narrative that rings true to our times. It is a compelling listen/read. I’d even say Hari is “Berard Complete” – he feels real without being tediously fleshed out, or anyway, more than a first-person narrator of his kind would flesh himself out in the course of telling a harrowing personal tale. I guess, at some point, I would like a story, one that isn’t about superheroes or people who might as well be, who see that fighting people who would oppress you, while not easy on the soul, is possible, sometimes necessary, and maybe not even a road to automatic emotional ruin and distance from your loved ones. Just for variety! I understand it doesn’t make sense to ding an author for the story they didn’t write, and this book certainly held my interest and inspired respect for its craft more than most recent literary books do. So, I won’t ding it that half star I was considering for my horror movie fan-style frustration with the Haris of the world, yelling at the book, “just punch him, you asshole! It worked on Richard Spencer!” *****

Review – Kunzru, “Red Pill”

Review – Chateaubriand, “The Genius of Christianity”

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François-René de Chateaubriand, “The Genius of Christianity” (1801) (translated from the French by Charles White) – This is, arguably, one of my “less essential” readings on the right. No one’s going around making Chateaubriand memes these days. But I had heard of him, and knew he was important at one point, and I’m going to have to get to grips with the whole religious-conservative thing one of these days. Classic me, I jump to this instead of just choking down some Rushdoony, or better yet, just YouTubing megachurch seminars or something… like trying to figure out the “altright” from essays and novels instead of memes and YouTube comments…

Anyway! I do think this was educational and worth reading. Chateaubriand came from an aristocratic family that escaped the guillotine. Young Franky-Rennie took the obligatory Enlightenment-leaning young aristo trip to the nascent United States to see what the noble savages were up to. At one point, the two epic poems he wrote inspired by having a look at the deep woods from out of his carriage were included in “The Genius of Christianity,” but the fussy American (one suspects Irish-) Catholic editors of this English translation decided to leave those out of the translation I read. 

Either way, between the revolution and whatever else, Chateaubriand left the Enlightenment behind and embraced the Catholicism of his birth. Being young, inspired, and something of a hustler, he saw what a lot of his peers failed to see- you gotta propagandize. The old church really didn’t, not in Europe anyway, not after the wars of religion burned out over a century before. They were around and hegemonic and had been for a long time. What did they need clever essays in vernacular languages for? “To counter Voltaire and co,” Chateaubriand would say. It probably all seems a little pointless now, but this was then. You needed that little slice of the population that read clever essays, or anyway, enough of them to make the machines of modernizing society work. 

The main thing about Chateaubriand is he’s not too clever. There were other, cleverer lights on the emerging anti-revolutionary right circa the turn of the nineteenth century. Many of them, including the brilliant and sinister Joseph de Maistre, also defended mother church. But Maistre, with his rhapsodies for the hangman as the holy spirit in the earthly trilogy of throne, altar, and gallows, is not for mass consumption, even educated mass consumption. Chateaubriand was no theologian (though he read, or at least skimmed, many), no Jesuit logician. What Chateaubriand seems to have been was a bridge figure between the French counter-enlightenment, Catholicism, and romanticism. A three way bridge, like the Triboro!

So Chateaubriand barely concerns himself with proving Christianity true. He mostly talks about it as beautiful, mysterious, and of course he doesn’t use the word but comes close to the concept, cool. Atheism and deism are for nerds, Catholicism has rad buildings, historicity, etc. He provides the sort of skein of rationale that a literate audience that doesn’t want to think of itself as stupid, but still wants to believe whatever it wants uncritically, like to have, and then gets on with the business of talking about how beautiful and life-affirming the whole Christian deal is. You might think “hey, that sounds like tradcaths!” Meaning online reactionary Catholic converts. Sure- they’re definitely more in it for the aesthetic than anything else. But Chateaubriand, while he gets his licks in at the lumieres, isn’t as resentful and scared as they are (is anyone?). If anything, the whole thing reminded me more of people closer to the left that I know, who agree with Chateaubriand that Catholicism is pretty and that maybe something is missing in their lives without it, or some equivalent. Chateaubriand hadn’t really figured out the irony-kitsch thing, but, hey, progress matches on, I suppose. ***

Review – Chateaubriand, “The Genius of Christianity”