By James Carden, ACURA, 12/11/23

Well-heeled and highly credentialed, the proteges of powerful political patrons with ties to New Haven, Cambridge, Oxbridge and corporate America occupy the highest councils of government and advise a sitting US president who, while blessed with long experience as a US Senator, hails from rather less-exalted circumstances than his own advisers. These advisers, with their degrees and pedigrees, stir within their chief a toxic combination of envy, resentment and insecurity which manifests itself through occasional outbursts of bad temper.

The president’s advisers believe (or say they do) in a theory of international relations called the Domino Theory, which means, in the shortest of shorthand, that should a democratic country fall to a hostile authoritarian state, then others will soon meet a similar fate. Hence it is imperative that the United States, beacon of goodness and protector of democracy, stave off the darkness, no matter the cost.

Yet as the course of the war proceeds, it becomes clear to many that victory, once assured, has slipped further and further from reach. In the face of an increasingly skeptical public, the president, who also believes in the Domino Theory (or says he does), urges Congress to stay the course.

If this sounds familiar, it is because it is.

But in this newest iteration of the drama, the title role is filled not by Lyndon Johnson of the Texas Hill Country, but by Joe Biden of Scranton, Pennsylvania. And while the mise en scene of the war in question has moved from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, the rationale laid out by the President’s men for continued American involvement remains much the same. As Biden’s Secretary of State, a product of Dalton, Harvard and Columbia, recently put it, “The issue here is not just Ukraine’s security it is the security and safety of the entire Euro-Atlantic space.”

When President Biden named Jake Sullivan to the position of Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, he referred to Sullivan as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” People used to talk that way about Johnson’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who, among other laurels, was, at age 34, the youngest Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As it happens, Sullivan, at 44, is the youngest national security adviser since Bundy. And here is how Sullivan, in a gushing profile published this October in The New Yorker, describes his view of what is at stake in the war in Ukraine,

…As a child of the eighties and ‘Rocky’ and ‘Red Dawn’ I believe in freedom fighters and I believe in righteous causes, and I believe the Ukrainians have one. There are very few conflicts that I have seen–maybe none–in the post-Cold War era where there’s such a clear good guy and bad guy, and we have to do a lot for that person.”

This “once-in-a-generation” intellect then went on to compare the foreign policy challenge posed by Russia to a scene from the Mike Meyers comedy Austin Powers, in which…

…there’s a steamroller on the far side of the room, and a guy standing there, holding up his hand, and shouting, ‘No!’ Then they zoom out, and the steamroller is moving incredibly slowly and is really far away.” He added, “I was determined that we were not going to be that guy—just waiting for the steamroller to roll over Ukraine. We were going to act.”

Whatever the merits of these reflections, what is true is that the policy of near limitless financial and material support to the Zelensky regime has only succeeded in killing thousands of Ukrainian civilians and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who might otherwise have lived had Sullivan, Blinken and Biden showed even a modicum of interest in the very real peace proposals that circulated between Russia and Ukraine in the opening months of the conflict.

A key difference between then and now is that Johnson had, within the highest councils of State, a brilliant, determined dissenter. George Ball, who served as under secretary of state, and later, as US Ambassador to the UN, tirelessly pressed Johnson and his inner circle to re-think the wisdom of their chosen course with regard to the war in Vietnam.

The lesson to which Ball worked for years to draw Johnson’s attention was how quickly, despite the best laid plans, wars can escalate. And like Johnson, Biden has been drawn into an escalatory spiral from which he will find it increasingly difficult to jump off.

As recounted by the journalist and author David Halberstam, Ball challenged “that greatest of American assumptions, that somehow, whatever we did, the other side would lie down and accept it.” In a 1964 memo to Bundy and Pentagon chief Robert McNamara, Ball pointed out that, “Once on the tiger’s back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.”

As Biden sinks the US and what little is left of its reputation into a second war now being waged with the full, indeed shameless, support of the administration, Ball’s warnings about the dangers of inadvertent escalation from a half century ago take on a renewed urgency.

One wonders then: Does Biden have a George Ball of his own; a seasoned veteran who can cut through the cant and nonsense funneled to him on a daily basis from the likes of Blinken and Sullivan? Or is Biden wholly reliant on the slim reeds of his own intellect and the disastrous advice of his most senior aides? Is there anyone else  – besides this latest iteration of the American establishment’s “best and brightest“- advising Mr. Biden?

And if so, does he possess the strength of character to find it within himself to listen?

James W. Carden, senior advisor to ACURA, writes from Washington, DC. 

Link here.

In this clip from journalist Kevin Gosztola’s weekly show, he honors the lives of 10 Palestinian journalists who were killed in the first days of the Israeli government’s war on Gaza. Around 75 or more journalists have died after two months of a siege and invasion by Israeli military forces. This is the first of several segments to commemorate their lives and call attention to clear attacks on members of the press.

Link here.

About halfway through the video, Sakwa states that Kremlin sources have told him that Britain’s decision to sail its warship into an area of the Black Sea near Crimea in June of 2021 infuriated Putin and contributed to his actions in February of 2022. – Natylie

Crosstalk, RT, 11/29/23

NATO’s Ukraine proxy war on Russia should have never happened. Before the conflict there were options. A month into the conflict there were options to end it. The West refused to negotiate. Now ending it is proving most difficult.

Watch here.

By Vladimir Golstein, Facebook, 12/4/23

My review of Gary Saul Morson’s book, Wonder Confronts Certainty, has just came out in Claremont Review of Books, a fascinating publication whose authors are doing ungrateful job of swimming against the current.

Below are some of my observations from this essay. I guess one has to be a subscriber to read the whole thing. But you’ll catch the drift from these paragraphs. The link to the essay (is in the comments):

What is there in great Russian novels that provokes such a strong sense of attachment and identification? Morson, a prolific literary and cultural critic whose insights into Russian literature have benefited generations of readers, is abundantly qualified to answer that question.

Claremont Review of Books

Fall 2023

A Happy Guest in Russia’s Pages

The great Russian novels provoke a strong sense of attachment and identification.

by Vladimir Golstein

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/a-happy-guest-in-russias-pages/

Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

By Gary Saul Morson

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Wonder-Confronts-Certainty-Timeless-Questions/dp/0674971809

This volume is vintage Morson. It addresses serious subjects with the gravity they deserve, conveying the sense of wonder one experiences when reading great fiction. The study also exposes the follies and abuses perpetrated by the Commissars of Certainty—the radical intelligentsia (from the Russian intelligents) willing to die or kill for some scheme of universal happiness. The plea that resounds again and again throughout Russian novels is to avoid abstract utopias and focus on the goodness and beauty of everyday life. It is as timely a message now as it was in the 19th century— or even more so, since technological advances make it easier for today’s Grand Inquisitors to forcibly impose their idea of human bliss on the world stage. The petty tyrant of medieval Seville, whom Fyodor Dostoevsky depicts subjugating city-dwellers and interrogating Christ in The Brothers Karamazov, couldn’t even imagine all the means of control and manipulation available to today’s self-appointed saviors of mankind.

Russia’s peculiar historical development furnished the intelligentsia with plenty of means, motives, and opportunities to articulate, and more importantly to implement, their radical theories. Over the course of the last 150 years, these theories and practices have shaped the trajectory of Russia’s intellectual and material history. Morson’s book frames an opposition between the literary artists who attempted to make sense of themselves and their world, and the ideologues who fancied they had already explained the world and so wanted, à la Karl Marx, to change it…

The book explores intense culture wars waged between the artists (call them “Team Wonder”) and the radical critics (“Team Certainty”). These groups embodied not just two different cultural traditions but two rather fundamental aspects of human nature—perhaps distinguished by the two sides of our brains, or simply two different approaches to the universe and its mysteries.

Morson compares “certaintists” to the hedgehog, and their opponents to the fox of the fable popularized by Isaiah Berlin: “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” While foxes thrive on dialogue, on switching perspectives, and on looking at themselves from outside so as to learn and adapt, “for hedgehogs, dialogue can make no further discoveries because there is nothing left to discover.” The road to hell is paved with certainties.

Since we do see through a glass darkly in the affairs of this world, it remains reasonable to avoid fake clarity and abstract formulas that can’t possibly do justice to life’s complexity and unpredictability. It was these demonic certainties of the intelligentsia that great Russian authors exposed—convincingly, to many, though not to the intelligentsia itself. The intelligents, despite the inadequacies of their outlook, persisted in becoming more self-righteous, intolerant, and violent. They embraced first anti-tsarist terrorism, then the 1917 revolution with its stated goal of constructing a socialist utopia. Morson’s comparisons between the insights of novelists and the follies of the intelligentsia justify the harsh judgment pronounced in 1909 by the essayist Mikhail Gershenzon: “In Russia an almost infallible gauge of the strength of an artist’s genius is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia.”

A book like this, which argues for the relevance of thousands of small things and resists sweeping pronouncements of certainty, can’t be reduced to one message. Morson eschews grand theories about “what must be done” (the obsession of Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Vladimir Lenin). Instead he focuses on negative examples of what must be avoided: dogmatism, myopia, and what Mikhail Bakhtin called “theoretism,” i.e., “the belief that abstractions are more real than experience.” The book’s main argument is presented in chapters with revealing titles: “What Is Not to be Done?” “Who Is Not to Blame?” “What Don’t We Appreciate?” “What Doesn’t it all Mean?” Reading through Morson’s lively narrative, an attentive reader is bound to acquire a wisdom that prefers not to blame, not to imagine that it knows what to do, not to reduce complex life experience to abstractions, and not to suffocate with certainty what should remain a subject of wonder….

Novels rarely offer recipes for universal salvation. They capture small discoveries and might prompt slight adjustments in a few hearts, which nevertheless can be a great boon to humanity at large. Along with other great novelists, Leo Tolstoy prompted his readers to reorient their vision and re-calibrate their system of values: What matters is the person suffering here and now, rather than some distant scheme. In War and Peace, Tolstoy’s Pierre is transformed when he realizes that “everything near and commonplace” once seemed “insignificant and limited” because he “had equipped himself with a mental telescope

and gazed into the distance” so that “things seemed to him great and infinite only because they were not clearly visible.” It is this need to replace our mental telescope with the microscope, clarity with wonder, that Russian novelists articulate so forcefully.

Writing when the microscope and telescope were both new discoveries, John Milton made a similar plea. In Paradise Lost (VIII.172-4), the archangel Raphael admonishes Adam against trying to decipher all God’s “wondrous Works”: “Heav’n is for thee too high / To know what passes there; be lowlie wise: / Think onely what concernes thee and thy being.”

In Landmarks, the philosopher Semen Frank highlighted the dangers of the “telescopic” way of approaching the world: “The abstract ideal of absolute happiness in the remote future destroys the…vital sensation of love for one’s neighbor…. Great love for future humanity engenders great hatred for people.”

But such appeals, writes Morson, “ran counter to the prevailing Russian ethos.” The intelligentsia’s telescopic myopia was as disturbing as its intolerance of criticism and opposing points of view. “Nothing in Marxism is subject to revision,” Lenin declared. “There is only one answer to revisionism: smash its face in.” This attitude, which Morson calls “willful non-knowing,” is the zeal of a neophyte who views disagreement as religious apostasy, meriting destruction or, in current parlance, “cancellation.” Still today, certainty can lead quite naturally to absolutism.