Will Morrisey Reviews

J. D. Crouch and Patrick J. Garrity: You Run the Show or the Show Runs You: Capturing Professor Harold W. Rood’s Strategic Thought for a New Generation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

 

Harold W. Rood was a plain-spoken man who “wanted, above all, to instruct his students in the hard logic of power, especially as that logic played out in international politics.” The notion of international relations struck him as touchy-feely, and he never hesitated to strike back. But he neither worshiped political power nor supposed it to operate like electricity, He considered it as an instrument of strategy, that is, of prudential reasoning—reasoning that itself both served purposes but needed steady reminders that purposes must be navigated through a complex landscape. Part of that landscape is political, but much of it really is landscape—that is, geography. As a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, he could scarcely overlook the importance of terrain, physical resources, and logistics. He was a geopolitician, and proud of it.

The authors divide their book into three segments. The first three chapters present Rood’s understanding of nature: the nature of politics, the nature of international politics, and the nature of strategy. The final three chapters present the main strategic problem Rood considered in his career—the Russian problem—and the strategy Americans devised to address it; the last chapter shows that Rood did not think the Russian problem had disappeared with the disintegration of the Soviet empire; moreover, the Chinese problem had been added to it. The fourth, central chapter treats the “democratic strategic deficit,” that is, the limitations imposed upon democratic-republican regimes as such, apart from the territorial, demographic, and other material strengths and weaknesses a given democratic republic must work with and against. The strategic deficit such regimes characteristically suffer ensure that while they may embody ‘the end of history’ in Fukuyama’s sense of the best practicable regime under modern conditions, they will always have weaknesses other regimes can and will exploit, and therefore will never put a stop to historical conflict, never bring on an ‘end time’ of perpetual peace.

The chapter on the nature of politics is short. Rood did not elaborate on human nature in the direct manner of a political philosopher. One gets the sense he thought Aristotle had already done that, with Hobbes providing a useful supplement. Subtitled, “The Inherent Logic of Events,” this chapter shows Rood to have been anything but a Hegelian; the “logic” here amounts to a set of deductions from human nature, embodied in human individuals and groups living in physical places and ruled by “constitutional arrangements” or regimes “through which men seek to control and govern their environment,” that is, those physical places. The “inner logic of historical themes” derives from the nature of human beings, in their physical and political circumstances. Rood described themes, preferring not to attempt to track down causes, because “strategy involved an appreciation of human agency”; he was no fatalist, no historicist in the philosophic sense. In too many circumstances causation is too complex to account for. Attempts to do so usually lead to terrible simplifications wielded by terrifying simplifiers.

Rood saw what physicists came later to see: There is no such thing as chaos. “Organization and control are present even in what seem to be the most chaotic and violent of circumstances.” Spontaneous ‘uprisings’ and ‘riots’ are seldom spontaneous, and genocide doesn’t happen by accident. But strife does concentrate minds on the fact that “power is intrinsic to politics, something that intellectuals often forget.” Power, including technological power, serves purposes. In the early years of the Internet, when I told college students that warfare had moved from land and sea to the air and now to cyberspace (without moving away from land, sea, and air) they thought me a fool. Didn’t I know that networks of personal computers would bring peoples closer together, facilitating peaceful commerce and friendship? That the new technology would make war far less likely? No, I didn’t. Neither did Rood. In his opinion, power, including technological power, remains instrumental for any number of human purposes, not all of them pleasant. Ten years later, students treated my observation as ordinary; cyber-warfare was on, now noticeably. As Rood once wrote, politics is “the organization and application of power to accomplish purpose,” whatever that purpose might be. Worthy purposes include peace, justice, and defense, purposes and indeed “obligations” that “exist irrespective of the nature of the regime and whether its constitution is written or unwritten.” Unlike Machiavelli or Hobbes, “Rood drew a fundamental distinction between the position of the tyrant and that of the lawful prince” because tyrants effectively wage war against their own subjects, ruling by force alone and not by law. Tyrants invite faction and rebellion, and these make foreign intervention likely and also more likely to be effective. “When the weak, faction-ridden French government and people failed to defend France in 1940, there was no justice in France, save for that dictated by the occupying authorities.” Faction arises even in well-governed countries, and in large, diverse, democratic republics it poses a problem for foreign-policy strategists as well as for citizens and ordinary politicians. Rood never succumbed to the typical geopolitician’s prejudice: assuming that states are like billiard balls, caring only about the size, density, and velocity of each ball, ignoring its internal structure. He cared very much about size, density, and velocity in international politics, but those things did not add up to the whole of the matter.

Rood understood the nature of international politics in Hobbesian (but also Socratic-Platonic) fashion: “There is going to be a war.” International politics consists of conflict. “There are clashes of will between nations or communities of nations just as there are clashes of will within nations,” clashes “arising from profound differences in outlook and purpose,” some of them “irreconcilable short of war.” War isn’t pathological or anomalous; it “is the political means by which humans, to a first (if not final) order, determine who will organize things, and for what purpose they will be organized.” Accordingly, in international politics “there is either war, or the preparation for war,” and you had better be ready to fight if you don’t want to lose. Nuclear weapons, economic ‘globalization,’ non-governmental organizations, sensitivity to the need to protect human rights, the interdependence of peoples: none of these things has stopped warfare from continuing, although they have all altered the ways in statesmen fight wars. Therefore, “the bottom line of war—who rules in whose land—should never be ignored.” If you want to be ruled this way, not that way—by the way of (for example) British parliamentarism or the German tyrant—you won’t, or at least shouldn’t, ignore that bottom line. For all our technology, geography remains central to understanding international politics. Sitting at your computer, you may feel as if the screen links you to the whole world, and so it does. But to what is your computer linked, if not to an electric grid constructed on a particular topography, in this climate, on a territory of a certain size, featuring some resources but not everything you need to live as you sit in a safe space, tapping away on the keyboard?

“Geography conditions the distribution and configuration of the great powers, as well as their natural enemies and friends.” ‘Powers’ great and small being located somewhere, “international politics are characterized by certain persistent patterns of great power interactions despite apparent changes in political regimes.” The exact ‘whereness’ of those states will shift, given the continual struggle that animates international politics. In his long career, Rood considered five major topics, each illustrating this point. They were: the German problem; the problem of Asia; the Middle Eastern question; the Caribbean-Cuban salient; and, as mentioned, the Russian problem. The first and the fifth problems, taken together, might be said to form the European problem, which reflects the geographical fact that Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals” (in de Gaulle’s phrase), and especially northern Europe, consists of a large, flat surface, well-suited for running armies through it.

Germany made itself a problem in Europe by the mid- to late 1800s, when Prussia overcame the divisions in which the 1648 Peace of Westphalia had left it. That settlement had been very much to the advantage of France, already united during the early modern period. Rood cited the Prussian General Staff’s history of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866: The war “must sooner or later have broken out,” the authors wrote. “The German nation could not forever exist in the political weakness into which it has sunk between the Latin West and the Slavonian East since the age of Germanic Emperors.” French statesmen saw that German unification spelled “disaster for France,” but Napoleon III made things worse by launching a premature war in 1870. His defeat cost him his throne, making the next war not only a war for territory but a regime war, a war setting republics against monarchies, with the French republic and the German monarchy at its center. Through 1945, in fact, “the logic of strategy dictated that it would be in united Germany’s interest to see that France was dismembered and removed from the ranks of European great powers. Otherwise, France would inevitably seek allies to encircle and redivide Germany.” This core conflict in turn troubled, and was troubled by, the weakening of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, European imperial rivalries outside Europe, European social revolutions, the stresses of industrialization, and even Japan’s defeat of China, on the other side of the now-interconnected international-politics world. The Great War occurred not because diplomats failed but because they had to: “the growth of German industrial, military, and naval power [was] nothing short of revolutionary, as German rulers could now hope to push hard against the western country, France, the eastern country, Russia, and, on the seas, the British navy which had effectively policed what Thomas Jefferson had called the great highway of the nations.

“The defeat of Imperial Germany in 1918 did not reset the German strategic agenda. This was as true of the Weimar regime as it would be for the Nazis, although the Nazis proved considerably more dangerous. It was the moderate president of the German Armistice Commission, Matthias Erzberger, who took care to tell the Brits, in the form of a 1920 letter to The Times of London, that “another war between Germany and the Anglo-Saxons [that is, the British and the Americans] is inevitable,” especially given the injuries sustained by the French during the war, making France a dubious shield for the Atlantic powers. At that time, Germans had already begun rearming, and Reich Chancellor Hitler described the next, complementary step: “We must never permit anybody but the Germans to carry arms!” The relatively modest re-dismemberment of Germany (into merely two, rather than some 300, independent states) was only reversed near the end of the Cold War because Americans saw Germany as an ally against the Soviets and, Rood argued, because the Russians considered it “necessary to weaken and eventually eliminate the U.S. presence from Europe”—a trend already visible by the beginning of the next millennium.

The problem of Asia consists of the rise of Japan in the twentieth century, Russian/Soviet expansion, and “the breakdown and recovery of a unified Chinese empire.” At the core of the Asian problem Rood saw “a China Problem—whether China is to be divided or unified,” who will rule the mainland, what the mainland’s boundaries and “strategic perimeter” will be, and what allies it will have. Rood pointed to The Problem of Asia and Its Effect on Modern Politics, published in 1910 by the great British geopolitician of naval power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and the lesser-known 1936 book by Gregory Bienstock, The Struggle for the Pacific, as perennially useful guides to Asian geopolitics.

Rood identified the source of the “the modern manifestation” of Sino-Japanese conflict as the 1868 regime change in Japan, when a centralized modern state was established with the emperor as its head, replacing the feudal-warlord regime of the Shogunate. China at that time still suffered from the absence of a modern state, with oligarch/warlords vying for control. Just as French statesmen long intended to keep Germany divided, so Japanese statesmen intended to keep China divided; they also wanted it isolated from foreign powers that might use it “as a means of weakening Japan.” Accordingly, Japan fought wars against China in the 1890s and Russia in the 1900s, acquiring Korea and with it the means to take control of Manchuria when offered it by its fellow-allies at the end of the Great War. In the settlement they also acquired German island colonies which “made ideal bases from which Japan could sever communications between the United States and the Philippines and isolate America from China.” The Japanese also “used commercial enterprises to penetrate those places they would target later in wartime,” as strategy that the China of the twenty-first century may well be emulating. By the late 1930s, Japan had conquered China, establishing a vast empire. As for Russia, the Soviets were happy to sign a non-aggression treaty in 1941 because Japanese conquests in Asia would rid the area of the Western empires and “expose those territories to the rise of nationalist movements that the Soviets were prepared to abet through indigenous communist parties,” as indeed they did throughout the postwar period. American anti-colonialism aided Soviet purposes in that regard, too. “Newly independent nations were susceptible to Soviet influence in a manner not possible when imperial control was being effectively exerted,” whether by the Japanese or the Europeans.

The breakup of the Soviet empire left China with a freer hand in Asia, where its sole remaining ‘superpower’ rival is the United States. “Since 1949, Rood noted, the Chinese government has suppressed internal dissent, sought the unification of Chinese territory, and promoted loyalty to the regime in Beijing”; this in turn has enabled modernization, including industrialization and militarization, with a network of highways and railways to the borders and, after Rood’s death, beyond those borders. “Han Chinese, accompanied by Communist Party cadres, have been transferred to the outlying regions to ‘dilute’ the local population, despite resistance from the indigenous peoples.” They have re-taken the key commercial and financial hub, Hong Kong, and intend to recover Taiwan, as well. Recent Chinese political-economic inroads into the Philippines (to take but one example) would come as no surprise to Rood. Nor have they relinquished hopes of unifying Korea “under a friendly regime.” As Rood summarized it, China remains “a one-party, totalitarian regime where international politics is seen to be an arena of unending struggle for a world order in which Chinese interests are respected and deferred to by other powers,” and this will require the United States to respond, if it intends to line up with its allies in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the Middle East, peace has prevailed only when enforced by “ruthless application” of authority by an imperial power—a pattern Rood might easily have traced back to Biblical times. Even such well-removed powers as Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and China have involved themselves in the Middle East for one reason or another, ranging from the need to defend against Muslim encroachment, maritime trade and naval routes, the desire to secure routes for navies and maritime commerce, or the hunger for oil. From a military standpoint, Mesopotamia is central to the region; accordingly, the British founded modern Iraq, hoping to “render Iraq an independent nation, one that was self-governing and equipped to maintain internal stability and defend its borders.” Half a century later, the Americans were still attempting to do the same thing. Meanwhile, the Russians, once under the Soviet regime, now under Putin, continue to follow their own geopolitical imperative to establish warm-water access points; their thus-far successful intervention in the Syrian civil war follows from Rood’s analysis of a strategy pursued since the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. The regimes have changed on all sides, but the geography hasn’t. The Soviets may have been atheists in principle, following Marx, but their policy “aimed to array Islam against the West, just as the Kaiser and Hitler had once done,” and the well-trained geopolitician Vladimir Putin is no different. Thus Rood supported the 2003 United States war in Iraq not because he cared about changing its regime or worried about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the tyrant Saddam Hussein, but because the United States could use a military anchor in the region, just as it had one in Germany, against Russia.

Closer to home, Rood considered the Caribbean-Cuban salient indispensable to American security. (He was not alone; Thomas Jefferson called any country that controlled New Orleans the enemy of the United States). America must always defend the two main avenues of approach to its heartland: the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence; and the salient, whose gateway from the Atlantic is Cuba, commanding the sea routes into the Gulf of Mexico. The British proved that in the 1760s, when its capture of Havana “crippled Spanish power in the West Indies and cut the communications between Old and New Spain.” “Whenever Cuba has been in the hands of a weak regime or one hostile to the United States, American interests have been threatened,” whether from piracy in the 1820s, Confederate raiding ships that found friendly ports there in the 1860s, or potentially from any hostile European power. (Although Rood may not have suspected this, it seems likely that Theodore Roosevelt took a strong disliking to the young Winston Churchill because Churchill wrote articles for publication in 1896, suggesting that the British seize the island from Spain. Whether or not this is so, Teddy did beat them to the punch, a couple of years later.) Rood did recall the 263 U.S. merchant ships sunk by German submarines in the Gulf and the Caribbean during World War II, and the Soviet-sponsored communist coup in 1959 gave the Russians what he called “an unsinkable aircraft carrier, 90 miles from the United States”—a platform “for expansion into the Western Hemisphere.”

Throughout this chapter, Crouch and Garrity take pains to show that although the conflict of regimes is indeed a major consideration in international politics, geography—combined with existing, if temporary, circumstances—may override such differences. For example, although “Russia and Japan were mortal enemies in East Asia over the future disposition of China” they “shared a common interest in expelling the Western colonial powers from the region,” just as Russia and Middle-East jihadists shared an interest in ridding the Middle East of Americans and Europeans. In the 1940s, Soviet Russian gyrations—a peace treaty with Germany, then alliance with the ‘Anglo-Americans’—were products of shifting military circumstances; either way, Stalin wanted control of Eastern Europe.

From the nature of politics and the nature of international politics, the authors shift to Rood’s understanding of the nature of strategy, encapsulating in his mot, “You run the show or the show runs you.” As the authors remark, this is no time-bound, ‘historically relative’ principle but one that’s “been in operation since before Thucydides.” More formally stated, “the ultimate goal in strategy is to confront an enemy with such a preponderance of forces, and such superiority of strategic position from which to deploy those forces, that the enemy, however much he may resist, can only conform to one’s will.” General Lee, meet General Grant. Geography enters in because this goal usually requires occupying physical chokepoints such as the city of New Orleans, controlling the mouth of the Mississippi River; Gibraltar, controlling the western entrance to the Mediterranean; the Straits of Malacca, connecting the Pacific with the Indian Ocean. Even in the era when the British ‘bourgeoisie’ enjoyed unmatched ascendancy in the world, no less a personage than Queen Victoria understood that maintaining military power is “the true economy.” (Adam Smith would not have disagreed.) Pace George Kennan, but “diplomacy cannot substitute for military power or make up for its deficiencies.” Sooner or later, someone else will cut through your verbiage.

Different regimes incline toward different kinds of strategies. Although Carl von Clausewitz famously called war a continuation of politics by other means, Rood thought that modern tyrannies, “following Lenin,” consider politics “a continuation of war by other means.” So, for example, while “the United States thought it could seek a political solution in Vietnam as though it were an alternative to a military resolution of the war,” the Vietnamese communists “pursued a straightforward military victory, at the conference table as well as on the battlefield.”  Throughout the ‘Peace Talks’ held in Paris, the communists sought a settlement whereby they would “preserve their armed forces and… retain strategic positions in South Vietnam,” thus “set[ting] the stage for its eventual victory in the war, as American patience with the war waned.” In the words of an even more conspicuous tyrant, Adolf Hitler, after military victory has been achieved “the wise victor will, if possible, always impose his claim on the defeated people stage by stage, dealing with the people that has grown defeated, and this in every people which has voluntarily submitted to force. He may then rely on the fact that not one of these further acts of oppression will seem sufficient reason to take up arms again.”

In preparation for such a consummation, the tyrant may often rely on his enemy’s wishful thinking, “the tendency for the inferior, unprepared power” to, in Rood’s words, “rethink the enemy’s strategy until one comes up with one that is not threatening.” Between the world wars and after the second one, many influential citizens in the commercial republics did exactly that, readying themselves in some cases for a nasty military surprise. Israel was nearly obliterated in 1973 for that reason, and of course the conduct of French and British parliamentarians in the 1930s remains the best-remembered example of the syndrome. Such psychological defeat can be hastened by deception and subversion. It was no wonder (to those who notice such things) when some of the most persistent apologists for Soviet conduct suddenly fell silent when the Soviet Union went out of business, although they might easily have told us that they had been right all along in claiming the regime was incapable of harming the commercial republics.

If you want to run the show instead of letting it run you, and you also intend to avoid war unless necessary, the best strategy will rest on deterrence. “But, like peace, it can never be achieved directly.” You will deter your enemy only if he knows you can and will act in such a way as to do him insufferable harm. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover kept the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii beyond its usual annual stay, but this failed to deter Japan from moving against China because Hoover “had already made it clear that he would not fight for Asia.” Worse, in 1940 President Roosevelt supposed that the mere presence of the U.S. naval forces in Hawaii would restrain Japan, without ensuring that they were ready for war if it came. The Japanese military leaders figured that out, and moved accordingly. Shows of force only work if the enemy believes the force is real; bluffing a steadfast and well-informed enemy risks a lot.

The authors turn to the regime-specific “democratic strategy deficit” in their central chapter. In view of the catastrophic failures of tyrants in the twentieth century, twenty-first-century tyrants “may become more subtle without becoming more just.” The constitutional-democratic, commercial-republican way of life and the ethos it generates and reinforces commendably seek to protect the weak, but that principle does not “ordinarily operate within the international community.” Tyrannies, however, “constantly at war with their own citizens,” apply that mindset and the policies it generates to “free peoples outside of their borders,” although such warfare may not entail “a shooting war” at all times, any more than it entails the use of truncheons against all their own subjects at all times.

As a result of the regime ethos of the republics, foreign policy ‘realists’ in them often display little realism. For a man like George F. Kennan, for example, “war, not totalitarianism, was the enemy to be resisted.” The purely diplomatic means proposed by him when he wrote on ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union could not work because Kennan largely eschewed military action and even adequate military preparedness to back up his diplomacy. Kennan’s ‘political’ geopolitics was therefore in fact apolitical, assuming that no “fundamental conflict between totalitarianism and democracy” existed. Kennan’s ‘realism’ treated the state instead of the regime as fundamental to politics, but, like all organizations, states have regimes, and therefore characters, inclinations, sentiments that effect their actions, even if they do not simply determine those actions. Democratic-republican ‘idealists’ do see the differences in regimes, but, precisely because they are idealists, often fail to see the serious real-world difficulties in establishing congenial commercial republics in foreign countries, many of which have “never known” political liberty and don’t know what to do with it when they get it. And so in Iraq, United States policy should have been less ambitious—aiming at a regime that fostered “a stable and comfortable place for ordinary citizens to live and prosper,” which might well be a decent rule of ‘the one’ and/or ‘the few.’

Significantly, in searching for an instance of sound military planning in a modern republic Rood found it within a sort of a non-democratic, non-republican organization within that republic: the policy set down by the U.S. military between the world wars. Given that “war is an instrument of national policy,” and that “wars are won by attacking, disorganizing, and destroying the armed forces of the enemy,” the American military should be “capable of carrying war to an enemy.” An “isolationist” policy would have amounted to coastal defense, reinforcing a naval fleet restricted to home waters—the naval equivalent of France’s Maginot Line. No other agencies in the federal government were “prepared to accept war as a legitimate act of policy and not imply as an expedient for the defense of the physical borders of the country.” Interwar U. S. foreign policy was ideological, “not territorial, and devoted to goals that had the haziest definitions,” such as “peace, disarmament, world order, sanctity of treaties, and international law.” “It was not until the middle of 1941 that the services received a firm directive from the president concerning the kind of war for which they should plan.” Fortunately, the military officers already knew what they needed to do, having learned from the experience of the Great War and rejecting “the reliance on static or trench warfare” seen in that war. As early as 1919, an article in the Infantry Journal argued that “war is motion,” that “only the unlimited offensive brings decisive results.” This doctrine quickly got into the curricula at West Point and Annapolis. Indeed, future naval officers had been studying Mahan in the years before the Great War, and drew from him the determination to prevent attacks on the American coasts, not merely to respond to them. To his credit, Franklin Roosevelt, while serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the war, imbibed this doctrine, too, although he didn’t understand the need for an army expeditionary force until much later. Although Crouch and Garrity don’t mention it, the idea of ‘advance defense,’ of carrying the war to the enemy, animated American military policy throughout the nineteenth century during the Indian Wars and the Civil War. When American military planners decided that “the implacable logic of military doctrine” required preparedness to fight the country’s “nearest and most dangerous enemy,” they followed the practice of their predecessors.

For the United States and its allies after the Second World War, the nearest and most dangerous enemy was Soviet Russia. Crouch and Garrity turn to Rood’s analysis of “the Russian Problem” in the first chapter of the book’s third triptych. Since Peter the Great established the first modern state in Russia, the country’s grand strategy has consisted of “the persistent drive to open waters” on all sides of its huge territory. “If successfully accomplished, this strategy would have left Russia the dominant Eurasian power, given Russia’s long-standing ability to control or influence events in Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia”—vast, mostly flat expanses that lend themselves to the movements of mass armies culled from a massive population. “The political-religious notion that [Russia] was destined to be the ‘Third Rome'” has reinforced this policy; the Marxist-Leninist ambition to serve as the cutting edge of ‘World History’ yielded the same policy, albeit on an atheist foundation. “Rood took seriously the statement of… Soviet officials that the end of their policy was to be the establishment of socialism and communism throughout the world.” Under their ideology, the world needed to be reorganized, wrested from the capitalists. “So long as the nations of the West continued to claim the right to rule themselves under the principles to which they adhered, Rood concluded that there was a high probability of war.”

Rood understood Soviet grand strategy to consist of five characteristics: in contrast to the Nazis, postwar Soviet rulers showed patience, relying on the security provided by their Eastern and Central European empire and the absence of any Asian power capable of launching a major invasion; Soviet rulers “played both sides against the middle,” often backing both sides in a conflict, thereby positioning themselves for influence over whichever side won; the Soviets always linked politics, economics, and military strategy ( beginning in the 1950s, in Afghanistan, they built roads and airports as an apparent means of improving commerce, then used that infrastructure to launch their 1979 military invasion); they established alliances with two or more countries that could serve one purpose, as when they allied with both Egypt and Libya in the late 1960s, reasoning that if one of those countries ‘turned’ on them or lost a major war, the other would still provide them with a foothold in the Mediterranean; and finally, the Soviets “sought to force the United States to defend areas away from the principal theater of war,” as for example in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s, theatres far from the crucial European Plain. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia not only served to firm up the Soviet empire, it also “effectively served as a dress rehearsal for an invasion of Western Europe, without unduly alarming the United States and its NATO allies.” After the re-conquest, the Soviets took care to leave two tank divisions and three motorized rifle divisions behind, strengthening their in-place military capabilities near the border with the West Europeans, and doing so without provoking “any commensurate military response” from NATO. Meanwhile, in southern Europe, by the 1970s Yugoslavia “had become an advanced base for Soviet military power in the eastern Mediterranean,” serving as a point of transit for Soviet military supplies to Egypt during the 1973 Middle East War. By then, NATO would have been hard pressed to defend Greece or Turkey in a war with Warsaw Pact forces. The beauty of all this, from the Soviet perspective, was that “nowhere had the Soviet Union needed to wage war to change the strategic circumstances in its favors, although wars in the area had frequently opened opportunities for new strategic gains.” They employed a similar strategy in Asia, aiming at isolating the United States from such allies as Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

But what about deterrence based on U.S. nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles? The Soviets devoted substantial resources to civil defense, evidently not concurring with Western claims that such efforts must be useless against such weapons. “Rood thought that if the West acted upon the belief that the Soviets were not really serious about going to war, that they were only interested in security, the West would fall victim to the self-deception that characterized the democratic strategy deficit.” But if the nuclear standoff really was a standoff, if nuclear weapons were truly ‘unusable’ because a first strike by one side would provoke an obliterating counterattack by the other, why would a well-prepared ‘conventional’ war in Europe not make sense? What would the Americans do about it? “Americans had not toughed it out in Vietnam—why should it be any different in Western Europe, when the costs would be so much higher?”

In Rood’s judgment, the end of the Cold War left American more, not less vulnerable to Russian machinations, in the long run. “He wondered if objective conditions now rendered an alliance between Moscow and Beijing, based on their common anti-Western perspective, much more viable than it had been.” Nothing that has occurred since his death in 2011 has undermined that suspicion.

How would America’s rivals address their “America Problem”? “If there is to be a war, Americans will want to fight it abroad.” To avoid fighting on American soil, and to avoid fighting a large and costly war far from that soil, Americans will need to prepare “to fight a lot of little” wars; this requires a network of “bases and allies abroad, from which to conduct military operations.” Considered as targets, North and South America “are little more than continent-sized islands off the west coast of Europe and off the east coast of Asia”; taken together with Africa, they constitute what geopolitical strategist Halford Mackinder called “The World Island.” This ‘Old World’ is much bigger than the New World, making “the balance of power in Eurasia…of intense interest to Americans,” inasmuch as a country or coalition of countries that dominated the World Island would confront the United States with “an overwhelming material threat to its existence.”

American interests overseas are more than military and political. As a commercial republic, America has “far-flung commercial interests and the desire for open markets.” Both the Quasi-War with France and the Barbary Wars—the “first congressionally authorized uses of force” under the 1787 Constitution—aimed at protecting U.S. commerce.

The sheer size of the United States, along with the extent of its commercial and military interests, makes it both powerful and vulnerable in international politics. More, the very proliferation of factions that benefits American regime (as shown by Publius in the tenth Federalist) can prove a handicap in international politics because it provides foreign powers opportunities to play divide-and-rule, as Americans also saw early on, when French agent Edmond Genêt fomented dissent against the Adams Administration. Rood understood the American Civil War geopolitically, as a struggle by the United States to prevent disunion, which would have caused the North to deal “with endless coalitions between the confederacy and any European powers with territorial ambitions in North America,” a likelihood illustrated during the war itself, when France attempted to install an Austrian prince as the monarch of Mexico. It was not until a couple of years after the U.S. victory in the war that Great Britain finally accepted “the viability of the United States,” as signaled by the British North America Act of 1867.

A good thing, too, for both countries, as the twentieth century saw. “The imperatives of strategy would eventually overcome the American notion of political and military isolation from Europe,” as “Germany’s war aims in 1914 clearly included domination of the European continent, which meant controlling the maritime approaches to Europe and dictating the terms of peacetime commerce with powers like the United States.” Further, as Rood put it, “one of the invariable indications that the United States is in for trouble with a foreign power is when that power begins open or clandestine operations in the Western Hemisphere,” as Germany did in the run-up to both world wars. In both cases, the main political challenge came from the reluctance of democratically-elected political representatives to contradict the intense desire of their constituents to stay out of the war; the average citizen doesn’t think geopolitically, and usually doesn’t want to.

Competing European empires had buffered the United States for decades because none was able to dominate Europe, much less the World Island. The collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, and French empires left only one empire standing there. Soviet ambitions compelled the United States “to man the distant ramparts itself.” As Rood acknowledged, Nicholas Spykman had anticipated this circumstance during the war, calling the attention of readers of his 1942 book, America’s Strategy in World Politics, to the need to prevent hostile powers from controlling the “Rimland,” that is, the borders of Eurasia—areas containing most the world’s population and natural resources. The strategy of ‘containment’ followed from Spykman’s insights; Rood recommended U.S. efforts “to defeat probes or aggression by the communist bloc in the Rimland; to threaten to escalate the conflict locally if circumstances warranted; and to roll back marginal communist gains in the Rimland whenever the opportunity presented itself.” Hence his support for the American military intervention on the side of the non-communist regime in South Vietnam against the communist North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong guerrillas operating in the south. “If the United States withdrew from Vietnam, Rood thought that the Philippines would be forced to reconsider its attitude toward China,” which is exactly what has happened. Rood also judged that withdrawal would risk “a later war with China when it had developed a full-sized nuclear arsenal, backed by the capacity to command the sea areas around the island shield of Asia”; the first has now happened, the second is in the works.

Since the Cold War never quite ended, as Russia regrouped and reprised many of its longstanding policies, Rood observed that “geography has not changed”: “Even a diminished Russia is still only a few hundred miles from the German border, while the United States will always be thousands of miles away.” Russia’s regime changed, but not into a commercial republic, ready to give up its extraterritorial ambitions and happily restrict its relations with the world to diplomacy, commerce, and cultural exchange. “Like Germany after 1918,” Russia “had not been occupied”; “in the mind of its leaders and people, it had not truly been defeated” but rather had been “cheated out of its rightful place in the sun by traitors and scheming foreign enemies.” Russia’s 2001 agreement to a “strategic partnership” with China underscored this point, a point underwritten not only by China’s growing military power but by the much-overlooked fact that “Russia remains the strongest military power in Europe,” as China does in Asia.

Rood’s welcome defense of the American 2003 intervention in Iraq reflects these concerns. Iraq was an ally of Russia; Russia wants the U.S. out of the Middle East. In defeating the Saddam Hussein regime, America had “accrued strategic advantages” by “remov[ing] a protégé of Russia” and a “disruptive force in the Middle East.” But although America “had neutralized Iraq,” it hadn’t “dealt with other hostile nations claiming leadership of the Arab world,” nor “resolved the terrible weakness of the Saudi regime in the face of Arab-Islamic terrorism.” The war in Syria illustrates this, although Rood did not live to see it.

Crouch and Garrity conclude their study of Rood’s strategic thought with a call for moral and political responsibility. “What if” America’s “apparent loss of direction is not merely the result of uncontrollable historical forces, and the limits of our power and human foresight, but at least in part is due to the strategic purposes and actions of others? What if these purposes are long-standing, going back not only to 1991 but well before that? What if others are patiently accumulating the sort of strategic advantages that will put us at grave disadvantage in a war, or at least in a major political crisis, while attempting to conceal those preparations. Are objective conditions bringing about an alignment of hostile powers?” Good questions, all. Who today is answering them?

Elzbieta Matynia, ed.: The Uncanny Era: Conversations between Vacláv Havel and Adam Michnik. Translated by Elzbieta Matynia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

 

Prophets and philosophers alike often doubt or deny that truth may be found in political life. The truth shall set you free, Jesus teaches, but attention to ‘this world’ will enslave you, block you from finding God. Socrates discharged his civic duties without enthusiasm, devoting his life to private conversations in which he dismissed even the great Pericles as a mere builder of walls.

Yet the Kingdom of God Christians seek is, after all, a kingdom, a regime. The God of the Bible chooses a particular people, establishing not one but several regimes for it, adjusting His political strategy to his people’s changing circumstances, and eventually exiling most of them to the Babylonian monarchy when he runs out of patience with their uncivil behavior. Universalizing Jesus denies the distinction between Jew and Greek, but nonetheless calls out His people for membership in His assembly or church—founding a regime, if not one ‘of this world.’ As for Socrates, he initiates not philosophy but political, dialogic philosophy, engaging citizens and foreigners in dialectic while eschewing the practice of previous philosophers, who had sought to behold the truths of nature directly, without regard to the opinions that prevailed in the polis.

From time to time, the late Vacláv Havel—Czech playwright, sometime dissident, eventual president of the Czech Republic—joined longtime friend and fellow dissident, Polish essayist and sometime politician Adam Michnik to discuss these and related matters. Both men preferred the Socratic direction. Havel had participated in the Prague Spring of 1968, when the political underground of dissidents in Czechoslovakia surfaced in street demonstrations against the Communist regime, installed two decades earlier by the Soviet Union. The Red Army rolled in and suppressed the uprising. In her informative introduction to this volume, New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty member Elzbieta Matynia (no stranger to political activism in her native Poland) recounts that Czech and Polish dissidents held a secret meeting in the mountains along the border of the two countries in August 1978, a decade after their early hopes for freedom had been disappointed. Havel and Michnik met at that time.

Their hopes had been disappointed, but not killed. At the meeting, they “plott[ed] democracy in both countries,” and not, as it transpired, in vain; eleven years later, in 1989, the Soviet empire collapsed and many of these same dissidents themselves took positions of authority as founders of the new, republican regimes of Central Europe. Revolution came first to Poland, where, “the principle of a nonviolent, self-limiting revolution, guided by an unrelenting commitment to create alternative institutions outside the state’s control, [had] led to the first solid promise of democratic change” in the states dominated by Moscow since the Second World War. When Michnik and several other newly-elected Polish parliamentarians visited Havel in the summer of 1989, Michnik told the incredulous Czech, “Before year’s end you’ll be President” of Czechoslovakia. And so, astonishingly, it was; not for nothing does Matynia consider the era “uncanny,” taking the term from Michnik’s own title for a published conversation with Havel held in Prague in 1991. But the term “uncanny” refers not to the peaceful overthrow of the old regimes—in Czechoslovakia, they called it the “Velvet Revolution”—but to the end of ‘post-communism,’ the end of the aftermath of those revolutions. Revolutions clarify; post-revolutionary conditions see the return of complexity, ambiguity.

As it happens, Americans are (or should be) quite familiar with many of the questions raised in this and the subsequent conversations recorded here. After the American Civil War, a victorious United States government attempted to ‘reconstruct’ republican regime in the states of the defeated Confederacy. Slaveholding plantation oligarchs had established their rule over the Southern states decades before the war; in firing on U. S. forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, they had asserted the independence of what had been an anti-republican (and therefore unconstitutional) regimes for a long time. Now that they had been defeated, what would become of these oligarchs? How would these states be returned to the American Union in conformity with the United States Constitution? The results of Reconstruction were to be mixed, as many ‘old South’ grandees re-established themselves, re-subordinating if not re-enslaving their former slaves. How would Czechoslovakia and Poland fare, as they attempted to consolidate regime changes of their own? We have six conversations between Michnik and Havel, from the years 1991 to 2007, followed by two pieces published by Michnik after his friend’s death.

Michnik opened the 1991 conversation by asking if there might be a restoration of the Communist ‘old regimes’ in Central and Eastern Europe. Havel considered this “out of the question.” He did, however, accurately predict the rise of former Communists “return[ing] under a slightly repainted banner,” namely nationalism. But the Soviet Union as an empire won’t return. The problems now were the huge state-owned enterprises and state bureaucracies, complemented by “the habits of normal average citizens” who “got accustomed to the fact that the omnipotent state towers over them,” like a father who doesn’t want his children to grow up. This has indeed proven to be a real problem, and not only in post-communist countries.

Michnik identified two approaches to consolidating regime change, one seen in Poland, the other in Czechoslovakia. Polish republicans drew “a thick line between the past and the present,” saying that “the only criterion for judging bureaucrats would be their competence and their loyalty to the new order.” Czech and Slovak politicians preferred the policy of lustration, a term derived from the Christian idea of penitence followed by purification. Havel advocated an in-between ground leaning toward lustration; penitence and purification, yes, but followed by forgiveness on the part of the victims of the former regime for those who served in that regime. There were gradations of guilt, ranging from genuinely evil characters to those who were forced to collaborate by the regime, and even some whose role in the underground organizations was precisely to collaborate, in order to gain access to information or to inflect regime policies in a liberalizing direction. “The boundary can be designated only by something intangible or something that does not lend itself to legal norms, such as feelings, taste, understanding, prudence, wisdom”—what Aristotle would immediately recognize as natural right. In his own case, “Shortly after I became president, I was given a list of all colleagues who had informed on me, but that same day I not only lost the piece of paper but on top of that I forgot who was on the list.” But that was on the personal level. “As president I have to take into account that society needs this kind of accountability, because they have a sense that the revolution has not been completed”; those who “terrorized the population and in obvious ways abused human rights” must be removed from office.

Ever the secularist, Michnik remarked that although the Catholic Church has a firm understanding of sin, forgiveness, and absolution, it also organized the Inquisition. Havel replied that “absolution is always connected with confession,” acknowledging sin, “whereas the Inquisition is about tracking down the hidden sins.” Michnik concurred, concluding as Havel had done that “we can absolve only those wrongs done to us, but to absolve the wrongs suffered by others is not in our power.” He worried that revolutionary revanchism may never end, as indeed it did not, in France, until the despot Napoleon redirected French hatreds outward, to the destruction of large swaths of Europe. Havel acknowledged that the pent-up hatreds were real, because Communism had the opposite effect its practitioners intended. Instead of accelerating ‘History’ or the course of events toward a benign and wondrous culmination, Communist regimes actually “postponed [history’s] natural development and movement,” interrupting what, by the early twentieth century, had looked like a gradual democratization of civil societies accompanied by republican regimes. “Here in Czechoslovakia, in every little town or county, one can see that people are reaching back for traditions were destroyed over forty years ago”—that is, in the 1930s, initially by the Nazi invasion. Long suppressed, both good “spirits” and bad “demons” are now “awakening,” the demons being both religious and ethnic hatreds, anti-Semitism among them. If such demons prevail, the political result will be not a return to communism but a return to fascism, which in the Czech region was secular, but in the Slovak region allied with elements of the Catholic Church. This ties in with the problem of democracy: “Democratic rule, when compared with the prior totalitarian rule, inevitably appears indecisive, uncertain, insufficiently strong or energetic,” a “feeling [which] constitutes fertile ground for those who yearn for rule with an iron hand” by “the so-called strong personality.” This notwithstanding, Havel rejected Michnik’s worry that “anti-Communism” by itself inclines toward fascism. “I think that if nothing intervenes in this normal development, then in time the political spectrum will stabilize” because “concrete political work will begin” under the new republican regimes. And Michnik himself, after all, remained a critic of Communism: Under such regimes, “It was enough to know a few formulas to be wiser than Plato, Heidegger, or Descartes.”

What will replace the Communist ideology? “Ideas,” Havel replied, by which he means a kind of post-modernist globalism—’post-modern’ in its rejection of the grand thought-systems produced by the likes of Hegel and Marx (exactly the sort of system easily vulgarized into the “few formulas” criticized by Michnik), globalist in a sense that he does not immediately make clear, but which seems to involve both a sense of international law fortified by international institutions along with the variation of natural right seen in environmentalism. Michnik challenged Havel on this point. “Is the era of ideology really ending? Isn’t that just wishful thinking, the yearning of humanists and intellectuals?” His concerns about the rise of nationalism were more intense than Havel’s. Havel conceded that national sentiments will remain strong, if only because they do not require mastery of even the most elementary philosophic doctrines: “Everybody knows his nationality.” Xenophobia arises from closed societies where people do not speak with one another, do not learn to live together, and from the desire to assign guilt for whatever troubles confront us. Xenophobia thus has both a ‘regime’ basis and a natural basis. “I think a lot of time must pass before civil society will respect all the dimensions of our ‘self’ will appreciate the matter of national belonging but not encourage a sense of superiority, and will not turn it into an ideology or the organizing principle of the state.” In this, perhaps without not knowing it, Havel took the stance of that Frenchman of the previous generation, Charles de Gaulle.

Michnik wanted to know what Havel thought of “the role of religion,” now that the Communist regimes are gone. “Under the Communist dictatorship it was for all of us a source of strength, whether we were religious or not. It was our only recourse to a natural law that we all had to answer to.” What now? Havel found in religion “two dimensions,” one indispensable to good politics, the other dangerous to it. Religion “puts things into perspective, as it directs human attention upward, reminding us of the metaphysical anchoring of our conscience and our responsibility, because it emphasizes brotherly love and unselfishness.” But it also may enter political life more directly—this “might be stronger in Poland than here”—and remains lethally strong in Muslim countries. A regime founded upon “seemingly” religious but actually “ideological and doctrinal principles” becomes “in its essence intolerant, because it reduces the human being to one dimension of his life, constrains him and manipulates him,” just as such secularist ideologies as communism and nationalism do. Havel suggested that “after the collapse of Communism religious or nationalist fundamentalism may come to the fore,” but the “force that acts against them, a force that I hope will succeed,” is “the power of the survival instinct of this planet.” In other writings, Havel refers to this as the “Gaia hypothesis”—that the earth itself, including the human beings living on it, has a sort of organic wisdom, which rebalances itself when some portion of it runs to any extreme. For example, he cited the international military response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, “which could be interpreted as a sign of those survival mechanisms.” So yes, fundamentalism endangers us, but it “fac[es] forces that are capable of withstanding it.” But those forces are not simply mechanistic or automatic; they will require statesmanship to “quickly strengthen democratic institutions, mechanisms, and the rules of the game. Democracy has to earn its authority quickly,” or it will have authority rested from it by ‘authoritarians.’

Such institutions will include a stronger executive branch of the Czechoslovak government (not popular election of the president, but veto power and the right to dissolve the legislature and call for early elections), an institution which can serve as “the most effective weapon against those who come in with the idea of rule by an iron hand” by imparting decisiveness to a regime in which the legislature, the ‘talkative’ branch, currently enjoys too much power. Political discussion, to be sure, but also political decision must be a hallmark of republicanism, lest more forceful ‘deciders’ persuade the people, unaccustomed to the republican way of politics, that republicanism itself must go. On the other side (and glancing at his own political rival, Vacláv Klaus), while a free-market economy underlies lasting prosperity, Havel denied that “the market mechanism is a magical key that will solve everything, nor do I think that the free market is a worldview or the meaning of life,” a conviction familiar to Americans who read Ayn Rand. Libertarianism makes such a sensible institution as private property and the law of supply and demand which follows from it into yet another ideology aiming at yet another utopia. The law of supply and demand should rather be understood “as something that has been tested for centuries,” something that “resonates with human nature, and functions in a natural way.” “This is not a religion.”

Havel and Michnik next met four years later, also in Prague. By 1995, Havel was no longer president of Czechoslovakia because there was no longer a Czechoslovakia; he had resigned in protest when Slovaks declared their independence in 1992. Promptly elected president of the new Czech Republic, he recalled that “with the collapse of Communism the structure of habits, values, and ways of life also collapsed”; “people had to organize their lives anew,” not fully understanding that they would need to do this, that it wouldn’t be done for them by rulers ‘from above.’ In democratic republics, “those who come to power will only be of a kind that the society is capable of generating,” and post-communist societies had suffered serious deformations. He marvels at the success of the American Revolution, attributing it to a situation in which people did not win “over others but rather that principles won.” (He was half-right: Principles did win, but the Tories left for Canada and their property was expropriated.) Principles or no principles, human nature remains the same, regardless of the regime, and human nature is a mixed bag. Given the experience in ruling large organizations and their extensive interpersonal networks built during their years in power, ex-Communist officials enjoyed political and economic advantages, leading to “some kind of Velvet Restoration,” in the years after the Velvet Revolution.

Unlike Czechoslovakia, Michnik observed, Poland entertained few such starry-eyed hopes. “Our revolution was a revolution without a utopia”; “we had no illusions like those of the Jacobins or Bolsheviks.” Accordingly, his concerns focus not on internal faction but on international military alliance. He awaited Polish accession to NATO, impatiently. Havel, with experience foreign policy, explained that the delay had occurred because “contemporary politicians are much more constrained” by mass-media pressures than the framers of NATO were. What is more, “Today there are no politicians as courageous and magnanimous as Adenauer, de Gaulle, and Gasperi after the war.” He worried that Americans especially tend to assume that now the revolutions have been accomplished, all will be well. But not so. Russia remains both insecure and ambitious, located as it is on the eastern part of the Great European Plain. Eastern and Central European countries will need protection from Russian irredentism, even if the full reconstitution of the Soviet empire under the new regime in Moscow remains improbable.

Meanwhile, and disturbingly, nationalist and religious factions had boiled up in the Balkans, in the form of exercises in ‘ethnic cleansing.’ The Kosovo War “can only be stopped by outside force,” but for the moment “there is no political will” to exert it because “Western politicians are not prepared to make quick decisions,” often lacking firm executive authority in their regimes but also, even with such authority, constrained by media scrutiny. “If the new European order is not created by democrats, nationalists will take care of it.” But if Czech and Polish democratic republicans can “notice the dangers lurking in the contemporary world and to articulate them in the right way thanks to the specific experience of Communism and our entire history,” this may spur West European and North American politicians take action. For Havel, this is what ‘thinking globally’ means: the defense of commercial republicanism against a new, ‘authoritarian’ nationalism, fueled by revenues from state-owned enterprises and fired by an ideology of ethnic triumphalism and domination. Medium- and small-sized countries like Poland and the Czech Republic can in this way take the lead in world affairs, even without the material resources of the major powers. In the event, the Czech Republic did support NATO’s intervention in the Balkans, the following year.

By November 1998, the time of their third conversation, Havel had been re-elected president. He was still “not worried about Russia” as a genuinely imperialist force in Europe. He now worried more about what he called “a fundamental issue for the future of our civilization,” challenged by politicians and intellectuals in Asia who argued that “democracy is a great thing but it has to stop somewhere, because democracy without limitations leads to a crisis of authority and sooner or later brings about chaos.” Havel wasn’t concerned about anarchy, but he did contend (as André Malraux had done, thirty years earlier) that “if our civilization does not somehow deepen spiritually, if it doesn’t realize anew its own spiritual roots, if it doesn’t start to respect moral principles, we are threatened with a disintegration of our human bonds, the loss of a sense of responsibility, and totally unbridled self-interest.” “To some extent, I’m a product of the sixties”—a product, that is, of a “decade of cultural, spiritual and social rebellion against all establishments.” True enough: unlike Malraux and de Gaulle, however, it’s hard to tell if he sees that the rebellions of the ‘Sixties lacked precisely the “spiritual roots” he saw missing from the West of the uncanny era.

In 2003, when they next met, this time in Poland, Havel had left office (his rival Klaus succeeded him) and was recovering from cancer. He continued to discuss the “crisis of civilization,” a crisis “deeper than the crisis of democracy.” He set himself resolutely against historical determinism. “I believe that all people are agents of historical events, except that there are many people, and they are different, and so history depends on lots of factors.” The overall trajectory of technological mastery over nature has yielded “a huge variety of benefits that make daily life easier” while it also threatens the environment and (with the prospect of modern weapons in the hands of terrorist gangs) “coexistence on this planet.” Such a civilizational contradiction stems from the contradictions of human nature itself; “a human being remains a creature full of contradictions, as he always was.” We are not only the first planetary civilization but “the first atheist civilization.” By what light can such a civilization illuminate its path?

Michnik replied, “You are on the same wavelength as John Paul II,” and “I don’t agree with this.” Atheism, no; secularism, yes. The West still has principles, an orientation towards ‘Being,’ even if they remain unstated or poorly stated. Further, religion isn’t enough; Muslim terrorists are religious. “As long as civilization exists, the need for metaphysics will endure.” For example, “nobody reasonable will accept the thesis that it’s a matter of moral indifference that there is a regime in Iraq which chops people’s hands off, plucks their eyes out, cuts off their ears, and the world is to look at that quietly in the name of the holy rule of sovereignty.” Neither he, nor Havel, nor the Pope partook of pacifism in such matters, even if they preferred velvet revolutions to violent ones. Havel didn’t dispute Michnik’s correction, except for one important caveat: “The state is the work of people, while the person is a work of God. There is some hierarchy here.” His metaphysics has religious dimension, albeit one consonant with the natural rights of individual persons. The media-driven, publicity-hound politics which prevents the formation of outstanding statesmen, reducing politics to “public relations” and thereby establishing a “cult of mediocrity” becomes possible when human beings keep their eyes on what is around and beneath them, and never on what, or who, is above them. The youth of the ‘Sixties has seen the crisis of civilization more clearly now, precisely because he has engaged in politics. In that sense, a man can indeed seek and find truth in political life.

Their next conversation occurred in October 2007, the year Havel published his memoir, To the Castle and Back. Havel asked Michnik about the political circumstances in Poland, where the Kaczynski brothers had been elected on a nationalist platform. Michnik said that a coalition of three right-wing parties had been “changing the system” in Poland “in a stealthy, creeping way”—attempting a revolution of the velvet glove, as it were, a garment that leaves no fingerprints behind. What he called the Polish “Fourth Republic,” with its “permanent ‘moral revolution'” backed by the security services and the Polish equivalent of the attorney-general’s office, used wiretaps and denunciations by informers to enforce a never-ending purge of regime ‘enemies,’ especially of anyone who could be accused of having had ties to the Communist regime. Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kacynski had been “able to persuade many people that Poland is ruled by a secret pact that ought to be tracked down and destroyed”—that is, he made use of a populist conspiracy theory to aggrandize his power. “The real model is the consistent and effective authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin” in Russia. “We should look at the practices of Putin to understand the nature of the threats to democracy in the countries of post-Communist Europe,” which amounts to a sort of Slavic Francoism. All this notwithstanding, Michnik remained guardedly optimistic. “Poland is a country where no nastiness ever wins out in the end. In Poland, everything is possible: even change for the better.”

The following year, Havel had returned to his first love, the theater, writing several plays before his death in 2011. They met in the offices of Michnik’s newspaper in Warsaw, the city in which Havel chose to stage the premiere of his first new play in many years. Recalling the Soviet invasion ending the Prague Spring of 1968, Havel recalled that the attack “opened the eyes of the Western left” to the character of the Soviet regime, an awakening that seemed to occur about once every decade or so, and needed to, given the somnolence of the Left when it came to threats from that quarter. Michnik and Havel worried that some former dissidents in Russia, Solzhenitsyn by far the most important, might now be the ones who have fallen asleep, when it comes to the depredations of Putin and other rightists. Havel remarked, “In Russian society there lurks a peculiar complex, an anxiety as to whether it will be taken seriously in the West. This, the biggest country in the world, appears to itself to be small, and that is why it glances at neighboring states as though it doesn’t know exactly where Russia begins and where it ends.” This anxiety has given us Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but also Stalin and Brezhnev and Putin—not to be confused, to be sure, when it comes to the amount of blood on their hands, but not to be trusted, either, when it comes to the independence of Eastern and Central Europe. “There are no totalitarian pressures any more, that doesn’t mean we have won.”

Shortly before Havel’s death, Michnik published “When Socrates Became Pericles,” an article marking his seventy-fifth birthday. Michnik recalls how Havel would bring drinks to the secret police agents who were freezing outside the door of his house on winter nights—a characteristic gesture of compassion and good-humored irony. “Theater of the absurd is Havel’s specialty.” But far more than a mere sense of the absurd: “I was struck by how he evaded all attempts at simplistic classification: he was not a mutinous Communist… nor was he a Catholic. He was neither a conservative nor a liberal, nor was he a Social Democrat…. Simply put, he was a democrat, a shy, gentle, and modest man with great courage, imagination, and determination.” He understood that it’s not enough to ‘stand on principle’ because most people can’t afford to do that; they need a way to survive. Michnik finds “as good an illustration as could be found of the historical legacy with which Havel wrestled throughout his life” in a 1938 essay by the novelist and playwright Karel Capek. At the time it seemed as if those living under Nazism could choose among “shared culpability, cowardice, or martyrdom.” “But there is a fourth way,” Capek wrote: “Refusal to betray one’s spiritual discipline, no matter how difficult the circumstances and no matter what pressures, refusal to deny the spirit of independence and conscious awareness,” a spirit which tells us “that reason can be universal, and experience, cognition, laws of the spirit, and laws of conscience can still have binding power.” The question of how to win the Cold War, how to secure a decent regime in its aftermath, had been preceded long before by the question, “How to lose?” In an open letter to Alexander Dubcek, who had wanted “Socialism with a Human Face,” Havel had warned that the Communists’ “desire to bring you to your knees will not be satisfied simply because you no longer have power; they need more; they need you to lose face.” The only thing that can be salvaged, for now, is self-respect. This was no situation in which political calculation would serve. Like Lincoln in 1861, de Gaulle in 1940, “the sudden assertion of human criteria within a dehumanizing framework of political manipulation can be like a flash of lightning illuminating a dark landscape.” Dubcek wasn’t up to such an assertion. Havel was.

In a letter to Dubcek’s Soviet-installed replacement, Gustáv Husák, Havel predicted the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire and of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. He was right, but also came to think that the modern project itself, especially the “technological society” it has produced, eventually would suffer collapse, as well, for the same reason: its denial of the human person. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, the ancient Greek poet wrote, but she will return. That is, Havel concurred with Heidegger regarding technology and the conquest of nature it is intended to effect, but refused to follow Heidegger into radical historicism, much less suffering illusions about the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. Closer to his Czech home, he is following the lead of Capek, who wrote extensively on the challenges technology poses to the human person, and indeed popularized the word ‘robot’ in a play first staged in 1920. For Capek and Havel alike, nature, not ‘History,’ will have the last word.

It was this intention to assert “human criteria” that guided Havel in his decision to remain in Czechoslovakia and go to prison instead of fleeing to the United States. The simple fact that by 1979 the regime preferred not to kill him but to offer him a choice between incarceration and exile proved that the regime itself was beginning to hesitate, by then, to question its ideology. By going to prison he could put his principles into practice, proving himself to his friends, to God, and to himself. As Michnik writes, the “dissident subculture had snares of its own”—”demonizing the enemy” and “angeliz[ing] oneself.” But for Havel, “the enemy was the Communist system, not the Communists”; a Christian would call that hating the sin, not the sinner.

On the matter of religion, too, Michnik provides a just assessment of his friend, who “rejected the atheist worldview”—possibly in part because it is a worldview, a too-confident system of ‘totalizing’ belief. Havel was rather a “philosophically inclined homo religiosus” who delivered himself of the extraordinary sentence, “I accept the Gospel of Jesus as a challenge to go my own way.” That doesn’t sound quite like what Jesus had in mind, but it does indeed bring Socrates to church. This “outlook” (not “worldview”) inflected his politics, Havel’s considerations on Machiavelli’s modern ‘state.’ Michnik quotes him as identifying the origin of lo stato to “a moment when human reason begins to ‘liberate’ itself from the human being as such, from his personal experience, personal conscience, and personal responsibility and so also from that to which, within the framework of the natural world, all responsibility is uniquely related his absolute horizon.” Understanding that ‘Machiavellian moment’ in Western thought enabled him to “unmask Marxism-Leninism as a para-religion offering ready-made answers to all questions”; against this, he (“in his own way”) upheld “a religion that demands humility in the face of Mystery.” Politically, such humility issued in a commitment to “political and economic pluralism, along with dialogue between democratic representatives and expert opinion”—the two components of modern republican government.

The choice for Havel, then, was between attempts to take an idea (or more usually a closed system of ideas) and institutionalize it and the attempt to live in the world of politics Socratically, “living in the truth.” Michnik observes that Havel never claimed to have coined that phrase, although it came to be identified with him. It was Jan Patocka, “an intellectual mentor and moral authority for the Czech dissidents,” who did so, associating it with Socrates and pointing out that Socrates eventually was put to death by the regime of his city. Havel “chose, like Socrates, uncompromising conflict with the authorities. And astoundingly, by happenstance, this time Socrates became Pericles.” And although his vocation ended less grimly than Socrates’, his move to abolish the death penalty (and, it might be added, to pardon most of the old-regime operatives) brought unwelcome grumblings from a less-than-Socratic public stuck in a “Czech small-mindedness” that Michnik perhaps too quickly associates with “petty bourgeois provincialism” instead of with democracy itself. There weren’t many bourgeois in Socrates’ Athens, and no Czechs at all, but there were plenty of democrats. In this, Michnik relies too much on the formulas of the nineteenth-century European ‘Left,’ insufficiently on Tocqueville.

The continued rise of rightist populism in Europe and elsewhere shows that concerns of Michnik and Havel were far from groundless. Some of the appeal of these groups may arise from hyper-nationalist sentiment, but one must also notice that it responds to the persistent moral flaccidity of many contemporary democratic republics, and also to the longstanding political problems raised by bureaucracy—especially by international and ‘globalist’ bureaucracy, which hardly deserves the name of either democracy or republicanism. Solzhenitsyn had pointed to the moral crisis of the West as early as 1978, in his much-misunderstood commencement speech at Harvard University. This must explain, at least in part, his late-life sympathy for Putin. Among European thinkers now, Pierre Manent may best articulate an answer to these concerns, and to these groups themselves, but how many are listening?

Adam Michnik: The Trouble with History: Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution. Elzbieta Matynia, Agnieszka Marczysk, and Roman Czarny translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

 

A worrisome thing that’ll cause you to sing the blues in the night: That’s history, all right, and Adam Michnik knows it like a Pole—in his bones. Part of the troublesomeness of history derives not only from the history we mean when we think of the course of human events—often more a slaughter-bench than a stream—but from history held up as a source of moral and political authority, as a dialectical unfolding of some form of ‘Absolute Spirit,’ of class- or race-consciousness which acts rather in the manner of Biblical Providence, revealing truth to all who have ears to hear and rubbishing those graceless souls who don’t. Situated squarely between Germany and Russia and its sometime imperial provinces, Belarus and Ukraine, Poles have witnessed and suffered the consequences of those ideologies for a century.

In inaugurating a series of books exploring “democracy and its discontents,” Yale University Press chose one of the best of the secularist Poles. A red-diaper baby born in 1946, in the aftermath of the Soviet-enforced ascension of the Polish Communist Party, he proved one of those rare persons who thinks his way free from the idols of the cave, perhaps with some help from the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, whom he met as a university student in Warsaw. His political activities earned him expulsion from Warsaw University in that unrestful year, 1968, and the next two decades found him sometimes in prison, sometimes in exile, but never removed from engagement in the efforts of Poles to liberate themselves. As those efforts gained traction in the early 1980s, Michnik founded Gazeta Wyborcza at the behest of Polish Solidarity labor union leader Lech Walesa; the newspaper quickly established itself as more than just the voice of the Solidarity Citizens’ Committee but as a serious source of reliable news and political analysis. Briefly a member of the first real Polish parliament of the postwar era, Michnik settled into his true vocation as a writer and editor, which he fills to this day.

Michnik divides his book into two parts. In Part One he looks at the 1989 revolution against the Soviet-imposed oligarchy prospectively—concerning West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik of the 1970s and its status as a proximate cause of that revolution—and prospectively—showing how, in the aftermath of that revolution, politicians in Poland and the other “young democracies” have manipulated historical truth in ways that injure the newly-founded regimes in which they operate. In Part Two he thinks about how history might be used instead of abused by looking at the aftermath of the French Revolution through the eyes of a non-historian, Stendhal, that Napoleon of French novelists who came both to extend and finish the Revolution. Extending and finishing a revolution requires of politicians and of writers the imagination of a realist novelist; trained as a historian and tried in politics revolutionary and post-revolutionary, Michnik finds a path to truth in a certain well-measured use of the imagination.

Michnik titles his essay on Brandt “Morality in Politics,” involving his readers in the dilemmas confronted by both Brandt and the Central European dissidents who watched him, dilemmas of compromise between what one wants and what one can do, “between the voice of conscience and the pragmatic dictate of common sense.” What Aristotle calls “moral courage”—remarked by Michnik—proves necessary but not sufficient in politics, as Aristotle himself knew and taught in his account of phronēsis or “practical wisdom.” Holding moral courage and practical wisdom together comes hard. Michnik admires those who do, criticizing them with sympathetic firmness when they fail.

Brandt visited Poland as the newly-elected president of West Germany in 1970. As a social democrat, he represented a party with its own troubled history with the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat Marxists of East Germany and in Central and Eastern Europe generally, but such partisan tensions on the ‘Left’ seemed insignificant compared to the gestures he made in his capacity not as a socialist but as a German head of state. In Poland to sign the Treaty of Warsaw, officially recognizing the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish-German border, Brandt laid wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Ghetto Heroes Monument—memorials to the victims of Nazi aggression against Poles generally and against Polish Jews, respectively. At the Monument, he startled his hosts, his own people, and the world at large by kneeling in remorse for German war crimes. Closely related to this act of national contrition, Brandt implemented Ostpolitik—his diplomatic opening to the Soviet bloc—as a signal that West Germany politely asserted itself as “a fully independent political actor on the European scene”—independent, that is, of the quarter-century of Allied domination of his country that had begun with its occupation and partition after the defeat of the Nazi regime. As Brandt riposted to his critics in West Germany who objection to his recognition of the border, which transferred nearly one-quarter of territories ruled by pre-Hitler Germany to Poland, the Federal Republic of Germany didn’t lose those lands; the “criminal National Socialist regime did”—a regime, it might be added, that Germans of the hapless Weimar Republic had effectively voted to establish when the elected Hitler as Reich Chancellor in 1933, a regime that Brandt had opposed from the day of its founding until its welcome destruction.

Further, given the anti-Jewish animus of some within the existing Polish communist regime in 1970, a sentiment shared by certain Polish nationalists who detested that regime, Brandt had emphatically pointed to a moral limit to Ostpolitik: He would not allow it to serve as an occasion for any recrudescence of xenophobia, then or in the future. And finally, by disproving the Polish communist regime’s claim that republican West Germany somehow wanted to attack Poland, in imitation of the Hitler tyranny, and to seize the lost territory, Brandt opened political space for the anti-communist resistance that would culminate in Poland’s own independence by freeing that movement from charges of intentional or unintentional collaboration with German revanchism. “Brandt’s Ostpolitik was directed not only against the ruling communists, but also toward the society that was standing up to the dictatorship.” It had been, after all, the Soviet Union which had destroyed hopes of a ‘popular-front’ coalition of communist and non-communist workers in the 1930s, when it signed the 1939 pact with Hitler as a prelude to dividing Poland between the two tyrannies, and of course it had been the Soviet Union that had betrayed the Allies’ agreement at the Yalta Conference of 1945, pledging free and fair elections in Poland after the war.

Like de Gaulle before him, Brandt wanted a Europe free of both American and Soviet military occupation. As the former mayor of West Berlin, he knew very well the reluctance of the NATO allies to “die for Berlin,” despite the resolution shown in the 1948-49 airlift and the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961. He wanted to break the impasse between West and East, between democratic and commercial-republican Europe and the states of the Soviet empire.

While admiring Brandt’s courage and prudence at Warsaw in 1970, Michnik criticizes the Ostpolitik as it came to be developed, throughout the decade. Like the Nixon/Kissinger policy of détente, “the politics of consistent rapprochement with Moscow and East Berlin and the language of ‘concern for peace’ practically drove out concern for human rights in Central and Eastern Europe.” The era of what American detentists called “quiet diplomacy” too often meant neglect of the very feature of the communist oligarchies which made them tyrannical: their rejection of human rights in principle and in practice. “When he accepted the Oder-Neisse border in the name of the Federal Republic, Brandt had spoken to all Poles. Later he spoke only to Poland’s communist governing elite”—and none too effectively, at that. ‘Top-down’ reform just wasn’t going to happen. At the same time the Czech playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel “wrote about ‘the power of the powerless,’ Willy Brandt demonstrated the moral powerlessness of the powerful.” Only revolution ‘from below’ would work, and that was where Poland’s Solidarity trade union came in, allied with a new generation of Polish intellectuals and also with Polish farmers who detested the system of collectivized agriculture. (It would be well to observe that those classes were supported by the Roman Catholic Church to which no small number of Poles belonged, and its Polish pope, John-Paul II; the Church and its pontiff are oddly absent from Michnik’s account, here—perhaps a token of his secularism.)

The new revolutionaries in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Central Europe, supported across the political spectrum in many of the commercial republics—from Ronald Reagan on the ‘Right’ in America to François Mitterand on the ‘Left’ in France—insisted that while the Soviet Union and its empire “was no longer a system of Stalinist-totalitarian oppression… it retained the institutions of a totalitarian state.” The time of “ideology” had not passed; the time of an interests-based, allegedly pragmatic politics of peace—often masking moral cowardice and imprudence—had not begun. While détente and Ostpolitik “contributed to the destabilization of communist regimes… that was not either Kissinger’s or Brandt’s goal.” It was the goal of Reagan and Mitterand, of Michnik, Walesa, and Havel, and they set a different course to arrive at that different goal. The forthright assertion of human rights by all of these statesmen and statesmen-in-waiting “did not trigger war,” as their alarmist critics feared.

Michnik thus begins his book with an essay exhibiting both a sober acknowledgement of the realities of politics and a firm adherence to the humane, genuinely liberal principles that policies and political regimes should secure. A ‘man of the Left’ himself, he has always refused to say, ‘No enemies on the Left’ or ‘No friends on the Right.’ He understands and appreciates international politics, especially geopolitics, as any sensible Pole must do. At the same time, he sees the importance of what Aristotle calls the politeia or regime, both within a countries and in relations among countries. Aristotle describes the regime in four dimensions: the person who rule (one, few, or many and also, crucially, good or bad); the forms or institutions by which those rulers rule; the Bios ti, the way of life rulers and institutions encourage and sustain; the telos or purpose of the rulers, the forms of rule, and the way of life. Michnik keeps track of them all, with special attention to the conditions and consequences of regime change, or revolution.

As seen in the essay on Brandt, political revolutions involve us in profound moral, theological, and even epistemological questions. Fascist and communist tyrannies alike not only committed he worst crimes ‘against humanity,’ as the saying goes; by being what they were and therefore acting as they did, the marked the souls of both victims and predators long after the regimes themselves had undergone revolution. This is part of “The Trouble with History,” the title of Michnik’s second chapter, concluding Part One. Characteristically, Michnik sympathetically identifies the constraints imposed upon heads of state like Brandt while unflinchingly pointing also to their failures to see when and where those constraints were more apparent than real—understandable failure, but still failures of courage and of prudence. At the same time, he points to the much more salutary constraints that ought to prevail among the revolutionaries and the beneficiaries of the revolutions against the communist regimes. This sympathy, combined with such criticism, distinguishes Michnik’s writing from those of the majority of journalists and scholars of his own, and of any generation.

One of the illusions prevailing among well-meaning communist moderates (as it were) during the Cold War was the notion of “socialism with a human face”—a slogan coined by the Czech communist reformer Alexander Dubçek during the Prague Spring of 1968. Considering an apologia for McCarthyism written by a Polish right-winger in the aftermath of the far more successful Central European ‘Spring’ of 1989, Michnik calls this new turn “anti-communism with a Bolshevik face.” He means that such neo-McCarthyism in Central Europe rests on “the belief that by using the techniques of intimidating public opinion one can build a world without sin.” This amounts to a sort of millennialism of the ‘Right’ matching that of the ‘Left.’ Although this Rightist campaign had not (yet) moved against the lives or personal liberties of its targets, and hardly aimed at the enormities of Nazism, it did move against their livelihoods, aiming to disqualify ex-communists from all government positions and moreover to discredit their participation in democratic political life. It treated all members of the previous, justly defeated regimes as irreconcilables.

The Polish Right was beginning to use history as a means of persecution. Under the new regime envisioned by the Right, only those entirely free of association with communism might wield public authority, can and should take a different turn from the purges that followed the revolution of 1945.

As compromised and polluted beings, the others must shut up and go away. In this anti-Bolshevik appropriation of Bolshevik-like practices, Michnik sees another deformation of historical dialectic: “It is clear that communism created as its antithesis not only an attitude of dialogue and pluralism”—underground men and women who established a civil society unseen by their uncivil, would-be totalitarian rulers—”but also a philosophy of replacing communist monologue with an anti-communist monologue.”

Exercising the freedom to write guaranteed by the 1989 revolution, Michnik interrupts the new monologists by making some reasonable distinctions. As Aristotle would argue, circumstances alter cases: The harshness of Nazi rule in Poland had far exceeded the harshness of the Soviet and Polish communist rule that followed it there, although Hitler had nothing on Stalin when it came to genocide in other places. Similarly, the peaceful revolution that removed the communist regime “had nothing in common with the end of the Nazi occupation”—coming, as it did, during a world war and resulting in the very oppression now deplored by the new Polish Right. This means that the politics of Polish republicanism, post-1989, can and should take a different turn than the purges that followed the revolution of 1945.

“There is only one thing everybody agreed on” in 1989: “that the past had to be de-falsified.” Such de-falsification must not entail de-fenestration of those associated with the thuggish and tyrannical but not genocidal regime of Polish communism—a regime which, to its credit, collaborated in its own demise by negotiating with the revolutionary dissidents. Some on the Right in post-communist, democratic-republican Poland claimed that “all those who after 1945 took part in supporting communist rule” were quislings to be “taken to court for high treason against their own nation.” Such persecution will not tend to establish a civil society in a country still recovering from tyranny. Similarly, in the United States of the late 1940s and early 1950s it was one thing to prosecute Americans who had acted as Soviet agents, another to accuse anyone who had associated with the Reds with treason.

Michnik wants no one to mistake his intention: Communist tyranny deserved its political ‘deconstruction.’ But in its four and a half decades of misrule it had moved “from Stalinist fanaticism and terror to a dictatorship that tolerated an independent Catholic Church and private farming, and periodically allowed some margin of freedom in artistic expression and scholarly research”—the very things that eventually helped to bring about its collapse. What is more, even and especially the dissidents who lived under that regime and undermined it necessarily got some dirt on their hands by the very act of pushing back against dirty things. The dissidents what every sane person does, and not only in politics; they won gains by making compromises. They too had to think ‘dialectically’ in one sense: the sense (moreover, the common sense) of the communists’ old slogan, “Two steps forward, one step back.” “Can one mechanistically classify all of those people”—surely including Michnik himself and his colleagues—”as traitors to Poland?” By that standard, only those who did nothing at all could now qualify for full participation in Poland’s new civic life.

Michnik coins a word to describe the partisan, self-serving abuse of history: “historiosophy.” Historiosophists attempt to exploit the understandable passion to avenge past injustices by precluding all the ‘impure’—in this case anyone who held a government position in the old regime and indeed anyone identified in the police records of that regime as a collaborator with it—from any form of government position, now and in the future. This is a Right which imitates the very partisans the Right has long (and properly) condemned: the Jacobins of France and the Bolsheviks of Russia, who claimed that the proverbial slate needed cleaning (by themselves) and that only then, “with them” ruling, a “new era of national history begins.” The sophistry of historiosophy consists in believing that such a thing is possible and, if possible, just. What begins with an attempt to prevent an old, historical regime from returning risks the founding of a new tyranny.

Michnik admires Aristotle, and he evidently appreciates Aristotle’s approach to politics. Aristotle famously identified three kinds of rule in the household and thus in the polis, that community consisting of households. There is parental rule—one-way rule of command and obedience, rightly exercised for the good of those ruled. There is masterly rule—one way rule of command and obedience, exercised for the good of the master. And there is marital rule, reciprocal rule, “ruling and being ruled,” as Aristotle describes it. Only the latter is political rule in Aristotle’s strict sense of the word. Michnik wants Polish politics to be political in that strict sense. Beginning with “a democratic opposition [that] confronted the monologue of the communists’ version of history with a polyphonic voice”—a real dialectic, not a pseudo-scientific or sophistical one—Polish democratic republicans understood history as “the real teacher of life,” of a life with a purpose, namely, “a persistent striving after truth.” This means (and not incidentally) that the founders of Polish democracy rejected not only the grand narratives of the Left, with their dubious claims of having discovered a ‘scientific’ socialism that made further civic discussion unnecessary in principle, but equally the Nietzschean or quasi-Nietzschean claims of the Right, which subordinated the quest for truth to the will to live, conceived as the ‘will to power.’

To understand one’s husband or wife, to understand one’s fellow-citizens, indeed to understand any human being, one must enter into the kind of dialogue Aristotle and Michnik esteem. “One cannot understand the French Revolution or the American Civil War,” Michnik writes, “by adopting only one perspective, whether monarchist or Jacobin, that of Lincoln or the southern generals.” One needs to listen to them all, attentively. Leaving it at that would indeed bring on the moral relativism or soft nihilism deplored by the historiosophists of the Right. But of course one need not leave it there. Having studied the writings of both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee (or better, John C. Calhoun), one can still in the end conclude that Lincoln was nearer to the truth. Still, only those who listen to the testimony presented by all sides may honestly judge with (as that eminently civil saying goes) malice towards none and charity towards all.

A historian’s responsibility “is to cultivate a spirit of heresy” with regard to all claims, but especially those that reinforce claims to rule in the present or the future. Such heresy may extract a lesson from piety. The historian “has to believe that the truth is worth caring for, and that only the truth has the power to liberate”—to set you free, as the Polish pope would have been quick to add. Free from what, and from whom? From those who would parent adults and master the un-slavish. Freed from those who overestimate their own virtue and underestimate yours.