A miscellany of British museums

What did we do in England for the month of July? In addition to crewing on a narrowboat and hiking in the Lake Country, we visited museums. Here are a few of them:

The best, or at least most rewarding, first: the Imperial War Museum outside Manchester. I've wanted to visit one of the IWM's three locations for years. The visit was totally worth our time; we did it by tram from the boat. This charitable foundation shares not just stories of wartime heroism and sacrifices, of massive social upheavals, but also asks the questions and highlights the misgivings raised by Europe's spasms of 20th century barbarism. 

• • •

Also in Manchester, we visited the Science and Industry Museum which recounts, celebrates, and interrogates the history of the first modern industrial city. Erudite Partner was mainly excited by the historic cotton looms; she's a weaver. I was gripped by seeing this earl 20th century Linotype machine on display; in the early 1970s when I worked on the Catholic Worker newspaper, we went to press from a shop that used just such a set up; their real business was printing Variety, but they made room for us. Typesetting consisted of a skilled printing professional typing out lead lugs for each line of print from such a mechanism. The machines, arrayed in a long line, were deafening.

I sat in on a class which instructed 8 year olds about the industrial and scientific accomplishments of their city. They were enthusiastic.

• • •

 

On the  Liverpool docks, we visited the International Slavery Museum. I got the impression of a facility trying to find its footing. On the one hand, the museum makes very clear how the trade in human chattel formed the city, its economy, and its residents.

 

But the museum seems to be struggling to give voice to what enslavement meant in the lives of the enslaved people. A work in progress?

• • •

In Sheffield, we were impressed by the Kelham Island Museum which documents the industrial accomplishments of the city, particularly in steel fabrication. Among these, the prototype of the modern water closet.

Sheffield is a city whose prosperity is rooted in steel fabrication, so it is not surprising that its Anglican cathedral features this steel nativity scene by Brian Fell.

We had a great time, away from the local lunacy. There are few joys to equal learning about new places and people!

After empire

Conservative Party British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has set a general election for July 4. (We'll be in that country floating the inland canal system on a narrowboat, so I may or may not see something of this.) 

I had been holding Alex Massie's commentary on the contemporary United Kingdom for our visit, but Sunak's surprise move makes it worth publishing now. 

There is much truth in the post-imperial line, “We are here because you were there” but even this undersells the real transformation of the British population.

To observe this is simply to note reality. There is nothing wrong or deplorable about any of this and I see no reason to regret it.

And, overall and with obvious counter-examples to complicate the picture, this transformation has been achieved with comparatively little trouble or fuss. That is not to downplay the experiences of black and asian Britons but, rather, to try and see the larger picture.

High-profile leadership positions are not everything but nor are they nothing. The prime minister is a Hindu whose parents hail from India, the mayor of London is the son of a Pakistani bus driver, the first minster of Scotland is Scots-Pakistani (and so is the leader of the Scottish Labour party), Kemi Badenoch, who may yet be the next leader of the Conservative party, was born in Nigeria, the next foreign secretary, David Lammy, is the son of Guyanese immigrants, and Vaughan Gething, the new first minister of Wales, is a black man born in Zambia.

It is exaggeration to say that among western nations only the United States has political leadership of such diversity (and even then, some of that American diversity is a matter of political appointment rather than electoral success).

Ten million people living in Britain today were born overseas. The paradox of immigration politics in Britain is that politicians talk tough on immigration while presiding over a system of unprecedented liberalism. The rhetoric may sometimes be ugly; the reality is rather different.

Britain is no longer the quaint antiquarian museum of castles, cathedrals, and the slightly absurd monarchy of American imagination. Nor is it the land of a wondrous, universal national health system won by unionized labor. I am looking forward to a glimpse (only) of a more complex reality.

Shards from the wide world, mostly about power and who has it

When I share domestic tidbits, I usually know where I think they lead. When it comes to the emerging 21st century global power configurations, I'm a bemused and helpless spectator. Here are some links, some with my commentary in italics.

Atrios: Biden's foreign policy leans towards do the right thing more than any president in my lifetime, as far as I can tell.
I agree, feeling concern and consternation amid inevitable reservations.

John Ganz: I am overly given to viewing things in terms of grand clashes of ideologies and social forces to the point that I can sometimes lose sight of the two dominating spirits of world-affairs: stupidity and vanity.
A useful caution ...

Nathaniel Rachman - marking Mikhail Gorbachev' passing
How politicians deal with opposition, humiliation and defeat is one of the great tests of office. Now more than ever, those in charge of the world’s leading powers struggle to face it. In China, the leadership of the Communist Party has blundered into a disastrous Covid policy, unable to change course for fear of tarnishing its own image. In the United States, a former president has rejected his own electoral defeat, imperiling American democracy. And in Russia, Putin’s vicious resentment of Ukraine’s independence led to this year’s brutal invasion.
Unlike Putin, Xi and Trump, Gorbachev’s was a model of leadership defined not by achieving one’s goals, but by accepting their rejection. He is a reminder that even those who fail spectacularly can redeem themselves by knowing how and when to lose. It is a shame so few leaders today seem ready to do the same.

Brad DeLong - the mysteries of British decline
My view—which may be wrong—has been that Britain’s long relative economic decline since the heights of 1870 has been due to its persistent refusal to invest in its people and in its technology-driving industries. You can say that the first of these has cultural-ideological-political roots—Tories fearing that if people get over-educated they will not respect their betters, and Labour fearing that if people get over-educated they will not respect their parents—and you could be right. You can blame the second on the British Empire making it just too easy to to invest abroad and count on the power of the gunboats to make foreign investments safe. You can then say that those institutional habits persist to this day, and you could be right as well. Perhaps. ...

John Cassidy: In the past six years, the Conservative Party has jettisoned economic skepticism, and embraced wishful thinking and self-sabotage.
Yes, the Tories suck. Or perhaps we see across the pond the natural trajectory of imperial decline?

Meanwhile the far-flung US imperial project grinds along:

Sarah Lazare: In September, the U.S. created a foundation that was supposed to unfreeze Afghanistan’s foreign assets. Yet, interviews with trustees reveal that, in three months, no funds have been disbursed—or concrete plans made—to help the Afghan people.

Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute: While MBS Undermines America, Joe Biden Has His Back on Yemen -- Few people noticed, but the United States Senate came very close to ending America’s complicity in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen earlier this week. But the very same person who had vowed to end that war intervened and stopped the Senate from taking action — President Joe Biden. The White House feared that the Senate resolution would have emboldened the Yemeni Houthi movement. But Biden may have instead signaled the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) that, even as he continues to undermine the United States, America still has his back.  
We're addicted to both fossil fuels and treating the people of the greater Middle East as pawns in American strategic games. You too Joe Biden.

And so to Russia's imperial dreams:

Someone using the handle Daragh at Crooked Timber:
... in many ways the Russian populace is much like the poor-white farmers of the antebellum south – hugely disadvantaged by the system themselves, but willing to support it because it puts them one or two steps up the ladder of oppression. Changing this mentality will be difficult work – potentially the work of generations. But it's work that needs doing if there is going to be a Russia that isn’t inclined to aggressive predation on its neighbours.

Greg Afinogenov: Unlike the American Baby Boomers, who have retained a vision of themselves as the protagonists of history since their teenage years, the utopians among the Soviet shestidesiatniki (“‘60s-ers”) became the occupants, if not of the dustbin of history, at least of its recycling bin. Too old when the USSR collapsed to forge new lives in its wreckage, they were also too young to have benefited much in its prime.

Ghia Nodia: An Imperial Mindset -- What the outcome of World War One was for Hitlerism, the outcome of the Cold War was for Putinism. ...A bigger problem is that, unlike Germany after World War Two, it will be very difficult for Russia to find a place in the world that would be acceptable for its national self-esteem. Before the war, Russia’s economy and institutions did not allow it to become either a true member of the global elite or an alternative center of power like China. It could only desperately punch above its weight—by invading Ukraine—without a chance of ever being truly satisfied. These underlying conditions will not disappear: in fact, they have been made worse as a result of the invasion. Russia will not become a true member of the international elite any time soon, though it may face a choice between being a poor relation of the West or becoming a junior partner of China. In either case, ressentiment will remain.

So to the Ukrainian people whose admirable, involuntary resistance to tyranny, we use to inspire ourselves:

Tom Nichols: This holiday season, many of us will seek peace and a reset heading into the new year by drawing closer to family, taking a break from work, and observing the rituals of our faith. We tend, during this time, to clear our mind of unpleasant things. But as Americans, citizens of the greatest democratic power on Earth, we must not forget that the largest European conflict since World War II is continuing to burn away in Ukraine. A democratic nation is refusing to be conquered by a vengeful imperial power, and it is paying for it with the lives of innocent men, women, and children. As we celebrate the season, let us remember that the Russians have shown no intention of taking a holiday from murder.

I agree with Nichols here -- but seeking to use our wealth and privilege for peace is always a higher calling than victory, even when the struggle is just. I believe Ukraine's cause is necessary and just. And I don't want to forget that justice is not everything. 

Happy New Year!

De-industrialization all around

Part 2: Insights from There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill; Part 1 here.

The second theme of this fascinating book that I want to highlight is that the people who built the industrial economy and modern world have been screwed similarly in the U.K., the U.S.S.R., and the U.S. by subsequent economic developments. They are all left-behind people.

Fiona Hill comes from Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in the North East of England. The early industrial revolution was based on coal and the labor of the miners who dug it; her hometown was where much of the coal which powered British commerce and military might came from when the empire ruled much of the globe during the 19th century.

But by the time Hill was born in 1965, English coal country was an economic disaster area. She writes:

In the 1980s, during the period when Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister, we were the pioneers for a unique form of social and economic malaise — a decline from the heyday of the industrial era that would come to define the entire developed world. The local mines closed,  along with associated manufacturing industries. Businesses were shuttered, communities gutted. Family and friends lost their way of life. Bishop Auckland, my once-prosperous hometown, was a forgotten place.

When she came to the United States in 1989 to pursue her professional fortune, she found her parents' coal town had all too many analogues in this country.

In the decades after I arrived in the United States, the fate of my home area in the United Kingdom was that of every major mining community in the Appalachia region, stretching from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the south up to West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in the north. America’s coal country too lost the mainstay of its economy and opportunity.

She had struggled for educational and career opportunities and had the good fortune to find a niche as an expert on Russia. Russian forced-march industrialization was the wonder of the inter-European-war world in the 1930s. But by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, she recognized familiar situations. Post-industrial misery was

... also emblematic of industrial regions across Russia and the former Soviet Union, and indeed in other parts of Europe. This fact was a significant revelation once I moved beyond the narrow confines of the blighted world that I was from and finally began to understand the forces shaping our lives in the twentieth century.

She points out a pattern replicated out across different countries and economic systems.

Structurally, the United Kingdom and the United States — like Russia and other advanced economies — cycled through a rapid buildup of extractive industry and mass manufacturing in the 1920s and 1930s and again at the end of the Second World War. Our nations began the descent into what became known as the postindustrial era in the 1960s, and especially after the 1970s, when they were hit by successive oil shocks.

... The 1980s were the critical turning point. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off. 

... at the end of the 1980s, the Rust Belt was far more like the Soviet Union and the North East of England than most Americans realized. The United States’ big industries had also developed under a fixed set of technological and economic conditions. They were huge enterprises, centers of mass production, purpose-built for a specific time and place in the first half of the twentieth century. They had been built close to major sources of raw materials, energy, and transportation routes, such as shipping routes across the Great Lakes or down major rivers to the ocean. They had enormous sunken and fixed costs. The enterprises had drawn in hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers, often with central state and local government intervention and direction. 

... [These U.S. towns] were in essence the same kind of big company or mono-industry towns as Dnipropetrovsk (now in Ukraine), Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and Magnitogorsk in the USSR. Regardless of the particular circumstances of their individual creation, they were now outmoded and depleted, their big industries shrinking as they modernized and became automated. 

... Mass industries built the cities, not the other way around. When the industries closed, the place-based economies and societies crumpled in on themselves. ...  It was the same in the U.S., the UK, and the USSR. When the mine or the factory closed, there was no work, nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Thriving industry-built cities became shattered ghost town.

Having grown up in Buffalo in the decades when that city was losing its automotive and steel industries, I find it easy to visualize the economic devastation. (Like Hill, I got out ASAP; apologies to Buffalonians who are still today trying to dig the place out of its doldrums.) What I find novel is Hill's documentation that Soviet heavy industrial cities were experiencing something so similar. Using up and throwing away the land and people who do the work is simply the way of heavy industrial development, everywhere, whether under capitalism or "socialism."

Hill explains very clearly how the consequences of de-industrialization were particularly brutal for many workers of the Soviet Union. In the UK, Labour governments had won the National Health Service and some educational opportunity for working class students like Hill. Russians even under the decayed communism of the Brezhnev era, expected to have guaranteed jobs with social subsidies like housing, health care, and a pension. These weren't good lives, but they were lives. The violent imposition of kleptocratic capitalism in the 1990s was literally fatal to people who had once worked in heavy industries which could not be made profitable. Workers were out on their ears, took to drink, died young, and whole cities were depopulated. Sound familiar?

In Britain and the U.S., the people left behind by de-industrialization do still have the chance to to express themselves in free elections. Winners in the contemporary economy may find their choices incomprehensible, but Hill doesn't. Trump's rise made sense to her.

Populists play in the gaps created by generational and demographic change, divergent economic circumstances, competing social and cultural identities, and along the seams of inequality. ... From my vantage point growing up in the industrial North East, it was easy to see Trump’s allure for American workers. ... On trips to visit my family, I heard plenty of complaints in Bishop Auckland, ... about the way local voters were taken for granted by Labour politicians who wanted a safe seat in Parliament to satisfy their own ambitions. In their view, the Labour Party had abandoned the working class. ... Similarly, in the United States, workers believed the Democratic Party had abandoned them .

Hill's clear-sighted understanding of the failures of UK and US governance didn't make her a Trump believer. She joined his National Security Council because she hoped to use her expertise about Russia to avert terrible choices by an ignorant buffoon. She was at the Women's March in DC when she got the call about the job. She's very much a Russia-hawk, but way too well-informed and realistic to be a contemporary Republican apparatchik, even if they'd have her back after her impeachment testimony. She's a patriotic immigrant U.S. citizen who knows we Americans are sometimes neither wise nor good.

And she has a prescription for bringing the places in the first world where de-industrialization has destroyed individuals, families, and communities: more educational opportunity for children and adults. She has a detailed, thoughtful chapter on how community organizing and education might turn the left-behind places around, all drawn from her own experience. After all, education worked for her ... the girl from Bishop Auckland wasn't supposed to go anywhere and ended up testifying before the U.S. Congress ...

Part 1 about Hill's personal struggles is here.

A meandering meditation on "Losers' Consent" and other democratic virtues

People who read the blog are likely concerned about the health of U.S. democracy. The extraordinary, even bizarre, contortions British democracy is going through over Brexit may have some relevance to thinking about our condition.

I'm not going to try to dig into Brexit here; that's beyond me. The simplest narrative is that in a referendum in 2016 a small majority (52-48) of British voters opted to pull the country out of its over-40 year participation in the customs arrangements and governing structures of the European Union. Most Leave voters were older, white, rural, and traditionally English; most Remain voters were younger, urban, came from Scotland, Northern Ireland, or cosmopolitan London, and many were non-white. One way of looking at the referendum is that Britain's past voted against its future. Seem familiar? Britain has still not actually departed the EU; implementing Brexit has snarled British politics in previously unimaginable tangles ever since the vote. This may (or may not) be resolved in the upcoming election on December 12. Meanwhile the EU is frustrated and getting impatient.

Watching the Brexit mess and reading commentators, I've found myself pondering the concept of "Losers' Consent." This political science concept (outlined in a 2005 book) means what it says: democracy only works when losers accept the legitimacy of electoral defeats. This lament from a 2016 Remain voter who plans to vote this time around for a pro-Brexit party catches its essence:

“The vote was to leave, so you know, recognize the vote,” the man said. “To me, once you vote, that’s it — you either accept it, or if you don’t accept it, democracy means nothing.”

He's sticking up for democracy in his own way.

The current British election is being contested amid violent threats that are shocking in what believed itself to be a more restrained political polity. During the 2016 campaign, a young rising star Labour Party parliamentarian, Jo Cox, who stood against Brexit and for inclusion of immigrants, was knifed on the street in her district. Fears linger. Richard Wyn Jones of Cardiff University has found surprising levels of approval for political violence. He opines:

... one factor that may be contributing to the “industrial quantities” of threats is that those on the losing side haven’t accepted defeat. And they haven’t accepted defeat, he said, because they feel they were “lied to, cheated and that the referendum was held under false pretenses.”

He added that on the winning side, “there was no attempt to reach out to the very, very large minority who voted a different way to say, ‘I hear your concerns, this is how we will assuage them.’ … Instead they are called ‘saboteurs’ or ‘remoaners’ or ‘traitors,’ and Brexit is redefined in an evermore hard-line way.”

Again, sound familiar amid our present U.S. situation?...When Losers' Consent follows from a democratic process, the political science literature says democracy is strengthened. In our domestic experience, it's hard to be convinced that it true. Al Gore affirmed losers' consent in the arguably stolen election of 2000; in 2016, Hillary Clinton gracefully affirmed losers' consent when a systemic curlicue (the Electoral College) denied her what the popular vote total would indicate was the democratic outcome. Winners -- George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump -- sought to brush aside or deny the questions about their lack of popular vote legitimacy.

Contemporary norms of democratic fairness -- an expectation that the candidate with the most votes wins -- have been violated, repeatedly. The shrinking old, white, rural base of the contemporary Republican Party can't win by attracting raw numbers -- more and more they have can only win through stratagems that disempower the voting strength of their opponents, that undermine popular electoral democracy.

And so we are living with an impeachment drama well described by scholar Danielle Allen in a recent oped.

For Democrats working their hearts out, on behalf of one or another candidate, the discovery that President Trump appears to have marshaled the unmatchable power of his office to conjure up investigations into a leading political rival is a heavyweight punch to the gut. The unfairness of having to fight against someone willing to fight that dirty, and with the power and resources to distort the election almost at will, is enraging.

For Republicans who worked their hearts out in 2016 on behalf of candidate Donald Trump, the relentless investigations into the president are equally enraging. The unfairness of having to constantly fight against what feel like efforts to undo a legitimate election result causes them to see red. Conservative media is full of angry denunciations of Democrats for failing to accept their humiliating political defeat.

We are all enraged, the entire polity. We are enraged because few of us believe the other side respects, and will protect, free and fair elections.

She's accurate of course; hardly anyone is in the condition of mind and heart to offer losers' consent to those with whom they differ. ...I'm reminded that this is a country founded in refusal of consent to governance that our founders believed to be illegitimate. I'm reminded that the Declaration of Independence grounds the colonial rebellion against the English monarch in the bold assertion that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." We still believe this, most of us.

And that "we" who demand a democratic right to consent is an ever larger fraction of the people of this land; there were a lot of "non-people" around in 1776 and 1787 -- women, native people, enslaved people, non-Christian people, and others with no property. Now we all want and expect to be insiders in our democracy, not just spectators. Hence rage and #Resistance. ...Political scientists who have elaborated the losers' consent concept suggest that there's an important fraction in a democratic polity who we overlook and who can tip the balance in a closely divided context.

[This is] the conventional image of the ideal citizen: informed, sophisticated, committed, and able to overcome their frustrations after a defeat. However, the findings suggest that the stability of democracies may also depend on other groups of voters rarely celebrated by analysts – namely some of the late deciders and those voters torn between contradicting considerations.

These two groups have a reputation for being less politically educated and deciding how to vote in emotional or expressive ways. We suggest that the ‘graceful’ losers amongst them are an indispensable component of the democratic majority in the aftermath of an electoral campaign, and that they contribute to the stability of democratic regimes.

This observation points to the necessary target of the grand democratic mobilization that will be the 2020 election. There are still a few people who are disengaged from contemporary politics -- and who don't want participate in the general rage. Their desire for social harmony is a healthy contribution the wider polity, even if infuriating to those of us feeling an existential threat to ourselves and our country's possibilities. There aren't many, but they can be won, but only if we organize ourselves to talk with them rather than just yell louder.

The LA Times interviewed such a voter. Christie Black is a 35-year-old stay-at-home mom who abandoned the GOP and voted independent in 2016 rather than support Trump. Now she might be open to voting for a Democrat.

“I think right now the most important thing is to get those principles of democracy tied down, get that return to regular order, and then we can worry and get back to squabbling about conservative versus liberal.”

That's not how I think, but the winner of the 2020 election needs to reach the Christies. To the annoyance and even fury of many, they may be what keeps this listing democratic vessel on an even keel.

Happy birthday to the Queen

If, as is true in this household, you get your news from the BBC, you can hardly have missed that today is the 90th birthday of the English monarch.

Flickering black and white live images of her coronation are my first memories of television; my mother was an Anglophile in whose mind the Royals were associated with winning the war against Hitler. They got a lot of passes for that one.

The image is from the recent Annie Leibowitz show at the Presidio. Oddly, this was the only projected photo which remained onscreen throughout -- and definitely one of the most interesting.

World War I morsels by ear

When offered nearly 19 hours of recorded lectures on World War I: The Great War on sale for less than $7, I could hardly resist during this 100th anniversary. I had never heard of the "Great Courses" series this came from, but I'm glad I took the small risk.

Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius of the Universally of Tennessee provides a solid thematic survey in 36 half hour lectures. Oddly, each is prefaced and ended with the sound of an audience clapping. I don't ever remember applauding in any of my large lecture classes as an undergraduate, even for that famously spellbinding lecturer Carl Schorske. This survey is much stronger than it might have been because Liulevicius is a German speaking specialist in eastern European developments, just what most English speakers tend to underplay.

Some thoughts and themes from the lectures -- nothing new, but still interesting, at least to me:

• At the beginning of the war in August 1914, all the belligerent parties insisted that they were acting in self-defense, even as they moved to set in motion war plans that put them on immediate offensives. Then as now, when public opinion matters at all to governments, wars must be sold as defensive, however absurd that might be in any rational calculus. Does anyone else remember when Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada to defend medical students on the Caribbean island?

• The war became fully global because the Allies (France, Great Britain, and czarist Russia) and the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) found themselves bogged down, particularly in the trenches on the Western Front in France. Neither side was winning. Hence the scramble to open new fronts as at Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire (modern Turkey) and carry the war to imperial outposts all around the world. This created something like bidding wars to attract additional allies that usually carried with them territorial or other promises. Many of these had to be kept secret from the peoples whose futures were being traded about cavalierly.

• Insofar as the core combatants pursued imperial designs through the conflict, these war aims contradicted their public declarations of fighting in righteous self-defense against aggressor enemies. In the multi-national states (Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) both victories and defeats unleashed pre-existing national tensions.

• Despite popular fury over German U-Boat attacks on U.S. ships, it was not really possible to sell to the war to the U.S. population as necessary for defense of the homeland. Hence the war was marketed as a struggle to promote democracy. Interesting how durable that trope turned out to be ...

• Once the U.S. joined the fray, the industrial strength of the Allies and their success at blockading German ports ensured their victory. By 1918, except for the United States, all the belligerents were near collapse. Russia and Austria-Hungary had already disintegrated. The German state was teetering -- and Britain and France were also depleted and broke after their immense exertions. The 1918 armistice was a measure of continental exhaustion; the German invaders in France were never dislodged, feeding the myth that Germany could somehow have fought on if leftists hadn't stabbed the state in the backed. The victorious Allies in the next war in 1945 were well aware of this dynamic, so from early on insisted that they would only accept total victory and unconditional surrender.

• Liulevicius points out that for many eastern European national groups -- Poles, Czechs, Serbs, etc. -- the memory of the war is of the moment when they acquired sovereignty, at least for a few decades. Armistice Day (November 11), when the guns stopped firing on the western front, is still celebrated as Independence Day in Poland.

Lots to think about here and certainly worth 19 hours of listening.

History as snark

In honor of a British election (excellent pre-primer here) in which that nation's electoral system and internal unity seem sorely tested, it seems appropriate to note a charming history from another time. In 1935 the journalist George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England--1910-1914 describing a series of trials from which the country was only rescued by the Great War in Europe. In this author's telling, without that patriotic emergency, the contradictions within Britain's transition to a modern democracy might have led to civil war. The signs and violent eruptions were everywhere.

The four presenting crises of this short period were the Conservative (Tory) Party's sabotage of the governing Liberals' legal process to enact the supremacy of the House of Commons over the House of Lords; the traumatic divide in Irish nationalism which pitted the island's Catholic majority against Protestant Ulster, secretly abetted by the Tory leader; the upper class women's suffrage rebellion led by the Pankhursts which employed rioting, arson and bombs to agitate for extension of the franchise; and a militant working class movement which evolved from demands for union recognition and a minimum wage through a series of violent general strikes that seemed pointed toward an anarcho-syndicalist revolution. The mildly conventional Liberal Party of that day had no answers for all this ferment (and in fact has been a minor element in British politics ever since.)

All this is fascinating, but the bare facts do not convey the pure delight of Dangerfield's book. This is history as snark, biting and sometimes scathing about the follies of the figures of the day, but also ultimately gentle in its treatment of their unheroic flailing. I often laughed out loud while reading it.

Here's a taste of the style, describing the indomitable and more than slightly crazed upper class element in the women's uprising:

... the revolution was on its way, and the way it took was the way of all revolutions. Its end was a valuable one -- the solidarity of women, the recovery of their proper place in the world; its means were violent and dubious. But no revolution has ever taken place without the sudden, the unbridled uprising of long suppressed classes and long ungratified desires; without cruelty and rage: nor is a revolution anything but the savage assault of right instincts upon wrong ideals. The Georgian suffragette was not personally attractive, or noble, or clairvoyante. People who make history very seldom are. Providence has bestowed upon them an instinctive response to the unrecognized needs of the human soul, and though this response is often wry and more often ridiculous, life could scarcely progress without it.

By 1910 the ideal of personal security through respectability had become putrid: therefore it was necessary that it should die. And to accomplish its death there assembled, crowding up from the depths of the female soul, as uncouth a collection of neglected instincts, hopes, hatreds, and desires as thorough-going a psychological jacquerie, as ever came together at any time in human history ....

Victorian notions of respectability must be killed and there were deaths in the women's revolt, as in the other uprisings described here, though among these women the casualties were mostly a few of the women themselves. It is also worth noting that "Votes for Women" finally began to progress when the excited "respectable" ladies of the Pankhurst faction found themselves allied, not entirely willingly, with working women.

Dangerfield writes in the light of not only what all historians know -- how the story came out -- but also in the looming awareness of that the disruptions of that time turned into the as-yet-unimagined horror of the Great War. The 1914-18 conflict swept all these ripples away and changed the landscape of British democracy forever.

This book is not easy going for an early 21st century reader in the United States. We don't talk or write like this. But I found it delightful -- and quite unique among narrative histories.

An unambiguous yarn about World War I

Popular historian Barbara Tuchman's 1958 effort, The Zimmermann Telegram, is the sort of thing that "serious" historians seldom write these days: it's a good yarn. In later years Tuchman established her reputation with more substantial volumes, but this early World War I tale is more like a thriller than most history.

In 1916, the British (and the French but they don't play in this tale) were on the ropes -- broke and exhausted after two years of bloody and massively mismanaged war against Germany. Their only hope was intervention from the reluctant United States led by President Woodrow Wilson who was re-elected that year with the slogan "he kept us out of war!" Their prospects look bad.

But professorial code breakers in the basement of the British Admiralty had cracked the German codes, so the British were reading German diplomatic correspondence. Learning from these cables that the Germans were intriguing with Mexico and Japan to encourage an attack on the United States through the southwest, the British finally had a smoking gun that would force Wilson to bring his country into the European war. But how to use the diplomatic communication -- the "Zimmermann telegram" of the title -- without leaking its source and revealing to the Germans that Britain was reading its mail? The solution to that problem of "protecting intelligence assets" forms the guts of Tuchman's narrative of how the U.S. finally came into the war. It is a good story (some of which has been amplified by subsequent releases from period archives.)

When you read a lot of books about the same period, as I am doing these days about World War I (see here and here), you begin to catalog their similarities and differences and to feel they are talking with each other. Though this is a slight book about a minor episode, I found myself approaching it this way.

World War I was such a clearly mad enterprise that every author touching on it vies to describe its horrors. Here's a snippet of Tuchman's scene setting about the third winter of the war:

The ghastly losses on the Somme -- sixty thousand British casualties in a single mad day, over a million Allied and enemy losses in the five month battle --had been for nothing. The Hindenburg Line was still unbreached. The whole war had been like that, regiments of lives spent like water, half a million at Verdun alone, without either side's winning a strategic advantage, but only being riveted together like two fighting elks who have locked horns. Now the French were drained, the Russians dying, Rumania, a late entry on the Allied side, already ruined and overrun.

The enemy was no better off. Germans were living on a diet of potatoes, conscripting fifteen-year-olds for the army, gumming up the cracks that were beginning to appear in the authority of Kaiserdom with ever harsher measures. ... England had fortitude left, but no money and, what was worse, no ideas. New commanders stumbled forward in the old rut, not questioning whether to assault the Western Front again, but merely where along its wall to bang their heads. No prospect of any end was visible.

Tuchman makes no bones about her belief that defeating Germany amounted to holding up the cause of civilization and that Britain's efforts to persuade the United States to jump into the fray were completely proper and justified. She portrays President Wilson as an irritatingly stubborn impediment to this country's doing the right thing:

War stifles reform and, if the United States was sucked in, all plans for the New Freedom would be thwarted. He was lured, too, by a vision of the New World, through himself, bringing to the Old the gift of peace and a league of nations to enforce peace, an old idea newly in vogue, which Wilson now embraced as his own. If he could stop the war he could save his own program and save Europe from itself. ...

... Although no two men in any one period of history were more unlike, Wilson shared one characteristic with the Kaiser -- he would not listen to opinions he did not welcome. Wilhelm was afraid of them, but Wilson considered opinions which opposed his as simply a waste of. time. Intent upon saving Europe, he ignored the mood of the Europeans.

... Wilson saw the world caught in a berserk carnage endlessly continuing unless stopped by a disinterested outsider -- himself. The question of rights and wrongs he would not look at or professed, at this time, not to see.

Reading these repeated disparaging descriptions of the man, I was reminded of a passage from Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars, a narrative of Britain's warriors and resisters:

... if the leaders of any one of the major European powers had been able to look forward in time and see the full consequences, would they still have so quickly sent their soldiers marching off to battle in 1914?

Two years later, the leader of the United States did foresee terrible consequences and he tried mightily to "keep us out of war," perhaps not always wisely but certainly fervently.

Would the course of the 20th century have been different if the United States somehow had not gone in? Our fresh troops and above all our financing made the French and British victory of 1918 possible. The U.S. came out of that war the world's essential economic power and henceforth its imperial reach penetrated not only the colonial periphery in South America and Asia, but also the European center. The long truce of 1918-1939 in Europe ended in barbarity that made the "First World War" look a far smaller catastrophe.

Contrafactual questions are always fruitless -- and remain suggestive and intriguing. This little Tuchman volume brings them to fore starkly because it avoids any pretense of neutrality about the war's essential necessity. In later works Tuchman showed much more ambivalence, but here her story is interesting precisely because it is constructed without any such questioning.

Bertrand Russell: hero of war resistance

This book introduced me to the story of a person whose heroism I'd never before appreciated -- heroes are rare enough to be very prized finds indeed.

Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 recounts the swath of horror World War I cut through British culture, British families and every aspect of British life. He weaves together the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people -- grieving relatives, trade unionists, politicians, soldiers, socialists, and imperialists -- to give readers a human-scale sense of the war's enormity.

It's not easy for us to take in the sheer awfulness it all. Every World War I historian I read tries to convey the horror and they all seem daunted. Here's a sample from Hochschild's summary description:

For more than three years the armies on the Western Front were virtually locked in place, burrowed into trenches with dugouts sometimes 40 feet below ground, periodically emerging for terrible battles that gained at best a few miles of muddy, shell-blasted wasteland.

The destructiveness of those battles still seems beyond belief. In addition to the dead, on the first day of the Somme offensive another 36,000 British troops were wounded. The magnitude of slaughter in the war's entire span was beyond anything in European experience: more than 35 percent of all German men who were between the ages of 19 and 22 when the fighting broke out, for example, were killed in the next four and a half years, and many of the remainder grievously wounded. For France, the total was proportionately even higher: one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at the war's outbreak were dead when it was over.

... British stonemasons in Belgium were still at work carving the names of their nation's missing onto memorials when the Germans invaded for the next war, more than 20 years later. Cities and towns in the armies' path were reduced to jagged rubble, forests and farms to charred ruins. "This is not war," a wounded soldier among Britain's Indian troops wrote home from Europe. "It is the ending of the world."

While this madness raged on the continent, in Britain, there remained a (very) few who resisted the war fever. At the war's outset, most people set aside any qualms. Perhaps most surprisingly, socialist trade unionists who had been proclaiming working class solidarity across borders quickly signed up for the national fight as did advocates for "votes for women" who had been throwing rocks at the Prime Minister's residence shortly before.

The prominent Cambridge academic philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell kept a perspective on the nationalist delirium.

Over the more than four years of fighting to come, he never yielded in his belief that "this war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. . . . , The English and French say they are fighting in defense of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta."

For his pains, he and the little band of war resisters with whom he collaborated were subjected first to ostracism, then verbal and physical attack, and finally imprisonment. Anyone who resisted the national impulse to take revenge in the days immediately after 9/11 will recognize this description of the environment they found themselves in:

... Antiwar beliefs were severely tested by the mass patriotic hysteria of the war's first months. "One by one, the people with whom one had been in the habit of agreeing politically went over to the side of the war," as Russell put it, "and as yet the exceptional people . . . had not yet found each other." How hard it was, he wrote, to resist "when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement. As much effort was required to avoid sharing this excitement as would have been needed to stand out against the extreme of hunger or sexual passion, and there was the same feeling of going against instinct."

What's fascinating about Hochschild's account of the role of this eminent man was the extent to which he was willing not just to be a spokesman, but to share the work of building what seems to have been pretty efficient resistance under extremely difficult circumstances.

... the longer the war went on, the more it was militarizing Britain in Germany's image, while killing and maiming men by the millions and making certain an embittered and dangerous postwar world. He not only lent his enormous prestige to the No-Conscription Fellowship; for much of the war his thick shock of graying hair was a familiar sight at the NCF headquarters each day, for he became the group's acting chairman when its head went to prison for refusing the call-up. He attended the courts-martial of COs, visited them in prison, and devoted hours to the most mundane office tasks, writing numerous "Dear Comrade" letters to branches around the country, signed "Fraternally Yours, Bertrand Russell."

And he made clear to all that he was as willing to sacrifice his freedom for what he believed as were the younger men and women around him. When the government began prosecuting people for distributing an NCF leaflet, he immediately wrote to the Times: "Six men have been condemned to varying terms of imprisonment with hard labour for distributing this leaflet. I wish to make it known that I am the author of this leaflet, and that if anyone is to be prosecuted, I am the person primarily responsible." For this he was fined £100 (which he refused to pay, forcing the authorities to seize some of his property), dismissed from his post at Cambridge, and denied a passport for a trip to lecture at Harvard. ...

... Believing -- correctly -- that sooner or later most of its leaders would be arrested, the NCF set up a "shadow" structure... If any officer was jailed, someone else, designated in advance, would automatically take his or her job. Similarly, wrote one member, "in various secret places, buried in an orchard in Surrey, or locked in an unsuspecting city merchant's safe, or at the back of the bookshelf in the house of a remote sympathiser . . . were duplicates of every document likely to be seized." These included a daily bulletin on the numbers of men arrested, courtmartialed, and imprisoned, and file cards showing the whereabouts of every CO. Any instance of their mistreatment was recorded and turned over to one of the small band of sympathetic MPs willing to ask questions in the House of Commons. Communications were often in code: if a telegram said that a meeting was to be at Manchester, it in fact meant Newcastle. ...

I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be," wrote Russell decades later. " I felt that for the honour of human nature those who were not swept off their feet should show that they stood firm."

Of course, the war protesters couldn't stop that war -- or any of our subsequent wars. Though millions of men in the French army staged a brief mutiny and the Russian tzar was overthrown while his army melted away, the war ground on. Hochschild reflects on the resisters' all too minor part in the tapestry he weaves for us:

I wish theirs was a victorious story, but it is not. Unlike, say, witch-burning, slavery, and apartheid, which were once taken for granted and are now officially outlawed, war is still with us. Uniforms, parades, and martial music continue to cast their allure, and the appeal of high technology has been added to that; throughout the world boys and men still dream of military glory as much as they did a century ago.

Yes -- and no. There are suggestive arguments that we live in a world in which war is far less frequent, widespread and legitimate than in the past. We do momentarily see the U.S. empire becoming less willing to endure U.S. casualties and to spend unlimited treasure on world dominance than in the recent past.

Just as World War I set many terrible developments in motion at the beginning of the last century, the British resisters to the "Great War" created a template for future anti-war movements. Adam Hochschild's volume brings both these figures and their antagonists to life.

Riot weather

After San Francisco's 7.1 earthquake in 1989, a friend who writes comic theater started a new movement, the Society for the Prevention of Seismic Events (SPSE). In those pre-internet days, this concept "went viral" in the way that gripping innovations did in those days: soon lots of Bay Area cars sported bumper stickers for this humorous response to fear, destruction and disruption.

I think about this as I read and listen to commentary on the awful riots in British cities last week. (Previous post on this topic.) The prosecutions and pontificating, the mourning and the recriminations, seem to me just as likely to prevent such eruptions as the SPSE was to prevent further earthquakes. People who've ever seen a riot on the ground know that, in the moment, riots consist predominately of ordinary people milling about and acting stupidly, swept along on a high tide of less than rational feeling that can seem to participants much like a party.

Open Democracy shared impressions from a Londoner, Nick Smith, who writes as Motown. He passed through this scene while trying make his way home from work.

Walworth Road - Only Fools no Horses
... I decided to head further down the street. There were a lot of people out on the street, but relatively few involved in looting. There were a lot of people (my estimate is 30% of people there) who looked as though they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time (like the two girls and the guy on the bike in front of the bus).

It wasn't really a scary environment, I'm not saying that people weren't frightened, but I think a better description would be shocked and disgusted. I saw a middle aged woman walking with her elderly mother through the worst hit area and they were obviously concerned, but I (and I hope they also) didn't feel that they were unsafe.

It sounds stupid to say it, but the atmosphere amongst everyone else seemed like carnival - I actually saw a girl getting chirpsed (chatted up). There were plenty of people (my estimate is maybe as many of 50% of people there) hanging around, fascinated by everything and enjoying watching the 'entertainment'. They didn't seem to be in the wrong place, they wanted to be there and to see what was going on.

I got the feeling that they wouldn't get involved in smashing any shops in, but if there were goods dropped by looters, they wouldn't hesitate to pick them up and I actually witnessed this later on. Lots of these onlookers were females and young kids (10-13) and they came from ALL races. I didn't notice any racial tension, Walworth is a very diverse area and white and blacks were mixing together whether that was in watching or in looting. ...

I'm really angry about ALL of those involved.

A messy situation, confusing, ripe for injury -- whether inflicted by the smash and grabbers or by law enforcement reasserting control -- but not terribly frightening at this location. That's most of a riot as seen on the ground. Post riot commentary from the heights of politics and the media invariably reads false if you've ever seen such a thing.

Social scientists naturally have weighed in on when we should expect urban riots. Their conclusions are pretty straightforward.

The connection between joblessness and violence comes to life in a timely August research paper Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009, which found "a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability." Authors Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth examined the relationship between spending cuts and a measure of instability they termed CHAOS -- "the sum of demonstrations, riots, strikes, assassinations, and attempted revolutions in a single year in each country."

Their conclusion: Austerity breeds anarchy. More cuts, more crime. ...

My emphasis.

We could wish that Republicans and the President would think about this as they slash budgets and refuse to tax the rich in the midst of economic carnage. But actually, conservatives rather like the riots that ensue from fiscal austerity: to them, disturbances just prove that the poor are undeserving.

Urban riots have a lot in common with weather: when the right combination of temperature and moisture come together, storms can gather force and break explosively. When the right (wrong) combination of unemployment, misery, and alienation coincide, riots become possible, even likely. At any given time and place, it's hard to predict whether the storm will break, but given the prerequisites -- youth unemployment amid social squalor and hopelessness -- the potential is very much there.

Photo from Motown.

London riots

Someone who calls herself Penny Red writes about the British riots while listening to the violence come closer to her London flat:

It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

No one expected this. ... The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

This seems highly believable to me -- though who can be sure from thousands of miles away in another country?

Unlike most younger white U.S. adults, I grew up with rioting. U.S. cities burned as the heat climbed, as reliably as summer came around each year during the latter part of the 1960s. As seems to be happening in Britain, mostly people burned their own neighborhoods, many of which have still not recovered. (This is a story told cogently in columnist Eugene Robinson's recent book on Black America.) Concurrently I saw (and ran within) what the media called "student riots" -- mostly protests that began peacefully, though some turned destructive when broken up by police force. I saw a man take birdshot in the back next to me as we tried to escape such a scene. When I went to graduate school to study modern European history, I remember a seminar that was discussing popular uprisings in 19th century cities -- there was a sharp divide in the room between our professors and most the students who had never seen street violence and the small number of us who had. Our experiences meant we saw the world differently.

Some of us knew, as Penny Red says that riots are about power and about catharsis.

Riots have remained part of my experience since. In 1979 there was the San Francisco White Night Riot touched off by lenient sentencing of the murderer of the city's mayor and first gay supervisor, a former cop. In 1992, when part of Los Angeles went up in smoke after the acquittal of policemen who beat Rodney King and were caught on video, I witnessed the smaller, gentler San Francisco sympathy riot. Just recently in 2009, Oakland protests against the shooting of unarmed Oscar Grant by a transit cop, again caught on video, resulted in what media called a riot soon after the fact. Police got some of their own back when the officer got a light sentence and a small band of protesters ran into a mass police pushback a year later.

Note there's a common factor in these events: police officers get off easy for killings that would get civilians locked up for life, if not executed. People feel they have nothing left to lose -- bingo, there's a riot.

But Penny Red gets at something more. Elites think they can do anything to people who lose all hope. That's just as true in the United States as in Britain. Eventually, something makes a spark. Then there will be a riot and no sophisticated surveillance systems and police preparations can entirely stop it.

Will rioting do anyone any good? Probably not. But when you've got nothing left to lose, who cares?***H/t open democracyfor leading me to Penny Red.

And for what it is worth, here's a link to the UK government's riot website. Yes, they are on top of things. They've put up a web page.

Democracy, Brit style

As Josh Marshall at TPM points out, you have to appreciate "the weird mix of high dudgeon and understatement that is the hallmark of British public politics" to properly enjoy this. But enjoy it you will, for about 11 minutes. (Some of the tangled background here.)

The Murdoch media scandal they are chewing over of course has implications for this side of the Atlantic. The bullying billionaire rightwinger owns the Fox media empire as well as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Harper Collins publishing. Every British politician of all parties for the last generation has had to come to some kind of accommodation with Murdoch's thuggish outlets, as ours do with Fox.

People familiar with the debates in the British House of Commons often mourn that few of our politicians could survive if this kind of unscripted verbal fluency were required of them. On the other hand, their pols are seldom nearly so practiced at glad-handing folks at church picnics. Different skills for different continents.

Rays of effing sunshine: Johann Hari podcast and the royals

I don't want to just gripe here all the time. I do after all, quite frequently, encounter things and people that delight me. Hence a new feature: occasional posts labeled "rays of effing sunshine."

The first of these is a shout-out to the guy who gave me the idea: Johann Hari, a pissy, articulate, brilliant and funny leftish columnist for the London Independent. He has turned his thoughts into a podcast and that's the way to enjoy him if at all inclined -- sure you can read him, but listening to the guy himself is worth a visit to iTunes for a download.

Since I don't know how to implant audio here, I thought I'd share part of Hari's commentary on the royal wedding. It's a hoot.

Okay, let's cut a deal here. If Britain can afford to spend tens of millions of pounds on the royal wedding, we have to spend an equal amount distributing anti-nausea pills across the land – to all of us who can't bear to see our country embarrass itself in this way. Don't let the Gawd-bless-you-ever-so-'umbly-yer-Majesty tone of the media coverage fool you. Most British people are benignly indifferent to the wedding of William Windsor and Kate Middleton. The 20 percent of us who are republicans, like me, have it slightly worse. We will suffer that face-flushing, stomach-shriveling embarrassment that strikes when somebody you love – your country – starts to behave in a deeply weird way in a public place. ...

In most countries, parents can tell their kids that if they work hard and do everything right, they could grow up to be the head of state and symbol of their nation. Not us. Our head of state is decided by one factor, and one factor alone: did he pass through the womb of one aristocratic Windsor woman living in a golden palace? The US head of state grew up with a mother on food stamps. The British head of state grew up with a mother on postage stamps. ...

The monarchist spin-machine, the tabloids and the tea-towel industry have created a pair of fictitious characters for us to cheer, while the real people behind them are being tormented by their supposed admirers. Think back to the 1981 royal wedding and you realise how little we know about these people we are supposed to get moist and weepy over. While millions wept at the "fairytale wedding", Diana was ramming her fingers down her throat, Charles was cursing that he didn't love her, and they both stood at the aisle raging against their situation and everyone around them, while the nation cheered.

Similarly, from beneath the spin, the evidence is pretty clear that William and Kate will be smiling at us through gritted teeth. ...

You get the style. By the way, Hari makes it a practice to tell you what he has enjoyed this week at the end of each of his podcast diatribes. That's was my inspiration for "rays of effing sunshine."

In honor of the royal-a-palooza this weekend, I thought I'd share below an artifact of the monarchist tea-towel trade that I inherited from my mother, an inveterate American enthusiast for the Windsor family. (She claimed it derived from listening to 1940 broadcasts on shortwave radio from London under Hitler's blitz.) I don't know if this card was from the current queen's wedding or her coronation, but it is a striking reminder that Elizabeth Windsor was young once.

Dumb wars and dumb revenge make for war crimes

It's long been clear that, at the operational level if not at the elite level, the widespread adoption of torture of prisoners swooped up in current US wars came in part out of ignorance and prejudice mixed with an impulse to take for revenge. 9/11 bloodied our noses; we'll show these haajis

The impulse to take revenge can feel like a vigorous application of a sort of rough justice; I am sure some of the guys who had fight our wars adopted that understanding of what they were doing. But as numerous atrocities demonstrate -- see for example the recently disclosed kill team photos -- an opportunity to be judge and punisher of people with no discernible connection to the offense lets loose the torturers' own demonic side.

Every once in awhile, someone who knows what he is talking about just comes out and says so. Here's Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator in Iraq who found that implicit permission to brutalize suspects was getting in the way of both protecting US troops and their mission.

...a common parlance that was said by some interrogators and analysts, which is that Arabs grow up in a culture of violence, so they only understand violence.

... those prejudices worked directly in contrast to what we were trying to accomplish. ... I believe that you can't talk about torture unless you talk about the prejudice that led to the torture, that the two things are intertwined. And it was that prejudice against Arabs and Muslims, and the stereotypes that were used against them, that led to the torture.

And so I think you can make rules that prohibit torture. But if you don't also make improvements to the way that we train and educate soldiers, that we'll still have incidents of torture and abuse. They might be much more rare, but the underlying conditions will still be there.

What soldier do while on a hostile battlefield is bad, but when a federal judge in New York City buys into the poisonous pleasure of revenge, we're pretty far gone. Karen Greenberg who directs NYU's Center on Law and Security reports that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan seemed to veer into that territory in statements at the recent sentencing of Ahmed Ghailani for participation in al-Qaida's African embassy bombings in 1998. The judge lectured from the bench:

Whatever Mr. Ghailani suffered at the hands of the CIA and others in our government, and however unpleasant the conditions of his confinement, the impact on him pales in comparison to the suffering and the horror that he and his confederates caused. For every hour of pain and discomfort that he suffered, he caused a thousand-fold more pain and suffering to entirely innocent people.

He's not talking about some "harsh interrogation," perhaps by officials looking for a ticking time bomb here; Kaplan is endorsing our spooks forcefully punishing a putatively (but untried) guilty captive. Guess he's never noticed they do make mistakes; ask Khalid el-Masri or Maher Arar. Civilized countries use legal proceedings to determine guilt -- and 147 countries have signed on to the U.N. Convention against Torture, including the United States.

***Meanwhile, both the United States and the United Kingdom seem to be implicated in new torture cases under the cover of investigating bombings in Kenya in 2010. Clara Gutteridge writes in the Guardian that about a man "rendered" from Kenya to Uganda.

... Omar Awadh's case raises serious concerns that the FBI is running – with British complicity – what is essentially a sort of decentralised, outsourced Guantánamo Bay in Kampala, under the cloak of legitimate criminal process. ...

Since Omar Awadh was brought to Uganda, he has been singled out for harsh treatment and intensive interrogations by foreign agents, and routinely physically abused and subjected to threats. On one occasion, Awadh was kicked, slapped and had his legs stepped on by Ugandan officers, in the presence of individuals who had previously identified themselves as being from the FBI. Awadh has reported being beaten because he refused to give US agents a sample of his DNA; on another occasion, a gun was pointed at him during an interrogation.

... The allegations against Omar Awadh are that he participated in meetings in Nairobi with several co-accused, and that he was arrested by Ugandan police with incriminating items in his possession.

However, after six months of detention and interrogations, Awadh has still not been given any further details of any of the evidence against him. Indeed, Awadh's interrogators appear to have focused on topics that are totally unrelated to the offences with which he has been charged. He has reported to his lawyer that his interrogators have said that they do not believe he was involved in the Kampala bombings, but they want to interrogate him about other matters. This suggests that the Ugandan criminal process is being used as a veil behind which Omar Awadh is being held "beyond the rule of law" for illegal interrogations by foreign agents.

Sounds like Dick Cheney's "dark side" is alive and well in Kampala under the Obama administration,