Autocracy and its Mitigation

Vladimir Putin is giving us all a crash course in the evils of autocracy. It’s a “hands on” course. His gratuitous war is killing and wounding hundreds or thousands of real people. It’s destroying buildings, bridges, power plants and other infrastructure. It’s obliterating social, political and family ties, some of which have lasted decades or even most of a millennium. It’s uprooting and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, maybe eventually millions. And it’s doing all this in the middle of a global pandemic.

No one doubts that this is Putin’s war and his alone. There is no one who can restrain him, no one whom he trusts and heeds. When meeting with others, he sits at the edge of a twenty-foot table, highlighting his personal isolation. While alone, he ferments in his fevered dreams of restoring a bygone empire. Some of his closest observers, and many professionals—those paid to observe him and analyze his words and actions—are beginning to suggest that he is slowly going mad.

Even the monarchs of old had their grand viziers, their wise men, their Sir Thomas Mores. Not Putin. A single man holds the future of Ukraine, and perhaps Eastern Europe, in his hands. A single man has his finger on the nuclear button and repeatedly makes not-so-veiled threats to push it unless others help make his fevered dreams real.

Democracy is absent in Russia. It’s also under siege worldwide. But there’s a big chasm between any kind of democracy and what Russia is doing to Ukraine today.

As this particular autocracy threatens regional and even global catastrophe, it behooves us all to think of ways that any government can avoid the kind of sick and dangerous autocracy that Russia has become. While dreaming of the best, we must think of ways to keep the best from becoming a permanent enemy of the good.

To make the point, let’s compare China. No one in his right mind would call today’s China a democracy. But it’s nothing like Putin’s Russia. Xi Jinping must answer to a seven member committee, the Plenum of the Central Committee, of which he is part. The Communist Party, with some 90 million members nationwide, has some sway over who gets on that committee, as well as local, regional and national policy.

In contrast, Russia today has no real political party. The United Russia “party” that supported Putin’s last (disputed) election was and is little more than than a propaganda campaign and a few PR slogans. Real power in Russia lies in the hands of Putin and, subject to his whim, his favored oligarchs. In contrast, China’s Party, with its ninety million members, holds regular meetings and selects, oversees and disciplines local and regional leaders. It makes and interprets laws and runs local and regional government on a day-to-day basis.

Although different in name, China’s Communist Party is heir to China’s ancient Mandarin system. In China’s historical heyday, that system translated the Emperor’s edicts into local and regional policy, taking local conditions and problems into account.

Sometimes local and regional considerations still prevail. An ancient Chinese proverb encapsulates the intrinsic difficulty of turning a great nation’s national norms into local reality: “Heaven is very high, and the Emperor is far away.” That’s precisely the philosophy that our own governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis were following when they banned mask mandates without regard to federal pandemic guidelines.

The results of China’s less-than-fully-autocratic government are also worth noting. Since 1954, the end of the Korean War, into which China sent hundreds of thousands of troops to save North Korea’s bacon, China has not started a single war. It has built a fearsome military, bullied its neighbors, and even sunk a few fishing boats to make a point. Just now, it’s bullying Taiwan with aggressive overflights and aggressive language. But it has not started a single war. Not one.

In contrast, Russia has invaded and made war in Chechnya, (former Soviet) Georgia, and Ukraine (now twice). We have started two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we gratuitously picked up our Vietnam debacle from colonial France. (Gulf I, the only recent big war we actually won, was started by Saddam Hussein when he took over Kuwait’s oil fields.)

One more thing about China before moving on. We Americans fear China because it’s big, it’s powerful, and its leaders are smart. For the past two generations, they have out-thought, out-played and out-maneuvered us. So we tend to exaggerate China’s faults and sins.

But we need to think clearly about China if we are to live with it, let alone prosper, as it continues to rise. Of all the great powers in human history, including us, China since 1949 has likely been the least warlike. Today’s China, unlike most great powers in human history, repeatedly and credibly disclaims dreams of world domination, or even political hegemony. (Profitable trade and sharp business dealings are another matter.)

As for the Uyghurs, what China is doing with and to them is awful, but it’s not a “genocide.” Any word that ends in “-cide” involves killing. But the number of Uyghurs that China has deliberately killed, if any, is far lower than the number killed in industrial and transportation accidents. China has restrained, imprisoned, detained, displaced, and “re-educated” Uyghurs, and its appears to have subjected many to forced labor. But that’s not a “genocide” It’s nothing like the Holocaust. And we Americans, who have the highest per-capita incarceration rate of any developed nation, including China, are in a poor position to point fingers.

The point of this essay is hardly that China has not sinned. It’s treatment of Hong Kong and Taiwan, not to mention Tibet, involves human and political sins in many ways. In some ways it’s stupid and short-sighted. But it’s not war, and it’s not “genocide.” It doesn’t involve much, if any, killing. Oppressive politics and even incarceration are reversible; mass murder is not.

The point of this essay is that the absence of greater evils probably devolves, at least in part, from China’s distance from authentic one-man autocracy. Some kind of collective government, even if undemocratic and highly imperfect, can find smarter and more humane ways to attain its ends than killing and wanton destruction.

The danger for China (and the world) is Xi tightening his grip and becoming more like Mao, whom Xi presumes to emulate. Mao nearly destroyed China in his dotage, with such whimsical and ultimately catastrophic initiatives as the “Thousand Flowers” campaign (including attempts to make steel in every backyard) and the Cultural Revolution, which turned Chinese society upside down. It’s hard to imagine any such catastrophic mistakes, or what Putin is now doing in Ukraine, emerging from a committee, at least if its members have a reasonable simulacrum of equality of authority.

Now let’s look at the West. Western commentators tend to lump all democracies together, as if they were the same. But they’re self-evidently not. Hungary, Poland and Turkey, while still democratic in legal form, are tilting authoritarian, with little to stop them (but EU surveillance) from going all the way. Mexico is losing its democracy to violent semi-fascistic drug cartels.

And with our own Demagogue eagerly waiting in the wings to try another putsch, we Americans are in no position to lecture anyone about democracy. The two worst presidents of my lifetime—George W. Bush and the Demagogue—were both elected by a nationwide minority of voters. (Nixon, whom some might consider worse, was ultimately ejected by a system that seemed to work then.) Add to that the reason why our Senate and our Electoral College were designed from the outset for minority rule—perpetuating slavery—and you can see that the basic structure of our American democracy is nothing to brag about. (The Bill of Rights, which was an afterthought, is another matter. It was a unique product of Enlightenment thinking.)

So if we Americans can quell our unrealistic national pride and look objectively and analytically at the world today, what are the best practical ways we can see to avoid or mitigate autocracy? We have already examined rule by a committee: that’s one of the chief reasons why China is less autocratic than Russia today. Our own Federal Reserve Board, an independent committee of experts, also has done a good job of stabilizing our economy when under stress. What other ideas are out there for keeping autocracy at bay?

The most important, I think, is hiding in plain sight: term limits. In the abstract, term limits might seem counterproductive. Why give up a great leader who’s just hitting his or her stride? The trouble is, the vast majority of leaders are not great. Most are mediocre. Some are terrible. And some are catastrophic, including Mao in his dotage and Putin today.

If Putin had left office in 2012, after twelve years, he might now rate as one of Russia’s greatest leaders. He had successfully transitioned the Russian economy from the scientifically fictional system of Communism. He had even let Russia build some rudimentary political parties. His wars in Chechnya and Georgia had happened, but his grab for Ukraine had not. His successor might have made the same sort of deal for the Black Sea Fleet’s port in Sevastopol as we made with Cuba for Guantánamo. Then the world (not to mention Eastern Europe) might be a better, more stable, and more prosperous place, with Russia taking its place among normal nations. (I still remember Boris Yeltsin, who began Russia’s transition from Communism, announcing on his election as president that Russia was to become a normal country. Yeltsin must now be rolling over in his grave.)

If Mao had stepped down after unifying China and ameliorating its wartime destruction, he would still be revered as the founder of modern China, and rightly so. The disasters of his loony late-life policies, attempting to institutionalize “perpetual revolution,” might never have occurred. Deng Xiaoping, or someone like him, might have converted China to state capitalism, and begun China’s “economic miracle,” even earlier. And without term limits, we Americans might be suffering, right now, under the caprice and corruption of the Demagogue as our first Emperor, aka President for Life.

Running any modern nation, with tens or hundreds of millions of people, is just too big a job for one person. It involves overseeing and coordinating experts in innumerable specialties, from foreign languages and relations, to computer and nuclear science, to medicine and public health in a pandemic. It’s exhausting and inevitably disappointing. If one person’s rule goes on too long, it produces delusions of grandeur, paranoia, omniscience and omnipotence. So leaders don’t age like wine. They age like eggs: they mostly get rotten. Or rarely, like FDR, they let doing an impossible but honest job consume them and die in the saddle.

At the end of the day, term limits are probably the strongest bulwark against autocracy and tyranny known to our species. That’s why our own George Washington, even had he done nothing else, would still deserve our species’ eternal gratitude. He established term limits as a custom, long before they became part of our Constitution: he adamantly stepped down, despite popular calls for more, after two terms as president.

I end this essay not with a conclusion, but with speculation and an hypothesis. In governments that purport to be democratic, political parties are vital. But how many parties best provide stable insurance against autocracy, creeping or otherwise?

China’s recent history shows that a single-party system can degenerate into autocracy, even with ameliorating customs like committee rule. Before Xi Jinping declared himself “Chairman” (a title used previously only by Mao) and removed term limits, China had had the same two-term limit on supreme leaders as George Washington had given us (albeit for five-year terms, not four). China’s was also an unwritten, customary rule, in China’s Plenum, which elects China’s supreme leader from its members, in a sort of “leadership apprenticeship”—also a very good idea. I have a firm conviction that China will regret acceding to Xi’s imperial self-declaration, as will the world, when Xi inevitably ages and becomes more autocratic and erratic.

So if single-party systems tend toward autocracy, what’s the best number of parties to have? We Americans pride ourselves on our two-party system, deriding the multi-party systems of foreign parliamentary democracies as unruly and indecisive. But are we right?

Our own recent history suggests that two-party systems are no proof against autocracy. For a long time, our two-party system has been unable to get much done legislatively, due to adamant and unreasoning opposition, especially among Republicans. Our two parties have become so antagonistic as to divide into warring tribes, with one seeking to “own” the other and both using every means, fair and foul, to gain power. As a result, we came within one election of devolving into autocracy, and we face a similar risk in the next presidential election.

Perhaps multiple parties, by focusing on issues and differing substantive priorities, not personalities, can avoid devolution into warring tribes. As for decisiveness, consider Olaf Scholz, Germany’s new Chancellor. The product of a narrow win by a fragile coalition of parties, he just managed to act decisively, after Russia invaded, by providing useful defensive weapons to Ukraine, and agreeing to impose SWIFT sanctions on Russia (albeit “targeted” ones, to ease his people’s pain).

On the hypothesis of the more parties, the better, the jury is still out. What’s clear is that term limits and collective government, whether by committees or cabinets, are good precautions against the excesses of autocracy. What’s also clear is that the governmental structure of our American Constitution, although taught in our schools as a product of ageless genius, is deeply flawed and dragging us down. It became a global model not because of its intrinsic merit, let alone its history, but only because we Americans managed to achieve economic and military supremacy despite its flaws. (Again, the Bill of Rights is another matter, separate from the structure of our government.)

Now, with democracy under siege globally and autocracy on the rise, it’s time to think hard about how to make democracy better, more durable and more popular. If we can’t do that, we must conceive of ways to ameliorate autocracy by institutional mechanisms and so make Vladimir Putin the last autocrat to singly threaten global peace, harmony and survival. That’s something for Russians and all of us to ponder, before someone pushes the Button by design, miscalculation or delusion.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post

Putin’s Imperial Land Grab

With today’s general invasion of Ukraine, it’s now clear how Vladimir Grozny has snookered the West. He’s misled his adversaries, his prey, and even his own people about his real motives and aims. Now it’s likely too late to stop him from annexing all of Ukraine, or turning most or all of it into an unwilling vassal state.

With this general invasion, Putin is finally showing his true colors. He simply wants Ukraine as part of Russia’s empire. Period.

His “fears” about NATO, EU and Western encroachments were plausible distractions. His analogy to the Cuban Missile Crisis was a clever ruse. So was his recent Hitler-like diatribe about alleged cultural affinity and betrayal.

Here’s the analysis:

The Cuban Missile Crisis is irrelevant, if not obsolete. Deterring a nuclear first strike no longer depends—if it ever did—on how close to your territory your adversary has ground-based nuclear weapons. As long as enough of your own weapons can survive long enough to get up in the air, and so to menace your adversary’s capital and major cities, mounting a first strike against you would be untenable.

This is especially so for Russia, with all its huge territory and eleven times zones. It would be virtually impossible for any enemy to launch missiles from enough separate locations to take out all of Russia’s land-based missile systems simultaneously. Even if such a minutely choreographed global launch were possible, the various missiles would have to travel vastly different distances. So the Russians could easily detect the furthest away to launch long before the first-to-arrive struck, thus leaving ample time to launch a devastating second strike. The risk would be too high for any sane adversary to take.

What probably precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis was our developing nuclear submarines first. In theory, those submarines were hard enough to detect to get close enough to both St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow to mount an effective first strike.

The Soviets then had nothing like our nuclear subs. The subs they sent to meet our fleet blockading Cuba were obsolete diesel models, built for cold climates, whose interior temperature rose to 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the tropical waters near Cuba. So the Soviets understandably wanted ground-based missiles in Cuba to deter a possible first strike.

Today, the Soviet K-19 disaster, chronicled in the famous movie, is ancient history. The Russians now have competent nuclear subs. Even if they’re not quite as quiet or as big as ours, their deterrent, in Shakespeare’s words, “twill serve.” Russia’s subs’ ability to hide, launch nukes from anywhere in the sea, and so mount a devastating second strike is a deterrent good enough.

Add to this Russia’s much-hyped hypersonic missiles, which allegedly can evade all our airborne missile defenses. If Russia can penetrate even our best land-based missile defenses, its second-strike deterrent would be secure even without subs. So Putin’s display of paranoia about encirclement was little more than a clever act.

The key to understanding Vladimir Grozny is that he’s an absolutely brilliant spook. He manipulates people as a sculptor molds clay.

He got George W. Bush to trust him, and to see into “his soul,” simply by wearing a crucifix and talking a bit about religion and history. He got our Demagogue to see him as “a genius” and play his lackey, probably by cruder and more mercenary means not yet fully known. Earlier, Putin got the whole world to treat him like a democratic visionary, by speaking about peaceful trade (in fluent German) before the German Bundestag and about poverty in Russia on the national news. In understanding what people want to hear and how to influence them, Putin may be unmatched among world leaders today.

In this round, Vladimir Grozny snookered the West by playing on our own fears of nuclear Armageddon. He also played on the empathy of many of our geopolitical analysts, who thought NATO’s encirclement of Russia had gone too far. (I must confess that I was among those empathizers. [Search linked source for second occurrence of “NATO”]).

Yes, at 490 km, Ukraine’s border is closer to Moscow than, say, Vilnius in Lithuania is, at 784 km. But Lithuania is already a member of NATO and the EU. Is that 294 km difference—182 miles—really worth going to war for, with all the other practical means of assuring a devastating second strike? And if future deployment of nukes or troops were the real issue, why not rely on diplomacy to prevent it, at least as a first resort?

Vladimir Grozny has been equally brilliant on the people side. He avoided the Nazis’ catastrophic mistake of racism and claiming racial supremacy. Instead, he emphasized the brotherhood and cultural affinity of Russians and Ukrainians. By painting the West as the divider and conqueror, he created some doubt, if not credulity, among his own people and even some Ukrainians.

(If WWII Germans had not been Nazi racial supremacists, but simple, honest imperialists, with a bit of people skills, and if they had had the good sense not to invade Russia, Germany might today be master of virtually all of Europe, and Europe might be a far more stable and safer place. But that’s another story. [Search linked source for first instance of “alternative”.])

If our Demagogue is right about anything, it’s that Putin is a manipulative genius. The express and implied threats that led me to name him “Vladimir Grozny” are just one of his many techniques of manipulation.

Anyone who knows history knows how specious was Putin’s recent diatribe. But WWII, let alone the great famine (Holodomor) that Stalin caused in Ukraine, is beyond the memory of almost everyone living. Putin has created a modern, mostly fictional, social-media meme that is plausible and attractive to many Russians and to some Russian-leaning Ukrainians. To the West, it’s an effective distraction from his real motives.

So what are his real motives? To say that Putin is not a moral man would be a breathtaking understatement. But so would saying he’s just smart. He’s well aware of Russia’s economic failings. He just doesn’t understand or appreciate how business under recognized international rules might help. As a consummate spook and true kleptocrat, he feels safer keeping the goodies for himself and his cronies and under his control.

What he does understand is that Russia makes little, if anything, that the rest of the world needs. And what Russia has in abundance—oil and gas—is poisoning our planet. So the rest of the world is trying to stop using it.

But Ukraine has vast natural resources that will never go out of style. Food is one. Ukraine is Russia’s traditional “black earth” breadbasket; that’s why Stalin squeezed it enough to cause the Holodomor.

Ukraine also has vast mineral resources, including uranium (for carbon-free nuclear power), iron (to make steel), and titanium (to make bearings and jet engines). Used for burning renewables-derived hydrogen, turbines with titanium blades might someday replace jet engines using fossil fuels.

There is a far greater list of Ukraine’s vast natural resources circulating on the Internet. I haven’t had the time to check it all out, and I don’t intend to add to the cesspool of misinformation that is social media. But the apparently reliable sources linked above have convinced me that Ukraine would make a substantial addition to Russia’s natural resources, material wealth, and future productivity.

In contrast, most of Russia’s vast unused territory is Siberian tundra unsuitable for growing rice, wheat or corn. Its mineral wealth, if any, lies mostly unknown and unexplored. As global warming melts its permafrost, many of its roads will become unusable and may have to be rebuilt at great expense.

So it looks as if Putin has pulled a clever fast one on the West, on Ukraine, and on his own people. With the advantages of speed, distraction and overwhelming force, he appears close to taking the whole of Ukraine for Russia in a vast, twenty-first-century land grab.

What will the West do, if anything, when satellite and drone photos start showing trucks carting Ukrainian resisters off to the gulags? Can we make up for failing to anticipate and plan intelligently for the worst? Only time will tell. But the task will not get easier the longer we wait and temporize.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post

Vladimir Grozny (Владимир Грозный, or Vladimir the “Terrible”)

The English word “terrible” is a terrible translation of the Russian word grozny, now the historical moniker for the medieval Tsar Ivan the Terrible. As applied to either Ivan or Vladimir Putin, it misses the mark.

“Terrible” is a weak word in English. It connotes anything from a bad joke to a poor performance in a concert or on an exam. In contrast, the Russian word “grozny” (грозный) is sinister and specific. It has the same root as “угроза”: “threat” or “menace.”

Ivan the Terrible ruled by threat and menace. His acts included bits of sheer terror. According to legend, he blinded the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral to keep him from creating anything more beautiful for anyone else. According to history, Ivan murdered his own eldest son and heir in a fit of pique. Ivan’s reign was one of the bloodiest periods in Russian history, but it gave birth to the modern state.

So how does Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin compare? Let’s analyze.

Putin hasn’t (yet) resurrected Stalin’s system of prison camps—a system so vast that the great Soviet writer Solzhenitsyn called them the “gulag archipelago.” But Putin doesn’t have to. He’s a highly intelligent man living in a time of infinitely greater public access to information and real news. It’s enough for him to have intimidated and marginalized key figures who might have challenged his utter dominance of Russia. The rest—all but the reckless—took heed.

The highly popular Boris Nemtsov was gunned down, right near the Kremlin, reportedly just before he was to reveal the presence of Russian military in Ukraine. The oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed for ten years and then exiled, reportedly after having had the temerity to propose international standards for doing business in Russia. And the highly popular blogger and opposition leader Aleksei Navalny is in jail right now, on charges of fleeing (made after he voluntarily came home), with more charges to come.

Add to this the deaths of dozens of journalists since Putin came to power in 2000, with few convicted of any crimes. The sum total is an ongoing threat and menace to anyone who challenges Putin for power, or even for control of information. When made real that often and that openly, a threat need not be verbally explicit.

Now let’s looks at geopolitics. Putin has made two explicit threats to foreign nations that might oppose him. He has accumulated an estimated force of 190,000 troops, replete with aircraft, warships, artillery and armor, surrounding Ukraine on all sides except the west. His recently broadcast videos of nuclear-capable ballistic and cruise missiles, not to mention hypersonic missiles that Putin insists can evade our defenses, make the nuclear threat as near to explicit as one can, without emulating Kim Jong Un or our own deranged Demagogue in response (remember “fire and fury”?).

And if Putin himself doesn’t make that threat explicit, he doesn’t have to. Russia has an over-the-top TV commentator, the mirror image of our own Tucker Carlson, who has touted Russia’s ability to reduce our American cities to “radioactive ash.”

So as the old joke about the prostitute goes, we know what Putin is. He’s grozny, just as “terrible” as Ivan. Given the power of modern Russia and modern weaponry, he’s far more grozny. He’s a man who lives and rules by threats and menace.

What we don’t yet know is how far he’s willing to go, against what resistance and beyond words. His acts today included recognizing the Russian-separatist enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent nations and flooding them with Russian troops.

Our media didn’t make clear whether what he recognized was the whole of the erstwhile Ukrainian provinces or just the separatist parts. Yet the logic of his position and of the situation suggest the latter. Russian troops would encounter little resistance in the separatist enclaves; indeed they might be welcomed.

The open presence of Russian military, with military discipline and a clear chain of command, might be a welcome change for the local Russian-leaning population. Up to now, they reportedly have had to put up with a motley (and sometimes assassinated) collection of ad-hoc and self-appointed leaders, including organized criminals and under-cover Russian military. (One of these leaders, whose nom de guerre (Strelkov) derives from the Russian word “to shoot,” was apparently responsible for downing a civilian airliner in 2015. He seems since to have disappeared inside Russia.)

Russia now appears to have “relocated,” or to be in the process of relocating, a large number of Russian nationals from the separatist enclaves to Russia proper, perhaps as a pretext for a wider war. But to the extent the separatist enclaves have real, open military government, they probably will be safer, more stable, calmer and more pleasant places for those former residents, if any, who choose to return.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that Vladimir Grozny has gone to all this trouble and expense, and created all these savage and world-disturbing threats, simply to consolidate control over separatist enclaves that Russia already governed in all but name. In his latest personal diatribe against Ukraine, Putin left a distinct impression that making it a vassal state is high on his list of priorities and demands. Precisely how he would do that remains to be seen.

I leave it to our diplomatic and intelligence services to speculate on the precise limits, if any, on freedom of action that Putin himself perceives. I write this essay just to provide an historical perspective on how unique is Putin on the world stage and how serious and ultimately personal are his threats.

Vladimir Grozny is indeed a unique figure on the world stage today. There is nothing like him anywhere else, perhaps save Kim Jong Un. Even Xi Jinping must answer to China’s seven-member Plenum of the Central Committee. And ultimately China’s 90-million member Communist Party, organized in the image of China’s ancient Mandarin system, has some influence over how China is governed. Xi may have made himself Chairman for Life, in the image of Mao, and he may have cut the Plenum from nine to seven members the better to control it. But the Plenum and the Party still exist and might well rebel, for example, if Xi risked nuclear war, or even a big and unnecessary conventional war, with the West.

Unfortunately, there are no similar brakes on the supreme leader’s acts in Russia today. The Communist Party is gone with the wind. The “United Russia” Party, under which Putin ran for office most recently, is mostly a slogan and an advertising campaign. If it has any real political existence, let alone influence, such as do the two big American political parties, I have never seen it.

So Putin sits alone at the apex of Russian power. To understand just how alone, you need only review one of the shocking tapes of Putin’s most recent inauguration. If that doesn’t convince you that Putin sees himself as Russia’s most recent Tsar, nothing will. (See also, this recent expert analysis of Putin’s increasing personal isolation due to Covid precautions and his utter lack of peers and even serious confidants.)

A bit of Russian literary history is also worth noting. The Russian poet Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821-1877) wrote one of humankind’s greatest patriotic poems. Entitled simply Rus’ (Русь, the ancient and affectionate name for Russia), it recounts an unnamed war dreamed up by an unnamed Tsar. It’s key stanzas follow, with my own translation after each, valuing meaning over meter and sound:

Русь/Rus'

Битву кровавую
С сильной державою
Царь замышлял.
Хватит ли силушки?
Хватит ли золота? –
Думал-гадал.

A bloody battle
With a mighty empire
The Tsar dreamed up.
Would forces suffice?
Would the money last?
He thought and he speculated.

* * *

Русь не шелохнется,
Русь — как убитая!
А загорелась в ней
Искра сокрытая,

Rus’ won’t move
Rus’ lies as beaten!
But something in her strikes
A secret spark,

* * *

Рать подымается
Неисчислимая!
Сила в ней скажется
Несокрушимая!

The host arises
Numberless!
The might in her said
To be boundless!

This part of Nekrasov’s epic poem came out sometime between 1866 and 1877. These short excerpts don’t do it justice, but I hope they make the point here.

Within the limits of poetic license—at a time when Tsarist rule still prevailed—Nekrasov made clear that the war under discussion was the Tsar’s invention and enterprise, and his alone. The poet used Russian diminutives (which don’t come across in my translation) to suggest that the Tsar may have had too little else to occupy his time, such as his people’s happiness. But in the end the Russian people’s instinct for self-preservation arises, along with the “numberless host” of Russian soldiers, to save the day.

I thought of this poem while watching videos of Russian troops slogging dutifully through the snow in and near Ukraine. In their pace, stance and general demeanor, they reminded me of the American troops commanded recently to Europe to defend NATO and the EU. All are desultorily ready to fight an unnecessary war that they simply don’t understand. None will be fighting for home or family. You’d think that Putin or his advisors would have learned something from our own disasters in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

No one but Putin wants this war. Like the “bloody battle” that Nekrasov’s unnamed tsar dreamed up, it’s the invention and the project of one man: Vladimir Grozny.

And Putin even got his history mixed up. Russia didn’t create Ukraine, as he reportedly claimed, unless you think Ukraine’s creation began with the Soviet Union’s recognition of it as a separate administrative entity. On the contrary, Kievan Rus—one of Russia’s early city-states, centered on what is now Kyiv—was something like Russia’s mother country, as England is to us. Ukraine even has its own unique language, a Slavic language as similar to Russian as Spanish is to Portuguese or Italian, but with some uniquely Ukrainian Cyrillic letters.

Unfortunately, in its Soviet guise Russia treated its mother rather harshly. In the early thirties, Soviet Russia enforced collectivization of farming and commandeered the fruits of Ukraine’s breadbasket, thereby precipitating a massive multi-year famine called the Holodomor. That famine killed millions.

That, not some fictional affinity for Germany or Nazis, was why many Ukrainians fought with the Nazis during WWII. They wanted to avoid further famine by controlling their own land and farms. So they saw the Nazis as potential liberators, only to find that, in the end, the Nazis treated them as subhuman just the same as they did the Russians.

The dismal fate of wartime Ukrainians, caught thus between the two gigantic Soviet and Nazi war machines, was one of human history’s most tragic chapters. It was and is no excuse for recriminations, let alone an invasion.

For a man as intelligent as Putin, this “justification” for invading and occupying Ukraine, let alone annexing it, is shockingly inaccurate and specious. It’s a bit like trying to rationalize raping your mother.

The bottom line is that this war/invasion is a one-man enterprise, dreamed up by Vladimir Grozny and him alone. Before tens of thousands die in this demented enterprise, we should at least ask the question how far diplomatic immunity should extend.

A Russian friend once told me that Russians, or at least their medieval Mongol occupiers, invented diplomatic immunity. After a besieged city had assassinated their emissaries, the Mongols slaughtered everyone in the city and razed it to the ground. Eventually, the custom of respecting emissaries, and not killing them, caught on. Today it applies to leaders of all sorts, who naturally preserve the rule as a way to protect themselves personally.

But how far should diplomatic immunity extend? Should it immunize a leader who singlehandedly starts a real war in the twenty-first century, which might turn nuclear and extinguish our species? Is any one man’s life, even a leader’s, worth that much?

Since this war is an enterpise conceived by one lone man who rules by threat and menace, it seems that at least threatening to make Vladimir Grozny a personal target is worth a try. He appears to be the only leader on Earth with both the power and the recklessness to start a war that might extinguish our species. (Recent revelations made clear that even our own Demagogue, at the height of his self-assumed power, never threatened such a war.) So threatening to extinguish Vladimir Grozny personally might be something he could understand.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post

Straight Talk

Have we Americans lost the capacity for straight talk?

Sometimes it seems that way. Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s new Republican governor, won on a platform of not teaching kids things that might make them “uncomfortable.” His state and others passed laws against such teaching. Really!

Lots of things make me “uncomfortable.” Climate change makes me uncomfortable. Being among maskless strangers while the pandemic rages makes me uncomfortable. Thinking about the next variant after Omicron makes me uncomfortable.

Thinking about nuclear war—or Russia invading Ukraine—makes me uncomfortable. Watching the consequences of four centuries of American racism in action makes me uncomfortable. Knowing that our Constitution, which they taught me all my life (even in law school) to venerate like scripture, creates a deeply flawed structure of minority rule, designed from the outset to perpetuate slavery, makes me uncomfortable.

So what should I do? What should we do? Should we stick our collective heads in the sand to maintain our mental equilibrium and await the apocalypse?

The “socializing” emotions of shame, guilt, remorse and (their lesser cousin) embarrassment all make us uncomfortable. That’s their purpose. They are our internal pillars of civilization. The discomfort they provoke is good discomfort, much like John Lewis’ “good trouble.” They make us think about others and try to distinguish right from wrong.

They bring us around to the right path. They are our social, cultural, biological and evolutionary guard rails. Lose their corrective redirection, and we slip over the edge into the selfishness, anarchy and darkness. We need to be made uncomfortable at times, to know when we are wrong.

I’m not a religious man. If I were, my Jewish roots would probably keep me from becoming a Christian, though I have deep respect for Jesus of Nazareth as a thinker, leader and early small-d democrat. Yet today I find myself magnetically drawn to certain Christian religious leaders, mostly Black ones. Some have a way of turning discomfort into a light showing the path. In Lincoln’s words, they use discomfort to guide us to the “the better angels of our nature.”

Dr. King, MLK, was the finest. He had a unique combination of penetrating insight, vast intelligence and moral acuity. They killed him because his gifts made many of us uncomfortable and had begun motivating uncomfortably rapid change.

I’ve spent decades thinking about Dr. King and what he might have accomplished had he lived longer. He was an American virtuoso of straight talk. He could inform and enlighten without offending or inflaming.

Today we have few like him. Most of our leaders were trained as lawyers, a few as business people. But neither hair-splitting nor profit-seeking can help us now. We need men and women who can show us, with the clarity of biblical parables, where lie right and wrong. We need those guard rails more than ever.

Then came the Reverend Raphael Warnock. I gave to his campaign because he’s a Democrat and a progressive, and because Stacey Abrams endorsed him. The beautiful symbolism of the first Black senator from Georgia, which Sherman’s infamous March to the Sea had made a citadel of racism and regional resentment for centuries, was not lost on me. But I didn’t really see Rev. Warnock until recently.

I get my video news from PBS almost exclusively. The reason is simple: I want my information focused by reason and public interest, not profit. Fox may be the worst, but it’s not the only medium to let profit dictate its coverage and its “angle.” Sooner or later all the profit-making “news” media fall into Facebook’s dismal trap: they jolt our amygdalas, stoking shock, surprise, fear and rage, just to attract eyeballs and build viewership and profit. That’s not the way to build a civilization.

That’s not the way to straight talk. Nor is bend-over-backwards objectivity, bothsidesism, or retreat into nuance and complexity. Every once in a while, we need a moral leader who can and will illuminate the right path with simplicity and force.

So, like most of us, I lapsed into a diet of bland pablum. I thought I knew where right lay, but I rarely heard anyone say it. As leaders and newscasters described how Republicans were systematically making it harder for people to vote, all I heard was numbers and abstract verbal analysis, which missed the human and moral point. The incessant statistics were mind-numbing, even for a wonk like me.

Then, one night, Judy Woodruff interviewed Rev. Warnock on the PBS Newshour. At the end of the interview, she asked him to comment on the massive GOP efforts at voter suppression. Here’s part of what he said:

“[The suppressors] know what they’re up to. And the people of Georgia know what they’re up to. I have stood in those lines. I’m not making this up. I’m not telling you what someone told me. I have been in those lines. I have seen people in neighborhoods stand eight and 10 hours trying to vote. I have gotten those phone calls.”

“I have seen the ways in which our state has purged hundreds of thousands of voters on a Saturday night. And now, in this very moment, they are threatening to swoop in and take over local boards of elections. This is anti-democratic. It's anti-American. And we have an obligation to stand up.”

* * * “[A]s the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached and where John Lewis worshipped, I don’t have any right to give up. I don’t have any right to break in into tears right now. These folk fought battles that we look back [on] and we act as if those victories were inevitable.”

“The truth is, they were quite improbable. It was improbable that John Lewis could walk across that bridge, face that kind of brute force, and somehow bend the arc of history. We don’t know when that moment comes. It’s our obligation to keep fighting the good fight, to stay in what he called good trouble.”

“And that’s what I intend to do, because I believe in democracy, and I love this country enough, a kid who grew up in public housing, now serving in the United States Senate. I love this country enough and what it represents at its core to fight for it. . . .”

“And the democracy gives me a framework in which to fight. You can't do that everywhere all over the world, and that’s why I’m fighting for it.”

That’s straight talk. That’s the kind of moral leadership that no lawyer’s brief or research report can lend, however erudite or well composed it may be. Rev. Warnock got me up off my couch, shouting, singing and dancing with determination and joy. And the next thing I did was make a spontaneous, unscheduled contribution to his re-election campaign.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post

The Powell Doctrine and Ukraine

One of the best ideas in postwar geopolitics is the Powell Doctrine, developed by our late Joint Chiefs Chairman and Secretary of State Colin Powell. It underlay our quick win in Gulf I—the war to kick Saddam’s Iraq out of the Kuwaiti oil fields that it had seized. That win was our single major military victory since our useful (for South Korea) stalemate in the Korean War in 1954.

The Powell Doctrine is especially apt in the Nuclear Age, when all-out or “total” war is unthinkable. It allows major powers to achieve military victories by conventional means. It has three elements: (1) overwhelming force, (2) limited objectives, and (3) a clear exit strategy.

How would Vladimir Putin apply the Powell Doctrine to Ukraine? He already has assembled overwhelming force, and he appears prepared to use it. At least President Biden thinks so: he has urged Americans to get out of Ukraine by this weekend.

But what about the other two elements: the limited objectives and the clear exit strategy?

For objectives, the past is prologue. Putin already has annexed Crimea, a province of Ukraine in which Russians comprise three-quarters of the population. Sevastopol, the province’s capital, is the historical site of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, roughly analogous to San Diego for us. Also, Russian separatists have virtually annexed the coal-and-steel provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which are and have been interwoven with Russian industry.

From the Russian point of view, the only objective that remains in doubt is the status of Ukraine as a whole. Russia wants to be sure that Ukraine will never become an outpost of the West, let alone harbor Western troops or strategic weapons. That means Ukraine never joining NATO or the EU. (In my view, Putin’s request for legal guarantees was just a feint: legal measures have not been kind to Russia. For example, the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pack preceded the Nazis’ invasion, which was catastrophic for Russia.)

Does Putin want to invade and occupy all of Ukraine? Unlikely, in my view. If Putin didn’t learn the lesson of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, he no doubt learned it from ours. The last thing Russia wants is a long, grinding war of occupation, culminating in another losing and ignominious exit, when its main objective is just to insure its future border security, not with words on paper, but with deeds on the ground.

Russia’s most likely limited objectives seem threefold: (1) a pliable puppet government in Kyiv, (2) a reliable land route from Russia proper to Crimea, and (3) substantial autonomy, i.e., Russian hegemony, in Donetsk and Luhansk. Likely a pincer movement toward Kyiv could achieve the first and third objectives quickly, as (3) would follow directly from (1). The second objective could be achieved by a regionally limited application of overwhelming force in the south.

What French President Emmanuel Macron offered Putin in his private talks is unknown. But likely (1) and (3) were part of it, of course without the pejorative characterization of a “puppet” government in Kyiv. Apart from Macron, the US and Europe claim to insist on a genuinely independent government in Kyiv, with a perpetual possibility of joining NATO and/or the EU.

So diplomacy appears to have failed on the second point. That also made the third point of the Powell Doctrine fail as well. A clear exit, at least a durable one, is impossible for Russia unless it has the assurance of a friendly, or at least pliable, government in Kyiv. Without one, the land bridge to Crimea and the status of Donetsk and Luhansk would forever be uncertain, not to mention Ukrainian distance from the West.

I don’t normally post predictions. But if diplomacy remains hung up on this point, I don’t see any outcome as likely as a Russian blitzkrieg aimed at regime change in Kyiv. Its purposes would be ruling out Ukraine joining NATO or the EU and assuring a land bridge to Crimea and substantial independence of, and Russian hegemony over, Donetsk and Luhansk. I would expect Russian military operations to cease, and peace of a sort to be restored, once these objectives had been achieved. To the extent kept in place, or nearby (even inside Russia), the overwhelming force that Russia has already assembled could be a guarantor of Russia’s exit, at least from active war and whole-nation occupation.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post

Our Evolutionary Crisis

To a guy of my 76 years, our planet now looks like someone else’s. It’s not even close to the one I was born on.

Consider Xi Jinping. There he stands, tall, impassive and inscrutable, reviewing dozens of heavy missile carriers and thousands of troops drilling and shouting in perfect order. Even when just preening before thousands of women whirling in pastel gowns, he’s as creepy. We aleady have one Little Kim. Do we really need one a thousand times more powerful, ruling the world’s most ancient civilization?

In the midst of it all comes Vladimir Putin, massing the greatest collection of troops and armor seen in Europe in 77 years. It’s all arrayed around Ukraine, but Putin says it’s not for an invasion. The Western world is threatening a banking freeze in response, nothing more. Why do the words “Peace in our time” keep ringing in my ears?

Then there’s us. Don’t get me wrong. I like Joe Biden. I voted for him, with some enthusiasm. As Picasso said about being 92, Biden was and is better than the alternative. Far better.

But Biden is the antithesis of youth and dynamism. Our Congress is a veritable gerontocracy, with a mean age of House members of 57.6 and of Senators of 62.9. Wasn’t 65 once our retirement age? And from whence did we drag a Supreme Court that gets its “law” from the Bible and the Eighteenth Century? Just today it ruled it proper to confine Alabama’s 25% of Black people to electing one out of seven US representatives.

Last year a bunch of crude, big guys with automatic weapons showed up at the Michigan state capital to intimidate the duly elected governor, and nothing happened. A few months later, a much bigger mob of insurrectionists showed up at our national Capitol, ransacked the place, caused four deaths and dozens of injuries, and drove out our legislators. And still nothing much happened to the perpetrators.

Some people have been arrested, and some have been jailed. Leaders of one of our two big political parties called it all a “legitimate political discourse.” Still they back the guy, the Demagogue, who appears to have incited the Insurrection in an attempt to change the election’s result.

And then there’s the global epidemic of sexual harassment and predation. Men use their political, economic and social power, if not just their bigger muscles, to take what they want from women. Hollywood and media moguls have been doing that for most of a century. But now it’s also the Catholic Church, for God’s sake, taking from little boys!

Then there are the nice guys. Remember Canada? Does a downtown Toronto clogged by thousands of Big Rigs massed by angry truckers protesting vaccine mandates sound like Canada to you?

I could go on and on. But you get the idea. The world has gone mad. The center cannot hold. It’s all topsy-turvy. Recite whatever cliché you prefer. But it’s all happening now, at once. Nothing makes much sense, and the pandemic keeps grinding away.

One source of it all is crystal clear. We’ve come up against the limits of our evolutionary biology. We’ve reached our Peter Principle as a species.

We now have weapons that we can use to extinguish ourselves, if not destroy our entire biosphere. We have a global energy economy big and powerful enough to destabilize the climate in which we evolved. So far, we’re just letting it rip, with dire and unforeseeable consequences, mostly because rich and powerful people gain in the short term.

We just can’t seem to govern ourselves. We can’t even seem to control ourselves on a national or regional level. As David Brooks pointed out in a must-read news analysis, even the religious among us are running amok, purging and damning each other with hate and fear, not Christian love. Truly the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The crux of the matter is how we evolved. We developed from apes in clans of about thirty or so individuals. An alpha ape ruled each clan absolutely. He was the biggest, the strongest, the quickest and the fiercest. Often he was also the nastiest. He ruled the females as his harem. There was no “consent,” only procreation. (That’s why there’s so much sexual predation among our political and industrial rulers today: it’s literally in our DNA.)

There was no democracy or consensus among our ape ancestors. To the extent communication was inefficient, a snarl, a growl, a showing of teeth, or a roundhouse swipe of the alpha ape’s great arms wrought compliance. Beta males were ostracized from the clan, by force of combat. Some of them slunk away, perhaps to start their own clans. Others waited in the wings, hoping to become the next alpha rules by force, as the incumbent alpha aged. Combat was only rarely deadly, for evolution does not favor wasting good genes, even if second best.

This same regime continued throughout our biological evolution. It took us 3.5 billion years to evolve from a single-celled creature and an estimated 6-9 million years to evolve from our primate forebears. In comparison, the roughly five thousand years of our recorded human civilization ranks, respectively, as less than 0.00015% or 0.085%.

So our brief recorded history hasn’t given us nearly enough time to evolve another style of governance. The alpha-male ruler is still encoded in our DNA. That’s why a strongman feels so “right” to many of us, especially males, and especially in times of uncertainty and stress like now.

That’s why some 71 million Americans could vote for the Demagogue, despite his obvious failings in morality, intelligence, veracity, consistency, and simple competence. That’s why few males object seriously (let alone violently) to sexual harassment, even though they know it can impact their own mothers, daughters, aunts, and sisters, or their own wives. Back in our ape clans, the alpha ape’s physical dominance and harassment were the “right” way to procreate and organize the clan.

Every time I see TV images of Xi before his multitudes, I can’t get the incongruity out of my mind. Here is an alpha male before his minions. Thousands are present in person, dancing, marching, in tanks or driving missile carriers. Somewhere behind electronic media, or in homes throughout China, are all 1.4 billion of them.

And all this evolved out of clans of thirty of so individuals. Can the ancient paternalism of Confucius really encompass 1.4 billion modern humans? Can it do so although millions, maybe tens of millions, have critical knowledge, information, expertise and skills that Xi lacks? If it all weren’t so tragically and spectacularly inane, I would laugh until I got a hernia.

What about democracy, you ask? Well, what about it? In our recorded history, it has been a rarity, an oddity. The democratic Greek city-states were minuscule relative to the great empires that preceded and followed them. They are notable only for their art, philosophy and ideas, which left an intriguing written record replete with future possibility.

In all our short human history, only three powerful empires have been democratic: ancient Rome, the British Empire and (as its successor) the United States. Rome lasted a few centuries and degenerated into empire. The Brits held sway for at most three centuries. They are still around but have lost their Empire and (with Boris Johnson) their gloss. And US democracy now hangs by the thread of a Constitution defectively designed to preserve slavery.

Does this mean that democracy and human “rights” are doomed? Are we all destined to live henceforth in rude empires, crawling over each other like crabs in a bucket—by force, duress, colonization and conquest? Will our species live thus until someone finally sets off the nuclear spark and puts us out of our misery, or until we immiserate ourselves and catastrophically reduce our population with runaway climate change?

Not necessarily. Two other features of our biological evolution offer hope: our intelligence and our ability to learn. Both modern democracy and modern science are their products. Both arose at about the same time, during the seventeenth century, in a phase of human history that we in the West call the Enlightenment (or, in self-congratulation, the “Western Enlightenment”).

Science and democracy are intertwined and interdependent. You can’t have good science without freedom of inquiry. If “truth” comes only from the Emperor, there is no use making observations or doing experiments. That’s what the Pope, then as supreme leader, tried to prove by excommunicating Galileo for his heliocentric theory of the Solar System.

Modern science depends upon a vast industrial and technological infrastructure, whose development and advancement require cooperation among specialists on an unprecedented scale. It takes thousands of people to design and build a car, many thousands an airplane. It took a whole infrastructure of scientists, engineers, technicians, technologists and industrial workers just to build the single torus of high-temperature-superconductor material that we hope may some day bring us nuclear fusion (a small Sun in a bottle) and thus all the carbon-free energy we need. And the mRNA vaccines that are the most promising defense against Covid-19 (in part because they are easy to replicate for variants) resulted from vast international collaboration over the Internet.

The crux of the matter is specialization. No single person has the knowledge, expertise and skill necessary to build a power plant, a solar panel, an airplane, or a computer, or to design and make a vaccine against a new pandemic. It takes millions of specially educated and trained people to make our modern industrial society work.

So strict top-down rule doesn’t work well with modern industrial-scientific civilization. Modern science, engineering and industry work best with voluntary cooperation among the many specialists required to make them function. Hence democracy has a chance to succeed alpha-ape rule, if only for its practical advantages. This explains the origin of the bureaucratic state and its expert regulators.

But make no mistake about it. Democracy and the science it facilitates are most definitely not encoded in our DNA. They’re a product of our Reason and our conscious striving for a better life for the greater number. Without books or modern computer storage to perpetuate them, both science and democracy could vanish in a single generation. That might actually happen after a nuclear war.

Democracy and science are thus always contingent and precarious. They depend on each succeeding generation’s education, training and understanding. Nature copies our DNA for us automatically, for each succeeding generation. But like the hatred sung in “South Pacific,” democracy, science and human rights have got to be carefully taught.

Science doesn’t actually require democracy, although democracy helps. Science can limp along even in the most repressive of empires. It did just that in the brief twelve years of the Third Reich. But Nazi science lost the race for nuclear weapons because the best minds had escaped its harsh empire and worked furiously in the free West.

Will something similar happen under Xi Jinping as Big Brother? It’s much too early to tell. Xi is smarter and better educated than Adolf Hitler was. He’s well aware of the role of science and technology in the recent rise of the West. He’s also much smarter than our own Demagogue, let alone the Demagogue’s lackeys. So science would likely flourish better in China than here if our Demagogue ever returned to power.

Historically, science and democracy have flourished together because science works best in an atmosphere of free inquiry. But there is no reason why science could not flourish a bit less, but still impressively, under a sufficiently enlightened Emperor. That tale is yet to be told: modern science as we know it only emerged toward the end of the Age of Empire in the West.

It’s possible that strong national leadership in an empire like modern China could convert its energy infrastructure to renewables, or even nuclear fusion (if it ever works), faster than could a democracy beholden to carbon-based legacy technologies and industries. The big trouble with empires is that even enlightened absolute leaders grow old and die. There can be no guarantee that the next winner of the alpha-ape power struggle will be as enlightened as the last. Often a second- or third- rate offspring of the deceased prevails by inherited influence, not merit. (Indeed, Xi himself might fit this mold, as an offspring of an early Communist leader.)

Yet at the moment, all eyes are on the West, where democracy is busy devouring itself. Misinformation, disinformation, disorder, hate and nonsense are propagating widely for profit, as men like Mark Zuckerberg storm the hills of competition in their own narrow industries, and in their own personal interests, without regard to consequences.

So Reason in the West is on the run. Nonsense, lies, disorder, ideological cant, propaganda and hate are on the rise. Unless the democrats and the few oligarchs who back them can reverse this trend, the mantle of science and Reason may pass to Asia and its more paternalistic empires, at least for a time, as I half predicted in 2009. (Perhaps Japan’s aging democracy will help keep the spark alive.) That in itself would not be so bad for our species, as long as life elsewhere did not get so chaotic as to let the nukes fly or global warming run away.

But for us in the West, the prognosis is not good. From relative tranquility and confidence after the Cold War’s end, we have entered a new world of “interesting times” (the Chinese curse) with head-spinning suddenness. Further human biological evolution is far too slow to offer any help. So for now, it’s all up to what remains of our Western Reason and self-discipline, characteristics in which China seems ascendant. The small flame of the Western Enlightenment is guttering even now. Soon it could go out.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post

Dr. King

I didn’t write a post for Dr. King’s birthday this year. I just wasn’t ready.

What could I say that hadn’t been said already? What could I add that hadn’t already nudged Dr. King toward banality and being taken for granted?

I had already noted his eminence as our nation’s chief national saint and martyr, far surpassing the over-hyped Nathan Hale. Hale had given his life for the cause of American independence, in a war that took six years. Dr. King gave his life for the cause of freedom and equality, in a mostly peaceful struggle that just recently passed four centuries in duration and is still going on. He brought about a moral awakening in a much larger and more complex nation than Hale’s, and he built his awakening on a solid foundation of non-violence.

Only three people in human history have wrought freedom for oppressed people without violence. All were non-white: Dr. King, Mandela and Gandhi. Dr. King’s revolution is still incomplete. But, as we will see, it’s incomplete precisely because of its extraordinary context: a nation that believes it can do no wrong but is in fact one of the most consistently violent societies in human history.

Still, something was missing from my understanding of Dr. King. It hit me about the time I wrote what I did on his birthday: a paean to Stacey Abrams and her brilliance in re-discovering neighbor-to-neighbor politics in the Age of Facebook and algorithmic lies.

If anything can cure the disease of high-tech algorithms that systematically press our emotional buttons of shock, fear, surprise and hate, it’s getting to know real people who live around us. What Abrams had re-discovered and put into action was a timeless truth about human nature and social evolution: trust develops best with long-term, face-to-face daily living. Her insight was brilliant, and so was the way she put it into practice.

Funny thing, that. How often have you heard the word “brilliant” applied to Black people? I haven’t done a Google search, but as I scan my 76 years of memory they come up blank. We credit a now half-forgotten white Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, with saying “all politics is local.” But who recently reminded us that politics is human, not a matter of software and algorithms and the money behind them? Who taught us, with actual electoral success, that more durable human connections can bring us back from the brink?

Abrams did, and her insight just might save us all. On the way, it might spare political contributors a whole lot of useless expense on various forms of risky electronic propaganda.

But back to Dr. King. At about the same time it dawned on me how brilliant Abrams is, I had similar thoughts about him. I went back and re-read the speech that he gave precisely a year before his own assassination, on April 4, 1967. Entitled “Beyond Vietnam—Time to Break Silence,” it was his first clear break with the Administration of Lyndon Johnson on the War in Vietnam.

Today the speech is available online, in verbatim transcribed text and (on YouTube) in full-motion video. If I were a high school social-studies teacher, I would teach it as one of our nation’s founding documents, right after the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. (I would do this only in high school, for I would have to presume a working knowledge of slavery, our Civil War, Jim Crow and institutionalized racism, and our abject loss in Vietnam—the first loss of a major war in our history.)

Understandably, Dr. King spent a large part of his speech explaining why he was breaking with the same president who had managed to twist arch-segregationists’ arms to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If you’re in a hurry, you can skip this introductory part, and begin with the words “Now it should be incandescently clear . . .” and the short excerpt from a Langston Hughes poem above them.

If you read the rest of the speech with an open mind, you will discover something extraordinary. Way back in 1967, while our escalation of the War in Vietnam was just gathering serious steam, Dr. King predicted precisely how and why we would lose the war. He also predicted how our involvement would poison our own society and destroy the Great Society that Lyndon Johnson was trying to build at home, even while waging a cruel and unnecessary war abroad.

What impresses is not just Dr. King’s moral tone. That was his trademark. What impresses, even today, is the uncanny accuracy of his predictions. It bares repeating that he made them nearly 55 years ago, in the midst of embattled politics and only partially successful civil-rights activism. No one, except apparently him, could foresee what he saw.

Every step of Dr. King’s logic was based on cause and effect: “if we do this, then that will happen.” For a man who had gained fame as a preacher and activist, it was an extraordinary display of brilliant reasoning. To an ex-scientist turned law professor like me, it resembles a physicist or chemist describing the expected result of a bad experiment. What Dr. King was describing, with depressing accuracy and decades in advance, was our society and its future.

In the very old days, people would have called Dr. King a “seer” or a “prophet.” Perhaps we should use those words again today. We desperately need simple language to identify leaders who can see cause and effect. We have so few of them in public life today: most of our pols spend their time laying blame after the fact and inciting hate, even making up lies for those purposes.

But I digress. The secret sauce of Dr. King’s prophecy had three ingredients. His moral temperament and his absolute commitment to non-violence are well known. What is less well known is a penetrating, insightful intellect, of a quality that shows up only rarely in the hurly-burly of the public arena. This rare combination of faith and deep intelligence made Dr. King the kind of leader whose greatness only time and future generations can reveal.

I’ll close by examining a notable quote from him, seemingly divorced from his main topic. (At the time, it got a lot of critical press, mostly out of context.) Ending the long introduction on his break with Johnson, Dr. King said:

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

With this quote, he addressed over-the-top, high-tech violence that we were then visiting upon the mostly-peasant people of Vietnam, in an ultimately fruitless quest to bend them to our will. The violence included saturation-bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail, bombing innocent neighboring countries Laos and Cambodia, napalming whole villages, the infamous Mi Lai Massacre, defoliating millions of acres of forest with the cancer-causing Agent Orange, and the mining millions of acres of farmland with land mines that still maim people today.

If you focus your lens on our nation now, an even clearer image of mayhem comes into view. We have the most guns per capita, by far, of any nation on Earth. We have by far the greatest number and percentage of random firearm massacres of innocents of any nation in human history. Our Supreme Court has perverted a constitutional provision about “a well-regulated militia” into carte blanche for today’s primary instrument of crime, disorder and mayhem: the individual handgun.

Next, widen your gaze to societal violence of the type we perpetrated in Vietnam. We spend as much on “defense” as the next nine nations combined. We have the world’s most extensive nuclear arsenal, ultimately capable of extinguishing all life on Earth. We have, proportionately, the greatest number of people incarcerated in any nation on Earth.

Perhaps the least-known aspect of our inherent societal violence is assassination. Deliberate killings of our own leaders have sealed our national fate and set our national direction more than any other nation’s, let alone any democratic one’s.

Perhaps our most consequential assassination ever was Lincoln’s. It ultimately ended Reconstruction with little progress for Black people besides nominal release from slavery. Then, a century later, we suffered the three terrible assassinations of my youth, JFK’s, RFK’s and Dr. King’s—all within five years. Can anyone imagine how different (and how much better) our nation would be today if all three men had lived?

These fateful killings were but a sample. If you add up all assassinations of and attempts on presidents, assassinations of presidential candidates and of Dr. King, they amount to six assassinations and two attempts in a mere 150 years: more than one every generation, on average. If you can cite any other developed nation, let alone a developed democracy, with that dismal a record of killing its own best leaders, please let me know.

Some of this horror undoubtedly derives from our original sin. For most of four centuries, we used whips, chains, lynching, incarceration and police violence to enslave, exploit, oppress and incarcerate Black people. Most recently, we used an official knee on a neck, sparking a long-delayed awakening. And last year’s January 6 Insurrection made us the only purported democracy in any developed nation to have suffered a fatal attack on its legislative center. (The Brits celebrate thwarting such an attack on Guy Fawkes Day, and the notorious burning of Germany’s Reichstag came a month after Hitler’s election as Chancellor, when the weak Weimar Democracy already had been spent.)

Way back in 1967, when Dr. King described our government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” it seemed an edgy characterization, perhaps a false prediction. In light of subsequent events, his insight only enhances his reputation as an accurate social seer. Today we would have to include our people, not just our government, in the characterization.

We now face grave problems that even Dr. King could not foresee: global warming, a persistent global pandemic, accelerating nuclear proliferation, other-species extinction (perhaps followed by our own), gross overpopulation and planetary-scale pollution. All these things require non-violence and cooperation to solve. All can be made worse—even species-extinction-level worse!—by violence among ourselves.

So maybe we should not just name streets for Dr. King. Maybe we should recognize him for what he was: a moral and practical prophet of the same magnitude and importance of those in our ancient scriptures. He gave us a clear recipe—nonviolent cooperation—for surviving our modern age, if only we would use it.

In the final analysis, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was far more than “just” a civil-rights activist. He was one of the great thinkers of our age, perhaps the most important. It’s now up to us to recognize his wisdom and put it to practice. For the hour is growing late, not just for us Americans and our democracy, but for our entire human species.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post