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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/boun-j10.html
By Patrick Martin
10 July 2020
Less than two weeks after it kicked off a media frenzy with its front-page report claiming that the Russian military intelligence agency GRU had paid bounties to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan to kill American soldiers, the New York Times published an editorial effectively conceding that there was no factual basis for its reporting.
The editorial appeared on Wednesday, July 8, one day after General Frank McKenzie, the commander of Centcom, with overall responsibility for Afghanistan and the Middle East, told the press that there was no evidence that any US soldiers had been killed because of the alleged Russian bounties.
“I didn’t find that there was a causative link there,” McKenzie said, “the intel case wasn’t proved to me.” In any case, he continued, no additional precautions were required because the US military already takes “extreme force protection measures” in Afghanistan “whether the Russians are paying the Taliban or not.”
McKenzie was speaking Tuesday by telephone to a group of reporters including the Associated Press, which ran a report. The Times did not report his comments, which diametrically contradicted the newspaper’s own reporting of June 27.
But that night, the newspaper’s editorial page threw in the towel, publishing an editorial on the Times web site which appeared the next morning in the print edition, under the headline, “Don’t Let Russian Meddling Derail Afghanistan Withdrawal Plans.”
The editorial begins with the admission: “There’s a lot still missing from the reports that Russia paid for attacks on American and other coalition forces in Afghanistan. That’s why it’s critical that emotions and politics be kept at bay until the facts are in.”
This appeal for waiting “until the facts are in” is remarkable since the Times itself had claimed to be in possession of the facts about alleged Russian efforts to murder American soldiers, citing unnamed “intelligence officials,” and it gave the signal for a vast media campaign aimed at whipping up a very specific “emotion,” hatred of Russia.
Moreover, the Democratic Party—with which the Times is closely allied—immediately seized on this report to resurrect its long-discredited claims that Trump is a Russian stooge and does nothing without Vladimir Putin’s direction and approval.
This was the basis, first of the Mueller investigation and then of the impeachment inquiry, neither of which developed any credible evidence to back the McCarthyite howling about the White House doing the bidding of the Kremlin. Now the Times report has become the basis for demands by Democrats, and many Republicans, that Trump take immediate action that would, in the words of one senator, result in Russians going home “in body bags.”
The editorial further admits that there was no independent reporting to back the claims of Russian bounty payments. Instead, its articles “cite intelligence findings.” In other words, the Times served as a conduit for unnamed officials, apparently in the CIA, who leaked uncorroborated and disputed claims, allegedly based on the interrogation of prisoners captured in the war with the Taliban. The CIA did not divulge who these prisoners are, where they are being held, and what torture or other mistreatment they may have been subjected to.
The editorial goes on to say: “Then there’s the question of the motives behind the leaks and the solidity of the information.”
One might think that a first rule of journalism would be to question the motives of officials when they come forward with such inflammatory allegations, as well as to seek confirmation of claims made by an agency which specializes in lying and political provocations. However, that is not the relationship between the New York Times and the CIA.
On the contrary, the Times has been a willing stenographer and propagandist for the US intelligence services for many decades, going back to the “weapons of mass destruction” fraud that paved the way to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and well before.
The editorial continues: “Other questions abound: When did the reported payments begin? Were they payback for American support of Afghan militants against Soviet troops there in the 1980s, or something else? Were the payments a factor in the deaths of any American or other coalition troops? Was the intelligence tweaked by people seeking to hinder efforts to withdraw American troops?”
These are the questions that should, of course, have been addressed before the Times published its front-page “exposé.” The fact that they are only raised now, in an editorial 12 days later, is a declaration of journalistic bankruptcy.
As the last question in the list suggests, as well as the headline of the editorial, it now appears that CIA officials opposed to Trump’s decision to pull most US troops out of Afghanistan on a timetable geared to the November 3 election leaked the “bounties” claim to the Times to generate political pressure to overturn that decision. They were successful, as the White House has now delayed the final withdrawal, meaning that it can be more easily reversed by an incoming Democratic administration if Trump loses the election.
The Times is not the only “news” organization with egg on its face after the collapse of the “bounties” campaign. NBC News published a similar retraction on its web site, under the defensive headline, “US officials say intel on Russian bounties was less than conclusive. That misses the big picture.”
NBC admits that a “growing chorus of American officials” say that the evidence of Russian bounties is “less than conclusive.” But it argues that the “big picture” is the unsurprising news that Russian and American interests in Afghanistan do not coincide, and that Moscow has sought to cultivate relations with the Taliban in recent years, and even provide indirect support.
NBC casts some resentful blame on the Times for calling the report on the bounties a “finding” of the intelligence community, i.e., a consensus assessment, which turned out not to be true. The CIA drew its conclusion with only “moderate confidence”—a term of art that means, in effect, “we made it up”—while the National Security Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, said “it could not corroborate” the reports.
None of this alters the fact that the allegation of Russian bounties has entered the bloodstream of American capitalist politics like snake venom for which there is no antidote.
Hence the spectacle of Representative Jason Crow, a former Army special forces officer in Afghanistan, one of the CIA Democrats whose rise was analyzed and exposed by the WSWS in 2018, joining with Republican Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president and unindicted war criminal, to co-sponsor an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act barring the Trump administration from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan until it has taken action over the allegations of “Russian bounties.”
There is little doubt that Democratic candidates, from Joe Biden on down, will be making an issue of Trump’s failure to “punish” Russia for killing American soldiers right through November 3, regardless of the abject disavowal of these bogus charges by the Times.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/fasc-j10.html
By Jordan Shilton
10 July 2020
In a lengthy July 3 article, the New York Times extensively documented a right-wing extremist conspiracy involving sections of the German military, intelligence agencies and police to carry out a violent uprising on “Day X.” The article, based on a year-long investigation, documents wide-ranging far-right networks within the military and police, the infiltration of the elite special forces unit (KSK) by fascists and the growing influence of right-wing extremist political forces like the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Entitled “As neo-Nazis seed military ranks, Germany confronts an enemy within,” the article details how the existence of shadowy networks for planning attacks and storing weapons have been tolerated and even supported by army commanders for years. One former KSK commander, Gen. Reinhard Günzel, published a book in which he likened the KSK to the Waffen-SS, the Nazi stormtroopers notorious for carrying out numerous mass executions of Jews during the Holocaust.
In a raid on the house of just one KSK soldier in May, investigators found “two kilograms of PETN plastic explosives, a detonator, a fuse, an AK-47, a silencer, two knives, a crossbow and thousands of rounds of ammunition,” according to the Times. Another former KSK member nicknamed Hannibal ran a chat group in which the plotting of terrorist attacks were discussed. Several members of the group are under investigation, and one has been placed on trial. Interviewed by the Times, “Hannibal” described his group as being about “war gaming” against “gangs, Islamists and antifa,” who are “the enemy troops on our ground.”
The Times’ piece appeared just days after Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer was forced to announce the restructuring of the KSK, including the disbanding of one of its companies, due to its emergence as a hotbed for right-wing extremists. This extraordinary event, which illustrates how the German state apparatus and security forces are increasingly dominated by neo-Nazis 75 years after the collapse of Hitlerite fascism, forced the Times and a host of newspapers internationally to report on a reality they have largely sought to ignore for years.
Recalling political conditions during the Weimar Republic following World War I, the Times’ article paints a picture of a nominally democratic state confronting far-right conspiracies on all sides, above all from within. Right-wing extremist networks are “hoarding weapons, maintaining safe houses, and in some cases keeping lists of political enemies” to execute, the Times noted. Within the KSK alone, 48,000 rounds of munition and 62 kilograms of explosives have gone missing.
The Times article pointed to the comments of Brendan Tarrant, the far-right terrorist who gunned down dozens of Muslim worshippers in a mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, as having written that “hundreds of thousands” of soldiers in Europe’s militaries hold fascist and right-wing nationalist views. It continued, “Germany’s military counterintelligence agency is now investigating more than 600 soldiers for far-right extremism, out of 184,000 in the military. Some 20 of them are in the KSK, a proportion that is five times higher than in other units.
“But the German authorities are concerned that the problem may be far larger and that other security institutions have been infiltrated as well. Over the past 13 months, far-right terrorists have assassinated a politician, attacked a synagogue and shot dead nine immigrants and German descendants of immigrants.”
The true extent of the far-right infiltration remains unclear, the Times continued, because sections of the intelligence agencies are dominated by right-wing extremists as well. It referred to a tip-off given to KSK soldiers by a military counter-intelligence agent about a raid in May, before quoting Stephan Kramer, president of the domestic intelligence agency in the state of Thuringia, as saying, “What we are dealing with is an enemy within.”
The author of the article, Katrin Bennfold, observed that “military and intelligence officials” and “avowed far-right members” told her about “nationwide networks of current and former soldiers and police officers with ties to the far-right.” Some media outlets describe it as a “shadow army,” recalling the campaign of assassinations, coup plots and conspiracies conducted by far-right forces within the military during the Weimar Republic with the aim of overturning bourgeois democracy.
“In many cases, soldiers have used the networks to prepare for when they predict Germany’s democratic order will collapse,” continued the Times, in perhaps its most startling revelation. “They call it Day X. Officials worry it is really a pretext for inciting terrorist acts, or worse, a putsch.”
For many Times’ readers, the news that Germany, held up by ruling circles as one of Europe’s leading democracies following the defeat of Nazism in 1945, faces the imminent threat of a military coup by the far-right will have come as a surprise. However, the reality is that the same objective contradictions of capitalism that led the German bourgeoisie to back the installation of Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933 behind the backs of a hostile working class are propelling its descendants towards the cultivation of the far-right and outright fascist forces. On the one hand, German imperialism is confronted by the necessity of advancing more ruthlessly its predatory economic and geostrategic interests around the world under conditions of accelerating tensions between the major powers. On the other, it faces deep-seated opposition among working people to its policies of austerity and war.
The German Trotskyists of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) and the World Socialist Web Site warned from the outset that the attempt to develop a more aggressive foreign policy to assert German imperialist interests on the world stage was intimately bound up with the rehabilitation of right-wing extremist views and the promotion of pro-Nazi forces. The SGP declared in a September 2014 resolution adopted at a special conference against war, “The propaganda of the post-war era—that Germany had learnt from the terrible crimes of the Nazis, had ‘arrived at the West,’ had embraced a peaceful foreign policy, and had developed into a stable democracy—is exposed as lies. German imperialism is once again showing its real colours as it emerged historically, with all of its aggressiveness at home and abroad.”
This resolution was adopted in opposition to the statements of German President Joachim Gauck, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Defence Minister Ursula Von der Leyen, who all proclaimed at the 2014 Munich Security Conference that the era of German military restraint was over. Germany was too large to comment on world politics from the “sidelines,” argued Steinmeier, before going on to call for a more decisive and substantial intervention by the armed forces in foreign military operations.
The same month Gauck, Steinmeier and Von der Leyen delivered their remarks, Jörg Baberowski, a professor of Eastern European history at Berlin’s Humboldt University, told Der Spiegel magazine, “Hitler was not a psychopath, he was not vicious. He did not want to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table.”
Not a single voice from academia or the political establishment was raised against this gross falsification of history by Baberowski, who also proclaimed his support for Ernst Nolte, the most well-known pro-Nazi historian in post-war Germany. On the contrary, Baberowski and his co-thinkers were defended and supported by Humboldt University’s management, which declared “attacks in the media” on him to be “unacceptable.” This support extended beyond Germany, with Princeton University awarding Baberowski a research grant of $300,000 for his work on dictatorship, which the professor studies as a legitimate and even popular “alternative political order” to democratic forms of rule. When Baberowski travelled to Princeton in the spring of 2019 to attend a closed door conference, he was accompanied by his research assistant Fabian Thunemann, who was identified as a leading participant in a neo-Nazi demonstration in the German city of Hannover in 1998. (See: Why did Princeton University provide funding for the German right-wing extremist Jörg Baberowski?)
While Baberowski’s far-right rewriting of history enjoyed sympathetic backing from the media and academia, the SGP and its student organization was subjected to a vicious media campaign. In 2018, the SGP was placed on a watch list by the Secret Service for being “left-wing extremist.” In its justification of the move, the intelligence agency, which was headed at the time by the AfD sympathiser Hans-Georg Maassen, argued that “the struggle for a democratic, egalitarian, socialist society” and “agitation against alleged ‘imperialism’ and ‘militarism’” are anti-constitutional, i.e., illegal.
The reason for this ruthless response was that the SGP’s opposition to Baberowski, the trivialisation of the Nazis’ crimes, and the revival of German militarism cut across the ruling elite’s conspiracy to shift politics sharply to the right. The neo-fascist AfD has been systematically built up since its founding in 2013. After it secured just 12.6 percent of the vote in the 2017 federal election and became the first fascist party since 1945 to be represented in the federal Parliament, Steinmeier, who was by then German president, met with the AfD’s leaders and urged other parties to dismantle the “walls of irreconcilability” around the AfD and strive for “German patriotism.” Several months later, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats concluded the formation of a new grand coalition government, which had the effect of making the AfD the official opposition party in Parliament.
The AfD has since been able to dictate large parts of the grand coalition’s policy, particularly in the areas of immigration and refugees. All of the parliamentary parties ensured that positions were left open at the head of important parliamentary committees for the far-right party to fill.
In February, the liberal Free Democrats and Christian Democrats took this cooperation with the AfD to its next logical step in the state of Thuringia, where they relied on the votes of the neo-fascists to elect the FDP’s Thomas Kemmerich as the state’s Minister President. Widespread popular outrage over the first Minister President in a post-war German state to be elected with the votes of a fascist party forced Kemmerich to resign soon afterwards. (See: Sound the alarm! Political conspiracy and the resurgence of fascism in Germany)
It is within this reactionary right-wing political climate that the activities of fascist terrorists and coup plotters in and around the military, police and intelligence agencies has flourished.
The fact that the Times now feels compelled to report so explicitly on the danger of right-wing extremist networks speaks to the deepening crisis of bourgeois rule under conditions of world capitalist breakdown that are unprecedented since the 1930s. Faced with glaring levels of social inequality, a resurgence of inter-imperialist rivalries and the erosion of democratic forms of rule, ruling elites everywhere are turning to authoritarian and right-wing extremist forces to defend their interests against the working class at home and their national competitors abroad. As Trotsky wrote in 1929, analysing the growing trend towards dictatorship in Europe and the strengthening of fascist forces, “The excessively high tension of the international struggle and the class struggle results in the short circuit of the dictatorship, blowing out the fuses of democracy one after the other.”
While the infiltration of the German military and state apparatus by fascist forces with the backing of the political establishment is the most graphic example of this process, no less dangerous developments are under way in other leading capitalist countries.
In neighbouring France, President Emmanuel Macron has lauded the legacy of Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain as a national hero and ordered a brutal military-style crackdown on Yellow Vest protesters, resulting in fatalities and the maiming of hundreds.
In the United States, Trump continues to cultivate a base of support among far-right and fascist layers, as shown most recently by his retweeting of a video showing one of his supporters shouting “white power.” Confronted by mass, multi-racial protests against police brutality in early June, the US president responded by initiating a military coup with the aim of creating an authoritarian regime under his personal command.
Far-right and fascistic forces are also being promoted in Canada, including to intimidate and disperse working class struggles. Just a day prior to the publication of the Times’ exposé of the far-right in Germany, an army reservist motivated by right-wing extremist views launched a failed assassination attempt against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
There could be nothing more criminally light-minded than to underestimate the threat from the fascist far-right. But unlike the 1920s and 1930s, the far-right in Germany and elsewhere does not yet enjoy a mass following. In fact, the AfD and its backers are widely despised among the broad masses of the population, who have not forgotten the barbaric crimes perpetrated by the Nazis throughout Europe, above all the Holocaust. The far-right’s apparent strength comes exclusively from the fact that it has powerful allies within the ruling elite and its state apparatus.
To prevent the far-right conspiracies of the ruling elites in Germany and other countries from succeeding, the widespread working class hatred towards right-wing extremism must be transformed into a conscious political movement against the revival of fascism and militarism, and the rotten capitalist profit system in which this process is rooted. Above all, this requires the building of the International Committee of the Fourth International as the revolutionary leadership of the international working class.
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/cdck-j10.html
By David Walsh
10 July 2020
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century and a world-historical literary and cultural figure. In the English language, he is perhaps second only to William Shakespeare in enduring significance and popularity.
His imperishable works include The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and, of course, the novella that introduced the reading public to Ebenezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol.
In late June, the Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, in East Kent, England, was vandalized by an individual who sprayed “Dickens Racist” on the building. The perpetrator, Ian Driver, is a former Green Party councillor.
Unrepentant, Driver subsequently indicated he targeted the museum because it represented “the deep-rooted institutional racism of Broadstairs Town and Thanet District councils.” In a statement, he deplored the celebration of “genocidal racists such as Charles Dickens and King Leopold of Belgium.”
Driver may be an eccentric or unstable individual, but his actions fit a general pattern. In the US, statues of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant have been removed, defaced or threatened.
Moreover, a campaign against Dickens as a misogynist, imperialist, anti-Semite and reactionary defender of law and order has been under way for decades in pseudo-left, feminist and postmodernist academic circles.
Inspired by the postmodernist Michel Foucault in particular, D.A. Miller, an American academic, in The Novel and the Police (1988), for instance, asserted that “Few of course would dispute [!] that, with Dickens, the English novel for the first time features a massive thematization of social discipline.” A headline in the Daily Mail this May read “Charles Dickens the misogynist,” with a subhead that continued, “He championed family values—yet the novelist was cruel to his wife, hated his mother, had an affair …”
The anti-Dickens banner has attracted some detestable personalities. The late journalist-scoundrel Christopher Hitchens, with all the moral grandeur of someone who gravitated from the upper middle class “left” politics of the International Socialists group in Britain to the Bush war camp in the early 2000s, eagerly cheering on the criminal, murderous invasion of Iraq, informed his readers in 2010 that Dickens was “the worst of men.”
This is all extremely reactionary and stupid, the worst sort of myopic, ahistorical moralizing, and, to the extent such an effort has gained any traction, it reveals or confirms the intellectual and moral rottenness of these affluent petty bourgeois layers.
Dickens is a beloved figure, first of all, because of the deep sympathy in his novels for those mistreated and oppressed by official, respectable society, especially children. It is difficult to think of another writer who conveyed such sympathy in significant fiction, with the possible exception of Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist. Dickens, of course, enjoyed the “advantage” of having suffered poverty and abuse as a child, including during his stint, at 12 years old, working ten-hour days at a blacking (boot polish) factory while his father was locked up in a debtors’ prison.
Second, and related to that, Dickens was second to none in creating scathing portraits of hypocrites and sophists, especially those who prosper from the misery of others, while offering high-minded advice to the down-trodden on their ostensible moral and religious obligations. Karl Marx included Dickens among the “present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England” who were painting the various layers of the English middle class as “full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance.”
The novelist’s satire—as British writer George Gissing noted, in a perceptive 1898 study, in regard to Bleak House, one of Dickens’ masterpieces—had “very wide application; it involves that whole system of pompous precedent which in Dickens’s day was responsible for so much cruelty and hypocrisy, for such waste of life in filth and gloom and wretchedness.”
The Northern Star, the newspaper of the Chartist movement, the revolutionary movement of British workers at the time, hailed Dickens as “the champion of the oppressed.” Edwin Pugh, in Charles Dickens, Apostle of the People (1908), (mistakenly) claimed Dickens for the working class as an “unconscious socialist.” George Bernard Shaw asserted that not only was Dickens’ Little Dorrit one of the greatest books every written in English, which is true, it was “more seditious than Das Kapital,” which is untrue. Tolstoy, who admired Dickens greatly, said of him: “He loves the weak and poor and always despises the rich.”
Dickens did all this, and a great deal more, in the liveliest and often most comic manner. He created a universe of characters and personalities, again, in English, only second to Shakespeare. His characters’ remarkable names often say a good deal: Henrietta Boffin, Vincent Crummles and family, Affery Flintwinch, Tom Gradgrind, Mr. and Mrs. Gulpidge (dinner guests), Mr. M’Choakumchild (school teacher), Newman Noggs, “The Infant Phenomenon,” Herbert Pocket, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Mr. Pumblechook, Mr. Smallweed (moneylender), Wackford Squeers, Paul Sweedlepipe, Montague Tigg, Nathaniel Winkle and Mr. Wopsie, to mention only a few.
In his brilliant essay, Dickens: The Two Scrooges (1939), American critic Edmund Wilson noted that the novelist was “almost invariably against institutions.” In spite of the lip service Dickens paid to “Church and State,” Wilson argues, whenever he comes to deal concretely in his art with “laws, courts and the public officials, the creeds of Protestant dissenters and of the Church of England alike, he makes them either ridiculous or cruel, or both at the same time.”
Dickens, Wilson continued, was one of “the very small group of British intellectuals to whom the opportunity had been offered to be taken up by the governing class and who have actually declined the honor.”
The claims of Dickens’s racism stem from observations he made at various times about India, Africa, China and Ireland, and about British colonial operations in those regions. Some of the comments are reactionary and intemperate. The worst were made during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, also known as the Sepoy Mutiny, after 120 British women and children were killed by rebel forces.
As Grace Moore explains, in her sensible book, Dickens and Empire, “Although much has been made of Dickens’s unpleasant and bloodthirsty calls for vengeance in the massacre’s immediate aftermath, these demands were in fact restricted to a six-month period. When it became apparent … that the ghastly actions of the sepoys were matched by equally repugnant behaviour on the part of the British, Dickens’s outbursts ceased abruptly.”
Interestingly, Moore goes on to argue that in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), “Dickens revised his attitude towards the sepoy soldiers and the rebels who joined them, by sympathetically aligning them with both the French third estate of 1789, and the English working classes. Indeed, following his explosion of 1857 Dickens was certainly more cautious about speaking out on matters of race in the future.”
In any event, an entire industry, modest but no doubt lucrative, has sprung up dedicated to exposing Dickens for the racist, misogynist scoundrel that he was.
Few enduring literary or artistic figures are immune from such efforts. Shakespeare was subjected to idiotic abuse in Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011). The playwright was depicted as a semiliterate braggart, drunk and murderer who took credit for works actually written by the Earl of Oxford.
Tolstoy underwent some degree of falsification and trivialization, although nowhere nearly so malicious, in The Last Station (2009), and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron suffered some of the same fate in Mary Shelley (2017). In Papa: Hemingway in Cuba (2015), both Ernest Hemingway and his art were horribly banalized. On a smaller scale, Orson Welles has been reduced and dismissed in Me and Orson Welles (2008) and RKO 281 (1999). Various books have been dedicated to demolishing the reputation of German dramatist-poet Bertolt Brecht, including John Fuegi’s Brecht & Co. (1994).
Dickens, of course, has already come under attack in Ralph Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman (2013), about the writer’s 13-year extra-marital relationship with the much younger actress Ellen Ternan. The filmmakers expressed disapproval of Dickens’s treatment of his wife and mistress, ignoring the reality, the WSWS wrote, that the writer was “a product of his era and social circumstances (which made divorce unthinkable).”
We added: “Frankly, the novelist’s dedication to presenting life in his novels is a thousand times more important and enduring than his imputed peccadilloes. Who set up these middle class critics as the arbiters of morality extending back into history? What have they got to boast about? It should be noted that the movie was scripted by Abi Morgan, who wrote the shameful tribute to Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady.”
In part, this entire process is simply one more indication of a very bad artistic and social climate. In a period in which artistic genius of the type exemplified by Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac and others—or anything even resembling it—has been sadly, conspicuously lacking, mediocrities feel it vital to repudiate the idea that genius has ever existed. The artist of the past must be cut down to size to make the present-day nonentity feel better about him or herself. “Well, they weren’t so different from us, after all, petty, selfish, back-biting …” Several generations of intellectuals, who have swung largely to the right, cannot conceive of artistic greatness, with all the self-sacrifice and exhaustive mental labor involved, on the level of a Dickens (a labor that helped bring about his death at the age of 58).
They search out and discover pettiness and sordid motives everywhere because their own lives and activity are dominated by pettiness and sordid motives. Scandal-mongering, gossip and the rest define their existence and they impose all that on the subjects of their research.
Moreover, one of Dickens’ tremendous failings from the point of view of the contemporary academic is his continuing popularity. His works have never fallen out of print. A Tale of Two Cities is estimated to be one of the most widely read novels of all time. With the aid of “cheap monthly installments he [Dickens] wins a completely new class for literature, a class of people who had never read novels before,” asserted cultural historian Arnold Hauser.
All of this is reason enough for the contemporary academic cynic, resigned to his or her own insignificance and impotence, to despise Dickens. What the mass of the population is drawn toward must be rubbish, because the masses are backward rubbish. It is appropriate that the attack on Dickens House in Broadstairs was carried out by a member of the Green Party, a petty bourgeois, neo-Malthusian movement profoundly hostile to the working class.
In regard to a healthy portion of the current academic view of Dickens, what amounts to a deep, abiding antagonism toward wide layers of the population is framed in “left” language, as befits our present situation. Dickens is faulted, in the end, for not holding socialist and internationalist views. The fact that he lived 38 of his 58 years and wrote eight major novels (The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son and David Copperfield) before socialist internationalism even existed as an organized force (the first English-language edition of the Communist Manifesto was only published in the latter half of 1850) is not an issue that concerns the critics.
Dickens appeared to the public as a serious fiction writer and as a chronicler of urban life, including plebeian urban life, in the mid-1830s. He had behind him many illustrious figures in Britain, including Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Walter Scott, but he was writing a new kind of social novel. How many guides did he have before him to show him the “proper” path? Our contemporary critics never ask themselves that.
Nor do they concern themselves with the enormous pressures exerted on a popular writer of the time. Leon Trotsky notes somewhere the astonishing fact that Tolstoy rewrote and reworked War and Peace (a 1,200 page novel) seven times! Equally astonishing, however, is the fact that Tolstoy had the leisure time in which he could carry out such titanic efforts. Dickens wrote his large, complex novels in monthly installments, in “real time,” as it were. Once an installment was out there in the public, there was no going back. This method, George Gissing pointed out, “with author but a little in advance of printer, was … as bad a one as novelist has ever contrived.”
Dickens the man had many failings, some of them nearly inevitable, some of them his own responsibility. It is nearly impossible to find an important artist without personal failings. Class society damages, twists or obstructs very gifted people as it does everyone else. Artistic genius, on the one hand, and personal idiosyncrasy, selfishness or even destructiveness, on the other, may coexist within a single human being.
The projection back in time of prevailing middle class values, the view that “all one has to do is to attribute the thoughts, feelings and motives of present-day men to the past,” in Georg Lukacs’ phrase, is one of the most intellectually debilitating and counter-productive efforts imaginable. The contemporary petty bourgeois, offended by Dickens’ occasional backwardness and prejudice, much of it expressed privately, remains immune to the novelist’s deep, deep feelings for the crushed and oppressed present in his novels, because he or she has no such feelings. He or she has sensitivities, and identity issues, and enormous quantities of self-regard and self-pity. The problems of the great mass of the population are of no great interest—more than that, such problems, of a vast, life-and-death character, and the human beings whom they press forward, threaten to push the self-important middle class out of the spotlight and off the social and intellectual stage completely.
In his 1898 essay, Gissing, writing at a time when Dickens was already coming under attack by aesthetes, refined modernists and others, responded sharply to the ahistorical, anachronistic approach to art. He observed that the great novelist “was opening in truth a new era of English fiction, and the critic of our day who loses sight of this, who compares Dickens to his disadvantage with novelists of a later school, perpetrates the worst kind of injustice! Dickens is one of the great masters of fiction, who, by going straight to life, revitalized their art. That he did not see life with the eyes of a later generation can scarcely be brought as a charge against him; that his individuality [i.e., individual and specific conditions] affected his vision is no more than must be said of any artists that ever lived.” Precisely.
Edmund Wilson suggested that of all the great Victorian writers, Dickens “was probably the most antagonistic to the Victorian age itself.” In an apparent contradiction, Gissing asserted that the novelist was, “in all but his genius, a representative Englishman of the middle-class.”
There may not be a contradiction here if the matter is understood correctly. If one is speaking of Dickens’ art, especially as he practices it in his later, darker novels (Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend), in its unbounded fecundity, its restless, relentless moral radicalism, its instinctive hatred for everything official, then Wilson is undoubtedly correct. Dickens the artist is at war with his age and culture.
At the same time, as a highly respected, well-compensated member of British society, the wealthiest and most powerful in the world, Dickens was also very much a “representative Englishman of the middle class” in his social views and conduct. At a time when nations and nationality carried far greater weight and exerted far greater pressure, Dickens attached “paramount importance,” as Grace Moore points out, “to British needs.”
Dickens makes a great point of mocking and deriding missionaries and other do-gooders (e.g., Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House) who concern themselves with the fate of Africans and others when there is so much misery at home in Britain. However, in that regard, as A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge (a historical novel, in Scott’s style, set during the Gordon Riots of 1780) demonstrate, the novelist—as Wilson observed—both “sympathizes with and fears” the mass of the population, at home and abroad.
All of the contradictions unfold systematically and logically, including his ambiguous or worse sentiments about the colonial populations.
Dickens felt a “genuine abhorrence” for slavery (Moore) and the violence inflicted on male and female slaves, as his American Notes —based on his dispiriting trip to the US in 1842—made clear. Moore writes further that “Dickens was strongly committed to the emancipation of all slaves and believed that they could eventually be integrated into society on an equal basis with white men.”
Yet when the Civil War broke out, like the majority of the English middle class, which he so often lampooned in his novels, Dickens sympathized with the South in the name of “free trade,” justifying himself in a letter on the grounds that “the North hates the Negro, and that until it was convenient to make a pretence that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there is not a pin to choose between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out of it, just as it happens.”
Dickens’ great contribution was as an artist, not a social thinker or political philosopher. His books contain great heaps of petty bourgeois pathos, melodrama and sentimentality—and many social blind spots—but they include far greater heaps of life as it is, including, of course, as Gissing writes, “murky, swarming, rotting London.”
The important artist adds to the body of human understanding and feelings, particularly to those of its progressive or ascending social classes. Aspects of social and psychic reality that were outside the bounds of human awareness are brought within it. The word “Dickensian” entered the English language for a reason. The novelist, out of his intense and sometimes devastating experiences, his compassion and his great artistic intuition, held up a mirror to the misery and wretchedness the ruling elite was imposing on the population, and the latter’s complex, sometimes explosive response. The artist for the most part does not advance a political program, his or her radicalism involves the depth of his or her honest engagement with life.
Aleksandr Voronsky, the Soviet literary critic, insisted in his essay “On Art” (1925) that while a “genuine scientist discovers the laws of nature, otherwise he is a narrow pedant, or in the best case a gatherer of facts … the artist, too, makes such discoveries.” Darwin, Voronsky asserted, brought to light and explained the origin of species, but Tolstoy brought to light the objectively existing human types with which he peopled War and Peace. So too Dickens “discovered” Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Uriah Heep, Seth Pecksniff, Estella Havisham and Sam Weller … and Jarndyce and Jarndyce (in Bleak House), the wretched, soul-destroying, financially draining court case that has dragged on for many generations and “become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least.”
“The true artist, like the true scientist, always adds to what existed before him, otherwise he either repeats what has been established, or he simply describes things,” Voronsky adds.
We read Dickens today, not because he was a respectable Victorian gentleman, with a host of prejudices, but largely in spite of that fact. He did what every great artist does, he gave such broad and vivid expression to his opinions and moods that he lifted them above the limitations of his time, class and milieu. In Trotsky’s phrase, he raised “the experience of his epoch to a tremendous artistic height.” Everything else is secondary.
National Security Adviser Ajit Doval negotiated a de-escalation after a tense military standoff between the nuclear rivals
By SUMIT SHARMA
JULY 9, 2020
https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/ex-spy-brought-india-china-back-from-the-brink/
MUMBAI – It takes nerves of steel and a cool wit to negotiate a truce in the face of a grave provocation – such as the brutal killing of 20 soldiers – and getting two nuclear-armed rivals to pull back from the brink of a full-scale confrontation.
But that’s what Ajit Doval, India’s national security adviser, managed to do as he walked a diplomatic tightrope in recent talks with Chinese officials.
Before he was beckoned, India’s Defense Ministry was busy getting its forces ready for any eventuality and the Foreign Ministry was pulling out all stops to get crucial support from major powers.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trusted team of Defense Minister Rajnath Singh, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Home Minister Amit Shah owe thanks to Doval for the de-escalation agreement announced with China on July 6.
The two sides agreed not to allow differences to become disputes and to de-escalate tensions in border areas by pulling back their respective troops and creating a buffer zone to prevent a recurrence of violent clashes.
It took Doval and his team days of delicate negotiations peppered by conflicting claims and counterclaims. The pressure increased only days before the agreement when Modi launched a surprise rhetorical attack and lashed out at China’s “expansionism”, calling it a threat to world peace.However, some say that fiery speech was aimed mainly at India’s domestic audience, which China apparently took onboard in following through on the agreement.
Doval, a former spy, has now emerged from the shadows and firmly established himself as a key player in Modi’s government. Despite keeping a low profile, Doval is known to have impeccable contacts in New Delhi, say observers.
A decorated officer from the premier Indian Police Service, Doval had a six-year stint in Pakistan as an intelligence officer and also worked as a minister in the Indian High Commission in the United Kingdom.
He was appointed as director of the Intelligence Bureau in 2004 by the Congress-led government, a fact that speaks to his ability to negotiate domestic political currents.
“His wide experience across a variety of different and difficult assignments gives him an edge,” said Nandan Unnikrishnan, a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. “His on-the-ground experience gives him a judgment that’s practical and not just on the drawing board.”
The Ladakh agreement clearly has Modi’s stamp of approval. And Doval had the advantage of getting input from Modi’s closest lieutenants, Singh, Jaishankar and Shah.
Doval is known to have an overlapping vision with Modi and the advantage of a long-standing personal relationship. Like Modi, he too has been a hands-on man, working at the grassroots level for most of his life.
He was awarded a Police Medal within six years on the job, something that is usually only awarded after 17 years of service. Crisis management, observers say, is his forte. In his police role, he learned from experience how to wear down opponents through persevering in negotiations.Doval is widely credited with negotiating the rebel Mizo National Front back into the mainstream in 1986. He also dealt with Sikh terrorists in 1988 and Kashmiri separatists in the early 1990s.
Moreover, he was instrumental in dealing with the hijackers of an Air India plane with 171 passengers aboard in 1999, haggling down the number of terrorists to be exchanged from 40 to three in that high-stakes crisis situation.
During the historic and controversial step to remove Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in August 2019, his years of firsthand experience in the state helped to manage unrest that threatened to spiral out of control.
During communal riots in Delhi while US President Donald Trump was in the capital, Doval was the one to douse the flames.
Delhi-watchers see him as a force multiplier, an official who can cut across the bureaucratese and formal protocols ministers must maintain. With an office next to the all-powerful Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), he is known to have Modi’s ear.
That by no means understates the power and roles of other members of Modi’s quartet. Defense Minister Singh is an old party hand, who in 2013 as president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) picked Modi to lead the party in the 2014 election. Singh is No 2 in the cabinet, although Modi has a natural affinity with Shah, his long time associate from his home Gujarat.
Foreign Minister Jaishankar, with a four-decade career as a distinguished diplomat – including four and a half years as ambassador to Beijing, ambassador to the US, and foreign minister since May 2019 – he carries a wealth of experience. Yet some have asked why it was not Jaishankar who signed the truce agreement with China?According to New Delhi-based analysts, it was partly due to the Modi government’s habit of having ministers double up for each other, and partly because talks with China over the past two decades have been conducted through appointed “special representatives” from both sides.
For India, Doval was the special representative, while for China it was Foreign Minister Wang Yi in the recent negotiations.
Following China’s killing of 20 Indian army troops on June 15, Jaishankar reportedly protested in strong terms in a telephone call with Wang on June 17. The Chinese thus may have perceived him as a tougher nut to crack in any talks, say Delhi insiders.
A minister who signs an agreement is also answerable to queries in parliament, under Indian law. The prime minister, on the other hand, can handle questions about agreements signed by his appointed national security advisor.
This may be crucial since the agreement is seen by some analysts and opposition leaders as unequal, with some claiming the deal cedes Indian land long-occupied by China in exchange for peace. Modi’s government has vehemently denied the charge.
The tone and content of China’s July 6 statement articulated its still hard-line stance, whereby it has blamed India for the deadly skirmish and escalating tensions.
“Both sides should adhere to the strategic assessment that instead of posing threats, the two countries provide each other with development opportunities,” said the Chinese statement. “The right and wrong of what recently happened at the Galwan Valley in the western sector of the China-India boundary is very clear.
“China will continue firmly safeguarding our territorial sovereignty as well as peace and tranquility in the border
areas.”
Some critical voices in India feel that successive governments have bowed to China at a time it is intimidating many of India’s neighbors, including most recently the tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan.
“Bite by bite, China has been nibbling away at India’s borderlands, even as successive Indian PMs have sought to appease it,” Brahma Chellany, a renowned security analyst, recently wrote in the Hindustan Times. “When political calculations trump military factors and a nation lives by empty rhetoric, it can win neither war nor peace.
“The present path risks locking India in a ‘no war, no peace’ situation with China and imposing mounting security costs. This path aids China’s time-tested strategy of attrition, friction and containment to harass, encumber, encircle, deceive and weigh India down,” he wrote.
But if bilateral tensions mount again, a distinct possibility, expect Doval to be in the middle to negotiate a new peace.
https://www.risingupwithsonali.com/2020/07/09/is-trumps-insistence-on-reopening-school-an-election-ploy/
President Donald Trump railed this week against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s guidelines for schools to reopen in the fall. Trump has made it clear that in order to maximize his chances of reelection in November, American society and economy must return to “normal,” in spite of a massive resurgence of the coronavirus.
On Wednesday, just hours after Trump denounced the CDC school guidelines on Twitter, Vice President Mike Pence claimed, “Well the president said today, we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough… That’s the reason why next week, the C.D.C. is going to be issuing a new set of tools.” But CDC Director Robert Redfield said a day later that the guidelines would not be weakened.
Meanwhile Education Secretary Betsy DeVos who has emerged as one of Trump’s strongest allies, also insisted that schools must reopen. The proponent of so-called “school choice” insisted against given educators and parents a choice on whether kids should go back to school.
For more on his work, visit https://educationdeans.org.
