The Symptom … And The Cure?

The Art Of The Deal: “[T]he old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles, but we have overcome them and we are here today.” North Korea's Kim Jong Un responds to President Donald Trump's introductory remarks at their historic summit-meeting in Singapore on Tuesday, 12 June 2018.

THE NOTE OF SURPRISE in the voices of the talking heads on CNN was unmistakable. How could this be happening? How could these two men – both of them routinely ridiculed by those claiming expertise in international relations – have gotten even this far? The leaders of USA and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, meeting in Singapore on Tuesday, 12 June 2018 and exchanging warm handshakes across the table. The eccentrically-coiffed and generously-fleshed scion of the redoubtable Kim dynasty, Kim Jong Un, offering up to the world the amazing soundbite:  “the old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles, but we have overcome them and we are here today”. How was any of this possible?

One might as well ask – how was the 1972 meeting between Mao Zedong and President Richard Nixon possible? American GIs and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had been in a shooting war barely 20 years before that historic summit in Beijing. For quarter-of-a-century the US Pacific Fleet had shielded the Nationalist regime on Taiwan from the People’s Republic’s wrath. And yet, it happened.

In Oliver Stone’s movie “Nixon” there is a memorable scene in which Chairman Mao, through his interpreter, asks Nixon: “Is peace all you are interested in? The real war is in us. History is a symptom of our disease.” The dialogue is, of course, the work of the film’s screenwriters: Stephen J. Rivelle, Christopher Wilkinson and Stone himself; but it succinctly captures an essential truth about such extraordinary political figures as Mao Zedong, Kim Jong Un, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.

Some political leaders are content to be guided by their advisers – like George “Dubbya” Bush. For others, it is the events in which they are caught up that provide the opportunities for extraordinary displays of leadership. Think Winston Churchill in World War II, or, Lyndon Johnson and the struggle for Black civil rights 1964-65.

Then there are the leaders who, for a whole host of reasons, become the authors of events to which all these other, lesser, statesmen must respond. Grandiloquent and narcissistic, often paranoid, they are prey to deep existential fears and driven by inner-demons of unrelenting ferocity. This kind of leader has the power to project the turmoil and tumult of their own psyches onto the world around them. The ability to, in Stone’s memorable formulation, make History a symptom of their disease.

The rest of humanity has every reason to fear such individuals. Who in their right mind would cast themselves as a plaything in someone else’s paranoid fantasy? Democracies, in particular, should reject such individuals, in whose character there is much more of the emperor and dictator than there is the citizens’ humble representative.

Except, of course, History has a way of infecting individuals with the diseases whose morbid symptoms they will subsequently cause it to display. A nation rent by anxieties and resentments can hardly avoid throwing up the exceptional individual in whom those anxieties and resentments have not only been distilled to an uncommon purity, but who is also able to express them with extraordinary clarity and force.

Democracies in decay are particularly vulnerable to such individuals. The causes of a nation’s inner corruption, when given individual political expression, become accentuated and the process of decomposition is speeded-up. A malign feedback loop emerges by which the neuroses of the nation are both fed by – and feed – the person it has made its own. Be it Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump, the people’s “drummer” renders a double service: he is both the person who beats – and the person who is beaten.

Is it really so unbelievable, then, that the America which has grown so deeply resentful and untrusting of its political elites should be willing-on the President who has so openly defied them? That the more the experts deplore Trump’s ignorance and denounce his unwillingness to be guided, the more his supporters thrill to his insouciance.

“It’s about attitude. It’s about willingness to get things done”, declared the President, who went on to claim that he would know within the first minute of their meeting whether Kim Jong Un was serious about reaching a deal. When asked how, he replied simply: “My touch, my feel – that’s what I do.”

Encountering this phenomenon, it is hardly surprising that Kim, a genuine emperor, could believe that all the old prejudices, practices and obstacles might – just – be overcome.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 June 2018.

World War I - Whodunit?

 

 

I’VE AN IDEA for a television documentary – one I probably should have had two years ago. If it had occurred to me then, and I’d found someone to back it, it would be on your screens right now. This is, after all, the week in which we commemorate the outbreak of the First World War.

 

My idea is to treat the outbreak of the war as a cold case, with a crusty old Chief Inspector and an idealistic young Detective Sergeant.

 

The documentary (“docu-drama” is a better description) begins with the Detective Sergeant approaching the Chief Inspector with what he claims is evidence of a gross miscarriage of justice.

 

He points out that Germany’s confession of “war guilt” in the Treaty of Versailles was extracted under duress.

 

“For goodness sake!”, he tells the Chief Inspector, “the country was still being blockaded. It’s population was starving. There was rioting in the streets. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the armies of France, the British Empire and the USA were camped on its doorstep. What choice did she have?”

 

“That’s all very well,” says the Chief Inspector, “but for the past 100 years the evidence of Germany’s guilt has been regarded as overwhelming: proved beyond reasonable doubt.”

 

“Well, the Allied Powers would say that, wouldn’t they?”, says the Detective Sergeant. “I mean, they were hardly going to admit that the death of so many of their sons was the result of their own nefarious machinations – were they?”

 

The Chief Inspector demands to know if the Detective Sergeant has anything in the way of fresh evidence. Something solid enough to have the whole case re-opened.

 

The Detective Sergeant slams down a book by Cambridge historian, Chris Clark – The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.

 

“The question, as always, in a crime such as this is ‘Cui bono?’ – who benefits? The evidence suggests that it was Serbia that had the most to gain. Its great dream was a South Slav nation – ‘Yugoslavia’ – which Serbia would dominate. But Yugoslavia could only be constructed upon the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that would require a general European war.”

 

“You’re saying Serbia wanted a general European war?”

 

Dragutin Dimitrijevic: Serbia's Head of Military Intelligence. He not only wanted a general European war - he triggered it.

 

“Not only did they want it – they triggered it!”, exclaims the Detective Sergeant. “Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian assassin of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was the wind-up toy of Serbian military intelligence. The latter’s boss, Dragutin Dimitrijevic, was certain that the Archduke’s death would provoke a war with Austria and that this, in turn, would draw in Serbia’s protector, Imperial Russia. Once the Russians moved, a general war was inevitable.”

 

“Hmmm”, says the Chief inspector, “it’s pretty thin.”

 

“Okay, but there’s more”, says the Detective Sergeant. “The entire Serbian economy, bankrupted by the Balkan Wars of 1912 and1913, was being kept afloat by French and Russian loans. So Dimitrijevic wasn’t going to move without the go-ahead from Paris and St Petersburg.”

 

“Wait a minute. Are you saying that the French and the Russians gave the green light to Franz Ferdinand’s assassination?”

 

Raymond Poincare: The French president was present in St Petersburg in the midst of the assassination crisis, which he helped to fan into war.

 

“Petty much, pretty much. Maybe not the assassination specifically, but definitely something in the nature of a casus belli – a cause for war. How else do you explain the fact that in the twelve months immediately preceding the outbreak of war, the French President, Raymond Poincaré, was present in both London and St Petersburg. Hell’s teeth! The man was actually in Russia at the exact moment the crisis was unfolding!”

 

“What are you saying?”

 

“I’m saying that Poincaré, having confirmed the anti-German faction at the British Foreign Office still had Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s ear, made sure he was in St Petersburg to steady Tsar Nicholas’s nerves.”

 

“His motive?”

 

“Revanche! Chief Inspector. Revenge! Poincaré was born in Alsace – the province stolen by Germany in 1871.”

 

“And the Russians?”

 

“Constantinople! They were terrified that Germany’s friendship with the Turkish Empire would stymie their plans for seizing the Bosphorus – gateway to the Mediterranean.”

 

Sir Edward Grey: The British Foreign Secretary who famously remarked on the eve of World War I: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Less well known is his role in extinguishing them!

 

“And Great Britain?”

 

“She had no choice but to go along – if only to keep St Petersburg’s attention on the Balkans and away from India.”

 

“But Germany invaded Belgium!”, objected the Chief Inspector.

 

“Facing a war on two fronts: what other choice did she have?”

 

Now, tell me these aren’t the ingredients for a gripping whodunit – History’s ultimate cold case?

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 August 2014.

Islam And Democracy

Representative Of The People: Egypt's new President, Mohammed Morsi, candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been hailed as that country's first democratically elected leader. But early Islamic history manifested a strong impetus towards political representation and equality within the community of the faithful. The great hope of the so-called "Arab Spring" is that these traditions will undergo a powerful revival.

IS MOHAMMED MORSI Egypt’s first democratically elected leader? Though many journalists are insisting he merits that distinction, it’s just possible the journalists may be wrong.

Among the first peoples to be conquered by the followers of the Prophet Mohammed, Seventh Century Egyptians discovered earlier than most that membership of the community of the faithful (the Ummah) conferred radical new rights. Among the most important of these was the right to elect representatives. These upright citizens (the Shura) were, in their turn, collectively charged with determining upon whose shoulders the responsibility for leading the peoples of Islam should fall.

The chosen one, known as the Caliph, was of necessity both a religious and political leader. Islam, unlike Christianity, draws no clear distinction between the things that belong to Caesar and the things that belongs to God. The Caliphate, at least in its original form, was, therefore, a proto-democratic republic of faith, ruled over by a person in whose supreme office the powers of President and Pope were combined. It’s at least arguable that, fourteen hundred years ago, Mr Morsi had a predecessor.

Given the political traditions of the era, it is hardly surprising that the Caliphate became the prize of a succession of dynasties. Even so, the core religious-political principle of the fundamental equality of all believers made possible the dazzling and extraordinarily tolerant culture of Islam’s “Golden Age” (750-1250 AD).

The Great Mosque of Cordoba, in Spain. In the islamic Golden Age (750-1250 AD) the best scientific minds were to be found in Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

Weakened by successive Christian assaults from the West (the Crusades) the Abbasid Caliphate was finally laid low in 1258 by the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan. The West, however, had reason to be grateful that before the beautiful cities, towering mosques and celebrated universities were destroyed, most of the scientific, mathematical, medical and philosophical achievements of Islamic civilisation had already, by fair means and foul, passed into the hands of Christendom.

Though the Caliphate would rise again under the Ottoman Turks, it would never again attain the extraordinary confidence and poise of Islam’s golden age. Hugely impressive (not to mention militarily dominant) though the Ottoman Caliphate may have been, there was something missing. That vital spark which had lit the fires of creation and inquiry for so long was, for some reason, no longer being struck.

Scholars of Islamic history called that missing spark ijtihad – the spirit of independent reasoning. Today, we’d call it critical thinking. The loss of confidence which followed the slaughter and devastation of the Mongols, combined with the authoritarian military-bureaucratic culture of the Ottomans, saw ijtihad replaced by taqlid – reliance on the tested, following established practice, deferring to the teachings of those who had come before.

At the same moment that the knowledge passed to Christendom began fostering the intellectual forces that would result in the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the Islamic world was beginning its slow but remorseless decline into insularity and orthodoxy.

The real question to be asked about the so-called “Arab Spring” is whether or not it signals a reaffirmation of the fundamental equality of all believers, and a rebirth of the democratic spirit of the shura? If so, then the world can hope that the spirit of independent thought, of ijtihad, will similarly be born again and the Islamic world will recapture the glories of its golden age.

But, if the revolts taking place across the Middle East end up being hijacked by the upholders of taqlid: if Mr Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood are only interested in the re-establishment of orthodoxy and the extinguishing of freedom, then spring will become winter and the Ummah will, once again, be robbed of the summer they deserve.

As we watch these events unfold across the Islamic world, we should resist the temptation to celebrate our historical escape from the clutches of taqlid. The global financial crisis harrowing the West may not mirror the mayhem of the Mongols, but all around us there is evidence of a very similar loss of confidence and intellectual agility.

Looking at our own caliphs, are we struck by their ability to engage in independent reasoning and creative thinking? Or have they, too, fallen victim to the false promises of orthodoxy?

What now lies before the West: a golden light, or gathering darkness? In the words of the Fifteenth Century Syrian scholar, Ahmad ibn Arabshah: “If the future is hidden, yet you should guess it from the past.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 June 2012.