The Gandhi Nobody Knows
I had the singular honor of attending an early private screening of Gandhi with an audience of invited guests from…
Richard Grenier 1983-03-01I had the singular honor of attending an early private screening of Gandhi with an audience of invited guests from the National Council of Churches. At the end of the three-hour movie there was hardly, as they say, a dry eye in the house. When the lights came up I fell into conversation with a young woman who observed, reverently, that Gandhi’s last words were “Oh, God,” causing me to remark regretfully that the real Gandhi had not spoken in English, but had cried, Hai Rama! (“Oh, Rama”). Well, Rama was just Indian for God, she replied, at which I felt compelled to explain that, alas, Rama, collectively with his three half-brothers, represented the seventh reincarnation of Vishnu. The young woman, who seemed to have been under the impression that Hinduism was Christianity under another name, sensed somehow that she had fallen on an uncongenial spirit, and the conversation ended.
At a dinner party shortly afterward, a friend of mine, who had visited India many times and even gone to the trouble of learning Hindi, objected strenuously that the picture of Gandhi that emerges in the movie is grossly inaccurate, omitting, as one of many examples, that when Gandhi’s wife lay dying of pneumonia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her, Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in her body and simply let her die. (It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of an appendectomy.) All of this produced a wistful mooing from an editor of a major newspaper and a recalcitrant, “But still. . . .” I would prefer to explicate things more substantial than a wistful mooing, but there is little doubt it meant the editor in question felt that even if the real Mohandas K. Gandhi had been different from the Gandhi of the movie it would have been nice if he had been like the movie-Gandhi, and that presenting him in this admittedly false manner was beautiful, stirring, and perhaps socially beneficial.
An important step in the canonization of this movie-Gandhi was taken by the New York Film Critics Circle, which not only awarded the picture its prize as best film of 1982, but awarded Ben Kingsley, who played Gandhi (a remarkably good performance), its prize as best actor of the year. But I cannot believe for one second that these awards were made independently of the film’s content—which, not to put too fine a point on it, is an all-out appeal for pacifism—or in anything but the most shameful ignorance of the historical Gandhi.
Now it does not bother me that Shakespeare omitted from his King John the signing of the Magna Charta—by far the most important event in John’s reign. All Shakespeare’s “histories” are strewn with errors and inventions. Shifting to the cinema and to more recent times, it is hard for me to work up much indignation over the fact that neither Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin nor his October recounts historical episodes in anything like the manner in which they actually occurred (the famous march of the White Guards down the steps at Odessa—artistically one of the greatest sequences in film history—simply did not take place). As we draw closer to the present, however, the problem becomes much more difficult. If the Soviet Union were to make an artistically wondrous film about the entry of Russian tanks into Prague in 1968 (an event I happened to witness), and show them being greeted with flowers by a grateful populace, the Czechs dancing in the streets with joy, I do not guarantee that I would maintain my serene aloofness. A great deal depends on whether the historical events represented in a movie are intended to be taken as substantially true, and also on whether—separated from us by some decades or occurring yesterday—they are seen as having a direct bearing on courses of action now open to us.
On my second viewing of Gandhi, this time at a public showing at the end of the Christmas season, I happened to leave the theater behind three teenage girls, apparently from one of Manhattan’s fashionable private schools. “Gandhi was pretty much an FDR,” one opined, astonishing me almost as much by her breezy use of initials to invoke a President who died almost a quarter-century before her birth as by the stupefying nature of the comparison. “But he was a religious figure, too,” corrected one of her friends, adding somewhat smugly, “It’s not in our historical tradition to honor spiritual leaders.” Since her schoolteachers had clearly not led her to consider Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams as spiritual leaders, let alone Joseph Smith and William Jennings Bryan, the intimation seemed to be that we are a society with poorer spiritual values than, let’s say, India. There can be no question, in any event, that the girls felt they had just been shown the historical Gandhi—an attitude shared by Ralph Nader, who at last account had seen the film three times. Nader has conceived the most extraordinary notion that Gandhi’s symbolic flouting of the British salt tax was a “consumer issue” which he later expanded into the wider one of Indian independence. A modern parallel to Gandhi’s program of home-spinning and home-weaving, another “consumer issue” says Nader, might be the use of solar energy to free us from the “giant multinational oil corporations.”
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As it happens, the government of India openly admits to having provided one-third of the financing of Gandhi out of state funds, straight out of the national treasury—and after close study of the finished product I would not be a bit surprised to hear that it was 100 percent. If Pandit Nehru is portrayed flatteringly in the film, one must remember that Nehru himself took part in the initial story conferences (he originally wanted Gandhi to be played by Alec Guinness) and that his daughter Indira Gandhi is, after all, Prime Minister of India (though no relation to Mohandas Gandhi). The screenplay was checked and rechecked by Indian officials at every stage, often by the Prime Minister herself, with close consultations on plot and even casting. If the movie contains a particularly poisonous portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Indian reply, I suppose, would be that if the Pakistanis want an attractive portrayal of Jinnah let them pay for their own movie. A friend of mine, highly sophisticated in political matters but innocent about film-making, declared that Gandhi should be preceded by the legend: The following film is a paid political advertisement by the government of India.
Gandhi, then, is a large, pious, historical morality tale centered on a saintly, sanitized Mahatma Gandhi cleansed of anything too embarrassingly Hindu (the word “caste” is not mentioned from one end of the film to the other) and, indeed, of most of the rest of Gandhi’s life, much of which would drastically diminish his saintliness in Western eyes. There is little to indicate that the India of today has followed Gandhi’s precepts in almost nothing. There is little, in fact, to indicate that India is even India. The spectator realizes the scene is the Indian subcontinent because there are thousands of extras dressed in dhotis and saris. The characters go about talking in these quaint Peter Sellers accents. We have occasional shots of India’s holy poverty, holy hovels, some landscapes, many of them photographed quite beautifully, for those who like travelogues. We have a character called Lord Mountbatten (India’s last Viceroy); a composite American journalist (assembled from Vincent Sheehan, William L. Shirer, Louis Fischer, and straight fiction); a character called simply “Viceroy” (presumably another composite); an assemblage of Gandhi’s Indian followers under the name of one of them (Patel); and of course Nehru.
I sorely missed the fabulous Annie Besant, that English clergyman’s wife, turned atheist, turned Theo-sophist, turned Indian nationalist, who actually became president of the Indian National Congress and had a terrific falling out with Gandhi, becoming his fierce opponent. And if the producers felt they had to work in a cameo role for an American star to add to the film’s appeal in the United States, it is positively embarrassing that they should have brought in the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, a person of no importance whatever in Gandhi’s life and a role Candice Bergen plays with a repellant unctuousness. If the film-makers had been interested in drama and not hagiography, it is hard to see how they could have resisted the awesome confrontation between Gandhi and, yes, Margaret Sanger. For the two did meet. Now there was a meeting of East and West, and may the better person win! (She did. Margaret Sanger argued her views on birth control with such vigor that Gandhi had a nervous breakdown.)
I cannot honestly say I had any reasonable expectation that the film would show scenes of Gandhi’s pretty teenage girl followers fighting “hysterically” (the word was used) for the honor of sleeping naked with the Mahatma and cuddling the nude septuagenarian in their arms. (Gandhi was “testing” his vow of chastity in order to gain moral strength for his mighty struggle with Jinnah.) When told there was a man named Freud who said that, despite his declared intention, Gandhi might actually be enjoying the caresses of the naked girls, Gandhi continued, unperturbed. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see Gandhi giving daily enemas to all the young girls in his ashrams (his daily greeting was, “Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?”), nor see the girls giving him his daily enema. Although Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule for India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine cleaning (“The bathroom is a temple. It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there”), I confess such scenes might pose problems for a Western director.
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Gandhi, therefore, the film, this paid political advertisement for the government of India, is organized around three axes: (1) Anti-racism—all men are equal regardless of race, color, creed, etc.; (2) anti-colonialism, which in present terms translates as support for the Third World, including, most eminently, India; (3) nonviolence, presented as an absolutist pacifism. There are other, secondary precepts and subheadings. Gandhi is portrayed as the quintessence of tolerance (“I am a Hindu and a Muslim and a Christian and a Jew”), of basic friendliness to Britain (“The British have been with us for a long time and when they leave we want them to leave as friends”), of devotion to his wife and family. His vow of chastity is represented as something selfless and holy, rather like the celibacy of the Catholic clergy. But, above all, Gandhi’s life and teachings are presented as having great import for us today. We must learn from Gandhi.
I propose to demonstrate that the film grotesquely distorts both Gandhi’s life and character to the point that it is nothing more than a pious fraud, and a fraud of the most egregious kind. Hackneyed Indian falsehoods such as that “the British keep trying to break India up” (as if Britain didn’t give India a unity it had never enjoyed in history), or that the British created Indian poverty (a poverty which had not only existed since time immemorial but had been considered holy), almost pass unnoticed in the tide of adulation for our fictional saint. Gandhi, admittedly, being a devout Hindu, was far more self-contradictory than most public men. Sanskrit scholars tell me that flat self-contradiction is even considered an element of “Sanskrit rhetoric.” Perhaps it is thought to show profundity.
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Gandhi rose early, usually at three-thirty, and before his first bowel movement (during which he received visitors, although possibly not Margaret Bourke-White) he spent two hours in meditation, listening to his “inner voice.” Now Gandhi was an extremely vocal individual, and in addition to spending an hour each day in vigorous walking, another hour spinning at his primitive spinning wheel, another hour at further prayers, another hour being massaged nude by teenage girls, and many hours deciding such things as affairs of state, he produced a quite unconscionable number of articles and speeches and wrote an average of sixty letters a day. All considered, it is not really surprising that his inner voice said different things to him at different times. Despising consistency and never checking his earlier statements, and yet inhumanly obstinate about his position at any given moment, Gandhi is thought by some Indians today (according to V.S. Naipaul) to have been so erratic and unpredictable that he may have delayed Indian independence for twenty-five years.
For Gandhi was an extremely difficult man to work with. He had no partners, only disciples. For members of his ashrams, he dictated every minute of their days, and not only every morsel of food they should eat but when they should eat it. Without ever having heard of a protein or a vitamin, he considered himself an expert on diet, as on most things, and was constantly experimenting. Once when he fell ill, he was found to have been living on a diet of ground-nut butter and lemon juice; British doctors called it malnutrition. And Gandhi had even greater confidence in his abilities as a “nature doctor,” prescribing obligatory cures for his ashramites, such as dried cow-dung powder and various concoctions containing cow dung (the cow, of course, being sacred to the Hindu). And to those he really loved he gave enemas—but again, alas, not to Margaret Bourke-White. Which is too bad, really. For admiring Candice Bergen’s work as I do, I would have been most interested in seeing how she would have experienced this beatitude. The scene might have lived in film history.
There are 400 biographies of Gandhi, and his writings run to 80 volumes, and since he lived to be seventy-nine, and rarely fell silent, there are, as I have indicated, quite a few inconsistencies. The authors of the present movie even acknowledge in a little-noticed opening title that they have made a film only true to Gandhi’s “spirit.” For my part, I do not intend to pick through Gandhi’s writings to make him look like Attila the Hun (although the thought is tempting), but to give a fair, weighted balance of his views, laying stress above all on his actions, and on what he told other men to do when the time for action had come.
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Anti-racism: the reader will have noticed that in the present-day community of nations South Africa is a pariah. So it is an absolutely amazing piece of good fortune that Gandhi, born the son of the Prime Minister of a tiny Indian principality and received as an attorney at the bar of the Middle Temple in London, should have begun his climb to greatness as a member of the small Indian community in, precisely, South Africa. Natal, then a separate colony, wanted to limit Indian immigration and, as part of the government program, ordered Indians to carry identity papers (an action not without similarities to measures under consideration in the U.S. today to control illegal immigration). The film’s lengthy opening sequences are devoted to Gandhi’s leadership in the fight against Indians carrying their identity papers (burning their registration cards), with for good measure Gandhi being expelled from the first-class section of a railway train, and Gandhi being asked by whites to step off the sidewalk. This inspired young Indian leader calls, in the film, for interracial harmony, for people to “live together.”
Now the time is 1893, and Gandhi is a “caste” Hindu, and from one of the higher castes. Although, later, he was to call for improving the lot of India’s Untouchables, he was not to have any serious misgivings about the fundamentals of the caste system for about another thirty years, and even then his doubts, to my way of thinking, were rather minor. In the India in which Gandhi grew up, and had only recently left, some castes could enter the courtyards of certain Hindu temples, while others could not. Some castes were forbidden to use the village well. Others were compelled to live outside the village, still others to leave the road at the approach of a person of higher caste and perpetually to call out, giving warning, so that no one would be polluted by their proximity. The endless intricacies of Hindu caste by-laws varied somewhat region by region, but in Madras, where most South African Indians were from, while a Nayar could pollute a man of higher caste only by touching him, Kammalans polluted at a distance of 24 feet, toddy drawers at 36 feet, Pulayans and Cherumans at 48 feet, and beef-eating Paraiyans at 64 feet. All castes and the thousands of sub-castes were forbidden, needless to say, to marry, eat, or engage in social activity with any but members of their own group. In Gandhi’s native Gujarat a caste Hindu who had been polluted by touch had to perform extensive ritual ablutions or purify himself by drinking a holy beverage composed of milk, whey, and (what else?) cow dung.
Low-caste Hindus, in short, suffered humiliations in their native India compared to which the carrying of identity cards in South Africa was almost trivial. In fact, Gandhi, to his credit, was to campaign strenuously in his later life for the reduction of caste barriers in India—a campaign almost invisible in the movie, of course, conveyed in only two glancing references, leaving the audience with the officially sponsored if historically astonishing notion that racism was introduced into India by the British. To present the Gandhi of 1893, a conventional caste Hindu, fresh from caste-ridden India where a Paraiyan could pollute at 64 feet, as the champion of interracial equalitariansim is one of the most brazen hypocrisies I have ever encountered in a serious movie.
The film, moreover, does not give the slightest hint as to Gandhi’s attitude toward blacks, and the viewers of Gandhi would naturally suppose that, since the future Great Soul opposed South African discrimination against Indians, he would also oppose South African discrimination against black people. But this is not so. While Gandhi, in South Africa, fought furiously to have Indians recognized as loyal subjects of the British empire, and to have them enjoy the full rights of Englishmen, he had no concern for blacks whatever. In fact, during one of the “Kaffir Wars” he volunteered to organize a brigade of Indians to put down a Zulu rising, and was decorated himself for valor under fire.
For, yes, Gandhi (Sergeant-Major Gandhi) was awarded Victoria’s coveted War Medal. Throughout most of his life Gandhi had the most inordinate admiration for British soldiers, their sense of duty, their discipline and stoicism in defeat (a trait he emulated himself). He marveled that they retreated with heads high, like victors. There was even a time in his life when Gandhi, hardly to be distinguished from Kipling’s Gunga Din, wanted nothing so much as to be a Soldier of the Queen. Since this is not in keeping with the “spirit” of Gandhi, as decided by Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi, it is naturally omitted from the movie.
Anti-colonialism: as almost always with historical films, even those more honest than Gandhi, the historical personage on which the movie is based is not only more complex but more interesting than the character shown on the screen. During his entire South African period, and for some time after, until he was about fifty, Gandhi was nothing more or less than an imperial loyalist, claiming for Indians the rights of Englishmen but unshakably loyal to the crown. He supported the empire ardently in no fewer than three wars: the Boer War, the “Kaffir War,” and, with the most extreme zeal, World War I. If Gandhi’s mind were of the modern European sort, this would seem to suggest that his later attitude toward Britain was the product of unrequited love: he had wanted to be an Englishman; Britain had rejected him and his people; very well then, they would have their own country. But this would imply a point of “agonizing reappraisal,” a moment when Gandhi’s most fundamental political beliefs were reexamined and, after the most bitter soul-searching, repudiated. But I have studied the literature and cannot find this moment of bitter soul-searching. Instead, listening to his “inner voice” (which in the case of divines of all countries often speaks in the tones of holy opportunism), Gandhi simply, tranquilly, without announcing any sharp break, set off in a new direction.
It should be understood that it is unlikely Gandhi ever truly conceived of “becoming” an Englishman, first, because he was a Hindu to the marrow of his bones, and also, perhaps, because his democratic instincts were really quite weak. He was a man of the most extreme, autocratic temperament, tyrannical, unyielding even regarding things he knew nothing about, totally intolerant of all opinions but his own. He was, furthermore, in the highest degree reactionary, permitting in India no change in the relationship between the feudal lord and his peasants or servants, the rich and the poor. In his The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, the best and least hagiographic of the full-length studies, Robert Payne, although admiring Gandhi greatly, explains Gandhi’s “new direction” on his return to India from South Africa as follows:
He spoke in generalities, but he was searching for a single cause, a single hard-edged task to which he would devote the remaining years of his life. He wanted to repeat his triumph in South Africa on Indian soil. He dreamed of assembling a small army of dedicated men around him, issuing stern commands and leading them to some almost unobtainable goal.
Gandhi, in short, was a leader looking for a cause. He found it, of course, in home rule for India and, ultimately, in independence.
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We are therefore presented with the seeming anomaly of a Gandhi who, in Britain when war broke out in August 1914, instantly contacted the War Office, swore that he would stand by England in its hour of need, and created the Indian Volunteer Corps, which he might have commanded if he hadn’t fallen ill with pleurisy. In 1915, back in India, he made a memorable speech in Madras in which he proclaimed, “I discovered that the British empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in love. . . .” In early 1918, as the war in Europe entered its final crisis, he wrote to the Viceroy of India, “I have an idea that if I become your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men upon you,” and he proclaimed in a speech in Kheda that the British “love justice; they have shielded men against oppression.” Again, he wrote to the Viceroy, “I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the empire at this critical moment. . . .” To some of his pacifist friends, who were horrified, Gandhi replied by appealing to the Bhagavad Gita and to the endless wars recounted in the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, adding further to the pacifists’ horror by declaring that Indians “have always been warlike, and the finest hymn composed by Tulsidas in praise of Rama gives the first place to his ability to strike down the enemy.”
This was in contradiction to the interpretation of sacred Hindu scriptures Gandhi had offered on earlier occasions (and would offer later), which was that they did not recount military struggles but spiritual struggles; but, unusual for him, he strove to find some kind of synthesis. “I do not say, ‘Let us go and kill the Germans,’” Gandhi explained. “I say, ‘Let us go and die for the sake of India and the empire.’” And yet within two years, the time having come for swaraj (home rule), Gandhi’s inner voice spoke again, and, the leader having found his cause, Gandhi proclaimed resoundingly: “The British empire today represents Satanism, and they who love God can afford to have no love for Satan.”
The idea of swaraj, originated by others, crept into Gandhi’s mind gradually. With a fair amount of winding about, Gandhi, roughly, passed through three phases. First, he was entirely pro-British, and merely wanted for Indians the rights of Englishmen (as he understood them). Second, he was still pro-British, but with the belief that, having proved their loyalty to the empire, Indians would be granted some degree of swaraj. Third, as the home-rule movement gathered momentum, it was the swaraj, the whole swaraj, and nothing but the swaraj, and he turned relentlessly against the crown. The movie to the contrary, he caused the British no end of trouble in their struggles during World War II.
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But it should not be thought for one second that Gandhi’s finally full-blown desire to detach India from the British empire gave him the slightest sympathy with other colonial peoples pursuing similar objectives. Throughout his entire life Gandhi displayed the most spectacular inability to understand or even really take in people unlike himself—a trait which V.S. Naipaul considers specifically Hindu, and I am inclined to agree. Just as Gandhi had been totally unconcerned with the situation of South Africa’s blacks (he hardly noticed they were there until they rebelled), so now he was totally unconcerned with other Asians or Africans. In fact, he was adamantly opposed to certain Arab movements within the Ottoman empire for reasons of internal Indian politics.
At the close of World War I, the Muslims of India were deeply absorbed in what they called the “Khilafat” movement—“Khilafat” being their corruption of “Caliphate,” the Caliph in question being the Ottoman Sultan. In addition to his temporal powers, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire held the spiritual position of Caliph, supreme leader of the world’s Muslims and successor to the Prophet Muhammad. At the defeat of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Turkey), the Sultan was a prisoner in his palace in Constantinople, shorn of his religious as well as his political authority, and the Muslims of India were incensed. It so happened that the former subject peoples of the Ottoman empire, principally Arabs, were perfectly happy to be rid of this Caliph, and even the Turks were glad to be rid of him, but this made no impression at all on the Muslims of India, for whom the issue was essentially a club with which to beat the British. Until this odd historical moment, Indian Muslims had felt little real allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan either, but now that he had fallen, the British had done it! The British had taken away their Khilafat! And one of the most ardent supporters of this Indian Muslim movement was the new Hindu leader, Gandhi.
No one questions that the formative period for Gandhi as a political leader was his time in South Africa. Throughout history Indians, divided into 1,500 language and dialect groups (India today has 15 official languages), had little sense of themselves as a nation. Muslim Indians and Hindu Indians felt about as close as Christians and Moors during their 700 years of cohabitation in Spain. In addition to which, the Hindus were divided into thousands of castes and sub-castes, and there were also Parsees, Sikhs, Jains. But in South Africa officials had thrown them all in together, and in the mind of Gandhi (another one of those examples of nationalism being born in exile) grew the idea of India as a nation, and Muslim-Hindu friendship became one of the few positions on which he never really reversed himself. So Gandhi—ignoring Arabs and Turks—became an adamant supporter of the Khilafat movement out of strident Indian nationalism. He had become a national figure in India for having unified 13,000 Indians of all faiths in South Africa, and now he was determined to reach new heights by unifying hundreds of millions of Indians of all faiths in India itself. But this nationalism did not please everyone, particularly Tolstoy, who in his last years carried on a curious correspondence with the new Indian leader. For Tolstoy, Gandhi’s Indian nationalism “spoils everything.”
As for the “anti-colonialism” of the nationalist Indian state since independence, Indira Gandhi, India’s present Prime Minister, hears an inner voice of her own, it would appear, and this inner voice told her to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as produced by provocative maneuvers on the part of the U.S. and China, as well as to be the first country outside the Soviet bloc to recognize the Hanoi puppet regime in Cambodia. So everything plainly depends on who is colonizing whom, and Mrs. Gandhi’s voice perhaps tells her that the subjection of Afghanistan and Cambodia to foreign rule is “defensive” colonialism. And the movie’s message that Mahatma Gandhi, and by plain implication India (the country for which he plays the role of Joan of Arc), have taken a holy, unchanging stance against the colonization of nation by nation is just another of its hypocrisies. For India, when it comes to colonialism or anti-colonialism, it has been Realpolitik all the way.
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Nonviolence: but the real center and raison d’être of Gandhi is ahimsa, nonviolence, which principle when incorporated into vast campaigns of noncooperation with British rule the Mahatma called by an odd name he made up himself, satyagraha, which means something like “truth-striving.” During the key part of his life, Gandhi devoted a great deal of time explaining the moral and philosophical meanings of both ahimsa and satyagraha. But much as the film sanitizes Gandhi to the point where one would mistake him for a Christian saint, and sanitizes India to the point where one would take it for Shangri-la, it quite sweeps away Gandhi’s ethical and religious ponderings, his complexities, his qualifications, and certainly his vacillations, which simplifying process leaves us with our old European friend: pacifism. It is true that Gandhi was much impressed by the Sermon on the Mount, his favorite passage in the Bible, which he read over and over again. But for all the Sermon’s inspirational value, and its service as an ideal in relations among individual human beings, no Christian state which survived has ever based its policies on the Sermon on the Mount since Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. And no modern Western state which survives can ever base its policies on pacifism. And no Hindu state will ever base its policies on ahimsa. Gandhi himself—although the film dishonestly conceals this from us—many times conceded that in dire circumstances “war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil.”
It is something of an anomaly that Gandhi, held in popular myth to be a pure pacifist (a myth which governments of India have always been at great pains to sustain in the belief that it will reflect credit on India itself, and to which the present movie adheres slavishly), was until fifty not ill-disposed to war at all. As I have already noted, in three wars, no sooner had the bugles sounded than Gandhi not only gave his support, but was clamoring for arms. To form new regiments! To fight! To destroy the enemies of the empire I Regular Indian army units fought in both the Boer War and World War I, but this was not enough for Gandhi. He wanted to raise new troops, even, in the case of the Boer and Kaffir Wars, from the tiny Indian colony in South Africa. British military authorities thought it not really worth the trouble to train such a small body of Indians as soldiers, and were even resistant to training them as an auxiliary medical corps (“stretcher bearers”), but finally yielded to Gandhi’s relentless importuning. As first instructed, the Indian Volunteer Corps was not supposed actually to go into combat, but Gandhi, adamant, led his Indian volunteers into the thick of battle. When the British commanding officer was mortally wounded during an engagement in the Kaffir War, Gandhi—though his corps’ deputy commander—carried the officer’s stretcher himself from the battlefield and for miles over the sun-baked veldt. The British empire’s War Medal did not have its name for nothing, and it was generally earned.
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Anyone who wants to wade through Gandhi’s endless ruminations about himsa and ahimsa (violence and nonviolence) is welcome to do so, but it is impossible for the skeptical reader to avoid the conclusion—let us say in 1920, when swaraj (home rule) was all the rage and Gandhi’s inner voice started telling him that ahimsa was the thing—that this inner voice knew what it was talking about. By this I mean that, though Gandhi talked with the tongue of Hindu gods and sacred scriptures, his inner voice had a strong sense of expediency. Britain, if only comparatively speaking, was a moral nation, and nonviolent civil disobedience was plainly the best and most effective way of achieving Indian independence. Skeptics might also not be surprised to learn that as independence approached, Gandhi’s inner voice began to change its tune. It has been reported that Gandhi “half-welcomed” the civil war that broke out in the last days. Even a fratricidal “bloodbath” (Gandhi’s word) would be preferable to the British.
And suddenly Gandhi began endorsing violence left, right, and center. During the fearsome rioting in Calcutta he gave his approval to men “using violence in a moral cause.” How could he tell them that violence was wrong, he asked, “unless I demonstrate that nonviolence is more effective?” He blessed the Nawab of Maler Kotla when he gave orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state. He sang the praises of Subhas Chandra Bose, who, sponsored by first the Nazis and then the Japanese, organized in Singapore an Indian National Army with which he hoped to conquer India with Japanese support, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. Meanwhile, after independence in 1947, the armies of the India that Gandhi had created immediately marched into battle, incorporating the state of Hyderabad by force and making war in Kashmir on secessionist Pakistan. When Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist in January 1948 he was honored by the new state with a vast military funeral—in my view by no means inapposite.
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But it is not widely realized (nor will this film tell you) how much violence was associated with Gandhi’s so-called “nonviolent” movement from the very beginning. India’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, had sensed a strong current of nihilism in Gandhi almost from his first days, and as early as 1920 wrote of Gandhi’s “fierce joy of annihilation,” which Tagore feared would lead India into hideous orgies of devastation—which ultimately proved to be the case. Robert Payne has said that there was unquestionably an “unhealthy atmosphere” among many of Gandhi’s fanatic followers, and that Gandhi’s habit of going to the edge of violence and then suddenly retreating was fraught with danger. “In matters of conscience I am uncompromising,” proclaimed Gandhi proudly. “Nobody can make me yield.” The judgment of Tagore was categorical. Much as he might revere Gandhi as a holy man, he quite detested him as a politician and considered that his campaigns were almost always so close to violence that it was utterly disingenuous to call them nonviolent.
For every satyagraha true believer, moreover, sworn not to harm the adversary or even to lift a finger in his own defense, there were sometimes thousands of incensed freebooters and skirmishers bound by no such vow. Gandhi, to be fair, was aware of this, and nominally deplored it—but with nothing like the consistency shown in the movie. The film leads the audience to believe that Gandhi’s first “fast unto death,” for example, was in protest against an act of barbarous violence, the slaughter by an Indian crowd of a detachment of police constables. But in actual fact Gandhi reserved this “ultimate weapon” of his to interdict a 1931 British proposal to grant Untouchables a “separate electorate” in the Indian national legislature—in effect a kind of affirmative-action program for Untouchables. For reasons I have not been able to decrypt, Gandhi was dead set against the project, but I confess it is another scene I would like to have seen in the movie: Gandhi almost starving himself to death to block affirmative action for Untouchables.
From what I have been able to decipher, Gandhi’s main preoccupation in this particular struggle was not even the British. Benefiting from the immense publicity, he wanted to induce Hindus, overnight, ecstatically, and without any of these British legalisms, to “open their hearts” to Untouchables. For a whole week Hindu India was caught up in a joyous delirium. No more would the Untouchables be scavengers and sweepers! No more would they be banned from Hindu temples! No more would they pollute at 64 feet! It lasted just a week. Then the temple doors swung shut again, and all was as before. Meanwhile, on the passionate subject of swaraj, Gandhi was crying, “I would not flinch from sacrificing a million lives for India’s liberty!” The million Indian lives were indeed sacrificed, and in full. They fell, however, not to the bullets of British soldiers but to the knives and clubs of their fellow Indians in savage butcheries when the British finally withdrew.
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Although the movie sneers at this reasoning as being the flimsiest of pretexts, I cannot imagine an impartial person studying the subject without concluding that concern for Indian religious minorities was one of the principal reasons Britain stayed in India as long as it did. When it finally withdrew, blood-maddened mobs surged through the streets from one end of India to the other, the majority group in each area, Hindu or Muslim, slaughtering the defenseless minority without mercy in one of the most hideous periods of carnage of modern history.
A comparison is in order. At the famous Amritsar massacre of 1919, shot in elaborate and loving detail in the present movie and treated by post-independence Indian historians as if it were Auschwitz, Ghurka troops under the command of a British officer, General Dyer, fired into an unarmed crowd of Indians defying a ban and demonstrating for Indian independence. The crowd contained women and children; 379 persons died; it was all quite horrible. Dyer was court-martialed and cashiered, but the incident lay heavily on British consciences for the next three decades, producing a severe inhibiting effect. Never again would the British empire commit another Amritsar, anywhere.
As soon as the oppressive British were gone, however, the Indians—gentle, tolerant people that they are—gave themselves over to an orgy of bloodletting. Trained troops did not pick off targets at a distance with Enfield rifles. Blood-crazed Hindus, or Muslims, ran through the streets with knives, beheading babies, stabbing women, old people. Interestingly, our movie shows none of this on camera (the oldest way of stacking the deck in Hollywood). All we see is the aged Gandhi, grieving, and of course fasting, at these terrible reports of riots. And, naturally, the film doesn’t whisper a clue as to the total number of dead, which might spoil the mood somehow. The fact is that we will never know how many Indians were murdered by other Indians during the country’s Independence Massacres, but almost all serious studies place the figure over a million, and some, such as Payne’s sources, go to 4 million. So, for those who like round numbers, the British killed some 400 seditious colonials at Amritsar and the name Amritsar lives in infamy, while Indians may have killed some 4 million of their own countrymen for no other reason than that they were of a different religious faith and people think their great leader would make an inspirational subject for a movie. Ahimsa, as can be seen, then, had an absolutely tremendous moral effect when used against Britain, but not only would it not have worked against Nazi Germany (the most obvious reproach, and of course quite true), but, the crowning irony, it had virtually no effect whatever when Gandhi tried to bring it into play against violent Indians.
Despite this at best patchy record, the film-makers have gone to great lengths to imply that this same prinicple of ahimsa—presented in the movie as the purest form of pacifism—is universally effective, yesterday, today, here, there, everywhere. We hear no talk from Gandhi of war sometimes being a “necessary evil,” but only him announcing—and more than once—“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” In a scene very near the end of the movie, we hear Gandhi say, as if after deep reflection: “Tyrants and murderers can seem invincible at the time, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always.” During the last scene of the movie, following the assassination, Margaret Bourke-White is keening over the death of the Great Soul with an English admiral’s daughter named Madeleine Slade, in whose bowel movements Gandhi took the deepest interest (see their correspondence), and Miss Slade remarks incredulously that Gandhi felt that he had failed. They are then both incredulous for a moment, after which Miss Slade observes mournfully, “When we most needed it [presumably meaning during World War II], he offered the world a way out of madness. But the world didn’t see it.” Then we hear once again the assassin’s shots, Gandhi’s “Oh, God,” and last, in case we missed them the first time, Gandhi’s words (over the shimmering waters of the Ganges?): “Tyrants and murderers can seem invincible at the time, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always.” This is the end of the picture.
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Now, as it happens, I have been thinking about tyrants and murderers for some time. But the fact that in the end they always fall has never given me much comfort, partly because, not being a Hindu and not expecting reincarnation after reincarnation, I am simply not prepared to wait them out. It always occurs to me that, while I am waiting around for them to fall, they might do something mean to me, like fling me into a gas oven or send me off to a Gulag. Unlike a Hindu and not worshipping stasis, I am also given to wondering who is to bring these murderers and tyrants down, it being all too risky a process to wait for them and the regimes they establish simply to die of old age. The fact that a few reincarnations from now they will all have turned to dust somehow does not seem to suggest a rational strategy for dealing with the problem.
Since the movie’s Madeleine Slade specifically invites us to revere the “way out of madness” that Gandhi offered the world at the time of World War II, I am under the embarrassing obligation of recording exactly what courses of action the Great Soul recommended to the various parties involved in that crisis. For Gandhi was never stinting in his advice. Indeed, the less he knew about a subject, the less he stinted.
I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the former British Raj, the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan are simply words. But other names, such as Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term “Jew,” also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie Gandhi should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers’ knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for “ages to come.” If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a “rich heritage to mankind.” Although Gandhi had known Jews from his earliest days in South Africa—where his three staunchest white supporters were Jews, every one—he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn’t they? They might as well have died significantly.
Gandhi’s views on the European crisis were not entirely consistent. He vigorously opposed Munich, distrusting Chamberlain. “Europe has sold her soul for the sake of a seven days’ earthly existence,” he declared. “The peace that Europe gained at Munich is a triumph of violence.” But when the Germans moved into the Bohemian heartland, he was back to urging nonviolent resistance, exhorting the Czechs to go forth, unarmed, against the Wehrmacht, perishing gloriously—collective suicide again. He had Madeleine Slade draw up two letters to President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia, instructing him on the proper conduct of Czechoslovak satyagrahi when facing the Nazis.
When Hitler attacked Poland, however, Gandhi suddenly endorsed the Polish army’s military resistance, calling it “almost nonviolent.” (If this sounds like double-talk, I can only urge readers to read Gandhi.) He seemed at this point to have a rather low opinion of Hitler, but when Germany’s panzer divisions turned west, Allied armies collapsed under the ferocious onslaught, and British ships were streaming across the Straits of Dover from Dunkirk, he wrote furiously to the Viceroy of India: “This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man. . . .”
Gandhi also wrote an open letter to the British people, passionately urging them to surrender and accept whatever fate Hitler had prepared for them. “Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds.” Since none of this had the intended effect, Gandhi, the following year, addressed an open letter to the prince of darkness himself, Adolf Hitler.
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The scene must be pictured. In late December 1941, Hitler stood at the pinnacle of his might. His armies, undefeated—anywhere—ruled Europe from the English Channel to the Volga. Rommel had entered Egypt. The Japanese had reached Singapore. The U.S. Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. At this superbly chosen moment, Mahatma Gandhi attempted to convert Adolf Hitler to the ways of nonviolence. “Dear Friend,” the letter begins, and proceeds to a heartfelt appeal to the Führer to embrace all mankind “irrespective of race, color, or creed.” Every admirer of the film Gandhi should be compelled to read this letter. Surprisingly, it is not known to have had any deep impact on Hitler. Gandhi was no doubt disappointed. He moped about, really quite depressed, but still knew he was right. When the Japanese, having cut their way through Burma, threatened India, Gandhi’s strategy was to let them occupy as much of India as they liked and then to “make them feel unwanted.” His way of helping his British “friends” was, at one of the worst points of the war, to launch massive civil-disobedience campaigns against them, paralyzing some of their efforts to defend India from the Japanese.
Here, then, is your leader, O followers of Gandhi: a man who thought Hitler’s heart would be melted by an appeal to forget race, color, and creed, and who was sure the feelings of the Japanese would be hurt if they sensed themselves unwanted. As world-class statesmen go, it is not a very good record. Madeleine Slade was right, I suppose. The world certainly didn’t listen to Gandhi. Nor, for that matter, has the modern government of India listened to Gandhi. Although all Indian politicians of all political parties claim to be Gandhians, India has blithely fought three wars against Pakistan, one against China, and even invaded and seized tiny, helpless Goa, and all without a whisper of a shadow of a thought of ahimsa. And of course India now has atomic weapons, a satyagraha technique if ever there was one.
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I am sure that almost everyone who sees the movie Gandhi is aware that, from a religious point of view, the Mahatma was something called a “Hindu”—but I do not think one in a thousand has the dimmest notion of the fundamental beliefs of the Hindu religion. The simplest example is Gandhi’s use of the word “God,” which, for members of the great Western religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all interrelated—means a personal god, a godhead. But when Gandhi said “God” in speaking English, he was merely translating from Gujarati or Hindi, and from the Hindu culture. Gandhi, in fact, simply did not believe in a personal God, and wrote in so many words, “God is not a person . . . but a force; the undefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything; a living Power that is Love. . . .” And Gandhi’s very favorite definition of God, repeated many thousands of times, was, “God is Truth,” which reduces God to some kind of abstract principle.
Like all Hindus, Gandhi also believed in the “Great Oneness,” according to which everything is part of God, meaning not just you and me and everyone else, but every living creature, every dead creature, every plant, the pitcher of milk, the milk in the pitcher, the tumbler into which the milk is poured. . . . After all of which, he could suddenly pop up with a declaration that God is “the Maker, the Law-Giver, a jealous Lord,” phrases he had probably picked up in the Bible and, with Hindu fluidity, felt he could throw in so as to embrace even more of the Great Oneness. So when Gandhi said, “I am a Hindu and a Muslim and a Christian and a Jew,” it was (from a Western standpoint) Hindu double-talk. Hindu holy men, some of them reformers like Gandhi, have actually even “converted” to Islam, then Christianity, or whatever, to worship different “aspects” of the Great Oneness, before reconverting to Hinduism. Now for Christians, fastidious in matters of doctrine, a man who converts to Islam is an apostate (or vice versa), but a Hindu is a Hindu is a Hindu. The better to experience the Great Oneness, many Hindu holy men feel they should be women as well as men, and one quite famous one even claimed he could menstruate (I will spare the reader the details).
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In this ecumenical age, it is extremely hard to shake Westerners loose from the notion that the devout of all religions, after all, worship “the one God.” But Gandhi did not worship the one God. He did not worship the God of mercy. He did not worship the God of forgiveness. And this for the simple reason that the concepts of mercy and forgiveness are absent from Hinduism. In Hinduism, men do not pray to God for forgiveness, and a man’s sins are never forgiven—indeed, there is no one out there to do the forgiving. In your next life you may be born someone higher up the caste scale, but in this life there is no hope. For Gandhi, a true Hindu, did not believe in man’s immortal soul. He believed with every ounce of his being in karma, a series, perhaps a long series, of reincarnations, and at the end, with great good fortune: mukti, liberation from suffering and the necessity of rebirth, nothingness. Gandhi once wrote to Tolstoy (of all people) that reincarnation explained “reasonably the many mysteries of life.” So if Hindus today still treat an Untouchable as barely human, this is thought to be perfectly right and fitting because of his actions in earlier lives. As can be seen, Hinduism, by its very theology, with its sacred triad of karma, reincarnation, and caste (with caste an absolutely indispensable part of the system) offers the most complacent justification of inhumanity of any of the world’s great religious faiths.
Gandhi, needless to say, was a Hindu reformer, one of many. Until well into his fifties, however, he accepted the caste system in toto as the “natural order of society,” promoting control and discipline and sanctioned by his religion. Later, in bursts of zeal, he favored moderating it in a number of ways. But he stuck by the basic varna system (the four main caste groupings plus the Untouchables) until the end of his days, insisting that a man’s position and occupation should be determined essentially by birth. Gandhi favored milder treatment of Untouchables, renaming them Harijans, “children of God,” but a Harijan was still a Harijan. Perhaps because his frenzies of compassion were so extreme (no, no, he would clean the Harijan‘s latrine), Hindu reverence for him as a holy man became immense, but his prescriptions were rarely followed. Industrialization and modernization have introduced new occupations and sizable social and political changes in India, but the caste system has dexterously adapted and remains largely intact today. The Sudras still labor. The sweepers still sweep. Max Weber, in his The Religion of India, after quoting the last line of the Communist Manifesto, suggests somewhat sardonically that low-caste Hindus, too, have “nothing to lose but their chains,” that they, too, have “a world to win”—the only problem being that they have to die first and get born again, higher, it is to be hoped, in the immutable system of caste. Hinduism in general, wrote Weber, “is characterized by a dread of the magical evil of innovation.” Its very essence is to guarantee stasis.
In addition to its literally thousands of castes and sub-castes, Hinduism has countless sects, with discordant rites and beliefs. It has no clear ecclesiastical organization and no universal body of doctrine. What I have described above is your standard, no-frills Hindu, of which in many ways Gandhi was an excellent example. With the reader’s permission I will skip over the Upanishads, Vedanta, Yoga, the Puranas, Tantra, Bhakti, the Bhagavad-Gita (which contains theistic elements), Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and the terrible Kali or Durga, to concentrate on those central beliefs that most motivated Gandhi’s behavior as a public figure.
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It should be plain by now that there is much in the Hindu culture that is distasteful to the Western mind, and consequently is largely unknown in the West—not because Hindus do not go on and on about these subjects, but because a Western squeamishness usually prevents these preoccupations from reaching print (not to mention film). When Gandhi attended his first Indian National Congress he was most distressed at seeing the Hindus—not laborers but high-caste Hindus, civic leaders—defecating all over the place, as if to pay attention to where the feces fell was somehow unclean. (For, as V.S. Naipaul puts it, in a twisted Hindu way it is unclean to clean. It is unclean even to notice. “It was the business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.”) Gandhi exhorted Indians endlessly on the subject, saying that sanitation was the first need of India, but he retained an obvious obsession with excreta, gleefully designing latrines and latrine drills for all hands at the ashram, and, all in all, what with giving and taking enemas, and his public bowel movements, and his deep concern with everyone else’s bowel movements (much correspondence), and endless dietary experiments as a function of bowel movements, he devoted a rather large share of his life to the matter. Despite his constant campaigning for sanitation, it is hard to believe that Gandhi was not permanently marked by what Arthur Koestler terms the Hindu “morbid infatuation with filth,” and what V.S. Naipaul goes as far as to call the Indian “deification of filth.” (Decades later, Krishna Menon, a Gandhian and one-time Indian Defense Minister, was still fortifying his sanctity by drinking a daily glass of urine.)
But even more important, because it is dealt with in the movie directly—if of course dishonestly—is Gandhi’s parallel obsession with brahmacharya, or sexual chastity. There is a scene late in the film in which Margaret Bourke-White (again!) asks Gandhi’s wife if he has ever broken his vow of chastity, taken, at that time, about forty years before. Gandhi’s wife, by now a sweet old lady, answers wistfully, with a pathetic little note of hope, “Not yet.” What lies behind this adorable scene is the following: Gandhi held as one of his most profound beliefs (a fundamental doctrine of Hindu medicine) that a man, as a matter of the utmost importance, must conserve his bindu, or seminal fluid. Koestler (in The Lotus and the Robot) gives a succinct account of this belief, widespread among orthodox Hindus: “A man’s vital energy is concentrated in his seminal fluid, and this is stored in a cavity in the skull. It is the most precious substance in the body . . . an elixir of life both in the physical and mystical sense, distilled from the blood. . . . A large store of bindu of pure quality guarantees health, longevity, and supernatural powers. . . . Conversely, every loss of it is a physical and spiritual impoverishment.” Gandhi himself said in so many words, “A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and cowardly, while in the chaste man secretions [semen] are sublimated into a vital force pervading his whole being.” And again, still Gandhi: “Ability to retain and assimilate the vital liquid is a matter of long training. When properly conserved it is transmuted into matchless energy and strength.” Most male Hindus go ahead and have sexual relations anyway, of course, but the belief in the value of bindu leaves the whole culture in what many observers have called a permanent state of “semen anxiety.” When Gandhi once had a nocturnal emission he almost had a nervous breakdown.
Gandhi was a truly fanatical opponent of sex for pleasure, and worked it out carefully that a married couple should be allowed to have sex three or four times in a lifetime, merely to have children, and favored embodying this restriction in the law of the land. The sexual-gratification wing of the present-day feminist movement would find little to attract them in Gandhi’s doctrine, since in all his seventy-nine years it never crossed his mind once that there could be anything enjoyable in sex for women, and he was constantly enjoining Indian women to deny themselves to men, to refuse to let their husbands “abuse” them. Gandhi had been married at thirteen, and when he took his vow of chastity, after twenty-four years of sexual activity, he ordered his two oldest sons, both young men, to be totally chaste as well.
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But Gandhi’s monstrous behavior to his own family is notorious. He denied his sons education—to which he was bitterly hostile. His wife remained illiterate. Once when she was very sick, hemorrhaging badly, and seemed to be dying, he wrote to her from jail icily: “My struggle is not merely political. It is religious and therefore quite pure. It does not matter much whether one dies in it or lives. I hope and expect that you will also think likewise and not be unhappy.” To die, that is. On another occasion he wrote, speaking about her: “I simply cannot bear to look at Ba’s face. The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something. I see, too, that there is selfishness in this suffering of hers. . . .” And in the end he let her die, as I have said, rather than allow British doctors to give her a shot of penicillin (while his inner voice told him that it would be all right for him to take quinine). He disowned his oldest son, Harilal, for wishing to marry. He banished his second son for giving his struggling older brother a small sum of money. Harilal grew quite wild with rage against his father, attacked him in print, converted to Islam, took to women, drink, and died an alcoholic in 1948. The Mahatma attacked him right back in his pious way, proclaiming modestly in an open letter in Young India, “Men may be good, not necessarily their children.”
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If the reader thinks I have delivered unduly harsh judgments on India and Hindu civilization, I can refer him to An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization, two quite brilliant books on India by V.S. Naipaul, a Hindu, and a Brahmin, born in Trinidad. In the second, the more discursive, Naipaul writes that India “has little to offer the world except its Gandhi an concept of holy poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of its holy men, and . . . is now dependent in every practical way on other, imperfectly understood civilizations.”
Hinduism, Naipaul writes, “has given men no idea of a contract with other men, no idea of the state. It has enslaved one quarter of the population [the Untouchables] and always has left the whole fragmented and vulnerable. Its philosophy of withdrawal has diminished men intellectually and not equipped them to respond to challenge; it has stifled growth. So that again and again in India history has repeated itself: vulnerability, defeat, withdrawal.” Indians, Naipaul says, have no historical notion of the past. “Through centuries of conquest the civilization declined into an apparatus for survival, turning away from the mind . . . and creativity . . . stripping itself down, like all decaying civilizations, to its magical practices and imprisoning social forms.” He adds later, “No government can survive on Gandhian fantasy; and the spirituality, the solace of a conquered people, which Gandhi turned into a form of national assertion, has soured more obviously into the nihilism that it always was.” Naipaul condemns India again and again for its “intellectual parasitism,” its “intellectual vacuum,” its “emptiness,” the “blankness of its decayed civilization.” “Indian poverty is more dehumanizing than any machine; and, more than in any machine civilization, men in India are units, locked up in the straitest obedence by their idea of their dharma. . . . The blight of caste is not only untouchability and the consequent deification in India of filth; the blight, in an India that tries to grow, is also the overall obedience it imposes, . . . the diminishing of adventurousness, the pushing away from men of individuality and the possibility of excellence.”
Although Naipaul blames Gandhi as well as India itself for the country’s failure to develop an “ideology” adequate for the modern world, he grants him one or two magnificent moments—always, it should be noted, when responding to “other civilizations.” For Gandhi, Naipaul remarks pointedly, had matured in alien societies: Britain and South Africa. With age, back in India, he seemed from his autobiography to be headed for “lunacy,” says Naipaul, and was only rescued by external events, his reactions to which were determined in part by “his experience of the democratic ways of South Africa” [my emphasis]. For it is one of the enduring ironies of Gandhi’s story that it was in South Africa—South Africa—a country in which he became far more deeply involved than he had been in Britain, that Gandhi caught a warped glimmer of that strange institution of which he would never have seen even a reflection within Hindu society: democracy.
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Another of Gandhi’s most powerful obsessions (to which the movie alludes in such a syrupy and misleading manner that it would be quite impossible for the audience to understand it) was his visceral hatred of the modern, industrial world. He even said, more than once, that he actually wouldn’t mind if the British remained in India, to police it, conduct foreign policy, and such trivia, if it would only take away its factories and railways. And Gandhi hated, not just factories and railways, but also the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the airplane. He happened to be in England when Louis Blériot, the great French aviation pioneer, first flew the English Channel—an event which at the time stirred as much excitement as Lindbergh’s later flight across the Atlantic—and Gandhi was in a positive fury that giant crowds were acclaiming such an insignificant event. He used the telegraph extensively himself, of course, and later would broadcast daily over All-India Radio during his highly publicized fasts, but consistency was never Gandhi’s strong suit.
Gandhi’s view of the good society, about which he wrote ad nauseam, was an Arcadian vision set far in India’s past. It was the pristine Indian village, where, with all diabolical machinery and technology abolished—and with them all unhappiness—contented villagers would hand-spin their own yarn, hand-weave their own cloth, serenely follow their bullocks in the fields, tranquilly prodding them in the anus in the time-hallowed Hindu way. This was why Gandhi taught himself to spin, and why all the devout Gandhians, like monkeys, spun also. This was Gandhi’s program. Since he said it several thousand times, we have no choice but to believe that he sincerely desired the destruction of modern technology and industry and the return of India to the way of life of an idyllic (and quite likely nonexistent) past. And yet this same Mahatma Gandhi hand-picked as the first Prime Minister of an independent India Pandit Nehru, who was committed to a policy of industrialization and for whom the last word in the politico-economic organization of the state was (and remained) Beatrice Webb.
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What are we to make of this Gandhi? We are dealing with two strangenesses here, Indians and Gandhi himself. The plain fact is that both Indian leaders and the Indian people ignored Gandhi’s precepts almost as thoroughly as did Hitler. They ignored him on sexual abstinence. They ignored his modifications of the caste system. They ignored him on the evils of modern industry, the radio, the telephone. They ignored him on education. They ignored his appeals for national union, the former British Raj splitting into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu India. No one sought a return to the Arcadian Indian village of antiquity. They ignored him, above all, on ahimsa, nonviolence. There was always a small number of exalted satyagrahi who, martyrs, would march into the constables’ truncheons, but one of the things that alarmed the British—as Tagore indicated—was the explosions of violence that accompanied all this alleged nonviolence. Naipaul writes that with independence India discovered again that it was “cruel and horribly violent.” Jaya Prakash Narayan, the late opposition leader, once admitted, “We often behave like animals. . . . We are more likely than not to become aggressive, wild, violent. We kill and burn and loot. . . .”
Why, then, did the Hindu masses so honor this Mahatma, almost all of whose most cherished beliefs they so pointedly ignored, even during his lifetime? For Hindus, the question is not really so puzzling. Gandhi, for them, after all, was a Mahatma, a holy man. He was a symbol of sanctity, not a guide to conduct. Hinduism has a long history of holy men who, traditionally, do not offer themselves up to the public as models of general behavior but withdraw from the world, often into an ashram, to pursue their sanctity in private, a practice which all Hindus honor, if few emulate. The true oddity is that Gandhi, this holy man, having drawn from British sources his notions of nationalism and democracy, also absorbed from the British his model of virtue in public life. He was a historical original, a Hindu holy man that a British model of public service and dazzling advances in mass communications thrust out into the world, to become a great moral leader and the “father of his country.”
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Some Indians feel that after the early 1930’s, Gandhi, although by now world-famous, was in fact in sharp decline. Did he at least “get the British out of India”? Some say no. India, in the last days of the British Raj, was already largely governed by Indians (a fact one would never suspect from this movie), and it is a common view that without this irrational, wildly erratic holy man the transition to full independence might have gone both more smoothly and more swiftly. There is much evidence that in his last years Gandhi was in a kind of spiritual retreat and, with all his endless praying and fasting, was no longer pursuing (the very words seem strange in a Hindu context) “the public good.” What he was pursuing, in a strict reversion to Hindu tradition, was his personal holiness. In earlier days he had scoffed at the title accorded him, Mahatma (literally “great soul”). But toward the end, during the hideous paroxysms that accompanied independence, with some of the most unspeakable massacres taking place in Calcutta, he declared, “And if . . . the whole of Calcutta swims in blood, it will not dismay me. For it will be a willing offering of innocent blood.” And in his last days, after there had already been one attempt on his life, he was heard to say, “I am a true Mahatma.”
We can only wonder, furthermore, at a public figure who lectures half his life about the necessity of abolishing modern industry and returning India to its ancient primitiveness, and then picks a Fabian socialist, already drawing up Five-Year Plans, as the country’s first Prime Minister. Audacious as it may seem to contest the views of such heavy thinkers as Margaret Bourke-White, Ralph Nader, and J.K. Galbraith (who found the film’s Gandhi “true to the original” and endorsed the movie wholeheartedly), we have a right to reservations about such a figure as a public man.
I should not be surprised if Gandhi’s greatest real humanitarian achievement was an improvement in the treatment of Untouchables—an area where his efforts were not only assiduous, but actually bore fruit. In this, of course, he ranks well behind the British, who abolished suttee—over ferocious Hindu opposition—in 1829. The ritual immolation by fire of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, suttee had the full sanction of the Hindu religion, although it might perhaps be wrong to overrate its importance. Scholars remind us that it was never universal, only “usual.” And there was, after all, a rather extensive range of choice. In southern India the widow was flung into her husband’s fire-pit. In the valley of the Ganges she was placed on the pyre when it was already aflame. In western India, she supported the head of the corpse with her right hand, while, torch in her left, she was allowed the honor of setting the whole thing on fire herself. In the north, where perhaps women were more impious, the widow’s body was constrained on the burning pyre by long poles pressed down by her relatives, just in case, screaming in terror and choking and burning to death, she might forget her dharma. So, yes, ladies, members of the National Council of Churches, believers in the one God, mourners for that holy India before it was despoiled by those brutish British, remember suttee, that interesting, exotic practice in which Hindus, over the centuries, burned to death countless millions of helpless women in a spirit of pious devotion, crying for all I know, Hai Rama! Hai Rama!
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I would like to conclude with some observations on two Englishmen, Madeleine Slade, the daughter of a British admiral, and Sir Richard Attenborough, the producer, director, and spiritual godfather of the film, Gandhi. Miss Slade was a jewel in Gandhi’s crown—a member of the British ruling class, as she was, turned fervent disciple of this Indian Mahatma. She is played in the film by Geraldine James with nobility, dignity, and a beatific manner quite up to the level of Candice Bergen, and perhaps even the Virgin Mary. I learn from Ved Mehta’s Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles, however, that Miss Slade had another master before Gandhi. In about 1917, when she was fifteen, she made contact with the spirit of Beethoven by listening to his sonatas on a player piano. “I threw myself down on my knees in the seclusion of my room,” she wrote in her autobiography, “and prayed, really prayed to God for the first time in my life: ‘Why have I been born over a century too late? Why hast Thou given me realization of him and yet put all these years in between?’”
After World War I, still seeking how best to serve Beethoven, Miss Slade felt an “infinite longing” when she visited his birthplace and grave, and, finally, at the age of thirty-two, caught up with Romain Rolland, who had partly based his renowned Jean Christophe on the composer. But Rolland had written a new book now, about a man called Gandhi, “another Christ,” and before long Miss Slade was quite literally falling on her knees before the Mahatma in India, “conscious of nothing but a sense of light.” Although one would never guess this from the film, she soon (to quote Mehta’s impression) began “to get on Gandhi’s nerves,” and he took every pretext to keep her away from him, in other ashrams, and working in schools and villages in other parts of India. She complained to Gandhi in letters about discrimination against her by orthodox Hindus, who expected her to live in rags and vile quarters during menstruation, considering her unclean and virtually untouchable. Gandhi wrote back, agreeing that women should not be treated like that, but adding that she should accept it all with grace and cheerfulness, “without thinking that the orthodox party is in any way unreasonable.” (This is as good an example as any of Gandhi’s coherence, even in his prime. Women should not be treated like that, but the people who treated them that way were in no way unreasonable.)
Some years after Gandhi’s death, Miss Slade rediscovered Beethoven, becoming conscious again “of the realization of my true self. For a while I remained lost in the world of the spirit. . . .” She soon returned to Europe and serving Beethoven, her “true calling.” When Mehta finally found her in Vienna, she told him, “Please don’t ask me any more about Bapu [Gandhi]. I now belong to van Beethoven. In matters of the spirit, there is always a call.” A polite description of Madeleine Slade is that she was an extreme eccentric. In the vernacular, she was slightly cracked.
Sir Richard Attenborough, however, isn’t cracked at all. The only puzzle is how he suddenly got to be a pacifist, a fact which his press releases now proclaim to the world. Attenborough trained as a pilot in the RAF in World War II, and was released briefly to the cinema, where he had already begun his career in Noël Coward’s super-patriotic In Which We Serve. He then returned to active service, flying combat missions with the RAF. Richard Attenborough, in short—when Gandhi was pleading with the British to surrender to the Nazis, assuring them that “Hitler is not a bad man”—was fighting for his country. The Viceroy of India warned Gandhi grimly that “We are engaged in a struggle,” and Attenborough played his part in that great struggle, and proudly, too, as far as I can tell. To my knowledge he has never had a crise de conscience on the matter, or announced that he was carried away by the war fever and that Britain really should have capitulated to the Nazis—which Gandhi would have had it do.
_____________
Although the present film is handsomely done in its way, no one has ever accused Attenborough of being excessively endowed with either acting or directing talent. In the 50’s he was a popular young British entertainer, but his most singular gift appeared to be his entrepreneurial talent as a businessman, using his movie fees to launch successful London restaurants (at one time four), and other business ventures. At the present moment he is Chairman of the Board of Capital Radio (Britain’s most successful commercial station), Gold-crest Films, the British Film Institute, and Deputy Chairman of the BBC’s new Channel 4 television network. Like most members of the nouveaux riches on the rise, he has also reached out for symbols of respectability and public service, and has assembled quite a collection. He is a Trustee of the Tate Gallery, Pro-Chancellor of Sussex University, President of Britain’s Muscular Dystrophy Group, Chairman of the Actors’ Charitable Trust and, of course, Chairman of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. There may be even more, but this is a fair sampling. In 1976, quite fittingly, he was knighted, by a Labor government, but his friends say he still insists on being called “Dickie.”
It is quite general today for members of the professional classes, even when not artistic types, to despise commerce and feel that the state, the economy, and almost everything else would be better and more idealistically run by themselves rather than these loutish businessmen. Sir Dickie, however, being a highly successful businessman himself, would hardly entertain such an antipathy. But as he scrambled his way to the heights perhaps he found himself among high-minded idealists, utopians, equalitarians, and lovers of the oppressed. Now there are those who think Sir Dickie converted to pacifism when Indira Gandhi handed him a check for several million dollars. But I do not believe this. I think Sir Dickie converted to pacifism out of idealism.
_____________
His pacifism, I confess, has been more than usually muddled. In 1968, after twenty-six years in the profession, he made his directorial debut with Oh! What a Lovely War, with its superb parody of Britain’s jingoistic music-hall songs of the “Great War,” World War I. Since I had the good fortune to see Joan Littlewood’s original London stage production, which gave the work its entire style, I cannot think that Sir Dickie’s contribution was unduly large. Like most commercially successful parodies—from Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend to Broadway’s Superman, Dracula, and The Crucifier of Blood—Oh! What a Lovely War depended on the audience’s (if not Miss Littlewood’s) retaining a substantial affection for the subject being parodied: in this case, a swaggering hyper-patriotism, which recalled days when the empire was great. In any event, since Miss Littlewood identified herself as a Communist and since Communists, as far as I know, are never pacifists, Sir Dickie’s case for the production’s “pacifism” seems stymied from the other angle as well.
Sir Dickie’s next blow for pacifism was Young Winston (1973), which, the new publicity manual says, “explored how Churchill’s childhood traumas and lack of parental affection became the spurs which goaded him to . . . a position of great power.” One would think that a man who once flew combat missions under the orders of the great war leader—and who seemingly wanted his country to win—would thank God for childhood traumas and lack of parental affection if such were needed to provide a Churchill in the hour of peril. But on pressed Sir Dickie, in the year of his knighthood, with A Bridge Too Far, the story of the futile World War II assault on Arnhem, described by Sir Dickie—now, at least—as “a further plea for pacifism.”
But does Sir Richard Attenborough seriously think that, rather than go through what we did at Arnhem, we should have given in, let the Nazis be, and even—true pacifists-let them occupy Britain, Canada, the United States, contenting ourselves only with “making them feel unwanted”? At the level of idiocy to which discussions of war and peace have sunk in the West, every harebrained idealist who discovers that war is not a day at the beach seems to think he has found an irresistible argument for pacifism. Is Pearl Harbor an argument for pacifism? Bataan? Dunkirk? Dieppe? The Ardennes? Roland fell at Roncesvalles. Is the Song of Roland a pacifist epic? If so, why did William the Conqueror have it chanted to his men as they marched into battle at Hastings? Men prove their valor in defeat as well as in victory. Even Sergeant-Major Gandhi knew that. Up in the moral never-never land which Sir Dickie now inhabits, perhaps they think the Alamo led to a great wave of pacifism in Texas.
In a feat of sheer imbecility, Attenborough has dedicated Gandhi to Lord Mountbatten, who commanded the Southeast Asian Theater during World War II. Mount-batten, you might object, was hardly a pacifist—but then again he was murdered by Irish terrorists, which proves how frightful all that sort of thing is, Sir Dickie says, and how we must end it all by imitating Gandhi. Not the Gandhi who called for seas of innocent blood, you understand, but the movie-Gandhi, the nice one.
_____________
The historical Gandhi’s favorite mantra, strange to tell, was Do or Die (he called it literally that, a “mantra”). I think Sir Dickie should reflect on this, because it means, dixit Gandhi, that a man must be prepared to die for what he believes in, for, himsa or ahimsa, death is always there, and in an ultimate test men who are not prepared to face it lose. Gandhi was erratic, irrational, tyrannical, obstinate. He sometimes verged on lunacy. He believed in a religion whose ideas I find somewhat repugnant. He worshipped cows. But I still say this: he was brave. He feared no one.
On a lower level of being, I have consequently given some thought to the proper mantra for spectators of the movie Gandhi. After much reflection, in homage to Ralph Nader, I have decided on Caveat Emptor, “buyer beware.” Repeated many thousand times in a seat in the cinema it might with luck lead to Om, the Hindu dream of nothingness, the Ultimate Void.
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The Gandhi Nobody Knows
Must-Reads from Magazine
How Bad Is the Great American Slowdown?
An inquiry into the nature of our current economic morass
James Pethokoukis 2016-09-13
t’s never paid to bet against America.” That is the advice long proffered by investment legend Warren Buffett. And yet here we are, with the candidate of one of the two major parties basing his bid for the presidency on the notion that the United States has become a loser nation. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra, which reflects some aspects of the public mood even now, more than seven years after the Great Recession’s end, shows just how hard it can be to heed Buffett’s wisdom. And it reminds us again that Americans have found it difficult to keep the country’s enduring virtues in mind during the spasms of national pessimism that have overtaken it at irregular intervals since the Second World War.
Americans have shown an abiding capacity to express their deep disquiet about the nation’s direction: Maybe this is as good as it’s ever going to get, or worse, maybe tomorrow won’t be as materially prosperous or offer as much opportunity as today or the recent past.
History does record that these moments of misgiving would indeed have been terrible ones in which to bet against the United States. Each bout of pessimism was followed by economic expansion and an upsurge of optimism and national morale. The volatile 1970s reached their emotional nadir 16 months before Jimmy Carter’s reelection defeat, with his “malaise” address. In Ronald Reagan’s 1979 speech, which launched his presidential bid, Carter’s successor said, “They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where—because of our past excesses—it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don’t believe that. And I don’t believe you do, either.”
Reagan was speaking at a time when fewer than a fifth of Americans were satisfied with the country’s direction, according to Gallup. Country singer-songwriter Merle Haggard had a 1982 hit called “Are the Good Times Really Over?” that reflected the nation’s apparent permanent funk. But that was followed in relatively short order by “Morning in America” and the Reagan boom.
A decade later, the country was awash in angst after the short, sharp recession of 1990–91, when all the talk was of the lack of opportunity for “Generation X,” the cohort that found itself forced to wear second-hand clothing and grungy shirts from Army Navy surplus stores. That angst was relieved by the Internet boom and the fastest growth in incomes since the 1960s.
The lesson these examples seemed to have taught us was that when trouble came, you had to buck up, be patient, and wait for the sputtering American Growth Machine to shift back into high gear. If you sold America at the bottom, you were a sucker.
But maybe this time really is different (to cite a non-Buffett financial aphorism). Most deep downturns were typically followed by robust recoveries, but that hasn’t happened here. The growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) has averaged a subpar 2 percent annually since the end of the Great Recession, making it the weakest recovery since at least World War II. And the seven years before the financial crisis weren’t so hot, either, with GDP growth undershooting its postwar average by a full percentage point.
All in all, using GDP alone, the economy really hasn’t been firing on all gears since the late 1990s. We haven’t seen back-to-back years of 3 percent growth since 2004–5.
During the Republican primary, Jeb Bush said that getting the economy to grow 4 percent annually should be a national goal. That is a target the economy used to hit with some regularity. During the 1980s and 1990s, there were 35 total quarterly periods when the economy grew 4 percent or faster on an annualized basis. Since then, there have been only eight. Like an aging sprint champion, the U.S. economy finds that peak performances occur with decreasing frequency. And if you listen to economic forecasts—whether from the Federal Reserve, the Congressional Budget Office, or the private sector—the Two Percent Economy is here to stay.
Superficially, the reasons behind the slowdown are straightforward. It’s just simple math. U.S. economic growth, adjusted for inflation, has averaged 3.3 percent over the past five decades. Of that growth rate, roughly half (1.6 percent) has come from a growing labor force, while the other half (1.7 percent) has come from increased productivity. And if the labor force were still growing at that pace and each of America’s workers were becoming more productive as rapidly as they did in the past, the economy would over the longer term grow as fast in the future as in past decades.
But the old math is giving way to a new math. As the Obama White House noted in its 2013 economic report: “In the 21st century, real GDP growth in the United States is likely to be permanently slower than it was in earlier eras because of a slowdown in labor-force growth initially due to the retirement of the post–World War II baby-boom generation, and later due to a decline in the growth of the working-age population.” According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor force is projected to grow only 0.5 percent per year from 2012 to 2022, compared with an annual growth rate of 0.7 percent from 2002 to 2012. That’s a huge drop-off from the second half of the 20th century.
If the labor force grows more slowly than in the past, that shortfall will need to be made up through higher productivity growth. But we are seeing the opposite. After surging during the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s, productivity growth has decelerated by more than half, averaging just 1.3 percent annually since 2005. And it has been much worse during this recovery and expansion, averaging about 0.5 percent. Taken together, you get an economy capable of growing only 1–2 percent annually on a consistent basis.
Perhaps the most comforting explanation for the post-recession slowdown is that the economy is still suffering from a hangover. The recession of 2008–9 was different from the ones that preceded it during the postwar era. Most of those downturns were spurred by tighter monetary policy from the Federal Reserve, which often acted to cool off an economy in danger of overheating. A too-tight Fed likely played a key role in this downturn, as well. But this one was accompanied and worsened by a financial shock in banking and housing. The economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have argued that recoveries tend to be particularly slow after financial-crisis-driven recessions. Things do get better, just not so quickly.
But when, exactly? Let’s say productivity growth eventually rebounds to roughly where it was from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s, rather than the warp-speed productivity surge from 1996 through 2005 when information-technology investment finally started paying big dividends to business.
Combine that with the demographics of a population hitting retirement age and growing more slowly, and according to a recent analysis from the San Francisco Fed economist John Fernald, “GDP growth is likely to be well below historical norms, plausibly in the range of 1 o 1 percent per year with per capita growth of under 0.9 percent.” That is an alarming trend line when you consider that per capita GDP growth has averaged around 2 percent annually for more than a century. And it suggests just how important it will be to speed productivity growth so that output per worker could again be like it was during and just after the Internet boom, or how it was from 1920 through the 1970s—nearly 3 percent annually.
It may be important, but we shouldn’t count on it happening, warns Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon. In his much-discussed book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Gordon explains that the period from 1870 through 1970 was a “special century” of fast growth, productivity, and innovation. It was an era of amazing progress and invention from electrification to the combustion engine to running water and public sanitation. And huge advances of that kind are unlikely to happen again. Modern advances just don’t compare, in Gordon’s view. They mostly have been in the narrow sphere of entertainment, information, and communications technology. It is a perspective perhaps best summed up by the motto of venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s firm: “We were promised flying cars, and instead what we got was 140 characters.”
Gordon argues that the 1990s productivity surge was a one-off, and that the “main benefits of digitalization have already occurred”; his conclusion is buttressed by the inability to sustain it beyond the mid-2000s. What’s happening now is a return to something more like the earlier, slower growth era—maybe a bit worse—that began once the massive productivity gains of the “special century” had run their course. Combine that with income inequality, and the economic future will feature only marginal gains for most Americans over their lifetimes, Gordon concludes.
In Gordon’s view, then, all the big, fat, low-hanging fruit of the industrial and post-industrial ages has already been harvested. Future advances will be incremental. The age of miracles has passed. Now it’s the age of the slog. This partially explains the “secular stagnation” that the economist Laurence Summers fears is upon us. With less innovation, there are fewer great new investment opportunities and thus less business investment and slower growth.
All is not lost: Fernald offers an exit from this never-ending new normal when he points out that “raising growth above this modest pace depends primarily on whether the private sector can find new and improved ways of doing business.” This is the voice of optimism, the voice that argues there’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what’s right with America. Business dynamism is and has always been America’s deep resource—a world of entrepreneurship and creativity where the economy generates new fast-growing firms that produce new products and services and forces incumbents to innovate or die.
But then there’s this sobering fact: The productivity slowdown has been accompanied by what appears to be a decline in American entrepreneurship. Since the late 1970s, start-ups as a share of all firms have fallen by more than half, while the share of workers employed at new firms has fallen by three-fourths. These distressing numbers recently led the Financial Times to ask “Has America Lost Its Capitalist Mojo?”
A less entrepreneurial economy means a less dynamic economy. Entrepreneurship provides opportunities for employment, upward mobility, and eventually economic security. For many Americans, that is truly where the American dream manifests itself. One of the more interesting moments in the primaries came when the socialist candidate Bernie Sanders complained that banks were stifling capitalist creativity by hoarding the capital small businesses need—capital to start a restaurant or expand one restaurant into three, or to buy dry-cleaning equipment for a store, or to secure office space for a small consulting firm. Republicans complain that the increase of costly and burdensome occupational licensing regulations makes it harder for some small businesses, like hair styling and massage therapy, to get up and running.
But it is more than just that. America is not only a technologically advanced economy; it is an economy that pushes forward the edge of the technological frontier. It is the high-growth startups—Apple, Google, Uber, following in the footsteps of Henry Ford’s assembly lines, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York harbor ferries, and even R.H. Macy’s innovative department stores—that really transform the American economy in a deep, structural way, driving innovation, competition, and high-wage job creation. These, too, face difficulties in the form of cronyist regulatory governmental structures that favor incumbent businesses—the war on Uber in places like Austin, Texas, being the foremost recent example. There has been an apparent decline in these high-impact start-ups as well, according to some research.
So if you think America risks permanent stagnation from weak productivity and innovation, then this apparent decline in high-impact entrepreneurship is of paramount importance. But what it the productivity crisis and start-up crises are overblown? There is a compelling case that they are.
Even a quick glance at the business-news headlines would suggest America is generating plenty of fast-growing tech firms. Europe would love to have America’s start-up woes. One study last year found that the cumulative value of all European billion-dollar tech start-ups created since 2000 is around $120 billion. Facebook alone currently has a market capitalization of more than $300 billion. As the venture capitalist Michael Moritz has put it:
Over the past five years the eight most valuable technology companies developed in Europe have assembled a combined market value of around $32 billion. That’s not a figure to be sneezed at any more than the admirable young European technology entrepreneurs who, despite all odds, are more inclined to take a risk than members of their parents’ generation. But EU legislators should be wondering why Europe’s eight most valuable companies are only worth about 10 percent of Facebook or 6 percent of Google.
Contra Gordon, the U.S. is doing something right. More good news comes from the Kaufmann Foundation, which tracks the state of high-impact or “growth” entrepreneurship. Its latest research finds that growth in such entrepreneurial businesses has risen for three straight years and has “largely recovered from its Great Recession slump.”
The data suggest a mixed message: The Great American Slowdown may indeed be a thing. Living standards are growing, but perhaps not as fast as they used to. The Benefits may not be as broadly shared. And growing the economy as fast in the future as in the past will require smarter policy making at all levels.And if America’s entrepreneurial engine is doing better than many think, the same might also be true of productivity and overall economic growth. So maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. As Goldman Sachs recently noted, “the post-2008 U.S. recovery has not been unusually weak or prolonged relative to other financial crisis episodes, and in fact has been notably stronger when judged from a labor-market perspective.” The annual GDP growth rate may underwhelm, but the labor market has been notably stronger over the past few years, with the jobless rate at around 5 percent and some 15 million private-sector jobs generated during the recovery.
There is a clear disconnect between economic growth and the job market, which is a bit of a conundrum in the economics world. One reason Goldman thinks the job market is a more informative way of gauging the economy is that it thinks official GDP and productivity numbers miss a lot of economic activity. Perhaps metrics devised for America’s 1930s “steel-and-wheat” economy, in the words of economic historian Joel Mokyr, are inadequate for one in which information technology and communications are of growing importance.
There are two serious measurement problems here, according to Goldman. First, government statisticians might be missing productivity advances in software ranging from inventory-management systems to video games such as Grand Theft Auto. Second, even though free digital content and products—from Google maps and searches to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter—provide real value to consumers, their positive impact is hard to figure into GDP. As the bank’s economic team recently wrote in a research note: “The combined equity market capitalization of Alphabet/Google and Facebook alone has grown to $900 billion, nearly 5 percent of the S&P 500. There is something rather unsatisfactory about effectively excluding the output of some of the U.S. economy’s most successful firms from the U.S. government’s highest-profile measure of economic activity.”
Adding it all up, Goldman thinks real GDP growth may be anywhere from 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points higher than the story told by the official numbers. So maybe we actually have something closer to a Three Percent Economy than a Two Percent Economy. “Our results imply the true pace of increase in living standards may not have weakened as much as suggested by the sharp slowdown” in the official productivity and inflation data, Goldman notes.
The idea that GDP and income numbers tell only a partial story is widely, though not universally, accepted. A 2015 University of Chicago Business School survey of top economists found that 70 percent agreed or strongly agreed that official numbers “substantially” understate how much better off the median American household is today versus 1980.
The data suggest a mixed message: The Great American Slowdown may indeed be a thing. Living standards are growing, but perhaps not as fast as they used to. The benefits of growth may not be as broadly shared. And growing the economy as fast in the future as in the past will require smarter policymaking at all levels.
Yet even if there are systemic reasons that faster growth and rapidly rising incomes will be harder to achieve in this century than in the last one, we are hardly powerless. Even believing the bearish economic case doesn’t require surrender to stagnation. There are numerous self-inflicted errors we can reverse. And even if the economy is somewhat or a lot better than we think, there is considerable room for improvement. Policymakers would do well to assume stagnation is upon us, because it will force them to push hard for acceleration.
Gordon, for one, suggests corporate tax reform as one possible way to boost business investment and productivity. The Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps worries that American intellectual-property law has devolved into a cronyist protection scheme for big business that stifles competition and innovation. In his recent book, Mass Flourishing, Phelps writes that “the economy is clogged with patents.” For his part, the Fed’s Fernald thinks that “policies to improve education and life-long learning can help raise labor quality and, thereby, labor productivity.”
On the state level, there’s been growing attention to how non-compete agreements—signed by nearly a fifth of American workers, thus exposing them to litigation should they attempt to change jobs—damage wage growth and crush innovation. Indeed, researchers think one reason behind Silicon Valley’s success is that California doesn’t enforce such contracts.
Some economists are focusing more on how excessive or unnecessary land-use or zoning regulations damage growth and worker mobility by making housing more expensive in high-productivity cities such as Boston and San Francisco. Reform in all these areas would be a welcome effort in boosting productivity.
Then there is the labor-force aspect of economic growth. While there are demographic reasons behind the decline in labor-force participation—the decline in work among prime-age males is particularly worrisome—policymakers aren’t without options. Among possible reforms: making work more attractive by expanding earning subsidies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit; reforming the Social Security Disability Insurance program so it encourages reentry into the job market; expanding work-based learning programs such as apprenticeships; and tweaking Social Security so that older workers stay in the workforce longer.
The above list of ideas is hardly complete. But there is good reason to think a pro-innovation, pro-work policy agenda could result in an economy capable of reversing its 2000s slowdown and again growing as it did in the late-20th century. Of course, “things are better than you think” is not a sound political message; people feel what they feel, and they won’t be talked out of what they feel by pundits. And promising that things can be somewhat improved through incremental policy changes is about as unsatisfying a guarantee as one can imagine a politician making. But the truth is the truth, satisfying or not.
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Harassment Is Not the Same Thing as Assault
The Way We Live Now
Christine Rosen 2016-09-13
he recent sexual-harassment lawsuits filed against Fox News and its former chief, Roger Ailes, have prompted predictable glee on the left. Jane Mayer of the New Yorker used the news as an excuse to revisit Republican peccadilloes of the past 30 years—the “unending scandals of the scandalmongers,” she called them—and devoted lots of space to airing the grievances of an admittedly psychologically unstable former employee of Ailes. After cataloging the affairs and failed marriages of many Republican men, she smugly reminded readers: “The Clintons, by contrast, have remained married.”
Similarly, an indignant employee of the website ThinkProgress recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times denouncing Fox News as “a place where sexual harassers roam free, grabbing or ogling whatever they fancy, with consequences brought to bear only on the victims who speak up”—which sounds a lot like the Bill Clinton era, as a matter of fact, at least if your name was Monica, or Paula, or Juanita, rather than Hillary.
And the New York Times spent months researching a story about how Donald Trump treated the women who worked for his company and attended his Mar-a-Largo pool parties, clearly insinuating that he committed actionable harassment; they even published a follow-up piece devoted to reactions to the story, with helpful reader insights such as, “I need a shower after reading this.”
The narrative promoted in these stories and in popular culture at large is that the hypocritical, backwards right still hasn’t learned the lessons of the Anita Hill era. Indeed, NPR recently trotted out Ms. Hill, like a postfeminist Oracle at Delphi, to comment on the Fox News allegations and reflect on her role in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings 25 years ago (and which HBO recently made into a glossy film starring Kerry Washington). Hill gave herself credit for prompting so many “public conversations” about sexual harassment, scolded Fox News for giving Ailes a severance package, and reminded listeners, “I was treated very badly.”
Of all the unwelcome 1990s ghosts come back to haunt this election season, sexual harassment might prove the most difficult to exorcise. Since the era of Anita Hill and Bill Clinton, we’ve had decades of “public conversations” about sexual harassment—and what has resulted? We have less understanding, not more, of what should qualify as legally actionable harassment and what is and is not an acceptable level of misbehavior in the workplace and on college campuses.
Consider the ubiquitous sexual-harassment training workshop. It continues to thrive even though research by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and several independent academic studies have found that sexual-harassment-prevention training (a staple of the business world and the well-deserved target of pop culture parody) often has the counterintuitive effect of making men less likely to be able to identify harassment and more likely to stereotype women in the workplace.
Perhaps the most dramatic change in harassment culture since the 1990s is the role of the victim vis-à-vis the accused. The climate of the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas era was a litigious he-said, she-said; the present mood is simply J’accuse! Today, an accusation is all that is required to confer immediate cultural and political power on the person who makes it.
What was once scoffed at by sensible people as PC academic nonsense—feminist studies professors denouncing the ‘male gaze’ as a form of rape culture, for example—has now become mainstream.Some of the credit for this goes to the Obama administration’s “It’s on Us” campaign, which seeks to raise awareness of sexual assault on campus by asking students to pledge to “recognize that non-consensual sex is sexual assault” as well as to “intervene in situations where consent has not or cannot be given.” The campaign isn’t merely earnest pledges and charming public-service announcements featuring Jon Hamm and Questlove. The administration also informed universities that take federal money to use a “preponderance of evidence” standard in investigating sexual-assault accusations rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The new standard is less rigorous by design and has led to many more expulsions of (male) students. It has also prompted lawsuits by 100 men (and counting) who claim to have been denied due process after enduring Kafkaesque investigative and disciplinary proceedings by their universities.
One Washington Post reporter declared that President Obama had been inspired to launch the “It’s on Us” campaign because he “became alarmed at the idea of rape as a fixture of college life.” But is rape a fixture of college life? The reliability of campus sexual-assault statistics has been hotly debated for decades, given that much of the data is gathered through voluntary surveys with unacceptably small samples. We still don’t have a clear picture of the rate or severity of sexual assault on campuses. Nevertheless, activists claim that a “rape culture” is rampant.
This has contributed to a pernicious development. Our culture now regularly elides harassment and assault. What was once scoffed at by sensible people as PC academic nonsense—feminist studies professors denouncing the “male gaze” as a form of rape culture, for example—has now become mainstream. In the 1990s, female co-eds were given school-issued rape whistles to protect themselves and encouraged to participate in therapeutic “Take Back the Night” rallies. Today they can simply talk to credulous reporters, like the one at Rolling Stone who published a salacious and now thoroughly discredited story of a gang rape of a student by young men at the University of Virginia in 2014.
Or they can mimic Columbia University’s “mattress girl,” who turned a regrettable consensual sexual encounter into “performance art” by claiming rape and dragging a dirty mattress around campus, for which she received fawning praise (the woman’s supposed rapist was cleared of all charges by Columbia and is now suing the university). And pity the college administrator who suggests that female students take some personal responsibility for their safety by refraining from getting blackout drunk at a fraternity party on a Friday night. Such counsel is not to be considered commonsense advice; it’s victim-shaming.
In the media, fear-mongering stories, such as a recent piece at Slate outlining the many ways women are at risk of sexual assault by creepy men on long-haul flights, read like bad horror-film scripts (“Beware the Perv in 3B!”). A Huffington Post contributor wrote an “open letter” to the mothers of sons who might one day grow up to be predators: “Who are these ‘creepy men’ and where did they come from AND who in the hell raised them? The answer, unfortunately, is YOU.”
Perhaps the most dramatic example of the current climate is the case of Nate Parker, the writer-director-star of the forthcoming film The Birth of a Nation. Seventeen years ago, when he was in college, Parker was accused of rape. He was acquitted of all charges. Eleven years later, the alleged victim committed suicide. The story resurfaced just before the release of his new film, and Parker (who has been outspoken in his condemnation of rape and sexual assault) now finds himself in the crosshairs of activists who want people to boycott his film because he was acquitted of sexual assault decades ago.
Rape and other forms of sexual assault and harassment are serious crimes, and young people especially should be raised to know that they should promptly report them when they happen so the perpetrators can be prosecuted. But crime statistics show that, overall, incidences of rape and other sexual assaults are the lowest they’ve been in decades.
We live in weird sexual times: The BBC recently reported that young, porn-addled teens are more likely to seek medical treatment for erectile dysfunction than older men are; Anthony Weiner’s rabid sexting habit destroyed his marriage and his reputation without him ever actually touching any of his partners; and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach recently joined forces with former Playboy playmate Pamela Anderson to write an op-ed about the dangers of porn.
But our current cultural climate surrounding sexual harassment and sexual assault isn’t weird; it’s harmful. It undermines due process and encourages a view of men—especially young men on college campuses—as likely predators. The equation of harassment with assault weakens our ability to separate false accusations from true ones, and more serious behavior from misunderstandings. Worst of all, it encourages women to view themselves as victims-in-waiting in nearly every situation they encounter. It’s a siren’s lure.
Join us—you'll be in good company. Every conservative intellectual whose thoughts are worth reading is reading (and writing for) COMMENTARY:
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „

Jonah Goldberg
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „

Max Boot
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „

Yuval Levin
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „

Arthur Herman
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „

Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „

William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „

Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „

Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „

John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „

Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „

Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „

Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „

Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „

Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „

Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „

Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „

David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „

Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „

Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „

Andrew Roberts
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „

David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „

Dana Perino
Subscribing to COMMENTARY gives you full access to every article, every issue, every podcast—the latest stories as well as over 70 years of archives, the best that has been thought and written since 1945.
Join the intellectual club, today.
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When a Cough Is Not Just a Cough
Mediacracy
Matthew Continetti 2016-09-13
ack in June, Lloyd Grove, of the Daily Beast, noticed something peculiar. Conservative media and Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, were obsessed with the health status of Hillary Clinton. For years, even before she was diagnosed with a blood clot in 2012, websites like the Drudge Report had recorded every moment in which Clinton coughed or tripped or appeared out of sorts. Hillary’s cough, Grove said, had become a conservative “meme,” a shorthand metaphor for her age and physical incapacity that was also a groundless conspiracy theory. The headline of his article said it all: “Is Hillary Clinton’s Cough the New Benghazi?”
As Grove’s piece suggested, interest in Clinton’s health provoked a reaction from journalists eager to rule the subject out of bounds. The media blowback intensified along with Clinton’s cough. And when Clinton was revealed to be unhealthier than the American public had been led to believe, her physical condition took on another dimension. The cough was no longer funny, no longer material for irrational speculation. It became a metaphor for Clinton’s untrustworthiness and dishonesty, an illustration of the way the media play defense for liberal politicians.
By Labor Day weekend, for example, when Clinton’s first press availability in months was interrupted by another hacking fit, Chris Cillizza had had enough. The affable Washington Post political reporter, who edits the highly trafficked blog The Fix, announced that Clinton’s health status was not a legitimate topic of inquiry. “Can we just stop taking about Hillary Clinton’s health now?” he asked on September 6. The cough was “a totally ridiculous issue,” Cillizza said, “one that if Trump or his Republican surrogates continue to focus on is a surefire loser in the fall.” Why? Because “the simple fact” is “there is zero evidence that anything is seriously wrong with Clinton.” So shaddup you face.
Nor did Cillizza flinch when Twitter users pointed out that, eight years ago, he had written the very opposite about the health of Republican nominee John McCain. “We are talking about—and I am/was writing about—apples and oranges,” he said. McCain would have been the oldest man elected president. He was also a cancer survivor. Neither was the case with Clinton. “And based on all available medical evidence,” Cillizza went on, “from an actual doctor who has actually examined Clinton—she suffered a concussion and resultant blood clot in 2012/2013 from which she has fully recovered.”
James Hamblin, an M.D. and senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly, concurred. “If there were reason to discuss Clinton’s cough,” he wrote, “it would traditionally be as a story of resolution and determination—a public servant who refuses to be sidelined by some infirmity,” like, say, FDR. “As an outside observer,” Hamblin continued, “what would be concerning is a person who never coughs. And what is concerning is the standard through which this cough, in this particular person, is read as weakness.”
This flipping of the script—so that the story isn’t the candidate but the people scrutinizing her—was a common response. A week after Dr. Drew Pinsky caused an uproar when he said on a radio program that he was “gravely concerned not just about her health,” but also Clinton’s “health care,” HLN canceled his cable show. When Andrew Rafferty, an embed with NBC, wrote a piece on September 5 headlined “Hillary Clinton Fights Back Coughing Attack,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told Rafferty to “get a life.” Clinton herself laughed off the incident, ascribing it to “allergies.” The co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, was against showing video of the fit. “It’s silly,” she said. They played the clip anyway. When it was over, Brzezinski said, “She’s awesome. Not sick.”
Oh, but she was.
The worst day of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has to be September 11, 2016. It exemplified the changing explanations and outright lies for which Clinton is known.There are many options to choose from—and as I write there are 60 days until the election—but the worst day of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has to be September 11, 2016. An hour and a half into a 9/11 memorial ceremony at Ground Zero, Clinton suddenly left and was spirited to her daughter’s apartment three miles away.
At first there was confusion, since Clinton departed without the pool of reporters that follow her every move. Then a spokesman said that she had left because she was feeling “overheated.” Then a video surfaced in which Clinton struggled to reach her SUV, and had to be lifted by staff members into the vehicle. Then Clinton appeared outside the apartment and said she felt great. And then, hours after the event, the campaign released a statement by Clinton’s physician saying that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days before.
This sequence of events was more than bizarre. It exemplified the opacity and dissimulation, the changing explanations and outright lies, for which Clinton is known. There couldn’t be a worse way for her to combat her reputation for dishonesty and untrustworthiness than to have a medical episode at a 9/11 memorial, be tight-lipped about what happened, and then say she’d had a serious illness for days.
The media did not come across any better. MSNBC weekend anchor Alex Witt ascribed Clinton’s departure to the New York weather that day, which in her words was “humid,” “horrible,” “horrific,” and “ridiculously awful.” It was 79 degrees. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell said Clinton had looked fine to her. Brian Stelter of CNN warned his peers not to give credence to “conspiracy theories.”
A piece on Vox.com described “The Problem With All the Speculation About Hillary Clinton’s Pneumonia,” before speculating about . . . Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia. Patients “can experience a wide range of symptoms, from the very mild to the deadly,” wrote “senior health correspondent” and “evidence enthusiast” Julia Belluz. “It’s also silly to speculate about Hillary Clinton’s medical status because her entire health history is not publicly available.” Maybe that’s the problem?
By the evening of September 11, Chris Cillizza had reversed his opinion of five days prior. “Hillary Clinton’s health just became a real issue in the presidential campaign,” he wrote. “Sunday morning changed the conversation in the race about Clinton’s health. Or rather it will force Clinton to have a conversation about her health in the race.” Now he tells us!
Credit Cillizza for being honest. Might Hillary Clinton be similarly forthright and direct? Sorry, ma’am. I’m afraid the prognosis is negative.
Join us—you'll be in good company. Every conservative intellectual whose thoughts are worth reading is reading (and writing for) COMMENTARY:
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „

Jonah Goldberg
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „

Max Boot
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „

Yuval Levin
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „

Arthur Herman
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „

Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „

William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „

Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „

Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „

John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „

Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „

Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „

Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „

Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „

Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „

Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „

Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „

David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „

Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „

Michael Medved
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Andrew Roberts
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Leo Strauss’s Forgotten Letter
The influential philosopher defended Israel against the anti-Semitism of the political right
Steven B. Smith 2016-09-13
srael is facing a legitimacy crisis, and not for the first time in its existence. Unlike previous crises, the current one is not geopolitical—not the result of a united Arab rejectionist front or of hostile diplomatic actions like the infamous United Nations resolution of 1975 that declared Zionism a form of racism. Rather, it emerges from tendencies and currents within the West itself. The Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement has taken the war on Israel to college campuses, first in Europe but increasingly in the United States. BDS derives its intellectual ballast from the academic field known as post-colonial studies, a creature of the postmodern fragmentation of the disciplines at universities; the field’s inception came with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. It takes as a given that Israel was not the first success of the anti-colonial movement, as it was once viewed, but rather is itself an outpost of European colonialism in the Middle East. Zionism, in this view, is not an expression of a legitimate aspiration of Jewish self-determination (achieved in part by fighting the British Empire) but a new tool of Western domination and empire. Doubtless some in the BDS movement are motivated by sincere concern with acts of injustice committed against Palestinians in the “occupied territories,” but its leadership and its intellectual drivers clearly are seeking the international delegitimization of the Israeli state as a whole.
There is nothing new under the sun, of course, and in the 1950s, the German emigré political philosopher Leo Strauss, then a professor at the University of Chicago, confronted a similar phenomenon. The difference is that in Strauss’s day, the attack on Israeli legitimacy came from the political right, whereas today it comes mainly from the left. In 1957, Strauss took on the American conservative magazine National Review, now a stalwart defender of Israel and its right to exist and protect itself, for being a source of much of the early anti-Israel agitation in the United States. Strauss never wrote an article for National Review, but he did write one letter to the editor. It appeared in the issue of January 5, 1957, and he took the magazine to task for what he called the “anti-Jewish animus” of its treatment of Israel.
Strauss was a man who chose his words carefully. The fact that he used the term “anti-Jewish” suggests he believed the magazine was not simply opposed to this or that policy of the Israeli state but to its Jewish character, that is, to its very reason for being.
Strauss’s pique seems to have been touched off by an article titled “The Myth We Call Abroad,” by Guy Ponce de Leon, which had appeared the previous November. De Leon took exception to the view that racial segregation was hurting the American image abroad. He argued that in fact America was more advanced than most countries in its attempt to combat racial injustice. He then added the following sentence: “Even the Jews, themselves the victims of the most notorious racial discrimination of modern times, did not hesitate to create the first racist state in history” (emphasis added). Sound familiar?
Strauss’s letter was designed to convince the readers of National Review that as “conservatives,” they should be sympathetic to the Israeli national project. Despite his present reputation, Strauss was not himself a conservative if that word is used to describe a person who identifies the good with the ancestral or the traditional. But he was a believer in conducting arguments in the terms best understood by his interlocutors, and so his National Review letter was deliberately crafted to cast light on the traditionalist conservative foundations of the Israeli state. The letter is an exercise in persuasion; whether the opinions he expressed were his real thoughts or deepest thoughts remains to be established.
The first point Strauss makes is that Israel is a Western country, one that educates its citizens in the ways of the West. There is “a single book” that “absolutely predominates” in Israeli education. That book is the Hebrew Bible. “The spirit of the country,” he notes in a striking formulation, can be described as “heroic austerity supported by the nearness of biblical antiquity.” It is this combination of Sparta (“heroic austerity”) and Jerusalem (“biblical antiquity”) that defines the character of the new country. Nowhere on earth, Strauss alleges, is this respect for antiquity “stronger and less lethargic than in Israel.”
Strauss next turns to issues of realpolitik. It was the view of many anti-Israel voices at the time that it made no sense to champion the fragile new state because the experiment was doomed to failure. Strauss acknowledges the problem. The country he describes is small. It is surrounded by numerically larger and (at the time) more powerful enemies. It stands “within easy range of Jordanian guns.” It lacks oil and other natural resources. Is not the very existence of an Israeli state a quixotic adventure? Under such unfavorable geopolitical circumstances, isn’t its ultimate failure not only possible but even likely? Strauss replies that the question of whether the country will end up a success should not blind us to “the nobility of the effort.” Strauss taunts the NR reader: “A conservative,” he writes, “is a man who despises vulgarity,” and a person concerned only with success is a vulgarian. The very existence of Israel is testimony to the human capacity to dream and imagine, something that cannot be accounted for by the vulgar calculation of interests.
Strauss then moves on to the conservative objection that Israel is a socialist state. It was, it is true, run by labor unions, the Histadrut, and a Labor Party government. Strauss, who was deeply opposed to socialism, goes on to offer an extraordinary defense of labor Zionism. The governing party of Israel, he writes, came largely from Russia and Eastern Europe in the earlier part of the century, and the political experiences of its leaders were not shaped by life under a constitutional democracy or adorned by an “exemplary judiciary.” Besides which, different arrangements may be necessary under different circumstances, like the creation of a new nation. In government, there is no one size that fits all. The recognition of diverse moral and political traditions is also a conservative principle.
Strauss never invokes the Holocaust as the reason for Israel’s existence. He refuses to treat causes that either highlight Jewish weakness or appeal to European guilt. If Israel is to stand, it must stand on its own two feet, that is, from sources within its own tradition.In any case, he argues that those constituting the early Israeli ruling class are more properly described as “pioneers” than trade unionists. They were kibbutzniks who tilled the land and forged the country under hopelessly difficult circumstances. Accordingly, they are looked upon by all “nondoctrinaires” as the “natural aristocracy” of the country, the same way in which Americans regard the Pilgrim fathers. “Natural aristocracy” is a term that Strauss took from Thomas Jefferson, who used it when writing to John Adams to describe a ruling class of talent and intellect.
The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was guided by a fundamentally “conservative” goal, he says. It was to preserve “the moral spine” of Judaism at a time when Jews were increasingly becoming alienated from their heritage. The Jews of Europe—like Esau, who exchanged his birthright for “a mess of pottage”—were trading a moral heritage for the promise of formal, legal equality. Strauss makes reference to a famous article by the Zionist leader Lev Pinsker arguing that this pursuit was a condition of “internal servitude.” Political Zionism, by contrast, was the attempt to restore that “simple dignity” of which “only people who remember their heritage and are loyal to their fate are capable.”
Strauss concludes his letter on a slightly chastened note. “Political Zionism is problematic for obvious reasons,” he writes. He does not state what those reasons are. I suspect his concern was that political Zionism focused entirely on issues of land and security while neglecting the specifically Jewish or spiritual core of the Israeli state. A Jewish state that neglected a Jewish way of life would not be sustainable. Nonetheless, Strauss says that he “can never forget” what old-fashioned political Zionism achieved as a “moral force” in the face of the levelling of “venerable, ancestral” traditions.
What are we to make of this letter today?
Many of Strauss’s arguments seem beside the point now. Israel’s physical existence is no longer in danger of literally being overrun by its neighbors, as it was in 1957. And the description of the country as poor and as run by labor unionists is certainly no longer applicable. The Spartan quality of “heroic austerity” has been replaced by the new image of Israel as the “startup nation,” and this is something Strauss would not have considered an “unmitigated blessing.” Israeli life today is far from the armed camp Strauss felt it was on his visit, despite the fact that nearly all Israelis still serve in the army.
The most obvious omission of Strauss’s letter from the present-day perspective is any reference to the Palestinians, those who had been dispossessed by the new state. This was not as pressing a subject then, while the Palestinian issue is at the core of BDS and other anti-Israel movements today. But one must not forget that even in the absence of this issue, critics like De Leon had no compunction in the 1950s about referring to Israel as a “racist state.” Strauss refers to this statement directly: “The author does not say what he understands by a ‘racist state,’ nor does he offer any proof for the assertion that Israel is a racist state.” Strauss wonders if this could allude to the fact that there are no civil marriages in Israel, that there is, strictly speaking, no intermarriage, or that there are only Jewish, Christian, and Muslim weddings. Does this a “racist state” make? Certainly not by the standards of a “conservative” publication.
Revealingly, Strauss never invokes the Holocaust as the reason for Israel’s existence. He refuses to treat causes that either highlight Jewish weakness or appeal to European guilt. If Israel is to stand, it must stand on its own two feet, that is, from sources within its own tradition.
The best reply to the deniers and delegitimizers is a serious engagement with the founding texts of Zionism—Herzl, Nordau, Ahad Ha-am, Jabotinsky. These are to Israel’s lifeblood what the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers are to American self-understanding. Strauss points to the conditions of human dignity that can be attained only by a self-governing people capable of determining their fate while remaining loyal to their heritage. Israelis and, just as important, Americans trying to defend Israel must never shrink from this task.
Much to his credit, William F. Buckley Jr., founder and editor of National Review, would later go on to purge the magazine’s staff of its anti-Semites. The magazine today is a strong supporter of Israel, just as American conservatives are Israel’s strongest allies in the United States. Leo Strauss’s letter was a harbinger of that change, though it would take two generations for it to come to fruition.
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Donald Rumsfeld
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Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „

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The Apology of Patroclus
Tod Lindberg 2016-09-13
“I shall stay here where my ships are lying, but I shall send my comrade into battle….Grant, O all-seeing Jove, that victory may go with him; put your courage into his heart that Hector may learn whether my squire is man enough to fight alone, or whether his might is only then so indomitable when I myself enter the turmoil of war.” Achilles, speaking of Patroclus in Book 16 of The Iliad, translation by Robert Fitzgerald
I am not his pet.
I come when he calls and do as he commands,
True. Yet so does everyone.
Are all men his pets then?—or perhaps his flock
Spread across a pasture, chewing,
Impassive, solitary, deluded by bestial nature
Into the belief that all is naturally well?
No. These men know him as well as
Anyone can (and know what they can’t know),
Know it’s nature he keeps at bay
Through rage and action, rage and rage,
His human nature beating all others—
Unmatched strength, unmatchable rage.
Of their better, an obedient flock know nothing.
His men know him and obey.
I am the one closest at hand. I serve him,
Yes, when he asks and when he doesn’t.
But am I servile? Some say. Many.
Yet by strength of my own, strength and rage,
The battle prizes I have carried home,
Large in number, I myself have won.
This is true. Most know it.
Still they say what they do. Yet if,
A thousand years from now or more, some fool old soldier
Names his horse “Patroclus” on account of
My service and someone else’s glory and rage,
I will not be mortified. I will be dead,
Forever deaf to mockery or praise.
So will Achilles. And soon enough,
The old soldier and his horse.
We have been together since distant youth.
It used to be that people forgot I’m older,
But now my brow and eyes are lined,
My hair grayed at the sides—his, not yet. Or ever.
Picture him as now, in the full flower
Of youthful manhood. He will never change—
Because he will die. So the prophecy says.
Of course they took me for the younger when
Both us had fully bloomed. I knew then
Who he was, and he knew me.
One, the senior in prowess, in bearing,
In beauty too; the other casting a lesser light
But radiant in his glow, and so perforce the
Junior of the two. A common mix-up.
I grew used to it.
We took lessons together
And practiced our arts one against one. Swords, spears,
Horses and wrestling, footraces to the distant cliffs
And back. In childhood I won.
I recall the rue that came upon his face
When, panting at the finish, he looked to me:
“You win this race, Patroclus,
But not forever.” I laughed and so did he.
The day he first beat me? I recall
What my expression said: You win this time,
Achilles—and the next time and hereafter.
So it was. No one beat him, ever.
Achilles, “the swiftest runner”—true.
And he made me a faster runner for keeping up
With the joyfully merciless pace he set.
I know what some will always say:
Lovers. No shame in candor now, not
Where he and I are going soon.
The faces of the bloodless dead don’t blush.
I am older, and for a short, sweet season, between
My coming to manhood and his, I knew from time to time
Exquisite pleasure, yes, from him.
But then his voice began to crack and deepen,
Silky hair to thicken on his loins.
And that was that. We took up girls.
He fathered a son. And soon after, we left
For Troy, for the hardships and pleasures
Of men at war. Sometimes we shared
A battle prize, a concubine,
My pleasure enhanced by the closeness of his.

Nothing came between us, ever.
But no one believes this. They say,
Human nature, surely you were jealous.
This “best of men” stuff must get old.
And they ask—but, tactful, not of me—
What dog has never once been kicked?
I don’t say we never disagreed; two
Human beings must, they’re not the same.
You can’t feed one through the other’s belly.
But long ago, from our earliest years,
We understood each other—where we stood.
Even when I was winning our races,
I knew I wouldn’t for long. On this ground,
We learned we could fashion for ourselves
A lasting way, to the good of us both.
It does no dishonor to me that I
Am the great man’s best-loved friend.
Just the opposite—he honors me.
Son of immortal Thetis, schooled by the centaur Chiron
(Oh please, the nonsense said of him)—
Perhaps a man as great as Achilles
Belongs in the company of gods instead,
perhaps could do without human friends.
But though head above his fellow mortals,
He, alas, remains one of us,
Not of the gods. And above all mortals,
The one he has chosen for friendship
Is me. Have you heard him talk, fantasize really,
Of striding in triumph through the ruins of Troy,
None left alive but the two of us alone? I have.
I have considered this vision of his
Long enough to be terrified by it.
They say Achilles longs for glory—
That prophecy his mother told him: Go home and live
A long and happy life, or die young at Troy
And win deathless glory. By now, it’s clear:
He’s staying. So he must desire glory above all,
They say. And besides, he sulks in his tent
Rather than raging in battle because of
Agamemnon, who stole his honor.
The “lord of men” took back sweet Briseis, his battle prize
(One of those he shared with me).
So, honor and glory mean all to Achilles,
They say. But I think they are mistaken,
Flattering themselves that he values their opinion.
He does at times succumb to glory’s lure.
That stupid row with Agamemnon shows as much.
Achilles, the greatest warrior, called out the greatest king,
Told him the temple priest was right, that
Apollo was angry at him and punishing us all.
Wars have come of lesser effrontery
Than that of Achilles to the “lord of men” that day.
Yet Agamemnon bore it well enough,
Changed kingly course at once, before all—
But not without a reminder to Achilles
That Agamemnon is chief of all contingents.
And so it worsened between the two.
Denied due honor from the greatest king,
Achilles, for once, forgot who he is,
Caging himself in the gaze of another.
But I say no, that’s not who he is.
The authority for my remark is his.
No glory abides in his fantastic vision—
The bodies of all the Trojans and Greeks
Staring lifeless upon a blood-soaked plain
As we two alone stride through ruins we have made.
This is the Achilles I know and sometimes fear
(Though I myself have nothing to fear)—
Not one resentful at some mere slight,
Not one hungering for acclaim from those
He knows will never measure up to him.
His satisfaction was Troy destroyed
And no one left to cheer Achilles—
Self-sufficient in the greatness of himself,
In the power of his rage—plus, beside him, me.
And if I step inside his fantastic vision,
Stride with him through Troy’s ruined towers
And two whole armies of breathless dead,
How does it sit with me? Not the same.
I feel his satisfaction but none of my own.
There lies Agamemnon dead, and
Odysseus and Nestor, Telamonian
Ajax, Eurypylus (brave warrior, whose wounds
This day not in fantasy but in fact I bound),
And Menelaus too, for whose honor
Justice was done and the world perished.
All of them dead, our Myrmidons too,
The Argives wiped from memory far from Argos.
This he prayed for. And the Trojans: Hector, Paris, Priam,
Through enmity and rage, all slain.
All gone, in that fantastic vision.
And to what end? Shall Patroclus and Achilles
Settle down in Priam’s lovely town,
A sweet spot on the coast grown rich off
Ships that pay to tarry until the wind is fair?
No, no more town, so his vision decrees.
Achilles will pull its towers to the ground!
I guess I am supposed to help.
Were we ourselves immortal Olympians,
Having conquered the world and put the Titans down,
Maybe his vision would yet make sense,
And we could repair forever to our mountain abode,
To fiddle as we please in the affairs of men.
But men we are and soon must die like all the rest.
What a wasteland his fantasy entails.
Of all the lesser kings at Troy
In service to the “lord of men,” the one
I always trusted least is Nestor.
Odysseus, true, would lie to your face—
But do so smiling, as if to say,
We both know the truth, and that wasn’t it.
The first neck Odysseus saves is his own—
And probably the last one, too. But Nestor—
Old Nestor, his dissimulation sparkles.
He natters on so, almost drooling,
Barely able to keep to his thread,
His palsied arm resting on a shoulder for support—
Until ready to bury in that sympathetic back
The knife he’s all along concealed.
His joy comes from the surprise, I think.
He reminded me today of my father’s injunction
To give good counsel to the great Achilles—
As if I could somehow forget those words.
No, I have followed them to the letter—
Though counseling Achilles requires art.
He does not take advice as such, rather
Pushes back—he’s right, I’m wrong. How
Could anyone ever conclude to the contrary?
But wait a day, and see what course
Achilles chooses for himself. (I don’t remind him,
But he knows. As I said, we have our way.)
But now, the Argives greatly imperiled, Trojans
Bearing down to torch the ships, I’ll admit,
Nestor riled me up, stirred in me a fighting spirit,
With the plan he seemed to contrive on the spot.
Of course he had not. The contrivance was
Long before. (This I concluded while tending
Eurypylus for an arrow-wound from Paris’s bow.)
When Nestor proposed that I put on
The armor of Achilles, and lead our
Myrmidons, fresh from unwanted rest,
To halt the Trojan advance and save the Argive ships,
He knew exactly what he sought: Achilles
Back in the fight, he whose rage alone
Could carry the day now the Trojans
Had made the choice of open battle.
And no, not for one moment did
Artful old Nestor believe the Trojans
Would mistake me for Achilles and run away.
One way only to bring Achilles back:
Patroclus dead. Nestor reasoned rightly, of course.
The rage of Achilles in pursuit of vengeance
For the loss of his dearest friend—of me
—Would drive an army of twice these Trojans
Back on their heels, if not at headlong run for Troy.
To die and release the rage of Achilles,
Who saves the Argives this direful day—
A useful part for me to play, by Nestor’s light.
On the way back to Achilles
I came upon Eurypylus, in bad shape.
Of course I stopped to help, to cut the arrow free.
So many Achaean kings lay wounded this day—
Diomedes, Odysseus, Agamemnon himself,
So many lesser lords as well, brave fighters,
In grave need. No man could tend to them all. What then?
When I told Achilles Nestor’s plan,
He liked it well enough—his Myrmidons,
Myself in command, turning the battle’s tide.
But I must not advance too far, he said.
For Agamemnon would soon see the need
To make amends with his greatest warrior—and so
At last would Achilles return to the fight.
(In the modified plan, I don’t count for much.)
His armor, his army—his honor rightly restored
At last by the lord of men. Now, why Agamemnon
Would honor him, not me, did not occur to Achilles.
Why would it? And this is fine with me.
I could counsel him differently,
Explain to him he’d lost sight of who he is.
But the Achaeans don’t have until tomorrow.
There is that other prophecy—
Well, dozens more, I reckon, soothsayers seeking
To cover all contingencies to redeem their art—
But one in particular, which he doesn’t like. It holds:
The best man among Myrmidons will die
At Troy, while Achilles yet lives on.
I don’t doubt but he’s forgotten it;
It casts him in a lesser light.
I thought of it as I put on his armor.
Best of the Myrmidons? Better than Achilles?
What is it that Achilles lacks
That demands to acknowledge someone better?
This I leave for others to consider.
I fire my rage for battle now, and his will follow—
We have prophecies to meet.
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Albion’s Ashes
Review of 'Hillbilly Elegy,' by J.D. Vance
Kevin D. Williamson 2016-09-14
t is the case, as Leo Tolstoy insisted, that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but with Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance would have us understand his story as representative. And perhaps it is, in an unexpected way.
Vance’s memoir really is not, despite its marketing, a tale of economic privation among the Kentucky Scots-Irish exodus. It is closer to the opposite: His Kentucky-exile grandparents are secure and prosperous in spite of their own humble origins and a long period of alcohol-fueled domestic strife; they own a nice, four-bedroom home and drive new high-end cars—convertibles, even. Growing up in a small town in Ohio in the 1990s, Vance lived in a household with an annual income exceeding $100,000, or the equivalent of about $175,000 a year in today’s dollars. He had a close-knit extended family, including a grandmother who read to him and a grandfather who helped him get ahead of the other children in math, which served him well: After college and law school—at Yale—Vance went on to become the principal of a Silicon Valley investment firm. He is 31 years old.
His family was indeed miserable, but theirs wasn’t the misery of poverty and privation. It was the misery of people determined to be miserable at any price. The great American bounty was wheeled out for their enjoyment like room service at the Ritz Carlton, and they decided they preferred Wendy’s and Night Train and OxyContin and desultory sex with strangers from bars.
Nothing happened to them—they happened.
The main difference between Vance and his unhappy forebears with their Byzantine marital histories and “Mountain Dew mouth”—exactly what it sounds like—is that he had the good sense to say yes to the happiness that was offered him.
What’s interesting about his story—his only real excuse for writing a memoir, in fact—is that he almost said no, and that he is one of those unusual men who actually understands the decisions he has made, why and how he made them, and the effects they have had. He also writes well and is, if not quite immune to the sentimental horse manure that plagues the “My Old Kentucky Home” genre, at least sensible enough to be embarrassed about it and limit his indulgence in it.
Some writers of memoirs engage in literary embellishment, but the more common sin is literary oversimplification, reducing the fullness of men and women to chessmen to be moved about the board in whatever way suits the authorial purpose. Vance does not seem to have done this, but the men and women in his life are nonetheless familiar enough as types—queasily familiar, in fact, if you have much experience with the milieu he is documenting. His mother is a nurse, a much-married woman who grows bored with men who are kind and well-employed, who takes up drinking and carousing relatively late in life and engages in theatrical public meltdowns, including purported suicide attempts. His father is a bit player in the drama and relinquishes his legal paternal rights to one of Vance’s subsequent stepfathers, who also is out of the picture soon enough. Vance’s grandmother (and surrogate mother), whom he calls Mamaw, is one of those horrifying redneck women who thinks of herself as a matriarch, threatens to shoot people all the time, and apologizes for being a “crazy bitch” even while she obviously takes pleasure and a sense of personal identity from being one. His grandfather is a working drunk who eventually puts the plug in the jug and lives his life a decent man. There are many uncles and other relations who play larger and smaller roles in the tale.
The economics of Vance’s life are worth noting. As he reports, the chaos of his upbringing—at one point, he’s dividing his time between three different households, and most of the members of his tight clan have different surnames—is real and it is awful, but it has little to do with economic opportunity per se. His family doesn’t live in the poor section of town, and they have money to provide him with all sorts of desirable things, including golf lessons. He gets a nice set of secondhand MacGregors—being a poor hillbilly ain’t what it used to be.
When he needs a decent job to put aside some money to finance his move to New Haven, he finds one working in a floor-tile warehouse for $13 an hour with no trouble. The owners of the facility are desperate for help and cannot fill positions in spite of paying wages that are very high relative to the cost of living in their community, where an apartment goes for a few hundred bucks a month. One of Vance’s fellow workers, a 19-year-old man with a child on the way, is consistently late and takes hours worth of “bathroom” breaks every day, until he is fired. His reaction is a familiar one: “How could you do this to me?” The idea that he is somehow responsible for his own situation, that he is in fact at fault in his firing, is alien to him, unthinkable.
Vance’s mother loses her high-paying nurse’s job in a similar if more dramatic fashion, raiding the hospital pharmacy, getting high as a Georgia pine on prescription painkillers, and then Rollerblading through the emergency room.
The family does not start off poor—it achieves poverty under the expert ministrations of Vance’s mother. She gets herself into a domestic-abuse case—during one of her theatrical fits, she threatens to kill Vance and herself, and then commences beating the terrified child, who bolts from the family car (of course it happens in a car) while on a highway and then runs to the house of a stranger begging for shelter. The homeowner takes him in and calls the police. Of course, Vance’s grandparents do everything they can to protect his mother from the consequences of her actions, including pressuring little J. D. to lie about the episode in court. They also hire very expensive attorneys for her.
That kind of help does not come cheap. Between the legal fees, the rehab facilities, the never-to-be-repaid “loans” during spells of self-inflicted unemployment, Vance’s mother bleeds her parents white over the course of her adult life. By the time Mamaw dies and Vance is left to settle her estate, her only remaining asset is her house. If she hadn’t died at the peak of the housing bubble, Vance estimates, her estate would have been bankrupt.
Thought experiment: Imagine these people living on minimum wage or welfare. Imagine them living in a black ghetto in Detroit rather than a white ghetto in Ohio.
Vance, who tells his story with admirable humility, entered into a period in his teenage years where he seemed set to follow in his family’s footsteps. He nearly failed out of school, and, rather than being horrified by the sometimes violent dramatic performances within his family, he came to look forward to domestic conflicts, savoring them as a form of entertainment. He says that he was spared entering fully into that despair and chaos by the intervention of certain “loving people.”
That is not usually how one hears Marine drill instructors described.
Vance had the good sense to delay college and enlist in the Marine Corps instead. And the Marine Corps is one of the few remaining American institutions that delivers more or less exactly as advertised. Vance entered the boot camp pudgy, disorganized, immature, and lacking in confidence. He left it harder, wiser, and more capable. His account of his time in the Marines is in fact one of the most interesting sections of the book, and the one that points both to the promise and shortcomings of public-policy interventions to counter the dysfunction of the white underclass. As Vance puts it, the Marines take in new recruits under an assumption of maximum ignorance, i.e., that they do not know the basics of anything, from personal hygiene to keeping a schedule. The Marine Corps interferes in Vance’s life in intensely invasive and personal ways: When he decides he needs to buy a car, an older Marine is dispatched to make sure he doesn’t buy something stupid and stops him from signing a high-interest financing contract with the dealer, steering him instead toward a much better deal available through the Marines’ credit union.
The man who did not know how to handle automotive financing works in finance today. By his own account, he did not know that “finance” was an industry and a career option until well into his college education. Things like how to dress for a job interview and how to conduct himself at a business dinner—he’s flummoxed to learn that there’s more than one kind of white wine—simply were not within his experience.
That sort of thing is awkward, and there are tens of millions of Americans who have had such fish-out-of-water experiences on their way up. The truth is, our schools and other institutions do a pretty good job of identifying the J.D. Vances of the world, thanks in no small part to standardized testing, though of course committed and engaged teachers play an indispensable role, too. But consider what it took to turn Vance’s life around and get him ready for Ohio State and Yale. Short of universal or near-universal military conscription—something that would be resisted both by the public and by the military, which is still resisting the politicians’ efforts to transform it entirely into a social-services agency—what policy options do we have to intervene in the lives of young men and women who come from backgrounds like Vance’s, but who are even worse off in both economic and social-capital terms, and who do not have the innate intelligence to cut it in Silicon Valley or who lack comparable skills and talents? We know what to do about poor kids with IQs of 120—what about the ones with IQs of 100? What about those with IQs of 90?
J.D. Vance may have set out to write something like Angela’s Ashes, exploring the interaction between addiction, poverty, pride, and clannishness, but what he has delivered is a personal supplement to Albion’s Seed, updating us on the decline of the Scots-Irish communities whose submersion in atavistic hinterland folkways keeps them in poverty even when they are not, strictly speaking, poor. It is an engaging and at times fascinating read, and one that contains, despite Vance’s best efforts, very little to support a case for hope.
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“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „

Jonah Goldberg
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „

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“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „

Yuval Levin
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „

Arthur Herman
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „

Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „

William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „

Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „

Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „

John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „

Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „

Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „

Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „

Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „

Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „

Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „

Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „

David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „

Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „

Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „

Andrew Roberts
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „

David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „

Dana Perino
Subscribing to COMMENTARY gives you full access to every article, every issue, every podcast—the latest stories as well as over 70 years of archives, the best that has been thought and written since 1945.
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