Wednesday, October 26, 2016
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène
An earnest attempt at grafting Marxism onto colonial Senegal. Maybe a little GVHD.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Black Wind, White Snow by Charles Clover
Russia, as Western commentators often say, is a country in search of a national idea. Until 1917, tsarist despotism sufficed to hold together Russia’s sprawling conglomeration of ethnicities, territories, religions, and languages. The USSR, of course, lived and died by the viability of its evolving brand of Marxism-Leninism, which was replaced in the 1980s by a short-lived desire to join the Western liberal order. Delt successive blows over the course of the 90s, Russian liberalism had all but expired by the 1998 financial crisis and currency devaluation, leaving as an open question what would come next. According to Charles Clover’s Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism, the answer is Eurasianism, a specious and – for most of its history – marginal strain of multiethnic nationalism that appears custom-made for the Kremlin’s neo-imperial project.
Black Wind, White Snow begins by tracing the intellectual history of Eurasianism, which developed in the writings of men brutalized over the course of Russia’s turbulent twentieth century. The first wave of Eurasianists belonged to Russia’s pre-revolutionary elite, who fled the country as part of the White diaspora and lived the rest of their lives in European exile, pining for a world that no longer existed. One of the most prominent, Nikolay Trubetskoy, was typical in that he achieved lasting recognition for his work in a different field – linguistics – and later disavowed his Eurasianist phase.
Perhaps because Eurasianism itself does not merit serious critique, Clover constantly psychologizes his subjects, arguing that they practiced political philosophy as therapy. Surviving mass violence and social upheaval, their “pet theory was born out of a collective questioning of the very value of civilization and progress” (9), Clover writes. Stateless and nostalgic for home, Eurasianists created a theory that promised powerful state protection and national belonging. In Clover’s telling, the circumstances of its creation determined Eurasianism’s features.
The result is a brutal, borderline fascist line of thought, which from the start was predicated on a rejection of Western liberal values in favor of a primal, traditional, geographically determined culture that Russia supposedly shares with the other peoples of Eurasia. Trubetskoy and his peers argued that “cultures and civilizations have natural boundaries that delineate the extent of the unconscious architecture of a unique cultural geometry. They are characterized by an entire substratum of unconscious relationships between language sounds, music scales, folk dress, art and even architecture which will naturally occur over a certain territory and end at common geographical frontiers of common culture (55).” These first Eurasianists believed that the various cultures of the Eurasian heartland – the “world island,” in Halford Mackinder's famous term – were converging naturally and inevitably, and that the root of all Russia’s troubles was failure to respect “the frontiers of natural systems” (57). In other words, Russia foundered when it sought to join the West.
The next link in the Eurasianist chain, Lev Gumilev, associated this common culture with self-sacrifice and centralized state control, despite – or perhaps owing to – his own extensive suffering at the hands of the Soviet state. Gumilev, the son of renowned poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev, spent fourteen years in the USSR’s system of forced labor, which included work on the White Sea–Baltic Canal. During his time in the Gulag, Gumilev conceived the idea of “passionarity” (пассионарность), which he defined as “the powerful impulse which pulls the human towards obtaining some kind of unnecessary benefit, in particular, posthumous honor” (96). According to Gumilev, cultures excel that abound with such self-sacrificing, militant passionaries: witness the waves of nomads that periodically swept out of the Eurasian heartland and across Europe. In his later years as an author of popular and fanciful “histories,” Gumilev wrote that the USSR was heir to this fighting Eurasian spirit, “emphasizing the ‘unity’ of the Soviet peoples under a benevolent Russian hand” (141). He would spend the end of his life waging a campaign to preserve the same Soviet state that had imprisoned him for so many years.
Black Wind, White Snow makes a sharp turn when it reaches the post-Soviet era and career of Alexander Dugin, the ultranationalist intellectual whom many consider the Kremlin’s unofficial ideologue. Beginning in the 90s, Eurasianism emerged from obscurity to become the ideology of choice for Russia’s military and security elite, and consequently Clover’s job becomes much harder – he must demonstrate Eurasianism’s influence on the state, as well as its continuing historical evolution. Clover does not fully succeed at either task.
Dugin got his start in Moscow’s far-right underground of the 1980s, which gleefully appropriated Nazi, theosophist, and other esoteric ideas and iconographies as an expression of anti-Sovietism. However, after the USSR disintegrated, Dugin made an about-face and became one of the Soviet Union’s most fervent apologists, casting it in the role of latter-day Russian empire, host of primordial Eurasian civilization. In Dugin’s best known work, The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, Russia is described as a “tellurocracy,” or land power, with a civilization tending toward “settlement, conservatism...hardness and stability of social traditions” (238). Similar to his Eurasianist predecessors, Dugin believed that a “society’s juridical order and state institutions are expressions of the particular character of geography” (239). In Russia’s case, that meant a civilization-state defined by “upheaval and violence...as spiritual values in themselves” (239), authoritarianism, and opposition to “Liberalism in all its manifestations” (284). Among Dugin’s main prescriptions for restoring Russia to greatness was reconstituting Soviet territories: “Georgia must be dismembered and Ukraine annexed” (238). In all this, a reader could be forgiven for seeing a Russian version of National Socialism. One primary difference is the Eurasianist emphasis on multiethnic empire – made to order for the rulers of a revanchist, multiethnic state.
Therefore, it is not surprising that, as the Kremlin soured on Western liberalism, it would turn to Eurasianist ideas to justify an expansionist and authoritarian project. Putin signaled this change in an address to the federal assembly by citing Lev Gumilev’s passionarity as key to determining “[w]ho will lead and who will remain on the periphery, and inevitably lose their independence” (1-2). Dugin, who had long lectured privately to Russia’s future military leaders at the prestigious Academy of the General Staff, found himself in the public eye, appearing on television and granted his own radio show. Most prominent, of course, have been Putin’s annexation of Crimea and interventions in Georgia and eastern Ukraine, all territories Dugin had often called on the Kremlin to retake. Dugin even predicted “the design of the flag of the Donetsk Republic” (330). Altogether, Clover convincingly makes the case that Dugin has become the Kremlin’s unofficial political theorist – if only as a matter of convenience.
Yet, the latter half of Black Wind, White Snow has significant shortcomings. In what is foremost the history of an idea, Clover does not fully establish Dugin within the Eurasianist tradition of Trubetskoy and Gumilev. While Dugin’s ideas bear many similarities to those of earlier Eurasianists, the reader is mostly left to discern the resemblance and assume linkages; Clover traces few direct lines of influence. Moreover, Clover over-promises the extent to which his book explicates the Kremlin’s actions through the lens of Eurasianism. In the introduction, he argues that “[i]deas – both good and bad – play an underappreciated role in political life” (5) and that “[l]ooking at Russia’s recent behavior through the lens of Eurasianism [...] makes a lot of the current behaviour snap into focus” (17).
Black Wind, White Snow is a history of nationalism, yet rarely questions the idea at nationalism’s core: that there exists a primordial nation to be mobilized and harnessed by the state. This reflects Clover’s tendency to handle his biographical content more deftly than his characters’ ideas, which he presents more often than he scrutinizes. This may have been a deliberate choice, an acknowledgement that Eurasianism has never been about robust thinking, or even Eurasia. At heart, Eurasianism is a program of anti-Westernism, anti-liberalism, and political expedience, cynically adopted by Russia’s leadership because, for the time being, they work.
Black Wind, White Snow begins by tracing the intellectual history of Eurasianism, which developed in the writings of men brutalized over the course of Russia’s turbulent twentieth century. The first wave of Eurasianists belonged to Russia’s pre-revolutionary elite, who fled the country as part of the White diaspora and lived the rest of their lives in European exile, pining for a world that no longer existed. One of the most prominent, Nikolay Trubetskoy, was typical in that he achieved lasting recognition for his work in a different field – linguistics – and later disavowed his Eurasianist phase.
Perhaps because Eurasianism itself does not merit serious critique, Clover constantly psychologizes his subjects, arguing that they practiced political philosophy as therapy. Surviving mass violence and social upheaval, their “pet theory was born out of a collective questioning of the very value of civilization and progress” (9), Clover writes. Stateless and nostalgic for home, Eurasianists created a theory that promised powerful state protection and national belonging. In Clover’s telling, the circumstances of its creation determined Eurasianism’s features.
The result is a brutal, borderline fascist line of thought, which from the start was predicated on a rejection of Western liberal values in favor of a primal, traditional, geographically determined culture that Russia supposedly shares with the other peoples of Eurasia. Trubetskoy and his peers argued that “cultures and civilizations have natural boundaries that delineate the extent of the unconscious architecture of a unique cultural geometry. They are characterized by an entire substratum of unconscious relationships between language sounds, music scales, folk dress, art and even architecture which will naturally occur over a certain territory and end at common geographical frontiers of common culture (55).” These first Eurasianists believed that the various cultures of the Eurasian heartland – the “world island,” in Halford Mackinder's famous term – were converging naturally and inevitably, and that the root of all Russia’s troubles was failure to respect “the frontiers of natural systems” (57). In other words, Russia foundered when it sought to join the West.
The next link in the Eurasianist chain, Lev Gumilev, associated this common culture with self-sacrifice and centralized state control, despite – or perhaps owing to – his own extensive suffering at the hands of the Soviet state. Gumilev, the son of renowned poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev, spent fourteen years in the USSR’s system of forced labor, which included work on the White Sea–Baltic Canal. During his time in the Gulag, Gumilev conceived the idea of “passionarity” (пассионарность), which he defined as “the powerful impulse which pulls the human towards obtaining some kind of unnecessary benefit, in particular, posthumous honor” (96). According to Gumilev, cultures excel that abound with such self-sacrificing, militant passionaries: witness the waves of nomads that periodically swept out of the Eurasian heartland and across Europe. In his later years as an author of popular and fanciful “histories,” Gumilev wrote that the USSR was heir to this fighting Eurasian spirit, “emphasizing the ‘unity’ of the Soviet peoples under a benevolent Russian hand” (141). He would spend the end of his life waging a campaign to preserve the same Soviet state that had imprisoned him for so many years.
Black Wind, White Snow makes a sharp turn when it reaches the post-Soviet era and career of Alexander Dugin, the ultranationalist intellectual whom many consider the Kremlin’s unofficial ideologue. Beginning in the 90s, Eurasianism emerged from obscurity to become the ideology of choice for Russia’s military and security elite, and consequently Clover’s job becomes much harder – he must demonstrate Eurasianism’s influence on the state, as well as its continuing historical evolution. Clover does not fully succeed at either task.
Dugin got his start in Moscow’s far-right underground of the 1980s, which gleefully appropriated Nazi, theosophist, and other esoteric ideas and iconographies as an expression of anti-Sovietism. However, after the USSR disintegrated, Dugin made an about-face and became one of the Soviet Union’s most fervent apologists, casting it in the role of latter-day Russian empire, host of primordial Eurasian civilization. In Dugin’s best known work, The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, Russia is described as a “tellurocracy,” or land power, with a civilization tending toward “settlement, conservatism...hardness and stability of social traditions” (238). Similar to his Eurasianist predecessors, Dugin believed that a “society’s juridical order and state institutions are expressions of the particular character of geography” (239). In Russia’s case, that meant a civilization-state defined by “upheaval and violence...as spiritual values in themselves” (239), authoritarianism, and opposition to “Liberalism in all its manifestations” (284). Among Dugin’s main prescriptions for restoring Russia to greatness was reconstituting Soviet territories: “Georgia must be dismembered and Ukraine annexed” (238). In all this, a reader could be forgiven for seeing a Russian version of National Socialism. One primary difference is the Eurasianist emphasis on multiethnic empire – made to order for the rulers of a revanchist, multiethnic state.
Therefore, it is not surprising that, as the Kremlin soured on Western liberalism, it would turn to Eurasianist ideas to justify an expansionist and authoritarian project. Putin signaled this change in an address to the federal assembly by citing Lev Gumilev’s passionarity as key to determining “[w]ho will lead and who will remain on the periphery, and inevitably lose their independence” (1-2). Dugin, who had long lectured privately to Russia’s future military leaders at the prestigious Academy of the General Staff, found himself in the public eye, appearing on television and granted his own radio show. Most prominent, of course, have been Putin’s annexation of Crimea and interventions in Georgia and eastern Ukraine, all territories Dugin had often called on the Kremlin to retake. Dugin even predicted “the design of the flag of the Donetsk Republic” (330). Altogether, Clover convincingly makes the case that Dugin has become the Kremlin’s unofficial political theorist – if only as a matter of convenience.
Yet, the latter half of Black Wind, White Snow has significant shortcomings. In what is foremost the history of an idea, Clover does not fully establish Dugin within the Eurasianist tradition of Trubetskoy and Gumilev. While Dugin’s ideas bear many similarities to those of earlier Eurasianists, the reader is mostly left to discern the resemblance and assume linkages; Clover traces few direct lines of influence. Moreover, Clover over-promises the extent to which his book explicates the Kremlin’s actions through the lens of Eurasianism. In the introduction, he argues that “[i]deas – both good and bad – play an underappreciated role in political life” (5) and that “[l]ooking at Russia’s recent behavior through the lens of Eurasianism [...] makes a lot of the current behaviour snap into focus” (17).
That the Kremlin is driven to defend territories that are not in all cases Russian, but does not ‘defend’ Russians in other states, is indicative: there are certain parts of the former Russian Empire that are seen as ‘ours’ and certain parts that are not. This dividing line appears to follow a strategic and cultural logic strikingly in tune with the theories of the Eurasianists who drew cultural frontiers across Eastern Europe, approximately where the Kremlin seems to have done the same. (16)Fascinating as this idea is, Clover does not return to it. In fact, the book’s final chapters, in which Clover attempts to show the Kremlin acting on a Eurasianist agenda (or at least exploiting Eurasianist ideas), read like a hasty addendum. Once again, Clover only sketches lines of influence. In part, this is because Kremlin decisionmaking is notoriously opaque, but may also be because Clover was caught unawares at a late stage of composition when his obscure intellectual history abruptly became politically relevant.
Black Wind, White Snow is a history of nationalism, yet rarely questions the idea at nationalism’s core: that there exists a primordial nation to be mobilized and harnessed by the state. This reflects Clover’s tendency to handle his biographical content more deftly than his characters’ ideas, which he presents more often than he scrutinizes. This may have been a deliberate choice, an acknowledgement that Eurasianism has never been about robust thinking, or even Eurasia. At heart, Eurasianism is a program of anti-Westernism, anti-liberalism, and political expedience, cynically adopted by Russia’s leadership because, for the time being, they work.
Friday, October 7, 2016
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
See, I hate this. I know I read this within the last five or so years. Looking up the plot summaries of many of the stories, I recall their general arcs, more or less. Some of them clearly made no impression whatsoever, but I did read the book. Yet, I didn't record it at the time, and my memory of the stories is considerably fuzzier than usual, much like Dear Life by Alice Munro, which I also had to enter years later after vaguely recalling that I had read it but never recorded doing so. Yes, I do find short story collections harder than usual to get through, unless listened to as audiobooks, but I have no justification for either my bad memory of these two or failure to make an entry.
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