Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

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Cutting morality

Published by peter on 2010-10-16 in Economics and Politics. Closed

When, in 2 or 5 or 25 years,  we look back on this strange, phony-war period of wasted economic opportunity, we will wonder why the lessons of the Great Depression – lessons that we know, and that we know that we know – are not being applied by those with the power to decide levels of Government spending:  Congress in the USA, the ConDem coalition in the UK, austeritarians everywhere.    The reasons for the drive to austerity cannot be ignorance, for we know full well that this policy is inappropriate in the present circumstances.   Here is Robert Skidelsky, economist and Keynes’ biographer, writing in the Financial Times this week (2010-10-13) showing the wrong-headed-ness of a policy of cutting spending in a recession:

David Cameron, Mr Osborne, and Nick Clegg appear to believe in something called “crowding out”. This is the view that for every extra pound the government spends, the private sector spends one pound less.  Jobs created by stimulus spending are jobs lost by the decline of private spending. Any stimulus to revive the economy is doubly damned: not only does it fail to stimulate, but, because government spending is less efficient than private, it reduces the economy’s longer term recovery potential.
Applied to the deficit, the “crowding out” thesis takes two forms. The first is “Ricardian equivalence’’. Government borrowing is simply deferred taxation, because it produces no revenue to pay for it. Households save more to pay the higher taxes they expect. This means that any extra income created by the deficit will be saved, not spent. Net stimulus: zero.
The other leg of the “crowding out” argument is that government borrowing causes interest rates to rise. There is a fixed lump of saving. The more the government borrows, the more private borrowers will have to pay for their loans.
A refinement of this argument is “psychological crowding out”. In this version it is not a shortage of saving, but a shortage of confidence in the government’s creditworthiness – due to a fear of default – which causes interest rates to rise. Either way the deficit “crowds out” private investment. Net stimulus: zero.
The supposed implication of this type of argument is that in the short-run the deficit can do no good; and that in the slightly longer term it harms the potential for recovery. What the cutters have to believe is that every pound of deficit reduction will be matched by an extra pound of private sector spending.  That is, if the government weren’t spending this money, the private sector would be, and making much better use of it. Mr Osborne’s programme is a beautiful cure for recession, provided there’s no recession to cure!
Keynesians do not deny the possibility of “psychological crowding out”: markets are subject to all kinds of irrational hopes and fears. But what the cutters mean by “crowding out” can normally only happen at full employment.  At full employment, extra public spending obviously subtracts from private spending. But this is not the position we are in today.
What Keynesians say is that when resources are unemployed, government borrowing is not deferred taxation: it brings resources into use that would otherwise be idle, and thus increases the government’s revenues without having to raise taxes. When the government borrows money for which there is no current business use, this increases people’s incomes and therefore the saving needed to finance the borrowing, without interest rates having to rise. And though confidence problems may occur even in an under-employed economy, the probability of the UK government defaulting on its debt is, if not zero, extremely low.
In short, the “crowding out” argument is false.  The problem is not the expansion of the deficit but the shrinkage of the economy. The deficit is the stimulant the economy needs to start growing again: its withdrawal guarantees stagnation or worse.”

With such knowledge, what forgiveness?  Ignorance of the appropriate macro-economic policy thus cannot be the reason for our political leaders adopting a policy of drastic cuts.  The reason for cutting now can only be a desire to reduce the total levels of Government spending to further some ideological agenda, regardless of the deleterious economic and social consequences of the policy.
In Britain, the Conservative and Unionist Party has prepared for this ideological moment for some time, despite appearances to the contrary.  In the period leading up to the June 2010 election, the Conservative party was awash with funds.  The party paid to place enormous campaign posters in central Liverpool, in the constituency of Liverpool Riverside, a constituency that has been held by the Labour Party since the constituency’s creation in 1983.  Liverpool Riverside was formed from constituencies which had been held by Labour since 1964 (Liverpool Toxteth, although for 2 years its MP was a Social Democrat), 1945 (Liverpool Exchange), and 1929 (Liverpool Scotland, before which it was held from 1885 by prominent Irish Nationalist, TP (aka “Tay Pay”) O’Connor).  In the election of June 2010, the Labour MP, Louise Ellman actually increased her share of the vote to 59%, and the Conservatives placed 3rd, with a mere 11% of the vote.   In other words, parts of Liverpool Riverside have not voted for the Conservative Party for more than 125 years, almost back to the time when the Party actively prevented Jewish emancipation.
Why would the Conservative and Unionist party waste large sums of money on campaign posters in a constituency it would never win?  The answer is in the content of the posters:  The posters were billboard size and showed a picture of Gordon Brown’s head with a slogan blaming him for increasing the national debt massively.   What they did not do was thank Brown for steering the economy successfully through the worst recession for 80 years, nor for saving millions from unemployment, nor for leading the G20 nations in policies to ensure the world did not suffer worse, nor for leading global efforts to re-regulate the financial sector to prevent a repeat of the events leading to the crash.   With such posters, the ground was being prepared for a push for austerity, even months before the election, and despite the warm and fuzzy noises of the Conservative leadership during the campaign itself.
These posters were the tendentious work of ideologues, intent on reducing the size of the state, regardless of any economic or social consequences, and undertaken with forethought.  Given the consequences of a policy of large cuts at the present time, and our knowledge of them, adopting such a deleterious policy is malicious and immoral, and shames all those who have promoted it.

In defence of secularism

Published by peter on 2010-09-02 in History, Politics and Religion. 0 Comments

Edmund Adamus, director of pastoral affairs at the Roman Catholic diocese of Westminster, London, is apparently upset at modern, liberal secular society, claiming (inter alia) that:

Our laws and lawmakers for over 50 years have been the most permissively anti-life and progressively anti-family and marriage, in essence one of the most anti-Catholic landscapes, culturally speaking – more than even those places where Catholics suffer open persecution.”

This is nonsense.  It was secularists – atheists, agnostics, non-believers, liberals, and anti-bigots – who led the campaign in Britain for Catholic emancipation, the right to vote, and the right to sit in Parliament, granted in 1829.   It was secularists who achieved the right for Jews to sit in Parliament from 1858 and the right to vote in 1867, something that the same political party currently ruling Britain stymied for a quarter century.  (The bill emancipating Jews passed the House of Commons in 1833, but was repeatedly blocked in the House of Lords by Conservative peers and bishops.  What reasonable person with knowledge of this history could belong to such a party?)  It was secularists, not the religious, who led the campaign which ended the deaths of women in illegal back-street abortions and gave equal rights to people regardless of their gender or colour or sexual orientation.  It was even  secularists who passed a law in 2001 – yes, 2001!  – that finally allowed Catholic priests and former priests to sit in the British Parliament.    If not for secularism and the progressive extension of political and social rights to all citizens, regardless of their religion or race or gender, Edmund Adamus would not even have the freedom of speech to voice his obnoxious opinions.
Few things make me angry.  Religious bigotry and racial prejudice are among them.  So too is this stupidity of religious conservatives, unable to see where there own self-interests lie.  Their interests are best served by a secular society and state which guarantees equal rights to all, not special rights to some on the basis of their religious beliefs or their gender or any other biological or social construct.  Britain is still not entirely there yet, with the fact of unelected, unrepresentative, and unaccountable Church of England Bishops still sitting in the House of Lords (and thus voting on legislation that impacts us all), and the country’s denial of religious freedom for the Head of State and his or her immediate family.  But the great progress in extending freedom to all that has been made these last 200 years is due to secularism and secularists, not to religious bigotry or obscurantism.

The DDR and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

Published by peter on 2010-08-25 in History and Politics. 0 Comments

In a recent post, I briefly reviewed Hans Kundnani’s fascinating book about the German left, Utopia or Auschwitz:  Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust.  I said that he had overlooked that the army of the DDR joined the Warsaw Pact forces which invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in August 1968.    It turns out I was wrong.

My apologies to Mr Kundnani, to whom I also owe the knowledge of this correction.   Although forces of the army of the DDR, the National People’s Army (NVA), did assemble near the border ready to invade, at the last moment their action was stayed.  The decision to stay them seems to have been made in the Kremlin on the advice of senior Czech communists who were supporting the invasion, a fact only confirmed recently.  Interestingly, it seems that during and subsequent to the invasion, the SED Government of the DDR never corrected reports which said that they had participated.

It was not until 2008, at an international joint project on the ‘Prague Spring’, that researchers from the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Graz, from Russian institutes and archives [sic] from other research institutions were able to provide a clear answer.  In Moscow they found previously unknown documentary evidence that the decision for the non-participation of the NVA in the invasion was indeed made on short notice by Soviet Party leader Leonid Brezhnev following requests by high-ranking Czechoslovak opponents of Dubcek.”  (Wenzke, p. 155)

References:
Rudiger Wenzke [2010]:   The role and activities of the SED, the East German State and its military during the “Prague Spring” of 1968. pp. 137-164 in:  M. Mark Stolarik (Editor): The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968:  Forty Years Later. Illinois, USA: Mundelein.
Hans Kundnani [2009]:  Utopia or Auschwitz:  Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. London, UK:  Hurst and Company.

Recent reading 4: Achtundsechziger

Published by peter on 2010-08-12 in Books, History, Literature, Politics, Recent Reading and Terrorism. 0 Comments


While elements of the left turned to revolutionary violence in most countries of the West at the end of the 1960s, three countries experienced this turn to a much greater extent than any other:  Germany, Italy, and Japan.  This fact has always intrigued me.   Why these three?     What facts of history or culture link the three?  All three endured fascist totalitarian regimes before WW II, but so too did, say, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Portugal, and Spain.  The countries of Eastern Europe, however, met the 1960s still under the Soviet imperium, and so opportunities for violent resistance were few, and in any case were unlikely to come from the left.   Spain and Portugal and, for a time, Greece, were still under fascism in the post-war period, so opposition tended to aim at enlarging democracy, not at violent resistance.   Perhaps that history is a partial explanation, with (some of) the first post-war generation, the 68ers (in German, achtundsechziger) seeking by their armed resistance to absolve their shame at the perceived lack of resistance to fascism of their parents’ generation.  Certainly the writings of the Red Army Fraction (RAF), the Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army give this as a justification for their turn to violence.
I have always thought that another causal factor in common between these three countries was the absence of alternating left and right governments.  With a succession of right-wing and centre-right regimes in Italy and Japan, and right-wing and grand-coalition (right-and-left-together) regimes in Germany, how were views in favour of socialist change able to be represented and heard?  Indeed, in the German Federal Republic, the communist party had been declared illegal in 1956, and remained so until its reformation (under a new name) until 1968.   And even the USA may not be an exception to this heuristic:  In 1968, the candidate of the major party of the left, Hubert Humphrey, was a protagonist for the war in Vietnam (at least in public, and during the election campaign).  And while the candidate of the major party of the right, Richard Nixon, had promised during the campaign to end the war, once in office he intensified and extended it.   For anyone opposed to the war in Vietnam, the democratic political system appeared to have failed;  indeed, one of those who had most publicly opposed the war, Robert Kennedy, had been assassinated. It is interesting in this regard to note that the Weather Underground only adopted armed resistance as a strategy in December 1969, a year after Nixon’s election.   In Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism view of democracy, a key role of political argument and verbal conflict is to bring everyone into the political tent.  If some voices, or some views, are excluded by definition or silenced by assassination, we should not then be surprised that those excluded try to burn down the tent.
And perhaps because I like the idea of acting according to (an empirically-grounded) theory of history, I always found the primary argument of the RAF very intriguing:  That by engaging in armed resistance to the capitalist state, the revolutionary left would force the state to reveal its essential fascist character, and that this revelation would awaken the consciousness of the proletariat, leading to the revolutionary overthrow of the state. Although intrigued by it, I never found this argument quite compelling:  First, it could be argued that a democratic state only has a fascist character in response to, and to the extent of, armed resistance to it.  So predictions of its fascist tendencies become self-fulfilling.   Second, the history of countries ruled by fascism in the 20th century surely shows that life under totalitarian rule makes organizing and engaging in dissident activities, particularly group-oriented dissident activities, less not more feasible.     Third, I believe strongly that not only do ends not usually justify means, but often means vitiate ends.     This is the case here:  suppose the violent left’s violent resistance had indeed worked in overthrowing the governments they were directed at.  What sort of society would have resulted?   What we know of the personalities of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and their revolutionary colleagues leads me to think that a Cambodia under the Khmer Rouges, rather than a Sweden under Olof Palme, would be a more likely description for life in a West Germany led by the RAF.  Thank our stars they failed.
These thoughts are provoked by some recent reading on the subject of leftist urban terrorism in the West, both fiction and non-fiction.  The fiction concerns the psychology and consequences of life underground, long after any thrill of plotting and executing armed resistance has passed.
First,  a novel about the Angry Brigade (AB), the lite, British version of the Red Army Fraction:  Hari Kunzru’s “My Revolutions”.   This is a gripping first-person account by someone who had participated in AB actions, and now, 30 years later, is living under an assumed name.  His past comes back to him, through some not-fully-explained, but dirty, tricks that British intelligence agencies seem to be running.  These dirty actions are (or rather, appear to be) targeted against those who were on the edges of the violent left, but not part of it, who have now risen to prominence in Government (Joschka Fischer comes to mind), and the narrator is used by the shadowy intelligence forces to blackmail or destroy the career of the target of the action.  The writing is fluent and plausible, and the tale engrossing.  Only occasionally does Kunzru trip:  Who ever uses “recurrent” (page 4) in ordinary speech?  (Some people may say “recurring”.)    Precisely how does the sun beat down like a drummer? (page 10).   But most of the novel reads as the words of the protagonist, and not the words of the novelist, indicating that a realistic character has been created by the author’s words.
The same cannot be said for Dana Spiotta’s “Eat the Document”.   Although this book too is riveting, it is not nearly as well-written as Kunzru’s book.   The story also concerns the later after-life of some formerly violent leftists, presumably once members of the Weather Underground, now living in hiding in the USA, incognito.   The story is told through the purported words of multiple narrators, a technique which enables the events to be described from diverse and interesting perspectives.  I say “purported” because too often the words and tone of different narrators sound the same.  In addition, often a narrator uses expressions which seem quite implausible for that particular narrator, as when the teenage boy Jason speaks of “recondite” personalities in suburbia (page 74):  these are not Jason’s words but those of the author.
These works of fiction are partly engrossing to me because I once unwittingly knew a former violent leftist on the lam – the Symbionese Liberation Army’s James Kilgore,  whom I knew as John Pape.  I wish I could say I’d always suspected him, but that is not the case.  Indeed, if anything, I suspected him of being a secret religious believer.  He was serious, always intense, and softly-spoken, and ideologically pure to the point of having no sense of humour. The Struggle was all, and life seemed to be all gravitas, with no levitas (at least in my interactions with him.  I have no idea how much of this serious demeanor  is or was his true self.)  Adopting a position as a committed revolutionary is certainly an interesting strategy for a cover;  one does not expect underground weathermen to be regular attenders at Trotskyist reading circles, but Pape was.  (And he did the homework!) But perhaps someone with a sense of humour does not join a movement of revolutionary violence in the first place, at least not in a democracy.
In the non-fiction category is Susan Braudy’s history of the Boudin family, one of whose members, Kathy Boudin, was a member of the Weather Underground.   As with Kunzru’s and Spiotta’s novels, this non-fictional account is also riveting.   It is, however, appallingly badly written. For instance, for a history, the book is very fuzzy about dates – when did Jean Boudin die, for example?  And much of the text reads like third-hand family anecdotes, perhaps interesting or amusing to the family but not to anyone else.  (Aunty Merle always was partial to rhubarb and once asked for it in a restaurant.)    And lots of very relevant information is simply not provided, for instance the prison sentences given to Kathy Boudin’s fellow-accused in 1981.   As a history book, this is certainly a book.
Finally, a quick report on Hans Kundnani’s superb analysis of the extreme German left, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust.  Kundnani argues that there were competing strains within the violent German left in the 1960s and 1970s:  one strain engaged in struggle (against capitalist and western imperialist injustice) as a form of remedy for the failure – or at least, the perceived failure – of their parents’ generation to resist Nazism, and other strains comprising German-nationalist and, suprisingly, even anti-semitic tendencies.    The presence of such tendencies at least explains how some on the far left in the 1960s ended up on the neo-Nazi right thirty years later.  Kundnani’s book is superb – interesting, well-written, humane, engrossing, and tightly-argued.  I had only one small quibble, which is perhaps a typo or an oversight:  On page 252, Kundnani refers to German military participation in a NATO-led attack on Serbian forces on 24 March 1999 as the “first time since 1945, Germany was at war.”  Well, the Federal Republic of Germany perhaps.   The DDR sent troups to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in August 1968.   If I was a former citizen of the DDR, regardless of my opposition to that invasion, I would be annoyed that my nation’s history seems to have been forgotten by people writing after unification on German history.
UPDATE (2010-08-25): My remark about participation by the DDR military in the Warsaw Pact invasion of the CSSR in 1968 is wrong.   The forces of the DDR were, at the last moment, stayed, as I explain here.    Thanks to Hans Kundnani for correcting me on this (see comment below).
References:
Bill Ayers [2001]:  Fugitive Days:  A Memoir. Boston, MA, USA:  Beacon Press.
Dan Berger [2006]:  Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. Oakland, CA, USA:  AK Press.
Susan Braudy [2003]:  Family Circle:  The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left. New York, NY, USA;  Anchor Books.
Uli Edel [Director, 2008]: Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex.  Germany.
Ron Jacob [1997]: The Way the Wind Blew:  A History of the Weather Underground. London, UK:  Verso.
Hans Kundnani[2009]:  Utopia or Auschwitz:  Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. London, UK:  Hurst and Company.
Hari Kunzru[2007]:  My Revolutions.  London, UK:  Penguin.
Chantal Mouffe[1993]: The Return of the Political.  London, UK: Verso.
Dana Spiotta[2006]:  Eat the Document.  New York: Scribner/London, UK: Picador.
Tom Vague [1988/2005]:  The Red Army Faction Story 1963-1993.  San Francisco:  AK Press.
Jeremy Varon [2004]:  Bringing the War Home:  The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley, CA, USA:  University of California Press.
Some previous thoughts on beating terrorism here.  Past entries in the Recent Reading series are here.

Agonistic planning

Published by peter on 2010-08-09 in Argumentation, Decision theory, History, Joint-Action Society, Marketing strategy, Military strategy, Planning, Politics and Team working. 0 Comments

One key feature of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations identified by David Halberstam in his superb account of the development of US policy on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, was groupthink:  the failure of White House national security, foreign policy and defense staff to propose or even countenance alternatives to the prevailing views on Vietnam, especially when these alternatives were in radical conflict with the prevailing wisdom.   Among the junior staffers working in those administrations was Richard Holbrooke, now the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama administration.  A New Yorker profile of Holbrooke last year included this statement by him, about the need for policy planning processes to incorporate agonism:

“You have to test your hypothesis against other theories,” Holbrooke said. “Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.” During Vietnam, he had seen officials such as McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s national-security adviser, “cut people to ribbons because the views they were getting weren’t acceptable.” Washington promotes tactical brilliance framed by strategic conformity—the facility to outmaneuver one’s counterpart in a discussion, without questioning fundamental assumptions. A more farsighted wisdom is often unwelcome. In 1975, with Bundy in mind, Holbrooke published an essay in Harper’s in which he wrote, “The smartest man in the room is not always right.” That was one of the lessons of Vietnam. Holbrooke described his method to me as “a form of democratic centralism, where you want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy’s decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don’t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.”  (page 47)
Of course, Holbrooke’s positing of policy development as distinct from policy implementation is itself a dangerous simplification of the reality for most complex policy, both private and public, where the relationship between the two is usually far messier.    The details of policy, for example, are often only decided, or even able to be decided, at implementation-time, not at policy design-time.    Do you sell your new hi-tech product via retail outlets, for instance?  The answer may depend on whether there are outlets available to collaborate with you (not tied to competitors) and technically capable of selling it, and these facts may not be known until you approach the outlets.  Moreover, if the stakeholders implementing (or constraining implementation) of a policy need to believe they have been adequately consulted in policy development for the policy to be executed effectively (as is the case with major military strategies in democracies, for example here), then a further complication to this reductive distinction exists.
 
 
UPDATE (2011-07-03):
British MP Rory Stewart recounts another instance of Holbrooke’s agonist approach to policy in this post-mortem tribute: Holbrooke, although disagreeing with Stewart on policy toward Afghanistan, insisted that Stewart present his case directly to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in a meeting that Holbrooke arranged.
 
References:

David Halberstam [1972]:  The Best and the Brightest.  New York, NY, USA: Random House.
George Packer [2009]:  The last mission: Richard Holbrooke’s plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan.  The New Yorker, 2009-09-28, pp. 38-55.

Death under communism

Published by peter on 2010-08-01 in Heroes, History and Politics. 0 Comments

Reflecting on the previous post and why the Slansky show-trial accused (and those similarly accused elsewhere in Eastern Europe at the time) were mostly executed, I remembered a chilling statement by Igal Halfin in his superb book about life under Soviet dictatorship:

In the Bolshevik tradition, death linked the individual in a final embrace with the brotherhood of the elect. Death could be a sublime, highly positive experience of self-sacrifice, or a negative experience, in which one’s expulsion from the society of men was rendered eternal. The unidirectional structure of the official autobiography takes us nearer the meaning of death in Communism. If in order to realize one’s true self one had to become a Party member, failure to do so meant cutting the story short. A life lost to the Party was a life aborted, an unfinished life, and it could be narrated as such. But nothing short of conversion to Communism fully satisfied the demands of the genre. This seemingly innocuous feature of Communist poetics inspired a morbid conclusion: the individual who was absolutely unable to see the light of Communism – human dross at best, a menace to universal salvation at worst – had to disappear; whereas at first Communist misfits were given a second and a third chance to reform, properly to complete their life’s journey and become good Communists, from 1936 onward they were shot.” (p. 274)

Reference:
Igal Halfin [2003]:  Terror in My Soul:  Communist Autobiographies on Trial.  Cambridge, MA, USA:  Harvard University Press.

Stalinist justice

Published by peter on 2010-08-01 in Books, Communism, Heroes, History, Intelligence and Espionage and Politics. 0 Comments

The Guardian recently carried a brief obituary of Marian Fagan, widow of Otto Sling (1912-1952), one of the accused in the show trials that took place in the CzechoSlovak Republic (CSR) in 1950-1952 while under Communist rule.    The obituary is written by their son, Karel Schling.   Sling had been a communist party official, and was one of the 11 (of the 14) defendants executed.  Fagan and her sons also spent time in prison as part of the investigations.  The show trials were arranged at Stalin’s behest and took place throughout Eastern Europe, with the partial exception of Poland.    The lead defendant in the Czech trials was Rudolf Slánsky, a Deputy Prime Minister who until shortly before his arrest had been Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC).

Apparently, the CSR President Clement Gottwald had initially resisted Soviet pressure to arrest Slánsky, especially because the two men were personally very close from their time in exile in Moscow.   Only when threatened with arrest and deposition himself did Gottwald agree to order Slánsky’s arrest, while still delaying the execution of the arrest warrent.    Sadly, an attempt by Czech emigre anti-communist intelligence organization Okapi to smear leading communist party officials by falsely associating them with western intelligence agencies resulted in an unsolicited letter being sent to Slánsky offering to help him to flee westwards (Lukes 1999), and this letter was then used as evidence for the Soviet allegations of treason against Slansky, forcing Gottwald’s hand.  This false letter appears to have been sent without prior knowledge or consent of western intelligence agencies.

The dialogue of the show trial was scripted beforehand by Soviet advisors to the Czech intelligence agency, the StB.  At least some of the accused had been promised lenient sentences if they followed the scripts provided to them, but these promises were broken.    To ensure that none of the accused spoke off-script (as had happened, for instance, in similar trials in Hungary), the trials were even rehearsed.   However, due either to independence of spirit or to memory lapses (the accused had been held in solitary confinement and tortured in other ways), not all the accused always followed their scripts: at times, defendants answered questions that had yet to be asked, for example. Because the trials were being broadcast live to the nation, the judges of the court – unable or unwilling to improvise responses – adjourned the trial proceedings immediately these off-script statements occurred.

Among those falsely arrested and convicted were some who were not even communists or ones not of long standing, including the economist Rudolf Margolius, Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade at the time of his arrest.  Margolius only met his alleged fellow-conspirator, Rudolf Slánsky, at the trial itself.    Despite a promise of a lenient sentence in exchange for following the trial script, Margolius was executed, along with 10 of his 13 co-accused.  Three were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The injustice of this trial and the sentences imposed are not lessened by the observation that Rudolf Slánsky may also have ordered the trial if his and Gottwald’s positions had been reversed, or that others, such as Sling, had been brutal Stalinists when in power themselves.   An innocent victim is still innocent even if he may, in some alternative universe, not be a victim.    According to Lukes (1999), Czech StB agents were appalled by the torture used by their counterparts in Hungary and Poland.   However, what strikes me as very interesting is that the Polish communist party leadership managed to mostly resist Stalin’s pressure to hold show trials and executions in this period, a subject deserving of another post.

Last month also saw the death of Sir Charles Mackerras, US-born, Australian-educated, British conductor and leading champion of Czech music.

UPDATE (2011-09-11):  An explanation for Polish recalcitrance is provided by Stewart Steven, who argued that the post-war Eastern European show trials were the result of a sophisticated and cunning US intelligence operation, called Splinter Factor and using a Polish double-agent, to create suspicions between pro-Moscow and nationalist communists across the region. As with any writings on intelligence, the truth is hard to determine:  there may or may not have been such a US intelligence operation with this goal prior to the trials; if it had existed, it may or may not have been important or catalytic in the creation of the trials; indeed, the publication of a claim of the existence of such an operation 20 years after the trials themselves may itself have been part of some later intelligence operation, and unconnected with the earlier events.

References:

An interesting obituary of Marian Sling in The Independent is here.  If nothing else, it shows that the petty vindictiveness of the stalinists who ran the CSR in the 1950s was not shared by ordinary citizens.

My prior salute to Czech reform communist Zdenek Mlynar is here.  Other posts in this series of heroes are here.

 

Igor Lukes [1999]:  The Rudolf Slánsky affair:  new evidence. Slavic Review, 58 (1): 160-187.

Heda Margolius Kovaly [1997]: Under a Cruel Star:  A Life in Prague 1941-1968.   New York, USA:  Holmes and Meier.

Ivan Margolius [2006]:  Reflections of Prague:  Journeys Through the 20th Century. Chichester, England:  Wiley.  The Margolius family website is here.

Stewart Steven [1974]:  Operation Splinter Factor.  Panther (Granada, edition published 1976).

Five minutes of freedom

Published by peter on 2010-08-01 in Argumentation, Heroes, History, Intelligence and Espionage, Literature, Mathematics, Matherati, Poetry and Politics. 0 Comments

Jane Gregory, speaking in 2004, on the necessary conditions for a public sphere:

To qualify as a public, a group of people needs four characteristics. First, it should be open to all and any: there are no entry qualifications. Secondly, the people must come together freely. But it is not enough to simply hang out – sheep do that. The third characteristic is common action. Sheep sometimes all point in the same direction and eat grass, but they still do not qualify as a public, because they lack the fourth characteristic, which is speech. To qualify as a public, a group must be made up of people who have come together freely, and their common action is determined through speech: that is, through discussion, the group determines a course of action which it then follows. When this happens, it creates a public sphere.

There is no public sphere in a totalitarian regime – for there, there is insufficient freedom of action; and difference is not tolerated. So there are strong links between the idea of a public sphere and democracy.”

I would add that most totalitarian states often force their citizens to participate in public events, thus violating two basic human rights:  the right not to associate and the right not to listen.

I am reminded of a moment of courage on 25 August 1968, when seven Soviet citizens, shestidesiatniki (people of the 60s), staged a brave public protest at Lobnoye Mesto in Red Square, Moscow, at the military invasion of Czechoslovakia by forces of the Warsaw Pact.   The seven (and one baby) were:  Konstantin Babitsky (mathematician and linguist), Larisa Bogoraz (linguist, then married to Yuli Daniel), Vadim Delone (also written “Delaunay”, language student and poet), Vladimir Dremlyuga (construction worker), Victor Fainberg (mathematician), Natalia Gorbanevskaya (poet, with baby), and Pavel Litvinov (mathematics teacher, and grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov).  The protest lasted only long enough for the 7 adults to unwrap banners and to surprise onlookers.  The protesters were soon set-upon and beaten by “bystanders” – plain clothes police, male and female – who  then bundled them into vehicles of the state security organs.  Ms Gorbanevskaya and baby were later released, and Fainberg declared insane and sent to an asylum.

The other five faced trial later in 1968, and were each found guilty.   They were sent either to internal exile or to prison (Delone and Dremlyuga) for 1-3 years; Dremlyuga was given additional time while in prison, and ended up serving 6 years.  At his trial, Delone said that the prison sentence of almost three years was worth the “five minutes of freedom” he had experienced during the protest.

Delone (born 1947) was a member of a prominent intellectual family, great-great-great-grandson of a French doctor, Pierre Delaunay, who had resettled in Russia after Napoleon’s defeat.   Delone was the great-grandson of a professor of physics, Nikolai Borisovich Delone (grandson of Pierre Delaunay), and grandson of a more prominent mathematician, Boris Nikolaevich Delaunay (1890-1980), and son of physicist Nikolai Delone (1926-2008).  In 1907, at the age of 17, Boris N. Delaunay organized the first gliding circle in Kiev, with his friend Igor Sikorski, who was later famous for his helicopters.   B. N. Delaunay was also a composer and artist as a young man, of sufficient talent that he could easily have pursued these careers.   In addition, he was one of the outstanding mountaineers of the USSR, and a mountain and other features near Mount Belukha in the Altai range are named for him.

Boris N. Delaunay was primarily a geometer – although he also contributed to number theory and to algebra – and invented Delaunay triangulation.  He was a co-organizer of the first Soviet Mathematics Olympiad, a mathematics competition for high-school students, in 1934.   One of his students was Aleksandr D. Alexandrov (1912-1999), founder of the Leningrad School of Geometry (which studies the differential geometry of curvature in manifolds, and the geometry of space-time).   Vadim Delone also showed mathematical promise and was selected to attend Moskovskaya Srednyaya Fiz Mat Shkola #2, Moscow Central Special High School No. 2 for Physics and Mathematics (now the Lyceum “Second School”). This school, established in 1958 for mathematically-gifted teenagers, was famously liberal and tolerant of dissent. (Indeed, so much so that in 1971-72, well after Delone had left, the school was purged by the CPSU.  See Hedrick Smith’s 1975 account here.  Other special schools in Moscow focused on mathematics are #57 and #179. In London, in 2014, King’s College London established a free school, King’s Maths School, modelled on FizMatShkola #2.)  Vadim Delone lived with Alexandrov when, serving out a one-year suspended sentence which required him to leave Moscow, he studied at university in Novosibirsk, Siberia.   At some risk to his own academic career, Alexandrov twice bravely visited Vadim Delone while he was in prison.

Delone’s wife, Irina Belgorodkaya, was also active in dissident circles, being arrested both in 1969 and again in 1973, and was sentenced to prison terms each time.  She was the daughter of a senior KGB official.  After his release in 1971 and hers in 1975, Delone and his wife emigrated to France in 1975, and he continued to write poetry.   In 1983, at the age of just 35, he died of cardiac arrest.   Given his youth, and the long lives of his father and grandfather, one has to wonder if this event was the dark work of an organ of Soviet state security.  According to then-KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov’s report to the Central Committee of the CPSU on the Moscow Seven’s protest in September 1968, Delone was the key link between the community of dissident poets and writers on the one hand, and that of mathematicians and physicists on the other.    Andropov even alleges that physicist Andrei Sakharov’s support for dissident activities was due to Delone’s personal persuasion, and that Delone lived from a so-called private fund, money from voluntary tithes paid by writers and scientists to support dissidents.   (Sharing of incomes in this way sounds suspiciously like socialism, which the state in the USSR always determined to maintain a monopoly of.)  That Andropov reported on this protest to the Central Committee, and less than a month after the event, indicates the seriousness with which this particular group of dissidents was viewed by the authorities.  That the childen of the nomenklatura, the intelligentsia, and even the KGB should be involved in these activities no doubt added to the concern.  If the KGB actually believed the statements Andropov made about Delone to the Central Committee, they would certainly have strong motivation to arrange his early death.

Several of the Moscow Seven were honoured in August 2008 by the Government of the Czech Republic, but as far as I am aware, no honour or recognition has yet been given them by the Soviet or Russian Governments.   Although my gesture will likely have little impact on the world, I salute their courage here.

I have translated a poem of Delone’s here.   An index to posts on The Matherati is here.

References:

M. V. Ammosov [2009]:  Nikolai Borisovich Delone in my Life.  Laser Physics, 19 (8): 1488-1490.

Yuri Andropov [1968]: The Demonstration in Red Square Against the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Report to the Central Committee of the CPSU, 1968-09-20. See below.

N. P. Dolbilin [2011]: Boris Nikolaevich Delone (Delaunay): Life and Work. Proceedings of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, 275: 1-14.  Published in Russian in Trudy Matematicheskogo Instituta imeni V. A. Steklov, 2011, 275:  7-21.  Pre-print here.

Jane Gregory [2004]:  Subtle signs that divide the public from the private.  The Independent, 2004-05-20.
Hedrick Smith [1975]:  The Russians.  Crown.  pp. 211-213.

APPENDIX

Andropov Reoport to the Central Committee of the CPSU on the protests in Red Square. (20 September 1968)
In characterizing the political views of the participants of the group, in particular DELONE, our source notes that the latter, “calling himself a bitter opponent of Soviet authority, fiercely detests communists, the communist ideology, and is entirely in agreement with the views of Djilas. In analyzing the activities . . . of the group, he (DELONE) explained that they do not have a definite program or charter, as in a formally organized political opposition, but they are all of the common opinion that our society is not developing normally, that it lacks freedom of speech and press, that a harsh censorship is operating, that it is impossible to express one’s opinions and thoughts, that democratic liberties are repressed. The activity of this group and its propaganda have developed mainly within a circle of writers, poets, but it is also enveloping a broad circle of people working in the sphere of mathematics and physics. They have conducted agitation among many scholars with the objective of inducing them to sign letters, protests, and declarations that have been compiled by the more active participants in this kind of activity, Petr IAKIR and Pavel LITVINOV. These people are the core around which the above group has been formed . . .. IAKIR and LITVINOV were the most active agents in the so-called “samizdat.”
This same source, in noting the condition of the arrested DELONE in this group, declared: “DELONE . . . has access to a circle of prominent scientists, academicians, who regarded him as one of their own, and in that way he served . . . to link the group with the scientific community, having influence on the latter and conducting active propaganda among them. Among his acquaintances he named academician Sakharov, who was initially cautious and distrustful of the activities of IAKIR, LITVINOV, and their group; he wavered in his position and judgments, but gradually, under the influence of DELONE’s explanations, he began to sign various documents of the group. . . ; [he also named] LEONTOVICH, whose views coincide with those of the group. In DELONE’s words, many of the educated community share their views, but are cautious, fearful of losing their jobs and being expelled from the party.” . . . [more details on DELONE]

Agents’ reports indicate that the participants of the group, LITVINOV, DREMLIUGA, AND DELONE, have not been engaged in useful labor for an extended period, and have used the means of the so-called “private fund,” which their group created from the contributions of individual representatives in the creative intelligentsia and scientists.
The prisoner DELONE told our source: “We are assisted by monetary funds from the intelligentsia, highly paid academicians, writers, who share the views of the Iakir-Litvinov group . . . [Sic] We have the right to demand money, [because] we are the functionaries, while they share our views, [but] fear for their skins, so let them support us with money.”

Spy vs. Spy

Published by peter on 2010-07-30 in Intelligence and Espionage and Politics. 0 Comments

The only convincing explanation I have heard of the recent USA-Russian Federation espionage scandal, where Russian sleeper agents were living underground in the USA this last decade, deeply embedded in American suburbia, and regularly sending useless (and mostly already-public) information back to Moscow Center is this:  That this was an elaborate financial scam with the sleeper agents being children of the KGB nomenklatura, and that embedding them in the USA as “spies” was a way to transfer state funds to them, in hard currency, legally.  Of all the explanations I have heard, this is the only one which explains how the operation could have continued so long without people at the Center raising objections to the poor quality and low frequency of the information being transmitted.   This explanation also perhaps explains the relatively muted reactions of both administrations  – the USA and the RF – over the case:  If these people weren’t real spies, Moscow would not be upset at them losing their cover.  If Washington also knew that they weren’t real spies, and knew that Moscow believed them not to be real spies, then Washington would not be too upset at learning of their long undercover presence.

Concat 1: The GEC

Published by peter on 2010-07-21 in Concats, Economics, Global Economic Crisis, History and Politics. Closed

A post to concatenate interesting material on the GFC and the GEC: