The Cherry Orchard

This is a hard post to write, because everybody who’s watching the terrible tale of mass murder on the Virginia Tech campus can sympathize with the devastated students and faculty members who lived through the horror. I have nothing to say that will compare with their statements and their memorials, and with the journalistic coverage of the professionals who are close to the scene.

But I was baffled by the report I watched on yesterday’s NBC Nightly News, in which two college students described hiding under desks with the rest of their class as Cho Seung-hui shot, reloaded and shot some more. One of these students had been hit by a bullet, the other hadn’t, and both described themselves as terrified. That’s quite understandable, but I can’t be the only one wondering why a roomful of students did not try to overpower a lone gunman.

I thought this was the lesson of September 11, the lesson of United Flight 93: in the face of any type of murderous rampage, whether a carefully planned act of terrorism or a random act of insane violence, a crowd’s ability to overtake an attacker might offer their best chance. Sure, it takes incredible bravery to rush a guy with automatic weapons, even when the gunman is reloading, and there would have been casualties. But with ten or more students in a room, there is no question that the crowd could have prevailed within a matter of seconds.

I truly do not wish to cast dispersions on the suffering students who did not attempt to overpower Cho Seung-hui in Blacksburg. I am sure it was a lack of decisiveness, rather than a lack of courage, that led them to attempt a passive path towards survival. And, of course, I wasn’t there and I do not have the information to understand why this disaster played out the way it did.

But I do think it’s important for people all over the world to ask themselves the question: in a situation like the one in the Virginia Tech classrooms, can a crowd work together to overpower an armed attacker, and how can we all improve our chances of controlling situations like this?

I don’t want to get all survivalist at this moment, but I will say this: if I ever find myself a potential victim in this type of situation, and I truly hope I don’t, I will vote for “Let’s Roll”. I like the odds better.

I hope this posting is not offensive or wrong-headed. My sympathies go out to everybody who suffered directly from the horrid act at Virginia Tech.

I was away on a very refreshing vacation for a few days, which means I didn’t watch the evening news (or my regular favorite, Keith Olbermann, or my regular un-favorite, Bill O’Reilly) for about five days in a row. Here’s what I found on my return, when I checked in on the TV sound bites:

1) It’s impossible not to feel sorry for George W. Bush at this point, despite the incredible damage he has done to our country’s security, our country’s budget and our planet’s progress towards international understanding. It’s a telling fact that he has failed to follow the longstanding Presidential tradition of opening the baseball season by throwing out the first ball at a chosen stadium. The reason is obvious: there is no stadium of baseball fans in America, not even in Texas, that wouldn’t boo him off the pitcher’s mound.

But the President did address a captive audience of soldiers at California’s Fort Irwin yesterday, and the tapes show a tired, confused man straining to infuse his own words with conviction. Please watch his body language the next time you catch this politician on TV, and I think you will notice the same thing I’m seeing: Bush barely seems to believe his own words about Iraq anymore. My guess is that there are massive internal divisions plaguing the Bush/Cheney team at this point, and I wonder if the President might be smart enough to start realizing (a few years too late) how badly he has been duped by his closest advisers. The front man is starting to falter, and when I say “front man” I’m not talking about Tony Snow.

2) I’m pretty disgusted at all the talk about Democratic 2008 Presidential candidate fundraising. As I’ve said before, I really don’t give a fuck who’s raised $26 million and who’s raised $25 million. I’ve got one dollar and one vote to offer to any candidate who promises to manage our country’s future responsibly and intelligently, and all this talk of tying up the nomination with big-money bonanzas just makes me feel like we don’t live in a democracy at all

I’m also disgusted at the thought that three senators — Obama, Clinton and Edwards — are spending so much time campaigning for 2008 when there is so much important work the Senate needs to do now. My mind is not yet made up who I will support in this race, but my big one dollar and one vote just might go to the one politician of the three who convinces me that they are working hard NOW to help our country by their actions in the Capitol. Let’s live in the moment, candidates, okay? This type of electoral shenanigans is more palatable in peacetime — in time of war, it’s really very offensive.

3) I’m also sick of our nation’s romantic notions of a savior celebrity President. Most democracies on this planet are led not by their Presidents but by their Prime Ministers, who correspond most closely to our Speaker of the House. As far as I can tell, the most important elected official in the United States government right now is Nancy Pelosi, and I am very impressed by her focus, her cool unflappability and her resolve to forge her own path towards solving our problems. Why the hell shouldn’t I support Nancy Pelosi for President? She’s working hard to run our country, while the rest of these celebrities are working hard to look good on TV. Screw that nonsense — we’ve got problems to solve.

There’s my Spring Break catch-up. Go, Nancy, go!

This Hillary Clinton/Apple Computer ad mash-up that’s been making the rounds is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. However, it’s totally unfair to Hillary Clinton, who does not have a robotic personality (she’s actually just shy and not very telegenic, and in fact she’d be much more likable if she could be programmed), and who has never used her political influence as either a First Lady or a Senator to exert control over the citizens of America.

The fact is, the charge that Hillary Clinton advocates an Orwellian America comes from nowhere and is completely random. This short mock-ad is a very clever work of propaganda, but the cleverness of the underlying approach (make up a lie and put it on YouTube) is more disheartening than the cleverness of the cinematic work is pleasing.

I’m not even particularly a Hillary Clinton fan, by the way — but for all her faults, Hillary Clinton is no totalitarian Big Sister.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is almost definitely going to resign. Yay. One more liar down.

I don’t usually gaze into crystal balls, but here’s a rare Cherry Orchard political prediction just for the fun of it. Dick Cheney will resign the Vice-Presidency “for health reasons” by mid-summer. Condoleeza Rice will replace him, in an attempted “sacrifice fly” by the White House administration. Whether the sac succeeds or not, time will tell.

You read it here first.

So the Scooter Libby verdict is in. Like many Americans, I am happy to hear that Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff has been found guilty (and I’m happy to rub this in Fox News’ face by displaying their write-up of this news). But, of course, the wrong guy is going to jail.

Scooter Libby lied under oath about the justification for the Iraq War, and he’s now facing up to 25 years in jail. Libby’s boss also lied repeatedly to the American people about the justification for the Iraq War, but since he did not lie “under oath” he doesn’t face criminal charges for perjury.

It sure seems to me that anytime a United States Vice President speaks to the American people about a decision to go to war, his words are “under oath”. What oath? Gee, I don’t know … the oath of office, maybe? It’s sad to see a hapless bureaucrat like Scooter Libby face jail time for his boss’s crime, based on the technicality that he lied under oath whereas his boss simply lied.

Enough about that. I still hope — naively, perhaps — to see both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush eventually cooling their heels in minimum security prison for their dishonest and harmful leadership of our country’s foreign policy. But maybe I need to let go of my anger and think about where this country will head next. This is a subject I touched on in a brief piece I just wrote for the PBS blog, Remotely Connected.

The subject of this article is an engaging documentary about an earnest but underfinanced young politician named Jeff Smith trying to beat the odds and get nominated by his Missouri district’s Democratic party to run for U. S. Congress. Does money really count for everything in modern electoral politics? If not, why do we hear so much about certain candidates “locking up” their nominations by fund-raising? If not, why did Tom Vilsack give up? If not, why does the press coverage speak of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the only two viable Democratic Party presidential candidates?

I don’t want the race for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination to be “locked up” in fundraising bonanzas. I want at least ten candidates in this race. I want to hear debates — big, loud, angry, intellectually substantial debates. I want John Edwards to keep throwing curve balls. I want to get Al Gore back in the game (and if I could choose any favorite among them all at this point, Al’s my man). I even want to get Yellin’ Howard Dean and John “Investigate and Indict” Murtha into the mix.

It’s only March 2007, and our two front-runners for the Democratic nomination are already too bland, too careful, too poll-conscious for my tastes. Voters, let’s reject the idea of an early victor and demand a better race.

Of course, bringing this whole thing back to my earliest point of the article, I have to say that I don’t think the next American president will be a Democrat. I’m guessing the next President will be a Republican — John McCain, perhaps, or Tom Ridge, or Condoleeza Rice. That’s because I’m still guessing (and hoping) that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will be out of Washington D. C. and safely ensconced with Scooter Libby and a bunch of other felons in a minimum security prison sometime before the next Presidential election takes place. I’m still guessing Cheney will resign and go to jail first, and whoever Bush picks to replace Cheney will be our next President, because I think Bush will resign and go to jail soon after.

So our next President will be a Republican. But the winner of the 2008 Presidential election will be a Democrat. You heard it here first.

I just finished a powerful, mind-bending history book, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang (a Chinese novelist) and Jon Halliday (an American writer and historian). This thick but highly readable book chronicles Mao Zedong’s entire life, from his humble beginnings as a student, librarian and bookseller to his death in 1976. According to this book, it doesn’t matter how monstrous you thought Chairman Mao was; he was worse than that. The book reads like a diatribe, but the scholarship is persuasive. I did some fact-checking, and it appears that Chang and Halliday are simply laying out the sad truth: the political career of Mao Zedong was one of the great frauds of modern history.

The most surprising finding in this book is that Mao, who was never popular or highly regarded by his political peers during the Communist rise to power, ascended to party leadership by consistently sabotaging his partners. Mao was a ruthless “master player”, always looking beyond his organization’s immediate goals to calculate the long-term effects a military defeat or victory would have on his own position within the team. Chang and Halliday provide evidence that Mao regularly forced changes in battle plans or retreat plans, often with disastrous results, so as to deny his “comrades” great victories. This is most pronounced during the famous “Long March”, in which terrible decisions were made at great human cost, diminishing the size and strength of the escaping Chinese Communist Party until it was weak and fractured enough for Mao to begin to emerge as the party’s leader.

Sabotage seems to have been the sharpest tool in Mao’s toolbox, and he betrayed the trust of his colleagues over and over during his long career. I’ll never think of the Korean War the same way again, for instance; I’d always understood that the Chinese and North Koreans were close partners in this conflict, but Chang and Halliday lay out a strong case that Mao allowed North Korea to suffer a disastrous loss in a successful bid to raise China’s global profile and gain access to weapons.

The most upsetting part of the book deals with the agricultural collectivization project known as the “Great Leap Forward”, which caused the deaths of tens of millions of peasants from 1958 to 1961. Here, Mao’s personal perversity is clearly visible; he is unabashedly proud to have managed to have caused such extreme suffering and death, as if this proves his power and his determination. In an almost comic coda to this disaster (which was finally eased after other Chinese Communist politicians bravely defied Mao to end the horror), we see Mao reaching out to heads of state in Iron Curtain-era Eastern Europe by advising them to torment their own populations as successfully as he has in China. Not surprisingly, even the communist leaders of Eastern Europe found Mao’s instructions unappealing, except for the leaders of Albania, who fell for it.

I’m planning to read more about the Chinese peasant genocide of 1958-1961. As I read these chapters, the word “slavery” kept popping into my head. That’s the clearest description of what China’s government achieved during this program: a handful of coastal leaders managed to turn the world’s most populous country into a slave society. It’s quite frightening to see how easily this was achieved.

On an existential or psychological level, a portrait of Mao emerges. He was brave, ambitious and quite smart. He appeared to be a happy and lustful person, without a shred of idealism or humane warmth. Indeed, he mocked and denigrated anyone in his orbit who expressed idealistic or romantic notions, and this ability to undercut the idealism of his “revolutionary” party served him well.

The Dalai Lama bitterly referred to Mao Zedong as his “greatest teacher”, since Mao taught him how venal and destructive a single human being can possibly be. Based on this book, I’ve still got some learning to do.

There’s been a lot of reaction to Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, so I checked it out.

Pro-Israel opponents of the book claim that Carter is equating Israel’s painful Palestinian conflict with the former white government of South Africa’s exploitative policy of apartheid. Other critics have pointed out other signs of a biased attitude towards Jews in the book. I’ve checked it out, and it seems to me these charges are unfounded.

Jimmy Carter knows a lot about the Israeli-Arab conflict. As the broker between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in the 1970’s, he demonstrated great leadership and finesse. There’s no strong evidence that the former President has a biased attitude towards any group. What about the comparison to apartheid? Well, it’s a harsh criticism, but Carter is calling the shots the way he sees them.

29 years ago, Jimmy Carter showed the world where his convictions lie: with peace, with compromise, with a humane sense of justice. Israelis and Palestinians are both well-served by Carter’s book, and I hope many in Israel and Palestine will read it.

Suffer in silence. So you were removed from your home, and informed you had no right to live there. So you were told that you were an insect, that your family was a family of insects. So you were barred from working where you have always worked, even though you did a good job there and everybody liked you. So you were put in a train. So you were stripped of your clothes in the cold. So they took all your food away. So your family was shot. So they made you march. So they put you in a camp. So you were forced to breathe poison gas. So your kids were killed. Suffer in silence. Shut up and take what you deserve.

This blog hasn’t been very cheerful the last few days. I’ve been immersing myself in the historical records of one atrocity after another, and it’s been screwing with my state of mind. So many facts to learn, so many pictures to look at, so much I still don’t understand.

But here’s one thing I’ve figured out: genocide works because the persecutors manage to shame their victims into silence. Fear and shame are two of the main weapons in the genocidal toolbox, and we need to ask hard questions about why so little is known about the atrocities of our time. Where is the literature of the Ukranian Holodomor (a word I’ve just learned today)? Who is the Primo Levi, or the Cynthia Ozick, or the Steven Spielberg of Cambodia, of Rwanda, of the Ukraine, of China, of Bosnia, of Darfur? Dave Eggers is doing his best, but mostly there is silence.

It happens that silence is what the persecutor wants to hear from his victims. The experts know what they’re doing, and they know how to manipulate and dehumazine their targets into submission and silence. This is why our modern planet cannot stop the threat of genocide, even today. The technique still works, and it’s happening again as we speak.

One of the several books I’m reading is The Holocaust Chronicles, which begins with this line: “It exists alone in history.” Hardly. This is a question I brought up earlier in this series: why is so much known about the Jewish holocaust and so little about all the others? Well, maybe the Jews were the first people to actually speak — loudly, defiantly, and absolutely incessantly — about what happened to them. I’m proud of this. I’m even proud to be continuing to complain about it here today, and I’m not halfway done complaining yet.

How about you — when are you going to complain about it?

Our inquiry into the meaning of “genocide” continues. Yesterday we looked at the most common template for genocide, in which a “suspect” minority is attacked in time of war. The Armenian massacre, the Jewish Holocaust and the Rwandan massacre all fit this pattern, and so do the the horrifying crimes Saddam Hussein committed against Kurds in northern Iraq during the final years of the Iran-Iraq War. Recent genocidal disasters in the former Yugoslavia (involving Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo and Albania) fit this pattern as well, and so does the genocide currently raging in civil-war torn Darfur.

But it’s too early to conclude that war is the necessary and sufficient explanation for genocide, because (strangely enough) the two worst genocides of the last hundred years contradict this thesis completely. The two worst recorded genocides of all time took place during peacetime, and were targeted against utterly placid and defenseless people. I’m speaking of the two forced famines that decimated the peasantry of Russia in the 1930’s and the peasantry of China in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and of the two incredible monsters who committed these acts. Ladies and gentleman, meet the two champions in the all time pantheon of bureaucratic murder: Joseph Stalin (7 million deaths in 2 years) and Mao Zedong (20 to 30 million deaths in 3 years).

Unlike the Jews or Armenians of Europe or Tutsis of Rwanda, the victims of the vast Russian and Chinese genocides never had the catharsis of victory or judgement against their persecutors. Joseph Stalin decimated his nation’s population and went on to rule as the Great Father of Russia for 20 more years until his death in 1953. Chairman Mao decimated his nation’s population and went on to rule as the mystical oracle of China for 25 more years until his death in 1976. Neither nation has ever mourned for its sins. You think Turkey is in denial? Let’s talk about China if you want to talk about denial …

But let’s start with Russia and Joseph Stalin, because his holocaust came first. Stalin, newly powerful as the sole leader of the fledgling Communist nation, embarked in 1931 on an aggressive program of farm collectivization designed to “increase productivity” and erase bourgouis notions of private ownership across the Russian countryside. Collectivization was a Marxist ideal, but in Stalin’s perverse hands the idealistic project never had a chance, because the farmers were essentially transformed into slaves.

They could not keep up with required yields, and the result was a national starvation. It’s not clear to what extent the government leaders in Moscow cared that the great agricultural project had failed, and to what extent they were actively scheming to trim their population by forced famine.

Thirty years later this pattern repeated itself almost exactly in China, which also suffered from economic problems due to population excess. The similarities between Russia’s “Five Year Plan” and China’s “Great Leap Forward” are quite stunning, though Mao’s scale was significantly larger.

Fifteen years later, yet another Communist dictator, Pol Pot of Cambodia, carried out a program of genocide against his own population that also resembled the Russian and Chinese atrocities. Victims were estimated at 1.7 million.

The Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot template — genocide for population control — provides a strong contrast to the more common war-based genocide template we discussed yesterday.

Despite the strong contrast, though, one principle stands: genocide always serves a functional purpose. Whether the purpose is economic (Russia, China, Cambodia) or military/strategic (Turkey, Nazi Europe, Iraq, the Balkans, Rwanda, Darfur), genocides don’t happen by accident. Genocides happen because governments plan them.

Comments welcome again … and I’ll write another installment on this topic tomorrow.

Before I dive into the following inquiry, I’d like to clear up why I think I’m qualified to write about history even though I have no training as a historian (though I have degrees in philosophy and computer science and consider myself well-read).

The fact is, our “experts” aren’t getting the job done. History is an absolutely critical piece for anybody trying to understand modern politics, and in fact a good understanding of the past and present is probably the single most important tool in the toolbox of anybody engaged in a political field (as a journalist, a candidate, a commentator or a supporting player). When it comes to strong popular coverage of the stunningly important debates of the day, though, it seems like we’ve let the room get taken over by yammering monkeys. There’s a lot of noise, but nobody’s saying much at all.

I think we should do better. In the series of posts I’ll be writing for the next few weeks, I’m focusing on one particular question, and I hope you’ll help me figure out the answer by posting comments if you’d like.

It’s a simple question, the kind only an amateur would ask. What is genocide?

What is genocide? Well, let’s see what some of these events share in common. Thinking about, say, the Turkish murder of a million and a half Armenians during World War I, the Nazi Holocaust during World War II, and the monthlong killing spree in Rwanda in which a million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus, one big fact pops out right away. All three of these events occured during wartime, and the victims were ethnic minorities who were considered likely to betray their nations to invading armies.

The nation of Turkey (during the last years of the Ottoman empire) was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary against France, Britain and Russia in the First World War. After Turkey lost critical battles to the Russians, the government resolved that the minority population of Armenian Christians were likely to welcome the coming invaders, and planned to kill them all. They carried these plans out for three years.

The Jews of the varied nations of Europe were already reeling from the incredible discrimination and dehumanization of the German Nazi regime when the death trains began rolling in 1942. The Nazi brand of anti-semitism has deep roots, but the German drive to clear Eastern Europe of Jews during its vicious war against Russia was rooted in military strategy as well.

The Rwandan million-person massacre of 1994 was, incredibly enough, a carefully plotted and insidiously executed political maneuver. Hutus form the majority population of Rwanda, but remained in many ways economically and politically subservient to the wealthier minority Tutsis. In 1994, the weak Hutu-led government seemed about to collapse to a powerful invading force of Tutsi exiles when a Hutu radio station began broadcasting instructions that all Tutsis must die (the machetes had already been distributed).

What is genocide? Well, it seems to have a hell of a lot to do with war. Ahh, those masters of war! Genocide belongs to them too (no, to us, all of us, since we are all to blame).

Here’s a slogan more people should hear: War Causes Genocide. War causes genocide like cigarettes cause lung cancer. Something to think about the next time you’re about to reach for a pack, or call up some troops.

More on this subject to follow, of course! Please feel free to comment and tell me how you think this inquiry is going so far.