Turbulent times

I knew a lot about politics when I was about fifteen, sixteen. I had faith in Stalin as a benevolent father of the free world. When my social studies teacher questioned the influence of Stalin, and portrayed him as an evil dictator I knew that it was not Stalin but his misguided advisers who were responsible for Stalin's dastardly acts. Not only I, but millions of people, and in particular, teenagers who thought about the troubles in the world thought of Stalin as I did, and when Stalin died in 1953, they mourned his passing and were worried about what would happen to the world.Those were amazing times. The Americans were engaged in wars to topple regimes, undermined the communists of Italy and France, sided with brutal dictators. went to war in Korea in support of the corrupt premier Syngman Rhee, They worked on the development of the Hydrogen Bomb and Klaus Fuchs passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. I make this embarrassing confession, because I am reading Khrushchev Remembers, his kind of autobiography with notes by the eminent commentator on Soviet affairs, Edward Crankshaw, It was John Le Carre who aroused my interest in politicians who changed the world. I started with Mikhail Gorbachev. To understand him I had to understand his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev's story has an epic dimension, the son of an illiterate minor from Donbass, in the industrial part of Western Ukraine, a simple man with very little education, who had the talent for getting things done. He came under the wing of Kaganovich, one of Stalin's henchmen, Stalin took a liking to him, perhaps he saw in him the ultimate worker who rose to power in the workers' communist state. Not being an old-time party leader, and being a man of limited education, Stalin didn't feel threatened by him. Khrushchev moved among terrible, brutal men in Stalin's circle. His life was in constant danger. But he had a touch of humanity. He could relate to simple soldiers, and working with Zhukov and other Russian generals, had a great impact on the Russian victory at Stalingrad. This simple man in his ill cut suits and coarse peasant manners, changed the world by acknowledging the crimes of Stalin. He also opened my eyes. His narrative, his picture of Stalin's inner circle, men who were household names when I grew up, has a Shakesperean dramatic quality. Perhaps only those who lived through those times can appreciate this. Remembering times past is one of the rewards of old age.

Culture vulture

I chatted with an old friend about university education. Though we go back many years, almost his entire life, he is my son's age, by the time he went to university university was almost unrecognisably different from the university I went to and society was very different too. My friend asked me what I studied at university. I left school believing that there are only three things worth studying, Latin, Greek and Mathematics. Where I picked up this piece of nonsense I don't know, but it was in line with my idea of becoming a cultured person. I was quite unprepared for university, but had enough of school. I thought that I was a grown up. Schools were for kids. The thought that I need to learn something at university that would help me earn a living never crossed my mind. You could leave school and walk into a job any day. Making money didn't concern me either. There were more important things in life than getting rich. I wanted to be a cultured, civilised man, and to attain that I had to understand ancient civilisation, language, and to understand science and rational thinking I had to understand mathematics. The reality was that I didn't have enough grounding in mathematics to cope with it at university level and had to give it up, and although I persisted with Latin, and a smattering of Greek, I didn't have a real flair for either. Ironically, I had just enough Latin to teach it, though at least one of my students far outstripped me in no time. He ended up becoming a Professor of Russian. However it appears that I somehow, far from intending to, projected an image of someone who knew much more than in reality I did. People thought of me as an 'intellectual' whatever that is, someone who has views out of step with popular views. Someone who knew me when we were both young, someone whose learning far exceeded anything I could ever aspire to said that at the time he was terrified of me. I must have had the look of a classical scholar that concealed my ignorance. Yet deficient as I am in scholarship and education, I have huge problems with the celebration of post-truth. I can't accept the idea that truth is negotiable, that my gut feeling is as valid as that of the opinion of scholars, scientists, experts. We don't know where this scepticism, doubts about empirical evidence might lead to, but decisions based on gut feeling, ignoring historical and scientific evidence caused tremendous harm in the past.

The burdens and frustrations of office

The failure of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi

Yet again, my old friend, The New Yorker, provided me with food for thought. An article about El-Sisi, the military ruler of Egyptian, by Peter Hessler, who spent five years reporting  from Egypt raised questions about the challenges of democracy, the obligation of a man with power to step in and take control, and the pernicious effect of dependence on charity. The promise of the revolution that heralded democracy and brought to power Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood resulted in chaos and political paralysis. In stepped the army and the general in charge of intelligence, the self-effacing General El-Sisi, seemingly untainted by corruption. He proved to be ruthless in face of military challenges. He confronted threats by Islamist extremists in Sinai, terrorism on the ground and in the sky. As a soldier he was trained to fight the enemy, whoever that may be. What he was not trained to do was to address economic challenges. Egypt's economy is entirely dependent on largess from the Arab states, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, and Qatar, which consider Egypt a a bulwark of Suni Islam against the threat of Iran and the Shiites. The United States funds the Egyptian military. But this dependence on hand-outs stunted the development of the economy. People with education and skills cannot find outlet for their creative talents, and unemployment or underemployment as well as a lack of hope and prospects leads to restlessness and ultimately threatens El-Sisi's rule, and political stability. There is a parallel with the threats faced by Mickhail Gorbachev, whose initial promise and success was undermined by his inability to manage the economy. It is failure to address unglamorous micro-details while focusing on the grand overall schemes that result in failure.

Jews are news

Guilty as charged! I wrote a letter to the Editor, which elicited replies and added to the controversy. My letter pointed out that the term 'Occupied territory' as it applies to the former land of Palestine has a different meaning for Arabs, Jews, and the rest of the world. When Arabs, i.e. Jordan occupied East Jerusalem, drove the Jews out, destroyed the synagogues, that was OK, but when, after 1967, the Jews moved back to Jerusalem, that was 'occupation' Although some people approved of my letter, and others had disagreed, no one picked up on the obvious historical truth that was my point. Suddenly the newspaper is full of letters about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. When there is no news, bash Israel, and by implication, the Jews. Today there were two long opinion pieces on the subject, one presenting the Palestinian side, arguing on points of international law, the other presenting the Israeli side, taking a broad historical perspective, going back to the Ottoman Empire, the creation of the Arab kingdoms by the British after the First World War, and the promise of a homeland for the Jews.  Both articles are right in essence, but neither comes to grips with the present reality, that the Jews are there to stay in the land formerly known as Palestine, and the Arab refugees who fled from there have nowhere else to go and have lived on international charity for the last sixty years. The New Zealand government's official position is that it support a two state solution  and sees Israel's, and especially Benjamin Netanyahu's intransigence as the one great obstacle to this ideal solution. Hi presto! Murray McCully has the answer to this intractable problem that had eluded all the other great statesmen for two generations. Well, Mr, McCully, I am entirely on your side, I totally agree with you. A two state solution would be an admirable resolution of the problem of two people sharing the same land, but only if Jews can live in peace among Arabs without fear of being murdered just as Arabs live among Jews in Israel. Unfortunately such a radical solution has not proved to be acceptable to the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs (don't call them Palestinians, because that implies that only the Arabs who fled from Palestinian are Palestinians). Unfortunately understanding the issues confronting the Jews of Israel is beyond many New Zealanders who read the newspapers and listen superficially to the news. Even Tom Scott, a prodigiously talented left leaning cartoonist, playwright and film maker, depicted the Arab Israeli conflict in images reminiscent of the images of the Jew in der Sturmer, a huge, overpowering, Israel bullying poor wee, small Murray McCully.

Learning from history to understand the present

John Le Carre is a writer who always intrigued me. He is a convoluted but wonderful story teller, and in his Cold War, Smiley novels he created an imaginary world which somehow seemed to have an uncanny resemblance to a secret but real world of the Cold War. Were Smiley and his crew like real spies, and how real was his nemesis, Karla? Le Carre's latest book, The Pigeon Tunnel, is a series of essays about people he had met and incorporated in his fiction. As always, John Le Carre tells great yarns. Reading The Pigeon Tunnel led me to read about the man who killed off the Cold War, Gail Sheehy's very readable Mikhail Gorbatchev, The Man Who Changed the World. Gorbachev was the protege of Yuri Andopov, head of the KGB, the only institution in Brezhnev's Soviet Union largely untainted by corruption, until he became the General Secretary of the Communist Party and head of the Soviet Union in 1982. Was Andropov Le Carre's Karla? Andapov fostered Gorbachev's vision of an egalitarian communist society free of corruption. To understand Gorbachev, you have to understand Andropov, but also Khrustchev, who in his 1956 denunciation of Stalin, attempted to steer the Soviet Union away from Stalin's bloody legacy. And to understand Putin you have to understand Gorbachev. Khruschev, Gorbachev and Putin.all tried to free, not successfully, Russia and Russian communism, from the stranglehold of corrupt apparatchiks, servants of the regime who peddled influence and used their power, often petty and pernicious power, to feather their own nests, while impoverishing their society, the people all around them. Both Khruschev and Gorbachev ultimately failed and were defeated by entrenched forces, Khruschev by Brezhnev, Gorbachev by Yeltsin and his supporters. The jury is out on Putin. He managed to survive and project the image of the strong leader, who enjoys popularity because a strong ruler makes for stability. But reading about Gorbachev prompted me to ask questions about other leaders who took strong stands and were maligned for it. What do we know about Assad who was undermined by fundamentalist Islamist rebels enjoying American patronage. He may not be a good guy, may not have the charm of a Gorbachev, but he is an educating, intelligent man. Syria would be a happier place had his autocratic rule not been undermined. This is something that Putin understands, but Western leaders don't.

The meaning of words

Dave Armstrong, musician, playwright and left leaning weekly columnist of the DominionPost is a writer whose prejudices I, an unreconstructed socialist, often share. Yet when this week's article was entitled 'Three cheers for a brave Murray McCully' I wondered what he was on about. I have some idea of the meaning of the word "brave", as in 'Brave Soldier Janos' who, in the story of Hari Janos captured Napoleon single handed and saved the Emperor's daughter. Brave, for me, means facing great danger with fortitude. I am not aware of Murray McCully facing such danger in proposing New Zealand's resolution on Israeli settlements in the last few days of New Zealand's tenure on the UN Security Council. So what was Dave Armstrong on about? John Kerry, the US Secretary of State whispered a few words in McCully's ear during his very brief visit to New Zealand, and McCully, like a good colonial petty chief, jumped to attentions. You want us to solve the world's most pressing problem, kick that uppity Jew, Benjamin Netanyahu in the teeth, or any other part of his anatomy, we will be glad to oblige. And what would be the down side? At the worst world peace would not break out. At best, we might be able to sell a little more meat to Arab countries. Certainly not to the United States, because that would displease the American farmers and would look bad to the electorate. 

So where is the bravery? Should McCully get a medal, or be just pensioned off to a comfortable diplomatic post where he may not have to face such dire danger, but would perhaps not be able to do much harm either.