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The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?

How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?

How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.

The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.

Historical context – the War on Terror

It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.

Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:

expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges

The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,

Ignatieff’s approach

The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).

In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.

My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)

It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.

The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.

Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.

There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.

If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)

Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?

Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.

But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.

It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.

Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.

In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.

In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.

Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.

In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.

Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.

But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.

By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.

Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.

If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

An examination of terrorism itself.

In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)

Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:

insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power

With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.

Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?

Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.

Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.

Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).

The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)

The Arab future

Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.

Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:

the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
widespread lack of education
marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)

One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.

This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)

Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.

As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.

First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.

Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.

It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.

Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.

With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.

His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.

b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.

c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.

He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.

The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).

But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.

So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.

These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.

This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.

Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.

Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?

Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).

2. The threshold of repugnance

The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.

Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.

3. The world is watching

There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.

The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).

In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).

At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.

These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).

Notes and thoughts

This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.

I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.

I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.

This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.

Seven days later

Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).

The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.

What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.

Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.

Credit

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

New world disorder reviews

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff (2003)

Nobody likes empires but there are some problems for which there are only imperial solutions.
(Empire Lite, page 11)

Nations sometimes fail, and when they do only outside help – imperial help – can get them back on their feet. (p.106)

A bit of biography

In the 1990s Ignatieff managed to combine being a tenured academic, a journalist making extensive foreign trips, and a TV presenter. Without planning it, Ignatieff fell into a rhythm of publishing every 2 or 3 years short books chronicling the unfolding of the failed states he visited, and the chaos which engulfed some countries after the end of the Cold War.

These short but engaging studies build up into a series of snapshots of the new world disorder unfolding through the 1990s and into the post 9/11 era, mixed with profound meditations on the morality of international affairs and of humanitarian intervention:

Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism (1994)
Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1997)
Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000)
Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (2003)
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004)
The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (2017)

Ignatieff’s disappearance from British TV and radio around 2000 is explained by the fact that he moved from London to America to take up a post at Harvard. The gap in the sequence of books listed above is explained by the fact that in 2005 he was persuaded to stand as an MP in the Canadian parliament, that in 2006 was made deputy leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and in 2009 became Liberal Party leader. Under his leadership the Liberals lost badly in the election of 2011 and Ignatieff quit as party leader. He went back to teaching at university, in between-times undertaking extended trips to eight non-Western nations which form the basis of his most recent book, The Ordinary Virtues published in 2017.

Empire Lite: Introduction

Three of the four chapters in this book started out as magazine articles published in 2002, so very soon after the seismic shock of 9/11. The premise of the book as a whole is that America is an empire which refuses to acknowledge the fact.

The Americans have had an empire since Teddy Roosevelt, yet persist in believing they do not. (p.1)

But America is not like any previous empire, it doesn’t have direct control of colonies, it is an ’empire lite’, which Ignatieff defines as:

hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risk of daily policing. (p.2)

Nonetheless, America is the only global superpower, spends a fortune on an awesome array of military weapons and resources, and uses these ‘to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests’ (p.2) which is what he considers to be imperial activities.

In this book Ignatieff sets out to look at the power, reach and, in particular, the limits of America’s informal empire by looking at three locations he knows well and has covered in previous books, Bosnia and Kosovo in former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. In his previous books he has covered states which were collapsing into anarchy and attempts to bring peace to them. Now he is moving on. This book:

deals with the imperial struggle to impose order once intervention has taken place. (p.vii)

It focuses on the problem that, although many states in the modern world have failed or are failing and although some kind of humanitarian intervention is emphatically called for, yet intervention is dogged with problems. Two of the biggest are:

the practical limitations of what can be achieved
the tension between what the intervening power (almost always America) wants to achieve, and the wishes of the local population

After 9/11

The chapters of this book were written during the 18 months following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, after George Bush had declared a ‘War on Terror’ in a speech 2 weeks later (20 September 2001), and just as America was limbering up to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein on the controversial pretext of confiscating his weapons of mass destruction. The book was completed and sent to the publishers in January 2003 and the invasion of Iraq began on 20 March 2003.

In other words it was conceived and written in a very different climate of opinion than his pre-9/11 works and 9/11 dominates its thinking. Ignatieff says ‘the barbarians’ have attacked the imperial capital and now they are being punished.

And yet he warns that the ‘War on Terror’ may turn into a campaign without end. He quotes Edward Gibbon who, in his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, attributes the fall of Rome to what is nowadays called ‘imperial overstretch’, to the effort of trying to extend imperial control to regions beyond the empire’s natural borders. The Americans cannot control outcomes everywhere. This book sets out to examine the ragged edges where American hegemony reaches its limits.

Ignatieff says the terrorists who attacked on 9/11 co-opted grievances and the rhetoric of Islam into an unabashed act of violence. Violence first, cause later. What is worrying is the huge wave of support they garnered in parts of the Islamic world which feels it has been oppressed and humiliated for generations. It’s not just the obvious example of the Palestinians, oppressed by America’s client state Israel (Ignatieff mentions the pitiful inadequacy of the 1990 ‘peace treaty’ which set up the Palestinian Authority) but of dissident voices all across the Arab world.

9/11 highlighted the limitations of American influence in Islamic states. America has poured billions of dollars into Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and yet Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen and the Pakistanis founded, trained and supervised the Taliban which was giving Al Qaeda hospitality at the time of the attacks. And, as we have seen just a month ago (August 2021), the Taliban were to prove impossible to extirpate and have just retaken Afghanistan after 20 years of supposed ‘nation building’. So:

America may have unrivalled power but it has not been able to build stability wherever it wants on its own terms. (p.10)

Problems of empire

Ignatieff bubbles over with ideas and insights, too many to summarise. I was struck by his notion that the central problem of empires is deciding which of the many demands made on them that the imperial authorities should respond to. This is a fascinating insight to apply to the history of the British Empire, which never had enough resources to properly deal with the endless flare-ups and problems in the numerous countries it claimed to manage. Eventually it became too expensive and too complicated for a country brought to its knees by two world wars, and we just walked away. The mystery is how we managed to hang on for so long.

And now the Americans face the same problem. Ignatieff interprets the crisis in Afghanistan as a result of the way the Americans spent ten years lavishly funding and supporting the anti-Soviet resistance (in reality, a congeries of regional tribal groupings to which we gave the blanket name ‘the mujihadeen’). Then, when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, so did the Americans; walking away and letting the highly-armed tribal groups collapse into prolonged civil war, out of which emerged the extremist Taliban who were to give shelter and succour to al-Qaeda ten years later.

Another way of putting this is that America hoped, with the end of the Cold War, to benefit from a ‘peace dividend’: to reduce its armed forces, to withdraw from various strategic parts of the world, job done. On the contrary, as Ignatieff’s previous books have shown, imperial withdrawal from countries around the world did not lead to an outburst of peace, love and understanding but to the complete or partial collapse of many states and the emergence of new kinds of conflict, of ethnic wars, ‘ragged wars’, chaotic wars, and widespread destabilisation.

In these zones of chaos (Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia) the enemies of the West, and of America in particular, have flourished and now, in 2002, as Ignatieff was writing these pieces, American rulers had to make some very difficult decisions about where to intervene and how much to intervene, and for how long.

Chapter 1. The Bridge Builder

The bridge in question is the bridge over the River Neretva in the centre of the town of Mostar in southern Bosnia. The town actually takes its name from the bridge, which is called the Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Serbo-Croat, and from the bridge-keepers, known as mostari, who guarded it.

The Stari Most was built by the Ottomans in the 16th century, was one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most visited landmarks, and was considered an exemplary piece of Islamic architecture. It was erected in 1566 on the orders of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin.

During the Yugoslav civil wars Mostar suffered two distinct conflicts: after Bosnia-Herzogovina declared independence in April 1992 the (mostly Serb) Yugoslav Army went in to try and crush its independence. They were opposed by an army quickly assembled from both the Croat and Bosnian Muslim (or Bosniak) population (which both made up about a third of the city’s population). In June 1992 the Croat-Bosniak forces successfully attacked the besieging Yugoslav Army and forced them to withdraw from Mostar. Lots of shelling and shooting resulted in the town’s historic buildings getting badly knocked about, but not the bridge.

The bridge was destroyed as part of the second conflict, for after jointly seeing off the Serbs, tension then grew between the former allies, the Croats and Bosniaks. In October Croats declared the independence of a small enclave which they called ‘the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia’, supported by the government of neighbouring Croatia and this triggered the Croat–Bosniak War which lasted from 18 October 1992 to 23 February 1994.

The Old Bridge was destroyed by Croatian forces on November 9, 1993 during a stand-off between opposing forces on each side of the river. It’s said that more than 60 shells hit the bridge before it collapsed. The collapse of the bridge consolidated the complete ethnic division of the city into Croat west bank and Muslim east bank.

What’s amazing is the enmity that lingered on after the ‘end’ of this small war. The town actually had six bridges and some of the others survived but adult men were forbidden from crossing over to the ‘enemy’ side. Ignatieff tells the story of a Muslim lad who drove over one of the surviving bridges to visit a Croatian girl he’d known before the division. On the way back he was shot in the back of the head by the Croat checkpoint guards and his car slowed to a halt half way across the bridge as he died (p.33). To understand the Yugoslav catastrophe you have to get inside the minds of the soldiers who did that.

While UN peacekeepers eventually moved in to supervise the fragile peace, the European Union considered how to repair the devastated infrastructure all across the former Yugoslav states. Ignatieff meets the man charged with rebuilding the famous Mostar bridge, a French architect named Gille Pequeux. Ignatieff spends time with him, learning how the Frenchman is doggedly studying whatever architects’ plans still survive from the original bridge, analysing the ancient techniques the Ottomans used to cut the stone and carve runnels along the inward-facing sides of it, which were then filled with molten lead to tie them together. In every way Pequeux is trying to make the reconstruction as authentic as possible.

Ignatieff drolly points out that the president of Turkey offered to fund the rebuilding the bridge as a symbol of Turkey’s long-term presence/contribution/imperial occupation of this part of Europe. The EU politely turned down the offer and insisted it was done by one of their own. So it is drily ironic that the much-lauded rebirth of this ‘symbol of multiculturalism’ entailed a diplomatic rebuff of an actual gesture of multiculturalism (p.36).

But rebuilding bridges and houses and hospitals and mosques is easy. Reconciling the people who live and work in them is much harder. Ignatieff is blunt. The EU and America have spent over $6 billion ‘reconstructing’ Bosnia but it is still ruled by the crooks who rose to power during the wars and a big part of the aid money, like aid money everywhere, is routinely creamed off by corrupt leaders and gangsters.

Now the leaders of the rival communities never meet and rarely talk. They only get together for the photo opportunities required to make a show of unity for the press and EU officials to ensure the all-important foreign aid cash keeps flowing. As soon as the lights are turned off they turn away from each other.

For our part, the West is disillusioned. Real reconciliation has not taken place. Corruption is endemic. Some of the refugees have returned to their homes but for many, ethnic cleansing achieved its goals. They will never return. And many of the locals still hate each other.

And so Ignatieff points out that rebuilding the bridge is as important for the morale of the interventionist West as for the locals. We need it to prop up our delusions that opposite sides in a civil war can be reconciled. That our costly interventions are worthwhile.

This lovely essay rises to a poetic peroration:

The Western need for noble victims and happy endings suggests that we are more interested in ourselves than we are in the places, like Bosnia, that we take up as causes. This may be the imperial kernel at the heart of the humanitarian enterprise. For what is empire but the desire to imprint our values, civilisation and achievements on the souls, bodies and institutions of another people? Imperialism is a narcissistic enterprise, and narcissism is doomed to disillusion. Whatever other people want to be, they do not want to be forced to be us. It is an imperial mistake to suppose that we can change their hearts and minds. It is their memory, their trauma, not ours, and our intervention is not therapy. We can help them to rebuild the bridge. Whether they actually use it to heal their city is up to them. (p.43)

Beautiful rhythm to it, isn’t there? Lovely cadences. The flow of the prose beautifully embodies the flow of the thought, which is both clear and logical but also emotive and compelling. Ignatieff writes like this everywhere: he is lucid and logical, but also stylish and evocative. He’s the complete package.

Chapter 2. The Humanitarian as Imperialist

This essay opens in 2000 with Ignatieff attending a press photo shoot given by the UN representative in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, and a Spanish general, who have persuaded two local Kosovar politicians, one of them a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army nicknamed ‘the snake’, to accompany them to the site of an atrocity. In the night someone laid a landmine. This morning a van driving between two Serb villages ran over it, it detonated, killing two outright and blowing the legs off the one survivor. The two Kosovar politicians say the required words about the need to change hearts and minds. Kouchner delivers his patter. The photographers snap, the new crews record, then it is over and everyone jumps into their cars and speeds off.

Ignatieff accompanies Kouchner to a Serbian monastery. Father Sava, the head of the monastery, has been chosen as a ‘moderate’ leader of the minority Serbian community left in Kosovo when the war ended in 1999. Attacks on Serbs are continuing on a daily basis. Kouchner and the Spanish general assure Father Sava that they are doing everything they can to protect his community. It doesn’t much matter since the simmering Serb community doesn’t believe either Sava or the UN. Not when members of their families are getting blown up or shot every day.

The international community is having to rebuild Kosovo from the ground up, rebuilding its entire infrastructure, economy, everything, making it ‘the most ambitious project the UN has ever undertaken’ (p.51).

Once again Ignatieff repeats that the West wants ‘noble victims’ and doesn’t know how to cope when the victims (the Kosovo Albanians) turn on their former oppressors (the Serbs).

Bernard Kouchner

All this is by way of introduction to a long profile of Bernard Kouchner. Being Ignatieff, he sees Kouchner not so much as a person but as a walking embodiment of an idea, in this case the way the entire doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ has changed and evolved over the past thirty years.

Ignatieff says Kouchner came of age during the heady revolutionary days of Paris 1968. In a change-the-world spirit he volunteered to go serve as a doctor with the Red Cross in Biafra. However, he drastically disagreed with the Red Cross ideology of neutrality, non-intervention and non-reporting, removed his Red Cross armband and was among the founder members of the French organisation Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders. These guys are more prepared to call out the aggressors and killers in the war zones where they operate. Ignatieff considers the pros and cons of the two positions, the Red Cross’s studied neutrality, Médecins’ political engagement.

Ignatieff claims Kouchner also pioneered the involvement of the media in humanitarian aid, realising that people need to be shocked out of their complacency by images of horror and starving children on their TVs. He has been involved in various publicity stunts which drew down a world of mockery from liberal commentators but do, in fact, help to publicise his causes.

It is Kouchner, more than anyone else, who created the modern European relationship between civic compassion, humanitarian action and the media. (p.61)

Kouchner parted from Médecins when the latter won the Nobel Prize in 1999. This is because Kouchner had moved on from thinking aid organisations should speak out about evil, murder, massacre, human-engineered famine and so on, and had progressed to a more assertive position – that humanitarian organisations needed to get involved in political attempts to combat evil.

Aid organisations talk about ‘civil society’ and the ‘humanitarian space’ but Ignatieff says Kouchner thought this was an illusion. Aid agencies are supported and enabled by nation states. More than that, some crises aren’t humanitarian crises at all, they are crimes. Thus Saddam Hussein attacking his Kurdish population, trying to exterminate it and driving it up into the mountains to starve to death wasn’t a ‘humanitarian crisis’, it was a crime against humanity. Situations like this don’t call for the discreet, neutral aid providing of the Red Cross; they must be opposed by force.

This led Kouchner to become deeply involved in French and then UN politics. In 1988 he became Secrétaire d’état for Humanitarian Action in 1988 in the Michel Rocard cabinet, then Minister of Health during Mitterrand’s presidency. He served in the European Parliament 1994 to 1997, chairing the Committee on Development and Cooperation. He became French Minister of Health 1997 to 1999 in Lionel Jospin’s government, and then served as Minister of Health for a third time, 2001 to 2002.

Ignatieff says Kouchner’s positions, then, aren’t just interesting conversation pieces, but have directly influenced French government action. Thus his position influenced the French decision to back the UN resolution to send a peace-keeping force into Bosnia, part of which was meant to protect Sarajevo and Srebrenica. This failed miserably, with the Serbs bombing Sarajevo for years, and rounding up and exterminating 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica under the noses of the 300-strong UN peacekeeping force.

The logic of this sequence of events is that only force can work against evil aggressors, and it was this thinking which finally led the Americans to intervene, when they ordered air strikes against Serbian positions in defence of a Croat advance; and then onto the sustained bombing of Belgrade from March to June 1999 to persuade the government of Slobodan Milošević to stop the massacring of Albanian Kosovars.

So the appointment of Kouchner as UN Representative to Kosovo in 1999 was full of historical ironies and meanings. This was the man who had led humanitarian intervention away from the studied neutrality of the 1960s, through active calling-out of the bad guys, towards evermore aggressive intervention against the wrongdoers. So it is the evolution of Kouchner’s theoretical positions which interests Ignatieff.

In this chapter he reiterates what are, by now, becoming familiar points. One is that modern-day ‘humanitarian’ intervention is ‘imperial’ in a number of ways. First and foremost, imperialism means powerful states compelling populations in weaker ones to behave how the powerful ones want them to. But all this talk about reconciliation is far from disinterested altruism: the European nations want to sort out the Balkan issue and impose peace and reconciliation so as to remove a source of political instability which could (in an admittedly remote scenario) draw in either Russia or Turkey. More immediately, restoring some kind of peace is designed to cut off the influx of the Balkans’ most successful exports to Europe, which Ignatieff drily lists as organised crime, drugs and sex slaves (p.60).

Secondly, as in his concluding essay about Bosnia and Afghanistan and in The Warrior’s Honour, Ignatieff is very, very sceptical about the chances of anything like genuine reconciliation. The same ethnic groups are now at daggers’ drawn and will do everything they can to harm or kill members of the opposing groups. He claims that Kouchner was taken aback by the ferocity of the tribal hatred he encountered when he first arrived (p.63), and depicts Kouchner, when he’s not performing for the cameras, as an exhausted and disillusioned man.

As in the essay on Mostar, Ignatieff asks why the victims should be obliged to conform to the Western stereotype of the noble-minded victim? In reality, the second they had the chance, the ‘victims’ have turned the tables and are carrying out a campaign of revenge killings and terrorist atrocities against the Serbs still stuck in north Kosovo who haven’t been able to flee to the safety of Serbia, every bit as brutal as the violence which eventually prompted NATO to start bombing Belgrade.

Ignatieff sees Kouchner as an imperial viceroy who has been parachuted in to try and rebuild the country and prepare it for ‘autonomy’. He calls Kouchner’s power a ‘protectorate’ with a pretence of local autonomy but where rule actually stops with the imperial viceroy, as in the Raj, as in the British and French mandates in the Middle East between the wars. If that was ‘imperialism’, surely this is, too.

Once again, Ignatieff makes the point that maybe what Kosovo needs is not a moderately independent-minded Kouchner, but an utterly independent-minded General MacArthur, the American general who was given a free hand to rule Japan as he saw fit for six whole years after the Second World War. Maybe what the Balkans need is not less imperialism, but a more naked, out-and-out, assertive imperialism. Do this, or else.

(In the event Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008. As of 4 September 2020, 112 UN states recognised its independence, with the notable exceptions of Russia and China.)

Chapter 3. Nation-building Lite

Max Weber said a state is an institution which exerts a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence over a given territory. Generally, this monopoly is channeled via the institutions of a professional police service and an army. In a Western nation the police are subject to elected politicians and their work feeds into an independent judiciary, while the army is trained and led by professionals.

In a failed state, weapons are everywhere and the use of violence is widely dispersed. Usually, after a period of anarchy, warlords emerge who control the application of violence, at least in their territories, but often only up to a point, and sometimes cannot control permanently embedded, low-level street violence.

The essence of nation-building is to get weapons out of circulation – out of the hands of warlords, paramilitaries, criminal gangs and punks on the street – and restore that monopoly of violence which is one definition of a functioning state; and in so doing to create a space in which non-violent politics – negotiation, discussion and compromise – can be encouraged. It may still be a violent and corrupt state but it is, at least, a starting point.

Ignatieff pointed out in The Warrior’s Honour that, in quite a few failed states round the world, this is now harder to do than ever before, because modern weapons are so cheap and easily available. Some societies have become so soaked in guns that it’s hard to see a way back to unarmed civility.

Afghanistan

And so on to the specific country in question, Afghanistan. Ignatieff recapitulates the modern history of Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion of 1979, the West’s backing of the mujahideen who, once the Soviets left and the West walked away in the early 1990s, degenerated into a civil war of regional warlords. But Ignatieff’s interest in the story is, as always, in the principles and theory behind it.

Reconstruction

He repeats one of his central ideas which is that nation-building takes a long, long time, and then gives a striking example. America’s own nation-building, starting with the Reconstruction Period after the civil war, arguably took an entire century, right up until the civil rights legislation of 1964 finally abolished discrimination against Afro-Americans (p.85).

Reconstruction in Germany and Japan took about a decade, but in both countries the nation-builders were starting off with states with well-defined borders, established (albeit corrupted) institutions, and ethnic homogeneity. The populations of both countries wanted to be reconstructed.

Don’t say when you’ll leave

Igantieff makes the point that one of the secrets of success for an empire is the illusion of permanence, of longevity. As soon as you announce that you’re leaving at some fixed moment in the future, all the vested interests rise up and jockey for power. This is vividly demonstrated by the absolute chaos triggered when the Belgian imperial authorities abruptly withdrew from the Congo at independence, as provinces seceded and new parties jockeyed for power using extra-political means i.e. guns and coups. Same thing happened in Angola where the abrupt announcement of the imperial power, Portugal, that it would completely withdraw its forces in a matter of months led to civil war between the various independence paramilitaries, a civil war which dragged on for 27 years and wrecked the country.

Ignatieff says the Americans have a poor track record on this matter, and a bad reputation for walking away from chaotic states as soon as it suits them. This means local warlords realise they just have to mind their manners and bide their time.

The American withdrawal from Afghanistan, 2021

What Ignatieff didn’t know in 2002 was that the Americans would stay for an epic 20 years nor that the same rule of permanence was to apply: that as soon as Joe Biden announced the US were leaving, people all across the country realised the Taliban would swarm back into power and began making arrangements accordingly, i.e. Afghan police, army and local governors defected to the Taliban within days o fthe last Yanks leaving, so that the entire Afghan security apparatus melted away and the Taliban were in Kabul within a week.

Not so easy, running an empire, is it? Maybe the thousands of American academics who loftily criticise Britain’s chaotic withdrawal from Palestine or India will reflect on the cracking job their boys did in Afghanistan. With 70 more years of academic theorising and practical experience than the Brits, the Yanks still made a complete shambles of it.

Europe and America: division of roles

Ignatieff makes another snappy point: how can American Republican administrations, who are fanatically opposed to Big Government, find themselves spending tens of billions of dollars creating huge administrations in foreign countries? Easy. They get the Europeans to do it. The Americans are good at fighting (Ignatieff says that, in a sense, America is the last truly warlike nation in the West) so they handle the bombs and drones and special forces. Then the Europeans then move in with the peacekeeping police forces and the droves of humanitarian aid agencies, building schools, hospitals etc. Yin and yang.

Chapter 4. Conclusion: Empire and its Nemesis

Ignatieff describes modern Western nation-building as ‘imperial’ because:

its main purpose is to create stability in border zones essential to the security of the great powers
the entire project rests on the superior armed might of the West
no matter how much ‘autonomy’ is given to local rulers, real power always remains in Washington

In addition, he repeats the point that all empires have to ration their interventions. You have limited resources: which of the world’s endless trouble spots can you afford to address? Ignatieff points out the basic hypocrisy of ‘humanitarian intervention’ which is that it is only carried out in places which are convenient or important to the West. The West is never going to intervene in Chechnya or Crimea or Xinjiang because they are the preserves of other empires.

And the new imperialism is not only lite it is impatient. The British gave themselves generations to prepare the populations of India for independence. The UN gives places like Kosovo or Afghanistan 3 years before they have to hold their first elections. Hurry up! This is costing us money!

No imperialists have ever been so impatient for quicker results. (p.115)

Why? Partly the short attention span of the modern media, always hurrying on to the next story. (It took, by my calculation, about ten days from the American departure from Afghanistan being the biggest story in the whole world to being completely ignored and forgotten about.)

And then the short election cycles in democracies. Whatever plans you put in place now, at the next election in a few years’ time the leader of the opposition party will be promising to bring our boys home and save everyone a shedload of money. Western democracies, by their very nature, struggle to make long-term commitments to anything.

This concluding essay takes its title from a reflection on the enduring force of nationalism which empires find so difficult to counter. In the end, the European empires were defeated by the indomitable resilience of their colonies’ nationalist movements. This was the lesson the Americans should have learned from Vietnam. It wasn’t their weapons which won the Viet Cong victory, it was their nationalist convictions. Nationalism always trumps empire.

Nationalism will always prove to be the nemesis of any imperial nation-building project. (p.117)

Ignatieff didn’t know this when he wrote these lines, but they were to apply to the American invasion of Iraq which commenced just as his book was being published. The Americans overthrew a dictator and promised to bring peace and plenty but were utterly unprepared for the violence of the forces that then attacked them from all sides.

Thoughts

1. So Ignatieff’s message is that if liberal humanitarians really want to do good, they should really intervene: go in hard, defeat the bad guys, disarm them, force parties to the negotiating table, and run things themselves, setting up strong national institutions and teaching squabbling factions what democracy looks like in practice. And they have to do this for years, decades maybe, until the institutions and mindsets of civic society have been thoroughly inculcated. And only leave when everything is completely in place for the transition. In other words – imperialism. Not the kind of imperialism which exploits the native populations and rips off their raw materials. An altruistic imperialism, a humanitarian imperialism. But imperialism all the same.

2. When Ignatieff devotes a chapter of The Warrior’s Honour to the West’s growing sense of weariness and disillusion with humanitarian intervention, I suspected he was mainly talking about himself. This book shows a further deterioration in his attitude. I simply mean he has become markedly more cynical.

Across-the-board hopes have been crushed, ideals have been compromised, ambitions have been stymied. Much of this may reflect the appalling history of the 1990s, but I also think some of it may be a projection of Ignatieff’s own growing disillusion.

You feel this downward trajectory when he says that Bernard Kouchner arrived in Kosovo in July ‘talking about European values, tolerance and multiculturalism’ but by Christmas this had been revised down to hopes for ‘coexistence’ (p.63). Kouchner simply hadn’t anticipated the hatred and the intransigence which he found in Kosovo. So many aid workers and proponents of humanitarian intervention don’t. In Blood and Belonging Ignatieff refers fairly respectfully to ‘the international community’. Eight years later he refers to it as:

what is laughingly referred to as the ‘international community’. (p.97)

His journey his taught him that the international institutes he used to respect are, in fact, a sham.

He is particularly disillusioned with the international aid industry, which he sees as almost a scam, a locust swarm of very well-paid white Western graduates, who fly in, can’t speak the language, pay over the odds for everything thus pricing the locals out of accommodation and food, stay hunkered down in their armoured enclaves, drive everywhere in arrogant white 4-by-4s, and cook up huge impractical ‘aid’ projects without consulting any of the locals. All the Afghans he talks to complain to Ignatieff about the NGOs’ arrogance and condescension. It is the old colonialist attitude but now with emails and shades. During the course of this book he takes to referring to the aid organisation community dismissively as ‘the internationals’, by contrast with the poor, often ignored ‘locals’, the people who actually live there.

In this book Ignatieff is as clever and incisive and thought-provoking as ever. But sometimes he sounds really tired.

Credit

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2003. All references are to the 2003 Vintage paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

Age of Terror: Art since 9/11 @ Imperial War Museum London (March 2018)

Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut (1979)

The most embarrassing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me. (p.178)

This is Vonnegut’s ninth novel, published 27 years after his first, Player Piano (1952).

A hell of a lot had happened in those years – most of the 1950s, the entire 1960s and most of the 1970s – sex and drugs and rock and roll, the swinging sixties, hippies, glam rock, prog rock, punk – the Vietnam War with all its student protests segueing into the Killing Fields in Cambodia, the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement morphing into the Black Panthers and Black Power, the entire Space Age from Sputnik through the moon landings to the Space Shuttle, the oil crisis, Watergate and the discrediting of the American presidency.

Reading Vonnegut’s novels in sequence is like following him and his country on an enormous bender, and then waking up dazed and incredibly hungover the morning after.

A return to sobriety

That’s how reading Jailbird feels (at first, anyway). In comparison with the freaky experimentalism of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and of his most fragmented and experimental novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973) which comes complete with Vonnegut’s own illustrations – and unlike the knackered sci-fi of the dystopian novel Slapstick (1976), Jailbird seems like a return to sobriety and convention.

For example, unlike those three novels whose texts are split up into fragmented sections and paragraphs by asterisks or arrows, garnished with illustrations, packed with digressions, including the author’s speculations about his own characters – Jailbird is visually a return to convention, the prose arranged without gimmicks into consecutive paragraphs, themselves grouped into 23 normal-length chapters (unlike the page or half-page-long chapters of its predecessors). Jailbird looks like a normal book.

The long preface

And it does indeed turn out to be a much more conventional read, in tone, mood and style. This is signalled by the thirty-page preface.

Vonnegut hadn’t been shy of writing prefaces to his novels which, as the 60s turned into the 70s, had contained more and more personal, almost intimate, information (for example, about his mother’s suicide and his own depression).

In striking contrast to the ‘letting it all hang out’ approach of those introductions, the introduction to 1979’s Jailbird is strikingly serious and earnest. In tones close to that of a history book or journalistic feature, it recounts the story of the Cuyahoga Bridge Massacre, in which, in 1894, peaceful and mostly female protesters outside an iron works which had laid off their menfolk for rejecting a pay cut, were shot down by freelance ‘security men’ brought in from outside the state.

The link to the rest of the book is that one of the sons of the brutal Scottish immigrant who owned the iron works – Daniel McCone – who was, therefore, responsible for the massacre, is Alexander Hamilton McCone. Well-meaning and well educated Alexander had tried to intervene to break up the protest but is forced to watch the massacre take place, nonetheless.

This results in him withdrawing to live as a traumatised recluse cut off from society, from even his own wife and daughter, by an extreme stammer. His only company is a young boy, the son of the McCone family’s cook and chauffeur Walter F. Starbuck. In return for keeping him company, Alexander promises to send the lad to Harvard when he grows up.

And Jailbird turns out to be the story of Walter F. Starbuck’s life, as told by himself.

First person memoir

In this respect it is like the first-person memoirs which make up Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle and Slapstick. In all of these an ageing man (Starbuck is 66 at the time of writing this book, p.47) looks back over his life from a current situation in which it is drawing to an end. Use of this retrospective point of view means the narrative can jump around from scene to scene, can set up expectations of the future, can signpost major incidents coming up numerous times before actually getting round to describing them.

And it leaves the narrator free to lard the text with his own comments, thoughts and interpretations, something Vonnegut was very inclined to do in those earlier books.

So this memoir or biography is being written by by Walter F. Starbuck.

Right on the first page he gives us the straightforward chronology of his life (just as he did the life of Billy Pilgrim on page one of Slaughterhouse-Five). He was born in 1913, went to Harvard in 1931, got his first government job in 1938. In 1945 he was sent to Germany ‘to oversee the feeding and housing of the American, British, French, and Russian delegations to the War Crimes Trials’ (p.51) and ends up spending four years in Germany.

In 1946 he married a Jewish translator he met in Germany and quickly had a son from whom he is estranged. In 1953 he was sacked from the federal government and ended up helping his wife with her interior decoration company throughout the 1960s. In 1970 he was offered a job in the Nixon White House, and in 1975 tried and convicted of involvement in the Watergate conspiracies, followed by early release from prison in 1977.

Somewhere in the blurbs for the book it says that this is Vonnegut’s Watergate novel but that is wildly misleading. That makes you think you’re going to be taken into the labyrinthine complexities of the Watergate conspiracies, meet the various bad guys in the Nixon administration, maybe there will be some thriller-style suspense and uncovering of new evidence.

Imagine how thrilling and exciting a write like Robert Harris would make a thriller about Watergate.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Jailbird is neither thrilling nor exciting, it is weird and – the temptation is to say ‘surreal’, but really it is nonsensical in the Edward Lear sense of putting nonsensical, non-sequitur and bizarre ideas together to see what effect they give.

RAMJAC Corps

Thus throughout the book we keep hearing that almost any company you can think of is being bought up by the huge and anonymous RAMJAC Corporation. It is only at the end of the book that we realise RAMJAC is run by one of Starbuck’s old girlfriends, in fact one of the only four women he’s ever loved, Mary Kathleen O’Looney. She lives as a bag lady on the streets of New York, wearing enormous black trainers in which she keeps all her legal documentation, and carrying six stuffed filthy bags around. She stinks, her hair is falling out and she is physically disgusting as Starbuck discovers the day after he is released from prison and a friend hails him in the street.

O’Looney hears his name, grabs hold of his hand, refuses to let go, and takes him down into her secret hideaway in a disused train station beneath Manhattan (to be precise, an abandoned locomotive repair shop beneath Grand Central Station). She reveals that she is the CEO of RAMJAC Corp and sends instructions by mail to the lawyer who administers her wishes under the pseudonym of Mrs Jack Graham. These are verified by including fingerprints of all her fingers and thumbs. This means that criminals who have learned about this system, try to kidnap her and cut off her hands in order to use the fingerprints to steal her money. This is not as paranoid as it sounds: one time she was staying in a hotel suite in Nicaragua waited on only by Mormons, the only people she trusts. She met a woman whose husband had just died of amoebic dysentry and put her up in her rooms, while she (Mary) went to make arrangements to ship the body home.

When she came back the Mormon had been murdered – and both her hands cut off and stolen (p.217).

In the couple of days after being released from prison Starbuck receives kindly treatment from a number of people – a prison guard, the chauffeur who brings him into Manhattan, a waiter at a restaurant, the owner of a deep fat frying joint, and so on.

Chatting to the disgusting, half-bald, filthy O’Looney he mentions their names only to have her straightaway write a letter to her executive lawyer, Arpad Leen, instructing that these eight people (including Starbuck himself) be immediately made Vice Presidents of various divisions of RAMJAC Corps, and that’s how the book ends, with a party attended by this random selection of eight guys who now find themselves executives in a massive American corporation.

Starbuck himself ends up as Executive Vice-President of the Down Home Records Division of the RAMJAC Corporation, along with Clyde Carter the prison guard, Cleveland Lawes the limousine driver, Dr Israel Edel the night clerk at the Arapahoe Hotel, Frank Ubriaco owner of the Coffee Shop who once deep-fat-fried his own hand when his expensive watch fell off into the fryer and on impulse he reached in to get it – all Vice presidents of one bit or another of the multinational corporation.

Hopefully, this summary of the RAMJAC/O’Looney thread of the novel shows you that this is not a book about Watergate, nor a thriller, nor really a conventional novel at all.

Satire or ridicule?

And it’s not really a satire on corporate America. A satire usually aims to undermine its target by making accurate, insightful hits on it. Inventing the idea that the most powerful corporation in America is run by a baglady hiding out in a derelict station under Manhattan isn’t really satirising corporate America, it is ridiculing it. This book – maybe all Vonnegut’s books – are less satires than ridicules.

In his view the whole world is so absurd and nonsensical that ridiculing it is the only rational response – including ridiculing the very idea of being a writer and writing novels (which is why I think I like Breakfast of Champions best of the seven novels I’ve read). There is no subtlety or insight to it.

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders what is really going on.
We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans. (p.123)

This is not satire. It is the despairing ridicule of a man who has given up trying to understand.

Watergate

The Watergate theme, such as it is, is limited to the following. Starbuck tells us that back in the 1950s he was called on to testify about communists in government. Before the famous House Un-American Activities Committee Starbuck lists a number of colleagues who he knows were communists in the 1930s buthave changed their views and present no threat to the American people. Among these he mistakenly includes a colleague named Leland Clewes. Clewes in fact had never been a communist and tries to clear his name.

Starbuck explains that the young assistant to Senator Joe McCarthy, one Richard Milhous Nixon, then spends two years hounding and investigating Clewes and eventually getting him convicted and sent to jail. This drew Nixon into the public eye. In a roundabout way, then, Starbuck takes the blame for having made Nixon’s career. This is why, a long time later, Starbuck finds himself offered a job at the Nixon White House. Nixon one day remembered his name, asked his aides what Starbuck was doing, wondered if he’d accept a lowly job.

This nothing job is ‘President’s special advisor on youth affairs’ (p.46). Starbuck was given a windowless room in the basement of the White House (‘a sub-basement in the Executive Office Building’), from where he churned out some 200 reports over five years about youth activities, none of which were ever read by anyone. Salary: $36,000 pa.

Starbuck’s sole connection with any of the Watergate conspiracy was twofold. Throughout his time there he could hear people stomping about upstairs. One day he coughed loudly and immediately there was a rumpus down the stairs and a couple of senior staffers burst in demanding to know whether he’d been listening in on their conversations. They then tested the soundproofing, with one of them shouting and swearing upstairs, while another one stood in Starbuck’s office until he was satisfied that even shouting didn’t travel through the floorboards and he could never have heard anything.

And then, in 1975, when police came to search the White House, some of the guilty staffers came rushing downstairs with several crates packed with cash. These were illegal donations to Nixon’s re-election campaign, which they thought they could stash in Starbuck’s out-of-the-way office. But the cops searched even down here, found it, arrested Starbuck, and that was what he was tried and convicted and sent to gaol for, conspiracy to hide, defraud, illegal contributions etc.

So you see, the book offers little or no insight into Watergate or Nixon, or the intricacies of the conspiracy (there is one scene where Starbuck attends a meeting of the entire cabinet, seated far away, the lowest of the low, and chain smoking so much that Nixon makes a joke about him – that is Starbuck’s one and only encounter and anecdote about Nixon pp.61-62. He takes the opportunity to name a number of the men around the table who would end up in prison. But it isn’t an insight or exploration or explanation of the Nixon White House. It is one joke and a list of names).

It’s more as if Starbuck is an innocent bystander, an inoffensive drone right on the periphery of the administration who gets sent to prison because the bad guys stashed some hot money in his office and he was too dutiful to reveal their names. This could have been the basis of a comedy if the rest of the book wasn’t so weird and nonsensical, and about so much else.

Ruth

For example, there is much more about is wife Ruth, her history, how they met and their life together, than there is about politics. Jewish, Ruth had been hidden for the first part of the war, but then discovered and sent to a concentration camp which she survived to be liberated by the Americans and Starbuck met her only hours after they had been requisitioned by an American army unit which needed a translator at a checkpoint. Starbuck himself requisitioned her, took her to a good hotel, fed her up, and employed her as a translator for his work with the War Trials. He takes ten or so pages to describe their work in some detail, to paint a picture of her earnest pessimism, and the determination with which she sets up an interior design company once they return to American in 1949.

Kilgore Trout

Trout was, by this stage, a well known recurrent figure in Vonnegut’s fiction, maybe his most eminent creation, having appeared in Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five. In Champions he is one of the two major protagonists and we learn a lot about his life. He is definitely a ‘real person’. So it comes as a surprise in Jailbird to learn that Trout is in fact one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves his two year sentence, in fact the only ‘lifer’ in the Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility near Finletter Air Force Base, Georgia. His real name is Dr Robert Fender and he has a doctorate is in veterinary science. While in prison, Fender also writes science fiction novels under another pseudonym, Frank X. Barlow (p.67).

I have seen the way Trout’s character changes in different novels as an example of Vonnegut’s use of ‘unreliable narrators’, but I think it’s far bigger than that. If we agree that Vonnegut’s strategy goes far beyond ‘satire’ into the realm I’ve described as ‘ridicule’, then Jailbird‘s revealing that Kilgore Trout in fact doesn’t exist, is another example of Vonnegut’s full-spectrum ridiculing of all stable and sensible ideas about fiction. It is an example of his ‘nonsense’ approach to fiction.

One strategy Vonnegut retains from earlier books, especially Breakfast of Champions, is that the narrator summarises entire novels or stories by Trout. The result is that, instead of having to read an entire Trout novel, you can simply read the narrator’s one or two-page summary which are much zippier, funnier or wackier.

There are other echoes of earlier techniques as well. You know I said that Jailbird looks more conventional in the sense that the prose is arranged into consecutive paragraphs and the chapters are a sensible length (unlike all three of his previous novels). Yes, but he redeploys the catchphrase. In Slaughterhouse many paragraphs or anecdotes ended with the phrase ‘So it goes’. Here it is ‘And so on’. Similarly, it doesn’t happen often, but every now and then Vonnegut just inserts a one-word paragraph saying ‘Peace’. Just to remind us that the same wacky nonsensicalist of the earlier experimental books is still there, lurking.

And the spirit of the nonsensicalist emerges more and more as the book progresses. There is an extended description of the night in 1931 he took the ‘Yankee clock heiress’ Sarah Wyatt to dinner at the swanky Hotel Arapahoe in Manhattan. Partly because he remembers it all when, having just been released from prison in 1977, Starbuck returns to the same hotel to see it much reduced, shabby and dingy and half boarded up. In fact, the receptionist tells him, the entire area where the restaurant used to be has been converted into a porn movie cinema which specialises in gay porn, many of the movies climaxing with scenes of anal fisting, something which, unsurprisingly, shocks and horrifies the narrator (p.130).

When he expresses an opinion, Starbuck just sounds dazed at what his country has come to.

Mary Kathleen O’Looney wasn’t the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentant murderers ten years old, and dope fiends, and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time. (p.151)

Sacco and Vanzetti

He’s obviously been thinking, or reading, about the celebrated case of the Italian-born American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti who were controversially convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the April 15, 1920 armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. They were both executed in the electric chair just after midnight on August 23, 1927.

Vonnegut refers to them in the preface to the book, and the preface ends with a quote from Nicola Sacco writing to his 13-year-old son Dante, a quote which went on to be turned into a song, and rallying cry for the Socialist cause in America.

Help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.

Towards the end of the book, the narrative stops altogether while Vonnegut gives an extended summary of the events surrounding the supposed crimes, trial and execution of the pair. This chimes with the fact that Starbuck, although a Harvard man, was himself a student activist, and an actual member of the communist party.

This is par for the course in Vonnegut’s novels all of which contain large chunks of random subject matter thrown in from all sides. It’s part of what makes them surprisingly chewy and dense.

But it’s difficult to reconcile this apparent earnestness about Sacco and Vanzetti and the anarchist / socialist cause – the totally straight description of the 1894 Cuyahoga Bridge Massacre (fictional, although based on similar worker killings which took place around that time), and descriptions of Starbuck’s own student activism (it was while editing a communist student paper at Harvard that he first met the beautiful and idealistic Mary Kathleen O’Toole) — with the helpless nonsensicality of the main plot i.e. the way a ruined baglady turns out to be running the largest corporation in America. It doesn’t cohere. It’a as if they’re from different worlds – the serious, and the utterly nonsensical.

The nonsense is entertaining and sometimes funny but the trouble is it makes all his ‘serious’ criticisms of America or war or capitalism tremendously easy to ignore, take with a pinch of salt, and dismiss.

Epilogue

In the epilogue Starbuck describes how, soon after being made Executive Vice-President of the Down Home Records Division of the RAMJAC Corporation, he goes to see Mary Kathleen O’Looney in her secret base under grand Central Station and discovers her in a very poor way. In fact she dies in his arms. The epilogue then describes how Starbuck disposes of her body secretly and doesn’t tell anyone. RAMJAC Corporation continues for another two years before the discovery of its CEO’s demise is finally made. At which point Starbuck is taken to court once again, and convicted of not reporting her death, fraud etc.

The book ends with a party given for him by all the other vice-presidents, which has the effect of tying up any loose strands of the ‘plot’, before he is scheduled to be sent back to the slammer. And that is the story of this inveterate jailbird.

Kurt Vonnegut reviews

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke* – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa

Bauhaus by Frank Whitford (1984)

It is perhaps details of the more trivial aspects of life which help us more clearly to imagine the atmosphere of the Bauhaus. (p.162)

This is a wonderful book. I’ve read plenty of accounts of the Bauhaus which emphasise its seismic importance to later design and architecture, but this is the only one which really brings it alive and makes it human. It is almost as gripping, and certainly filled with as many vivid characters and funny anecdotes, as a good novel.

Whitford’s book really emphasises that the Bauhaus was not some mythical source of everything wonderful in 20th century design, but a college of art and design, in essence like many others of the day, staffed by a pretty eccentric bunch of teachers and the usual scruffy, lazy and sometimes brilliant students. During its very chequered fifteen year history it faced all the usual, mundane problems of funding, staffing, organisation and morale with often chaotic and sometimes comic results.

Part of the Bauhaus building at Dessau, Germany

Two things really stand out from this account:

One is Whitford’s attitude, which is refreshingly honest and accessible. He tells jokes. Usually the names of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (who both taught the college’s innovative Introductory course) are mentioned with reverend awe. It is extremely refreshing, then, to read accounts left by students who didn’t understand their teachings at all, and even more so for Whitford himself to admit that, even to their most devoted fans, the writings of both Klee and Kandinsky are often incomprehensible.

The practical problems of resources and staffing loom large in Whitford’s down-to-earth account. While Klee and Kandinsky were trying to teach their esoteric theories of line and picture construction to uncomprehending neophytes, the director Walter Gropius was doing deals with local grocers and merchants to get enough food for the students to eat, and wangling supplies of coal to keep the draughty old buildings heated.

Walter Gropius, founding director of the Staatliches Bauhaus

The second key element is that the book is very rich in quotes, memories, diaries, letters, memoirs, later accounts from the successive directors, the teaching staff and – crucially – from the students. Kandinsky is an enormous Legend in art history: it makes him come alive to learn that although he dressed impeccably, in a sober suit with a wing collar and bow tie, he also loved cycling round the campus on a racing bike.

Whitford quotes a student, Lothar Schreyer, who decided to take the mickey out of the Great Man. Believing that abstract painting was nonsense he solemnly presented Kandinsky with a canvas painted white. Kandinsky went along with the plan by taking it intensely seriously and discussing his motivation, his choice of white, the symbolism of white and so on. But then he went on to say that God himself created the universe out of nothing, so ‘let us create a little world ourselves’, and he proceeded to carefully paint in a red, a yellow and a blue spot, with a shadow of green down the side. To the surprise of Schreyer and the students watching, the result was astonishingly powerful and ‘right’, in the way of the best abstract art. He was converted on the spot.

God, to have such teachers today!

Composition VIII by Wassily Kandinsky (1923)

The power of Whitford’s account is that he doesn’t stop at generalisations about teaching methods or philosophies; he gives vivid examples. Here’s an actual homework Kandinsky set:

For next Friday please do the following: take a piece of black paper and place squares of different colours on it. Then place these squares of the same colours on a white sheet of paper. Then take the coloured squares and place on them in turn a white and then a black square. This is your task for next class. (quoted page 100)

The aim wasn’t to produce works of art or learn to paint. It was to conduct really thorough systematic experiments with the impacts of countless combinations of colours and shapes. After a year of doing this (plus other things) in the introductory course, students would then move on in the second year to specialise in metalwork, ceramics, glasswork, industrial design, household products and so on – but with a year’s worth of experimenting with lines and shapes and colour combinations behind them.

The equally legendary Hungarian polymath László Moholy-Nagy arrived at the Bauhaus in 1923, taking over from the eccentric spiritualist Johannes Itten as teacher of the Bauhaus preliminary course, also replacing Itten as Head of the Metal Workshop.

Moholy-Nagy wore worker’s overalls to emphasise his communist Constructivist views, sweeping away the soft arts and crafts approach which had dominated the school for its first four years and implementing an entirely new approach, focused on designing and producing goods which could be mass produced for the working classes.

László Moholy-Nagy, the stern constructivist man of the people

So far, so legendary. But it’s typical of Whitford’s account that he tells us that about the only thing Moholy-Nagy didn’t do well was speak German, with the result that the students took the mickey out of his appalling accent and nicknamed him ‘Holy Mahogany’. Now that sounds like a proper art school.

Even details like exactly how many people were on the teaching staff (12) and how many students there were (initially about 100, rising to 150) gives you a sense of the scale of the operation. Tiny, by modern standards.

I laughed out loud when Whitford tells us that Gropius very optimistically held an exhibition of students work in 1919 that was so disastrous – the exhibits were so poor and the reaction of the press was so scathing – that he swore never to hold another one (p.136).

For it was a college like any other and had to justify its costs to the local authorities. The government of Weimar (one of Germany’s many Länder, or mini-states) funded it for six years before withdrawing their funding. The director, Walter Gropius, had to advertise to the other states in Germany, asking if any others would be willing to fund the school. From the first it aimed to become self-supporting by selling its products (ceramics, rugs, fixtures and fittings, metal work, the occasional full-scale architectural commission) but it never did.

Herbert Bayer’s cover for the 1923 book Staatliches Bauhaus

So the school’s reliance on state funding put it at the mercy of the extremely volatile politics and even more unstable economics of Germany during the 20s. László Moholy-Nagy didn’t just join the Bauhaus, he joined a school of art and design which was struggling to survive, whose teaching staff were in disarray, which had failed to deliver on many of its initial aims and promises, and at the time of Germany’s ridiculous hyper-inflation which looked as if it might see the overthrow not only of the government but of the entire economic system.

Thus the sweeping changes to the syllabus he and his colleague Albers introduced weren’t just a personal whim, they were absolutely vital of the school was to stand a hope of breaking even and surviving. For the first four years Johannes Itten had included meditation, breathing exercises and the cultivation of the inner spirit in the Induction Course. Moholy-Nagy scrapped all of it.

Typically, Whitford finds a humorous way of conveying this through the words of a student eye witness. According to this student, they had previously been encouraged to make ‘spiritual samovars and intellectual doorknobs’; Moholy-Nagy instructed them to start experimenting with a wide range of modern materials in order to design practical household objects, tea sets, light fittings. Using glass and metal, they made what are probably the first globe lamps made anywhere.

It’s Whitford’s ability to combine a full understanding of the historical background, with the local government politics of Weimar or Dessau, with the fluctuating morale at the school and the characters of individual teachers, and his eye for the telling anecdote, which contribute to a deeply satisfying narrative.

Even if you’re not remotely interested in art, it would still be an interesting book to read purely as social history. Again Whitford made me laugh out loud when he pointed out that, although Germany’s hyperinflation of 1923 was catastrophic for most people, it was, of course, boom times for the printers of bank notes! Verily, every cloud has a silver lining.

Bauhaus student Herbert Bayer was commissioned to design 1 million, two million and one billion Mark banknotes. They were issued on 1 September 1923, by which time much higher denominations were needed.

Emergency bank notes designed by Herbert Bayer (1923)

Against his better judgement Gropius was persuaded to hold another exhibition, in 1923. This one, to everyone’s pleasant surprise, was a commercial and critical success. It ran from 15 August to 30 September. When it opened one dollar was worth two million Marks; by the time it ended a dollar bought 160 million Marks (p.147). What a catastrophe.

Brief timeline

The Bauhaus school of art, architecture and design lived precisely as long as the Weimar Republic. It was founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, who was invited by the government of Weimar to take over a merger of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Gropius wanted to integrate art and design with traditions of craft and hand manufacture, following the beliefs of the English critic John Ruskin and artist-entrepreneur and activist William Morris and the atmosphere of the early school was intensely spiritual and arty. The teachers were divided into ‘Masters of Form’ – responsible for theory of design – and ‘Workshop Masters’ – experts at rug-making, ceramics, metalwork and so on. The idea was that the two would work in tandem though in practice the relationship was often problematic.

Johannes Itten, follower of the fire cult Mazdaznan, deeply spiritual and the main influence on the first period of the Bauhaus to 1923

As mentioned above, the hyper-inflation and the political crisis of 1923 helped to change the culture. Gropius managed to sack the spiritual Ittens and bring in the no-nonsense Moholy-Nagy and Albers. This inaugurated the Second Phase, from 1923 to 1925, when Romantic ideas of self-expression were replaced by rational, quasi-scientific ideas. Whitford points out that this shift was part of a wider cultural shift across Germany. The tradition of Expressionism which lingered on from before the Great War was decisively dropped in a whole range of arts to be replaced by a harder, more practical approach which soon came to be called the New Objectivity.

In 1925 a nationalist government took power in Weimar and withdrew funding from the school, which they portrayed (not inaccurately) as a hotbed of communists and subversives. The Bauhaus quit Weimar and moved to purpose-built buildings in Dessau. 1925-28 are probably its glory years, the new building inspiring a wave of innovations as well as – as Whitford emphasises – the themed parties which soon became legendary.

A new younger cohort of teachers, the so-called Young Masters, most of whom had actually been students at the school, were now given teaching places and generated a wave of innovations. Herbert Bayer pioneered the use of simple elegant typefaces without serif or even capital letters. Marcel Breuer designed the first ever chair made from tubular steel with leather pads stretched across it, a design which was still going strong when I started work in media land in the late 1980s, 60 years later. Breuer named it the Wassily chair in honour of his older colleague.

The Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer (1925)

In 1928 Gropius quit and handed over the directorship to Hannes Meyer, an avowed Marxist who saw art and architecture solely in terms of social benefit. The merit of Whitford’s account is that for 150 pages or so, he has made us share Gropius’s triumphs and disasters, made us feel for him as he fought the local governments for funding, tried to stage exhibitions to raise the school’s profile and to sell things, battled against critics and enemies of both the right and the left.

Whitford quotes from the letters which Gropius sent out to his colleagues in which he explained that, after ten years of fighting, he is exhausted. More than that, Gropius realised that it was make or break time for him as a professional architect: either he was going to spend the rest of his life as a higher education administrator or get back to the profession he loved.

Similarly, Whitford deals sympathetically with the directorship of Meyer, which lasted for two short years from 1928 to 1930. Usually this seen as a period of retrenchment when the last dregs of the school’s utopianism were squeezed out of it. But Whitford is sympathetic to Meyer’s efforts to keep it afloat in darkening times. Students complained that all the other specialities were now subjugated to Meyer’s focus on architecture, for example explorations of how to use prefabricated components to quickly build well-designed but cheap housing for the masses.

But it was during Meyer’s time that the school had its biggest-ever commercial success. Whitford tells the story of how the school received a commission to design wallpaper, a challenge which was handed over to the mural-painting department. Staff and students developed a range of ‘textured and quietly patterned’ designs which were unlike anything else then on the market. To everyone’s surprise they turned out to be wildly popular and became the most profitable items the school ever produced. In fact they are still available today from the firm which commissioned them, Emil Rasche of Bramsche.

Bauhaus wallpaper designs

Meyer really was a devoted communist. He instituted classes in political theory and helped set up a Communist Party cell among the students. Opposition from powerful factions in the government of Thuringia (of which the city of Dessau was capital) lobbied continuously for Meyer to be replaced or the entire school closed down. The older generation of teachers were just as disgruntled as the last dregs of Expressionist feeling were squashed beneath revolutionary rhetoric.

The mayor of Dessau fired Meyer on 1 August 1930. Meyer promptly went to Russia to work for the Soviet government, taking several Bauhaus students with him.

Radical Bauhaus designs for household appliances

Meyer was replaced by the internationally renowned architect Mies van der Rohe, who Gropius had sounded out about replacing him back in 1928.

Mies was more open to ideas of beauty and design than the functionalist Meyer, but he was forced by the Thuringian authorities (who, after all, owned and funded the school) to cut down severely on political activity at the college. This backfired as the politicised students demanded to know by what right Mies was implementing his policies and organised meetings, several of which descended into near riots.

The police were called and the school was closed. Not for the last time, ‘radical’ students were playing into the hands of their political enemies. Mies re-opened the school and insisted on a one-to-one interview with all the returning students, each of which had to make a personal promise, and sign a contract, to avoid political activity and trouble-making.

Of all the teachers who’d been at the college when it opened, only Kandinsky and Klee remained and Klee resigned soon after Mies’s arrival.

Of course, looming behind all this was the Great Depression, which had begun with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. America had been the main backer of the German economy via the Dawes Plan of 1924 (which is what had brought the hyper-inflation under control). Now American banks, under extreme pressure, demanded all their loans back, and there was no-one to replace them.

Nesting tables designed by Josef Albers (1927)

Companies throughout Germany went bankrupt and millions of workers were laid off. In September 1928 Germany had 650,000 unemployed, By September 1931 there were 4,350,000 unemployed (and the number continued to rise, reaching a staggering 6,100,000 unemployed by January 1933, the year Hitler came to power promising jobs and work for all Germans.)

In 1931 the growing Nazi Party achieved control of the Dessau city council. After a campaign of criticism of its foreign-influenced and un-German designs, the school was closed on 30 September 1932. Nazi officials moved in, smashing windows and throwing paperwork and equipment out into the street.

It stuttered on. Heroically, Mies rented space in a disused telephone factory in Berlin and turned the school into a private institution, requiring private fees. They set about constructing workshops and teaching areas. Amazingly, Kandinsky was still on the faculty, though whether he was still cycling round on his racing bike isn’t recorded. Even this private incarnation was targeted by the Nazis and Whitford quotes a student’s vivid eye-witness account of truckloads of Nazi police rolling up outside the building on 11 April 1933.

Whitford reports the fascinating coda when, for a few months, letters were exchanged and discussion had with the new authorities about whether a school of modern design could find a place in the new Reich – after all the Nazi leadership had a keen sense of the arts and had utopian plans of their own to rebuild Berlin as the capital of Europe. But the discussions petered out and on 10 August 1933 Mies sent a leaflet to the remaining students telling them the school had been wound up.

Bauhaus chess set designed by Josef Hartwig in 1923 (the shape of the pieces indicates the moves they can take)

Impact

After being closed down by the Nazis many of the teaching staff went abroad to found similar schools, colleges and institutes in other countries. In particular Germany’s loss was America’s gain. Moholy-Nagy founded the ‘New Bauhaus’ in Chicago in 1937. Gropius taught at Harvard. Albers taught at the hugely influential Black Mountain College. After the war a Hochschule für Gestaltung was set up in Ulm, which continued the school’s investigations into industrial design.

As to the Bauhaus’s general influence, Whitford opened the book with a summary. The Bauhaus influenced the practice and curriculums of post-war art schools around the world:

Every student who does a ‘foundation course’ at art school has the Bauhaus to thank for this idea.
Every art school which offers studies of materials, colour theory and three dimensional design is indebted to the experiments Bauhaus carried out.
Everyone sitting in a chair made with a tubular steel frame, or using an adjustable reading lamp, or is in a building made from pre-fabricated elements is benefiting from Bauhaus inventions.

I was particularly struck by the section about the model house, the Haus am Horn designed by Georg Muche, which Bauhaus architects and designers built as a showcase for the 1923 exhibition. It was the first building constructed based on Bauhaus designs, and its simplicity and pure lines were to prove very influential in international modern architecture.

Whitford, as ever, goes into fascinating detail, quoting a student who remarked of the interior designs by Marcel Breuer (then still himself a student) that it included: the first kitchen in Germany with separated lower cupboards, suspended upper cupboards attached to the walls, a continuous work surface running round the wall, and a main workspace in front of the kitchen window. (p.144)

The revolutionary kitchen of the Haus am Horn (1923)

Whitworth also points out that the Bauhaus legacy isn’t as straightforward as is often portrayed. From the mid-20s journalists began to associate the name with everything modern and streamlined in contemporary design, everything functional and in modern materials. But this was misleading; it certainly hadn’t been Gropius’s intention. He never wanted there to be a ‘Bauhaus style’; the whole idea was to encourage new thinking, questioning and variety.

The Bauhaus style which sneaked its way into the design of women’s underwear, the Bauhaus style as ‘modern decor’, as rejection of yesterday’s styles, as determination to be ‘up-to-the-minute’ at all costs – this style can be found everywhere but at the Bauhaus. (Oskar Schlemmer, quoted page 198)

Summary

By treating each period of the school’s evolution so thoroughly, beginning with a fascinating account of the pre-war sources of much of its thinking in the arts and crafts of Morris or the Expressionism of Kandinsky and Marc, Whitworth restores to the story its complexity, its twists and turns, showing that at different moments, and to different teachers and students, Bauhaus meant completely different things. The full fifteen year story has to be taken and understood as a whole to give a proper sense of the exciting experimentalism, diversity, challenges and achievements of this extraordinary institution.

This is a really good book, authoritative, sensible, funny – deeply enjoyable on multiple levels.

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by Simon on January 20, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Architecture, Art, Design

Posted by Simon on January 20, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/20/bauhaus-frank-whitford/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Harvard

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

Historical context – the War on Terror

Ignatieff’s approach

Contents

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

The Arab future

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

2. The threshold of repugnance

3. The world is watching

Notes and thoughts

Seven days later

Credit

New world disorder reviews

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Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff (2003)

A bit of biography

Empire Lite: Introduction

After 9/11

Problems of empire

Chapter 1. The Bridge Builder

Chapter 2. The Humanitarian as Imperialist

Bernard Kouchner

Chapter 3. Nation-building Lite

Afghanistan

Reconstruction

Don’t say when you’ll leave

The American withdrawal from Afghanistan, 2021

Europe and America: division of roles

Chapter 4. Conclusion: Empire and its Nemesis

Thoughts

Credit

New world disorder reviews

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Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut (1979)

A return to sobriety

The long preface

First person memoir

RAMJAC Corps

Satire or ridicule?

Watergate

Ruth

Kilgore Trout

Sacco and Vanzetti

Epilogue

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Kurt Vonnegut reviews

Other science fiction reviews

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Bauhaus by Frank Whitford (1984)

Brief timeline

Impact

Summary

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