Canadian Cincinnatus

Referendum in Moscow on reinstalling statue of KGB founder

Feliks Dzerzhinsky was one of the original Bolsheviks who, in the October Revolution of 1917, overthrew the Czar to set up the world’s first communist government. Dzerzhinsky’s contribution to the fledgling Soviet Union was to organize Cheka, the communists’ feared secret police force. Due to various purges and reorgs down the years, the name mutated through various alphabet-soup acronyms. Today, this organization is best known by the three-letter acronym KGB. This name lasted from 1954 until 1991, when it was divided into the various components that exist today: the FSB, the SVR, and others.

It has been estimated that the Soviet Union deliberately murdered between 10 and 30 million of its own people for nutso political reasons. The main agent behind this atrocity was Cheka and its successors.  For his role in setting up Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky established himself as one of history’s greatest criminals. He was truly a loathsome person in every way. In his personal life he was apparently a sexual sadist. In this way, both his personal and professional lives were twisted and perverted.

As a result, a statue of him in front of the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters, was removed in the early 90’s. This was newly liberated Russia distancing herself from an evil part of its history. Now we hear news that the City of Moscow is planning a referendum – the first on any topic since the collapse of the Soviet Union - on the restoration of Iron Feliks’s statue.

If one said that this is kind of like Berlin wanting to set up a statue of Heinrich Himmler, one would be wrong. It is not kind of like putting up a statue of Himmler, it is exactly like putting up a statue of the Reichsfuhrer. 

Given that nothing happens in Russia these days – especially in Moscow - without at least the tacit approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin, I would like to pose a question to all those conservatives out there who think Putin is a swell guy. Do you still think he is the champion of western civilization?

Well, do ya?

Daniel Hannan: Nationalism yes, EU no

Two years ago I had the privilege to hear MEP for South East England, Daniel Hannan, speak at the Manning Networking Conference. It was the best speech I have ever heard in my life. In my opinion, there is no greater champion of the liberal nation-state than him. If you want to know who the heir to Margaret Thatcher is in the UK, you have to look no farther than Hannan. (It certainly ain’t David Cameron.)

Last week, a masterful article by him appeared in the Telegraph explaining why the nation-state is the natural home to liberal democracy and why the EU is not.

“Nationalism as a political ideology. My dictionary defines it as "the drive of people of the same language-group to form independent and unitary states". Nationalism in this sense was a direct consequence of democracy. When Europe was a patchwork of dynastic territories, formed by conquest, marriage and happenstance, it never occurred to anyone to let people decide which state to belong to. But from the late eighteenth century, the idea got abroad that governments should be answerable to the people. And this, of course, immediately raised the question: "What people?" Within what unit was the democratic process to be played out?”

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the people rooting for a transnational superstate are big government types of one sort or the other. And fans of small, decentralized government tend to be nationalists.

“But from the late eighteenth century, the idea got abroad that governments should be answerable to the people. And this, of course, immediately raised the question: "What people?" Within what unit was the democratic process to be played out?

The answer was that a state should comprise citizens who felt enough in common with one another to accept government from each other's hands – in other words, it should comprise a nation. The early democrats were almost all nationalists in this sense. They wanted to replace the Europe of prelates and princes with a Europe of democratic nation-states.”

Democracy and liberty works best when most people want approximately the same thing, and when there are bonds of kinship to encourage individual sacrifice for the common good. 

“It is our sense of common identity that makes us willing to accept election results when we voted for the losers, to pay taxes to support strangers, to obey laws with which we disagree.”

Hannan also makes the valid point that Hitler was not a nationalist, in spite of his party’s name: The National Socialist German Worker’s Party: 

“You can accuse Hitler of many things, but one thing you can't accuse him of is respect for national sovereignty. In no sense did he want a Europe of nation-states of the kind proposed by Mazzini or any of the 1848 radicals. What he wanted was an empire into which other peoples would be forcibly incorporated, either as citizens or as slaves. The defeat of Nazism in 1945, like the defeat of Soviet Communism in 1989, was a victory for national independence. 

Those who have done most to threaten peace, far from being nationalists, are usually proponents of trans-national ideologies. The Islamists today, like the Nazis and Soviets before them, claim to answer to a higher doctrine than the established rules of territorial jurisdiction and national sovereignty.”

This is right. The real destruction in the past century has been caused by ivory tower ideologies.

“The nation-state, rooted as it is in old loyalties, tends to be the surest defence against these enthusiasms.”

The essence of conservatism is to ally modern functions to “old loyalties”. 

“What about the favourite example cited by Steinmeier and Barroso – that of the First World War? We can't blame it on Nazism or Communism or Islamism. Isn't nationalism responsible here? Well, yes, but look at what kind of nationalism it was. The proximate cause of the fighting was the desire of many of the South Slav subjects of Austria-Hungary for self-determination. It's a common cause of conflict, this feeling that people are, one way or another, in the wrong state. Look at the hotspots today: Kashmir, Chechnya, Palestine, Western Sahara, Tibet. Jamming different peoples together, rather than allowing them to live as peaceable neighbours, tends to stoke rather than soothe national antagonisms.”

While nationalism has been often blamed for World War I, it is seldom remarked upon that Europe in 1914 was dominated by a few, very large empires: the British, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman. I don’t think it was an accident that war started in the most unnatural of them, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Or that three out of the four empires that collapsed after than war (the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman) were a multicultural polyglot of unrelated tribes. 

Amity Shlaes: Calvin Coolidge’s muse

Our view of history is largely shaped by the people who write it down: the historians, and - even more so - the artists who memorialize it with vivid images. As a result, depending on the veracity of the storytellers and verisimilitude of their output, our impressions of a particular era can be quite a bit different from what people living through the era in question saw going on around them.

One of my pet peeves is our hazy collective memory of communism. If one only has pop culture as a guide (and for many people – the MTV generation, that is their only guide to the past), their view of communism centers on a crazy senator from Wisconsin who terrorized a whole nation for a decade hunting a phantom menace. In reality, though he went too far in some of his accusations, most of Joe McCarthy’s targets were in fact committed communists. And most importantly, communism was then a bloodthirsty worldwide movement that deliberately murdered over a 100 million people. 

For a more positive example, take the Apollo project. Before the 1995 film, Apollo 13, everybody remembered it for Apollo 11 – the crowning achievement of the Apollo project. Apollo 13 was forgotten as the ‘screw-up mission’. After Ron Howard’s riveting film, people appreciate the heroism and greatness exhibited during NASA’s “finest hour”. “Houston, we’ve got a problem” was transformed into “failure is not an option.” And forgotten heroes like Gene Kranz and Chris Kraft are now remembered again.

For this reason, business journalist and economic historian Amity Shlaes is like a gift from heaven. For years, the myth was propagated that FDR saved America during the Depression. People in the know would of course respond with, “yeah, so why did the Depression last so long if Roosevelt did such a bang-up job?” But even we were hazy about the details. Then along comes Shlaes, who produced a readable history of the Depression, The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression. Not only did it debunk the New Deal myth, it did so in a popular format. The book sold a quarter of a million copies, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks and has been translated into 5 other languages.

Now she has done it again with her history of Calvin Coolidge. Those of us familiar with the Calvin Coolidge story know that the American historians’ rating of Coolidge as one of the worst presidents in American history is bunk. Shlaes revisionist biography is very timely indeed because Coolidge possessed the virtues that the president who succeeds Obama should ideally possess. Coolidge was a frugal, taciturn minimalist who balanced the budget, raised government revenue by cutting tax rates and vetoed a lot of the stupid, pork barrel ideas that Congress produced during his tenure. He wrote to his father, "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” In fact, it is largely Coolidge’s fiscal probity that enabled FDR to run up the tab without busting the budget. Not that Roosevelt ever thanked him for it. As Shlaes wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Coolidge is a better role model for the next president than even Ronald Reagan.

Hopefully Shlaes current book is as popular as her last, and is able to restore to glory a much maligned American hero.

Rob Long: “Stop Connecting” or why the British Empire was so efficient

Last week Rob Long wrote a Ricochet post quoting a Bain Consulting study that concluded that corporate managers are spending too much time ‘connecting’. Rob said:

“I've often wondered how much better some meetings would be if every laptop was shut and every phone switched off.”

This article triggered an idea that I have had for a while, that is best introduced by answering this question: why was the British Empire so efficient? For there is no doubt about it, it was. A mere thousand bureaucrats in the Colonial Office managed an empire so large that the sun never set on it, an empire that included a subcontinent. How was this possible?

One reason, I think, is that the colonies weren’t informatically connected. No phones, no text messages, no Skype, no e-mail, no conference calls, no webinars, no meetings. Therefore, no micromanagement. For reasons of necessity, all decisions had to be pushed down to the lowest possible levels. This not only had the effect of minimizing bureaucracy but it also meant that the character of the Empire’s decision makers was more solid.

Consider, say, the Governor of Tasmania. Halfway around the world, if there was a sudden insurrection or unexpected invasion, it would take two weeks for your urgent request for help reach Whitehall. That means that the soonest help could arrive is a month, assuming the government sends off reinforcements within a day, which it wouldn’t. So who would apply for such a job? Not a bureaucratic manager, content to transport papers from the inbox to the outbox and breath heavily at conference calls all day. But a bold leader, a man of action, might. Somebody, for whom, the lack of connections to the home country would be liberating not enervating.

The result was an efficient, adaptable and decisively run empire.

 

UPDATE: Thank's for the Instalanch Glenn!

For those of you who have been directed to this post for the first time by Glenn Reynolds, feel free to look around. And don't let the name fool you. I do talk a lot about American politics.