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      Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’

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      InterviewHistorian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’Tim Adams The author of On Tyranny on the lack of historical literacy, how local news has been replaced by Facebook, and why novels matter to himTimothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of books about the 20th-century history of central Europe, including Bloodlands, which examined the devastating consequence of Hitler and Stalin’s simultaneous reign of terror over civilian populations, and won the 2013 Hannah Arendt prize for political thought. In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Snyder wrote a short book, On Tyranny, which provided 20 brief lessons – “Defend Institutions”, “Remember Professional Ethics”, “Read Books” – from the 20th century that might help readers protect democracy against dictatorship. It topped the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction in 2017. A new edition of the book, with illustrations by the German-American Nora Krug, whose graphic memoir Belonging confronted Germany’s Nazi past, has just been published.What prompted you to want to make this graphic version of On Tyranny?It came out originally in this extremely simple, accessible form. I always had the idea that it could take a different form, but that only became concrete once I read Nora Krug’s Belonging. I cold-called her and said: “Could you please do this?” Part of it was also to renew it. I changed the text a little bit, removed some of the stuff that was specific to 2016 and added some lines that recall what happened in 2020.You wrote the original in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Was it intended as a call to arms for yourself as well as to others?Yes, it was like something snapped in me where I thought we should all do the things that we can. In writing the book I was putting myself out there, so it was something I had to live by. I’m glad I did that. As a writer, you have to make yourself vulnerable sometimes.Looking back, it seemed important to say that being outraged on social media about Trump probably wasn’t going to be enough?Exactly. I think the lesson that maybe people reacted to the most is number 12: “make eye contact and talk to people” in the corporeal world. And then number 13, which was to actively get involved in politics, to get our physical bodies into unfamiliar situations. The book is a frontal attack on that idea that it is never enough to accept the world as it is and just comment on it.One of the things that the book is alarmed by is a lack of historical literacy. The fact that terms such as “America first” or, in the UK, “enemies of the people” could be employed with so few alarm bells ringing among people about their history in fascism. Do you still see that kind of illiteracy even in some of your students?History has been seriously devalued in the US, I would say, since 1989 and that very unfortunate idea [“the end of history”] that history was now over. “America first” and “enemies of the people” are words that are consciously applied by people who wish to destroy democracy. If people don’t know how those words have been applied in the past, then that is dangerous. Part of the backwash of the Trump coup attempt is all of these laws in various states are designed to make history uncontroversial – which, let’s be clear, means: uncontroversial for white people.At the time you wrote the book, people were being criticised for making comparisons with what was happening in 2016 and the 1930s. Did you feel any trepidation about doing that?I don’t remember having that feeling. When people refuse to make comparisons with events that have happened before, what they are really saying is: “I don’t want to look at either the past or the present.”You grew up in Dayton, Ohio. How much did that firsthand knowledge of the midwest and those declining industrial heartlands inform your understanding of the forces that produced Trump?It certainly affected it. In 2016, I spent some time going door to door there and talking to people about the forthcoming presidential election. That helped me to see how important social media was. I asked one guy a question and he went back and checked Facebook before answering. Where my parents are from and still live had become entirely Trumpland.The demise of local news is not mentioned often enough in these kind of conversations…I think a lack of local news may be the single greatest source of the problem. Most American counties are now news deserts; they have no reporters covering local politicians at all. People have no way of being active citizens; they go on reading but the stuff they read drives them upwards to national politics, into obsession and conspiracy. They bring the trust they had for local news to Facebook.One of your antidotes to that is “read books”; who have been the writers that you’ve turned to most in the past five years?I always go back to Roger Penrose, the physicist. He is important to me because he has a view about unpredictability in quantum mechanics, which has implications for politics. And then some of the people who confronted these questions in the last century in different ways: Hannah Arendt, Václav Havel, Victor Klemperer. In addition to that, it’s really important to me to read novels, because they prepare you for scenes in the real world you haven’t yet confronted. I’ve just started rereading Les Liaisons Dangerouses. But I also get excited when I hear Julian Barnes has a new novel out.It seems to me that the opposite of tyranny is not freedom, but something more active: creativity, engagement. Do you think artists and writers have lately stepped up to that challenge?I think it’s true that freedom cannot be the opposite of anything. But I’m not going to criticise artists and writers – the main problem is often the way that their work has trouble getting viewed. One of our big problems at the moment is that we find it hard to imagine a viable future. Art and literature enable us to flex those imaginative muscles.Where do you place your optimism?I prefer hope to optimism. One thing is, it turns out that people really like democracy. It has been heartening to see that so many people care enough about democracy to take personal risks to defend it.TopicsHistory booksBooks interviewUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future

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      How I wroteBarack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his futureThe former president of the United States was at a crossroads in his life when he wrote his first book, Dreams from My Father Barack ObamaSat 2 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTI was in my early 30s when I wrote Dreams from My Father. At the time, I was a few years out of law school. Michelle and I were newly married and just beginning to think about having kids. My mother was still alive. And I was not yet a politician.I look back now and understand that I was at an important crossroads then, thinking hard about who I wanted to be in the world and what sort of contribution I could make. I was passionate about civil rights, curious about public service, full of loose ideas, and entirely uncertain about which path I should take. I had more questions than answers. Was it possible to create more trust between people and lessen our divides? How much did small steps toward progress matter – improving conditions at a school, say, or registering more people to vote – when our larger systems seemed so broken? Would I accomplish more by working inside existing institutions or outside of them?Behind all of this floated something more personal, a deeper set of unresolved questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? How do I belong?That’s what compelled me to start writing this book.A Promised Land by Barack Obama review – an impressive but incomplete memoirRead moreI’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased.These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future. In writing it, I was able to dwell inside the lives of my parents and grandparents, the landscapes, cultures and histories they carried, the values and judgments that shaped them – and that in turn, shaped me. What I learned through this process helped to ground me. It became the basis for how I moved forward, giving me the confidence to know I could be a good father to my children and the courage to know I was ready to step forward as a leader.The act of writing is exactly that powerful. It’s a chance to be inquisitive with yourself, to observe the world, confront your limits, walk in the shoes of others, and try on new ideas. Writing is difficult, but that’s kind of the point. You might spend hours pushing yourself to remember what an old classroom smelled like, or the timbre of your father’s voice, or the precise colour of some shells you saw once on a beach. This work can anchor you, and fortify you, and surprise you. In finding the right words, in putting in that time, you may not always hit upon specific answers to life’s big questions, but you will understand yourself better. That’s how it works for me, anyway.The young man you meet in these pages is flawed and full of yearning, asking questions of himself and the world around him, learning as he goes. I know now, of course, that this was just the beginning for him. If you’re lucky, life provides you with a good long arc. I hope that my story will encourage you to think about telling your story, and to value the stories of others around you. The journey is always worth taking. Your answers will come.TopicsHow I wroteAutobiography and memoirUS politicsHistory booksfeaturesReuse this content More

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      The Cause: a history of the American revolution for our own troubled time

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      BooksThe Cause: a history of the American revolution for our own troubled timeIn his new work on 1776 and all that, Joseph Ellis sees the roots of anti-government intransigence and conspiracy theories John S GardnerSat 25 Sep 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 25 Sep 2021 01.01 EDTA word to know: semiquincentennial, which will appear with increasing frequency as the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches. Joseph Ellis, author of well-regarded biographies of America’s founders, is out early with a history of the revolution.Travels with George review: Washington, America’s original sin … and its divided presentRead moreOr, as he terms it, the “American Evolution”. For generations, treatments of the revolution have reflected the interests and prejudices of their times. Ellis provides numerous analogies to the politics of the moment, notably bitter opposition to a strong national government, the dangers of debt and misplaced hubris.The work covers some familiar ground from his other works with a focus on “bottom-up” politics. Ellis terms the story “The Cause”, because the patriots used it as “the operative term from the summer of 1775 to the summer of ’76”. Leaving aside the actual cause of the split (briefly, “power, not money” and George III’s policy after the peace of 1763), Ellis’ emphasis is the uncomfortable nature of its legacy and its impact on politics. The revolutionary “cause” contained the seeds of others.That the promises of the revolution and Jefferson’s “unalienable rights” failed, not least on slavery and Native Americans, is a shameful blight on the founding. But as Ellis writes, “not all revolutions end in gulags and guillotines”. Compromise was indispensible to uniting 13 colonies to achieve victory.Was that compromise the essence of the revolution or a painful cost of it, laying a deposit or “promissory note” of freedom? On that question hangs the meaning of the revolution, both for greater understanding of the past and applying its lessons in the present.Ellis succeeds more on the first, noting many founders’ discomfort with the compromises they made.On politics, Ellis takes the division back to the war itself, when conspiracy-minded “True Whigs” asserted that those who favoured strong national government were seeking to replicate George III’s power, even as the continental army went unpaid and Washington prevented a military coup against Congress, shaming those who would “overturn the liberties of our country and open the flood gates of civil discord”. The conspiratorial mindset found a home early in American politics.History is by definition selective, and what is selected reflects the historian’s perspective as well as the zeitgeist. This is a relatively short history for the general reader, reflecting contemporary concerns, including relative brevity. There are some curious omissions, notably the Boston Massacre, in which Crispus Attucks, a Black and Native American patriot, was probably the first killed. Ellis cites three, not all four, of the 1774 Coercive Acts. Writing about the British North America (Quebec) Act would have enabled him to address religious prejudice in American history. More prosaically, Emerson, not Longfellow, wrote of the “shot heard round the world”.Much of the book concerns military history.Vietnam/Iraq analogies to British policy and warfare serve a purpose but become tiresome. Ellis argues that “Great Britain never had a realistic chance to win … American victory was not a miracle; it was foreordained”.That seems wrong. A failed crossing of the Delaware, an annihilation of American forces on Long Island (where even Ellis admits “the fate of the war … would have become uncertain”), Cornwallis escaping at Yorktown, the French fleet not arriving in time, Americans tiring of war – there are many points at which the military outcome could have been different, despite repeated failings of British leadership. Here, the “triumphalist” perspective (which Washington endorsed, calling victory a “standing miracle”) seems justified: the world turned upside down. Valley Forge really was as terrible as popular myth holds, Washington’s leadership preserving the army in impossible circumstances was equally strong.There is an urgent need for history for the general reader. Ellis’s story is generally told well. British perspectives receive sensitive attention, continuing a tradition exemplified by the great Bernard Bailyn.Ellis ends with an emotional recounting of Washington’s resignation of his commission in 1783 but also on a sour, pessimistic note, describing an “antinational”, even “antigovernment” feeling seeing “an American nation-state as a preposterous distortion of The Cause”. He identifies two legacies from the revolution: “Any robust expression of government power … was placed on the permanent defensive; second, conspiracy theories that might otherwise have been dismissed as preposterous shouts from the lunatic fringe enjoyed a supportive environment because of their hallowed association with The Cause”.This is presumably description, not endorsement. But then why not add a chapter taking the history to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, to show the victory of the nationalist view Washington espoused? Ellis has written this before.Shining a bright light on terrible moments in American history and expanding the understanding of the founding to include other voices is necessary and wise. Contemporary Americans should understand that “The Cause contained a double-barreled legacy: government was ‘Them’ and government was ‘Us’” – a debate that continues sharply today.Forget the Alamo review: dark truths of the US south and its ‘secular Mecca’Read moreThe danger, though, is that Ellis’ approach merely becomes history for an age of debunking history, which contains its own dangers – not least when others try to offer “alternative” history for their own, for conspiratorial agendas.. Ellis tries to defend history against both “presentistic” and conspiratorial views but may not succeed as well as he hopes.“Like the deepest meaning of The Cause itself,” he writes, “if you had not lived it, no one could explain it to you”. That’s what historians are supposed to do – explain. Ellis eschews triumphalism, yet on occasion even he gets caught up in the wonder of it all: “There was something almost elegiac about ordinary farmers, accustomed to gather in order to pass regulations about roaming cows or pigs, meeting now to debate the fate of America’s role in the British Empire.”Despite the revolution’s serious “discontents” and compromises, perhaps one need not force a choice between triumphalism and skepticism. Perhaps one may even consider the place of idealism, permitting Americans to be inspired once again by the Declaration of Independence and Valley Forge – and to redeem their implicit promises of union, freedom and justice for all.
      The Cause is published by Liveright
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      Jonathan Mirsky obituary

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      The ObserverChinaJonathan Mirsky obituaryJournalist and historian of China who went from admiring the regime to being one of its sternest critics Jonathan SteeleThu 9 Sep 2021 12.15 EDTLast modified on Thu 9 Sep 2021 12.17 EDTJonathan Mirsky, who has died aged 88, was a prominent American historian of China who switched to journalism and won the international reporter of the year title in the 1989 British Press Awards for his coverage in the Observer of the Tiananmen uprising.Getting the story had been a bloody experience. Armed Chinese police gave him a severe beating when they discovered he was a journalist. He was lucky to be rescued by a colleague from the Financial Times who led him away, his left arm fractured and three teeth knocked out.Mirsky’s career encapsulated the shifts in the way the western left viewed China, from the first decades of communist rule to Beijing’s move to capitalism while still under single-party control.He began as an early and prominent academic critic of the US’s role in the Vietnam war, starring in numerous protest marches and campus teach-ins. Opposing the US strategy of isolating China in the years before Nixon and Kissinger’s 1972 visit to Mao Zedong in Beijing, Mirsky supported the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group of radical US academics who criticised the senior faculty elite of US Asian studies for their silence on the immorality of the war.He had his first direct encounter with Maoism on an extraordinary boat trip led by Earle Reynolds, a Quaker peace activist. In 1969 Reynolds took Mirsky and four other Americans on his ketch, Phoenix, heading for Shanghai. It was meant as a goodwill gesture in the hope of starting a dialogue between Americans and Chinese officials. When they were stopped by a Chinese naval vessel 20 miles from the coast and ordered to leave, Mirsky – according to his account to friends – thought: “OK. In that case I’ll swim to China.” He jumped into the sea. The Chinese vessel hurriedly pulled away, and the Phoenix sailed back to Japan.Mirsky was never a “110 percenter” like some western admirers of Maoism but he was prepared to be impressed on his first foray to China in April 1972. With a dozen other young China scholars he spent six weeks travelling around the country with official guides. As he recalled in a book of essays by alumni of King’s College, Cambridge, he had gone “convinced that the Maoist revolution and even the Cultural, which was still going on, were good for China”. After only a few days he became convinced something bad was happening that their hosts were covering up. Many colleagues on the trip resented his growing scepticism. Some years later Mirsky met one of the guides again and complained about his deception. The guide replied: “We wanted to put rings in your noses and you helped us put them there.”Over the next four and a half decades Mirsky was to develop into one of China’s sternest and most knowledgable critics, a trajectory that he described as “From a Mao fan to a counter-revolutionary” in his contribution to the book My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on Their First Encounters with China (2012). He regularly lambasted western leaders for downplaying human rights violations for the sake of trade.In typically colourful language in a 2014 article for the New York Review of Books, he deplored the lack of political and social progress. “I may have been inadvertently right in May 1989 [just after Tiananmen] when I said China would ‘never be the same again’. It is sleeker, richer, internationally more reckless, more corrupt – and its leaders are ever more terrified … I am reminded of the old street sweeper in 1990 at a corner in Beijing. She was shovelling donkey dung into a pail. I asked her if she thought things had changed for the better. She replied, ‘This city is like donkey dung. Clean and smooth on the outside, but inside it’s still shit.’”Mirsky was born in New York to Reba Paeff, a children’s author and harpsichord player, and Alfred Mirsky, a pioneer in molecular biology. Educated first at Ethical Culture Fieldston school in the city, he went on to obtain a BA in history at Columbia University. He spent a year at King’s, Cambridge, in 1954, during which he met an American woman who had been a missionary in China and who urged him to study Mandarin. Three years of language study in the US followed before Mirsky, with his first wife, Betsy, also a Mandarin student, went to Taiwan to run a language school for four years.Back in the US he was awarded a PhD in Chinese history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966. He and Betsy divorced in 1963 and he married Rhona Pearson, a British neurobiologist, with whom he moved to Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, in 1966. There he became co-director of the East Asia Language and Area Studies Center. However, he was refused tenure, in part because of his anti-Vietnam protest activity, and in 1975 he and Rhona moved to London.Mirsky was attracted to journalism and became the Observer’s China correspondent, based in London but frequently travelling to the country. His critical views of communist rule were strengthened when he made the first of six visits to Tibet for the paper. He decided the fault was not just communism but racist imperialism by Han Chinese towards ethnic minorities. Later he visited the exiled Dalai Lama in north India, who became a close friend. They shared the same sense of humour, and Mirsky was delighted to receive a long message from the Dalai Lama a few weeks before he died.During a trip to China in 1991 Mirsky was asked by the foreign ministry to leave the country and told he would never again receive a visa. In 1993 he moved to Hong Kong to become East Asia correspondent of the (London) Times until he resigned in 1998 in protest at its owner, Rupert Murdoch’s, accommodating line on China. Back in London, Mirsky wrote dozens of book reviews, mainly for the New York Review of Books. They were always erudite and colourful, and are admired today by scholars of China for their astute observation.For at least a quarter of a century Mirsky loved to hold court with friends over lunch at the same table at Fortnum and Mason’s in Piccadilly, usually enhanced by at least one Jewish and one off-colour joke. In the words of a close friend, Michael Yahuda, a former professor at the London School of Economics, “Jonathan was a master of anecdotes and he was never shy of embellishing them in favour of a good story. Above all, he enjoyed friendships and a good meal. Life with him was never dull.”He and Rhona divorced in 1986. While in Hong Kong, a decade later Mirsky married Deborah Glass, an Australian specialist in financial regulation who became deputy chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission when they moved to London. In 2014 they separated and Deborah returned to Australia.He is survived by his sister Reba. TopicsChinaHistory booksNewspapers & magazinesUS politicsThe ObserverobituariesReuse this content More

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      The Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies

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      BooksThe Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post used freedom of information to produce the definitive US version of the warJulian BorgerSun 5 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTIn the summer of 2009, the latest in a long line of US military commanders in Afghanistan commissioned the latest in a long line of strategic reviews, in the perennial hope it would make enough of a difference to allow the Americans to go home.‘The intensity has not changed’: Jason Kander on the fall of Afghanistan – and trying to get friends outRead moreThere was some excitement in Washington about the author, Gen Stanley McChrystal, a special forces soldier who cultivated the image of a warrior-monk while hunting down insurgents in Iraq.Hired by Barack Obama, McChrystal produced a 66-page rethink of the Afghan campaign, calling for a “properly resourced” counter-insurgency with a lot more money and troops.It quickly became clear there were two significant problems. Al-Qaida, the original justification for the Afghan invasion, was not even mentioned in McChrystal’s first draft. And the US could not agree with its Nato allies on whether to call it a war or a peacekeeping or training mission, an issue with important legal implications.In the second draft, al-Qaida was included and the conflict was hazily defined as “not a war in the conventional sense”. But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting.The story is one of many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities uncovered by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post. His book is based on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, most from “lessons learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a watchdog mandated by Congress to keep tabs on the hundreds of billions flowing into Afghanistan.In the Sigar files, and other interviews carried out by military institutes and research centres, Whitlock found that soldiers of all ranks and their civilian counterparts were “more open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news story”.Blunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking.The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk.“With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” Whitlock writes. “Instead, they chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”As Whitlock vividly demonstrates, the lack of clarity, the deception, ignorance and hubris were baked in from the beginning. When he went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, George Bush promised a carefully defined mission. In fact, at the time the first bombs were being dropped, guidance from the Pentagon was hazy.It was unclear, for example, whether the Taliban were to be ousted or punished.“We received some general guidance like, ‘Hey, we want to go fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan,’” a special forces operations planner recalled. Regime change was only decided to be a war aim nine days after the shooting started.The US was also hazy about whom they were fighting, which Whitlock calls “a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover”.Most importantly, the invaders lumped the Taliban in with al-Qaida, despite the fact the former was a homegrown group with largely local preoccupations while the latter was primarily an Arab network with global ambitions.That perception, combined with unexpectedly easy victories in the first months, led Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to believe the Taliban could be ignored. Despite offers from some leaders that they were ready to negotiate a surrender, they were excluded from talks in December 2001 on the country’s future. It was a decision the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, called the “original sin” of the war.Rumsfeld declared there was no point negotiating.“The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them,” he said in March 2002. “And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone.”Not even Rumsfeld believed that. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, at about the same time, he wrote: “I am getting concerned that it is drifting.”In a subsequent snowflake, two years after the war started, he admitted: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”’The Taliban had not disappeared, though much of the leadership had retreated to Pakistan. The fighters had gone home, if necessary to await the next fighting season. Their harsh brand of Islam had grown in remote, impoverished villages, honed by the brutalities of Soviet occupation and civil war. The Taliban did not represent anything like a majority of Afghans, but as their resilience and eventual victory have shown, they are an indelible part of Afghanistan.Bruised Biden tries to turn the page after US debacle in AfghanistanRead moreWhitlock’s book is rooted in a database most journalists and historians could only dream of, but it is far more than the sum of its sources. You never feel the weight of the underlying documents because they are so deftly handed. Whitlock uses them as raw material to weave anecdotes into a compelling narrative.He does not tell the full story of the Afghan war. He does not claim to do so. That has to be told primarily by Afghans, who lived through the realities submerged by official narratives, at the receiving end of each new strategy and initiative.This is a definitive version of the war seen through American eyes, told by Americans unaware their words would appear in public. It is a cautionary tale of how a war can go on for years, long after it stops making any kind of sense.TopicsBooksAfghanistanSouth and Central AsiaUS militaryUS foreign policyUS national securityGeorge BushreviewsReuse this content More

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      Priscilla Johnson McMillan obituary

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      US newsPriscilla Johnson McMillan obituaryJournalist, author and historian who knew both President John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald Michael CarlsonMon 19 Jul 2021 04.54 EDTLast modified on Mon 19 Jul 2021 05.38 EDTPriscilla Johnson McMillan, who has died aged 92 after a fall, was the only person who could claim to have known both President John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. As a young college graduate, Johnson was befriended by Senator Kennedy while she worked in his office; a few years later she interviewed the young Oswald soon after he showed up in Moscow wishing to defect to the Soviet Union.After the assassination, Johnson was given exclusive access to Oswald’s Russian widow, Marina, and her ensuing book, Marina and Lee (1977), became a key document in establishing Oswald as a lone disturbed assassin. It also prompted many researchers to point to Johnson’s close ties to the US intelligence community, not least when she received similarly exclusive access to Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, when she defected to the US, and worked with her through translating her bestselling 1967 memoir Twenty Letters to a Friend.Johnson’s career grew from her unexpected interest in Russian language and culture. Her father, Stuart Johnson, a financier, was heir to a textile fortune; he was her mother, Mary Eunice Clapp’s, second husband. Patricia was born in Glen Cove, New York, and grew up on the family’s estate, Kaintuck Farm, in Locust Valley, Long Island.She was educated at Brearley school in New York, then at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, one of the elite “seven sisters” female colleges, where she became the first graduate majoring in Russian studies and was active in the United World Federalists (UWF), dedicated to effective world cooperation, primarily to prevent nuclear war.After an MA at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University), in 1953 she joined the staff of the newly elected senator Kennedy, researching French Indochina. They became friends; he would call her regularly for chats. She denied any romance, “I didn’t love him; he was mesmerising but he was just someone I knew.” She was rejected when she applied to join the CIA, ostensibly because of her ties to the UWF. Oddly, her interviewer was Cord Meyer, who in 1947 had been the first president of the UWF; now he headed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, aimed at influencing media. She did translation work for a review of the Soviet press, spending much time in Russia. On Kennedy’s recommendation, she received a grant to study the Soviet legal system, and again did translation work at the US embassy. She met Truman Capote, travelling with a US production of Porgy and Bess, and is mentioned in his book The Muses Are Heard.In 1958 she joined the North American News Alliance (NANA), and in November 1959 arrived in Moscow just a day after Aline Mosby of United Press International had filed a story on Oswald’s defection. The US consul John McVickar, himself a CIA man, recommended she interview Oswald, who was at her hotel; her report on the four-hour session appeared in NANA-affiliated papers.Mosby noted that Johnson lived in the Metropol, unlike other press in their state-assigned office/residence, saying “she was a very nice person and had good connections”. Johnson was one of many journalists expelled from Russia in the wake of the Russians shooting down of an American U2 spy plane; Oswald had been a radar operator at the Atsugi, Japan base from which U2s flew.She became a visiting fellow at the Russian research centre at Harvard, returning to Russia in 1962 and writing a memorable piece for Harper’s magazine about the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak’s funeral. On her return she was interviewed by Donald Jameson, the head of the CIA’s Soviet Russia division, who described her in a memo as someone who could “be encouraged to write the articles we want … but it’s important to avoid making her think she’s being used as a propaganda tool.”Then, in November 1963, came the news of Kennedy’s assassination by Oswald; Johnson gasped as she realised: “I know that boy.” Her 1959 profile of Oswald was immediately reprinted, but with a few changes, including a final line that did not appear in the original: “This was the stuff of which fanatics are made.”In 1964, when Marina was being held incommunicado, under threat of deportation, Johnson moved in with her. With her Russian and knowledge of Lee, she won Marina’s trust, but her book did not appear until 1977. While researching it, Johnson co-edited a collection of essays, Khrushchev and The Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture (1965). She returned to Kaintuck, where Alliluyeva lived while they worked on her memoir.Johnson married the journalist George McMillan in 1966; he covered the civil rights movement in the south, and published, in 1977, Making of an Assassin, showing how Martin Luther King’s alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, acted alone. They divorced in 1980.Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F Kennedy finally appeared, coincidentally, just as the House select committee on assassinations reopened the case. Johnson testified in closed session; large sections of her HSCA testimony are redacted whenever she is asked about her intelligence connections. Her book was a major influence on Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale; Mailer blamed Oswald’s killing of the president on his sexual frustration with Marina, and jealousy of JFK. By this time Marina began to distance herself from Johnson’s conclusions, saying “it was up to Priscilla to fish out all the facts and everything”.In 1988, Johnson added another line to her Oswald interview, telling Dan Rather of CBS that Oswald had told her: “I want to give the people of the US something to think about.” Eventually, Marina would claim she was “misled by the ‘evidence’ presented to me by government authorities … I am now convinced Lee was an FBI informant and did not kill President Kennedy”.Priscilla’s obituary of Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists led to her being asked to write about the hearings that declared J Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb, a security risk when he opposed building an H-bomb.She received extensive access to the archives of the Los Alamos Atomic Laboratory, but as with Marina and Lee, the research overwhelmed the writing. When The Ruin of J Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race finally appeared in 2005, it was a year after a massive Oppenheimer biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin had won a Pulitzer prize. But her portrayal of the political shift that left Oppenheimer on the outside won praise.On the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Marina and Lee was reissued. Johnson wrote of Oswald’s “unfitness for any conspiracy outside his own head”. Oddly enough, the description also would suit a hapless someone who was, as Oswald himself claimed, a “patsy”.Johnson is survived by a niece, Holly-Katharine Johnson, who is working on her biography.TopicsUS newsUS politicsJohn F KennedyRussiaNew YorkCIATruman CapoteobituariesReuse this content More

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      Last Best Hope by George Packer review – shrewd analysis of America’s ruptures

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      George Packer’s incisive, deftly argued book about the moral and political quandary of the United States begins and ends with his declaration: “I am an American.” The statement is self-evident but also self-congratulatory: Americans regard their citizenship as a spiritual credential, a gesture of faith in the country that has always claimed to be the last, best hope of beleaguered mankind. Packer’s native land, however, no longer deserves to be quite so certain of its exceptional virtue or its automatic pre-eminence. Early in the pandemic it had to accept charitable handouts from Russia and Taiwan, and Packer sadly accepts a new, reduced reality by calling America “a beggar nation” and even “a failed state”. After this he twists his title from a boast into an abject plea: “No one is going to save us. We are our last best hope.”The need for salvation became urgent before the election last November when Packer, having moved his family from Brooklyn to a Covid-free rural retreat, noticed a sign beside the road on a neighbouring farm. His car headlights flashed across a red rectangle branded with five white capital letters. Even here, Packer realised with a shudder, he was not safe. He doesn’t need to say what the letters spelled out: they were as succinctly satanic as the number 666 – the mark of the beast in the Book of Revelation – which made Nancy Reagan alter the street address of a house where she and the retiring president were due to live in Los Angeles.Superstitiously refusing to name Trump when he reads the campaign sign, Packer eventually recognises his “reptilian genius” – a talent for sniffing out and then stoking up the grudges of voters in the “terra incognita” that lies between America’s shining seas. A self-accusing shock follows. As the election draws near, Packer sees shop owners fortifying their premises. “Millions of people were arming up,” says this impeccably liberal urban man. He then adds: “I wondered if I should do the same.” Of course he decides not to, but the damage is done: his panicked reaction testifies to the collapse of the trust in others that sustains democracy. The problem, Packer acknowledges, is “not who Trump was, but who we are”. The first verb in that sentence is happily in the past tense, but the second remains in the troubled present: the populace empowered the vicious populist in the first place, and may yet allow him to revive his lawless, larcenous, nepotistic sideshow.Packer – who as well as contributing to the New Yorker and the Atlantic has edited collections of George Orwell’s essays – goes on to attempt something close to the ideological fables in Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. He dramatises a “cold civil war” between four incompatible versions of the US: the Free America of libertarian Reagan, the Smart America of Clinton-era technocrats, the Real America of Trump the bottom-feeding demagogue, and the Just America of #MeToo and BLM. Each has its own narrative, abhors the others as existential enemies, and regards compromise as betrayal.The US has had many crises: a nation founded on a messianic idea can redeem itself by reaffirming first principles“I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them,” Packer concludes. He smirks about customers at Walgreen drugstores and members of Rotary clubs in the heartland, snidely notes Sarah Palin’s post-political career as an “autographed merchandise saleswoman”, and even derides the “sagging bellies” of the marauders who invaded the Capitol on 6 January, as if their obesity was the worst thing about them. But all these alien groups have to be included in democracy’s gathering of “We the people”: Packer’s sniffy attitude is a symptom of the problem he defines. An “epistemic rupture”, he says, has made Americans “profoundly unreal to one another”; lacking a shared reality, they have burrowed into partisan encampments or sealed themselves in digital ghettoes, echo chambers of angry prejudice.The relevance of this depressing analysis extends across the ocean. Disaffected American activists in red and blue states fantasise about secession; here a fraying union is much more likely to fall apart. Packer believes that his country’s dualistic political parties have in effect changed places, with the Democrats now “the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans… sound like populist insurgents”. Hasn’t the same switchover happened with Labour and the Tories? Packer calls Trump “an all-American flimflam man”; Boris Johnson is our homegrown equivalent, the embodiment of all that is bogus, smug and sloppily amateurish in this country – though at least Trump transmitted a sulphurous “dark energy”, whereas Johnson mainly gives vent to verbal flatulence. Trump, Packer says in passing, “levelled everyone down together”: that exposes Boris’s blather about “levelling up” as an empty, opportunistic play on words. Commenting on an American meritocracy whose sole merit is its luck on the stock market, Packer predicts: “As with any hereditary ruling class, political power will fall into the hands of increasingly inferior people.” To prove his point locally, I nominate slick Sunak, shifty Hancock, Patel the bully and Williamson the schoolroom dunce.Packer is still able to cheer himself up at the end by reiterating: “I am an American and there’s no escape.” After our own disastrous epistemic episode, what can we say? We’re no longer Europeans, and only foreigners call us Brits, which they generally do while rolling their eyes in exasperation. Belonging by birth to none of the UK’s four tribes, I sometimes feel like a stateless refugee holed up in the republic of my house. Although America suffered through what Packer calls “a near-death experience” with Trump, it has had many such crises and has recovered from them all: a nation founded on a messianic idea can always redeem itself by reaffirming first principles, as Joe Biden seems determined to do. The UK lacks an originating myth or mission, and thus has no sense of purpose, no means of renewal, and nothing to look forward to but pitiful decline. Despite imperial puffery, we may never have been the best, but we used to be better than this. Now we seem doomed to be last, and there’s no hope anywhere. More