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      To Rescue the Republic review: Grant, the crisis of 1876 … and a Fox News anchor reluctant to call out Trump

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      To Rescue the Republic review: Grant, the crisis of 1876 … and a Fox News anchor reluctant to call out Trump Brett Baier has an eye on unity as well as compelling history. So why not say Trump refused to face the truth as Grant did?For a group of TV anchors and reporters, the team at Fox News are keen scribblers. Often with co-writers, former host Bill O’Reilly writes of assassinations and Brian Kilmeade authors histories. Bret Baier is chief political anchor but has also written several books as a “reporter of history”. Now comes a biography of Ulysses S Grant which focuses on the grave constitutional crisis following the disputed election of 1876.A disputed election, a constitutional crisis, polarisation … welcome to 1876Read moreMagnanimous in civil war victory, Grant was elected in 1868 on the theme of “Let us have peace”. By the nation’s centennial eight years later, Americans had wearied of scandals, economic troubles and federal troops in the south, seeking to enforce to some degree the new civil rights of Black Americans, notably the vote. In 1874, Democrats took the House. Now they wanted the presidency.They nominated the New York governor, Samuel Tilden, a moderate nevertheless supported in the south. The Republicans picked Rutherford Hayes of Ohio. It was a bitter campaign, filled with threats of violence, each side playing to its base.Tilden performed surprisingly well in the north, winning his home state and four others. Hayes winning Indiana and Connecticut alone would have prevented the subsequent controversy. He did not, but he did win Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, southern states with Republican governors.Hayes needed all three states to win. “Self-appointed Democratic counters”, however, submitted results for Tilden. As Grant said: “Everything now depends on a fair count.”Tensions ran high, with rumors of southern militia marching on Washington and US troops on standby. Baier writes that Grant “had influence, and he decided to use it to expedite a fair result – even if that result required sacrificing his own achievements”.Grant knew that to be seen to be fair, the result must “appeal to [the people’s] sense of justice”. For that, both parties had to agree – and the south had to support Hayes. At Grant’s insistence, an electoral commission was formed, the deciding vote given to the supreme court justice Joseph Bradley. Bradley chose to support the states’ official electoral certifications. Hayes won. Tilden did not pursue extraordinary means to ensure victory, stopping a bribery effort in his favor.But the battle was not over. Grant believed Louisiana’s certificate was probably fraudulent, and there was bedlam in Congress. Grant favored compromise and Edward Burke of Louisiana effectively proposed a trade: Hayes for the presidency, Democrats for the disputed governorships of Louisiana and South Carolina.A separate group of Republicans – acting without Grant – then promised Democrats Hayes would withdraw troops from the south. In return, Democrats would agree that Hayes was duly elected, along with vague and worthless promises to respect Black rights. At this point, Baier writes, “the nation breathed a sigh of relief”.Baier clearly admires Grant – and there is much to admire. Though betrayed by false friends, as president Grant exercised his office with firmness where necessary and with a passionate desire to inspire Americans towards greater unity. Political inexperience cost him dearly.But what of the big issue? Did Grant really put an end to Reconstruction and consign Black Americans to nearly a century under Jim Crow?Hayes had shown a willingness to end Reconstruction. Tilden would certainly have done so. Grant strongly supported Black suffrage and kept troops in the south to ensure the rights of people increasingly threatened by armed violence. He sent troops to an area of South Carolina especially marked by Klan violence and vigorously promoted and enforced an anti-Klan act. He sent troops to Louisiana to enforce voting rights and secured passage of the 1875 Civil Rights Act.Nonetheless, the supreme court reduced Black rights, and as Baier writes, “the country no longer supported the use of federal troops”. Grant had his army but had lost his people.He promoted a compromise in 1877 not from any desire to abandon the Black community but from the painful realization that America had tired of the journey. Whether Hayes or Tilden had been elected, Reconstruction was over and a more painful era in the south was about to begin.The problem wasn’t Grant, but that America was not ready to live up to its promises.Baier begins and ends his book with the events of 6 January 2021.“What happens,” he asks, “when the fairness of an election is in doubt, when the freedom of the people is constrained, and when the divisions on the public square strangle the process?“What can we learn from the healing mission of our 18th president that might show us a path towards union?”Baier answers the second question only implicitly. He echoes the historical consensus that the “sad and inescapable truth is that there was no way of knowing the right verdict”.True in 1877. Clearly not in 2021.After Appomattox, the Confederate general James Longstreet, a friend of Grant, asked “Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?”Liberty is Sweet review: an American revolution for the many not the fewRead moreThe answer frequently involves failures of political leadership. Baier writes that Grant “knew that in times of great national conflict there are only two choices – to stand for division or to stand for peace”.Grant used his power for good, to promote national unity. Donald Trump did not say the words or take the actions that Grant did during an equally if not more severe challenge to democracy. Baier misses an opportunity for Grant-like firmness in not asking why Trump failed to call on his supporters to accept the result. Rather than simply speaking of America’s strength and resilience, why not point out directly the contrast with a president who stood for division?In 2021, the national sigh of relief did not come until after noon on inauguration day, as President Biden took the oath.The danger persists, and not every president is Gen Grant.
      To Rescue the Republic is published in the US by Custom House
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      Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl review – a tyrant’s last stand

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      Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl review – a tyrant’s last stand The ABC News correspondent offers a sobering glimpse of a man unfit to govern and the chaos wreaked by an ego unable to grasp its own ineptitudeA statue in the US Capitol honours Clio, the marmoreal muse of history. Floating above the political fray, she rides in a winged chariot that allegorically represents time and has a clock for its wheel. Looking over her shoulder as she writes in a stony ledger, she tracks events in serene retrospect. The journalists who nowadays report on happenings in Washington work at a more frantic, flustered tempo, racing to catch up with the chaos of breaking news. Jonathan Karl, a correspondent for ABC News, seems to be permanently breathless. In Betrayal, he runs for cover during an emergency lockdown at the White House, with grenades detonating in the distance. He is roused after midnight by the announcement of Trump’s Covid diagnosis; later, he has to rush to the hospital, ditch his car and scramble into place before the presidential helicopter lands on a strip of road that is suddenly “the centre of the broadcast universe”. And on 6 January Karl keeps up a live commentary as the Capitol is invaded by a mob determined to lynch Vice-President Mike Pence – reviled as a “pussy” by Trump because he refused to overturn Biden’s victory – on a makeshift gallows.‘Pence was disloyal at exactly the right time’: author Jonathan Karl on the Capitol attackRead moreThe Capitol was designed as a classical temple consecrated to democracy, which is why Clio is at home there: picture the Parthenon on steroids, topped by the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica. In Betrayal, however, it is the set for a mock-heroic battle between thugs in horned helmets wielding fire extinguishers as weapons and politicians who prepare to fight back with ceremonial hammers torn from display cases and a sword left over from the civil war. Aghast and incredulous, Karl exhausts his supply of synonyms; this final act of the expiring Trump regime is nuts, weird, crazy, kooky and bonkers.Worse follows when crackpot conspiracy theorists gather to explain to Trump how the election was rigged. One sleuth contends that wireless thermostats made in China for Google reprogrammed voting machines in Georgia. A shadowy figure called Carlo Goria blames an Italian company and its “advanced military encryption capabilities”; Trump had two government departments investigate this claim, although the picture in Goria’s Facebook profile identifies him as the deranged scientist played by Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove. Numerous high-level functionaries shiftily justify themselves by telling Karl that the main concern of the administration was to control or at least frustrate its chief executive. During the Black Lives Matter unrest, Trump ordered out the troops to impose martial law on Washington. His wily secretary of defence, Mark Esper, deployed an army unit, but confined it to a fort outside the city. The ruse was a pacifier; rather than calming the streets, Esper’s aim was “to quell the dangerous and dictatorial urgings of his commander in chief”. Our prime minister may be a clown, but for four years the US had an outright lunatic as its president.Like all reality TV, what Karl calls “the Trump show” is the product of fantasy and fakery; its star is an existential fraud who admits his unease by referring to himself in the third person. “You must hate Trump,” says Trump when Bill Barr, his previously compliant attorney general, rebuffs his lies about a stolen election. He then says: “You must hate Trump” a second time, making it an exhortation as much as an accusation. He can’t command love and suspects that he doesn’t deserve it: will hatred do as a second best? Elsewhere, Trump re-enacts for Karl an exchange with his sullen adolescent son. “Do you love your dad?” he wheedles, as needy as a black hole. “Uh, I don’t know,” grunts Barron. “Too cool,” remarks the paterfamilias, frozen out.Karl’s anecdotes offer some sharp insights into Trump’s compulsions. He fawns over autocratic thugs such as Putin because he is himself a weakling. While demanding “total domination” of demonstrators outside the White House, he is hustled to safety in a fortified basement, which prompts an internet wit to nickname him “bunker bitch”. As a populist, he cares only about popularity and purchases it with tacky giveaways; while in hospital with Covid, he sends lackeys to distribute “cartons of M&M’s emblazoned with his signature” to the fans outside. When Karl prods him to denounce the riot at the Capitol, he fondly recalls that “magnificently beautiful day” and grumbles that the fake news didn’t give him “credit” for attracting such a large crowd. Negotiating with Karl over his attendance at the White House correspondents’ dinner, where the president usually delivers a jocular speech, Trump asks: “What is the concept? Am I supposed to be funny up there?” Yes, the psychotic shtick of this would-be dictator is dictated by whatever audience he is playing to.When the counting of electoral votes resumed late at night on 6 January, Karl notes that the senators picked their way into the chamber through splintered wood, shattered glass and a surf of ransacked documents, with the stink of pepper spray lingering in the air; the bust of President Zachary Taylor had been smeared “with a red substance that appeared to be blood”. In a poem about the statue of Clio written in 1851, President John Adams regretted that she had to listen to “the conflicting jar/ Of ranting, raving parties”. Adams didn’t know the half of it. Perhaps Clio’s marble pallor reflects her state of mind: she must be appalled by what she has recently had to record in her open book.TopicsHistory booksObserver book of the weekUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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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