5:33 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Self-Determination and Disorder: For those who are interested, a recent essay from my International Relations tutorial--taking a relatively dim view of nationhood, independence movements, and Michael Walzer's political program--is now posted here.

 

8:23 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Nattering Nabobs, etc.: William Safire coins a new phrase for liberal pessimists: the "Schopenhauer Left."

 

7:31 AM :: Stephen (contact)

The Elephantiasis of Reason: The bombing of the Red Cross offices in Baghdad was a great tragedy. Those who died were engaged in a selfless effort to help others in need. But as the occupation goes on, the tragedy may be compounded by a mindset that deeply underestimates the danger:

For the humanitarian agency, the blast shattered the belief that 23 years of good deeds in Iraq could be worn like protective armor against violence. "We were always confident that people knew us and that our work here would protect us," said Nada Doumani, spokeswoman for the Red Cross in Baghdad. "How do we understand this?"

For some reason, the answer doesn't seem particularly difficult--the people who killed UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, along with so many other innocents, don't care that the Red Cross does a world of good. They want Iraq to be unstable and insecure, because a secure, stable Iraq is one in which they can't easily take power. It seems unnecessary to point out, but they don't have the Iraqi people's best interests at heart.

Back in January, David Brooks had written an article in the Atlantic Monthly called "The Elephantiasis of Reason" (borrowing the phrase from Irving Kristol). It described the CIA report "Global Trends 2015," which attempted to predict the future through a focus on major social forces, ignoring the individuals such forces might affect. According to Brooks,

There are no human beings in the world described by the CIA. There are no passions or religious ideals, no dreams or urges, no altruism or malevolence. Instead there are only impersonal forces: technological developments, economic trends, and demographic pressures.

The CIA's approach, Brooks argues, relies on an unspoken assumption by analysts that "foreign dictators will behave as they--social scientists with Ph.D.s and homes in suburban Virginia--would behave in similar circumstances." Yet what it cannot account for is the potential irrationality, or at least apparent irrationality, that a dictator's behavior might display. Similarly, a worldview that considers all Iraqis to have certain universal interests (peace, stability, prosperity, etc.), and to pursue those interests rationally, will fail to understand how the terrorists could be murdering their benefactors. Consider the following statement by the president of the French Red Cross:

"This is very serious, because this is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and Iraq is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions," said Marc Gentilini, a physician and president of the French Red Cross.

You know, I thought it was serious because so many people died. The fact that it violated the Geneva Conventions had kind of slipped my mind.

These sound like the words of someone who has spent so long in the world of international law that he has forgotten there's another world outside. So what if Iraq is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions? The government that signed them never kept them, and in any case, it no longer exists. Does Dr. Gentilini honestly think that the terrorists who planned the attack consider themselves bound by international agreements? On whom is he trying to impress the seriousness of this treaty violation?

If any demonstration were needed that the world does not operate in a calm, rational, lawlike fashion, this is it. If we want to make Iraq a better place for its citizens, we can't assume that the murderers who target their fellow citizens will be motivated for a desire for peace--and then panic when it turns out we're wrong. (How could the U.N. have possibly run Iraq if it has withdrawn almost all of its staff after two bomb attacks?) The most important thing for now is improving security, and that means going after these groups wherever they can be found. If that requires more troops and resources than have been invested thus far, so be it. But nothing can be accomplished so long as we ignore the true nature of our--and the Iraqi people's--enemies.

 

8:14 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Cut and Run: An unlikely suggestion from Gregg Easterbrook:

IT'S THIS SIMPLE: COME CLEAN ON WMD, OR LEAVE IRAQ: I'd like to propose a simplification of the entire Iraq/WMD debate. It's this: If the reason we went into Iraq really, truly was that the Bush administration really, truly believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, then there is nothing of which the administration need feel shamed--but the United States must immediately leave Iraq.

We now know there is no significant banned-weapons program in Iraq. Any serious manufacturing facilities for banned weapons would have been detected by this point. If we went in to stop a banned-weapons program genuinely believing one existed, and now know one did not exist, then our military must depart immediately. This is the only honorable course.

Alternative: The administration admits that other reasons, possibly valid, were the real reasons all along.

I respect Easterbrook as a writer, but I have to say that's the silliest "simplification" I've ever heard. Even if weapons of mass destruction were the only potentially legitimate reason for the war (which is false) and if Iraq had no programs we should be concerned about (which is also false), why on earth would an immediate departure be "the only honorable course"?

Easterbrook's logic only makes sense if you assume that our presence in Iraq is in some way punitive--designed to punish those darn weapon-building I-raqis by taking away their country for a while. If this war really was merely punitive, reasons Easterbrook, and it turns out that the punishment was undeserved, then of course we ought to stop punishing them, and set things back to rights. But if Easterbrook thinks we have a responsibility to restore the status quo ante, then the answer isn't just to leave Iraq, but to install Saddam back in power first. Is that really what he is calling for? It's certainly what would happen if we left now, but is that what Easterbrook really wants?

Alternatively, maybe Easterbrook's argument is that a war designed solely to stop Saddam's pursuit of WMD has now achieved its purpose--"mission accomplished," so let's go home. But this argument fails on its own terms, since Saddam's pursuit of WMD can't be guaranteed to have stopped permanently until he's guaranteed to be out of power--which, at the very least, requires the creation of some effective government to take his place. It also assumes that Iraq is strategically irrelevant to us except with regard to its weapons (or lack thereof)--that once we're sure the WMD are gone, we can just go home. With the welfare of 22 million Iraqis, $87 billion in taxpayer money, and a huge amount of America's credibility on the line, that's patently not the case. Even if this war were purely about WMD, we still might have reasons why, once we've defeated Saddam's regime, we'd want to shape the new Iraq in ways that fit our narrow self-interest (let alone our moral sensibilities).

But the most fundamental flaw in this post is that it assumes that the administration has to "admit[]" that there were other reasons "all along." In my view, the administration hasn't exactly been hiding its non-WMD reasons for action. Check out the following, from an NYT editorial of Feb. 27, 2003 (quoted to brilliant effect by Andrew Sullivan):

President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a 'free and peaceful Iraq' that would serve as a 'dramatic and inspiring example' to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict. The idea of turning Iraq into a model democracy in the Arab world is one some members of the administration have been discussing for a long time.

Why is Easterbrook ignorant of this? Why does he insist that one set of reasons or another must have been "the real reasons all along"? Isn't it possible for a major policy decision like the invasion of Iraq to have many independent reasons in its favor--to be morally overdetermined?

And let's suppose, just for a moment, that the invasion of Iraq was fundamentally unjustified and irrational--that Bush had ordered it by accident one morning and was always too embarrassed to say so. Wouldn't the moral course of action still be for us to remain in Iraq for as long it took to lay the foundations of a peaceful and democratic society?

Or would it be to cut and run?

 

5:25 PM :: Stephen (contact)

One, Two, Three, Throw: A friend points me to one of the most prestigious sports competitions in the world: The 2003 World Rock Paper Scissors Championship. It's a vicious game--described by NPR as "a tense drama pitting fist against splayed fingers against outstretched hand"--but it has been celebrated a wide variety of propaganda posters as showcasing the benefits of modern technology.

Just remember: Think Rock.

The World Rock Paper Scissors Society claims this poster, "Think Rock", was part of a 1955 campaign to woo the public back toward the Rock. The society says the poster was an attempt to reposition Rock as the "thinking man's throw."
Provided by: The World Rock Paper Scissors Society

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh asks, "what's with this paper beats rock thing, anyway?"

 

8:15 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Hmm... From the NYT account of the attack on the Rashid Hotel:

Altogether the launcher held 40 missile pods, said Brig. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division, whose responsibility is the security of Baghdad. He was speaking at a news conference this evening, held in a building in the compound near the Rashid Hotel.

Half the missiles were 68 millimeter, which have a range of two to three miles; the others were 85 millimeter, whose range is three to four miles, he said. The smaller ones were French made, and designed for use by helicopters. The others were Russian. The French rockets, officers said, were quite new, and likely purchased after the arms embargo was in place.

"They were in pristine condition," said one military officer who inspected the rocket tubes and assembly.

Saddam Hussein had weapons of this type in his arsenal, but General Dempsey said he did not know the origins of these missiles.

 

7:12 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Southern Cross: Two Rhodes Scholars, both from South Africa, have started a great new blog to focus on Southern African issues. Check out southern-cross.blogspot.com for very interesting posts on Zimbabwe, press freedom, and the morality of accepting a Rhodes Scholarship.

 

5:43 AM :: Stephen (contact)

"Students Favor Bush in IOP Poll": The Harvard Crimson carried an astounding story in Thursday's edition:

College students are more likely to register as Republicans and support President Bush than the general public, according to a survey released yesterday by Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP).

The nationwide poll of 1,202 undergraduates revealed that 61 percent approve of Bush’s performance as president, compared to 53 percent of all voters.

College students, 81 percent of whom say they will definitely or probably vote in the 2004 elections, could tip the scales in next year’s presidential race, the survey results indicated.

Unfortunately, The Crimson lets the data be submerged beneath tepid analysis:

"It sends the message that youth are up for grabs in 2004," said Jonathan S. Chavez ’05, who directed the survey for the IOP’s Student Advisory Committee (SAC).

I'm sorry, but this poll says a lot more than that: it sends the message that the Democratic Party is in real trouble. Most people I knew in college subscribed to 1960s-era stereotypes, in which idealistic young people, unbeholden to the system, take up the progressive flag against their reactionary elders. ("Don't trust anyone over 30," etc.)

I subscribed to the stereotype too, at least to some extent, and I was very surprised that the Democratic Party had failed to make use of what could be a powerful base of support. But what I didn't realize was that the liberal-activist tradition on campus has veered sharply to the left, leaving a large chunk of students in the middle. The kind of social revolution the activist wing calls for isn't one that most students want to see. And in any case, today's Democratic Party isn't a party of revolution. In many ways, it's become a status quo party, dedicated to preserving the gains of the Great Society against the evil Republicans who want grandma thrown in the street. In contrast, the right spent 40 years trying to come up with an intellectual alternative to the New Deal, and since the 1970s has been advancing an ideological program that, regardless of its merits, has seemed far more attractive to many Americans than the continual expansion of the welfare state. The aftermath of 9/11 has only intensified the problem--the GOP's approach to national security may be flawed, but the Democrats simply haven't offered a clear alternative, and the proposals of the loudest voices on the left don't inspire much trust.

In the same way, liberalism on campus is no longer the cutting edge. College faculties and administrations are now more liberal than society as a whole, and those who want to speak truth to power are generally on the other side of the political divide. When the Establishment is comfortably liberal, where are energetic young iconoclasts to go?

I say this, of course, as someone who doesn't celebrate these results; to be honest, I'm really hoping for an ideologically coherent alternative to the party of Tom DeLay. But if the Dems don't recognize this rejection of old stereotypes--like Schwarzenegger's election in California (the bluest of all blue states!)--as a shock to the system and a signal for reform, then the re-thinking that's needed won't ever take place. When more college students plan to vote for Bush than for a generic "Democratic candidate," something's gone very wrong for the Democrats.

That's why it's so dangerous for the poll story to be downplayed by Democrats like former Agriculture Secretary (and IOP Director) Dan Glickman, who responded by calling college students "an untapped reservoir for politicians and political parties to mine." (The Christian Science Monitor flubs the story as well, opening with a bizarre non-lede: "Intriguing evidence indicates today's college students may be a potent political force in next year's election and beyond.") The problem isn't that political parties have failed to tap the reservoir; the problem is that the Democratic Party is finding it dry. Indeed, it's hard to overestimate the significance of this poll--if the Democratic Party is losing college students, who can it win? And of the 61 percent who approve of Bush now, how many will grow any more liberal as they get older?

(One final note: the poll also showed that among college students, the Democratic frontrunner is Joe Lieberman, who's been far more willing than other candidates to buck traditional liberal constituencies. Lieberman is also nearly alone among Democratic candidates in articulating a foreign policy vision that's both firmly rooted in liberal ideals and a realistic counterweight to Bush's approach. Maybe ideological coherence is making a comeback? We can only hope.)

 

2:59 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Ominous Product Warning of the Day: From an Argos halogen lamp:

IF THE SUPPLY CORD IS DAMAGED,
THE LUMINARIES MUST BE DESTROYED.

Release the hounds.

 

12:31 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Next on FOX: When Llamas Attack.

LONDON (AFP) - Ambulance crews called to the aid of a 72-year-old farmer who injured himself after tripping over a rabbit hole were left powerless to help him after his herd of stubborn llamas leapt to his defence.

Graham Bailey who farms four South American llamas, called Milo, Bertie, Horatio and Felix, fell in a field on his farm near Kettering, and was stranded for two hours before a passer-by heard his screams.

Attempts to rescue the stricken pensioner were halted when the head llama led the animals in a circle and began dancing around to protect him.

"The ringleader Milo stirred the others up," an air ambulance spokesman said.

As my brother says, oldest story in the book.

 

6:16 AM :: Stephen (contact)

National Character: It's hard what to make of this exchange of gifts, as recorded by the Washington Post:

Bush gave Koizumi a pair of monogrammed brown cowboy boots as well as a little Japanese flag. In return, Koizumi gave Bush a voice-recognition pet-dog robot.

 

11:38 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Back in the U.S.S.R.: While reading for my tutorial in international relations, I came across the following quote, written in 1979:

The death rate among states is remarkably low. Few states die; many firms do. Who is likely to be around 100 years from now--the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Egypt, Thailand, and Uganda? Or Ford, IBM, Shell, Unilever, and Massey-Ferguson? I would bet on the states, perhaps even on Uganda. (Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 95).

It consistently amazes me that 12 years before the Soviet Union's collapse, the analyst community was convinced it would still exist a century later. And it looks like IBM's doing pretty well thus far...

 

5:58 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Luitginisc Cnuosifon: Back in September, the Volokh Conspiracy posted the following email forward:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Fcuknig amzanig huh?

Like most email forwards, it's an urban legend; many versions circulating around the web change the text slightly, such as referencing an "Elingsh uinervtisy" instead. (The "Elingsh uinervtisy" version was reprinted in the October 2003 edition of Prospect Magazine.) But apparently this legend has a grain of truth behind it, originating in actual linguistic research. By now, the forward has shown up in several different versions and even 14 different languages.

So, does it work? To test it, I've put up a simple CGI script (written in GAWK!) called "The Jumbler", which can randomly jumble any text while preserving the first and last letters of each word, as well as punctuation. Results may differ, but running the first sentence of the email through a second time produced "Accirnodg to a raecchesrh at Cdiagmrbe Uirsitnvey," which is far less legible (especially if you don't know what you're supposed to be reading). Here are some other results; judge for yourself.

When in the Crsoue of hmaun enevts, it bcoemes neasrscey for one ppeloe to dslsoive the ptocaiill badns wchih hvae cetcnoend them wtih ahtnoer, and to aussme amnog the prewos of the etrah, the sapreate and eqaul sitoatn to wcihh the Lwas of Nuarte and of Ntuare's God elnttie tehm, a deenct rcspeet to the oionpnis of mnkaind rereqius taht they sluhod dclaere the cauess wichh iepml them to the satraopein.

To be, or not to be: that is the qesoutin:
Weehhtr 'tis nbelor in the mnid to suffer
The snlgis and aowrrs of ougautores furntoe,
Or to take amrs angisat a sea of tboulres,
And by oopinpsg end them?

I wulod gllday pay you Tudseay for a hrgmuaebr tdaoy.

It seems that some basic aspects of consonant ordering need to be preserved, but that's just my first impression--I'll wait to hear what the experts have to say.

 

7:11 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Mass Delusion on the Korean Peninsula: Few recent newspaper articles are more disturbing than this Washington Post report from back in September, which I recently re-read. How is it that only 9 percent of citizens consider the possession of nuclear weapons by a secretive, isolated dictator--whose policies are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of his countrymen and whose government frequently threatens to unleash "a sea of fire" on its enemies--to be "a major government concern"?

In my copious free time, I've just finished reading The Aquariums of Pyongyang, an account of the North Korean gulag system by an escaped survivor (recommended here). It's a heartbreaking book, and the conditions it describes of deprivation, barbed wire and prison camps are depressingly similar to those created by totalitarian regimes in Europe. The managers of the Yodok camp borrow methods directly from the Nazis and the Soviets--forcing inmates to act as informers, turning them against each other, manipulating them through their own fear and hunger--to dehumanize the prisoners and subject them to the most severe physical and psychological torture.

I almost wrote "borrowed" there, but there's no reason to put things in the past tense. As Tacitus notes, these camps are still operating today, and if anything the situation is probably more desperate--this being a time of famine--than it was when Kang Chol-Hwan was imprisoned in the late 1980s. From a European perspective, concentration camps are a creature of the 20th Century, not the 21st. It's hard to remember that they exist not only in black-and-white History Channel documentaries, but in a modern age with real people inside them. It's even harder to remember that the starvation in these camps, as well as the famine sweeping the larger prison Kim Jong-Il's regime has become, are not the result of forces of nature. The evil wrought there is entirely manmade.

I'm not asking for the use of military force to open the camps (although it was hard to read of Yodok's terrors without remembering the calls to bomb Auschwitz, without wanting to end them now). At least, I'm not asking yet. But I can't help remembering how, after each new set of concentration camps was opened in Europe, the world made a resolution of "Never Again." We took our videos and aired the documentaries, we admitted how much we had known all along, and we declared that in the future, such injustices would not stand, the pleas of innocents would not be ignored, the nations of the world would intervene.

Well, here are the camps. Here is a genuine case of a prison regime, a ruling clique that retains power only through the cruelest oppression of its people. Here is a militarist dictatorship that poses a grave security threat--perhaps one of the greatest of the last decade--to the nations of Asia and peace-loving people the world over. Why is this not a dominant topic of world politics, a major focus of concern? Why is Halliburton getting more air time than the suffering of millions?

Even if there are few good options in North Korea--and I'd be the first to admit it--that still doesn't answer why we haven't put more effort into finding the best of them. The energy that was displayed when millions took to the streets last spring was dissipated in a fruitless cause; could it not be channeled into more productive use? Couldn't a world movement--especially one ostensibly concerned about freedom--spend less time protesting the violent removal of one Stalinist, and more time planning the peaceful removal of another?

Yet the experience of South Korea, as described by the Post, makes me begin to lose hope. What's truly startling about the end of Kang's book is the kind of reception he's received in the South--where college students accused him of parroting the government line. At first, I found it unfathomable that those most suspicious of "propaganda" would trust a regime from which starving people routinely risk their lives to escape. (If pictures of George W. Bush were hung in every American home, if every popular song referenced his name, if schoolchildren were taught miraculous accounts of his birth, would the pronouncements of his government be treated with similar respect?) But having read the Post article, it's become more understandable to me now. Denying that any of this represents "a major government concern" is much easier than accepting how dangerous, and how evil, the world really is.

I think I'm starting to understand something else now, too--why it was so easy for Hitler to rise to power, and to begin his aggression unchallenged. Never underestimate the capacity for self-delusion of a threatened nation that honestly desires peace.

 

5:06 AM :: Stephen (contact)

The double standard: Another trip update--on a day spent in Budapest, I visited the Dohany Synagogue, the second largest in the world. Although it's been substantially renovated, the original late 19th-c. walls are, remarkably, still standing. The synagogue wasn't damaged by the Nazis because the Gestapo used it as a headquarters, and it wasn't bombed by the Allies because it was a synagogue. Although it's designed like a cathedral (the architects didn't know how to build anything different), it's a beautiful place of worship, and a reminder of how vibrant Jewish life in Europe had been before the catastrophe.

As I had half expected, the synagogue complex is surrounded by an iron gate, and those entering are required to pass through a metal detector. At first, I didn't think much of it; various security precautions aren't that unheard of for synagogues, and this was a landmark.

But then it started to worry me. Why should I expect this? When's the last time you went through a metal detector to enter a church? The fear isn't limited to tourist destinations; why should the Hillel on Harvard's campus, of all places, need extra police protection during the High Holidays? Why should a concern for random physical violence be almost normal for synagogues, something you often don't notice and don't find unusual?

It was hard to think about such questions without recognizing something I had never really considered--the "double standard." The Russian Orthodox diaspora, for example, doesn't live in fear for what Yeltsin and Putin have done to the Muslims of Grozny. And the evidence for deliberate and calculated attacks on innocent civilians is far, far better in the case of Chechnya than in the Occupied Territories. Why are true accounts of massacres in Chechnya (including threats to "exterminate" the civilian population) so quickly forgotten, while erroneous accounts of massacres in Jenin are remembered so clearly?

Obviously, these questions are just rhetorical; there are plenty of symbolic as well as power-politics reasons why the U.N. and others ignore Chechnya and focus on Palestine. And I certainly don't intend to justify all of Israel's actions, some of which (though only some) are indeed reprehensible, by claiming that "Everyone's doing it." But Jews aren't Israel, even if most Israelis are Jews. Why, then, does it seem like no surprise if innocent individuals are held responsible (even viciously murdered) for the actions of their co-religionists? (And this in the heart of Europe?)

I don't think the answer can be found in international politics, but only in something much darker. Those Parisian Jews who marched against the war were still beaten for looking Jewish. Yet the near-universal response--to change the subject to Israel's actions, to accept without question that Jews everywhere bear the blood guilt for Israel's sins--is nothing more than blaming the victim. It is deeply worrying to live in a world where this, too, is just to be expected.

 

7:00 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Don't call it a comeback: I've been here about a week, since I arrived in Oxford after visiting an old friend and his family in Hungary. I stayed for eight days, and had a wonderful time there. However, I don't want the following to give the impression that my experience was primarily political; it's just that I couldn't visit a country that had undergone such drastic change without spending a moment thinking about its history.

The last time I visited Hungary was nine years ago, in the summer of 1994. I don't remember too many of the places we went, but I do remember how it felt very different, like a socialist country. We had our passports checked every ten feet in the airport; we saw policemen in military-style uniforms; we stood in Heroes Square (baking like a reflector oven in the hottest summer yet on record) and saw all around us the concrete fruits of the past 50 years.

This time, things were very different. As I traveled through Hungary, staying a few days in Budapest as well as driving almost the length and breadth of the country, I noticed a very Central European feel, kind of like "Austria East." After living in England for a year, a country of rolling hills and green pastureland, I was glad to see straight highways, open plains, and immense fields of wheat--I'm starting to miss the Mid-West. Maybe it was because I was staying with friends, maybe it was because I had been there before, but it didn't feel foreign to me at all.

But I got the strong impression that this sense of normalcy was deliberate. On our drive, we visited Fort Monostor in Komarom, which had once withstood a siege of 60,000 soldiers, and from which the departing Soviet troops had removed everything movable (including the floors and windows). We walked through Festetics Castle in Keszthely, where the Russians decided to build a concrete-walled road through the middle of what had been a beautiful garden estate. Now the castle garden was again carefully tended, and the fort was building a new restaurant and visitor's center. My friend kept remarking how well and how recently various sights had been restored; I didn't notice, since they looked as well-maintained as any similar destinations in the U.S. (and more so than many). With every renovation, the legacy of socialism was being carefully removed, and the memory of Hungary's brighter days--when Budapest had been among the first cities of Europe--revived.

On my last day, we visited the Statue Park on the outskirts of Budapest, where several monuments to the old regime have been deposited. It's hard to reach from the center of the city, so there were only a handful of people there, and between the monuments and the emptiness it had the atmosphere of a graveyard. What struck me most was that these monuments, ostensibly erected in celebration of Hungary's achievements, were far from celebratory in emotion. There was no mistaking their design: they were supposed to be ominous and forbidding. A trio of Hungarian socialist leaders were depicted looking like nothing so much as evil robots emerging from the stone; the workers had strong arms, clenched fists, and expressions of righteous anger.



The implied message was not "let us build a worker's paradise," but "we will bury you." The many "Liberation" monuments took on a new light when my friend told me that the "liberation" was not from the fascists of 1945, but from the "counter-revolutionaries" of 1956--an inversion of meaning that reminded me of Berthold Brecht's poem "The Solution":

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

It's difficult for me to imagine living under a government that sees its role, not as serving the people, but as compelling the people to service. Lord knows capitalism hasn't solved everything, and that Hungary is hardly free of problems, but it was difficult to go there and not think that something very important has been achieved.

Best of all, they're selling T-shirts at the entrance, not far from the statues of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. A final insult to their memory, I suppose.