Wednesday, February 09, 2022

James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution


https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.17923/page/n13/mode/2up 


Burnham managerial revolution paper Economic History



"Second Thoughts on James Burnham" ("James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution", when published as a pamphlet) is an essay, first published in May 1946 in ...


SECOND THOUGHTS ON JAMES BURNHAM

This material remains under copyright and is reproduced by kind permission of the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books.

James Burnham’s book, The Managerial Revolution, made a considerable stir both in the United States and in this country at the time when it was published, and its main thesis has been so much discussed that a detailed exposition of it is hardly necessary. As shortly as I can summarize it, the thesis is this:-

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

In his next published book, The Machiavellians, Burnham elaborates and also modifies his original statement. The greater part of the book is an exposition of the theories of Machiavelli and of his modern disciples, Mosca, Michels, and Pareto: with doubtful justification, Burnham adds to these the syndicalist writer, Georges Sorel. What Burnham is mainly concerned to show is that a democratic society has never existed and so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. Burnham does not deny that ‘good’ motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or ‘the classless society’, or ‘the Kingdom of Heaven on earth’, are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way into power. The English Puritans, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, were in each case simply power seekers using the hopes of the masses in order to win a privileged position for themselves. Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority. In each great revolutionary struggle the masses are led on by vague dreams of human brotherhood, and then, when the new ruling class is well established in power, they are thrust back into servitude. This is practically the whole of political history, as Burnham sees it.

Where the second book departs from the earlier one is in asserting that the whole process could be somewhat moralized if the facts were faced more honestly. The Machiavellians is sub-titled Defenders of Freedom. Machiavelli and his followers taught that in politics decency simply does not exist, and, by doing so, Burnham claims, made it possible to conduct political affairs more intelligently and less oppressively. A ruling class which recognized that its real aim was to stay in power would also recognize that it would be more likely to succeed if it served the common good, and might avoid stiffening into a hereditary aristocracy. Burnham lays much stress on Pareto’s theory of the ‘circulation of the élites’. If it is to stay in power a ruling class must constantly admit suitable recruits from below, so that the ablest men may always be at the top and a new class of power-hungry malcontents cannot come into being. This is likeliest to happen, Burnham considers, in a society which retains democratic habits – that is, where opposition is permitted and certain bodies such as the press and the trade unions can keep their autonomy. Here Burnham undoubtedly contradicts his earlier opinion. In The Managerial Revolution, which was written in 1940, it is taken as a matter of course that ‘managerial’ Germany is in all ways more efficient than a capitalist democracy such as France or Britain. In the second book, written in 1942, Burnham admits that the Germans might have avoided some of their more serious strategic errors if they had permitted freedom of speech. However, the main thesis is not abandoned. Capitalism is doomed, and Socialism is a dream. If we grasp what is at issue we may guide the course of the managerial revolution to some extent, but that revolution is happening, whether we like it or not. In both books, but especially the earlier one, there is a note of unmistakable relish over the cruelty and wickedness of the processes that are being discussed. Although he reiterates that he is merely setting forth the facts and not stating his own preferences, it is clear that Burnham is fascinated by the spectacle of power, and that his sympathies were with Germany so long as Germany appeared to be winning the war. A more recent essay, ‘Lenin’s Heir’, published in the Partisan Review about the beginning of 1945, suggests that this sympathy has since been transferred to the U.S.S.R. ‘Lenin’s Heir’, which provoked violent controversy in the American left-wing press, has not yet been reprinted in England, and I must return to it later.

It will be seen that Burnham’s theory is not, strictly speaking, a new one. Many earlier writers have foreseen the emergence of a new kind of society, neither capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery: though most of them have differed from Burnham in not assuming this development to be inevitable. A good example is Hilaire Belloc’s book, The Servile State, published in 1911. The Servile State is written in a tiresome style, and the remedy it suggests (a return to small-scale peasant ownership) is for many reasons impossible: still, it does foretell with remarkable insight the kind of things that have been happening from about 1930 onwards. Chesterton, in a less methodical way, predicted the disappearance of democracy and private property, and the rise of a slave society which might be called either capitalist or Communist. Jack London, in The Iron Heel (1909), foretold some of the essential features of Fascism, and such books as Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes (1900), Zamyatin’s We (1923), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1930), all described imaginary worlds in which the special problems of capitalism had been solved without bringing liberty, equality, or true happiness any nearer. More recently, writers like Peter Drucker and F. A. Voigt have argued that Fascism and Communism are substantially the same thing. And indeed, it has always been obvious that a planned and centralized society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship. Orthodox Conservatives were unable to see this, because it comforted them to assume that Socialism ‘wouldn’t work’, and that the disappearance of capitalism would mean chaos and anarchy. Orthodox Socialists could not see it, because they wished to think that they themselves would soon be in power, and therefore assumed that when capitalism disappears, Socialism takes its place. As a result they were unable to foresee the rise of Fascism, or to make correct predictions about it after it had appeared. Later, the need to justify the Russian dictatorship and to explain away the obvious resemblances between Communism and Nazism clouded the issue still more. But the notion that industrialism must end in monopoly, and that monopoly must imply tyranny, is not a startling one.

Where Burnham differs from most other thinkers is in trying to plot the course of the ‘managerial revolution’ accurately on a world scale, and in assuming that the drift towards totalitarianism is irresistible and must not be fought against, though it may be guided. According to Burnham, writing in 1940, ‘managerialism’ has reached its fullest development in the U.S.S.R., but is almost equally well developed in Germany, and has made its appearance in the United States. He describes the New Deal as ‘primitive managerialism’. But the trend is the same everywhere, or almost everywhere. Always laissez-faire capitalism gives way to planning and state interference, the mere owner loses power as against the technician and the bureaucrat, but Socialism – that is to say, what used to be called Socialism – shows no sign of emerging:

Some apologists try to excuse Marxism by saying that it has ‘never had a chance’. This is far from the truth. Marxism and the Marxist parties have had dozens of chances. In Russia, a Marxist party took power. Within a short time it abandoned Socialism; if not in words, at any rate in the effect of its actions. In most European nations there were during the last months of the first world war and the years immediately thereafter, social crises which left a wide-open door for the Marxist parties: without exception they proved unable to take and hold power. In a large number of countries – Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France – the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce Socialism or make any genuine step towards Socialism. . . . These parties have, in practice, at every historical test – and there have been many – either failed Socialism or abandoned it. This is the fact which neither the bitterest foe nor the most ardent friend of Socialism can erase. This fact does not, as some think, prove anything about the moral quality of the Socialist ideal. But it does constitute unblinkable evidence that, whatever its moral quality, Socialism is no going to come.

Burnham does not, of course, deny that the new ‘managerial’ régimes, like the régimes of Russia and Nazi Germany, may be called Socialist. He means merely that they will not be Socialist in any sense of the word which would have been accepted by Marx, or Lenin, or Keir Hardie, or William Morris, or indeed, by any representative Socialist prior to about 1930. Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality and internationalism. There is not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere, and the one great country in which something described as a proletarian revolution once happened, i.e. the U.S.S.R., has moved steadily away from the old concept of a free and equal society aiming at universal human brotherhood. In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger. But at the same time, Burnham insists, there has been no tendency to return to capitalism. What is happening is simply the growth of ‘managerialism’, which, according to Burnham, is in progress everywhere, though the manner in which it comes about may vary from country to country.

Now, as an interpretation of what is happening, Burnham’s theory is extremely plausible, to put it at the lowest. The events of, at any rate, the last fifteen years in the U.S.S.R. can be far more easily explained by this theory than by any other. Evidently the U.S.S.R. is not Socialist, and can only be called Socialist if one gives the word a meaning different from what it would have in any other context. On the other hand, prophecies that the Russian régime would revert to capitalism have always been falsified, and now seem further than ever from being fulfilled. In claiming that the process had gone almost equally far in Nazi Germany, Burnham probably exaggerates, but it seems certain that the drift was away from old-style capitalism and towards a planned economy with an adoptive oligarchy in control. In Russia the capitalists were destroyed first and the workers were crushed later. In Germany the workers were crushed first, but the elimination of the capitalists had at any rate begun, and calculations based on the assumption that Nazism was ‘simply capitalism’ were always contradicted by events. Where Burnham seems to go most astray is in believing ‘managerialism’ to be on the up-grade in the United States, the one great country where free capitalism is still vigorous. But if one considers the world movement as a whole, his conclusions are difficult to resist; and even in the United States the all-prevailing faith in laissez-faire may not survive the next great economic crisis. It has been urged against Burnham that he assigns far too much importance to the ‘managers’, in the narrow sense of the word – that is, factory bosses, planners and technicians – and seems to assume that even in Soviet Russia it is these people, and not the Communist Party chiefs, who are the real holders of power. However, this is a secondary error, and it is particularly corrected in The Machiavellians. The real question is not whether the people who wipe their boots on you during the next fifty years are to be called managers, bureaucrats, or politicians; the question is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy or to true democracy.

But curiously enough, when one examines the predictions which Burnham has based on his general theory, one finds that in so far as they are verifiable, they have been falsified. Numbers of people have pointed this out already. However, it is worth following up Burnham’s predictions in detail because they form a sort of pattern which is related to contemporary events, and which reveals, I believe, a very important weakness in present-day political thought.

To begin with, writing in 1940, Burnham takes a German victory more or less for granted. Britain is described as ‘dissolving’, and as displaying ‘all the characteristics which have distinguished decadent cultures in past historical transitions’, while the conquest and integration of Europe which Germany achieved in 1940 is described as ‘irreversible’. ‘England,’ writes Burnham, ‘no matter with what non-European allies, cannot conceivably hope to conquer the European continent.’ Even if Germany should somehow manage to lose the war, she could not be dismembered or reduced to the status of the Weimar Republic, but is bound to remain as the nucleus of a unified Europe. The future map of the world, with its three great super-states is, in any case, already settled in its main outlines: and ‘the nuclei of these three super-states are, whatever may be their future names, the previously existing nations, Japan, Germany, and the United States’.

Burnham also commits himself to the opinion that Germany will not attack the U.S.S.R until after Britain has been defeated. In a condensation of his book published in the Partisan Review of May-June 1941, and presumably written later than the book itself, he says:

As in the case of Russia, so with Germany, the third part of the managerial problem – the contest for dominance with other sections of managerial society – remains for the future. First had to come the death-blow that assured the toppling of the capitalist world order, which meant above all the destruction of the foundations of the British Empire (the keystone of the capitalist world order) both directly and through the smashing of the European political structure, which was a necessary prop of the Empire. This is the basic explanation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which is not intelligible on other grounds. The future conflict between Germany and Russia will be a managerial conflict proper; prior to the great world-managerial battles, the end of the capitalist order must be assured. The belief that Nazism is ‘decadent capitalism’ . . . makes it impossible to explain reasonably the Nazi-Soviet Pact. From this belief followed the always expected war between Germany and Russia, not the actual war to the death between Germany and the British Empire. The war between Germany and Russia is one of the managerial wars of the future, not of the anti-capitalist wars of yesterday and today.

However, the attack on Russia will come later, and Russia is certain, or almost certain, to be defeated. ‘There is every reason to believe . . . that Russia will split apart, with the western half gravitating towards the European base and the eastern towards the Asiatic.’ This quotation comes from The Managerial Revolution. In the above-quoted article, written probably about six months later, it is put more forcibly: ‘the Russian weaknesses indicate that Russia will not be able to endure, that it will crack apart, and fall towards east and west.’ And in a supplementary note which was added to the English (Pelican) edition, and which appears to have been written at the end of 1941, Burnham speaks as though the ‘cracking apart’ process were already happening. The war, he says, ‘is part of the means whereby the western half of Russia is being integrated into the European super-state’.

Sorting these various statements out, we have the following prophecies:

  • Germany is bound to win the war.
  • Germany and Japan are bound to survive as great states, and to remain the nuclei of power in their respective area.
  • Germany will not attack the U.S.S.R. until after the defeat of Britain.
  • The U.S.S.R. is bound to be defeated.

However, Burnham has made other predictions besides these. In a short article in the Partisan Review, in the summer of 1944, he gives his opinion that the U.S.S.R. will gang up with Japan in order to prevent the total defeat of the latter, while the American Communists will be set to work to sabotage the eastern end of the war. And finally, in an article in the same magazine in the winter of 1944–45, he claims that Russia, destined so short a while ago to ‘crack apart’, is within sight of conquering the whole of Eurasia. This article, which was the cause of violent controversies among the American intelligentsia, has not been reprinted in England. I must give some account of it here, because its manner of approach and its emotional tone are of a peculiar kind, and by studying them one can get nearer to the real roots of Burnham’s theory.

The article is entitled ‘Lenin’s Heir’, and it sets out to show that Stalin is the true and legitimate guardian of the Russian Revolution, which he has not in any sense ‘betrayed’ but has merely carried forward on lines that were implicit in it from the start. In itself, this is an easier opinion to swallow than the usual Trotskyist claim that Stalin is a mere crook who has perverted the Revolution to his own ends, and that things would somehow have been different if Lenin had lived or Trotsky had remained in power. Actually there is no strong reason for thinking that the main lines of development would have been very different. Well before 1923 the seeds of a totalitarian society were quite plainly there. Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely.[1] Had he lived, it is probable that he would either have been thrown out, like Trotsky, or would have kept himself in power by methods as barbarous, or nearly as barbarous, as those of Stalin. The title of Burnham’s essay, therefore, sets forth a reasonable thesis, and one would expect him to support it by an appeal to the facts.

However, the essay barely touches upon its ostensible subject-matter. It is obvious that anyone genuinely concerned to show that there has been continuity of policy as between Lenin and Stalin would start by outlining Lenin’s policy and then explain in what way Stalin’s has resembled it. Burnham does not do this. Except for one or two cursory sentences he says nothing about Lenin’s policy, and Lenin’s name only occurs five times in an essay of twelve pages: in the first seven pages, apart from the title, it does not occur at all. The real aim of the essay is to present Stalin as a towering, superhuman figure, indeed a species of demigod, and Bolshevism as an irresistible force which is flowing over the earth and cannot be halted until it reaches the outermost borders of Eurasia. In so far as he makes any attempt to prove his case, Burnham does so by repeating over and over again that Stalin is ‘a great man’ – which is probably true, but is almost completely irrelevant. Moreover, though he does advance some solid arguments for believing in Stalin’s genius, it is clear that in his mind the idea of ‘greatness’ is inextricably mixed up with the idea of cruelty and dishonesty. There are curious passages in which it seems to be suggested that Stalin is to be admired because of the limitless suffering that he has caused:

Stalin proves himself a ‘great man’, in the grand style. The accounts of the banquets, staged in Moscow for the visiting dignitaries, set the symbolic tone. With their enormous menus of sturgeon, and roasts, and fowl, and sweets; their streams of liquor, the scores of toasts with which they end; the silent, unmoving secret police behind each guest; all against the winter background of the starving multitudes of besieged Leningrad; the dying millions at the front: the jammed concentration camps; the city crowds kept by their minute rations just at the edge of life; there is little trace of dull mediocrity or the hand of Babbitt. We recognize, rather, the tradition of the most spectacular of the Tsars, of the Great Kings of the Medes and Persians, of the Khanate of the Golden Horde, of the banquet we assign to the gods of the Heroic Ages in tribute to the insight that insolence, and indifference, and brutality on such a scale remove beings from the human level. . . . Stalin’s political techniques shows a freedom from conventional restrictions that is incompatible with mediocrity: the mediocre man is custom-bound. Often it is the scale of their operations that sets them apart. It is usual, for example, for men active in practical life to engineer an occasional frame-up. But to carry out a frame-up against tens of thousands of persons, important percentages of whole strata of society, including most of one’s own comrades, is so far out of the ordinary that the long-run mass conclusion is either that the frame-up must be true – at least ‘have some truth in it’ – or that power so immense must be submitted to – is a ‘historical necessity’, as intellectuals put it. . . . There is nothing unexpected in letting a few individuals starve for reasons of state; but to starve, by deliberate decision, several millions, is a type of action attributed ordinarily only to gods.

In these and other similar passages there may be a tinge of irony, but it is difficult not to feel that there is also a sort of fascinated admiration. Towards the end of the essay Burnham compares Stalin with those semi-mythical heroes, like Moses or Asoka, who embody in themselves a whole epoch, and can justly be credited with feats that they did not actually perform. In writing of Soviet foreign policy and its supposed objectives, he touches an even more mystical note:

Starting from the magnetic core of the Eurasian heartland, the Soviet power, like the reality of the One of Neo-Platonism overflowing in the descending series of the emanative progression, flows outward, west into Europe, south into the Near East, east into China, already lapping the shores of the Atlantic, the Yellow and China Seas, the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf. As the undifferentiated One, in its progression, descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter, and then through its fatal Return back to itself; so does the Soviet power, emanating from the integrally totalitarian centre, proceed outwards by Absorption (the Baltics, Bessarabia, Bukovina, East Poland), Domination (Finland, the Balkans, Mongolia, North China and, tomorrow, Germany), Orienting Influence (Italy, France, Turkey, Iran, Central and south China . . .), until it is dissipated in MH ON, the outer material sphere, beyond the Eurasian boundaries, of momentary Appeasement and Infiltration (England, the United States).

I do not think it is fanciful to suggest that the unnecessary capital letters with which this passage is loaded are intended to have a hypnotic effect on the reader. Burnham is trying to build up a picture of terrifying, irresistible power, and to turn a normal political manoeuvre like infiltration into Infiltration adds to the general portentousness. The essay should be read in full. Although it is not the kind of tribute that the average russophile would consider acceptable, and although Burnham himself would probably claim that he is being strictly objective, he is in effect performing an act of homage, and even of self-abasement. Meanwhile, this essay gives us another prophecy to add to the list; i.e. that the U.S.S.R. will conquer the whole of Eurasia, and probably a great deal more. And one must remember that Burnham’s basic theory contains, in itself, a prediction which still has to be tested – that is, that whatever else happens, the ‘managerial’ form of society is bound to prevail.

Burnham’s earlier prophecy, of a German victory in the war and the integration of Europe round the German nucleus, was falsified, not only in its main outlines, but in some important details. Burnham insists all the way through that ‘managerialism’ is not only more efficient than capitalist democracy or Marxian Socialism, but also more acceptable to the masses. The slogans of democracy and national self-determination, he says, no longer have any mass appeal: ‘managerialism’, on the other hand, can rouse enthusiasm, produce intelligible war aims, establish fifth columns everywhere, and inspire its soldiers with a fanatical morale. The ‘fanaticism’ of the Germans, as against the ‘apathy’ or ‘indifference’ of the British, French, etc., is much emphasized, and Nazism is represented as a revolutionary force sweeping across Europe and spreading its philosophy ‘by contagion’. The Nazi fifth columns ‘cannot be wiped out’, and the democratic nations are quite incapable of projecting any settlement which the German or other European masses would prefer to the New Order. In any case, the democracies can only defeat Germany if they go ‘still further along the managerial road than Germany has yet gone’.

The germ of truth in all this is that the smaller European states, demoralized by the chaos and stagnation of the pre-war years, collapsed rather more quickly than they need have done, and might conceivably have accepted the New Order if the Germans had kept same of their promises. But the actual experience of German rule aroused almost at once such a fury of hatred and vindictiveness as the world has seldom seen. After about the beginning of 1941 there was hardly any need of a positive war aim, since getting rid of the Germans was a sufficient objective. The question of morale, and its relation to national solidarity, is a nebulous one, and the evidence can be so manipulated as to prove almost anything. But if one goes by the proportion of prisoners to other casualties, and the amount of quislingism, the totalitarian states come out of the comparison worse than the democracies. Hundreds of thousands of Russians appear to have gone over to the Germans during the course of the war, while comparable numbers of Germans and Italians had gone over to the Allies before the war started: the corresponding number of American or British renegades would have amounted to a few scores. As an example of the inability of ‘capitalist ideologies’ to enlist support, Burnham cites ‘the complete failure of voluntary military recruiting in England (as well as the entire British Empire) and in the United States’. One would gather from this that the armies of the totalitarian states were manned by volunteers. Actually, no totalitarian state has ever so much as considered voluntary recruitment for any purpose, nor, throughout history, has a large army ever been raised by voluntary means.[2] It is not worth listing the many similar arguments that Burnham puts forward. The point is that he assumes that the Germans must win the propaganda war as well as the military one, and that, at any rate in Europe, this estimate was not borne out by events.

It will be seen that Burnham’s predictions have not merely, when they were verifiable, turned out to be wrong, but that they have sometimes contradicted one another in a sensational way. It is this last fact that is significant. Political predictions are usually wrong, because they are usually based on wish-thinking, but they can have symptomatic value, especially when they change abruptly. Often the revealing factor is the date at which they are made. Dating Burnham’s various writings as accurately as can be done from internal evidence, and then noting what events they coincided with, we find the following relationships:-

In the supplementary note added to the English edition of the book, Burnham appears to assume that the U.S.S.R. is already beaten and the splitting-up process is about to begin. This was published in the spring of 1942 and presumably written at the end of 1941; i.e. when the Germans were in the suburbs of Moscow.

The prediction that Russia would gang up with Japan against the U.S.A. was written early in 1944, soon after the conclusion of a new Russo-Japanese treaty.

The prophecy of Russian world conquest was written in the winter of 1944, when the Russians were advancing rapidly in eastern Europe while the Western Allies were still held up in Italy and northern France.

It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship or power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.

Suppose in 1940 you had taken a Gallup poll, in England, on the question ‘Will Germany win the war?’ You would have found, curiously enough, that the group answering ‘Yes’ contained a far higher percentage of intelligent people – people with IQ of over 120, shall we say – than the group answering ‘No’. The same would have held good in the middle of 1942. In this case the figures would not have been so striking, but if you had made the question ‘Will the Germans capture Alexandria?’ or ‘Will the Japanese be able to hold on to the territories they have captured?’, then once again there would have been a very marked tendency for intelligence to concentrate in the ‘Yes’ group. In every case the less-gifted person would have been likelier to give a right answer.

If one went simply by these instances, one might assume that high intelligence and bad military judgement always go together. However, it is not so simple as that. The English intelligentsia, on the whole, were more defeatist than the mass of the people – and some of them went on being defeatist at a time when the war was quite plainly won – partly because they were better able to visualize the dreary years of warfare that lay ahead. Their morale was worse because their imaginations were stronger. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory. But there was more to it than that. There was also the disaffection of large numbers of intellectuals, which made it difficult for them not to side with any country hostile to Britain. And deepest of all, there was admiration – though only in a very few cases conscious admiration – for the power, energy and cruelty of the Nazi régime. It would be a useful though tedious labour to go through the left-wing press and enumerate all the hostile references to Nazism during the years 1935–45. One would find, I have little doubt, that they reached their high-water mark in 1937–38 and 1944–45, and dropped off noticeably in the years 1939–42 – that is, during the period when Germany seemed to be winning. One would find, also, the same people advocating a compromise peace in 1940 and approving the dismemberment of Germany in 1945. And if one studied the reactions of the English intelligentsia towards the U.S.S.R., there, too, one would find genuinely progressive impulses mixed up with admiration for power and cruelty. It would be grossly unfair to suggest that power worship is the only motive for russophile feeling, but it is one motive, and among intellectuals it is probably the strongest one.

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end. Burnham’s writings are full of apocalyptic visions. Nations, governments, classes and social systems are constantly described as expanding, contracting, decaying, dissolving, toppling, crashing, crumbling, crystallizing, and, in general, behaving in an unstable and melodramatic way. The slowness of historical change, the fact that any epoch always contains a great deal of the last epoch, is never sufficiently allowed for. Such a manner of thinking is bound to lead to mistaken prophecies, because, even when it gauges the direction of events rightly, it will miscalculate their tempo. Within the space of five years Burnham foretold the domination of Russia by Germany and of Germany by Russia. In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible. With this in mind one can criticize his theory in a broader way.

The mistakes I have pointed out do not disprove Burnham’s theory, but they do cast light on his probable reasons for holding it. In this connexion one cannot leave out of account the fact that Burnham is an American. Every political theory has a certain regional tinge about it, and every nation, every culture, has its own characteristic prejudices and patches of ignorance. There are certain problems that must almost inevitably be seen in a different perspective according to the geographical situation from which one is looking at them. Now, the attitude that Burnham adopts, of classifying Communism and Fascism as much the same thing, and at the same time accepting both of them – or, at any rate, not assuming that either must be violently struggled against – is essentially an American attitude, and would be almost impossible for an Englishman or any other western European. English writers who consider Communism and Fascism to be the same thing invariably hold that both are monstrous evils which must be fought to the death: on the other hand, any Englishman who believes Communism and Fascism to be opposites will feel that he ought to side with one or the other.[3] The reason for this difference of outlook is simple enough and, as usual, is bound up with wish-thinking. If totalitarianism triumphs and the dreams of the geopoliticians come true, Britain will disappear as a world power and the whole of western Europe will be swallowed by some single great state. This is not a prospect that it is easy for an Englishman to contemplate with detachment. Either he does not want Britain to disappear – in which case he will tend to construct theories proving the thing that he wants – or, like a minority of intellectuals, he will decide that his country is finished and transfer his allegiance to some foreign power. An American does not have to make the same choice. Whatever happens, the United States will survive as a great power, and from the American point of view it does not make much difference whether Europe is dominated by Russia or by Germany. Most Americans who think of the matter at all would prefer to see the world divided between two or three monster states which had reached their natural boundaries and could bargain with one another on economic issues without being troubled by ideological differences. Such a world-picture fits in with the American tendency to admire size for its own sake and to feel that success constitutes justification, and it fits in with the all-prevailing anti-British sentiment. In practice. Britain and the United States have twice been forced into alliance against Germany, and will probably, before long, be forced into alliance against Russia: but, subjectively, a majority of Americans would prefer either Russia or Germany to Britain, and, as between Russia and Germany, would prefer whichever seemed stronger at the moment.[4] It is, therefore, not surprising that Burnham’s world-view should often be noticeably close to that of the American imperialists on the one side, or to that of the isolationists on the other. It is a ‘tough’ or ‘realistic’ world-view which fits in with the American form of wish-thinking. The almost open admiration for Nazi methods which Burnham shows in the earlier of his two books, and which would seem shocking to almost any English reader, depends ultimately on the fact that the Atlantic is wider than the Channel.

As I have said earlier, Burnham has probably been more right than wrong about the present and the immediate past. For quite fifty years past the general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy. The ever-increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and the growth of the new ‘managerial’ class of scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats; the weakness of the proletariat against the centralized state; the increasing helplessness of small countries against big ones; the decay of representative institutions and the appearance of one-party régimes based on police terrorism, faked plebiscites, etc.: all these things seem to point in the same direction. Burnham sees the trend and assumes that it is irresistible, rather as a rabbit fascinated by a boa constrictor might assume that a boa constrictor is the strongest thing in the world. When one looks a little deeper, one sees that all his ideas rest upon two axioms which are taken for granted in the earlier book and made partly explicit in the second one. They are:

  • Politics is essentially the same in all ages.
  • Political behaviour is different from other kinds of behaviour.

To take the second point first. In The Machiavellians, Burnham insists that politics is simply the struggle for power. Every great social movement, every war, every revolution, every political programme, however edifying and Utopian, really has behind it the ambitions of some sectional group which is out to grab power for itself. Power can never be restrained by any ethical or religious code, but only by other power. The nearest possible approach to altruistic behaviour is the perception by a ruling group that it will probably stay in power longer if it behaves decently. But curiously enough, these generalizations only apply to political behaviour, not to any other kind of behaviour. In everyday life, as Burnham sees and admits, one cannot explain every human action by applying the principle of cui bono? Obviously, human beings have impulses which are not selfish. Man, therefore, is an animal that can act morally when be acts as an individual, but becomes unmoral when he acts collectively. But even this generalization only holds good for the higher groups. The masses, it seems, have vague aspirations towards liberty and human brotherhood, which are easily played upon by power-hungry individuals or minorities. So that history consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters.

Political activity, therefore, is a special kind of behaviour, characterized by its complete unscrupulousness, and occurring only among small groups of the population, especially among dissatisfied groups whose talents do not get free play under the existing form of society. The great mass of the people – and this is where (2) ties up with (1) – will always be unpolitical. In effect, therefore, humanity is divided into two classes: the self-seeking, hypocritical minority, and the brainless mob whose destiny is always to be led or driven, as one gets a pig back to the sty by kicking it on the bottom or rattling a stick inside a swill-bucket, according to the needs of the moment, And this beautiful pattern is to continue for ever. Individuals may pass from one category to another, whole classes may destroy other classes and rise to the dominant position, but the division of humanity into rulers and ruled is unalterable. In their capabilities, as in their desires and needs, men are not equal. There is an ‘iron law of oligarchy’, which would operate even if democracy were not impossible for mechanical reasons.

It is curious that in all his talk about the struggle for power, Burnham never stops to ask why people want power. He seems to assume that power hunger, although only dominant in comparatively few people, is a natural instinct that does not have to be explained, like the desire for food. He also assumes that the division of society into classes serves the same purpose in all ages. This is practically to ignore the history of hundreds of years. When Burnham’s master, Machiavelli, was writing, class divisions were not only unavoidable, but desirable. So long as methods of production were primitive, the great mass of the people were necessarily tied down to dreary, exhausting manual labour: and a few people had to be set free from such labour, otherwise civilization could not maintain itself, let alone make any progress. But since the arrival of the machine the whole pattern has altered. The justification for class distinctions, if there is a justification, is no longer the same, because there is no mechanical reason why the average human being should continue to be a drudge. True, drudgery persists; class distinctions are probably re-establishing themselves in a new form, and individual liberty is on the down-grade: but as these developments are now technically avoidable, they must have some psychological cause which Burnham makes no attempt to discover. The question that he ought to ask, and never does ask, is: Why does the lust for naked power become a major human motive exactly now, when the dominion of man over man is ceasing to be necessary? As for the claim that ‘human nature’, or ‘inexorable laws’ of this and that, make Socialism impossible, is simply a projection of the past into the future. In effect, Burnham argues that because a society of free and equal human beings has never existed, it never can exist. By the same argument one could have demonstrated the impossibility of aeroplanes in 1900, or of motor cars in 1850.

The notion that the machine has altered human relationships, and that in consequence Machiavelli is out of date, is a very obvious one. If Burnham fails to deal with it, it can, I think, only be because his own power instinct leads him to brush aside any suggestion that the Machiavellian world of force, fraud, and tyranny may somehow come to an end. It is important to bear in mind what I said above: that Burnham’s theory is only a variant – an American variant, and interesting because of its comprehensiveness – of the power worship now so prevalent among intellectuals. A more normal variant, at any rate in England, is Communism. If one examines the people who, having some idea of what the Russian régime is like, are strongly russophile, one finds that, on the whole, they belong to the ‘managerial’ class of which Burnham writes. That is, they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige. These people look towards the U.S.S.R. and see in it, or think they see, a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves. It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip. Burnham at least has the honesty to say that Socialism isn’t coming; the others merely say that Socialism is coming, and then give the word ‘Socialism’ a new meaning which makes nonsense of the old one. But his theory, for all its appearance of objectivity, is the rationalization of a wish. There is no strong reason for thinking that it tells us anything about the future, except perhaps the immediate future. It merely tells us what kind of world the ‘managerial’ class themselves, or at least the more conscious and ambitious members of the class, would like to live in.

Fortunately the ‘managers’ are not so invincible as Burnham believes. It is curious how persistently, in The Managerial Revolution, he ignores the advantages, military as well as social, enjoyed by a democratic country. At every point the evidence is squeezed in order to show the strength, vitality, and durability of Hitler’s crazy régime. Germany is expanding rapidly, and ‘rapid territorial expansion has always been a sign, not of decadence . . . but of renewal’. Germany makes war successfully, and ‘the ability to make war well is never a sign of decadence but of its opposite’. Germany also ‘inspires in millions of persons a fanatical loyalty. This, too, never accompanies decadence’. Even the cruelty and dishonesty of the Nazi régime are cited in its favour, since ‘the young, new, rising social order is, as against the old, more likely to resort on a large scale to lies, terror, persecution’. Yet, within only five years this young, new, rising social order had smashed itself to pieces and become, in Burnham’s usage of the word, decadent. And this had happened quite largely because of the ‘managerial’ (i.e. undemocratic) structure which Burnham admires. The immediate cause of the German defeat was the unheard-of folly of attacking the U.S.S.R. while Britain was still undefeated and America was manifestly getting ready to fight. Mistakes of this magnitude can only be made, or at any rate they are most likely to be made, in countries where public opinion has no power. So long as the common man can get a hearing, such elementary rules as not fighting all your enemies simultaneously are less likely to be violated.

But, in any case, one should have been able to see from the start that such a movement as Nazism could not produce any good or stable result. Actually, so long as they were winning, Burnham seems to have seen nothing wrong with the methods of the Nazis. Such methods, he says, only appear wicked because they are new:

There is no historical law that polite manners and ‘justice’ shall conquer. In history there is always the question of whose manners and whose justice. A rising social class and a new order of society have got to break through the old moral codes just as they must break through the old economic and political institutions. Naturally, from the point of view of the old, they are monsters. If they win, they take care in due time of manners and morals.

This implies that literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it. It ignores the fact that certain rules of conduct have to be observed if human society is to hold together at all. Burnham, therefore, was unable to see that the crimes and follies of the Nazi régime must lead by one route or other to disaster. So also with his new-found admiration for Stalin. It is too early to say in just what way the Russian régime will destroy itself. If I had to make a prophecy, I should say that a continuation of the Russian policies of the last fifteen years – and internal and external policy, of course, are merely two facets of the same thing – can only lead to a war conducted with atomic bombs, which will make Hitler’s invasion look like a tea-party. But at any rate, the Russian régime will either democratize itself, or it will perish. The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.

One cannot always make positive prophecies, but there are times when one ought to be able to make negative ones. No one could have been expected to foresee the exact results of the Treaty of Versailles, but millions of thinking people could and did foresee that those results would be bad. Plenty of people, though not so many in this case, can foresee that the results of the settlement now being forced on Europe will also be bad. And to refrain from admiring Hitler or Stalin – that, too, should not require an enormous intellectual effort. But it is partly a moral effort. That a man of Burnham’s gifts should have been able for a while to think of Nazism as something rather admirable, something that could and probably would build up a workable and durable social order shows, what damage is done to the sense of reality by the cultivation of what is now called ‘realism’.

ORWELL’S NOTES

[1] It is difficult to think of any politician who has lived to be eighty and still been regarded as a success. What we call a ‘great’ statesman normally means one who dies before his policy has had time to take effect. If Cromwell had lived a few years longer he would probably have fallen from power, in which case we should now regard him as a failure. If Pétain had died in 1930, France would have venerated him as a hero and patriot. Napoleon remarked once that if only a cannon-ball had happened to hit him when he was riding into Moscow, he would have gone down to history as the greatest man who ever lived.

[2] Great Britain raised a million volunteers in the earlier part of the 1914–18 war. This must be a world’s record, but the pressures applied were such that it is doubtful whether the recruitment ought to be described as voluntary. Even the most ‘ideological’ wars have been fought largely by pressed men. In the English Civil War, the Napoleonic wars, the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, etc., both sides resorted to conscription or the press gang.

[3] The only exception I am able to think of is Bernard Shaw, who, for some years at any rate, declared Communism and Fascism to be much the same thing, and was in favour of both of them. But Shaw, after all, is not an Englishman, and probably does not feel his fate to be bound up with that of Britain.

[4] As late as the autumn of 1945, a Gallup poll taken among the American troops in Germany showed that 51 per cent ‘thought Hitler did much good before 1939’. This was after five years of anti-Hitler propaganda. The verdict, as quoted, is not very strongly favourable to Germany, but it is hard to believe that a verdict equally favourable to Britain would be given by anywhere near 51 per cent of the American army.

Published by Polemic, May 1946, and as James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution when published as a pamphlet, 1946





Before Trump, Alex Jones and QAnon: How Robert Welch and the John Birch Society created the paranoid far right
 Salon
February 09, 2022
In the standard origin story of the modern U.S. right, today's conservative movement was born with an excommunication: when William F. Buckley, the erudite, upper-crust founder of the National Review, turned on his onetime ally, Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, driving Welch and the rest of the conspiracy-hunting "Birchers" out of the respectable right. 

The truth, as always, is much messier, as historian and Northeastern University professor Edward H. Miller demonstrates in his new book, "A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism," published this month by the University of Chicago Press.

"Like the fundamentalists of the 1920s, many Birchers did disengage when it became an embarrassment to be associated with the Society," Miller writes. "Welch's followers were seen as crackpots, deplorables, losers who did not fit into the modern world." But rather than disappear, the Birchers just assumed a lower profile. And today, the ideas they promoted "are everywhere — even in the White House. Even in your own house."

Miller's book constitutes the first full-scale biography of Welch, which is surprising in and of itself, considering the impact the Birchers had on American politics, as the most successful anti-Communist organization in U.S. history. And it takes an impressively long view, beginning almost 200 years before Welch's birth, on the North Carolina farms worked by his forebears — initially too poor to be slave-owners, and later on, consumed with elaborate paranoia about shadowy forces conspiring to take their human property away. Later still, as Welch grew up in the first decades of the 20th century — a child prodigy who became the University of North Carolina's youngest student at age 12 —evidence of Southern farmers' diminished status, and their fears of further "slippage," was all around him.

It doesn't take much of a leap to see the resonance of that broad narrative today, or its psycho-political implications. Miller acknowledges this early on, writing that Donald Trump's "entire political career — and a great deal of his popular appeal — lay in conspiracism of a kind that owes something to Robert Welch."

But the deeper imperative of the book, Miller writes, is to correct historians' long-standing misapprehensions about conservatism, and what the field has missed by dismissing the darker, stranger corners of the right, and how its apparent losers may have won the long game.

"For about two decades we have falsely bought into a narrative of American conservatism as a mild-mannered phenomenon," with historical treatments of the New Right making "the tones of American conservatism sound like the Beach Boys," argues Miller. In reality, "it has always sounded like death metal."














Miller spoke with Salon this January.


How did we get here, and what does the answer to that question have to do with Robert Welch?

Well, a lot of the conspiratorial views he possessed are now reflected in the culture. He is primarily known as the individual who founded the John Birch Society and called Dwight Eisenhower a communist. He had other conspiratorial perspectives, arguing that schools, academia, the government, the media and other institutions of society were inundated with communists. And he had a conspiratorial view of history. He believed Sputnik was fake; that the Cuban Missile Crisis was exaggerated; that the 1952 election was rigged. He was a precursor to many of the issues that the "Reagan revolution" embraced, including abortion, anti-[Equal Rights Amendment] policy and tax reform.

What sparked the idea for this book?

I wrote a book called "Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy," and I just kept thinking that I'd missed something in the story of Robert Welch; that Welch was more important to what I was talking about than I'd mentioned. So it was basically a continuation of what I was doing with the first book, but at a new level, exploring the nuances of his conspiratorial style, his paranoid style, as Richard Hofstadter called it.

How have historians typically thought about Welch and the John Birch Society, and where did you feel a corrective was needed?

Typically the narrative has been promoted that was inaugurated by Lisa McGirr's classic "Suburban Warriors": that the John Birch Society was fringe, and not part of the respectable conservatism that gave way to the Reagan revolution. The John Birch Society wasn't given the attention other organizations and individuals on the right, like William F. Buckley, were. But as things going on in the United States and around the world started to reflect some of the concerns the John Birch Society promulgated, I realized that this was not the correct narrative, and that we historians needed to look further at the intellectual losers of the far right: the surrealists, the individuals historians saw as charlatans outside the fringe.


Kimberly Phillips-Fein, a historian at NYU, says we have to start looking at the far right and considering its relationship with what's considered "respectable conservatism." I argue in the book that there really is no clear demarcation between the two — that "respectable conservatism" is influenced by the far right. And despite the narrative that Welch was ostracized from the conservative movement by Buckley, I argue in the book that he wasn't, and his views were reflected in the views of Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and '80s and continue to influence the right into the 21st century.

I'm not alone. Historians John Huntington and Seth Cotlar have been hard at work making the case that we need to really look at the far right. David Austin Walsh has a book coming out in a few years. So my book is an attempt to look at one group that was the most important anti-communist organization to influence the far right and get a general audience to realize that the far right is more influential than we thought.

In discussing this myth that the Birchers were purged from conservatism, a couple of lines you wrote stood out to me: One, that the concept of the responsible right is a delusion; and two, that American conservatism sounds like death metal.

If we look at William F. Buckley, he said the 14th and 15th Amendments were "inorganic accretions" tacked on by the winners of the Civil War. He said we should never get rid of colonies in Africa until Africans "stop eating each other." He says, in his letter to the South, that the white race is the advanced race at this particular moment in time. These are egregious things said by the "respectable" right. But he's urbane, stylish, cosmopolitan, a member of the establishment.

Reagan continued to promote conspiracy theories throughout the 1970s. He was talking about how Gerald Ford was faking his own assassination attempts; in his campaign newsletter Reagan promoted a John Birch Society quack remedy for cancer called Laetrile. And his Iran-Contra policy was basically right out of the John Birch Society playbook: that the communists are taking over South and Central America. So I think it's very clear that this "respectable" right has to be looked at again.

In terms of "death metal," I guess I was having a little fun. "Suburban Warriors" is about Orange County, California. And when I read that it's the story of upwardly mobile men and women in Southern California, I got the feeling that they were innocuous. No criticism of Lisa McGirr — it's a pathbreaking book. But it's a book that doesn't focus enough on race and doesn't focus enough on the strangeness of some of the things they were saying. I discovered "Suburban Warriors" during a graduate school colloquium, and as I read it, I said, this doesn't sound like the conservatism I grew up with in Boston in the 1970s and early '80s. This seems a lot more like the early Beach Boys. It really doesn't show the darkness and the danger of some of the conspiratorial ideas that reverberated throughout the right.

Was Welch a victim of a paranoid time, or a leader who led other people into paranoia?

I think he sincerely believed. He was not anybody who presented these views for political or monetary gain. But there were unintended consequences of his political imagination that we see playing out. I do see him as a leader of that style, and really as the person that Hofstadter was homing in on. Hofstadter mentioned that it was a characteristic of American history. Welch was born in 1899, and I spent a lot of time on his family and their ownership of slaves and what it was like to live in the South at that particular time, with the fear of losing their slaves and this idea of a Northeastern establishment of bankers controlling them. That's how they viewed the world. Welch is a sincere believer from this environment. But I don't consider him a victim. He embraced this. He's a very, very intelligent person who falls into this worldview.

I was interested in your description of Welch's family's sense of "slippage." It's almost impossible to read that without thinking of the wealth of stories we've seen about Trump voters, and their fear of losing status in a diversifying world.

I think it's analogous. Honestly, Welch's family was very lucky. They were doing very well. Welch himself did very well. I don't think status anxiety applies to Welch individually. He was a very successful businessman. He had a loving family. He was surrounded by business leaders who revered him. He enjoyed white privilege. But at the same time, his family suffered some difficult times in the South after the Civil War, and there was a fear that things could fall apart. I never came across anything [from Welch] that's exactly about those particular views. He was too optimistic about his future, I think, to suggest that. But definitely that connection can be made: that his family felt the same economic and social pressures that modern working-class folks feel in the deindustrialized Midwest.

You note several times in the book that we now live in Welch's America.

Well, No. 1, conspiracy theories abound. There are conspiracy theories about vaccination policy and [vaccines'] alleged futility, despite the fact that these vaccines are saving lives. You can get into some of the strange things, like people who are using dirt to cure the coronavirus. At the same time, you have this belief that the [2020] election was rigged, despite all evidence to the contrary that suggests it was completely legitimate. Many of the conspiratorial views far-right media expounds would be something expressed by Welch back in his heyday. I mean, he doesn't believe Sputnik exists. He believes the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came closest to nuclear annihilation, was exaggerated. He believes Vietnam was a phony war run by the Kremlin. He believes that the Korean War was run by the Kremlin. These are the kinds of things we'd hear today. Not necessarily the exact same things, but the unreality of it.


There are a number of places where that historical rhyming is so exact that it's jarring: Welch belonged to an America First committee in World War II, while today we have a white nationalist movement called America First. Welch constantly depicted the civil rights movement as communist, just as today's Black Lives Matter movement is called Marxist by right-wing media and politicians.

Well, here we are talking on Martin Luther King Day. Welch had a perspective that in Birmingham, when Bull Connor unleashed his dogs on African-American people fighting for justice, Welch came to the conclusion that what happened was one of the African-Americans hit one of the dogs and then it started to attack the crowd, and that's where [reporters] came in and captured that picture. There's no evidence whatsoever of that. That's not what happened. It was Bull Connor who was attacking African-Americans and using fire hoses on people struggling for their civil rights. But it's the same type of false flags you hear every day on the Alex Jones program, where there are communist agents provocateurs and no evidence to make that case.

If we continue to go down that line where we believe this nonsense, I think we're going to be in a suboptimal position. Reality is very important and truth is very important. And if we're going to continue to live in a country where we love one another, as Martin Luther King dreamed of, we have to have some agreement on what reality is.


Can you talk about Welch's role in facilitating the presence of so much racism and antisemitism in movement conservatism?

As I mention in the book, it's a complicated subject. There were contradictions, sophistry and duplicity in how he presented himself. He would denounce [America First Party founder] Gerald L.K. Smith, who was the most notorious antisemite, but at the same time, he would say that the parent of the communist conspiracy was the Zionist conspiracy. He would argue that some of his best friends were Jewish — and he did have a more amicable relationship with Jews, for his time, than Dwight Eisenhower — but he maintains relationships with some antisemites of the old guard. He kicked [white nationalist] Revilo Oliver — a fascinating palindrome — out of the John Birch Society, but he's too slow to do so. I kind of agonized over this while writing; it was a complicated matter. But there never should have been antisemites in his organization. It's inexcusable.

In the final analysis, he could have done a better job to extirpate the vehement and notorious antisemitism that existed in the old guard. But I think William F. Buckley could have as well. Buckley had some of the same individuals in the National Review. So I think there's a case that it's not just Welch, it's the institutional antisemitism that is part of both the new and the old right.



Were there points where you felt sympathy for Welch?

Some of the characterizations that were directed at Welch in the early 1960s were incorrect. There were individuals like Mike Newberry and [FDR's son] John Aspinwall Roosevelt who called Welch a fascist and a Nazi. There were pictures of Welch next to [American Nazi Party founder] George Lincoln Rockwell. But those characterizations should have been handled with more nuance. And the idea that Welch was an authoritarian, there couldn't be anyone further from that. He was not a charismatic speaker. He was a rather clumsy speaker. He would get up to deliver his speech, and it was kind of a disaster. His papers would be dropping. He looked like a professor. But they called him one goose-step away from fascism. And I just didn't see anything in his personality, and in the John Birch Society's response to that, that could substantiate those claims.

There was also so much infighting in the society. If you take a look at what early 1960s journalists and other authors wrote about him, they claimed that he would brook no insubordination. But the fact was he had to deal with too much of it, even from his own national council. He couldn't get anybody to agree with what he was saying. Many people argued that he should just hand over the keys to the John Birch Society and somebody else should take over because of his conspiratorial screeds.


















Are there figures today who play similar roles to those of Welch and Buckley?

I think it's mirrored throughout the Republican Party. When [Sen.] Mike Lee says we live in a republic, not a democracy, those same points were made [by Welch]. There was a suggestion somewhere that fluoride should be outlawed. That was one of the pet projects of the John Birch Society. The goal of Steve Bannon to get [conservatives] on the PTA to address the vaccine — there have been disruptions in the middle of school board meetings because of this. There's just so many. I read something and think, there we go again. The de-legitimacy of presidents. Welch suggested the Eisenhower presidency was illegitimate, that Ike stole the 1952 Republican primary from Robert Taft. We see the same effort to undermine Joe Biden's presidency with the current shenanigans. I could go on and on. History doesn't repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes, as you alluded to.

You write that Welch sincerely believed even his most ludicrous conspiracy theories. How does that compare today, in terms of people who sincerely believe conspiracy theories versus those who use them more cynically?

Robert Welch died with nothing. He spent all his money on fighting windmills. His wife had to sell their house [after his death] to survive. But today I think the temptation to make money off this is so powerful that many embrace this false reality for monetary gain. Welch wouldn't and didn't do that. It was completely different than something you'd see today, where people promote climate denial when they don't believe it; when they're taking the vaccines and the boosters while telling people it's against their freedoms. I mean, it's unconscionable. Sorry to get emotional, but I don't know how they can sleep at night.

For people disturbed by living in Robert Welch's America today, what can we learn from his story?

The more history we study, the more we realize that the actions of individuals create history. The idea that there is this grand conspiracy is false. The claim that everything is planned in advance is lazy and actually dangerous. We have to get beyond this nonsensical view of reality. There is a truth that we can get to and we have to make that commitment, and that involves some effort.





205: Americanist Library

December 8, 2014

https://ia803009.us.archive.org/12/items/TheWebOfSubversionJamesBurnham/The_Web_of_Subversion_-_James_Burnham.pdf

This week we swing from left to far right, Africa to Belmont, Massachusetts. Sorry for the whiplash. The Americanist Library is a collection of almost twenty mass market paperbacks put out by Western Islands, the publishing wing of the extreme right-wing John Birch Society. Chronicling the book covers of the far right is not normally what I do here, but hell, they’re interesting and they’re political. I first stumbled on Western Islands at a used bookshop in Los Angeles (where else?), when I found the book above: The Web of Subversion. The cover is amazing, with the capital tangled up in a crazed set of intersecting lines and connections. The active illustration is offset by a classic frame, silver circle within silver rectangle, on a field of regal blue. Good stuff.
 
Turns out I was pulling at the tail end of a little gold mine, this being the eighteenth book in the series (all appear to be published in 1965), which includes volumes about strikes, anarchists, spies, communists, traitors, and so much other awesome stuff, all seen through the lens of fanatical anti-communist lunatics!
 
The basic cover design is the same for each book, all done by Peppino Rizzuto. I assume he also did each of the cover illustrations, as none of them have individual artists attributed, and most are stylistically similar. The back covers match the front in simplicity, with the same silver border, rich blue field, and then the press logo—an eagle with its wings outstretched into flag-like stripes, sitting on a couple of stars, of course. The bird also becomes both book and pen nib, a volume written by freedom!
 

 
The two books below are about Asia’s communist turn (China, Vietnam, Cambodia, N. Korea, etc.), bemoaning how we “lost” them. This all looks quite silly in the contemporary context of Vietnam and China’s full embrace of market systems and logics. Below these two I’ve discussed certain covers when interesting ideas emerged, but left others without comment.
 

 
The Whole of Their Lives is an expose about how the Communist Party controls people, and the cover illustration is an interesting visual articulation of this. The shared head outlines are supposed to illustrate the terrors of collectivism, but they can just as easily be read as an articulation of how “we are all connected.” This speaks directly to how much as designers and artists we assume our audience will see things through the same lens we created them. (An aside: Max Eastman, who wrote the foreword, was the editor of the socialist/anarchist paper The Masses from 1912-1917, but then went on to become a free-market ideologue and virulent anti-communist in the 1940s/50s.)
 

 
While at initial glance, the portraits of Sacco and Vanzetti on the cover of Montgomery’s book below look sympathetic, it’s a rouse. To cut straight through the feigned neutrality, we can skip straight to the last line of the book: the “myth” of their innocence is “the Greatest Lie of all.”
 

 
The cover image on The Kohler Strike is one of my favorites—there is something about the composition of the tools, and the burning orange, that remind me of Orozco’s Man of Fire. On the cover of Smoots’ The Invisible Government is a enigmatic “CFR” floating in the clouds. This logo stands for the Council on Foreign Relations, a shady Trilateral Commission-type entity made up of bankers supposedly trying to rule the world. Of course the ruling class seem to be doing just fine ruling the world without their crypto-fascist clubhouses, but alas, how can a rational materialist analysis of how capitalism functions hold up against conspiracy theories about lizard people? At least we know that people had to contend with these idiots fifty years ago, and they weren’t created by 9/11.
 

 
The cover of the Shanghai Conspiracy is the most successful of the “comic” covers (like the dragon on While You Slept and blinded figure on The People’s Pottage, both above). The three figures are simultaneously creepy and sad, their fedoras and red glowing eyes seeming as much a burden as accoutrements of sneaky spy-craft.
 

 
When I originally published this post back in 2014, I couldn’t find what seemed like a key title in the series: Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. I even suspected that it might not really exist. But I eventually found it, at a little used bookstore in Grand Rapids, MI. In 1965, the John Birch Society was upwards of 100% white, yet they had no problem absorbing Booker T. into their narrative of American individualism and market ingenuity. And to add some frosting to the cake, at the time they were republishing Washington, they were simultaneously claiming the the Civil Rights Movement was entirely the fabrication of a small group of Communists in order to destroy America!
 
[Post updated with additional images and information on 01/07/18.]


PRO UNION USA
Amid Amazon Warehouse Union Push, Nearly 4 in 5 Voters Support Collective Bargaining

Majorities in all parties favor workers’ right to advocate for better pay and benefits, while overall voter support for labor unions generally continues to hover around 50%


A truck passes an Amazon fulfillment center in Birmingham, Ala., amid a labor push from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union on March 5, 2021. A Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 77 percent of registered voters support the right to bargain collectively for various workplace protections. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)

BY CHRIS TEALE
February 9, 2022 at 6:00 am ET

As more Amazon.com Inc. warehouse workers move to unionize, support among registered voters for employees’ rights to collectively bargain remains robust at 77 percent, a figure that is virtually unchanged since last year, according to a new Morning Consult/Politico poll.



What the numbers say

In the survey, nearly half of the respondents were asked whether they backed workers’ “right to bargain collectively” for various workplace protections, while the other half were asked simply about their support for “labor unions.” Voter support was substantially higher for the former, and also in line with the results from an April 2021 Morning Consult/Politico poll.

Forty-four percent of voters said they “strongly support” the rights of workers to collectively bargain for workplace conditions like better pay, health care and time off, including 54 percent of Democrats. The changes in those shares compared to April 2021 were relatively flat.

“Strong” support for collective bargaining among Republicans and independents, meanwhile, saw increases outside the groups’ margin of error, with 11- and 14-percentage-point bumps, respectively.

Despite the enthusiasm for workers’ rights, support for labor unions generally remains comparatively tepid among registered voters: 51 percent said they “strongly” or “somewhat” supported labor unions this year, compared to 54 percent in 2021.




Why it matters

Efforts to unionize at Amazon warehouses have seemingly started to gather momentum, as workers in Bessemer, Ala., last week began a revote on whether they should unionize. The National Labor Relations Board ruled last month that workers at a Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse have enough petition signatures for a unionization vote of their own.

Workers at a second Staten Island warehouse, known as LDJ5, also have petitioned to form a union. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the new unionization effort and similar initiatives elsewhere, except to say that the NLRB has not notified the company of any new developments at LDJ5.

Among those behind the unionization push have been the nascent Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island, and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union more broadly, including in Alabama. Spokespeople with the Amazon Labor Union did not respond to requests for comment.

In a briefing last month, workers at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse accused the company of surveilling their activities and said an increasing number of employees are coming together to demand better pay, a fairer break system, better communication and “dignity and respect at work.”

“The union is not some third party, but it’s us coming together to demand change,” Isaiah Thomas, who works at the warehouse’s ship dock, said during the briefing. An RWDSU spokesperson declined to comment further.


The Feb. 5-6, 2022, survey was conducted among a representative sample of 2,005 registered voters, with an unweighted margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
DECRIMINALIZE NOW
Opioid fight needs new strategy, Cabinet leadership: report

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR

FILE - Signs are displayed at a tent during a health event on June 26, 2021, in Charleston, W.Va. Volunteers at the tent passed free doses of naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose by helping the person breathe again. The U.S. needs a more nimble strategy and Cabinet-level leadership to counter its festering opioid epidemic, a bipartisan congressional commission said Tuesday. (AP Photo/John Raby, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. needs a nimble, multipronged strategy and Cabinet-level leadership to counter its festering overdose epidemic, a bipartisan congressional commission advises.

With vastly powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl driving record overdose deaths, the scourge of opioids awaits after the COVID-19 pandemic finally recedes, a shift that public health experts expect in the months ahead.

“This is one of our most pressing national security, law enforcement and public health challenges, and we must do more as a nation and a government to protect our most precious resource — American lives,” the Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking said in a 70-page report released Tuesday.

The report envisions a dynamic strategy. It would rely on law enforcement and diplomacy to shut down sources of chemicals used to make synthetic opioids. It would offer treatment and support for people who become addicted, creating pathways that can lead back to productive lives. And it would invest in research to better understand addiction’s grip on the human brain and to develop treatments for opioid use disorder.

The global coronavirus pandemic has overshadowed the American opioid epidemic for the last two years, but recent news that overdose deaths surpassed 100,000 in one year caught the public’s attention. Politically, federal legislation to address the opioid crisis won support across the partisan divide during both the Obama and Trump administrations.

Rep. David Trone, D-Md., a co-chair of the panel that produced the report, said he believes that support is still there, and that the issue appeals to Biden’s pragmatic side. “The president has been crystal clear,” Trone said. “These are two major issues in America: addiction and mental health.” Trone’s counterpart was Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

The U.S. government has been waging a losing “war on drugs” for decades.

The stakes are much higher now with the widespread availability of fentanyl, a synthetic painkiller 80 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. It can be baked into illicit pills made to look like prescription painkillers or anti-anxiety medicines. The chemical raw materials are produced mainly in China. Criminal networks in Mexico control the production and shipment to the U.S.

Federal anti-drug strategy traditionally emphasized law enforcement and long prison sentences. But that came to be seen as tainted by racial bias and counter-productive because drug use is treatable. The value of treatment has recently has gained recognition with anti-addiction medicines in wide use alongside older strategies like support groups.

The report endorsed both law enforcement and treatment, working in sync with one another.

“Through its work, the commission came to recognize the impossibility of reducing the availability of illegal synthetic opioids through efforts focused on supply alone,” the report said.

“Real progress can come only by pairing illicit synthetic opioid supply disruption with decreasing the domestic U.S. demand for these drugs,” it added.

The report recommends what it calls five “pillars” for government action:

— Elevating the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy to act as the nerve center for far-flung federal efforts, and restoring Cabinet rank to its director.

— Disrupting the supply of drugs through better coordinated law enforcement actions.

— Reducing the demand for illicit drugs through treatment and by efforts to mitigate the harm to people addicted. Treatment programs should follow science-based “best practices.”

— Using diplomacy to enlist help from other governments in cutting off the supply of chemicals that criminal networks use to manufacture fentanyl.

— Developing surveillance and data analysis tools to spot new trends in illicit drug use before they morph into major problems for society.

Participating as non-voting members in the commission’s work were high-level executive branch officials, including representatives from law enforcement, the departments of State, Treasury and Homeland Security, the intelligence community, and the White House. Administration officials said Biden has already issued two executive orders to counter fentanyl trafficking and called on Congress to pass his $41 billion request to address the overdose epidemic.

In prepared statements, Republican commission members stressed the law enforcement response. “We must redouble our efforts to secure the border against illegal trafficking by targeting Mexican cartels flooding our streets with illicit opioids and force China’s hand to crackdown on their pharmaceutical industry supplying cartels with the base compounds used to manufacture synthetic opioids,” said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich.

Trone said it’s going to take cooperation from both political parties. “We have to take this toxic atmosphere in Washington and move past it,” he said. “Because 100,000 people, that’s husbands, sisters, mothers, fathers. As a country, we are better than that.”
Samsung to use recycled fishing nets for new Galaxy phones

By Jo Sung-a & Kim Tae-gyu

Samsung Electronics said its new Galaxy S22 is made of recycled fishing nets. The new model will be unveiled Wednesday. Photo courtesy of Samsung Electronics


SEOUL, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- Samsung Electronics said it will start repurposing ocean-bound discarded fishing nets for its new Galaxy devices.

The first product using the new materials will be the Galaxy S22, the flagship smartphone that the company plans to unveil Wednesday at the Unpacked event.

Samsung Electronics said Monday these "ghost nets," which amount to 640,000 tons every year, pose a big threat to marine life, coral reefs and other natural habitats.

The company did not disclose how much and in what parts of the products it would use the materials or how they would fit into the construction of the devices.

"Samsung is committed to addressing ocean plastic pollution in a way that will positively impact not only the environment but also the lives of all Galaxy users," the company said in a statement.

"This new technological advancement marks a notable achievement in the company's journey to deliver tangible environmental actions and protect the planet for generations to come," it added.

Samsung Electronics is not the only company to commit to sustainability-aligned practices.

Last year, U.S. automaker Ford said it had used recycled plastics retrieved from oceans to produce wire holders for its new Ford Bronco Sport.


Apple announced in 2020 that its iPhone 12 was the first smartphone with 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets. It has also set a goal to make the iPhone recyclable.

Apple said it would continue to make progress in reducing its contribution to climate change by focusing on making energy-efficient products with renewable or recycled materials.
End of war brings relief, and despair, to Afghan women




Afghan mother Friba says she has a more peaceful life now that foreign forces have left the country
 (AFP/Wakil KOHSAR)

Emma CLARK
Tue, February 8, 2022, 7:33 PM·4 min read

The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in August brought an end to 20 years of fighting -- and relief for many women -- but harsh restrictions imposed by the new government are also causing despair.

Here is a look at how the lives of three ordinary women have changed with the return to power of the Taliban.

- The mother -

In a hilltop village outside Kabul, children rush between the low-slung entrances of mud-brick houses as Friba settles into what she calls a more peaceful life now foreign forces have left.

"Before this, the planes were in the sky and bombing," said the mother of three, who like many Afghans goes by only one name.

The Taliban's victory over US-backed former government forces has dramatically reduced the violence that killed tens of thousands of Afghans over the past two decades –- the majority in rural areas –- and left many too afraid or unable to leave their villages.

Foreign forces were often accused of disrespecting local customs while successive governments were plagued by corruption.

Having lost several relatives in the conflict, Friba was also in a near-permanent state of worry about family members criss-crossing the country looking for work.

"We are happy that the Taliban came to power and peace came," she tells AFP at her two-room dwelling in Charikar, Parwan province.

"Now I’m sitting at home, more relaxed."

But while security has vastly improved, the struggle to maintain a household remains the same.

"Nothing has changed, nothing at all. We have no money," she explains.

She and her husband rely on casual farm work and aid handouts to get by, including from the new Taliban rulers.

"I am worried about my daily expenses... I worry day and night," she says.

"But it is better now."

- The student -


Zakia was in her third year of an economics degree at Kateb University in August when her teacher announced the Taliban were at the gates of the city.

"My hands started trembling. I pulled my phone from my bag to call my husband... and it slipped onto the ground a couple of times," she told AFP.

That was the last time she was in class.

Although private universities reopened last year -- and some government institutions restarted classes last week -- many aspiring women graduates have dropped out.

For Zakia, the issue is twofold.

Paying for tuition would be a major challenge given her husband's government salary has been drastically reduced by the impoverished new leadership.

But her family's dread over the Taliban foot soldiers that patrol the neighbourhood is the main barrier that keeps her from returning to class.

Zakia has left home only a handful of times since August to limit her interaction with the hardliners.

"(They) say that I might get stopped by a Taliban, maybe they’ll beat me," she said.

"It would be a huge dishonour for people to say that the Taliban has beaten someone's daughter."

She despairs over how close she was to graduating in a country where the education system has been devastated by decades of sustained conflict, disproportionately affecting girls.

"I would look at other people who were illiterate, who were not getting an education, and then look at myself and how my family supported me," she said.

"I had a feeling of pride, that I was lucky."

There is some hope for the 24-year-old, who is one of hundreds of Afghan women to benefit from a scholarship with the US-accredited online University of the People.

She logs on almost every day to study business administration, a chance to nurture her mind between sleepless nights.

But thoughts for the future -- especially for her young daughter -- distress her.

"How will I bring her up in such a society?"

- The breadwinner -


Roya used to bustle into a central Kabul studio each day, ready to face dozens of women students eager to learn the embroidery skills she had mastered.

Her earnings paid the household bills and school fees for her children’s education, while in the evenings she designed and made dresses and blouses for a boutique she hoped to open with her daughters.

"I know every type of tailoring. Anything anyone wanted, I could do," she told AFP from her home in Kabul.

"I felt strongly that I needed to work, be a strong woman, provide for my children and bring them up through my tailoring," she adds.

But the foreign-funded training school she taught at closed the day the Taliban entered Kabul, and she hasn't seen any of her students since.

Now she spends the long days at home with her sons and daughters, who once studied or worked in offices.

Her husband is now the sole breadwinner, earning just a few dollars a week as a part-time security guard.

"I'm powerless," said Roya.

"I'm so afraid that we can't even go outdoors into the city or the bazaar."

With the help of Artijaan, a social enterprise that employs women artisans to create handmade crafts, she makes a little money with the occasional orders of embroidered tablecloths.

But her cupboards remain stuffed with unsold elegant dresses and jackets she once took pride in intricately designing.

"I am sitting at home with all these hopes and dreams," she sighs.

bur-ecl-fox/lto
'My heart and body shake': Afghan women defy Taliban





In the 20 years since the Taliban last held power in Afghanistan, a generation of women -- largely in major cities -- became business owners, studied PHDs, and held government positions, now they are battling for their rights 

Rouba EL HUSSEINI
Tue, February 8, 2022,

One after the other, quickly, carefully, keeping their heads down, a group of Afghan women step into a small Kabul apartment block -- risking their lives as a nascent resistance against the Taliban.

They come together to plan their next stand against the hardline Islamist regime, which took back power in Afghanistan in August and stripped them of their dreams.

At first, there were no more than 15 activists in this group, mostly women in their 20s who already knew each other.

Now there is a network of dozens of women –- once students, teachers or NGO workers, as well as housewives -— that have worked in secret to organise protests over the past six months.

"I asked myself why not join them instead of staying at home, depressed, thinking of all that we lost," a 20-year-old protester, who asked not to be named, tells AFP.

They know such a challenge to the new authorities may cost them everything: four of their comrades have already been seized.

But those that remain are determined to battle on.

When the Taliban first ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, they became notorious for human rights abuses, with women mostly confined to their homes.

Now back in government and despite promising softer rule, they are cracking down on women's freedoms once again.

There is enforced segregation in most workplaces, leading many employers to fire female staff and women are barred from key public sector jobs.

Many girls' secondary schools have closed, and university curriculums are being revised to reflect their hardline interpretation of Islam.

Haunted by memories of the last Taliban regime, some Afghan women are too frightened to venture out or are pressured by their families to remain at home.

For mother-of four Shala, who asked AFP to only use her first name, a return to such female confinement is her biggest fear.

A former government employee, her job has already been taken from her, so now she helps organise the resistance and sometimes sneaks out at night to paint graffiti slogans such as ‘Long Live Equality’ across the walls of the nation's capital.

"I just want to be an example for young women, to show them that I will not give up the fight," she explains.

The Taliban could harm her family, but Shala says her husband supports what she is doing and her children are learning from her defiance -- at home they practise chants demanding education.

- 'Fear can’t control me' -

AFP journalists attended two of the group's gatherings in January.

Despite the risk of being arrested and taken by the Taliban, or shunned by their families and society more than 40 women came to one event.

At another meeting, a few women were fervently preparing for their next protest.

One activist designed a banner demanding justice, a cellphone in one hand and her pen in the other.

"These are our only weapons," she says.

A 24-year-old, who asked not to be named, helped brainstorm ideas for attracting the world's attention.

"It's dangerous but we have no other way. We have to accept that our path is fraught with challenges," she insists.

Like others, she stood up to her conservative family, including an uncle who threw away her books to keep her from learning.

"I don't want to let fear control me and prevent me from speaking and telling the truth," she insists.

Allowing people to join their ranks is a meticulous process.

Hoda Khamosh, a published poet and former NGO worker who organized workshops to help empower women, is tasked with ensuring newcomers can be trusted.

One test she sets is to ask them to prepare banners or slogans at short notice -- she can sense passion for the cause from women who deliver quickly.

Other tests yield even clearer results.

Hoda recounts the time they gave a potential activist a fake date and time for a demonstration.

The Taliban turned up ahead of the supposed protest, and all contact was cut with the woman suspected of tipping off officials.

A core group of the activists use a dedicated phone number to coordinate on the day of a protest. That number is later disconnected to ensure it is not being tracked.

"We usually carry an extra scarf or an extra dress. When the demonstration is over, we change our clothes so we cannot be recognised," Hoda explains.

She has changed her phone number several times and her husband had received threats.

"We could still be harmed, it's exhausting. But all we can do is persevere," she adds.

The activist was one of a few women flown to Norway to meet face to face with the Taliban's leadership last month, alongside other civil society members, when the first talks on European soil were held between the West and Afghanistan's new government.




Hoda Khamosh, a published poet and former NGO worker who organised workshops to help empower women, was one of a few women flown to Norway to meet face to face with the Taliban's leadership last month
 (AFP/Mohd RASFAN)

- Crackdown on dissent -

In the 20 years since the Taliban last held power, a generation of women -- largely in major cities -- became business owners, studied PHDs, and held government positions.

The battle to defend those gains requires defiance.

On protest days, women turn up in twos or threes, waiting outside shops as if they are ordinary shoppers, then at the last minute rush together: some 20 people chanting as they unfurl their banners.

Swiftly, and inevitably, the Taliban's armed fighters surround them -- sometimes holding them back, other times screaming and pointing guns to scare the women away.

One activist recalls slapping a fighter in the face, while another led protest chants despite a masked gunman pointing his weapon at her.

But it is becoming increasingly dangerous to protest as authorities crack down on dissent.

A few days after the planning meeting attended by AFP, Taliban fighters used pepper spray on the resistance demonstrators for the first time, angry as the group had painted a white burqa red to reject wearing the all-covering dress.

Activists said two of the women who took part in the protests -- Tamana Zaryabi Paryani and Parwana Ibrahimkhel -- were later rounded up in a series of night raids on January 19.

Shortly before she was taken, footage of Paryani was shared on social media showing her in distress, warning of Taliban fighters at her door.

In the video, Tamana calls out: "Kindly help! Taliban have come to our home in Parwan 2. My sisters are at home."

It shows her telling the men behind the door: "If you want to talk, we'll talk tomorrow. I cannot meet you in the night with these girls. I don't want to (open the door)... Please! help, help!"

Several women interviewed by AFP before the raids, who spoke of "non-stop threats", have since gone into hiding.

Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denied any women were being held, but said authorities had the right "to arrest and detain dissidents or those who break the law", after the government banned unsanctioned protests soon after coming to power.

Three weeks on and they have still not been found, with the United Nations and Human Rights Watch among those calling on the Taliban to investigate the disappearances.

The UN has also demanded information about two more female activists allegedly detained last week, named by rights advocates as Zahra Mohammadi and Mursal Ayar.

- Starting from scratch -


The women are learning to adapt quickly.

When they began the movement last September, demonstrations would end as soon as one of the participants was pushed or threatened by the Taliban.

Hoda says they have now developed a system where two activists take care of the victim, allowing the others -- and the protest -- to continue.

As the Taliban prevents media coverage of protests, many of the female activists use high quality phones to take photos and videos to post on social media.

The content, often featuring them defiantly showing their faces, can then reach an international audience.

"These women… had to create something from scratch," says Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch.

"There are a lot of very experienced women activists who have been working in Afghanistan for many years... but almost all of them left after August 15.”

"(The Taliban) don't tolerate dissent. They have beaten other protesters, they have beaten journalists who cover the protests, very brutally. They've gone and looked for protesters and protest organisers afterwards," she adds.

Barr believes it is "almost certain" those involved with this new resistance will experience harm.

A separate, smaller woman's group is now trying to focus on protest that avoids direct confrontation with the Taliban.

"When I am out on the streets my heart and body shake," said Wahida Amiri.

The 33-year-old used to work as a librarian. Sharp and articulate, she is used to fighting for justice having previously campaigned against corruption in the previous government.

Now that is no longer possible, she sometimes meets a small circle of friends in the safety of their homes, where they film of themselves holding candlelit vigils and raising banners demanding the right to education and work.

They write articles and attend debates on audio apps Clubhouse or Twitter, hoping social media will show the world their story.

"I have never worked as hard as I have in the past five months," she says.

Hoda's biggest dream was to be Afghanistan’s president, and it’s difficult for her to accept that her political work is now limited.

"If we do not fight for our future today, Afghan history will repeat itself," the 26-year-old told AFP from her home.

"If we do not get our rights we will end up stuck at home, between four walls. This is something we cannot tolerate," she said.

Kabul's resistance is not alone. There have been small, scattered protests by women in other Afghan cities, including Bamiyan, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.

"(The Taliban) have erased us from society and politics," Amiri says.

"We may not succeed. All we want is to keep the voice of justice raised high, and instead of five women, we want thousands to join us."

rh/aya/ecl/lto

Tuesday, February 08, 2022


WHO urges rich countries to pay up for Covid plan


The WHO Wednesday urged rich countries to pay their fair share of the money needed for its plan to conquer Covid-19 by contributing $16 billion as a matter of urgency.

The World Health Organization said the rapid cash injection into its Access to Covid Tools Accelerator could finish off Covid as a global health emergency this year.

The WHO-led ACT-A is aimed at developing, producing, procuring and distributing tools to tackle the pandemic: vaccines, tests, treatments and personal protective equipment.

ACT-A gave birth to the Covax facility, designed to ensure poorer countries could access eventual vaccines, correctly predicting that richer nations would hog doses coming off the production lines.

Covax delivered its billionth vaccine dose in mid-January.

ACT-A needed $23.4 billion for its programme for the year October 2021-September 2022 but only $800 million has been raised so far.

The scheme therefore wants $16 billion up front from wealthy nations "to close the immediate financing gap", with the rest to be self-funded by middle-income countries.

- Omicron impetus -


WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the rapid spread of the Omicron variant made it all the more urgent to ensure tests, treatments and vaccines are distributed equitably.

"If higher-income countries pay their fair share of the ACT-Accelerator costs, the partnership can support low- and middle-income countries to overcome low Covid-19 vaccination levels, weak testing, and medicine shortages," he said in a statement.

"Science gave us the tools to fight Covid-19; if they are shared globally in solidarity, we can end Covid-19 as a global health emergency this year."

Just 0.4 percent of the 4.7 billion Covid tests administered globally during the pandemic have been used in low-income countries.

Meanwhile only 10 percent of people in those nations have received at least one vaccine dose.

The WHO said the vast inequity was not only costing lives and hurting economies, it was also risking the emergence of new, more dangerous variants that could rob current tools of their effectiveness and set even highly-vaccinated populations back by many months.

- Ramaphosa call -


ACT-A has come up with a new "fair share" financing model on how much each of the world's wealthy countries should contribute, based on the size of their national economy and what they would gain from a faster recovery of the global economy and trade.

On the 2020-21 ACT-A budget, only six countries -- Canada, Germany, Kuwait, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Sweden -- met or exceeded what would have been their fair share commitments.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who co-chairs the ACT-A facilitation council, said inequitable access to Covid vaccines, tests and treatments was simply prolonging the pandemic.

"I urge my fellow leaders to step up in solidarity, meet their fair shares, and help reclaim our lives from this virus," he said.

Ramaphosa and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, his fellow co-chair, have written to 55 capitals -- all high-income countries, G20 upper middle-income nations, and two other middle-income states -- outlining their "fair share" and encouraging them to cough up.

rjm/mtp