Reason Magazine - Staff > Cathy Young

Ms. Wasilla Goes to Washington

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:00:00 EST

Election 2008, which shattered the ultimate barrier by bringing an African-American to the White House, also turned out to be the Year of the Woman Who Failed. First, Hillary Clinton (D-NY) had the Democratic presidential nomination almost within her grasp only to have it snatched away. From the ashes of her campaign rose Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate—and now, some are blaming her for McCain's defeat. But was her candidacy, in spite of it all, a step forward for women?

When Palin first emerged on the national scene, I thought—despite strongly disagreeing with her views on abortion and many other issues—that she could do a great job of advancing a conservative or individualist feminism that should be a vital part of our discourse on women's issues. Unlike many other conservative female politicians, Palin unabashedly called herself a feminist. Instead of echoing traditionalist pieties about the special nature of women, she matter-of-factly told Katie Couric, "I'm very, very thankful that I've been brought up in a family where gender hasn't been an issue" and expressed the conviction that "women...today have every opportunity that a man has to succeed, and to try to do it all, anyway." This is a philosophy that vast numbers of Americans can relate to—a cheerful can-do feminism far more practical and appealing than perpetual victimhood.

Palin's rise enraged many liberal and left-wing feminists. At HuffingtonPost.com, novelist Jane Smiley branded her "a woman who reinforces patriarchal power rather than challenges it." (The notion that "patriarchal power" exists in the United States in 2008 is only slightly less delusional than the belief, erroneously attributed to Palin, that God created the dinosaurs 5000 years ago.)

The backlash was not just about abortion. Pro-choice conservative women, from Margaret Thatcher to Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, have met with similar hostility from "movement" feminists, who regard support for free markets or military strength as heresies and extensive social programs as an article of faith. Some of Palin's critics, such as Katherine Marsh in The New Republic, faulted her for sending the message that women can and should do it all on their own without help from the government.

That's precisely why Palin could have been good for feminism. In the 1993 book Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century, feminist writer Naomi Wolf argued that feminism had to discard "litmus tests" which exclude too many women. Wolf wrote that the beliefs of conservative and Republican women who embrace "self-determination, ownership of business, and individualism" should be "respected as a right-wing version of feminism." She even suggested that the "no litmus tests" principle should extend to abortion rights.

It is doubtful that Wolf would apply any of this to Palin, whom she denounced as a tool of Karl Rove's sinister cabal. But that doesn't make what Wolf wrote any less true.

And for a while, Palin did seem like the very model of the modern right-wing feminist. She was not, as some of her detractors sneered, a man-pleasing "Stepford Wife" but a powerful, take-charge woman who was raising five children—not on her own, but in partnership with her husband. That, too, would have made her a great role model. The biggest feminist issue in America today is the career-family balance, a women's issue that cannot be addressed without getting men more involved. It would be genuinely inspirational to see that the "mommy track" can be a road to the White House—and to see a stay-at-home dad as Second Dude.

Unfortunately, Palin's feminist star was dimmed by a few things, especially the mounting evidence that she was less than qualified for the spot. (Her supporters derided such concerns as "elitism.") The shielding of Palin from the media, and the McCain campaign's request for a less challenging format for her debate with Joseph Biden, would have been embarrassing for any candidate - but especially for the first woman on the Republican ticket. Palin went from Xena, Warrior Princess to damsel in distress, and her candidacy began to smack a particularly pernicious form of faux feminism: gender-based promotion of the less competent.

Palin's cultural divisiveness made her unsympathetic as well. While her populist fans accused her detractors of snobbery and class hatred, class warfare against "the elites" drove her candidacy from the start. If there was a central idea to her campaign, it was the superior virtue of the small towns and rural areas that she dubbed "real America" and "the pro-American parts of the country." While rejecting the feminist brand of victimhood, Palin became a standard-bearer for its right-wing equivalent: cultural conservative grievance.

Will Palin redeem herself in 2012 as a candidate with a less polarizing and more substantive message? Perhaps. In the meantime, the good news is that no one regards her failures as failures of women. The bad news is that conservative feminism is still waiting for its spokeswoman. To succeed, feminism needs to learn to connect with a wide spectrum of women and men.

But perhaps the most important thing female politicians can do for feminism is to show us what women can be and what they can do. And in that sense, the Palin's candidacy was only a half-step forward.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at reason magazine. A shorter version of this column previously appeared in Newsday.

Sympathy for the Devil

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Last Friday, Salon.com columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald, one of the Bush presidency's harshest critics, blasted both major party presidential candidates for perpetuating the "blatant falsehood" that Russia launched an "unprovoked attack" on Georgia last August. This, he asserted, was a clear-cut instance of the suppression of legitimate and vital debate in America's political discourse. It so happens that Greenwald's charge is blatantly false—and reveals much more about the mindset of the left than about the state of American democracy.

In Greenwald's view, McCain has championed the false notion of the Russia-Georgia war to further his own neocon agenda, while Obama has "adopted the lie" out of political expediency:

Since all of the major candidates accept the deceitful premise about what happened—that Russia's "aggression" against Georgia was "unprovoked"—nobody refutes it... The propaganda is just asserted to be true by the political establishment and thus accepted by most of the citizenry, and then becomes the unchallenged foundation of all sorts of dangerous, militaristic policy orthodoxies...

Yet, curiously enough, neither of the presidential debates to which Greenwald links to back up his argument contains the word "unprovoked." In the first debate, on September 26, Obama called Russia's actions "unacceptable" and "unwarranted"; McCain spoke of "serious aggression" and criticized Obama for his initial statement urging mutual "restraint," while Obama denied that his statement was soft on Russia and noted that he had warned back in April about the risks of Russian "peacekeepers" in Georgia's disputed regions. In the second debate, on October 7, it was much the same (though McCain came closest to Greenwald's description when he condemned Russia's "naked aggression").

One candidate did use the word. In her September 11 interview with ABC's Charles Gibson, Sarah Palin referred to Russia "invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked." But her claim went anything but unchallenged, with Gibson at once interjecting, "You believe unprovoked." The Los Angeles Times described her position as "at odds with that of U.S. officials who have reviewed events leading up to the military action." In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd chided Palin for not knowing that "as heinous as Russia's behavior toward Georgia was, it was not completely unprovoked."

Indeed, as harsh a critic of Russia as Condoleezza Rice has openly acknowledged that Georgia initiated the military action by shelling the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on August 7, and that "all sides made mistakes." Clearly, what irks Greenwald is not that Russia's actions in Georgia are viewed as unprovoked but that they are viewed as (to quote Obama) unacceptable and unwarranted. Incidentally, this view is hardly unique to the United States, as Greenwald implies; it is also dominant in Europe.

Why? Well, let's review Russia's actions, not just during and after but before the armed conflict. For years, Russia backed separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia while paying lip service to Georgia's sovereignty. Since about 2002, it has been handing out Russian passports to people in these regions, in a transparent ploy to create a "legitimate" cause for intervention—defense of its citizens. (It's unclear whether these passports, the kind held by Russian citizens abroad, would allow their possessors to live inside Russia.) It engaged in blatant provocations toward Georgia, apparently including the downing of a Georgian reconnaissance drone over Abkhazia.

Georgia has staunchly maintained that Russia initiated the military action in the recent conflict by moving its troops inside the Roki Tunnel, which links Russia to South Ossetia, about 20 hours before the shelling of Tskhinvali began. These claims, still under investigation by European Union officials, are at least partly corroborated by intercepted cell phone calls indicating Russian troop movements before dawn on August 7, and by other intriguing, if inconclusive, evidence.

Whatever is eventually learned about the start of the war, Russia's actions afterwards are not in doubt: the illegal invasion and partial occupation of Georgia; the looting and destruction of Georgian property and military equipment; the abetting of ethnic cleansing in Georgian villages by South Ossetian vigilante squads; the abrupt, unilateral recognition of the two separatist republics. Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili may be no paragon of democratic governance or wisdom, but that doesn't change the basic fact of Russian aggression.

These facts are widely known in almost every place where the Russia-Georgia conflict has received attention. Almost. Which brings us to a particularly stunning passage in Greenwald's piece: "Americans are alone in this world in being lied to about what happened. Virtually the entire rest of the world...has access to the truth." Greenwald seems to have forgotten about Russia, where state-run television—the average citizen's main, and often only, source of news—went on a Soviet-style propaganda binge for weeks, and where the pro-government media has repeated outlandish claims of Georgian "genocide" in South Ossetia long after these tales were discredited.

There is something puzzling about the sympathy for Russia evident in many quarters of the American left—from Greenwald to Noam Chomsky to Alexander Cockburn and Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Nation (not to mention numerous commenters at sites like Salon.com and The Huffington Post). When Cold War-era leftists pleaded for a more understanding view of the Soviet Union, they were at least arguing on behalf of a power that, despite its abuses, at least outwardly embraced many "progressive" ideals: free medicine, housing and education, extensive social services, secularism, women's rights, relative social equality. The Putin/Medvedev Russia is the opposite of everything today's left supports: It's a land where billionaires flaunt their $20,000 watches and $350 million yachts, social services are slashed to a minimum, religion is entangled with the state, ethnic bigotry flourishes, labor unions are trampled, and homophobia is rampant and officially condoned.

Why the sympathy, then? A knee-jerk reaction that equates hostility to Russia with red-baiting? Or could it be that to some on the left, the cause of sticking a finger in America's eye is progressive enough?

Contributing Editor Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood.

The Campaign Turns Nasty

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

At a moment when America faces hard choices and perhaps hard times, the presidential election campaign has largely degenerated into a vicious squabble whose poisonous effects are likely to be felt for years to come.

The nastiness has itself become the focus of debate: Who's the meanest of them all? Predictably, most Democrats point fingers at the Republicans and vice versa. In the blogs and in the more traditional media, liberal commentators accuse Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin of waging a campaign based on personal attacks and veiled appeals to bigotry, and whipping up their supporters into a frenzy of hate. Meanwhile, most conservative commentators assert that the lion's share of the negativity comes from Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) supporters. But in fact, there is plenty to go around.

There's no question that in recent weeks, most of the overt attacks have been from Republicans. While some claims of lynch-mob conduct at McCain-Palin rallies are vastly exaggerated, with one or two ugly outbursts magnified into a blanket charge, the ugliness is real—some of it coming from people associated with the campaign.

The other day, Virginia GOP chairman Jeffrey M. Frederick told McCain volunteers in a pep talk that Obama and al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon"—referring to Obama's connection to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. The repeated invocation of Obama's middle name, Hussein, has troubling overtones, as well.

Meanwhile, on many right-wing Web sites, Obama is everything from Hitler to a secret Communist to a Muslim mole. One bizarre rumor alleges that his memoir Dreams from My Father was ghostwritten by Ayers.

But does the current Republican edge in anger and negativity reflect superior Democratic virtue, or is it more related to the fact that the McCain-Palin campaign is struggling and lagging badly in the polls? Think back to September, when it appeared that the wave of Palin-generated enthusiasm might carry the Republican ticket to the White House. The outpouring of rage from the left was downright scary at times.

Comedienne Sandra Bernhard assailed Palin as a "turncoat" in a foul-mouthed rant at a Washington, D.C., theater; she reportedly suggested that Palin would be raped by black men if she dared to enter Manhattan. (Bernhard seemed to confirm this comment to the Daily News, but later denied it.) Some self-styled feminists hurled misogynist invectives, such as "pornographic centerfold"; a few posters on left-wing blogs vented obscenely violent fantasies about doing Palin harm. She was accused of everything from banning books to faking her own pregnancy to cover for her teenage daughter.

Bring up the fact that nastiness and paranoia in politics are a two-way street, and you will be blasted—by both sides—for the crime of moral equivalency. Of course there isn't always a precise equality between the two camps. Yet the bottom line is that neither side is without sin, and both are eager to throw stones.

In part, the hypocrisy stems from the sincere conviction that one's own hatred and fear are justified because the other side really is evil: Palin would usher in an American Taliban; Obama is a friend to terrorists. (By the way, it is appalling that so many mainstream liberals were willing to embrace the unrepentant Ayers—but it's hardly better for mainstream conservatives to "pal around" with Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, who once plotted to murder his fellow Americans and more recently counseled gun owners to shoot federal agents in the head.)

Many people who are tired of the mudslinging can't wait for the election to be over. But Nov. 4 is unlikely to bring much relief. The dogs of war are loose, and they won't be easy to leash. If, as seems likely, Obama is elected, a large number of people on the right will see him as a stealth radical who won thanks to media bias and rampant voter fraud. If McCain pulls off a surprise upset, at least as many people on the left will blame racism, Republican dirty tricks or both—and some will regard the results as proof that the right-wing cabal behind Bush will never let go of power. Either way, a substantial minority of Americans will see themselves as living under an illegitimate and evil regime.

And that's more frightening than the economic crisis.

Cathy Young is a reason contributing editor. A version of this article originally appeared at Newsday.

Kenny Will Live!

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Forty years ago, eight brave Russians came out on Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion that crushed the “Prague Spring” with a banner that said, “For your freedom and ours.” (As one might expect, it ended quite badly for them.) Last month, a banner with these words showed up in the hands of one of hundreds of demonstrators in a Moscow park protesting the Russian government’s attempt to crush the television show South Park. And, for now, it seems to have ended in a victory for the protesters—at a time when victories for freedom in Russia are a rare treat.

It started on September 7 when a prosecutor’s office in Moscow, on a complaint from an evangelical Christian group, brought charges of “extremist activity” against 2x2, a television channel that specializes in cartoons. The offense was a January broadcast of the South Park episode, “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Special,” in which characters including Satan, Adolf Hitler, and the anthropomorphic human excrement Mr. Hankey perform in a Christmas variety show. The episode, prosecutors said, “insults the honor and dignity of both Christians and Muslims” and could “provoke ethnic conflict and inter-religious hatred.” (Under a 2006 law, Russia’s “extremism” statute includes not only incitements to violence but loosely defined hate speech.) A few days later, the General Prosecutor’s Office lodged a complaint with the Federal Mass Communications Control Agency accusing 2x2 of “violating the rights of children” by broadcasting “propaganda of violence, cruelty and pornography.” The complaint named twelve animated series, including South Park and The Simpsons.

With 2x2’s broadcast license up for renewal in mid-October, these actions raised concerns that the channel would be shut down. Further alarm bells went off when Pavel Tarakanov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Youth Issues, suggested that 2x2’s frequency could be given to a new channel reflecting “the government’s position with regard to youth policy.” “We need to raise a generation of 21st Century Russians who are proud of living in a civilized nation, so we need our own media outlet that would reach the largest possible audience,” Tarakanov told the Interfax news agency.

But in the meantime, something else was happening. The Russian public, grown notoriously apathetic during the Putin era of relative prosperity, stability, and rising authoritarianism, suddenly stirred. Starting in mid-September, Moscow and St. Petersburg saw a flurry of pickets, flash mobs, and rallies protesting the moves to squash the channel. Passing drivers honked in solidarity. While the demonstrations were held with prior permission from the authorities, one of the organizers of a September 22 rally in downtown Moscow was briefly detained because the turnout of about 700 vastly exceeded the estimate in the permit application. That evening, over a thousand people gathered around a club that hosted a free rock concert in support of 2x2; some clashed with police when attempts were made to disperse the crowd. In a few days, the protesters collected 34,000 signatures to keep 2x2 on the air.

Judging by photos, the atmosphere at the rallies—which drew mostly young men and women—was both defiant and exuberant, with much sharp humor and creativity. In St. Petersburg, men in black capes and Ku Klux Klan robes slapped “Signal lost or scrambled” notices on the screens of two TV sets. In addition to the inevitable “They killed Kenny!”, a particularly inventive sign read, “Kenny lived, Kenny lives, Kenny will live!", in a play on the once-ubiquitous Soviet slogan about Lenin. Many handwritten signs, like “For your freedom and ours,” had broader political overtones: “This is a free country—we don’t want censorship!”; "Today they came for Kenny, tomorrow they'll come for you"; “Let’s ban banning!”

The people’s voice, apparently, was heard. On September 25, Russia’s Federal Competitive Bidding Commission on Broadcasting voted unanimously to recommend that 2x2's license be renewed. The final decision is up to another federal agency, but it is expected to follow the recommendation. 2x2, in turn, will comply with the commission’s request to expand its programming to include TV movies and non-animated series, as stated in its official description; the channel’s general director Roman Sarkisov has promised that the new fare will be “faithful to the style of 2x2.” Meanwhile, South Park stays on the air except for the "offending" episode, which has been shelved pending further investigation of “extremism.”

Despite this partial victory, Russian opponents of censorship (even leaving aside the political kind) still face an uphill battle. Polls show that some 60 percent of Russians think the government should be able to ban “immoral” TV programming. Nonetheless, the protests in support of 2x2 are a hopeful sign, and not just for uncensored entertainment. “True, this is not about…the fight for democracy and the future of Russia,” activist and journalist Alexander Podrabinek wrote on the EJ.ru website. “And yet these events give cause to hope that not everything is lost…that not everyone in Russia is under the yoke of submission, fear and apathy. People who have nothing to do with politics have come out to defend their right: the right to watch a TV channel they like.” In a verse commentary titled “The Last Bastion” in the weekly Ogoniok, the astute satirist Dmitry Bykov wrote:

The days of liberty are now behind us,
And yet here is a fact you can't avoid:
As long as we can say, "Don't have a cow, man!",
Freedom in Russia cannot be destroyed!

Ironically, both Bykov and Podrabinek seem to regard the disputed cartoons as dumb, crude comedy with lots of poop jokes; to Bykov, this makes 2x2’s victory a bittersweet one. In fact, South Park and The Simpsons have had a lot to say about individual freedom, censorship, intolerance, and other issues extremely relevant in today’s Russia. It may even, in the end, teach more about liberty and independent thinking than some weighty political debates.

This would not be the first time that “vulgar” entertainment has played a role in advancing political freedom—from Pierre de Beaumarchais’s bawdy, aristocracy-bashing comedy The Marriage of Figaro under 18th Century European monarchies to rock music under 20th century communist dictatorships.

Stan, Cartman, and the gang as keepers of liberty’s flame in Russia? Whyever not? Indeed, one might say that Kenny is not a bad metaphor for the spirit of freedom in Russia: killed again and again, and somehow always alive for another round.

A Great Moment for Women

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Whatever the outcome of the presidential race, 2008 will be a memorable Year of the Woman. First, Hillary Clinton came close to capturing the Democratic nomination, a feminist dream that failed. Now, there is Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential pick: to some a new feminist dream, to others a feminist nightmare—a conservative female politician who embraces a right-wing social agenda, including opposition to abortion.

To the contrast between Clinton and Palin, add a contrast between Palin and Democratic vice presidential nominee Senator Joseph Biden, himself a player in gender politics as the champion of a major piece of feminist legislation—the Violence Against Women Act of 1994.

Is Palin—whose image as a tough woman has evoked comparisons to historical and fictional female fighters like Joan of Arc and Xena, Warrior Princess—a feminist hero?

To some feminists, the answer is a clear no. Novelist Jane Smiley brands her "a woman who reinforces patriarchal power rather than challenges it."

But the charge is unfair. Unlike right-wing columnist Ann Coulter, to whom Smiley compares her, Palin is not known for attacking the women's movement; she credits it with breaking down gender barriers and creating the opportunities she has enjoyed. While anti-abortion, she belongs to a group called Feminists for Life.

As a social issues liberal with strong concerns about religion-based public policy, I have some serious disagreements with Palin, though it's often hard to separate the reality of her views from the caricatures painting her as a zealot. But I also believe that her candidacy is a great moment for American women.

First, more representation for feminism across the spectrum of political beliefs is a good thing. Women, like men, should be able to disagree on gun ownership, environmental policies, taxes, even abortion while agreeing on gender equity.

Second, the biggest feminist issue in America today is the career-family balance. Despite remaining discrimination, motherhood is at the core of the "glass ceiling" holding back female achievement. How inspirational, then, to see that the "mommy track" can be a road to the White House. Palin is a mother of five who resumed an intensive work schedule days after giving birth, and whose husband seems to be a full partner.

Palin's candidacy may also be a watershed moment in conservative politics. The right has long been ambivalent about working mothers; a number of conservative politicians and pundits have been given to chiding "selfish" women who pursue career ambitions after having children. Now, a mother with a high-powered career is a conservative hero, and full-time motherhood may be forever gone from the roster of "family values."

If there is hypocrisy in this conservative celebration of Palin, it is outdone by the hypocrisy of feminist liberals who deploy sexist weapons against her. Smiley calls Palin "arrogant"; sex educator Deborah Haffner and women's magazine editor Bonnie Fuller attack her as a bad mother; an article on Salon.com by Gary Kamiya titled "The Dominatrix" derides her as a "pinup queen." It is not sexist to question Palin's qualifications; but a disturbing amount of the criticism targets her as a woman.

On the Democratic side, the vice presidential candidate offers another form of pseudo-feminist sexism. Biden's legislative offspring, the Violence Against Women Act, authorized some good programs addressing rape and domestic violence. But it also represents a toxic mix of gender-war feminism that treats such crimes as acts of patriarchal oppression rather than individual wrongdoing, and paternalism that sees women as deserving of special protection. One of the Act's provisions sought to discourage "dual arrests" in domestic assaults, based on the false assumption that women in such cases are wrongly arrested for defending themselves.

At the 1990 Senate hearings on the bill, Biden proudly reported that he and his brothers were forbidden to lay a hand on their sister even in self-defense, while she enjoyed "absolute impunity"—and added, apparently not as a joke, that he had "the bruises to prove it." This is not equality; it's chivalry masquerading as feminism.

Ultimately, women should vote on the basis of a candidate's ideas and ability, not gender. But in the contest of the vice presidential candidates, Palin represents by far the better version of female empowerment. Regardless of how we vote or who wins, that empowering message is here to stay.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor of reason. A version of this article originally appeared in The Boston Globe.

Don't Cry for Russia

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

...

The Triumph of Putinism

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:30:00 EDT

The coverage of the Russian-Georgian conflict in the Russian and Western media has an odd "through the looking glass" quality. One side sees naked aggression by Russia toward small, defiant, democratic Georgia; the other sees naked aggression by Georgia toward the tiny separatist region of South Ossetia. Where Western observers tend to see a deplorable failure by the world's democracies to take decisive measures against Russia's bullying, Russian and pro-Russian commentators see blatant anti-Russian prejudice and a concerted effort to weaken Russia.

But this is not a situation with two equally valid opposing views of reality, or with roughly balanced rights and wrongs on both sides. True, on a political level, there are no real good guys in this conflict; the only true innocents are the ordinary people caught in the crossfire. But there are bad guys—and, at least in the short term, they seem to be the likely winners.

Mikheil Saakashvili—the pro-Western, pro-U.S. president of Georgia who was swept to power in 2003 in one of the peaceful, grassroots "color revolutions" that so rattled the Kremlin—is no liberal hero. Since 2007, he has moved to squelch the opposition and shut down the independent media, depicting his critics as puppets of Moscow in much the same way Putin has depicted his opponents as hirelings of the West. Saakashvili's decision to send troops to take control of South Ossetia and shell its capital Tskhinvali, though undertaken in response to a series of Russian provocations, was not only a major strategic blunder but also an assault on an area heavily populated by civilians.

Russia's military response, which most likely inflicted further damage on the South Ossetian population while repelling Georgian troops, quickly turned into an all-out assault on Georgia itself—a clear-cut punitive strike against a recalcitrant former colony that has been a major irritant to the ruling clique in the Kremlin, and to Putin himself.

Reliable information on many aspects of the conflict is hard to obtain. The Georgians claim that separatist-controlled Tskhinvali served as a launching pad for attacks on nearby Georgian villages. The Russians cry genocide, claiming that some 1,600 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the Georgian attack, and accusing Georgian soldiers of burning people alive and crushing them with tanks. Other observers, including Russian Human Rights Watch activist Tatiana Lokshina, dispute the high casualty estimates and say that the injured seen in area hospitals are mostly fighters from the South Ossetian militias.

Russia has pointedly compared South Ossetia's claims to independence to those of Kosovo, whose recognition it strongly opposed. (Russia's own war against secessionist Chechnya, which killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians, goes unmentioned.) Yet many of Russia's critics, abroad and at home, see the South Ossetia breakaway movement as a faux separatism serving as a cover for a Russian power grab.

As evidence, they cite Russia's move a few years ago to grant citizenship to thousands of South Ossetians who were citizens of Georgia—even while paying lip service to Georgia's sovereignty over the region and serving as a supposedly neutral peacekeeper between Georgia and Ossetia. Notably, former high-level Russian military and security officers hold key posts in the South Ossetian separatist government. EJ.ru columnist Yulia Latynina calls the South Ossetian government "a joint venture of KGB generals and Ossetian bandits for the purpose of procuring money to finance conflict with Georgia."

Still, there is no denying that Ossetian separatism is based on real, longstanding grievances against Georgia. Partly, these grievances are rooted in the complex history of the Caucasus, a morass of tribal rivalries and hatreds. An experience recounted by the Russian Jewish journalist Grigory Svirsky (now living in Canada) vividly illustrates the local mindset. In the 1960s, as a young man, he was traveling through the region with a hiking group. In an Ossetian village, an elder invited the group to a wedding—except for Svirsky, who was emphatically told not to come. Some time later, to his amazement, the wedding party showed up to fetch him, with profuse apologies; he was brought to the feast and treated as the guest of honor. It turned out Svirsky had been excluded because the villagers thought he looked Georgian. When another hiker explained the error, the horrified elder hastened to make up for the dreadful insult of not only excluding a man from a wedding but mistaking him for a Georgian.

Such local hostilities are not merely the spontaneous product of local culture and history. Over time, they have been cleverly exploited and cultivated, first by Tsarist Russia, then by the Soviet Union, and now by Putin's Russia on the "divide and conquer" principle. If Georgia loses South Ossetia and the other secessionist province, Abkhazia, this will not translate into independence for the two regions but into de facto annexation by Russia.

As Russia agrees to a ceasefire, on terms that at least for now will allow it to maintain a strong presence in the two regions, it is still too early to predict the full consequences of this crisis. Some liberal Russian commentators, such as EJ.ru's Dmitry Sidorov, argue that Saakashvili walked into Moscow's trap, giving Russia an excuse for an invasion that will fatally destabilize Georgia's political system. Meanwhile, opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov believes it was the Kremlin that let itself be provoked into a military confrontation that will badly hurt Russia's international standing. That depends on the extent to which the U.S. and Western Europe will be willing to risk a major chill in relations with Russia. It remains to be seen whether Georgia and Ukraine will gain the NATO membership they seek, whether Russian "peacekeeping" forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be replaced by an international force, or whether Russia will lose the coveted choice of Sochi—only a few miles away from Abkhazia—as the site of 2014 Winter Olympics.

One outcome, at least, seems clear: a consolidation of Vladimir Putin's power in Russia. In recent weeks, the independent Russian media had started to talk about Dmitry Medvedev growing more assertive in his role as president, particularly after a Medvedev aide mildly rebuked Prime Minister Putin for unleashing a war of words against Mechel, a leading Russian mining company. But in the operation against Georgia, Putin has dominated the news, acting as commander-in-chief and perhaps showing not only Saakashvili but Medvedev who's boss. Meanwhile, if Medvedev's plans for a new rapprochement with the West were ever anything more than a façade, those hopes have suffered a severe blow. Putin, the Russian strongman, not only firmly holds the reins of power; he is also riding a popular wave of jingoism, one-upmanship, paranoia, and grievance toward the West—the very sentiments that have always formed the core of Putinism. For now, the Putin regime wins; Russia and Georgia lose.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood.

Solzhenitsyn's Tarnished Legacy

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

When I first heard of Alexander Solzhenitsyn during my childhood in the Soviet Union, he was the officially reviled author of forbidden books. To my anti-communist parents and their friends, he was a hero who had challenged the leviathan of the Soviet state and told the truth about its crimes. Today, nearly 20 years after the collapse of communism, Solzhenitsyn—who died Sunday, a few months short of his 90th birthday—is remembered with admiration around the world and in his own country. And yet his legacy as a public figure is far more complicated.

By the early 1980s, Solzhenitsyn, who was deported from the Soviet Union in 1974 and settled in the United States, was fighting not just the communist regime, but other dissidents who were too pro-Western, too liberal, too supportive of individualism and pluralism. Russia, Solzhenitsyn argued, had its own path, rooted in national identity, traditional faith, and community rather than individual rights and secular democracy.

A few years later, debates about competing visions for post-communist Russia were suddenly no longer academic. In 1990, Solzhenitsyn's essay, "How to Rebuild Russia," was published in the Soviet Union as a mass-circulation pamphlet. In 1994, he returned to his homeland to a hero's welcome. Sharply critical of Boris Yeltsin's policies, he turned down a state award in 1998, saying he could not accept it from "a government which has brought the country to its present state of ruin."

Last year, he accepted Russia's State Prize from the hands of Vladimir Putin.

It was startling to see Solzhenitsyn, the chronicler of the gulag, chatting with Putin, a career KGB officer. A month later, in an interview with the German magazine Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn explained that Putin "was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag," but rather an officer in foreign intelligence, an honorable career in many countries. Never mind that, whatever division he worked in, Putin served in the same institution that hounded dissidents and sent people to the gulag; or that, after his ascent to power, he moved to restore the KGB and its predecessors to a place of honor in Russian history and society.

In the same interview, Solzhenitsyn pointedly refused to criticize Putin's assertion that Russia should not dwell on the horrors of the Stalinist past; instead, he complained that both the West and the former Eastern-bloc Soviet satellites were using Stalin-era atrocities as a moral bludgeon against Russia.

Putin's Russia was hardly Solzhenitsyn's ideal; its rampant consumerism and kitschy pop culture far exceeded the Western materialism that he deplored. And yet Putin's authoritarian regime, with its emphasis on national unity, its ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, and its assertiveness in foreign affairs appealed strongly to the writer.

This was the sad paradox of Solzhenitsyn's final years. The man who once wrote to Soviet leaders demanding the abolition of censorship never protested the revival of censorship. The man who used his Nobel Prize to start a fund for political prisoners kept quiet about the new political prisoners of Putin's regime. The man who coined the slogan "To live not by the lie" had a cozy relationship with a government that rigged elections and filled the media with lies big and small. The man who had once asked the West for "more interference in our internal affairs" joined the chorus of anti-Western agitprop.

In his last article, in Izvestia in April, he castigated as anti-Russian the Ukrainian government's efforts to have the state-engineered famine of 1932-33 declared a genocide. He lamented, "Such savage incitement will be the easiest thing for the West to swallow: They have never even tried to understand our history, they'll eat up any fable, no matter how demented."

Solzhenitsyn's role in bringing down communist totalitarianism will never be forgotten. But in giving his de facto blessing to a resurgent authoritarianism that rolled back many of Russia's hard-won freedoms, when he had the moral authority to speak up and have an impact, he inevitably tarnished this role.

In his Nobel speech in 1974, Solzhenitsyn said that "one word of truth will outweigh the whole world." In the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn spoke this word when it mattered. In the 21st, he did not.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood. A version of this article originally appeared in The Boston Globe.

Sidebar: Fun Facts About Putin's Russia

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

--Nikita Mikhalkov, filmmaker and Putin sycophant extraordinaire, is the eldest son of Sergei Mikhalkov, the Soviet-era poet/propagandist and three-time lyricist of the Soviet/Russian anthem. Originally composed in 1944, the verses later had to be tweaked to eliminate references to Stalin. When Putin resuscitated the anthem in 2000, the senior Mikhalkov, then 87, wrote entirely new lyrics, in which “the triumph of the deathless ideas of Communism” gave way to verses about “our ancestors’ hallowed wisdom” and “a country watched over by God.”

--In 2007 Russia celebrated November 7 as a holiday for the last time. The holiday, which originally commemorated the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and was clumsily reinvented in the Yeltsin era as a “day of national accord and reconciliation,” is being retired in favor of November 4 as National Unity day, commemorating a rather obscure historical event: the defeat, in 1612, of a Polish garrison that controlled Moscow during the 17th century’s “Time of Troubles.” In Grani.ru, commentator Boris Sokolov points out that the new holiday contains all the principal elements of the new Russia’s ideology: a strong authoritarian state (the November 4 victory was a precursor to the establishment of the Romanov monarchy), populist rhetoric (it was the victory of a “people’s army,” albeit led by two princes), and religion (the victory was widely credited to an icon of the Virgin carried by Moscow’s liberators). Of course, it is also conveniently close to November 7.

--Amazing, but true: Post-1917 Soviet history has invariably featured alternating bald and hairy leaders. The bald Lenin was succeeded by the hairy Stalin, then the bald Khrushchev, then the hairy Brezhnev, then the bald Andropov, then the hairy Chernenko, and finally the bald Gorbachev. The tradition has continued in post-Soviet Russia: Gorbachev was succeeded by the hairy Yeltsin and then the follically challenged Putin—who is about to hand over the reins to Medvedev, with a full head of hair.

--“Medved” is Russian for “bear,” the symbol of United Russia. This prompted EJ.ru columnist Anton Orekh to observe that “with Medvedev at the top, the power structure is now perfect: Medvedev the chief, a ruling party of medvedi under him, and the ‘Mishki’ [Little Bears] for the kids. All that’s left is to rename Russia ‘The Bear Den’—which would be rather fitting, in view of our cold climate and general hibernation.”

Sidebar: Dissent in the Russian Press

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Translated by Cathy Young

Under Soviet communism, trusted friends surreptitiously passed around critical broadsides against the government, often in barely legible carbon copies of typewritten texts. Today, by contrast, you can encounter dissenting views in a number of newspapers, magazines, websites, and popular radio shows. Some samples:

Adrian Piontkovsky: “Russia is a land of mystery. The powers-that-be can fuck their God-bearing people in any way they like, with all manners of perversions, seemingly for as long as they please. But sometimes, as one of the country’s smarter alpha males [Stalin] once remarked, they get dizzy with success, and then they do something—no, not something brutal (brutality would be met with animal fear and respectful trembling), but something stupid. For instance, they fail to deliver bread to the shops in St. Petersburg, or declare a campaign against drinking. And then everything crumbles and the Russian rebellion, pointless and pitiless, begins.

“Or, for instance, the ruler suddenly has his lackeys produce a piece of political erotica about their strong manly love for him. The film is shown on a state TV channel to the entire nation. And it turns out to be so obscene that everyone throws up.”
—Grani.ru, October 29, 2007

Yulia Latynina: “Russia under Putin certainly cannot be called a rogue nation—that is, a country in which the only goal of the elite is total control over its own people. Russia under Putin is a bastard nation—a country in which the only goal of the elite is la dolce vita, money in Western banks, fancy cars, and vacations in Nice.

“It is a country whose entire legal infrastructure is geared toward allowing the elite to grab as much oil, gas, and oil and gas money as it can. Such an elite cannot be called anything but a bastard elite. Their natural resentment toward the West for failing to treat them as equals turns into an ‘everyone hates us’ ideology, which they then feed to the people and which they use to drive the people back into the Middle Ages.”
—EJ.ru, January 14, 2008

Leonid Radzikhovsky: “People understand power when it’s clear and simple. The tsar is the tsar, the official is the official. Mixing these roles can only create confusion.

“So, while Putin may have made a winning move, his position is actually not that sweet. Putin as president had all the power, all the honors, and plenty of safety mechanisms.

“Putin as prime minister will have almost all the power (divided power), part of the honors, and very weak safety mechanisms.

“And this, at a time when many expect the oil boom to diminish. But even if that doesn’t happen, the people’s appetites will definitely keep growing, while respect for state power with its unpleasantly complicated structure will likely diminish. To write ‘Medvedev’ and mean ‘Putin’ is complicated mental work. You burden people with that kind of work, you have to pay.

“So, the costs of the people’s loyalty will keep growing, while revenues are unlikely to grow. And it’s the prime minister who will have to deal with this mess.”
—EJ.ru, December 11, 2007

After Putin

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In his eight years as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin has clamped down on his country’s newborn freedoms and returned it to a more confrontational stance toward the West. His second and constitutionally final term is scheduled to come to an end on May 7, 2008; as that date began to draw near, the perennial Kremlin power struggle that Winston Churchill once described as “a bulldog fight under the rug” grew more intense. The December 2007 elections for the Duma, the tamed Russian parliament, took a back seat to the mystery of presidential succession. Would Putin stay? Leave? Continue to rule through a figurehead heir? The only thing clear was that the decision would be made under that rug, with minimal input from the Russian people.

Putin solved part of the mystery on December 10 by endorsing a successor: deputy prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, a 42-year-old lawyer currently in charge of “national development projects.” He has also accepted Medvedev’s offer to take over as prime minister (which, under Russia’s current system, is mainly an administrative post with no political or executive power). Barring any surprises, the top jobs in the Kremlin for the next presidential term are filled.

Yet in many ways, Russia’s political future remains almost as much of a mystery as it was in the fall. The unknowns include whether 140 million residents will live in a partially free, liberalizing society or under increasingly authoritarian rule, and whether a country filled with nuclear missiles and vast energy resources will be an ally or enemy of the West.

Deciphering the Putin Plan
In late 2007, you could be excused for thinking that the Kremlin was clearing the way for some form of open-ended Putin presidency, if not a de facto coronation. In October, even as the former KGB chief announced he would join the ranks of mere mortals by heading up his United Russia Party’s list of candidates for parliamentary elections, a third-term-for-Putin movement gathered force, with a wave of “spontaneous” rallies, meetings, and other events around the country. The kind of adoration lavished on the termed-out president by his servile party and the equally servile state media did not suggest an impending retirement. On October 7 Rossiya, one of several government-owned national TV channels, marked Putin’s 55th birthday with a worshipful 20-minute tribute produced and narrated by Nikita Mikhalkov, the director of the 1994 Oscar-winning film Burnt by the Sun. Less than two weeks later, the government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an open letter from several leading cultural figures, including the ubiquitous Mikhalkov, begging the dear leader to stay for a third term. “Russia,” they wrote, “needs your statesmanlike talent and your political wisdom.”

United Russia’s parliamentary campaign became a national Putin love-in. City streets and squares sprouted posters and banners celebrating a previously unheard-of Putin Plan, with such Soviet-flavored slogans as “The Putin Plan Is Working!” and “You, Too, Are a Part of Putin’s Plan,” sometimes helpfully accompanied by circles marked “pensions,” “salaries,” and “student aid.” A United Russia booklet titled “The Putin Plan Is Russia’s Victory!” featured photo after photo of the great man inspecting troops and strolling through wheat fields. United Russia and the government-run media touted the election itself as a referendum on a man whose post-election plans remained a mystery. Putin’s role as “national leader,” they declared, transcended mere constitutional time frames and had to be preserved one way or another. An essay by United Russia activist Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, posted on the party’s website in early November, advocated a “National Civic Council” that would formally anoint Putin as national leader.

The December parliamentary elections were brazenly rigged in favor of United Russia. Opposition leaders were all but barred from television (with the occasional exception of the private REN-TV channel, now owned by a Putin crony but still retaining vestiges of independence). Some parties were kept off the ballot: The authorities required a high number of signatures on their petitions, and many signatures were reportedly invalidated arbitrarily. Others, such as the pro-western Union of Right Forces, faced official harassment and intimidation; the police confiscated their campaign materials, and state TV rejected their ads as too negative or “extremist.” In the run-up to the election, the repression grew worse. Self-styled “Marches of Dissent” in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities, organized by the opposition to show that not everyone in Russia was on board the Putin bandwagon, were routinely dispersed by special security forces, with beatings that sent dozens of people to hospital emergency rooms. Putin himself, at a November 21 rally of 5,000 supporters, railed against “those who go jackaling around foreign embassies and diplomatic missions, relying on foreign foundations and governments rather than support from their own people.” The prominent “jackal” Gary Kasparov, chess grandmaster and founder of the dissenting Other Russia coalition, was arrested and detained for five days for attending a banned rally on Moscow’s Pushkin Square.

On December 2, the results were in: United Russia won a whopping 64 percent of the vote, followed by 11.5 percent for the Communists, 8 percent for the misnamed “Liberal Democratic Party of Russia” (led by the clownish right-wing provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky), and just under 8 percent for a new left-leaning party called Fair Russia, which hovers somewhere between loyal opposition and junior partner to the party in power. Russia’s democratic opposition finished dismally—the Union of Right Forces received slightly below 1 percent of the vote, the Yabloko (“Apple”) party about 1.5 percent—though liberals were still somewhat heartened by the fact that United Russia’s landslide victory wasn’t even bigger.

It’s hard to tell how different the results would have been in a fair contest. Media access was grossly unequal. Fraud was massive; in the southern province of Ingushetia, which is under virtual martial law, close to 100 percent of all eligible voters chose United Russia. There was also widespread vote-coercion—of soldiers on army bases, patients in hospitals, and employees at government institutions. In a post-election wrap-up commentary on the radio station Echo of Moscow, the political satirist Victor Shenderovich compared United Russia’s posters thanking voters for their support to rapists sending flowers to their victims. The metaphor was a little extreme: For the most part, the Russian electorate was not so much raped as alternately seduced and bullied into submitting in front of a powerful, oil-rich provider and protector. But popular passion for the victors was clearly lacking. The fact that the Putin regime was anxious enough to defame and suppress the opposition suggests that it did not feel entirely secure.

Having sewn up its dominance in the Duma, United Russia was widely expected to try to change the constitution to let Putin stay in office. Yet one week later, on December 10, United Russia and three other pro-government parties nominated Medvedev as their presidential candidate. Putin publicly endorsed his old protégé, who in turn said on television that he would agree to run only on the condition that Putin would pick up the reins as prime minister. While Medvedev’s election seemed virtually assured at press time, this news still raised more questions than it answered. Is Russia in for a non-succession succession in which Putin will remain the de facto head of state? Or would a Medvedev presidency usher in a possible liberalization? A power struggle in which the loyal protégé might turn on his mentor?

Semi-Autonomous Zone
With the rollback of post-Soviet freedoms in the Putin era —the restoration of censorship, the assaults on the multiparty system, even the return of the old Soviet anthem with updated lyrics—it is tempting to view the Putin regime as a regression to Soviet communism. Certainly, there are striking echoes and parallels. Izvestia television columnist Irina Petrovskaya has pointedly compared Mikhalkov’s birthday panegyric to a 1970s documentary extolling Brezhnev. The “Putin Plan” booklet evokes Soviet-era imagery, and there are echoes of the Stalin cult in praises of Putin’s “wisdom” and statesmanship. Putinism has even developed its equivalent of the ubiquitous Soviet-era children’s and youth organizations: “Nashi” (Our Guys), a semi-official movement for people ages 18 to 25 that promotes old-fashioned morality and harassment of opposition activists, and “Mishki” (Little Bears), a Nashi-sponsored group for the eight-to-15 set that bandies about such slogans as “Thank you, President Putin, for our stable future.”

But Putin is not Brezhnev or Stalin. A Soviet-era Rip van Winkle waking up in Putin’s Russia would not easily recognize his country. Western companies and consumer goods are omnipresent. Russian TV may be largely scrubbed of dissent, but it offers a superficially plausible simulacrum of Western-style programming, from celebrity gossip to daytime soaps to sensational, often gory crime news.

Despite periodic outbursts of anti-Western rhetoric, the Putinites are clearly anxious to be accepted by the West as equal, “civilized” partners. They have made occasional noises about a uniquely Russian political path, such as an attempt in late 2006 to popularize the concept of “sovereign democracy” (which essentially boiled down to “we’ll make democracy our own way—butt out!”). But they do not try to assert, as Soviet leaders did, that they have a different and better conception of human rights and freedoms; they just claim that rights and freedoms in the usual Western sense are thriving in Russia, with their exercise merely hampered a little by the hardships of transition. There has been some partial rehabilitation of the Soviet period—particularly of Putin’s beloved alma mater, the KGB—but this has its limits; a controversial high school history textbook recently omitted from its final version a particularly odious chapter presenting a whitewashed Stalin. If Putinism has an ideology, it is not Marxism but a pseudo-populist statism laced with religion, which is touted as society’s moral guide and foundation. (The Russian Orthodox Church, in particular, is closely allied with the government.)

The practice behind the rhetoric, meanwhile, is a corrupt crony capitalism in which public/private corporate hybrids roam the land—dominated by Gazprom, the oil-and-gas leviathan. The boundaries between business and government are infinitely flexible. (The Russian political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin has dubbed this bureaucratic business class “bureness.”) It is a system in which an obscure ex-KGB man turned oil trader named Gennady Timchenko, a longtime Putin pal, is worth some $14 billion as co-owner of the Russian/Swedish petroleum export company Gunvor. It is a system in which other Friends of Vlad control virtually all of Russia’s oil and gas industry. It is a system in which, according to The Moscow Times, United Russia sold slots on its candidate list for as much as $4 million.

In short, Putinism is not a return to communism so much as a movement toward the capitalism of Soviet caricature: the rule of robber barons who control the state behind a façade of pretend democracy, with religion as an opiate for the masses and televised bread and circuses to further pacify the people.

Yet under this corrupt authoritarian regime, there remains a semi-free space that would have been unthinkable under totalitarian Soviet rule. It is a space that permits some latitude for the print media; even the pro-government daily Izvestia still publishes dissenting voices such as
Petrovskaya and Maksim Sokolov, a commentator who directs his caustic swipes equally at the government and the opposition. Echo of Moscow, the radio station whose independent future seemed in question a few months ago in the hands of a new pro-government management, continues to provide a platform to vocal critics of the regime. Between the radio, the newspapers, and growing access to the Internet, free speech has a solid foothold in Russia.

This niche market is constantly under threat. In 2007, an opposition website was fined 20,000 rubles (about $820) for publishing an article that referred to Putin as “Russia’s phallic symbol.” In December, New Times reporter Natalia Morari—a Moldovan citizen with legal residency in Russia who has written several articles exposing corruption—was unexpectedly denied re-entry to the country following a trip to Israel, on unspecified “national security” grounds.

And yet, in this semi-autonomous space, surprises still abound. For instance:

• In November, the political satirist Shenderovich held a solitary protest on a Moscow street with a “Free Gary Kasparov!” sign. (Under Russian law, lone protests, unlike group events, can be held without official authorization.) After politely declining a police request to leave, Shenderovich was suddenly joined by a smirking young man armed with an opposition party sign—which immediately turned his legal one-man protest into unlawful assembly. As both were hustled into a police car, the young man unabashedly admitted that he was a plant. After a few hours at the police precinct, Shenderovich was released (but not before signing autographs for the cops). In January, the case against him ended in acquittal.

• Petrovskaya’s scathing Izvestia review of the Putin birthday tribute, initially killed by the editors, was eventually allowed to run (albeit paired with an opposing viewpoint) after the story was discussed on Echo of Moscow and picked up by liberal websites such as Grani.ru.

• The open letter begging Putin to stay for another term “in the name of Russia’s art community” brought forth a public backlash from other artists, including the popular singer and Duma member Iosif Kobzon. On October 25, the NTV channel’s debate program At the Bar had Mikhalkov square off against writer Venedikt Yerofeyev, who castigated the filmmaker for encouraging Putin to violate the constitution and addressing him in servile terms more befitting a sultan than a democratically elected president. When a testy Mikhalkov asked, “Who told you I’m promoting a personality cult?” Yerofeyev shot back, “I’m telling you.” Three of the four in-studio judges declared Mikhalkov the winner, but the viewer call-in vote went for Yerofeyev, 90,000 to 52,000.

Writing on Grani.ru, the columnist Adrian Piontkovsky argued that the program may have been a small but important turning point in Russia’s political life. The independent-minded portion of society found its voice and spoke against the “government-fostered little personality cult” of Putin. It’s hard to say whether this popular reaction, along with the tepid landslide of December 2, had anything to do with Putin’s decision not to seek a third term. Notably, too, the essay advocating Putin’s confirmation as “national leader” was removed from United Russia’s website after a chorus of pointed criticism. (In another curious development, the Nashi youth organization, built largely around Putin worship, underwent a rapid decline by the end of 2007. Its rallies thinned, and its loss of official favor was evident when it attempted to picket the European Commission offices in Moscow to protest the denial of travel visas to some of its activists. The demonstration ended with police intervention and arrests.)

Russian civil society, then, may not be as dead as it seems. And Russia’s repressive machine, despite its petty viciousness, is far from reopening the gates of the gulag.

Wishing for a Better Czar
What will happen to Putin’s machine as he formally leaves office? There is little doubt that it will be used, if necessary, to ensure an uneventful succession. Already, Kasparov has been denied the opportunity to register his presidential bid because the initiative group for his nomination was unable—apparently due to behind-the-scenes government pressure—to lease a space to hold the nomination conference by the registration deadline. At press time, it appears that the other leading opposition candidate, Putin’s former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, will be disqualified from running, on the grounds of allegedly invalid signatures on his nominating petitions (though in any case, his chances of winning were only theoretically above zero). In Russia, the introduction of Dmitry Medvedev as “the next president” is not merely a figure of speech, as it is in America. Every Russian journalist assumes that the election results are a foregone conclusion, with a “play communist” and a “play liberal” joining Medvedev on the ballot merely for decency’s sake.

But what then? Putin has vowed, more than once, that there will be no redistribution of power from the presidency to the office of prime minister. No one knows whether to take him at his word. It is widely believed that Medvedev was picked because he is a Putin protégé who will be easily controlled by his former boss. Yet a number of Russian commentators suggest there may come a day when even the “good boy” Medvedev will realize that real power is now in his hands to use as he pleases.

Many liberals are at least somewhat encouraged by this situation. They anticipate the growth of a dual power structure, an unwieldy beast with its loyalties divided between Putin and Medvedev. Political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin argues that at the very least, under a Medvedev/Putin (or Putin/Medvedev) regime, different interest groups within the state-corporate leviathan will solidify into competing factions that unwittingly act as checks and balances on each other. Still others speculate that Putin is not interested in maintaining an active role in Russian politics and wants to stay close to the center of power only to avoid being tossed to the wolves in case the economy falters and the new government needs a scapegoat.

Some dissidents even suggest that Medvedev is, in the words of the columnist and radio commentator Yulia Latynina, the “best of successors”—the standard-bearer, perhaps, of Putinism with a human face. In the past, Medvedev has cautiously voiced concern about the government’s assault on the YUKOS oil company (owned by Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky), and has criticized the aforementioned concept of “sovereign democracy.” He is also one of the few men in Putin’s inner circle who does not have a KGB background. Medvedev belongs, Latynina notes hopefully, to a different, post-Soviet generation. (Of course, no one knows how that will play out. The political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky cautions that Medvedev may take steps to curb political speech on the Internet because, unlike the older-generation Putin, he understands the Web’s power and relevance.)

So three months before the presidential election, Russian liberals were reduced to hoping, yet again, for a better Czar—or for a good-Czar/bad-Czar system whose inherent tensions may cause the authoritarian regime to collapse upon itself. Yet there may also be some other checks on the Russian state, from the elites’ desire for acceptance by the West to the small and battered voice of Russia’s own civil society. Post-Communist Russian democracy, like Communism itself, is dead. The authoritarian system that has risen on its wreckage is not a pretty sight. But there are still signs of life.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor & Fields).

Meet the New Czar

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:15:00 EDT

A popular Soviet joke once asked when would the first Soviet-style election take place? Answer: When God brought Eve before Adam and said, "Choose your wife." For the Russian presidential election of March 2, 2008, this could be updated to a "democratic" scenario in which Adam's choices also include two monkeys and a blow-up doll.

That the "election" was a fixed game was clear from the start, when Dmitry Medvedev's "nomination" by the dominant United Russia Party and three small pro-government parties served as a façade for his selection as Vladimir Putin's heir. The last fig leaf of legitimacy was tossed aside when former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the only serious candidate of the liberal opposition, was disqualified from running, supposedly due to a high rate of invalid signatures on his petitions.

Adding to the farce, an obscure "liberal" candidate—38-year-old Andrei Bogdanov, a self-styled Freemason and head of the tiny Democratic Party of Russia—did get on the ballot. Widely viewed as a Kremlin puppet, Bogdanov was the blow-up doll to the campaign's two monkeys: "Liberal Democratic Party of Russia" leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose infamous antics include public fisticuffs with other politicians and pledges to help raise the birth rate by personally fathering children around the country, and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov. Several Medvedev-less televised debates supplied their moments of pseudo-political circus, such as Zhirinovsky verbally abusing Bogdanov spokesman Nikolai Gotsa, then punching him on their way off the set and telling a bodyguard to "take him outside and shoot him." The Medvedev campaign, meanwhile, consisted of aggressive, often coercive efforts to boost voter turnout. (Eventually, official reports put turnout at 67 percent, with Medvedev getting 70 percent of the vote.)

A number of pundits, both in Russia and in the West, have argued that the rigged vote was still a genuine and rational people's choice—a choice to continue the Putin course that brought stability and relative prosperity to the country. That the choice was "genuine," if influenced by pervasive misinformation, is probably true. "Rational" is another matter. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Stanford University professors Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss argue convincingly that Putinite authoritarianism held Russia back economically at a time of oil windfalls, and that crime and corruption have actually worsened in the "stable" Putin years.

But will Putin's course really continue? Will Putin, the future Prime Minister, remain the Kremlin's puppet master, or will the mild-mannered Medvedev come into his own and toss his former friends overboard? Could he usher in a new liberalization? On these questions, the real outcome of the "election" is far from clear.

While most of Russia's embattled liberals cautioned against waiting for the "good czar," some pointed to possible signs of a "thaw"—such as reports that Nashi, the thuggish Putin-worshiping youth group, was being disbanded. (The daily newspaper Kommersant quoted a Kremlin insider as saying that the government no longer needed "foot-stomping mobs.")

Opinion was divided on the pro-government side as well. In early February, political analyst and former Putin administration staffer Vitaly Ivanov published a virulent column in the centrist business daily Vzglyad.ru jeering liberal hopes for a "second wind" and the idea that Putin could have picked a liberal successor. This was followed by a sharp retort from Vzglyad managing editor Yuri Girenko, who castigated both the radical opposition and diehard authoritarians for their "rejection of evolution." Ironically, a few liberal commentators saw Ivanov's shrill tirade as grounds for optimism—a hysterical outburst showing that the hardliners were getting nervous at the prospect of Medvedev moving in a liberal direction.

In a similar vein, Putin's macho swagger at his much-publicized February 16 press conference—in which he told foreign observers critical of Russia's elections to "teach their wives how to make cabbage soup" and suggested that, as prime minister, he would not hang a portrait of President Medvedev in his office—was interpreted by some as a sign of weakness rather than strength. In a caustic essay on EJ.ru, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky depicted Putin as a lame duck lashing out angrily as the realization of his looming political impotence descends upon him. Wishful thinking or astute insight? In today's Russian political scene, it's often hard to tell the two apart.

For now, as the post-election days have made clear, Russia remains in a semi-authoritarian limbo in which every sign of freedom's survival is countered by evidence of steady and perhaps growing repression.

In the pro-government Izvestia, officious reports on the remarkable success of the election as an expression of the popular will coexisted with a scathing March 6 column by Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich, who dismissed triumphalist rhetoric about the gains of the Putin-Medvedev era as a tissue of lies, "widening the gap of alienation between the government and the people" and leading Russia back into a Soviet-style dead-end. The paper's website, Izvestia.ru, also hosted a heretical video made for a student comedy festival, satirizing the election: a clip from the 1971 Soviet comedy Kidnapping, Caucasian Style, redubbed into a short in which a geeky "Medvedev" is invited to participate in a "pretend election" against three buffoonish rivals, but is chagrined to learn that Putin will become prime minister because "he just loves to be in the driver's seat."

Meanwhile, the day after the election also saw the return of Nashi, who held a couple of boisterous rallies in Moscow —perhaps, some Russian commentators speculated, as a message to Medvedev from their hard-line sponsors. Street action by the opposition fared far worse. The anti-Putin "Other Russia" coalition was initially denied permits to hold demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg on March 3, on the grounds that the requested locations were not available. In violation of the law, the authorities did not suggest alternate locations. Finally, the city government in St. Petersburg relented and offered another route, with less visibility and access. In Moscow, about 50 dissenters defied the ban and tried to hold a protest, resulting in the now common arrests and beatings by the riot police. In St. Petersburg, the march took place without incident, but it coincided with the launch of a blatantly political case against a leading opposition activist, Maksim Reznik, chair of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Yabloko party.

In the early morning hours of March 3, Reznik was arrested outside the party's offices for "attacking a police officer" in a scuffle that was almost certainly a staged provocation. At the prosecutors' request, and without interviewing witnesses, the judge agreed to hold Reznik in pretrial detention for two months. In an especially troubling development, Reznik's participation in protest marches was cited by a prosecutor as proof of a "pattern of illegal behavior" and "a negative reflection on his character." Reznik remains in jail, and while some protests on his behalf have been allowed to proceed peacefully, others have ended in police provocations and arrests. In another transparently political case, Kasyanov's campaign workers around the country are harassed by the police and threatened with prosecution for "forging signatures."

This isn't an auspicious opening to the Medvedev—or "Putvedev"—era. The next "thaw" may yet be a few seasons away.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young is the author of Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality and Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood.

A Secular Fantasy

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:00:00 EST

The controversy surrounding The Golden Compass, the recently released screen adaptation of the first book of Philip Pullman’s best-selling fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, was not exactly unexpected. Pullman, a 61-year-old British writer of fantasy and mystery novels for children and young adults, has been dubbed “the most dangerous man in Britain” by Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens. He is a self-proclaimed atheist who has referred to himself, tongue in cheek, as being “of the devil’s party.” He makes no secret of the fact that his books are intended as a sweeping attack not only on organized religion but on the monotheistic concept of God.

Yet the world of Pullman’s sacrilegious epic is not a conventionally materialistic one. It includes all the basic elements of Christian theology, from God and angels to the souls of the dead, but in a way that turns the traditional religious viewpoint on its head. The phrase “his dark materials” comes from a passage in John Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan contemplates the possibility that God may use “his dark materials to create more worlds”—a reference not only to the multiple worlds of Pullman’s universe but to his retelling of the Miltonian epic with the rebel angels as the good guys.

The film version of the first novel, brought to the screen in December by New Line Cinema and marketed as a Lord of the Rings–style grand epic fantasy, has been scrubbed of explicit references to religion—enough to pacify the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other mainstream religious organizations. (William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, unappeased, still called for a boycott.) There is a certain irony to this, since the movie opens on the heels of an atheist revival of sorts, heralded by such recent books as Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

It remains to be seen whether the two sequels, if they get made, will manage to navigate the dangerous waters of Pullman’s narrative and to translate his anti-religious message into a general anti-authoritarian one without diluting it beyond recognition. In any case, it is a safe bet that the movie, which opened to mixed reviews and a respectable though not spectacular box office performance, will lead to a resurgent interest in Pullman’s books, not only among adventure and fantasy fans but among readers interested in the case against religion and for a secular morality. As a novelist, Pullman may be to militant atheism what Ayn Rand was to militant capitalism: a writer who can convey important ideas through frequently riveting fiction but can’t always stop those ideas from congealing into rigid ideology.

Pullman’s Parallel Universe
Who is Philip Pullman? A Christian-bashing God hater or, as the liberal Catholic writer Donna Freitas has argued, a profoundly unorthodox religious thinker? A propagandist for godlessness or a master of storytelling whose enchantment draws in both children and adults? This much is certain: His blend of fantasy and philosophy has been highly successful. The Dark Materials trilogy, hailed for skillful plotting, exquisite prose style, and imaginative fantastic landscapes as well as challenging ideas, has sold about 12 million copies worldwide. (The Golden Compass, published in 1995, was followed in 1997 by the second volume, The Subtle Knife, and then in 2000 by The Amber Spyglass, which became the first children’s book to win the prestigious Whitbread Prize for literature.) The series has earned Pullman a devoted following among well-educated adults as well as children.

The books’ greatest strengths are several memorable characters—above all the spunky and precocious 12-year-old heroine, Lyra Belacqua, raised as a ward of a college at Oxford—and an equally memorable alternate world. For Lyra’s Oxford is not “our” Oxford. It exists in a vaguely Edwardian-era England that has sophisticated flying craft and research into particle physics, in a world with such countries as Muscovy and Texas—and a powerful, oppressive, united Christian Church whose hierarchy, the Magisterium, is based in Geneva. This world is populated by witches who fly and live for hundreds of years and Arctic tribes of intelligent white bears who wear armor and are skilled metalworkers. Most unusually, every human being in this universe has a “daemon,” a talking animal that embodies his or her soul; their bond is so close that separation by more than a few feet causes agony to both. A child’s daemon can change into any animal, but it “settles” at puberty, taking on a shape that reflects the human’s identity: dogs for loyal servants, birds for free spirits, and so on.

Pullman excels at fleshing out his imagined universe, with its unique technologies, its social rules (there is a strict taboo against touching another person’s daemon), and its linguistic quirks (in Lyra’s English, chocolate is “chocolatl” and electricity is “anbaric power”). He excels, too, at drawing the reader into the story and deftly pulling together seemingly unrelated strands of the plot.

At the start of The Golden Compass, Lyra learns that her uncle, Lord Asriel, is leaving on a polar expedition to study something called Dust—a mysterious substance, invisible to the naked eye, that the Church regards as evil and sinful. This development coincides with a series of kidnappings that claims Lyra’s best friend, Roger, and the appearance of a beautiful aristocratic woman who befriends Lyra and is connected to the abductions. Lyra’s journey to rescue Roger puts her on the trail of a hideous Church-sponsored experiment to keep children pure of sin. It also puts her on the trail of Lord Asriel, who is working on an experiment of his own to open a window into parallel worlds.

As events unfold in the next two volumes, it turns out that Lord Asriel’s real goal is nothing less than to overthrow the rule of God, and that Lyra has a special role in this quest: A prophecy names her as the new Eve, destined to free humanity from the yoke of sin and death. Lyra’s allies on this worthy mission include witches, bears, rebel angels, and two people from “our” London: Mary Malone, a physicist and ex-nun, and Will Parry, a boy Lyra’s age with a unique destiny of his own. After harrowing adventures and great sacrifices, Lyra devotes herself to building a “Republic of Heaven” in her world to replace the false promise of the Kingdom of Heaven. This republic, our young heroes learn, must be based on human self-government rather than divine authority, and on the conviction that we should live life to its fullest in this world rather than aspire to bliss in the next one.

In Pullman’s universe, God, also known as the Authority, is worse than nonexistent: He is a tyrannical fraud. According to Pullman’s peculiar theogony, in the beginning there was Dust, a substance generated when matter develops consciousness. Dust condensed into beings of pure spirit—angels—and the first of them established his dominance over the others by falsely telling them he had created them and the world. (In the final volume of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, this entity is explicitly identified as the Judeo-Christian God.) In a similar twist, the afterlife is real, but it’s a bleak, desolate prison camp for the souls of the dead, and true salvation lies in the oblivion expected by atheists. In a powerful sequence deliberately modeled on the Christian story of the Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ descends into the underworld to liberate the righteous, Will and Lyra invade the world of the dead and lead the souls out into a living world where they blissfully dissolve into atoms.

Pullman deserves credit for tackling ideas of this depth and magnitude in his novels, and for his ambitious reimagining of myth and theology (at times bringing to mind Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic Russian fantasy novel The Master and Margarita, with its unique take on the Devil and the life of Jesus). Unfortunately, His Dark Materials suffers from serious flaws both as literature and as a religious critique.

Evangelizing Atheism
While Pullman has said that he is interested in “telling a story, not preaching a sermon,” he slides more and more frequently into preaching as the story goes on. Some of his favorite ideas—for instance, that the human body with its senses is far superior to the fleshless spirit of the angels, or that the best afterlife is to become one with nature—are stated again and again and again and again. The idea that the transition from childhood innocence to adult experience should be welcomed, not feared, is illustrated by a heavy-handed plot twist in which Lyra and Will’s sexual awakening proves to be the key to the world’s salvation. When ideology and literature collide, literature suffers. The Amber Spyglass is not quite on a par with the first two novels: Its new characters and worlds are generally less interesting, far too much space is given to sententious musings about the meaning of life in a post-God world, and eventually you start to feel that Pullman is trying to cram too many messages into his narrative, even if that means unnecessarily dragging it out.

He stacks the deck too. It’s not clear, for instance, why the Authority needs to keep the souls of the dead in such a wretched place and not even bother to reward the faithful. Conversely, to sell the idea that “the sweet and most desirable end” for the souls of the dead is to drift into nothingness, Pullman depicts this dissolution as an ecstatic moment in which the souls’ atoms not only become one with the universe but mingle happily with the particles of deceased loved ones (whom, for some reason, they couldn’t find among their fellow ghosts).

Worse still, Pullman paints every character connected to the Church or religion, from the fascistic zealots of the Magisterium to the crazed monk in the world of the dead who stubbornly believes he’s in paradise, with an antipathy that sometimes recalls Ayn Rand’s demonization of her welfare-state bureaucrats. (In a 2003 interview with the Christian magazine The Third Way, Pullman conceded that this tendency was “an artistic flaw.”) Those on the anti-God side, meanwhile, are judged far more leniently. Lord Asriel, who sacrifices the life of an innocent child to his single-minded crusade, is still a heroic if flawed figure. The witches can be ruthless and vindictive—we learn that one witch queen punished a tribe that failed to honor her by slaughtering the white tigers it worshipped as totem gods—but they are still portrayed sympathetically because they are nature-loving, Church-hating pagans. The double standard grates at times.

When Time Out New York asked him about his anti-religious message, Pullman replied, “The position I’ve always taken is that religious intolerance and tyranny is just one aspect of a wider problem, which is the tendency in human societies toward absolutism.…We have to struggle all the time against that tendency toward wanting the one ‘true’ answer that abolishes all the others forever. That’s true in politics, and it’s true in religion, and it’s true in every aspect of human life.” But Pullman is soft-pedaling his position. His Dark Materials, at least, explicitly singles out religion as the major source of oppression throughout human history. “That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling,” the tiger-slaying witch queen says with the author’s obvious approval. In Pullman’s novels, religion is not credited with any positive contributions to human society (whereas, in real history, the Catholic Church played a key role in ending such practices as forced marriage and infanticide) and is blamed for some things to which it has little if any connection (such as genital mutilation intended to prevent sexual pleasure).

The Third Way interview offers an interesting window into Pullman’s beliefs. At first he asserts, very much in the vein of Dawkins and Hitchens, that faith in one God is itself the source of evil: “Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him.” Asked about the crimes committed by atheistic totalitarian regimes, Pullman responds that “they functioned psychologically in exactly the same way,” with their own sacred texts and exalted prophets: “The fact that they proclaimed that there was no God didn’t make any difference: it was a religion, and they acted in the way any totalitarian religious system would.”

The interviewer presses on, pointing out that in that case, perhaps belief in one God isn’t really the root of the problem—and that not only Stalin but even the secular French revolutionaries in the 18th century killed more dissenters than any Church authority. Pullman fires back with a non sequitur: “Well, that was very comforting as the flames were licking round your toes.” When he finally acknowledges that “the religions are special cases of the general human tendency to exalt one doctrine above all others,” it comes across less as a reconsideration of his views than as a grudging concession. There are no reports of Pullman’s plans to write a sequel to His Dark Materials in which the attempt to build an earthly Republic of Heaven ends in firing squads and gulags.

An Attack on Narnia
The intolerant underside of Pullman’s views also can be seen in his intemperate attack on C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia, launched in a 1998 essay in The Guardian. He is hardly the first to accuse Lewis of sexism for his tendency to relegate girls to subordinate roles, and of racism for his negative depiction of the dark-skinned Calormenes. What stands out is the nastiness of Pullman’s rhetoric: He calls the Narnia books “ugly and poisonous things” and “nauseating drivel,” and he declares that he hates them “with a deep and bitter passion.”

Pullman’s specific criticisms of Lewis—which include not only racism and misogyny but class snobbery and a “sadomasochistic relish for violence” and the elevation of childhood innocence over adulthood—are cautiously supported by some critics and hotly disputed by others. If you approach His Dark Materials in a similarly uncharitable spirit, you could find similar grounds for complaint.

Sexism? Heroic though Lyra is, it is mostly Will who fights and who gets to possess a special mystical weapon, while some of Lyra’s greatest feats are accomplished by the “feminine” method of clever manipulation and lies. The trilogy’s main adult female character, Mrs. Coulter, is virtually a cliché of feminine evil—a cold, ruthless siren who schemes, lies, and seduces her way to power—until she is partly, and not very plausibly, redeemed by a spark of stereotypical feminine virtue: maternal love.

Class snobbery? The illegitimate but aristocratic-born Lyra is vastly superior in intelligence and initiative to the lower-class children she befriends; the other hero, Will, is the son of an officer in the Royal Marines. Sadomasochistic violence? Pullman’s trilogy features some very unpleasant deaths and mutilations.

This is not to say that Pullman is a misogynist, a class snob, or a sadist, only that he should be more cautious in branding others with such labels. It is not much of a stretch to think that Pullman sees himself as the anti-Lewis. Third Way asked Pullman if he is “a conscious antidote to C. S. Lewis, seeking to do for a moral atheism what he did for Christianity.” Pullman gave a curious reply: “It’s largely nonsense, of course” (emphasis added). Writing in the British Spectator, critic Caroline Moore argues that “Pullman, for all his superior imaginative powers, is paradoxically more intolerant, more fiercely exclusive and more violently propagandist than Lewis.” That’s a shame, because there is much in Pullman’s message that deserves to be commended, including the idea that, in a world without God, one can find meaning in human consciousness, human work, human freedom, and human responsibility to the world.

Yet His Dark Materials has already earned a place of honor in contemporary popular literature and may well end up as long-lived and beloved as the Narnia series. An interesting if often frustrating thinker, a masterful if flawed storyteller, Philip Pullman deserves the larger audience he is likely to find with the release of the Golden Compass movie. For some readers, his stories will stimulate a discussion of religion and freedom, raising tough questions for believers and nonbelievers alike. For others, it will be the stories themselves that endure: tales of bravery and magic, of heroic children and armored bears, that can stand on their own regardless of any self-consciously heretical message.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young (cathyyoung63@gmail.com) is the author of Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (Free Press).

That's What Little Boys Are Made Of

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 14:52:00 EDT

Jerry Falwell's Paradoxical Legacy

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:57:00 EDT

The death of televangelist Jerry Falwell in May at age 73 drew the curtain on a paradoxical career. Falwell was a founding father of the Christian right, which has succeeded in uniting religion and politics to a degree unthinkable in the late 1970s. Yet its gains in the political arena have been accompanied by equally impressive losses in the culture wars. He crusaded tirelessly against pornography and immorality in the media, yet the legal battle he fought against pornographer Larry Flynt expanded the boundaries of constitutionally protected free speech.

Falwell started out his career as a TV preacher opposed to mixing religion and politics, but this opposition was never uniformly applied. In the mid-’60s he warned that Christians were called to “preach the word,” not “reform the externals,” and slammed ministers involved with the civil rights movement. At the same time, Falwell’s own Old Time Gospel Hour frequently featured segregationist politicians such as Lester Maddox and George Wallace as guests.

Francis Schaeffer, a fundamentalist champion of “dominion theology,” reportedly helped allay Falwell’s stated fears of tainting religion with politics. Schaeffer believed that Christians are called to rule America under the guidance of biblical law. His followers include the radical “Christian Reconstructionists” who would impose Old Testament law—requiring the stoning of homosexuals, for example—in America. In a 2005 report for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Bob Moser quotes former Falwell ghostwriter Mel White as saying that Schaeffer “convinced Jerry there was no biblical mandate against joining with ‘nonbelievers’ in a political cause.”

This shift in Falwell’s thinking allowed ecumenicism to emerge among fundamentalist Christians, a strangely progressive result of Falwell’s reactionary thinking. Evangelical Protestants could work together with conservative Catholics and even Jews to defeat their liberal secularist enemies. This ecumenicism was rooted in shared hatred: of abortion, homosexuality, feminism, secularism, and other bogeymen and bogeywomen of modernity.

Falwell’s group, the Moral Majority, helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, but his presidency was not an enormous success for the religious right. Reagan paid lip service to Falwell’s social agenda but did little to enact it. His administration made no serious attempt to curb abortion; early in his first term, in 1981, Reagan put Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court despite religious conservatives’ misgivings about her stance on reproductive rights. When Falwell said that “every good Christian should be concerned” about O’Connor’s nomination, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) quipped that “every good Christian should line up and kick Jerry Falwell’s ass.”

Other issues dear to Falwell and his constituency got equally short shrift. Far from seeking to shore up the traditional family with a stay-at-home mom, for example, Reagan reduced the tax burden on dual-earner families, making it easier for middle-class women to enter the work force.

Two decades later, President George W. Bush seems not simply to talk the talk but to care about the religious right’s agenda, whether it’s “saving marriage” from gays, banning “partial-birth abortion,” or curbing federal stem cell research. And yet, 28 years after the launch of the Moral Majority, a reversal of Roe v. Wade seems unlikely, and statewide bans on same-sex marriage are offset by the legalization of civil unions in some states and moves toward full marriage rights for same-sex couples in others. Even Bush has spoken in favor of civil unions.

Interestingly, Falwell was wary about one of the Bush administration’s most successful moves to blur the lines between religion and government: the “faith-based initiative” to funnel federal funds for social services to religious organizations. Falwell worried that entanglement with the federal government could subject churches to restrictions—and that funds could also go to liberal churches or, worse yet, to such suspect groups as Scientologists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Though the movement Falwell helped launch was unable to enact much of its agenda into law, there is no question that it transformed the American political landscape. Even the battles it hasn’t won, such as the effort to teach “intelligent design” in schools on a par with evolution, are still battles it was able to force on its opponents.

More broadly, it helped create a climate in which the language of politics is saturated with references to God, a political culture in which a major political magazine (Newsweek) can ask a presidential candidate (Howard Dean) whether he believes in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the path to eternal life.

Despite these political inroads, Falwell’s brand of religious conservatism has suffered losses in the culture wars. Feminism, its radical excesses mostly discarded, has become firmly integrated into America’s cultural mainstream. (Even, apparently, in Falwell’s own family: His daughter is a surgeon.) Acceptance of gays is now at a level that would have been unthinkable in 1980. Sexual content in mainstream entertainment has steadily increased, and adults-only material is more available than ever thanks to new technologies. While divorce rates have dropped somewhat, so have marriage rates; in much of America, sex between single adults is widely accepted as a social norm.

It is perhaps emblematic of the larger failure of Falwell’s cause that some of his most personal battles ended up helping the other side. During a TV show in 1984, an audience member who happened to be a former Baptist Bible College classmate of Falwell’s, Jerry Sloan, asked him about his statement that the pro-gay Metropolitan Community Church was a “vile and Satanic system” that would “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” Falwell denied making the remarks. When Sloan said he had a tape, Falwell offered to pay $5,000 if he produced it.

When Sloan did exactly that, Falwell refused to pay up. Sloan took him to court and won, and then used the money to launch Sacramento’s first gay community center, the Lambda Community Center. According to columnist Deb Price, Sloan wryly calls Falwell “one of our community center’s godfathers.”

A few years later, Falwell was involved in a far more celebrated legal dispute with Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Flynt had published an ad parody featuring Falwell describing his first sexual experience—with his mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued for $45 million. While a jury rejected his claim of libel on the grounds that no reasonable person could have believed the parody to be factual, Falwell won damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Flynt’s appeal went to the Supreme Court, which in February 1988 ruled unanimously that public figures could not sue satirists for damages on the grounds of emotional distress. Falwell’s suit turned into a major victory for free speech.

A decade later, after appearing together on The Larry King Show to discuss the 1997 movie The People vs. Larry Flynt, Falwell and Flynt developed a friendship. At Falwell’s suggestion, they toured college campuses debating morality and freedom of speech. After Falwell’s death, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece by Flynt titled “My Friend, Jerry Falwell.” Perhaps not the send-off Falwell would have hoped for, but a fittingly ironic one for a man whose achievements and intentions were always a world apart.
Contributing Editor Cathy Young blogs at cathyyoung.blogspot.com.

Gut Feelings and Real Threats

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:19:00 EDT

Ever since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the terrorist threat to the West and to Americans in particular has been the subject of contentious debate. Is there a grave and urgent danger, or is it vastly exaggerated by the media and by politicians out to take advantage of popular fears? Does the real danger, as many civil libertarians argue, lie in the temptation to restrict liberties in response to this threat? Do we, in other words, have nothing to fear but fear itself?

There is little doubt that the terrorist threat has been exploited by politicians—including the Bush administration, which has used the specter of September 11 to justify questionable policies both foreign and domestic. Half-baked plots by incompetent wannabe jihadists are hyped as imminent attacks with devastating consequences. Recently, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff incurred much ridicule when he spoke of his "gut feeling" that a terrorist attack could be imminent.

This situation has led some civil libertarians, most notably Ohio State University political science professor John Mueller, to declare what left-wing enfant terrible Michael Moore was excoriated for writing a few years ago: There is no terrorist threat. In a 2006 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, Mueller notes that radical Islamic terrorists have not made a major attack on U.S. soil since September 11, and argues that this is unlikely to be due to the vigilance of homeland security. Mueller concludes that the Al Qaeda has been largely defanged and that terrorists are clearly not as determined, effective or ubiquitous as they are made out to be. Thus, he asserts, we may have authorized massive surveillance and detention programs and other restrictive policies in response to a phantom menace.

Yet a new National Intelligence Estimate contradicts Mueller's assessment of the threat level: according to the report, the Al Qaeda has regrouped and is now the strongest it has been since 2001. This is not Bush Administration propaganda. In fact, Bush critics, including The New Republic and New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, were quick to seize on the NIE as an indictment of the administration—for going after Saddam Hussein while failing to capture Osama Bin Laden, and for turning Iraq into a terrorist launching pad and recruiting tool.

This indictment may well be accurate, and quite damning for an administration that has used keeping Americans safe from terrorists as a catchall rationale. But is also a reminder that the terror threat is more than mere hype.

Most of the recent failed terror plots may have been inept exercises in fantasy. But even if one out of a thousand such plots succeeds, it could be a tragedy of horrific proportions, especially if biological weapons or suitcase nukes are involved. Clearly, not all terrorists are inept; besides, even the most inept of bumblers sometimes manage to get lucky. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which did only minor damage, was the work of amateurs of almost comical ineptitude. Eight years later, no one was laughing.

How to deal with this threat is another question. Civil libertarians (and others) have made plenty of legitimate criticisms of specific policies pursued under the umbrella of the War on Terror. We can point out that confiscating baby bottles at the airport does not make us safer; that torture not only debases us all but is quite likely to generate false and misleading information; that we don't have to resort to Kafkaesque indefinite detention of suspects to protect ourselves from terrorists. We can point out that the National Security Agency's post-September 11 monitoring of some telephone calls to foreign countries did not have to be carried out illegally and without minimal judicial safeguards; the administration's insistence on circumventing the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts seems to have been rooted in arrogance rather than necessity.

All these are vital arguments that must be heard. What's not going to help is dismissing the risk of a terrorist attack—an argument that can easily backfire, in a reversal of the story of the boy who cried wolf, if a major strike does happen. An even greater mistake is to is downplay the consequences of such an attack. Thus, in his Foreign Affairs article, Mueller writes, "Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000)."

But this argument ignores the impact of such attacks on the friends and families of the victims—and the psychological impact on the entire nation (not to mention the economic devastation). It is true, as some have pointed out, that even in Mueller's extreme scenario, the annual casualties would still be far below the toll of auto accidents. But that does not mean we are irrational in our response to terrorism. For one, a large-scale disaster, even a natural one, draws more attention and thus elicits far more shock than many small incidents with a higher cumulative death toll. Perhaps more importantly, there are many things one can do to reduce one's risk of dying in a car crash. There is nothing one can do, short of moving into a bomb shelter, to minimize the risk of being killed or maimed in a random terrorist attack.

No society can regard large-scale casualties from terrorist acts as an acceptable risk. An individual can personally prefer a higher risk of death in such an attack over some expansion of government powers, but telling others to make the same choice is not a winning argument.

In the past, wars and other national security threats led to far worse assaults on American liberties than anything being contemplated now. Already, the majority of Americans seem willing to accept at least some curtailment of civil liberties in order to reduce the threat of terrorism. Even one more major attack, let alone three a year, could usher in some very dark days for freedom. If champions of civil liberties want to prevent that, they need to take a different approach: to show that the compromises we are being asked to accept will not make us safer, or that there are ways to make us more secure without sacrificing our bedrock principles. If they want to be heard when they warn about loss of liberty, they cannot afford to sound cavalier when they talk about loss of life.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor for reason.