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\nI’ve got a couple of what I call “intellectual idols”, people who analyze and parse the world and its events, in a way that seems singular, important, and (in some cases) life-altering (for me). I was one way before I read Ryszard Kapuscinski. After reading him, I will never look at the world in the same way again. George Orwell is another one. Robert Kaplan is another one. I suppose Alexander Hamilton is another one, although I think of him more as my boyfriend. His perspective was, in many respects, larger and more sweeping than his contemporaries – for a variety of reasons. He was an immigrant? He wasn’t attached to one colony emotionally? He had grown up in a mercantile atmosphere, not agrarian at all – so he did not fear big money, and the loss of an agricultural economy. Who knows why – but he had a longer view going on than most, as far-seeing as all of “those guys” were. Robert Conquest is another intellectual idol. This is not about total agreement, by the way, which never interests me in the slightest. This is about people who seem to have some sort of perspective<\/i> on events, perspective that gives them the LONG view of things, as opposed to the short. In many cases, these people (while very political) rise above politics, at least in the every-day mucky muck of them, and they see things in different contexts, because they understand history, because they can PLACE certain events in a context that makes them seem completely different. You are forever changed once you get that kind of perspective.<\/p>\n
But the grand pooh-bah of intellectual idols is Rebecca West.<\/p>\n
I am now reading her A Train of Powder<\/a> As with many of these people I mention, they are interconnected. Robert Kaplan introduced me to Kapuscinski and also Rebecca West (his Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History<\/a> Train of Powder<\/i> is made up of four very long essays having to do with various trials that West, as a journalist, covered, one being the Nuremberg Trials. The Nuremberg Trials are broken up into three long parts, each one called “Greenhouse with Cyclamens”. One of the things that is so extraordinary about Rebecca West, and why she is so revered by anyone who wants to write thoughtfully about history and politics, is that she was able to see things before others did. (Or, not ALL others, but she certainly stands apart) She traveled through Yugoslavia in 1938, 1939. Not only could she sense the cataclysm that was to come in WWII (she is especially brutal about the German tourists she observed on the train – in them, she can see the entire Nazi Party) – but she predicts the breakup of Yugoslavia some 50 years later, and the genocidal campaigns of people like Slobodan Milosevic. Nobody who read her book would be at all shocked that Serbia would rise in such a monstrous way. Of course they did. Retrospect makes prophets of us all, and there are many who could say, “I saw it coming …” Yes: but could you have seen it coming in 1938? There was something about Rebecca West’s mind – cold and detached (yet she comes off incredibly warm in interviews) – that kept her above events, without the accompanying sense of superiority that so often comes with detached individuals.<\/p>\n She seems always to be on the side of the individual<\/i>, which again separates her from her contemporaries – many of whom were swayed by Socialist ideas (Orwell and others) but she really never was. She considered herself a radical and a feminist, to be sure, but she always has a very healthy suspicion of any group<\/i>, and such people are really rare – and almost nonexistent today, at least in political writing, where everything is about propping up your GROUP. West saw what group-identity-politics could wrought, in places like Yugoslavia, and then also in places like Germany, and she conscoiusly separated herself from the pack: “No, thanks. Not for me.” Not an easy stance to take, and she is often mistaken for a reactionary which makes me chuckle – because that is so often the accusation thrown towards someone who refuses to “play well with others”, who never drank the Kool-Aid in the first place.<\/p>\n I am devouring Train of Powder<\/i> at the speed of light. The first big essay about the Nuremberg Trials has many different aspects to it: the vibe, in general, at the time, for those journalists who had been observing the trials in their entirety: the intense boredom, and the homesickness, but that’s just one element. She’s an incredible observer, which makes you want to read everything she writes, just to see how she interprets things. The whole “greenhouse” she encounters during her stay at a huge country house in Germany where all the press were camped out – is incredible because she takes the fact of the greenhouse (and the one legged gardener, and his devotion to cyclamens) and extrapolates out of that the meaning of the entire German people following the war. It’s not a stretch. This is a woman who observed history, who knew revolutions and wars, who understood tyranny on a deep Hannah-Arendt level.<\/p>\n Yet she was also a humanist. This gives her writing the power and scope that it has.<\/p>\n She sat in the press box in the court room at Nuremberg, for months on end, and observed, taking in everything: the zaniness of much of it (due, perhaps, to the fact that a trial like this had never occurred before), the behavior of the “defendants” (what a good eye she has), and thoughts on what all of this would actually mean<\/i>. What exactly<\/i> is going on here? She makes insightful observations – which probably rang uneasily in the minds of her contemporaries, who were still under the sway of the glorious revolution going on in Russia, something she never fell prey to. For example, she notes that the international judges, each read different parts of what each defendant was accused of. Here she observes:<\/p>\n It turned out that the Russian was reading the part of the judgment that condemned the Germans for their deportations: for taking men and women away from their homes and sending them to distant camps, where they worked as slave labour in conditions of great discomfort, and were often unable to communicate with their families. There was here a certain irony, and a certain warning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The essay was written in 1946. It is fresh news. It was unpopular, at that moment in time, to criticize Russia – for various reasons – and many just decided to stick their heads in the sand, to avoid uncomfortable truths. That was never Rebecca West’s bag.<\/p>\n She’s good on all aspects here – atmosphere, context, analysis – this is journalism of the highest order, a dying art, which is one of the reasons why I love Robert Kaplan so much. If you read his books (which are part travelogue, part journalism, part history), and his long articles in The Atlantic Monthly<\/i>, you can see a similar context at work. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he considers Rebecca West to be his idol as well. You can feel him trying to be as good as her, in his thoughts, analysis, and perspective. In many respects, he succeeds. My favorites of his are The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy<\/a> But back to Rebecca West. (It is hard to talk about her without referencing the generations of writers she inspired …)<\/p>\n I was particularly riveted by West’s observations about the defendants in the Nuremberg Trials, some more monstrous than others. Here are a couple of excerpts showing her thoughts on Hermann Wilhelm G\u00c3\u00b6ring, which gives just a taste of her gift. There really is nobody else like her.<\/p>\n And though one had read surprising news of G\u00c3\u00b6ring for years, he still surprised. He was so very soft. Sometimes he wore a German Air Force uniform, and sometimes a light beach suit in the worst of playful taste, and both hung loosely on him, giving him an air of pregnancy. He had thick brown young hair, the coarse bright skin of an actor who has used grease paint for decades, and the preternaturally deep wrinkles of the drug addict. It added up to something like the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He looked infinitely corrupt, and acted naively. When the other defendants’ lawyers came to the door to receive instructions, he often intervened and insisted on instructing them himself, in spite of the evident fury of the defendants, which, indeed, must have been poignant, since most of them might well have felt that, had it not been for him, they never would have had to employ these lawyers at all. One of these lawyers was a tiny little man of very Jewish appearance, and when he stood in front of the dock, his head hardly reaching to the top of it, and flapped his gown in annoyance because G\u00c3\u00b6ring’s smiling wooden mask was bearing down between him and his client, it was as if a ventriloquist had staged a quarrel between two dummies.<\/p>\n G\u00c3\u00b6ring’s appearance made a strong but obscure allusion to sex. It is a matter of history that his love affairs with women played a decisive part in the development of the Nazi party at various stages, but he looked as one who would never lift a hand against a woman save in something much more peculiar than kindness. He did not look like any recognized type of homosexual, yet he was feminine. Sometimes, particularly when his humour was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel. His like are to be seen in the late morning in doorways along the steep streets of Marseille, the professional mask of geniality still hard on their faces though they stand relaxed in leisure, their fat cuts rubbing against their spread skirts. Certainly there had been a concentration on appetite, and on elaborate schemes for gratifying it; and yet there was a sense of desert thirst. No matter what aqueducts he had built to bring water to his encampment, some perversity in the architecture had let it run out and spill on the sands long before it reached him. Sometimes even now his wide lips smacked together as if he were a well-fed man who had heard no news as yet that his meals were to stop. He was the only one of all these defendants who, if he had the chance, would have walked out of the Palace of Justice and taken over Germany again, and turned it into the stage for the enactment of the private fantasy which had brought him to the dock.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As is well-known, the day before G\u00c3\u00b6ring was to be put to death, he killed himself in his cell. Rebecca West has some choice words about that event.<\/p>\n The executions were to take place on October 16. Some time during the preceding night G\u00c3\u00b6ring killed himself. The enormous clown, the sexual quiddity with the smile which was perhaps too wooden for mockery and perhaps not, had kicked the tray out of the hands of the servants who were bringing him the wine of humiliation, the glasses had flown into the air and splintered with a sound too much like laughter. This should not have happened. We are all hunters, but we know ourselves hunted by a mightier hunter, and our hearts are with the hunted, and we rejoice when the snared get free of the snare. In this moment visceral mournfulness changed to visceral cheerfulness; we had to applaud for the flesh that would not accept the doom that had been dealt to it but changed it to an expression of defiance. All those people who had fled from Nuremberg, British and American and French, who were scattered over the world, trying to forget the place of their immurement, would straighten up from whatever they had been bent over and burst out laughing before they could help themselves, saying, “That one! We always knew he would get the better of us yet.” Surely all those Germans who walked through the rubble of their cities while their conquerors drove, they too would halt, and throw back their heads, and laugh, and say, “That one! We always knew he would get the better of them yet.”<\/p>\n G\u00c3\u00b6ring should not have been permitted even this small amelioration of his doom. True, we now know some reasons for feeling that he might have been allowed to get a little of his own back. Like all the Nazis, he had been plagued by the attentions of the psychiatrists who haunted Nuremberg Jail, exercising a triple function of priest and doctor and warder hard to approve. They visited the men in the cells and offered themselves as confidants, but performed duties at the behest of the court authorities. When some of the defendants seemed to be taking an unrepentant pro-Nazi stand in their line of defence, one of the psychiatrists worked out, at the commandant’s request, a plan for a new seating arrangement at the lunch table in order to break up this group and expose them to other influences. It is not easy to think of an accused person on trial before a national tribunal being subjected to such manipulation by prison officials. There was no silver lining to this cloud. One of these psychiatrists has related, without humorous intention, that when G\u00c3\u00b6ring asked him what a certain psychological test had revealed about his character, he replied that it had shown that he lacked the guts to face responsibility. G\u00c3\u00b6ring had also the benefit of spiritual care of a remarkably robust kind. He asked the Lutheran chaplain to give him Holy Communion on the night before the executions, but the chaplain refused, on the ground that he was probably shamming.<\/p>\n Nevertheless G\u00c3\u00b6ring should not have been given the chance to use his courage to weaken public horror at his crimes, to which his courage was not relevant. The Nazis were maniacs who plastered history with the cruelty which is a waste product of man’s moral nature, as maniacs on a smaller scale plaster their bodies and their clothes with their excreta. Since sanity is to some extent a matter of choice, a surrender to certain stimuli and a rejection of others, the nature of mania should never be forgotten. It is unfair, not only to Germans, but to all the world, if the vileness of the Nazis be extenuated; and it was unfair that this Nazi of all Nazis should have been allowed to disguise his gross dementia. This suicide meant a long-term danger to human standards, and it might have meant a short-term danger too, had it not been for the severity of the following winter. Germany was to be ice-bound and water-logged and had no time to think of reviving the Nazi party; and if that stretch of bad weather broke Europe’s heart, it also broke the continuity of popular political thinking and forced it on to a fresh phase not shadowed by resentment at conquest. But the Allies had failed idiotically in a prime matter. All to no purpose had the military policeman in the CIP gallery shaken the venerable Lord of Appeal and bidden him wake up and uncross his legs. All to no purpose had his colleague waved his club round the ears of the judge and asked him how the hell he had got in. All to no purpose had the maternal colonel shadowed our passes with his pendulous bosom. The cyanide had freely flowed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n She is magnificent. A Train of Powder<\/i> is a must-read.<\/p>\n \n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1566633192\")
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\n<\/i>) are examinations of the US military, its purpose and mission, but also its place in history. He talks to people. He gives great portraits of the men and women fighting in our military. You get to know them. He has traveled the world (obviously). He is not afraid to look deeply. He has spent his career examining other cultures – traveling through Iran and Indonesia and Turkey. In An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future<\/a>![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0679776877\")
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