Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats

Things Fall Apart is one of those classics that you know you should read, but somehow never did. It is considered the archetypal modern African novel - it was the first truly popular work to break through the monopoly of white voices talking about Africa - and give Africans themselves a voice. Since the arrival of European colonialism, novels about Africa tended to be rather in the vein of H. Rider Haggard: native Africans were “uncivilized savages,” needing to be governed by the (occasionally) benevolent white saviors. In this book, Achebe pushes back against that paternalism and condescension to portray traditional African culture as a fully realized, civilized social system. True, it had its flaws - and Achebe doesn’t sugar coat them - but so do ALL cultures, our own as much as any. (And seriously, we still have a hell of a lot of “white savior complex” in our beliefs.) 

The book follows the life of Okonkwo, a leader in his tribe. Okonkwo’s life and style are a reaction against his own father, who was a lazy no-goodnik sort, who got into debt, neglected his family, and showed cowardice. In contrast, Okonkwo is determined to be hard working and wealthy. And he does achieve wealth and status as a result of his hard work. In that sense, he is admirable. However, he has a dark side as well. He feels his father was “feminine” rather than “masculine.” Weak rather than strong. And Okonkwo views strength and masculinity as connected with violence and anger. He hates his father’s idleness - but also his father’s gentleness. A passage from early in the book is illustrative:

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. 

In this, of course, is the seed of Okonkwo’s eventual destruction. (That shouldn’t be a spoiler - I mean, the book is called Things Fall Apart because things...fall apart.) His fear of appearing weak starts a sequence of bad luck or karma or whatever you want to call it. A young boy, who has been taken as payment for a murder committed by another tribe is given to Okonkwo to care for. Later, when the oracle decides that the boy should die, Okonkwo is warned by the eldest man in the tribe to avoid having anything to do with the killing. Unfortunately, Okonkwo fears being seen as weak (that is, womanly), and ends up striking the death blow. 

From there, things start to go to pieces. Okonkwo loses the respect of his eldest son, who was attached to the victim. His favorite daughter becomes gravely ill. And finally, at the funeral for the eldest man, his gun explodes during the salute, and kills the deceased’s son. By the law of the tribe, he is exiled for seven years to appease the gods. 

While Okonkwo is away, the white missionaries arrive, and proceed to set up British rule, a church, and attempt to dismantle elements of the tribal culture. The clash eventually becomes bloody, and things really go to hell from there. 

The novel is fairly short, and moves at a fast pace. Achebe does a great job of portraying the culture of a particular part of Nigeria in a way that explains things enough for an outsider to follow, while never getting bogged down in explanation. As I noted above, Achebe doesn’t use a soft focus, but strives for neutrality and accuracy. Thus, the culture is, like Okonkwo himself, complicated and nuanced. Like any culture, its best parts are admirable and serve to regulate human behavior in a way that benefits everyone. At its worst, though, it is misogynistic and obsessed with avenging insults. The missionaries are right in rescuing abandoned twins. (A practice that makes sense from a Darwinian point of view - in a situation of scarcity.) But they are all too often interested in imposing their culture rather than finding common ground. Even there, there is a contrast between the first missionary, who did a lot of listening, and the second, who was determined to win even if it took violence to “subdue the natives.” 

Similarly, though, in a clash of cultures, flexibility is needed on both sides. Okonkwo is as rigid as the British, and makes things worse rather than better. Since he cannot bend, he is broken. When he asserts his (toxic) masculinity, he alienates his family and his neighbors. As over 100 years of time has proven, the Europeans haven’t fared that much better in the long run. Colonialism has left immense damage, contributing to two world wars, enormous expenditures, and a legacy of failed states left behind and abandoned. 

I want to mention one more thing in the book that I thought was a really fantastic conversation. It takes place between Mr. Brown (the original, decent missionary) and Akunna, a leader in the tribe. Mr. Brown is trying to convert Akunna to monotheism, yet it turns out that they aren’t as far apart as Mr. Brown thinks. Akunna explains that he does indeed believe in a one god who is greater than all. However, just as Mr. Brown is a messenger from his religion, or the bureaucrats represent the queen, the lesser gods are the messengers and representatives of the high god Chukwa. In each case, the work is done through delegation. I was struck by how much this resembled the story of the centurion in the Gospel of Matthew:

When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. ⁶ “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.”

Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?”

The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that moment.

Mr. Brown tries to argue with Akunna. But Jesus marveled at the centurion’s faith. It is a totally different response to a similar situation. I suspect Jesus would have been a heck of a lot different than the European missionaries. I also suspect that said missionaries never noticed the warning in this story: many are going to come from cultures all over the world and take their place at the great feast. But those who are so sure they alone have the truth are going to be tossed outside. 

In this way, Things Fall Apart is an excellent example of the beauty of stories that show a different point of view. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (one of my favorites) points out, our white, Euro-American view of Africa has been and continues to be dominated by one single story: a white European story. Achebe and his literary heirs have contributed a chorus of other voices, new stories, from new (and old) perspectives. It is a beautiful thing. 

A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

I was 13 when Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait, and a newlywed on 9-11. An uncle nicknamed my brother after Seyyed Abolhassan Banisadr - I can’t find the person that my nickname came from but it was some other guy from that era.I think it is safe to say that the modern troubles of the Middle East have been laced through the formative years of my life and beyond.

Furthermore, I was raised in American Evangelicalism - with a foray into some crazy Fundie stuff. Among the weird stuff in the water I drank was a lot of theorizing about the Middle East, which, frankly, the older I get and the more I read - the crazier and more frightening it seems. Particularly now that the US President appears to be taking his foreign policy from the wingnuts pushing this nonsense. (More about that later…)

Anyway, this book has been on my list for a while. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East is widely regarded as THE work on the history behind the modern Middle East, and one that is crucial to understanding the dynamics at play now, and how they relate back to historical decisions made during and after World War One.

This book thoroughly delivers on that promise, and more. It isn’t an easy read, though. It checks in at nearly 700 pages of small print, contains a high level of detail backed up by exhaustive research, and is intended for a reader who already knows a good deal about the background. It really helps to have a working knowledge of World War One (I did okay on this part, thanks to stuff I have read by Churchill and others), British politics of the era (thanks to William Manchester’s biography of Churchill for this one), French politics of the era (um, I had a lot to learn here), and American politics of the era (I could have been better.) Oh, and also a basic awareness of the different sects of Islam, the history of colonialism, the geography of the Middle East, and the ability to keep track of dozens of people and their relationships. It’s not easy. Fromkin assumes a very educated reader, not a neophyte. Fortunately, you can learn from the book without this background knowledge, but it will be harder to get through. I recommend it anyway.

The bottom line is this: decisions made by the Allied powers during and after World War One had dramatic effects on the region. A couple of bad decisions by Britain led to the Ottoman Empire joining the Axis, rather than the Allies. Once the war was started, Britain and Russia (and to a lesser degree, France and the United States), made decisions to divide up the Middle East as the spoils of war. In doing so, they combined gross ignorance of the people, politics, and religion of the area with astounding hubris and arrogance and too little foresight to see the end of Empire and Colonialism in the near future. This had, predictably, bad consequences in the short and especially the long term. One hundred years later, the world is still paying the price for what was done.

It was fascinating to see that so many of the rivalries from the early 20th Century are still in play. Scratch that, it is fascinating to see how many rivalries from the 11th through 19th Centuries are still very much in play. Just a couple of cases in point: (1) the battle between Russia (then the USSR, and now Russia again…) and the Allies (mostly Britain back then, but now the United States) over the region, and (2) The Sunni/Shiite wars. In the case of Britain, many fateful mistakes were made because Britain was determined to keep Russia from controlling the land route to India. This seems beside the point now, with most shipping going by ship, Iran and Afghanistan somewhere between basket cases and openly hostile and...India isn’t part of the Empire anymore anyway.

I could go on with more detail, but Fromkin does it better. I should be clear that this book, while it does have a point of view and an agenda, it is far from one-sided. To the extent he can, Fromkin tells the story in a neutral manner, drawing on primary sources for as much as he can. This means that most of his sources are, in fact, British - they kept better records of correspondence - and he is thus able to make his case mostly by giving the Allies enough rope to hang themselves. Fromkin isn’t a storyteller, really. He doesn’t build excitement, and don’t expect a good yarn. This is a book of serious, researched, fair and balanced non-fiction, not pop-history. I would compare it to G. M. Trevelyan, not Simon Winchester.

I took quite a few notes, because there is so much in this book. These are not meant to cover everything, just some specifics that I really thought encapsulated whole sections of the book. Let’s start with this one:

The West and the Middle East have misunderstood each other throughout most of the twentieth century; and much of that misunderstanding can be traced back to Lord Kitchener’s initiatives in the early years of the First World War. The peculiarities of his character, the deficiencies of his understanding of the Moslem world, the misinformation regularly supplied to him by his lieutenants in Cairo and Khartoum, and his choice of Arab politicians with whom to deal have colored the course of political events ever since.

For example, our Gulf Wars have been, in rather large part, a meddling in the rivalry between the House of Saud and the House of Hussein - both of which were major players in this book in large part because of British decisions. And also, as the book extensively documents, the Western failure to understand the locus of politics and religion - and the rivalries - in the Islamic world has led to grave mistakes both then and now.

I should point out that the mistakes weren’t just on the Allies’ side. (Although the comedy of errors surrounding the Dardanelles - which Churchill took the fall for, despite being absolutely correct - it should have been a combined sea and land attack, and the decision to overrule Churchill cost roughly 200,000 additional casualties - is quite the lesson in what not to do…) The Ottomans violated Vizzini’s cardinal rule: “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia…’” They chose to invade the southern provinces of the Russian empire...in the winter. Ouch. And there was an overture AND an epic book written about that mistake and everything.

The primary mistakes the Allies made weren’t military, however, even if the military ones were pretty bad. Soon after it became apparent that the Allies could likely at least defeat the Ottomans eventually (although the outcome with Germany was in doubt much longer), a British committee was convened to decide how to divide up the Middle East. Leaving aside the retrospective hilarity (dark as it is) that the Brits just assumed that it was their right to grab a new set of colonies as the spoils of war even as they threw millions of young men into the meat grinder of the trenches and borrowed their economy into near-oblivion, consider this: the committee was a bunch of rich boys educated in the “Classical” model of the English private schools. (Insert joke about Brexit here…) As such, their knowledge of the Middle East was based on ancient Greek and Roman works - they even used outdated, vague Greek terms for regions, with no actual knowledge of boundaries as they existed in 20th Century. Which is in large part why we have countries like Iraq today - it was the ignorant fantasy of where “Mesopotamia” was. And thus were many boundaries drawn and countries invented out of the whole cloth.

One of these mistakes, of course, was the ongoing debacle of Jewish and Arab Palestine. Even the name is wrong - it was a transliteration of “land of the Philistines,” which wasn’t what anyone who lived there called it. (Ditto for the term “Middle East,” which was invented by an American naval officer and popularized by Sir Mark Sykes, a central figure in this story.) And, to put a finer point on it, there was hardly an upwelling of support for the idea of creating one or two new states in the area. There were plenty of Jewish settlors, of course, dating back mostly to the pogroms in Russia against the Jews in the late 1800s. But the region was ruled reasonably well by the Ottomans before the war, Jews and Arabs living together more or less well. The Zionist idea was a fairly small fringe movement even within Palestine. In the US, far less than one percent were associated even loosely with Zionist movements. This isn’t a mystery. For the last 2000 years, the struggle of Jewish people has been rejection by the countries of their residence. The eviction from England, of course, but the general view the Jews were not “real” [Germans, Englishmen, Americans, etc...fill in the blank.] So, for many Jews, a push for a new nation of their own seemed to reinforce the “you will never be one of us” problem they already had, and thus was an obstacle to acceptance and assimilation in their home countries. (It isn’t a coincidence that some factions of the Nazi party heartily supported Zionism - it was a less bloody way of getting rid of the Jews.) A few influential Zionists, however, got the ear of Balfour, who essentially promised a Jewish state and made it part of British policy. This worried the local Arabs, because the desert seemed (to them) incapable of physically supporting a few million more people - particularly if they all arrived quickly. We are still paying the price for this decision. As the author puts it, citing the views of the local Arabs and British officers actually serving in Palestine:

As they saw it, London’s policy of Zionism might have been expressly designed to stir up trouble, and must have been devised by far-off officials who did not have to live with and deal with local conditions.

Rather more than the Jewish Diaspora, however, it was certain Christian religious sects (more about them later) who tied the establishment of a Jewish homeland, not to any concrete benefit to Jews, but to an apocalyptic eschatology: the establishment of the Jewish homeland would trigger Armageddon, the bloodbath to end the world.

Whatever you think about the creation of Israel, it is difficult to argue that it was done in a way that gave it any chance of succeeding peacefully. It was forced on the inhabitants by Britain, who didn’t bother to consult or work with the actual people living there, forced a settlement that few wanted, then essentially withdrew their armies due to homeland political pressure, and left matters to be resolved by endless war. It makes one wonder what might have been if Europe (and America) had spent more time addressing their own antisemitism (which would reach its horrible zenith a couple decades later with the Holocaust), and left the Middle East to itself without interference.

It wasn’t just this issue, though, that was sparked by the war. The pressure on the Ottoman Empire produced, as threats tend to, a vicious reaction against ethnic and religious minorities. Just as the Nazis would later claim that it was the Jews’ fault that they lost the war, the “Young Turks” who came to power in Turkey blamed the Armenian Christian population for allegedly conspiring with Russia to defeat Turkey. The Armenian Genocide is a tragedy that has been undersold, probably because the raw numbers weren’t as high as the Holocaust, and there weren’t horrifying pictures circulated throughout the West. But it still killed at least half of the Armenian population, and displaced the rest. This was yet another example of how the horrors of war - and the battle between Britain and Russia to claim the Middle East as colonial spoils - stirred up ancient feuds and led to instability which has persisted ever since.

While Britain was really the driving force behind most of the key decisions, the US played an interesting role on a few fronts. First of all, Woodrow Wilson had a strikingly different vision for the Middle East than the Brits. Wilson’s brainchild was the League of Nations - the forerunner of the United Nations - a good idea that has often been incompetently implemented - and undermined by those wishing to disregard the idea that other people groups have rights too. Some of Wilson’s other goals (as set forth in his Fourteen Points) were interesting. As globalists in our own time, he sought to reduce tariffs, seek free trade, use diplomacy and transparency whenever possible, build economic relationships rather than seek war, and so on. But perhaps most to the point, Wilson believed that the peoples of the Middle East should not be divided up as spoils of war, but decisions should be made for the benefit of those peoples.

2. That peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels or pawns in a game, even the great game, now for ever discredited of the balance of power; but that

3. Every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states...

As it would turn out, Wilson would be out of office when the war ended, and his legacy largely undermined by Warren Harding. Most notable in this context is the fact that Harding was thoroughly corrupt (probably the most corrupt US president until Donald Trump), and wholly owned by certain oil interests. (His most famous scandal was Teapot Dome - where valuable oil rights (including near where I live) were sold for pennies to Harding’s cronies, who made billions as a result.) Thus, the end of World War One was the beginning of the United States’ involvement in the Middle East primarily to secure access to oil - which would become the backbone of American transportation within a decade or two.

Another concept that intrigued me was that of Nationalism. Historically, Nationalism was in many ways a reaction to centuries of religious warfare. In its more benign formulation, it was an attempt to defuse religious tensions by the idea of the State, a polity which combined people of similar nature (perhaps religion, language, ethnicity, geography, or some other common trait) and allowed them to thrive in their own special way. In aspiration, Nationalism was intended to both allow individual nations to thrive, and to grant them self-determination and freedom from oppression, but also to encourage them to live in peace with their neighbors. Obviously, this hasn’t worked out the same way in practice as in theory.

The dark side is obvious enough: the intolerance of groups different from the majority. Jews took the brunt of this in Europe, to be sure. In our own time, “Nationalism” in America means White Nationalism - and the persecution and exclusion of those the white majority deem to be “not real Americans.”

Another issue that really seems relevant today is that of the internal dynamics of Islam as found in the Middle East. All the major (and likely the minor) religions are hardly the monolithic and centralized groups they are often portrayed as being. Even the Roman Catholic Church, with its centralized leadership structure, has different flavors around the world, and to expect an American Catholic to be the same as a Filipino Catholic, or an Argentinian Catholic is an error. And most religions are even more fragmented than that. (See for example the literally thousands of Protestant sects…) In context here is the seeming paradox that Middle Eastern Islam is both more powerful as an organizing force than national identity AND deeply divided and at war with itself. The failure to take this into account was a major reason the Brits failed in their attempt to find a universally accepted religious and political leader in the Middle East. And also the source of much of the United States’ embarrassing blunders in the past few decades. The Sunni - Shiite divide is the most obvious, of course, and one which has bedeviled US policy in the region throughout my lifetime, despite the brighter minds trying to address it. Take a look at this quote from the book (written in 1989 about events in the 1910s) regarding what was to become the nation of Iraq. That nation, of course, was cobbled together from diverse groups, and its boundaries were based, not on rational ethnic or political divisions, but by a combination of factors, chief of which were the relationship to the road to India and the location of key oil reserves. Doesn’t this sound relevant today?

It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi’ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces, and the commercial predominance of the Jewish community in the city of Baghdad made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.

And this, from later in the book:

A fundamental problem, as [administrator Arnold] Wilson saw it, was that the almost two million Shi’ite Moslems in Mesopotamia would not accept domination by the minority Sunni Moslem community, yet “no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination.

No shit. We still don’t have that single unified government, for those very reasons (although Saddam Hussein came close using brutal force.) But it was and is worse than that.

Because of the British (and later American) determination to rule the region through force if necessary, the most radical and fanatical elements of Islam were able to portray the conflict as a holy war, and set themselves as the alternative to Western hegemony and oppression. (That’s how the Islamic Revolution in Iran took place - and that is just one example.) The author notes that Ibn Saud - the ancestor of the rulers of Saudi Arabia today - was a genius at discerning how the energies of the Wahhabis - the severely puritanical and fundamentalist sect of Islam - could be harnessed for his own political ends. This is very much in play today. Sadly, a broad swath of American politics is unwilling to accept the obvious: that our policies have given power to the radicals.

One final question of ethnic and linguistic identity interested me. Recently, I read The Possessed by Elif Batuman, which opened my eyes to something easily obscured by the political realities of the late 20th Century. Much of what I generically thought of as the USSR - or later as the “Stans” - those difficult to pronounce and spell countries like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan - were actually part of a larger and ancient realm of the Turkish and Turkic languages. As this book points out, “Turkish-speaking Central Asia is one of the largest continuous language areas in the world - larger than the Great Russian area and almost as large as the English or Spanish-speaking area in America.” This was obscured by the conquest of these areas by Russia in the 19th and 19th Centuries, but that reality and the Russian urge toward colonialism today drive much of the politics in that region as well.

To sum up a lot of what happened and what resulted, I want to go through a few ideas which dominated the second half of the book, which covered the process of winding down the war and addressing the aftermath.

Perhaps no character more exemplifies British hubris and delusionalism than T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia. He had his fingers in a lot of the events in this book, not as an official, necessarily, but as the “expert” those in power relied on for insight into the region and its people. This was not a positive. As the book puts it:

Lawrence possessed many virtues but honesty was not among them: he had passed off his fantasies as the truth.

The problem wasn’t that there wasn’t truth in there, but that truth, fiction, and outright fantasy were amalgamated and thus impossible to separate. And those with the real power did a poor job of doing so. Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau had little if any personal knowledge of the area, and relied all too much on the advice of people like Lawrence, who were either ignorant, or unreliable themselves. As Arthur Balfour would later say, having observed the meetings of the heads of state: These three all-powerful, all-ignorant men, sitting there and carving up continents, with only a child to lead them.” It is no wonder that the settlement of Europe would lead to another catastrophic war in less than two decades, and that the “settlement” of the Middle East has lead to 100 years of violence and unrest.

There is a fantasy at the heart of this, which affected Britain then, and still affects the United States, particularly a certain political party therein.

The principal British fantasy about the Middle East - that it wanted to be governed by Britain, or with her assistance - ran up against a stone wall of reality.

The US keeps thinking this too, and keeps getting blindsided when it turns out that in fact the Middle East does NOT see us as liberators, but as oppressors, meddling where we are not wanted, and stirring up trouble. (I will point out that Russia is in the same category - and much of the violence has been exacerbated by the sale of modern arms by both the US and Russia to the various sides, enabling them to kill more and more of each other. Both pairs of hands are thoroughly bloody.)

In speaking of the series of revolts against British rule which took place in the aftermath of World War One, the author nails it. Many of those in power believed there was some malevolent foreign conspiracy (presumably from Russia - or the Jews) that gave rise to these uprisings.

In fact there was an outside force linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle East,  but it was the one force whose presence remained invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the globe whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country out to have expected to encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule. The shadows that accompanied the British rulers wherever they went in the Middle East were in fact their own.

Substitute “United States” for “British” and you have the modern situation.

Although I generally loathe Warren Harding (see above), I have to admit, he is spot on in one quote this book cites. After the war, the Greeks and the Turks got into it, and there were calls for the US to get involved - and these were typically religiously motivated. As Harding put it:

“Frankly, it is difficult for me to be consistently patient with our good friends of the Church who are properly and earnestly zealous in promoting peace until it comes to making warfare on someone of the contending religion.”

A final thought to conclude this post:

The Middle East became what it is today both because the European powers undertook to re-shape it and because Britain and France failed to ensure that the dynasties, the states, and the political system that they established would permanently endure. During and after the First World War, Britain and her Allies destroyed the old order in the region irrevocably; they smashed Turkish rule of the Arabic-speaking Middle East beyond repair. To take its place, they created countries, nominated rulers, delineated frontiers, and introduced a state system of the sort that exists everywhere else; but they did not quell all significant local opposition to those decisions.

As a result the events of 1914-22, while bringing to an end Europe’s Middle Eastern Question, gave birth to a Middle Eastern Question in the Middle East itself.

Fromkin concludes with a sobering analogy. As he sees it, the fall of the Ottoman Empire has a lot in common with the fall of the Roman Empire. The collapse of the old order led to an extended period where the former subjects of the Empire had to work out for themselves a new order and a new political system. That process can reasonably be said to have taken 1500 years. (The end of World War Two led to the longest extended era of peace in Europe since the fall of Rome.) One can hope that the process might be quicker in the Middle East - but Fromkin is not so sure.

After finishing this book, I have to wonder how the foreign policy events of my lifetime might have been different had those in power taken to heart the lessons of history. As it occurred 100 years ago, so today those making the decisions relied, not on those with actual knowledge of the complexities, but on the Lawrence of Arabia and Mark Sykes sorts, who in the latter case was unaware of his blind spots, and the former of which was mostly a craven self-promoter. People like Fromkin gave warnings that the US was about to enter a series of unwinnable wars, and that has proven to be the case. Since 2001, we have had 18 years of continuous warfare, and we have gone from Saddam to ISIS in Iraq, and have had to essentially admit defeat in Afghanistan (like the Russians 30 years ago…) In the process, we have given viciously racist demagogues opportunity to stir up Islamophobia and hate here at home, making life worse for the 3.3 million Muslims living peacefully in the US. As a young man (My salad days, when I was green in judgment: cold in blood, to say as I said then!) I supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan - but I am willing to admit I was wrong, and that little positive - and much negative - has been the result. The same might be said of the partition of the Ottoman Empire. One hundred years of conflict has resulted from momentary bad judgment and worse motives. Would that we had learned from the mistakes of the past.

***

We are still fighting the same colonialist battles:

Venezuela is a current events example of the way that global politics continue to be a series of proxy wars between Russia and the dominant Western power. As soon as a botched election gave way to unrest, it was uncanny how quickly the US and Russia jumped in to back the competing factions. If I had some say in this, I would push for a global moratorium on arms sales. Since the end of World War Two, the US wars have all been meddling in what are essentially regional civil wars - and it seems increasingly obvious that our motives aren’t all that different in reality from those of the openly colonialist British Empire.

***

The Fundamentalist/Evangelical Debacle:

Perhaps the best summary of the problems inherent in the Evangelical way of looking at the Middle East is from Mark Noll’s fantastic book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In describing how Dispensationalist eschatology led Evangelicals into either antisemitism or Zionism (or often both - as was the experience of my childhood), Noll notes the cause:

In both cases, however the stance toward the Jews arose from prophetic interpretation much more than from contemporary analysis or more general theological reflection on nations, international justice, or the recent history of the Middle East.

In my experience, most Evangelicals have absolutely no use for history, justice, empathy, or wisdom in their view on Israel and the Middle East. The only thing that matters is that (in their bizarre theological interpretation of apocalyptic passages in the bible) is that Israel must exist in order to trigger the End Times™, and thus, support for everything Israel does - every atrocity - must be supported. In the hope that Armageddon™ comes, and God is able to slaughter humanity so that the blood is as high as a horse’s head for 180 miles. Oh, and lest you think that this is in any way pro-Jew, remember that all the armies of the world converge to fight over Palestine, and the infidel Jews are slaughtered along with them. The only survivors will presumably be the True Christians™ who finally get to see the unbeliving (atheist, non-Christian, and LGBTQ) filth purged from the planet.

No, this is in no way a “Love Your Neighbor” moment. It is a revenge fantasy, and comes from the same dark place in the soul that white Evangelicalism’s ongoing xenophobic tantrum is coming from. The hate of those outside of the tribe runs very deep indeed.

I mention this because, as far as I can see, Fundamentalist and White Nationalist asshat Robert Jeffress appears to be driving the Trump Administration’s policies regarding the nation of Israel. And that, to me and others outside the Fundie bubble, is a terrifying thought. Lawrence of Arabia was bad enough. Jeffress would be happy to trigger the end of the world.  

Oh, and don’t forget the literalist interpretation of where Israel’s borders should be: basically most of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and some of Iraq would be encompassed. So a few Gaza or West Bank settlements are well inside the borders...

By the way, while I looked up the links, I didn’t have to research any of the teaching: I was raised in this nonsense, along with the theories of a global Jewish/Masonic conspiracy. Which leads me to:

***

Opposition to specific actions of Israel is not antisemitic.

This is the big stick dragged out by those with Zionist leanings to bludgeon those who shine a light on Israel’s ongoing human rights abuses. (I find it interesting that those who do so are overwhelmingly...not Jewish.) As Fromkin points out, Zionism and European antisemitism had a lot in common. Zionism was viewed as a possible solution to the “Jewish Problem,” much the same way that many Northerners believed that the solution to the problem of slavery wasn’t equality, but deportation of African Americans “back” to Africa. In our modern times too, those who most loudly defend the abuses of the present Israeli government are usually those who also loundly crow about an alleged Jewish Communist conspiracy led by, say, George Soros.

Antisemitism and Zionism are quite compatible in the minds of a lot of people - including Fundies.

But to point out the obvious: opposition to Jim Crow in the 1940s didn’t make one un-American. Opposition to Hitler didn’t make one a racist against Germans. And opposition to morally loathsome actions by the Israeli government doesn’t make on antisemitic. Rather, it reflects a commitment to universal human rights, justice, and an understanding of the past and our less-than-honorable role in it.

***

More Fundie nonsense:

I can’t forget to mention this. In addition to the problems posed by irresponsible eschatology, Evangelical interpretation of the causes of the current conflict are also informed, not by history or knowledge, but by theological dogma.

Specifically, Evangelicals generally believe (and I was taught) that the cause of unrest in the Middle East was that divine decree stated that there would be ceaseless fighting. Why?

Well, it goes back to the belief that the stories about the Patriarchs are not only literally true in every respect, but that specific modern people groups are literally descended from the handful of people involved, and that these sibling rivalries dictate endless war. I should point out, however, that there are serious problems of internal inconsistency in addition to those of historicity.

Fundies (and this is most Evangelicals in my experience) believe that the Genesis stories are literally true in every respect, and that the claims that the various nations in and around the Middle East (particularly Palestine) descended from certain individuals is completely true. And that furthermore, the various blessings and curses put on the individuals has trickled down more than 3000 years to dictate present events.

Here are the origins, for those who didn’t grow up Fundie:

Canaanites: These came from Noah’s grandson Canaan. This is interesting too, because of a certain bawdy incident which scholars generally acknowledge to be intended as a justification of the conquest of Canaan by Israel. In our own times, however, it was taken as a justification of the enslavement of African Americans, and later by the Mormon church for exclusion of African Americans. In the Fundie view, the Canaanites should have been wiped out by the Israelites as god commanded. Thus, any conflict with their descendents is due to the fact that a genocide was incomplete. Ponder the ethical bankruptcy of that position for a bit…

Arabs: These are believed to be the descendents of Ishmael, Abraham’s son produced by his rape of Sarah’s servant Hagar. (With Sarah’s encouragement…) Jewish and Muslim tradition have generally accepted this. The idea that they would fight forever and to the death is more of a Fundie Christian interpretation, however.

Edomites: Descendents of Jacob’s (Israel’s) brother Esau. This was arguably the most epic sibling rivalry in Genesis. And of course their descendents still fight, right? Even though Jacob and Esau reconciled…

Moabites/Ammonites: The product of another sordid sexual episode. Lot got drunk after his wife was turned to a pillar of salt (geez, who wouldn’t?) and they had sex with him so they could have children. (I wrote about this story and others here, if you want to read about it…) Well, the Moabites and Ammonites weren’t thrilled about the Israelites treating them like the Germans treated Belgium, and objected to a big army marching across their land on the way to slaughter the Canaanites. As a result, they were cursed. (Again, scholars believe this was a justification created for the subjection of the Moabites and Ammonites by Israel later in history.)

So, those are your major groups. Which rather discounts a bunch of other groups in the area, including, well, most everyone else. The point is that Fundies believe that Israel essentially has the right to make war against its neighbors - and even exterminate them - because of their interpretation of Genesis and Exodus.

Even those who do not, though, still believe (and I was taught) that we will never see peace in the Middle East because it is Isaac and Ishmael still fighting. And that the cause of the fighting isn’t in any way connected to what Britain and the Allies did in the 1910s and 20s. Rather, it is inevitable, and there is nothing we can do about it. Well, other than sell arms to Israel so it can slaughter the damn Arabs, I guess.

This is yet another example of what Mark Noll is talking about. It is foreign policy based, not on concepts of justice, morality, human rights, knowledge of history, or any of that modern rot. It is instead based on questionable dogma arrived at through (as Noll puts it) irresponsible hermeneutics. And it is that insanity which is driving US foreign policy in the Middle East right now.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

This post is dedicated to the memory of my cousin-in-law Jennifer, who encouraged me to read this book. She succumbed to breast cancer back in October, leaving an aching void in the hearts of many, from her students and former students at Santa Monica High, where she taught English, to her many friends and relatives who loved good books, Disney, cats, and making the world a better place. 

Yaa Gyasi, like one of the characters in this book, was born in Ghana, and immigrated to Alabama. She writes, therefore, as a person who straddles two cultures, and two contrasting experiences of being black in a world still shaped by colonialism and white supremacy.

The book is essentially historical fiction, and covers a couple hundred years, from the days of the African slave trade, through what is roughly the present. The story follows two branches of an African family who take very different journeys over the course of seven generations. Effia is a beautiful young woman, who is married off to an Englishman involved in the slave trade. Her half-sister, Esi, is captured and sold as a slave in America.

On Effia’s branch, the story parallels Ghana’s history, with the various warring tribal kingdoms eventually conquered by the English, independence sought, and eventually gained. Esi’s story is that of African Americans in the United States. Slavery, Convict Leasing, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the inner city Heroin epidemic, and so on to the present, where white supremacy remains strong, if less open.

A representative of each generation gets a chapter in the book, and that chapter focuses on a pivotal moment in that character’s life. Enough background information is given to connect the stories together, but this is more of a close focus rather than landscape view. The book alternates between branches, so the parallels - and differences - of the corresponding stories are easy to spot. Gyasi doesn’t overdo the parallelism, but it can be seen both in the individuals and in the history that accompanies them.

Homegoing is not an easy book to read. Gyasi does not shy away from the horrors of slavery, the slave trade, warfare, mental illness, drug addiction, or injustice. She also does not excuse Africans for their role in the slave trade, or progressive whites who remain uncomfortable with people of color encroaching on their own families.

There are a few episodes that I want to specifically mention. The first is one set in America at the time of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. We tend to forget this one, because it runs counter to the narrative that neo-Confederates of all stripes (and that in practical terms includes anyone trying to keep monuments to Confederate leaders in places of honor, or those who claim the Civil War wasn’t primarily about slavery) want you to believe. No, the South wasn’t content to preserve their slavery-built-and-maintained way of life. They wanted the North to use its police power to seek, capture, and return the enslaved who managed to escape to freedom.

In this particular story, one of the characters happens to be a free-born black married to an escaped slave. However, she is arrested and sent to the South and slavery for her and her unborn child. Yes, this happened. It happened a lot. And therefore, a free black in the North could never rest easy, because his or her freedom was fragile, and could be terminated at any time. We forget this part of our history to our own shame.

I also want to mention an interesting story set in the time of the Great Migration, when millions of blacks left the Jim Crow South looking for better opportunity in the Northeast. (Black Boy (American Hunger) has a semi-autobiographical tale of moving north at this time.) In this story, a character is abandoned by her husband in New York, after he learns he can “pass” as white. He marries a white woman and starts a second family. Recently, DNA testing has become fairly sophisticated and affordable, and a number of friends have taken a test to show where their ancestors (probably) came from. This has led to, shall we say, some interesting revelations. I have seen a few high-profile stories that seem to involve this very thing. A light colored African American “passes” for white, and his or her descendants are shocked - shocked - to find out they have slaves in their ancestry. (Also amusing is a friend’s family who, after years of denial, was forced to admit that there was both French and German in there. This was hilarious because at least one family member cared deeply about this, and was horrified at the result. Who knew?)

In addition to the historical issues, Gyasi also takes an uncomfortable look at the role of religion. After all, it was Christianity that justified the slave trade and slavery itself using its scriptures. The contrast of the traditional African beliefs with the white man’s religion is interesting. Gyasi doesn’t make much of a value judgment. She just presents the uncomfortable truth about both. There is good and bad in each, really, and it isn’t the religion that determines whether a person does good or evil. We just use our religion to justify our behavior, good or evil. Thus, what we whites would call superstition contributes to an unlucky white traveler being burned to death. And Christian “values” are used to support Segregation, and justify beatings and torture of slaves. This is, unfortunately, the truth of history.

There is one religious issue, however, that I think really does need to mentioned. There is an issue with how we Christians tend to talk about forgiveness. I do not blame the teachings of Christ for this, as I believe they have been twisted beyond recognition. But I do believe this is a problem that pervades how we practice our religion. One character notes that the whites talked a lot about forgiveness. “Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs.” This is how it has been. We talk about grace and forgiveness, and try to shut up the victims of oppression, whether they be of prejudice and police brutality, or of sexual predation by powerful men. (Hello, there, Roy Moore…) I think Gyasi has an interesting take on this. Forgiveness is supposed to take place in the future. After the bad acts have ceased. By talking about forgivness, the focus is taken off of the present - and the evil being done - and redirected to the future, when all will (allegedly) be well. I may have to write about this in a separate post, but the discomfort of American White Evangelicals right now when people like me point out that they have harmed others by voting for the openly white supremacist candidate and for social darwinist policies is due to the fact that they do not want to acknowledge that they have harmed others, repent (in the sense it is used in scripture of changing direction - doing the opposite of the harmful behavior), and ask forgiveness from those they have hurt.

I am glad I read this book, and recommend it highly. As the history teacher character demonstrates at one point, the study of history is difficult because all we have are the stories. And not all of the stories. Because history is generally told by the victors, and the victims have their stories silenced. Gyasi tells some of these other stories in this book - the stories that have been largely silenced or marginalized by the colonialist/white supremacist victors. One of the most influential moments in my own thinking was when I listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk entitled The Danger of a Single Story. It was then that I really understood that it was only relatively recently that these other stories were told. I grew up reading books like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - but that came out in 1976! My parents didn’t read books like that because they didn’t exist. I am thankful that they made sure we did. This is why I encourage my children to read stories from a variety of perspectives - particularly the ones that have been silenced in the past. While this book is a bit too intense for little kids, I think it would be appropriate for teens, who are on the cusp of going out into a world where hate and a white supremacist narrative are newly re-emboldened by their return to political power. And, as the founder of my religion understood, stories are the most powerful way to communicate truth. 

The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

This is another book that I plucked from the “new books” display on a whim. It dealt with a topic that has interested me for some time: the enslavement of Native Americans in the New World.

A bit of personal background first. I am not (to my knowledge) Native American. (There is one branch of the family for which paternity was never established, so goodness only knows where those genes came from.) However, I have a history of involvement with Native Americans. In addition, my parents were both born overseas - my mom in Mexico, where her parents were missionaries to a village consisting in large part of Native American peoples.

As for my own history, I spent a good bit of time in my teens working with a church group that worked on the Navajo reservation. We assisted in building churches (which also functioned as centers for distribution of aid and assistance), and provided food distribution during Christmas. Out job wasn’t really to preach, but to provide assistance to Navajo (and Zuni and Hopi) leaders so they could care for their communities. As a result of this, I learned a lot about the culture (I can still roast pine nuts which grow in the mountains near where I live, and make fry bread), and spent time listening to Code Talkers and veterans and grandmothers, and so on.

More recently, as part of my law practice, I represent a Tribe in their California juvenile dependency cases. (This is where a child is removed from the home due to abuse or neglect.) As a result of this work, I have had ample opportunity to learn the legal history of the attempts to destroy Indian culture by the forcible removal of children from the home - a tradition that dates back several hundred years, and is not at all benign.

So this book naturally appealed to me. 

The book is called The Other Slavery because the enslavement of other races, in contrast to African American slavery - the “peculiar institution” - is less known, and also had distinct features which made it more difficult to abolish. It also is more relevant to us today, because, unlike institutional slavery, which is illegal nearly everywhere in the world, the Other Slavery persists around the world because the instinct to enslave is more creative than the efforts to end enslavement.

The Other Slavery covers a broad period in history, roughly from the first contact by Christopher Columbus (not coincidentally the first record of Native American enslavement) through the first half of the 20th Century, when Native Americans were finally guaranteed United States citizenship and permitted to vote in 1924. (Yes, shockingly, it took that long…)

Andrés Reséndez is a professor and historian at the University of California, Davis. He has written a couple of other books about Mexican history and the borderlands, which sound interesting as well.

I was struck by two things about the author’s writing style. First, it is remarkably dispassionate and objective. Rather than make an impassioned argument, he uses a devastating accumulation of the bare facts to make his point. It is a book, as the Los Angeles Times review stated, that is remarkably free of ideology. This isn’t to say it is dry. Quite the contrary, the writing tells the story in a manner which holds the interest. The other thing that impressed me is the extensive use of primary sources. The research that went into this book is incredible - it is obvious Reséndez spent hours combing through the inventories from hundreds of years past to find the many references to slaves. It was particularly interesting to note the differences in terms used throughout the history. In the times when enslavement and slave trading were expressly legal, the slaves were referred to as such. However, the increasingly creative terms (and often laws) calculated to conceal the continued existence of slavery took over during times when the authorities attempted to shut the system down. Euphemism and legal sophistry were the order of the day then (as now).

The first point that really stood out to me is something Reséndez includes in the introduction: the four essential elements of slavery. He spells this out because of all the different “forms” of slavery used to evade prohibitions on slavery itself. When outright enslavement was no longer permitted, slave owners (and the government officials which enabled them) used other systems to get the same effect - most notably debt peonage, which remains popular today.

These four elements are: 1. Forcible removal of the victims from one place to another, 2. Inability to leave the workplace, 3. Violence or threat of violence to compel them to work, and 4. Nominal or no pay. I think that these four are useful to divide between actual slavery and “mere” oppressive employment practices. This is necessary in significant part because the remedies are different. Slavery demands freedom, not reform.

Another fact that I was not aware of, but found intriguing was that in the Other Slavery, adult male slaves were far less desirable than women and children. Yes, children - they were arguably the most valuable slaves of all, because they could be disconnected from their culture. Since they wouldn’t know any other life, they could be kept indefinitely.

In a lot of ways, this makes sense. When enslaving people from the general area, you will always risk that they will attempt to escape and return to their own villages. This is less likely for women and children. (Also less likely when you bring your slaves across a large ocean…) The type of labor to be done also can determine who is desired. Agricultural work can often be done by women and teens - as African American slavery proved.

One thing that I will admit hit me a bit hard was the realization that I could - perhaps for the first time - see the benefits of owning slaves. I mean, in the abstract, I understood. Working large plots of land requires laborers. Whether you want to call them serfs, or slaves, or (in our modern era) farm workers, if you want to work more land than you can personally, you need others to do it. To become truly wealthy, you need cheap labor. In an era when land was cheap - or free via the Homestead Act - there was a lot of competition for labor. After all, why work for a pittance for someone else when you can simply get some land of your own and work for yourself? Thus, slaves (or at least immigrants lacking access to land) are necessary. Likewise, to work the infamous Mexican silver mines, you needed labor. Lots of replaceable labor, because life expectancies were very low indeed. But nowadays, fulfilling labor requirements by slavery sounds like an expensive proposition compared to “mere” labor exploitation. The economics don’t seem to work.

[Side note: the Mexican Silver Rush lasted for a couple hundred years, and produced 12 times as much metal as the better-known California Gold Rush. While the Gold Rush attracted a bunch of freelancers, the Silver Rush mines were worked almost exclusively by slaves.]

In contrast, as I realized to my dismay, having someone to do household work in exchange for a shack to sleep in and some food seems like a great deal - for the slave owner. My wife and I could indeed use a teenage girl who could do the Cinderella thing and work 12 hour days for room and board - for the rest of her life… Not a good feeling.

The author’s most interesting point in this book, though, is that he believes - and makes a compelling case - that the genocide of the Native Americans was not, as commonly taught in school, caused by disease, but was in fact caused by the widespread enslavement. The records of the era seem to bear this out. The common practice over a wide area, and over centuries, was to require slave labor from Native Americans, and then when they (inevitably) revolted, use the revolt as an excuse to slaughter the men, and enslave even more women and children. Because there was a seemingly endless supply of slaves - it was cheaper to obtain slaves from the surrounding areas than to bring them across the Atlantic - there was little incentive to prevent the massive numbers of early deaths. The slave trade itself turned out to be a major reason for the spread of the very diseases that killed many as well.  

A few years back, I read a long-form magazine article which pointed out that in the United States just prior to the Civil War, the value of the slaves exceeded every other class of assets - indeed, the slaves were worth more than all the other assets combined. This book confirms that idea, and applies it to the Other Slavery as well. A devastating quote comes from Columbus himself:

“[T]he Indians of Española were and are the greatest wealth of the island, because they are the ones who dig, and harvest, and collect the bread and other supplies, and gather the gold from the mines, and do all the work of men and beasts alike.”

One of the more depressing things about this book was the account (which recurs throughout the book) of how, faced with legal pressure, slavers made little changes to preserve their trade and the institution itself. So, rather than call slaving raids what they were, the slavers trumped up charges that the Native Americans were at fault, making the war against them “just,” and thus justifying the enslavement as punishment for the war. Or, when outright slavery was outlawed, the existing - and future - slaves were then held in “debt peonage.” Essentially, they - or their parents - were considered to owe money to the employer. Thus, they could be kept at involuntary employment until the debt was paid. Which of course never happened. Records were never kept, naturally. And the peon could be sold at will. As Julius Graves, a special agent appointed in the aftermath of the Civil War to investigate Indian Slavery put it, debt peonage was widespread, and “the universally recognized mode of securing labor and assistance; and the results of that system were identical to that of Negro slavery as formerly practiced in the southern states.”

Slavery by a different name.

The elimination of the Other Slavery bedeviled generations of reformers, from the rather admirable Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain to the US Congress in the 1860s. Congress turned out to be the most successful, but it still took two generations to accomplish citizenship for Native Americans.

The author points out in the last section of the book that there is a significant connection between African American Slavery and the Other Slavery that continued to be relevant for a century after the end of the Civil War. In order to maintain Debt Peonage, certain “Indian Codes” were passed. These would later be copied during the Jim Crow era as “Black Codes.” In essence, people of the disfavored group - Indians or Blacks as the case would be - would be required to carry papers showing their employment at all times. If they were caught unemployed, they could be “sold” to the highest bidder for a temporary job - temporary slavery, really. This worked to bind the slave to the employer - he or she couldn’t simply leave to seek better employment, but would be arrested and sold.

It boils down to a universal desire of humanity, perhaps what we should be least proud of. Abraham Lincoln said it so well in one of his debates with Stephen Douglas:

"It is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. It is the same spirit that says 'you toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle."

If we think we moderns are immune from this, one need only look at the debate over wages and the remarkably widespread belief that there should be no restrictions on wages or working conditions. It is the delusion that there is no risk of exploitation, and that the powerful will resist the temptation to enrich themselves at the expense of those below them.

Perhaps that is the most uncomfortable lesson of the book. We too are capable of this, and we too would find ways to justify our exploitation of others as being for their own good.

This is an excellent book, and one I am going to put on my list of important books for understanding the true history of our nation.