Korean War by Blaine Harden

Part 1

After World War II, most American servicemen were desperate to go home. From Austria to the Philippines, tens of thousands of them marched and protested, sometimes violently, to speed up the pace of demobilization. Within two years, nine out of ten had returned to the States. Between 1945 and 1947 ,the number of military personnel plummeted from more than 12 million to fewer than 1.6.

[ Nichols was a carburetor repairman in the day and a mortician at night in Karachi during the war. “Our brass evidently forgot that people would die”, he wrote in his autobiography. This also happened to be the case in the early weeks of the D-Day campaign though soon Graves became one of the most efficient divisions in the Army. Nichols also served on a security detail at the port. After some months recovering in a hospital stateside, he re-enlisted, received  three weeks training in Intelligence on Guam and  shipped to Korea in 1946. Nobody could have possibly been as an active spy than he, independently building on one success after another without any extended leave until he was dismissed in 1957.]

For Americans officers and enlisted men who remained overseas as postwar occupiers, the placed to be in the Far East was Japan. Every private could feel rich and eat well there. It was safe. Soldierly responsibilities were few. “Shack girls” were abundant and affordable, easy money could be made in the black market. Back in the States, “Have fun in Japan” was an army recruitment pitch.

Kora was seen as a hellhole. Soldiers complained about the stink of human excrement, which was used to fertilizer rice paddies. Housing was limited, food bad, roads poor and weather extreme with harsh winter winds and sweltering summers punctuated by long bouts of rain. Mud brown was the color of a GI’s life in Korea. For Americans stationed in Japan, an American general said there was only three things to fear: “gonorrhea, diarrhea and Korea.” Only losers, it was said, were posted to Korea.

 Korea was seen as a sideshow. Except for a few hundred Protestant missionaries, few Americans had ever travelled to Korea or knew anything about the place. There were no important American commercial interests in the Korea. The Joint Chiefs had declare  it to be of little strategic value.

Chaos awaited Nichols in Korea. Rioters and police began killing each other in appalling ways in the autumn of 1946 – disemboweling, beheading, burying alive. The American public took no notice of the fratricidal war that was taking hold. The political culture of Korea had been crushed by more than three decades of colonial servitude. From 1910 to 1945, imperial Japan dominated the Korean Peninsula and humiliated the Koreans. The mistreatment only worsened during World War II, when Koreans were forced to abandon their names, language, and religious shrines. Korean men had to fight for the Emperor Hirohito; about two hundred thousand Korean women were forced to become sex slaves for his troops.

As a colonizer, Korea subjugated and industrialized Korea at the same time. It built state-of-the-art chemical factories, hydroelectric dams and delivered electricity to major cities. It increased food production and assembled the developing world’s best network of railroads, ports and highways [ all eventually destroyed during the Korean War]. But most of the food grown in Korea was exported and eaten in Japanese cities, while Koreans endured chronic hunger. Similarly, Japanese companies kept the profits from manufacturing. Four out of five Koreans had menial jobs, usually as tenant farmers. Most of the peninsula’s thirty million people were uneducated and landless.

The defeat of Japan in 1945 released decades of pent-up hatred- for the Japanese and for the well-heeled Koreans who had collaborated with them. The Korean people wanted a strong, independent government that would redistribute wealth and redress colonial injustices. The landless majority was attracted to the policies of the Left, which demand comprehensive land reform and punishment of collaborators. The Korean Right was controlled and financed by a small number of wealthy collaborators seeking to preserve vested property rights. The championed an American-style, free-market economy  that they intended to dominate. . . . Neither the Right nor the Left was open to compromise; both sides were eager to kill and willing to die. Disagreements were sorted out by mobs, arson, and assassinations.

Nasty as all this was, the Korean Peninsula had an infinitely more explosive and globally significant problem. In the early maneuvers of the so-called cold war, the world’s two most powerful nations had sliced Korea in half and were picking sides ion the emerging civil war. The Russians rolled into the North, the part with heavy industry and hydroelectric dams. The United States occupied the South, home to two-thirds of the population and most of the fertile land. Between them lay the thirty-eighth parallel, an entirely arbitrary border drawn after midnight on August 11, 1945, by to American colonels using a small National Geographic map.

In addition to being high-handed and insulting, American plans for the peninsula’s future were delusional. Division proved to be an irreversible blunder. The nonsensical border squeezed the life out of Korea’s already anemic economy. Electricity stopped flowing south. Food stopped moving north. Store shelves emptied.  A relatively insignificant postcolonial struggle between the landed and landless Koreans was transformed into a proxy fight between superpowers.

From Tokyo, MacArthur sensed trouble. Days after American soldiers arrived in Seoul, he sent a top secret cable to Secretary of State George Marshal: “The splitting of Korea into two parts for occupation by force of nations operating under widely divergent policies and no command command is an impossible situation.” No fool, MacArthur assigned day-to day management to a subordinate commander, General John R. Hodge, telling him to “use your best judgement as to which action is to be taken.”

A much decorated hero of the Pacific War, Hodges had no experience as an occupation administrator. He was ignorant of Korea’s colonial history and did not understand the reasons for the civil war he was presiding over. During his first week in Seoul he was quoted in the press- inaccurately and out of context, American officials would later claim- as saying the Koreans were ‘the same breed of cats’ as the Japanese. He also said, for the sake of efficiency, Japanese officials would temporarily retain their posts. Truman apologized, Hodges hustled the Japanese out of Korea. Within four months, nearly four hundred thousand of them were gone. But the damage had been done. Hodges was viewed as a racist and a dictator, Americans perceived to have taken sides in favor of land owners while turning their backs on the poor. This perception was largely correct.

MacArthur spelled out the ‘father-knows-best role the Americans would try to play: “ The Koreans themselves have for so long a time been down-trodden that they cannot now or in the immediate future have a rational; acceptance of the situation and its responsibilities.” He argued that Lefty-leaning political groups in Korea “are being born in emotion.” The wise course, he wrote, was to embrace and empower the Right: “Some older and more educated Koreans despite being now suspected of collaboration  are conservatives and may develop into quite useful groups.”

The United States chose sides in Korea’s civil war while paying little attention to questions of social justice, economic equality, or majority will. It was a blinkered decision similar to those Washington would later make in Iran, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hodge was an inflexible anti-communist who could not stomach the sweeping land reform most Koreans wanted. In a cable to MacArthur, he aid that events on the ground in Kora were forcing him into “a declaration of war’ on “communistic elements.”

There was a lot of  hand-wringing, no direct crushing of human rights or colonial subjection seemed in keeping with American prestige in the world; attempts were made to form a coalition government. Dodge even suggested a mutual withdrawal of Russia and the U.S. from the peninsula.

North of the thirty-eighth parallel, there was no such hand wringing among Soviet generals, no talk of giving up and going home. . The hated pillars of Japanese rule quickly remove. Power was given to compliant Koreans of the Left, while exiling, locking up and executing everyone else. In the the first weeks of occupation, Soviet soldiers ran wild, looting, raping and terrifying Korans. But after Stalin personally ordered the troops ‘not to offend the population”, the Soviet zone became much quieter and more manageable than the American occupied South. Soon, Soviet-style reforms redistributed farmland, nationalized factories, and began teaching millions of poor Koreans to read. . .



Part 2

The quiet passing of Donald Nichols in the psychiatric ward of the Veteran Administration Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on 2 June 1992  occasioned no examination of his behavior in Korea or the blinkered acceptance of it by his commanders. Nichol’s battlefield  achievements- assembling of code breakers that helped save the U.S. Eighth Army in the Pusan Perimeter, identifying weaknesses in Soviet-made tanks and fighter jets, and finding thousands of targets behind enemy lines- altered the course of a major war of the twentieth century and saved untold numbers of American and South Korean lives.[1] For this he deserved his medals. But his closeness to Syngman Rhee made him, at the very least, a passive accomplice to atrocities that occurred both before and during the war.

Nichols, along with not a few other American military personnel, attended  mass executions of South Korean civilians, trained the murderous Korean National police, and regularly sat in on torture sessions. While there is no documentary evidence or eye-witness testimony showing that Nichols personally took part in mass killings or torture, he acknowledge in his autobiography that his career benefited from the intelligence that torture extracted. If he had interfered ‘in the methods our Allies used during interrogation,” Nichols said, “a good  source of information would have dried up.”[2] Nichols was compromised by his closeness top Rhee In much the same way. It gave him exclusive information, high-level contacts[3] , and an inside-the-palace cache that thrilled his commanders, who rewarded him with promotions, power and autonomy. He did not see – or care to see – (as  Harden dubiously puts it) Rhee’s criminal excesses or his incompetence. Nichols convinced himself that Rhee was “a great Democrat and a “deeply trusted  leader of the South Koreans.”[4]

In the confused early days of the Korean War, when the air force was utterly dependent on Nichol’s Intelligence, he was allowed, even encouraged to operate outside the normal military chain of command. When he got into a bloody shoot-out with agents who feared that Nichols would send them to die in North Korea, his behavior ( mistaking a protest for an attack, he killed two and wounded others), his behavior did not raise eyebrows: the gunfight in his own quarters with his own men never entered his military service record. When he pushed double suspected double agents out of boats and aircraft, commanding officers in the air force did not know or did not care.

At moments in his autobiography, Nichols raised questions about the morality of his behavior, even if he was not honest or rigorous in examining it. He knew, for example, that he needed tighter supervision, complaining that he “received absolutely no training.” He was unequipped, he said, to manage what he called his “legal license to murder”.

“Who should have this kind of authority?” he wrote. “Perhaps, if I had the benefits of a higher education, an education which included something of philosophy and an understanding of lifer and man and their inter-relationships with morals, honor, and duty, it would be easier for me to assay our wartime conduct . . . .I was a small cog in a big machine, the one that had to do a lot of dirty work for higher headquarters.” [5]

Why was a poorly educated, minimally trained American agent allowed to befriend – and serve the interests of a foreign head of state? Who allowed him to work for years with South Koran enforcers who sent severed heads to Seoul to demonstrate their loyalty? Who allowed Nichols to push people out of planes? To send hundreds of South Koran agents to their deaths in the North. There are no answers for these questions, in part because no one outside the Far East Air Forces knew enough about Nichols to asks them- until more than a quarter century after he was dead.[6]

Nor is there an easy explanation for Nichols decades-long pattern of secretly abusing young men and boys. The hospital based psychiatric care Nichols received in the air force failed him – and the boys he later victimized in Florida. According to his clinical record, air force psychiatrists- between lockdowns, heavy doses of thorazine, and multiple rounds of electroshock – never made an effort to explore his family history. They diagnosed and treated a “schizophrenia” who did not exist. They failed to notice or help the sexual predator who did.

[Herden misses, as the others did- what might have been the correct diagnosis: Nichols was a ‘sociopath’. The trouble is that, generally speaking, sociopaths make great soldiers until their crimes are discovered or become inconvenient in the ever changing world of politics and war. As President Rhee’s positions and behaviors became more and more inconvenient for the Americans after the armistice, Nichols intimate relationship with that tyrant became a problem and he was relieved of command and ‘disposed off’ as best they could without raking up the mud.

[1]  His early warnings of the North’s invasion of the South and, later, the Chinese invasion of the North were dismissed by top brass.

[2] On the other hand, he also recognized that those subjected to torture would say anything so that they information they gave was often useless. Furthermore, Harden also reports than many of the dozens of medals Nichols received were for actions actually performed by the young Korean soldiers under his command which accounts to some extent for his ‘wonderful luck under fire.’ Harden has a bit of difficulty connecting the dots  in his own story.

[3] e.g. including Kim ‘The Snake” Chang-ryong, the former Japanese military officer who became Rhee’s right-hand man for anti-Communist vengeance and score settling.

[4] This is from Harden’s concluding chapter. In previous chapters he does discuss the enormous sums of cash Nichols often displayed at his headquarters and managed to bring back with him from Korea when he was dismissed in 1957. He speculates it was derived from the black currency markets, a common practice among U.S. occupation forces which Command did not police systematically. Nichols himself never explained the source of his  ubiquitous bags of cash.

Nichol’s autobiography is tainted by his efforts to conform to official history of the war, sometimes quite lamely.  Reporting that a huge mass execution of civilians, including women and children,  occurred in the location official  history said it did (where it hadn’t- he witnessed it) while admitting the perpetrators were South Korean though it had officially been attributed to the Norths.

[5] Nobody ever saw Nichols read a book. After he returned to the States he never attempted to enroll in school. On several occasions in Korea he had opportunities for reassignment. He fought to keep and expand his powers. He was a  big and largely incognito cog in a very dark machine.

[6] At one point  General Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief of Intelligence ordered the burning of the Far East Command. Many existing records of the Korean War remain classified.. . its in the book!

Ibn Khaldun by Robert Irwin

The Liberal historian H.A.L Fisher made the following confession in the preface to his History of Europe, published in 1934:

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me, I can only see one emergency following up on another as wave  follows on wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian; that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen .  .  .the ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next.

Well, Ibn Khaldun was wiser and more learned than Fisher. He was able to contemplate the complexity, unpredictability, and bloodiness of politics as practiced by the Medieval Merinids, Hafsids, ‘Abd al-Wadids, and Nasrids, and having considered all that, he was able to generalize and draw from it laws that governed the formation and and dissolution of communities. His version of history was less narrowly political than that of Fisher and gave more weight to such factors as the economy, climate, kinship bonds, and the operations of the supernatural*. The laws he discovered would, he believed, explain not only what had happened, but what would happen.

Fisher’s lament had surely been a critical response to the publication of the first three volumes of Toynbee’s A Study in History , which had been published a few years earlier.**  Doubtless, the pessimistic tone of Fisher’s response also reflected the disillusionment that was widely felt in the wake of the First World War, as well as anxiety about the rise of Nazism and Communism in Europe. But there is something of a touch of disingenuousness about Fisher’s disavowal of any ability to see a pattern. If his History of Europe really had no plot, no shaping pattern, and was a blurred concatenation of events without any special significance, then this would make for hard reading (but it is not and I read it several times as a schoolboy). His book does have a plot, even if this is not admitted by the author. And indeed, having penned his despair at history’s failure to deliver easy lessons, he then added : This is not a doctrine of cynicism and despair. The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history.” And, as one would expect from a Liberal historian writing in the tradition of the Whig version of history, a pattern of sorts does appear in the narrative of his book. Under the Romans civilization flourished for three hundred years in much of Europe, before being destroyed by the Teutonic invasions. The story thereafter is one of slow and bumpy progress toward a new civilization. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution were milestones on that progress. But as Fisher wrote, civilization was once again under threat from the Teutons and “Nordic Paganism”. Fisher took it for granted that European history had a meaning, unlike that of the rest of the world: “But of all the human misery which prevails in the vast spaces of Asia, Africa and South America where thousands of millions of men and women lived, worked and died, leaving no memorial, contributing nothing to the future, these volumes are not concerned.”

To return to Ibn Khaldun, writing this book has been the culmination of a necromantic pursuit. I have spent most of my life communing with a man who has been dead for over six hundred years, a man whose ways of thinking are very different from my own. It has been a kind of séance and, as is so often in the case of séances, it has sometimes been difficult to interpret the messages coming across the centuries. I am conscious that I have sometimes failed to understand what Ibn Khaldun is saying. I am not the first person to be defeated by his account of the  operations of the za’uiraja [half divination machine, half parlor game], but I also found his exposition of physiology, psychology, dreaming, and soothsaying somewhat obscure. Then, setting aside topics on which he seemed to have difficulty in expressing himself clearly, more generally the sheer depth and elaboration of the man’s thinking is challenging. Even when what he is saying sees perfectly clear, it is still difficult. Otherwise there would not be so many different interpretations of the message of the Muqaddima. Wordsworth’s lines on Isaac Newton come to mind:

The marble index of the mind
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

Those “seas of thought” are indeed strange and to modernize Ibn Khaldun and to elide the strangeness of his thinking is to denature him. Previous accounts of his life and works, in the course of seeking to demonstrate that he was the world’s first sociologist, or an early Marxist, or a philosopher in the Aristotelian tradition, or a forerunner of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, have exaggerated Ibn Khaldun’s rationality and posited an essentially secular frame of mind. ( In many cases they have presented him as being guilty of what the Surrealist used to term “anticipatory plagiarism.”) He has been stretched out on a procrustean bed, in which certain parts of him have been lopped off in order to make him fit on a piece of furniture of modern design. The discarded parts include, among other things, his devotion to Maliki jurisprudence and his preoccupation with occultism and futurology, as well some of his bizarre  scientific ideas.

Who was Ibn Khaldun writing for? Well, certainly not for me. Nor come to that, for the massed academics of the twenty-first-century world. Moreover, though he dedicated copies of the Maqaddima to the ruler of Tunis and to the sultan of Egypt, it does not seem he wrote the book to guide a ruler. It is unlikely that Ibn Khaldun was seeking readers among his fellow jurists and teachers of whom he had a rather low opinion. We have also seen that he was suspicious of merchants and shopkeepers. Most of the tribesmen he had dealing with could not read. I suspect that Ibn Khaldun’s ideal destination audience was himself and that he wrote to clear his head of all those ideas and insights that boiled and seethed within it.

Some of our problems in reading Ibn Khaldun arise from trying to make him a more systematic thinker than he really was. He was inconsistent in the use of certain keywords, including ‘asabiyya [‘group solidarity’], badawi [affiliations of various sorts] and “Arab”  [sometimes a race, sometimes ‘nomadic’].He was inconsistent on whether  the Mamluk system [slave armies] was immune from the historical cycle of decay or not. He was inconsistent on whether his cyclical theory of history applied outside the Maghreb or not. He was inconsistent on the causes of the plague. That he often seems to contradict himself in the Maquaddima is not surprising. The book was written over a long period of time in various locales. While at times he ha access to large libraries, at other times he did not. Moreover, as Aristotle observed, “Great men may make great mistakes.”

Does what Ibn Khaldun wrote have relevance today? Many Arab academics have argued that he does. Cheddadi believes that modern anthropologists can learn from him. Himmich finds support for the tenets of Marxism in the Muqaddima. Other Arab scholars have hailed Ibn Khaldun as an early Arab nationalist. To take a different kind of example, the ghostly presence of Ibn Khaldun can be detected in The Arab Human Development Report 2004, which had this to say about the Gulf and, more generally, about the Arab world in the twenty-first century: “clannism [‘asabiyya] in all its forms (tribal, clan-based, communal, and ethnic) . . .tightly shackles its followers through the power of the authoritarian patriarchal system. This phenomena . . represents a two-way street in which obedience and loyalty are offered in return for protection, sponsorship and a share of the spoils  . . . Its positive aspects include a sense of belonging to a community and the desire to put its interests first.” For all its reference to “positive aspects,” the Report is clearly using ‘asabiyya in a pejorative sense and moreover applying it in an urban context. Ibn Khaldun’s sense of the word always had a positive and dynamic quality, whereas the Report implicitly presents ‘asabiyya as something that contributes to the stagnation of contemporary Arab society.

Few today would share Ibn Khaldun’s positive vision of tribal loyalty as the engine of social change. Much of the Muquaddima’s fascination lies in the fact that’s its author, starting from medieval premises and working on medieval data, went onto create powerful theoretical models to explain how things worked in the world he lived in. In that sense Ibn Khaldun can indeed be compared to Darwin, Marx, and Durkheim, even though Ibn Khaldun’s theoretical models and conclusions cannot apply to modern societies. As Mark Zuckerberg observed when selecting the Muquaddima as one of his books of the year in 2015, “While much of what was believed then now is disproven after 700 years of progress, it’s still interesting to see what was understood at the time and the overall world view when it is considered together.”

Perhaps the ultimate purpose of the Muquaddima was to prepare Muslims for the Last Judgment. Ibn Khaldun quoted a saying of the Prophet: “Be in this world as if you were a stranger and a passing traveler.” The bleakness and loneliness of this historian are striking. It can be argued that Ibn Khaldun was unreasonably prejudiced against luxury and today there must be many who would argue from their experience, and against Khaldun, that living in luxury can be conducive to health and contentment. He was austere. He was also arrogant, as both his contemporaries and his own writings bear witness, but then he had a lot to be arrogant about. On quite a few issues the Qur’an and Maliki law books did his thinking for him. In so many ways he was outstanding and exceptional; yet in other ways his thinking was that of a thoroughly conventional Muslim. Consequently this book has served not only as an count of the workings of a genius, but also as a guide to perfectly ordinary Muslim beliefs.

Finally: “We almost strayed from our purpose. It is our intention now to stop . . .Perhaps some later scholar, aided by the divine gifts of a sound mind and solid scholarship, will penetrate into these problems in greater detail than we did here . . .God knows and you do not know.”[Muq., vol 3, p.481]

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

* In his chronicle Ibn Marzuq (who became one of Ibn Khaldun’s betes noirs) provided material details about costume, cuisine and folk customs, the kinds of things that tended to be neglected in the latter’s writings.

As Patricia Crone observed: “In practice the government of the time was more often than not both weak and oppressive: weak in the sense that it could not get much done, oppressive in the sense that rulers would freely sacrifice the lives and properties of their subjects in order to a stay in power and keep some semblance of order.” And yet curiously little of this nightmarish turbulence featured in Muqaddima.

When expounding on his suspicions about commerce and the accumulation of excess capital Ibn Khaldun cited a hadith to this effect: “The Prophet said: ‘The only thing you really possess of your property is what you ate, and have thus destroyed, o what you wore, and have thus worn out; or what you gave to charity, and have thus spent.”

Furthermore, as Fromherz observed: “For Ibn Khaldun, the science of astrology held as many secrets about humanity’s actions as his more interesting theories of economy, tribalism and state development.” He also believed in numerology and letter magic. His primary beef with occult practices was that they might carried veiled Shiite messages and cause political disruption.

Ibn Khaldun followed the Maliki school of jurisprudence and thus stressed the importance of the public’s interest but his theory of the rise and fall of governments was fairly simple: dynasties formed through straightforward adherence to Sharia Law and economic austerity. Once in power they succumbed to the enticements of wealth and luxury, not longer followed the law, decayed and were then replaced by one or another of the ‘barbarian’ (Nomadic) tribes whose social cohesion and military strength were underwritten by poverty and strict adherence to religious law. In all this the hand of God was paramount. Such were and are the conundrums of futurology. The Apocalypse, End Times and the Antichrist formed significant aspects of the thinking of Medieval Islamic scholars  much as they did they did Christian ones, from the 1250s to the end of the Middle Ages. [ See  The Anti-fraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature by Penn R. Szittya, Princeton University Press, 1986].  For background to these developments see  Thomas N. Bisson’s difficult but fascinating The Crisis of the Twelfth Century; Power, Lordship  and the Origins of European Government. The spread of global trade and the revival and innovating articulations of technologies from the Classical periods by increasing wealth produced a breakdown of the ethos of ‘public interest’ in the governing classes resulting in a proliferation of  the now romantically conceived ‘Castle Kingdoms” by independently exploiting agents, so-called knights.

This is too much for a mere footnote, I concede. I just wanted to mention that I recently read those two books.

** Toynbee was drawn to Ibn Khaldun- he read it in a French translation- ‘it was like discovering a long-lost relative’. Although he disputed  Muqaddima on several points, as he aged, Toynbee eventually identified God as the ultimate mover of the cycles of civilization and came to view the primary function of civilizations as to be the bearers of religion. “History is a vision of God’s creation on the move”.

The Death Instinct by Eugene Thacker

The Vesicles of Death. There are moments in Freud’s writing where one suspects that the human being itself is simply a symptom  of some deeper, more nebulous, cosmic pathology, the play-thing of drives, instincts, and other obscure forces that precede the human beings emergence into an illusory or even delusory self-consciousness. “If we are to take as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again-  then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.’

For instance, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud picks apart the presumption that human life is governed by the search for pleasure over pain, and happiness over unhappiness. “It must be pointed out,” he notes, “that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.” The search for happiness at the core of the pleasure principle is, in Freud’s words, “at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.” After all, he asks,  what good to us is a long life if it is difficult, barren of joys, and if so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”

Then what keeps us going? What keeps us going is certainly not “us,” not anything inherent in our psyche or our convoluted rationalizations for our motives and actions, but something more nebulous, “an urge inherent inorganic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity had been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces.” The so-called death drive. Freud also defines it as “the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life,” and it underscores primordial nature: “ . . . it must be an old state of things, and initial state from which the living entity has at one time or another departed and to which it is striving to return . . .” The pull of the organic towards the inorganic, of the animate towards the inanimate, of the living towards the unliving- the pull towards something “old”.

[and is this notion not embedded in Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of the commodity  and the ceaselessly reactionary character of its political productions?]

In these moments, the human being the human being is turned inside out, revealing the entirety of human civilization as a big-brained neurosis, beneath which a deeper, multilayered geo-trauma manifests itself in a myriad of ways, from frenetic protozoa to the torpid, stumbling forth of human self-awareness.

In his essay Freud seems acutely, even anxiously aware of the pessimistic tone of his theory: “It may be difficult, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I can not see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved.” ( Adding: “The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals.”)

                                     .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .


 In his book Thacker does not treat Freud as a ‘full-fledged’ pessimist, much less, though Freud suffered immensely in his last years, a patron saint of pessimism. Freud’s whole life and work runs counter to that judgment. Perhaps the author would put Freud under the definition of a pessimist as  a well-taught optimist.

Saintly status is reserved for folks like Philipp Mainlander:

“ Presaging an idea that would become central to Nietzsche’s thought, Mainlander asserts that everything that exists is the result not of a beneficent Creator, but the death of God: ‘God is dead and his death was the life of the world.”

More than this, God doesn’t die accidentally, but kills himself. In this self-cadaverization of God, Mainlander suggests that the world, life, our very selves, are all the rotting residue of God’s suicide.”

Most of the characters revealed in this book, even Mainlander, hover in a netherworld between the two poles- pessimism and optimism- ultimately unable to entirely renounce either. Even Thacker himself reports with great excitement studies which suggest pessimists, for all their world weariness, live longer than optimists.

I have to say, the 15 pages Thacker devotes to Kierkegaard in the second part of the book brings the man to sharper light than  Joakim Garff’s 900 page plus biography, and probably any other. The direct examination of pessimism and its proponents is no exercise in futility.

Aesthetics Lecture 21 by Adorno

Let us try to take up our threads, meanwhile somewhat tangled, where we left them hanging weeks ago. I closed with an attempt to ground aesthetics in the so-called aesthetic experience or the consciousness of the aesthetic observer, and the final motif I introduced was that, in general, defining this so-called aesthetic experience, or defining what one experiences through works of art, is something entirely skewed and inadequate because it overlooks the decisive fact that there is really no such thing as determinate, unambiguous reactions, much less unambiguous intellectual judgments, as the conclusion of a work of art.

This type of unambiguity, to which we are accustomed from knowledge in the form of judgments – something is or is not the case- is quite simply absent from the sphere of the work of art. Perhaps you recall that I pointed you to the phenomena of Edouard Manet  in order to make this a little clearer, and I tried –admittedly only in the   form of propositions, for naturally I cannot develop this adequately in such a theoretically orientated lecture – to show you that, in this work [The Absinthe Drinker, in particular] a critical, a socio-critical aspect, and also an aspect one could describe as the experience of destructiveness or evil, is interwoven in  most peculiar way with a delight at the charms associated with this, and that, even in the form it assumes in Manet, the work of art – as Hegel puts it- does not offer a ‘slogan’. One could almost arrive at the heretical notion that the work attempts, in this way, to heal some of what is inflicted on things by the discursive logic that proceeds in concepts and judgments. This means that the world is indeed as complex as the world feeling evoked by a significant work of art.

While typical judgments that are for or against something –that say something is so or not so, and go no further than criticism or a position- in a sense destroy the whole interwovenness of truth and untruth, the interwovenness of what is alive, the work of art, by not arbitrarily separating these aspects and proceedings towards decisions but, rather, by presenting them in their intertwined state, could be said to restore the truth, which we lose precisely through the form of the mere judgment.


 But I think you would be underestimating the epistemic character of works of art or artistic experience if you thought that what I have called – using a phrase whose questionable nature I have already conceded to you, and whose questionable nature I would like to underline again in the strongest terms, and which only gives a small intimation about a very complex issue-if you were to think what I called a ‘world feeling’ conveyed by a work were really something entirely vague and undefined. For the world feeling which we gain in artistic experience contains, precisely in that multifacetedness which I attempted to elaborate for you in a somewhat determinate fashion, all sorts of extremely concrete aspects.


You would be entirely mistaken if, for example, as people tend to do in vulgar existential interpretations of Kafka – yes there is such a thing as vulgar existentialism!- you thought, if I too may express myself in vulgar terms, that this depicted the general lousiness of the world, as it were, and that these works, even Kafka’s, were ultimately  only about the general uncertainty surrounding the heroes of these novels and this general non liquet [‘it is not clear’] and non sequitur (‘it does not follow’) which the plots of these works of art repeatedly encounter. Rather, these works contain an infinite number of entirely determinate aspects – be it the sphere of law firms or the sphere of sadism, which also plays so infinitely large a part in Kafka’s oeuvre, or be it a very specific connection to the question of guilt and the guilt context of myth. All of these aspects are evident in Kafka’s works in the most unambiguous and emphatic form, and you will only understand it at all if you also note the unambiguity with which these motifs appear in his writing. But you must not treat it as a conclusion . . . and say ‘Such-and such reveals itself here’; or as some also say, ‘This or that corresponds to Kafka’s world picture or ‘worldview’; for you, perhaps, the disgusting and repulsive nature of terms  such as ‘worldview’ or ‘world picture’ already denounces the thing which such atrocious words usually stand for. And the synthesis of these aspects that Kafka brings about is indeed not one which tells us ‘That is so’; it does not result in a conclusion, a slogan, a judgment, but rather it is  the judgmentless and, if you will, the ambiguous intertwining of these aspects that really permits the work of art to incorporate that very wealth of the existent which is otherwise cut off by the logic of the judgment. . .

[To fill one’s mouth as fully as possible with these thoughts one could say that ‘the vital principle beauty is distance or dissonance: the elusive, not quite graspable, ephemeral impossibility of being pinned down’ -Lecture Four where Adorno also says:]

 “One could say that every dissonance is a small remembrance of the suffering which the control over nature, and ultimately a society of domination as such, inflicts over nature, and only in the form of this suffering, only in the form of yearning – and dissonance is always substantially yearning and suffering- only thus can suppressed  nature find its voice at all. And dissonance therefore contains not only this aspect of an expression of negativity, of this suffering, but always at the same time the happiness of giving nature its voice, finding something not yet taken, drawing something into the work that –if I could use the word again- has not yet been domesticated, something akin to fresh snow, which thus reminds us of something other than the self-same machinery of bourgeois society in which we are all trapped. .  . So, in other words: in this process whereby humans remove themselves from the threat of forceful nature, they always did nature an injustice too. And art, by clinging in a certain sense to the mimetic process, to this archaic, older phenomena rather than a rational one – and, in this, I would almost say that all art is childlike, infantile, because it truly still has the notion that it can take full control of reality through the image, not by intervening in reality with thought and action –by clinging to this aspect, art always tries at the same time to do justice to that element of suppressed nature. This strikes me as the more comprehensive historico-philosophical explanation for the circumstance of the return of nature in art. That is why nature remains in art, that is why art means the restoration of nature in a certain sense, because it is part of the prehistory of art itself – the idea of art itself, if you will- that that which would otherwise perish because of rationale, law, order, logic, classificatory thought, because of all these categories, finds its voice and receives its due after all.”

Playing the Press by Henry Rousso

After the right was returned to power in the March 1986 elections, the idea that collaboration and fascism were somehow born on the left, an idea that had first taken shape while the left was in control of the government, ceased to be mere insulting  rhetoric and became a “historical concept” approved by various authorities. Encouraged by this shift in opinion, by this new revisionism, Charles Pasqwua, a rightest minister of the interior, calmly charged that certain friends of the Socialists had “prostrated themselves before the occupying power.” This charge was launched on 20 May 1986 during the debate over whether to replace proportional representation with winning-take- all balloting.

Again we see all the elements of the syndrome: retroactive blurring of the boundaries, calculated provocation, uncontrolled reaction, and ultimately diversion.

It would be easy to minimize the impact of these polemical attacks. But we have seen that they had a specific function, an intrinsic role in the French political debate, and one that was rooted in tradition. A clear sign of the perpetuation of this tradition is that politician born during or after the war, and thus not personally implicated in the events, resorted to the same kinds of attacks. This enduring turmoil has had profound consequences on memories of the war.

Generally these attacks follow a standard pattern, involving what Evelyne Largueche calls “allusive insult.” In most of the instances described above four parties were involved: the insulter, who launches the attack; the insultee, or object of the attack; the insulted, mentioned in the attack (Vichy, collaboration, non-Resistance); and, finally, the witness to the insult. All the classical devices of rhetoric are employed, from metonymy  (“X . . .is Vichy) to allusion (“And Mitterrand? And Hersant?) and amalgamation (Guiscard and the collaboration, Rocard’s policy and Laval’s). 

Accusations charging a specific person with a specific crime are rare. Exceptions include the  Herant, Marchais, and the Papon cases, all of which of which came to the courts either because libel was alleged or because potentially solid charges existed. More often a double or triple language was used so as to avoid libel: it was alleged, for example, that the “friends’ of the Socialists “prostrated themselves before the occupying power,” or that X or Y ‘worked with Vichy” without further elaboration (when of course thousands of people, including authentic resistants, fit that description), or that X or Y belongs to the “collaborationist breed,” without actually stating that X or Y personally collaborated.

In attacks of this kind, what counts is the general effect on public opinion and not direct damage to the ostensible adversary, and for this witnesses are required – the media first of all and through them “public opinion.” It is the media and the public who, on their own, draw the conclusion that so- and- so is a collaborator and therefore a traitor or criminal. A typical example of this was the debate on regulation of the press, when it was the Socialists who first raised the question of Mitterrand’s past, not after the war, as the opposition urged, but during the war, thus (unwittingly) leaving it to the media and the public to ask what was being covered up.

In other words, the fraudulent “truths” of polemical attack are framed not only by those directly involved but also by spectators who, in spite of themselves, maintain a climate of suspicion. This systematic practice of appealing to the public is a crucial factor in the history of the syndrome. In many respects, the appeal seems to have been out of step with the actual state of opinion; as we shall see later, the public appears to have been less preoccupied with these quarrels than many people, especially politicians, believed at the time. What turmoil did do, however, was to force people to ask questions about the past.

The use of veiled language and the fact that politicians of every stripe used similar kinds of invective tended to confuse the image of the past. The political truth of the moment periodically supplanted the truth of history. Words like “collaborator” lost all real meaning. Worse still, they suggested that everyone involved had something to hide or to be ashamed of, since insult is by definition a mechanism of defense. Thus the polemics often had unintended consequences, and often it was those who initiated them, on both the right and left, who suffered the worse damage.

It is rather surprising how little is added to our understanding of the past by this kind of political rhetoric. The attacks, far from routing the enemy, served only as periodic reminders that no party and no individual, no matter how reputable, emerged from the Occupation unscathed. In  a sense, this banal judgment signifies the ultimate failure of the resistance heritage; forty years later, the heroism and lucidity of a few cannot make up for the real or alleged faults of others.

Intro to Sex After Fascism by Dagmar Herzog

This book was originally conceived as a study of the generation of 1968 in West Germany. Seeking to understand how Nazism and its legacies were interpreted in the 1960s, especially by the New Left student movement, I was struck by the preponderance of arguments that the Third Reich was a distinctly sexually repressive era and that to liberate sexuality was an antifascist imperative. Numerous New Leftists argued directly that sexuality and politics were causally linked; convinced that sexual repression produced racism and fascism, they proposed that sexual emancipation would further social and political justice.

Members of the West German New Left student movement, along with many of their liberal elders, defended activism on behalf of sexual emancipation on the grounds that sexual repression was not merely a characteristic of fascism but its very cause. As one author put it, “it would be wrong to hold the view that all of what happened in Auschwitz was typically German. It was typical for a society that suppresses sexuality.” Another argued that “brutality and the lust for destruction become substitutes for bodily pleasure . . . This is how the seemingly incredible contradiction that the butchers of Auschwitz were – and would become again- respectable, harmless citizens, is resolved.” Or as yet another phrased it even more succinctly: “In the fascist rebellion, the energies of inhibited sexuality formed into genocide.” In the 1960s these views were widely held, and they provided moral justification for dismantling the postwar culture of sexual conservatism. To liberate sexuality, it was believed, would help cleanse Germany of the lingering  aftereffects of Nazism.

For many commentators in present-day reunified Germany, more than fifteen years after the collapse of communism, it has become standard to denigrate the rebellions of the later 1960s for their Utopian romanticism and fierce anti-capitalism. But in their historical moment, those rebellions – and not the least the sexual element in them – were signally important. They fundamentally reconfigured familial, sexual, and gender relations and all codes of social interaction. They undermined the authority of  political life for nearly two decades, and the succeeded in reorienting society-wide moral discussion and debate towards global concerns like social injustice, economic exploitation, and warfare.

As my research unfolded, I found that the New Left’s interpretation of the Third Reich’s sexual politics as profoundly repressive had been almost uniformly adopted in recent scholarship on Nazism as well. I also found, however, in researching the more immediate post World War II period, that numerous commentators in that period had a completely different interpretation of the Third Reich. They argued that the Nazis had encouraged sexual licentiousness or even suggested that their sexual immorality was inextricable from their genocidal barbarism. Indeed, for many of these more immediate postwar observers, the containment of sexuality and the restoration of marriage and family were among the highest priorities for a society trying to overcome Nazism. It increasingly appeared as though the postwar culture of sexual conservatism was not ( as the New Left believed) a watered-down continuation of a sexually repressive fascism but rather had itself developed at least in partial reaction against Nazism.  .  .

In aiming to illuminate how we might think about the ever-altering connections between sexual and other kinds of politics, the book shows how sex can be a site for talking about very many other things besides sex and working through a multitude of other social and political conflicts. At the same time, specifically the contrast of developments under three regimes – fascist, democratic capitalism, and state socialism –offers an opportunity to ground historically investigations into the relationships between social structures, ideologies, bodies, and minds and to consider how, in the twentieth century, sex could become such an extraordinarily significant locus for politics, one of the major engines of economic development, and such a central element in strategies of rule. “Sex is not a natural act,” the psychologist Leonore Tiefer once wrote; the seemingly most intimate parts of our lives are strongly shaped by social forces, even as the dynamics of the interrelationships between the social and the individual are elusive and constantly changing. The challenge is to take such matters as sexual practices, or subjective accounts of the dissociation or connection between physiological sensations, fantasies, and emotions, as legitimate objects for historical inquiry.

Throughout, a crucial point – and each chapter reveals another dimension of this phenomena – is that memories were not preserved and passed on in some pure, uncontaminated fashion. Rather, “memories” of the Third Reich were continually constructed and reconstructed after the fact, so much so that these subsequent memories were even more influential – in political and social conflicts, and individual psyches – than the actual complicated original reality. Each memory was always also an interpretation, mixing kernels of truth about the past with powerful emotional investments that had much to do with an evolving present. The ways the Nazis constructed Weimar, or the ways former citizens of East Germany, after reunification, constructed their experiences under communism, or the ways former New Leftists in the early twenty-first century have re-imagined the significance of 1968, offer further expositions of this theme. Moreover, and while the literature on post-fascist memory in Germany is large, what attention to the workings of memory in conflicts over sex in particular offers us extraordinary insight into how memories get ‘layered’ – that is, the ways each cohort and constituency approached both the immediate and the more distant past only through the interpretations of its historical predecessors. What becomes apparent, in short, is the intricate mutual imbrication of different eras of German history.

I hope to offer perspectives that are relevant for scholars studying memory cultures also in other national contexts. The aim is to explore the processes by which certain cultural understandings – with enormous and quite concrete consequences for how lives are lived- are achieved. Precisely, then, by historicizing how German constructions of the Nazi past evolved, and the remarkable impact those constructions have had (and continue to have), the book considers the lasting power not just of real but also of fictive memories.

Old Man by Paul Theroux

I sometimes wondered what I was seeing in the South, and what I missed. So much of what we see is unknowable. You don’t have to be young to have a keen sense of sensuality. In the rural South I never recognized a beckoning of the sensual, though a certain sluttishness was the unmistakable trope here and there. The land bereft of temptations, of dreams deferred, was overwhelmed by reality, the presence of decline and death; a world where people are struggling to survive offers no occasion for the sensual, which if it existed there would look like another dead end. It was odd never to be in the presence of temptation, no flirting, no romance, no promise of another life. The valiant woman Dolores Robinson’s sweet anticipating smile represented release and freedom, not passion, and her life, like many I encountered in the South, was a wounded one, with questions to which I did not have any answers.

Perhaps that is an old man’s response t a long trip, but so what? This trip was not about me, not a journey to There and Back, overcoming obstacles on bad roads, an autobiographical diversion about my moods and petty successes. No one ever got to know me well, and few people asked anything of me. “What sorts of things do you write, Mr. Thorax?” I took to be my triumph of anonymity. Only two out of the hundreds of people I met had read anything I had written. Fine with me. It’s better to be a stranger, without a past; it is a bore and an encumbrance to be conspicuous. Fame is a nuisance, and anonymity  is bliss. (Bene qui latuit bene exit, wrote Ovid. To live well is to live unnoticed.) I did not really mind being singled out by blacks as a cracker, or by whites as an agitator, in either case a controversialist, since those misidentifications help me understand the mind of the person who saw me that way, and it helped me become, if only briefly, part of the scene.

But in the travel narrative of struggle, I was not as struggler. I was the bystander or the eavesdropper, recording other people’s pain or pleasure. I knew very little discomfort, never sensed I was in danger. No ordeals, few dramas. I nearly always felt I was in the presence of friends.

From state to state, county to county, I breezed along, and this progress was a way of understanding how lucky I was, but the confinement that Southerners feel, their keen awareness of themselves as stereotypes – provincials and yokels, in literature, in life- is sometimes palpable. No wonder, given the obliqueness of Southern fiction (and one way to know a place is through its writing – the evasions, the jokes, the showy literary metaphors. No wonder the grotesque preponderance of the gothic and the freaks- the reality was too brutal to state baldly, unbearably so.

Critics and academics extol the South for the abundant wealth of its literature, the region encouraging a story-telling tradition. This praise seemed to me a crock and self-serving. The opposite was the case: there was not enough writing, and what existed, with a few exceptions, was insufficient. Missing was a coherent introduction for the outsider to the South that exists, the South that I saw. Most of the South’s fiction suggests that it’s a broken place, but that’s not news. Anyone who strikes up a conversation there or wanders a little can sense the crack that runs through the South from one end to the other, a crack that began as a hairline fracture in the distant past and widened through its history to an abyss. The broken culture, perhaps unmendable, that Southerners were still trying to reckon with bewildered some people into intransigence and made many others gentler, and needed more chroniclers.

“Read the books,” people say, ”Study Southern gothic and the evocative poems.”

I say ignore the books and go there. The deep South today is not in its books, it’s in its people, and the people are hospitable, they are talkers, and if they take to you, they’ll tell you their stories. The Deep South made me feel;  like a fortunate traveler in an overlooked land.

Catastrophically passive, as though fatally wounded by the Civil War, the South has been held back from prosperity and has little power to exert influence on the country at large, so it remains immured in its region, especially in its rural areas, walled off from the world. I had not realized until I spent some time there how cruel it was that so many American companies has fled the South for other countries and taken the jobs with them; that the American philanthropists and charities, benevolently concerned with poverty and deficiencies elsewhere, had traveled halfway around the world – was it for acclaim? For the picturesque? For the tax benefit, for the photo op? for an escape from reality? – to bring teachers to Africa and food to India and medicine elsewhere; they had allowed the poor in the South, a growing peasant class, to die for lack of health care, and many to remain uneducated and illiterate and poorly housed, and some to starve. Though America in its greatness is singular, it resembles the rest the rest of the word in its failures.

An old man gabbling in another language, I was the quintessential stranger, but a welcome one. I made friends. With rare and farcical exceptions, I was treated with kindness by the people I met by chance. “Kin Ah he’p you . . .in inny way?” was the rule. I cherished these experiences. In  my life they will be fewer and fewer, because I am moving across the earth like  the Old Man, to end my days in the sea, my dust to dissolve into undifferentiated mud.

Lingering, driving slowly and stopping often, procrastinating, I didn’t want this trip to end. The land matched so many images I’d had in my imagination, and I understood what Rebecca West had written in the 1930s of Macedonia, how it was like a vision in the midst of muddled slumber. That was the Deep South for me: a dream, with all a dream’s distortions and satisfactions, “the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking.”

In a long traveling life, I had always depended on public transport; the clattering train, the slow boat, the tuk-tuk or scooter rickshaw, the overcrowded chicken bus, the careering East African minibus known as the matutu, the shuttling ferry, the trolley, the tram. F or the first time I was driving myself the whole way in my own car. What made the experience a continuing pleasure was that, in my car, I never knew the finality of a flight, being wrangled and ordered about at an airport, the stomach turning gulp of liftoff or the jolt of a train, but only the hum of tires, the telephone poles or trees whipping past, the easy escape, the gradual release of the long road unrolling like a river, like the Old Man itself.

Except for the fart and flutter-blast of a johnboat below, skidding sideways in the current like a soap dish in a murky sink, I saw no river traffic today from my parking place on Walden’s Landing, on the Arkansas side of the Helena Bridge. Beneath the bridge, a truck parked next to a conveyor belt had opened its hopper to the belt, which was emptying into a moored barge of the soybeans of Andre Peer and his fellow farmers, $600,000 worth of beans. In sharp contrast to the geometry of plowed fields on the nearer banks was te curvaceous Mississippi, slipping southerly in languid liquefaction, so brown it was like the solid earth made fluid. A “reminder/ of what men choose to forget,” the poet from St. Louis ha written of the Old Man rolling along, pulling the banks that in places were as soft and crumbly as cake, touching lives, stirring the edges of the land in inquiring eddies, squirming through backwaters, fetching up at bungalows and whispering at the fringes of cotton fields, then moving on. I was the river.

When had I ever felt this way, reluctant to go back to my desk, not wanting the trip to end, this procrastinating sense that, even after a year and a half of being on the road, between the Southern salutations of Lucille’s “Be blessed” at the start and Charles Portis’s “Be careful” at the end, I wished to keep going. That same St. Louis poet had also written, “Old men ought to be explorers.” I could have kept on, easily, on this rare trip that was a cure for homesickness. Because the paradox of it all was that though I had come so far –miles more than I ever had in Africa or China – I had never left home.