Excellent points. I can't tell you how many people I've seen all over the Internet since Trump's victory write essays or do YouTube videos announcing "Why I'm Leaving the Left" or whatever.
A vast majority of the time, these people fall down a wormhole and become obsessive, single-issue anti-woke voters, and they end up making alliances with some truly horrifying people on the Right because, well.... "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
This is no way to do politics, and yet, too many people are unquestionably doing it. It's disheartening.
Right on that it is hard to tell what he is for these days (less crime; fewer riots?) and to forget politics without real guiding vision is to miss the point. The sentiment he expresses about China and "Western elites" is distressingly common and bipartisan, though. Funny, given his contrarian posturing. Anyway, hope the good common sense part of the message against chest thumping on China gets spread broadly.
The point re the US controlling Maine and Guam stood out to me because the US controlling Guam has been quite good for the people living there. Guam's GDP/capita is roughly an order of magnitude larger than many comparable Oceanic countries. (Similarly, Puerto Rico's living standards are also much higher than neighboring Caribbean countries.)
Way too many, "lets destroy it all because its bad" types who will happily tell you they have no idea what will come next, other than it automatically has to be better because they will call it something nice like "the committee for public safety"
To be fair, though, Zaid doesn't really support militarism. One of his positions is that the US government should impose sanctions on US companies that do business in Xinjiang/with alleged Xinjiang slave labor. As far as I can tell he's less economically hawkish than say, Matt Stoller.
I think Zaid's tweet was unfortunate but he's regularly complained about the establishment and its appendages turning a blind eye to whatever may be happening to the Uyghurs, which I find hard to argue with.
Closer to the point of your post though is that Zaid does seem to think the crimes of the US towards its own people (and the world, though his POV is limited there) pales in comparison to the crimes of China towards its own people. I think Zaid has a very parochial view of geopolitics, but that's common to most US commentators (I've noticed many left commentators ascribe the US, esp. the CIA near omnipotence).
Thanks for bucking me up. Every day I wake up and remind myself not to let the excesses and contradictions of wokeism push me into apathetic despair. I find people committed to material change and do what I can to swim against the current. But it's incredibly tempting to give up and just sit around reading and writing crumudgeonly hot takes on the woke trend du jour.
Excellent writing. My positive vision for the U.S. is that we would zealously advocate for human rights home and abroad. (Yes, I realize this isn't going to happen). But I believe in it, just like I believe in the United Nations (which was never founded on utopian ideals; it was establishing an institution to do the ugly work of avoiding future annihilating wars.) Because I'm a rootless cosmopolitan who thinks the world will perish if we don't work together, and working together is ugly and hard and doesn't always work. But our ancestors knew the alternative is, I think, much worse.
Anyway, my point is this: I think the world should take on China over genocide. But Freddie's writing here is clear and necessary -- "Throw up harsh economic sanctions on China and you destroy the world economy." I have no time for endless whining about how we should talk tough on China. If you really believe that this is a moral crisis we should not stand for, then we have to tell people the absolute truth - if you want change, it requires sacrifice. It requires admitting that capitalism has been so successful that it made China a key player in the capitalist system. So key that to attack China means pulling that system apart.
I know Americans have no stomach for shared sacrifice - this country couldn't even pull together in a pandemic - but that won't stop me from saying we should put our values where are beliefs are.
I found Freddie's argument unconvincing. If you're an NBA coach, or a member of the US State Department, or a major tech company VP, you have to be very, very careful about saying something like Freddie's "But sure, there are huge human rights violations in China". Most such people are consciously careful not to say things like that, because they know it could damage or end their careers. That is literally appeasement. Collectively, it emboldens oppressors in the Chinese government. Within China, people are taken by the government from their families, and imprisoned or put in work camps, for saying things like this. What would you call the fealty that the Chinese government demands, even of foreigners, but a demand for appeasement?
As for "don't have an anti-politics"... oh, for fuck's sake, Freddie! You're the most anti person I've ever known with regard to your political positions and takes! It's often thought-provoking for me to read your fresh perspectives, but they are almost always a contrarian reaction to a mainstream view. Zaid didn't actually suggest that the West was appeasing to the USSR, but Freddie went on a whole rant about how "insane" that is anyway.
"you’ll wake up one day and you’ll find you’ve become completely unmoored", indeed!
And this is also great observation: "The United States is slinking out of Afghanistan after 20 years. The usual suspects are decrying this as, more or less, appeasement towards the Taliban, not seeming to understand that the Taliban live there, and we don’t, and thus they will always ultimately have more say than we do and cannot be waited out."
Remember, John McCain always said we should've stayed in Vietnam even longer, as long as it took. Well, we'd still be there now if we took his advice. Do I think Vietnam is better off because we didn't stay 40 years? Yes.
Will and talking tough don't matter that much, especially not in the 21st century when some of America's power has waned. So what you get from intellectuals and politicians is this theater of tough talk that will never go anywhere because it can't. International corporations have more binding power than any individual government as far as sanctions are concerned. China is the entity that is too big to fail of capitalism and that's so hilarious on many fronts.
Your ultimate point is very important. I'm one of those left of center people who's not a big fan of wokeness, but I'm cognizant that those feelings are at least in part rooted in a vision of a better world and a desire to make it happen rather than resentment. And the resentment is there, but I have to keep in mind that that's not what I'm really after.
As for China, I think people freaking out over it aren't looking at the bigger picture. China will be a superpower, but unlike America, it's in a crowded neighborhood. India, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea and maybe even Russia are probably not too thrilled about having a superpower in their backyard. They saw how that worked for Latin America, after all. Some may drift towards China but I'd bet the majority will be reluctant at best. There are simply a lot of potential counterweights to Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific region. The Chinese must know this, too, so I'd expect them to be a lot more cautious than the neocons expect
You are, of course, correct that the United States was practicing no sort of "politics of appeasement" towards the Soviet Union in the Cold War. I don't believe many would argue that. But Jilani was referencing U.S. behavior towards them in the 30s and 40s, and if our behavior then wasn't appeasement, I'm not sure what one ought to call it. In specific, I would argue that the United States followed a pattern of appeasement towards the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s despite irreconcilable ideological aims, leading ultimately and predictably to the Cold War. Several specific moments illustrate this reconciliation:
Most famous is Walter Duranty's receipt of a Pulitzer for romanticizing the Holodomor-era Soviet Union. Because it is so well-known, I will not dwell on it. Less remembered is that the United States elected to reverse its policy and officially recognize the Soviet Union at around the same time in 1933, accompanied by an empty pledge from the Soviet Union not to conspire for the overthrow of the American Government.
More interesting to me is the case of William Bullitt, our first ambassador to the Soviet Union, who started his tenure as ambassador with deep sympathies towards its aims and ended it by providing a scathing warning:
"The Soviet Union genuinely desires peace on all fronts at the present time but this peace is looked upon merely as a happy respite in which future wars may be prepared... It is of course the heartiest hope of the Soviet Government that the United States will become involved in a war with Japan. . . . To maintain peace for the present, to keep the nations of Europe divided, to foster enmity between Japan and the United States, and to gain blind devotion and obedience of the communists of all countries so they will act against their own governments at the behest of the Communist Pope in the Kremlin is the sum of Stalin's policy."
I'm not sure how to read Roosevelt's rejection of that warning and subsequent reassignment of Bullitt to France as anything but an example of appeasement.
The examples of appeasement continue apace through World War II. What bitter irony that Britain entered the war by pledging to defend Poland against the Nazis, and the Allies ended it by explaining to the erstwhile Polish government, at that point exiled in Britain, that they could do nothing for them and that their country would stay in the hands of the Soviet Union. What was the Tehran conference if not appeasement: the US and Britain sitting down at a table with Stalin, pledging to allow his annexation of the Baltic States and large parts of Finland and Poland, along with massive influence over eastern Europe?
Even moments like our action (or rather, lack thereof) in China could be viewed as appeasement: the US encouraging the Nationalists and Communists there towards an impossible peace, while the Soviet Union shrugged and provided Mao with all the military aid he needed to seize the whole country and exile the Nationalists until the present day.
You say the case for appeasement of the Nazis is stronger because by the height of the Cold War we may have been spending 18 cents out of every dollar to oppose the Soviet Union. But that is like saying there were no efforts to appease the Nazis because at the height of World War II, we completed such a comprehensive rout of them that they were swept from the earth and their ideology made synonymous with the height of evil. No, appeasement isn't what happened during the Cold War, but prior to it: During the same time the world had elected to use the greatest collection of military might ever assembled to make the Nazis a hiss and a byword, with full awareness of what the Soviet Union was and intended, we overtly helped its sphere of influence spread from Russia alone to 23 nations containing almost half a billion people by 1946.
Yes, after that point, the US entered a long, drawn-out ideological war against the Soviet Union full of bitter proxy wars, immense effort, and blunders along the way. But the Cold War didn't start until we spent the better part of two decades aiming towards appeasement, and pointing to what we did after that switch flipped is a poor case against calling our actions during the 1930s and 1940s appeasement. I believe, by any clear standard, they were.
The whole reason, well, a huge reason I'm anti-woke, is that the wokesters are cops on everyone (yes I am referring to the Planet of Cops essay), to the point where there is no solidarity, so to be not like them I'm going to work with them to the degree that we can work together, plus actually like some of them, which would be impossible if I were to be like them in the "cop" respect.
To quibble, isn't Jilani talking about LeBron James/John Cena as the modern day counterparts to Walter Duranty and Paul Robeson? The position of the US government/NATO/etc. isn't the issue.
Excellent points. I can't tell you how many people I've seen all over the Internet since Trump's victory write essays or do YouTube videos announcing "Why I'm Leaving the Left" or whatever.
A vast majority of the time, these people fall down a wormhole and become obsessive, single-issue anti-woke voters, and they end up making alliances with some truly horrifying people on the Right because, well.... "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
This is no way to do politics, and yet, too many people are unquestionably doing it. It's disheartening.
Right on that it is hard to tell what he is for these days (less crime; fewer riots?) and to forget politics without real guiding vision is to miss the point. The sentiment he expresses about China and "Western elites" is distressingly common and bipartisan, though. Funny, given his contrarian posturing. Anyway, hope the good common sense part of the message against chest thumping on China gets spread broadly.
The point re the US controlling Maine and Guam stood out to me because the US controlling Guam has been quite good for the people living there. Guam's GDP/capita is roughly an order of magnitude larger than many comparable Oceanic countries. (Similarly, Puerto Rico's living standards are also much higher than neighboring Caribbean countries.)
Way too many, "lets destroy it all because its bad" types who will happily tell you they have no idea what will come next, other than it automatically has to be better because they will call it something nice like "the committee for public safety"
Took no time for Zaid to notice your post.
https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1418252778552664064
To be fair, though, Zaid doesn't really support militarism. One of his positions is that the US government should impose sanctions on US companies that do business in Xinjiang/with alleged Xinjiang slave labor. As far as I can tell he's less economically hawkish than say, Matt Stoller.
I think Zaid's tweet was unfortunate but he's regularly complained about the establishment and its appendages turning a blind eye to whatever may be happening to the Uyghurs, which I find hard to argue with.
Closer to the point of your post though is that Zaid does seem to think the crimes of the US towards its own people (and the world, though his POV is limited there) pales in comparison to the crimes of China towards its own people. I think Zaid has a very parochial view of geopolitics, but that's common to most US commentators (I've noticed many left commentators ascribe the US, esp. the CIA near omnipotence).
Thanks for bucking me up. Every day I wake up and remind myself not to let the excesses and contradictions of wokeism push me into apathetic despair. I find people committed to material change and do what I can to swim against the current. But it's incredibly tempting to give up and just sit around reading and writing crumudgeonly hot takes on the woke trend du jour.
"don't have an anti-politics" comes ONE DAY after trashing liberals for trying to achieve something in politics. The mind reels.
"first, get mad at your own country, one of the greatest enemies of human rights in world history."
How so? While I agree with you on a great many things in this piece, one doesn't have to be an jingoist to see this comment as a gross exaggeration.
Excellent writing. My positive vision for the U.S. is that we would zealously advocate for human rights home and abroad. (Yes, I realize this isn't going to happen). But I believe in it, just like I believe in the United Nations (which was never founded on utopian ideals; it was establishing an institution to do the ugly work of avoiding future annihilating wars.) Because I'm a rootless cosmopolitan who thinks the world will perish if we don't work together, and working together is ugly and hard and doesn't always work. But our ancestors knew the alternative is, I think, much worse.
Anyway, my point is this: I think the world should take on China over genocide. But Freddie's writing here is clear and necessary -- "Throw up harsh economic sanctions on China and you destroy the world economy." I have no time for endless whining about how we should talk tough on China. If you really believe that this is a moral crisis we should not stand for, then we have to tell people the absolute truth - if you want change, it requires sacrifice. It requires admitting that capitalism has been so successful that it made China a key player in the capitalist system. So key that to attack China means pulling that system apart.
I know Americans have no stomach for shared sacrifice - this country couldn't even pull together in a pandemic - but that won't stop me from saying we should put our values where are beliefs are.
I found Freddie's argument unconvincing. If you're an NBA coach, or a member of the US State Department, or a major tech company VP, you have to be very, very careful about saying something like Freddie's "But sure, there are huge human rights violations in China". Most such people are consciously careful not to say things like that, because they know it could damage or end their careers. That is literally appeasement. Collectively, it emboldens oppressors in the Chinese government. Within China, people are taken by the government from their families, and imprisoned or put in work camps, for saying things like this. What would you call the fealty that the Chinese government demands, even of foreigners, but a demand for appeasement?
As for "don't have an anti-politics"... oh, for fuck's sake, Freddie! You're the most anti person I've ever known with regard to your political positions and takes! It's often thought-provoking for me to read your fresh perspectives, but they are almost always a contrarian reaction to a mainstream view. Zaid didn't actually suggest that the West was appeasing to the USSR, but Freddie went on a whole rant about how "insane" that is anyway.
"you’ll wake up one day and you’ll find you’ve become completely unmoored", indeed!
And this is also great observation: "The United States is slinking out of Afghanistan after 20 years. The usual suspects are decrying this as, more or less, appeasement towards the Taliban, not seeming to understand that the Taliban live there, and we don’t, and thus they will always ultimately have more say than we do and cannot be waited out."
Remember, John McCain always said we should've stayed in Vietnam even longer, as long as it took. Well, we'd still be there now if we took his advice. Do I think Vietnam is better off because we didn't stay 40 years? Yes.
Will and talking tough don't matter that much, especially not in the 21st century when some of America's power has waned. So what you get from intellectuals and politicians is this theater of tough talk that will never go anywhere because it can't. International corporations have more binding power than any individual government as far as sanctions are concerned. China is the entity that is too big to fail of capitalism and that's so hilarious on many fronts.
Your ultimate point is very important. I'm one of those left of center people who's not a big fan of wokeness, but I'm cognizant that those feelings are at least in part rooted in a vision of a better world and a desire to make it happen rather than resentment. And the resentment is there, but I have to keep in mind that that's not what I'm really after.
As for China, I think people freaking out over it aren't looking at the bigger picture. China will be a superpower, but unlike America, it's in a crowded neighborhood. India, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea and maybe even Russia are probably not too thrilled about having a superpower in their backyard. They saw how that worked for Latin America, after all. Some may drift towards China but I'd bet the majority will be reluctant at best. There are simply a lot of potential counterweights to Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific region. The Chinese must know this, too, so I'd expect them to be a lot more cautious than the neocons expect
You are, of course, correct that the United States was practicing no sort of "politics of appeasement" towards the Soviet Union in the Cold War. I don't believe many would argue that. But Jilani was referencing U.S. behavior towards them in the 30s and 40s, and if our behavior then wasn't appeasement, I'm not sure what one ought to call it. In specific, I would argue that the United States followed a pattern of appeasement towards the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s despite irreconcilable ideological aims, leading ultimately and predictably to the Cold War. Several specific moments illustrate this reconciliation:
Most famous is Walter Duranty's receipt of a Pulitzer for romanticizing the Holodomor-era Soviet Union. Because it is so well-known, I will not dwell on it. Less remembered is that the United States elected to reverse its policy and officially recognize the Soviet Union at around the same time in 1933, accompanied by an empty pledge from the Soviet Union not to conspire for the overthrow of the American Government.
More interesting to me is the case of William Bullitt, our first ambassador to the Soviet Union, who started his tenure as ambassador with deep sympathies towards its aims and ended it by providing a scathing warning:
"The Soviet Union genuinely desires peace on all fronts at the present time but this peace is looked upon merely as a happy respite in which future wars may be prepared... It is of course the heartiest hope of the Soviet Government that the United States will become involved in a war with Japan. . . . To maintain peace for the present, to keep the nations of Europe divided, to foster enmity between Japan and the United States, and to gain blind devotion and obedience of the communists of all countries so they will act against their own governments at the behest of the Communist Pope in the Kremlin is the sum of Stalin's policy."
I'm not sure how to read Roosevelt's rejection of that warning and subsequent reassignment of Bullitt to France as anything but an example of appeasement.
The examples of appeasement continue apace through World War II. What bitter irony that Britain entered the war by pledging to defend Poland against the Nazis, and the Allies ended it by explaining to the erstwhile Polish government, at that point exiled in Britain, that they could do nothing for them and that their country would stay in the hands of the Soviet Union. What was the Tehran conference if not appeasement: the US and Britain sitting down at a table with Stalin, pledging to allow his annexation of the Baltic States and large parts of Finland and Poland, along with massive influence over eastern Europe?
Even moments like our action (or rather, lack thereof) in China could be viewed as appeasement: the US encouraging the Nationalists and Communists there towards an impossible peace, while the Soviet Union shrugged and provided Mao with all the military aid he needed to seize the whole country and exile the Nationalists until the present day.
You say the case for appeasement of the Nazis is stronger because by the height of the Cold War we may have been spending 18 cents out of every dollar to oppose the Soviet Union. But that is like saying there were no efforts to appease the Nazis because at the height of World War II, we completed such a comprehensive rout of them that they were swept from the earth and their ideology made synonymous with the height of evil. No, appeasement isn't what happened during the Cold War, but prior to it: During the same time the world had elected to use the greatest collection of military might ever assembled to make the Nazis a hiss and a byword, with full awareness of what the Soviet Union was and intended, we overtly helped its sphere of influence spread from Russia alone to 23 nations containing almost half a billion people by 1946.
Yes, after that point, the US entered a long, drawn-out ideological war against the Soviet Union full of bitter proxy wars, immense effort, and blunders along the way. But the Cold War didn't start until we spent the better part of two decades aiming towards appeasement, and pointing to what we did after that switch flipped is a poor case against calling our actions during the 1930s and 1940s appeasement. I believe, by any clear standard, they were.
The whole reason, well, a huge reason I'm anti-woke, is that the wokesters are cops on everyone (yes I am referring to the Planet of Cops essay), to the point where there is no solidarity, so to be not like them I'm going to work with them to the degree that we can work together, plus actually like some of them, which would be impossible if I were to be like them in the "cop" respect.
To quibble, isn't Jilani talking about LeBron James/John Cena as the modern day counterparts to Walter Duranty and Paul Robeson? The position of the US government/NATO/etc. isn't the issue.