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One evening in February 2012, Vassar College students Xialou "Peter" Yu and Mary Claire Walker, both members of the school's rowing team, had a few drinks at a team gathering and left together as the party wound down. After a make-out session at a campus nightspot, they went to Yu's dorm room, where, by his account, they had sex that was not only consensual but mainly initiated by Walker, who reassured her inexperienced partner that she knew what to do. At some point, Yu's roommate walked in on them; after he was gone, Yu says, Walker decided she wanted to stop, telling him it was too soon after her breakup with her previous boyfriend. She got dressed and left.
The next day, according to documents in an unusual complaint that Yu filed against Vassar last June, Yu's resident adviser told him some students had seen him and the young woman on their way to the dorm. They had been so concerned by Walker's apparently inebriated state that they called campus security. Alarmed, Yu contacted Walker on Facebook to make sure everything was all right. She replied that she had had a "wonderful time" and that he had done "nothing wrong"-indeed, that she was sorry for having "led [him] on" when she wasn't ready for a relationship. A month later Walker messaged Yu herself, again apologizing for the incident and expressing hope that it would not affect their friendship. There were more exchanges during the next months, with Walker at one point inviting Yu to dinner at her place. (In a response to Yu's complaint in October, attorneys for Vassar acknowledged most of these facts but asserted that Walker had been too intoxicated to consent to sex and had been "in denial," scared, and in shock when she wrote the messages.)
Last February, one year after the encounter, the other shoe dropped: Yu was informed that Walker had filed charges of "nonconsensual sexual contact" against him through the college disciplinary system. Two and a half weeks later, a hearing was held before a panel of three faculty members. Yu was not allowed an attorney; his request to call his roommate and Walker's roommate as witnesses was denied after the campus "gender equity compliance investigator" said that the roommates had emailed him but had "nothing useful" to offer. While the records from the hearing are sealed, Yu claims his attempts to cross-examine his accuser were repeatedly stymied. Many of his questions (including ones about Walker's friendly messages, which she had earlier told the investigator she sent out of "fear") were barred as "irrelevant"; he says that when he was allowed to question Walker, she would start crying and give evasive or nonresponsive answers. Yu was found guilty and summarily expelled from Vassar.
New Rules for Campus Sex
Yu, a U.S.-educated Chinese citizen, is now going after the Poughkeepsie, New York, school in federal court, claiming not only wrongful expulsion and irreparable personal damage but sex discrimination. His complaint argues that he was the victim of a campus judicial system that in practice presumes males accused of sexual misconduct are guilty. His is one of three such lawsuits filed last summer. St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia is being sued by an expelled student, New York state resident Brian Harris, who likewise claims he was railroaded by a gender-biased campus kangaroo court. And in August college basketball player Dez Wells sued Ohio's Xavier University for expelling him in the summer of 2012 based on a rape charge that the county prosecutor publicly denounced as false.
While the lawsuits target private colleges, they also implicate public policy. That was especially true in Wells' case: When he was accused, Xavier was under scrutiny by the federal government for its allegedly poor response to three prior sexual assault complaints, and his attorney says he was the "sacrificial lamb" to appease the U.S. Department of Education. In the other two cases, there was no such direct pressure, but the charges were adjudicated under a complainant-friendly standard that the Obama administration has been aggressively pushing on academic institutions.
In April 2011, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to college and university presidents laying out guidelines for handling reports of sexual assault and harassment. One key recommendation was that such complaints should be evaluated based on a "preponderance of the evidence"-the lowest standard of proof used in civil claims. (In lay terms, it means that the total weight of the believable evidence tips at least slightly in the claimant's favor.) Traditionally, the standard for finding a student guilty of misconduct of any kind has been "clear and convincing evidence"-less stringent than "beyond a reasonable doubt," but still a very strong probability of guilt.
Last May the government reiterated its commitment to the "preponderance" standard in a joint Department of Justice/Department of Education letter to the University of Montana following a review of that school's response to sexual offenses. The letter was explicitly intended as a "blueprint" for all colleges and universities; noncompliant schools risk losing federal funds, including student aid eligibility. Meanwhile, the Department of Education also has launched civil rights investigations into complaints by several college women who say they were sexually assaulted by fellow students, then revictimized by school authorities when their assailants either went unpunished or received a slap on the wrist. The schools under scrutiny include the University of Southern California, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
'Rape Culture'
The federal war on campus rape is unfolding amid a revival of what Katie Roiphe, in her landmark 1994 book The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus, dubbed "rape-crisis feminism"-a loosely defined ideology that views sexual violence as the cornerstone of male oppression of women, expands the definition of rape to include a wide range of sexual acts involving no physical force or threat, and elevates the truth of women's claims of sexual victimization to nearly untouchable status. This brand of feminism seemed in retreat a few years ago, particularly after a hoax at Duke University drew attention to the danger of presuming guilt. (In 2007, the alleged rape of a stripper by three Duke lacrosse players sparked local and national outrage-until the case was dismissed and the young men declared innocent.) Yet in 2013, the concept made a strong comeback with a sexual assault case that gained national visibility in January and went to trial in March. This one was in Steubenville, Ohio.
The facts in Steubenville were ugly enough. A 16-year-old girl who got very drunk at an end-of-the-summer high school party was repeatedly sexually assaulted while unconscious or barely conscious. One boy, 17-year-old Trent Mays, penetrated her with his fingers, tried to get her to perform oral sex, and essentially used her as a masturbation aid; another, Ma'lik Richmond, briefly participated in the abuse. Three other teenagers witnessed at least some of these acts (which took place in a car and in the basement of a home after the girl left the party with the boys), taking photos and a video. The next day, Mays bragged about his exploits and mocked the girl in text messages to friends, to whom he also sent her nude photo. When Mays and Richmond, both star players on the Steubenville High School football team, were arrested and charged with rape a few days later, many residents in the football-worshiping small town sympathized with the boys and were inclined to assume that the girl-an out-of-town private school student-was lying to cover up her misbehavior.
This sordid saga arguably shone a spotlight on the dark underside of small-town "football culture," which can breed a sense of entitlement and impunity in popular athletes. Yet the national press coverage, fueled by wild rumors of unspeakable brutalities (the girl was said to have been drugged, kidnapped, urinated on, and gang-raped for hours) and of an official cover-up, turned into a far more sweeping indictment of America's "rape culture"-a term that suddenly migrated from the fringes of feminist rhetoric into mainstream discourse.
Like many radical theories, the idea of rape culture contains plausible elements of truth: Some traditional gender arrangements have indeed encouraged cavalier or even tacitly accepting attitudes toward certain kinds of sexual violence. For much of history women have been treated to varying degrees as men's sexual property, with rape condoned if not legitimized in some circumstances: for example, in marriage (including forced marriage), or toward women who transgressed norms of feminine propriety. Even in the United States, as recently as 40 years ago, juries could be instructed to consider "unchaste character"-such as being single and on birth control-as a strike against an accuser's credibility, and courts often treated submission to overt physical intimidation as consent (at least in acquaintance-rape situations). And there is some basis for the argument that the conventional script of male pursuit and feminine coyness-with "no" routinely taken to mean "try harder"-can sometimes blur the lines between consent and coercion.
But this history is only one part of a complex mix of cultural attitudes-a mix that has long included genuine societal abhorrence of rape as a violation of female personhood. It is a measure of this abhorrence that when feminists in the 1970s challenged the unjust treatment of rape victims, the reforms they advocated-such as dropping resistance requirements that did not apply to other violent crimes, or barring the use of a woman's sexual history to discredit her-were soon enacted with overwhelming support. Moreover, the social response to sex offenses has been complicated by many factors besides sexism, from a general human tendency to sweep sordid matters under the rug to the difficulty of proving crimes that occur in intimate settings; these factors have affected male victims, too. Feminist theory offers no convincing explanation for why a homophobic patriarchy would also fail to protect boys from adult male sexual predators.
And yet the "rape culture" trope has gained such sway that even a New Yorker writer highly critical of activist zealotry over Steubenville offered a disclaimer to defend the term. In an article in the magazine's August issue, Ariel Levy cited a 2011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report stating that one in five American women are victims of rape or attempted rape and a recent Pentagon survey finding that one in four active-duty service members have been sexually assaulted. The problem, she concluded, could not be so pervasive unless there was a rape-enabling culture treating sex as "something men get-and take" from women.
Defining Rape
But what do these numbers mean? The Pentagon poll defined sexual assault broadly enough to include a slap on the behind-and half of its self-reported victims were men. The CDC study treats all sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs as rape, with no distinction between unconsciousness and impaired judgment. Even the CDC's definition of rape by force could include such transgressions as unwanted penetration with a finger (no matter how brief) during an otherwise consensual make-out session. The respondents were never asked if they thought they were assaulted; in a comparable survey, the federally sponsored 2007 Campus Sexual Assault study, two-thirds of the women classified as victims of drug- or alcohol-induced rape and 37 percent of those counted as forcibly raped did not consider the event to be a crime. (And these were college women in the age of mandatory campus date-rape awareness programs.) Notably, when CDC survey respondents were asked about victimization during the previous 12 months, men reported being "forced to penetrate someone"-an act classified as sexual violence other than rape-at the same rate that women reported forced penetration. Either "rape culture" goes both ways, and women also sexually assault their male partners with alarming frequency, or the CDC definition of sexual violence needs rethinking.
Other claims about America's alleged rape-supportive misogyny typically rely on falsified or out-of-context pseudo-facts. Thus, on the website of The Nation, Jessica Valenti states that "we live in a country where politicians call rape a 'gift from God' "-not only distorting a comment made by Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock during his 2012 run for the U.S. Senate, but neglecting to mention that the gaffe almost certainly ensured his defeat in a Republican stronghold. (What Mourdock said was that life was a "gift from God" even when it began "in that horrible situation of rape.") In The Huffington Post, writer Soraya Chemaly's list of "facts about rape" includes the claim that 31 states allow rapists who impregnate their victims to sue for child custody or visitation. Actually, these states simply don't have laws explicitly barring such suits, mainly because it is presumed to be a non-issue. So far, the only known case of this kind involves a Massachusetts man convicted of statutory rape who sued for visitation with his daughter after a family court ordered him to pay child support.
The Steubenville story, with its evidence of boys behaving abominably documented by social media, came to be seen as Exhibit A for the "rape culture." Never mind that it's quite a leap from the repulsive acts of a few drunk adolescents to the notion that our culture normalizes such acts; or that it's hardly unusual for teenagers to flaunt illegal and socially unacceptable behavior; or that the morning-after text messages in the case made it clear that a number of boys were well aware that something very wrong was done to "Jane Doe" and that legal trouble could follow.
After Mays and Richmond were convicted in juvenile court, the media went into moral panic overdrive. In Time magazine, novelist Peter Smith scolded his fellow men for their failure to reject male solidarity and "say something" against rape-as if a male judge hadn't just "said something" by sending the perpetrators to jail. MSNBC talk show host Melissa Harris-Perry delivered an on-air apology to the victim for failing to make the world safe for her. Twitter threats to "Jane Doe" from two teenaged girls, one of them Richmond's cousin, were seized upon as more evidence of rape culture's pernicious sway. The barrage of threats to Steubenville residents who had been labeled pro-rapist, including the female prosecutor baselessly accused of a cover-up, went unnoticed until Levy's New Yorker article. Even CNN, a major promoter of the "rape culture" meme, got hit by friendly fire: Correspondent Poppy Harlow and host Candy Crowley were vilified as rape apologists for daring to voice some sympathy for the defendants-and, it was falsely claimed, failing to mention the harm to the victim.
Much of this reaction was well-intentioned. Yet in the end rape-culture feminism promotes not only a toxic view of relationships but a skewed and dangerous view of justice. Its key tenets: 1) Women almost never lie when they report a sex crime, and to doubt them is to perpetuate rape culture; 2) rape is any sexual act in which the woman feels violated-unless she suffers from false consciousness and needs to be educated about her violation; 3) rape includes situations in which the woman agrees to sex because of persistent advances, "emotional coercion," or intoxication-or because she doesn't have the nerve to say no; 4) no matter how willing the woman appears to be, it is the man's responsibility to ensure explicit consent-or he may be guilty of rape.
The inroads these ideas could make in the actual justice system have been limited by constitutional protections for the accused, including the presumption of innocence, a high standard of proof, and the right to confront the accusing witness. But colleges are almost perfect laboratories for feminist rape prosecutions, even if the penalty can be no worse than getting expelled.
Campus Kangaroo Courts
The campus is a place where sex happens a lot-including sex in random, often drunken encounters rife with potential for misunderstanding and regret. The Online College Social Life Survey, collected from nearly 25,000 students on 20 campuses from 2005 to 2011, found that women and men alike drink heavily when hooking up with a casual partner: an average of five alcoholic drinks for women, six for men. When you try to criminalize much of this confused and confusing sex, subjecting it to second-guessing by secretive quasi-judicial panels operating under arbitrary rules and influenced by the deference to feminist orthodoxy that prevails on many campuses, the results will not be pretty.
Complaints from all sides about the way colleges handle sexual assault reports raise the question: Why should an offense as serious as rape be "prosecuted" by a college, rather than turned over to the police? The answer is that the vast majority of these charges would be unlikely to survive the most basic legal scrutiny.
In at least one case currently under review by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, the police reviewed and closed the woman's complaint. University of Colorado at Boulder sophomore Sarah Gilchriese says a male student, a fellow member of the school's Alpine Club, sexually assaulted her when they were drinking together. From media accounts, it is unclear whether Gilchriese accuses the man of using force or simply having sex with her when she was, by her own account, intoxicated but not "blackout drunk." Prosecutors at the Boulder District Attorney's Office declined to pursue the case, believing that they had little chance of obtaining a conviction.
But the university's Office of Student Conduct found the man guilty of "non-consensual intercourse" and punished him with an eight-month suspension. Gilchriese filed a grievance in response, complaining that the male student was allowed to finish the semester and stay on campus for four weeks after the hearing, and was scheduled to be allowed to return after his suspension even though she was still attending school. (She obtained a restraining order to keep him off campus.)
In other college cases that have made news, local authorities have gone so far as to proclaim the defendant's innocence. As mentioned earlier, that was true for Dez Wells, the basketball player expelled from Xavier University on a disciplinary charge of sexual assault. And in February 2010, University of North Dakota student Caleb Warner was convicted by a campus tribunal and banned from school for three years, just three months before the Grand Forks County District Court issued a warrant for his alleged victim's arrest for making a false police report, a charge that prompted her to leave the state. The sanctions against Warner were vacated in October 2011 after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) brought national attention to his story.
The case of Landen Gambill is perhaps the best illustration of how skewed, misguided, and detrimental to justice the crusade against rape culture can be. Gambill, a University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill student, became a cause célèbre when the school tried to forbid her to speak publicly about her alleged assault on the grounds that it constituted harassment toward the male student cleared of the charge. The student Gambill accused was a former boyfriend whom she had started dating in high school before they both enrolled at UNC. She claims he repeatedly abused her, physically and sexually, over the course of the relationship. They broke up in their freshman year at the university; four months later, Gambill filed a complaint accusing her ex-boyfriend of rape. A five-person panel of students and faculty-two men and three women-found him not guilty except for a single charge of verbal harassment.
Gambill, who turned to activism after this experience, has expressed outrage not only at the acquittal but at the process itself. As an example of the "victim-blaming" that she says she had to endure, she cites this question from a jury member at the hearing: "Landen, as a woman, I know that if that had happened to me, I would've broken up with him the first time it happened. Will you explain to me why you didn't?" Gambill also says that her pre-college history of mental illness and attempted suicide was used to damage her credibility even though it was a result of the abusive relationship-and that, after the hearing, a meddling juror decided to give a written account of the alleged assaults to Gambill's parents.
But guess who else feels victimized by the university? Gambill's ex-boyfriend, who shared his side of the story (anonymously) with the student paper, The Daily Tar Heel. He was suspended immediately after the accusation and forced to undergo a psychological evaluation that he says included invasive, humiliating questions about his sexual activities with Gambill. Portions of this evaluation were apparently shared with his accuser at the hearing, in violation of confidentiality. After being cleared, the young man had to submit to additional evaluations before the university agreed to re-admit him, delaying his return to school by six months. He has had to adjust his class schedule to comply with an order from school officials to stay away from Gambill. The ordeal, the student told the paper, caused him to develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
Only Gambill and her ex-boyfriend know which one of them is the real victim-and maybe not even they do, given how past events are filtered through subjective perceptions. Yet from the perspective of the Department of Education, which is pursuing Gambill's civil rights complaint against the university, her grievance is the only one that counts.
Federal involvement is likely to exacerbate the pro-accuser bias on many college campuses. In addition to the lower standard of proof, the recent Department of Education/Department of Justice blueprint for colleges mandates training for administrators, faculty, and student jurors involved in handling of sexual assault complaints. In practice, the training often amounts to indoctrination in the "correct" view of sexual assault. In 2011 FIRE publicized Stanford University's reading materials for student jurors (mostly excerpted from the book, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, by domestic violence specialist Lundy Bancroft). Among other things, students were advised that acting "logical and persuasive" in one's defense was typical of an abuser and that one should be "very, very cautious in accepting a man's claim that he has been wrongly accused" since "the great majority of allegations…are substantially accurate."
In the midst of a moral panic, the rights of the accused-including the wrongly accused-count for little. In May The Daily Princetonian, Princeton University's student daily, ran an editorial urging the school to change its standard of proof in sexual assault cases from "clear and convincing evidence" to "preponderance of the evidence." Noting that "sexual assault is unique among cases requiring on-campus discipline" in its lack of corroborative evidence and its he said/she said nature, the editorial board concluded that the "clear and persuasive" standard might be appropriate for charges of theft, assault, or drug use, but it is "inappropriate in the case of sexual assault."
The wheel has come full circle: Forty years ago, feminists argued that rape should be treated the same as other crimes against persons. Today the progressive position appears to be that since rape is harder to prove than other crimes (particularly when it is defined so that it does not require physical coercion, threats of violence, or incapacitation), it should receive special treatment.
When schools try to mitigate absurdly broad redefinitions of sexual assault with a nuanced approach to crime and punishment, they are liable to find themselves accused of coddling rapists. At Yale, for instance, a student may be sanctioned if he (or she, theoretically) fails to obtain "clear and unambiguous consent to each activity at every stage of a sexual encounter." In August the university's report on its handling of sexual misconduct caused an outcry in the feminist and left-wing blogosphere with the revelation that, of six students found guilty of "non-consensual sex" since the start of 2013, one had been suspended for a year, one placed on probation, and four given a "written reprimand" and encouraged to seek counseling. Yale activists such as law student Alexandra Brodsky and feminist blogs such as Jezebel assailed the university for hiding rape behind euphemistic doublespeak and letting off rapists with a slap on the wrist.
In September, to clarify its policy, Yale released a memo with several hypothetical scenarios explaining what action would be taken. While some of the "non-consensual" situations involved forced sex, others read more like a parody. In one vignette, "Ansley" rebuffs "Devin" 's attempt to take intimate activity to the next level, saying, "I'm not sure"-but makes no objection, except for "inch[ing] backward," when Devin tries again later. (Devin's penalty, according to the memo, would range from multi-semester suspension to expulsion.) In another, "Kai" starts to reciprocate oral sex without first getting a clear go-ahead from "Morgan" (which would evidently qualify for a reprimand). The activists' response to these absurd tales of woe was to complain that Yale was still treating sexual misconduct too leniently and to demand a policy, similar to the one recently enacted at Duke, making expulsion the presumptive penalty for such offenses.
While the immediate consequences of being found guilty by a campus tribunal are limited to academic or disciplinary sanctions, these cases are likely to have repercussions beyond the insular world of academe. A student's conviction of sexual assault, even in college judicial proceedings, goes on his college record and is thus apt to follow him to other schools and to be brought to the attention of prospective employers.
The consequences may go beyond the students themselves. The tendency to expand the definition of nonconsent to include ambiguous or fairly innocuous situations, and to hold rape accusations to a lower standard of proof, may "bleed out" from colleges into real life and the real justice system, especially if many law students absorb these ideas.
New Rules Needed
Women clearly have a particular vulnerability to sexual violence; while feminists have a tendency to exaggerate both women's fear of rape and men's sense of safety, there is a very real gender gap. This female fear is often invoked as a tragic consequence of rape culture and as proof of the urgent need to combat it.
But there is a paradox here. Women's fear of sexual violence is related almost entirely to the kind of attack-the proverbial stranger in a dark alley-that rape-culture ideologues tend to downplay as a stereotype and a distraction. (It is also relatively rare: Survey data indicate that a woman's lifetime chance of being raped by a stranger is around 2 percent.) No less ironic, the same ideologues who deplore women's lack of safety often scoff at safety precautions, insisting that we must "teach men not to rape" rather than teach women to avoid rape-as if there were a single crime that could be completely eradicated by "teaching" people not to commit it. (In October, Slate writer Emily Yoffe was excoriated as a rape apologist and a victim-blamer when she suggested that college women should avoid heavy drinking since there are sexual predators who specifically look for intoxicated women to exploit.)
In the end, the "rape culture" crusade is not so much about rape as it is about remaking sex. It stigmatizes assertive male sexuality and promotes a sexual norm in which every act must be negotiated in advance and undertaken with a completely rational, literally sober mind. In June a Kickstarter project to fund the publication of a dating guide for men was denounced as "rape-y" because preliminary excerpts advised men to "escalate" physical contact in an intimate situation without waiting for the woman's encouragement or advance approval-even though author Ken Hoinsky emphatically told his readers to back off at the woman's "no" and "try again at a later time if appropriate or cease entirely if she is absolutely not interested." After a backlash from feminist bloggers, Kickstarter scrapped the project and donated $25,000 to a sexual assault prevention organization. A few months later, the "rape culture" moral panic targeted Robin Thicke's hit song "Blurred Lines" (banned from several British university campuses) because of such lyrics as "I know you want it."
There is nothing wrong with challenging traditional rules of courtship or sexual norms. Many advocates of explicit consent insist they are trying to promote better communication and prevent hurtful misunderstandings. But it's one thing to make a persuasive case for more open communication about sex; it's another to make this a question of sexual violence, denigrating different views of sexuality as promoting "rape culture" and using the power of government to enforce one's preferred rules.
Since it's extremely unlikely that most college students will pause for a "May I?" before each intimate act, or stop having sex under the influence, the real outcome of the new campus policies will be to make virtually every sexually active male student vulnerable to a sexual offense charge if his partner retroactively reinterprets the experience as nonconsensual. Aside from the obvious unfairness to men, this is hardly a prescription for healthy interaction between men and women-or for basic respect for justice.
More lawsuits from men victimized by this warped notion of gender justice may, if successful, help restore balance. It is no exaggeration to say that this is one of the pressing civil rights issues of our time-one in which the federal civil rights watchdogs are on the wrong side.
]]>The biggest news story out of Russia in 2012 was not Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency in May. It was the trial of three young women from the guerrilla-girl punk band Pussy Riot, charged with "hate-motivated hooliganism" for a protest performance in a Moscow church. The women's offense was a brief song-and-dance act at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February, opening with a prayer chant of "Mother of God, Blessed Virgin, drive out Putin." On August 17, after a nonjury trial in which the judge blatantly favored the prosecution, Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were found guilty and handed two-year prison sentences. In October, two of the women were transported to remote penal colonies.
The prosecution, which was condemned by figures ranging from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Icelandic singer Bjork to Polish former president and dissident Lech Walesa, became an international symbol of the Kremlin's heavy-handed approach to dissent and artistic freedom. Yet at its core, the Pussy Riot case was also about the unholy union of organized religion and authoritarian state in modern-day Russia.
Pussy Riot's protest song was about not just Putin but also the cozy ties between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church under the leadership of the pro-Putin Patriarch Kirill. The indictment against the punk rockers accused them not only of demeaning the beliefs of Orthodox Christians but of "belittl[ing] the spiritual foundations of the state."
The case looked and felt like something out of the Dark Ages. The state-run Rossiya television channel repeatedly referred to the women as "blasphemers," while a co-founder of the semi-official pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi warned that the decline of harsh blasphemy laws throughout Europe had set the continent on a path to destructive liberalism. During the trial, the judge deemed it relevant that the Pussy Rioters had violated rules established by an eighth-century church council. Outside the courtroom, the lawyer for one of the prosecution witnesses told a newspaper, with no trace of humor, that the group's actions stemmed from Satan himself.
Are these developments harbingers of a new Russian theocracy? While some of the religious zealotry underlying the scandal was undoubtedly genuine, the prosecution was mostly a loud display of pretend medievalism—political theater performed by Jesus-loving Stalinists, KGB clerics, and Christian soldiers who dabble in soft porn. As Novaya Gazeta columnist Andrei Kolesnikov has pointed out, religion's true role in contemporary Russia is perhaps best summed up by none other than Karl Marx, who in his 1852 pamphlet The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte described it as "the domination of the priests as an instrument of government."
'A Land Watched Over By God'
The irony should not be lost on anyone who remembers the extent to which Soviet evildoing was chalked up to godlessness by many in the West, especially Americans. "Communism's attempt to make man stand alone without God" was a central theme of Ronald Reagan's famous "Evil Empire" speech in 1983; three decades earlier, the addition of "under God" to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was at least partly motivated by a desire to differentiate God-fearing America from the atheistic USSR.
The Soviets certainly earned their godless reputation. In 1918 Soviet Russia became the world's first atheist state, and its rulers launched a ruthless, sustained attack on religion. Thousands of priests, monks, and nuns were killed, and many more were imprisoned. Churches were sacked, converted to warehouses and social clubs, or razed. (The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, demolished in 1931, was the most famous casualty; the present building, the scene of Pussy Riot's crime, is a 1990s reconstruction.) Later, physical violence gave way to an aggressive propaganda war against faith.
The persecution eased after Hitler's 1941 invasion. Seeking to rally Christians to a "holy war," Joseph Stalin scuttled the anti-religion campaign and allowed thousands of churches to reopen. Official attitudes fluctuated during the next four decades, but atheism always remained central to state ideology. In the 1970s and early '80s, as Soviet communism limped toward the ash heap of history, believers generally had to stay in the closet or face unpleasant consequences. Being a churchgoer could cost you your job or get you kicked out of college. Those who stepped out of bounds—priests whose sermons were too bold, laypeople who published Christian samizdat—were harassed, terrorized, and sometimes thrown into labor camps or mental hospitals. Baptists and other "sectarians" faced especially vicious treatment.
All of this changed in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms opened up Soviet society. Interest in religion surged, just in time for the millennial anniversary of Russia's conversion to Christianity in 1988 (the occasion for the first-ever broadcast of church services on Soviet television). Two years later, communist-era restrictions on faith were formally abolished, and equality for all believers and nonbelievers became law.
Before long, however, the Russian Orthodox Church, historically the dominant religious organization in Russia, had had enough of religious freedom. Authorities were nervous about the flood of post-Soviet missionaries from abroad and the massive crowds that turned out for Rev. Billy Graham's historic 1993 trip to Moscow. In the early 1990s, the church began to lobby for measures to curb proselytizing and other religious work by foreign nationals. Such moves stalled at first, due both to Western backlash and to conflicts between parliament and then-President Boris Yeltsin. But in 1997 Yeltsin reluctantly signed a new law that returned religion in Russia to a highly regulated status—privileged for some faiths, marginalized for others.
While ostensibly affirming religious freedom and the secular nature of the state, the law's preamble recognized "the special role of Orthodoxy" and expressed "respect" for Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism as faiths with historical roots in Russia. Meanwhile, new religious groups seeking legal recognition now had to overcome numerous bureaucratic hurdles, including a 15-year probation period during which they were barred from virtually any activity other than private services and prayer meetings. Even existing religious organizations were subject to multiple restrictions. Today, less favored faiths endure routine discrimination and abuse: Last September, the evangelical Church of the Holy Trinity in Moscow was bulldozed into rubble after the city refused to renew its land-use permit; church belongings, including costly audio equipment, were carted away by the demolition team. A few days later, pastor Sergei Romanyuk was briefly arrested for conducting a prayer service—deemed an unsanctioned rally—at the site.
As the regulations went into effect, a new climate of official religiosity was taking hold in Russia. In 2001, when George W. Bush first met with Vladimir Putin, the two presidents bonded over Putin's heartwarming tale about a cross he had supposedly received from his mother and worn his entire life, and which had miraculously survived a fire at his summer cottage. It is hard to say whether this anecdote attests more to Bush's credulity or to Putin's cynicism; the thought of an active-duty KGB officer wearing a cross is hilarious to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of Soviet society. But it also illustrates the extent to which God talk was becoming part of Russia's official discourse, and not just for foreign consumption. When Putin restored the old Soviet anthem with brand-new lyrics in 2000, "the victory of communism's deathless ideas" gave way to "a land watched over by God."
By the end of the decade, Russia was a country where politicians regularly attended televised religious services; Orthodox priests blessed everything from spaceships to new prison buildings; Nashi, the "patriotic" youth movement mobilized to whip up loyalist fervor and browbeat the opposition, had an "Orthodox division" (whose chief, Boris Yakemenko, waxed nostalgic for medieval blasphemy laws during the Pussy Riot case); and some high-level officials spoke of the Orthodox faith as the "kernel" of Russian identity. In a televised debate during the 2012 presidential campaign, filmmaker and Putin crony Nikita Mikhalkov questioned whether one of Putin's Potemkin rivals, businessman Mikhail Prokhorov, was fit to lead Russia since he was an avowed nonbeliever. Orthodoxy is the majority religion, Mikhalkov pointed out, and the Orthodox believe all authority comes from God.
'Try Believing in God Instead, Scumbag'
In the wake of the Pussy Riot debacle, a number of commentators noted that religion has become the Russian state's new ideological prop, a "national idea" to fill the post-communist void. Not surprisingly, this religion-as-ideology often seems more political than spiritual—an aggressively statist creed perfectly aligned with Putin's worldview.
Thus the 2008 formal statement of "Russian Orthodox Church Doctrine on Human Dignity, Freedom and Rights" amounted to a Christian-flavored manifesto for Putin-style "sovereign democracy." Individual rights, the doctrine made clear, must never take priority over the interests of "Fatherland" (Otechestvo); human rights activism must not advance the agenda of "particular countries" seeking to export their way of life (a thinly veiled jab at supposedly U.S.-sponsored dissidents); and citizens' exercise of their political rights should never undermine social unity or the traditional Orthodox model of harmony between government and society.
Practical examples of such church-state harmony apparently include Putin dodging the constitutional two-term limit on the presidency by using loyal protégé Dmitry Medvedev as a placeholder. In September 2011, after Medvedev announced that he would not seek a second term but instead step aside for his benefactor, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department of Public Relations, hailed the development as a "peaceful, dignified, honorable, friendly transfer of power" that other nations should envy. (That Russian voters had yet to ratify the "transfer of power" was clearly a minor detail.)
Ideological Orthodoxy fits snugly with the anti-Western animus that pervades Putinism. Take a look at the much-ballyhooed "Name of Russia" TV project held in 2008 to choose history's greatest Russian. The winner (almost certainly government-approved, with Internet vote-rigging to avert a first-place finish for Stalin) was the legendary 13th-century prince and Orthodox saint Alexander Nevsky, famous for routing small bands of Northern European crusaders. Future Patriarch Kirill, then an archbishop, championed Alexander in television studio debates as the warrior who saved Russia from the Western menace. Kirill even praised Alexander's choice to collaborate with the conquering Mongol Horde—whose rule is generally viewed as disastrous for Russia—while spurning an alliance with the Pope. The Horde "only wanted our purses," Kirill said, while the West threatened Russia's very identity.
In a modern context, this attitude translates into a full endorsement of the Kremlin's Putin-era foreign policy, with its peculiar mix of ego-driven global posturing, imperial nostalgia, and paranoid pique. Kirill, who was elected Patriarch by the senior church hierarchy in 2009 and thus became spiritual and organizational head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has echoed Putin in deploring the Soviet Union's collapse. Chaplin, the Patriarchate's P.R. man, raised eyebrows last January when he suggested that Russia should step up its military involvement "in all areas where people are concerned about the danger of orange experiments" (Kremlin-speak for alleged U.S.-manipulated subversion, named after Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution, which ousted a pro-Moscow president by challenging election fraud).
Last February, at a meeting with religious leaders hosted by the Patriarch, Putin mused that "the primitive understanding of the separation of church and state" should be jettisoned in favor of "cooperation." And indeed, the church was cooperating at that very moment by serving as the state's cheerleader in the face of rising popular discontent. Putin's planned Kremlin comeback, compounded by fraud in the December 2011 parliamentary vote, had finally roused many Russians from apathy and sent tens of thousands into the streets. The response from church leadership—aside from a few squeaks about the need for government to hear citizens' legitimate concerns—was to caution against rocking the boat and to praise Putin as (almost literally) God's gift to Russia.
In early January, as protests grew, Chaplin wrote in a column for the Interfax website that while "the popular will to political activity should not be suppressed," it was "shameful" for Russian activists to stand next to liberal opposition leaders such as chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov. In televised sermons, Patriarch Kirill warned of the potential bloodshed, chaos, and destruction from people fighting for "their own small, human, insignificant truths" and averred that "Orthodox believers don't know how to go out to demonstrations." While hosting Putin's meeting with clergy in February, the Patriarch described Russia's revival since 2000 as "a miracle of God"—one for which he bestowed much of the credit on Putin himself. (These comments inspired the Pussy Riot lyrics, "Patriarch Gundyayev [Kirill's secular name] believes in Putin; try believing in God instead, scumbag!")
The Abbot Kisses the Ring
In return for its loyalty, the church—or at least its senior hierarchy—has been amply rewarded with wealth, status, and perks. But that doesn't mean the more faith-specific parts of its agenda get translated into government policy (aside from local bans on gay pride events and on "propaganda of homosexuality to minors," an area where church dogma dovetails with majority biases). Abortion, which is as unacceptable in Orthodoxy as it is in Catholicism, remains not only legal but free at public clinics. In 2011 the Patriarch's plea to end government funding for abortions was briskly dismissed by the ruling United Russia party, and legislation introducing some restrictions, such as spousal consent for married women, died in the Duma (the Russian parliament); the only actual policy change was tighter regulation after the first trimester. Church advocacy on this issue has been fairly low-key and deferential; when Kirill raised it in his meeting with Putin, it was to concede the pro-choice tilt of popular opinion and beg for better incentives for women to make other choices.
The effort to bring Orthodoxy into public education has yielded mixed results at best. A few years ago, proposals to make "the basics of Orthodox culture" a required subject for middle school students met with a strong backlash, including an open letter from a group of concerned scientists whom the church assailed as relics of militant Soviet atheism. Then Putin's docile Duma nixed a resolution condemning the critics, and Putin himself warned that religious indoctrination in state schools would be illegal. As if on cue, church spokesman Chaplin made a conciliatory statement calling for a pluralistic approach to religious studies. The solution was a class in "secular ethics and world religions" (which recently became mandatory nationwide after a two-year pilot program), with several options from which parents can choose. So far less than a third of students have enrolled in the Orthodox track, compared to more than 40 percent for secular ethics and 20 percent for world religions. The Patriarch blamed the church's comparative failure on "the liberal press."
All this is a far cry from theocracy, even if disturbing examples of religious coercion are common. (Last spring, REN-TV did a report on kids being pressured into baptism at a summer camp for the children of railway employees.) It is, rather, an unequal tandem of a cynically pious state and a cynically servile church.
Of course, subservience to state power is an old tradition for the Russian Orthodox Church; it started under the czars—particularly after the 1700s, when Peter the Great effectively reduced the church to a subordinate branch of government—and continued under the Soviets, when the church was brought back from near-obliteration as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet regime and the KGB.
That dark legacy lives on in the present-day church. In 1992 a parliamentary investigative commission co-chaired by Father Gleb Yakunin, an Orthodox priest and Soviet-era dissident, released KGB files exposing a vast network of collaborators among clerics, particularly at the highest levels. (Shortly afterward, Yakunin was defrocked, supposedly for violating church discipline through his political activity.) One of those collaborators, code-named Mikhailov, was almost certainly Kirill himself. In the 1970s, the future Patriarch, then an up-and-coming church official, traveled regularly abroad for conferences where he participated in the Soviet "struggle for peace" and pooh-poohed claims about religious persecution in the USSR.
Compared to Soviet times, the church today enjoys a far more exalted status. Yet there is no doubt as to which side dominates in the church-state "partnership." A few days before the Pussy Riot verdict, a clip from a Russian newscast made a splash on the Internet: On a visit to a historic monastery, a startled Putin shrank back when the abbot bowed and moved to kiss his hand. Russian media outlets treated the abbot's abasement as a comical gaffe, and he later apologized for his inappropriate zeal; but many Russians saw the gesture as a fitting bit of symbolism.
'War of the Whores'
Aside from the fact that many of its high-ranking servants of God are former servants of a totalitarian atheist state, Russian Orthodoxy today has another unusual quality: Many of its rank-and-file believers aren't believers at all. Both church leaders and establishment politicians describe Russia as a highly religious, overwhelmingly Orthodox nation. Nearly three out of four Russians identify as Orthodox Christians, up from 30 percent in 1989 and just over half in 1994. Yet according to the Levada Center, Russia's premier independent polling firm, only 40 percent of these self-proclaimed Orthodox say they definitely believe in God, while 30 percent definitely do not. Half never go to church; only one in 10 prays and fasts. Fewer than 5 percent know the Ten Commandments. All this recalls a popular 1990s Russian joke mocking faddish faux religion among the nouveau riche: A "New Russian" at a jewelry shop asks for a cross—the biggest, most expensive they've got. The salesgirl brings a massive, jewel-studded golden cross with the crucified Christ on it. "Great!" says the man. "But can you take down the gymnast?"
In other ways, too, Russia does not fit the image of a religious society. Sexual liberation, eagerly embraced after decades of forced communist-era prudery, is still in full swing. Premarital sex is the norm; almost one in three births are to single mothers, nearly triple the figure in the early 1980s; and at least 45 percent of pregnancies end in abortion, compared to 15 percent to 20 percent in Western Europe. Popular culture is sex-saturated to an extent that Westerners find jarring; respectable news sites routinely feature links—complete with R-rated thumbnail pictures—to raunchy gossip, risqué celebrity photos, and sex tips. Nashi, the Kremlin-financed youth group with an Orthodox division, has promoted racy novelty items such as bikini panties pledging loyalty to Putin and "erotic calendars" in which lingerie-clad beauties in provocative poses declare their passion for Dear Leader or battle corruption with innuendo-laced slogans like "you can have it without a bribe."
The paradoxes of Russian-style religion were on stark display during the Pussy Riot backlash. TV pundit Maxim Shevchenko, who denounced the punk feminists and their supporters' assault on the faithful in a blog post titled "War of the Whores," is a staunch defender of Stalin, on whose watch the original Christ the Savior cathedral was destroyed. Multimillionaire pop singer Elena Vaenga, who posted on her website a much-ridiculed semiliterate rant demanding punishment for "the skanks" and declaring herself deeply insulted as a Christian, recently had an out-of-wedlock child a few months after leaving her common-law husband. Vaenga's music is as un-Orthodox as her lifestyle: In the video for one of her songs, she strips down to satin panties and bra and gets into bed with a man while talking to another lover on the phone.
What kind of Christians are these? Ones for whom, writes Kommersant columnist Konstantin Eggert, Orthodox Christianity is "a new ideology to replace 'the moral code of the builder of communism'—a quaint mix of ill-understood rituals, well-studied conspiracy theories, rote- memorized rules and state-backed patriotism." Some Orthodox ideologues freely concede this communist lineage. Discussing the Pussy Riot verdict on a radio show, Roman Silantiev, an official in the church-sponsored activist organization the Russian People's Assembly, predicted that the controversy would draw more "patriotic-minded people" to the church because Russia's enemies were lined up on the other side. "Just as they used to say 'anti-Soviet' meaning 'Russia-hater,' they are now saying that anyone who hates the Russian Orthodox Church hates Russia," Silantiev said. "These are the people who will make the church stronger."
'The Miracle of the Watch'
If the full-bore prosecution of the Pussy Riot trio was intended to rally the religious around government, or to drive a wedge between the secular and religious parts of the opposition, the move failed. In the end, the controversy may well hurt both the Russian Orthodox Church and the church-state alliance. While few Russians approved of the feminists' stunt in the cathedral, opinions were sharply split on the prison sentence. In one poll, one-third felt it was too harsh, about as many saw it as appropriate; 15 percent found it too lenient, and 10 percent said there should have been no prosecution. Many were critical of the church's response to the incident, which included calling for hate crime charges and penalties severe enough to deter future miscreants. On the eve of the trial, only one in five Russians agreed this stance was justified; twice as many said the church should not have tried to influence the court at all, and 30 percent felt it should have "shown Christian mercy" and asked for the women's release. (After the sentencing, the church chimed in with a mealy-mouthed plea for clemency.)
Even more people were alienated by the outpouring of hate from self-styled defenders of the faith such as the talk-show callers who proposed lurid punishments for the women, from public scourging to impalement, and the Orthodox activist photographed punching a female Pussy Riot supporter in the face. No prominent churchmen condemned this behavior, saving their rebukes for believers who called for tolerance and forgiveness.
The aftermath of the trial saw more moves by the government to tighten the screws on undesirable religious expression; a bill that would institute criminal penalties, including prison terms of up to three years, for "insulting the feelings of believers" began to move through the Duma. Characteristically, the law protects only followers of the four institutionalized faiths mentioned in the 1997 legislation on religion: Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam. There was also a series of incidents in which hardcore "Orthodox activists" used frankly thuggish tactics to intimidate church critics and other undesirables—harassing people wearing pro-Pussy Riot T-shirts, disrupting a theater performance that supported the group, and even invading a museum of erotica to subtly threaten the owner. These developments will inevitably drive a deeper wedge not only between religious and secular Russians, but between Christians who believe in religious liberty and the faithful who are also believers in state power.
The Church's image problems have been compounded by several unsavory recent controversies surrounding the Patriarch, including one featuring a luxury apartment, an extortionate lawsuit, and a rumored mistress. (Orthodox priests can marry, but bishops belong to the celibate monastic priesthood.) In late March, the news site Rosbalt.ru reported that a prominent retired surgeon was being forced to pay nearly $1 million for damage supposedly caused by dust from renovation work at his apartment to his upstairs neighbor's furnishings. The owner of the apartment above was Patriarch Kirill, who has two official residences; the apartment's occupant, and the plaintiff in the dust-damage lawsuit, was one Lydia Leonova, described as the prelate's longtime friend and "second cousin." Then in April came what wags called "the miracle of the watch." After a television interview in which Kirill denied owning a $35,000 Breguet watch and asserted that a photo of him wearing one was a fake, bloggers discovered that the watch had vanished from the Patriarch's wrist in a photo on the Moscow Patriarchate's website—yet a reflection of the offending object could be seen in a mahogany table.
In August the VTSIOM, the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, found that half of all Russians trusted clergymen, down from two-thirds in 2010. Growing negativity about the church is found not only among secular Russians but among the faithful, including some members of the clergy. In 2011 three priests from the Izhevsk diocese in northern Russia wrote to Patriarch Kirill criticizing the church's cozy relationship with government leaders and wealthy patrons; the local archbishop responded by banning the priests from service.
The Pussy Riot fiasco is likely to accelerate this trend. On the day the women were sentenced, Muscovite Svetlana Goryacheva, writing on Facebook, explained her choice to leave the Russian Orthodox Church after 16 years as a churchgoer: "I am still a believing Christian, but I cannot stay in a church full of liars, money-grubbers and bigots."
]]>In March, almost 10 years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, America's uneasy, contradictory relationship with Islam was on full display at two congressional hearings. The first, a House Committee on Homeland Security meeting chaired by Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), tackled "radicalization" among American Muslims. Three weeks later, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) presided over a Senate Judiciary Committee panel that heard testimony about anti-Muslim prejudice. Conservatives trumpet the Muslim peril, while liberals warn of Islamophobia.
Islamic extremism is indeed a serious global problem today, to a degree unmatched by the radical fringes of other major religions. While violent fundamentalism is far less of a problem in the United States than in many other parts of the world, radicalism within the American Muslim community is not entirely an invention of the Islamophobic right. The 2009 Fort Hood shooting by U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hassan is an extreme but real example of what some Americans are willing to do. And a 2007 Pew poll found that 27 percent of American Muslim men under 30 believe suicide terrorism in defense of Islam is at least sometimes justified.
But bias against American Muslims isn't a P.C. myth. Once confined mainly to a few right-wing blogs, anti-Islamic bigotry has become a visible presence in Republican politics and the respectable conservative media. All around the country, right-of-center activists and politicians are trying to use government force to limit the property rights of Muslims and repel the alleged menace of Shariah law. Islamophobia has crossed the line from fringe rhetorical hysteria to active discrimination against U.S. citizens of the Islamic faith.
Blocking Mosques
For several years after 9/11, anti-Muslim rhetoric remained fairly rare. This can be credited in no small part to then-President George W. Bush, who repeatedly stressed that we were not at war with Muslims, that Islam was a peaceful religion hijacked by violent extremists. The idea that Islam itself was evil and that virtually all Muslims were potential enemies flourished mostly on "anti-jihadist" blogs, and some conservative pundits such as Michelle Malkin occasionally peddled Muslims-under-the-bed paranoia. But these remained the exceptions.
When Barack Obama became president, that changed. Bush no longer held authority as a conservative leader, and the persistent rumors that Obama is a secret Muslim gave added traction to a more overt anti-Islamic hostility. The turning point came during the furor over the "Ground Zero Mosque."
That controversy was slow to start. When plans for Park 51, an Islamic center and mosque near the World Trade Center site, were initially announced in December 2009, there was hardly any negative reaction from the right. "I like what you're doing," the conservative pundit Laura Ingraham told Park 51 project organizer Daisy Khan on Fox News.
But a few months later, the far-right blogger/activist Pamela Geller launched a "Stop the 911 Mosque" campaign that was soon introduced to larger audiences by the likes of Fox News host Sean Hannity and New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser. By the summer of 2010, opposition to the Islamic center project became the conservative party line, and majorities of both Americans and New Yorkers agreed that the center shouldn't be built.
The symbolism of sites associated with tragic memories can be a highly sensitive issue. In the late 1980s, many Jewish groups objected when a group of Carmelite nuns set up a convent on the edge of the Auschwitz grounds to pray for the dead. Their critics viewed the convent as an affront to the memory of the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy. It is not difficult to see why a large Islamic structure near a place where fanatics claiming to fight for Islam murdered nearly 3,000 people would stir emotions.
But there is also no question that the anti-mosque campaign was rife with vitriol toward all of Islam. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and other pundits equated the project with a Ku Klux Klan memorial at Gettysburg, a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor, or a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum, each analogy equating mainstream Muslims with murderous aggressors. Rallies against Park 51 featured signs declaring that "Islam Kills" and "Islam Is Terrorism," occasionally spelling Islam with a double s scripted like the Nazi SS logo.
Mohammed Al-Darsani, a second-generation immigrant, son of an imam, Florida International University law student, and U.S. Army veteran who considers himself a member of the political right, believes opposition to Park 51 became "an overt assault on Islam." Al-Darsani admits this hostility is largely a response to the real threat posed by Islamist extremism. Still, he says, "what unnerves me most is that detractors of the center seem to assume that American Muslims are not as American as non-Muslims and have somehow been less affected by the terrorist attacks."
During the mosque debate, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer asserted that "no one disputes the right to build" it, only "the decency of doing so" in that location. In fact, some of Park 51's leading opponents, including Geller and Gingrich, explicitly advocated a government ban. Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor, wanted the government to stop the project; so did Rick Lazio, his chief rival for the GOP nomination. What's more, around the same time, mosque blocking spread across the country, thousands of miles away from Ground Zero.
In Temecula, California, the mosque-fighting Baptist pastor Bill Rench bluntly stated that "we really don't want to see their influence spread." Tea Party activist Diana Serafin berated local authorities for worrying too much about religious freedom: "I know it's there in the Constitution and everything, but everything I read says Islam is a political movement."
In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the backlash against a mosque-to-be included vandalism as well as legal efforts to stop the project. The opposition was backed by Republican politicians: Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, then a gubernatorial candidate, questioned "whether being a Muslim is actually a religion," while congressional candidate Lou Ann Zelenik campaigned on a firm stance against the "Muslim extremists." One Zelenik press release stated that "until the American Muslim community find it in their hearts to separate themselves from their evil, radical counterparts…we are not obligated to open our society to any of them." (Ramsey and Zelenik both lost in the Republican primaries in November 2010.)
Some opposition to mosques surely stems from concerns about traffic and other land-use issues. But the activists' denial of anti-Muslim animus is often belied by their own words. In New Jersey, Bridgewater Township recently moved to ban houses of worship from residential neighborhoods after a Muslim group announced plans to convert a vacant inn into a mosque and community center. (The ordinance is now being challenged in court.) Local Tea Party leader James Lefkowitz, who supports the ban, told the New Jersey Jewish News his objections were entirely about neighborhood impact: "The fact that the center would contain a Muslim, rather than Christian or Jewish, house of worship doesn't trouble me at all." Yet in the very same interview, Lefkowitz also stated that "certainly a Muslim mosque raises questions about where the money is coming from and the principals involved and any association with terrorism." Ironically, it was Republicans who, 10 years ago, spearheaded a federal law prohibiting local governments from using zoning laws to impose an "undue burden," especially in a targeted, discriminatory sense, on the exercise of religion.
Fighting Shariah
The last year also has seen an explosion of bills to ban the use of Islamic religious law in state courts. In November a ballot initiative prohibiting courts from considering Shariah law or international law passed in Oklahoma. (The law has been stayed by a federal injunction pending a court challenge.) The Missouri House of Representatives approved a similar measure in April. Anti-Shariah bills—sometimes specifically singling out Islamic law, sometimes referring more broadly to international, foreign, or religious law—are pending in about a dozen other states.
The push for Shariah bans is puzzling, to say the least. Since Muslims make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population, and government establishment of religion is prohibited by the Constitution, a Shariah takeover in America is about as likely as a zombie apocalypse. Yet to proponents, this is a threat that must be stopped while there's still time. A closer look at the purported evidence for "creeping Shariah," however, shows a lot of skewed and garbled facts—and issues by no means unique to Muslims or Islam.
The most notorious example in the anti-Shariah brief was a 2010 New Jersey case in which a judge seemed to say that an American Muslim could rape his wife with impunity because his religion allowed it. The 18-year-old plaintiff, who had come to the U.S. from Morocco with her husband shortly after their arranged marriage, was seeking a permanent restraining order while filing for divorce. She testified that her husband had repeatedly assaulted her—claims corroborated by police photos of multiple bruises on her body—and forced her to have sex against her will. Family Court Judge Joseph Charles made a finding of domestic violence but denied the restraining order, dismissing the abuse as a "bad patch" in the marriage. As for the forced sex, the judge reasoned that, since the husband believed he was within his rights to demand sex from his wife, he lacked the intent to commit criminal sexual assault.
Outrageous? Yes. Shariah in action? Not exactly. Excusing illegal acts because they are sanctioned by a defendant's culture or religion is a very bad idea for many reasons. It subverts equal justice, hinders the integration of immigrants, and perpetuates oppressive customs that many hope to escape. But the "cultural defense" in U.S. law goes back more than 20 years, and most controversies related to it have not involved Muslims. In 1989 a Chinese immigrant in New York City received five years' probation for bludgeoning his unfaithful wife to death; the defense argued that he had been provoked by the extreme shame attached to cuckoldry in Chinese culture. The decision angered many people, especially advocates for battered women. But no one tried to depict it as a warning sign of the yellow peril.
Another minor cause célèbre in 2010 was the summer arrest of four Christian evangelists at the annual Arab festival in Dearborn, Michigan, for disturbing the peace, a story that spread through Christian and conservative blogs. The missionaries, it was reported, had committed no offense but speaking of their faith and handing out Christian literature, and were arrested in deference to the Shariah ban on preaching religions other than Islam. Republican politicians such as Newt Gingrich, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle sounded the alarm about Shariah law coming to Dearborn, which has a large Muslim population.
The real story was far more complicated. The evangelists, members of a ministry called Acts 17 Apologetics, were arrested based on a complaint from a Christian festival volunteer who claimed they had verbally harassed him and blocked his path. Two days later, they returned to hand out gospel booklets in the street outside the festival—mainly, as their own video of the incident makes clear, to test whether they would be stopped. They were approached by police, taken to a security booth, and advised that festival rules prohibited any handouts in that location.
The Dearborn Four were later acquitted on the breach of peace charge, and video footage strongly suggests the initial harassment complaint was trumped up. (Whatever verbal aggression occurred in the encounter came primarily from the volunteer himself.) The complaint may have arisen from a vendetta against a group that festival staffers saw as obnoxious troublemakers. An Acts 17 video from 2009, Sharia in America, shows three members of the group goading a man at an Arab festival booth in a debate on Islam and terrorism, ignoring his requests to stop filming him, and then getting into a spat with security.
But were the evangelists targeted for preaching the word of Christ to Muslims? The Baptist Press columnist Kelly Boggs, one of the commentators who made this charge, retracted it a week later after learning some additional facts—in particular, that several Christian ministries had booths at the festival where they freely interacted with visitors and gave out DVDs, pamphlets, and books, including the Gospels in Arabic. Acts 17 leader Nabeel Qureshi has acknowledged in an interview that "not all Christians ran into trouble," only "those who were vocal" and who would not obey rules restricting the distribution of literature to certain locations. So much for the dramatic assertion in one of the group's videos that "this is life in Dearborn if you're a Christian."
Qureshi and his friends have attracted little sympathy from the local Christian community. A 2009 letter co-signed by several ministers—not "Kumbaya"-singing liberal Christians but conservative evangelicals who stressed their own critical view of Islam—accused them of spreading blatant falsehoods about the situation in Dearborn, saying their aggressive conduct at the festival "brought shame to the name of Christ."
Annoying though their antics may be, the Dearborn Four still have First Amendment rights that were very likely violated. But the real issue here is the practice of restricting freedom of speech at conventions, festivals, and other public events to designated "free speech zones." It is not about "Shariah law" any more than the 2007 arrest of two Jews for Jesus members for handing out leaflets outside an Israel Day festival in Los Angeles was about covert rabbinical rule.
Culture Clash
Shariah panic aside, there are real cultural conflicts involving the practice of Islamic beliefs in the United States. At the extreme, these tensions can escalate into severe and even deadly violence toward women who transgress traditional norms of behavior. Far more commonly, disputes have arisen over such minor yet momentarily divisive issues as cab drivers turning down passengers who are carrying alcoholic beverages or accompanied by service dogs. (In many such cases, the "Muslim" position is a fringe one within Islam. While Muslims are forbidden to drink alcohol and strongly discouraged from keeping dogs as house pets, most Islamic authorities agree there is no prohibition on transporting either.)
So far the official responses to these disputes show no signs of a rush to either appeasement or persecution. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, the only metropolitan area where taxi drivers' denial of service to liquor-carrying passengers at the airport is a significant issue, the city responded with stiff penalties—a 30-day license suspension on the first offense, a two-year revocation on the second—for refusing a passenger for "unwarranted reasons."
In other instances, furor over Islamization has been set off by trivial and harmless measures that infringe on no one's rights, such the installation on a few college campuses of foot baths for Muslim students to use for ritual ablutions. Such provisions are no different in principle from accommodations that benefit other religious groups, such as kosher menus in student dining halls.
Indeed, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment specialist, points out that many current disputes about public accommodation of Islamic beliefs and practices, or enforcement of private contracts and arbitrations based on Islamic law, are not particularly novel. "They're not some special new monkey wrench that Muslims are throwing into our legal system," he wrote on his Volokh Conspiracy blog on March 25. "Christians, Jews, and others have routinely raised such issues before, and continue to do so today." In most such cases—for instance, when Catholic social service agencies ask to be exempted from state laws that prohibit discriminating against same-sex couples in adoption placements—conservatives are found on the side of more religious accommodation.
Such accommodations, large and small, are very much a part of American life. While single-sex hours at a few municipal swimming pools for the benefit of Muslims who observe traditional rules of modesty have raised hackles, similar provisions have been made for Orthodox Jews. In many areas with large Jewish communities, push-button-controlled traffic lights at crosswalks switch to automatic control on the Sabbath, when the Orthodox are not allowed to operate electrical devices.
Nor is there anything new about conflicts and controversies over religion and state. In upstate New York in the 1980s, parents in an Orthodox Jewish enclave sued the public school board because of their objections to female drivers on school buses carrying boys; when the suit was rejected, they created their own school district, which was green-lit by the state legislature but later blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court as overtly religious in nature. In some religious communities that expect all interpersonal disputes to be handled by spiritual elders—Jehovah's Witnesses, ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Amish—there have been serious concerns about cover-ups of criminal acts such as child sexual abuse, because of traditional pressure to not report such crimes to the secular authorities.
How do critics of "Islamization" deal with these parallels? Last December, a Jewish reader on the website of Middle East Forum Director Daniel Pipes pointed out that much-reviled proposals to allow Muslims to voluntarily settle domestic relations cases and financial disputes in Shariah courts are analogous to existing Jewish religious courts or within-community conflict resolutions among Mormons or the Amish. Pipes responded: "Jews and Amish do not try to take over the United States; Islamists do." Thus, all Muslims who ask for modest and standard accommodations for their religious values are equated with "Islamists" who seek to take over America, and any concessions to such requests are seen as "the camel's nose under the tent"—the first step to public floggings, stonings, and beheadings.
Any accommodation of faith-based beliefs that violates fundamental liberties and individual rights should be firmly rejected, whether it's the acceptance of religiously sanctioned wife beating or the recent suggestion by Washburn University law professor Liaqat Ali Khan that "desecrations of the Qur'an" should be outlawed because "given the presence of a growing population of American Muslims, Qur'an burning threatens domestic peace." But the anti-Islamic backlash threatens essential rights too. Efforts to block the construction of mosques using government muscle are the most obvious example. The recent Shariah bans could prevent American courts from honoring and enforcing private contracts and agreements based on Islamic religious law, and perhaps even from recognizing the validity of marriages performed by Islamic courts abroad.
The Myth of the Muslim Monolith
The hard-to-swallow truth is that anti-Islam polemicists have a point: Islam is not quite the same as any other major religion. There is no country in the world right now where a Christian or Jewish government executes people for blasphemy, apostasy, or illicit sex; several major Muslim states do. Earlier this year in Pakistan, after Punjab Gov. Salman Taseer spoke out in defense of a Christian woman sentenced to death for allegedly insulting Muhammad, Taseer himself was murdered. Large segments of the Pakistani public, including politicians and clerics, hailed his assassin as a hero. Even in modernized Malaysia and Indonesia, which have legal guarantees for religious minorities and are often cited as models of tolerance among majority-Muslim states, Shariah courts have the de facto power to bar any Muslim from converting to another faith or (for women) marrying a non-Muslim.
But many self-styled anti-jihadists—Geller, her guru and comrade-in-arms Robert Spencer, Michelle Malkin, and quite a few others—go further, claiming that fanaticism, intolerance, and violence are at the core of Islam and that the religion is impervious to reform. Spencer, who blogs at JihadWatch.org, adamantly asserts that terrorism is the real face of Islam and that so-called moderate Muslims are either liars or dupes who don't understand the true nature of their faith. As evidence, he and others quote inflammatory verses from the Koran that prescribe the conquest and slaughter of unbelievers and enjoin the faithful against befriending Christians and Jews.
Yet the Bible has more than a few alarmingly violent and intolerant passages, and even the relatively pacific New Testament contains an exhortation from St. Paul to avoid friendships with non-Christians. Such verses have not prevented most Christians from coming to terms with modernity and liberal democracy. Much more of Islam is stuck in a pre-modern, authoritarian frame of mind. When a figure like Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi—the Qatar-based cleric who advocates capital punishment for apostates and homosexuals and the "light beating" of unruly wives—can be an esteemed religious scholar and a reputed "moderate," it says a great deal about the current state of the religion.
But there are many Muslims who have condemned and stood up against terrorism, including those who recently volunteered to serve as human shields for Christian churches in Egypt after church bombings by Islamist fanatics. There are Muslim scholars who are advocating a revision of Islamic orthodoxy on issues ranging from women's rights to blasphemy and apostasy, and who are challenging the age-old clerical doctrine that the Koran's earlier, more peaceful and tolerant verses are nullified by the later, more militant ones. In 2004, over 2,500 Muslim academics from 23 countries signed a petition condemning "theologians of terror" (al-Qaradawi among them) who use Islamic scriptures as justification for political violence. It remains to be seen whether such voices will prevail in the Arab Spring sweeping the Middle East.
Islamist radicalism is pervasive enough to pose thorny problems for the West. Even in the United States, where the Muslim community is far more integrated into the mainstream culture than in Europe, some mosques have been used for terrorist recruitment and some supposedly moderate Muslim groups have provided a platform to those who advocate violence.
Al-Darsani readily agrees that the Muslim community in the United States has a problem with extremism. "It certainly does not help," he says, "when their religious leaders use Islam as a tool to vent their political dissatisfaction through violent rants about how evil America is and how the West is waging a cosmic war against Islam." Yet Al-Darsani is also convinced that "this is where freedom and tolerance come into play: As second- and third-generation American Muslims are exposed to freely exchanged ideas and establish themselves in America, they will become an integral part of the American fabric."
The tolerance this requires is exactly what the "anti-jihadists" vehemently reject. Spencer's JihadWatch site has argued that even secularized Muslims are potentially dangerous because either they or their children could revert to militant Islam. Comments threads on anti-jihadist sites are filled with calls to block Muslim immigration or ban Islam altogether.
With Muslims accounting for nearly a quarter of the world's population, the modernization of Islam is one of the 21st century's most urgent priorities. But the obstacles to reform come not only from militant Islamism but from Islamophobia as well. The Islamophobes, after all, repeat everything the Islamists tell Muslims: that the West is implacably hostile to them and their faith, that the most extreme and violent form of Islam is also its truest form, and that a liberalized Islam is impossible. American Muslims, and America, deserve better.
Contributing Editor Cathy Young (firstname.lastname@example.com) is a columnist for RealClearPolitics.
]]>Last summer, for the first time since the now-misty days of Soviet communism, U.S.-Russia relations took center stage in American politics. In the wake of the war in Georgia, with its unnerving sight of Russian tanks crossing the border of a former satellite, talk of a resurgent, aggressive Moscow was everywhere. During the presidential debates, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain fielded questions on whether the Evil Empire was back.
By the time Election Day rolled around, Georgia was no longer on everyone's mind and the Russian bear seemed far less scary than the bears on Wall Street. Still, Moscow will be an urgent foreign policy priority for the Obama White House. Apart from the sometimes forgotten fact that Russia retains nuclear parity with the United States, it remains a key player in a number of vital international issues, including nuclear proliferation and the war in Afghanistan. In the worst-case scenario (unlikely in the near future, given Russia's significant domestic and military problems), an interventionist Russia could provoke the U.S. military to defend NATO allies in Eastern Europe or the Baltic. If, on the other hand, relations with Russia take a more pacific turn, a genuine partnership could help the U.S. scale down its military commitments in regions where a pro-Western Russia would be a stabilizing influence.
Moscow warrants attention from those of us outside the State Department as well. Americans need not be interventionists to have both a moral and a practical interest in the state of freedom around the world. And in that light, whether Russia—a country that straddles Europe and Asia, claiming large parts of both as its sphere of influence—is a friend or foe to liberty matters a great deal.
During the presidential campaign, McCain was seen as the main Russia hawk. He certainly lived up to the reputation in August, when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's attempt to forcibly retake the Moscow-backed separatist province of South Ossetia escalated into a military conflict with Russian troops, then a full-scale Russian invasion of Georgia. McCain seized the moment, declaring that "we're all Georgians" and stressing his friendship with the strongly pro-American Saakashvili.
Obama, after initially urging moderation on both sides, emerged as almost equally hawkish. He condemned Russia's incursion into Georgia and pointed out that, months earlier, he had urged that Russian peacekeepers in the region be replaced with an international force to avert just such a crisis. During the debates, the two candidates' stands on Russia seemed virtually identical: Both said they wanted to avoid a new Cold War while holding Russia accountable for bad behavior and helping former Soviet satellites resist Vladimir Putin's bullying; both stressed "energy independence" as a way of reducing oil- and gas-rich Russia's ability to throw its weight around.
While some on the left accused Obama of joining the Russia bashing out of political expediency, his relatively hawkish stance was nothing new. In the June 30 issue of The Nation, Stephen F. Cohen, the doves' favorite Kremlinologist since Soviet days, chided both candidates for talking tough instead of addressing U.S. policies that, he argued, had antagonized and provoked the Russians. Writing on the Nation website on July 2, the investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss continued the criticism, noting that Obama was "getting advice from some of the hardest of hardliners on Russia policy," such as Hoover Institution scholar Michael McFaul, guilty of being more concerned with "the autocratic nature of Putin's rule" than with the "stability" it had brought. As this issue goes to press, it is unclear whether McFaul will have a role in the Obama administration, or who the president's point person on Russia will be. But Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is generally a Russia hawk, and she vied with McCain for the spot of top Putin basher during the campaign.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin's behavior both on the eve of Obama's election and right after it seemed to indicate the opposite of a rapprochement. On November 2, Nashi, the state-sponsored youth movement, held a massive anti-American demonstration in front of the U.S. Embassy, accommodated with street closures in traffic-clogged downtown Moscow for nearly a full day. The event featured a short film accusing America of orchestrating both world wars as well as the war in Georgia.
On November 5, in his first annual address to the parliament, President Dmitry Medvedev slammed the U.S. as the main culprit in Russia's economic and political problems. He also promised to deploy new short-range missiles near the Polish border if the U.S. went ahead with the installation of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. The timing of this threat was not coincidental, particularly since the speech had been rescheduled from October 23. Medvedev, who made no mention of Obama in his remarks, later claimed with a straight face that the fact that Americans had just elected a new president had slipped his mind.
In the next weeks, some friendlier overtures followed from both sides, with talk of a "fresh start." On January 20, Obama's inaugural speech contained what could be a direct message to the Kremlin: "To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West—know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."
Who Lost Moscow?
Two schools of thought duel to explain the deterioration of
U.S.-Russian relations. One blames a resurgent, belligerent Russian
nationalism that seeks to re-establish great power status and
dominance in former Soviet territories—and to use anti-Western
paranoia to justify increasingly harsh
authoritarianism at home. The other blames an American
intransigence that subjected Russia to years of post–Cold War
humiliation, rubbing the bear's nose in defeat, ignoring its
legitimate foreign policy interests, and brushing aside its
security concerns, thus producing a backlash that endangers both
Russia's neighbors and U.S. national security. These opinions cut
across standard ideological lines of right and left: A leading
exponent of the second school, the British journalist Anatol
Lieven, has published his commentary in both The American
Conservative and The Nation.
These opposing views could be approached, in a Marxian irony, dialectically, creating a unity of opposites. Perhaps the higher truth is that the fault lies with both Russia and the U.S. but not because the U.S. was too intransigent toward Russian interests. Rather, the U.S. was willing not just to accommodate but to assist Russian misbehavior—and in many ways Washington set a bad example that Moscow happily followed.
In an October 31 article for the Russian policy analysis website Polit.ru, the Carnegie Endowment political scientist Lilia Shevtsova criticized Western leaders for placing too much emphasis on personal relationships with Kremlin leaders and prioritizing "stability" at the expense of freedom. The standard America-blaming narrative asserts that Putin's strong support for the U.S. after the September 11 attacks and his willingness to work with NATO in Afghanistan were rewarded by nothing but slap after slap in the face. This story line overlooks the fact that Putin actually received a major payoff for his cooperative attitude: de facto U.S. acquiescence in, and sometimes direct collaboration with, the Kremlin's brutal pacification of separatist Chechnya. Indeed, one little-noticed irony is that the presence of U.S. military advisers in Georgia—recently seized upon by Moscow and its supporters as evidence of hostile American meddling—began in 2002 as part of a Russia-backed effort to get Georgia to drive Chechen rebels out of their enclave in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge
It could even be argued that the Bush administration's aggressive unilateralism on the war in Iraq, its often cavalier attitude toward human rights in the War on Terror, and its executive power grab on the home front emboldened Putin to behave similarly. While most of the alleged Bush-Putin parallels are specious, the actions of the Bush White House easily lent themselves to a self-serving interpretation by the Putin clique, validating its cynical conviction that democracy is just a cover for "might makes right." The war in Iraq also made it far too easy to equate all efforts at "democracy promotion," even peaceful activities such as assisting civil rights groups, with naked imperialism. This helped the Putin propaganda machine stoke Russian unease about the U.S. role in the "color revolutions" in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, which replaced those nations' governments with ones less devoted to Moscow.
Many Russians certainly experienced the collapse of the USSR and the weakening of Russia's influence abroad as a blow to their national pride. But the notion that the United States rubbed Russia's face in its humiliation is a myth. (If the West rejoiced in Communism's Cold War defeat, so did most of the Russian media and political elites at the time.) Yes, NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics ranks high on the list of Russian grievances. But when NATO first began seriously considering admitting former Eastern Bloc states in the early 1990s, most supporters of expansion assumed that it could eventually include Russia—and Russia seemed receptive. These prospects were undercut by pressures from neo-Communists and nationalists in the Russian parliament, who wanted a less pro-Western stance, and by mixed signals and suspicions on both the Russian and the U.S. sides.
It could be that the conflict is more contrived than real on Russia's end. The belief that Kremlin rhetoric about the American threat is a faux paranoia, calculated to enable bullying at home and abroad, is shared by numerous commentators inside Russia, from the Carnegie Endowment's Lilia Shevtsova to former top-level Soviet arms negotiator Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin. Writing in the independent online journal EJ.ru in April 2008, Dvorkin pointed out the obvious: Given Russia's nuclear potential, a military attack by NATO troops on Russia is unthinkable, no matter how many of its neighbors join the alliance. The real danger to Russia, in Dvorkin's view, is "civilizational isolation" if the country continues to resist democratization and modernization and finds itself surrounded by neighbors integrated into the West.
Russia's Shaky State
There are plenty of signs that Russia in the Putin era has been traveling down that path. During the last eight years, the messy and corrupt but relatively free political system of the Yeltsin era has given way to rigid top-down control by the central state (in Putin-speak, "the power vertical"). The political party United Russia, now headed by Putin, has been firmly established as the country's ruling force. Political opposition has been marginalized and local governments brought under Moscow's heel. Television programming, the primary source of news for the vast majority of Russians, is under rigid censorship, and most radio broadcasting and print outlets have been brought under government control as well.
Under the guise of restoring national pride, the Putin regime has pandered to the worst instincts of the Russian public, cultivating a collective mind-set that includes a colossal yet fragile ego, a siege mentality saturated with paranoia, hatred, and mistrust of anyone labeled as the enemy, and the thuggish conviction that being respected equals being feared.
By the end of 2008, it was clear that the formal transfer of power from a term-limited President Putin to new President Medvedev had not brought about even a cosmetic liberalization. Medvedev's nod to democratization in his November parliament speech consisted mainly of a laughable proposal to build up the multiparty system by allowing parties that get 3 percent to 5 percent of the vote in elections to have one or two seats in the legislature. Control over television was not lessened. A new opposition party led by former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, People for Democracy and Justice, was denied registration, despite having more than the required 50,000 members on its roster, because the registration commission found improprieties in 37 signatures. "Marches of dissent" were still violently suppressed. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the ex-CEO of the Yukos oil company imprisoned in 2003 after he began financing the opposition, was still denied early release.
While the government made some cautious overtures to liberals—including the creation of a Kremlin-funded, loyalist "liberal" party called The Right Cause and the appointment of opposition leader Nikita Belykh to a governorship —these moves were widely seen as attempts to co-opt what remained of the opposition. (The creators of The Right Cause cannibalized and disbanded one of the country's two remaining legal liberal opposition parties, the Union of Rightist Forces.)
Other steps by the Kremlin could signal a further slide toward dictatorship. In his November address, Medvedev proposed increasing the presidential term from four years to six; a constitutional amendment to that effect was speedily enacted and ratified by the end of the year, sparking speculation that the change would pave the way for new elections and Putin's return to the presidency. A few days into 2009, Medvedev signed a law that abolished the right to a jury trial for defendants accused of terrorism, treason, insurrection, or fomenting civil unrest—despite opposition from the usually docile Public Chamber, a monitoring body meant to function as a collective ombudsman.
The gutting of jury trials is particularly alarming in conjunction with another government-backed bill that would broaden the definition of treason. While current law defines treason as aiding and abetting an external threat, the new version would include aiding "a foreign state, a foreign or international organization, or representatives thereof " in any activity that endangers "the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional system, its sovereignty, its territorial integrity and statehood." The potential for criminalizing dissent is obvious: With its vague formula, the law could be easily directed against an opposition activist or publication working with, say, Amnesty International.
But could the situation change if, as quite a few Russian and Western pundits had predicted during the transition, the Putin-Medvedev two-czar show turns into a power struggle? Tea leaf readers have been hard at work looking for signs of a split, or of Medvedev growing a spine and a power base of his own. By and large, such claims have been long on speculation and short on evidence.
Curiously, the proposed new treason law gave rise to one of the first actual signs of a possible fissure in the "tandem." On January 14, the independent daily Nezavisimiaya Gazeta reported that the bill had been shelved by the committee on legislation in the Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, and sent back to the government for revision, at the insistence of members known to be close to Medvedev. "Duma sources" told the paper that Medvedev could not sign the bill without compromising his "liberal" image but could not openly veto it because it had Putin's backing; the only way out was to have it quietly amended. While this explanation indicates that Putin's power remains unchallenged, the leaking of such information to a major newspaper—presumably by pro-Medvedev legislators—could also be an effective way to embarrass Putin.
Apart from the possibility of conflict at the top, the past year has starkly revealed the weaknesses of Russia's neo-autocracy. Even the successful war in Georgia, widely touted as a victory over the Americans, exposed serious problems in the Russian army, including a lack of coordination, a shortage of modern weapons, and breakdown-prone armored vehicles. Russia's military faces other problems as well. The Iskander missiles Medvedev has brandished as Moscow's response to U.S. radar bases in Eastern Europe have the problem of not yet existing; their production is scheduled to start in 2010, but according to a November 18 report by the RIA Novosti news service, some military experts doubt this schedule can be met "due to a lack of production facilities and a workforce shortage."
The war in Georgia and its aftermath—Russian recognition of the independence of the breakaway Georgian provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia—also highlighted Moscow's international isolation: As Ilya Milshtein, a columnist for the liberal website Grani.ru, put it in a scathing year-in-review column, Russia was reduced to "chasing its friends all over the world," pleading for recognition of the two states. So far, only Nicaragua has answered the plea; even Russia's closest allies among the former Soviet republics, such as Belarus, dragged their feet, despite being bribed with loans and cheap gas. In another Pyrrhic turn, the victory in Georgia saddled Russia with two new impoverished and violence-prone colonies. (Quick wits dubbed the Abkhazia- South Ossetia-Russia alliance "AbOsRus," which sounds exactly like a Russian vulgarism meaning, more or less, "in deep shit.")
After much defiant posturing, Russia proved eager to patch up relations with at least the European West. In his speech at the World Policy Forum in Evian, France on October 8, Medvedev argued that the U.S. had forfeited its global leadership role and that Europe and Russia should join in a new security pact. The already slim chances of the E.U. being receptive to such overtures were reduced to zero by Obama's election—and by the fact that in 2009 the chairmanship of the E.U. is held first by the Czech Republic and then by Sweden, both countries with a hard-line attitude toward Russia. The January gas price dispute between Russia and Ukraine, which caused fuel to be cut off to many European countries during a cold snap—and which, no matter how one apportions the blame, was indubitably a result of Putin's policy of using natural gas for political leverage—is likely to further chill Russia's relations with Europe.
Then, of course, there is the ongoing international economic crisis, which hit Russia especially hard, on the heels of pre-existing economic problems that often had political roots. The first big Russian stock market drop took place in late July, after an offhand comment by Putin sparked fears that a major steel company, Mechel, was being targeted for a Yukos-style Kremlin vendetta. At a cabinet meeting, Putin slammed Mechel for exporting raw materials at below-market prices and possibly underpaying taxes, and noted that company owner Igor Zyuzin had been invited to the meeting but had claimed to be ill. He then added, in his characteristic Tony Soprano–style lingo, that Zyuzin "ought to get better soon, or we'll have to send him a doctor and clean up these problems."
By the end of the year, the Russian market had lost 70 percent of its capitalization. Industrial output dropped sharply; the ruble reeled, and the extent to which Russia's relative prosperity of the 2000s had rested on an oil barrel became painfully evident. Writing in Moscow News on December 24, Anders Aslund, a senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, argued that the Putin government had squandered the opportunities offered by high oil prices by building up huge and inert state-controlled companies instead of modernizing the infrastructure and eradicating corruption.
The crisis also exposed the fakery of the Kremlin's feel-good propaganda machine. While state-controlled television news initially avoided the word crisis—except with regard to the West—Russian citizens rushed to convert rubles to dollars.
In December, Russia heard the first rumblings of popular protest. An announcement of stiff new tariffs on imported used cars sparked rallies and demonstrations in Russia's Far East, where importing used cars from Japan is a major source of livelihood. These protests quickly turned political, with signs that called for Putin's resignation, urged Medvedev to "stop being a wimp," and denounced United Russia as "bloodsuckers." On December 21, a peaceful rally in Vladivostok was brutally broken up by the federal riot police; several journalists were among those beaten and arrested. While television news ignored the incident, many mainstream newspapers did not. Remarkably, several local legislatures in the Russian Far East backed the protesters' demands.
Will the protests spread? In a Levada Center survey conducted in December, nearly a quarter of Russians said mass protests related to the drop in living standards were possible, and one in five said they themselves might participate. Economic hardships may also aggravate other problems, such as the tensions simmering in the Caucasus, where violence in hot spots such as Ingushetia and Dagestan has never abated.
Widespread unrest could lead to a state of emergency, perhaps with Medvedev stepping down and Putin returning to the Kremlin as de facto dictator. Another possible scenario is an attempt at state-managed liberalization, a strategy proposed in a December report by the Institute for Modern Development, a group of political experts whose board of trustees is headed by none other than Medvedev. Such a liberalization, which would likely require the resignation and scapegoating of Putin, could spin out of control into an "orange revolution"—or into a far darker scenario of descent into chaos or a totalitarian takeover.
U.S.-Russian Relations in the Age of Obama
Whatever Russia's near-term path, the Obama administration will undoubtedly pursue cooperation right away in some areas, such as checking Iran's nuclear ambitions. A review of missile defense plans could be in the works as well, though Russia's crude attempt at missile-rattling blackmail makes an agreement in this area less likely.
A NATO membership track for Georgia and Ukraine is off the table at the moment. Unfortunately, given the way NATO expansion was framed under Putin, continuing to delay these countries' possible inclusion is likely to be interpreted as a signal that they are fair game for Russian bullying. Moscow may have a legitimate interest in having friendly neighbors, but it has no more right to object to a government with an independent political course in Ukraine than Washington has to object to, say, a leftist government in Chile.
One way Obama might decide to neutralize the NATO expansion issue would be to revive the idea of future NATO membership for Russia itself, contingent on genuine democratic reforms. At the moment, the idea seems hopelessly utopian; but who knows whether it will still look that way in 2010? A Russia-enriched NATO presumably would focus its military priorities on anti-terrorist operations—or, perhaps, begin to evolve from a military alliance into a primarily political one. One potential danger of this scenario is that problems such as climate change could be redefined as "security threats," setting the stage for a far-reaching push for international regulations.
The real challenge to the Obama administration will come if there are signs of change in Russia, especially if Putin is forced to resign and Medvedev emerges as the new leader with backing from one of the Kremlin factions. Washington could find itself having to decide whether to prop up a Russian government that declares itself pro-Western and liberal but has its roots in an authoritarian regime and an illegitimate election, or watch it fall to demands for a new election whose outcome might send Russia hurtling toward "red" or "brown" extremism. (Let's not forget those nukes.)
The Putin-era backsliding toward autocracy has convinced many, both in Russia and in the West, that Russians are congenitally unfit for freedom and given to longing for empire and a czar. And indeed there are powerful strands of authoritarianism, imperialism, and nationalist paranoia in Russian society, and those elements have been assiduously cultivated by several yearsof official propaganda.
But many polls show that Russian anti-Americanism is fairly shallow. In most surveys, about two-thirds of Russians have said their attitude toward the United States is positive or mostly positive, except for spikes of negative attitudes at moments of tension between Moscow and Washington. While most Russians choose stability over democracy if they have to make a choice, majorities also favor a strong multiparty system, democratic elections, and a mixed economy that encourages the growth of small and medium-sized business.
From the vantage point of today, the incoming Obama administration has no way of knowing whether Putinism is but a detour on Russia's road to freedom or the dominant direction of Russia's future. Ultimately, that is only for Russians to decide. America's role in the next few years will be to find a delicate balance: to support liberal values without appearing to dictate far-off events; to work with Russia when necessary while making it clear that a true partnership is possible only if Russia (in Obama's words) "unclenches its fist" and renounces anti-Western, anti-liberal policy and rhetoric. The U.S. must simultaneously avoid the Yeltsin-era trap of entanglement with a corrupt and failing government and the Putin-era trap of supporting an increasingly authoritarian regime.
Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor & Fields).
]]>--Nikita Mikhalkov, filmmaker and Putin sycophant extraordinaire, is the eldest son of Sergei Mikhalkov, the Soviet-era poet/propagandist and three-time lyricist of the Soviet/Russian anthem. Originally composed in 1944, the verses later had to be tweaked to eliminate references to Stalin. When Putin resuscitated the anthem in 2000, the senior Mikhalkov, then 87, wrote entirely new lyrics, in which "the triumph of the deathless ideas of Communism" gave way to verses about "our ancestors' hallowed wisdom" and "a country watched over by God."
--In 2007 Russia celebrated November 7 as a holiday for the last time. The holiday, which originally commemorated the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and was clumsily reinvented in the Yeltsin era as a "day of national accord and reconciliation," is being retired in favor of November 4 as National Unity day, commemorating a rather obscure historical event: the defeat, in 1612, of a Polish garrison that controlled Moscow during the 17th century's "Time of Troubles." In Grani.ru, commentator Boris Sokolov points out that the new holiday contains all the principal elements of the new Russia's ideology: a strong authoritarian state (the November 4 victory was a precursor to the establishment of the Romanov monarchy), populist rhetoric (it was the victory of a "people's army," albeit led by two princes), and religion (the victory was widely credited to an icon of the Virgin carried by Moscow's liberators). Of course, it is also conveniently close to November 7.
--Amazing, but true: Post-1917 Soviet history has invariably featured alternating bald and hairy leaders. The bald Lenin was succeeded by the hairy Stalin, then the bald Khrushchev, then the hairy Brezhnev, then the bald Andropov, then the hairy Chernenko, and finally the bald Gorbachev. The tradition has continued in post-Soviet Russia: Gorbachev was succeeded by the hairy Yeltsin and then the follically challenged Putin—who is about to hand over the reins to Medvedev, with a full head of hair.
--"Medved" is Russian for "bear," the symbol of United Russia. This prompted EJ.ru columnist Anton Orekh to observe that "with Medvedev at the top, the power structure is now perfect: Medvedev the chief, a ruling party of medvedi under him, and the 'Mishki' [Little Bears] for the kids. All that's left is to rename Russia 'The Bear Den'—which would be rather fitting, in view of our cold climate and general hibernation."
]]>In his eight years as Russia's president, Vladimir Putin has clamped down on his country's newborn freedoms and returned it to a more confrontational stance toward the West. His second and constitutionally final term is scheduled to come to an end on May 7, 2008; as that date began to draw near, the perennial Kremlin power struggle that Winston Churchill once described as "a bulldog fight under the rug" grew more intense. The December 2007 elections for the Duma, the tamed Russian parliament, took a back seat to the mystery of presidential succession. Would Putin stay? Leave? Continue to rule through a figurehead heir? The only thing clear was that the decision would be made under that rug, with minimal input from the Russian people.
Putin solved part of the mystery on December 10 by endorsing a successor: deputy prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, a 42-year-old lawyer currently in charge of "national development projects." He has also accepted Medvedev's offer to take over as prime minister (which, under Russia's current system, is mainly an administrative post with no political or executive power). Barring any surprises, the top jobs in the Kremlin for the next presidential term are filled.
Yet in many ways, Russia's political future remains almost as much of a mystery as it was in the fall. The unknowns include whether 140 million residents will live in a partially free, liberalizing society or under increasingly authoritarian rule, and whether a country filled with nuclear missiles and vast energy resources will be an ally or enemy of the West.
Deciphering the Putin Plan
In late 2007,
you could be excused for thinking that the Kremlin was clearing the
way for some form of open-ended Putin presidency, if not a de facto
coronation. In October, even as the former KGB chief announced he
would join the ranks of mere mortals by heading up his United
Russia Party's list of candidates for parliamentary elections, a
third-term-for-Putin movement gathered force, with a wave of
"spontaneous" rallies, meetings, and other events around the
country. The kind of adoration lavished on the termed-out president
by his servile party and the equally servile state media did not
suggest an impending retirement. On October 7 Rossiya, one of
several government-owned national TV channels, marked Putin's 55th
birthday with a worshipful 20-minute tribute produced and narrated
by Nikita Mikhalkov, the director of the 1994 Oscar-winning film
Burnt by the Sun. Less than two weeks later, the
government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an open
letter from several leading cultural figures, including the
ubiquitous Mikhalkov, begging the dear leader to stay for a third
term. "Russia," they wrote, "needs your statesmanlike talent and
your political wisdom."
United Russia's parliamentary campaign became a national Putin love-in. City streets and squares sprouted posters and banners celebrating a previously unheard-of Putin Plan, with such Soviet-flavored slogans as "The Putin Plan Is Working!" and "You, Too, Are a Part of Putin's Plan," sometimes helpfully accompanied by circles marked "pensions," "salaries," and "student aid." A United Russia booklet titled "The Putin Plan Is Russia's Victory!" featured photo after photo of the great man inspecting troops and strolling through wheat fields. United Russia and the government-run media touted the election itself as a referendum on a man whose post-election plans remained a mystery. Putin's role as "national leader," they declared, transcended mere constitutional time frames and had to be preserved one way or another. An essay by United Russia activist Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, posted on the party's website in early November, advocated a "National Civic Council" that would formally anoint Putin as national leader.
The December parliamentary elections were brazenly rigged in favor of United Russia. Opposition leaders were all but barred from television (with the occasional exception of the private REN-TV channel, now owned by a Putin crony but still retaining vestiges of independence). Some parties were kept off the ballot: The authorities required a high number of signatures on their petitions, and many signatures were reportedly invalidated arbitrarily. Others, such as the pro-western Union of Right Forces, faced official harassment and intimidation; the police confiscated their campaign materials, and state TV rejected their ads as too negative or "extremist." In the run-up to the election, the repression grew worse. Self-styled "Marches of Dissent" in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities, organized by the opposition to show that not everyone in Russia was on board the Putin bandwagon, were routinely dispersed by special security forces, with beatings that sent dozens of people to hospital emergency rooms. Putin himself, at a November 21 rally of 5,000 supporters, railed against "those who go jackaling around foreign embassies and diplomatic missions, relying on foreign foundations and governments rather than support from their own people." The prominent "jackal" Gary Kasparov, chess grandmaster and founder of the dissenting Other Russia coalition, was arrested and detained for five days for attending a banned rally on Moscow's Pushkin Square.
On December 2, the results were in: United Russia won a whopping 64 percent of the vote, followed by 11.5 percent for the Communists, 8 percent for the misnamed "Liberal Democratic Party of Russia" (led by the clownish right-wing provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky), and just under 8 percent for a new left-leaning party called Fair Russia, which hovers somewhere between loyal opposition and junior partner to the party in power. Russia's democratic opposition finished dismally—the Union of Right Forces received slightly below 1 percent of the vote, the Yabloko ("Apple") party about 1.5 percent—though liberals were still somewhat heartened by the fact that United Russia's landslide victory wasn't even bigger.
It's hard to tell how different the results would have been in a fair contest. Media access was grossly unequal. Fraud was massive; in the southern province of Ingushetia, which is under virtual martial law, close to 100 percent of all eligible voters chose United Russia. There was also widespread vote-coercion—of soldiers on army bases, patients in hospitals, and employees at government institutions. In a post-election wrap-up commentary on the radio station Echo of Moscow, the political satirist Victor Shenderovich compared United Russia's posters thanking voters for their support to rapists sending flowers to their victims. The metaphor was a little extreme: For the most part, the Russian electorate was not so much raped as alternately seduced and bullied into submitting in front of a powerful, oil-rich provider and protector. But popular passion for the victors was clearly lacking. The fact that the Putin regime was anxious enough to defame and suppress the opposition suggests that it did not feel entirely secure.
Having sewn up its dominance in the Duma, United Russia was widely expected to try to change the constitution to let Putin stay in office. Yet one week later, on December 10, United Russia and three other pro-government parties nominated Medvedev as their presidential candidate. Putin publicly endorsed his old protégé, who in turn said on television that he would agree to run only on the condition that Putin would pick up the reins as prime minister. While Medvedev's election seemed virtually assured at press time, this news still raised more questions than it answered. Is Russia in for a non-succession succession in which Putin will remain the de facto head of state? Or would a Medvedev presidency usher in a possible liberalization? A power struggle in which the loyal protégé might turn on his mentor?
Semi-Autonomous Zone
With the rollback of
post-Soviet freedoms in the Putin era —the restoration of
censorship, the assaults on the multiparty system, even the return
of the old Soviet anthem with updated lyrics—it is tempting to view
the Putin regime as a regression to Soviet communism. Certainly,
there are striking echoes and parallels. Izvestia
television columnist Irina Petrovskaya has pointedly compared
Mikhalkov's birthday panegyric to a 1970s documentary extolling
Brezhnev. The "Putin Plan" booklet evokes Soviet-era imagery, and
there are echoes of the Stalin cult in praises of Putin's "wisdom"
and statesmanship. Putinism has even developed its equivalent of
the ubiquitous Soviet-era children's and youth organizations:
"Nashi" (Our Guys), a semi-official movement for people ages 18 to
25 that promotes old-fashioned morality and harassment of
opposition activists, and "Mishki" (Little Bears), a
Nashi-sponsored group for the eight-to-15 set that bandies about
such slogans as "Thank you, President Putin, for our stable
But Putin is not Brezhnev or Stalin. A Soviet-era Rip van Winkle waking up in Putin's Russia would not easily recognize his country. Western companies and consumer goods are omnipresent. Russian TV may be largely scrubbed of dissent, but it offers a superficially plausible simulacrum of Western-style programming, from celebrity gossip to daytime soaps to sensational, often gory crime news.
Despite periodic outbursts of anti-Western rhetoric, the Putinites are clearly anxious to be accepted by the West as equal, "civilized" partners. They have made occasional noises about a uniquely Russian political path, such as an attempt in late 2006 to popularize the concept of "sovereign democracy" (which essentially boiled down to "we'll make democracy our own way—butt out!"). But they do not try to assert, as Soviet leaders did, that they have a different and better conception of human rights and freedoms; they just claim that rights and freedoms in the usual Western sense are thriving in Russia, with their exercise merely hampered a little by the hardships of transition. There has been some partial rehabilitation of the Soviet period—particularly of Putin's beloved alma mater, the KGB—but this has its limits; a controversial high school history textbook recently omitted from its final version a particularly odious chapter presenting a whitewashed Stalin. If Putinism has an ideology, it is not Marxism but a pseudo-populist statism laced with religion, which is touted as society's moral guide and foundation. (The Russian Orthodox Church, in particular, is closely allied with the government.)
The practice behind the rhetoric, meanwhile, is a corrupt crony capitalism in which public/private corporate hybrids roam the land—dominated by Gazprom, the oil-and-gas leviathan. The boundaries between business and government are infinitely flexible. (The Russian political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin has dubbed this bureaucratic business class "bureness.") It is a system in which an obscure ex-KGB man turned oil trader named Gennady Timchenko, a longtime Putin pal, is worth some $14 billion as co-owner of the Russian/Swedish petroleum export company Gunvor. It is a system in which other Friends of Vlad control virtually all of Russia's oil and gas industry. It is a system in which, according to The Moscow Times, United Russia sold slots on its candidate list for as much as $4 million.
In short, Putinism is not a return to communism so much as a movement toward the capitalism of Soviet caricature: the rule of robber barons who control the state behind a façade of pretend democracy, with religion as an opiate for the masses and televised bread and circuses to further pacify the people.
Yet under this corrupt authoritarian regime, there remains a
semi-free space that would have been unthinkable under totalitarian
Soviet rule. It is a space that permits some latitude for the print
media; even the pro-government daily Izvestia still publishes
dissenting voices such as
Petrovskaya and Maksim Sokolov, a commentator who directs his
caustic swipes equally at the government and the opposition. Echo
of Moscow, the radio station whose independent future seemed in
question a few months ago in the hands of a new pro-government
management, continues to provide a platform to vocal critics of the
regime. Between the radio, the newspapers, and growing access to
the Internet, free speech has a solid foothold in Russia.
This niche market is constantly under threat. In 2007, an opposition website was fined 20,000 rubles (about $820) for publishing an article that referred to Putin as "Russia's phallic symbol." In December, New Times reporter Natalia Morari—a Moldovan citizen with legal residency in Russia who has written several articles exposing corruption—was unexpectedly denied re-entry to the country following a trip to Israel, on unspecified "national security" grounds.
And yet, in this semi-autonomous space, surprises still abound. For instance:
• In November, the political satirist Shenderovich held a solitary protest on a Moscow street with a "Free Gary Kasparov!" sign. (Under Russian law, lone protests, unlike group events, can be held without official authorization.) After politely declining a police request to leave, Shenderovich was suddenly joined by a smirking young man armed with an opposition party sign—which immediately turned his legal one-man protest into unlawful assembly. As both were hustled into a police car, the young man unabashedly admitted that he was a plant. After a few hours at the police precinct, Shenderovich was released (but not before signing autographs for the cops). In January, the case against him ended in acquittal.
• Petrovskaya's scathing Izvestia review of the Putin birthday tribute, initially killed by the editors, was eventually allowed to run (albeit paired with an opposing viewpoint) after the story was discussed on Echo of Moscow and picked up by liberal websites such as Grani.ru.
• The open letter begging Putin to stay for another term "in the name of Russia's art community" brought forth a public backlash from other artists, including the popular singer and Duma member Iosif Kobzon. On October 25, the NTV channel's debate program At the Bar had Mikhalkov square off against writer Venedikt Yerofeyev, who castigated the filmmaker for encouraging Putin to violate the constitution and addressing him in servile terms more befitting a sultan than a democratically elected president. When a testy Mikhalkov asked, "Who told you I'm promoting a personality cult?" Yerofeyev shot back, "I'm telling you." Three of the four in-studio judges declared Mikhalkov the winner, but the viewer call-in vote went for Yerofeyev, 90,000 to 52,000.
Writing on Grani.ru, the columnist Adrian Piontkovsky argued that the program may have been a small but important turning point in Russia's political life. The independent-minded portion of society found its voice and spoke against the "government-fostered little personality cult" of Putin. It's hard to say whether this popular reaction, along with the tepid landslide of December 2, had anything to do with Putin's decision not to seek a third term. Notably, too, the essay advocating Putin's confirmation as "national leader" was removed from United Russia's website after a chorus of pointed criticism. (In another curious development, the Nashi youth organization, built largely around Putin worship, underwent a rapid decline by the end of 2007. Its rallies thinned, and its loss of official favor was evident when it attempted to picket the European Commission offices in Moscow to protest the denial of travel visas to some of its activists. The demonstration ended with police intervention and arrests.)
Russian civil society, then, may not be as dead as it seems. And Russia's repressive machine, despite its petty viciousness, is far from reopening the gates of the gulag.
Wishing for a Better Czar
What will
happen to Putin's machine as he formally leaves office? There is
little doubt that it will be used, if necessary, to ensure an
uneventful succession. Already, Kasparov has been denied the
opportunity to register his presidential bid because the initiative
group for his nomination was unable—apparently due to
behind-the-scenes government pressure—to lease a space to hold the
nomination conference by the registration deadline. At press time,
it appears that the other leading opposition candidate, Putin's
former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, will be disqualified from
running, on the grounds of allegedly invalid signatures on his
nominating petitions (though in any case, his chances of winning
were only theoretically above zero). In Russia, the introduction of
Dmitry Medvedev as "the next president" is not merely a figure of
speech, as it is in America. Every Russian journalist assumes that
the election results are a foregone conclusion, with a "play
communist" and a "play liberal" joining Medvedev on the ballot
merely for decency's sake.
But what then? Putin has vowed, more than once, that there will be no redistribution of power from the presidency to the office of prime minister. No one knows whether to take him at his word. It is widely believed that Medvedev was picked because he is a Putin protégé who will be easily controlled by his former boss. Yet a number of Russian commentators suggest there may come a day when even the "good boy" Medvedev will realize that real power is now in his hands to use as he pleases.
Many liberals are at least somewhat encouraged by this situation. They anticipate the growth of a dual power structure, an unwieldy beast with its loyalties divided between Putin and Medvedev. Political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin argues that at the very least, under a Medvedev/Putin (or Putin/Medvedev) regime, different interest groups within the state-corporate leviathan will solidify into competing factions that unwittingly act as checks and balances on each other. Still others speculate that Putin is not interested in maintaining an active role in Russian politics and wants to stay close to the center of power only to avoid being tossed to the wolves in case the economy falters and the new government needs a scapegoat.
Some dissidents even suggest that Medvedev is, in the words of the columnist and radio commentator Yulia Latynina, the "best of successors"—the standard-bearer, perhaps, of Putinism with a human face. In the past, Medvedev has cautiously voiced concern about the government's assault on the YUKOS oil company (owned by Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky), and has criticized the aforementioned concept of "sovereign democracy." He is also one of the few men in Putin's inner circle who does not have a KGB background. Medvedev belongs, Latynina notes hopefully, to a different, post-Soviet generation. (Of course, no one knows how that will play out. The political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky cautions that Medvedev may take steps to curb political speech on the Internet because, unlike the older-generation Putin, he understands the Web's power and relevance.)
So three months before the presidential election, Russian liberals were reduced to hoping, yet again, for a better Czar—or for a good-Czar/bad-Czar system whose inherent tensions may cause the authoritarian regime to collapse upon itself. Yet there may also be some other checks on the Russian state, from the elites' desire for acceptance by the West to the small and battered voice of Russia's own civil society. Post-Communist Russian democracy, like Communism itself, is dead. The authoritarian system that has risen on its wreckage is not a pretty sight. But there are still signs of life.
Contributing Editor Cathy Young is the author of
Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor &
The controversy surrounding The Golden Compass, the recently released screen adaptation of the first book of Philip Pullman's best-selling fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, was not exactly unexpected. Pullman, a 61-year-old British writer of fantasy and mystery novels for children and young adults, has been dubbed "the most dangerous man in Britain" by Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens. He is a self-proclaimed atheist who has referred to himself, tongue in cheek, as being "of the devil's party." He makes no secret of the fact that his books are intended as a sweeping attack not only on organized religion but on the monotheistic concept of God.
Yet the world of Pullman's sacrilegious epic is not a conventionally materialistic one. It includes all the basic elements of Christian theology, from God and angels to the souls of the dead, but in a way that turns the traditional religious viewpoint on its head. The phrase "his dark materials" comes from a passage in John Milton's Paradise Lost in which Satan contemplates the possibility that God may use "his dark materials to create more worlds"—a reference not only to the multiple worlds of Pullman's universe but to his retelling of the Miltonian epic with the rebel angels as the good guys.
The film version of the first novel, brought to the screen in December by New Line Cinema and marketed as a Lord of the Rings–style grand epic fantasy, has been scrubbed of explicit references to religion—enough to pacify the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other mainstream religious organizations. (William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, unappeased, still called for a boycott.) There is a certain irony to this, since the movie opens on the heels of an atheist revival of sorts, heralded by such recent books as Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
It remains to be seen whether the two sequels, if they get made, will manage to navigate the dangerous waters of Pullman's narrative and to translate his anti-religious message into a general anti-authoritarian one without diluting it beyond recognition. In any case, it is a safe bet that the movie, which opened to mixed reviews and a respectable though not spectacular box office performance, will lead to a resurgent interest in Pullman's books, not only among adventure and fantasy fans but among readers interested in the case against religion and for a secular morality. As a novelist, Pullman may be to militant atheism what Ayn Rand was to militant capitalism: a writer who can convey important ideas through frequently riveting fiction but can't always stop those ideas from congealing into rigid ideology.
Pullman's Parallel Universe
Who is Philip
Pullman? A Christian-bashing God hater or, as the liberal Catholic
writer Donna Freitas has argued, a profoundly unorthodox religious
thinker? A propagandist for godlessness or a master of storytelling
whose enchantment draws in both children and adults? This much is
certain: His blend of fantasy and philosophy has been highly
successful. The Dark Materials trilogy, hailed for
skillful plotting, exquisite prose style, and imaginative fantastic
landscapes as well as challenging ideas, has sold about 12 million
copies worldwide. (The Golden Compass, published in 1995,
was followed in 1997 by the second volume, The Subtle
Knife, and then in 2000 by The Amber Spyglass, which
became the first children's book to win the prestigious Whitbread
Prize for literature.) The series has earned Pullman a devoted
following among well-educated adults as well as children.
The books' greatest strengths are several memorable characters—above all the spunky and precocious 12-year-old heroine, Lyra Belacqua, raised as a ward of a college at Oxford—and an equally memorable alternate world. For Lyra's Oxford is not "our" Oxford. It exists in a vaguely Edwardian-era England that has sophisticated flying craft and research into particle physics, in a world with such countries as Muscovy and Texas—and a powerful, oppressive, united Christian Church whose hierarchy, the Magisterium, is based in Geneva. This world is populated by witches who fly and live for hundreds of years and Arctic tribes of intelligent white bears who wear armor and are skilled metalworkers. Most unusually, every human being in this universe has a "daemon," a talking animal that embodies his or her soul; their bond is so close that separation by more than a few feet causes agony to both. A child's daemon can change into any animal, but it "settles" at puberty, taking on a shape that reflects the human's identity: dogs for loyal servants, birds for free spirits, and so on.
Pullman excels at fleshing out his imagined universe, with its unique technologies, its social rules (there is a strict taboo against touching another person's daemon), and its linguistic quirks (in Lyra's English, chocolate is "chocolatl" and electricity is "anbaric power"). He excels, too, at drawing the reader into the story and deftly pulling together seemingly unrelated strands of the plot.
At the start of The Golden Compass, Lyra learns that her uncle, Lord Asriel, is leaving on a polar expedition to study something called Dust—a mysterious substance, invisible to the naked eye, that the Church regards as evil and sinful. This development coincides with a series of kidnappings that claims Lyra's best friend, Roger, and the appearance of a beautiful aristocratic woman who befriends Lyra and is connected to the abductions. Lyra's journey to rescue Roger puts her on the trail of a hideous Church-sponsored experiment to keep children pure of sin. It also puts her on the trail of Lord Asriel, who is working on an experiment of his own to open a window into parallel worlds.
As events unfold in the next two volumes, it turns out that Lord Asriel's real goal is nothing less than to overthrow the rule of God, and that Lyra has a special role in this quest: A prophecy names her as the new Eve, destined to free humanity from the yoke of sin and death. Lyra's allies on this worthy mission include witches, bears, rebel angels, and two people from "our" London: Mary Malone, a physicist and ex-nun, and Will Parry, a boy Lyra's age with a unique destiny of his own. After harrowing adventures and great sacrifices, Lyra devotes herself to building a "Republic of Heaven" in her world to replace the false promise of the Kingdom of Heaven. This republic, our young heroes learn, must be based on human self-government rather than divine authority, and on the conviction that we should live life to its fullest in this world rather than aspire to bliss in the next one.
In Pullman's universe, God, also known as the Authority, is worse than nonexistent: He is a tyrannical fraud. According to Pullman's peculiar theogony, in the beginning there was Dust, a substance generated when matter develops consciousness. Dust condensed into beings of pure spirit—angels—and the first of them established his dominance over the others by falsely telling them he had created them and the world. (In the final volume of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, this entity is explicitly identified as the Judeo-Christian God.) In a similar twist, the afterlife is real, but it's a bleak, desolate prison camp for the souls of the dead, and true salvation lies in the oblivion expected by atheists. In a powerful sequence deliberately modeled on the Christian story of the Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ descends into the underworld to liberate the righteous, Will and Lyra invade the world of the dead and lead the souls out into a living world where they blissfully dissolve into atoms.
Pullman deserves credit for tackling ideas of this depth and magnitude in his novels, and for his ambitious reimagining of myth and theology (at times bringing to mind Mikhail Bulgakov's classic Russian fantasy novel The Master and Margarita, with its unique take on the Devil and the life of Jesus). Unfortunately, His Dark Materials suffers from serious flaws both as literature and as a religious critique.
Evangelizing Atheism
While Pullman has
said that he is interested in "telling a story, not preaching a
sermon," he slides more and more frequently into preaching as the
story goes on. Some of his favorite ideas—for instance, that the
human body with its senses is far superior to the fleshless spirit
of the angels, or that the best afterlife is to become one with
nature—are stated again and again and again and again. The
idea that the transition from childhood innocence to adult
experience should be welcomed, not feared, is illustrated by a
heavy-handed plot twist in which Lyra and Will's sexual awakening
proves to be the key to the world's salvation. When ideology and
literature collide, literature suffers. The Amber Spyglass
is not quite on a par with the first two novels: Its new characters
and worlds are generally less interesting, far too much space is
given to sententious musings about the meaning of life in a
post-God world, and eventually you start to feel that Pullman is
trying to cram too many messages into his narrative, even if that
means unnecessarily dragging it out.
He stacks the deck too. It's not clear, for instance, why the Authority needs to keep the souls of the dead in such a wretched place and not even bother to reward the faithful. Conversely, to sell the idea that "the sweet and most desirable end" for the souls of the dead is to drift into nothingness, Pullman depicts this dissolution as an ecstatic moment in which the souls' atoms not only become one with the universe but mingle happily with the particles of deceased loved ones (whom, for some reason, they couldn't find among their fellow ghosts).
Worse still, Pullman paints every character connected to the Church or religion, from the fascistic zealots of the Magisterium to the crazed monk in the world of the dead who stubbornly believes he's in paradise, with an antipathy that sometimes recalls Ayn Rand's demonization of her welfare-state bureaucrats. (In a 2003 interview with the Christian magazine The Third Way, Pullman conceded that this tendency was "an artistic flaw.") Those on the anti-God side, meanwhile, are judged far more leniently. Lord Asriel, who sacrifices the life of an innocent child to his single-minded crusade, is still a heroic if flawed figure. The witches can be ruthless and vindictive—we learn that one witch queen punished a tribe that failed to honor her by slaughtering the white tigers it worshipped as totem gods—but they are still portrayed sympathetically because they are nature-loving, Church-hating pagans. The double standard grates at times.
When Time Out New York asked him about his anti-religious message, Pullman replied, "The position I've always taken is that religious intolerance and tyranny is just one aspect of a wider problem, which is the tendency in human societies toward absolutism.…We have to struggle all the time against that tendency toward wanting the one 'true' answer that abolishes all the others forever. That's true in politics, and it's true in religion, and it's true in every aspect of human life." But Pullman is soft-pedaling his position. His Dark Materials, at least, explicitly singles out religion as the major source of oppression throughout human history. "That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling," the tiger-slaying witch queen says with the author's obvious approval. In Pullman's novels, religion is not credited with any positive contributions to human society (whereas, in real history, the Catholic Church played a key role in ending such practices as forced marriage and infanticide) and is blamed for some things to which it has little if any connection (such as genital mutilation intended to prevent sexual pleasure).
The Third Way interview offers an interesting window into Pullman's beliefs. At first he asserts, very much in the vein of Dawkins and Hitchens, that faith in one God is itself the source of evil: "Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him." Asked about the crimes committed by atheistic totalitarian regimes, Pullman responds that "they functioned psychologically in exactly the same way," with their own sacred texts and exalted prophets: "The fact that they proclaimed that there was no God didn't make any difference: it was a religion, and they acted in the way any totalitarian religious system would."
The interviewer presses on, pointing out that in that case, perhaps belief in one God isn't really the root of the problem—and that not only Stalin but even the secular French revolutionaries in the 18th century killed more dissenters than any Church authority. Pullman fires back with a non sequitur: "Well, that was very comforting as the flames were licking round your toes." When he finally acknowledges that "the religions are special cases of the general human tendency to exalt one doctrine above all others," it comes across less as a reconsideration of his views than as a grudging concession. There are no reports of Pullman's plans to write a sequel to His Dark Materials in which the attempt to build an earthly Republic of Heaven ends in firing squads and gulags.
An Attack on Narnia
The intolerant
underside of Pullman's views also can be seen in his intemperate
attack on C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia,
launched in a 1998 essay in The Guardian. He is hardly the
first to accuse Lewis of sexism for his tendency to relegate girls
to subordinate roles, and of racism for his negative depiction of
the dark-skinned Calormenes. What stands out is the nastiness of
Pullman's rhetoric: He calls the Narnia books "ugly and poisonous
things" and "nauseating drivel," and he declares that he hates them
"with a deep and bitter passion."
Pullman's specific criticisms of Lewis—which include not only racism and misogyny but class snobbery and a "sadomasochistic relish for violence" and the elevation of childhood innocence over adulthood—are cautiously supported by some critics and hotly disputed by others. If you approach His Dark Materials in a similarly uncharitable spirit, you could find similar grounds for complaint.
Sexism? Heroic though Lyra is, it is mostly Will who fights and who gets to possess a special mystical weapon, while some of Lyra's greatest feats are accomplished by the "feminine" method of clever manipulation and lies. The trilogy's main adult female character, Mrs. Coulter, is virtually a cliché of feminine evil—a cold, ruthless siren who schemes, lies, and seduces her way to power—until she is partly, and not very plausibly, redeemed by a spark of stereotypical feminine virtue: maternal love.
Class snobbery? The illegitimate but aristocratic-born Lyra is vastly superior in intelligence and initiative to the lower-class children she befriends; the other hero, Will, is the son of an officer in the Royal Marines. Sadomasochistic violence? Pullman's trilogy features some very unpleasant deaths and mutilations.
This is not to say that Pullman is a misogynist, a class snob, or a sadist, only that he should be more cautious in branding others with such labels. It is not much of a stretch to think that Pullman sees himself as the anti-Lewis. Third Way asked Pullman if he is "a conscious antidote to C. S. Lewis, seeking to do for a moral atheism what he did for Christianity." Pullman gave a curious reply: "It's largely nonsense, of course" (emphasis added). Writing in the British Spectator, critic Caroline Moore argues that "Pullman, for all his superior imaginative powers, is paradoxically more intolerant, more fiercely exclusive and more violently propagandist than Lewis." That's a shame, because there is much in Pullman's message that deserves to be commended, including the idea that, in a world without God, one can find meaning in human consciousness, human work, human freedom, and human responsibility to the world.
Yet His Dark Materials has already earned a place of honor in contemporary popular literature and may well end up as long-lived and beloved as the Narnia series. An interesting if often frustrating thinker, a masterful if flawed storyteller, Philip Pullman deserves the larger audience he is likely to find with the release of the Golden Compass movie. For some readers, his stories will stimulate a discussion of religion and freedom, raising tough questions for believers and nonbelievers alike. For others, it will be the stories themselves that endure: tales of bravery and magic, of heroic children and armored bears, that can stand on their own regardless of any self-consciously heretical message.
Contributing Editor Cathy Young (email@example.com) is
the author of Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to
Achieve True Equality (Free Press).
A thoughtful, poignant post by Shaun Mullen at The Moderate Voice (and in a longer version on his own blog) commemorates yesterday's anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Mullen opens with a heartbreaking image of human suffering -- the death of a three-year-old boy who was outside riding his tricycle when the bomb hit. Then, he examines the arguments for and against the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and concludes that Harry Truman made the right call.
Oliver Kamm, British commentator and liberal hawk, makes the same argument in The Guardian, challenging the "alternative history" which claims that Japan was on the brink of surrender and the nuclear bombs were dropped in order to intimidate Stalin's Soviet Union. Says Kamm:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire - and for Japan itself. One of Japan's highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.
Here, I will say that my knowledge of World War II is limited. I
don't know who is factually correct about the situation in the
Pacific theater at the end of the war. (The revisionist case is
made here by the
Hoover Institution's David Henderson.) The argument that the
primary goal of dropping the bombs was to intimidate the Soviets
doesn't make much sense, given that we allowed the Soviet Union to
keep all of Eastern Europe, half of Germany, and the Baltics as
part of its empire.
On a purely instinctive level, I am of course appalled by
justifications for the killing of about 150,000 civilians, many of
them children. One cannot, if one is a normal person, justify such
an act without doing violence to one's moral sense. But are there
times when the unspeakable is the lesser of two evils? Obviously,
arguments that noble ends can justify terrible means can lead to
some dark places, and such arguments have also served countless
tyrants as excuses for barbarism. The danger of becoming "as bad as
the enemy" is real.
But at the opposite extreme, the view that all use of terrible
means is equal represents a kind of moral laziness, an abdication
of critical distinctions and context. When some have the will
and the power to do evil things -- to enslave and murder -- there
is generally no way to stop them except by force; and when we
choose to use force, terrible choices must sometimes be
made. Yes, even necessary violence, particularly when it
kills innocents, damages the soul. I will agree that we should all
find it a little harder to live with ourselves knowing that the
victory over evil in World War II was bought with the lives of so
many innocents, not only at Hiroshima but in Dresden or in Tokyo,
where the men, women and children killed by "conventional"
firebombing were as dead as the victims of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Nonetheless, it was as clearcut a victory
over evil as there has ever been in history.
And that's why what truly shocked me was the responses to Oliver
Kamm on the Guardian website, where many of the
anti-Kamm posts were truly striking in their venom and their
strident moral equivalency:
What a disgusting article. For me, the dropping of an atomic bomb on any town anywhere is entirely despicable. In my opinion it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that whilst Americans may be lovely people when they are getting their way, they will stoop to any depths to ensure their personal gain in the face of opposition. They will also, always hide behind "holier than thou" reasons for their contemptible behaviour.
Wow. Americans are just shocking in their denial. By this sick logic the jihadis are completely justified when they attack American civilians in massive acts of terror - which I might add are mere blips in comparison to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We live in a sick culture, where 60 years have passed, and there isnt even a shred of shame with regards to this heinous crime. For the sake of our species - Boycott America.
"Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome."
The other side also did similar terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome which became war crimes.
It is the winner who decides what is or is not a war crime.America has ever been a psychopathic bully ever since it's (sic) first days and the genocide against the indiginous Americans. Why all these attempts to justify what was clearly a war crime greater than all others?
The US has never learned the lesson of treating one's enemies with grace and magnanimity once those enemies have lost--it is always vindictive, always demands unconditional surrender, complete acquiescence to US subjugation.
What is absent from these comments (and many others like them) is any awareness of things like the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March, or the Holocaust for that matter; or of the fact that America's supposed determination to crush her enemies manifested itself in rebuilding postwar Germany and leaving Japan with a political system that allowed it to become a strong economic rival to America herself. A few commenters suggest that America should have allowed the Soviets to end the war by invading Japan, blithely unaware of the hell on earth that would have awaited the Japanese under Soviet occupation. This isn't mere ignorance; it's a profound conviction that only evil done by the West, and above all by "psychopathic bully" America, truly matters. Meanwhile, posters who point out Japanese atrocities in World War II are rebuffed with accusations of "the implicitly racist overtone [of] recounting the endless 'savagery' of the Japanese."
When anti-Americanism becomes so extreme that it turns the U.S. into the bad guy of World War II, that's truly frightening and depressing. As for whether the bombing was indeed the least evil of all available options: again, I don't know. I'm sure there is room for legitimate debate on this issue. But that debate is almost entirely drowned out by hate and self-righteousness. The insistence on moral purity has turned to moral blindness.
See more at The Y-Files.
The Scott Thomas Beauchamp brouhaha, if you have been following it, is a proverbial tempest in a teapot. The claims Beauchamp made (as the barely pseudonymous "Scott Thomas") in his "Baghdad Diarist" New Republic article about American soldiers behaving badly are fairly trivial; the war in Iraq does not stand or fall on their truthfulness. Nonetheless, the blogosphere's reaction to the story has been sharply divided along pro-war and anti-war lines almost from the start, and this across-the-board knee-jerk response is, perhaps, the most interesting (if depressing) aspect of the entire affair.
Right meme: it's a liberal media conspiracy to besmirch the war effort by encouraging a leftist literary poseur to publish fictional or embellished stories painting soldiers as depraved sociopaths. Left meme: it's a right-wing cyber-lynching of a soldier telling the ugly truth about the war. TNR's announcement that it has confirmed the story to its satisfaction has not changed any minds.
There is no question that some of the right-wing rhetoric directed at Beauchamp and at TNR was indeed shockingly ugly, violent, and paranoid (Beauchamp was a leftist mole who had deliberately infiltrated the military in order to destroy it from within!). But the defense of Beauchamp from the anti-war camp seems misguided. For one thing, the one detail that TNR admits he got wrong -- the incident which opens his piece, in which Beauchamp and a buddy publicly mock a woman disfigured in an IED explosion, did not occur in Iraq but in Kuwait while awaiting deployment -- is not a triviality. After all, with the correct location, the anecdote would not have fit into Beauchamp's narrative. His point was that war messes up one's moral compass, including his own. If this happened before he was in a war zone, there goes the moral of the story.
Far less attention has been paid to the curious matter of Beauchamp's first diarist piece, "War Bonds". In it, Beauchamp chats with a friendly Iraqi boy while changing a flat tire, only to find out the next day that the boy, who called himself "James Bond," had his tongue cut out by insurgents for talking to Americans. This horrifying tale abounds in improbabilities -- above all, the fact that a month or two later Beauchamp sees the same kid back on the same streets, hanging around Americans and waiting for handouts, smiling happily and sprinting after a soccer ball. His spirits are apparently undampened by the mutilation or by fear of further reprisals, and his family has not thought to keep him off the streets, or maybe try to get out of that neighborhood. None of it rings true -- though I'm certainly not denying that the insurgents could have done such a thing. (For more analysis of that piece, see my post at The Y-Files.) Of course, no one questioned that story because no one has a political or emotional stake in disproving atrocities by insurgents.
So yes, I think there are good reasons to question Beauchamp's accuracy, and neither TNR nor liberal bloggers are doing themselves any favors by coming uncritically to his defense. But conservative bloggers aren't covering themselves in glory either when they stridenly insist that TNR gave Beauchamp a platform in a nefarious plot to smear and slander the troops. TNR is not some far-left rag that revels in spitting on American soldiers; it is a centrist magazine that initially supported the war in Iraq. Indeed, while I think the story of the boy who had his tongue cut out raises further doubts about Beauchamp's credibility, it also points to the aburdity of claims that TNR editors were eager to publish Beauchamp because his writings put U.S. troops in Iraq in a bad light. I think Beauchamp wanted to write gritty, vivid, human-interest-rich accounts of the horrors of war, and TNR wanted to publish them.
I also think Andrew Sullivan probably has a point when he speculates that one reason for the Beauchamp brouhaha is that, unable to discredit the real bad news coming from Iraq, war supporters have targeted the Beauchamp story as a weak link. There are also far too many on the right who do not want to hear, or to accept, any bad news about the conduct or the morale of American troops.
But none of that changes the fact that a magazine like TNR owes its readers real accuracy, not just a "close enough." Truth in journalism matters; that's why the Beauchamp saga is not entirely trivial. And even those who are rightly disgusted by the hysteria about "slandering the troops" should not overlook this fact. In the end, Beauchamp and his persecutors may well deserve each other.
Extended version cross-posted at The Y-Files.
]]>Patterico covers what should be a blogosphere scandal but isn't, for some reason.
A few days ago, one of Patterico's regular commenters, Carlitos, informed him that a comment he had posted in a debate on abortion on the Liberal Avenger blog was altered (by someone with admin privileges) to include this lurid passage:
Still, there are some valid and acceptable reasons to have abortions - reasons I think we can all agree with. For example, when my sister and I were in Junior high school we used to experiment sexually - you know, the usual stuff that horny, young brothers and sisters do: rimming, finger-fucking, dry humping, etc. We practically spent the entire summer between 7th and 8th grade in bed - it was great. Of course, by the end of the summer my sister was pregnant. Given our age and maturity levels, we knew she had to get an abortion.
After Patterico emailed Liberal Avenger about this, the comment
disappeared. However, a screenshot was preserved, and Patterico
posted it on his blog on February 13 at 6:51
Liberal Avenger responded (February 13, 11:03 a.m.):
I don't know what the big deal is. The comment appears to be gone. I never saw it. I have no reason to believe that it ever existed in the first place. Patterico's screenshot is meaningless as by its very existence it had to have been manipulated by Photoshop. I'm not saying that he made it up, but I'm saying that in order for somebody to take a screenshot and crop/reduce it to post on their blog it has to be pulled into Photoshop or another image editing practice. Once that happens, the content of that image belongs to Patterico - not me. I've learned this through the course of reading countless shrill wingnut blog posts about image manipulation over the past year.
He then concluded:
I'm closing this thread to commenting. Patterico - shame on you!
On Patterico's site, Liberal Avenger posted:
Yeah, I'm not too concerned about carlitos suing me because of something Patterico made up.
A few hours later, Patterico posted a
full screenshot of the altered comment (which he had previously
cropped for size).
Liberal Avenger then
admitted in Patterico's thread that he had personally altered
Carlito's comment, and offered a charming defense:
The comment in question as originally written by him was an elitist swipe at poor/minority women. It was yet another bogus collection of facts and innuendo to support the racist/classist opinion that most women seeking abortions use abortion as a casual means of birth control. His argument consisted of several variations on the old "the bitch had an abortion because she didn't want pregnancy to interfere with her fabulous ski vacation" canard.
In fact, Carlito had posted information from this birth control
website about women's reasons for having abortions. He also
says that he actually made fun of the "ski trip" rationale. But
let's say, for argument's sake, that Carlito's comment was a
collection of putrid ideological clichés. Does that make Liberal
Avenger's "prank" okay? Would it be okay for, say, Jeff Goldstein to edit a
comment by a poster spouting clichés about The Evil Patriarchy to
include a lurid description of her secret fantasy of being
dominated by a big, hairy, musclebound, hung-like-a-horse male
Liberal Avenger
also now claims now claims that he was just kidding when he
said that the edited comment may never have existed:
It's hilarious that they can't tell when they're being teased.
Well, if there was any humor in Avenger's "Patterico -- shame on
you!" February 13 post, I certainly didn't see it.
In a ghoulish twist, Patterico's
follow-up post revealed that the rewritten comment was
especially disturbing to Carlito because his only sister died
several years ago. Admittedly, Liberal Avenger was unaware of this
when he altered the comment. However, he is aware of it now,
and he has yet to offer an apology. Instead, he and his left-wing
continue to treat this as a big joke on his blog, and he
continues to tell Patterico and his commenters to "stop taking
yourselves so seriously."
It's a shame, because I have encountered Liberal Avenger on Eric Muller's Is That Legal blog and elsewhere -- he first came to my attention in debates over Michelle Malkin's odious book In Defense of Internment -- and have generally found him to be a reasonable and interesting commenter. I'm disappointed that he has both compromised his integrity, first with the alteration of Carlito's comment and then with the attempted cover-up, and played into the worst right-wing stereotypes of liberals as intolerant of conservative dissent. With avengers like these, liberals don't need enemies.
Liberal Avenger's "prank" is not only juvenile, unethical, and offensive; it is also dangerous to blog discourse. If people know that a blog administrator can tamper with comments at will, it could have a truly chilling effect on speech in the blogosphere. Any blogger, liberal or conservative, should take this very seriously indeed.
Extended version cross-posted at The Y Files.
]]>I'm coming a little late to the farewell party for Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte as blog coordinator for the Edwards campaign. Now, Marcotte's sister-in-arms, Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister, has stepped down as well.
Some, such as my Reason colleague David Weigel, are concerned that the Marcotte/McEwan brouhaha may backfire against all bloggers who don't write like political hacks. I think outspoken bloggers have nothing to fear unless they aspire to actually become paid political hacks. (Andrew Sullivan has a good comment on this.) What I find more troubling is that the criticism of Marcotte has focused so much on her swipes at religion, and so little on her brand of feminism -- a cult of female victimhood rife with militant anti-male bigotry.
A number of publications have quoted her sarcastic comment on the Duke alleged sexual assault case: "Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair." But it's hard to appreciate the full flavor of that comment without its full context. This is the post that Marcotte scrubbed from her blog after it attracted unwanted attention in the wake of her new job with the Edwards campaign. It seems she also deleted some of her comments in the thread, preserved here. Even with Marcotte's posts gone, the thread remains quite revealing: Marcotte's like-minded regulars (particularly ginmar) verbally assault, insult, and mock any dissenter. Responding to a feminist blogger who says she is a survivor of sexual assault herself but is concerned about fair treatment for the accused players, ginmar offers this gem:
Natalia, I don't think anybody cares if you're a rape victim and you toe the party line when it comes to "But what about the menz!"
(Yes, I know ginmar is not Amanda Marcotte, but ideologically
they're pretty much peas in a pod.)
A sampling of Marcotte's other posts on the Duke case can be found
on this
page. Anyone who questions the guilt of the accused players, in
her book, is a "rape apologist." In
this post, she fumes:
Kathleen Parker has been ... building a long case that unless the victim is 9 years old and a virgin and white and blonde and her attacker kills her and he mutiliates her body, then rape isn't so much a crime as a feminist plot to put all men in jail so that we can, I don't know, wear sweatpants more or something.
Here are three
columns, discussing the "rush to judgment" in the Duke case. In
last of these columns, Parker actually expresses concern that
the alleged victim may be seen as less deserving because she's a
stripper, and writes, "A woman raped is a woman raped, no matter
what her ill-chosen profession."
Marcotte's crude "satire" is far worse than a caricature of Parker's views. A caricature is an exaggeration of truth. Marcotte's summary of Parker's position is an outright, slanderous lie.
I should add here that I have been on the receiving end of the Marcotte method of polemics myself. On July 25, 2005, Marcotte made a post at Pandagon titled, Cathy Young to battered wives-"Stop hitting yourself!" This in reference to my Boston Globe column on the Violence Against Women Act. Somehow, my discussion of the false assumption that mutual violence always involves male aggression/female self-defense becomes a call for throwing battered women in jail if they fight back or so much as accidentally hit the abuser while flailing around trying to escape. See also Marcotte's post here at Feministing, and more of my discussion here.
And finally, best for last: an October 19, 2006 post in which Marcotte explains that there's no such thing as man-hating feminists. She's particularly unhappy with the "made-up word 'misandry.'" (Actually, the word "misandry," or "hatred of males," appears in the Webster's Encyclopaedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language [1996] and its origins are traced to 1945-50. That patriarchal conspiracy sure is insidious!) Sayeth Marcotte:
This is a word that was made up by men on a victim trip because they don't get to abuse and oppress women as much as they'd really like to, and it's an attempt to pretend there's a tradition of man-hating so severe it deserves a word of its own. ... Attempts to create a false equivalence are about the worst sort of victim tripping imaginable. It wasn't the girls that were sent out of the room so boys could be raped and killed in recent school shootings.
Marcotte, I assume, is referring to these two
cases. The horrific actions of two severely disturbed men
become her paradigm for male attitudes toward women in our society.
(Was serial killer
John Wayne Gacy a self-hating misandrist male because he killed
only boys?)
Marcotte's conclusion:
The phrase "man-hater" is more an insult to men than to feminists. Anyone who uses it generally means that the person thus accused is a rapist-hater, abuser-hater, sexist-hater. And when you call someone a "man-hater" who is actually hating on sexists, abusers, and rapists, you imply all men are these things. And they are not. So who are really the man-haters when that phrase is being wielded? It's not the feminists; it's the men implying that hating rape or hating abuse is the same thing as hating men.
Or maybe the person using the phrase "man-hater" means that the person thus accused is ready to presume any man to be a rapist or abuser at the drop of an accusation, no matter how non-existent the evidence. For a stark demonstration of such bigotry, look no further than the Marcotte/ginmar lynch-mob mentality in the Duke case.
Extended version cross-posted at The Y Files.
]]>The February edition of Reason has my column on fan fiction, "The Fan Fiction Phenomena: What Faust, Hamlet, and Xena the Warrior Princess have in common," in which I discuss fan-written stories based on television, film, and book characters. (As I mention in the column, I myself write Xena: Warrior Princess fanfic.) I also discuss some of the critiques directed at fan fiction. One of those critics, writer Lee Goldberg, now argues on his blog that I misrepresented his position.
Here's what I wrote:
[S]ome arguments advanced by fanfic's foes make little sense. Thus Hobb exempts from her scorn professionally written Star Trek novels licensed by the copyright owner—even though the license comes from the corporation, not the creators of the characters. ... The vehemently anti-fanfic writer Lee Goldberg, who blogs at leegoldberg.com, is the author of several authorized novels based on the TV shows Monk and Diagnosis Murder—a contradiction he defends on the grounds that he does it only for the money.
Says Goldberg:
I have written extensively on my blog about fanfiction, particularly my view that the practice of publishing it in print and on the Internet infringes on the original author's creative rights (not to mention the trademark and copyright issues). I've argued that fanfiction writers should get the permission of the author or rights holder before distributing their work. If the original author or rights holder has no problem with fanfiction based on their work, then I don't either. I have also said that licensed tie-in fiction, which I have written, differs significantly on ethical and legal grounds from fanfiction because it is done with the consent, participation and supervision of the original author or rights holder. At no point have I *ever* expressed the views that she incorrectly (and I have to assume deliberately) attributed to me.
Now, I assume the views I have allegedly misattritubed to Goldberg are, (1) that he is vehemently anti-fanfic, and (2) that he has defended his authorship of tie-in novels on the grounds that he only writes them for the money.
On the first count, I think that a read-through of Goldberg's blogposts on fanfic will suffice to prove my case. While Goldberg does in fact state in a number of posts that in his opinion, fan fiction violates copyright and intellectual property, he devotes far more space to jeering at the moral degeneracy and weirdness of fanficcers, focusing on such fringe phenomena as kiddie porn fanfic, a fan who surfs the Web searching for masturbation fic, male pregnancy fanfic, one fan's fantasies about Roy Orbison and cling-wrap, real-person slashfic in which actors, singers, and other celebrities are depicted in homoerotic sexual situations, and the like. (By the way, it's hard not to notice that Goldberg seems especially incensed by gay-themed fanfiction.) He constantly engages in gross generalization; a post about a self-professed Harry Potter smut aficionada is entitled "The Fanfic Mind." If Goldberg has ever said anything positive about fanfic writers in fandoms where the copyright holders and creators have explicitly allowed and even encouraged fan fiction -- such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter -- I have found no evidence of that on his blog. I have, however, found such statements as:
Money and copyright aside, what an incredible waste of creativity. Why toil on characters you don't own in a world that's not your own? It's not even literary masturbation. It's more like the literary equivalent of having sex with an inflatable woman who looks like Halle Berry.
another post, mocking an email correspondent who asks him for a
link to some fanfic he has mentioned, Goldberg says that it's "sort
of like asking a Jew to direct you to some really rocking
anti-Semitic screeds." Wow, Mr. Goldberg. Tell us how you
really feel.
It was not my intent in my column to extensively discuss Lee Goldberg's views on fan fiction, or the debate about fanfic and copyright/intellectual property laws (an issue I briefly mentioned in my discussion of fantasy writer Robin Hobb's attack on fan fiction). I would say, however, that "vehemently anti-fanfic" sums up Goldberg's stance pretty well.
Now, on to the second part. Did Goldberg ever defend his tie-in novels on the grounds that he only writes them for the money? Sure he did, on the very same blog where he now claims to have been misrepresented. In fact, he devoted an entire post to this point on June 16, 2005:
[S]omeone asked what the difference is between someone who writes tie-ins and someone who writes fanfic... beyond the fact that tie-ins are written with the consent of the author/right's (sic) holder.
There's a big difference.
I was hired to write DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MONK novels. It's something I am being paid to do. It's not like I woke up one morning with a burning desire to write DIAGNOSIS MURDER novels, wrote one up, and sent it off to a publisher (or, as a fanficcer would do, posted it on the web). The publisher came to me and asked me to write them.
I would never write a book using someone else's characters unless I was hired to do so. It would never even occur to me because the characters aren't mine.
Given a choice, I would only write novels and TV shows of my own creation. But I have to make a living and I take the work that comes my way...and that includes writing-for-hire, whether it's on someone else's TV show or original tie-in novels based on characters I didn't create. Ultimately, however, what motivates me as a writer is to express myself...not the work of someone else.
That's the big difference between me and a fanficcer.
Given a choice, fanficcers "write" fanfic.
(The numerous italics are all in the original.)
More recently, Goldberg returns to this theme in a September 20,
2006 post, "Am
I a Fanficcer?" While he does stress that his TV show-based
novels are published with the consent and involvement of the
owners, the "I'm only in it for the money" defense rears its head
What I do isn't comparable to fanfiction -- which is using someone else's work without their consent or involvement and distributing on the Internet. I don't do it as my personal artistic expression -- it's a job, one that I do to the best of my ability. ... I much prefer to write totally original work and if I could make my living only doing that, I would.
In fairness to Goldberg, I should have said that he defends his
tie-in novels partly on the grounds that he only writes
them for the money. I singled out this argument because I found it
particularly bizarre -- it's the first time I have seen paid
hackwork held up as morally superior to an unpaid labor of love --
and because I had already mentioned the "fanfic is intellectual
theft" argument in my comments on Robin Hobb. If that gave a
misleading impression of Goldberg's views on fanfic, I will readily
offer my apologies. However, I certainly did not put any argument
in Goldberg's mouth that he did not repeatedly make on his
Since we're on the subject, I will answer a question Goldberg poses
in his September 20 post:
What I have yet to see any fanficcer explain why they won't to (sic) ask the creator or rights holder for permission before posting and distributing their work. ... I know the answer, of course. Fanficcers are terrified of officially being told NO... and identifying themselves in case they decide to blithely violate the author's wishes anyway.
Is Goldberg kidding? Would original fiction writers be willing to
spend hours every day answering emails asking them if it's okay to
post a fanfiction based on their work? In the case of movie-
and TV-based fanfiction, does Goldberg expect studios to hire a
staff just to field requests for permission to post a story? And to
whom should the request be directed? The corporation? The
creator(s) of the characters? What's more, the writers
or the studio personnel would have either to read the stories --
which would be incredibly time-consuming and legally problematic --
or to authorize them unread.
I do think that it would be an ideal resolution to the legal dilemma of fan-created works if authors or creators/copyright holders were to state upfront that they do not object to non-commercial fan endeavors, perhaps under certain conditions. I also strongly believe that the wishes of any writer who has asked people not to write fan fiction based on his or her work -- or has set guidelines for such fan fiction, like Rowling or Anne McCaffrey -- should be respected. In the absence of such explicit statements, given that the widespread existence of fan fiction is by now no secret to anyone, I think silence may be presumed to equal consent. (Since a pro-Goldberg blogger indicts me for "absconding with characters" created by others, I will mention that the producers of Xena actually hired one of my fellow intellectual thieves, fanfic writer Melissa "Missy" Good, to write scripts for the show.)
Finally, since we're on the topic of misrepresentation: In a post on October 12, 2006, Goldberg suggests, on the basis of a New York Times profile of fanfic writer-turned-pro Naomi Novik, that Novik has revised her previously "liberal" views on fanfic and copyright now that she is a commercially published author herself. As some of his commenters point out, Novik has in fact specifically said that this is not so. Goldberg has yet to issue a retraction in the body of his post or even to acknowledge his error in the comments, despite having posted in the comments thread several times.
(Somewhat longer version cross-posted at The Y Files.)
]]>(Cross-posted at The Y Files.)
My Y Files post on the Eric Pianka controversy has generated considerable debate in the blog's comments, with some posters saying that I have fallen for a right-wing creationist smear against an innocent scientist accused of advocating the deaths of billions for the sake of the planet. The "smeared by the right" meme also prevails in the liberal blogosphere, and one conservative blogger, Atlanta Rofters, has retracted his anti-Pianka position and apologized.
So, do I stand by my first blogpost? Mostly, yes.
I'm quite certain that Pianka, a University of Texas biologist, did not advocate active steps to kill 5 billion people with a deadly virus; but I made it clear in my initial post that I endorsed no such claim. I believe that for "Intelligent Design" maven William Dembski to report Pianka to Homeland Security as a potential terrorist was ludicrous and reprehensible.
Did Pianka, as reported by Forrest M. Mims III, wax enthusastic to the Texas Academy of Sciences about the prospect of over 5 billion people dying in an Ebola plague, or express hope that such an epidemic would come to pass (rather than merely warn that it will if we don't change our profligate ways)? I'm not absolutely certain of that; but I think that the rush to exonerate Pianka in some quarters is a little too quick and easy. For instance, at The Panda's Thumb, we're told that "KXAN News36 in Austin, TX, has just debunked the whole thing." But the "debunking" does not include any independent evidence, such as a transcript of an audio recording of Pianka's speech, or an eyewitness account contradicting Mims. It consists, instead, of Pianka's assertion that he is not pro-genocide, doesn't want vast numbers of people to die and wants his granddaughters to have a future. Well, that's very nice. But, as one commenter at The Panda's Thumb correctly noted, "A denial is by no means a 'debunking.'"
Others have pointed to this statement on Pianka's website, denying any ill will toward humanity and asserting that Pianka's apocalyptic scenario was simply a warning, as exculpatory evidence. But this statement, as far as I can tell, was posted after Pianka became the target of unwelcome publicity. It does not, as Atlanta Rofters seems to think, represent the content of his speech.
So, what about this content? A partial transcript of the Texas Academy of Sciences speech has been posted on the website of Nancy Pearcey, another ID champion. In those portions, Pianka hails draconian measures to restrict childbearing, but the part dealing with the human "die-off" is not there.
There is, however, a transcript of another, apparently quite similar speech Pianka made before the controversy broke, at St. Edward's University in Texas. It was given on March 31 -- actually, the very day Mims published his account of the earlier speech. The trasncript from an audio (with a few small gaps) was published on April 7 in The Sequin Gazette-Enterprise, which has covered the Pianka story. Weirdly enough, a couple of days later the paper removed all Pianka-related material from its website (even though stories generally stay up for a month). What is behind this removal, I don't know. However, thanks to Google cache, I was able to locate a copy of the transcript. Here it is.
This transcript, as the pro-Pianka blog The Questionable Authority points out, differs in some substantial ways from the paper's own report about the speech. It's also interesting to note that in this speech, Pianka actually says that it's likely going to be some virus other than Ebola that is going to get us. But TQA's textual analysis omits the portions of the transcript that tend to bear out Mims's claims:
So this is really, really an exciting time in the history of mankind. Remember the ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times"? I think that right now has got to be just about the most interesting time ever and you get to see it, and, hopefully, a few are gonna live through it. ... Things are gonna get better after the collapse because we won't be able to decimate the earth so much. And, I actually think the world will be much better when there's only 10 or 20 percent of us left.
It would give wildlife a chance to recover -- we won't need conservation biologists anymore. Things are gonna get better.
So yes, there is documented evidence of Pianka expressing enthusiasm for a mass die-off. There is also, as I previously mentioned, Brenda McConnnell's blogpost about his speech -- one that supports his views, and also largely supports Mims's account. McConnell has now deleted her blog, but the relevant portions are reproduced in my blogpost.
Check out, too, this interesting post in the Daily Kos comments thread from Neil Sinhababu, a UT graduate student in philosophy who closely knows people who work with Pianka:
I just asked them if this sounded like something Pianka would actually say. The grad student laughed and told me that Pianka is in fact crazy, and has repeatedly said in classes that it'd be good if devastating diseases would wipe out 90% of the human population. There were freakish references to "our friend, AIDS."
He has a history of other bizarre behavior too. The professor says that whenever new prospective faculty are brought into the biology department and meet Pianka, Pianka likes to puts his feet up on his desk and loudly say, "We're all fucked!" (This is apparently how the professor himself was greeted.) The biology department has started making sure that new hires meet the other ecologists before they meet Pianka, so as to make clear that not all Texas ecologists are insane.
The poster's bona fides seem to be in order
(check out his own
blog). Admittedly this is second-hand information, but in
conjunction with the speech transcript, Brenna McConnell's
blogpost, and some of the student
evaluations he has posted on his own website, the picture that
emerges is not a pleasant one.
Many people find it unbelievable that someone who spouts the human-hating views attributed to Pianka would be treated as mainstream in the biology/ecology field. Well, in my last post, I cited the example of Dr. David Graber, a biologist with the National Park Service, who wrote in 1989 in the Los Angeles Times:
We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. ... Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
If Graber has been professionally shunned for this repugnant statement, I'm certainly not aware of it. (He is currently a science advisor to the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.)
It should be noted as well that the kind of views Pianka has been accused of holding have been expressed by some of his supporters on various blogs. Take, for instance, this post by "Praedor Atrebates" at Pharyngula:
Umm...feeling some personal satisfaction at the thought of an inevitable population decline (due to disease, famine, whatever) because of the harm we as a species are doing to our home is NOT the same as advocating same.
I welcome a culling for the same reasons but have no desire to see any particular people die. It is a general, theoretical feeling of satisfaction. We as a species getting our comeuppance due to your thoughtless activities against the natural world. Such an onslaught can ONLY come to ill, not only for humans, but for far too many innocent other species as well (the collatoral damage).
I also fully realize that a human species fall could well include ME. So be it. That doesn't mean I don't, in general, get a feeling of satisfaction from the idea of schadenfreude: humans getting their broad just deserts for thoughtlessness, greed, profligacy, and selfishness. Totally different from advocating actively bringing about such a result, which Pianka is accused (falsely) of.
It is objective fact that the environment would do EXTREMELY well should humans fall out of it. There's a silver lining to all storm clouds.
This post, I believe, speaks for itself. (It should be noted as well that none of the other Pianka supporters in the thread reacted to "Praedor's" post with outrage.)
I don't want to get into the issue of how much of Pianka's alarmism -- for instance, about deadly virus mutations due to overpopulation -- is rooted in good science. This is primarily an issue not of science, but of ideology.
The conflict between Pianka and his persecutors, most of whom are ID supporters, has been (mis)cast as a war between science and reason on one side, and religious zealotry and superstition on the other. But as I have said before, I think it is in fact a conflict between two different brands of religious zealotry. Commenters at Kos and other left-of-center blogs have gleefully pointed out that the same religious conservatives who voice outrage at Pianka's vision of an agonizing death for 80 to 90% of humanity often embrace the idea of a God who will visit horrific destruction upon the world and punish the disobedient with eternal agony. They are correct, but they miss the point that the irony goes in the other direction, too: the radical environmentalists are as enamored of Armageddon as the more conventional religious extremists. The eco-doomsayers are driven at least as much by their fervent belief that humanity needs to be punished for its sins of greed and luxury as they are by scientifically based concerns. (Note the moralistic, not scientific, language in "Praedor Atrebates'" post above.) Joseph Herzlinger, who has a blog of his own, puts it best in the comments thread at Bad Astronomy Blog:
This looks like crackpot vs. crackpot. It's a debate between someone ignoring the evidence in favor of Darwin's theories and someone ignoring the evidence against Malthus's theories.
The enviro-zealots and the religious zealots are united in their hatred of the human mind, of human freedom and pride; and both long to see humanity crushed under the weight of a superior power, be it God or Nature. I should add here, by the way, that I have nothing against God or Nature, against religion or environmentalism -- as long as they are not anti-human.
But of course, humanism -- the bugaboo of the religious right -- is also in disfavor with the Piankas of this world, who lament the evil of "anthropocentrism." Even PZ Myers of Pharyngula, who regards Pianka as "eccentric," writes that he is "more sympathetic to the egalitarian view that denies humanity a privileged position, except in our own personal esteem." Being a humanist, it seems, is a lonely job these days.
]]>Last September, some cartoons about Islam published in a Danish newspaper caused serious offense to Muslims. (To see the cartoons, go here and scroll about halfway down.) A few days ago the paper apologized, but apparently not enough -- the apology was for offending the feelings of Muslims but not for actually publishing the cartoons -- leading to more protests and boycotts, as well as threats of violence.
The media in Muslim countries have weighed in. According to the Christian Science Monitor:
The Arab News of Saudi Arabia calls upon Denmark to legally ban religious hate speech.
Meanwhile, some European newspapers have reprinted the cartoons as a way of striking a blow for freedom of expression.
Under the headline "Yes, we have the right to caricature God", France Soir ran a front page cartoon of Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim and Christian gods floating on a cloud.
It shows the Christian deity saying: "Don't complain, Muhammad, we've all been caricatured here."
The full set of Danish drawings, some of which depict the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist, were printed on the inside pages.
The paper said it had decided to republish them "because no religious dogma can impose itself on a democratic and secular society."
Or can it? Unfortunately, France Soir's demonstration of the value of free speech ended in a fiasco: the paper published an apology and sacked its managing editor.
Meanwhile, the Norwegian Christian paper Magazinet, which also published the cartoons, then took them off its website because of threats. According to The Brussels Journal:
Magazinet also interviewed two leading Norwegian cartoonists: Finn Graff and Morten M. Kristiansen. Graff, who was known in the 1960s and '70s for his satirical drawings of Jesus Christ, said that he does not draw pictures mocking Muhammad. He does so out of fear for Muslims, and also "out of respect." Muslims, he said, are very sensitive about their religion and their prophet, which is something one has to take into account and one has to respect. Kristiansen said he had received many protest letters in the past whenever he mocked Christ. The same applies to cartoons about Muhammad, but lately the protest letters from Muslims had increasingly become threats, including death threats in e-mails from places such as Iran. Unlike Graff, Kristiansen said he will not change his behaviour because of these threats because it is important to defend the right to freedom of expression.
All this prompts Pieter Dorsmann to compare this to the "Piss Christ" controversy and Glenn Reynolds to comment:
The lesson is that if you want your religion not to be mocked, it helps to have a reputation for senseless violence. Is this the incentive structure we want?
That observation is, of course, quite correct. Christians who protest blasphemy generally do not threaten a violent response (though there were some bomb threats in response to a planned production of Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi a few years ago). But I would note that the "blasphemy as hate speech" meme is shared by quite a few conservative Christians as well; and, in some cases, this translates into sympathy for even violent Muslim backlash against perceived anti-Muslim blasphemy. Here, for instance, a Christian blogger condemns the cartoons about Islam on the grounds of disrespect:
The cartoons are clearly offensive attacks on the faith of all Muslims and it is not surprising that people are upset (if similar cartoons were drawn about Christians there would be considerable protest and outrage). Thus, it was sad to learn that one of the newspapers that published the cartoons was an evangelical Christian paper in Norway. The editor said he had received death threats and hate letters.
What did he expect? He published hate cartoons and thus should not be surprised to receive hate mail. How does this guy think he can reach out to the Muslims in Norway with the Gospel if he so grossly mocks their faith? Why must Christian newspapers publish tabloid trash? It is time for Norway's Christians to demand the editor leave or to cancel their subscriptions.
And Pat Buchanan recently had this to offer:
When Bush speaks of freedom as God's gift to humanity, does he mean the First Amendment freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses, a book considered blasphemous to the Islamic faith? If the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom, why is it our duty to change their thinking? Why are they wrong?
The "hate speech," "bigotry," and "Christian-bashing" label was slapped on the NBC show "The Book of Daniel" (canceled due to protests and boycotts), which featured an Episcopal priest with a dysfunctional family and a Jesus who urged him to be tolerant of human frailties.
I agree that cheap religion-baiting, and particularly Christian-baiting, has long been in vogue among the liberal intelligentsia, and that it can be very juvenile and tiresome. But there is something dangerous, in my view, about the idea that certain beliefs are beyond criticism, even disrespectful criticism (or irreverent reinterpretation).
Once, in illiberal and authoritarian times, blasphemy was outlawed as an offense to God and the authority of churches. Now, we are hearing calls to outlaw blasphemy as an offense to human sensibilities based on group identity.
In attacking "The Book of Daniel," Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition urged the entertainment industry to treat Christians with the same respect it treats Muslims and Jews. I don't know about Jews; but if the Danish cartoons saga is an example, the way Western societies today treat speech deemed offensive to Muslims is precisely the wrong way to approach speech about religion.
(Cross-posted at The Y-Files.)
]]>In a horrific and heartbreaking case in Massachusetts, an 11-year-old child abuse victim lies comatose in a hospital while medical and social welfare authorities try to decide whether to disconnect her feeding tube. Some conservatives, notably Michelle Malkin, are trying to turn this into a Terri Schiavo II. More links can be found in this Malkin post, along with a chiding of bloggers and others who are exhibiting a "post-Schiavo syndrome" and failing to show concern for Haleigh's fate.
In fact, this case is eminently worthy of attention and concern. The Massachusetts Department of Social Services managed to overlook egregious signs that the girl was being abused by her adoptive mother and stepfather (including multiple and repeated physical injuries), and then, after those lovely people finally beat her into a coma, exhibited a rather unseemly haste in wanting to take her off life support -- a mere three weeks after she lapsed into unconsciousness. It now seems that Haleigh may have been misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, and after having being taken off the ventilator she has actually shown signs of improvement. Plans to remove her feeding tube have now been suspended, and certainly public attention to the case is needed to ensure that this child gets every chance she can to live and have some degree of recovery.
However, if Haleigh Poutre is getting less attention than she should as a result of Schiavo fatigue, the fault will rest squarely with the so-called "champions" of Terri Schiavo.
After all the lies and all the hysteria from the "save Terri" brigade, any cause seen as Schiavo redux is going to be seen with a certain degree of cynicism. As far as I'm concerned, those responsible for that macabre circus have squandered all moral authority on this issue. The best thing they can do for Haleigh is keep quiet and leave this case to those who have some credibility.
See more on the subject at my blog, The Y Files.