At the start of the month, I did a post about the ongoing coup in the USA which listed some of the key articles helpful to an understanding of what is going on in that strange country.
Claire Berlinski is a blogger I need to add to the list. She has just started a series of posts called – Profiles in Cowardice, with this being the second and this, so far, the third. She uses a book produced in 1940 by a French historian Marc Bloch who was a resistance fighter eventually executed by the Nazis
Bloch was a medievalist, but his account of the Battle of France showed him to be just as skillful an analyst of contemporary politics. His book Strange Defeat (produced posthumously in 1946) is not a personal memoir, although it incorporate
his perspective as a witness to the events. It’s a work of history, written by a participant in the battle, and it is written to the standards Bloch believed history
should be written, even though he was writing of events, as he described them in a
letter to Febvre, that “surpass in horror, and in humiliation, all we could dream in our worst nightmares.” He assesses both the proximate and the deeper causes of the catastrophe No segment of French society escapes his scrutiny. All are weighed in the balances, and all are found wanting. He carefully describes the failings of military, from the high command to the conscripted soldier, and the inadequacies of the French ruling class. He describes the shortcomings of the French bourgeoisie, the worldviews of rural and the urbanized Frenchman. He details the failures of politicians, of the left and the right, and those of the press, academics, teachers, and labor unions. All failed to prepare the country to confront the threat it faced. What drove the French army to disaster, Bloch concludes, was the accumulation of
many mistakes. What characterized them all, however, was the inability of the French leadership to think in terms of a new war. “In other words,” he writes, “the German
triumph was, essentially, a triumph of the intellect—and it is that which makes it so peculiarly serious.” It’s important to consider what he means in saying that France’s defeat was a defeat of the intellect. So is ours, and it is that which makes it not only serious, but extremely difficult to fix. When Bloch writes of the failures of the High Command, it calls to mind two images.
First, there are the elderly Democrats, who cannot be made to understand that this unleashed version of Trump, and the cult he commands, are not like anything in their experience. They cannot see that laws of politics with which they grew up no longer apply, and the strategies with which they’re familiar no longer work. They are in an entirely new fight, shaped by technologies they don’t understand—but their opponents do—and they lack the alacrity the circumstances demand. Her second image is more dubious – its the so-called Russian invasion of our minds….
Other relevant posts are
Adam Przeworski’s February-March posts - 39 pages long!
Rules for Destroying a Liberal
From the Berghof to the Oval Office
