December 10, 2006
Realism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:20 PM EST At seven or so this morning I heard a loud noise from the other room, as if something had fallen from a height to the floor. I went out and looked and saw nothing, but a couple of hours later a better-faith effort revealed a few books had tumbled six feet from a shelf, one of them Brian Bond’s The Pursuit of Victory. Bond is one of the best of military historians, and having just taught one of his books (The Unquiet Western Front), and thus being filled with renewed admiration for him, I started reading around in The Pursuit of Victory. In his chapter on World War II, Bond points out that while German and Japanese efficiency in exploiting conquered economies was in many cases very impressive—more impressive than anyone seems to have realized until the mid-1990s—the viciousness and intensity of German and Japanese racism squandered the results of even clever looting. Does it make sense to say that this cost the Axis the war? On the one hand, a less brutal and arrogant Japan could have had many more willing allies among the subjects of the European empires it smashed, and Hitler could probably have had a lot of more willing subjects in the portions of the Soviet Union he controlled. Less mad racism would certainly have gotten more food and resources out of Soviet territory and recruited more puppet troops. On the other hand it is hard to imagine Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan behaving very differently in this particular respect. Peculiarly vicious racism and other forms of profound irrationality were at the very core of those regimes. Had they possessed a different attitude toward their subjects, they would not have been who they were, and a Germany that could have behaved so differently in victory would not have been Nazi Germany. Had such a regime defeated Stalin, it would not have created that nightmare world that seems the worst of possibilities. Could Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have concealed their natures a bit longer, long enough to win? In both cases, victory disease made masking their true natures seem unnecessary, and necessity eventually made masking their nature impossible, so upon reflection, their elemental nature made the historical outcomes very likely. Character is sometimes fate. This made me think a bit about the word realism, as it has been bandied about in the wake of the report of the Iraq Study Group. Realism can mean praiseworthy willingness to face unpleasant facts. It is an unpleasant fact that imperialism sometimes pays, at least for a while. When Peter Liberman published Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies, a book that informed Brian Bond’s chapter, academics usually chose to ignore that unpleasant fact. Liberman is generally described as a realist political scientist, and for a good reason. In the case of the Iraq Study Group, it is an unpleasant fact that constructing a sturdy and attractive democracy in Iraq may not be a wholly promising project, and the Iraq Study Group’s willingness (in some quarters, even possible eagerness) to acknowledge that fact in its report has been styled “realism.” On the other hand the Iraq Study Group seems to think that the United States may be able to discover common interests with Iran, Syria, and the current leadership of the Palestinians. Unfortunately, vicious secular tyrannies, brutal theocracies, and unabashed millenarian terrorists may not think they have many common interests with the United States, in which thought they may be absolutely correct. Realism means acknowledging that fact too. It is an oddity of our times that the claim that if we abandon Iraq, we may well reach a promising modus vivendi with Iran, Syria, and Hamas is nowadays styled “realism.”
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