March 29, 2007
Weisberg, Roberts, and George W. Bush Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:50 PM EST American Heritage today links to a Slate piece by Jacob Weisberg on Andrew Roberts’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. I should declare an interest and a disability: I know Andrew Roberts, and I looked over a very few pages of a draft of a portion of his book, but I have not read the book, nor do I know if its author took any of the advice I offered. I have disagreed with many things Andrew Roberts has written and said in other contexts, but Jacob Weisberg’s review is so mechanically and effortlessly snide that it sets my teeth on edge, probably because Weisberg, generally an intelligent man, seems eerily careless in this effusion of easy contempt. For example, consider one terse little dismissal: Roberts is scorned because “that Bush has brought ‘full democracy’ to Iraq is stated as unequivocal fact.” But if full democracy means majority rule achieved via pretty honest elections with full adult suffrage, which is precisely what it is often taken to mean, Bush has indeed brought full democracy to Iraq; that is part of the tragedy. The Shiites, perhaps 55 percent of the Iraqi population, have voted in a government in an election boycotted by many Sunni Arab Iraqis, who correctly surmised that majority rule meant, among other things, the loss of their formerly privileged position. Right now, that elected government is menaced by a terrorist insurgency, and if the Iraqi government (and American troops who are there with its consent) ever crushes that insurgency and leaves the confessional and ethnic majority in control of a centralized state, there may well be very bad outcomes for many Iraqis, Kurds, secularists, non-Islamist women, and a lot of others. But the problem is with democracy, not with the false implication that Bush has failed to bring it to Iraq. There is much to be said against the Maliki government—but it is, for better and for worse, a democracy. Or how about this one: Roberts is patronized for having his “own idiosyncratic definition of English-speaking countries, which includes New Zealand but not Bermuda, Canada but not Ireland, and Australia but not India or South Africa.” Is it absurdly idiosyncratic to exclude Ireland from an analytic category denoting a number of English-speaking countries which are assumed to share a political culture? Maybe, although I’d guess Roberts was remembering that Ireland was proudly neutral during the Second World War, during which de Valera sent official regrets on the news of Hitler’s death, a courtesy I believe he omitted when hearing of Roosevelt’s. Maybe Irish political culture was not, over the entire course of the last century, quite as committed to what Roberts thinks of as the Anglosphere’s achievements as was, say, Canada. You could make a case that leaving out India was the worse mistake: Indians may not speak English as a first language, but they are a billion-strong parliamentary democracy, a political form they inherited from the British Empire Weisberg elsewhere sneers at. If the “Anglosphere” is “a natural alliance among the English-speaking former colonies of Great Britain that spreads higher civilization in the form of democracy and capitalism,” then India has a fair claim to membership, even if English is not most Indians’ first language. Is there no “natural alliance among the English-speaking former colonies of Great Britain”? Maybe not, although a fair number of French politicians have feared there was. That belief was one of the reasons for Mitterand’s attempt to preserve genocidal rule by Francophones in Rwanda, against the threat of English-speaking Tutsi putting a stop to the slaughter. On Roberts’s larger claims about the achievements of English-speaking democracies in the twentieth century, contemplating any hypothetical world run by the political regimes the “Anglosphere” defeated or outlasted may make Roberts’s alleged triumphalism sound less outrageous (again, I have not read the book). Some of my Polish, Czech, and for that matter German friends seem unfashionably grateful for the Anglosphere’s political and military achievements, and some of my Persian friends—the ones liable to execution by being buried alive or stoned to death—loudly regret the failure of the British Empire to incorporate Persia. They’re joking, at least to some degree—I think. My friends compare the current situation of their country to the current situation of India, so maybe I hear more joke than is intended. Here’s another much-too-easy sneer: “The fire-bombing of Dresden was ‘justified,’ the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki positive in various ways.” Some very capable modern scholarship, reviewed on this website, has endorsed both of those claims. Those defenses can be disputed with great vigor, although in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is harder to do so than nonspecialists tend to understand, and the most recent book on Dresden, by Frederick Taylor, concedes the horror but makes some powerful arguments about justification. In this case, Weisberg probably knows much less than he thinks he does, since he implies that both of Roberts’s claims are obvious absurdities, and they are anything but. I am sure that there are defects in Andrew Roberts’s book, of both tone and fact. I wonder if they are appreciably more grating than the defects in Weisberg’s smug little rant.
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