The Curse Of Zhou Bai Den.

Or, masochism for fun and profit.

We recently passed 8500 subscribers, which is very gratifying. Many new subscribers have come from reader sharing, and I’d like to thank everyone who has done that.

These essays will always be free, but you can support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. If you would like to take out a paid subscription I won’t stand in your way, (I’d be very honoured in fact) but I can’t promise you anything in return except a warm feeling of virtue.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️

As always, thanks to those who tirelessly supply translation in other languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here.Hubert Mulkens has volunteered to make another translation into French, and we’ll be working on that, this week I hope. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:

********************

You won’t be surprised to learn that the French media have been consumed for the last month or so by the coming to power of Donald Trump: evidently, this obsession has meant that arguably more important developments, in China or Ukraine or in the Middle East, let alone in France, have been given less coverage than they deserved. Every pundit and scribbler, on radio, TV and Internet, seems to want to say something, even if they have nothing to say. Many of them have difficulty pronouncing Anglo-Saxon names, and the first time I heard a reference to what sounded like Zhou Bai Den, I thought the Chinese had finally got around to buying America.

There are of course objective reasons for taking an interest in the US Presidency, although among ordinary people in France (and as far as I can judge, elsewhere in Europe) the level of interest is pretty superficial. But the intellectual, media and political classes in Europe are so obsessed with US politics and culture, at home and abroad, that they often seem to have insufficient time to cover the political and social crises in their own countries. Moreover, they very often adopt, and unreflectively at that, the self-image of the United States as the principal actor in the world, and talk about many of the world’s problems and crises as though the US was the only major player, and its views were always right. Even (perhaps especially) the bitterest critics of US policy indulge that country in its delusions of being some weird kind of imperial power.

It is strange that this should be so, and I’m going to try to account, at least partly, for why it is. In the process, I’m going to talk quite a bit about Britain and France, since those are the two countries I know best. Long-term readers will know that I rarely discuss the United States directly, because I don’t know the country particularly well, nor do I have a great deal of empathy with it, but I will say a few words nonetheless, because the intellectual domination of the US over Europe, and the current intellectual cringe of Europeans before the US, is actually quite recent, and is essentially an interaction between two cultures and two histories. It has very little to do with anything as mundane as reality.

So, it wasn’t always thus. When I was growing up in the 1960s, the image of America in the world was generally questionable, if not downright negative. Racial tensions, race riots, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Weathermen, the Vietnam War, Cambodia, worldwide demonstrations against the US, Nixon, Watergate, Gerald Ford … all seemed to reinforce the idea of a country in deep crisis. The ignominious failure of the 1980 mission to rescue US hostages in Tehran seemed to sum up a society which had lost is way and couldn’t do anything, and which was not a model for the rest of the world. By contrast, this was at the end of the “thirty glorious years” when Europe had known strong growth, social harmony and equality, and international peace, giving European leaders a confidence that they have since completely lost.

Of course there were brighter spots in the negative image of the US, especially cultural. Music had Dylan, evidently, but also the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane. Hollywood was turning out decent films, especially in the 1970s, authors like Saul Bellow and John Updike were in full flow, Thomas Pynchon was writing his masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, and the poet Robert Lowell was still alive, even if he wasn’t writing anything interesting. But these were very much in the background. And of course the annihilation of national cinemas by cheap Hollywood imports had already begun, and cheap American TV programmes had begun to infest the airwaves, so the transition I’m talking about wasn’t an overnight one.

The irony is that the period I’ve just described is now regarded by many Americans as a Golden Age, when living standards were higher, the economy was stronger, levels of health and education were better, cultural life was richer and even political life was less squalid. Objectively, the US should be having much less influence in the world today, and especially in Europe, than was the case fifty years ago. Yet manifestly this is not the case, although it’s not obvious why this should be so. Who, for example, would want to imitate US economic policies, or US healthcare practices? Well, a surprising number of politicians and pundits in Europe, including a number from the Notional Left.

The reasons for this are complex, and may seem counter-intuitive, but they are identifiable with a bit of thought. And they help to explain the same intellectual dominance at other levels: the wholesale destruction of British popular and high culture by cheap American imports, and the Americanisation of its government and the private sector, are now so deeply ingrained that a younger generation has trouble imagining that things were ever different. But the same is true elsewhere: few are the French companies or organisations without their Anglo-Saxon-style management processes and vocabulary, their performance indicators and their obsession with short-term financial savings at any price. Indeed, there seems to be an informal competition among younger European politicians to import the maximum number of English buzz-words into their discourses.

Education in Britain has followed American practices for some time: this has now spread to the rest of Europe. Although students in many European countries don’t pay fees, Universities have nonetheless opted to treat them as “consumers” and indulge their every whim, dealing with them like the children they mostly are. Many European students also go on exchange to the US, and bring back all sorts of weird ideas with them. French universities now seek to attract overseas students paying valuable fees, and who are no longer required to study in French, nor indeed to know the language at all. This leads to desperate and often fruitless attempts to provide teaching and administration in English, and an academic system which is a botched compromise between the French and the American: the latter taken to be an international standard.

The wider consequences of the Americanisation of European education include the wholesale importation of American social norms and customs. American-style identity politics is now rampant in French universities and among recent graduates, taking over its vocabulary, and often simply adopting English terms wholesale. Thus, an organisation called Black Lives Matter France appeared briefly a few years ago, although it was unable to point to any comparable examples to the Floyd affair in its own country. And rare is the discourse pronounced these days about alleged “racial troubles” in France that does not plead for their resolution according to the teachings of Martin Luther King, as though that were somehow relevant. Indeed, it’s fair to say that there’s not a single twist and turn in the US Grievance Space that isn’t taken up instantly in Europe.

The spread of such ideas has helped to undermine the traditional sophisticated and relaxed relations between the sexes that were part of French culture. These days, and especially at universities, a pitiless image of male aggressivity and passive female victimhood is rigorously promulgated, as the sexes are taught to hate and fear each other. Men and women students mix increasingly less, and are less ready to form relationships, which are now seen as unacceptably dangerous.

This could go on for a long time, but I’ll stop there, because it will already be obvious that none of the social, political, cultural and economic ideas and practices imported from the US over the last generation actually work, and quite a few make no sense at all in Europe. For example, I saw by accident part of a programme on TF1, France’s main commercial channel, in which aspiring pop stars were being groomed for success. (Practically everything on commercial French TV is inspired by US models.) Most of the singers were learning, parrot-fashion, to sing songs in English, although neither they, nor their instructors, nor their putative audiences in France, would necessarily understand quite what they were singing about.

But if, as I have indicated, there are an almost infinite number of examples, the real question is, Why? I’m going to make an attempt to answer that, but I think it needs to be understood before we start that the whole problem is not to do with American strength, but European weakness. And I mean here cultural and social weakness, which can be traced fairly directly to Europe’s recent historical experience. After all, no-one would objectively choose the US as a model to follow in the face of alternatives, and, even in terms of crude influence, the US has declined as a political, military and economic force, and continues to do so.

Let me offer four partial explanations for this state of affairs, which are not entirely distinct from each other. The first is simple power-worship. There is a dreadful tendency in Europe to take what the US says about itself at face value (a point to which I return.) The US manages to put up the facsimile of a military and economic superpower with sufficient conviction that many gullible pundits and politicians in Europe go along with the idea, in spite of the exhaustively-documented weaknesses of the US military and the US economy. The belief that mere threats of military intervention by the US would suffice to end the war in Ukraine was common in Europe for a long time, and has not fully disappeared even now. In part, this is because there is a psychological need to defer to someone larger and stronger, even at the risk of misrepresentation or simple invention of that status. After all, European political leaders and pundits have paid no attention to military issues or the retention of a serious capability for conventional military operations for some decades now, and European armed forces effectively have no serious possibility of playing the kind of lethal games being played in Ukraine. Indeed, the European political class and the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) each have such a confused and contradictory approach to conflict, somehow combining smug moral superiority with occasional outbursts of savage aggression, that actually trying to make plans for any sensible use of European armed forces is impossible.

Any expert will tell you that the US military is not in much better shape overall, but on paper, and as filtered through the lenses of Hollywood and a political culture of obligatory uncritical optimism, it does seem to be large and powerful. And if we cannot be strong ourselves, well, we can at least borrow reflected strength from our association with someone who looks powerful. If we can’t be the school bully, we can at least be the bully’s friend. This power-worship is not, of course, the result of rational analysis: if it were, our elites would be nervously enquiring about speed-learning Mandarin, to be well-placed in ten years’ time. (The role of sheer habit and tradition, it should be added, is an under-studied component of the business of international relations.)

The second is submissiveness and masochism, which is a tendency found in many societies, and especially among self-doubting and self-hating elites. There is a kind of perverse masochistic pleasure in seeing oneself, or one’s country, as weak and helpless in the face of overwhelming power. (It’s a pity Foucault never wrote about international relations: his first hand experience of S and M clubs would be valuable here.) In articles about international politics, and even more in comments on those articles, you can see words like “vassal” and “colony” attached to European states in their relationship with the US, and it’s clear that there are those who derive a kind of masochistic thrill from presenting things in such a way. It also, of course means never having to say you’re sorry: your own leaderships aren’t responsible for anything, because they are completely subservient to another country, and it’s the Big Boy’s fault, not yours.

And every masochist or every submissive needs a dominant figure to be submissive to (or at least I’m told that’s how things work.) The US, with its loudly-trumpeted, if fragile, sense of superiority and omnipotence, fits the metaphorical bill admirably, even if the reality is more nuanced. Now in this reality, and as US officials will unhappily confirm, the US is manipulated endlessly around the world by political cultures more devious and ruthless than anything you find in Washington, and where the average American politician would be dead in a fortnight. Not that it seems to matter.

Often, the apparent hierarchy of domination is reversed: a good historical example is South Vietnam, where Washington wound up in later years being little more than an apologist for a corrupt and brutal regime because it had invested too much in it to withdraw. A close recent analogue is Afghanistan where the US-installed regime got away with literal murder, without reprisal or even serious criticism. And as I write this, it appears that Rwandan troops—the Prussians of Africa—are now openly entering the eastern DRC to take the town of Goma, and definitively controlling the mineral riches of the region, in spite of repeated fruitless appeals from the US (and Britain and France) not to do so. But so complete is the emprise of the ruthless regime in Kigali, and so expert their exploitation of the terrible events of 1994, that they have managed to twist the West around their little fingers. (Indeed, the sight of President Clinton begging forgiveness from a brutal military dictatorship for events in which the US was not involved, early in the fancied period of US hegemony, was educational in itself.) And we are clearly not at the end of the tragic farce of a handful of Zionist fanatics who control the political future of Mr Netanyahu also controlling US policy in the region.

But in a sense that doesn’t matter, because it’s the appearance that counts, as so often in politics. There’s a happy(?) coincidence between the desire of the US elites to play the dominatrix, and the desire of European elites to play the submissives. Of course, this means that the ordinary people on both sides get left out, but thats politics for you.

The third, on a much more practical level, is a question of economies and advantages of scale. Notwithstanding the fact that the current European political class is bulk-manufactured in a factory somewhere underground in Transylvania, the countries they represent remain very different from each other, and even very different within each other, in the case of some of the larger states. The perennial problem of Europe is not lack of coordination, no matter how many irritable reports on that theme may issue from Brussels, but rather lack of common identity and common interest. The attempted creation of a deracinated, de-culturised, Globisch-speaking “Europe,” which has been the project of Brussels for the last thirty-odd years, actually makes things worse, rather than better, because it deliberately tries to bury these differences. A single nation, with a single national interest, is always going to dominate in comparison, and the larger that nations is, the easier the task. Moreover, there will be plenty of occasions where individual European nations see it as in their interest to take the side of the United States: for decades, NATO and the US have functioned as a counter to the power of France and Germany for smaller European nations.

The same applies culturally. Globalisation has had the effect of any lifting of rules, ie the largest and strongest will dominate. The size of the domestic US cultural market has always been such that its products are cheap, and can be dumped easily. But that would not have been such a problem without the 1980s liberalisation of television in Europe, which produced hordes of hungry and greedy new channels seeking the cheapest possible programmes to fill the gaps between the advertisements. The economics of the cinema have been similar: if the French cinema is having a bit of a revival at the moment, judging by the number of new films appearing, this isn’t true of many other countries, whose domestic markets simply aren’t large enough to compete. And in addition, of course, English, which means American, is often the only language that European elites have in common.

But if there are some pragmatic, economic reasons for cultural dominance, there are also some more tenuous ones. In many European cultures, up-market American cultural imports are associated with a wider, more international and more sophisticated view of the world. Of course popular American trash is devoured by the proles, as in every country, but prestige comes from subscribing to multiple US pay-TV channels that ordinary people often cannot afford. Lunch conversation among the European PMC is consequently often dominated by how many channels they subscribe to, and what they most recently saw on Netflix, or more probably what they hope to watch if they ever have the time.

All of which is weird, because the best US culture has always been popular in Europe. Many American film directors are treated with more reverence in Europe than in their own country: not surprising when you consider that in most European countries the cinema is still considered an art form. Retrospectives of great American films are frequently organised even in provincial cinemas in France, and there is an annual Festival of American Film every year in Deauville: every year a dozen or so actors and directors are honoured with prizes for their career contributions. But that is a healthy cultural relationship, not one based on pre-emptive cringe.

The fourth, which partly explains at least the first two, is the cultural and historical gulf that separates the United States from Europe. If it is misleading to talk of “Europe,” even in a too-precise geographical sense, it is largely pointless to talk of the “West” as though that were a cultural and historical entity. Even in “Europe,” there are fundamental differences in national experiences: Poland and the Netherlands, or Sweden and Spain, have almost no formative historical and cultural experiences in common, once you get beyond the cardboard cut-outs of the European PMC. And if anything, the transatlantic cultural gulf has widened (again excluding the PMC) in recent generations. After all, classic American literature was inspired by the Protestant Bible tradition imported from Europe (Whitman, Melville) and subsequently heavily influenced by artistic developments in Europe (Eliot and Pound most obviously.) The American cinema was famously created by European immigrants, mostly Jewish, as was also the case with American popular music, from Gershwin and Berlin, up to their descendants like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. Science, technology and engineering in the US owed its strengths to immigrants, often refugees, from Europe.

These days, there just seems to be a huge void. Most American culture these days seems the be aimed at adolescents of all ages. What might in the past have been characterised as genuine optimism, as “can do” and the “pioneer spirit” seems to have been replaced, at least to the outside observer, by a kind of happy-clappy conformism with a rictus smile, an organised denial of a whole range of severe problems, and an obligatory childlike faith that difficulties will be sorted out, just because. By contrast, voices pointing out that there are real and perhaps terminal problems are often shouted down. This has produced in turn an increasingly adolescent political culture, which has a number of manifestations.

One is the kind of solipsism into which adolescents customarily retreat: only I matter, it’s all about me. Another is pointless acts of rebellion and the hope of shocking one’s parents or their generation. American politics accordingly resembles a traditional school clique, or these days an adolescent social media group, where the objective is to be the coolest kid, or to have the most extreme and provocative opinions and to insult and make fun of anyone who disagrees with you. And adolescence is a time when nothing matters and there are no consequences: American politicians can say anything and do anything, because they speak only to each other, and it is doubtful if they even think about the effects on the rest of the world. In such a narcissistic, ingrown, adolescent political system, I used to reflect, the rest of the world was just a lobby group, somewhere behind the pharmaceutical industry in importance.

So it would be logical to do what many countries in the world do: allow the Americans to have their tantrum, make a few soothing noises and go on to do what you were doing anyway. Now it’s also true, on the other hand, that some countries do see actual value in cooperation: if you live in an unstable area, for example, an American military base in your country may be a good deterrent against your neighbours. US military personnel are unwittingly deployed as human shields like that in many countries. And of course, it’s possible to be more proactive, especially if you have money or can otherwise apply pressure: I’ve mentioned Israel and Rwanda, but then the Saudis have been very busy and successful as well. (Indeed, I’ve often wondered why the Europeans, perhaps with the Japanese, don’t just buy the American political system and have done with it: a hundred million dollars a year would be enough, surely?)

Nonetheless, in the face of this psycho-rigid incapacity to admit weakness and error, and in spite of the manifold documented problems of the country and the system, European states continue to indulge in a pre-emptive cringe before the US that comes less from “weakness” in any facile sense, but more from a feeling of historical and cultural exhaustion. Europe has always produced more history and politics than it can consume, and that politics has been fundamentally different from the US example. After all, how many American novelists were about to be executed for political activism, as Dostoyevsky was, only to be reprieved by an absolute ruler at the last minute? And how many American readers of Joyce’s Ulysses would have understood the lament of Stephen Daedalus that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Many other Europeans thought that too: many still do.

If we take the end of the American Civil War in 1865 as a point of departure, what does European history consist of thereafter? Well, a very selective list over the next generation would include the Franco-Prussian war and the bloody suppression of the Commune, the brief First Republic in Spain, the Russo-Turkish War, the violent struggle between Church and State in France, the Dreyfus Affair, the Graeco-Turkish War, the rash of political assassinations and bombings by anarchists, and above all, endless violent struggles between capital and labour, between nationalists and empires, between nationalists and nationalists, between autocrats and democratic forces. The twentieth century, of course was worse: not just for the terrible butchery of the endless wars, but for the political repression, the secret police, the pervasive fear, the prisons, the camps, the displaced persons, the party militias, the trials, the disappearances, the political crises, the violence in the streets, the families divided by religion and politics.

When he wrote his book Shakespeare our Contemporary (1964), the great Polish critic Jan Kott took it for granted that Shakespeare’s History and Roman plays described a world of violence and insecurity not unlike our own, and that all of his readers would know what it was like to be woken by the secret police in the middle of the night. Contemporary Anglo-Saxon reviewers gently mocked him for exaggeration, but of course such experiences were within the living memories of nearly all Europeans of the time, and indeed were still lived daily in Eastern Europe and in Spain and Portugal. The gulf between these historical experiences and those of the United States is unbridgeable, and I have always thought that part of the problems that the British had with Europe was that they had actually been spared the worst of modern European history. (For completeness, yes, it should be pointed out that societies in many parts of the world have political histories closer to Europe than to that of the United States: likewise New Zealand and Nicaragua cannot be treated in the same way.)

There’s a very strong argument that the two World Wars in Europe and their immediate consequences knocked the stuffing and the confidence out of European elites, and that these effects are still visible today. The First World War was a cataclysm beyond anything that could have been imagined: an unstoppable machine devouring the youth of the West. It produced not only crisis and devastation for years afterwards, but a traumatic psychic shock from which it took a decade even to begin to recover: the “war literature”—Sassoon, Graves, Remarque, even Hemingway—dates from the late 1920s. And it was itself gloomily assumed just to be an overture to another war, which would be the end of civilisation itself. The sequel was even more psychologically devastating, not just for the awesome level of physical destruction, but even more the revelation of the depths to which human beings could actually sink. For all that the Allies had long considered themselves to be fighting absolute Evil, it was still a shock to realise that for the Nazi regime the lives of non-Aryans were simply worth nothing: they were consumables, worked to death if they could work, summarily killed if they could not, or just left to die of cold and starvation as millions of Soviet prisoners of war were. This realisation, together with accounts of the almost-unbelievably sick barbarity of the War in the Balkans, Poland and elsewhere, was an existential shock to a continent, and to an elite, which had considered itself civilised.

Adorno’s oft-misquoted remark that Europe was “confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today” was perhaps extreme, but represented a very powerful current of elite reaction to the realisation of just what human beings like themselves were actually capable of. Falling into a new age of barbarism could be prevented to some extent by the fledging European institutions, thus making war “practically impossible” as Robert Schuman hoped, but that was not enough. The cultural and political drivers of conflict as seen by European elites—nationalism, national cultures, history, even language—had to be suppressed in the interests of peace, and be replaced by a featureless Euro-conformism from which everything controversial had been surgically excised As the generations went on, and the political confidence of the Glorious Years progressively faded, European students were taught to be ashamed of their own history and culture, and to seek forgiveness for the past. The most popular form of historical writing today is debunking, where cherished national stories are held up to ridicule. Needless to say, this satisfied nobody, and led to the rise of the very “extreme Right” (ie soverignist) political tendency it had tried to vanquish.

This is the origin of the curious situation where Europe seeks to interfere in the affairs of countries around the world without actually drawing on its numerous strengths and its particular history. Rather than proclaiming its status as then only continent that never had slavery, and actively worked to end it elsewhere, rather than talking about the triumph of a secular state over religion, the universal right to vote, the introduction of modern social and labour legislation, the creation of political parties along class rather than ethnic lines, the introduction of universal education, the invention of human rights, the growth of religious tolerance and a dozen other things, European interventions are in terms of bloodless normative atemporal prescriptions, completely divorced from any historical context except occasionally that of shame.

In such a situation, your own history and culture is just too big a burden, and too controversial to discuss freely. Much easier, therefore, to adopt somebody else’s, which has not been through the trauma that Europe has known. By contrast with European history, that of the United States is cuddly and provincial in nature. And so the comments pages of Internet sites are full of learned discussions of US politics and culture between people who once went on holiday to Disneyland, but watch a lot of US TV and YouTube sites.

The combination of a guilty-feeling, self-doubting, increasingly insecure European elite brought up without a solid cultural and historical foundation, and a solipsistic, narcissistic, self-regarding US elite, seldom taking account of the rest of the world, quick to bury failure and programmed for eternal facile optimism, creates an extremely odd situation: effectively, US elites pretend that they rule the world, and European elites pretend to believe them. That way everybody, both dominant and subservient, is satisfied.

Of course, this creates practical problems, since actual US capacity to run the world, as opposed to pretending that they do, is limited, and so masochistic European elites and the PMC have to resort to more and more bizarre rationalisations to make such a belief possible. So at first, apparently, the Grand Plan All Along was to trap Russia into a war with Ukraine which it would quickly lose, enabling US businesses to loot Russia. When that didn’t work the Other Grand Plan was assumed to have been to quickly bring Putin down with sanctions after which etc. When that didn’t work, the Other Other Grand Plan was to rebuild Ukrainian armed forces with surplus Warsaw Pact equipment after which etc. Then the Other Other Other Grand Plan was to rebuild Ukraine’s armed forces with western equipment after which etc. And so it went on, rationalising successive stages of defeat with the belief that there had been a (continually varying) Grand Plan All Along. What about a bonanza for the US arms industry? Unfortunately not, because most of the equipment sent was obsolescent and had already been replaced, and anyway most of it was made in Europe. But even then, the European PMC’s masochistic desire to be dominated and to worship power is reinforced by the existentialist terror that we live in a world where no-one is in control, and the desperate hope that someone, anyone, is.

Finally, it’s worth adding that the masochistic sense of failure and impression of domination isn’t peculiar to European PMC elites. It is in fact typical of countries with failed political systems, and massive problems for which they are unwilling to take responsibility. (There is even a minor US-specific variant which blames the ills of the world on the British Empire: in general, in fact, Americans tend to be much more obsessed with the Empire than the British are, or ever were.) It’s something you find frequently in post-colonial states where their own political systems have failed and their leaders are hated, and where intellectuals, NGO workers and journalists will spend hours lovingly explaining to you how weak and helpless their countries are, and how all their politicians are in the pockets of foreign powers. (Conversely, you don’t find the same discourse at all in small but successful post-colonial countries like Singapore.)

It’s a bit of a surprise to find the same thing in Europe, but I think that, beyond the factors mentioned before, the explanation lies partly in the almost total alienation of ordinary people from European political systems, and the sobering recognition that both the systems and those who operate them have failed, almost as much as in some former colonies. Indeed, as I’ve suggested a number of times, we are seeing a type of politics previously only associated with extractive regimes in post-colonial states rapidly becoming the norm in the West. At a certain level, European elites realise this, and, unlike their US analogues, they do not have the confidence to brazen it out. With nothing to lean on for confidence themselves, they attempt to borrow that confidence from somewhere else. Ultimately, for this generation of incapable politicians and their parasites, it’s more acceptable to be thought to be creatures of a foreign power than it is to stand up and take responsibility for your own actions. A Big Boy did it and ran away.