Don't fence me in . . .

Not Steven Sin . . .

. . . but close enough to 'sin'

Touché!

(Image from Saber Fencer)

The image above Steve Sin's blog is apparently of Sylwia Gruchala . . . a Polish fencer. Not the 'cowgirl' sort of fencer, but I won't argue the point with her. She can take whatever label she wishes, for she she seems pretty tough, having most recently won a gold medal in the 2007 World Championship for Team Foil . . . and several other medals over the past 10 years.

Excuse me, but I've been distracted.

What I meant to post was that my military friend, Steven S. Sin, has split his blog into two separate blogs -- one on A Fencer's Musings, the other on Northeast Asia Matters. Steve is the man who posted in response to my blog entry on the difficulties encountered by my daughter in Korean middle school.

Steve is also the man from whom I receive regular emails on open-source information about North Korea, prompting my recent posts on the North's decline. Posts like this one on Sylwia Gruchala.

Oops . . . distracted again. Sorry.

As I was saying, Sylwia Gruchala. No, dammit, not Sylwia Gruchala. I really don't mean Sylwia Gruchala. I'm certainly not obsessed with Sylwia Gruchala. I've never even heard of Sylwia Gruchala.

Okay. Focus. Think of the empire. The military. The enemy.

Kim Jong-il.

That did it.

Recurrence of "Eternal Recurrence"?

Friedrich Nietzsche

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm nearing the end of my re-reading of Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov and have recently finished chapter 9 of Part 4, Book 11, titled "The Devil. Ivan's Nightmare," which recounts Ivan Karamazov's descent into insanity through an illness called 'brain fever' that brings on a hallucinatory encounter with the Devil that seems to prefigure some of the later Bulgakov's devilish concerns. Some themes come around again and again, I suppose. And that brings me to my point, namely, that Dostoyevsky introduces something rather like Nietzsche's concept of "eternal recurrence" when the Devil tells Ivan:

"Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again 'the water above the firmament,' then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth -- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious . . ." (Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett, page 619)

This passage -- as with the entire book of course -- first appeared in print in 1880. Two years later, in Book 4, Section 341 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche's similar thought appears in print:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again -- and you with it, speck of dust!" -- Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!" If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Though Nietzsche does a lot more with the idea in this particular passage, the basic concept of "eternal recurrence" appears already in Dostoyevsky -- and both times expounded by a demon!

I'm not claiming that Nietzsche read Dostoyevsky's novel -- and indeed, that seems unlikely -- but the thought of eternal recurrence would appear to have been 'in the air'. Walter Kaufmann, who translated much of Nietzsche into English, suggests that Nietzsche had been reading Heinrich Heine, who earlier in the 19th century had written:

[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again. (cf. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 1959, page 276; see also Helge Kragh, Entropic Creation, page 142)

From Heine to Nietzsche? Perhaps so, and if so, perhaps also Dostoyevsky had been reading Heine. Be that as it may, I'm not the first to notice the similarity between Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky on this, for in researching the point, I've discovered that Gino Moliterno, in his article "Zarathustra's Gift in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice" (Screening the Past, Issue 12, 2001), tells us that the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's "explicit reference to Nietzsche's doctrine of the Eternal Return must appear highly charged with significance" in The Sacrifice (1985), especially since Tarkovsky had considered retitling his film The Eternal Return and seems to have wanted to insist on Nietzsche rather than Dostoyevsky as his own source, as Moliterno tells us in footnote 19:

It seems signficant, too, that Tarkovsky, at least in the film, is at pains to name Nietzsche specifically because, for a Russian filmmaker, another non-philosophical source for the idea of the eternal return would have been closer to hand. The notion appears in nuce in the mouth of the devil who appears to Ivan in chapter 12 of part 4 of The Brothers Karamazov:

"Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again 'the water above the firmament', then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth -- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly, and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious . . ." Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Heinemann, 1974), 683.

Curiously enough, in the published screenplay, after Otto has talked about Nietzsche's dwarf and expanded on what the notion of Eternal Recurrence entails, Alexander answers:

"That's already been done! Another, Svidrigailov . . . Don't think that you invented it!" Collected Screenplays, 519.

What's most curious is that Alexander is citing Dostoevsky but not referring to the relevant passage from The Brothers Karamazov quoted above; the allusion is instead to one of the major characters in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment who commits suicide at the end of the novel without ever making any reference to the notion of Eternal Return.

Both Tarkovsky and Moliterno would seem to have noted the 'recurrence' of Dostoyevsky's idea in Nietzsche (even if Tarkovsky preferred Nietzsche and erred in the Dostoyevsky citation).

I'm sure that I could go on and on about sources and parallels concerning "eternal recurrence," but I'll simply end by agreeing with Nietzsche that knowledge of an eternal recurrence of my life as I've lived it would be the heaviest weight, and I prefer Dostoyevsky's happier ending.

Oh, you don't know about that comedy of errors? Well, go forth and read.

Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad: "democracy . . . is an infidel regime"

Sada Al-Jihad

Pro-Jihad Islamist Magazine

(Image from MEMRI)

I recall explaining to a skeptical Korean audience on September 11, 2002 that the 9/11 attacks of the previous year were not merely a consequence of America's foreign policy but also an expression of Al Qaeda's hatred for American democracy. I even quoted one of Al Qaeda's spokesmen, Suleiman Abu Gheith:

America is the head of heresy in our modern world, and it leads an infidel democratic regime that is based upon separation of religion and state and on ruling the people by the people via legislating laws that contradict the way of Allah and permit what Allah has prohibited. (MEMRI: Special Dispatch No. 388)

Anti-American sentiment in Korea was peaking at that time, so my words didn't go over particularly well, but most Islamists still seem to hate democracy, for Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad tells us:

Though our clerics [i.e. salafi jihadi clerics] have spoken of democracy and clarified that it is an infidel regime, I will cite for you Wagdi Ghneim, who is known for his affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, who are the greatest proponents of democracy in our time. He stated in his book Divine Shura and Manmade Democracy (Rabaniyyat Al-Shura wa-Wadh'iat Al-Dimuqratiyya): 'Democracy is erroneous from its foundation. Allah's religion [i.e. Islam] considers it wrong, and anyone who believes in it, promotes it, confirms it, accepts it, or acts according to it . . . is an apostate, even if he has a Muslim name and falsely claims that he is a believing Muslim -- because in Allah's religion, Islam and democracy are absolutely incompatible.'" (MEMRI: Special Dispatch No. 2434)

Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad is a hardcore Salafi Islamist who dislikes even the Muslim Brotherhood's flirtation with democracy and cites one of the Brotherhood's intellectuals to demonstrate the inconsistency. I suspect that the Brotherhood's interest in democracy is purely instrumental, a means to power and not an end in itself, but even that instrumental concession goes too far for Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad.

Why is he so opposed to democracy? He tells us the fundamental reason:

"The dangers of democracy are clear for all to see, since it directly impairs tawhid [the belief in Allah's unity]."

By this criticism, he means that a Muslim should live only for Allah and follow only his laws, an imperative contradicted when Muslims submit to manmade laws, for this means that Muslims are submitting both to humanity and to Allah simultaneously, an insult to Allah and a division of Allah's unity through the sin of shirk (i.e., associating something nondivine with the divine Allah).

This shirk -- this democracy -- leads to moral deterioration:

"Human history has never known villainous massacres such as those of the era in which democrats emerged. World Wars I and II are evidence of the extent of the democrats' moral deterioration and their failure to take into account the simplest of [moral] principles of life customary among people in past eras."

I suppose that Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad would have preferred the nondemocratic regimes to have emerged victorious in those conflicts . . . even though those same nondemocratic regimes were also not Muslim. And if they had won, he might have decided that they, too, were full of democrats, for he sees democrats everywhere:

[On the one hand] are piled up all the democrats -- Christians, Jews, atheists, Hindus, Shi'ites, Zoroastrians, apostates, hypocrites, Murji'ites, and Ash'arites -- and [on the other hand are] the ranks of the Muslims clinging to the path of Allah.

Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad includes an image of Ayatollah Khamenei casting his vote in the recent Iranian election as evidence of that Shi'ite regime's democratic apostasy, but perhaps he will have softened his criticism on that since the election seems to have been less than fully democratic.

Be that as it may, the continuing hatred of most Islamists for democracy is useful to know as a reminder of one primary motive for the jihadist terrorism that the world confronts.

Poetry Break: "Match-Mater"

Crocogator or Alloguile?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Some mornings, I need a break from the seriousness of life, so I bring you this morning a bit of contrary-to-fact doggerel:

Match-Mater

Now if you cross a crocodile with an alligator,
Do you get an alloguile or a crocogator?
Then if you cross a crocogator with an alloguile,
Do you get an allodater or a crockoguile?
And if you cross a crockoguile with an allodater,
Do you get an allodile or a crockodater?
Or if you cross a crockodater with an allodile,
Do you get an allocrater or a crackadile?
But if you've hypo-theti-cized enough as a match-mater,
Be satisfied with crocodile, and also alligator.

Well, I hope that this was fun for you. It was for me, and that's what matters because I have to live with myself, but you can always just click away.

Click: "Away."

Neda Agha-Soltan: A Christian?

Neda Agha-Soltan

Click Photo to Enlarge

(Image from Gabrielle Cusumano)

Readers probably recognize this photo of Neda Soltan, the 26-year-old Iranian woman who was struck by a bullet in the heart on June 20, 2009 during the recent demonstrations in Iran. If you missed the earlier reports, see the Wikipedia entry on the "Death of Neda Agha-Soltan" for information and links.

Truth is hard to come by in a case such as this, for the Iranian government has clamped down on reports and has claimed that foreigners killed her. I certainly don't accept this official Iranian claim. Initially, I assumed that Ms. Soltan had simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and had gotten struck by a stray bullet, for she was apparently not directly involved in a protest at the moment, nor was she especially close to where clashes were occurring. Many reports that I've seen, however, insist that she was deliberately targeted by the Basij, a paramilitary volunteer militia formed to protect the Islamist Iranian state and monitor the Islamic practices of Iranian citizens. But I couldn't understand why someone as innocuous as Ms. Soltan would be targeted.

Now, the buzz on the internet has been growing that Ms. Soltan was a Christian, based on the evidence of what appears to be a Christian cross on the necklace that she is wearing in the photograph above. Click on the photo to enlarge the image, and decide for yourself, but it does appear to be a cross to my eyes -- as well as to the eyes of my wife.

From the fact that Ms. Soltan had studied at Islamic Azad University, majoring in philosophy and religion, I had assumed that she was Muslim, but supposing that she were a convert from Islam to Christianity, then a motive for her execution would become more plausible, for Muslim-background Christian have previously been targeted by Iran's Islamist government (e.g., Hossein Soodmand in 1989, Mehdi Dibaj in 1994, and Ghorban Tourani in 2005), and the popular disorder during the demonstrations may have provided the Basij a perfect opportunity to strike.

So . . . was Ms. Soltan a Christian . . . and was she targeted? I suspect that we'll be hearing more about this soon enough, though definitive answers might be difficult to obtain.

Steven S. Sin on Korean Education

Steven S. Sin

Cartoon Fencer . . .

or

. . . Ancient Astronaut?

(Image from Saber Fencer)

Today's blog is a follow-up to my entry on corporal punishment in Korean schools from the perspective of my 12-year-old daughter, Sa-Rah, which I posted on June 29th. I'm 'plagiarizing' comments posted by Saber Fencer, privately known as Steven S. Sin, who has given me permission to 'plagiarize' if I write a follow-up:

Well, if you do write a follow-up article, please feel free to 'plagiarize.' :)

With that permission, here follows my follow-up, in Steve's own words, originally posted as comments to my blog. Steve begins by noting my daughter's report of being forbidden on pain of physical punishment to ask "Why?" -- and quickly moves into a discussion of some intellectual consequences of this:

Watching and reading about this [experience of your daughter Sa-Rah] took me back to my elementary and middle school days . . . when I went to school here in Seoul before moving to the US.

Although this post was about corporal punishment in Korean schools, it also brought two points forward for me: 1) asking the question "why"; and 2) shaking things up in Korea.

1) Korean school system not only tell the very young students not to ask "why," but this "culture of blind acceptance" persists all the way to the very highest level of education.

Allow me to give a specific example. My wife is a Ph.D. student at S university right now, where the professors constantly remind their students that they are the selected lucky few because they can attend this "prestigious" institution of higher learning (I hate to say it, but I think my alma mater, [i.e., University of Texas, Austin,] which is a state university, actually was ranked ahead of this school last time the top 100 universities in the world list came out -- and we know how much Koreans love to rank things). Anyway, this is what happens at that school when a graduate student asks the professors "why." The answer is usually either 1) Ah, that is because you do not understand correctly the subject of *fill in the blank*. You would know that what I said is true and would not have asked that question if you understood it correctly in the first place; or 2) You didn't understand what I said because you did not go to this school for your bachelor's degree. If you had, you would not be asking such an idiotic question.

What any of these really have anything to do with the original question of "why?" Simple . . . the professors have no idea themselves, but they reply using personal attacks so that other students would not ask the same question. Who can blame them[, i.e., the students]? I, for one, would not want to be personally attacked and humiliated in public like that for actually wanting to understand things.

The other reason for these professors' reactions, I think, are simple laziness -- mentally, I mean. My experience is that the question "why" is actually the most difficult question to answer and requires a lot of thought.

Finally, I am willing to bet that a large number of these professors actually never learned to ask and think about a questions this way either. After all, they are also products of the same education system where the student who asks "why" is the abnormal one.

Of course, according to my wife, there's not a lot of students in the graduate school who actually ask "why." Two reasons -- 1) The question will not be answered; and 2) Students themselves do not know how to think, even at graduate level, to ask the question "why."

Sad . . . I thought one of the things we humans differ from other organisms living on earth is because we are the ones who could ask "why."

OK . . . before I get flayed for saying what I said about the professors above . . . I am not saying all professors in Korea are like that . . . just the majority of the ones I know at the S university in Seoul. So, I suppose that my observation and my hypothesis why this phenomenon occurs is limited to that specific school. :)

Well, that's certainly interesting -- and strongly increases my motivation on taking my daughter (and then my son) out of the Korean school system and letting them benefit from homeschooling. I would never punish my children for asking "Why?" As Steve notes, concern with the question "Why?" sets homo sapiens apart as thinking beings.

Be that as it may, Steve followed this comment with a remark on what happens when one tries to shake things up in Korea -- a suggestion proposed by John Hugens in response to my report of the physical abuse used by one particular teacher on students in my daughter's seventh-grade class -- and here is what Steve reported:

Moving on to 2) making waves in Korea.

Interesting thing . . . in the US, if you make waves and point out something that is wrong in the school or the university (especially about a faculty member), usually the faculty member is either asked to leave or gets reassigned. In Korea, usually it is the student that gets asked (sometimes not so nicely) to leave the school.

Again . . . my examples goes back to the famed S university. A faculty member there published a paper in the journal in his name. A student protested, and showed the school authorities a paper that he wrote for a class (and the paper was graded and everything). Although the student's paper was written much earlier than the paper the faculty member submitted to the journal (and upon comparison, the two papers were exactly the same . . . word for word), the student is no longer a student at the university. What happened to the faculty member? he's still teaching at the university. Oh, if you want to know why the student is no longer at the university . . . it is because other faculty members of the department refused to allow the student to register for their classes following this incident. Since this meant that the student could not take core classes required for his degree, he had to seek other options . . . actually, only one practical option for him . . . leave the university.

So, with this kind of mentality, who would want to make waves? I suspect that the parents of Jeffery's daughter's friend are not saying anything precisely because of this reason. They don't want their kid to be the one that gets ostracized because they stood up for something that is right and just.

As I tell my wife all the time:

I look at South Korea as a country and I see that it has all the right conditions and the ingredients to become a regional leader and one of the global leaders. Somehow, however, South Korea always falls short of its potential (almost at all things). South Koreans usually blame the external factors (or the other political party) for falling short. I would like to offer another view point . . . first try fixing the things like the ones I mentioned above before blaming everyone else for your problems.

Well, that's my two cents worth of rambling . . . sorry if I just rambled on, Jeff.

I certainly don't think that Steve rambled. He speaks from experience and intelligent reflection. I'm still unsure of what to do on this second point. John Hugens has spoken from the heart about the courageous thing to do -- as also has Hathor, who remarked:

I think I would try to do something about that social studies teacher, his actions might seriously injure or kill a student one day. I think you could find legal documentation of incidents that have caused harm.

I would think Koreans would know the difference between assault and corporal punishment.

I'd like to think so on this point, but I know how much power teachers have in Korean society . . . and how little power I have. I'm therefore still unsure about what to do.

By the way, since Steve Sin is in the U.S. military, I should probably add his disclaimers:

The views expressed here are not those of any other person, organization, or entity; they are mine alone. The material I post on this blog is either from open sources or unclassified information.

I think that noting this disclaimer is important because we wouldn't want anybody -- least of all Koreans -- to imagine that the American military has an official position on my daughter's education.

Of course, this means that Steve's report is merely anecdotal . . . and therefore not to be officially trusted.

Professor Martin Hengel has passed away at 82

Evangelisch-theologische Fakultät

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

(Image from Department of Protestant Theology)

From Dr. Jim West at the listserve CrossTalk Friday, I learned that Professor Martin Hengel has died. On both the listserve and his website, Dr. West linked to an announcement in the Dorstener Zeitung:

Einer der weltweit bedeutendsten Experten für die Literatur des Urchristentums und antiken Judentums, Prof. Martin Hengel, ist am Donnerstag in Tübingen gestorben. Der evangelische Theologe wurde 82 Jahre alt, teilte die Württembergische Landeskirche in Stuttgart mit. ("Theologe Martin Hengel gestorben," Dorstener Zeitung, July 2, 2009)

One of the foremost experts in the world for the literature of early Christianity and ancient Judaism, Professor Martin Hengel, died on Thursday in Tübingen. The Protestant theologian was 82 years old, reported the Evangelical State Church of Württemberg. (Translation Mine)

Sad news. As I noted on CrossTalk:

I took part in Hengel's weekly Friday night seminar for five years (1990-1995) and am very sad to hear of his death. My condolences to his family. Rest in peace, Professor Hengel.

Now that I've had time to reflect, I believe that the seminar was not weekly but every fortnight, for when I was romancing Sun-Ae, I'd visit her place in Munich every second weekend, and she'd visit me in Tübingen on the weekends that Hengel's seminar took place. We'd eat dinner together early on Friday evening at a restaurant near the Neckar River, and toward 8:00, we'd part as I biked up the steep hill to Hengel's seminar, which was held at his home in a large study filled with several thousand books that lined the walls alongside an enormously long table where we late-night scholars sat.

Perhaps to keep theologians off the streets and out of trouble, the seminar ran until midnight, with a break for fizzy apple juice accompanied by salty, buttered rolls. That break was necessary, for the seminar was intense. I learned a lot in my five years of participation -- though trying to understand the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, all in the context of a German-language seminar, was daunting indeed. I never quite rose to the multiple occasions, but Professor Hengel was gracious anyway.

I recall one anecdote, an exchange that he and I had during one of those seminars. Hengel was musing about prophecy and historical contingency -- both of which he took seriously -- and wondered aloud as to what would have happened in the choice between Jesus and Barabbas if the crowd had clamored for the release of Jesus. I ventured to suggest:

"If that had happened, then Pilate would have thought, 'Hmmm . . . perhaps he really is dangerous'."

"And have had him executed anyway!" cried Hengel, completing my point.

And thus through Pontius Pilate's paranoid suspicions would biblical prophecy have been saved from a dreadful disconfirmation. Hengel laughed at that, amused by my 'cleverness', but that was probably the only intelligent remark that I ever uttered in his seminar, so I can't claim to have made a profound impression on the man.

He did, however, like a synoptic arrangment that I made of the four Coptic texts of the Gnostic Apocryphon of John -- enough to request a photocopy for his library -- and he also remembered me well when I saw him at a 2003 Johannine Conference in St. Andrews, Scotland, where he wished me the best in my continuing search for a university position in the field of Gnostic studies (though that blessing has yet to have taken effect).

This photo that I've borrowed from Dr. West's website shows Professor Hengel as I recall him:


"Requiescat in Pace," Professor Hengel . . . though perhaps I should say, "Ruhe in Frieden."

Bernstein on Kolakowski's "Big Lie"

Richard Bernstein

(Master Media Speakers Bureau)

I guess that mainstream media ain't dead yet, or I wouldn't be learning so much from it. Yesterday was Ignatius applying Dostoyevsky to Putin; today is Bernstein applying Kolakowski to Iran.

I first read Leszek Kolakowski in Martin Jay's U.C. Berkeley seminar nearly 30 years ago, and except for excerpts since then, I've read little . . . though I keep promising myself to read more because every time that I read words that he wrote, I feel that I've learned something very important, such as what he said about "the big lie" -- which Richard Bernstein summarized a couple of days ago in his New York Times "Letter from America" column, "In Tehran, Shades of Tiananmen" (July 1, 2009):

Years ago, the Polish-born philosopher Leszek Kolakowski explained the remarkable adherence of totalitarian dictators to the big lie, which Mr. Kolakowski distinguished from the ordinary political mendacity -- an excellent recent example of which was the claim by Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina that he was enjoying a respite by hiking in the Appalachian Mountains when he was with his mistress in Argentina.

The ordinary political lie, in Mr. Kolakowski's view, didn't seek to erase "the distinction between truth and falsity," while the totalitarian big lie does. It defines truth as what the holders of power say it is, and, in this sense, as Mr. Kolakowski wrote in an 1983 article in Commentary Magazine, it is "the very core of a political system, the heart of a new civilization."

"By training people in this confusion," Mr. Kolakowski wrote, "and by inoculating them to believe that nothing is true in itself" it will "produce a new 'socialist man,' devoid of will and of moral resistance."

Kolakowski was speaking of Soviet-style socialism of the totalitarian sort, but Bernstein wonders if the concept can be extended further, a question stemming partly from his conversation with a Yale history professor:

"The Iranians are telling medium-sized lies," Timothy Snyder, a professor of East European history at Yale said in a conversation this week. The main thrust of the Iranian propaganda is to blame external enemies for internal problems, a practice, Mr. Snyder said, that was first used on a grand scale in mid-19th-century Europe, well before the era of total thought control.

Still, there seem to be more than faint echoes of the classic big lie in the case of Mr. Ahmadinejad and the actions of the security services.

"One reason the lie has to be big," Mr. Snyder said, "is that people will feel that if their leaders must have a lot of confidence to tell a lie that big, they are either crazy or they have a powerful security force behind them."

This doesn't mean that the lies Iran’s leaders are telling are going to work. Indeed there are plenty of signs that they won't. At the same time, events in Iran have proved that the leaders are eager to control information and they do have a powerful and ruthless security force behind them.

I wonder if the big lie can ever truly work anymore. Contemporary media is making the control of information significantly more difficult. Even something as 'silly' as "twittering" turned out to play a serious role in relaying information through short "tweets." Imagine how much more the young Chinese today would know about the killing of demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing 20 years ago if the new media that we have now had been available then. I don't think that any totalitarian system can erase "the distinction between truth and falsity" anymore because such a system requires "absolute control over every living soul" -- as Leonard Cohen puts it in "The Future" -- and that sort of system cannot be maintained without enormous expense of wealth, time, and energy against the tides of democracy.

As for those of us who belong to the more sophisticated West, we disdain the crude attempts at an erasure of "the distinction between truth and falsity" used in Soviet Russia, Communist China, or Islamist Iran, for we've developed a far subtler, much more efficient means: a quotidian relativism of everyday life.

Paradoxically, then, the West is best. Relatively speaking.

Vladimir Putin as Grand Inquisitor?

The Washington Post

I see that I'm not the only one reading The Brothers Karamazov these days, for David Ignatius of the Washington Post is drawing upon Dostoyevsky's famous novel to portray Vladimir Putin as "Russia's Grand Inquisitor" (July 1, 2009):

As Barack Obama packs for his trip to Russia next week, he should bring along a copy of "The Brothers Karamazov." For the modern Russia of Vladimir Putin is still struggling with the same political riddles that Fyodor Dostoyevsky described 130 years ago.

Human beings would happily trade their freedom for food and security, Dostoyevsky wrote in the novel's famous chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor." In place of this anarchic freedom, the Inquisitor offered the people "miracle, mystery and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from their hearts."

There's a palpable sense here that Putin has brought "miracle, mystery and authority" to a Russia that was severely traumatized by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The country is certainly less free than it was under Boris Yeltsin, but Putin is immensely popular -- and nobody wants to return to the crazy, freewheeling time of transition.

Vladimir Putin as the Grand Inquisitor? But I thought that President Bush had looked into Putin's eyes and taken the measure of the man's soul. Apparently, Bush should have read Dostoyevsky first to acquire the properly standardized metric for measuring Putin to see how well the Russian leader's muscular frame might fit the ascetic Inquisitor's "coarse, old, monk's cassock" and how capable this former KGB agent might be of providing "miracle, mystery, and authority" for contemporary Russia.

Certainly, Putin has his authoritarian tendencies that have stood him in good stead in a culture that prizes strong leaders:

Putin is the tough guy who put a wounded country back together after the fall of communism. "Russia emerged from the chaos of 1991 with disproportionately large political and socio-psychological scars," explained Alexey Chesnakov, a former Putin adviser who is director of the Center for Current Policy. When Putin became president in 1999, he brought "authoritarianism by consensus," said the head of another Russian think tank.

Ignatius doesn't offer quotes on what the "miracle" and the "mystery" are. Perhaps the miracle was the oil-boom wealth and the mystery Putin's continuing popularity despite the oil-price bust. Or are the miracle and the mystery Putin's perhaps authentic affirmation of Russian Orthodox Christianity?

And who's Christ in this drama, anyway? In Dostoyevsky's version, the terrible Grand Inquisitor has to be confronted by the one "with a gentle smile of infinite compassion" that perhaps overcomes even the Inquisitor's cynicism. Would that be President Obama? I suppose that I could here descend to the level of joking about "Obamessiah" . . . but I won't. Instead, I'll simply quote again from the article by Ignatius, who . . .

. . . was pleased when yet another Putin adviser, a publisher who helped organize the conference, reassured the group that these problems [of freedom versus authority] go back more than a century: "This is a Russian conversation you can see since Dostoyevsky's time."

A conversation that sometimes grows as heated as an argument, admittedly. Anyway, I guess that I have chosen the precisely right time to re-read Dostoyevsky's great work since it's now required reading for Russia experts such as myself, and I trust that I am maintaining proper modesty in suggesting that President Obama ought to take me aboard as one of his advisors when he heads for Russia to talk with the inquisitive Putin.

Jeffery Hodges: "How I met her" . . . thanks to Robert Musil

Robert Musil

(Image from Great Books Guide)

Matt Lamers, journalist and editor for the Korea Herald, is currently having a series of articles and columns examining international marriages in Korea published in the Herald's Expat Living section, and yesterday (July 1, 2009) was my turn to tell my story of how I met Sun-Ae . . . which was a bit different than the usual boy-meets-girl story. I've told this tale before here on Gypsy Scholar, but some readers might not have read it:

How I met her

By Jeffery Hodges

About four years ago, when my family and I were still living in Osan, a woman in our apartment complex encountered my wife and recognized her as "the person married to that foreigner."

What the woman particularly wanted to know was, "Why did he marry you? You're not beautiful."

I suppose that there's always a story to tell. I met my wife in Germany, on a train. I hadn't noticed her standing on the platform before boarding, but she had already observed me, perceived the danger, and kept her distance. Despite her effort to avoid me, I happened to sit down beside her. Pure chance - it was the only empty seat. (My wife says fate.)

"Hello," I said, noticing her for the first time, and liking what I saw.

"Hello," she responded, in a low, wary, but husky and thereby enticing voice.

"I'm Jeff Hodges," I told her.

"I'm Sun-ae," she told me.

"What does your name mean?" I asked.

"Good Love," she revealed.

I took it as a sign and decided to marry her. But I had to win her heart. I therefore asked her what she was studying.

"Robert Musil," she said, still wary.

Now, I don't know that "Musil" derives from "muse," and it may be just a variant of "mueseli," but I took him as my inspiration.

"Oh," I noted, "The Man Without Qualities."

By chance (or was it fate?), I had recently begun reading that novel. In German. Indeed, the entire conversation with this unexpected love of my life was taking place in German.

I am terrible at foreign languages, not particularly eloquent in even my own, and was having to woo in a tongue suited less to expressing passionate love than to explaining the mechanical workings of an internal combustion engine. Even the German title of Musil's book sounds mechanical: "Der Man ohne Eigenschaften."

Rather like a piston, isn't it: Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en ...

She, however, was impressed that I knew the book. Especially when I related the opening story, which introduces the main character, Ulrich, who meets a beautiful, mysterious woman through a series of unfortunate events and accidentally wins her heart.

This introductory part of the novel ends with the dry observation that, "One week later, she was already seven days his beloved." Which I quoted aloud.

I may not have won her heart with that, but I caught her attention. And over poetry the following evening, I did capture her heart.

When I took her to my Ozark home to meet my family, everyone was impressed with her but also baffled. My youngest brother put it succinctly, "How did Jeff ever get such a beautiful girlfriend?"

How indeed? I owe it all to a man without qualities.

That man would be Ulrich, I suppose . . . though I in fact owe my marital bliss to the author Mr. Robert Musil, who merely intended to write about the Austro-Hungarian Empire and would be astonished to learn that his magnum opus led to something far greater than that.

July 13th will make 17 years since Sun-Ae and I met on that German train, and our love is still an adventure going places.