#71 | The end of history rhymes, too
The "drums" of war is a cliché, but it’s apt: The thumping in the distance, the disorienting echo—from in-front, or behind?—from left, or the right? But listen carefully. Can we hear the drums of total war across Europe? Across the world? It's so damn hard to tell.
We can't know if, when, or how the invasion of Ukraine tumbles toward a proxy war (we're already at this point, perhaps) and slips further into a total war across the continent. Of course, when today's chapter closes, many will say how obvious it all was; how pre-destined this tragic destination is: "Putin was always mad", "it was a matter of time before the world's first nuclear war", "the West waited too long to respond". But, frankly, hindsight is a beautiful illuminator of opaque events. Today, not one of us knows.
That said, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And what is rhyming? Here are a couple of quotes. As you read them, guess when they were written:
"It's too early to say in just what way the Russian regime will destroy itself … But at any rate, the Russian regime will either democratise itself, or it will perish."
"In the end, the European peoples may have to accept American domination as a way of avoiding domination by Russia…"
The quotes above were written not this month but in 1946 and '47 respectively, by George Orwell. 1947 was in the shadow of the Second World War; at the onset of the Cold War, that continued, more or less, until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Orwell was correct: while Russia's empire was established and then governed over (most ruthlessly) by Stalin, at an immense human cost, it did not endure: it perished. In hindsight, Orwell was uniquely prescient.
Looking for rhymes further back, we can look to Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, published in 1910, shortly before the First World War. The book that spread like dry-rot through academic circles proved that nations' financial and economic interdependence meant that the victor and vanquisher would suffer from war equally. It was no longer profitable (or possible) to defeat enemies, said Angell, since both would suffer ruin in the process. In the same year, Lord Esher said that the interlacing of nations meant war "becomes every day more difficult and improbable". A century later, it's undoubted (proven by global sanctions and boycotts) that the world is interconnected; but does that interconnection prevent war, as they believed in 1910?
Here's another rhyme, this time quoting Howard Zin, the author of history is a Weapon (published here - recommended), writing about the start of the First World War:
"One day after the English declared war, Henry James wrote to a friend: "The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness ... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be ... gradually bettering." In the first Battle of the Maine, the British and French succeeded in blocking the German advance on Paris. Each side had 500,000 casualties."
In James's terms, have we not supposed the world to be "gradually bettering"? Technology has been the cornerstone of this improvement. Being more interconnected, are we, in some senses, safer from one another—we're more tightly bound. Each of us has Facebook and Snapchat—so, isn't each of us broadly the same?
Each of these quotes—these rhymes—are the echoes of drums. Looking at Russia's actions (with its Orwellian, North Korean, dystopian, use of propaganda, and totalitarian violence), it's hard to map it with the democratic, Westphalian values we love. It all feels like an outlier event, but there are clues in the past. “History doesn’t crawl; it leaps,” says Nassim Taleb, but it’s leapt before, too. Sometimes, one has to look back to look forward.
Indeed, it's a wake-up call to a generation. Especially my generation, who were born at and after the collapse of the USSR—at the “end of history”—that history didn’t end, and the tragedies of yesterday were lived through and written about by people just like us.
My week in books
World Order by Henry Kissinger - Kissinger is a statesman as distinguished as he is able, and as able as he is old (very! at 98, he’s still working). His life’s work on exercising American influence abroad is based on minimising intervention while balancing powers, thereby maintaining, what he calls, World Order. This book is excellent and explains his thesis, and unpacks the evolution of our geopolitical order today. Link.
Why Orwell Matters by (the late) Christopher Hitchens - No book has made more of an impression on me than Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell (link), so I have a keen interest in the character. Hitchens’s book on Orwell is explicitly not a biography but rather an overview of Orwell’s political thinking and a critique of his writing. It’s good, but Orwell is better, so I’d start there. Link.
Platform Revolution by Geoffrey G. Parker (and others) - The authors look at the impact of platforms—and argue (compellingly) that platforms will be everywhere in the future; all informal or broker-led systems will become managed by platforms that make the marketplaces more dynamic and fair. If you’re building a platform business (marketplace, social network, etc.) I recommend reading this. Link.
Live well,
-Hector