From Andrew Sullivan

 

Why Sam Harris Won’t Criticize Israel

Jul 31 2014 @ 12:14pm

It’s a very long piece – or, rather, a speech annotated with qualifications – an interesting way to put your thoughts down on a screen. And it’s well worth your while. The gist of it is that because Hamas is an almost text-book example of nihilist theocracy and Israel isn’t, Israel is on the right side of the defining struggle of our times – and so not a country Harris will criticize. A related, central point is that the use of human shields by Hamas puts them in an utterly different moral universe than the IDF, in whose interests it is not to kill Palestinian civilians.

This is a crude summary – for there are qualifications on so many points that the piece is almost an explosion of nuance. So, for example, in Sam’s view, Israel cannot be absolved from war crimes either; and should not even exist as a Jewish state. That last point is a pretty huge one – and it comes at the very start of the piece. But if Israel should not exist as a Jewish state, it should not exist at all. This is its core justification – and one of the issues the Israeli government has put at the center of any possible two-state solution. Get rid of the Jewishness of Israel … and you will soon have a Middle Eastern state pretty evenly divided between Jew and Arab and in which future immigration

would easily tip the demographic balance toward Islam. And this is where, I’d argue, Sam’s argument begins to unravel almost as soon as it begins: because it is overwhelmingly an abstract statement of abstract principles which fails to account for history in all its particular twists and turns. So he ends up refusing to criticize a state he really doesn’t believe should exist and yet then goes on to criticize it quite potently. You can call that original if you want. But you might also call it incoherent.

Still, Sam is unquestionably right about the theocratic extremism and despicable anti-Semitism of Hamas and its allies. It is much more extreme and central to Hamas than theocracy and anti-Arab racism is to Israel. He’s right that Hamas’ preference for building underground tunnels for war rather than underground bomb shelters for civilians makes them complicit (though far from solely responsible) in the horrifying carnage of the last few weeks. He’s also right about the difference between what Israelis would do if they had all the power and what Hamas would do in the same boat. Israel, with overwhelming power, gives many Arab citizens political rights even as it has penned a huge number into segregated bantustans, curtailed their travel, blockaded them (in Gaza), and surrounded them with theocratic Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Hamas would, in contrast, just kill every Jew it could find as soon as it could. That is an important difference.

But that’s why I absolutely do not support Hamas, and never have. Nor is there any excuse for their war crimes. But the issue here is not one of a choice between Israel and Hamas; it’s between the possibility of a two-state solution and the Israeli government’s refusal to take any of the off-ramps toward it if they would curtail the bid to settle and annex the West Bank. Much of Sam’s argument would hold water if the Israelis had been in earnest about peace, and in earnest in supporting moderate Palestinian forces on the West Bank, and in earnest about taking Obama’s proposals seriously this past decade. But they haven’t been. Settlements are much more important to them than peace. And the settlements are motivated by exactly the kind of theocratic zeal that Sam normally opposes.

But the settlements – themselves a standing war crime under Geneva – do not figure prominently in Sam’s account. And when they do, he offers an unconvincing defense:

What would the Israelis do if they could do what they want? They would live in peace with their neighbors, if they had neighbors who would live in peace with them. They would simply continue to build out their high tech sector and thrive. [Note: Some might argue that they would do more than this—e.g. steal more Palestinian land. But apart from the influence of Jewish extremism (which I condemn), Israel’s continued appropriation of land has more than a little to do with her security concerns. Absent Palestinian terrorism and Muslim anti-Semitism, we could be talking about a "one-state solution," and the settlements would be moot.]

This is delusional. It’s not just Palestinian terrorism and Muslim anti-Semitism that makes a one-state solution moot; it is embedded in the very meaning of Zionism. If Israel requires a Jewish majority to survive as a Jewish state, a one-state solution is anathema to it. And if all Israel wanted to do was have its tech sector thrive within (roughly) the 1967 borders, and embrace serious, US-backed security arrangements vis-a-vis Jordan, I’d be backing it to the hilt.

Instead, as Palestinian terrorism from the West Bank has declined drastically – the Israelis have intensified their theft of Palestinian land. Those settlements deeply hurt, rather than help, Israel’s security – because they alienate most of her allies, exacerbate bitterness and suspicion, and make the possibility of a two-state solution moot. You could secure the West Bank by military outposts if you wanted. But Israel is committed to engineering the demography of the place by settlements of religious fanatics of the sort Sam would usually excoriate. Netanyahu, we now know, would rather release hundreds of prisoners convicted of murdering Jews than remove a single brick from the West Bank settlements. It’s really not about security at all. It’s about race and religion in their ugliest zero-sum manifestations. Just because it isn’t as bad as Hamas doesn’t excuse it.

Then there is a really important point:

What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want to stifle every freedom that decent, educated, secular people care about. This is not a trivial difference. And yet judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now receives, you would think the difference ran the other way.

This kind of confusion puts all of us in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don’t want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world, because they are desperate to get to Paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel. It’s just that some of us haven’t realized it yet.

Again, the abstractions obscure rather than clarify. We are not all living in Israel. Nor should any sane person want to be. In America, we are surrounded by two vast oceans and two unthreatening neighbors – about as different from Israel as it is possible to conceive. We have more space and land to accommodate religious, racial and cultural diversity than Israel could even dream of. We are not defined by one race or religion – but defined rather by a radical separation of church and state. In so far as we face Jihadist terror, we do so from a vastly more secure vantage point – and its victims since 9/11 have been mercifully sparse, suggesting a threat more manageable within our existing laws and arrangements than I, for one, ever thought possible.

And we have a real debate about how to confront Jihadist terror. In the Cheney years, we adopted the Netanyahu "shock and awe" approach – bomb, invade, terrorize and detain. Since then, we have adopted smarter, more surgical and political initiatives to help defuse it. One way to defuse it would be to resolve the Israel-Arab conflict along the only two-state lines that can work. The Israel-Palestine dispute is not the only thing galvanizing Jihadism, of course. But it remains one area where we have some leverage to effect change, and it is one area where our alleged ally has done all it can to prevent us.

I oppose Jihadism, in other words, as much as Sam. But what Israel is doing in the West Bank and the horrors it is inflicting on Gaza are almost designed to inflame, give credence to, and empower Jihadism in ways that will not only affect the Israelis. We are not all living in Israel. But if Sam gets his way, and ever more salt is rubbed into an ever rawer wound, we could be.

Ukraine’s War of Independence (Slate Commentary)

Vladimir Putin has unleashed forces he might not be able to control  

By Lucian Kim SLATE

The latest round of economic sanctions against Russia is an act of desperation by Western leaders, baffled by Vladimir Putin’s intransigence over the conflict in Ukraine. Pleas and threats—voiced in backroom meetings and countless phone calls with the Russian president—failed to move Putin to publicly disown the pro-Russian rebels. Even the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine didn’t sway the Kremlin leader. The sanctions announced by the U.S. and European Union on Tuesday are an admission that the diplomatic toolkit is officially empty.

The West has miscalculated Putin’s machinations ever since his Ukrainian proxy, then-President Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia in February after three months of pro-EU protests ended in a massacre on Kiev’s Maidan square. To most Western Europeans at the time, Ukraine was an annoyingly large, poor country whose aspirations for EU membership caused more headaches than jubilation. But to Putin, Ukraine signified a strategically vital buffer zone whose sovereignty came only second to Russia’s national security. He was playing the highest stakes from the very start.

When pro-Western politicians formed a provisional government in the power vacuum that Yanukovych left behind, Putin was convinced that a U.S.-funded regime change had returned to Russia’s doorstep. Without hesitation he annexed Crimea—home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet—to forestall any future NATO expansion. Then Putin encouraged pro-Russian protests in eastern Ukraine in an effort to throw the new Kiev authorities farther off balance.

Putin understood the struggle for Ukraine to be about Russia’s—and his own—survival. He connected the dots from Kiev’s pro-Western Orange Revolution in 2004 to the anti-government protests that swept Moscow seven years later. This time Putin would take no chances: Allowing Ukraine to choose a Western course would be tantamount to letting the enemy in through the gates. In the former KGB agent’s world, where little happens due to chance or coincidence, one cynical conspiracy had to be met with another.

To Putin’s surprise, the attempt to start a pro-Russian, "anti-Maidan" uprising in predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine failed miserably. While local people may have been skeptical of closer association with the EU and the new Kiev government, they also didn’t rally en masse around the Russian flag and incoherent calls for "federalization." That’s why small, well-armed groups began seizing government buildings at strategic locations around the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in April to force the cause of independence from the "fascist Kiev junta." Supporters believed a slapdash "yes" referendum would guarantee them a fate like Crimea’s. Instead, the clumsy, unprepared Ukrainian military arrived to put down the rebellion.

It’s far from clear whether Ukraine can win its war for independence.

Earlier rounds of Western sanctions may have made Putin think twice about sending regular troops into Ukraine, but nothing was stopping men and matériel from crossing the porous border from Russia. What started as a bunch of bored teenagers and frustrated middle-aged men playing soldier has since turned into a localized but very real war that has cost more than 1,100 lives, according to the United Nations.

On a visit to Donetsk last week, I was struck by the change in mood compared with previous months. The city of 1 million has become a ghost town as the Ukrainian military closes in on the rebel stronghold. While locals used to openly express support for the separatists, I heard no praise for the rebels this time. One older woman whose neighborhood had been shelled told me she was disappointed that Petro Poroshenko, elected Ukraine’s president in May, reneged on his promise to make his first trip to Donetsk. A shopkeeper confided in me that she and all her acquaintances were impatiently awaiting the Ukrainian Army. A taxi driver railed that the anarchy was a bonanza for criminal gangs.

It wouldn’t be correct to call the current fighting a civil war because of the ambiguous, outsize role Russia has played. The Donetsk rebels’ commander, Igor Girkin, and their political leader, Alexander Borodai, are both from Moscow. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, there is no conflict between Ukrainian- and Russian-speakers. Large swaths of Ukraine, including Kiev, speak Russian as a first language.

In many ways, the conflict could be characterized as Ukraine’s war of independence, since the fighting has galvanized a sense of nation among Ukrainians regardless of where they live. Even if they didn’t support the pro-EU protesters during the winter demonstrations on the Maidan, most Ukrainians now view Russia as an antagonistic neighbor that can’t be trusted. It’s become impossible for Ukrainians to feel ambivalent about their national identity.

Just because Putin hasn’t succeeded in instigating a larger pro-Russian uprising doesn’t mean that a quick resolution is in sight. Ukrainian politicians from all camps have proved themselves to be singularly shortsighted and self-interested. Last week, with the battle for the East still far from won, the government coalition collapsed and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk resigned. When cold weather returns in the fall and the Ukrainian government discovers it doesn’t have enough money to pay Russian natural-gas giant Gazprom, the energy crunch will start to bite. And without a decisive victory on the battlefield, frustrations both within the military and on the homefront could boil over. It’s far from clear whether Ukraine can win its war for independence.

Putin has already shown that he is prepared to let Ukraine go up in flames—even if the consequences for Russia are unforeseeable. The danger is that the violent, nationalist elements in Russia unleashed by the war will demand greater Russian involvement, especially if the rebels lose more ground. Should Ukrainian forces manage to stamp out the rebellion, the chauvinist ghosts that Putin invoked to annex Crimea could come back to haunt him. The Girkins and Borodais of the world cheer Putin only as long as they see him restoring lost Russian glory, but their allegiance to the Kremlin is not unconditional. The blowback from Ukraine could make sanctions look like a joke

No More Mr. Tough Guy

By Adam Gopnik

The New Yorker

Barack Obama is not a tough guy. Everybody rolls him. He’s a wimp, a weak sister; he won’t stand up for himself or his country. Vladimir Putin, a true tough guy, blows planes out of the air, won’t apologize, walks around half-naked. Life, it seems, is like a prison yard, and Obama cowers in a corner. "It would be a hellish thing to live with such timidity. … He’s scared of Vladimir Putin," one Fox News contributor said about the President. But this kind of thing is not confined to the weirder fringes: Maureen Dowd pointed out a while ago that former fans of Obama "now make derogatory remarks about your manhood," while the Wall Street Journal ’s editorial page runs a kind of compendium of "weak sister" pieces every morning, urging the President, at one point, to make more "unambiguous threats"—making unambiguous threats evidently being the real man’s method of getting his way.

"Barack Obama is the first female president," The Daily Caller, a Web site co-founded by a former adviser to Dick Cheney, blared, without a trace of irony or consciousness that female might not be such a bad thing for a President to be. The Daily Caller lists seven basic "manly" traits—courage, industry, resolution, self-reliance, discipline, honor, and manliness, that last one bafflingly redundant but, hey, that’s the way men are—and shows how Obama fails in regard to each. (He’s terrified of his wife, apparently, though one would think that this is actually a classic Jimmy Stewart-style American sign of husbandliness.) Toni Morrison wrote memorably, in these pages, that Bill Clinton had become, in a symbolic sense, "our first black President"—meaning that Clinton’s perceived faults were flaws of appetite, of a kind that a racist imagination traditionally ascribed to black men. "His unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution," Morrison wrote. Obama’s perceived flaws are the ancient effeminate ones, of the kind that a bigoted tradition ascribed to women; above all, the criticism reflects the President’s unapologetic distaste for violent confrontation and for making loud threats, no matter how empty those threats may obviously be. (The joke, of course, is that, with Clinton as with Obama, the symbolic substitute may well precede the real thing.)

Obama—contemptibly, in this view—offers off-ramps in the direction of reason even when faced with the most fanatical opponents, who are bent on revenge for mysterious, sectarian motives, and yet he still tries to appease them. And that’s just the Republicans in Congress. Shouldn’t he be tougher with bad guys abroad? The curious thing, though, is how much the talk about manliness—and Obama’s lack of it—is purely and entirely about appearances. In the current crisis over the downed Malaysian plane, all the emphasis is on how it looks or how it might be made to look—far more than on American interests and much less on simple empathy for the nightmarish fate of the people on board. The tough-talkers end up grudgingly admitting that what the President has done—as earlier, with Syria—is about all that you could do, given the circumstances. Their own solutions are either a further variant on the kinds of sanctions that are already in place—boycott the World Cup in Russia!—or else are too militarily reckless to be taken seriously. Not even John McCain actually thinks that we should start a war over whether Donetsk and Luhansk should be regarded as part of Ukraine or Russia. The tough guys basically just think that Obama should have looked scarier. The anti-effeminate have very little else to suggest by way of practical action—except making those unambiguous threats and, apparently, baring your teeth while you do.

Why does this belligerent rhetoric still stir us? The American political historian K. A. Cuordileone wrote a good book a few years ago about the birth of this "cult of toughness" in American foreign policy, in which she makes the point that it was essentially the invention of liberals in the Kennedy Administration—the Eisenhower and Truman people were more inclined to talk of "duty"—who wanted to curb the suspicion that liberals were inclined to be effete. What is strange, reading through her pages, is exactly how exclusively focussed on pure appearances the cult of toughness always was. All of the arguments, the ones that led to the near-apocalypse in Cuba and, later, to Vietnam, were not about calculations made of interests and utility. They were about looking manly.

Cuordileone quotes Lyndon Johnson in his retirement on the catastrophe of Vietnam, when he was still obsessed with the idea that, if he had withdrawn, his enemies—by whom he meant, notably, Robert Kennedy, a founding member of the real-man cult—would know that Johnson was, in his own words, "a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine." She goes on to writes that Johnson’s words show a "deep psychological investment in masculine self-image," one that "has the power to subvert circumspection, logic, prudence, morality and even national self-interest in matters of national decision making, and create the illusion that there are no alternatives."

This business of looking manly even developed its own theoretical rationale, the concept of "credibility": if we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent. "Credibility" is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one. This is the logic that led to wild overinvestment in peripheral struggles like Iraq, and is, in the view of many of its proponents, too subtle for the feminine mind to grasp.

"I will do such things—what they are yet I know not—but they shall be the terror of the earth." So mad King Lear announces—and it is, as Bertrand Russell once noted, the Tough Guys’ point of view packed into a phrase. We’ll show them! Though what we’ll show them, and how we’ll show them, and to what end we’ll show them, and what we will say to the mothers of the children whose lives have been wasted in order to show them—those things remain as strangely unsayable for the serious men as they did for crazy Lear.

We don’t need tough guys. We need wise guys. We’ve tried tough guys, and it always ends in tears. Tough guys you know right away because they’re never scared of a fight. Wise guys you only know in retrospect, when you remember that they quietly walked away from the fight that now has the tough guy in a hospital. Wise women do that, too.

AN ALTERNATIVE TAKE

Israel's argument for war against Palestine ignores the context

For Israel, this is a war against Hamas that started a few weeks ago. Outsiders increasingly see it as war against Gaza for years, and against Palestinians for decades

　

Dahlia Scheindlin The Observer,

　

Gaza/Getty Images

Protective Edge, the war between Israel and Hamas, has received some legitimacy from key Israeli allies; both the US and Europe have observed Israel's right to defend itself against rockets and terror infiltration through tunnels. But from the start, the life span of that support was bound to be short. As a brief ceasefire was reached on Saturday, it may already be waning.

The reason can be summed up as follows: the immediate casus belli – Hamas aggression – appears to justify Israel's actions. But on closer inspection, threats against civilians fade compared to actual carnage among civilians – Palestinians. Zooming out, the long-term context of the conflict is increasingly indefensible. Yet Israel's argument for the war depends on immediate justifications and ignores the context. To compensate, Israel is fixated on narrative, in the deep conviction that a campaign of slogans and images, known as "hasbara", will work.

Start with the immediate pretext for the war: no one can allow rocket fire at civilians or terrorists' infiltration through tunnels. But many also know that both Israel and Hamas have played the game of provocations leading here. Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in a double rage following a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement and the murder of three Israeli teens in June, undertook a massive sweep against Hamas in the West Bank (producing no evidence that the latter committed the murders). The move was bound to elicit a reaction.

Wartime realities further erode Israel's case. Ironically, as the Iron Dome system protects Israelis from Hamas rockets, it highlights Palestinian civilians' helplessness. And it is tough to link the aim of destroying tunnels with the bombing of a UN school sheltering those who had fled their homes. Then there's the long view. Protective Edge represents the third war in five years, the umpteenth failure of peace negotiations that Netanyahu never intended would succeed. The international community tolerated Cast Lead, a Gaza war in 2008-9 (at least while it was happening) in part because then-prime minister Ehud Olmert had truly sought for long-term resolution through negotiations and concessions, but failed. Under Netanyahu, Israel's image as a rejectionist is more entrenched than ever.

Israelis hold the opposite view. For them, the last few years were a time of relative calm. They traded suicide bombs of the early 2000s for regular Gaza "operations" with low Israeli casualties, in the firm belief that it cannot be otherwise. They repress Palestinian statelessness and deep constraints on people, movement, goods, livelihood; they believe Gaza is unoccupied. They remember the conflict when Israelis are victims: when youngsters are murdered and rockets are fired.

For Israel, this is a war against Hamas that started a few weeks ago. Outsiders increasingly see it as war against Gaza for years, and against Palestinians for decades. In that environment, it doesn't matter who fired at the UN school.

People were killed because of a war, because of the big picture, which doesn't favour Israel. Not wishing to address the big picture, Israel has embraced hasbara to explain its pinpointed strikes. The strategy fails on multiple levels.

In general, Israeli hasbara observes only those short-term arguments for the war. But it drills down even further, to explain tactics and incidents. The UN school, like other cases before it, could be reduced to a whodunnit in the grimmest of games: Who fired the shot? Did Palestinians doctor the photos? Evidence-doubting is becoming a favourite game.

But as the war heats up, the global media pay closer attention to the whole situation. The world is able to pan out to see the whole picture, while Israel is zeroing in.

Another problem is that hasbara serves up pith instead of policy. From its Twitter account, the IDF offers these formulations: "Hamas does not exist for the people of Gaza; it abuses its people in order to exist."

"Israel uses its weapons to protect civilians; Hamas uses its civilians to protect weapons."

The slogans are augmented by flashy graphics that could grace a magazine but are no substitute for solutions. Netanyahu may know that the cartoon bomb he flashed in his 2012 United Nations speech about the Iranian nuclear threat yielded jokes. This time, no one is laughing.

Worse still, the scent of hasbara taints even clearly legitimate actions. Thus: "IDF soldiers were rushed by a female suicide bomber in Gaza. They were able to neutralise the threat," reads another message. Surely everyone can agree on the need to kill a suicide bomber before she strikes, if necessary. But the euphemistic self-justifications that are so overused in far less clear situations can cause momentary doubt even here.

By ignoring and perpetuating the long-term conflict, obsessively reading only the very, very short term, and by dressing up its actions in cheap linguistic clothes, Israel's communications may backfire among precisely those who need to be convinced.

There are two paths to understanding this conflict – Israel's and those seen by the outside world. Increasingly, they do not cross.

Dahlia Scheindlin is a public opinion researcher and consultant. She lives in Tel Aviv, and writes a regular column for +972 Magazine, an Israeli blog.

The energy-efficient way to punish Putin – and protect the planet

For once Europe’s greens and securocrats can join forces – by reducing the EU’s dependence on imports of Russian gas

Chris Huhne The Guardian

A Gazprom employee at work in the Sudzha plant, just 200 metres from the Ukrainian border. 'The share of Russian gas in EU gas imports has been declining for many years.' Photograph: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA

Europe has a Russia problem, as Herman van Rompuy, the president of the European council, recognised on Friday by sending out the latest draft of the proposed sanctions. Nick Clegg is right that Russia should lose the 2018 World Cup, but that is Fifa’s call. In those areas where it has clout, the EU is going to be tougher than most predict. The shooting down of MH17 has dramatised Russia’s role, and made it harder for European leaders to duck the consequences.

Astonishingly, the MH17 incident does not appear to have even interrupted Russian arms supplies to the Ukrainian rebels. Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s new president, believes Russia is continuing to supply weaponry – and according to western intelligence sources, he is right. Whether Putin wants to annex the Donbas – Luhansk and Donetsk – as well as Crimea is moot. Some argue that he sees Russian interests as equally well served by a fractured and weak Ukraine. Whatever the objective, the means are clear and hard to misinterpret.

The pro-Russian insurgents in Ukraine have been able to rely on Moscow’s support to keep them in the game, even after they lost control of Sloviansk to Ukrainian forces, largely as a result of Kiev’s air power. The Buk missile systems, probably supplied from the growing Russian base at Rostov, appear to have been a deliberate Russian attempt to balance forces. In short, modern Europe is facing a substantial regional power actively attempting to destabilise a sovereign neighbour.

This is deeply worrying. Ukraine is by no means the only country that has big Russian-speaking minorities susceptible to Putin’s tactics in Crimea and the Donbas. Take the Baltic states, all of them now members of the European Union, and also enjoying Nato’s mutual security guarantee. There are more than a million ethnic Russians in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and they form near or actual majorities in several easterly regions of Estonia and Latvia. Poland is equally sensitive to the ambitions of its Russian neighbour.

For all these reasons, it would be folly for the EU to allow Putin to proceed with impunity, even though sanctions inevitably hurt those who apply them as well as the targets. As Van Rompuy says, sanctions "should have a strong impact on the Russian economy while keeping a moderate effect on the EU economies".

The Brussels package looks as if it will straddle arms, finance and technology, and will spread the load across the member states. It is not fair to measure the impact on the City by the size of big Russian deals: City institutions win a small sliver of the face value of lending, and much of the money itself comes from continental savings markets. The EU banks operating most in Russia are Austrian and German, not British.

Russia needs western capital, and restrictions will slow its growth and punish its elite. The Brussels options paper points out that Russian state-owned financial institutions raised $16.4bn (£9.7bn) in EU capital markets between 2004 and 2012, and in 2013 nearly half of all the bonds issued by those banks – about €7.5bn (£5.9bn) – were issued in the EU.

By denying these institutions access to new finance, they will have to raise foreign currency elsewhere, clamping down on Russia’s ability to import. The options paper also suggests targeting hi-tech goods and the arms trade: Russia is still selling $3.2bn a year of arms to countries in eastern Europe, and buys just $300m in exchange.

There will no doubt be a row about the sale of two French helicopter carriers worth €1.2bn, but sanctions should be forward looking, applying to new deals not old. It would be odd to respond to a breach of international law by breaching contract, and respecting old contracts means Russian financial institutions have to repay capital and pay interest on old debt without having the ability to refinance it. That hurts.

Russian gas is explicitly excluded from the sanctions package, recognising that EU members as a whole buy nearly a quarter of their gas from Russia, and that Germany buys over a third. But the share of Russian gas in EU gas imports has been declining for many years, and Russian gas accounts for less than a 10th of the EU’s primary energy consumption.

Nor is this the political armlock that some assume. Russia needs to sell its gas as much as Europe needs to buy it. The toughest EU members on sanctions – Poland and the Baltic states – are the most dependent on Russian gas. Even the herbivorous Germans are becoming more assertive of their national interests. After all, Angela Merkel has just chucked out the CIA’s station chief in Berlin because of US snooping, and has been tougher than expected on Russian sanctions.

Gas storage in the EU is high thanks to the warm winter (and could be even higher, with the right support). Interconnection among the EU member states is still bad, but better than during the Ukrainian gas crises of 2006 or 2009. The market says it all: wholesale gas prices for next winter have continued to fall through the crisis, and are now down more than 15% since January.

The dependence could nevertheless be cut further: the EU summit in October is set to decide whether the 30% energy saving target for 2030 should be as legally enforceable as its renewable targets, something the Germans and the Danes want. Nothing else (certainly not shale gas production – fracking) can reduce energy import dependence more quickly.

Energy efficiency makes sense not just to curb imports, but also to cut carbon emissions. The European commission’s work has shown that gas imports could be down sharply with a modest increase in ambition on renewables and energy efficiency.

The technology is there: more renewable electricity; more biogas from waste; more insulation to curb heating demand; more ground- and air-source heat pumps to replace gas boilers at home; more solar thermal for hot water.

Energy efficiency – insulation of homes, for one – is cheaper than any energy-producing or generating option (which is why the Treasury cuts in the UK’s Eco energy efficiency budget are such folly). For once, Europe’s greens can make common cause with Europe’s securocrats: cutting gas demand makes sense both to protect the planet and to punish Putin

To mock President Putin’s pride and test his paranoia is folly

The downing of flight MH17 was clearly an accident. This tragedy should not be used as an excuse to punish Russia.

Barack Obama was a wimp. François Hollande was an appeaser. David Cameron was a hypocrite.' Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images Why does foreign policy default to stupid? From the moment that we heard of the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine it was clearly an accident. Whoever’s finger was on the trigger, the tragedy cannot have been meant. This was not another 9/11. It was cock-up, not conspiracy.Yet foreign policy craves conspiracy. Vladimir Putin blamed the Ukrainian government. Ukraine blamed the pro-Russian rebels. America’s UN ambassador, Samantha Power, "cannot rule out" Moscow’s responsibility. London howled blue murder all round. There had been blood. There had to be blame.

What happened was a ghastly mess in bandit country, meriting the swiftest possible restoration of dignity for the victims. Yet before even the bodies had been collected, politicians vied with each other for tightening sanctions, ending trade, expelling oligarchs and freezing bank accounts. Soon they were fighting like rats in a sack. Barack Obama was a wimp. François Hollande was an appeaser. David Cameron was a hypocrite. The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy hurled down thunderbolts on everyone, "This is the spirit of Munich – appeasement. And it is a disgrace."These moments are dangerous.

In 1914, the Austrian government declared the madcap shooting of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand a "Serbian government plot" and went to war. In 1983, the Russians shot down a Korean airliner that had strayed over Siberia, killing all 269 people on board. It was clearly an accident, the fighter pilots’ ground control being drunk and panicking. This intelligence was suppressed and the incident exploited to precipitate one of the most scary confrontations of the cold war.Five years later it was America’s turn, when a US cruiser shot down an Iranian civilian Airbus A300 in Iranian airspace. The US navy wriggled and excused itself, while Iran seized on it as a crime of wanton aggression, aided by America rewarding its sailors with medals. Washington refused to admit legal liability, and took eight years to pay $62m in compensation to bereaved families.

What is terrifying is how such incidents are distorted to suit the interests of revenge. Clearly Putin has been reckless along Russia’s western frontier, backing Ukrainian rebels with enough weaponry to make accidents more likely to happen. Yet the idea that he willed the tragedy is as absurd as that Konstantin Chernenko willed the Korean massacre or Ronald Reagan the downing of an Iranian plane.Putin must have been as appalled as anyone at the fate of the airliner. It also sabotaged his delicate power play in the region and threw him on the defensive. Intelligence from Moscow suggests that he is bruised and angry, retreating into his circle of hawkish advisers and their nationalist rhetoric.

This is the moment Confucius advises us to give the enemy a bridge over which to retreat. Instead, the west’s hawks are having a field day, deriding Putin’s paranoia as if to goad him into doing something worse.Visiting Russia in the 1990s after its humiliation in the cold war, I found it a sad and dangerous place, not unlike Germany after its defeat in 1918. Yet it was as if no western diplomat had read the Treaty of Versailles, or noted Keynes’ warning of the consequences.

Much was done to build economic ties between west and east. Energy, investment and contacts flowed back and forth. Western companies cavorted with oligarchs and kleptocrats. Money stolen from the Russian people gushed into the wildcat banks of Cyprus and London and into the Swiss and British property markets. London must rank as the greatest receiver of stolen goods of all time.So far, so good. But at the same time, Nato and the EU rolled forward over eastern Europe to the Russian frontier, as if aiming its guns at the gates of Moscow to taunt Russia for its defeat. Nato apologists argued that any country, be it Latvia, Georgia or Ukraine, should be free to join whichever club it liked (albeit objecting when Crimeans voted the other way). Yet only fools can ignore the fact of Russian pride and fear of encirclement.

The post-cold war provocation of Putin was good public relations, but it was rotten history.We are told that east Ukraine is one of many potential explosions that Putin could trigger along the Russian border, from the Baltic to the Caucasus. Everywhere are Russian minorities (or majorities) that could clash with local non-Russians.

Europe’s leaders have no conceivable interest in stirring up such conflicts – and yet that was precisely what they sought to do in Georgia and Ukraine.For Britain – or America – to try and lay down the law along Russia’s extensive borders is barking mad; to use a tragic plane accident as casus belli equally so. It is nothing but breast-beating machismo. Yet again we lurch towards the woolly-headed daftness of economic sanctions. It is beyond hypocrisy for the west to demand sanctions against Moscow when it happily buys Russian gas and sells Russia guns, ships, Knightsbridge flats and places at Eton.

These double-standards are of our hand. According to the commons committee on arms exports, Britain currently sells arms worth £12bn to 27 countries listed by the Foreign Office as "of human rights concern". It cannot enhance world peace to make Europe’s energy more expensive, Russian loans harder to get or Harrods less accessible to "Putin’s cronies". Putin could not care less.Economic sanctions are to modern statecraft what mounted lancers were to war in the trenches: magnificent but useless. Their continued deployment defies study after study showing them as cosmetic, cruel or counterproductive.

Yet how many times has Cameron emerged from his Cobra bunker to threaten "tighter economic sanctions" against some rogue regime, to absolutely no effect? The rhetoric is always the same, to "send a message", show resolve, impose a price, not to let "wrongdoing go unpunished". It is as if Britain were some superannuated school prefect.The emergence in Moscow in the 1990s of a tough, philistine nationalist like Putin was a near certainty. He may be a nasty piece of work but he runs what it is still a powerful nation. Mocking his pride and testing his paranoia is for fools. The one country that knows this and can keep a sane head on its shoulders is run by Angela Merkel. Thank goodness for Germany.

William Rapfogel Is Sentenced for Stealing From His Charity

By RUSS BUETTNER NY TIMES

             

(This man had everything! He lived a fabulous life, had a good family and friends who loved him! What possess a man of his success to act so irresponsibly? Boredom? A need to act naughty? DAF)  

 William E. Rapfogel, in April. 

 Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times       

 

For two decades, William E. Rapfogel met with presidents, governors and mayors eager to support the large social service organization that he oversaw and, some would say, charmed with his earnest charisma. The contrast could not have been more stark on Wednesday when Mr. Rapfogel slumped before a judge in Manhattan and meekly followed court officers to a holding cell to begin serving a prison sentence for stealing from that same organization.

Following the terms of a plea agreement he accepted in April, Mr. Rapfogel paid the remaining balance of $3 million he owed in restitution and was sentenced to 3 1/3 to 10 years in prison by Justice Larry Stephen of State Supreme Court. He had faced a slightly longer sentence of four to 12 years if he could not pay the full amount.

Mr. Rapfogel, 59, had led the nonprofit Metropolitan New York Council on Jewish Poverty through a period of tremendous growth after he became its executive director in 1993. Known as Met Council, it has spent more than $110 million a year, mostly from government funds, on home health care and other services for older people and the poor. Mr. Rapfogel’s annual compensation package exceeded $400,000.

Met Council fired Mr. Rapfogel last summer, after an internal investigation based on an anonymous tip uncovered evidence that he had engaged in a scheme with the organization’s insurance broker to pad insurance payments and split the surplus.

Investigators from the office of Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman concluded that Mr. Rapfogel had taken more than $3 million and used it “to fund a lavish lifestyle.” A total of $9 million was taken by the participants in the scheme, and some of the stolen money was used to make campaign contributions, through straw donors, to win the favor of political candidates, the attorney general’s office said.

The prosecutor on the case, Gary T. Fishman, chief of the attorney general’s Criminal Enforcement and Financial Crimes Bureau, said in court that Mr. Rapfogel “attempted to mislead” investigators from the start and had demonstrated a “lack of contrition.”

“The defendant continues to minimize to others the full extent of his complicity in the criminal scheme that was orchestrated against Met Council,” Mr. Fishman added, without elaborating.

The criminal case carried significant political overtones because of the close ties between Mr. Rapfogel and Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the State Assembly. For decades, Mr. Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, has given tax dollars to the organization, and appeared at Met Council events with Mr. Rapfogel, whom he described as a friend. Mr. Rapfogel’s wife, Judy, works as Mr. Silver’s chief of staff and has been an employee of his office since 1977.

Ms. Rapfogel sat next to her husband in the courtroom on Wednesday as they waited for the case to be called. She did not show emotion as he was led away.

Neither Mr. Silver nor Ms. Rapfogel has been implicated in the scheme. A spokesman for Mr. Silver’s office has said that Ms. Rapfogel was unaware of her husband’s misdeeds, including his stashing of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in their homes. After Mr. Schneiderman’s investigators asked about the scheme, Mr. Rapfogel turned over about $372,000 in cash. Investigators later recovered an additional $48,000 on a search warrant.

The owner of the insurance brokerage, Century Coverage of Valley Stream, and two former Met Council executives had previously pleaded guilty and received shorter sentences.

Justice Stephens said he had received letters in support of Mr. Rapfogel, but he did not quote from them. The courtroom appearance lasted only a few minutes. Mr. Rapfogel read from a brief statement in which he expressed regret for hurting the organization that he “worked so hard to build.”

“I have tried hard to make amends,” he said. “But I also recognize that what I did was seriously wrong and that I will continue to pay a heavy price for my actions. I am terribly sorry.”

 

The Decline of Harper Lee
By Boris Kachka
SLATE

　

The legacy of one of America's most beloved authors is in disarray.

This article originally appeared in Vulture.

For Monroeville, Alabama, population 6,400 and shrinking, the summer of 2010 was momentous. Over a long July weekend, locals reenacted historical vignettes, held a silent auction, cooked a southern feast, and led tours of local landmarks. There was a documentary screening, two lawn parties, and a marathon reading of the novel whose 50th anniversary was the grand occasion. To Kill a Mockingbird, which needs no introduction—because it is the introduction, for most American children, to civil rights, literature, and the justice system—had sold nearly a million copies for each year in print. There were at least 50 other celebrations nationwide, but the epicenter was Monroeville, a place whose only real industry (the lingerie plant having recently shuttered) was Mockingbird-related tourism. It was not only the model for the novel’s fictional Maycomb but the home of its author, Harper Lee. She lived less than a mile from the festival, but she never came.

If our country had a formalized process for anointing literary saints, Harper Lee might be first in line, and one of the miracles held up as proof would be her choice to live out her final years in the small town that became the blueprint for our collective ideal of the Small Town. But at 88, the author finds her life and legacy in disarray, a sad state of litigious chaos brought on by ill health and, in no small part, the very community she always believed, for all its flaws, would ultimately protect her. Maycomb was a town where love and neighborly decency could overcome prejudice. To the woman who immortalized it and retreated to it for stability and safety, Monroeville is something very different: suffocating, predatory, and treacherous.

For much of her life, Nelle Harper Lee (known to friends as Nelle) spent more time in the comforting anonymity of New York than in the Monroeville redbrick ranch house her family had occupied since 1952. Then, in 2007, a stroke left her wheelchair-bound, forgetful, and largely deaf and blind—forced to sell her Upper East Side apartment and move into a Monroeville assisted-living facility. It was a loss but also a homecoming: For decades she’d relied on another local living legend, Alice Lee—her older sister, part-time housemate, and lawyer—to maintain her uneasy armistice with her hometown and her fame.

Alice, who retired two years ago at the age of 100, had inherited her partnership in the family firm from their father, A.C. Lee, the model for Mockingbird’s righteous lawyer, Atticus Finch. (Nelle calls her "Atticus in a skirt.") The same family practice whose modest virtues are inculcated, via Mockingbird, to generation after generation of schoolchildren was charged with protecting the legacy of its author—a job that one of the best-selling novelists of all time wanted nothing to do with. Yet as both women passed into very old age, what should have been a peaceful and prosperous decline became a surprisingly turbulent decade, robbing Nelle of not just her health but old friends, her dearly held privacy, the town’s good will, and, for a time, the copyright to the book she sometimes wishes she hadn’t written.

It wasn’t just infirmity that kept Nelle from basking in those 2010 celebrations; it was disillusion. Allergic to both attention and commerce, she’d always found the Mockingbird industrial complex tacky and intrusive, but had managed to carve out a separate existence in its shadow. Now too many "well wishers" were stopping by her new apartment—including her literary agent, whom she eventually barred from the facility. (He’d already had her sign over her copyright.) Just a month before the anniversary, a family friend entered her room with a Daily Mail reporter in tow. The journalist flew back to London with an unflattering photo and a cruel 2,000-word profile to match. Monroeville had finally confirmed her fear that there really was nowhere to hide. She’d once explained to Oprah Winfrey, over lunch in a private suite at the Four Seasons, why she’d never appear on her show: Everyone compares her to Scout, the sweetly pugnacious tomboy who narrates Mockingbird. But as she told Oprah, "I’m really Boo"—Boo Radley, the young recluse in the creepy house who winds up saving the day.

By the time of Mockingbird’s golden anniversary, Nelle’s agent was denying in court that he represented her. The courthouse gift shop, "The Bird’s Nest," was selling To Kill a Mockingbird onesies and car decals. A former next-door neighbor, Marja Mills, was working on a memoir called The Mockingbird Next Door—which came out this week, lifting the veil of Nelle’s privacy amid a confounding volley of statements between lawyers, sisters, and friends over whether and when she approved of the project. It was left to Alice’s successor in the family firm, Tonja Carter, to sort things out. Carter restricted Lee’s visitors and instituted lawsuits against not just the literary agent but also the courthouse museum. She nearly sued Marja Mills, too, and released a letter last week reaffirming Nelle’s objections—objections that her own sister, Alice, had claimed Carter had ginned up on her behalf. "It’s a terrible thing to happen toward the end of a person’s life," says Thomas Lane Butts, a preacher who was among Lee’s best friends but hasn’t seen her in a year. Whatever Nelle’s intentions, Carter has upended the town’s delicate status quo, making as many enemies as headlines. Nelle never did like making headlines, even for the right reasons, but she did once love Monroeville.

* * *

In 1964, in one of her last interviews, Lee laid out her mission as a writer. "This is a small-town middle-class southern life as opposed to the Gothic," she said. "I believe there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing." She concluded, joking, "All I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama."

Mockingbird plays on Southern Gothic, only to demystify it and mythologize the ordinary instead. Amasa Coleman Lee may have been, as his daughter said, "one of the most beloved men in this part of the state," but he wasn’t Atticus Finch; he was a tax lawyer. He left his childhood farm in Florida, married a prominent village daughter (Frances Finch of Finchburg), and moved to Monroeville in order to manage the finances of the law firm of Barnett, Bugg & Lee, as it shortly became, a partnership of businessmen-attorneys who owned half the town. A.C. did try one criminal case, at age 29, defending two black men on a murder charge. He lost and they were hanged, pieces of their scalps mailed to the son of the victim.

Though Atticus defends a black man wrongly accused—and ultimately convicted—of rape, nothing quite so brutal happens in Mockingbird. And by making Atticus a widower, Lee also omitted a much more personal experience: her mother’s instability. According to Mills, Frances suffered a nervous breakdown after her daughter Louise failed to thrive. (The Lees had five children in five-year increments.) Dr. William Harper came to the rescue of both mother and baby, and Harper became their next child’s middle name. Truman Capote, Nelle’s best childhood friend, later described her upbringing as "Southern grotesque." He claimed Frances had tried to drown Nelle in the bathtub. Lee denied it vehemently, and for all her rebelliousness—Butts once said she had "hell and pepper in her"—she never said a word against her family, in fiction or otherwise. In her work and life, madness is banished in the light of reason and authority.

A.C. passed his august authority on to Alice. During the Depression, she had to leave college but was quickly brought under her father’s wing and into his law firm. Nelle tried to follow the same path—attending the same girls’ college as Alice and then transferring to the University of Alabama, where she loved writing but hated her sorority and law classes. After a summer at Oxford University, she dropped out. She wanted to make a go, like her friend Truman, of living and writing in New York. A.C., who’d been paying for school, said she’d have to make it on her own.

In New York, Lee found a tight-knit replacement family. Capote introduced her to Broadway lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife, Joy. They hooked her up with an agent, Maurice Crain, and on Christmas, 1956, they gave her the gift her father wouldn’t: enough money to do nothing but write for a year. She remembered it later as "a full, fair chance for a new life." Within five months, she had a draft of Atticus out on submission, and was already partway into a second novel when a Lippincott editor took it on.

Most of Mockingbird’s characters have real-life antecedents, and Scout’s delicate friend Dill is clearly Capote. He was Nelle’s first writing partner and her social fixer in New York, and Lee helped him research his true-crime classic, In Cold Blood. But Capote eventually spurned her. Rebutting his vicious gossip seems to have been one of Lee’s motivations for talking to Marja Mills. "They fled from the truth like Dracula from the cross," Lee told Mills, meaning him and his aunt, whose memoir Lee claimed to have thrown into a bonfire. "Truman was a psychopath, honey." Capote drifted away in a miasma of drugs and self-hatred—a cautionary tale of frustrated fame. His former best friend tacked fiercely in the opposite direction.

A.C. Lee was shocked by his daughter’s success. "It’s very rare indeed when a thing like this happens to a country girl going to New York," he told a reporter. "She will have to do a good job next time." He died in 1962, after meeting Gregory Peck but before seeing him play Atticus in Alan Pakula’s film. Nelle spent the next couple of years trying to write, but couldn’t shake the fear that there was, as her father had worried, nowhere to go but down. At one press conference to promote the movie, Lee’s humor was edged with tension. "Will success spoil Harper Lee?" asked a reporter. "She’s too old," Lee said. "How do you feel about your second novel?" asked another. "I’m scared," she said.

In his unauthorized 2006 biography, Mockingbird, Charles J. Shields quotes Lee telling a friend, "I wouldn’t go into downtown Manhattan for the world." Mills once made Lee a gift of E.B. White’s Here Is New York. Nelle "wept at the first sentence." It reads, "On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy." White later pictures "a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors." After Mockingbird won acclaim and a Pulitzer, Lee felt observed by everyone—the whole world a small town. At least when she stayed in Monroeville, she had Alice.

By 1970, when her beloved agent died, there was no one else left—not Capote, not her parents. "The close circle she was relying on fell away over the course of a decade, and her tight Monroeville clique was practically all that remained," says Charles Shields, who wrote the 2006 unauthorized biography, Mockingbird. "I think the Lees have kind of an old-fashioned notion," he adds. "Keep your friends close to your breast with hoops of iron and rely on them. And the novel, being one of the most popular of the 20th century, makes tremendous demands that go well beyond their abilities."

* * *

Maybe it wasn’t just Nelle’s insecurity that held her back from becoming "the Jane Austen of South Alabama," but also the dismaying decline of the "small-town middle-class" idyll she’d staked her career on documenting. She had, after all, written a historical novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed not in Monroeville but on an L.A. lot. There were—still are—remnants of Depression-era Monroeville, not least the old Federal-style courthouse. But even as the film came out, a drab new courthouse was being built next door. Downtown’s only movie theater burned down not long after Mockingbird had its first run, and was never rebuilt. In 1997, the city was dubbed "The Literary Capital of Alabama," prompting Lee, who wasn’t consulted on the nickname, to remark, "The literary capital of Alabama doesn’t read."

Harper Lee’s assisted-living apartment is on Highway Bypass 21, just a couple of blocks from the town’s real commercial center, a series of malls. There’s a place called Radley’s Fountain Grill down that way, and an old stone wall that once separated Lee’s childhood home from Capote’s—both long gone, replaced by a takeout shack called Mel’s Dairy Dream. Lee prefers the more generic places by the lingerie factory outlet (a remnant of the old Vanity Fair plant). Before her stroke, she could be found at Hardee’s, or better yet at McDonald’s, gulping down coffee during long chats with friends. (There were higher-end expeditions to the local golf club and to casinos on the Gulf coast.) When she watched an advance screening of the biopic Capote at a neighbor’s house—the Lees had no television—she opted for Burger King.

In 1961, Lee told Life that, unlike Thomas Wolfe, "I can go home again." That’s debatable, as is the question of why Harper Lee chose to spend so much of her life in a town whose only claim to fame was her fame—a fame she claimed to despise. The Mockingbird Next Door dwells on rural trips out of town, fishing and duck watching and off-the-record country drives. (Romantic inquiries were "not up for discussion.") Lee seemed to prefer the countryside to her hometown. "I was surprised that she was living here, to tell you the truth," says Butts, who was often on those drives. "It’s like being in a fishbowl."

Marja Mills’s astonishing access to Lee was the product of luck, both good and bad. Sent to Monroeville by the Chicago Tribune to find out what Harper Lee thought of Mockingbird being chosen for "One Book, One Chicago," she expected to strike out. But, after a polite introductory letter, Alice not only answered the ranch house door but also secured her an audience with Nelle. On Mills’s second visit to town, Butts gave her his rationale for the sisters’ openness: "When she and Alice go, people are going to start ‘remembering’ things as they didn’t happen, or outright making things up, and they won’t be here to set the record straight. So keep taking notes, girl." Mills suffers from lupus, and she had a flare-up just before leaving Monroeville again. Nelle claimed to be her mother-in-law so she could stay with her in the local hospital. Mills became an honorary member of "the old in a nation geared toward the young."

In 2004, sapped by her illness, Mills decided to leave her job and try to write a book. She wound up moving in next door to the Lees, securing a $450 rental with the sisters’ help. Over endless coffees and drives, Nelle opened up enough to give a solid sense of herself: unconfident in her looks and therefore unconcerned; witty and garrulous within the strict limits she sets for talk; conservative by northern standards; cranky and principled; moody but predictable.

Mills makes it clear in the book that she intended at first to write a broader Alabama history. Monroeville was confused, years later, by the news of a memoir. "I think that lady kind of pulled wool over their eyes," George Jones, the 91-year-old town historian and gossip, told me. Mills says only very few friends knew just how much time she and the sisters spent together. The Lees, she says, "managed to have a parallel existence" within Monroeville—a smaller bubble within the bubble of a hard-to-reach county seat, apart from tourists and nosy locals alike.

One of Nelle’s friends, retired Auburn history professor Wayne Flynt, is skeptical of Nelle’s participation—but not Alice’s. "Alice wanted the family story told and Alice has an agenda, and I think Marja Mills fits that agenda quite well," he says. "Nelle is afraid that telling the family story will be telling her story, and I can’t believe she cooperated." He adds that, around that time, he tried to persuade Nelle to record a sealed oral history, and she flatly refused. Last Monday’s letter, signed by Lee, seems to confirm his impressions: "I was hurt, angry and saddened, but not surprised," upon learning of Mills’s "true mission: another book about Harper Lee." She concludes, "rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood." Butts says she may well feel that way now, but didn’t at the time. "There was no break," he says—contrary to the letter’s claim—"until somebody talked to her, said she should oppose the book." He says he witnessed Nelle insisting on putting personal things on the record.

 

Mills’ portrait is gentle almost to a fault, but her mission was to humanize Lee, not to lionize her. Butts warned Mills she might get angry late-night phone calls from Nelle: "She accuses people, chews them out. The alcohol fuels it." Mills repeats speculation that drinking contributed to Lee’s abandoning a true-crime book in the '80s. Overall, Lee comes off both plain and complicated. She can be paranoid, but often for good reason. In Monroeville, Mills writes, "information about Nelle was currency. It could be spent, traded, or saved for the right moment." On Nelle’s earliest meeting with Mills, in a sweltering room at the Best Western, one of the first things she told the reporter was, "This is not the Monroeville in which I grew up. I don’t like it one bit." Mills writes of Lee looking over a ravine. "Nelle suggested that perhaps she could toss all her belongings in there and burn them, preferably shortly before she died, so she wouldn’t have to worry about her personal things falling into the wrong hands. She was only half kidding."

The case of Samuel Pinkus would make any writer paranoid. Pinkus had briefly run McIntosh & Otis on behalf of his ailing father-in-law—and Nelle’s longtime agent—Eugene Winick, but then suddenly left and took with him the estate-heavy firm’s most lucrative living authors, Mary Higgins Clark and Harper Lee. (No one knows exactly how he persuaded Lee to leave.) "It was an absolute betrayal," Winick told me last year, "not only as an employee, but also as a family member." The Winicks sought relief in mediation. Over the years, Pinkus set up a succession of corporations that, M&O’s and Lee’s lawyers claimed, were designed to avoid those debts. In the process of shifting around millions in royalties, Pinkus managed to take over Harper Lee’s copyright.

Lee’s 2013 complaint against Pinkus begins by describing her close ties to the agency: "Both Harper Lee and her sister trusted and relied on M&O virtually all the time since the publication of her famous novel." That account elides a lot of drift. After Maurice Crain died, Lee was passed along to his wife, but by the time Pinkus was brought into the company, it was Alice whom Nelle counted on most of all. When Nelle heard the courthouse-museum was putting out a book called Calpurnia’s Cookbook, using the name of Mockingbird’s maid, Alice sent the letter that took it off the shelves. M&O never even heard of it.

While working on his biography, Charles Shields called M&O and couldn’t get any real answers about their prized client. Maybe they were just being protective, but Shields found a willing correspondent in Alice Lee. They had a few written exchanges about Lee family history, and things seemed to be opening up—until, one day in 2006, he received "an imperious letter" from Pinkus, by then her exclusive agent, warning him off any further contact with the Lee sisters.

* * *

In June of 2007, Lee had a lunch appointment with friends in New York. When she didn’t show up, they went to her apartment, and found her lying on the floor. She’d been there for more than a day. Even before the debilitating stroke, she’d had hearing problems and macular degeneration—been forced to accessorize her khakis and sneakers with glasses fitted with side panels. Now she went through months of rehab, gave up her New York apartment, and moved straight from the hospital into assisted living.

Around this time, she signed an assignment of copyright to Sam Pinkus—an act she later forgot. Her lawyer during this period was still officially her sister Alice, 94. Eventually, Tonja Carter began pressing Pinkus to give up his copyright. (She had, however, notarized a reaffirmation of Pinkus’s copyright—something she’s never explained.) Finally, in 2012, Nelle got her copyright back, but according to the lawsuit, Pinkus continued to instruct publishers foreign and domestic to pay royalties into one of several companies. It wasn’t until a New York litigation firm filed suit—a move that put the elusive Harper Lee all over the news—that Nelle was finally able to free herself of Pinkus. The case was settled last September.

In 2011, while Carter and Pinkus haggled, Penguin Press acquired The Mockingbird Next Door after a heated auction. The day after it was announced, Carter released a statement from Harper Lee: "Contrary to recent news reports, I have not willingly participated in any book written or to be written by Marja Mills." Penguin Press responded by producing a statement, signed by Alice Lee, agreeing to participate. Few people paid attention when, a month later, the AP reported that Alice Lee now claimed that Carter’s statement was made without the sisters’ consent. That story concluded, "A woman who answered the phone at Barnett, Bugg declined comment and hung up on a reporter seeking comment."

Carter, who reportedly has power of attorney over Lee, replied to one email—"I can correspond by email when and if I become available"—but never answered my questions. It isn’t clear exactly what spurred Lee—or Carter—to file for a trademark to Lee’s name and the title of her book early last year. The Monroe County Heritage Museum fought the trademark, and Lee’s lawyers responded last October by suing them. Like the Pinkus suit, this complaint alleged that the defendant was taking advantage of Lee’s ill health—in this case, by ramping up gift shop operations and naming their website tokillamockingbird.com. (Both the shop and the website are more than 15 years old.)

The complaint begins immediately with a dig at Monroeville: "Although the story was set in the 1930’s, her realistic and highly critical portrayal of Maycomb’s residents shone a harsh light on the attitudes of communities that were the focal point of the civil rights movement in the 1960s … The town’s desire to capitalize upon the fame of To Kill a Mockingbird is unmistakable: Monroeville’s town logo features an image of a mockingbird and the cupola of the Old County Courthouse."

Seeking unspecified damages, the suit listed all the Mockingbird-branded items in the gift shop, including clothes for adults and children, tote bags, towels, "glass ware, plastic/acrylic tumbler glasses, seat cushions, car decals, coasters," and a dozen other tchotchkes. It estimated 2011 museum revenue at more than $500,000, without mentioning that expenses were almost as high—the difference being just a bit more than the roughly $30,000 the gift shop earns annually. Nor did the suit mention that the museum is a nonprofit, or that Tonja Carter and her husband, a distant cousin of Truman Capote, own a tourist-filled restaurant across from the courthouse.

Museum attorney Matthew Goforth released a statement in October firing back: "It is sad that Harper Lee's greedy handlers have seen fit to attack the non-profit museum in her hometown that has been honoring her legacy." Whatever the merit of Goforth’s argument, it brought to mind something Lee told Mills: "Greed is the coldest of deadly sins, don’t you think?"

"I was shocked," says Stephanie Rogers, executive director of the museum. "I tried to talk to the family and say, ‘let’s stop this.’" After that 50th-anniversary commemoration in 2010, she’d sent Nelle leftover cake (shaped like Mockingbird’s iconic knot-holed tree), and Nelle had written back thanking her "friends." After last month’s settlement, the website URL has been changed, but all the Mockingbird knickknacks are still for sale. Once the trademark goes through, they’ll be licensed through Lee. The Mockingbird Next Door will be sold there, too.

Friends were hurt by both the lawsuit and notes from Carter informing them they could no longer visit Nelle. One of them, Sam Therrell, owns Radley’s Fountain Grill and recently resigned as a member of the museum’s board. "I don’t think Miss Nelle or Alice had anything to do with it," he says. "It’s her agent and her local lawyer," Tonja Carter. "I don’t know what kind of relationship they entered into, how she ever became of counsel, and I don’t give a rat’s ass, to tell you the truth. It was stupid to let it happen, I can tell you that."

Other friends do emphasize her lifelong ambivalence over Monroeville. "She never has liked the museum," says Butts. "But a lot of her attitudes about things changed after the stroke. She becomes excitable in all sorts of ways." It’s perfectly plausible for Lee to be against the book, against the town—even against her own sister—without being fully accountable. "Nelle Harper’s at this stage in her life," says Butts, "at which she’s readily influenced about anybody who’s around her." He doesn’t fault Alice for failing to safeguard Lee’s rights; he faults Nelle for never relying on anyone else. "She lived as if Alice would never die."

Wayne Flynt, the Auburn professor, trusts Carter and believes she’s just honoring Nelle’s sense of being fed up. "Monroeville is like most small towns in the South," says Flynt, whose work focused on Alabama and poverty. "It’s wonderful because of its tremendous sense of curiosity and community, but it’s also nosy and intrusive. The world she wrote about is the world she now inhabits, with all the good stuff and the bad stuff."

In responding to Lee’s new letter last week, Penguin Press released a handwritten letter Alice Lee wrote to Marja Mills in 2011. It read, in part: "When I questioned Tonja"—her onetime protégé, inheritor of A.C. Lee’s firm—"I learned that without my knowledge she had typed out the statement, carried it to [Nelle’s apartment], and had Nelle Harper sign it … Poor Nelle Harper can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence. Now she has no memory of the incident … I am humiliated, embarrassed, and upset about the suggestion of lack of integrity at my office."

The letter signed by Nelle last week points out that "my sister would have been 100 years old" when she wrote those words. Butts insists Alice was "bright as a penny"—at least back then. Around the time of that letter, Alice stopped visiting the office regularly. She had a fall, then contracted pneumonia and began to decline. She moved out of the Lee’s redbrick ranch house and into a different assisted-living facility. Whatever Wayne Flynt’s suspicions about Marja Mills, he agrees with Nelle’s latest biographer on one point: Silence has not served Nelle Harper Lee. "In the absence of her being willing to talk, the only versions we’ll ever have are other people’s versions."