THE GREAT WAR HAS STARTED

THE GREAT WAR HAS STARTED

I made this recording in March 2014. It is still relevant. Please take a look.

Inside the information war

Inside the information war

Lucian K. Truscott IV (Truscott daily news letter)

There are so many things we don’t know about the current situation in Ukraine, I hesitate to say there is one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty, but here it is: Pentagon press secretary John Kirby goes to a lot of meetings every day -- I mean multiple, copious, numerous, multitudinous meetings. When you see his grim visage on your television screens with that oval crest reading “The Pentagon” behind him, you can count on the fact that he is the single most briefed individual in that building across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. where no less than 25,000 toil.

What comes out of his mouth every day is information warfare. The words he speaks can be as effective as bullets fired on a battlefield or bombs dropped in an airstrike. That’s why the man attends such a great number of meetings – because so much depends on the decisions made nearly every day about what he will tell the press.

Of course, some of what he says is general information about Department of Defense policy – budgets and expenditures and COVID statistics and the like. Yesterday, Kirby went on at some length about the number of active duty and reserve military medical personnel who have mobilized in support of civilian hospitals around the country since the onset of the COVID outbreak, and he announced that more than 1,000 additional service members had been activated and deployed to support 25 hospitals in 14 states just since January.

But that wasn’t Kirby’s emphasis on Tuesday. What he told the press reflected how cautiously the Pentagon regards statements made by Russian negotiators and battlefield commanders when they talk about their intentions in Ukraine. Yesterday, Kirby shot down the idea that Russian forces are “pulling back” from their positions around the capital city of Kyiv and instead called their moves “repositioning.” By the time of the press conference, reports had come out of Ukraine that some Russian forces around Kyiv had begun to move north towards Belarus and there was a theory that they might be going there to rest and resupply and be reinforced so they could return and continue the fight for Kyiv. Listen to how Kirby responded to a question along these lines:

“I would say at this early stage, we see the movement more northward. But again, it's too early to tell, Bob, what the destination is, what the final purpose is. And you know where exactly these troops are going to go long-term. We believe, we assess, that it is likely more repositioning to be used elsewhere in Ukraine.”

There are several points to be made about this statement by Kirby as well as others during the press conference. Notice his use of the term, “we see.” Kirby says “we see” repeatedly as he answers questions about Ukraine. In this use of language, I believe he is telling the literal truth. The Pentagon has access to gigantic piles of information gleaned from satellite surveillance and other forms of electronic information gathering. The NSA and the CIA and the DIA are “seeing” every movement of Russian troops and tanks on the ground. And you can count on this: when Kirby says “we see,” it means the Pentagon has already shared what it has seen with the Ukrainian military. Everything Kirby said at yesterday’s press conference, the Ukrainian department of defense had already been told and shown electronically.

Kirby also used the phrase, “we know” to describe Russia’s use of missiles against Ukraine. “We know that they’ve, since the beginning of this, launched more than 1,000. But I don't have an exact number,” Kirby answered when questioned about how many missiles Russian forces had fired into Ukraine. “We know” means they have counted the missile launches one by one. That he doesn’t have an “exact number” probably means only that he hasn’t been briefed about the number of launches that Russia may have made since he saw figures that morning while preparing to meet the press. The U.S. has the capability of tracking every missile launch, so the figure of 1,000 he used is not an estimate, and again, that number has been shared with Ukraine, as well as the U.S. estimate of what percentage of their missile capability Russia has used, because we can count the un-fired missiles as well.

Kirby went on to describe Ukrainian gains around Kyiv, saying, “We have seen the Ukrainians push back around Kyiv, particularly in suburbs to the west of Kyiv, where the Ukrainians have retaken ground…[and] to the east of Kyiv, where the Russians were on the outskirts of Brovary and the Ukrainians pushed them back then to almost more than 50 kilometers away from the city.”

Again, U.S. satellites have “seen” these movements and re-taking of territory, and Kirby was able to announce this to the press because the Ukrainian military knows very well where their own troops are and what positions they have been able to re-take.

What is missing from every one of Kirby’s briefings is a map of Ukraine. He’s not showing on a map what they are seeing from the sky because maps are way too specific in their descriptive ability to show tactical information. This means the maps you see on MSNBC or CNN showing in red areas Russian forces have taken and in green areas held by Ukraine and in stripes contested areas, reflect estimates the networks have been able to make using information provided by their own reporters on the ground, from statements made by Ukrainian government and military people, and using information gleaned from verbal statements by Kirby and other officials or sources who speak to network reporters in Ukraine and in Washington.

Kirby doesn’t refer to the network maps, nor should he, as they don’t reflect information he has from American intelligence agencies which has probably been shared with Ukraine but is not being shared with the press.

So what we’ve got here with every Pentagon briefing is a mix of what they are willing to tell the press, and the information they have decided to withhold for strategic and tactical reasons. Everything the Pentagon says and doesn’t say has meaning, and by putting these two indices of information together, we can come up with a fuller picture of what is going on in Ukraine.

It is particularly interesting to look at what Kirby is willing to go into detail about. For example, he was quite free in describing the failures of Russian forces to take various cities around Ukraine. Some of what Kirby describes, he prefaces with “you guys have seen,” which reflects what the Pentagon has observed in reporting on television and in the print media. He’s very free with this information, of course, because it’s already out there.

And then he got to a point in the press conference where he just listed Russian objectives and their failures to achieve them: “You just have to look at what they tried to do in those early days to see that they wanted Kyiv. They didn't get it. And in the last few days, they hunkered down into defensive positions, basically stopped advancing, and now they're saying and we're seeing small numbers move away. So, we'll see where this goes. But step back, they also, you know, failed to take, really take and hold any major population centers. They haven't taken Kharkiv. They haven't taken Chernihiv. They haven't taken Mariupol. And while we assess they took Kherson, that's back in play right now. So, if you count maybe Berdyansk on the on the Azov coast, you know, even that is contested.”

There is a strategy at work here as well. Kirby would not be reporting Russian failures to the press here in the United States unless he had an interest in his reports getting back to Russia, so why is he willing to do this? I think it’s because when all of the information the Pentagon has is taken into account – and it is WAY more than he gives to the press, as we have discussed – the Pentagon has concluded that saying out loud what Russia has failed to do will help the Ukrainians on the battlefield.

Kirby stuck a knife in the Kremlin and gave it a sharp twist at his news conference this afternoon when he officially confirmed what everyone already suspected: that Vladimir Putin has not kept himself accurately abreast of the performance of his own military in Ukraine.

“We would concur with the conclusion that Mr. Putin has not been fully informed by his Ministry of Defense, at every turn over the last month,” Kirby told the press. “If Mr. Putin is misinformed or uninformed about what’s going on inside Ukraine, it’s his military, it’s his war, he chose it. And so the fact that he may not have all the context — that he may not fully understand the degree to which his forces are failing in Ukraine, that’s a little discomforting, to be honest with you.”

Quoting “other American officials,” The New York Times quickly followed Kirby’s statement with even more information about how isolated Putin has been. “Officials believe that Mr. Putin has been getting incomplete or overly optimistic reports about the progress of Russian forces, creating mistrust with his military advisers,” The Times reported. “Mr. Putin’s ignorance showed ‘a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president,’ according to a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the declassified, but still sensitive, material. There ‘is now persistent tension’ between Mr. Putin and the Defense Ministry, the official said.”

The word The Times omitted when quoting “officials” was “intelligence,” as the information clearly came from sources in the intelligence community, both military and civilian, and those kinds of leaks are approved at the highest levels of command. Information about Putin’s isolation was leaked to The Times with a strategic goal in mind. There was a hint that some of the information about what Putin knows and doesn’t know evidently came from contacts with intimate knowledge about Putin and his habits, as The Times noted in its story something you almost never see in their coverage: “What American intelligence sources there might be in the Kremlin is a tightly held secret. But since Russia began its troop buildup along Ukraine’s borders last year, U.S. intelligence officials have accurately predicted Mr. Putin’s moves.” The explanatory note both acknowledges the accuracy of U.S. intelligence about Russia and indicates that American sources within Russia should be taken with great seriousness.

I think the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence have watched Russia waste so many of its combat assets including soldiers, tanks, ammunition and energy, they’re engaging in a form of rope-a-dope figuring they can help the Ukrainians by goading the Russians into further wearing themselves out without a chance of making any gains beyond what they have already achieved on the battlefield. According to Kirby, they haven’t gained much at all.

The key thing here is that information is just as powerful as secrecy when it comes to military strategy. Normally in a war, you don’t want your enemy to know what you’re going to do next and where you’ll do it, so you keep that secret. But there are times when telegraphing your intentions and capabilities works to your advantage.

One of those times was during the days immediately after we invaded Iraq in March of 2003. For several days, I watched something curious unfold. The New York Times was running a very detailed map of the battlefield in Iraq every day on the back page of the front section. The map revealed the movements of every American unit and showed how far they had advanced and indicated, if you paid close enough attention, where they expected to be the following day.

This was unprecedented. The most important American newspaper was publishing very up-to-date military information daily, information that clearly the Iraqis had as much access to as I had sitting in my living room in Los Angeles. I knew that the American press was embedded at every level of the American military effort, from down in infantry squads right up to reporters accompanying generals leading major U.S. Army units, like General William Scott Wallace, overall commander of the army’s Fifth Corps, and General David Petraeus commanding the 101st Airborne Division under him. Both commanders had reporters in close enough contact with them that Petraeus was quoted early in the conflict lamenting, “somebody tell me how this ends,” and Wallace was quoted complaining that his forces were not receiving resupply of MREs fast enough.

So I knew that the maps were based on real-time accurate information. The question was, why was the Pentagon clearly cooperating with the press in revealing what would ordinarily be top-secret maps of U.S. Army positions on a day-by-day basis?

Then it came to me: they wanted the Iraqi army commanders to see how large the American force was and how fast they were coming at them. The Pentagon was allowing the maps to be published to intimidate the Iraqi army and cause them to surrender as early as possible. The contrast between what everyone could see on their TV screens and see on the New York Times maps, and the happy-talk garbage being spewed by the Iraqi military spokesman who was known as “Baghdad Bob” was striking because what he said was so transparently false. The Times map was showing American forces closing in on Baghdad on the day Baghdad Bob announced, “They're not even [within] 100 miles [of Baghdad]. They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion ... they are trying to sell to the others an illusion."

The Iraqi army of course knew exactly where the Americans were, and as the Pentagon had hoped, the Iraqis were taking off their uniforms and disappearing from the battlefield – planning on returning to fight an insurgency, as it happened, but that would be another story for another day.

Something of the same thing seems to be going on with Pentagon briefings about Ukraine, albeit without the maps. At least in part the Pentagon seems be acknowledging that the wide coverage of the war can work to their, and Ukraine’s, advantage. A calculation seems to have been made by senior American military leaders, no doubt with the approval or at least the acquiescence of the Ukrainian military, that showing Russian failures to achieve their objectives in Ukraine works to that country’s advantage, not Russia’s. It’s yet another case of more is better when it comes to revealing what heretofore would have been military secrets to the press. Russia’s army has been shown to be piteously unprepared, incompetent, and in disarray. They may be laying waste to multiple Ukrainian cities and killing horrific numbers of civilians, but Russian forces have failed to achieve their objective of annexing Ukraine, as Kirby put it yesterday. With Russia completely isolated from the rest of the world – which Putin did by incurring sanctions and banning foreign media and censoring his own – he is losing the information war as well.

 The Strange Rebirth Of Imperial Russia

And why it could be here to stay. 

Andrew Sullivan The Weekly Dish

“The huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown,” - Vladimir Sorokin, New York Review of Books, 2017.

The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of post-modern life into a new collective, ancient meaning.

Even when it’s based on bullshit. You’d be amazed how vacuous slogans about returning to a mythical past — “Make America Great Again!”, “Take Back Control!” — can move public opinion dramatically in even the most successful modern democracies. That’s one reason it’s self-defeating for liberals to press for maximal change in as many things as possible. National identity, fused often with ethnic heritage, has not disappeared in the human psyche — as so many hoped or predicted. It has been reborn in new and strange forms. Now is the time of monsters, so to speak. Best not to summon up too many.

This, it seems to me, is what many of us have missed about the newly visible monster of post-Communist Russia. It would be hard to conjure up a period of post-modern bewilderment more vividly than Russia in the post-Soviet 1990s. A vast empire collapsed overnight; an entire totalitarian system, long since discredited but still acting as some kind of social glue and cultural meaning, unraveled in chaos and confusion.

Take away a totalitarian ideology in an instant, and a huge vacuum of meaning will open up, to be filled by something else. We once understood this. When Nazi Germany collapsed in total military defeat, the West immediately arrived to reconstruct the society from the bottom up. We de-Nazified West Germany; we created a new constitution; we invested massively with the Marshall Plan, doing more for our previous foe than we did for a devastated ally like Britain. We filled the gap. Ditto post-1945 Japan.

But we left post-1991 Russia flailing, offering it shock therapy for freer markets, insisting that a democratic nation-state could be built — tada! — on the ruins of the Evil Empire. We expected it to be reconstructed even as many of its Soviet functionaries remained in place, and without the searing experience of consciousness-changing national defeat. What followed in Russia was a grasping for coherence, in the midst of national humiliation. It was more like Germany after 1918 than 1945. It is no surprise that this was a near-perfect moment for reactionism to stake its claim.

It came, like all reactionary movements, not from some continuous, existing tradition waiting to be tweaked or deepened, but from intellectuals, making shit up. They created a near-absurd mythology they rescued from the 19th and early 20th centuries — packed with pseudo-science and pseudo-history. Russia was not just a nation-state, they argued; it was a “civilization-state,” a whole way of being, straddling half the globe and wrapping countless other nations and cultures into Mother Russia’s spiritual bosom. Russians were genetically different — infused with what the reactionary theorist Lev Gumilev called “passionarity” — a kind of preternatural energy or will to power. They belonged to a new order — “Eurasia” — which would balance the Atlantic powers of the US and the UK, and help govern the rest of the world.

In his riveting book, “Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism,” British journalist Charles Clover recounts how mystical and often fictional accounts of Russian history pre-1917 endured through suppression in much of the Soviet era only to burst into new life under Vladimir Putin. Clover’s summary:

The [reactionaries] argued that their native Russia, rather than being a branch of the rationalistic West, was the descendant of the Mongol Horde — a legacy that the Bolshevik Revolution, with all its savagery, seemed to confirm. They saw in the Revolution some promise of a future — a shedding of Western conformity and the rebirth of authentic Russianness, a Biblical event, a cataclysm that brings earthly beatitude.

Alrighty then. But a civilization that sees itself as the modern incarnation of the Steppe Mongol tribes who ransacked cities and towns wherever they went is not quite a regular, Westphalian nation-state, is it? Nothing in modernity’s political structures quite captures it — because it is a pre-modern concept: mystical, spiritual, with no border to the north but frozen darkness, and no firm border between its neighbors to the south and west either.

And, of course, in the 1990s and 2000s, this fantastic vision of a new Russia appealed to youngsters, hipsters, gamers, and online freaks, in a similar fashion to alt-righters in the West at the time, and often with the same ironic lulz. A key figure here is Aleksandr Dugin, a guitar-strumming poet who resurrected Gumilev’s theories by writing “The Foundations of Geopolitics.” That book is perhaps the best guide to understanding where Putin is coming from, and what Russia now is.

Dugin has the same post-modern worldview as the woke left and alt right in the US: nothing is true; everything is power; and power must be exercised. For Dugin, “all ideology is mere language games or camouflaged power relations; all politics is simulacrum and spectacle; all ‘discourses’ are equal, as is all truth,” Clover writes. So of course it doesn’t matter if history is invented, lies repeated, myths invoked as facts. For the Russian reactionaries, just as for the critical race theorists, history is a tool to be manipulated and wielded to gain power, not a truth to be discovered and debated.

And when Dugin pontificates about the West’s desire to dismember Russia, or sees the Cold War not as a fight between liberalism and communism, but between “sea people” and “land people,” you’re never quite sure if he’s serious or not. Was the long standoff between the US and USSR really “a planetary conspiracy of two ‘occult’ forces, whose secret confrontations and unwitnessed battle has determined the course of history”? Or is he just out for attention?

But for Putin, it didn’t seem to matter. Dugin’s and Gumilev’s ideas were perfectly attuned to a post-truth dictatorship, crafted by relentless TV propaganda and opinion polling, and gave him a rationale for a post-ideological regime. So from 2009 onwards, Putin started using words like “passionarity” and “civilization-state,” rejecting a Western-style Russian nation-state, in favor of a multi-ethnic empire, in line with “our thousand-year history.” Putin went on in 2011 to propose a “Eurasian Union” to counter the EU. It’s worth noting here that this is not Russian ethnic nationalism: the whole point is that there are many distinct ethnicities in the Russian Empire, all united in the protective motherland. When today, Putin insisted that cultural diversity is Russia’s strength, this is what he meant.

In all this, the contours of Dugin’s thought is pretty obvious: “The Eurasian Empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, the strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.” Putin’s seething resentment of the West, his inferiority complex, his paranoia are all echoed in Dugin’s sometimes hypnotic prose — as Putin’s latest diatribes show. And yes, this is a kind of international culture war, which is why illiberal rightists across the West warm to the thug in the Kremlin — and why Putin just invoked JK Rowling as a fellow victim of cancel culture.

Dugin’s view of Ukraine? “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion. This is my opinion as a professor,” he told a magazine in 2014. A joke or not? As with many of Dugin’s provocations, hard to tell. Putin distanced himself a little afterwards.

Religion is part of this new Russia, as it is in American reactionism. Like America’s religious right, Dugin’s version of Orthodoxy has replaced Christian faith with Christianism — a fusion of politics and religious tradition in defense of a single charismatic leader’s authority — and against cultural liberals and their “gender freedoms.” How earnest is this? About as earnest as Donald Trump’s “faith.” But negative polarization — the consuming hatred of Western liberalism — keeps the show on the road, even in a country where actual belief in God is hard to find.

There is a tendency to talk of Russia as if Putin has hijacked the country, wresting it away from the West, and from being a “normal country”. I wish that were true. Putin is closer to many Russians’ view of the world than we’d like to believe; his popularity soared after the seizure of Crimea; his mastery of modern media manipulation means his war propaganda can work at home — at least for a while.

Most Russians see Ukraine as indelibly Russian, and they certainly don’t support a fully independent nation-state allied with the EU and NATO. This was the view of figures as disparate as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, George Kennan, and Joseph Brodsky in their time. And if you want to grasp the power of nationalism in Russia, remember that Alexei Navalny, Putin’s greatest potential foe, has built his career on it.

All of this, it seems to me, tells us something about this moment: the invasion of Ukraine is part of a now-established narrative of Russia defending its civilization against the liberal West. It is wrapped up in history and religion and a sense that Russia means nothing if it is just another nation-state, what Russophobe John McCain called a “gas station masquerading as a country,” wedged between Europe and China. For years now, Putin has built his legitimacy as a “gatherer of the lands” of his Russian ancestors, buttressed by a near-eugenic understanding of Russian identity: “We are a victorious people! It is in our genes, in our genetic code. It is transferred from generation to generation, and we will have victory!”

That seems preposterous — at least right now, as Russian troops in Ukraine take massive casualties and remain stuck in a stalemate. It proves reactionaryism’s core weakness: its alienation from reality and the present. You can theorize endlessly about Eurasia, the glories of Empire and the legacy of the Mongols, but if your tanks keep getting blown up, your communications don’t work, and your troops are poorly trained, it will all look pretty ridiculous soon.

More to the point, if your nostalgia for imperial nationalism confronts real actual living nationalism among those you’re invading, it will also lose. The crudeness of the invasion, its cruelty and incompetence have all conjured up a far stronger Ukrainian identity — among Russian and Ukrainian speakers — than ever before. And if your worldview is built on esoteric theory from hipster fascists, and you ignore how countries shift in real time in practice, you’ll misunderstand your enemy. What Ukraine has gone through in the past decade has changed it. What it has endured this past month has transformed it. In one terrible mistake, Putin has been more successful at nation-building than the US has been for two decades. He has built a new Ukraine even as he continues to carpet-bomb it.

Which is, of course, the caveat. The invasion of Ukraine is integral to the entire edifice of the Putin era. It is what everything has been leading up to — from Chechnya to Syria. If it ends in manifest failure, Putin is finished. But if it becomes a grinding, hideous war of attrition; if the West loses interest (as we surely will); if exhaustion hits Ukraine itself and Russia is able to pulverize and terrorize it from a distance, I’m not so sure. At the very least, Putin may succeed in the permanent annexation of the Donbas and Crimea, claim he has disarmed the “Nazis” in Ukraine, milk the conflict for a jingoistic boost, and declare victory.

Russia tends to win wars of attrition — whether against Hitler or Napoleon, or in Chechnya and Syria. Russian regimes have little compunction in the mass murder of civilians or brutal destruction of towns and cities where their enemies live. Putin has a narrative into which all of this fits, and the extraordinary sanctions — an economic nuclear bomb — imposed on Moscow will feed into his story of the persecution of Russia and the perfidy and hypocrisy of the West. Putin could become like Assad, his puppet, turning Mariupol into Aleppo, testing chemical weapons, but with a nuclear capacity to turn the planet to dust. Sanctions? Putin will use them, as Saddam did, to further demonize the West, and sing the praises of Russian stoicism and endurance.

I pray he fails. But Putin is not without allies. China, Brazil, India, Israel — they’re all hedging their bets, alongside much of the global South. And the invasion of Iraq and the US abandonment of the Geneva Conventions have greatly undermined any moral authority the West once might have had in the eyes of many in the developing world. This story is not over. Nor is this war. Nor the project Putin has constructed.

It may, in fact, just be beginning.

NO MORE BULLSHIT: Time to tell the truth about Ukraine.

 NO MORE BULLSHIT: Time to tell the truth about  Ukraine.

This war will end in about two months. With food distribution at an end, critical medicine unavailable to most people, 40 million people having no job no money and the Russian bombing campaign going on even when all they are doing is making the rubble bounce. Just as in Grozny with everything ruined and the population beginning to starve NATO will start pressuring President Zelensky to cut a deal. Facing famine and ten million more refugees the west will finally step in and make a deal with Russia and tragically betray Ukraine. By August the Russians will control about 50% of the country, letting the rest become a NATO welfare case. In June 2023 the Russian sector will resemble East Germany in 1950 and the west resembling Baghdad in 2007, gangs fighting over western aid and Republicans in the US voting down all relief efforts and much of Europe sick and tired of the whole damn thing. Eventually Russia will seize the rest of Ukraine and the world will do nothing. All of this is horrid and shameful. Russian brutality and NATO making promises that will not be kept. Who, will spend a hundred billion dollars rebuilding Ukraine? Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, malnutrition, late night street battles, political corruption. All of this is painful to say but history is replete with examples of how generous promises end up being bullshit. In 2030 Ukraine will be a Russian district and Zelensky will operate a popular restaurant on Miami beach.

Why the School Wars Still Rage

From evolution to anti-racism, parents and progressives have clashed for a century over who gets to tell our origin stories.

By Jill Lepore The New Yorker

A stand in Dayton, Tennessee, during the July, 1925, Scopes trial. Photograph from Getty

In 1925, Lela V. Scopes, twenty-eight, was turned down for a job teaching mathematics at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, her home town. She had taught in the Paducah schools before going to Lexington to finish college at the University of Kentucky. But that summer her younger brother, John T. Scopes, was set to be tried for the crime of teaching evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee, in violation of state law, and Lela Scopes had refused to denounce either her kin or Charles Darwin. It didn’t matter that evolution doesn’t ordinarily come up in an algebra class. And it didn’t matter that Kentucky’s own anti-evolution law had been defeated. “Miss Scopes loses her post because she is in sympathy with her brother’s stand,” the Times reported.

In the nineteen-twenties, legislatures in twenty states, most of them in the South, considered thirty-seven anti-evolution measures. Kentucky’s bill, proposed in 1922, had been the first. It banned teaching, or countenancing the teaching of, “Darwinism, atheism, agnosticism, or the theory of evolution in so far as it pertains to the origin of man.” The bill failed to pass the House by a single vote. Tennessee’s law, passed in 1925, made it a crime for teachers in publicly funded schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Scopes challenged the law deliberately, as part of an effort by the A.C.L.U. to bring a test case to court. His trial, billed as the trial of the century, was the first to be broadcast live on the radio. It went out across the country, to a nation, rapt.

A century later, the battle over public education that afflicted the nineteen-twenties has started up again, this time over the teaching of American history. Since 2020, with the murder of George Floyd and the advance of the Black Lives Matter movement, seventeen states have made efforts to expand the teaching of one sort of history, sometimes called anti-racist history, while thirty-six states have made efforts to restrict that very same kind of instruction. In 2020, Connecticut became the first state to require African American and Latino American history. Last year, Maine passed “An Act to Integrate African American Studies into American History Education,” and Illinois added a requirement mandating a unit on Asian American history.

On the blackboard on the other side of the classroom are scrawled what might be called anti-anti-racism measures. Some ban the Times’ 1619 Project, or ethnic studies, or training in diversity, inclusion, and belonging, or the bugbear known as critical race theory. Most, like a bill recently introduced in West Virginia, prohibit “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating,” and the teaching of “divisive concepts”—for instance, the idea that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist,” or that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

While all this has been happening, I’ve been working on a U.S.-history textbook, so it’s been weird to watch lawmakers try their hands at writing American history, and horrible to see what the ferment is doing to public-school teachers. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin set up an e-mail tip line “for parents to send us any instances where they feel that their fundamental rights are being violated . . . or where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools.” There and elsewhere, parents are harassing school boards and reporting on teachers, at a time when teachers, who earn too little and are asked to do too much, are already exhausted by battles over remote instruction and mask and vaccine mandates and, not least, by witnessing, without being able to repair, the damage the pandemic has inflicted on their students. Kids carry the burdens of loss, uncertainty, and shaken faith on their narrow shoulders, tucked inside their backpacks. Now, with schools open and masks coming off, teachers are left trying to figure out not only how to care for them but also what to teach, and how to teach it, without losing their jobs owing to complaints filed by parents.

There’s a rock, and a hard place, and then there’s a classroom. Consider the dilemma of teachers in New Mexico. In January, the month before the state’s Public Education Department finalized a new social-studies curriculum that includes a unit on inequality and justice in which students are asked to “explore inequity throughout the history of the United States and its connection to conflict that arises today,” Republican lawmakers proposed a ban on teaching “the idea that social problems are created by racist or patriarchal societal structures and systems.” The law, if passed, would make the state’s own curriculum a crime.

Evolution is a theory of change. But in February—a hundred years, nearly to the day, after the Kentucky legislature debated the nation’s first anti-evolution bill—Republicans in Kentucky introduced a bill that mandates the teaching of twenty-four historical documents, beginning with the 1620 Mayflower Compact and ending with Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing.” My own account of American history ends with the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, and “The Hill We Climb,” the poem that Amanda Gorman recited at Joe Biden’s Inauguration. “Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: / That even as we grieved, we grew.”

Did we, though? In the nineteen-twenties, the curriculum in question was biology; in the twenty-twenties, it’s history. Both conflicts followed a global pandemic and fights over public education that pitted the rights of parents against the power of the state. It’s not clear who’ll win this time. It’s not even clear who won last time. But the distinction between these two moments is less than it seems: what was once contested as a matter of biology—can people change?—has come to be contested as a matter of history. Still, this fight isn’t really about history. It’s about political power. Conservatives believe they can win midterm elections, and maybe even the Presidency, by whipping up a frenzy about “parents’ rights,” and many are also in it for another long game, a hundred years’ war: the campaign against public education.

Before states began deciding what schools would require—from textbooks to vaccines—they had to require children to attend school. That happened in the Progressive era, early in the past century, when a Progressive strain ran through not only the Progressive Party but also the Republican, Democratic, Socialist, and Populist Parties. Lela and John Scopes grew up in Paducah, but they spent part of their childhood in Illinois, which, in 1883, became one of the first states in the Union to make school attendance compulsory. By 1916, nearly every state had mandated school attendance, usually between the ages of six and sixteen. Between 1890 and 1920, a new high school opened every day.

Some families objected, citing “parental rights,” a legal novelty, but courts broadly upheld compulsory-education laws, deeming free public schooling to be essential to democratic citizenship. “The natural rights of a parent to the custody and control of his infant child are subordinate to the power of the state, and may be restricted and regulated by municipal laws,” the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in 1901, characterizing a parent’s duty to educate his children as a “duty he owes not to the child only, but to the commonwealth.” As Tracy Steffes argues in “School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940” (2012), “Public schooling was not just one more progressive reform among many but a major—perhaps THE major—public response to tensions between democracy and capitalism.” Capitalism divided the rich and the poor; democracy required them to live together as equals. Public education was meant to bridge the gap, as wide as the Cumberland.

Beginning in the eighteen-nineties, states also introduced textbook laws, in an attempt to wrest control of textbook publishing from what Progressives called “the book trust”—a conglomerate of publishers known as the American Book Company. Tennessee passed one of these laws in 1899: it established a textbook commission that selected books for adoption. The biology book Scopes used to teach his students was a textbook that Tennessee had adopted, statewide, at a time when it made high school compulsory.

“Each year the child is coming to belong more and more to the state, and less and less to the parent,” the Stanford professor of education Ellwood Cubberley wrote approvingly in 1909. Progressives fought for children’s welfare and children’s health, establishing children’s hospitals and, in 1912, the U.S. Children’s Bureau. Mandatory school attendance was closely tied to two other Progressive reforms that extended the state’s reach into the lives of parents and children: compulsory vaccination and the abolition of child labor.

By 1912, twenty-seven states either required vaccination for children attending school or permitted schools to require it. Parents’ objections met with little success. In one New Jersey school district, in 1911, three hundred and fifty parents challenged the school board, pledging that “we will, one and all of us . . . move out of Montclair and out of the State of New Jersey before we allow our children to be vaccinated. There are other suburbs of New York which have not this fetish of forcing vaccination on children.” The school board backed down. But, beginning in 1914, with a widely cited case called People v. Ekerold, parents could be prosecuted for failing to vaccinate their children. “If a parent may escape all obligation under the statute requiring him to send his children to school by simply alleging he does not believe in vaccination,” the court ruled, “the policy of the state to give some education to all children, if necessary by compelling measures, will become more or less of a farce.”

Before compulsory schooling, many American children worked, in farms or factories. You might think that stopping parents from sending their children to work was a consequence of requiring that they send them to school, but the opposite was true: requiring parents to send their children to school was one way reformers got parents to stop sending their children to work. In 1916, Congress passed a law discouraging the employment of children younger than fourteen in manufacturing and the employment of children younger than sixteen in mines and quarries. When this and other laws targeting child labor were deemed unconstitutional by a laissez-faire Supreme Court, reformers drafted a Child Labor Amendment, granting Congress the “power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen.” It passed Congress in 1924 and went to the states for ratification. Progressive organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women, sent orders to their members to lobby state legislatures to pass the bill.

“Please remember, dear sisters, that unless two-thirds of the state legislators pass the Child Labor Amendment, it will not be incorporated into the Constitution of the United States,” the group’s former president Mary Church Terrell warned members, “and that will certainly be a calamity.” Businesses, not least the Southern textile industry, objected. And rural states, especially, objected—Kentucky was among those states which failed to ratify—since the amendment, which was badly written, could be construed as making it a crime for families to ask their children to do chores around the farm. The Ohio Farm Bureau complained, “The parents of the United States did not know that the congress was considering taking their parental authority from them.”

Parenthood, as an identity, and even as a class of rights bearers, is a product both of Progressive reform and of those who resisted it. The magazine Parents began publishing in 1926. “Devoted but unenlightened parenthood is a dangerous factor in the lives of children,” its editor said, maintaining that parents weren’t to be trusted to know how to raise children: they had to be taught, by experts. This doesn’t mean that experts usually prevailed; people don’t like to be told how to raise their kids, particularly when experts seek the power of the state. Like the Equal Rights Amendment, the Child Labor Amendment became one of only a handful of amendments that passed Congress but have never been ratified.

Anti-evolution laws, usually understood as fundamentalism’s response to modernity, emerged from this conflict between parents and the state. So did the teaching of biology, a new subject that stood at the very center of Progressive-era public education. At the time, parents, not schools, paid for and provided schoolbooks, so they had a close acquaintance with what their kids were being taught. The textbook that John Scopes used in Tennessee was a 1914 edition of George William Hunter’s “A Civic Biology,” published by the American Book Company. More than a guide to life on earth, “Civic Biology” was a civics primer, a guide to living in a democracy.

“This book shows boys and girls living in an urban community how they may best live within their own environment and how they may cooperate with the civic authorities for the betterment of their environment,” the book’s foreword explained. “Civic Biology” promoted Progressive public-health campaigns, all the more urgent in the wake of the 1918 influenza pandemic, stressing the importance of hygiene, vaccination, and quarantine. “Civic biology symbolized the whole ideology behind education reform,” Adam Shapiro wrote in his 2013 book, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools.” It contained a section on evolution (“If we follow the early history of man upon the earth, we find that at first he must have been little better than one of the lower animals”), but its discussion emphasized the science of eugenics. Hunter wrote, of alcoholics and the criminal and the mentally ill, “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.”

At bottom, “Civic Biology” rested on social Darwinism. “Society itself is founded upon the principles which biology teaches,” Hunter wrote. “Plants and animals are living things, taking what they can from their surroundings; they enter into competition with one another, and those which are the best fitted for life outstrip the others.” What did it feel like, for kids who were poor and hungry, living in want and cold and fear, to read those words?

When anti-evolutionists condemned “evolution,” they meant something as vague and confused as what people mean, today, when they condemn “critical race theory.” Anti-evolutionists weren’t simply objecting to Darwin, whose theory of evolution had been taught for more than half a century. They were objecting to the whole Progressive package, including its philosophy of human betterment, its model of democratic citizenship, and its insistence on the interest of the state in free and equal public education as a public good that prevails over the private interests of parents.

In the nineteen-twenties, Lela and John Scopes were students at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, when he took a course on evolution taught by a professor named Arthur (Monkey) Miller. That course caught the attention of people who thought the state was spending too much money on the university. In the summer of 1921, Frank McVey, the university’s president, had pressed the legislature for funding to expand the university. In January, 1922, in a move widely seen as a response, the legislature introduced a bill to ban the teaching of evolution at any school, college, or university that received public funds.

McVey occupied an unusually strong position, partly because of the way he’d handled the recent pandemic. Born in Ohio, the child of Progressive Republicans, McVey had earned a Ph.D. in economics at Yale, where he wrote a dissertation on the Populist movement, and in 1904, after a stint writing for the Times, he published “Modern Industrialism,” an argument against laissez-faire economics. He arrived at the University of Kentucky in 1917. A year later, during an influenza outbreak that took the lives of fourteen thousand Kentuckians, McVey made the decision, extraordinary at the time, to shut down the campus for nearly a month. Of twelve hundred students, four hundred became infected and only eight died, rates that were low compared with those at other colleges and universities. The achievement was all the more impressive because young adults, worldwide, suffered particularly high death rates.

The Kentucky anti-evolution campaign drew national attention. William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Presidential candidate and a former Secretary of State, hastened to offer support, predicting that “the movement will sweep the country and we will drive Darwinism from our schools.” In January, Bryan, a barnstorming, larger-than-life showman, travelled to Kentucky to speak before the House and the Senate.

McVey weighed his options: he could fight, or he could sit tight and hope that the law, if passed, would be found unconstitutional. He decided to fight. He wrote to Woodrow Wilson for support, but Wilson refused to take a stand that would have pitted him against a former member of his Cabinet. McVey sent telegrams to some fifty people. “Bill has been introduced in Kentucky Legislature with heavy penalty to prohibit teaching of evolution,” he cabled. “Wire collect your opinion.” Forty-seven fiery replies arrived within four days. The reverend of the First Christian Church of Paducah maintained that the law “contravenes the spirit of democracy.” “Universities must be left free to teach that which the best scholarship believes to be true,” a pastor wrote from St. Louis. The president of Columbia University suggested that the legislature do one better and prohibit the publication of any books that “use any of the letters by which the word evolution could be spelled.” The head of the First Christian Church in Frankfort, the state capital, called the bill “unwise, unamerican and contrary to the spirit of Jesus Christ.” Before the bill was considered, McVey had arranged for the responses to be published in newspapers across the state. Finally, he addressed both the House and the Senate and published an open letter to the people of Kentucky. “I have an abiding faith in the good sense and fairness of the people of this State,” he wrote. “When they understand what the situation means and when they come to comprehend the motives underlying this attack upon the public schools of the State they will hold the University and the school system in greater respect than ever before.”

He said that the university was bound to teach evolution “since all the natural sciences are based upon it,” but he hoped Kentuckians could agree that evolution wasn’t what its opponents had made it out to be: “Evolution is development; it is change, and every man knows that development and change are going on all the time.” He took pains to distinguish the theory of evolution from social Darwinism, regretting the law’s conflation of the two. Above all, he pointed out, banning the teaching of evolution “places limitations on the right of thought and freedom of belief,” and is therefore a violation of the Kentucky Bill of Rights.

Four days later, the bill was killed in the Senate, and the following month the House voted it down, forty-two to forty-one. McVey had won, but, as he remarked, “it may be that the fight here in Kentucky is really the forerunner of a conflict all over the nation.”

In 1924, John Scopes moved from Lexington, Kentucky, to Dayton, Tennessee, to take a job as a high-school coach. The next year, Tennessee passed an anti-evolution bill. Black intellectuals and Black reporters didn’t think the new law had anything to do with evolution; it had to do with an understanding of history. All Tennessee’s lawmakers know about evolution, the Chicago Defender suggested, “is that the entire human race is supposed to have started from a common origin. Therein lies their difficulty.” If they were to accept evolution, then they would have to admit that “there is no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise.” The president of Fisk University, a Black institution, wrote to the governor, “I hope that you will refuse to give your support to the Evolution Bill.” But the president of the University of Tennessee, fearful of losing the university’s funding, declined to fight the bill, and the governor signed it, declaring he was sure it would never be enforced.

In Dayton, Scopes had briefly subbed for the biology teacher, using the state-mandated textbook, “A Civic Biology.” He agreed to test the law and was arrested in May. William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution, defending the rights of parents. The month before the trial, he delivered a statement asking, “Who shall control our schools?” To defend the twenty-four-year-old Scopes, the A.C.L.U. retained the celebrated Clarence Darrow, who, that year, took on another case at the request of the N.A.A.C.P. As Darrow and the A.C.L.U. saw it, Tennessee’s anti-evolution law violated both the state’s constitution and the First Amendment. “Scopes is not on trial,” Darrow declared. “Civilization is on trial.”

During the trial, H. L. Mencken ridiculed Bryan (a “mountebank”) and fundamentalists (“poor half wits”): “He has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it.” But W. E. B. Du Bois found very little to laugh about. “Americans are now endeavoring to persuade hilarious and sarcastic Europe that Dayton, Tennessee, is a huge joke, and very, very exceptional,” he wrote. “The truth is and we know it: Dayton, Tennessee, is America: a great, ignorant, simple-minded land.”

Scopes, in the end, was found guilty (a verdict that was later reversed on a technicality), but Tennessee had been humiliated in the national press. Five days after the trial ended, Bryan died in his bed, and with him, many observers believed, died the anti-evolution campaign. The number of bills proposed in state legislatures dwindled to only three, in 1928 and 1929. But the battle was far from over. “The Fundamentalists have merely changed their tactics,” one commentator observed in 1930. They had given up on passing laws. “Primarily, they are concentrating today on the emasculation of textbooks, the ‘purging’ of libraries, and above all the continued hounding of teachers.” That went on for a long time. It’s still going on.

Lela Scopes, after losing out on that job teaching math in Paducah because she refused to denounce her brother, left Kentucky to take a job at a girls’ school in Tarrytown, New York. Then, in 1927, she moved to Illinois, where she taught at the Skokie School, in Winnetka. She never married, and helped raise her brother’s children—they lived with her—and then she paid for them to go to college.

In the nineteen-fifties, when Lela Scopes retired from teaching and moved back to Paducah, Southern segregationists resurrected Bryan’s parental-rights argument to object to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. “Free men have the right to send their children to schools of their own choosing,” Senator James Eastland, of Mississippi, insisted after the decision. All-white legislators in Southern states repealed Progressive-era compulsory-education laws: rather than integrate public schools, they dismantled public education, as Jon Hale reports in his recent book, “The Choice We Face: How Segregation, Race, and Power Have Shaped America’s Most Controversial Education Reform Movement.” The South Carolina governor George Bell Timmerman, Jr., signing one such bill in 1955, declared, “The parental right to determine what is best for the child is fundamental. It is a divine right. It is a basic law of nature that no man, no group of men, can successfully destroy.” The following year, all but twenty-six of the hundred and thirty-eight Southern members of the U.S. House and Senate signed a statement known as the Southern Manifesto, warning that “outside mediators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our public schools systems.” Two states in the West—Nevada, in 1956, and Utah, in 1957—passed measures making it legal for parents to keep their children home for schooling.

By the end of the nineteen-fifties, segregationists had begun using a new catchphrase: “school choice,” maybe because it would have been confusing to call for “parents’ rights” when they were also arguing for “states’ rights.” In Mississippi, opponents of segregation founded Freedom of Choice in the United States, or FOCUS. Advocates for “choice” sought government reimbursement for private-school tuition costs, in the name of allowing the free market to drive educational innovation. The free market, unsurprisingly, widened the very inequalities that public education aims to narrow. Between 1962 and 1966, for instance, Louisiana distributed more than fifteen thousand tuition vouchers in New Orleans; in 1966, ninety-four per cent of the funds went to white parents. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, court-mandated busing strengthened calls for choice, and Ronald Reagan pressed for the federal government to invest in vouchers; in the nineteen-nineties, Bill Clinton fought for funding for charter schools. Between 1982 and 1993, homeschooling became legal in all fifty states. Philanthropies, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice (now EdChoice), later joined the movement in force, funding research and charter schools. And yet, in “Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice Is Really About,” the education scholars Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Michael C. Johanek point out that about nine in ten children in the United States attend public school, and the overwhelming majority of parents—about eight in ten—are happy with their kids’ schools. In the name of “choice,” a very small minority of edge cases have shaped the entire debate about public education.

A century ago, parents who objected to evolution were rejecting the entire Progressive package. Today’s parents’-rights groups, like Moms for Liberty, are objecting to a twenty-first-century Progressive package. They’re balking at compulsory vaccination and masking, and some of them do seem to want to destroy public education. They’re also annoyed at the vein of high-handedness, moral crusading, and snobbery that stretches from old-fashioned Progressivism to the modern kind, laced with the same contempt for the rural poor and the devoutly religious.

But across the past century, behind parents’ rights, lies another unbroken strain: some Americans’ fierce resistance to the truth that, just as all human beings share common ancestors biologically, all Americans have common ancestors historically. A few parents around the country may not like their children learning that they belong to a much bigger family—whether it’s a human family or an American family—but the idea of public education is dedicated to the cultivation of that bigger sense of covenant, toleration, and obligation. In the end, no matter what advocates of parents’ rights say, and however much political power they might gain, public schools don’t have a choice; they’ve got to teach, as American history, the history not only of the enslaved Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619 and the English families who sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620, but also that of the Algonquian peoples, who were already present in both places, alongside the ongoing stories of all other Indigenous peoples, and those who came afterward—the Dutch, German, Spanish, Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Cambodian, Guatemalan, Japanese, Sikh, Hmong, Tunisian, Afghani, everyone. That’s why parents don’t have a right to choose the version of American history they like best, a story of only their own family’s origins. Instead, the state has an obligation to welcome children into that entire history, their entire inheritance.

Lela Scopes insisted that her brother’s trial had never been about evolution: “The issue was academic freedom.” Twentieth-century Progressives defeated anti-evolution laws not by introducing pro-evolution laws but by defending academic freedom and the freedoms of expression and inquiry. This approach isn’t available to twenty-first-century progressives, who have ceded the banner of free speech to conservatives. And, in any case, teachers don’t have much academic freedom: state school boards and school districts decide what they’ll teach. Still, there are limits. Biology and history offer accounts of origins and change, and, when badly taught, they risk taking on the trappings of religion and violating the First Amendment. Biology teachers have to explain evolution, but they can’t teach that God does not exist, just as public schools can’t preach social justice as a gospel, a dogma that can’t be disputed, and, equally, they can’t ban it.

That’s because history as doctrine is always dangerous. “Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing,” the Supreme Court ruled in 1943, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, when the Court struck down, as a violation of the First Amendment, a statute that required schoolchildren to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” History isn’t a pledge; it’s an argument.

John Scopes died in 1970. Lela Scopes buried him in Paducah, and had his headstone engraved with the words “A Man of Courage.” She died in 1989, and is buried nearby, under a stone that reads “A Gracious and Generous Lady.” She was ninety-two. She always said she thought the idea of evolution was even more beautiful than Genesis, evidence of an even more wonderful God. But she understood that not everyone agreed with her. ?

An earlier version of this article incorrectly dated the Capitol insurrection.

Page-Turner

How It Felt to Have My Novel Stolen

On the verge of selling my first book, I was scammed by a manuscript thief. My deepest insecurities about wanting to be a writer came rushing to the surface.

By Peter C. Baker The New Yorker

At 2:47 P.M. on September 20, 2020, I received what appeared to be an innocuous e-mail from my literary agent, Chris. Could I send over the latest version of my unsold novel-in-progress as a Microsoft Word file? “I just realized,” the e-mail read, “that I only have it as a PDF.” It wasn’t like Chris to misplace things, but the situation didn’t seem implausible. People switch computers. In-boxes get gnarly. I found an old e-mail with the Word file attached and forwarded it along.

At 3:44 P.M., another e-mail arrived: “Strange, I haven’t received anything now . . . can you resend please?” I re-forwarded the old e-mail with the Word file. At 4:03 P.M., I got another e-mail, which explained that Chris’s agency was in the process of switching servers, and perhaps this explained why my e-mails weren’t coming through. Could I try again, this time working around the problem by changing the .com suffix in Chris’s normal e-mail to .co?

Looking back, this is the part where I can’t quite understand my actions. Why didn’t I just call Chris and ask him what was going on? Here’s my best attempt at a defense. The night before, I’d been up several times, tending to my nine-week-old son, and never finding my way back to true sleep. I started on coffee sometime around dawn. When these e-mails came, I was a quivering zombie, incapable of real thought, looking only to move forward, dealing with whatever came up until the next time my son slept, when I could try sleeping, too. I was in no condition to think, only to do.

Not long after I sent the Word manuscript to the .co address, my phone rang. It was Chris. He’d been offline for a few hours, he said, so he was just now seeing that I’d sent him my manuscript twice that morning. Why, he asked, sounding more than a little bit stressed, had I done that, when he hadn’t asked me to?

I’d been scammed.

First, the shame. I pored over the e-mails from Phony Chris, castigating myself. Through the high-res zoom lens of hindsight, I saw linguistic tics that were decidedly unlike Chris, or, really, anyone for whom American English was a native tongue. Chris wouldn’t have said “haven’t received anything now,” for instance—he would have said “haven’t received anything yet.” I also noticed things that made me feel less embarrassed, if not less disturbed. Chris’s familiar e-mail signature was at the bottom of the messages. His real e-mail address, the .com one, was in the “from” field. (If I’d hit Reply, as my scammer had clearly been hoping I would, the To field of my response would have been sneakily populated by the heretofore hidden .co address.) Whoever wrote the e-mail referred to my novel by name, even though Chris had not yet begun formally shopping it around—besides him and a couple of editors he’d spoken to, the only people who knew the title were my wife and a few of my friends.

It was the first book I’d ever tried writing, and, during the previous near-decade, it had become an overburdened locus of my ambitions, hopes, doubts, and fears. Many times, I’d looked at the manuscript and wondered if I was fooling myself. Getting fooled into handing it over made me feel sick.

I felt slightly better after learning from Chris that I wasn’t alone: in recent years, he told me, many other manuscripts had been snatched with similar trickery. Everyone in publishing knew about it. No one knew who the scammer was, or what this person’s motives were. No ransoms had been demanded, and no piracy seemed to be afoot. Many, though by no means all, of the manuscripts in question were, oddly, like mine, first books from unknown authors. Why go to the trouble of stealing an unfinished début by a writer no one has heard of? I didn’t even have a publisher yet. We were late in the Trump Presidency, with speculation about foreign hackers wafting thick through the ether—maybe, Chris joked, we would get word, in a few years, of a Russian TV show with the same plot as my book.

In December of that year, the Times ran the first news story about the manuscript thief, whose identity was still a complete mystery. The Times revealed that luminaries including Ethan Hawke and Margaret Atwood had been targeted, along with, as the paper of record put it, “little-known debut writers” whose work “would have no obvious value on the black market.” (Look, Mom and Dad, I made the news!) By then, I’d sold my book, and was in the middle of editing it. I tried not to think about the old version, with all its holes and errors and infelicities, sitting on some nefarious stranger’s hard drive.

On January 5, 2022, a twenty-nine-year-old Italian citizen named Filippo Bernardini flew to New York City for a vacation. After he landed at J.F.K., he was arrested by the F.B.I., which alleged that Bernardini was the manuscript thief—or, as New York magazine had dubbed him in a long feature story the previous August, the Spine Collector. The Department of Justice charged Bernardini with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. (Bernardini has pleaded not guilty.) Bernardini worked in publishing, in the rights department of Simon & Schuster U.K. The indictment accused him of registering more than a hundred and sixty fake Web domains, which seem to have been used to prop up e-mail addresses like the .co that snared me. He allegedly set up fake log-in pages to harvest the usernames and passwords of publishing professionals and got his hands on hundreds of manuscripts, including one from an unidentified Pulitzer Prize winner. But, for all its details of how Bernardini had allegedly done what he’d done, the indictment shed no light on why.

Media interest in the story exploded, fuelled not only by the scope of the scammer’s exploits but by the ongoing mystery of his motives, and, it seems likely, by Bernardini’s youth and somewhat lowly position in publishing’s power structure. People have a soft spot for underdogs, even underdogs who have done something wrong. On the Instagram page @publishersbrunch—to which low-ranking publishing employees flock to share gossip and gallows humor about overwork, low pay, and the erosion of their ideals—Bernardini became something of a hero, at least of a partial, ironized variety. The account even started selling T-shirts and hats with “publishing scammer” emblazoned on the front.

Journalists began digging into Bernardini’s background. He’d written an apparently autobiographical novel, “Bulli” (Italian for “bullies”), with a narrator who is tormented by his schoolmates and becomes determined to prove himself superior to them, even if it means becoming a bully himself. Bernardini venerated the world of publishing but failed to make much progress scaling its corporate ladder, perhaps in part because of his impatience with the less than glamorous work that often falls to those at the entry level. He was good with languages and had sought to build a career as a literary translator, with mixed success.

I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, since long before I had any real idea what “being a writer” might mean. I needed to write, but that wasn’t all: I wanted to publish, and I wanted people who cared about literature to care, or at least to take notice. Back then—and, really, for a long time afterward—the literary world was, for me, an imaginary place, one that I thought about often but had no idea how to get to. Now I understand that it really is imaginary, by which I mean not that it’s false (though it can be) but that it’s a collective fiction, a story people stitch together in large part through force of will.

This, I think, goes a long way toward explaining the fascination with Bernardini’s alleged crimes—and also the sympathy, and the disgust, that they prompt. It’s not just that he lied––told tales––to people in the business of telling (and selling) tales. It’s that, in doing so, he touched up against an uncomfortable truth about how little space there can sometimes be between legitimate and illegitimate participation in a collective fiction. The work of the scammer and the work of making it as a writer have, in their most mundane details, much in common. You have to know who to e-mail, and how to e-mail them correctly. What to say outright, what to imply, what to avoid altogether. How to project a winning image of yourself, and how to vary this projection as needed from publication to publication or even from editor to editor.

What might it have been like, I asked myself, if, when I’d sent my novel to agents, none had wanted to represent me? Or if, when Chris sent it around to publishers, none had offered me a contract? What if magazine editors stopped answering my messages? Not long ago, I came across an interview with George Saunders in which he referred to an alternate life where his writing never took off, referring to it as a “shadow life,” one in which his “negative inclinations would have bloomed.” The wording gave me the chills.

Like many people who spend years writing and hoping to get that writing out into the world, I know a little bit about the dangers of such hoping. Wherever there are people who want something badly, there are also people who can sense that want, and intuit possibilities for turning it to their own advantage. Mentors who want more than to impart wisdom. Patrons who want more than literature in exchange for their money. I’ve had my own entanglements of this type, and seen other writers have theirs, and they’ve made me wary––of other people, but, more fundamentally, of myself. My desire to be seen as a real writer has at times burned so brightly that it shrank my field of vision, impairing my ability to perceive my own experience and choices, getting me into situations that I would later regret. This, I have come to realize, is part of why getting my manuscript stolen was so discomfiting. My wariness had failed to protect me, and old embarrassments had come rushing to the surface, reminding me of how vulnerable I’d been––and, perhaps, remained. Fictional worlds can be conjured from nothing, and they can vanish in an instant.

Will Sanctions Affect Putin?

by Emrys Westacott 3 Quarks Daily

Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is clearly a historically momentous event, already appearing to cause a seismic shift in the geopolitical landscape. What the long-term consequences will be are hard to say. The most obvious losers are the millions of Ukrainians–killed, injured, bereft, and displaced–who are the immediate victims of Putin’s onslaught. The most likely winner will probably be China, on whom Russia is suddenly much more economically dependent due to the sanctions imposed by the West, and who can therefore now expect Putin to dance to whatever tune it whistles.

The heroism of President Zerlensky and all the other Ukrainians willing to risk their lives in resisting the Russian military juggernaut is remarkable and inspiring. But exactly how countries who wish to support Ukraine should respond to what Putin has done is a question to which no-one has an entirely satisfactory answer.

Supplying the resistance with weapons and ammunition will make the war more costly to the Russian military. Confiscating or freezing the foreign assets of Russian oligarchs will “hurt” these people in limited ways (e.g. by messing up their foreign holiday plans). Economic sanctions will inflict considerable damage on the Russian economy, and the effects will be felt across the board, primarily, as is usually the case, by those who are not well off. Cultural sanctions, such as FIFA barring Russia from international soccer competitions, and universities cutting ties with academic institutions in Russia, will communicate to the Russian population the extent to which the country is isolated as a result of the invasion.

On moral grounds, all these measures are justified, even obligatory. But one also has to ask the pragmatic question: how are they supposed to work? That is, how might they lead to an end to the war–an end that consists of something other than a long -term Russian occupation or a Putin-propped puppet government?

We can safely discount the possibility that, faced with undaunted resistance, Putin’s conscience will prevent him from reducing the whole of Ukraine to rubble. The surviving residents of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, which Putin bombed into a ruin in 1999, are experts on Putin’s moral sensibilities.

Nor, of course, will Putin be constrained by too many electoral anxieties. Last year the Russian constitution was amended to allow him to serve two further six-year terms should he be re-elected as president in 2024. Given the character of Russian elections and the control exercised by the government over them, including the banning of Putin’s serious critics and restrictions on the media, it seems at present to be a foregone conclusion that he will be re-elected.

Still, the hope behind the support given to the Ukrainian resistance and the sanctions is that they cause Putin to lose support among various constituencies. These include:

* other military and political leaders who realize that the invasion of Ukraine is a colossal blunder

* a relatively small group of obscenely rich kleptocrats who stand to lose billions

* a much larger group of fairly well-off Russians whose expectations and quality of life (including for example, buying foreign goods, travelling abroad, attending foreign schools) will be significantly reduced by the damage done to the Russian economy and the country’s cultural isolation.

* Russians with family and friends in Ukraine

* the great majority of ordinary people whose material standard of living and general quality of life will be adversely affected by the war and the sanctions

Putin, by all accounts, is not indifferent to polls concerning his popularity. RIght now his popularity stands at around 70%, lying somewhere between a high of 88% in 2015 and a low of 60% in 2020. But the hoped for path from sanctions, to popular dissatisfaction, to a change in Putin’s policies (or the end of his rule) runs up against a number of roadblocks.

First, Putin appears to wield almost absolute power. The video clip that went viral recently of him cowing and humiliating the Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergey Naryshkin reveals very plainly the extent of his authority.

Second, he is willing to suppress, brutally if necessary, any public criticism. Dissent in Russia requires courage. There have been demonstrations already against the war in several Russian cities, and according to some accounts thousands protestors have been arrested.

Third, Putin’s government controls the mainstream media’s coverage of the war. This is even more true now that foreign news organizations like the BBC, the CBC, and Bloomberg News have ceased reporting from Russia after their reporters were threatened with arrest if they spread what the Russian government deemed “fake information.” To be sure, some Russians are able to find ways around the censorship, such as using VPNs. But the majority get their view of the world from the state media which, needless to say, constantly reinforces a pro-Putin narrative. So many people, just like in the US, live inside a news bubble that is rarely challenged by alternative accounts of what is happening in the world.

Fourth, that state-sanctioned narrative rests on a foundation of Russian nationalism that runs deep. Nationalism in a complex phenomenon. There are various kinds, and often these are intertwined. In the case of Russia, it involves, among other things, a strong traditional identity bound up with religion and a certain form of life; an impressive list of cultural contributions in science and the arts; a long history of feeling disrespected by Western Europe; the experience of being invaded several times by Western forces (Napoleon, allied opponents of the Bolsheviks, Hitler) and each time emerging victorious; the humiliation felt at the end of the cold war, exacerbated by American triumphalism; anger at the hypocrisy of countries like the US and the UK who condemn Russian foreign policies even though they are often equally culpable (see Iraq: unprovoked and illegal invasion of); and, more recently, a sense of being both excluded and threatened by the expansion Eastwards of NATO and the EU.

I doubt if many ordinary Russians share Putin’s overreaching geopolitical ambitions. But his phony justifications seek to exploit whatever nationalistic sentiments they have. This, after all, is a tactic employed by politicians in just about every country (witness, Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Johnson and other scoundrels). Sadly, it’s a tactic that often seems to work.

Ideally, the measures taken to oppose the invasion of Ukraine will undermine support for Putin. There is obviously a danger, though, that by increasing a sense of victimhood they could inflame nationalistic feelings within Russia. This was a weakness in Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1. He rightly targeted Putin rather than Russia as the agent responsible for the war. But he could have done more to emphasize that opposition to the invasion of Ukraine does not imply any lack of respect for Russia as a nation or for its people. For if the sanctions are to have the desired outcome within Russia–that is, if they are to undermine support for Putin–they need to be accompanied by this message, not understood as expressing contempt.

I have no idea if it is correct, as many are saying, that two decades of unbridled power has led to Putin becoming paranoid and deranged. If so, he exemplifies rather well the memorable portrait of the tyrant drawn by Plato in the Republic. It does appear, though, from his own speeches and from what others have reported, that he has a vision of regathering into a single entity lands which he believes share an ethnic and national identity. Moreover, he appears to think of himself as the individual chosen by history to accomplish this task.

The German philosopher Hegel writes in his lectures on the philosophy of history about “world historical individuals” like Julius Caesar and Napoleon who, whether they are fully aware of it or not, are responsible for historical changes that we eventually recognize as positive developments leading history toward its eventual goal . As someone familiar with Marx (who was steeped in Hegel), Putin would quite possibly be familiar with this notion. If so, that is one more reason to worry. Because Hegel, rather disturbingly, seems to give these world historical individuals license to operate beyond the constraints of conventional morality. “So great a figure,” he writes, “must necessarily trample on many an innocent flower, crushing much that gets in its way.”

But Hegel also claims that these world historical individuals are able to accomplish their aims because they inspire followers who support them not out of fear but from a vague sense that the “hero” in question has history on his side. On this count one suspects that Putin falls short. Let us hope so.