Rust Never--Well, Rarely--Sleeps

Reading Tony Judt's masterful Postwar I'm struck again by something that so often gets to me about the 20h Century's great adventure.  Specifically: how often and how needlessly the Nazis and he Japanese and later the Russians, blew it.  That is: how easy it would have been for them to win favor or support from the conquered peoples and to install themselves as masters not exactly beloved (what master is ever beloved?) but at least accepted and recognized as legitimate.  The point is particularly evident here as Judt shows how the Nazis came close to doing just that in their conquest of France, Norway and other nations of "people like us."  With a fairly light hand and a willingness to leave local matters in the hands of the locals, they bid fair to put themselves in a position to reign if not to rule over a reunified Europe. 

So, pity about that Russian business.Of course the Nazis weren't nearly as polite to those easterners whom they saw as more or less subhuman and in the end they paid a terrible price for their callousness. But no worse, really than the Japanese who could easily have been welcomed as racial allies against the hated Westerners, had not their own racist high-handedness trumped any impulse towards making common cause.   Even more foolish still, perhaps, was Stalin who had coherent realpolitik reasons to want to dominate his environs.  And indeed, again he sometimes came close: Poland where his practical concern was most urgent--he wanted a buffer against the possibility of a resurgent Germany--almost got away with a life of its own, as least for a while.  But ideological blindness led him to try to impose gratuitous indignities on the new satellites for reasons which, in retrospect, are almost impossible to define.

Rust never--well, rarely--sleeps.  Arrogance and foolishness are the natural handmaidens of power.  Surveying this record, it's comforting to know that we live in an empire that will never dissipate its natural advantages via indifference and insult.

Heh.

And How's That Workin' Out For Ya?

The Third Dynasty of Ur constitutes the second great empire in the history of humankind, after the reign of Sargon and his successors. It lasted about a century, from around 2112 to 2004 BC, dominating the southern portion of Mesopotamia, where it left behind, among other relics, the great ziggurat of Ur (in a simpler time, I thought “ziggurat of Ur” was the title of a person, not the name of a thing).

Ur's end was sudden. The internal machinery seems to have been wound too tightly. Also, anticipating a pattern repeated in so many later empires, it became the focus of attention from outsiders—here Amorite nomads, evidently tougher and more resilient than the empire itself, and covetous of the empire's wealth.

Ur's response was not entirely passive, however. The authorities did take measures to fend off the incursions of the nomads. What sort of measures? Why, they built a wall.

Niall Ferguson Gets One Thing Right

Niall Ferguson has written some good stuff although lately I get the feeling that his love life has impaired the clarity of his vision. Still, I think he makes at least one important point his new Foreign Policy piece on forecasting the demise of the American hegemony.

Ferguson says it's coming, and that it will be quick. Well, of course it's coming, ducks: every empire ends. I'm not persuaded that Ferguson knows the date and time and I'm not even certain that it will be quick. But it certainly could be quick. Some empires—Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Austrian--seem to take, like Charles II “an unconscionable time a-dying.” But empires can vanish in the blink of an eye. Think France in 1989 1789 (!), or Russia in 1917—scarcely anybody forecast that the apocalypse would be so swift or so calamitous. Perhaps the more troubling example is the Soviets in 1989. I met a lady who says she missed the fall of the Berlin Wall because she figured those demonstrations were nothing special, so she went home and fell asleep. Where were you in the revolution, mama? Oh, I was taking a nap. “Asleep” may be the right metaphor here. Our decline may be long and slow but nobody, absolutely nobody, can be certain that it won't be quick.

Update: H/T John for the date correction. John asks: "Didn’t we all sleep thru something?" Fair comment. Prompts me to remember Fabrizio in Stendahl's Charterhouse of Parma who lived through the Battle of Waterloo and didn't know he was there.