More Dairy, Less Empire

“I will moo harder!” says Comrade Cow.

 

Some time ago on This Here Blog I wrote very favorably about Yegor Gaidar’s 2007 paper “The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil.” In that essay Gaidar attributed the fall of the Soviet empire to a shortage of the one and a worldwide oversupply of the latter. More specifically: Soviet agriculture stagmated in the 1960s, and the USSR had to import grain to feed a growing population. Lacking hard currency, the Soviets sold oil and gas to pay for the imports. This worked until the oil price collapse of the mid-1980s. Thereafter Soviet officials made up the difference by borrowing abroad, which made their government an economic dependency of West Germany. When Bonn decided it didn’t like the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe, Gorbachev had to agree; Deutschmark uber alles.

 

Gaidar’s explanation was oversimplified, but not incorrect. At any rate, it had the advantage of attributing the Soviet collapse to economic crisis and bad political decisions, a more believable explanation than the dolchstoss theory favored by Vladimir Putin and his minions, or the Victory-through-Star-Wars narrative of American neoconservatives. Mr. Gaidar underestimated, however, how much bad political decisions accounted for the USSR’s later food shortages. I refer here not to the collectivization of agriculture - which, admittedly, didn’t help - but to something just noted by historian Ian Sheldon: Moscow’s decision in the early 1970s to ramp up domestic meat and dairy production. This was part of an overall effort by Eastern Bloc nations to quash political discontent by raising living standards. In the Soviet Union, government ministers believed that more beefsteaks and sour cream would pacify the population and head off challenges to Moscow’s authority.

 

The peoples of the USSR got a temporary improvement in their diets, but the cost was the reallocation of grain to livestock, and substitution via an unstable raw-materials market and then excessive borrowing. It proved a dumb decision in the long run, but the Soviet system (five-year plans to the contrary) prioritized short- and medium-term fixes. Such are the consequences of filling one’s leadership cadre with decrepit septuagenerians, lifelong drunkards, and great shambling bags of Lorezepam (looking at you, Leonid).  

 

In his article “Ukraine: The Breadbasket of Europe” (link above), Sheldon reports that the fall of the USSR ended Moscow’s subsidization of the meat and dairy industries, and the larger republics (like Ukraine) began privatizing most of their farms. Corn and wheat production took off, and by 2010 Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine exported more grain that the entire Soviet Union had imported in 1990. By 2020 many other nations had become dependent either on Russian and Ukrainian foodstuffs or Russian hydrocarbons, which is what made the outbreak of war between the two former Soviet republics so economically devastating. 

The price of eliminating communism was finding something to fill the ideological gap, in this case a combination of regional authoritarianism and neoliberalism, both of which have proven widely damaging to a vastly more interconnected world.

Of Calligrams and Force Protection

 

The Islamic rule against graven images did not prevent early-modern Muslims from developing capacious traditions of representational art. It merely required them to develop an extra measure of creativity. Some artists kept to the prohibition’s letter (so to speak) by adapting the acceptable, even praiseworthy, art of calligraphy to the goals of the painter. Calligrams, drawings comprised of skillfully curved and interwoven Arabic verses, first appeared in Islamic art at least one thousand years ago. By the early modern period artists had developed the form to a high level. 

One skillfully executed calligram, drawn in 1766 CE (A.H. 1180) by Abd al-Qadir Hisari, now reposes in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In it, golden Arabic letters trace out the hull, gunports, and windows of a three-masted Ottoman galleon. The artist has drawn in grey the sails, rigging, and two other warships in the background. Tiny “dust-letter” inscriptions in Ottoman (Arabic letters, Turkish words) run around the outside of the painting and adorn the edges of the waves, describing there the art and vicissitudes of sailing. The ship itself bears the monographic seal (or tughra) of Sultan Mehmet III, and a flag at the stern bears the Quran’s “throne verse,” which reads, in part, “Allah is He besides whom there is no god…His knowledge extends over the heavens and the earth; the preservation of them both tires him not.” The flag declares the ship’s owner a humble servant of God and invokes the supreme being’s protection. 

"Calligraphic Galleon," Metropolitan Museum of Art

It is not the only protective device in the painting: the calligraphic letters that form the ship spell out the names of the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” righteous men whom the Abrahamic deity protected by immuring them asleep in a cave. To some early-modern Muslims, including the artist, these names (which appear in the Quran) had almost magical protective powers; the Sleepers served the same function as saints in Christianity. Hisari’s painting is thus both aesthetically pleasing and practical: it twice asks for God’s blessing upon the sultan and his fleet.

God, it seems, helps those who help themselves, and reserves much of his aid for the prudent and humble. Mehmet III did not number these traits among his virtues. In 1768 the sultan, incensed by Russian troops’ border violations and goaded by his French allies, declared war on neighboring Russia. Mehmet perhaps believed that Ottoman forces would fare as well in this conflict as they had in the 1714-15 campaign against Venice or in the 1735-39 war with Austria and Russia. If so he believed wrongly. At the Battle of Cesme (1770), Catherine II’s Mediterranean fleet sank an Ottoman naval force twice its size. Four years later, facing ongoing Russian incursions and Russian-inspired rebellions in Greece and the Levant, the Porte and the Empress signed a treaty ceding the Crimea to Russia (first as a protectorate, later outright) and ending Turkish dominance of the Black Sea. There’s only so much that good art can do.

Diplomacy by Other Means

 

Conventional histories of the United States paint a lurid portrait of the republic’s early relationship with the Muslim world, especially with the so-called Barbary Coast states of northern Africa. The particulars of the Americans’ first violent encounter with a North African principality complicates the usual account of scimitar-wielding “Barbary corsairs” demanding tribute or enslaving white sailors. In October 1784 the American brig Betsey, en route from Boston to Tenerife, was captured by Moroccan raiders and by them taken to Sale. Perhaps the ten crewmen expected enslavement, but instead local officials held them as hostages, by order of the Moroccan sultan. Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdallah (r. 1757-90), the prince in question, had ordered the ship taken and its crew held not because he thirsted for blood and plunder, but as a diplomatic gambit. The United States, whose independence the sultan had recognized in 1777, had promised to send treaty commissioners to Morocco after the Revolutionary War. The increasingly moribund postwar Congress, however, dithered too long for Sidi Muhammad’s liking, and failed to send him either gifts or contrite sentiments by way of apology.

Modern brig (Maria Asumpta), by Murgatroyd49

Muhammad very much wanted trade with the United States and other Atlantic polities. His principality was poor in resources and its people were mostly self-governing nomads, from whom the sultan could expect little in taxes. Sidi Muhammad also wanted other nations to take him seriously as a sovereign. The capture of the Betsey was essentially a bit of princely throat-clearing. One could draw a comparison between this act of violent communication and the sharp but limited attacks - coups, as the historian Matthew Jennings calls them - that Native American nations sometimes made against the settlements of Europeans who had not treated them with proper respect. The goal, in each case, was not to start a war but to remind the other polity of the comparative benefits of peace, and to remind them too not to take the attacker for granted.

 

Sidi Muhammad’s act of diplomatic piracy paid off. The United States resumed communication with Morocco, and the sultan released his hostages into Spanish custody. In 1786 American commissions signed the Treaty of Marrakesh, a favorable commercial agreement with Morocco, henceforth a destination (if a marginal one) for American merchant ships. The treaty also clarified that the Moroccan state’s first attack on those ships was its last one: it guaranteed the Americans against detention and having to pay tribute to the sultan and his successors.

 

Sources: Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (Doubleday, 2009); Gary Wilson, "American Hostages in Moslem Nations, 1784-1796," Journal of the Early Republic 2 (1982): 123-141.

 

 

Good Works: Against Malaria

 

The name of the Against Malaria Foundation describes a goal rather than a moral position. Few, if any, people are FOR malaria,* a mosquito-borne illness that annually kills three hundred thousand children and sends 500 times that many kids and adults to the hospital. The name conceals the simplicity and effectiveness of the organization’s antimalarial strategy: to buy insecticide-treated malaria nets and distribute them in countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria is endemic and disruptive. There are other means of preventing malaria, including insecticide spraying, antimalarial drugs, and a new (if not yet fully reliable) vaccine. Most are still difficult to implement in poorer and more rural parts of Africa and South America, which makes nets much more immediately effective. Against Malaria’s strategy also allows it to share with donors how much their contribution is buying and where their nets are going, which can provide them with a welcome sense of connection to their good works.

 

*Supporters of malaria tend to be Nazis, rather than people.

Tired of Cursing the Darkness

 

I'm beginning a series of posts here analogous to my annual "Any Good News?" offerings, a series in which I introduce or describe organizations that are actually trying to make good news. Some of these entries will discuss sensitive subjects like suicide or abortion, but it is hard to be a helper while avoiding the hard facts of life. Your humble narrator will provide donation links for those willing to lend a hand, financially speaking.

 

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Herewith the obligatory PSA: if you or someone you know is in dire distress, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800/273-8255.

 

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One of my writing instructors in college admonished me never to joke about two subjects: AIDS, and suicide. Neither, he said, was ever funny. I think he was almost entirely right, but also that he had never seen the movie Heathers (1988), probably the best teen-angst picture of the 1980s. Michael Lehmann’s film mocked not suicide itself but the risible culture of suicide prevention, which in the Reagan era seemed to consist of empty admonitions masking adult indifference to young people’s suffering.

Among the laudable goals of Active Minds, a Philadelphia-based foundation with 1,000 local chapters around the United States, is to change the culture that Heathers effectively (if excessively) satirized. In the 2020s we are far likelier to recognize self-harm and suicide, particularly in young people, as signs not of spoiled self-indulgence but of treatable illness. The founders of Active Minds want to normalize conversations about mental illness, particularly on college and high-school campuses, using peer advocates, displays of empty backpacks (symbolizing the devastating impact of suicide on social networks), and a slogan, “The World Needs You Here,” that is far less vapid that “Teenage Suicide - Don’t Do It!” 

 

It is certainly a healthier and more constructive approach than that of my alma mater and other so-called elite institutions: identifying badly depressed students and turfing them out before they become a potential legal liability. If we believe that a university or high school is the sum of its students, and not the details of its balance sheet, then Active Minds’ mission - making sure that students stay alive both in and out of school - is more consistent with the purpose of higher education.    

 

Image via the Harvard Crimson, ironically enough.

Active Minds' donations page is here.

Any Good News in 2021?

As the days (in the Northern Hemisphere) grow shorter, coronavirus continues to ravage large parts of the world, the United States slouches toward fascism, and climate disasters grow ever more regular, it is easy to despair. The early months of winter are thus a good time to review the positive news stories of the year, via  Future Crunch. Few of these items made it to American newspapers or cable news services; all remind us that optimism is not an unrealistic outlook.

* Argentina legalized and Mexico decriminalized abortion, while Switzerland and several Mexican states legalized same-sex marriage.

* Suicide rates fell by 5 percent in the United States last year, despite the pandemic. American cancer death rates reportedly fell by 30 percent from 1990 to 2018. Europe also experienced declines. The World Health Organization approved for use the first malaria vaccine. Haiti brought its cholera epidemic under control - there have been no reported cases there since January 2019.

* New York and New Mexico legalized marijuana. Oregon decriminalized possession of all illegal drugs.

* Banks and governments pledged 14 billion dollars to fight deforestation in northern Africa. South Korea promised to plant 3 billion trees by 2050. Pakistan went ahead and planted 1.5 billion trees this year.

* Audi, Mercedes, and Volvo announced they will switch to all-electric car production by the end of the decade. Ford announced it will stop selling gas-powered cars in Europe by 2030. Barcelona began giving free three-year public-transit passes to residents who agreed to give up their cars.

* As of Fall 2021, endowment, pension, and sovereign-wealth funds worth 40 trillion dollars agreed partially or wholly to divest from fossil fuel production. China ended its funding of foreign coal-fired power plants and reduced the share of coal in its electricity budget below 50 percent. In the United States, the Biden administration ended support for the Keystone XL pipeline.

* The Canadian Mik'maq recovered their sovereign fishing rights. The Dakotas recovered sacred lands in Minneapolis; the Passamaquoddies bought back some of their ancestral land in Maine. Bison were reintroduced to the Salish-Kootenai reservation in Montana.

Even misspellings yielded some nice results this year. The image here shows what happens when you try to google "Santa hat" and instead type "Santa bat." (Image courtesy of Jo Jorgensen, via Twitter.com.)

The Establishment Wears a Red Dress

 

To be an independent woman in Georgian England one needed a solid layer of money between oneself and the world. In this regard, Mary Edwards (1705-43) enjoyed the equivalent of steel armor plate. From her Anglo-Dutch parents she inherited realty investments worth 60,000 pounds per annum (eight million pounds sterling today). She held her property free and clear until her marriage, then shared her income with her spendthrift partner until she repudiated him in her thirties. Like many wealthy Georgians, Mary became a patron of the arts, and one of her beneficiaries, William Hogarth, immortalized her and her self-image in a 1742 portrait.  

 

Edwards chose to emphasize her independence and the wealth that supported it. She and Hogarth thus de-emphasized or left out images and themes that suggested traditional femininity. Mary gazes directly at the viewer, her hair pulled back tightly from a high forehead, suggesting a cerebral nature. She wears not subdued pastels or virginal blue, but an eye-catching red damask gown trimmed with copious white lace, accessorized with enough diamonds to make Liz Taylor die of jealousy. A hunting dog, symbolizing the gentry's hunting privileges, sits at her feet in place of the submissive gentlewoman's lapdog. Her surroundings are those of a successful landowner or rentier (she was both): a dark-paneled office adorned with busts of King Alfred and Elizabeth I. Both monarchs the Georgian aristocracy considered defenders of English liberty, which is to say, their own privileges. The open page on the desk, containing a quote on liberty (again, patrician liberty) from Addison’s Cato, strengthens this symbolic point. Mary sees herself not merely as an independent woman, but as a pillar of the political establishment, a steward of the landed wealth that helped England’s aristocracy defend themselves and their institutions against monarchical tyranny.

 

I don’t know if Edwards ever became actively engaged in electioneering, as some eighteenth-century noblewomen did. Likely she did not have time for it. She died only a year after Hogarth, more famous for his acerbic political cartoons, helped her define herself for posterity as a full member of the establishment.