George Will speaks ex-cathedra at WAPO
Actually, he just mails it in
Like most Americans from boomers on who have an interest in our society, I’ve read George Will on occasion. He is one of those writers who is what one would call “connected” and knows people and ideas.
Will has never been one of my faves, but that may be my problem and not his. On the occasions I have read him, his writing was clear, but there is no memory of a salient point. Now the man made a living as a regular columnist and commentator on mainstream outlets. It may be unfair, but one should not be shocked if he rarely ventured out of his lane.
There is his oft noted comment that Americans are “undertaxed,” but using search engines, I could not find many entries about that. One was an article by a man named Llewellyn King who has a show, White House Chronicles, on PBS. He mentions Will in passing as agreeing with the undertaxed business. Both men met at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute where they were speakers. Needless to say, no one would be invited to blab at the API if they were overly concerned with the imposts laid on the plebs.
What else would one expect from a man who considers himself a “tory.”
Before the invasion of Iraq, Will did what was expected of him. He was part of the pro-invasion claque.
Of course, to protect his brand, George would want to put his own stamp on what was expected.
In the event, to be kind, he did not cover himself in glory, as recounted in my book; She Searches For Monsters To Destroy: America and the Eternal Recurrence of Unnecessary Wars.
His “Iraq War May Save Lives” commentary at ABC News of March 16, 2003, easily makes that point. Citing Walter Russell Mead, a less famous deep thinker, he agrees that containment would cost more Iraqi lives than war. It had the flavor of “let’s run this up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.”
That was not Will at his worst. In an October 8, 2002, interview with Charlie Rose, Will’s words betray either a deep naiveté or a man who is an active shill,
I think the answer is that we believe, with reason, that democracy’s infectious. We’ve seen it. We saw it happen in Eastern Europe. It’s just—people reached a critical mass of mendacity under those regimes of the East bloc, and it exploded. And I do believe that you will see [in the Middle East] a ripple effect, a happy domino effect, if you will, of democracy knocking over these medieval tyrannies . . . Condoleezza Rice is quite right. She says there is an enormous condescension in saying that somehow the Arab world is just not up to democracy. And there’s an enormous ahistorical error when people say, “Well, we can’t go into war with Iraq until we know what postwar Iraq’s going to look like.” In 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor, did we have a clear idea what we were going to do with postwar Germany? With postwar Japan? Of course not. We made it up as we went along, and we did a very good job.
Leaving aside that comparing Japan and Eastern Europe with Iraq was a stretch, Will was calling for war on spec that we could do well by the Iraqi people because that is what we did elsewhere. It was cute and wrong.
After the war, George had some ‘splainin’ to do.
Further in the book:
Since, Will, who is well able to tell which way the wind is blowing, has seen the light. Not one to defend an untenable position, the man is happy to point out the war was a mistake, and some of his writings about the error seem dead on. Illuminating the problem now that a bright light is shining is not hard to do.
Will is happy to not mention how he was able to be so wrong. This should give us all pause when he pontificates about foreign policy, which would seem impossible for him to not do.
So here we are in another war and Will might say something that sets himself apart from mass of pundits. Alas, no. He has decided to step out of line, not, and bash Putin.
Will is kind of stepping into Hilary Clinton territory. The lady as theologian pronounced the Russian president as without a soul as he had been with the KGB.
George, in the Washington Post has declared Putin the greatest fascist of all times. How can Vlad not be as the title of Will’s piece is “Putin is doing his best to out-fascist Mussolini.”
Will chronicles the rise of Mussolini and his cruelty on the way up. This bears no comparison with the ascent of Putin, but no matter.
Ah here it is “As a fascist, he had no precursors; he was, however, a precursor of the performative masculinity of the bare-chested, judo-practicing, stallion-riding Vladimir Putin.” Because Putin is an active man who does guy things, he is thus the reincarnation of Muss, except a little more so.
The WAPO columnist is using what is called a “documentary novel” about the impresario of fascism to go after Putin. By a documentary novel, Antonio Scurati, the author of M. Son of the Century: A Novel means that there is documentation of everything. Can we assume Will has done the same for his article?
“An essay in last week’s Economist establishes that Putinism is fascism: a simmering stew of grievances and resentments (about post-Soviet diminishment) expressed in the rhetoric of victimhood.”
So there is a doctrine of Putinism with a philosophy akin to Benito’s doctrine? The Economist article is behind a paywall, but there is no dogma that Will really gets into.
George does go into a litany of bad things that have gone on in Russia under Putin. It might have been a little bit honest to have also mentioned the horrible state of affairs Vlad inherited. He had to deal with oligarchs and the other looters, some from Harvard.
According to Will, there is no evil Putin will not stoop to, including genocide.
“The fascist aesthetic of redemptive, regenerative violence serves the fascist philosophy of national purification through the “self-detoxification of society” (Putin’s phrase). So, genocide, understood to encompass the erasure of an entire people’s cultural identity, flows inexorably from fascism. Andrew Stuttaford, writing for National Review, notes that Russians are not only destroying Ukraine’s cultural signifiers (churches, monuments, etc.), they are forcibly relocating to Russia more than “a million Ukrainians … among them hundreds of thousands of children, including, reportedly, orphans — some young enough to forget their identity and their language.””
Actually, that’s not genocide. According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition, the noun genocide is:
1. The systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group.
2. The systematic killing of a racial or cultural group.
3. The systematic killing of substantial numbers of people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, political opinion, social status, or other particularity.
I have read other accounts of what is happening in the Ukraine, pro and con and neither agree or disagree as I can’t know, but none of what I have read comports with the definition above.
The nicest one can say about Will is that he is careless.
To be fair, he does mention at one point Mussolini’s own definition of what Fascism is, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
That is, it is the total state, or totalitarian. That does not stop people from throwing the word around to brand people who do not philosophize in that manner, possibly the Russian leader.
Will, and most everyone who throws the word around should look to George Orwell for instruction. In 1944 he wrote:
“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.
Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”
The Putin as Mussolini was not original with George and the question is, was he taking his cue from reading others? Maybe, Maybe not.
His last paragraph:
“Putin’s regime encourages the public to show support for the Ukraine war by displaying the “Z” sign, which the Economist calls a “half-swastika.” Fascism might flourish more in this century than it did in the previous one.”
No, the Z sign is an identifying mark on tanks to avoid friendly fire. Some may have taken it up for other reasons, but then again, turn Winston Churchills V sign around and you get something else.
Below is a bumper sticker seen in an upscale Trader Joe’s in a woke area. The man who drove would probably liked Will’s column.
