Monthly Archives: June 2019

Full of Kunstim, Isn’t He?

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When I was a child in Ramat Gan, a town not far from Tel Aviv, my mother used to speak of kunstim. I am willing to bet that, with the possible exception of my younger brothers, no one in the world knows what the term means; so let me explain. In 1950 my parents, Leo and Greet van Creveld, left their native Netherlands for the young state of Israel. As time went on they both learnt to speak decent, though not quite perfect, Hebrew. My mother in particular used to speak of kunstim. In Hebrew as it was spoken at the time, a kunz—not, pay heed, kunst, but kunz—stood for a cheap trick. Obviously my mother confused this term with kunst, the Dutch (and German) term for art (as, for instance, in “the art of writing”). To kunz she added the Hebrew suffix im, used to turn nouns from the singular into the plural. It was as a result of this strange process that the word kunstim came into the world and was used in our home. As I just said, it mcant “cheap tricks.”

Over the last few months, The Donald has been engaging in kunstim. First, providing no new information whatsoever, he accused Tehran of violating the nuclear deal arrived at under his predecessor and announced that he was withdrawing from it. Next he said he had provided the Swiss Embassy with a number that the Mullahs could use to talk to him, should they feel like doing so (they did not). Next he sent some additional forces to the Gulf, albeit that they are not nearly sufficient for waging a full-scale campaign against a country as large and as powerful as Iran. Next, the Iranians having shot down an American drone, he said that the US would not simply let that incident pass. Next, apparently caught by his own words, he suggested that the Iranians might have intercepted the drone by mistake. Next, when the Iranians told him, loud and clear, that it had not been a mistake, he threatened retaliation. Next, claiming that the planned retaliatory strike as submitted to him by the Pentagon, was “disproportional” and would lead to too many Iranian casualties he cancelled it even though the planes were (or depending on whom you believe, were not) in the air. Next he let it be known that the attack had not been canceled, only put on ice. Throughout all this he keeps saying that he does not want war; but he also keeps threatening that, in case a war does breaks out, Iran will be “obliterated.”

Has the man gone bonkers, crazy, nuts? Quite some people, including not just the editors of Mad Magazine but some of his onetime closest associates as well, think so. After all, he has always been a megalomaniac and an unpredictable one at that. I, however, am willing to give him the benefit of doubt. Instead I suggest that, to understand what he is doing, we take a look at the principles of strategy. As everyone who has ever practiced it with some success knows, at bottom it is all a question of deception. If you are strong, pretend to be weak. If you are weak, pretend to be strong. If you are preparing to attack, pretend to be ready to defend. If you are concentrating at place X, pretend to be doing so at place Y. On some occasions you should go straight for your objective; on others, the best way is the roundabout one. Avoid the obvious and always do the unexpected. Threaten, relent, bluff. Mislead your opponent. Keep him off balance, put him into a situation where he is damned if he does and damned if he does not.

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All this, of course, means playing with fire. The more so because, amidst all the bluffs, the deceptions and the feints separating truth from falsehood, reality from make-believe, is very difficult. It may even be impossible. Devising kunzim to unbalance your opponent and cause him to lose his way, you are quite likely to lose your own.

And that, I suggest, is what is happening to Trump.

But What Is It Doing at Oxford?

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Theodore Zeldin is a retired Oxford professor. During his academic career his interests have reached from the reign of Napoleon III to freedom, gastronomy, and the future of work among other things. He is also a public intellectual who has been called one of the world’s most influential hundred scholars. The list of organizations that have sponsored his work, or invited him to speak, or presented him with some kind of award, is well-nigh endless. One of his books, An Intimate History of Humanity (1994), was even used by Australia’s National Museum as the basis of an exhibition of the emotions of that continent’s inhabitants. It was brought to my attention by a friend and former student who sought to help me with a project I am working on. That is why I want to write about it here.

In this particular volume, Zeldin’s objective is to show that some of people’s most intimate experiences—hope, solitude, love, sex, food, to mention but a few—are not the same at all times and in all civilizations. Instead he argues that, like anything else, they are historically-governed, meaning that they keep changing along with culture and society as a whole. As always with him, the volume focuses on France which Zeldin, the son of a Jewish-Russian couple who moved from Palestine to England, uses as a kind of gold standard for all other countries and societies to measure themselves by. Each chapter—even most of the few that supposedly deal with men—opens with an interview with one woman meant to illustrate some aspects in the emotional life of all others. Each interview is mixed with Zeldin’s ruminations on who she is, how she fits into society, how other societies have tried to deal with similar problems, and so on.

Why Zeldin only interviews women—who, after all, only form half of humanity—is never explained. But never mind. A typical interview, focusing on sex, is with a woman named Alicia R. Ivars. Spanish by origin, educated in France, she speaks four languages though none perfectly (who cares?). She is a professor (where? Of what?) and a self-appointed geisha—in the sense that she sees her destiny in pleasing others and avoids difficult question like who she is, what she is doing in this world, and so on. She always wears “amazing” attention-drawing clothes, runs a restaurant called “Garden of Delights,” and is “a world authority on olive oil.” What follows is a short extract of Zeldin’s text to give you an idea of what it is like.

“Sex is a separate matter, a distinct activity, ‘not to be ruined by an excess of intimate feelings or confidences, because then you become a slave to it.’ That does not mean Alicia wishes to avoid intimate feelings. ‘I have never been afraid of my intimate feelings. I have always enjoyed psychotropic experiences without panicking at the idea of losing contact with my inner self or with my body. I know which melody, which rhythm, which smell or caress or stroke will provide me with my desired intimate feeling.’ Engaging in sex is thus comparable with cooking; both create pleasure, ‘intimate feelings,’ both enable one to create such feelings in another. She distinguishes first of all ‘pure sex.’ In her youth she had this with a ‘Tantric man,’ with whom she carried on an ‘ultra-erotic correspondence, with a profusion of illustrations’ and whom she visited two or three times a year for the ‘actualization of all our fantasies.’”
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“… There is no reason, she thinks, why there should be any limits to sexual activity. I have not yet found limits to my predisposition… She remembers the visit of a foreigner to whom she was ‘very attracted: I could have played and enjoyed with her, she so wonderful to me, so much in need of affection, just recently a widow, we probably had telepathic sex.’” “At a young age, [Alicia] taught herself to cut her own hair, and has never been to a hairdresser since. That is the sign of her independence. Her hairstyles are always exotic like nobody else’s.”

“In Canada,” says another woman named Florence, selected to exemplify the nature of desire, “she met a marvelous man. For four days they talked. He was not afraid to say what he felt; he seemed authentic. “He satisfied my desire for harmony and gentleness.’ But she does not know what will become of this friendship, which appeals only to one side of her. ‘He does not put me in danger. I need not to have complete emotional security.’ Time will tell.” And so on, and so on, the kind of “luv” talk mixed with psychobabble one may expect to find in any women’s magazine with a minimum of “intellectual” pretense.

This is the kind of verbal diarrhea one expects to find in women’s weeklies. But what is it doing at Oxford?

I Ask You

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Life sometimes does strange things and brings together strange people. Some weeks ago I had a strange experience I want to tell you about.

It all started a few months ago when I got an invitation to speak at Salzburg, Austria. The request came from a person by the name of Killian Harbauer, who introduced himself as an “accredited parliamentary assistant” to Herr Franz Obermayr, a member of the European Parliament. I understood that the audience was to consist of the members of a right-wing student organization. The topic was to be my book, Pussycats, in which I tried to explain why, over the last few decades, whenever a military encounter took place, the Rest has been regularly beating the West. The book, whose German title is Weicheier (soft-boiled eggs), has been published by an Austrian firm.

I had addressed this topic in Austria before, and I was going to do so again in Germany soon. Which is why I did not take very long to say yes. On 25 May I arrived in Salzburg and was taken very decent care of. Here it might be worth adding that Salzburg itself is a beautiful city with quite some attractions to gladden a tourist’s heart. Well worth visiting.

Preparing for the meeting, I found myself in something of a fix. The audience, I believed, would consist of students. Students everywhere tend to be young and, being impecunious, dress somewhat informally. I therefore wondered whether or not I should put on a tie; in the end, I decided to follow my normal principle of dressing up. Imagine my surprise when, upon arrival, I saw—not a bunch of young students, but a whole lot of elderly men between about sixty and seventy. There must have been almost a hundred of them, all impeccably dressed in dark suits. A few younger lads were also present, but they can hardly have formed more than ten percent of the total.

The meeting was held in what the Germans call a lokal. Inside it was fairly dark, which at first made it a bit hard for me to see what was going on. Having adjusted, I saw that many of the men were wearing all kinds of chains, colored ribbons and feathers, etc. over their suits. One even wore a Napoleon-style hat! Painted on the walls or fixed to them were various emblems that had to do with the past glories of German/Austrian history. Taking up the place of honor along one wall, was a table. It was covered with a white cloth and on it were arranged three shining, sharp-looking, swords.

At this point I could no longer restrain my curiosity and asked Killian what it was all about. It turned out that this was the Burschenschaft Frankonia. Burschenschaften, perhaps best explained as associations of young, somewhat roguish, young men, started making their appearance at German universities soon after 1815. Originally their central concerns were freedom—these were the years when Metternich and the Reaction did their best to prevent the up-and-coming middle classes from upsetting the prevailing socio-political order—and German unification. Others were holding meetings at which prodigious quantities of beer were drunk, occasional fights broke out, and some chairs, windows and heads might be broken.

Most famous of all, the Burschenschaften practiced the custom of Mensur. To join a Burschenschaft one had to participate in a duel; hence the role of, and the reverence accorded to, the abovementioned swords. Going back to the second half of the eighteenth century, early on duels tended to be somewhat wild affairs in which serious wounds were sometimes inflicted and even an occasional death took place. Later the authorities intervened, threatening the Burschenschaften with closure unless they cleaned up their act. It worked, more or less.

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The heyday of the Burschenschaften was in the years just before World War I. During the 1920s they declined; whereas the Nazis, finding them too independent for their taste, suppressed them and replaced them with their own, the Nazis’, kind of organization. During the Cold War the Burschenschaften, while strictly prohibited in the East, made a modest revival in the West. Today there are some 160 of them, most of them scattered between Germany and Austria. They may, however, also be found in Poland, Scandinavia, and even as far away as Chile.

I asked around. The way it was explained to me, they were not racist. The objective of this particular Burschenschaft was to preserve the traditions of the organization in question, notably “freedom,” “liberalism,” “comradeship,” and mutual trust. I asked whether women could join; they could not, I was told, though they might attend meetings as guests (there were none at the one I participated in). I asked whether Muslims were welcome; an Iranian, I was told, would be, though the question as to whether the same applied to an Arab student was left without an answer. And I was told that the custom of Mensur was still practiced. Albeit, as far as I could see, so carefully that the risk was practically zero and the resulting scar, almost invisible.

I was there as a guest speaker, not as a member of Metternich’s secret police. So I gave my pre-prepared speech, and the audience liked it very much. After it was over I received a lot of applause, what with those present thumping the tables as is the German custom. The meeting included the participants singing about fifteen old students’ songs carefully selected from a corpus of some four hundred written, most of them, during the nineteenth century.

Many of the songs described the joys of student life. Others, though, bristled with expressions like deutsches Vaterland (German Fatherland), deutsche maennlichkeit (German manhood), deutsche Ehre (German honor), and deutsche Treue (German faith). At this point I, a Jew some of whose family members lost their lives during the Holocaust, was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable.

So I asked my guide, Killian. Here a surprise was waiting for me. He himself, he explained, was the son of a Jewish physician. Years ago the father had tried to make Aliya, i.e move to Israel, but was disgusted by the prevailing disorder in that country. Whereupon he went back to Europe, but not before taking with him a kibbutz member who was to become his wife. All this Killian explained to me in pretty good, if somewhat halting, Hebrew of which he was justifiably proud.

I ask you.

Crisis? What Crisis?

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Weeks have passed since The Donald, by announcing the U.S withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka the Iran nuclear deal, aka the Iran deal), started a “crisis” in the Middle East. Such being the case, it is time to draw at least a temporary balance as to what happened, what did not happen, and what is likely to happen in what is known, euphemistically, as “the foreseeable future.”

So here goes.

Iran was and remains the largest and most powerful, state in the region around the Persian Gulf. That this Iran has its ideology, its interests, its objectives, its phobias, its friends, and its enemies just as any other country does hardly requires saying, To be sure, Iranian policy has its peculiarities. But no more so than that of any others.

As far as anyone knows, the Mullahs have now been working on their nuclear program, which they inherited from the Shah, for some thirty years. As far as anyone knows, Trump’s new sanctions have not caused them to greatly accelerate that program or sharply change its course towards bomb-making. The step they, responding to Trump, have taken, i.e. increasing the enrichment of low level uranium, is mostly symbolic, though this might change later if and when they feel they are in real danger of coming under attack.

As was to be expected, the U.S-led sanctions on Iran, while making life difficult for many ordinary Iranians, have not worked. Nor are they very likely to work in the future. To be sure, many Iranians have no special love for the Mullahs’ regime, which they see as fanatical, oppressive, corrupt, and unnecessarily bellicose. They would certainly like to get rid of it; however, they seem to dislike foreigners meddling in what they see as their own affairs even more. This aspect of the matter, whose importance is paramount, would surely remain in place even if the Mullahs were to disappear tomorrow.

The Houthi rebels of Yemen, presumably armed and instigated by Iran, have mounted some attacks on Saudi and other Gulf country targets. Going from strength to strength, they have shown that the Saudis are as incapable of giving a good fight as they were back in 1991. More attacks, apparently meant to deter the Americans without provoking them too much, are likely to follow. Nevertheless, contrary to the fears of many there has been no dramatic increase in terrorism in the Middle East.

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For Tehran, opposing and threatening Israel is the red flag with to attract sympathy and allies in much of the Arab world. For Netanyahu, Iran is the rod with which to attract followers inside Israel. He continues doing his very best to get the U.S to launch a war against Iran, and will surely go on doing so as long as he remains in the prime minister’s office and out of prison.

The “crisis” has caused some Arab countries, notably those of the Gulf, to further tighten their already quite close relations with Israel. To that extent, Israel has also benefited from it.

Trump’s bluff has been called. For all his bluster, he has not brought the Mullahs to their knees. Nor did he start a war, nor reinforced his forces in the Gulf nearly to the point that would be needed in order to do so. The telephone number he gave the Swiss has remained unused, leaving him in a weaker position than previously.

Meanwhile, some of the heavyweights in Beijing may not be at all averse to witnessing this latest show of American weakness. That weakness is certain to have consequences later on, though when they will emerge and what form they will take is hard to say. As in the song: “Don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again.”

Finally: The Europeans do not count, since all the important decisions are made over their heads. As usual.