Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Good Tsar Bias and Bad Cossack Amnesia

    The Hitler Myth is an excellent book about how ordinary Germans understood Hitler and the Nazi Party while Hitler was in power. It enjoys the distinction of being one of the two books that I was assigned to read in more than one class in college.* Xavier Marquez wrote a fascinating post on the book a couple of weeks ago, using the term “Good Tsar Bias” to describe the phenomenon that

    until the war started turning sour in late 1942, Hitler was far more popular than the Nazi Party, which quickly grew to be disliked, even despised, by the vast majority of Germans.

    He goes on to note that Good Tsar Bias is by no means unique to Germany under Hitler:

    Regardless of the specifics of the Nazi case, these sorts of rationalizations seem common enough that they deserve a name. We find something like them, for example, in the combination of dissatisfaction with the Venezuelan government and genuine love of Chavez characteristic of many Chavistas even before Chavez’ death; or in the contrast between the apparent popularity of Putin and the unpopularity of much of Russia’s political class and governing apparatus; and perhaps also in the Franco regime, with the disjunction between Franco’s apparent high prestige and the unpopularity of the Falange during the 1940s and 1950s.

    He later references Brad Delong’s reminder that “the Cossacks work for the Tsar,” implying that Good Tsar Bias requires a peculiar kind of belief structure, one that supports a leader but not the party or the movement that s/he leads.

    Of course, I cannot help but read this and think of Indonesia. In Indonesia, “Good Tsar Bias” used to go by the term SARS, or Sindrom Aku Rindu Soeharto [= I Miss Soeharto Syndrome].

    Photo Credit: http://adibsusilasiraj.blogspot.com/2014/05/sepenggal-kisah-di-bulan-mei-yang-gerah.html
    Photo Credit: http://adibsusilasiraj.blogspot.com/2014/05/sepenggal-kisah-di-bulan-mei-yang-gerah.html

    Soeharto’s former son-in-law Prabowo Subianto, with his soldierly background and a career that was utterly dependent on his personal connections to Soeharto himself, is almost the ideal personification of the Cossack. He was also widely despised by Indonesians during Soeharto’s rule, even seeking asylum in Jordan for a time after Soeharto’s fall.

    Much like Vladimir Putin has been portrayed as a modern-day Tsar, though, Prabowo sought to portray himself as a modern-day Soeharto. This was almost a winning strategy. Perhaps there is another tendency like Good Tsar Bias—we might call it Bad Cossack Amnesia—that represents the continuation of Good Tsar Bias after the Tsar has been deposed.

    *********
    * The courses were HIST 2 (“Modern European History, 1789-1980,” which no longer seems to exist) and GERM 50 (“20th Century German Culture”, which is now GERM 0500). The other book was Imagined Communities.

  • Losing Hearts and Minds through Violence

    calvin-soldiers
    I am no specialist in the Israel-Gaza conflict, but I read with great interest Marc Lynch’s recent post at the Monkey Cage about political science and the current conflict in Gaza. One topic that seems to have been overlooked in that particular discussion is what we know about the role of violence as a tool of insurgent and counterinsurgent warfare.

    Here’s what I think we know: indiscriminate violence does not generate compliance. And this is absolutely fundamental to understanding the conflict right now and what its likely implications are going to be.

    The most topical recent work on this is Anna Getmansky and Thomas Zeitzof’s forthcoming APSR piece, which finds that exposure to rocket attacks in Israel is associated with greater support for right-wing parties among Israelis. The core feature of the rockets fired from Gaza is that they cannot effectively target people or installations. They fall almost randomly. Looking back in history to an earlier insurgent war, Matthew Kocher, Stathis Kalyvas, and I find that South Vietnamese villages exposed to aerial bombing from the United States and Republic of Vietnam forces were more likely to shift towards NLF (Viet Cong) control. Our argument also relies on the indiscriminate nature of this violence, which was simply incapable of separating true NLF supporters from neutrals or even RVN partisans within Vietnamese villages.

    Taken together, these studies show that indiscriminate violence—whether used by insurgents or counterinsurgents—does not generate compliance. In fact, it does the opposite. It loses the hearts and minds that are necessary for either side to prevail in asymmetric warfare.

    As Matt noted in the introduction to our Vietnam paper, quoting Hannah Arendt, “violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it” (see here [PDF] for the quote in context). If the goal of the violence produced in the Israel-Gaza conflict is to sow death and destruction on both sides, then violence will work. If the goal is to compel civilians and non-combatants to change their minds about the conflict, to create a new kind of politics, then it will not. Most worryingly, if our findings are true, then this dynamic creates incentives for each side to make it harder for its opponent to discriminate between its own combatants and non-combatants. This is sad, and frightening.