Author: manuscrypts

  • The Cold War: A World History

    Odd Arne Westad

    Growing up in the 80s in India, it was impossible not to have experienced the Cold War in some way – from listening to adults discussing it to having USA vs USSR wrestling matches between us kids! So this was nostalgia to some extent. And even though not by design, this was an opportune time to read this. To understand the direction and extent of the US hegemony in the last three decades and its impact on contemporary geopolitics, and to read it at the specific time when the Russian military invasion of Ukraine is bringing out a world order that is not just US-centric.

    The Cold War is about not just about philosophy and politics, but people, places and the events that were either cause or effect. Ideologically, it was a contest of how the world and its citizens should be organised and into that whirlpool a lot of countries, policies and people were sucked. And in the end, as Depeche Mode sang, “The dawning of another year…one in four still here”. 

    It is interesting to note that this level of bipolar conflicts are quite rare in world history, barring say Spain’s Catholicism vs English Protestantism. Though the Cold War can be seen as a confrontation between capitalism and socialism from 1945 to 1989, its roots exist even before World War 1. And its impact can be seen in contemporary politics – from the state of Afghanistan to authoritarian China to unhinged North Korea. 

    Socialism as a thought had existed since the French Revolution but its acceleration and the start of the Cold War happened in the context of two processes – the emergence of new states (50 in 1900 to 200 by the end of the century) and the transfer of power to the United States during the world wars. This combined with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the creation of the Soviet state as an alternate to the US brand of capitalism set the stage. The socialists considered the war a creation of capitalism and saw it as a war between robbers and thieves who had nothing in common with the soldiers fighting the war. The only thing that could benefit the common man was socialism and communism. Lenin set up Comintern in 1919 to which a bunch of nationalists and anti colonialists flocked. Towards the end of WW2, Churchill used “an iron curtain” despite the Soviets being an ally.

    And thus began the tussle that saw historic personality clashes and alliances – FDR, Stalin, Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Brezhnev, Johnson, Khrushchev, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Gorbachev as well as Latin American, East European and African dictators, Chinese autocrats, South Asian, Middle Eastern and “non aligned” leaders like Nehru and Sukarno. Not to mention China playing the superpowers and sometimes getting played. The Cold War had places as far away as Berlin, Brazil, Baghdad and Busan all becoming a theatre of war. When one looks at the dictatorships that the US propped up in Latin America, it is easy to wonder whether it’s really different from what the USSR did in Eastern Europe. The book also takes us through the context in which organisations like the UN, IMF and NATO were formed and how they became the arenas of the Cold War. Multiple spurts of arms races, events such as the Korean, Vietnam and Afghanistan wars, the Suez Canal clash, Cuban missile crisis, and even an ‘internal’ event like Watergate all left their mark. 

    It is fascinating to think about how the world might have been different if Gorbachev had decided not to take his annual vacation in Crimea in August 1991. Would there have been a coup at all, or would he have been able to put it down and steer the Soviet into a democratic coalition of independent republics? Would they have been part of the EU now? Would there be Putin, or even Donald Trump? Odd Arne Westad does a great job of making this narrative of contemporary history accessible and engaging. It is not an easy task to map time, places and people and cover everything that deserves a spot, but he does a fabulous job. if you’re even slightly interested in history, this should be in your reading list.

    Side Notes
    1. Denmark in 1899 was the first country to have an agreement of annual negotiations over wages and working conditions. Probably explains its quality of life now.
    2. Capitalist Norway has more state ownership of companies than China
    3. Hilarious Soviet Russia jokes on pg 368, 535
    4. Romania was so poverty-stricken that when Ceausescu visited Queen Elizabeth in 1978, the palace staff removed all valuables from guest rooms because he and his wife Elena might take them back with them!
    5. One does feel sad for Gorbachev and how under-appreciated he was by his own people. For a Communist leader, Glasnost and perestroika were extremely liberal initiatives with the good intent of providing more freedom and a better quality of life for the people of USSR
    6. An entire chapter is devoted to Indira Gandhi and boy, she was strong! In intent, speech, and action. To stand up to the might of the US when surrounded by Pakistan and China is no mean feat. “My father was a statesman, I am a political woman. My father was a saint. I am not.”

  • Mall me, maybe

    On a Friday last month, D and I decided to do something on a whim. We broke our now established weekend pattern of ‘logically arguing’ with ourselves and deciding to stay at home and watch a movie on OTT. Off(line) we went to the neighbourhood mall to watch a Malayalam movie, which turned out to be excellent, though the movie hall was just about half-packed. Since we’d had an early dinner, we decided to drop in at a Third Wave that we thought was new. But we hadn’t been to the mall in ages, and couldn’t be sure.

    In a lovely post titled Fountains of Youths, Jamie Loftus visits food courts from Alaska to Arizona and talks to teens about the local mall, and their favourite fare at the food courts. As I read it, I found myself time travelling to the 80s. To Suburban Store in well, the suburbs of Cochin. It was a department store but with malls being non-existent this was magic enough for me. They had two aisles full of toys after all. In the 90s, it was Abad Plaza on Cochin’s main street, the only place that had French fries! 🙂

    Zoom to the early 2000s and Transit at the Forum Mall, Koramangala was a regular hangout. We weren’t teens, but if Jamie talked to us, we would have had a few perspectives. In the 2010s, when Phoenix opened shop in Whitefield, we used to make the trek twice a year from Koramangala for the end of season sale. And chocolate momos at the food court were a ritual.

    Our visits have dwindled since then, and just before COVID, I was melancholic about my snobbery (or about finally adulting?) when passing through a food court, I realised that my sensibilities had changed to an extent where I asked D, how we could have eaten this! And in the context of the mall, “why are so many people here!” 😐

    At 10PM, we were one of a handful of customers at Third Wave. I sat sipping a Chamomile (I had given up after experiments at home, but thanks to this, realised that it is possible not to thoroughly destroy something!). The shops were closed and my cherished people-gawking pastime was impossible, but I realised I liked this. Late night in an empty mall. The coffee shop is adjacent to a book store and I told D that I missed the ‘discoveries’ at book stores. Amazon has spoilt me.

    One of two other customers at the coffee shop was an elderly man. It was only when his driver (I think) came to wheel him out that I noticed he was in a wheelchair. He tried to convince his helper to have something, and failed. He left, checking out books as the security watched him, and smiling at us as he went past. I sighed. A few minutes later, we paid and left. Once upon a time we would have walked home, but the roads have too many dogs that turn to dire wolves. Once upon a time, I’d have carried a stick, but now a fight has too many downsides.

    Something has shifted in me, I realised, as I turned back to look at the mall before getting into the cab. Maybe I will give Crossword some of my book business. And every once in a while, watch a movie in theatres. Discovery doesn’t just work for books. There is a joy in seeing other people laugh at the jokes while watching a movie, smiling back at an old man in a wheelchair in a mall at 10PM, and just seeing people outside the confines of a screen or an office. It seems we have come full circle. We are human again.

  • Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire, and How to Want What You Need

    Luke Burgis

    Schopenhauer is believed to have said “A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.” We can replace will with ‘want’ and it still holds. But we have convinced ourselves otherwise – that we desire things independently. Based on the work and philosophy of René Girard, and his own experiences, Luke Burgis sets about dismantling this notion – what the book calls the Romantic Lie – self delusion.

    If, in the free will debate, genetic and environmental determinism hasn’t made an impression on you, Girard postulates that most of what we desire is mimetic (imitative) and not intrinsic. We want what other people want. These desires are different from needs. Think of the latter as the two bottom rows of Maslow’s hierarchy and the former as the top three. And our choice of these desires are courtesy models – people or things that show us what is worth wanting. Look hard enough, and in all of your consumption and behaviour – from the choice of travel destinations to life partners, you will discover them. 

    Mimetic desire can lead us to destructive or productive cycles, and the book explores both paths. In the first part, we learn how mimetic desire starts in infancy to its evolution in adults, how it changes according to the person’s relationship with the model, how it works in groups (and causes societal conflicts) and how society has found ways (scapegoat mechanism) to diffuse it. This section has an excellent example of ‘models’ in action – Edward Bernays popularising smoking amongst women at a time when it was quite taboo. Another good example is that of a Romantic Lie – the efficient markets hypothesis – and what has been its anti-thesis consistently – Tesla. Musk clearly understands the power of mimetic desire really well. Dogecoin, anyone?

    Desire, according to René Girard, is always for something we think we lack — or else it wouldn’t be desire at all. And hence the model – the one who has what we lack. The person’s relationship with the model – either people belonging to the same time, place or social sphere (Freshmanistan, our immediate world) or outside it (Celebristan, outside our ‘world’) also has an impact on the kind of mimesis that happens. We don’t really compete with the latter, in fact we imitate them freely and openly, but with the former, we compete. [Sidebar – The use of ‘stan’ and the usage of phrases right below chapter titles indicated to me that the author probably has Taleb as one of his models]

    In a simpler world, our Freshmanistan was limited to those we actually were in touch in reality. And then came Facebook, which gave us practically infinite models. Scrolling, judging, comparing, imitating, seeking validation and praise….and feeling angsty! Burgis gives the example of one friend introducing another to baking, and how the desire to become the better baker locks them in mimetic rivalry that doesn’t end well. 

    A related part is about how the value of experts has shifted from people with a deep understanding of the subject to those with mimetic value. Just as we used to make fun of the Kardashians as ‘being famous for being famous’, we have experts who are ‘experts at being experts’. Also interesting that apparently Steve Jobs had a model too – Robert Friedland, a fellow student in college. And the example of Zappos, which was once a model, but imploded. 

    Mimetic desire spreads through culture, and creates competition and conflicts in societies. Early societies used sacrifice and the scapegoat mechanism – pinning the blame of the conflict on a specific entity – to diffuse the situation. It continues to this day – fired CEOs and coaches, ‘cancel culture’ etc. All parties silently agree that now that the conflict has been resolved, things will get better. There is an interesting perspective that the story of Jesus survived because though the mob tried to make him a scapegoat, it caused an enormous division in society, and one section called out the scapegoat mechanism – the folly of the crowd is shown to the reader of the scriptures, and hence it was unique for its time. 

    In the second part of the book, the focus is on how to break out of this cycle using techniques like disruptive empathy and intentionally discerning between thin and thick desires. Empathy is defined as the ability to share another person’s perspective without imitating or identifying with them to the extent of losing one’s own individuality. Developing thick desires, which endure and provide meaning, are a good way to not get distracted by thin, mimetic desires. Another interesting concept is ‘calculating thought’ and ‘meditative thought’. The former is the default, and the latter is slow, patient, and in the current usage of the word – nonproductive. This part also has a section on how to apply this to leadership, and ends with a perspective on the future of desire. 

    Mimetic desire permeates everything from the educational system to social media to venture capital, hijacking the original purpose of these entities. At an individual level, it impacts our work, relationships, parenting, and distorts the way we live our life. This book gives us a good perspective on making a different kind of attempt. By asking ourselves, why do we want what we want, really? 

    P.S. I tried reading Girard’s original work and couldn’t make a lot of headway. This is more accessible, and at some point, I am going to give the original work another shot.

  • Possessions

    I paused to take one final stock of the room. When I looked out of the window, I could see the mezzanine balcony. I doubt he had stood there, looking at it as I did. From his vantage point on the bed, he’d have seen the far wall. Photos, an album of life. I sat for a while on the bed, looking at a suitcase that wrapped up the last remnants of a life.

    But one day, years after the convergence has begun, you cannot only sense the inward trajectory of the walls, you can begin to see the terminal point in the offing even as the terrain that remains ​before you​ begins to shrink at an accelerating pace.

    …the three infirmities amount to the same sentence: the narrowing of life at the far tip of the diamond. Step by step, the stomping grounds of these friends had shrunk from the world itself, to their country, to their county, to their home, and finally to a single room where, blinded, breathless, forgetful, they are destined to end their days. Though Abacus had no infirmities to speak of yet, his world too was shrinking. He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb. 

    The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles

    In the second half of my life, I am now able to visualise this a lot more easily. There is something bittersweet about this. Like when I give away clothes. I am sometimes forced to pause for a minute because a particular tee would trigger memories of a different time. A different me. And by giving it away it is almost as though that part of me is now beyond retrieval.

    Later, when I got home, I looked around. The contents of our life, now. I’m sure all of it is subject to change. Home is after all a construct of the past, present, and future.. Things that point us to the past and helps us remember it as we grow older. Things that point us to the future, and help us visualise it the way we are imagining it now. And things that point us today to our self image. The things we possess, and the things that possess us. What would happen when they all start shrinking? As we clutch what we can remember of the past, struggle to imagine what can change in the future, and watch our self image shrinking? I suspect that is how the physical space too starts shrinking. Or maybe it works both ways.

    As I think about that suitcase now, and the remains of a lifetime, I wonder if he would have liked them to be in ‘the foreign object‘, a part of his happier days, which I had appropriated a decade later. I have no idea what will happen to the latter when I am gone. A cross-section of a life that no one needs to remember. And it makes me wonder as I look around again, all of these possessions which seemingly give our life meaning now, only have that meaning when we are around.

  • This is not Propaganda

    Peter Pomerantsev

    As the old joke goes, ‘Truth will prevail’, but no one said whose truth! I think if there is one book you should read to understand the sociopolitical information warfare on social media happening daily, this is it. From Mexico to Manila and London to Kiev, there is a playbook that is being followed to distort reality. The same tools that were originally used to create revolutions are now being used by autocrats to gain and hold power. More information was supposed to be more power, but it also provided new ways to silence dissent. Censorship through noise. And where did it all begin? In Russia. Peter Pomerantsev has a first-hand experience of how it all started. Forty years ago, his parents were forced out of Kiev (then part of the USSR), and their journey since then serves as a great narrative guide. 

    The book is divided into six parts. The first part uses examples like Rappler vs Duterte (Philippines’ version of Trump in the US and Bolsonaro in Brazil) and Lyudmilla Savchuk, who exposed Russia’s troll farms, to show how new instruments of information are being used to break people. Russia denies connection with the troll armies, like every other state – Turkey, Bahrain, Azerbaijan etc – that uses similar means. 

    The second moves to Latin America and EU to show how entire resistance movements have been dismantled. Clever rulers have found ways to remove the clarity around the ‘enemy’ by coopting the language and tactics as those who fight oppression. Srđa Popović knows a thing or two about the original playbook. A Serbian political activist, he was a leader of the student movement Otpor!, which was instrumental in toppling Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. He has since then trained activists in Georgia, Ukraine and Iran. It’s an irony that his manuals and courses are being used against the very purpose for which they were created, and it’s now come down to an arms race of tactics and technology between guys like Alberto Escorcia and Mexico’s corrupt politicians. Russia invaded Estonia in 2007 without setting foot in it by mimicking the entire playbook and using Estonia’s own pro-Russian citizens in protests. Another trick is to state that genuine protesters are being paid by the US. From Facebook to Discord there are people being recruited and systematic strategies being used to undermine pro-democracy efforts.

    The third part is on how one nation is able to ‘invade’ another without real contact by blurring the idea of war vs peace and domestic vs international. War is no longer in just physical space, it is hybrid, non-linear, full-spectrum (all terms used by experts) and is focused on decaying the opposing group/country from within. Information warfare is the first play and the military follows, if required. Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014 is the classic example. “Faced with wildly conflicting versions of reality, people selected the one that suited them.”

    The fourth explains how, without a tangible idea of the progress and future, anything goes! When Putin invaded Crimea, he first said there were no Russian soldiers there, and then later casually said there were. Replaced one reality with another. Another example – 76% of Trump’s statements in the election were mostly false or untrue! The case made for these distortions is that objectivity anyway doesn’t exist. Related to this is the glorification of the past. ‘The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. The twenty-first century is not characterised by the search for newness, but by the proliferation of nostalgias’. And in the era of ‘soft facts’, we can know everything happening in Aleppo and pretend to not see it.

    Pomerantsev sets a prelude for Chapter 5 with his own confused identity in childhood – British or Russian? When old notions of identity around demographics and religion get blurred, all politics now revolves around ‘identity’ they can create and use for their own ends. The story of Rashad, one of the founders of Hizb in the UK, who was early into this game but now works to dismantle it, is fascinating. This part also has the working of the Brexit campaign. Eighty types of targeted messages for 20 million people. Animal rights, environmentalism, gay rights, potholes all somehow made to connect with Brexit. And it all began in Russia. Starts by Pavlovsky for Yeltsin, but polished by Putin. 

    The final part is about the future – China, but begins with Nigel Oakes, founder of SCL, whose game was repurposed by one of its other founders to create Cambridge Analytica. China is well on its way to target people with demographic, psychographic and behavioural patterns. The book ends with a brilliant closure – of the subject as well as the personal history.

    While the wiring is clear, what remains to be seen is the second order consequences of this combination of trolls, psyops, dark ads, bots, soft facts etc. Not just at an individual or societal level, but at a species level. The book is extremely well-researched and has a narrative and language that is easily accessible. The interweaving of the personal narrative is at once sharp and seamless. This is a book I’ll hugely recommend. 

    P.S. I wish he had also covered India too, the playbook is being religiously followed here!