Category Archives: Books and movies

Making movies

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Here is a bit of a backstory on making movies filling in some behind-the-scenes detail. This bit about unions is probably the least surprising but tells you quite a bit about how hard these things are and how much damage unions do:

Much like an early 1900s coal mine, film sets have a union problem. Because the unions are so specialized, the work is intentionally split up into countless departments, and there are consequences for performing a task not specifically assigned to your department. . . .

If there’s an electrical cord in the way, even an extension cord plugged into nothing, someone from the electrical union has to move it, regardless of how easy it might be to do it yourself. And there are unions for everything, making you twist, turn, and dance through so much red tape that you practically mummify yourself with it any time you want to finish a simple task. And when we say ‘everything,’ we mean it — pushing the dolly, holding the clapper, setting up lunch, sculpting Robert Downey Jr.’s facial hair — every conceivable task is assigned to a specific department. And only that department.

The difference between propaganda and education

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Harold Lasswell explaining the difference between propaganda and education in 1935:

The spread of controversial attitudes is propaganda; the spread of acceptable attitudes is skills education. It is proper to speak of Communism as propaganda in Chicago and as education in Moscow.*

Today, of course, we could define propaganda and education in exactly the same way but the examples would be reversed.

*Harold D. Lasswell. 1935. “The Person, Subject and Object of Propaganda.” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, vol 179: 189. Quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch. 2006. Three New Deals. New York: Picador, 74.

Conrad Black on American Betrayal

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Conrad Black accuses Andy McCarthy of creating schisms on the right in endorsing Diana West’s American Betrayal. This is his article from National Review:

This is not a return to Diana West’s book. However, Andy McCarthy, a man for whom I have very great respect and whom I like very much, has written a review of it in The New Criterion that, because of its revisionist presentation of a number of historical events, is among the most discouraging political documents I have read in many years. Mr. McCarthy, a former prosecutor and distinguished and perceptive writer of the sensible Right, has frequently inspired me by his writing, and when I met him, at a difficult time in my own former travails, by his conversation also. I confidently turned to his review of Ms. West’s America Betrayed, which readers of this column will find it hard to forget after the robust knockabout the book received here and in her reply to me. The rigor of the review and its application to the book are matters I will address in a letter to The New Criterion, which the editor of that publication graciously invited, as I am mentioned, quite unexceptionably, in the review.

What seriously depresses me are three positions taken in the review. First is Andy McCarthy’s view that the scandalous, cowardly refusal of the mainstream elite of American culture and politics to recognize that America’s Islamist enemies are enemies can be traced to Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government in World War II. It is a fact that alarms and disgusts all of us in this debate, including Ms. West and her more vocal (than I am) critics, but I do not agree about the source of the problem. Second is Andy’s qualified accommodation, as worthy of reasonable consideration, of the claims by Ms. West that Lend-Lease was at least in significant part a mistaken reinforcement of Stalinist totalitarianism to the ultimate detriment of the West; that the Normandy invasion served Stalin’s purposes and enhanced his penetration of Western Europe; that Franklin D. Roosevelt was more or less ambivalent about the comparative virtues of Stalinist Communism and Western democracy (though he acknowledges that FDR disapproved of the barbarism of Stalin’s rule); that the Yalta agreement “gave” Stalin half of Europe; and that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were so significantly influenced in a pro-Soviet direction by Soviet agents and such arch-sympathizers that the distinction between an agent and a sympathizer was academic in the United States. And third, I am distressed by Andy McCarthy’s partial defense of Joseph R. McCarthy and his conclusion that the smear of McCarthy enabled Communism and anti-American reflexes to flourish in the United States through all the intervening years and are responsible for the inadequate general response to the Islamist threat that, I repeat, all the participants in this very heated and prolonged exchange revile in almost equally emphatic strictures.

The unanimity on this last point underlines the source of my concern. A relatively united Right, which included Diana West and other participants in this discussion, exercised a great influence in assisting President Reagan and his followers and collaborators in mobilizing opinion to support his arms buildup, his development of anti-missile defenses, his stiffening of the backbone of the Western alliance, and the consensus he helped create for a rollback of the Soviet intrusions in Central America, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the imposition of martial law in Poland. That unity of the influential Right was vitally important to the course corrections that lifted the United States and the West out of the inanities and shabby compromises of the Carter era, and led the world to the collapse of the Soviet Union and of international Communism, and to the triumph of democracy and market economics in most of the world. The New Criterion itself played an important and distinguished role in the intellectual phase of that struggle. Diana West, Andy McCarthy, and most of those who have supported and opposed Ms. West in this controversy all played their parts, and there is credit for all of them in the result: the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the nation-state.

A schism as profound as this controversy has now become will splinter the Right and render it incapable of united action, and perpetuate the precise condition that Andy decries and mistakenly lays at the door of Soviet wartime infiltration, both directly and through sympathizers. The process of fragmenting the Right, in this now notorious instance, began with Ms. West’s frequently, though not entirely, outrageous book, but for a writer of the stature of Andy McCarthy to take the positions mentioned above, and for The New Criterion to lend the exposition of those opinions the mantle of its earned prestige, is, and to say the least, very worrisome.

OK, I give up. Where’s the schism? Who is more in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, Conrad Black or Diana West? Reagan was demonised on the left as much as McCarthy ever was. For a variety of reasons it was not made to stick, but it wasn’t for want of trying. If I am not prepared to sell out one of the most relentless fighters on behalf of freedom I do not think of myself as anything other than acting in step with the values of a free world. No one in politics gets it right every time. No one can see the future perfectly. No one has absolutely pure and unblemished motives in everything they do. But if we are to walk away from McCarthy and his aims who then should be the person in the 1950s we should look to as the example of how these issues could be fought out? No one’s name comes to mind because no one else seemed willing to take these issues on and was capable of highlighting them in the same way.

If some of us over here prefer to honour McCarthy rather than revile him, so what? I can work perfectly well with people of a similar persuasion to myself who hold different views about McCarthy’s approach to dealing with our deadliest enemies. If it’s tactics and strategy you are worried about, then say so and this can be discussed. But it looks like a different agenda in play, one that is hard to fathom but seems to suggest that McCarthy was actually wrong in what he said, not in what he did. Since every single person he named in the 1950s has since that time been demonstrated to be an actual communist, communist sympathiser and useful idiot, nothing of what he did strikes me as wrongheaded and against my interests.

McCarthy’s only piece of bad luck was to have arrived on the scene at the same time as television. He seems strange to us today in those grainy black and white takes, but these are the takes made by his enemies in the media. We have our own battles today against a different kind of tyranny. I only wish we had a McCarthy right now who could show the same kind of leadership today that he did then.

Harvey Klehr on Joe McCarthy

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This is from an article by Harvey Klehr on FrontPageMag with the title, “Setting the Record on Joe McCarthy Straight”.

But if McCarthy was right about some of the large issues, he was wildly wrong on virtually all of the details.

There is no indication that he had even a hint of the Venona decryptions, so he did not base his accusations on the information in them. Indeed, virtually none of the people that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Soviet agents turn up in Venona. He did identify a few small fry who we now know were spies but only a few. And there is little evidence that those he fingered were among the unidentified spies of Venona.

Many of his claims were wildly inaccurate; his charges filled with errors of fact, misjudgments of organizations and innuendoes disguised as evidence.

He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies — distinctions that were important to make.

The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. He remains a demagogue, whose wild charges actually made the fight against Communist subversion more difficult.

Like Gresham’s Law, McCarthy’s allegations marginalized the accurate claims. Because his facts were so often wrong, real spies were able to hide behind the cover of being one of his victims and even persuade well-meaning but naïve people that the whole anti-communist cause was based on inaccuracies and hysteria.

So who else was carrying the anti-communist cause at the time? Where are these wild inaccuracies? Just yesterday I was reading a book co-authored by Klehr* and I opened it at random onto a section dealing with Owen Lattimore who is treated as a possible Soviet agent but over whom judgment must be suspended. But see Blacklisted by History Chapter 29 and elsewhere. Seventy years later Klehr (and Haynes) can’t make up their minds. McCarthy was there, then, right on the spot, trying as best he could surrounded by enemies out to destroy his reputation. There may be a strategic sense in attacking McCarthy today although I barely see it and don’t accept it. But if Lattimore in their minds is a 50-50 or less, then who can really be a certainty unless they confess in open court? But let’s take this one para from the above quotation to see what we find:

He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies — distinctions that were important to make.

Let me see. McCarthy is trying to sort out all of this in real time on his own and didn’t quite make all the fine distinctions we still cannot make three generations later. If Klehr is still not willing to point the finger at Lattimore because we cannot be absolutely positively sure, then what was McCarthy supposed to do? He wasn’t writing some useless scholarly tract. He was trying to help save the West from communist tyranny. And it wasn’t the US that was directly endangered but large parts of Asia and Europe. But if the US was going to carry this fight, it had to first know it was in a fight. This kind of refined sorting things out seventy years later is supposedly “right-wing” political writing at its worst. And the thing is, what’s the issue if people like me think back on McCarthy in a positive way?

I could see an argument that says you don’t want to get caught up in any of this since the McCarthy name remains a stick to beat you with. If the argument went that this is one sleeping dog that should be left to lie, then I could acknowledge that there are genuine dangers in bringing McCarthy up. But that does not seem to be the point. The criticisms are about McCarthy, what he did and how he did it that for all I can see could easily be published in the Washington Post.

Well let me use the Deng Zhao Ping ratio of 70% good 30% bad since if that’s good enough for Mao it ought to be more than good enough for Joe McCarthy (how bout 90-10?). In my view, though, looking back but having watched the ways of the Left, the reason McCarthy became as notorious as he did was because he was so effective in what he did. I don’t know exactly what these McCarthyist tactics are supposed to mean, but if it means exposing the existence of evil doers in the State Department, I am all for it.

* John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. 2006. Early Cold War Spies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For the discussion on Owen Lattimore see Chapter 2 on Amerasia.

Studying the humanities today will make you ignorant

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We’re not talking about just anywhere here, we are talking about UCLA. This is a report on a presentation given by Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute about the current state of our culture:

“Until 2011,” she noted, “students majoring in English at UCLA had been required to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature.

“Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the ‘Empire,’ UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.”

As Mac Donald put it, “In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent as to whether an English major had ever read a word of Milton, Chaucer or Shakespeare, but was determined to expose students, according to the course catalogue, to ‘alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race and class.'”

If nothing else, it’s easier on the students and no doubt on the junior staff as well. You will end up knowing bugger all but have strong opinions about it.

Is the history of economics economics?

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There is a review of my just published Defending the History of Economic Thought on the History of Economics website written by Marie Duggan. She didn’t quite get it but she got much of what matters. But I cannot help myself so have written this response:

I am grateful for Marie Duggan’s timely review of my Defending the History of Economic Thought and while I don’t think she quite conveys the urgency that went into its writing I think she conveys much of what the book is about. But if I may, I would like to supplement what she wrote.

The central question addressed by the book is this: should the history of economic thought be classified as part of economics? That is, when someone is undertaking research into some aspect of HET, is their work part of the study of economics or is it something else?

Here is the supposed parallel. When someone studies the history of physics, they are not classified as physicists. When someone studies the history of chemistry, they are not classified as chemists. So the argument has been, that when someone studies or writes on the history of economics, they are not economists, but are perhaps philosophers of science or historians. Therefore the history of economic thought should be removed from the economics classification and be placed somewhere else amongst the humanities for example.

Does this matter? I posted a note a few months back on the OECD’s redesign of its Frascati Manual which must seem to most people on this site as of absolutely no relevance to them in any way. In the manual at present, economics is classified as a social science while the history of economics is classified as part of the humanities. That is, the two areas are completely distinct with no overlap of any significance. Does that sound right to you? It doesn’t to me.

We here in Australia wrote a submission to the OECD, a submission which was endorsed by a number of other societies. We have in this way established a position that will need to be taken into account by those who are redesigning the manual and which will also provide the basis for a response if the new manual continues with the same structural division found at present.

I therefore wrote the book to explain just how precarious the History of Economic Thought is. The review only discusses our lobbying efforts with the Australian Bureau in 2007. It surprisingly ignores the more important of these lobbying efforts which was with the European Research Council in 2011. In Australia we were able to persuade the ABS not to make the change. In Europe, the change was made. The ERC removed HET from the economics classification. The effort was therefore devoted to asking the ERC to reverse a decision that had already been made which was ultimately successful.

This is from the original ERC decision. The concern referred to – our concern – is that HET would be removed from the economics classification:

“Addressing your concern, “history of economics” is divided between SH1 and SH6 (“The study of the human past: archaeology, history and memory”).”

If you would like to know what happened both before and after that decision, you will have to read the book. But if you think that you, as a historian of economic thought, are an economist undertaking economics work, try explaining that to your head of department when the official classification has you listed as working in an area described as “the study of the human past: archaeology, history and memory” (and in Australia the classification would have been, “History, Archaeology, Religion and Philosophy”). And to the extent that you could get funding for your work, these would be the panels you would need to apply to.

These, moreover, are not battles won. These are battles we remain in the midst of. Right now, even as I write, there is an attempt being made here in Australia to reclassify History of Political Economy from its current position as an A*-journal, which is our highest classification, to B-level, which is our third tier. The Journal of the History of Economic Thought has already gone from an A to B. This is not happenstance, this is deliberate and there are economists who favour this change. But the effect is obvious. There is a restricted academic reward in pursuing the study of HET. Do something else instead. You are wasting your time with these historical studies of dead economists of the past.

The reviewer says that I have invented straw men opponents of HET. Would that were the case. The history of economic thought has enemies. If HET is removed from the economics classification, it won’t be by accident.

The intent of the book was therefore to explain, as I had done in submissions to the ABS and ERC, why historians of economics are intimately involved in the development of economic theory. It’s not a subject undertaken by or read by non-economists. This is a specialist area in which economists write for other economists. We as economists orient ourselves and our theories through its historical development. That’s why the book is unlike any other on the subject. Most discussions on why study HET are about why individual economists might benefit individually. This book is about why economic theory is improved where economists know their subject’s history and where there are historians of economics to bring economists of the past into contemporary debates.

Most importantly, what the reviewer noted was this: “if colleagues or deans start taking potshots at HET (or any subfield that you hold dear), take a deep breath, and read Chapter 5 for some sound tactical advice.” The book is about alerting historians of economic thought to our present dangers and providing just the tactical advice she discusses. We are at the cliff’s edge. This book is written both to alert historians of economics about the dangers we face and to provide some suggestions on how we deal with this very great problem.

And while this is slightly off topic, my own favourite chapter of the book, but the reviewer’s least favourite, was on how to teach the history of economic thought. Where she writes, “Kates suggests a student in HET compare Mankiw’s 2013 textbook with one written a hundred years ago (Taylor 1913)”, my point was not that they be compared – I wouldn’t read Mankiw or any modern text in an HET class – but that students be asked to read actual mainstream introductory texts of previous eras, such as Taylor (1913) or McCullogh (1825) or even Samuelson (1948). If you would like to get an accurate sense of how economists in the past thought about economic issues I cannot think of a better way to do it.

Heidegger and Hannah Arendt

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A movie review of Hannah Arendt, Hannah and Her Admirers which looks at the film’s errors with special emphasis on its philosophical discussions.

To state the obvious: in a film about ideas, about thinking, the quality of the thought—the truth or falsity of the ideas—has to be central. Von Trotta and Katz make as strong a case as can conceivably be made for these ideas, and if the thesis of Eichmann in Jerusalem seems right to you, it is likely that Hannah Arendt will sit well with you, too. Katz told an interviewer that ‘the intellectual goal of the movie for me was that people who perhaps didn’t have a philosophical background [could] read and understand what was meant by this oft-misused catch phrase “the banality of evil.”‘ But Katz has misconstrued the issue. The difficulty is not that Hannah Arendt CliffsNotes are in short supply, but that Arendt’s ideas in Eichmann, and the tone in which she chose to express them, are in fact extremely problematic. As the German historian Hans Mommsen, an admirer of Arendt’s, would put it, dryly but pointedly, in his preface to the German edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem: ‘The severity of her criticism and the unsparing way in which she argued seemed inappropriate given the deeply tragic nature of the subject with which she was dealing.’