On Keegan’s “The American Civil War”

At some point it came up this summer around the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg that I didn’t know who actually won the battle – this despite knowing that it was the anniversary of the battle.

That made me realize that I’m now pretty much a middle age man, so that to go with the reading on the founders in the last couple of years, it was my duty as an American to become an expert on the civil war.

And this book helped. Now I can knowingly make jokes about Lincoln keeping McClellan as the head general too long when there were other more talented and more decisive generals waiting in the wings.

I think that Keegan may be a little too close to some of the nitty gritty here in the first 80% of the book, but that’s where he’s the best so it makes sense that this is where he keeps his focus. (I’ve read other Keegan like “The Face of Battle,” so I already knew I liked his style. That he does get close to the day to day action and does it well is balanced out by the later quintile where he starts to play economist and sociologist where he is not as good. It sticks out in a bad way.

Overall, it was a worthwhile read.

And the winner of the Battle of Gettysburg? The union, of course. Why else would Lincoln go give his address there?

Some thoughts on “Commanding Heights”

Looking back, the “End of History” as identified by the thinker Francis Fukuyama lasted about a decade. It was in this decade that the original book for Commanding Heights was written. The documentary came at the very beginning of a new age of the backlash to globalism that arose with 9/11.

The documentary is very much a product of its time. The source was written when the new economy was ascendant, the Clinton boom meant that the USA was paying back the debt and economists were worried about how to do monetary policy in an era of government surpluses. 

The new millennium made a lot of those issues moot. It wasn’t just 9/11, but the recession that came with the popping of the tech bubble exposing bad accounting from not just Enron but WorldCom and Tyco and Adelphia. All these names made the cover of the news magazines but receded to the collective unconscious. The last third tries to deal with this, but is too close in time to be truly reflective.

What commanding heights is at its core is a celebration of the economy that was in force in 1998. It is a celebration of free markets and the rise of the Austrian school. It is a celebration of Margaret Thatcher waving around a copy of Hayek and claiming, “This is what we believe”. It is a celebration of Reagan, or at least a version of Reagan that ignores pulling back from the tax cuts to a more modest tax reform, a Reagan that ended the cold war standing at the Brandenburg gate telling Gorbachev to “Take down this wall” – and not the Reagan that illegally sold arms to Iran to fund right-wing death squads against an elected government in Central America. And I get it. This time was good for a lot of people up until it wasn’t. It was so good that once it crashed the first time, we doubled down in America by pushing through tax cuts and borrowing more and inflating the deficit so that people could buy houses and we remade the good times.

And then this time it wasn’t good. We’re still coming to terms with the fact that perhaps the return to technology isn’t as high as we want it; that demographic pressures are working against the economy especially if we have less immigration. The tea party and Occupy and Bernie and Trump are two sides of the same coin – the coin being the realization that things are not as we have been told. It is a backlash of the world that is described in Commanding Heights, one that even a decade along after the crash we haven’t come to terms with. If Thatcherism was the English coming to terms with the fact that they were no longer an empire, perhaps that is just the reckoning that Trumpism is, with the red baseball hats and the weird idea that we need to look to the past to remake America in an image of the ideal and not look forward.

One thing that really strikes me is that the Commanding heights set’s up this great clash between Keynes and Hayek. As if Keynesianism didn’t work so this Hayekian version is what we should go with. And looking back now we see that both models of how to let capitalism have their limits. Perhaps the problem lies not with the interpretation of the system, but the system itself.

Two side notes: first one of the things that bugs me is setting up a dichotomy between Keynes and Hayek. They’re not on the same level. There’s a reason that any time a fan of Hayek starts talking about his biography they must rope in the time he was in London and Keynes was at Cambridge. There’s no parallel to people talking about Keynes. Hayek is but a footnote. On the flip side, Hayek does have that “Nobel” prize at least.

Notes on "The Corporation" (2003)

The movie "The Corporation" is available here for now:

Overall, this is the kind of documentary that is in my wheelhouse. It has some of the big names I like – Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky – and a bunch of other people as well, just sitting around and calling the current organization model of the corporation a psychopath if it is a person.

What’s missing is a lot in the timing. In the movie, corporation is almost at its peak. It is before the financial crisis, but it is before the Citizen’s United Case, allowing corporate speech in the form of money, and it is largely before the rise of social media. If the film were to be updated, I feel that these aspects would really push the case more towards what the producers were trying to prove. 

As a historical form of organizing capital, it might not have started badly. The documentary speaks of early joint stock organizations (but for some reason leaves out the Dutch and English East India Corporations, huge malefactors in their own right) and then moves towards the more contemporary world. In this world, the corporation is global, so even individual states have less power of what they can do in terms of exploiting the people and the land for their own ends, ignoring the externalities they generate so that they can grasp at these short-term gains. We look at intellectuals from think tanks giving cover to sweatshops as job creators to learning how Monsanto only paid 80 Million Dollars to the American victims of agent orange but there was nothing for the Vietnamese people. All these are costs of doing business for the corporation, a soulless entity given personhood in a perversion of the 14^th amendment.

It is biased, and if you go in knowing that, it’s’ not that much of a problem for me. What is a problem being that the documentary takes pains to show what a soulless beast the modern corporation is, but it doesn’t directly address the economic system that the corporation is working within? I wish I had a concordance of the script of the movie, but it struck me about half of the way through that no one said the world “capitalism” at all. It eventually came up, but only at the very end. By my count it was mentioned four times, and one of those four times was when it was shown written out on a billboard in the shot. This is important because the corporation didn’t just happen. Growing from the enclosure movements to global corporations takes a whole ideological system that encompasses the economic and political systems – it is this ideology of capitalism is the true thing that trickles down and makes the concept of the corporation seem like it has always been here. It is this ideology that is so persistent that we don’t even question it even in a documentary critical of its fruits.